“Promise me you’ll not scream and wake the pube in yonder bed.”
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“Pube?”
“The boy. Do ye promise?”
“Aye,” he said, falling into the half-forgotten patois of the Outer Arc without even being aware of it. Susan’s dialect. “It’s been long since I screamed, pretty.”
She colored more definitely at that, roses more natural and lively than the one on her breast mounting in her cheeks.
“Don’t call pretty what ye can’t properly see,” she said.
“Then push back the wimple you wear.”
Her face he could see perfectly well, but he badly wanted to see her hair—hungered for it, almost. A full flood of black in all this dreaming white. Of course it might be cropped, those of her order might wear it that way, but he somehow didn’t think so.
“No, ’tis not allowed.”
“By whom?”
“Big Sister.”
“She who calls herself Mary?”
“Aye, her.” She started away, then paused and looked back over her shoulder. In another girl her age, one as pretty as this, that look back would have been flirtatious. This girl’s was only grave.
“Remember your promise.”
“Aye, no screams.”
She went to the bearded man, skirt swinging. In the dimness, she cast only a blur of shadow on the empty beds she passed. When she reached the man (this one was unconscious, Roland thought, not just sleeping), she looked back at Roland once more. He nodded.
Sister Jenna stepped close to the suspended man, on the far side of his bed, so that Roland saw her through the twists and loops of woven white silk. She placed her hands lightly on the left side of his chest, bent over him . . . and shook her head from side to side, like one expressing a brisk negative. The bells she wore on her forehead rang sharply, and Roland once more felt that weird stirring up his back, accompanied by a low ripple of pain. It was as if he had shuddered without actually shuddering, or shuddered in a dream.
What happened next almost did jerk a scream from him; he had to 169
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bite his lips against it. Once more the unconscious man’s legs seemed to move without moving . . . because it was what was on them that moved. The man’s hairy shins, ankles, and feet were exposed below the hem of his bed-dress. Now a black wave of bugs moved down them. They were singing fiercely, like an army column that sings as it marches.
Roland remembered the black scar across the man’s cheek and nose—the scar that had disappeared. More such as these, of course.
And they were on him, as well. That was how he could shiver without shivering. They were all over his back. Battening on him.
No, keeping back a scream wasn’t as easy as he had expected it to be.
The bugs ran down to the tips of the suspended man’s toes, then leaped off them in waves, like creatures springing off an embankment and into a swimming hole. They organized themselves quickly and easily on the bright white sheet below, and began to march down to the floor in a battalion about a foot wide. Roland couldn’t get a good look at them, the distance was too far and the light too dim, but he thought they were perhaps twice the size of ants, and a little smaller than the fat honeybees which had swarmed the flower beds back home.
They sang as they went.
The bearded man didn’t sing. As the swarms of bugs that had coated his twisted legs began to diminish, he shuddered and groaned.
The young woman put her hand on his brow and soothed him, making Roland a little jealous even in his revulsion at what he was seeing.
And was what he was seeing really so awful? In Gilead, leeches had been used for certain ailments—swellings of the brain, the armpits, and the groin, primarily. When it came to the brain, the leeches, ugly as they were, were certainly preferable to the next step, which was trepanning.
Yet there was something loathsome about them, perhaps only because he couldn’t see them well, and something awful about trying to imagine them all over his back as he hung here, helpless. Not singing, though. Why? Because they were feeding? Sleeping? Both at once?
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The bearded man’s groans subsided. The bugs marched away across the floor, toward one of the mildly rippling silken walls.
Roland lost sight of them in the shadows.
Jenna came back to him, her eyes anxious. “Ye did well. Yet I see how ye feel; it’s on your face.”
“The doctors,” he said.
“Yes. Their power is very great, but . . .” She dropped her voice. “I believe that drover is beyond their help. His legs are a little better, and the wounds on his face are all but healed, but he has injuries where the doctors cannot reach.” She traced a hand across her midsection, suggesting the location of these injuries, if not their nature.
“And me?” Roland asked.
“Ye were ta’en by the green folk,” she said. “Ye must have angered them powerfully, for them not to kill ye outright. They roped ye and dragged ye, instead. Tamra, Michela, and Louise were out gathering herbs. They saw the green folk at play with ye, and bade them stop, but—”
“Do the muties always obey you, Sister Jenna?”
She smiled, perhaps pleased he remembered her name. “Not always, but mostly. This time they did, or ye’d have now found the clearing in the trees.”
“I suppose so.”
“The skin was stripped almost clean off your back—red ye were from nape to waist. Ye’ll always bear the scars, but the doctors have gone far toward healing ye. And their singing is passing fair, is it not?”
“Yes,” Roland said, but the thought of those black things all over his back, roosting in his raw flesh, still revolted him. “I owe you thanks, and give it freely. Anything I can do for you—”
“Tell me your name, then. Do that.”
“I’m Roland of Gilead. A gunslinger. I had revolvers, Sister Jenna. Have you seen them?”
“I’ve seen no shooters,” she said, but cast her eyes aside. The roses bloomed in her cheeks again. She might be a good nurse, and fair, but Roland thought her a poor liar. He was glad. Good liars were common. Honesty, on the other hand, came dear.
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Let the untruth pass for now, he told himself. She speaks it out of fear, I think.
“Jenna!” The cry came from the deeper shadows at the far end of the infirmary—today it seemed longer than ever to the gunslinger—
and Sister Jenna jumped guiltily. “Come away! Ye’ve passed words enough to entertain twenty men! Let him sleep!”
“Aye!” she called, then turned back to Roland. “Don’t let on that I showed you the doctors.”
“Mum is the word, Jenna.”
She paused, biting her lip again, then suddenly swept back her wimple. It fell against the nape of her neck in a soft chiming of bells.
Freed from its confinement, her hair swept against her cheeks like shadows.
“Am I pretty? Am I? Tell me the truth, Roland of Gilead—no flattery. For flattery’s kind only a candle’s length.”
“Pretty as a summer night.”
What she saw in his face seemed to please her more than his words, because she smiled radiantly. She pulled the wimple up again, tucking her hair back in with quick little finger-pokes. “Am I decent?”
“Decent as fair,” he said, then cautiously lifted an arm and pointed at her brow. “One curl’s out . . . just there.”
“Aye, always that one to devil me.” With a comical little grimace, she tucked it back. Roland thought how much he would like to kiss her rosy cheeks . . . and perhaps her rosy mouth for good measure.
“All’s well,” he said.
“Jenna!” The cry was more impatient than ever. “Meditations!”
“I’m coming just now!” she called, and gathered her voluminous skirts to go. Yet she turned back once more, her face now very grave and very serious. “One more thing,” she said in a voice only a step above a whisper. She snatched a quick look around. “The gold medallion ye wear—ye wear it because it’s yours. Do’ee understand . . .
James?”
“Yes.” He turned his head a bit to look at the sleeping boy. “This is my brother.”
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“If they ask, yes. To say different would be to get Jenna in serious trouble.”
How serious he did not ask, and she was gone in any case, seeming to flow along the aisle between all the empty beds, her skirt caught up in one hand. The roses had fled from her face, leaving her cheeks and brow ashy. He remembered the greedy look on the faces of the others, how they had gathered around him in a tightening knot . . .