“Roland,” she said wonderingly. Tasting it.
“Aye. Which do you like better?”
“Your real one,” she said at once. ” ‘Tis a noble name, so it is.”
He grinned, relieved, and this was the grin that made him look young again.
She raised herself on her toes and put her lips on his. The kiss, which was chaste and close-mouthed to begin with, bloomed like a flower: became open and slow and humid. She felt his tongue touch her lower lip and met it, shyly at first, with her own. His hands covered her back, then slipped around to her front. He touched her breasts, also shy to begin with, then slid his palms up their lower slopes to their tips. He uttered a small, moaning sigh directly into her mouth. And as he drew her closer and began to trail kisses down her neck, she felt the stone hardness of him below the buckle of his belt, a slim, warm length which exactly matched
the melting she felt in the same place; those two places were meant for each other, as she was for him and he for her. It was ka, after all— ka like the wind, and she would go with it willingly, leaving all honor and promises behind.
She opened her mouth to tell him so, and then a queer but utterly persuasive sensation enfolded her: they were being watched. It was ridiculous, but it was there; she even felt she knew who was watching. She stepped back from Roland, her booted heels rocking unsteadily on the half-eroded oxen tracks. “Get out, ye old bitch,” she breathed. “If ye be spying on us in some way, I know not how, get thee gone!”
15
On the hill of the Coos, Rhea drew back from the glass, spitting curses in a voice so low and harsh that she sounded like her own snake. She didn’t know what Susan had said—no sound came through the glass, only sight—but she knew that the girl had sensed her. And when she did, all sight had been wiped out. The glass had flashed a brilliant pink, then had gone dark, and none of the passes she made over it would serve to brighten it again.
“Aye, fine, let it be so,” she said at last, giving up. She remembered the wretched, prissy girl (not so prissy with the young man, though, was she?) standing hypnotized in her doorway, remembered what she had told the girl to do after she had lost her maidenhead, and began to grin, all her good humor restored. For if she lost her maidenhead to this wandering boy instead of to Hart Thorin, Lord High Mayor of Mejis, the comedy would be even greater, would it not?
Rhea sat in the shadows of her stinking hut and began to cackle.
16
Roland stared at her, wide-eyed, and as Susan explained about Rhea a little more fully (she left out the humiliating final examinations which lay at the heart of
“proving honesty”), his desire cooled just enough for him to reassert control. It had nothing to do with jeopardizing the position he and his friends were trying to maintain in Hambry (or so he told himself) and everything to do with maintaining Susan’s—her position was important, her honor even more so.
“I imagine it was your imagination,” he said when she had finished.
“I think not.” With a touch of coolness.
“Or conscience, even?”
At that she lowered her eyes and said nothing.
“Susan, I would not hurt you for the world.”
“And ye love me?” Still without looking up.
“Aye, I do.”
“Then it’s best you kiss and touch me no more—not tonight. I can’t stand it if ye do.”
He nodded without speaking and held out his hand. She took it, and they walked on in the direction they had been going when they had been so sweetly distracted.
While they were still ten yards from the hem of the forest, both saw the glimmer of metal despite the dense foliage— too dense, she thought. Too dense by far.
It was the pine-boughs, of course; the ones which had been whacked from the trees on the slope. What they had been interlaced to camouflage were the big silver cans now missing from the paved area. The silver storage containers had been dragged over here—by the oxen, presumably— and then concealed. But why?
Roland inspected along the line of tangled pine branches, then stopped and plucked several aside. This created an opening like a doorway, and he gestured her to go through. “Be sharp in your looks,” he said. “I doubt if they’ve bothered to set traps or tripwires, but ’tis always best to be careful.”
Behind the camouflaging boughs, the tankers had been as neatly lined up as toy soldiers at the end of the day, and Susan at once saw one reason why they had been hidden: they had been re-equipped with wheels, well-made ones of solid oak which came as high as her chest. Each had been rimmed with a thin iron strip. The wheels were new, so were the strips, and the hubs had been custom-made. Susan knew only one blacksmith in Barony capable of such fine work: Brian Hookey, to whom she had gone for Felicia’s new shoes. Brian Hookey, who had smiled and clapped her on the shoulder like a compadre when she had come in with her da’s shoebag hanging on her hip. Brian Hookey, who had been one of Pat Delgado’s best friends.
She recalled looking around and thinking that times had been good for sai Hookey, and of course she had been right. Work in the blacksmithing line had
been plentiful. Hookey had been making lots of wheels and rims, for one thing, and someone must have been paying him to do it. Eldred Jonas was one possibility; Kimba Rimer an even better one. Hart? She simply couldn’t believe that. Hart had his mind—what little there was of it—fixed on other matters this summer.
There was a kind of rough path behind the tankers. Roland walked slowly along it, pacing like a preacher with his hands clasped at the small of his back, reading the incomprehensible words writ upon the tankers’ rear decks: citgo. sunoco. exxon.
conoco. He paused once and read aloud, haltingly: “Cleaner fuel for a better tomorrow.” He snorted softly. “Rot! This is tomorrow.”
“Roland—Will, I mean—what are they for? ”
He didn’t answer at first, but turned and walked back down the line of bright steel cans. Fourteen on this side of the mysteriously reactivated oil-supply pipe, and, she assumed, a like number on the other. As he walked, he rapped his fist on the side of each. The sound was dull and clunky. They were full of oil from the Citgo oilpatch.
“They were trigged quite some time ago, I imagine,” he said. “I doubt if the Big Coffin Hunters did it all themselves, but they no doubt oversaw it … first the fitting of the new wheels to replace the old rotten rubber ones, then the filling.
They used the oxen to line them up here, at the base of the hill, because it was convenient. As it’s convenient to let the extra horses run free out on the Drop.
Then, when we came, it seemed prudent to take the precaution of covering these up. Stupid babies we might be, but perhaps smart enough to wonder about twenty-eight loaded oil-carts with new wheels. So they came out here and covered them.”
“Jonas, Reynolds, and Depape.”
“Aye.”
“But why?” She took him by the arm and asked her question again. “What are they for? ”
“For Parson,” Roland said with a calm he didn’t feel. “For the Good Man. The Affiliation knows he’s found a number of war-machines; they come either from the Old People or from some other where. Yet the Affiliation fears them not, because they don’t work. They’re silent. Some feel Farson has gone mad to put his trust in such broken things, but…”
“But mayhap they’re not broken. Mayhap they only need this stuff. And mayhap
Farson knows it.”
Roland nodded.
She touched the side of one of the tankers. Her fingers came away oily. She rubbed the tips together, smelled them, then bent and picked up a swatch of grass to wipe her hands. “This doesn’t work in our machines. It’s been tried. It clogs them.”
Roland nodded again. “My fa—my folk in the Inner Crescent know that as well.
And count on it. But if Farson has gone to this trouble— and split aside a troop of men to come and get these tankers, as we have word he has done—he either knows a way to thin it to usefulness, or he thinks he does. If he’s able to lure the forces of the Affiliation into a battle in some close location where rapid retreat is impossible, and if he can use machine-weapons like the ones that go on treads, he could win more than a battle. He could slaughter ten thousand horse-mounted fighting men and win the war.”