Calling on every bit of his willpower and control, Roland closed his eyes and concentrated on stilling his jerking limbs. If only he had been in bed instead of in these cursed slings, which seemed to tremble as if with their own ague at every movement!
The Little Sisters drew closer. The light of their candles bloomed red within his closed eyelids. Tonight they were not giggling, nor whispering among themselves. It was not until they were almost on top of him that Roland became aware of the stranger in their midst--a creature that breathed through its nose in great, slobbery gasps of mixed air and snot.
The gunslinger lay with his eyes closed, the gross twitches and jumps of his arms and legs under control, but with his muscles still knotted and crampy, thrumming beneath the skin. Anyone who looked at him closely would see at once that something was wrong with him. His heart was larruping away like a horse under the whip, surely they must see--
But it wasn't him they were looking at--not yet, at least.
"Have it off him," Mary said. She spoke in a bastardized version of the low speech Roland could barely understand. "Then t'other 'un. Go on, Ralph."
"U'se has whik-sky?" the slobberer asked, his dialect even heavier than Mary's. "U'se has 'backky?"
"Yes, yes, plenty whiskey and plenty smoke, but not until you have these wretched things off!" Impatient. Perhaps afraid, as well.
Roland cautiously rolled his head to the left and cracked his eyelids open.
Five of the six Little Sisters of Eluria were clustered around the far side of the sleeping John Norman's bed, their candles raised to cast their light upon him. It also cast light upon their own faces, faces which would have given the strongest man nightmares. Now, in the ditch of the night, their glamours were set aside, and they were but ancient corpses in voluminous habits.
Sister Mary had one of Roland's guns in her hand. Looking at her holding it, Roland felt a bright flash of hate for her, and promised himself she would pay for her temerity.
The thing standing at the foot of the bed, strange as it was, looked almost normal in comparison with the Sisters. It was one of the green folk. Roland recognized Ralph at once. He would be a long time forgetting that bowler hat.
Now Ralph walked slowly around to the side of Norman's bed closest to Roland, momentarily blocking the gunslinger's view of the Sisters. The mutie went all the way to Norman's head, however, clearing the hags to Roland's slitted view once more.
Norman's medallion lay exposed--the boy had perhaps wakened enough to take it out of his bed-dress, hoping it would protect him better so. Ralph picked it up in his melted-tallow hand. The Sisters watched eagerly in the glow of their candles as the green man stretched it to the end of its chain . . . and then put it down again. Their faces drooped in disappointment.
"Don't care for such as that," Ralph said in his clotted voice. "Want whik-sky! Want 'backky!"
"You shall have it," Sister Mary said. "Enough for you and all your verminous clan. But first, you must have that horrid thing off him! Off both of them! Do you understand? And you shan't tease us."
"Or what?" Ralph asked. He laughed. It was a choked and gargly sound, the laughter of a man dying from some evil sickness of the throat and lungs, but Roland still liked it better than the giggles of the Sisters. "Or what, Sisser Mary, you'll drink my bluid? My bluid'd drop'ee dead where'ee stand, and glowing in the dark!"
Mary raised the gunslinger's revolver and pointed it at Ralph. "Take that wretched thing, or you die where you stand."
"And die after I've done what you want, likely."
Sister Mary said nothing to that. The others peered at him with their black eyes.
Ralph lowered his head, appearing to think. Roland suspected his friend Bowler Hat could think, too. Sister Mary and her cohorts might not believe that, but Ralph had to be trig to have survived as long as he had. But of course when he came here, he hadn't considered Roland's guns.
"Smasher was wrong to give them shooters to you," he said at last. "Give em and not tell me. Did u'se give him whik-sky? Give him 'backky?"
"That's none o' yours," Sister Mary replied. "You have that gold-piece off the boy's neck right now, or I'll put one of yonder man's bullets in what's left of yer brain."
"All right," Ralph said. "Just as you wish, sai."
Once more he reached down and took the gold medallion in his melted fist. That he did slow; what happened after, happened fast. He snatched it away, breaking the chain and flinging the gold heedlessly into the dark. With his other hand he reached down, sank his long and ragged nails into John Norman's neck, and tore it open.
Blood flew from the hapless boy's throat in a jetting, heart-driven gush more black than red in the candlelight, and he made a single bubbly cry. The women screamed--but not in horror. They screamed as women do in a frenzy of excitement. The green man was forgotten; Roland was forgotten; all was forgotten save the life's blood pouring out of John Norman's throat.
They dropped their candles. Mary dropped Roland's revolver in the same hapless, careless fashion. The last the gunslinger saw as Ralph darted away into the shadows (whiskey and tobacco another time, wily Ralph must have thought; tonight he had best concentrate on saving his own life) was the Sisters bending forward to catch as much of the flow as they could before it dried up.
Roland lay in the dark, muscles shivering, heart pounding, listening to the harpies as they fed on the boy lying in the bed next to his own. It seemed to go on forever, but at last they had done with him. The Sisters relit their candles and left, murmuring.
When the drug in the soup once more got the better of the drug in the reeds, Roland was grateful . . . yet for the first time since he'd come here, his sleep was haunted.
In his dream he stood looking down at the bloated body in the town trough, thinking of a line in the book marked REGISTRY OF MISDEEDS AND REDRESS. Green folk sent hence, it had read, and perhaps the green folk had been sent hence, but then a worse tribe had come. The Little Sisters of Eluria, they called themselves. And a year hence, they might be the Little Sisters of Tejuas, or of Kambero, or some other far western village. They came with their bells and their bugs . . . from where? Who knew? Did it matter?
A shadow fell beside his on the scummy water of the trough. Roland tried to turn and face it. He couldn't; he was frozen in place. Then a green hand grasped his shoulder and whirled him about. It was Ralph. His bowler hat was cocked back on his head; John Norman's medallion, now red with blood, hung around his neck.
"Booh!" cried Ralph, his lips stretching in a toothless grin. He raised a big revolver with worn sandalwood grips. He thumbed the hammer back--
--and Roland jerked awake, shivering all over, dressed in skin both wet and icy cold. He looked at the bed on his left. It was empty, the sheet pulled up and tucked about neatly, the pillow resting above it in its snowy sleeve. Of John Norman there was no sign. It might have been empty for years, that bed.
Roland was alone now. Gods help him, he was the last patient of the Little Sisters of Eluria, those sweet and patient hospitalers. The last human being still alive in this terrible place, the last with warm blood flowing in his veins.
Roland, lying suspended, gripped the gold medallion in his fist and looked across the aisle at the long row of empty beds. After a little while, he brought one of the reeds out from beneath his pillow and nibbled at it.
When Mary came fifteen minutes later, the gunslinger took the bowl she brought with a show of weakness he didn't really feel. Porridge instead of soup this time . . . but he had no doubt the basic ingredient was still the same.
"How well ye look this morning, sai," Big Sister said. She looked well herself--there were no shimmers to give away the ancient wampir hiding inside her. She had supped well, and her meal had firmed her up. Roland's stomach rolled over at the thought. "Ye'll be on yer pins in no time, I'll warrant."
"That's shit," Roland said, speaking in an ill-natured growl. "Put me on my pins and you'd be picking me up off the floor directly after. I
've started to wonder if you're not putting something in the food."
She laughed merrily at that. "La, you lads! Always eager to blame yer weakness on a scheming woman! How scared of us ye are--aye, way down in yer little boys' hearts, how scared ye are!"
"Where's my brother? I dreamed there was a commotion about him in the night, and now I see his bed's empty."
Her smile narrowed. Her eyes glittered. "He came over fevery and pitched a fit. We've taken him to Thoughtful House, which has been home to contagion more than once in its time."
To the grave is where you've taken him, Roland thought. Mayhap that is a Thoughtful House, but little would you know it, sai, one way or another.
"I know ye're no brother to that boy," Mary said, watching him eat. Already Roland could feel the stuff hidden in the porridge draining his strength once more. "Sigul or no sigul, I know ye're no brother to him. Why do you lie? 'Tis a sin against God."
"What gives you such an idea, sai?" Roland asked, curious to see if she would mention the guns.
"Big Sister knows what she knows. Why not 'fess up, Jimmy? Confession's good for the soul, they say."
"Send me Jenna to pass the time, and perhaps I'd tell you much," Roland said.
The narrow bone of smile on Sister Mary's face disappeared like chalk-writing in a rainstorm. "Why would ye talk to such as her?"
"She's passing fair," Roland said. "Unlike some."
Her lips pulled back from her overlarge teeth. "Ye'll see her no more, cully. Ye've stirred her up, so you have, and I won't have that."
She turned to go. Still trying to appear weak and hoping he would not overdo it (acting was never his forte), Roland held out the empty porridge bowl. "Do you not want to take this?"
"Put it on your head and wear it as a nightcap, for all of me. Or stick it in your ass. You'll talk before I'm done with ye, cully--talk till I bid you shut up and then beg to talk some more!"
On this note she swept regally away, hands lifting the front of her skirt off the floor. Roland had heard that such as she couldn't go about in daylight, and that part of the old tales was surely a lie. Yet another part was almost true, it seemed: a fuzzy, amorphous shape kept pace with her, running along the row of empty beds to her right, but she cast no real shadow at all.
VI. JENNA. SISTER COQUINA. TAMRA, MICHELA, LOUISE. THE CROSS-DOG. WHAT HAPPENED IN THE SAGE.
That was one of the longest days of Roland's life. He dozed, but never deeply; the reeds were doing their work, and he had begun to believe that he might, with Jenna's help, actually get out of here. And there was the matter of his guns, as well--perhaps she might be able to help there, too.
He passed the slow hours thinking of old times--of Gilead and his friends, of the riddling he had almost won at one Wide Earth Fair. In the end another had taken the goose, but he'd had his chance, aye. He thought of his mother and father; he thought of Abel Vannay, who had limped his way through a life of gentle goodness, and Eldred Jonas, who had limped his way through a life of evil . . . until Roland had blown him loose of his saddle, one fine desert day.
He thought, as always, of Susan.
If you love me, then love me, she'd said . . . and so he had.
So he had.
In this way the time passed. At rough hourly intervals, he took one of the reeds from beneath his pillow and nibbled it. Now his muscles didn't tremble so badly as the stuff passed into his system, nor his heart pound so fiercely. The medicine in the reeds no longer had to battle the Sisters' medicine so fiercely, Roland thought; the reeds were winning.
The diffused brightness of the sun moved across the white silk ceiling of the ward, and at last the dimness which always seemed to hover at bed-level began to rise. The long room's western wall bloomed with the rose-melting-to-orange shades of sunset.
It was Sister Tamra who brought him his dinner that night--soup and another popkin. She also laid a desert lily beside his hand. She smiled as she did it. Her cheeks were bright with color. All of them were bright with color today, like leeches that had gorged until they were full almost to bursting.
"From your admirer, Jimmy," she said. "She's so sweet on ye! The lily means 'Do not forget my promise.' What has she promised ye, Jimmy, brother of Johnny?"
"That she'd see me again, and we'd talk."
Tamra laughed so hard that the bells lining her forehead jingled. She clasped her hands together in a perfect ecstasy of glee. "Sweet as honey! Oh, yes!" She bent her smiling gaze on Roland. "It's sad such a promise can never be kept. Ye'll never see her again, pretty man." She took the bowl. "Big Sister has decided." She stood up, still smiling. "Why not take that ugly gold sigul off?"
"I think not."
"Yer brother took his off--look!" She pointed, and Roland spied the gold medallion lying far down the aisle, where it had landed when Ralph threw it.
Sister Tamra looked at him, still smiling.
"He decided it was part of what was making him sick, and cast it away. Ye'd do the same, were ye wise."
Roland repeated, "I think not."
"So," she said dismissively, and left him alone with the empty beds glimmering in the thickening shadows.
Roland hung on, in spite of growing sleepiness, until the hot colors bleeding across the infirmary's western wall had cooled to ashes. Then he nibbled one of the reeds and felt strength--real strength, not a jittery, heart-thudding substitute--bloom in his body. He looked toward where the castaway medallion gleamed in the last light and made a silent promise to John Norman: he would take it with the other one to Norman's kin, if ka chanced that he should encounter them in his travels.
Feeling completely easy in his mind for the first time that day, the gunslinger dozed. When he awoke it was full dark. The doctor-bugs were singing with extraordinary shrillness. He had taken one of the reeds out from under the pillow and had begun to nibble on it when a cold voice said, "So--Big Sister was right. Ye've been keeping secrets."
Roland's heart seemed to stop dead in his chest. He looked around and saw Sister Coquina getting to her feet. She had crept in while he was dozing and hidden under the bed on his right side to watch him.
"Where did ye get that?" she asked. "Was it--"
"He got it from me."
Coquina whirled about. Jenna was walking down the aisle toward them. Her habit was gone. She still wore her wimple with its forehead-fringe of bells, but its hem rested on the shoulders of a simple checkered shirt. Below this she wore jeans and scuffed desert boots. She had something in her hands. It was too dark for Roland to be sure, but he thought--
"You," Sister Coquina whispered with infinite hate. "When I tell Big Sister--"
"You'll tell no one anything," Roland said.
If he had planned his escape from the slings that entangled him, he no doubt would have made a bad business of it, but, as always, the gunslinger did best when he thought least. His arms were free in a moment; so was his left leg. His right caught at the ankle, however, twisting, hanging him up with his shoulders on the bed and his leg in the air.
Coquina turned on him, hissing like a cat. Her lips pulled back from teeth that were needle-sharp. She rushed at him, her fingers splayed. The nails at the ends of them looked sharp and ragged.
Roland clasped the medallion and shoved it out toward her. She recoiled from it, still hissing, and whirled back to Sister Jenna in a flare of white skirt. "I'll do for ye, ye interfering trull!" she cried in a low, harsh voice.
Roland struggled to free his leg and couldn't. It was firmly caught, the shitting sling actually wrapped around the ankle somehow, like a noose.
Jenna raised her hands, and he saw he had been right: it was his revolvers she had brought, holstered and hanging from the two old gunbelts he had worn out of Gilead after the last burning.
"Shoot her, Jenna! Shoot her!"
Instead, still holding the holstered guns up, Jenna shook her head as she had on the day when Roland had persuaded her to push back her wimple so he could see her hair. The bells rang with
a sharpness that seemed to go into the gunslinger's head like a spike.
The Dark Bells. The sigul of their ka-tet. What--
The sound of the doctor-bugs rose to a shrill, reedy scream that was eerily like the sound of the bells Jenna wore. Nothing sweet about them now. Sister Coquina's hands faltered on their way to Jenna's throat; Jenna herself had not so much as flinched or blinked her eyes.
"No," Coquina whispered. "You can't!"
"I have," Jenna said, and Roland saw the bugs. Descending from the legs of the bearded man, he'd observed a battalion. What he saw coming from the shadows now was an army to end all armies; had they been men instead of insects, there might have been more than all the men who had ever carried arms in the long and bloody history of Mid-World.
Yet the sight of them advancing down the boards of the aisle was not what Roland would always remember, nor what would haunt his dreams for a year or more; it was the way they coated the beds. These were turning black two by two on both sides of the aisle, like pairs of dim rectangular lights going out.
Coquina shrieked and began to shake her own head, to ring her own bells. The sound they made was thin and pointless compared with the sharp ringing of the Dark Bells.
Still the bugs marched on, darkening the floor, blacking out the beds.
Jenna darted past the shrieking Sister Coquina, dropped Roland's guns beside him, then yanked the twisted sling straight with one hard pull. Roland slid his leg free.
"Come," she said. "I've started them, but staying them could be a different thing."
Now Sister Coquina's shrieks were not of horror but of pain. The bugs had found her.
"Don't look," Jenna said, helping Roland to his feet. He thought that never in his life had he been so glad to be upon them. "Come. We must be quick--she'll rouse the others. I've put your boots and clothes aside up the path that leads away from here--I carried as much as I could. How are ye? Are ye strong?"
"Thanks to you." How long he would stay strong Roland didn't know . . . and right now it wasn't a question that mattered. He saw Jenna snatch up two of the reeds--in his struggle to escape the slings, they had scattered all over the head of the bed--and then they were hurrying up the aisle, away from the bugs and from Sister Coquina, whose cries were now failing.