of herself now. A curl of black hair had escaped her wimple and
lay across her forehead in a comma. 'Now go. He's not up to your
jokes and laughter.'
'Order us not,' Sister Mary said, 'for we never joke. So you know,
Sister Jenna.'
The girl's face softened a little, and Roland saw she was afraid. It
made him afraid for her. For himself, as well. 'Go,' she repeated.
`'Tis not the time. Are there not others to tend?'
Sister Mary seemed to consider. The others watched her. At last
she nodded, and smiled down at Roland. Again her face seemed to
shimmer, like something seen through a heat-haze. What he saw
(or thought he saw) beneath was horrible and watchful. 'Bide well,
pretty man,' she said to Roland. 'Bide with us a bit, and we'll heal
ye.'
What choice have I? Roland thought.
The others laughed, birdlike titters which rose into the dimness like
ribbons. Sister Michela actually blew him a kiss.
'Come, ladies!' Sister Mary cried. 'We'll leave Jenna with him a bit
in memory of her mother, who we loved well!' And with that, she
led the others away, five white birds flying off down the centre
aisle, their skirts nodding this way and that.
'Thank you,' Roland said, looking up at the owner of the cool
hand.. . for he knew it was she who had soothed him.
She took up his fingers as if to prove this, and caressed them. 'They
mean ye no harm,' she said ... yet Roland saw she believed not a
word of it, nor did he. He was in trouble here, very bad trouble.
'What is this place?'
'Our place,' she said simply. 'The home of the Little Sisters of
Eluria. Our convent, if 'ee like.'
'This is no convent,' Roland said, looking past her at the empty
beds. It's an infirmary. Isn't it?'
'A hospital,' she said, still stroking his fingers. 'We serve the
doctors ... and they serve us.' He was fascinated by the black curl
lying on the cream of her brow - would have stroked it, if he had
dared reach up. Just to tell its texture. He found it beautiful because
it was the only dark thing in all this white. The white had lost its
charm for him. 'We are hospitallers ... or were, before the world
moved on.'
'Are you for the Jesus-man?'
She looked surprised for a moment, almost shocked, and then
laughed merrily. 'No, not us!'
'If you are hospitallers ... nurses ... where are the doctors?'
She looked at him, biting at her lip, as if trying to decide
something. Roland found her doubt utterly charming, and he
realized that, sick or not, he was looking at a woman as a woman
for the first time since Susan Delgado had died, and that had been
long ago. The whole world had changed since then, and not for the
better.
'Would you really know?'
'Yes, of course,' he said, a little surprised. A little disquieted, too.
He kept waiting for her face to shimmer and change, as the faces of
the others had done. It didn't. There was none of that unpleasant
dead-earth smell about her, either.
Wait, he cautioned himself. Believe nothing here, least of all your
senses. Not yet.
'I suppose you must,' she said with a sigh. It tinkled the bells at her
forehead, which were darker in colour than those the others wore -
not black like her hair but charry, somehow, as if they had been
hung in the smoke of a campfire. Their sound, however, was
brightest silver. 'Promise me you'll not scream and wake the pube
in yonder bed.'
'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 coloured 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 who?'
'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
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 which 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 leaping 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 flowerbeds back home.
They sang as they went.
The bearded man didn't sing. As the swarms of bugs which 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?
The bearded man's groans subsided. The bugs marched away
across the floor, towards one of the mildly rippling silken walls.