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 towards 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.
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.'
`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 ... and the way their faces had shimmered.
Six women, five old and one young.
Doctors that sang and then crawled away across the floor when
dismissed by jingling bells.
And an improbable hospital ward of perhaps a hundred beds, a
ward with a silk roof and silk walls ...
... and all the beds empty save three.
Roland didn't understand why Jenna had taken the dead boy's
medallion from his pants pocket and put it around his neck, but he
had an idea that if they found out she had done so, the Little Sisters
of Eluria might kill her.
Roland closed his eyes, and the soft singing of the doctor-insects
once again floated him off into sleep.
IV. A Bowl of Soup. The Boy
in the Next Bed. The Night-Nurses.
Roland dreamed that a very large bug (a doctor-bug, mayhap) was
flying around his head and banging repeatedly into his nose -
collisions which were annoying rather than painful. He swiped at
the bug repeatedly, and although his hands were eerily fast under
ordinary circumstances, he kept missing it. And each time he
missed, the bug giggled.
I'm slow because I've been sick, he thought.
No, ambushed. Dragged across the ground by slow mutants, saved
by the Little Sisters of Eluria.
Roland had a sudden, vivid image of a man's shadow growing
from the shadow of an overturned freight-wagon; heard a rough,
gleeful voice cry, 'Booh!'
He jerked awake hard enough to set his body rocking in its
complication of slings, and the woman who had been standing
beside his head, giggling as she tapped his nose lightly with a
wooden spoon, stepped back so quickly that the bowl in her other
hand slipped from her fingers.
Roland's hands shot out, and they were as quick as ever - his
frustrated failure to catch the bug had been only part of his dream.
He caught the bowl before more than a few drops could spill. The
woman - Sister Coquina - looked at him with round eyes.
There was pain all up and down his back from the sudden
movement but it was nowhere near as sharp as it had been before,
and there was no sensation of movement on his skin. Perhaps the
'doctors' were only sleeping, but he had an idea they were gone.
He held out his hand for the spoon Coquina had been teasing him
with (he found he wasn't surprised at all that one of these would
tease a sick and sleeping man in such a way; it only would have
surprised him if it had been Jenna), and she handed it to him, her
eyes still big.
'How speedy ye are!' she said. `'Twas like a magic trick, and you
still rising from sleep!'
'Remember it, sai,' he said, and tried the soup. There were tiny bits
of chicken floating in it. He probably would have considered it
bland under other circumstances, but under these, it seemed
ambrosial. He began to eat greedily.
'What do 'ee mean by that?' she asked. The light was very dim
now, the wall-panels across the way a pinkish-orange that
suggested sunset. In this light, Coquina looked quite young and
pretty ... but it was a glamour, Roland was sure; a sorcerous kind
of make-up.
'I mean nothing in particular.' Roland dismissed the spoon as too
slow, preferring to tilt the bowl itself to his lips. In this way he
disposed of the soup in four large gulps. 'You have been kind to
me'
'Aye, so we have!' she said, rather indignantly.