“He wakes!” one of them cried in a gruesomely coquettish voice.
“Oooo!”
“Ooooh!”
“Ah!”
They fluttered like birds. The one in the centre stepped forward, and as she did, their faces seemed to shimmer like the silk walls of the ward. They weren't old after all, he saw-middle-aged, perhaps, but not old.
Yes. They are old. They changed.
The one who now took charge was taller than the others, and with a broad, slightly bulging brow. She bent towards Roland, and the bells which fringed her forehead tinkled. The sound made him feel sick, somehow, and weaker than he had felt a moment before. Her hazel eyes were intent. Greedy, mayhap. She touched his cheek for a moment, and a numbness seemed to spread there. Then she glanced down, and a look which could have been disquiet cramped her face. She took her hand back.
“Ye wake, pretty man. So ye do. “Tis well.”
“Who are you? Where am l?”
“We are the Little Sisters of Eluria,” she said. “I am Sister Mary. Here is Sister Louise, and Sister Michela, and Sister Coquina-”
“And Sister Tamra,” said the last. “A lovely lass of one-and-twenty. “ She giggled. Her face shimmered, and for a moment she was again as old as the world. Hooked of nose, grey of skin. Roland thought once more of Rhea.
They moved closer, encircling the complication of harness in which he lay suspended, and when Roland shrank away, the pain roared up his back and injured leg again. He groaned. The straps holding him creaked.
“Ooooo!”
“It hurts!”
“Hurts him!”
“Hurts so fierce!”
They pressed even closer, as if his pain fascinated them. And now he could smell them, a dry and earthy smell. The one named Sister Michela reached out -
“Go away! Leave him! Have I not told ye before?”
They jumped back from this voice, startled. Sister Mary looked particularly annoyed. But she stepped back, with one final glare (Roland would have sworn it) at the medallion lying on his chest. He had tucked it back under the bed-dress at his last waking, but it was out again now.
A sixth sister appeared, pushing rudely in between Mary and Tamra. This one perhaps was only one-and-twenty, with flushed cheeks, smooth skin, and dark eyes. Her white habit billowed like a dream. The red rose over her breast stood out like a curse.
“Go! Leave him!”
“Oooo, my dear!” cried Sister Louise in a voice both laughing and angry. “Here's Jenna, the baby, and has she fallen in love with him?”
“She has!” laughed Tamra. “Baby's heart is his for the purchase,”
“Oh, so it is!” agreed Sister Coquina.
Mary turned to the newcomer, lips pursed into a tight line. “Ye have no business here, saucy girl.”
“I do if I say I do,” Sister Jenna replied. She seemed more in charge 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.