by Stephen King
All other considerations aside, it was getting late. It wouldn’t be prudent to stay here much longer.
“Susan, do you hear me?”
“Aye, Roland, I hear you very well.”
“Good. I’m going to say a rhyme. You’ll wake up as I say it. When I’m done, you’ll be wide awake and remember everything we’ve said. Do you understand?”
“Aye.”
“Listen: Bird and bear and hare and fish, Give my love her fondest wish.”
Her smile as she rose to consciousness was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen. She stretched, then put her arms around his neck and covered his face with kisses. “You, you, you, you,” she said. “You’re my fondest wish, Roland. You’re my only wish. You and you, forever and ever.”
They made love again there on the bank, beside the babbling stream, holding each other as tightly as they could, breathing into each other’s mouths and living on each other’s breath. You, you, you, you.
13
Twenty minutes later, he boosted her onto Felicia’s back. Susan leaned down, took his face in her hands, and kissed him soundly.
“When will I see ye again?” she asked.
“Soon. But we must be careful.”
“Aye. Careful as two lovers ever were, I think. Thank God thee’s clever.”
“We can use Sheemie, if we don’t use him too often.”
“Aye. And, Roland—do ye know the pavillion in Green Heart? Close to where they serve tea and cakes and things when the weather’s fair?”
Roland did. Fifty yards or so up Hill Street from the jail and the Town Gathering Hall, Green Heart was one of the most pleasant places in town, with its quaint paths, umbrella-shaded tables, grassy dancing pavillion, and menagerie.
“There’s a rock wall at the back,” she said. “Between the pavillion and the menagerie. If you need me badly—”
“I’ll always need you badly,” he said.
She smiled at his gravity. “There’s a stone on one of the lower courses—a reddish one. You’ll see it. My friend Amy and I used to leave messages there for each other when we were little girls. I’ll look there when I can. Ye do the same.”
“Aye.” Sheemie would work for awhile, if they were careful. The red rock might also work for awhile, if they were careful. But no matter how careful they were, they would slip eventually, because the Big Coffin Hunters now probably knew more about Roland and his friends than Roland ever would have wished. But he had to see her, no matter what the risks. If he didn’t, he felt he might die. And he only had to look at her to know she felt the same.
“Watch special for Jonas and the other two,” he said.
“I will. Another kiss, if ye favor?”
He kissed her gladly, and would just as gladly have pulled her off the mare’s back for a fourth go-round . . . but it was time to stop being delirious and start being careful.
“Fare you well, Susan. I love y—” He paused, then smiled. “I love thee.”
“And I thee, Roland. What heart I have is yours.”
She had a great heart, he thought as she slipped through the willows, and already he felt its burden on his own. He waited until he felt sure she must be well away. Then he went to Rusher and rode off in the opposite direction, knowing that a new and dangerous phase of the game had begun.
14
Not too long after Susan and Roland had parted, Cordelia Delgado stepped out of the Hambry Mercantile with a box of groceries and a troubled mind. The troubled mind was caused by Susan, of course, always Susan, and Cordelia’s fear that the girl would do something stupid before Reaping finally came around.
These thoughts were snatched out of her mind just as hands—strong ones—snatched the box of groceries from her arms. Cordelia cawed in surprise, shaded her eyes against the sun, and saw Eldred Jonas standing there between the Bear and Turtle totems, smiling at her. His hair, long and white (and beautiful, in her opinion), lay over his shoulders. Cordelia felt her heart beat a little faster. She had always been partial to men like Jonas, who could smile and banter their way to the edge of risquéness . . . but who carried their bodies like blades.
“I startled you. I cry your pardon, Cordelia.”
“Nay,” she said, sounding a little breathless to her own ears. “It’s just the sun—so bright at this time of day—”
“I’d help you a bit on your way, if you give me leave. I’m only going up High as far as the corner, then I turn up the Hill, but may I help you that far?”
“With thanks,” she said. They walked down the steps and up the board sidewalk, Cordelia looking around in little pecking glances to see who was observing them—she beside the handsome sai Jonas, who just happened to be carrying her goods. There was a satisfying number of onlookers. She saw Millicent Ortega, for one, looking out of Ann’s Dresses with a satisfying O of surprise on her stupid cow’s puss.
“I hope you don’t mind me calling you Cordelia.” Jonas shifted the box, which she’d needed two hands to carry, casually under one arm. “I feel, since the welcoming dinner at Mayor Thorin’s house, that I know you.”
“Cordelia’s fine.”
“And may I be Eldred to you?”
“I think ‘Mr. Jonas’ will do a bit longer,” she said, then favored him with what she hoped was a coquettish smile. Her heart beat faster yet. (It did not occur to her that perhaps Susan was not the only silly goose in the Delgado family.)
“So be it,” Jonas said, with a look of disappointment so comic that she laughed. “And your niece? Is she well?”
“Quite well, thank ye for asking. A bit of a trial, sometimes—”
“Was there ever a girl of sixteen who wasn’t?”
“I suppose not.”
“Yet you have additional burdens regarding her this fall. I doubt if she realizes that, though.”
Cordelia said nothing—’twouldn’t be discreet—but gave him a meaningful look that said much.
“Give her my best, please.”
“I will.” But she wouldn’t. Susan had conceived a great (and irrational, in Cordelia’s view) dislike for Mayor Thorin’s regulators. Trying to talk her out of these feelings would likely do no good; young girls thought they knew everything. She glanced at the star peeking unobtrusively out from beneath the flap of Jonas’s vest. “I understand ye’ve taken on an additional responsibility in our undeserving town, sai Jonas.”
“Aye, I’m helping out Sheriff Avery,” he agreed. His voice had a reedy little tremble which Cordelia found quite endearing, somehow. “One of his deputies—Claypool, his name is—”
“Frank Claypool, aye.”
“—fell out of his boat and broke his leg. How do you fall out of a boat and break your leg, Cordelia?”
She laughed merrily (the idea that everyone in Hambry was watching them was surely wrong . . . but it felt that way, and the feeling was not unpleasant) and said she didn’t know.
He stopped on the corner of High and Camino Vega, looking regretful. “Here’s where I turn.” He handed the box back to her. “Are you sure you can carry that? I suppose I could go on with you to your house—”
“No need, no need. Thank you. Thank you, Eldred.” The blush which crept up her neck and cheeks felt as hot as fire, but his smile was worth every degree of heat. He tipped her a little salute with two fingers and sauntered up the hill toward the Sheriff’s office.
Cordelia walked on home. The box, which had seemed such a burden when she stepped out of the mercantile, now seemed to weigh next to nothing. This feeling lasted for half a mile or so, but by the time her house came into view, she was once again aware of the sweat trickling down her sides, and the ache in her arms. Thank the gods summer was almost over . . . and wasn’t that Susan, just leading her mare in through the gate?
“Susan!” she called, now enough returned to earth for her former irritation with the girl to sound clear in her voice. “Come and help me, ’fore I drop this and break the eggs!”
Susan came, l
eaving Felicia to crop grass in the front yard. Ten minutes earlier, Cordelia would have noticed nothing of how the girl looked—her thoughts had been too wrapped up in Eldred Jonas to admit of much else. But the hot sun had taken some of the romance out of her head and returned her feet to earth. And as Susan took the box from her (handling it almost as easily as Jonas had done), Cordelia thought she didn’t much care for the girl’s appearance. Her temper had changed, for one thing—from the half-hysterical confusion in which she’d left to a pleasant and happy-eyed calmness. That was the Susan of previous years to the sleeve and seam . . . but not this year’s moaning, moody breast-beater. There was nothing else Cordelia could put her finger on, except—
But there was, actually. One thing. She reached out and grasped the girl’s braid, which looked uncharacteristically sloppy this afternoon. Of course Susan had been riding; that could explain the mess. But it didn’t explain how dark her hair was, as if that bright mass of gold had begun to tarnish. And she jumped, almost guiltily, when she felt Cordelia’s touch. Why, pray tell, was that?
“Yer hair’s damp, Susan,” she said. “Have ye been swimming somewhere?”
“Nay! I stopped and ducked my head at the pump outside Hookey’s barn. He doesn’t mind—’tis a deep well he has. It’s so hot. Perhaps there’ll be a shower later. I hope so. I gave Felicia to drink as well.”
The girl’s eyes were as direct and as candid as ever, but Cordelia thought there was something off in them, just the same. She couldn’t say what. The idea that Susan might be hiding something large and serious did not immediately cross Cordelia’s mind; she would have said her niece was incapable of keeping a secret any greater than a birthday present or a surprise party . . . and not even such secrets as those for more than a day or two. And yet something was off here. Cordelia dropped her fingers to the collar of the girl’s riding shirt.
“Yet this is dry.”
“I was careful,” she said, looking at her aunt with a puzzled eye. “Dirt sticks worse to a wet shirt. You taught me that, Aunt.”
“Ye flinched when I touched yer hair, Susan.”
“Aye,” Susan said, “so I did. The weird-woman touched it just that same way. I haven’t liked it since. Now may I take these groceries in and get my horse out of the hot sun?”
“Don’t be pert, Susan.” Yet the edginess in her niece’s voice actually eased her in some strange way. That feeling that Susan had changed, somehow—that feeling of offness—began to subside.
“Then don’t be tiresome.”
“Susan! Apologize to me!”
Susan took a deep breath, held it, then let it out. “Yes, Aunt. I do. But it’s hot.”
“Aye. Put those in the pantry. And thankee.”
Susan went on toward the house with the box in her arms. When the girl had enough of a lead so they wouldn’t have to walk together, Cordelia followed. It was all foolishness on her part, no doubt—suspicions brought on by her flirtation with Eldred—but the girl was at a dangerous age, and much depended on her good behavior over the next seven weeks. After that she would be Thorin’s problem, but until then she was Cordelia’s. Cordelia thought that, in the end, Susan would be true to her promise, but until Reaping Fair she would bear close watching. About such matters as a girl’s virginity, it was best to be vigilant.
INTERLUDE
KANSAS, SOMEWHERE, SOMEWHEN
Eddie stirred. Around them the thinny still whined like an unpleasant mother-in-law; above them the stars gleamed as bright as new hopes . . . or bad intentions. He looked at Susannah, sitting with the stumps of her legs curled beneath her; he looked at Jake, who was eating a burrito; he looked at Oy, whose snout rested on Jake’s ankle and who was looking up at the boy with an expression of calm adoration.
The fire was low, but still it burned. The same was true of Demon Moon, far in the west.
“Roland.” His voice sounded old and rusty to his own ears.
The gunslinger, who had paused for a sip of water, looked at him with his eyebrows raised.
“How can you know every corner of this story?”
Roland seemed amused. “I don’t think that’s what you really want to know, Eddie.”
He was right about that—old long, tall, and ugly made a habit of being right. It was, as far as Eddie was concerned, one of his most irritating characteristics. “All right. How long have you been talking? That’s what I really want to know.”
“Are you uncomfortable? Want to go to bed?”
He’s making fun of me, Eddie thought . . . but even as the idea occurred to him, he knew it wasn’t true. And no, he wasn’t uncomfortable. There was no stiffness in his joints, although he had been sitting cross-legged ever since Roland had begun by telling them about Rhea and the glass ball, and he didn’t need to go to the toilet. Nor was he hungry. Jake was munching the single leftover burrito, but probably for the same reason folks climbed Mount Everest . . . because it was there. And why should he be hungry or sleepy or stiff? Why, when the fire still burned and the moon was not yet down?
He looked at Roland’s amused eyes and saw the gunslinger was reading his thoughts.
“No, I don’t want to go to bed. You know I don’t. But, Roland . . . you’ve been talking a long time.” He paused, looked down at his hands, then looked up again, smiling uneasily. “Days, I would have said.”
“But time is different here. I’ve told you that; now you see for yourself. Not all nights are the same length just recently. Days, either . . . but we notice time more at night, don’t we? Yes, I think we do.”
“Is the thinny stretching time?” And now that he had mentioned it, Eddie could hear it in all its creepy glory—a sound like vibrating metal, or maybe the world’s biggest mosquito.
“It might be helping, but mostly it’s just how things are in my world.”
Susannah stirred like a woman who rises partway from a dream that holds her like sweet quicksand. She gave Eddie a look that was both distant and impatient. “Let the man talk, Eddie.”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Let the man talk.”
And Oy, without raising his snout from Jake’s ankle: “An. Awk.”
“All right,” Eddie said. “No problem.”
Roland swept them with his eyes. “Are you sure? The rest is . . .” He didn’t seem able to finish, and Eddie realized that Roland was scared.
“Go on,” Eddie told him quietly. “Let the rest be what it is. What it was.” He looked around. Kansas, they were in Kansas. Somewhere, somewhen. Except he felt that Mejis and those people he had never seen—Cordelia and Jonas and Brian Hookey and Sheemie and Pettie the Trotter and Cuthbert Allgood—were very close now. That Roland’s lost Susan was very close now. Because reality was thin here—as thin as the seat in an old pair of bluejeans—and the dark would hold for as long as Roland needed it to hold. Eddie doubted if Roland even noticed the dark, particularly. Why would he? Eddie thought it had been night inside of Roland’s mind for a long, long time . . . and dawn was still nowhere near.
He reached out and touched one of those callused killer’s hands. Gently he touched it, and with love.
“Go on, Roland. Tell your tale. All the way to the end.”
“All the way to the end,” Susannah said dreamily. “Cut the vein.” Her eyes were full of moonlight.
“All the way to the end,” Jake said.
“End,” Oy whispered.
Roland held Eddie’s hand for a moment, then let it go. He looked into the guttering fire without immediately speaking, and Eddie sensed him trying to find the way. Trying doors, one after another, until he found one that opened. What he saw behind it made him smile and look up at Eddie.
“True love is boring,” he said.
“Say what?”
“True love is boring,” Roland repeated. “As boring as any other strong and addicting drug. And, as with any other strong drug . . .”
PART THREE
COME, REAP
CHAPTER I
BENEATH THE HU
NTRESS MOON
1
True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring—once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome . . . except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners.
And, as is true of any other strong and addicting drug, true first love is dangerous.
2
Some called the Huntress the last moon of summer; some called it the first of fall. Whichever it was, it signalled a change in the life of the Barony. Men put out into the bay wearing sweaters beneath their oilskins as the winds began to turn more and more firmly into autumn’s east-west alley, and to sharpen as they turned. In the great Barony orchards north of Hambry (and in smaller orchards owned by John Croydon, Henry Wertner, Jake White, and the morose but wealthy Coral Thorin), the pickers began to appear in the rows, carrying their odd, off-kilter ladders; they were followed by horse-drawn carts full of empty barrels. Downwind of the cider-houses—especially downwind of the great Barony cider-mansion a mile north of Seafront—the breezy air was filled with the sweet tang of blems being pressed by the basketload. Away from the shore of the Clean Sea, the days remained warm as the Huntress waxed, skies were clear day and night, but summer’s real heat had departed with the Peddler. The last cutting of hay began and was finished in the run of a week—that last one was always scant, and ranchers and freeholders alike would curse it, scratching their heads and asking themselves why they even bothered . . . but come rainy, blowsy old March, with the barn lofts and bins rapidly emptying, they always knew. In the Barony’s gardens—the great ones of the ranchers, the smaller ones of the freeholders, and the tiny backyard plots of the townsfolk—men and women and children appeared in their old clothes and boots, their sombreros and sombreras. They came with the legs of their pants tied down firmly at the ankles, for in the time of the Huntress, snakes and scorpions in plentiful numbers wandered east from the desert. By the time old Demon Moon began to fatten, a line of rattlers would hang from the hitching posts of both the Travellers’ Rest and the mercantile across the street. Other businesses would similarly decorate their hitching posts, but when the prize for the most skins was given on Reaping Day, it was always the inn or the market that won it. In the fields and gardens, baskets to pick into were cast along the rows by women with their hair tied up in kerchiefs and reap-charms hidden in their bosoms. The last of the tomatoes were picked, the last of the cucumbers, the last of the corn, the last of the parey and mingo. Waiting behind them, as the days sharpened and the autumn storms began to near, would come squash, sharproot, pumpkins, and potatoes. In Mejis the time of reaping had begun, while overhead, clearer and clearer on each starry night, the Huntress pulled her bow and looked east over those strange, watery leagues no man or woman of Mid-World had ever seen.
