The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (23 page)

“I expected ye an hour ago,” Aunt Cord said. And then, although she didn’t sound it: “I was worried.”

“Aye?” Susan said, and said no more. She thought that on any other night she would have offered one of her fumbling excuses which always sounded like a lie to her own ears—it was the effect Aunt Cord had had on her all her life—but this hadn’t been an ordinary night. Never in her life had there been a night like this. She found she could not get Will Dearborn out of her mind.

Aunt Cord had looked up then, her close-set, rather beady eyes sharp and inquisitive above her narrow blade of a nose. Some things hadn’t changed since Susan had set out for the Cöos; she had still been able to feel her aunt’s eyes brushing across her face and down her body, like little whisk-brooms with sharp bristles.

“What took ye so long?” Aunt Cord had asked. “Was there trouble?”

“No trouble,” Susan had replied, but for a moment she thought of how the witch had stood beside her in the doorway, pulling her braid through the gnarled tube of one loosely clenched fist. She remembered wanting to go, and she remembered asking Rhea if their business was done.

Mayhap there’s one more little thing,
the old woman had said . . . or so Susan thought. But what had that one more little thing been? She couldn’t remember. And, really, what did it matter? She was shut of Rhea until her belly began to rise with Thorin’s child . . . and if there could be no baby-making until Reap-Night, she’d not be returning to the Cöos until late winter at the soonest. An age! And it would be longer than that, were she slow to kindle . . .

“I walked slowly coming home, Aunt. That’s all.”

“Then why look ye so?” Aunt Cord had asked, scant brows knitting toward the vertical line which creased her brow.

“How so?” Susan had asked, taking off her apron and knotting the strings and hanging it on the hook just inside the kitchen door.

“Flushy. Frothy. Like milk fresh out of the cow.”

She’d almost laughed. Aunt Cord, who knew as little about men as Susan did about the stars and planets, had struck it directly. Flushy and frothy was exactly how she felt. “Only the night air, I suppose,” she had said. “I saw a meteor, Aunt. And heard the thinny. The sound’s strong tonight.”

“Aye?” her aunt asked without interest, then returned to the subject which did interest her. “Did it hurt?”

“A little.”

“Did ye cry?”

Susan shook her head.

“Good. Better not. Always better. She likes it when they cry, I’ve heard. Now, Sue—did she give you something? Did the old pussy give you something?”

“Aye.” She reached into her pocket and brought out the paper with

written upon it. She held it out and her aunt snatched it away with a greedy look. Cordelia had been quite the sugarplum over the last month or so, but now that she had what she wanted (and now that Susan had come too far and promised too much to have a change of heart), she’d reverted to the sour, supercilious, often suspicious woman Susan had grown up with; the one who’d been driven into almost weekly bouts of rage by her phlegmatic, life-goes-as-’twill brother. In a way, it was a relief. It had been nervewracking to have Aunt Cord playing Cybilla Good-Sprite day after day.

“Aye, aye, there’s her mark, all right,” her aunt had said, tracing her fingers over the bottom of the sheet. “A devil’s hoof’s what it means, some say, but what do we care, eh, Sue? Nasty, horrid creature that she is, she’s still made it possible for two women to get on in the world a little longer. And ye’ll only have to see her once more, probably around Year’s End, when ye’ve caught proper.”

“It will be later than that,” Susan had told her. “I’m not to lie with him until the full of the Demon Moon. After the Reaping Fair and the bonfire.”

Aunt Cord had stared, eyes wide, mouth open. “Said she so?”

Are you calling me a liar, Auntie?
she had thought with a sharpness that wasn’t much like her; usually her nature was more like her father’s.

“Aye.”

“But why? Why so
long
?” Aunt Cord was obviously upset, obviously disappointed. There had so far been eight pieces of silver and four of gold out of this; they were tucked up wherever it was that Aunt Cord squirreled her money away (and Susan suspected there was a fair amount of it, although Cordelia liked to plead poverty at every opportunity), and twice that much was still owed . . . or would be, once the bloodstained sheet went to the Mayor’s House laundress. That same amount would be paid yet again when Rhea had confirmed the baby, and the baby’s honesty. A lot of money,
all told. A
great
lot, for a little place like this and little folk like them. And now, to have the paying of it put back so far . . .

Then came a sin Susan had prayed over (although without much enthusiasm) before getting into her bed: she had rather enjoyed the cheated, frustrated look on Aunt Cord’s face—the look of the thwarted miser.

“Why so
long
?” she repeated.

“I suppose you could go up the Cöos and ask her.”

Cordelia Delgado’s lips, thin to begin with, had pressed together so tightly they almost disappeared. “Are you pert, missy? Are you pert with me?”

“No. I’m much too tired to be pert with anyone. I want to wash—I can still feel her hands on me, so I can—and go to bed.”

“Then do so. Perhaps in the morning we can discuss this in more ladylike fashion. And we must go and see Hart, of course.” She folded the paper Rhea had given Susan, looking pleased at the prospect of visiting Hart Thorin, and moved her hand toward her dress pocket.

“No,” Susan said, and her voice had been unusually sharp—enough so to freeze her aunt’s hand in midair. Cordelia had looked at her, frankly startled. Susan had felt a little embarrassed by that look, but she hadn’t dropped her eyes, and when she held out her own hand, it had been steady enough.

“I’m to have the keeping of that, Aunt.”

“Who tells ye to speak so?” Aunt Cord had asked, her voice almost whining with outrage—it was close to blasphemy, Susan supposed, but for a moment Aunt Cord’s voice had reminded her of the sound the thinny made. “Who tells ye to speak so to the woman who raised a motherless girl? To the sister of that girl’s poor dead father?”

“You know who,” Susan said. She still held her hand out. “I’m to keep it, and I’m to give it to Mayor Thorin. She said she didn’t care what happened to it then, he could wipe his bum with it for all of her,” (the flush which suffused her aunt’s face at that had been very enjoyable) “but
until
then, it was to be in my keeping.”

“I never heard of such a thing,” Aunt Cordelia had huffed . . . but she had handed the grimy scrap of paper back. “Giving the keep of such an important document to a mere scrap of a girl.”

Yet not too mere a scrap to be his gilly, am I? To lie under
him and listen to his bones creak and take his seed and mayhap bear his child.

She’d dropped her eyes to her pocket as she put the paper away again, not wanting Aunt Cord to see the resentment in them.

“Go up,” Aunt Cord had said, brushing the froth of lace off her lap and into her workbasket, where it lay in an unaccustomed tangle. “And when you wash, do your mouth with especial care. Cleanse it of its impudence and disrespect toward those who have given up much for love of its owner.”

Susan had gone silently, biting back a thousand retorts, mounting the stairs as she had so often, throbbing with a mixture of shame and resentment.

And now here she was, in her bed and still awake as the stars paled away and the first brighter shades began to color the sky. The events of the night just past slipped through her mind in a kind of fantastical blur, like shuffled playing cards—and the one which turned up with the most persistence was the face of Will Dearborn. She thought of how that face could be hard at one moment and soften so unexpectedly at the next. And was it a handsome face? Aye, she thought so. For herself, she knew so.

I’ve never asked a girl to ride out with me, or if she would accept a visit of me. I would ask you, Susan, daughter of Patrick.

Why now? Why should I meet him now, when no good can come of it?

If it’s
ka
, it’ll come like a wind. Like a cyclone.

She tossed from one side of the bed to the other, then at last rolled onto her back again. There would be no sleep for her in what remained of this night, she thought. She might as well walk out on the Drop and watch the sun come up.

Yet she continued to lie in bed, feeling somehow sick and well at the same time, looking into the shadows and listening to the first cries of the morning birds, thinking of how his mouth had felt against hers, the tender grain of it and the feeling of his teeth below his lips; the smell of his skin, the rough texture of his shirt under her palms.

She now put those palms against the top of her shift and cupped her breasts with her fingers. The nipples were hard, like little pebbles. And when she touched them, the heat between her legs flared suddenly and urgently.

She
could
sleep, she thought. She could, if she took care of that heat. If she knew how.

And she did. The old woman had shown her.
Even a girl who’s intact don’t need to lack for a shiver now ’n then . . . Like a little bud o’ silk, so it is.

Susan shifted in bed and slipped a hand deep beneath the sheet. She forced the old woman’s bright eyes and hollow cheeks out of her mind—it wasn’t hard to do at all once you set your mind to it, she discovered—and replaced it with the face of the boy with the big gelding and the silly flat-crowned hat. For a moment the vision of her mind became so clear and so sweet that it was real, and all the rest of her life only a drab dream. In this vision he kissed her over and over, their mouths widening, their tongues touching; what he breathed out, she breathed in.

She burned. She burned in her bed like a torch. And when the sun finally came over the horizon some short time later, she lay deeply asleep, with a faint smile on her lips and her unbraided hair lying across the side of her face and her pillow like loose gold.

In the last hour before dawn, the public room of the Travellers’ Rest was as quiet as it ever became. The gaslights which turned the chandelier into a brilliant jewel until two of the clock or so on most nights were now turned down to guttering blue points, and the long, high room was shadowy and spectral.

In one corner lay a jumble of kindling—the remains of a couple of chairs smashed in a fight over a Watch Me game (the combatants were currently residing in the High Sheriff’s drunk-cell). In another corner was a fairly large puddle of congealing puke. On the raised platform at the east end of the room stood a battered piano; propped against its bench was the ironwood club which belonged to Barkie, the saloon’s bouncer and all-around tough man. Barkie himself, the naked mound of his scarred stomach rising above the waistband of his corduroy pants like a clot of bread dough, lay under the bench, snoring. In one hand he held a playing card: the deuce of diamonds.

At the west end of the room were the card tables. Two
drunks lay with their heads on one of these, snoring and drooling on the green felt, their outstretched hands touching. Above them, on the wall, was a picture of Arthur, the Great King of Eld astride his white stallion, and a sign which read (in a curious mixture of High and Low Speech):
ARGYOU NOT ABOUT THE HAND YOU ARE DELT IN CARDS OR LIFE
.

Mounted behind the bar, which ran the length of the room, was a monstrous trophy: a two-headed elk with a rack of antlers like a forest grove and four glaring eyes. This beast was known to local habitues of the Travellers’ as The Romp. None could have said why. Some wit had carefully drawn a pair of sow-titty condoms over the prongs of two of its antlers. Lying on the bar itself and directly beneath The Romp’s disapproving gaze was Pettie the Trotter, one of the Travellers’ dancers and gilly-girls . . . although Pettie’s actual girlhood was well behind her now, and soon she would be reduced to doing her business on her knees behind the Travellers’ rather than upstairs in one of the tiny cribs. Her plump legs were spread, one dangling over the bar on the inside, one on the outside, the filthy tangle of her skirt frothed up between. She breathed in long snores, occasionally twitching at the feet and fat fingers. The only other sounds were the hot summer wind outside and the soft, regular snap of cards being turned one by one.

A small table stood by itself near the batwing doors which gave upon the Hambry High Street; it was here that Coral Thorin, owner of the Travellers’ Rest (and the Mayor’s sister), sat on the nights when she descended from her suite “to be a part of the company.” When she came down, she came down early—when there were still more steaks than whiskey being served across the old scratched bar—and went back up around the time that Sheb, the piano player, sat down and began to pound his hideous instrument. The Mayor himself never came in at all, although it was well-known that he owned at least a half-interest in the Travellers’. Clan Thorin enjoyed the money the place brought in; they just didn’t enjoy the look of it after midnight, when the sawdust spread on the floor began to soak up the spilled beer and the spilled blood. Yet there was a hard streak in Coral, who had twenty years before been what was called “a wild child.” She was younger than her political brother, not so thin, and good-looking in a large-eyed, weasel-headed way. No one sat at her table during
the saloon’s operating hours—Barkie would have put a stop to anyone who tried, and double-quick—but operating hours were over now, the drunks mostly gone or passed out upstairs, Sheb curled up and fast asleep in the corner behind his piano. The softheaded boy who cleaned the place had been gone since two o’ the clock or so (chased out by jeers and insults and a few flying beer-glasses, as he always was; Roy Depape in particular had no love in his heart for that particular lad). He would be back around nine or so, to begin readying the old party-palace for another night of hilarity, but until then the man sitting at Mistress Thorin’s table had the place to himself.