aside and got up to see. A bird, perhaps. Or children playing Reaping jokes, unaware that the world had come to an end. Whatever it was, she would shoo it away.
Cordelia saw nothing at first. Then, as she was about to turn away, she spied a pony and cart at the edge of the yard. The cart was a little disquieting-black, with gold symbols overpainted-and the pony in the shafts stood with its head lowered, not grazing, looking as if it had been run half to death.
She was still frowning out at this when a twisted, filthy hand rose in the air directly in front of her and began to scratch at the glass again. Cordelia gasped and clapped both hands to her bosom as her heart took a startled leap in her chest. She backed up a step, and gave a little shriek as her calf brushed the tender of the stove.
The long, dirty nails scratched twice more, then fell away.
Cordelia stood where she was for a moment, irresolute, then went to the door, stopping at the woodbox to pick up a chunk of ash which fitted her hand. Just in case. Then she jerked the door open, went to the comer of the house, drew in a deep, steadying breath, and went around to the garden side, raising the ash-chunk as she did.
“Get out, whoever ye are! Scat before I-”
Her voice was stilled by what she saw: an incredibly old woman crawling through the frost-killed flowerbed next to the house-crawling toward her. The crone’s stringy white hair (what remained of it) hung in her face. Sores festered on her cheeks and brow; her lips had split and drizzled blood down her pointed, warty chin. The corneas of her eyes had gone a filthy gray-yellow, and she panted like a cracked bellows as she moved.
“Good woman, help me,” this specter gasped. “Help me if ye will, for I’m about done up.”
The hand holding the chunk of ash sagged. Cordelia could hardly believe what she was seeing. “Rhea?” she whispered. “Is it Rhea?”
“Aye,” Rhea whispered, crawling relentlessly through the dead silk-flowers, dragging her hands through the cold earth. “Help me.”
Cordelia retreated a step, her makeshift bludgeon now hanging at her knee. “No, I… I can’t have such as thee in my house… I’m sorry to see ye so, but… but I have a reputation, ye ken… folk watch me close, so they do…”
She glanced at the High Street as she said this, as if expecting to see a line of townspeople outside her gate, watching eagerly, avid to fleet their wretched gossip on its lying way, but there was no one there. Hambry was quiet, its walks and byways empty, the customary joyous noise of Reaping Fair-Day stilled. She looked back at the thing which had fetched up in her dead flowers.
“Yer niece… did this… “the thing in the dirt whispered. “All… her fault…”
Cordelia dropped the chunk of wood. It clipped the side of her ankle, but she hardly noticed. Her hands curled into fists before her.
“Help me,” Rhea whispered. “I know… where she is… we… we have work, us two… women’s… work…”
Cordelia hesitated a moment, then went to the woman, knelt, got an arm around her, and somehow got her to her feet. The smell coming off her was reeky and nauseating-the smell of decomposing flesh.
Bony fingers caressed Cordelia’s cheek and the side of her neck as she helped the hag into the house. Cordelia’s flesh crawled, but she didn’t pull away until Rhea collapsed into a chair, gasping from one end and farting from the other.
“Listen to me,” the old woman hissed.
“I am.” Cordelia drew a chair over and sat beside her. At death’s door she might be, but once her eye fell on you, it was strangely hard to look away. Now Rhea’s fingers dipped inside the bodice of her dirty dress, brought out a silver charm of some kind, and began to move it back and forth rapidly, as if telling beads. Cordelia, who hadn’t felt sleepy all night, began to feel that way now.
“The others are beyond us,” Rhea said, “and the ball has slipped my grasp. But she-! Back to Mayor’s House she’s been ta'en, and mayhap we could see to her-we could do that much, aye.”
“You can’t see to anything,” Cordelia said distantly. “You’re dying.”
Rhea wheezed laughter and a trickle of yellowish drool. “Dying? Nay! Just done up and in need of a refreshment. Now listen to me, Cordelia daughter of Hiram and sister of Pat!”
She hooked a bony (and surprisingly strong) arm around Cordelia’s neck and drew her close. At the same time she raised her other hand, twirling the silver medallion in front of Cordelia’s wide eyes. The crone whispered, and after a bit Cordelia began to nod her understanding.
“Do it, then,” the old woman said, letting go. She slumped back in her chair, exhausted. “Now, for I can’t last much longer as I am. And I’ll need a bit o’ time after, mind ye. To revive, like.”
Cordelia moved across the room to the kitchen area. There, on the counter beside the hand-pump, was a wooden block in which were sheathed the two sharp knives of the house. She took one and came back. Her eyes were distant and far, as Susan’s had been when she and Rhea stood in the open doorway of Rhea’s hut in the light of the Kissing Moon.
“Would ye pay her back?” Rhea asked. “For that’s why I’ve come to ye.”
“Miss Oh So Young and Pretty,” Cordelia murmured in a barely audible voice. The hand not holding the knife floated up to her face and touched her ash-smeared cheek. “Yes. I’d be repaid of her, so I would.”
“To the death?”
“Aye. Hers or mine.”
“Twill be hers,” Rhea said, “never fear it. Now refresh me, Cordelia. Give me what I need!”
Cordelia unbuttoned her dress down the front, pushing it open to reveal an ungenerous bosom and a middle which had begun to curve out in the last year or so, making a tidy little potbelly. Yet she still had the vestige of a waist, and it was here she used the knife, cutting through her shift and the top layers of flesh beneath. The white cotton began to bloom red at once along the slit.
“Aye,” Rhea whispered. “Like roses. I dream of them often enough, roses in bloom, and what stands black among em at the end of the world. Come closer!” She put her hand on the small of Cordelia’s back, urging her forward. She raised her eyes to Cordelia’s face, then grinned and licked her lips. “Good. Good enough.”
Cordelia looked blankly over the top of the old woman’s head as Rhea of the Coos buried her face against the red cut in the shift and began to drink.
20
Roland was at first pleased as the muted jingle of harness and buckle drew closer to the place where the three of them were hunkered down in the high grass, but as the sounds drew closer still-close enough to hear murmuring voices as well as soft-thudding hooves-he began to be afraid. For the riders to pass close was one thing, but if they were, through foul luck, to come right upon them, the three boys would likely die like a nest of moles uncovered by the blade of a passing plow.
Ka surely hadn’t brought them all this way to end in such fashion, had it? In all these miles of Bad Grass, how could that party of oncoming riders possibly strike the one point where Roland and his friends had pulled up? But still they closed in, the sound of tack and buckle and men’s voices growing ever sharper.
Alain looked at Roland with dismayed eyes and pointed to the left. Roland shook his head and patted his hands toward the ground, indicating they would stay put. They had to stay put; it was too late to move without being heard.
Roland drew his guns.
Cuthbert and Alain did the same.
In the end, the plow missed the moles by sixty feet. The boys could actually see the horses and riders flashing through the thick grass; Roland easily made out that the party was led by Jonas, Depape, and Lengyll, riding three abreast. They were followed by at least three dozen others, glimpsed as roan flashes and the bright red and green of serapes through the grass. They were strung out pretty well, and Roland thought he and his friends could reasonably hope they’d string out even more once they reached open desert.
The boys waited for the party to pass, holding their horses’ heads in case one of them took it in mind to whicker a greeting to the nags so close by. When they were gone, Roland turned his pale and unsmiling face to his friends.
“Mount up,” he said. “Reaping’s come.”
21
They walked their horses to the edge of the Bad Grass, meeting the path of Jonas’s party where the grass gave way first to a zone of stunted bushes and then to the desert itself.
The wind howled high and lonesome, carrying big drifts of gritty dust under a cloudless dark blue sky. Demon Moon stared down from it like the filmed eye of a corpse. Two hundred yards ahead, the drogue riders backing Jonas’s party were spread out in a line of three, their sombreros jammed down tight on their heads, their shoulders hunched, their scrapes blowing.
Roland moved so that Cuthbert rode in the middle of their trio. Bert had his slingshot in his hand. Now he handed Alain half a dozen steel balls, and Roland another half-dozen. Then he raised his eyebrows questioningly. Roland nodded and they began to ride.
Dust blew past them in rattling sheets, sometimes turning the drogue riders into ghosts, sometimes obscuring them completely, but the boys closed in steadily. Roland rode tense, waiting for one of the drogues to turn in his saddle and see them, but none did-none of them wanted to put his face into that cutting, grit-filled wind. Nor was there sound to warn them; there was sandy hardpack under the horses’ hooves now, and it didn’t give away much.
When they were just twenty yards behind the drogues, Cuthbert nodded-they were close enough for him to work. Alain handed him a ball. Bert, sitting ramrod straight in the saddle, dropped it into the cup of his slingshot, pulled, waited for the wind to drop, then released. The rider ahead on the left jerked as if stung, raised one hand a little, then toppled out of his saddle. Incredibly, neither of his two companeros seemed to notice. Roland saw what he thought was the beginning of a reaction from the one on the right when Bert drew again, and the rider in the middle collapsed forward onto his horse’s neck. The horse, startled, reared up. The rider flopped bonelessly backward, his sombrero tumbling off, and fell. The wind dropped enough for Roland to hear his knee snap as his foot caught in one of his stirrups.
The third rider now began to turn. Roland caught a glimpse of a bearded face-a dangling cigarette, unlit because of the wind, one astonished eye-and then Cuthbert’s sling thupped again. The astonished eye was replaced by a red socket. The rider slid from his saddle, groping for the horn and missing it.
Three gone, Roland thought.
He kicked Rusher into a gallop. The others did the same, and the boys rode forward into the dust a stirrup’s width apart. The horses of the ambushed drogue riders veered off to the south in a group, and that was good. Riderless horses ordinarily didn’t raise eyebrows in Mejis, but when they were saddled-
More riders up ahead: a single, then two side by side, then another single.
Roland drew his knife, and rode up beside the fellow who was now drogue and didn’t know it.
“What news?” he asked conversationally, and when the man turned, Roland buried his knife in his chest. The vaq’s brown eyes widened above the bandanna he’d pulled up outlaw-style over his mouth and nose, and then he tumbled from his saddle.
Cuthbert and Alain spurred past him, and Bert, not slowing, took the two riding ahead with his slingshot. The fellow beyond them heard something in spite of the wind, and swivelled in his saddle. Alain had drawn his own knife and now held it by the tip of the blade. He threw hard, in the exaggerated full-arm motion they had been taught, and although the range was long for such work-twenty
