Song of Susannah

“Where the Wolves brought the children.”

“Aye, and will bring them again,” Mia said. “For the King’s work will go forward after this disturbance raised by your friend the gunslinger is past. I have no doubt of it.”

Susannah looked at her with real curiosity. “How can you speak so cruel and yet be so serene?” she asked. “They bring children here and scoop out their heads like… like gourds. Children, who’ve harmed nobody! What they send back are great galumphing idiots who grow to their full size in agony and often die in much the same way. Would you be so sanguine, Mia, if your child was borne away across one of those saddles, shrieking for you and holding out his arms?”

Mia flushed, but was able to meet Susannah’s gaze. “Each must follow the road upon which ka has set her feet, Susannah of New York. Mine is to bear my chap, and raise him, and thus end your dinn’s quest. And his life.”

“It’s wonderful how everyone seems to think they know just what ka means for them,” Susannah said. “Don’t you think that’s wonderful?”

“I think you’re trying to make jest of me because you fear,” Mia said levelly. “If such makes you feel better, than aye, have on.” She spread her arms and made a little sarcastic bow over her great belly.

They had stopped on the boardwalk in front of a shop advertising MILLINERY amp; LADIES’ WEAR and across from the Fedic Dogan. Susannah thought: Burn up the day, don’t forget that’s the other part of your job here. Kill time. Keep the oddity of a body we now seem to share in that women’s restroom just as long as you possibly can.

“I’m not making fun,” Susannah said. “I’m only asking you to put yourself in the place of all those other mothers.”

Mia shook her head angrily, her inky hair flying around her ears and brushing at her shoulders. “I did not make their fate, lady, nor did they make mine. I’ll save my tears, thank you. Would you hear my tale or not?'

'Yes, please.”

“Then let us sit, for my legs are sorely tired.”

TEN

In the Gin-Puppie Saloon, a few rickety storefronts back in the direction from which they’d come, they found chairs which would still bear their weight, but neither woman had any taste for the saloon itself, which smelled of dusty death. They dragged the chairs out to the boardwalk, where Mia sat with an audible sigh of relief.

“Soon,” she said. “Soon you shall be delivered, Susannah of New York, and so shall I.”

“Maybe, but I don’t understand any of this. Least of all why you’re rushing to this guy Sayre when you must know he serves the Crimson King.”

“Hush!” Mia said. She sat with her legs apart and her huge belly rising before her, looking out across the empty street. “’Twas a man of the King who gave me a chance to fulfill the only destiny ka ever left me. Not Sayre but one much greater than he. Someone to whom Sayre answers. A man named Walter.”

Susannah started at the name of Roland’s ancient nemesis. Mia looked at her, gave her a grim smile.

“You know the name, I see. Well, maybe that’ll save some talk. Gods know there’s been far too much talk for my taste, already; it’s not what I was made for. I was made to bear my chap and raise him, no more than that. And no less.”

Susannah offered no reply. Killing was supposedly her trade, killing time her current chore, but in truth she had begun to find Mia’s single-mindedness a trifle tiresome. Not to mention frightening.

As if picking this thought up, Mia said: “I am what I am and I am content wi’ it. If others are not, what’s that to me? Spit on em!”

Spoken like Detta Walker at her feistiest, Susannah thought, but made no reply. It seemed safer to remain quiet.

After a pause, Mia went on. ’Yet I’d be lying if I didn’t say that being here brings back… certain memories. Yar!” And, unexpectedly, she laughed. Just as unexpectedly, the sound was beautiful and melodic.

“Tell your tale,” Susannah said. “This time tell me all of it. We have time before the labor starts again.”

“Do you say so?”

“I do. Tell me.”

For a few moments Mia just looked out at the street with its dusty cover of oggan and its air of sad and ancient abandonment. As Susannah waited for story-time to commence, she for the first time became aware of the still, shadeless quality to Fedic. She could see everything very well, and there was no moon in the sky as on the castle allure, but she still hesitated to call this daytime.

It’s no time, a voice inside her whispered-she knew not whose. This is a place between, Susannah; a place where shadows are cancelled and time holds its breath.

Then Mia told her tale. It was shorter than Susannah had expected (shorter than she wanted, given Eddie’s abjuration to burn up the day), but it explained a great deal. More, actually, than Susannah had hoped for. She listened with growing rage, and why not? She had been more than raped that day in the ring of stones and bones, it seemed. She had been robbed, as well-the strangest robbery to which any woman had ever been subject.

And it was still going on.

ELEVEN

“Look out there, may it do ya fine,” said the big-bellied woman sitting beside Susannah on the boardwalk. “Look out and see Mia before she gained her name.”

Susannah looked into the street. At first she saw nothing but a cast-off waggon-wheel, a splintered (and long-dry) watering trough, and a starry silver thing that looked like the lost rowel from some cowpoke’s spur.

Then, slowly, a misty figure formed. It was that of a nude woman. Her beauty was blinding-even before she had come fully into view, Susannah knew that. Her age was any. Her black hair brushed her shoulders. Her belly was flat, her navel a cunning cup into which any man who ever loved women would be happy to dip his tongue. Susannah (or perhaps it was Detta) thought, Hell, I could dip my own. Hidden between the ghost-woman’s thighs was a cunning cleft. Here was a different tidal pull.

“That’s me when I came here,” said the pregnant version sitting beside Susannah. She spoke almost like a woman who is showing slides of her vacation. That’s me at the Grand Canyon, that’s me in Seattle, that’s me at Grand Coulee Dam; that’s me on the Fedic high street, do it please ya. The pregnant woman was also beautiful, but not in the same eerie way as the shade in the street. The pregnant woman looked a certain age, for instance-late twenties-and her face had been marked by experience. Much of it painful.

“I said I was an elemental-the one who made love to your dinh-but that was a lie. As I think you suspected. I lied not out of hope of gain, but only… I don’t know… from a kind of wishfulness, I suppose. I wanted the baby to be mine that way, too-”

“Yours from the start.”

“Aye, from the start-you say true.” They watched the nude woman walk up the street, arms swinging, muscles of her long back flexing, hips swaying from side to side in that eternal breathless clock of motion. She left no tracks on the oggan.

“I told you that the creatures of the invisible world were left behind when the Prim receded. Most died, as fishes and sea-animals will when cast up on a beach and left to strangle in the alien air. But there are always some who adapt, and I was one of those unfortunates. I wandered far and wide, and whenever I found men in the wastes, I took on the form you see.”

Like a model on a runway (one who has forgotten to actually put on the latest Paris fashion she’s supposed to be displaying), the woman in the street pivoted on the balls of her feet, buttocks tensing with lovely silken ease, creating momentary crescent-shaped hollows. She began to walk back, the eyes just below the straight cut of her bangs fixed on some distant horizon, her hair swinging beside ears that were without other ornament.

“When I found someone with a prick, I fucked him,” Mia said. “That much I had in common with the demon elemental who first tried to have congress with your soh and then did have congress with your dinh, and that also accounts for my lie, I suppose. And I found your dinh passing fair.” The tiniest bit of greed roughened her voice as she said this. The Detta in Susannah found it sexy. The Detta in Susannah bared her lips in a grin of gruesome understanding.

“I fucked them, and if they couldn’t break free I fucked them to death.” Matter-of-fact. After the Grand Coulee, we went to Yosemite. Would you tell your dinh something for me, Susannah? If you see him again?”

“Aye, if you like.”

“Once he knew a man-a bad man-named Amos Depape, brother of the Roy Depape who ran with Eldred Jonas in Mejis. Your dinh believes Amos Depape was stung to death by a snake, and in a way he was… but the snake was me.”

Susannah said nothing.

“I didn’t fuck them for sex, I didn’t fuck them to kill them, although I didn’t care when they died and their pricks finally wilted out of me like melting icicles. In truth I didn’t know why I was fucking them, until I came here, to Fedic. In those early days there were still men and women here; the Red Death hadn’t come, do ye ken. The crack in the earth beyond town was there, but the bridge over it still stood strong and true. Those folk were stubborn, trying not to let go, even when the rumors that Castle Discordia was haunted began. The trains still came, although on no regular schedule-”

“The children?” Susannah asked. “The twins?” She paused. “The Wolves?”

“Nay, all of that was two dozen centuries later. Or more. But hear me now: there was one couple in Fedic who had a baby. You’ve no idea, Susannah of New York, how rare and wonderful that was in those days when most folk were as sterile as the elementals themselves, and those who weren’t more often than not produced either slow mutants or monsters so terrible they were killed by their parents if they took more than a single breath. Most of them didn’t. But this baby!”

She clasped her hands. Her eyes shone.

“It was round and pink and unblemished by so much as a portwine stain-perfect-and I knew after a single look what I’d been made for. I wasn’t fucking for the sex of it, or because in coitus I was almost mortal, or because it brought death to most of my partners, but to have a baby like theirs. Like their Michael.”

She lowered her head slightly and said, “I would have taken him, you know. Would have gone to the man, fucked him until he was crazy, then whispered in his ear that he should kill his molly. And when she’d gone to the clearing at the end of the path, I would have fucked him dead and the baby-that beautiful little pink baby-would have been mine. D’you see?”

“Yes,” Susannah said. She felt faintly sick. In front of them, in the middle of the street, the ghostly woman made yet another turn and started back again. Farther down, the huckster-robot honked out his seemingly eternal spiel: Girls, girls, girls! Some are humie and some are cybie, but who cares, you can’t tell the difference!’’