singing insects and chiming bells. There was an interval that might
have been sleep, or perhaps unconsciousness, but he never went all
the way back down.
At one point he thought he heard the girl's voice, although he
couldn't be sure, because this time it was raised in fury, or fear, or
both. 'No!' she cried. 'Ye can't have it off him and ye know it! Go
your course and stop talking of it, do!'
When he rose back to consciousness the second time, he was no
stronger in body, but a little more himself in mind. What he saw
when he opened his eyes wasn't the inside of a cloud, but at first
that same phrase - white beauty - recurred to him. It was in some
ways the most beautiful place Roland had ever been in his life ...
partially because he still had a life, of course, but mostly because it
was so fey and peaceful.
It was a huge room, high and long. When Roland at last turned his
head - cautiously, so cautiously - to take its measure as well as he
could, he thought it must run at least two hundred yards from end
to end. It was built narrow, but its height gave the place a feeling
of tremendous airiness.
There were no walls or ceilings such as those he was familiar with,
although it was a little like being in a vast tent. Above him, the sun
struck and diffused its light across billowy panels of thin white
silk, turning them into the bright swags which he had first mistaken
for clouds. Beneath this silk canopy, the room was as grey as
twilight. The walls, also silk, rippled like sails in a faint breeze.
Hanging from each wall-panel was a curved rope bearing small
bells. These lay against the fabric and rang in low and charming
unison, like wind-chimes, when the walls rippled.
An aisle ran down the centre of the long room; on either side of it
were scores of beds, each made up with clean white sheets and
headed with crisp white pillows. There were perhaps forty on the
far side of the aisle, all empty, and another forty on Roland's side.
There were two other occupied beds here, one next to Roland on
his left. This fellow
It's the boy. The one who was in the trough.
The idea ran goosebumps up Roland's arms and gave him a nasty,
superstitious start. He peered more closely at the sleeping boy.
Can't be. You're just dazed, that's all; it can't be.
Yet closer scrutiny refused to dispel the idea. It certainly seemed to
be the boy from the trough, probably ill (why else would he be in a
place like this?) but far from dead; Roland could see the slow rise
and fall of his chest, and the occasional twitch of the fingers which
dangled over the side of the bed.
You didn't get a good enough look at him to be sure of anything,
and after a few days in that trough, his own mother couldn't have
said for sure who it was.
But Roland, who'd had a mother, knew better than that. He also
knew that he'd seen the gold medallion around the boy's neck. just
before the attack of the green folk, he had taken it from this lad's
corpse and put it in his pocket. Now someone - the proprietors of
