moved on.'
'Are you for the Jesus-man?'
She looked surprised for a moment, almost shocked, and then
laughed merrily. 'No, not us!'
'If you are hospitallers ... nurses ... where are the doctors?'
She looked at him, biting at her lip, as if trying to decide
something. Roland found her doubt utterly charming, and he
realized that, sick or not, he was looking at a woman as a woman
for the first time since Susan Delgado had died, and that had been
long ago. The whole world had changed since then, and not for the
better.
'Would you really know?'
'Yes, of course,' he said, a little surprised. A little disquieted, too.
He kept waiting for her face to shimmer and change, as the faces of
the others had done. It didn't. There was none of that unpleasant
dead-earth smell about her, either.
Wait, he cautioned himself. Believe nothing here, least of all your
senses. Not yet.
'I suppose you must,' she said with a sigh. It tinkled the bells at her
forehead, which were darker in colour than those the others wore -
not black like her hair but charry, somehow, as if they had been
hung in the smoke of a campfire. Their sound, however, was
brightest silver. 'Promise me you'll not scream and wake the pube
in yonder bed.'
'Pube?'
'The boy. Do ye promise?'
'Aye,' he said, falling into the half-forgotten patois of the Outer Arc
without even being aware of it. Susan's dialect. 'It's been long since
I screamed, pretty.'
She coloured more definitely at that, roses more natural and lively
than the one on her breast mounting in her cheeks.
'Don't call pretty what ye can't properly see,' she said.
'Then push back the wimple you wear.'
Her face he could see perfectly well, but he badly wanted to see
her hair - hungered for it, almost. A full flood of black in all this
dreaming white. Of course it might be cropped, those of her order
might wear it that way, but he somehow didn't think so.
'No, 'tis not allowed.'
'By who?'
'Big Sister.'
'She who calls herself Mary?'
'Aye, her.' She started away, then paused and looked back over her
shoulder. In another girl her age, one as pretty as this, that look
back would have been flirtatious. This girl's was only grave.
'Remember your promise.'
'Aye, no screams.'
She went to the bearded man, skirt swinging. In the dimness, she
cast only a blur of shadow on the empty beds she passed. When
she reached the man (this one was unconscious, Roland thought,
