brought here?'
'At least twenty. They healed ... the bugs healed 'em ... and then,
one by one, they disappeared. You'd go to sleep, and when you
woke up there'd, be one more empty bed. One by one they went,
until only me and that, one down yonder was left.'
He looked at Roland solemnly.
'And now you.'
'Norman,' Roland's head was swimming. `I-`
'I reckon I know what's wrong with you,' Norman said. He seemed
to speak from far away . . . perhaps from all the way around the
curve of I the earth. 'It's the soup. But a man has to eat. A woman,
too. If she's a natural woman, anyway. These ones ain't natural.
Even Sister Jenna's not natural. Nice don't mean natural.' Further
and further away. 'And she'll be like them in the end. Mark me
well.'
'Can't move.' Saying even that required a huge effort. It was like
moving boulders.
'No.' Norman suddenly laughed. It was a shocking sound, and
echoed in the growing blackness which filled Roland's head. 'It
ain't just sleepmedicine they put in their soup; it's can't-move-
medicine, too. There's nothing much wrong with me, brother ... so
why do you think I'm still here?'
Norman was now speaking not from around the curve of the earth
but perhaps from the moon. He said: 'I don't think either of us is
ever going to see the sun shining on a flat piece of ground again.'
You're wrong about that, Roland tried to reply, and more in that
vein, as well, but nothing came out. He sailed around to the black
side of the moon, losing all his words in the void he found there.
Yet he never quite lost awareness of himself. Perhaps the dose of
'medicine' in Sister Coquina's soup had been badly calculated, or
perhaps it was just that they had never had a gunslinger to work
their mischief on, and did not know they had one now.
Except, of course, for Sister Jenna - she knew.
At some point in the night, whispering, giggling voices and lightly
chiming bells brought him back from the darkness where he had
been biding, not quite asleep or unconscious. Around him, so
constant he now barely heard it, were the singing 'doctors'.
Roland opened his eyes. He saw pale and chancy light dancing in
the black air. The giggles and whispers were closer. Roland tried to
turn his head and at first couldn't. He rested, gathered his will into
a hard blue ball, and tried again. This time his head did turn. Only
a little, but a little was enough.
It was five of the Little Sisters - Mary, Louise, Tamra, Coquina,
Michela. They came up the long aisle of the black infirmary,
laughing together like children out on a prank, carrying long tapers
in silver holders, the bells lining the forehead-bands of their
wimples chiming little silver runs of sound. They gathered about
the bed of the bearded man. From within their circle, candleglow
rose in a shimmery column that died before it got halfway to the
