Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [42]
Not as clever as she, maggot. Now, as if the ghost of Vannay were not enough, here was Cort to lecture him. She’s shown you before, hasn’t she?
Yes. She had shown him cleverness as three women. Now there was this fourth.
Nine
When Roland saw the break in the trees ahead—the road they’d been following, and the place where they’d camped for the night—he took two long, deep breaths. These were meant to steady him and didn’t succeed very well.
Water if God wills it, he reminded himself. About the great matters, Roland, you have no say.
Not a comfortable truth, especially for a man on a quest such as his, but one he’d learned to live with.
He took another breath, then stepped out. He released the air in a long, relieved sigh as he saw Eddie and Jake lying deeply asleep beside the dead fire. Jake’s right hand, which had been linked with Eddie’s left when the gunslinger had followed Susannah out of camp, now circled Oy’s body.
The bumbler opened one eye and regarded Roland. Then he closed it again.
Roland couldn’t hear her coming, but sensed her just the same. He lay down quickly, rolled over onto his side, and put his face in the crook of his elbow. And from this position he watched as the wheelchair rolled out of the trees. She had cleaned it quickly but well. Roland couldn’t see a single spot of mud. The spokes gleamed in the moonlight.
She parked the chair where it had been before, slipped out of it with her usual grace, and moved across to where Eddie lay. Roland watched her approach her husband’s sleeping form with some anxiety. Anyone, he thought, who had met Detta Walker would have felt that anxiety. Because the woman who called herself mother was simply too close to what Detta had been.
Lying completely still, like one in sleep’s deepest sling, Roland prepared himself to move.
Then she brushed the hair back from the side of Eddie’s face and kissed the hollow of his temple. The tenderness in that gesture told the gunslinger all he needed to know. It was safe to sleep. He closed his eyes and let the darkness take him.
Chapter IV:
Palaver
One
When Roland woke in the morning, Susannah was still asleep but Eddie and Jake were up. Eddie had built a small new fire on the gray bones of the old one. He and the boy sat close to it for the warmth, eating what Eddie called gunslinger burritos. They looked both excited and worried.
“Roland,” Eddie said, “I think we need to talk. Something happened to us last night—”
“I know,” Roland said. “I saw. You went todash.”
“Todash?” Jake asked. “What’s that?”
Roland started to tell them, then shook his head. “If we’re going to palaver, Eddie, you’d better wake Susannah up. That way we won’t have to double back over the first part.” He glanced south. “And hopefully our new friends won’t interrupt us until we’ve had our talk. They’re none of this.” But already he was wondering about that.
He watched with more than ordinary interest as Eddie shook Susannah awake, quite sure but by no means positive that it would be Susannah who opened her eyes. It was. She sat up, stretched, ran her fingers through her tight curls. “What’s your problem, honeychile? I was good for another hour, at least.”
“We need to talk, Suze,” Eddie said.
“All you want, but not quite yet,” she said. “God, but I’m stiff.”
“Sleeping on hard ground’ll do it every time,” Eddie said.
Not to mention hunting naked in the bogs and damps, Roland thought.
“Pour me some water, sug.” She held out her palms, and Eddie filled them with water from one of the skins. She dashed this over her cheeks and into her eyes, gave out a little shivery cry, and said, “Cold.”
“Old!” Oy said.
“Not yet,” she told the bumbler, “but you give me a few more months like the last few, and I will be. Roland, you Mid-World folks know about coffee, right?”
Roland nodded. “From the plantations of the Outer Arc. Down south.”
“If we