Song of Susannah Read Free

entirely male) elders about the day’s work, and then to tell them what payment was required. Roland went with Rosa to her cottage. It stood up the hill from a formerly neat privy which was now mostly in ruins. Within this privy, standing useless sentinel, was what remained of Andy the Messenger Robot (many other functions). Rosalita undressed Roland slowly and completely. When he was mother-naked, she stretched beside him on her bed and rubbed him with special oils: cat-oil for his aches, a creamier, faintly perfumed blend for his most sensitive parts. They made love. They came together (the sort of physical accident fools take for fate), listening to the crackle of firecrackers from the Calla’s high street and the boisterous shouts of the folken, most of them now well past tipsy, from the sound.
    “Sleep,” she said. “Tomorrow I see you no more. Not me, not Eisenhart or Overholser, not anyone in the Calla.”
    “Do you have the sight, then?” Roland asked. He sounded relaxed, even amused, but even when he had been deep in her heat and thrusting, the gnaw of Susannah had never left his mind: one ofhis ka-tet, and lost. Even if there had been no more than that, it would have been enough to keep him from true rest or ease.
    “No,” said she, “but I have feelings from time to time, like any other woman, especially about when her man is getting ready to move on.”
    “Is that what I am to you? Your man?”
    Her gaze was both shy and steady. “For the little time ye’ve been here, aye, I like to think so. Do’ee call me wrong, Roland?”
    He shook his head at once. It was good to be some woman’s man again, if only for a short time.
    She saw he meant it, and her face softened. She stroked his lean cheek. “We were well-met, Roland, were we not? Well-met in the Calla.”
    “Aye, lady.”
    She touched the remains of his right hand, then his right hip. “And how are your aches?”
    To her he wouldn’t lie. “Vile.”
    She nodded, then took hold of his left hand, which he’d managed to keep away from the lobstrosities. “And this un?”
    “Fine,” he said, but he felt a deep ache. Lurking. Waiting its time to come out. What Rosalita called the dry twist.
    “Roland!” said she.
    “Aye?”
    Her eyes looked at him calmly. She still had hold of his left hand, touching it, culling out its secrets. “Finish your business as soon as you can.”
    “Is that your advice?”
    “Aye, dearheart. Before your business finishes you.”
THREE
    Eddie sat on the back porch of the rectory as midnight came and what these folk would ever after call The Day of the East Road Battle passed into history (after which it would pass into myth . . . always assuming the world held together long enough for it to happen). In town the sounds of celebration had grown increasingly loud and feverish, until Eddie seriously began to wonder if they might not set the entire high street afire. And would he mind? Not a whit, say thanks and you’re welcome, too. While Roland, Susannah, Jake, Eddie, and three women—Sisters of Oriza, they called themselves—stood against the Wolves, the rest of the Calla- folken had either been cowering back in town or in the rice by the riverbank. Yet ten years from now—maybe even five!—they would be telling each other about how they’d bagged their limit one day in autumn, standing shoulder to shoulder with the gunslingers.
    It wasn’t fair and part of him knew it wasn’t fair, but never in his life had he felt so helpless, so lost, and so consequently mean. He would tell himself not to think of Susannah, to wonder where she was or if her demon child had yet been delivered, and find himself thinking of her, anyway. She had gone to New York, of that much he was sure. But when? Were people traveling in hansom cabs by gaslight or jetting around in anti-grav taxis driven by robots from North Central Positronics?
    Is she even alive?
    He would have shuddered away from thisthought if he could have, but the