Everything's Eventual

   "Jenna!" The cry came from the deeper shadows at the far end of the infirmary—today it seemed longer than ever to the gunslinger— and Sister Jenna jumped guiltily. "Come away! Ye've passed words enough to entertain twenty men! Let him sleep!"

   "Aye!" she called, then turned back to Roland. "Don't let on that I showed you the doctors."

   "Mum is the word, Jenna."

   She paused, biting her lip again, then suddenly swept back her wimple. It fell against the nape of her neck in a soft chiming of bells. Freed from its confinement, her hair swept against her cheeks like shadows.

   "Am I pretty? Am I? Tell me the truth, Roland of Gilead—no flattery. For flattery's kind only a candle's length."

   "Pretty as a summer night."

   What she saw in his face seemed to please her more than his words, because she smiled radiantly. She pulled the wimple up again, tucking her hair back in with quick little finger-pokes. "Am I decent?"

   "Decent as fair," he said, then cautiously lifted an arm and pointed at her brow. "One curl's out . . . just there."

   "Aye, always that one to devil me." With a comical little grimace, she tucked it back. Roland thought how much he would like to kiss her rosy cheeks . . . and perhaps her rosy mouth for good measure.

   "All's well," he said.

   "Jenna!" The cry was more impatient than ever. "Meditations!"

   "I'm coming just now!" she called, and gathered her voluminous skirts to go. Yet she turned back once more, her face now very grave and very serious. "One more thing," she said in a voice only a step above a whisper. She snatched a quick look around. "The gold medallion ye wear—ye wear it because it's yours. Do'ee understand . . . James?"

   "Yes." He turned his head a bit to look at the sleeping boy. "This is my brother."

   "If they ask, yes. To say different would be to get Jenna in serious trouble."

   How serious he did not ask, and she was gone in any case, seeming to flow along the aisle between all the empty beds, her skirt caught up in one hand. The roses had fled from her face, leaving her cheeks and brow ashy. He remembered the greedy look on the faces of the others, how they had gathered around him in a tightening knot . . . and the way their faces had shimmered.

   Six women, five old and one young.

   Doctors that sang and then crawled away across the floor when dismissed by jingling bells.

   And an improbable hospital ward of perhaps a hundred beds, a ward with a silk roof and silk walls . . .

   . . . and all the beds empty save three.

   Roland didn't understand why Jenna had taken the dead boy's medallion from his pants pocket and put it around his neck, but he had an idea that if they found out she had done so, the Little Sisters of Eluria might kill her.

   Roland closed his eyes, and the soft singing of the doctor-insects once again floated him off into sleep.

IV. A BOWL OF SOUP

. THE BOY IN THE NEXT BED.

THE NIGHT-NURSES.

Roland dreamed that a very large bug (a doctor-bug, mayhap) was flying around his head and banging repeatedly into his nose—collisions which were annoying rather than painful. He swiped at the bug repeatedly, and although his hands were eerily fast under ordinary circumstances, he kept missing it. And each time he missed, the bug giggled.

   I'm slow because I've been sick, he thought.

   No, ambushed. Dragged across the ground by slow mutants, saved by the Little Sisters of Eluria.

   Roland had a sudden, vivid image of a man's shadow growing from the shadow of an overturned freight wagon; heard a rough, gleeful voice cry "Booh!"

   He jerked awake hard enough to set his body rocking in its complication of slings, and the woman who had been standing beside his head, giggling as she tapped his nose lightly with a wooden spoon, stepped back so quickly that the bowl in her other hand slipped from her fingers.

   Roland's hands shot out, and they were as quick as ever—his frustrated failure to catch the bug had been only part of his dream. He caught the bowl before more than a few drops could spill. The woman—Sister Coquina—looked at him with round eyes.

   There was pain all up and down his back from the sudden movement, but it was nowhere near as sharp as it had been before, and there was no sensation of movement on his skin. Perhaps the "doctors" were only sleeping, but he had an idea they were gone.

   He held out his hand for the spoon Coquina had been teasing him with (he found he wasn't surprised at all that one of these would tease a sick and sleeping man in such a way; it would have surprised him only if it had been Jenna), and she handed it to him, her eyes still big.

   "How speedy ye are!" she said. "'Twas like a magic trick, and you still rising from sleep!"

   "Remember it, sai," he said, and tried the soup. There were tiny bits of chicken floating in it. He probably would have considered it bland under other circumstances, but under these, it seemed ambrosial. He began to eat greedily.