She had none. They'd brought along enough bones and khaki rags to make a fire, but Susannah knew the fuel wouldn't last long. The bits of clodi would burn as rapidly as newspaper and the bones would be gone before the hands of Roland's fancy new watch (which he had shown her with something like reverence) stood together at midnight. And tomorrow night there would likely be no fire at all and cold food eaten directly from the cans. She was aware that things could have been ever so much worse-she put the daytime temperature at forty-five degrees, give or take, and they did have food-but she would have given a great deal for a sweater; even more for a pair of longjohns.
"Probably we'll find more stuff we can use for fuel as we go along," she said hopefully once the fire was lit (the burning bones gave off a nasty smell, and they were careful to sit downwind)
"Weeds... bushes... more bones... maybe even deadwood."
"I don't think so," he said. "Not on this side of the Crimson King's castle. Not even devilgrass, which grows damned near anywhere in Mid-World."
"You don't know that. Not for sure." She couldn't bear thinking about days and days of unvarying chill, with the two of them dressed for nothing more challenging than a spring day in Central Park.
"I think he murdered this land when he darkened Thunderclap,"
Roland mused. "It probably wasn't much of a shake to begin with, and it's sterile now. But count your blessings." He reached over and touched a pimple that had popped out of her skin beside her full lower lip. "A hundred years ago this might have darkened and spread and eaten your skin right off your bones. Gotten into your brain and run you mad before you died."
"Cancer? Radiation?"
Roland shrugged as if to say it didn't matter. "Somewhere beyond the Crimson King's castle we may come to grasslands and even forests again, but the grass will likely be buried under snow when we get there, for the season's wrong. I can feel it in the air, see it in the way the day's darkening so quickly."
She groaned, striving for comic effect, but what came out was a sound of fear and weariness so real that it frightened her.
Oy pricked up his ears and looked around at them. "Why don't you cheer me up a little, Roland?"
"You need to know the truth," he said. "We can get on as we are for a good long while, Susannah, but it isn't going to be pleasant. We have food enough in yonder cart to keep us for a month or more, if we stretch it out... and we will. When we come again to land that's alive, we'll find animals even if there is snow. And that's what I want. Not because we'll be hungry for fresh meat by then, although we will be, but because we'll need the hides. I hope we won't need them desperately, that it won't be that near a thing, but-"
"But you're afraid it will."
"Yes," he said. "I'm afraid it will. For over a long period of time there's little in life so disheartening as constant cold-not deep enough to kill, mayhap, but always there, stealing your energy and your will and your body-fat, an ounce at a time. I'm afraid we're in for a very hard stretch. You'll see."
"She did.
FIVE
There's little in life that's so disheartening as constant cold.
The days weren't so bad. They were on the move, at least, exercising and keeping their blood up. Yet even during the days she began to dread the open areas they sometimes came to, where the wind howled across miles of broken bushless rock and between the occasional butte or mesa. These stuck up into the unvarying blue sky like the red fingers of otherwise buried stone giants. The wind seemed to grow ever sharper as they trudged below the milky swirls of cloud moving along the Path of the Beam. She would hold her chapped hands up to shield her face from it, hating the way her fingers would never go completely numb but instead turned into dazed things full of buried buzzings. Her eyes would well up with water, and then the tears would gush down her cheeks. These tear-tracks never froze; the cold wasn't that bad. It was just deep enough to make their lives a slowly escalating misery. For what pittance would she have sold her immortal soul during those unpleasant days and horrible nights? Sometimes she thought a single sweater would have purchased it; at other times she thought No, honey, you got too much self-respect, even now. Would you be willing to spend an eternity in hell-or maybe in the todash darkness-for a single sweater? Surely not!
Well, maybe not. But if the devil tempting her were to throw in a pair of earmuffs-
And it would have taken so little, really, to make them comfortable.
She thought of this constantly. They had the food, and they had water, too, because at fifteen-mile intervals along the path they came to pumps that still worked, pulling great cold gushes of mineral-tasting water from deep under the Badlands.