"These things you must now hear," Roland said, "and how you judge me will come in time."
He fetched a sigh - the deep sigh of a man who contemplates some arduous piece of work - and then tossed fresh wood on the fire. As the flames flared up, driving the shadows back a little way, he began to talk. All that queerly long night he talked, not finishing the story of Susan Delgado until the sun was rising in the east and painting the glass castle yonder with all the bright hues of a fresh day, and a strange green cast of light which was its own true color.
PART TWO SUSAN
CHAPTER I BENEATH THE KISSING MOON
1
A perfect disc of silver - the Kissing Moon, as it was called in Full Earth - hung above the ragged hill five miles east of Hambry and ten miles south of Eyebolt Canyon. Below the hill the late summer heat still held, suffocating even two hours after sundown, but atop the Coos, it was as if Reap had already come, with its strong breezes and frost-pinched air. For the woman who lived here with no company but a snake and one old mutie cat, it was to be a long night.
Never mind, though; never mind, my dear. Busy hands are happy hands. So they are.
She waited until the hoofbeats of her visitors' horses had faded, sitting quietly by the window in the hut's large room (there was only one other, a bedroom little bigger than a closet). Musty, the six-legged cat, was on her shoulder. Her lap was full of moonlight.
Three horses, bearing away three men. The Big Coffin Hunters, they called themselves.
She snorted. Men were funny, aye, so they were, and the most amusing thing about them was how little they knew it. Men, with their swaggering, belt-hitching names for themselves. Men, so proud of their muscles, their drinking capacities, their eating capacities; so everlastingly proud of their pricks. Yes, even in these times, when a good many of them could shoot nothing but strange, bent seed that produced children fit only to be drowned in the nearest well. Ah, but it was never their fault, was it, dear? No, always it was the woman - her womb, her fault. Men were such cowards. Such grinning cowards. These three had been no different from the general run. The old one with the limp might bear watching - aye, so he might, a clear and overly curious pair of eyes had looked out at her from his head - but she saw nothing in them she could not deal with, came it to that.
Men! She could not understand why so many women feared them. Hadn't the gods made them with the most vulnerable part of their guts hanging right out of their bodies, like a misplaced bit of bowel? Kick them there and they curled up like snails. Caress them there and their brains melted. Anyone who doubted that second bit of wisdom need only look at her night's second bit of business, the one which still lay ahead. Thorin! Mayor of Hambry! Chief Guard o' Barony! No fool like an old fool!
Yet none of these thoughts had any real power over her or any real malice to them, at least not now; the three men who called themselves the Big Coffin Hunters had brought her a marvel, and she would look at it; aye, fill up her eyes with it, so she would.
The gimp, Jonas, had insisted she put it away - he had been told she had a place for such things, not that he wanted to see it himself, not any of her secret places, gods forbid (at this sally Depape and Reynolds had laughed like trolls) - and so she had, but the hoofbeats of their horses had been swallowed by the wind now, and she would do as she liked. The girl whose tits had stolen what little there was of Hart Thorin's mind would not be here for another hour, at least (the old woman had insisted that the girl walk from town, citing the purification value of such a moonlit heel-and-toe, actually just wanting to put a safe bumper of time between her two appointments), and during that hour she would do as she liked.
"Oh, it's beautiful, I'm sure 'tis," she whispered, and did she feel a certain heat in that place where her ancient bowlegs came together? A certain moisture in the dry creek which hid there? Gods!
"Aye, even through the box where they hid it I felt its glam. So beautiful, Musty, like you." She took the cat from her shoulder and held it in front of her eyes. The old torn purred and stretched out its pug of a face toward hers. She kissed its nose. The cat closed its milky gray-green eyes in ecstasy. "So beautiful, like you - so y'are, so y'are! Hee!"
She put the cat down. It walked slowly toward the hearth, where a late fire lazed, desultorily eating at a single log. Musty's tail, split at the tip so it looked like the forked tail of a devil in an old drawing, switched back and forth in the room's dim orange air. Its extra legs, dangling from its sides, twitched dreamily. The shadow which trailed across the floor and grew up the wall was a horror: a thing that looked like a cat crossed with a spider.
The old woman rose and went into her sleeping closet, where she had taken the thing Jonas had given her.