Well-a-well , Mia thought. It all does fine for now, good as it can do, anyway, and like that woman in the book said, tomorrow's another day. Worry about it then. Right ?
Right. She picked up the roast again and began to eat. The smacking sounds she made were really not much different from those made by the rat. Really not much different at all.
TWO
Tian and Zalia had tried to give Eddie and Susannah their bedroom. Convincing them that their guests really didn't want their bedroom - that sleeping there would actually make them uncomfortable - hadn't been easy. It was Susannah who finally turned the trick, telling the Jaffordses in a hesitant, confiding voice that something awful had happened to them in the city of Lud, something so traumatic that neither of them could sleep easily in a house anymore. A barn, where you could see the door open to the outside world any time you wanted to take a look, was much better.
It was a good tale, and well told. Tian and Zalia listened with a sympathetic credulity that made Eddie feel guilty. A lot of bad things had happened to them in Lud, that much was true, but nothing which made either of them nervous about sleeping indoors. At least he guessed not; since leaving their own world, the two of them had only spent a single night (the previous) under the actual roof of an actual house.
Now he sat cross-legged on one of the blankets Zalia had given them to spread on the hay, the other two cast aside. He was looking out into the yard, past the porch where Gran-pere had told his tale, and toward the river. The moon flitted in and out of the clouds, first brightening the scene to silver, then darkening it. Eddie hardly saw what he was looking at. His ears were trained on the floor of the barn below him, where the stalls and pens were. She was down there somewhere, he was sure she was, but God, she was so quiet.
And by the way, who is she? Mia, Roland says, but that's just a name. Who is she really ?
But it wasn't just a name. It means mother in the High Speech , the gunslinger had said.
It means mother .
Yeah. But she's not the mother of my kid. The chap is not my son.
A soft clunk from below him, followed by the creak of a board. Eddie stiffened. She was down there, all right. He'd begun to have his doubts, but she was.
He had awakened after perhaps six hours of deep and dreamless sleep to discover she was gone. He went to the barn's bay door, which they'd left open, and looked out. There she was. Even by moonlight he'd known that wasn't really Susannah down there in the wheelchair; not his Suze, not Odetta Holmes or Detta Walker, either. Yet she wasn't entirely unfamiliar. She -
You saw her in New York, only then she had legs and she knew how to use them. She had legs and she didn't want to go too close to the rose.
She had her reasons for that, and they were good reasons, but you know what I think the real reason was ? I think she was afraid it would hurt whatever it is she's carrying in her belly.
Yet he felt sorry for the woman below. No matter who she was or what she was carrying, she'd gotten herself into this situation while saving Jake Chambers. She'd held off the demon of the circle, trapping it inside her just long enough for Eddie to finish whittling the key he'd made.
If you'd finished it earlier - if you hadn't been such a damned little chickenshit - she might not even be in this mess, did you ever think of that ?
Eddie had pushed the thought away. There was some truth to it, of course - he had lost his confidence while whittling the key, which was why it hadn't been finished when the time of Jake's drawing came - but he was done with that kind of thinking. It was good for nothing but creating a truly excellent array of selfinflicted wounds.
Whoever she was, his heart had gone out to the woman he saw below him. In the sleeping silence of the night, through the alternating shutters of moonlight and dark, she pushed Susannah's wheelchair first across the yard... then back... then across again... then left... then right. She reminded him a little of the old robots in Shardik's clearing, the ones Roland had made him shoot. And was that so surprising? He'd drifted off to sleep thinking of those robots, and what Roland had said of them: They are creatures of great sadness, I think, in their own way. Eddie is going to put them out of their misery . And so he had, after some persuasion: the one that looked like a many-jointed snake, the one that looked like the Tonka tractor he'd once gotten as a birthday present, the ill-tempered stainless-steel rat. He'd shot them all except for the last, some sort of mechanical flying thing. Roland had gotten that one.
Like the old robots, the woman in the yard below wanted to go someplace, but didn't know where. She wanted to get something, but didn't know what. The question was, what was he supposed to do?