The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (18 page)

She brought out a box and opened its lid, which was already ajar. Her face was flooded with soft pink radiance, and Susan gasped. For one moment it was the face of a young girl—but one filled with cruelty as well as youth, the face of a self-willed child determined to learn all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. The face of the girl this hag once
had been, mayhap. The light appeared to be coming from some sort of glass ball.

The old woman looked at it for several moments, her eyes wide and fascinated. Her lips moved as if she were speaking to it or perhaps even singing to it; the little bag Susan had brought from town, its string still clamped in the hag’s mouth, bobbed up and down as she spoke. Then, with what appeared to be great effort of will, she closed the box, cutting off the rosy light. Susan found herself relieved—there was something about it she didn’t like.

The old woman cupped one hand over the silver lock in the middle of the lid, and a brief scarlet light spiked out from between her fingers. All this with the drawstring bag still hanging from her mouth. Then she put the box on the bed, knelt, and began running her hands over the dirt just beneath the bed’s edge. Although she touched only with her palms, lines appeared as if she had used a drawing tool. These lines darkened, becoming what looked like grooves.

The wood, Susan! Get the wood before she wakes up to how long you’ve been gone! For your father’s sake!

Susan pulled the skirt of her dress all the way up to her waist—she did not want the old woman to see dirt or leaves on her clothing when she came back inside, did not want to answer the questions the sight of such smuts might provoke—and crawled beneath the window with her white cotton drawers flashing in the moonlight. Once she was past, she got to her feet again and hurried quietly around to the far side of the hut. Here she found the woodpile under an old, moldy-smelling hide. She took half a dozen good-sized chunks and walked back toward the front of the house with them in her arms.

When she entered, turning sideways to get her load through the doorway without dropping any, the old woman was back in the main room, staring moodily into the fireplace, where there was now little more than embers. Of the drawstring bag there was no sign.

“Took you long enough, missy,” Rhea said. She continued to look into the fireplace, as if Susan were of no account . . . but one foot tapped below the dirty hem of her dress, and her eyebrows were drawn together.

Susan crossed the room, peering over the load of wood in her arms as well as she could while she walked. It wouldn’t surprise her a bit to spy the cat lurking near, hoping to trip her
up. “I saw a spider,” she said. “I flapped my apron at it to make it run away. I hate the look of them, so I do.”

“Ye’ll see something ye like the look of even less, soon enough,” Rhea said, grinning her peculiar one-sided grin. “Out of old Thorin’s nightshirt it’ll come, stiff as a stick and as red as rhubarb! Hee! Hold a minute, girl; ye gods, ye’ve brought enough for a Fair-Day bonfire.”

Rhea took two fat logs from Susan’s pile and tossed them indifferently onto the coals. Embers spiraled up the dark and faintly roaring shaft of the chimney.
There, ye’ve scattered what’s left of yer fire, ye silly old thing, and will likely have to rekindle the whole mess,
Susan thought. Then Rhea reached into the fireplace with one splayed hand, spoke a guttural word, and the logs blazed up as if soaked in oil.

“Put the rest over there,” she said, pointing at the woodbox. “And mind ye not be a scatterbark, missy.”

What, and dirty all this neat?
Susan thought. She bit the insides of her cheeks to kill the smile that wanted to rise on her mouth.

Rhea might have sensed it, however; when Susan straightened again, the old woman was looking at her with a dour, knowing expression.

“All right, mistress, let’s do our business and have it done. Do ye know why you’re here?”

“I am here at Mayor Thorin’s wish,” Susan repeated, knowing that was no real answer. She was frightened now—more frightened than when she had looked through the window and seen the old woman crooning to the glass ball. “His wife has come barren to the end of her courses. He wishes to have a son before he is also unable to—”

“Pish-tush, spare me the codswallop and pretty words. He wants tits and arse that don’t squish in his hands and a box that’ll grip what he pushes. If he’s still man enough to push it, that is. If a son come of it, aye, fine, he’ll give it over to ye to keep and raise until it’s old enough to school, and after that ye’ll see it no more. If it’s a daughter, he’ll likely take it from ye and give it to his new man, the one with the girl’s hair and the limp, to drown in the nearest cattle-wallow.”

Susan stared at her, shocked out of all measure.

The old woman saw the look and laughed. “Don’t like the sound of the truth, do yer? Few do, missy. But that’s neither here nor there; yer auntie was ever a trig one, and she’ll have
done all right out of Thorin and Thorin’s treasury. What gold
you
see of it’s none o’ mine . . . and won’t be none o’ yours, either, if you don’t watch sharp! Hee! Take off that dress!”

I won’t
was what rose to her lips, but what then? To be turned out of this hut (and to be turned out pretty much as she had come, and not as a lizard or a hopping toad would probably be the best luck she could hope for) and sent west as she was now, without even the two gold coins she’d brought up here? And that was only the small half of it. The large was that she had given her word. At first she had resisted, but when Aunt Cord had invoked her father’s name, she had given in. As she always did. Really, she had no choice. And when there was no choice, hesitation was ever a fault.

She brushed the front of her apron, to which small bits of bark now clung, then untied it and took it off. She folded it, laid it on a small, grimy hassock near the hearth, and unbuttoned her dress to the waist. She shivered it from her shoulders, and stepped out. She folded it and laid it atop the apron, trying not to mind the greedy way Rhea of Cöos was staring at her in the firelight. The cat came sashaying across the floor, grotesque extra legs bobbling, and sat at Rhea’s feet. Outside, the wind gusted. It was warm on the hearth but Susan was cold just the same, as if that wind had gotten inside her, somehow.

“Hurry, girl, for yer father’s sake!”

Susan pulled her shift over her head, folded it atop the dress, then stood in only her drawers, with her arms folded over her bosom. The fire painted warm orange highlights along her thighs; black circles of shadow in the tender folds behind her knees.

“And still she’s not nekkid!” the old crow laughed. “Ain’t we lahdi-dah! Aye, we are, very fine! Take off those drawers, mistress, and stand as ye slid from yer mother! Although ye had not so many goodies as to interest the likes of Hart Thorin then, did ye? Hee!”

Feeling caught in a nightmare, Susan did as she was bid. With her mound and bush uncovered, her crossed arms seemed foolish. She lowered them to her sides.

“Ah, no wonder he wants ye!” the old woman said. “ ’Tis beautiful ye are, and true! Is she not, Musty?”

The cat
waowed.

“There’s dirt on yer knees,” Rhea said suddenly. “How came it there?”

Susan felt a moment of awful panic. She had lifted her skirts to crawl beneath the hag’s window . . . and hung herself by doing it.

Then an answer rose to her lips, and she spoke it calmly enough. “When I came in sight of your hut, I grew fearful. I knelt to pray, and raised my skirt so as not to soil it.”

“I’m touched—to want a clean dress for the likes o’ me! How good y’are! Don’t you agree, Musty?”

The cat
waowed,
then began to lick one of its forepaws.

“Get on with it,” Susan said. “You’ve been paid and I’ll obey, but stop teasing and have done.”

“You know what it is I have to do, mistress.”

“I
don’t,
” Susan said. The tears were close again, burning the backs of her eyes, but she would not let them fall.
Would not
. “I have an idea, but when I asked Aunt Cord if I was right, she said that you’d ‘take care of my education in that regard.’ ”

“Wouldn’t dirty her mouth with the words, would she? Well, that’s all right. Yer Aunt Rhea’s not too nice to say what yer Aunt Cordelia won’t. I’m to make sure that ye’re physically and spiritually intact, missy. Proving honesty is what the old ones called it, and it’s a good enough name. So it is. Step to me.”

Susan took two reluctant steps forward, so that her bare toes were almost touching the old woman’s slippers and her bare breasts were almost touching the old woman’s dress.

“If a devil or demon has polluted yer spirit, such a thing as might taint the child you’ll likely bear, it leaves a mark behind. Most often it’s a suck-mark or a lover’s bite, but there’s others . . . open yer mouth!”

Susan did, and when the old woman bent closer, the reek of her was so strong that the girl’s stomach clenched. She held her breath, praying this would be over soon.

“Run out yer tongue.”

Susan ran out her tongue.

“Now send yer breezes into my face.”

Susan exhaled her held breath. Rhea breathed it in and then, mercifully, pulled her head away a little. She had been close enough for Susan to see the lice hopping in her hair.

“Sweet enough,” the old woman said. “Aye, good’s a meal. Now turn around.”

Susan did, and felt the old witch’s fingers trail down her back and to her buttocks. Their tips were cold as mud.

“Bend over and spread yer cheeks, missy, be not shy, Rhea’s seen more than one pultry in her time!”

Face flushing—she could feel the beat of her heart in the center of her forehead and in the hollows of her temples—Susan did as told. And then she felt one of those corpselike fingers prod its way into her anus. Susan bit her lips to keep from screaming.

The invasion was mercifully short . . . but there would be another, Susan feared.

“Turn around.”

She turned. The old woman passed her hands over Susan’s breasts, flicked lightly at the nipples with her thumbs, then examined the undersides carefully. Rhea slipped a finger into the cup of the girl’s navel, then hitched up her own skirt and dropped to her knees with a grunt of effort. She passed her hands down Susan’s legs, first front, then back. She seemed to take special pains with the area just below the calves, where the tendons ran.

“Lift yer right foot, girl.”

Susan did, and uttered a nervous, screamy laugh as Rhea ran a thumbnail down her instep to her heel. The old woman parted her toes, looking between each pair.

After this process had been repeated with the other foot, the old woman—still on her knees—said: “You know what comes next.”

“Aye.” The word came out of her in a little trembling rush.

“Hold ye still, missy—all else is well, clean as a willow-strip, ye are, but now we’ve come to the cozy nook that’s all Thorin cares for; we’ve come to where honesty must really be proved. So hold ye still!”

Susan closed her eyes and thought of horses running along the Drop—nominally they were the Barony’s horse, overlooked by Rimer, Thorin’s Chancellor and the Barony’s Minister of Inventory, but the horses didn’t know that; they thought they were free, and if you were free in your mind, what else mattered?

Let me be free in my mind, as free as the horses along the Drop, and don’t let her hurt me. Please, don’t let her hurt me. And if she does, please help me to bear it in decent silence.

Cold fingers parted the downy hair below her navel; there
was a pause, and then two cold fingers slipped inside her. There
was
pain, but only a moment of it, and not bad; she’d hurt herself worse stubbing her toe or barking her shin on the way to the privy in the middle of the night. The humiliation was the bad part, and the revulsion of Rhea’s ancient touch.

“Caulked tight, ye are!” Rhea cried. “Good as ever was! But Thorin’ll see to that, so he will! As for you, my girl, I’ll tell yer a secret yer prissy aunt with her long nose ’n tight purse ’n little goosebump tits never knew: even a girl who’s intact don’t need to lack for a shiver now ’n then, if she knows how!”

The hag’s withdrawing fingers closed gently around the little nubbin of flesh at the head of Susan’s cleft. For one terrible second Susan thought they would pinch that sensitive place, which sometimes made her draw in a breath if it rubbed just so against the pommel of her saddle when she was riding, but instead the fingers caressed . . . then pressed . . . and the girl was horrified to feel a heat which was far from unpleasant kindle in her belly.

“Like a little bud o’ silk,” the old woman crooned, and her meddling fingers moved faster. Susan felt her hips sway forward, as if with a mind and life of their own, and then she thought of the old woman’s greedy, self-willed face, pink as the face of a whore by gaslight as it hung over the open box; she thought of the way the drawstring bag with the gold pieces in it had hung from the wrinkled mouth like some disgorged piece of flesh, and the heat she felt was gone. She drew back, trembling, her arms and belly and breasts breaking out in gooseflesh.

“You’ve finished what you were paid to do,” Susan said. Her voice was dry and harsh.

Rhea’s face knotted. “Ye’ll not tell me aye, no, yes, or maybe, impudent stripling of a girl!
I
know when I’m done,
I,
Rhea, the Weirding of Cöos, and—”

“Be still, and be on your feet before I kick you into the fire, unnatural thing.”

The old woman’s lips wriggled back from her few remaining teeth in a doglike sneer, and now, Susan realized, she and the witch-woman were back where they had been at the start: ready to claw each other’s eyes out.

“Raise hand or foot to me, you impudent cunt, and what
leaves my house will leave handless, footless, and blind of eye.”

“I do not much doubt you could do it, but Thorin should be vexed,” Susan said. It was the first time in her life she had ever invoked a man’s name for protection. Realizing this made her feel ashamed . . . small, somehow. She didn’t know why that should be, especially since she had agreed to sleep in his bed and bear his child, but it was.