They had stopped on the boardwalk in front of a shop advertising MILLINERY & LADIES' WEAR and across from the Fedic Dogan. Susannah thought:Burn up the day, don't forget that's the other part of your job here. Kill time. Keep the oddity of a body we now seem to share in that women's restroom just as long as you possibly can.
"I'm not making fun," Susannah said. "I'm only asking you to put yourself in the place of all those other mothers."
Mia shook her head angrily, her inky hair flying around her ears and brushing at her shoulders. "I did not make their fate, lady, nor did they make mine. I'll save my tears, thank you. Would you hear my tale or not?"
"Yes, please."
"Then let us sit, for my legs are sorely tired."
Ten
In the Gin-Puppie Saloon, a few rickety storefronts back in the direction from which they'd come, they found chairs which would still bear their weight, but neither woman had any taste for the saloon itself, which smelled of dusty death. They dragged the chairs out to the boardwalk, where Mia sat with an audible sigh of relief.
"Soon," she said. "Soon you shall be delivered, Susannah of New York, and so shall I."
"Maybe, but I don't understand any of this. Least of all why you're rushing to this guy Sayre when you must know he serves the Crimson King."
"Hush!" Mia said. She sat with her legs apart and her huge belly rising before her, looking out across the empty street. "'Twas a man of the King who gave me a chance to fulfill the only destiny ka ever left me. Not Sayre but one much greater than he. Someone to whom Sayre answers. A man named Walter."
Susannah started at the name of Roland's ancient nemesis. Mia looked at her, gave her a grim smile.
"You know the name, I see. Well, maybe that'll save some talk. Gods know there's been far too much talk for my taste, already; it's not what I was made for. I was made to bear my chap and raise him, no more than that. And no less."
Susannah offered no reply. Killing was supposedly her trade, killing time her current chore, but in truth she had begun to find Mia's single-mindedness a trifle tiresome. Not to mention frightening.
As if picking this thought up, Mia said: "I am what I am and I am content wi' it. If others are not, what's that to me? Spit on em!"
Spoken like Detta Walker at her feistiest,Susannah thought, but made no reply. It seemed safer to remain quiet.
After a pause, Mia went on. "Yet I'd be lying if I didn't say that being here brings back...certain memories. Yar!" And, unexpectedly, she laughed. Just as unexpectedly, the sound was beautiful and melodic.
"Tell your tale," Susannah said. "This time tell me all of it. We have time before the labor starts again."
"Do you say so?"
"I do. Tell me."
For a few moments Mia just looked out at the street with its dusty cover of oggan and its air of sad and ancient abandonment. As Susannah waited for story-time to commence, she for the first time became aware of the still, shadeless quality to Fedic. She could see everything very well, and there was no moon in the sky as on the castle allure, but she still hesitated to call this daytime.
It'snotime, a voice inside her whispered - she knew not whose.This is a place between, Susannah; a place where shadows are cancelled and time holds its breath.
Then Mia told her tale. It was shorter than Susannah had expected (shorter than she wanted, given Eddie's abjuration to burn up the day), but it explained a great deal. More, actually, than Susannah had hoped for. She listened with growing rage, and why not? She had been more than raped that day in the ring of stones and bones, it seemed. She had been robbed, as well - the strangest robbery to which any woman had ever been subject.
And it was still going on.
Eleven
"Look out there, may it do ya fine," said the big-bellied woman sitting beside Susannah on the boardwalk. "Look out and see Mia before she gained her name."
Susannah looked into the street. At first she saw nothing but a cast-off waggon-wheel, a splintered (and long-dry) watering trough, and a starry silver thing that looked like the lost rowel from some cowpoke's spur.
Then, slowly, a misty figure formed. It was that of a nude woman. Her beauty was blinding - even before she had come fully into view, Susannah knew that. Her age was any. Her black hair brushed her shoulders. Her belly was flat, her navel a cunning cup into which any man who ever loved women would be happy to dip his tongue. Susannah (or perhaps it was Detta) thought,Hell, I could dip my own. Hidden between the ghost-woman's thighs was a cunning cleft. Here was a different tidal pull.
"That's me when I came here," said the pregnant version sitting beside Susannah. She spoke almost like a woman who is showing slides of her vacation.That's me at the Grand Canyon, that's me in Seattle, that's me at Grand Coulee Dam; that's me on the Fedic high street, do it please ya. The pregnant woman was also beautiful, but not in the same eerie way as the shade in the street. The pregnant woman looked a certain age, for instance - late twenties - and her face had been marked by experience. Much of it painful.
"I said I was an elemental - the one who made love to your dinh - but that was a lie. As I think you suspected. I lied not out of hope of gain, but only...I don't know...from a kind of wishfulness, I suppose. I wanted the baby to be mine that way, too - "
"Yours from the start."
"Aye, from the start - you say true." They watched the nude woman walk up the street, arms swinging, muscles of her long back flexing, hips swaying from side to side in that eternal breathless clock of motion. She left no tracks on the oggan.
"I told you that the creatures of the invisible world were left behind when thePrim receded. Most died, as fishes and sea-animals will when cast up on a beach and left to strangle in the alien air. But there are always some who adapt, and I was one of those unfortunates. I wandered far and wide, and whenever I found men in the wastes, I took on the form you see."