Three

Twenty minutes later, Rosalita took Roland by the hand, her grip firm and dry. She led him into the pantry and closed the door. “Drop yer britches, I beg,” she said. “Be not shy, for I doubt you’ve anything I haven’t seen before, unless men are built summat different in Gilead and the Inners.”

“I don’t believe they are,” Roland said, and let his pants fall.

The sun was now up but Eddie and Susannah were still down. Roland was in no hurry to wake them. There would be plenty of early days ahead—and late evenings, too, likely—but this morning let them enjoy the peace of a roof over their heads, the comfort of a feather mattress beneath their bodies, and the exquisite privacy afforded by a door between their secret selves and the rest of the world.

Rosalita, a bottle of pale, oily liquid in one hand, drew in a hiss over her full lower lip. She looked at Roland’s right knee, then touched his right hip with her left hand. He flinched away a bit from the touch, although it was gentleness itself.

She raised her eyes to him. They were so dark a brown they were almost black. “This isn’t rheumatiz. It’s arthritis. The kind that spreads fast.”

“Aye, where I come from some call it dry twist,” he said. “Not a word of it to the Pere, or to my friends.”

Those dark eyes regarded him steadily. “You won’t be able to keep this a secret for long.”

“I hear you very well. Yet while I can keep the secret, I will keep the secret. And you’ll help me.”

“Aye,” she said. “No fear. I’ll bide’ee.”

“Say thankya. Now, will that help me?”

She looked at the bottle and smiled. “Aye. It’s mint and spriggum from the swamp. But the secret’s the cat’s bile that’s in it—not but three drops in each bottle, ye ken. They’re the rock-cats that come in out of the desert, from the direction of the great darkness.” She tipped up the bottle and poured a little of the oily stuff into her palm. The smell of the mint struck Roland’s nose at once, followed by some other smell, a lower smell, which was far less pleasant. Yes, he reckoned that could be the bile of a puma or a cougar or whatever they meant by a rock-cat in these parts.

When she bent and rubbed it into his kneecaps, the heat was immediate and intense, almost too strong to bear. But when it moderated a bit, there was more relief than he would have dared hope for.

When she had finished anointing him, she said: “How be your body now, gunslinger-sai?”

Instead of answering with his mouth, he crushed her against his lean, undressed body and hugged her tightly. She hugged him back with an artless lack of shame and whispered in his ear, “If ’ee are who ’ee say ’ee are, ’ee mustn’t let un take the babbies. No, not a single one. Never mind what the big bugs like Eisenhart and Telford might say.”