killed, and that's what we need a hammer for."
"Oh," she said in a choked voice. "Brains."
"To make a tanning slurry. But there's more use for chert than that. Look." He showed her how to bang two chunks together until one or both shattered, leaving large, nearly even pieces instead of jagged lumps. She knew that metamorphic rocks broke that way, but schists and such were generally too weak to make good tools. This stuff was strong.
"When you get chunks that break thick enough to hold on one side but thin to an edge on the other," Roland said, "lay them by. Those will be our scrapers. If we had more time we could make handles, but we don't. Our hands will be plenty sore by bedtime."
"How long do you think it will take to get enough scrapers?"
"Not so long," Roland said. "Chert breaks lucky, or so I used to hear."
While Roland dragged deadwood for a fire into a copse of mixed willows and alders by the edge of the frozen stream,
Susannah inspected her way along the embankments, looking for chert. By the time she'd found a dozen large chunks, she had also located a granite boulder rising from the ground in a smooth, weather-worn curve. She thought it would make a fine anvil.
The chert did indeed break lucky, and she had thirty potential scrapers by the time Roland was bringing back his third large load of firewood. He made a little pile of kindling which Susannah shielded with her hands. By then it was sleeting, and although they were working beneath a fairly dense clump of trees, she thought it wouldn't be long before both of them were soaked.
When the fire was lit, Roland went a few steps away, once more fell on his knees, and folded his hands.
"Praying again?" she asked, amused.
"What we learn in our childhood has a way of sticking," he said. He closed his eyes for a few moments, then brought his clasped hands to his mouth and kissed them. The only word she heard him say was Gan. Then he opened his eyes and lifted his hands, spreading them and making a pretty gesture that looked to her like birds flying away. When he spoke again, his voice was dry and matter-of-fact: Mr. Taking-Care-of-Business. "That's very well, then," he said. "Let's go to work."
SEVEN
They made twine from grass, just as Mordred had done, and hung the first deer-the one already headless-by its back legs from the low branch of a willow. Roland used his knife to cut its belly open, then reached into the guts, rummaged, and removed two dripping red organs that she thought were kidneys.
"These for fever and cough," he said, and bit into the first one as if it were an apple. Susannah made a gurking noise and turned away to consider the stream until he was finished. When he was, she turned back and watched him cut circles around the hanging legs close to where theyjoined the body.
"Are you any better?" she asked him uneasily.
"I will be," he said. "Now help me take the hide off this fellow.
We'll want the first one with the hair still on it-we need to make a bowl for our slurry. Now watch."
He worked his fingers into the place where the deer's hide still clung to the body by the thin layer of fat and muscle beneath, then pulled. The hide tore easily to a point halfway down the deer's midsection. "Now do your side, Susannah."
Getting her fingers underneath was the only hard part. This time they pulled together, and when they had the hide all the way down to the dangling forelegs, it vaguely resembled a shirt. Roland used his knife to cut it off, then began to dig in the ground a little way from the roaring fire but still beneath the shelter of the trees. She helped him, relishing the way the sweat rolled down her face and body. When they had a shallow bowl-shaped depression two feet across and eighteen inches deep, Roland lined it with the hide.
All that afternoon they took turns skinning the eight other deer they had killed. It was important to do it as quickly as possible, for when the underlying layer of fat and muscle dried up, the work would become slower and harder. The gunslinger kept the fire burning high and hot, every now and then leaving her to rake ashes out onto the ground. When they had cooled enough so they would not burn holes