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Afterward, Susannah thought that Roland must have smelled the place long before they saw it - scented it, as unconsciously and unerringly as a wolf scents a deer - and that had been the actual starting point of their conversation. The bee had probably only been what his conscious mind had seized upon as a reason for his train of thought, not the true inspiration of it.
A bee had buzzed by as they walked along the Path of the Beam. Roland, glancing at it, remarked, "Our cook Hax sometimes folded bits of dough over honey and fried them in oil. When you bit into them, hot honey spurted into your mouth."
Eddie grinned. "If I'd just heard the last few words you said, from the look on your face right now, I'd have thought you were talking about something other than dessert."
At the same time, Jake said, "Sounds like a jelly doughnut."
Roland chose to ignore Eddie and replied to Jake, "I believe they are the same. Hax's honey-bursts were not so much larger than a walnut, and much the same shape. And he did make them with jelly or jam at times." Dreamily, he added, "My favorites were honey-filled. But I wish I even had one filled with sour crab-apple jelly now."
"Jelly doughnuts are bigger." Jake cupped his hands to show the shape and size of one. "The ones with raspberry jam or blueberry pie filling have a sticky sugar glaze, and the ones with lemon pie filling are covered in powdered sugar. I wish I had one right now - raspberry-filled. And a glass of milk."
"I wish I had a bowl of peach cobbler," said Susannah, unable to resist joining in. "With the biscuits crisp on top and crumbly in the middle, and fresh peaches so sweet there's no need to add sugar."
"I wish I had a Snickers bar," said Eddie. "Frozen solid, so the caramel cracks like ice when you bite into it."
"What is a Snickle bar?" asked Roland.
"Snickers," said Eddie.
Roland mouthed the word once before carefully pronouncing, "Snickle."
"Ickers!" barked Oy.
Jake began to laugh. "I'm not sure which one of you is closer."
"But what is it?" Roland asked.
"It's a chocolate bar," said Jake.
Seeing Roland's blank look, Susannah explained. "There's a layer of nougat - that's soft white stuff made out of egg whites and sugar - and a layer of caramel with peanuts, and the whole thing is coated in chocolate."
Roland nodded along with the explanation of nougat, and again at caramel and peanuts. But the blank look returned at the end. "But what is chocolate?"
That struck all of them dumb. Eddie broke the silence with, "Roland, that is the saddest thing you've ever told us."
"It's sweet and brown," Jake tried. "It's made out of sugar and cacao beans."
"Sweet beans," Roland said, a little dubiously.
"It doesn't taste like beans. It tastes like..." Susannah trailed off. How did you explain the taste of chocolate to someone who had never tasted it? Jake was frowning, and Eddie was scratching his head. "It's a little bit like coffee, maybe." Which was also made of beans, come to think of it. "Earthy. Maybe a little bit bitter. But mostly sweet."
And then they were all trying to explain chocolate to Roland, and all failing miserably. They could tell because he murmured, "Sweet like honey... Sweet like the sugar-drink..."
"No," said Susannah. "It's not as sweet as that. At least, it doesn't have to be."
Roland shook his head. "I wasn't talking about your chocolate. I meant that scent." When they all started sniffing, he said, "It's carried on the breeze. Turn into it."
She inhaled a lovely aroma: sweet, as Roland had said, but not sweet like sugar. It was more delicate than that, like unexpectedly coming across a cluster of violets in the woods.
"Might be there's honey ahead, and not so far off either," said Roland hopefully. "I could show you how to smoke out the bees."
The others set off with an extra spring in their steps, and Susannah rolled her chair with a will. All that talk of sweets had made them all eager for honeycomb. Susannah could practically taste it, thick and sweet in her mouth, the chewy wax compressing under her teeth. But the scent grew no stronger as they continued on, and they saw no hive nor heard no buzzing bees. Soon they could see they were coming to the end of the forest, with something golden up ahead, but Susannah took it for sunlight shining through the trees.
Then they were abruptly out of the forest. A carpet of wildflowers stretched out before them; the scent arose from those. But no one had eyes for the flowers. A city rose up before them. They all stopped short and stared. It was very neat, very geometric, and all made of lovely golden glass. There were tall rectangular towers and enormous rectangular structures like apartment or office buildings, all very close together and set with precisely spaced rectangular windows. It looked more modern than anything Susannah had seen yet in Mid-World. Blaine had been out of the far future and Lud had been in ruins, but this city was like something she might have seen in her own world, if New York had been much cleaner, made of golden glass, and completely empty.
"Do you think everyone's hiding?" Jake spoke in a whisper; he had his gun drawn. So did the rest of them. Oy had withdrawn against Jake's legs. This place didn't look like Lud, but Lud had made them wary of cities.
Roland's reply was quiet, but not a whisper. "We shall see. But I think it's been abandoned." He nodded at the wildflowers that stretched between the woods and the city.
Susannah didn't understand for a moment, and then enlightenment struck her at the same moment it did Eddie. He said, "Oh. No path."
"And nothing trampled," Roland said. He shrugged. "Mayhap this is the back, and they come and go from the front. But I doubt it. No tracks, no sound..."
They approached warily, but nothing stirred. As they grew closer, they saw that the narrow alleys between the buildings were paved with the same golden glass. Susannah gave a sigh of sheer pleasure as her wheels hit the glass and rolled over it. Nothing had ever felt so effortless. It was the equivalent of walking on air. The loudest sound was the clicking of Oy's toenails as he trotted at Jake's heels. None of them spoke, and not only to avoid alerting any hostile presences. The city was so quiet, it felt as if speech would be rude.
As if Eddie had caught her thought, and perhaps he had, he said whispered, "Feels like I'd get smacked with a ruler if I sneezed here."
Very quietly, Roland said, "You might. Don't."
The doorways and windows in the buildings were cut outs in the golden glass. The ka-tet glanced inside a building as they passed. It was full of large golden boxes neatly stacked on or extruded from the the floors. Susannah wondered if they were full or empty, and what might be inside, but not enough to try to look.
The next building they came to had a huge arched doorway. Inside was a single vaulted room. The sunlight passed through the glass and drenched the room in golden light, as if it was drowned in honey. Susannah drew in a breath of awe. It was full of magnificent, life-sized angel statues on plinths. The plinths were made of the same golden glass as everything else, but the angels were carved from white marble. They had been made by a master, the gold-touched flesh as luscious and soft-looking as a statue by Rodin.
"It's a museum," murmured Jake.
"Or an art gallery," said Susannah.
The statues were beautiful but strange, and had obviously all been made by the same person. They were nude but had no breasts or sexual organs, and their faces were truly androgynous, strong and beautiful and sexless. They all had their eyes closed, but seemed as if they were listening and watchful rather than asleep. The majority of them had their wings folded across their backs, but some had their wings extended. They were not the classic feathered angel wings, but more like those of a dragonfly. There were four of them, oval and paneled, translucent and impossibly thin, and so beautiful that it made you wonder why anyone had ever depicted angel wings in any other way.
The statue closest to the doorway opened its eyes.
They were black and bulging and faceted, and there was no intelligence in them. A proboscis unfurled from its mouth to test the air. The thing's belly pulsed sickeningly. A sting shot out, long as a rifle and barbed like a harpoon.
Susannah was instantly conscious of the gun in her hand, the gun that was an extension of her hand and mind and heart. She could have put a bullet through the thing's faceted eye in an instant. Eddie and Jake too were ready.
"Hold!" Roland's voice was fierce but quiet, so quiet, barely a breath; it chilled Susannah as a shout would not have. "No guns. You'll wake the hive."
The hive.
That was what it was, that golden city: a beautiful beehive, its inhabitants nothing more than enormous nocturnal insects, drowsing in the sun.
Flowers closed at night, and that great proboscis was far too big to sip from flowers anyway. Susannah wondered what it sucked, and then instantly knew. What kind of honey, she thought, could be made from blood?
The creature before them turned its head this way and that, its proboscis flickering. Its faceted eyes didn't seem to see them; perhaps the sun was too bright for its strange vision. The ka-tet stood absolutely still, barely daring to breathe. Then the sting and the proboscis withdrew, the bulging eyes closed, and the thing once more appeared to be the statue of a lovely, androgynous angel.
Jake bent and scooped up Oy, who huddled against his chest. Then they crept through the city, their progress agonizingly slow as Susannah rolled her chair to minimize the sound of the wheels and the rest of them set their feet down with the balletic grace of dancers mired in honey. They passed more rooms full of angelic bee-creatures on plinths, rooms of immense cocoons dangling from the ceiling, and, most horribly, rooms of fat white larvae feeding on paralyzed deer.
The relief was incredible when they finally passed through the golden city, and the wheels of Susannah's chair once again caught and dragged on bumpy earth. While they were still in sight of it and still proceeding in absolute silence, they saw a great old oak tree, one branch bowed beneath the weight of a hive dripping with golden honey. But none of them, not even Roland, suggested smoking out the bees.