The Waste Lands (43 page)

“Probably both,” Roland grunted.

Some ninety years ago—within the lifetimes of Si and Aunt Talitha—a final band of outlaws had appeared, one so large that the outriders had gone galloping through River Crossing at dawn and the drogues did not pass until almost sundown. It was the last army these parts had ever seen, and it was led by a warrior prince named David Quick—the same fellow who supposedly later fell to his death from the sky. He had organized the raggle-taggle remnants of the outlaw bands which still hung about the city, killing anyone who showed opposition to his plans. Quick’s army of Grays used neither boat nor bridge to attempt entry into the city, but instead built a pontoon bridge twelve miles below it and attacked on the flank.

“Since then the war has guttered like a chimney-fire,” Aunt Talitha finished. “We hear reports every now and then from someone who has managed to leave, ay, so we do. These come a little more often now, for the bridge, they say, is undefended and I think the fire is almost out. Within the city, the Pubes and Grays squabble over the remaining spoils, only I reckon that the descendents of the harriers who followed Quick over the pontoon bridge are the real Pubes now, although they are still called Grays. The descendents of the original city-dwellers must now be almost as old as we are, although there are still some younkers who go to be among them, drawn by the old stories and the lure of the knowledge which may still remain there.

“These two sides still keep up their old enmity, gunslinger, and both would desire this young man you call Eddie. If the dark-skinned woman is fertile, they would not kill her even though her legs are short-ended; they would keep her to bear children, for children are fewer now, and although the old sicknesses are passing, some are still born strange.”

At this, Susannah stirred, seemed about to say something, then only drank the last of her coffee and settled back into her former listening position.

“But if they would desire the young man and woman, gunslinger, I think they would lust for the boy.”

Jake bent and began to stroke Oy’s fur again. Roland saw his face and knew what he was thinking: it was the passage under the mountains all over again, just another version of the Slow Mutants.

“You they’d just as soon kill,” Aunt Talitha said, “for you are a gunslinger, a man out of his own time and place, neither fish nor fowl, and no use to either side. But a boy can be taken, used, schooled to remember some things and to forget all the others.
They’ve
all forgotten whatever it was they had to fight about in the first place; the world has moved on since then. Now they just fight to the sound of them awful drumbeats, some few still young, most of them old enough for the rocking chair, like us here, all of them stupid grots who only live to kill and kill to live.” She paused. “Now that you’ve heard us old cullies to the end, are ye sure it would not be best to go around, and leave them to their business?”

Before Roland could reply, Jake spoke up in a clear, firm voice. “Tell what you know about Blaine the Mono,” he said. “Tell about Blaine and Engineer Bob.”

“ENGINEER
WHO
?” EDDIE ASKED, but Jake only went on looking at the old people.

“Track lies over yonder,” Si answered at last. He pointed toward the river. “One track only, set up high on a colyum of man-made stone, such as the Old Ones used to make their streets and walls.”

“A monorail!” Susannah exclaimed. “Blaine the Monorail!”

“Blaine is a pain,” Jake muttered.

Roland glanced at him but said nothing.

“Does this train run now?” Eddie asked Si.

Si shook his head slowly. His face was troubled and uneasy. “No, young sir—but in my lifetime and Auntie’s, it did. When we were green and the war of the city still went forrad briskly. We’d hear it before we saw it—a low humming noise, a sound like ye sometimes hear when a bad summer storm’s on the way-one that’s full of lightning.”

“Ay,” Aunt Talitha said. Her face was lost and dreaming.

“Then it’d come—Blaine the Mono, twinkling in the sun, with a nose like one of the bullets in your revolver, gunslinger. Maybe two wheels long. I know that sounds like it couldn’t be, and maybe it wasn’t (we were green, ye must remember, and that makes a difference), but I still think it wars, for when it came, it seemed to run along the whole horizon. Fast, low, and gone before you could even see it proper!

“Sometimes, on days when the weather were foul and the air low, it’d shriek like a harpy as it came out of the west. Sometimes it’d come in the night with a long white light spread out before it, and that shriek would wake all of us. It were like the trumpet they say will raise the dead from their graves at the end of the world, so it was.”

“Tell em about the bang, Si!” Bill or Till said in a voice which trembled with awe. “Tell em about the godless bang what always came after!”

“Ay, I was just getting to that,” Si answered with a touch of annoyance. “After it passed by, there would be quiet for a few seconds . . . sometimes as long as a minute, maybe . . . and then there’d come an explosion that rattled the boards and knocked cups off the shelves and sometimes even broke the glass in the window-panes. But never did anyone see ary flash nor fire. It was like an explosion in the world of spirits.”

Eddie tapped Susannah on the shoulder, and when she turned to him he mouthed two words:
Sonic boom
. It was nuts—no train he had ever heard of travelled faster than the speed of sound-but it was also the only thing that made sense.

She nodded and turned back to Si.

“It’s the only one of the machines the Great Old Ones made that I’ve ever seen running with my own eyes,” he said in a soft voice, “and if it weren’t the devil’s work, there be no devil. The last time I saw it was the spring I married Mercy, and that must have been sixty year agone.”

“Seventy,” Aunt Talitha said with authority.

“And this train went into the city,” Roland said. “From back the way we came . . . from the west . . . from the forest.”

“Ay,” a new voice said unexpectedly, “but there was another . . . one that went
out from
the city . . . and mayhap that one still runs.”

THEY TURNED. MERCY STOOD by a bed of flowers between the back of the church and the table where they sat. She was walking slowly toward the sound of their voices, with her hands spread out before her.

Si got clumsily to his feet, hurried to her as best he could, and took her hand. She slipped an arm about his waist and they stood there looking like the world’s oldest wedding couple.

“Auntie told you to take your coffee inside!” he said.

“Finished my coffee long ago,” Mercy said. “It’s a bitter brew and I hate it. Besides-I wanted to hear the palaver.” She raised a trembling finger and pointed it in Roland’s direction. “I wanted to hear his voice. It’s fair and light, so it is.”

“I cry your pardon, Auntie,” Si said, looking at the ancient woman a little fearfully. “She was never one to mind, and the years have made her no better.”

Aunt Talitha glanced at Roland. He nodded, almost imperceptibly. “Let her come forward and join us,” she said.

Si led her over to the table, scolding all the while. Mercy only looked over his shoulder with her sightless eyes, her mouth set in an intractable line.

When Si had gotten her seated, Aunt Talitha leaned forward on her forearms and said, “Now do you have something to say, old sister-sai, or were you just beating your gums?”

“I hear what I hear. My ears are as sharp as they ever were, Talitha—sharper!”

Roland’s hand dropped to his belt for a moment. When he brought it back to the table, he was holding a cartridge in his fingers. He tossed it to Susannah, who caught it. “Do you, sai?” he asked.

“Well enough,” she said, turning in his direction, “to know that you just threw something. To your woman, I think—the one with the brown skin. Something small. What was it, gunslinger? A biscuit?”

“Close enough,” he said, smiling. “You hear as well as you say. Now tell us what you meant.”

“There is another mono,” she said, “unless ’tis the same one, running a different course. Either way, a different course was run by
some
mono . . . until seven or eight year ago, anyways. I used to hear it leaving the city and going out into the waste lands beyond.”

“Dungheap!” one of the albino twins ejaculated. “
Nothing
goes to the waste lands! Nothing can live there!”

She turned her face to him. “Is a train alive, Till Tudbury?” she asked. “Does a machine fall sick with sores and puking?”

Well,
Eddie thought of saying,
there
was
this bear
. . .

He thought it over a little more and decided it might be better to keep his silence.

“We would have heard it,” the other twin was insisting hotly. “A noise like the one Si always tells of—”

“This one didn’t make no bang,” she admitted, “but I heard that other sound, that humming noise like the one you hear sometimes after lightning has struck somewhere close. When the wind was strong, blowing out from the city, I heard it.” She thrust out her chin and added: “I
did
hear the bang once, too. From far, far out. The night. Big Charlie Wind came and almost blew the steeple off the church. Must have been two hundred wheels from here. Maybe two hundred and fifty.”

“Bulldink!” the twin cried. “You been chewing the weed!”

“I’ll chew on
you
, Bill Tudbury, if you don’t shut up your honkin. You’ve no business sayin bulldink to a lady, either. Why—”

“Stop it, Mercy!” Si hissed, but Eddie was barely listening to this exchange of rural pleasantries. What the blind woman had said made sense to him. Of course there would be no sonic boom, not from a train which started its run in Lud; he couldn’t remember exactly what the speed of sound was, but he thought it was somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred and fifty miles an hour. A train starting from a dead stop would take some time getting up to that speed, and by the time it reached it, it would be out of earshot . . . unless the listening conditions happened to be just right, as Mercy claimed they had been on the night when the Big Charlie Wind—whatever that wasr—had come.

And there were possibilities here. Blaine the Mono was no Land Rover, but maybe . . . maybe . . .

“You haven’t heard the sound of this other train for seven or eight years, sai?” Roland asked. “Are you sure it wasn’t much longer?”

“Couldn’t have been,” she said, “for the last time was the year old Bill Muffin took blood-sick. Poor Bill!”

“That’s almost ten year agone,” Aunt Talitha said, and her voice was queerly gentle.

“Why did you never say you heard such a thing?” Si asked. He looked at the gunslinger. “You can’t believe everything she says, lord—always longing to be in the middle of the stage is my Mercy.”

“Why, you old slumgullion!” she cried, and slapped his arm. “I didn’t say because I didn’t want to o’ertop the story you’re so proud of, but now that it matters what I heard, I’m bound to tell!”

“I believe you, sai,” Roland said, “but are you sure you haven’t heard the sounds of the mono since then?”

“Nay, not since then. I imagine it’s finally reached the end of its path.”

“I wonder,” Roland said. “Indeed, I wonder very much.” He looked down at the table, brooding, suddenly far away from all of them.

Choo-choo
., Jake thought, and shivered.

HALF AN HOUR LATER they were in the town square again, Susannah in her wheelchair, Jake adjusting the straps of his pack while Oy sat at his heel, watching him attentively. Only the town elders had attended the dinner-party in the little Eden behind the Church of the Blood Everlasting, it seemed, because when they returned to the square, another dozen people were waiting. They glanced at Susannah and looked a bit longer at Jake (his youth apparently more interesting to them than her dark skin), but it was clearly Roland they had come to see; their wondering eyes were full of ancient awe.

He’s a living remnant of a past they only know from stories,
Susannah thought
. They look at him the way religious people would look at one of the saints—Peter or Paul or Matthew-if he decided to drop by the Saturday night bean supper and tell them stories of how it was, traipsing around the Sea of Galilee with Jesus the Carpenter.

The ritual which had ended the meal was now repeated, only this time everyone left in River Crossing participated. They shuffled forward in a line, shaking hands with Eddie and Susannah, kissing Jake on the cheek or forehead, then kneeling in front of Roland for his touch and his blessing. Mercy threw her arms about him and pressed her blind face against his stomach. Roland hugged her back and thanked her for her news.

“Will ye not stay the night with us, gunslinger? Sunset comes on apace, and it’s been long since you and yours spent the night beneath a roof, I’ll warrant.”

“It has been, but it’s best we go on. Thankee-sai.”

“Will ye come again if ye may, gunslinger”

“Yes,” Roland said, but Eddie did not need to look into his strange friend’s face to know the chances were small. “If we can.”

“Ay.” She hugged him a final time, then passed on with her hand resting on Si’s sunburned shoulder. “Fare ye well.”

Aunt Talitha came last. When she began to kneel, Roland caught her by the shoulders. “No, sai. You shall not do.” And before Eddie’s amazed eyes, Roland knelt before her in the dust of the town square. “Will you bless me, Old Mother? Will you bless all of us as we go our course?”

“Ay,” she said. There was no surprise in her voice, no tears in her eyes, but her voice throbbed with deep feeling, all the same. “I see your heart is true, gunslinger, and that you hold to the old ways of your kind; ay, you hold to them very well. I bless you and yours and will pray that no harm will come to you. Now take this, if you will.” She reached into the bodice of her faded dress and removed a silver cross at the end of a fine-link silver chain. She took it off.