The Waste Lands (47 page)

“I want to stand in that field of roses, and I want to see the Tower that stands there. I don’t know what comes next. Mourners please omit flowers, probably, and for all of us. But I don’t care. I want to stand there. I guess I don’t care if Blaine’s the devil and the train runs through hell itself on the way to the Tower. I vote we go.”

Roland nodded and turned to Susannah.

“Well, I didn’t have any dreams about the Dark Tower,” she said, “so I can’t deal with the question on that level—the level of desire, I suppose you’d say. But I’ve come to believe in
ka
, and I’m not so numb that I can’t feel it when someone starts rapping on my head with his knuckles and saying, ‘That way, idiot.’ What about you, Roland? What do you think?”

“I think there’s been enough talk for one day, and it’s time to let it go until tomorrow.”

“What about
Riddle-De-Dum
!—” Jake asked, “do you want to look at that?”

“There’ll be time enough for that another day,” Roland said. “Let’s get some sleep.”

BUT THE GUNSLINGER LAY long awake, and when the rhythmic drumming began again, he got up and walked back to the road. He stood looking toward the bridge and the city. He was every inch the diplomat Susannah had suspected, and he had known the train was the next step on the road they must travel almost from the moment he had heard of it . . . but he’d felt it would be unwise to say so. Eddie in particular hated to feel pushed; when he sensed that was being done, he simply lowered his head, planted his feet, made his silly jokes, and balked like a mule. This time he wanted what Roland wanted, but he was still apt to say day if Roland said night, and night if Roland said day. It was safer to walk softly, and surer to ask instead of telling.

He turned to go back . . . and his hand dropped to his gun as he saw a dark shape standing on the edge of the road, looking at him. He didn’t draw, but it was a near thing.

“I wondered if you’d be able to sleep after that little performance,” Eddie said. “Guess the answer’s no.”

“I didn’t hear you at all, Eddie. You’re learning . . . only this time you almost got a bullet in the gut for your pains.”

“You didn’t hear me because you have a lot on your mind.” Eddie joined him, and even by starlight, Roland saw he hadn’t fooled Eddie a bit. His respect for Eddie continued to grow. It was Cuthbert Eddie reminded him of, but in many ways he had already surpassed Cuthbert.

If I underestimate him
, Roland thought,
I’m apt to come away with a bloody paw. And if let him down, or do something that looks to him like a double-cross, he’ll probably try to kill me
.

“
What’s on your mind, Eddie?
”

“You. Us. I want you to know something. I guess until tonight I just assumed that you knew already. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Tell me, then.” He thought again:
How like Cuthbert he is!

“We’re with you because we have to be—that’s your goddamned
ka
. But we’re also with you because we want to be. I know that’s true of me and Susannah, and I’m pretty sure it’s true of Jake, too. You’ve got a good brain, me old
khef
-mate, but I think you must keep it in a bomb-shelter, because it’s bitchin hard to get through sometimes. I want to see it, Roland. Can you dig what I’m telling you?
I want to see the Tower
.” He looked closely into Roland’s face, apparently did not see what he’d hoped to find there, and raised his hands in exasperation. “What I mean is I want you to let go of my ears.”

“Let go of your ears?”

“Yeah. Because you don’t have to drag me anymore. I’m coming of my own accord.
We’re
coming of our own accord. If you died in your sleep tonight, we’d bury you and then go on. We probably wouldn’t last long, but we’d die in the path of the Beam.
Now
do you understand?”

“Yes. Now I do.”

“You say you understand me, and I think you do . . . but do you believe me, as well?”

But that was mean and unfair, and he knew it. Denigrating free will by confusing it with
ka
was worse than blasphemy; it was tiresome and stupid. “Yes,” he said. “I believe you. Upon my soul, I do.”

“Then stop behaving like we’re a bunch of sheep and you’re the shepherd walking along behind us, waving a crook to make sure we don’t trot our stupid selves off the road and into a quicksand bog. Open your mind to us. If we’re going to die in the city or on that train, I want to die knowing I was more than a marker on your game-board.”

Roland felt anger heat his cheeks, but he had never been much good at self-deception. He wasn’t angry because Eddie was wrong but because Eddie had seen through him. Roland had watched him come steadily forward, leaving his prison further and further behind—and Susannah, too, for she had also been imprisoned—and yet his heart had never quite accepted the evidence of his senses. His heart apparently wanted to go on seeing them as different, lesser creatures.

Roland drew in deep air. “Gunslinger, I cry your pardon.”

Eddie nodded. “We’re running into a whole hurricane of trouble here . . . I feel it, and I’m scared to death. But it’s not
your
trouble, it’s
our
trouble. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“How bad do you think it can get in the city?”

“I don’t know. I only know that we have to try and protect Jake, because the old auntie said both sides would want him. Some of it depends on how long it takes us to find this train. A lot more depends on what happens when we find it. If we had two more in our party, I’d put Jake in a moving box with guns on every side of him. Since we don’t, we’ll move in column—me first, Jake pushing Susannah behind, and you on drogue.”

“How much trouble, Roland? Make a guess.”

“I can’t.”

“I think you can. You don’t know the city, but you know how the people in your world have been behaving since things started to fall apart. How much trouble?”

Roland turned toward the steady sound of the drumbeats and thought it over. “Maybe not too much. I’d guess the fighting men who are still there are old and demoralized. It may be that you have the straight of it, and some will even offer to help us on our way, as the River Crossing
ka-tet
did. Mayhap we won’t see them at all—they’ll see
us,
see we’re packing iron, and just put their heads down and let us go our way. If that fails, I’m hoping that they’ll scatter like rats if we gun a few.”

“And if they decide to make a fight of it?”

Roland smiled grimly. “Then, Eddie, we’ll
all
remember the faces of our fathers.”

Eddie’s eyes gleamed in the darkness, and Roland was once more reminded forcibly of Cuthbert—Cuthbert who had once said he would believe in ghosts when he could catch one in his teeth, Cuthbert with whom he had once scattered breadcrumbs beneath the hangman’s gibbet.

“Have I answered all your questions?”

“Nope—but I think you played straight with me this time.”

. “Then goodnight, Eddie.”

“Goodnight.”

Eddie turned and walked away. Roland watched him go. Now that he was listening, he could hear him . . . but just barely. He started back himself, then turned toward the darkness where the city of Lud was.

But he knew something none of the others did. Perhaps, after the talk he’d just had with Eddie, he should tell them . . . yet he thought he would keep the knowledge to himself a little while longer.

In the old tongue which had once been his world’s
lingua franca
, most words, like
khef
and
ka,
had many meanings. The word
char,
however—
char
as in Charlie the Choo-Choo—had only one.

Char
meant death.

THEY CAME UPON THE downed airplane three days later.

Jake pointed it out first at midmorning—a flash of light about ten miles away, as if a mirror lay in the grass. As they drew closer, they saw a large dark object at the side of the Great Road.

“It looks like a dead bird,” Roland said. “A big one.”

“That’s no bird,” Eddie said. “That’s an airplane. I’m pretty sure the glare is sunlight bouncing off the canopy.”

An hour later they stood silently at the edge of the road, looking at the ancient wreck. Three plump crows stood on the tattered skin of the fuselage, staring insolently at the newcomers. Jake pried a cobble from the edge of the road and shied it at them. The crows lumbered into the air, cawing indignantly.

One wing had broken off in the crash and lay thirty yards away, a shadow like a diving board in the tall grass. The rest of the plane was pretty much intact. The canopy had cracked in a starburst pattern where the pilot’s head had struck it. There was a large, rust-colored stain there.

Oy trotted over to where three rusty propeller blades rose from the grass, sniffed at them, then returned hastily to Jake.

The man in the cockpit was a dust-dry mummy wearing a padded leather vest and a helmet with a spike on top. His lips were gone, his teeth exposed in a final desperate grimace. Fingers which had once been as large as sausages but were now only skin-covered bones clutched the wheel. His skull was caved in where it had hit the canopy, and Roland guessed that the greenish-gray scales which coated the left side of his face were all that remained of his brains. The dead man’s head was tilted back, as if he had been sure, even at the moment of his death, that he could regain the sky again. The plane’s remaining wing still jutted from the encroaching grass. On it was a fading insignia which depicted a fist holding a thunderbolt.

“Looks like Aunt Talitha was wrong and the old albino man had the right of it, after all,” Susannah said in an awed voice. “That must be David Quick, the outlaw prince. Look at the size of him, Roland—they must have had to grease him to get him into the cockpit!”

Roland nodded. The heat and the years had wasted the man in the mechanical bird to no more than a skeleton wrapped in dry hide, but he could still see how broad the shoulders had been, and the misshapen head was massive. “So fell Lord Perth,” he said, “and the countryside did shake with that thunder.”

Jake looked at him questioningly.

“It’s from an old poem. Lord Perth was a giant who went forth to war with a thousand men, but he was still in his own country when a little boy threw a stone at him and hit him in the knee. He stumbled, the weight of his armor bore him down, and he broke his neck in the fall.”

Jake said, “Like our story of David and Goliath.”

“There was no fire,” Eddie said. “I bet he just ran out of gas and tried a dead-stick landing on the road. He might have been an outlaw and a barbarian, but he had a yard of guts.”

Roland nodded, and looked at Jake. “You all right with this?”

“Yes. If the guy was still, you know, runny, I might not be.” Jake looked from the dead man in the airplane to the city. Lud was much closer and clearer now, and although they could see many broken windows in the towers, he, like Eddie, had not entirely. given up hope of finding some sort of help there. “I bet things sort of fell apart in the city once he was gone.”

“I think you’d win that bet,” Roland said.

“You know something?” Jake was studying the plane again. “The people who built that city might have made their own airplanes, but I’m pretty sure this is one of ours. I did a school paper on air combat when I was in the fifth grade, and I think I recognize it. Roland, can I take a closer look?”

Roland nodded. “I’ll go with you.”

Together they walked over to the plane with the high grass swishing at their pants. “Look,” Jake said. “See the machine-gun under the wing? That’s an air-cooled German model, and this is a Focke-Wulf from just before World War II. I’m sure it is. So what’s it doing here?”

“Lots of planes disappear,” Eddie said. “Take the Bermuda Triangle, for instance. That’s a place over one of our oceans, Roland. It’s supposed to be jinxed. Maybe it’s a great big doorway between our worlds one that’s almost always open.” Eddie hunched his shoulders and essayed a bad Rod Serling imitation. “Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for turbulence: you’re flying into . . . the Roland Zone!”

Jake and Roland, who were now standing beneath the plane’s remaining wing, ignored him.

“Boost me up, Roland.”

Roland shook his head. “That wing looks solid, but it’s not—this thing has been here a long time, Jake. You’d fall.”

“Make a step, then.”

Eddie said, “I’ll do it, Roland.”