The Waste Lands (49 page)

“I don’t know. And that’s the best reason of all to do it. Jake, choose us a riddle from your book.”

Eddie handed
Riddle-De-Dum!
to Jake, who thumbed through the pages and finally stopped near the back. “Whoa! This one’s a killer.”

“Let’s hear it,” Eddie said. “If I don’t get it, Suze will. We’re known at Fair-Days all across the land as Eddie Dean and His Riddling Queen.”

“We’re witty tonight, ain’t we?” Susannah said. “Let’s see how witty you are after settin by the side o’ the road until midnight or so, honeychild.”

Jake read: “ ‘There is a thing that nothing is, and yet it has a name. It’s sometimes tall and sometimes short, joins our talks, joins our sport, and plays at every game.’ ”

They discussed this riddle for almost fifteen minutes, but none of them could even hazard an answer.

“Maybe it’ll come to one of us while we’re asleep,” Jake said. “That’s how I got the one about the river.”

“Cheap book, with the answers torn out,” Eddie said. He stood up and wrapped a hide blanket around his shoulders like a cloak.

“Well, it
was
cheap. Mr. Tower gave it to me for free.”

“What am I looking for, Roland?” Eddie asked.

Roland shrugged as he lay down. “I don’t know, but I think you’ll know it if you see it or hear it.”

“Wake me up when you start feeling sleepy,” Susannah said.

“You better believe it.”

A GRASSY DITCH RAN along the side of the road and Eddie sat on the far side of it with his blanket around his shoulders. A thin scud of clouds had veiled the sky tonight, dimming the starshow. A strong west wind was blowing. When Eddie turned his face in that direction, he could clearly smell the buffalo which now owned these plains—a mixed perfume of hot fur and fresh dung. The clarity which had returned to his senses in these last few months was amazing . . . and, at times like these, a little spooky, as well.

Very faintly, he could hear a buffalo calf bawling.

He turned toward the city, and after a while he began to think he might be seeing distant sparks of light there—the electric candles of the twins’ story—but he was well aware that he might be seeing nothing more than his own wishful thinking.

He passed his time on watch trying to think of an answer to the last riddle of the evening. The scolding Roland had given him about his dead-baby joke had left him feeling disgruntled, and it would please him to be able to start off the morning by giving them a good answer. Of course they wouldn’t be able to check
any
answer against the back of the book, but he had an idea that with good riddles a good answer was usually self-evident.

Sometimes tall and sometimes short
. He thought that was the key and all the rest was probably just misdirection. What
was
sometimes tall and sometimes short? Pants? No. Pants were sometimes short and sometimes long, but he had never heard of tall pants. Tales? Like pants, it only fit snugly one way.
Drinks
were sometimes both tall and short—

“Order,” he murmured, and thought for a moment that he must have stumbled across the solution—both adjectives fit the noun glove-tight. A tall order was a big job; a short order was something you got on the quick in a restaurant—a hamburger or a tuna melt. Except that tall orders and tuna melts didn’t
join our talk or play at every game
.

He felt a rush of frustration and had to smile at himself, getting all wound up about a harmless word-game in a kid’s book. All the same, he found it a little easier to believe that people might really kill each other over riddles . . . if the stakes were high enough and cheating was involved.

Still, what else did he have to think about?

Then the drumming from the city began again, and he did have something else. There was no build-up; at one moment it wasn’t there, and at the next it was going full force, as if a switch had been turned. Eddie walked to the edge of the road, turned toward the city, and listened. After a few moments he looked around to see if the drums had awakened the others, but he was still alone. He turned toward Lud again and cupped his ears forward with the sides of his hands.

Bump. . . ba-bump . . . ba-bump-bumpbumpbump
.

Eddie became more and more sure that he had been right about what it was; that he had, at least, solved this riddle.

The idea that he was standing by a deserted road in an almost empty world, standing some one hundred and seventy miles from a city which had been built by some fabulous lost civilization and listening to a rock-and-roll drum-line . . . that was crazy, but was it any crazier than a traffic-light that dinged and dropped a rusty green flag with the word GO printed on it? Any crazier than discovering the wreck of a German plane from the 1930s?

Eddie sang the words to the Z.Z. Top song in a whisper:

They fit the beat perfectly. It was the disco-pulse percussion of “Velcro Fly.” Eddie was sure of it.

A short time later the sound ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and he could hear only the wind, and, more faintly, the Send River, which had a bed but never slept.

THE NEXT FOUR DAYS were uneventful. They walked; they watched the bridge and the city grow larger and define themselves more clearly; they camped; they ate; they riddled; they kept watch turn and turn about (Jake had pestered Roland into letting him keep a short watch in the two hours just before dawn); they slept. The only remarkable incident had to do with the bees.

Around noon on the third day after the discovery of the downed plane, a buzzing sound came to them, growing louder and louder until it dominated the day. At last Roland stopped. “There,” he said, and pointed toward a grove of eucalyptus trees.

“It sounds like bees,” Susannah said.

Roland’s faded blue eyes gleamed. “Could be we’ll have a little dessert tonight.”

“I don’t know how to tell you this, Roland,” Eddie said, “but I have this aversion to being stung.”

“Don’t we all,” Roland agreed, “but the day is windless. I think we can smoke them to sleep and steal their comb right out from under them without setting half the world on fire. Let’s have a look.” -

He carried Susannah, who was as eager for the adventure as the gunslinger himself, toward the grove. Eddie and Jake lagged behind, and Oy, apparently having decided that discretion was the better part of valor, remained sitting at the edge of the Great Road, panting like a dog and watching them carefully.

Roland paused at the edge of the trees. “Stay where you are,” he told Eddie and Jake, speaking softly. “We’re going to have a look. I’ll give you a come-on if all’s well.” He carried Susannah into the dappled shadows of the grove while Eddie and Jake remained in the sunshine, peering after them.

It was cooler in the shade. The buzzing of the bees was a steady, hypnotic drone. “There are too many,” Roland murmured. “This is late summer; they should be out working. I don’t—”

He caught sight of the hive, bulging tumorously from the hollow of a tree in the center of the clearing, and broke off.

“What’s the matter with them?” Susannah asked in a soft, horrified voice. “Roland, what’s the
matter
with them?”

A bee, as plump and slow-moving as a horsefly in October, droned past her head. Susannah flinched away from it.

Roland motioned for the others to join them. They did, and stood looking at the hive without speaking. The chambers weren’t heat hexagons but random holes of all shapes and sizes; the beehive itself looked queerly melted, as if someone had turned a blowtorch on it. The bees which crawled sluggishly over it were as white as snow.

“No honey tonight,” Roland said. “What we took from yonder comb might taste sweet, but it would poison us as surely as night follows day.”

One of the grotesque white bees lumbered heavily past Jake’s head. He ducked away with an expression of loathing.

“What did it?” Eddie asked. “What did it to them, Roland?”

“The same thing that has emptied this whole land; the thing that’s still causing many of the buffalo to be born as sterile freaks. I’ve heard it called the Old War, the Great Fire, the Cataclysm, and the Great Poisoning. Whatever it was, it was the start of all our troubles and it happened long ago, a thousand years before the great-great-grandfathers of the River Crossing folk were born. The physical effects—the two-headed buffalo and the white bees and such—have grown less as time passes. I have seen this for myself. The other changes are greater, if harder to see, and they are still going on.”

They watched the white bees crawl, dazed and almost completely helpless, about their hive. Some were apparently trying to work; most simply wandered about, butting heads and crawling over one another. Eddie found himself remembering a newsclip he’d seen once. It had shown a crowd of survivors leaving the area where a gas-main had exploded, flattening almost a whole city block in some California town. These bees reminded him of those dazed, shellshocked survivors.

“You had a nuclear war, didn’t you?” he asked—almost accused. “These Great Old Ones you like to talk about . . . they blew their great old asses straight to hell. Didn’t they?”

“I don’t
know
what happened. No one knows. The records of those times are lost, and the few stories are confused and conflicting.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Jake said in a trembling voice. “Looking at those things makes me sick.”

“I’m with you, sugar,” Susannah said.

So they left the bees to their aimless, shattered life in the grove of ancient trees, and there was no honey that night.

“WHEN ARE YOU GOING to tell us what you
do
know?” Eddie asked the next morning. The day was bright and blue, but there was a bite in the air; their first autumn in this world was almost upon them.

Roland glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

“I’d like to hear your whole story, from beginning to end, starting with. Gilead. How you grew up there and what happened to end it all. I want to know how you found out about the Dark Tower and why you started chasing after it in the first place. I want to know about your first bunch of friends, too. And what happened to them.”

Roland removed his hat, armed sweat from his brow, then replaced it. “You have the right to know all those things, I suppose, and I’ll tell them to you . . . but not now. It’s a very long story. I never expected to tell it to anyone, and I’ll only tell it once.”

“When?” Eddie persisted.

“When the time is right,” Roland said, and with that they had to be content.

ROLAND CAME AWAKE THE moment before Jake began to shake him. He sat up and looked around, but Eddie and Susannah were still fast asleep and in the first faint light of morning, he could see nothing amiss.

“What is it?” he asked Jake in a low voice.

“I don’t know. Fighting, maybe. Come and listen.”

Roland threw his blanket aside and followed Jake out to the road. He reckoned they were now only three days’ walk from the place where the Send passed in front of the city, and the bridge—built squarely along the path of the Beam—dominated the horizon. Its pronounced tilt was more clearly visible than ever, and he could see at least a dozen gaps where overstressed cables had snapped like the strings of a lyre.

Tonight the wind blew directly into their faces as they looked toward the city, and the sounds it carried to them were faint but clear.

“Is
it fighting?” Jake asked.

Roland nodded and held a finger to his lips.

He heard faint shouts, a crash that sounded like some huge object falling, and—of course—the drums. Now there was another crash, this one more musical: the sound of breaking glass.

“Jeepers,” Jake whispered, and moved closer to the gunslinger.

Then came the sounds which Roland had hoped not to hear: a fast, sandy rattle of small-arms fire followed by a loud hollow bang—clearly an explosion of some kind. It rolled across the flatlands toward them like an invisible bowling ball. After that, the shouts, thuds, and sounds of breakage quickly sank below the level of the drums, and when the drums quit a few minutes later with their usual unsettling suddenness, the city was silent again. But now that silence had an unpleasant waiting quality.

Roland put an arm around Jake’s shoulders. “Still not too late to detour around,” he said.

Jake glanced up at him. “We can’t.”

“Because of the train?”

Jake nodded and singsonged: “Blaine is a pain, but we
have
to take the train. And the city’s the only place where we can get on.”

Roland looked thoughtfully at Jake. “Why do you say we
have
to? Is it
ka?
Because, Jake, you have to understand that you don’t know much about
ka
yet—it’s the sort of subject men study all their lives.”

“I don’t know if it’s
ka
or not, but I do know that we can’t go into the waste lands unless we’re protected, and that means Blaine. Without him we’ll die, like those bees we saw are going to die when winter comes. We have to be protected. Because the waste lands are poison.”