Wolves of the Calla (24 page)

“Aye.”

“Brought some for us to ride.” Eddie, who had never ridden a horse in his life, was grateful that at least had been put off, but didn’t say so.

“Aye, tethered over the hill.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“Smelled em. I imagine the robot had the keeping of them.”

“Why would these folks take fifty or sixty horses, all the same shade, as a matter of course?”

“Because they don’t really think about the Wolves or anything to do with them,” Roland said. “They’re too busy being afraid, I think.”

Eddie whistled five notes that didn’t quite make a melody. Then he said, “Gray horses.”

Roland nodded. “Gray horses.”

They looked at each other for a moment, then laughed. Eddie loved it when Roland laughed. The sound was dry, as ugly as the calls of those giant blackbirds he called rusties . . . but he loved it. Maybe it was just that Roland laughed so seldom.

It was late afternoon. Overhead, the clouds had thinned enough to turn a pallid blue that was almost the color of sky. The Overholser party had returned to their camp. Susannah and Jake had gone back along the forest road to pick more muffin-balls. After the big meal they’d packed away, none of them wanted anything heavier. Eddie sat on a log, whittling. Beside him sat Roland, with all their guns broken down and spread out before him on a piece of deerskin. He oiled the pieces one by one, holding each bolt and cylinder and barrel up to the daylight for a final look before setting it aside for reassembly.

“You told them it was out of their hands,” Eddie said, “but they didn’t ken that any more than they did the business about all those gray horses. And you didn’t press it.”

“Only would have distressed them,” Roland said. “There was a saying in Gilead: Let evil wait for the day on which it must fall.”

“Uh-huh,” Eddie said. “There was a saying in Brooklyn: You can’t get snot off a suede jacket.” He held up the object he was making. It would be a top, Roland thought, a toy for a baby. And again he wondered how much Eddie might know about the woman he lay down with each night. The
women
.
Not on the top of his mind, but underneath. “If you decide we
can
help them, then we
have
to help them. That’s what Eld’s Way really boils down to, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Roland said.

“And if we can’t get any of them to stand with us, we stand alone.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about that,” Roland said. He had a saucer filled with light, sweet gun-oil. Now he dipped the corner of a chamois rag into it, picked up the spring-clip of Jake’s Ruger, and began to clean it. “Tian Jaffords would stand with us, come to that. Surely he has a friend or two who’d do the same regardless of what their meeting decides. In a pinch, there’s his wife.”

“And if we get them both killed, what about their kids? They have five. Also, I think there’s an old guy in the picture. One of em’s Grampy. They probably take care of him, too.”

Roland shrugged. A few months ago, Eddie would have mistaken that gesture—and the gunslinger’s expressionless face—for indifference. Now he knew better. Roland was as much a prisoner of his rules and traditions as Eddie had ever been of heroin.

“What if
we
get killed in this little town, screwing around with these Wolves?” Eddie asked. “Isn’t your last thought gonna be something like, ‘I can’t believe what a putz I was, throwing away my chance to get to the Dark Tower in order to take up for a bunch of snotnose brats.’ Or similar sentiments.”

“Unless we stand true, we’ll never get within a thousand miles of the Tower,” Roland said. “Would you tell me you don’t feel that?”

Eddie couldn’t, because he did. He felt something else, as well: a species of bloodthirsty eagerness. He actually wanted to fight again. Wanted to have a few of these Wolves, whatever they were, in the sights of one of Roland’s big revolvers. There was no sense kidding himself about the truth: he wanted to take a few scalps.

Or wolf-masks.

“What’s really troubling you, Eddie? I’d have you speak while it’s just you and me.” The gunslinger’s mouth quirked in a thin, slanted smile. “Do ya, I beg.”

“Shows, huh?”

Roland shrugged and waited.

Eddie considered the question. It was a
big
question. Facing it made him feel desperate and inadequate, pretty much the way he’d felt when faced with the task of carving the key that would let Jake Chambers through into their world. Only then he’d had the ghost of his big brother to blame, Henry whispering deep down in his head that he was no good, never had been, never would be. Now it was just the enormity of what Roland was asking. Because everything was troubling him, everything was wrong.
Everything
. Or maybe
wrong
was the wrong word, and by a hundred and eighty degrees. Because in another way things seemed too
right,
too perfect, too . . .

“Arrrggghh,” Eddie said. He grabbed bunches of hair on both sides of his head and pulled. “I can’t think of a way to say it.”

“Then say the first thing that comes into your mind. Don’t hesitate.”

“Nineteen,” Eddie said. “This whole deal has gone nineteen.”

He fell backward onto the fragrant forest floor, covered his eyes, and kicked his feet like a kid doing a tantrum. He thought:
Maybe killing a few Wolves will set me right. Maybe that’s all it will take.

Roland gave him a full minute by count and then said, “Do you feel better?”

Eddie sat up. “Actually I do.”

Roland nodded, smiling a little. “Then can you say more? If you can’t, we’ll let it go, but I’ve come to respect your feelings, Eddie—far more than you realize—and if you’d speak, I’d hear.”

What he said was true. The gunslinger’s initial feelings for Eddie had wavered between caution and contempt for what Roland saw as his weakness of character. Respect had come more slowly. It had begun in Balazar’s office, when Eddie had fought naked. Very few men Roland had known could have done that. It had grown with his realization of how much Eddie was like Cuthbert. Then, on the mono, Eddie had acted with a kind of desperate creativity that Roland could admire but never equal. Eddie Dean was possessed of Cuthbert Allgood’s always puzzling and sometimes annoying sense of the ridiculous; he was also possessed of Alain Johns’s deep flashes of intuition. Yet in the end, Eddie was like neither of Roland’s old friends. He was sometimes weak and self-centered, but possessed of deep reservoirs of courage and courage’s good sister, what Eddie himself sometimes called “heart.”

But it was his intuition Roland wanted to tap now.

“All right, then,” Eddie said. “Don’t stop me. Don’t ask questions. Just listen.”

Roland nodded. And hoped Susannah and Jake wouldn’t come back, at least not just yet.

“I look in the sky—up there where the clouds are breaking right this minute—and I see the number nineteen written in blue.”

Roland looked up. And yes, it was there. He saw it, too. But he also saw a cloud like a turtle, and another hole in the thinning dreck that looked like a gunnywagon.

“I look in the trees and see nineteen. Into the fire, see nineteen. Names make nineteen, like Overholser’s and Callahan’s. But that’s just what I can
say,
what I can
see,
what I can get hold of.” Eddie was speaking with desperate speed, looking directly into Roland’s eyes. “Here’s another thing. It has to do with todash. I know you guys sometimes think everything reminds me of getting high, and maybe that’s right, but Roland, going todash is like being stoned.”

Eddie always spoke to him of these things as if Roland had never put anything stronger than graf into his brain and body in all his long life, and that was far from the truth. He might remind Eddie of this at another time, but not now.

“Just being here in your world is like going todash. Because . . . ah, man, this is hard . . . Roland, everything here is real, but it’s not.”

Roland thought of reminding Eddie this wasn’t
his
world, not anymore—for him the city of Lud had been the end of Mid-World and the beginning of all the mysteries that lay beyond—but again kept his mouth closed.

Eddie grasped a handful of duff, scooping up fragrant needles and leaving five black marks in the shape of a hand on the forest floor. “Real,” he said. “I can feel it and smell it.” He put the handful of needles to his mouth and ran out his tongue to touch them. “I can taste it. And at the same time, it’s as unreal as a nineteen you might see in the fire, or that cloud in the sky that looks like a turtle. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I understand it very well,” Roland murmured.

“The people are real. You . . . Susannah . . . Jake . . . that guy Gasher who snatched Jake . . . Overholser and the Slightmans. But the way stuff from my world keeps showing up over here, that’s
not
real. It’s not sensible or logical, either, but that’s not what I mean.
It’s just not real
. Why do people over here sing ‘Hey Jude’? I don’t know. That cyborg bear, Shardik—where do I know that name from? Why did it remind me of rabbits? All that shit about the Wizard of Oz, Roland—all that happened to us, I have no doubt of it, but at the same time it doesn’t seem real to me. It seems like todash. Like nineteen. And what happens after the Green Palace? Why, we walk into the woods, just like Hansel and Gretel. There’s a road for us to walk on. Muffin-balls for us to pick. Civilization has ended. Everything is coming unraveled. You told us so. We saw it in Lud. Except guess what? It’s not! Booya, assholes, gotcha again!”

Eddie gave a short laugh. It sounded shrill and unhealthy. When he brushed his hair back from his forehead, he left a dark smear of forest earth on his brow.

“The joke is that, out here a billion miles from nowhere, we come upon a storybook town. Civilized.
Decent. The kind of folks you feel you know. Maybe you don’t like em all—Overholser’s a little hard to swallow—but you feel you know em.”

Eddie was right about that, too, Roland thought. He hadn’t even seen Calla Bryn Sturgis yet, and already it reminded him of Mejis. In some ways that seemed perfectly reasonable—farming and ranching towns the world over bore similarities to each other—but in other ways it was disturbing. Disturbing as
hell
. The sombrero Slightman had been wearing, for instance. Was it possible that here, thousands of miles from Mejis, the men should wear similar hats? He supposed it might be. But was it likely that Slightman’s sombrero should remind Roland so strongly of the one worn by Miguel, the old
mozo
at Seafront in Mejis, all those years before? Or was that only his imagination?

As for that, Eddie says I have none,
he thought.

“The storybook town has a fairy-tale problem,” Eddie was continuing. “And so the storybook people call on a band of movie-show heroes to save them from the fairy-tale villains. I know it’s real—people are going to die, very likely, and the blood will be real, the screams will be real, the crying afterward will be real—but at the same time there’s something about it that feels no more real than stage scenery.”

“And New York?” Roland asked. “How did that feel to you?”

“The same,” Eddie said. “I mean, think about it. Nineteen books left on the table after Jake took
Charlie the Choo-Choo
and the riddle book . . . and then, out of all the hoods in New York,
Balazar
shows up!
That
fuck!”

“Here, here, now!” Susannah called merrily from behind them. “No profanity, boys.” Jake was pushing her up the road, and her lap was full of muffin-balls. They both looked cheerful and happy. Roland supposed that eating well earlier in the day had something to do with it.

Roland said, “Sometimes that feeling of unreality goes away, doesn’t it?”

“It’s not exactly unreality, Roland. It—”

“Never mind splitting nails to make tacks. Sometimes it goes away. Doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Eddie said. “When I’m with her.”

He went to her. Bent. Kissed her. Roland watched them, troubled.

The light was fading out of the day. They sat around the fire and let it go. What little appetite they’d been able to muster had been easily satisfied by the muffin-balls Susannah and Jake had brought back to camp. Roland had been meditating on something Slightman had said, and more deeply than was probably healthy. Now he pushed it aside still half-chewed and said, “Some of us or all of us may meet later tonight in the city of New York.”

“I only hope I get to go this time,” Susannah said.

“That’s as ka will,” Roland said evenly. “The important thing is that you stay together. If there’s only one who makes the journey, I think it’s apt to be you who goes, Eddie. If only one makes the journey, that one should stay exactly where he . . . or mayhap
she
. . . is until the bells start again.”

“The
kammen,
” Eddie said. “That’s what Andy called em.”

“Do you all understand that?”

They nodded, and looking into their faces, Roland realized that each one of them was reserving the right to decide what to do when the time came, based upon the circumstances. Which was exactly right. They were either gunslingers or they weren’t, after all.

He surprised himself by uttering a brief snort of a laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Jake asked.

“I was just thinking that long life brings strange companions,” Roland said.

“If you mean us,” Eddie said, “lemme tell you something, Roland—you’re not exactly Norman Normal yourself.”

“I suppose not,” Roland said. “If it’s a group that crosses—two, a trio, perhaps all of us—we should join hands when the chimes start.”

“Andy said we had to concentrate on each other,” Eddie said. “To keep from getting lost.”

Susannah surprised them all by starting to sing. Only to Roland, it sounded more like a galley-chorus—a thing made to be shouted out verse by verse—than an actual song. Yet even without a real tune to carry, her voice was melodious enough:
“Children, when ye hear the music of the clarinet
. . .
Children, when ye hear the music of the flute! Children, when ye hear the music of the tam-bou-rine
. . .
Ye must bow down and wor-ship the iyyy-DOL!”