9
IT WAS THE TWINS, Bill and Till, who actually did most of the talking, one taking up the tale smoothly whenever the other left off. Every now and then Aunt Talitha would add something or correct something, and the twins would wait respectfully until they were sure she was done. Si didn't speak at all - merely sat with his untouched coffee in front of him, plucking at the pieces of straw which bristled up from the wide brim of his sombrero.
They knew little, indeed, Roland realized quickly, even about the history of their own town (nor did this surprise him; in these latter days, memories faded rapidly and all but the most recent past seemed not to exist), but what they did know was disturbing. Roland was not surprised by this, either.
In the days of their great-great-grandparents, River Crossing had been much the town Susannah had imagined: a trade-stop at the Great Road, modestly prosperous, a place where goods were sometimes sold but more often exchanged. It had been at least nominally part of River Barony, although even then such things as Baronies and Estates o' Land had been passing.
There had been buffalo-hunters in those days, although the trade had been dying out; the herds were small and badly mutated. The meat of these mutant beasts was not poison, but it had been rank and bitter. Yet River Crossing, located between a place they simply called The Land-ing and the village of Jimtown, had been a place of some note. It was on the Great Road and only six days travel from the city by land and three by barge. "Unless the river were low," one of the twins said. "Then it took longer, and my gran'da said there was times when there was barges grounded all the way upriver to Tom's Neck."
The old people knew nothing of the city's original residents, of course, or the technologies they had used to build the towers and turrets; these were the Great Old Ones, and their history had been lost in the furthest reaches of the past even when Aunt Talitha's great-great-grandfa-ther had been a boy.
"The buildings are still standing," Eddie said. "I wonder if the machines the Great Golden Oldies used to build them still run."
"Mayhap," one of the twins said. "If so, young fella, there don't be ary man or woman that lives there now who'd still know how to run em ... or so I believe, so I do."
"Nay," his brother said argumentatively, "I doubt the old ways are entirely lost to the Grays 'n Pubes, even now." He looked at Eddie. "Our da' said there was once electric candles in the city. There are those who say they mought still burn."
"Imagine that," Eddie replied wonderingly, and Susannah pinched his leg, hard, under the table.
"Yes," the other twin said. He spoke seriously, unaware of Eddie's sarcasm. "You pushed a button and they came on - bright, heatless can-dles with ary wicks or reservoirs for oil. And I've heard it said that once, in the old days, Quick, the outlaw prince, actually Hew up into the sky in a mechanical bird. But one of its wings broke and he died in a great fall, like Icarus."
Susannah's mouth dropped open. "You know the story of Icarus?"
"Ay, lady," he said, clearly surprised she should find this strange. "He of the beeswax wings."
"Children's stories, both of them," Aunt Talitha said with a sniff. "I know the story of the endless lights is true, for I saw them with my own eyes when I was but a green girl, and they may still glow from time to time, ay; there are those I trust who say they've seen diem on clear nights, although it's been long years since I have myself. But no man ever flew, not even the Great Old Ones."
Nonetheless, there were strange machines in the city, built to do peculiar and sometimes dangerous things. Many of them might still run, but the elderly twins reckoned that none now in the city knew how to start them up, for they hadn't been heard in years.
Maybe that could change, though, Eddie thought, his eyes gleaming. If, that is, an enterprising, travel-minded young man with a little knowl-edge of strange machinery and endless lights came along. It could be just a matter of finding the ON switches. I mean, it really could be that simple. Or maybe they just blew a bunch of fuses - think of that, friends and neighbors! Just replace half a dozen 400-amp Busses and light the whole place up like a Reno Saturday night!
Susannah elbowed him and asked, in a low voice, what was so funny. Eddie shook his head and put a finger to his lips, earning an irritated look from the love of his life. The albinos, meanwhile, were continuing their story, handing its thread back and forth with the unconscious ease which probably nothing but lifetime twinship can provide.
Four or five generations ago, they said, the city had still been quite heavily populated and reasonably civilized, although the residents drove wagons and buckboards along the wide boulevards the Great Old Ones had constructed for their fabulous horseless vehicles. The city-dwellers were artisans and what the twins called "manufactories," and trade both on the river and over it had been brisk.
"Over it?" Roland asked.
"The bridge over the Send still stands," Aunt Talitha said, "or did twenty year ago."
"Ay, old Bill Muffin and his boy saw it not ten year agone," Si agreed, making his first contribution to the conversation.
"What sort of bridge?" the gunslinger asked.
"A great thing of steel cables," one of the twins said. "It stands in the sky like the web of some great spider." He added shyly: "I should like to see it again before I die."
"Probably fallen in by now," Aunt Talitha said dismissively, "and good riddance. Devil's work." She turned to the twins. "Tell them what's happened since, and why the city's so dangerous now - apart from any haunts that may den there, that is, and I'll warrant there's a power of em. These folks want to get on, and the sun's on the wester."
10
THE REST OF THE story was but another version of a tale Roland of Gilead had heard many times and had, in some measure, lived through himself. It was fragmentary and incomplete, undoubtedly shot through with myth and misinformation, its linear progress distorted by the odd changes - both temporal and directional - which were now taking place in the world, and it could be summed up in a single compound sentence: Once there was a world we knew, but that world has moved on.
These old people of River Crossing knew of Gilead no more than Roland knew of the River Barony, and the name of John Parson, the man who had brought ruin and anarchy on Roland's land, meant nothing to them, but all stories of the old world's passing were similar... too similar, Roland thought, to be coincidence.
A great civil war - perhaps in Garlan, perhaps in a more distant land called Porla - had erupted three, perhaps even four hundred years ago. Its ripples had spread slowly outward, pushing anarchy and dissension ahead of them. Few if any kingdoms had been able to stand against those slow waves, and anarchy had come to this part of the world as surely as night follows sunset. At one time, whole armies had been on the roads, sometimes in advance, sometimes in retreat, always confused and without long-term goals. As time passed, they crumbled into smaller groups, and these degenerated into roving bands of harriers. Trade faltered, then broke down entirely. Travel went from a matter of inconvenience to one of danger. In the end, it became almost impossible. Communication with the city thinned steadily and had all but ceased a hundred and twenty years ago.
Like a hundred other towns Roland had ridden through - first with Cuthbert and the other gunslingers cast out of Gilead, then alone, in pursuit of the man in black - River Crossing had been cut off and thrown on its own resources.
At this point Si roused himself, and his voice captured the travellers at once. He spoke in the hoarse, cadenced tones of a lifelong teller of tales - one of those divine fools born to merge memory and mendacity into dreams as airily gorgeous as cobwebs strung with drops of dew.
"We last sent tribute to the Barony castle in the time of my greatgran'da," he said. "Twenty-six men went with a wagon of hides - there was no hard coin anymore by then, o' course, and 'twas the best they could do. It was a long and dangerous journey of almost eighty wheels, and six died on the way. Half fell to harriers bound for the war in the city; the other half died either of disease or devilgrass.
"When they finally arrived, they found the castle deserted but for the rooks and black-birds. The walls had been broken; weeds o'ergrew the Court o' State. There had been a great slaughter on the fields to the west; it were white with bones and red with rusty armor, so my da's gran'da said, and the voices of demons cried out like the east wind from the jawbones o' those who'd fallen there. The village beyond the castle had been burned to the ground and a thousand or more skulls were posted along the walls of the keep. Our folk left their bounty o' hides without the shattered barbican gate - for none would venture inside that place of ghosts and moaning voices - and began the homeward way again. Ten more fell on that journey, so that of the six-and-twenty who left only ten returned, my great-gran'da one of them... but he picked up a ring-worm on his neck and bosom that never left until the day he died. It were the radiation sickness, or so they said. After that, gunslinger, none left the town. We were on our own."
They grew used to the depredations of the harriers, Si continued in his cracked but melodious voice. Watches were posted; when bands of riders were seen approaching - almost always moving southeast along the Great Road and the path of the Beam, going to the war which raged endlessly in Lud - the townspeople hid in a large shelter they had dug beneath the church. Casual damages to the town were not repaired, lest they make those roving bands curious. Most were beyond curiosity; they only rode through at a gallop, bows or battle-axes slung over their shoul-ders, bound for the killing-zones.
"What war is it that you speak of?" Roland asked.
"Yes," Eddie said, "and what about that drumming sound?"
The twins again exchanged a quick, almost superstitious glance.
"We know not of the god-drums," Si told them. "Ary word or watch. The war of the city, now ..."
The war had originally been the harriers and outlaws against a loose confederation of artisans and "manufactories" who lived in the city. The residents had decided to fight instead of allowing the harriers to loot them, burn their shops, and then turn the survivors out into the Big Empty, where they would almost certainly die. And for some years they had successfully defended Lud against the vicious but badly organized groups of raiders which tried to storm across the bridge or invade by boat and barge.
"The city-folk used the old weapons," one of the twins said, "and though their numbers were small, the harriers could not stand against such things with their bows and maces and battle-axes."
"Do you mean the city-people used guns?" Eddie asked.
One of the albinos nodded. "Ay, guns, but not just guns. There were things that hurled the firebangs over a mile or more. Explosions like dynamite, only more powerful. The outlaws - who are now the Grays, as you must ken - could do nothing but lay siege beyond the river, and that was what they did."
Lud became, in effect, the last fortress-refuge of the latter world. The brightest and most able travelled there from the surrounding coun-tryside by ones and twos. When it came to intelligence tests, sneaking through the tangled encampments and front lines of the besiegers was the newcomers' final exam. Most came unarmed across the no-man's-land of the bridge, and those who made it that far were let through. Some were found wanting and sent packing again, of course, but those who had a trade or a skill (or brains enough to learn one) were allowed to stay. Farming skills were particularly prized; according to the stories, every large park in Lud had been turned into a vegetable garden. With the countryside cut off, it was grow food in the city or starve amid the glass towers and metal alleys. The Great Old Ones were gone, their machines were a mystery, and the silent wonders which remained were inedible.
Little by little, the character of the war began to change. The bal-ance of power had shifted to the besieging Grays - so called because they were, on average, much older than the city-dwellers. Those latter were also growing older, of course. They were still known as Pubes, but in most cases their puberty was long behind them. And they eventually either forgot how the old weapons worked or used them up.
"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 orga-nized 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 knowl-edge 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."
11
"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 was, 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 annoy-ance. "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 die 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," Rolund 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."