The Waste Lands

12

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, Tali-tha - 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 neighbor-hood 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 was - 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.

13

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 Everlast-ing, 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, Susan-nah 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 Imaged 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

Now it was Roland's turn to be surprised. "Are you sure? I did not come to take what belongs to you and yours, Old Mother."

"I'm sure as sure can be. I've worn this day and night for over a hundred years, gunslinger. Now you shall wear it, and lay it at the foot of the Dark Tower, and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth." She slipped the chain over his head. The cross dropped into the open neck of his deerskin shirt as if it belonged there. "Go now. We have broken bread, we have held palaver, we have your blessing, and you have ours. Go your course in safety. Stand and be true." Her voice trembled and broke on the last word.

Roland rose to his feet, then bowed and tapped his throat three times. "Thankee-sai."

She bowed back, but did not speak. Now there were tears coursing down her cheeks.

"Ready?" Roland asked.

Eddie nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

"All right," Roland said. "Let's go."

They walked down what remained of the town's high street, Jake pushing Susannah's wheelchair. As they passed the last building (TRADE & CHANGE, the faded sign read), he looked back. The old people were still gathered about the stone marker, a forlorn cluster of humanity in the middle of this wide, empty plain. Jake raised his hand. Up to this point he had managed to hold himself in, but when several of the old folks - Si, Bill, and Till among them - raised their own hands in return, Jake burst into tears himself.

Eddie put an arm around his shoulders. "Just keep walking, sport," he said in an uneasy voice. "That's the only way to do it."

"They're so old!" Jake sobbed. "How can we just leave them like this? It's not right!"

"It's ka," Eddie said without thinking.

"Is it? Well ka suh-suh-sucks!"

"Yeah, hard," Eddie agreed... but he kept walking. So did Jake, and he didn't look back again. He was afraid they would still be there, standing at the center of their forgotten town, watching until Roland and his friends were out of view. And he would have been right.

14

THEY HAD MADE LESS than seven miles before the sky began to darken and sunset colored the western horizon blaze orange. There was a grove of Susannah's eucalyptus trees nearby; Jake and Eddie foraged there for wood.

"I just don't see why we didn't stay," Jake said. "The blind lady invited us, and we didn't get very far, anyway. I'm still so full I'm practi-cally waddling."

Eddie smiled. "Me, too. And I can tell you something else: your good friend Edward Cantor Dean is looking forward to a long and lei-surely squat in this grove of trees first thing tomorrow morning. You wouldn't believe how tired I am of eating deermeat and crapping rabbit-turds. If you'd told me a year ago that a good dump would be the high point of my day, I would have laughed in your face."

"Is your middle name really Cantor?"

"Yes, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't spread it around."

"I won't. Why didn't we stay, Eddie?"

Eddie sighed. "Because we would have found out they needed firewood."

"Huh?"

"And after we got the firewood, we would've found they also needed fresh meat, because they served us the last of what they had. And we'd be real creeps not to replace what we ate, right? Especially when we're packing guns and the best they can probably do is a bunch of bows and arrows fifty or a hundred years old. So we would have gone hunting for them. By then it would be night again, and when we got up the next day, Susannah would be saying we ought to at least make a few repairs before we moved on - oh, not to the front of the town, that'd be danger-ous, but maybe in the hotel or wherever it is they live. Only a few days, and what's a few days, right?"

Roland materialized out of the gloom. He moved as quietly as ever, but he looked tired and preoccupied. "I thought maybe you two fell into a quickpit," he said.

"Nope. I've just been telling Jake the facts as I see them."

"So what would have been wrong with that?" Jake�C asked. "This Dark Tower thingy has been wherever it is for a long time, right? It's not going anywhere, is it?"

"A few days, then a few more, then a few more." Eddie looked at the branch he had just picked up and threw it aside disgustedly. I'm starting to sound just like him, he thought. And yet he knew that he was only speaking the truth. "Maybe we'd see that their spring is getting silted up, and it wouldn't be polite to go until we'd dug it out for them. But why stop there when we could take another couple of weeks and build a jackleg waterwheel, right? They're old, and have no more foot." He glanced at Roland, and his voice was tinged with reproach. "I tell you what - when I think of Bill and Till there stalking a herd of wild buffalo, I get the shivers."

"They've been doing it a long time," Roland said, "and I imagine they could show us a thing or two. They'll manage. Meantime, let's get that wood - it's going to be a chilly night."

But Jake wasn't done with it yet. He was looking closely - almost sternly - at Eddie. "You're saying we could never do enough for them, aren't you?"

Eddie stuck out his lower lip and blew hair off his forehead. "Not exactly. I'm saving it would never be any easier to leave than it was today. Harder, maybe, but no easier."

"It still doesn't seem right."

They reached the place that would become, once the fire was lit, just another campsite on the road to the Dark Tower . Susannah had eased herself out of her chair and was lying on her back with her hands behind her head, looking up at the stars. Now she sat up and began to arrange the wood in the way Roland had shown her months ago.

"Right is what all this is about," Roland said. "But if you look too long at the small rights, Jake - the ones that lie close at hand -  it's easy to lose sight of the big ones that stand farther off. Things are out of joint - going wrong and getting worse. We see it all around us, but the answers are still ahead. While we were helping the twenty or thirty people left in River Crossing, twenty or thirty thousand more might be suffering or dying somewhere else. And if there is any place in the universe where these things can be set right, it's at the Dark Tower ."

"Why? How?" Jake asked. "What is this Tower, anyway?"

Roland squatted beside the fire Susannah had built, produced his flint and steel, and began to flash sparks into the kindling. Soon small flames were growing amid the twigs and dried handfuls of grass. "I can't answer those questions," he said. "I wish I could."

That, Eddie thought, was an exceedingly clever reply. Roland had said I can't answer... but that wasn't the same thing as I don't know. Far from it.