The Waste Lands (Page 102)

“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?”

Of course, he thought. Where else do you have to go, Eddie, in this world that’s so strange to you? And what else could you do? You’d make a piss-poor farmer. 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 he that yon 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 MS, 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. He’s what the old woman called a Pube. She said both sides would want him. You won’t let me drop this time?

No. Not this time, not ever again.

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, how-ever—char as in Charlie the Choo-Choo—had only one.

Char meant death.

V

BRIDGE AND CITY

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.