The Waste Lands (Page 108)

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 over-stressed 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 land. 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.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I don’t know!” Jake said, almost angrily. “I just do.”

“All right,” Roland said mildly. He looked toward Lud again. “But we’ll have to be damned careful. It’s unlucky that they still have gunpow-der. If they have that, they may have things that are even more powerful. I doubt if they know how to use them, but that only increases the danger. They could get excited and blow us all to hell.”

“Ell,” a grave voice said from behind them. They glanced around and saw Oy sitting by the side of the road, watching them.

LATER THAT DAY THEY came to a new road which swept toward them out of the west and joined their own way. Beyond this point, the Great Road—now much wider and split down the middle by a median divider of some polished dark stone—began to sink, and the crumbling concrete embankments which rose on either side of them gave the pilgrims a claustrophobic trapped feeling. They stopped at a point where one of these concrete dikes had born broken open, affording a comforting line of sight to the open land beyond, and ate a light, unsatisfying meal. “Why do you think they dropped the road down like this, Eddie?” Jake asked. “I mean, someone did do it this way on purpose, didn’t they?” Eddie looked through the break in the concrete, where the flatlands stretched on as smoothly as ever, and nodded.

“Then why?”

“Dunno, champ,” Eddie said, but he thought he did. He glanced at Roland and guessed that he knew, too. The sunken road leading to the bridge had been a defensive measure. Troops placed atop the concrete slopes were in control of two carefully engineered redoubts. If the defenders didn’t like the look of the folks approaching Lud along the Great Road, they could rain destruction down on them.

“You sure you don’t know?” Jake asked.

Eddie smiled at Jake and tried to stop imagining that there was some nut up there right now, getting ready to roll a large, rusty bomb down one of those decayed concrete ramps. “No idea,” he said. Susannah whistled disgustedly between her teeth. “This road’s goin to hell, Roland. I was hoping we were done with that damn harness, but you better get it out again.” He nodded and rummaged in his purse for it without a word. The condition of the Great Road deteriorated as other, smaller roads joined it like tributaries joining a great river. As they neared the bridge, the cobbles were replaced with a surface Roland thought of as metal and the rest of them thought of as asphalt or hot-top. It had not held up as well as the cobbles. Time had done some damage; the passage of count-less horses and wagons since the last repairs were made had done more. The surface had been chewed into treacherous rubble. Foot travel would be difficult, and the idea of pushing Susannah’s wheelchair over that crumbled surface was ridiculous. The banks oh either side had grown steadily steeper, and now, at their tops, they could see slim, pointed shapes looming against the sky. Roland thought of arrowheads—huge ones, weapons made by a tribe of giants. To his companions, they looked like rockets or guided missiles. Susannah thought of Redstones fired from Cape Canaveral; Eddie thought about SAMs, some built to be fired from the backs of flatbed trucks, stored all over Europe; Jake thought of ICBMs hiding in rein-forced concrete silos under the plains of Kansas and the unpopulated mountains of Nevada, programmed to hit back at China or the USSR in the event of nuclear armageddon. All of them felt as if they had passed into a dark and woeful zone of shadow, or into a countryside laboring under some old but still powerful curse.