The Waste Lands (Page 91)

“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 dy***ite, 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.”