The Waste Lands (Page 92)

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.”

“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.”

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?”