The waste lands - Stephen King [153]
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 be that you 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 us, 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, however— char as in Charlie the Choo-Choo—had only one.
Char meant death.
V BRIDGE AND CITY
V
BRIDGE AND CITY
1
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