Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [111]
I could wake it up, Eddie thought. I really think I could.
Yes, and someone with an infected tooth could rap it with a hammer, but why would you?
We’ll have to wake it up eventually. I think we’re going to need it.
Perhaps, but that was for another day. It was time to let this one go.
Yet for awhile Eddie was incapable of doing that. Images flashed in his mind, like bits of broken mirror in bright sunlight. The Calla, lying spread out below them beneath the cloudy sky, the Devar-Tete Whye a gray ribbon. The green beds at its edge: rice come a-falla. Jake and Benny Slightman looking at each other and laughing without a word passed between them to account for it. The aisle of green grass between the high street and the Pavilion. The torches changing color. Oy, bowing and speaking (Eld! Thankee!) with perfect clarity. Susannah singing: “I’ve known sorrow all my days.”
Yet what he remembered most clearly was Roland standing slim and gunless on the boards with his arms crossed at the chest and his hands pressed against his cheeks; those faded blue eyes looking out at the folken. Roland asking questions, two of three. And then the sound of his boots on the boards, slow at first, then speeding up. Faster and faster, until they were a blur in the torchlight. Clapping. Sweating. Smiling. Yet his eyes didn’t smile, not those blue bombardier’s eyes; they were as cold as ever.
Yet how he had danced! Great God, how he had danced in the light of the torches.
Come-come-commala, rice come a-falla, Eddie thought.
Beside him, Susannah moaned in some dream.
Eddie turned to her. Slipped his hand beneath her arm so he could cup her breast. His last thought was for Jake. They had better take care of him out at that ranch. If they didn’t, they were going to be one sorry-ass bunch of cowpunchers.
Eddie slept. There were no dreams. And beneath them as the night latened and the moon set, this borderland world turned like a dying clock.
Chapter II:
Dry Twist
One
Roland awoke from another vile dream of Jericho Hill in the hour before dawn. The horn. Something about Arthur Eld’s horn. Beside him in the big bed, the Old Fella slept with a frown on his face, as if caught in his own bad dream. It creased his broad brow zigzag, breaking the arms of the cross scarred into the skin there.
It was pain that had wakened Roland, not his dream of the horn spilling from Cuthbert’s hand as his old friend fell. The gunslinger was caught in a vise of it from the hips all the way down to his ankles. He could visualize the pain as a series of bright and burning rings. This was how he paid for his outrageous exertions of the night before. If that was all, all would have been well, but he knew there was more to this than just having danced the commala a little too enthusiastically. Nor was it the rheumatiz, as he had been telling himself these last few weeks, his body’s necessary period of adjustment to the damp weather of this fall season. He was not blind to the way his ankles, especially the right one, had begun to thicken. He had observed a similar thickening of his knees, and although his hips still looked fine, when he placed his hands on them, he could feel the way the right one was changing under the skin. No, not the rheumatiz that had afflicted Cort so miserably in his last year or so, keeping him inside by his fire on rainy days. This was something worse. It was arthritis, the bad kind, the dry kind. It wouldn’t be long before it reached his hands. Roland would gladly have fed his right one to the disease, if that would have satisfied it; he had taught it to do a good many things