Dark Tower V, The Read online

  And the worst holes weren’t out where a man (or a mule) could see them. Not at all, sir, never think so. The leg-breakers were always concealed in innocent-seeming nestles of weeds and high grass. Your mule would step in, there would come a bitter crack like a snapping branch, and then the damned thing would be lying there on the ground, teeth bared, eyes rolling, braying its agony at the sky. Until you put it out of its misery, that was, and stock was valuable in Calla Bryn Sturgis, even stock that wasn’t precisely threaded.

  Tian therefore plowed with his sister in the traces. No reason not to. Tia was roont, hence good for little else. She was a big girl—the roont ones often grew to prodigious size—and she was willing, Man Jesus love her. The Old Fella had made her a Jesus-tree, what he called a crusie-fix, and she wore it everywhere. It swung back and forth now, thumping against her sweating skin as she pulled.

  The plow was attached to her shoulders by a rawhide harness. Behind her, alternately guiding the plow by its old ironwood handles and his sister by the hame-traces, Tian grunted and yanked and pushed when the blade of the plow dropped down and verged on becoming stuck. It was the end of Full Earth but as hot as midsummer here in Son of a Bitch; Tia’s overalls were dark and damp and stuck to her long and meaty thighs. Each time Tian tossed his head to get his hair out of his eyes, sweat flew out of the mop in a spray.

  “Gee, ye bitch!” he cried. “Yon rock’s a plow-breaker, are ye blind?”

  Not blind; not deaf, either; just roont. She heaved to the left, and hard. Behind her, Tian stumbled forward with a neck-snapping jerk and barked his shin on another rock, one he hadn’t seen and the plow had, for a wonder, missed. As he felt the first warm trickles of blood running down to his ankle, he wondered (and not for the first time) what madness it was that always got the Jaffordses out here. In his deepest heart he had an idea that madrigal would sow no more than the porin had before it, although you could grow devil-grass; yar, he could’ve bloomed all twenty acres with that shit, had he wanted. The trick was to keep it out, and it was always New Earth’s first chore. It—

  The plow rocked to the right and then jerked forward, almost pulling his arms out of their sockets. “Arr!” he cried. “Go easy, girl! I can’t grow em back if you pull em out, can I?”

  Tia turned her broad, sweaty, empty face up to a sky full of low-hanging clouds and honked laughter. Man Jesus, but she even sounded like a donkey. Yet it was laughter, human laughter. Tian wondered, as he sometimes couldn’t help doing, if that laughter meant anything. Did she understand some of what he was saying, or did she only respond to his tone of voice? Did any of the roont ones—

  “Good day, sai,” said a loud and almost completely toneless voice from behind him. The owner of the voice ignored Tian’s scream of surprise. “Pleasant days, and may they be long upon the earth. I am here from a goodish wander and at your service.”

  Tian whirled around, saw Andy standing there—all seven feet of him—and was then almost jerked flat as his sister took another of her large lurching steps forward. The plow’s hame-traces were pulled from his hands and flew around his throat with an audible snap. Tia, unaware of this potential disaster, took another sturdy step forward. When she did, Tian’s wind was cut off. He gave a whooping, gagging gasp and clawed at the straps. All of this Andy watched with his usual large and meaningless smile.

  Tia jerked forward again and Tian was pulled off his feet. He landed on a rock that dug savagely into the cleft of his buttocks, but at least he could breathe again. For the moment, anyway. Damned unlucky field! Always had been! Always would be!

  Tian snatched hold of the leather strap before it could pull tight around his throat again and yelled, “Hold, ye bitch! Whoa up if you don’t want me to twist yer great and useless tits right off the front of yer!”

  Tia halted agreeably enough and looked back to see what was what. Her smile broadened. She lifted one heavily muscled arm—it glowed with sweat—and pointed. “Andy!” she said. “Andy’s come!”

  “I ain’t blind,” Tian said and got to his feet, rubbing his bottom. Was that part of him also bleeding? Good Man Jesus, he had an idea it was.

  “Good day, sai,” Andy said to her, and tapped his metal throat three times with his three metal fingers. “Long days and pleasant nights.”

  Although Tia had surely heard the standard response to this—And may you have twice the number—a thousand times or more, all she could do was once more raise her broad idiot’s face to the sky and honk her donkey laugh. Tian felt a surprising moment of pain, not in his arms or throat or outraged ass but in his heart. He vaguely remembered her as a little girl: as pretty and quick as a dragonfly, as smart as ever you could wish. Then—

  But before he could finish the thought, a premonition came. He felt a sinking in his heart. The news would come while I’m out here, he thought. Out in this godforsaken patch where nothing is well and all luck is bad. It was time, wasn’t it? Overtime.

  “Andy,” he said.

  “Yes!” Andy said, smiling. “Andy, your friend! Back from a goodish wander and at your service. Would you like your horoscope, sai Tian? It is Full Earth. The moon is red, what is called the Huntress Moon in Mid-World that was. A friend will call! Business affairs prosper! You will have two ideas, one good and one bad—”

  “The bad one was coming out here to turn this field,” Tian said. “Never mind my goddam horoscope, Andy. Why are you here?”

  Andy’s smile probably could not become troubled—he was a robot, after all, the last one in Calla Bryn Sturgis or for miles and wheels around—but to Tian it seemed to grow troubled, just the same. The robot looked like a young child’s stick-figure of an adult, impossibly tall and impossibly thin. His legs and arms were silvery. His head was a stainless-steel barrel with electric eyes. His body, no more than a cylinder, was gold. Stamped in the middle—what would have been a man’s chest—was this legend:

  NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.

  IN ASSOCIATION WITH

  LaMERK INDUSTRIES

  PRESENTS

  ANDY

  Design: MESSENGER (Many Other Functions)

  Serial # DNF-44821-V-63

  Why or how this silly thing had survived when all the rest of the robots were gone—gone for generations—Tian neither knew nor cared. You were apt to see him anywhere in the Calla (he would not venture beyond its borders) striding on his impossibly thin silver legs, looking everywhere, occasionally clicking to himself as he stored (or perhaps purged—who knew?) information. He sang songs, passed on gossip and rumor from one end of town to the other—a tireless walker was Andy the Messenger Robot—and seemed to enjoy the giving of horoscopes above all things, although there was general agreement in the village that they meant little.

  He had one other function, however, and that meant much.

  “Why are ye here, ye bag of bolts and beams? Answer me! Is it the Wolves? Are they coming from Thunderclap?”

  Tian stood there looking up into Andy’s stupid smiling metal face, the sweat growing cold on his skin, praying with all his might that the foolish thing would say no, then offer to tell his horoscope again, or perhaps to sing “The Green Corn A-Dayo,” all twenty or thirty verses.

  But all Andy said, still smiling, was: “Yes, sai.”

  “Christ and the Man Jesus,” Tian said (he’d gotten an idea from the Old Fella that those were two names for the same thing, but had never bothered pursuing the question). “How long?”

  “One moon of days before they arrive,” Andy replied, still smiling.

  “From full to full?”

  “Close enough, sai.”

  Thirty days, then, give or take one. Thirty days to the Wolves. And there was no sense hoping Andy was wrong. No one kenned how the robot could know they were coming out of Thunderclap so far in advance of their arrival, but he did know. And he was never wrong.

  “Fuck you for your bad news!” Tian cried, and was furious at the waver he heard in his own
voice. “What use are you?”

  “I’m sorry that the news is bad,” Andy said. His guts clicked audibly, his eyes flashed a brighter blue, and he took a step backward. “Would you not like me to tell your horoscope? This is the end of Full Earth, a time particularly propitious for finishing old business and meeting new people—”

  “And fuck your false prophecy, too!” Tian bent, picked up a clod of earth, and threw it at the robot. A pebble buried in the clod clanged off Andy’s metal hide. Tia gasped, then began to cry. Andy backed off another step, his shadow trailing out long in Son of a Bitch field. But his hateful, stupid smile remained.

  “What about a song? I have learned an amusing one from the Manni far north of town; it is called ‘In Time of Loss, Make God Your Boss.’ ” From somewhere deep in Andy’s guts came the wavering honk of a pitch-pipe, followed by a ripple of piano keys. “It goes—”

  Sweat rolling down his cheeks and sticking his itchy balls to his thighs. The stink-smell of his own foolish obsession. Tia blatting her stupid face at the sky. And this idiotic, bad-news-bearing robot getting ready to sing him some sort of Manni hymn.

  “Be quiet, Andy.” He spoke reasonably enough, but through clamped teeth.

  “Sai,” the robot agreed, then fell mercifully silent.

  Tian went to his bawling sister, put his arm around her, smelled the large (but not entirely unpleasant) smell of her. No obsession there, just the smell of work and obedience. He sighed, then began to stroke her trembling arm.

  “Quit it, ye great bawling cunt,” he said. The words might have been ugly but the tone was kind in the extreme, and it was tone she responded to. She began to quiet. Her brother stood with the flare of her hip pushing into him just below his ribcage (she was a full foot taller), and any passing stranger would likely have stopped to look at them, amazed by the similarity of face and the great dissimilarity of size. The resemblance, at least, was honestly come by: they were twins.

  He soothed his sister with a mixture of endearments and profanities—in the years since she had come back roont from the east, the two modes of expression were much the same to Tian Jaffords—and at last she ceased her weeping. And when a rustie flew across the sky, doing loops and giving out the usual series of ugly blats, she pointed and laughed.

  A feeling was rising in Tian, one so foreign to his nature that he didn’t even recognize it. “Isn’t right,” he said. “Nossir. By the Man Jesus and all the gods that be, it isn’t.” He looked to the east, where the hills rolled away into a rising membranous darkness that might have been clouds but wasn’t. It was the edge of Thunderclap.

  “Isn’t right what they do to us.”

  “Sure you wouldn’t like to hear your horoscope, sai? I see bright coins and a beautiful dark lady.”

  “The dark ladies will have to do without me,” Tian said, and began pulling the harness off his sister’s broad shoulders. “I’m married, as I’m sure ye very well know.”

  “Many a married man has had his jilly,” Andy observed. To Tian he sounded almost smug.

  “Not those who love their wives.” Tian shouldered the harness (he’d made it himself, there being a marked shortage of tack for human beings in most livery barns) and turned toward the home place. “And not farmers, in any case. Show me a farmer who can afford a jilly and I’ll kiss your shiny ass. Garn, Tia. Lift em up and put em down.”

  “Home place?” she asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Lunch at home place?” She looked at him in a muddled, hopeful way. “Taters?” A pause. “Gravy?”

  “Shore,” Tian said. “Why the hell not?”

  Tia let out a whoop and began running toward the house. There was something almost awe-inspiring about her when she ran. As their father had once observed, not long before the fall that carried him off, “Bright or dim, that’s a lot of meat in motion.”

  Tian walked slowly after her, head down, watching for the holes which his sister seemed to avoid without even looking, as if some deep part of her had mapped the location of each one. That strange new feeling kept growing and growing. He knew about anger—any farmer who’d ever lost cows to the milk-sick or watched a summer hailstorm beat his corn flat knew plenty about that—but this was deeper. This was rage, and it was a new thing. He walked slowly, head down, fists clenched. He wasn’t aware of Andy following along behind him until the robot said, “There’s other news, sai. Northwest of town, along the Path of the Beam, strangers from Out-World—”

  “Bugger the Beam, bugger the strangers, and bugger your good self,” Tian said. “Let me be, Andy.”

  Andy stood where he was for a moment, surrounded by the rocks and weeds and useless knobs of Son of a Bitch, that thankless tract of Jaffords land. Relays inside him clicked. His eyes flashed. And he decided to go and talk to the Old Fella. The Old Fella never told him to bugger his good self. The Old Fella was always willing to hear his horoscope.

  And he was always interested in strangers.

  Andy started toward town and Our Lady of Serenity.

  Two

  Zalia Jaffords didn’t see her husband and sister-in-law come back from Son of a Bitch; didn’t hear Tia plunging her head repeatedly into the rain-barrel outside the barn and then blowing moisture off her lips like a horse. Zalia was on the south side of the house, hanging out wash and keeping an eye on the children. She wasn’t aware that Tian was back until she saw him looking out the kitchen window at her. She was surprised to see him there at all and much more than surprised by the look of him. His face was ashy pale except for two bright blots of color high up on his cheeks and a third glaring in the center of his forehead like a brand.

  She dropped the few pins she was still holding back into her clothes basket and started for the house.

  “Where goin, Maw?” Heddon called, and “Where goin, Maw-Maw?” Hedda echoed.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Just keep a eye on your ka-babbies.”

  “Why-yyy?” Hedda whined. She had that whine down to a science. One of these days she would draw it out a little too long and her mother would clout her right down dead.

  “Because ye’re the oldest,” she said.

  “But—”

  “Shut your mouth, Hedda Jaffords.”

  “We’ll watch em, Ma,” Heddon said. Always agreeable was her Heddon; probably not quite so bright as his sister, but bright wasn’t everything. Far from it. “Want us to finish hanging the wash?”

  “Hed-donnnn…” From his sister. That irritating whine again. But Zalia had no time for them. She just took one glance at the others: Lyman and Lia, who were five, and Aaron, who was two. Aaron sat naked in the dirt, happily chunking two stones together. He was the rare singleton, and how the women of the village envied her on account of him! Because Aaron would always be safe. The others, however, Heddon and Hedda…Lyman and Lia…

  She suddenly understood what it might mean, him back at the house in the middle of the day like this. She prayed to the gods it wasn’t so, but when she came into the kitchen and saw the way he was looking out at the kiddies, she became almost sure it was.

  “Tell me it isn’t the Wolves,” she said in a dry and frantic voice. “Say it ain’t.”

  “ ’Tis,” Tian replied. “Thirty days, Andy says—moon to moon. And on that Andy’s never—”

  Before he could go on, Zalia Jaffords clapped her hands to her temples and shrieked. In the side yard, Hedda jumped up. In another moment she would have been running for the house, but Heddon held her back.

  “They won’t take any as young as Lyman and Lia, will they?” she asked him. “Hedda or Heddon, maybe, but surely not my little ones? Why, they won’t see their sixth for another half-year!”

  “The Wolves have taken em as young as three, and you know it,” Tian said. His hands opened and closed, opened and closed. That feeling inside him continued to grow—the feeling that was deeper than mere anger.

  She looked at him, tears spillin
g down her face.

  “Mayhap it’s time to say no.” Tian spoke in a voice he hardly recognized as his own.

  “How can we?” she whispered. “How in the name of the gods can we?”

  “Dunno,” he said. “But come here, woman, I beg ya.”

  She came, throwing one last glance over her shoulder at the five children in the back yard—as if to make sure they were still all there, that no Wolves had taken them yet—and then crossed the living room. Gran-pere sat in his corner chair by the dead fire, head bent over, dozing and drizzling from his folded, toothless mouth.

  From this room the barn was visible. Tian drew his wife to the window and pointed. “There,” he said. “Do you mark em, woman? Do you see em very well?”

  Of course she did. Tian’s sister, six and a half feet tall, now standing with the straps of her overalls lowered and her big breasts sparkling with water as she splashed them from the rain barrel. Standing in the barn doorway was Zalman, Zalia’s very own brother. Almost seven feet tall was he, big as Lord Perth, tall as Andy, and as empty of face as the girl. A strapping young man watching a strapping young woman with her breasts out on show like that might well have been sporting a bulge in his pants, but there was none in Zally’s. Nor ever would be. He was roont.

  She turned back to Tian. They looked at each other, a man and a woman not roont, but only because of dumb luck. So far as either of them knew, it could just as easily have been Zal and Tia standing in here and watching Tian and Zalia out by the barn, grown large of body and empty of head.

  “Of course I see,” she told him. “Does thee think I’m blind?”

  “Don’t it sometimes make you wish you was?” he asked. “To see em so?”

  Zalia made no reply.

  “Not right, woman. Not right. Never has been.”

  “But since time out of mind—”