Dark Tower V, The Read online

  Beyond them and east of the river was desert, stretching for miles. Eddie could see parallel scratches of metal running into it, and made them for railroad tracks.

  And beyond the desert—or obscuring the rest of it—was simple blackness. It rose into the sky like a vapory wall, seeming to cut into the low-hanging clouds.

  “Yon’s Thunderclap, sai,” Zalia Jaffords said.

  Eddie nodded. “Land of the Wolves. And God knows what else.”

  “Yer-bugger,” Slightman the Younger said. He was trying to sound bluff and matter-of-fact, but to Eddie he looked plenty scared, maybe on the verge of tears. But the Wolves wouldn’t take him, surely—if your twin died, that made you a singleton by default, didn’t it? Well, it had certainly worked for Elvis Presley, but of course the King hadn’t come from Calla Bryn Sturgis. Or even Calla Lockwood to the south.

  “Naw, the King was a Mis’sippi boy,” Eddie said, low.

  Tian turned in his saddle to look at him. “Beg your pardon, sai?”

  Eddie, not aware that he’d spoken aloud, said: “I’m sorry. I was talking to myself.”

  Andy the Messenger Robot (Many Other Functions) came striding back up the path from ahead of them in time to hear this. “Those who hold conversation with themselves keep sorry company. This is an old saying of the Calla, sai Eddie, don’t take it personally, I beg.”

  “And, as I’ve said before and will undoubtedly say again, you can’t get snot off a suede jacket, my friend. An old saying from Calla Bryn Brooklyn.”

  Andy’s innards clicked. His blue eyes flashed. “Snot: mucus from the nose. Also a disrespectful or supercilious person. Suede: this is a leather product which—”

  “Never mind, Andy,” Susannah said. “My friend is just being silly. He does this quite frequently.”

  “Oh yes,” Andy said. “He is a child of winter. Would you like me to tell your horoscope, Susannah-sai? You will meet a handsome man! You will have two ideas, one bad and one good! You will have a dark-haired—”

  “Get out of here, idiot,” Overholser said. “Right into town, straight line, no wandering. Check that all’s well at the Pavilion. No one wants to hear your goddamned horoscopes, begging your pardon, Old Fella.”

  Callahan made no reply. Andy bowed, tapped his metal throat three times, and set off down the trail, which was steep but comfortingly wide. Susannah watched him go with what might have been relief.

  “Kinda hard on him, weren’t you?” Eddie asked.

  “He’s but a piece of machinery,” Overholser said, breaking the last word into syllables, as if speaking to a child.

  “And he can be annoying,” Tian said. “But tell me, sais, what do you think of our Calla?”

  Roland eased his horse in between Eddie’s and Callahan’s. “It’s very beautiful,” he said. “Whatever the gods may be, they have favored this place. I see corn, sharproot, beans, and…potatoes? Are those potatoes?”

  “Aye, spuds, do ya,” Slightman said, clearly pleased by Roland’s eye.

  “And yon’s all that gorgeous rice,” Roland said.

  “All smallholds by the river,” Tian said, “where the water’s sweet and slow. And we know how lucky we are. When the rice comes ready—either to plant or to harvest—all the women go together. There’s singing in the fields, and even dancing.”

  “Come-come-commala,” Roland said. At least that was what Eddie heard.

  Tian and Zalia brightened with surprise and recognition. The Slightmans exchanged a glance and grinned. “Where did you hear The Rice Song?” the Elder asked. “When?”

  “In my home,” said Roland. “Long ago. Come-come-commala, rice come a-falla.” He pointed to the west, away from the river. “There’s the biggest farm, deep in wheat. Yours, sai Overholser?”

  “So it is, say thankya.”

  “And beyond, to the south, more farms…and then the ranches. That one’s cattle…that one sheep…that one cattle…more cattle…more sheep…”

  “How can you tell the difference from so far away?” Susannah asked.

  “Sheep eat the grass closer to the earth, lady-sai,” Overholser said. “So where you see the light brown patches of earth, that’s sheep-graze land. The others—what you’d call ocher, I guess—that’s cattle-graze.”

  Eddie thought of all the Western movies he’d seen at the Majestic: Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Lee Van Cleef. “In my land, they tell legends of range-wars between the ranchers and the sheep-farmers,” he said. “Because, it was told, the sheep ate the grass too close. Took even the roots, you ken, so it wouldn’t grow back again.”

  “That’s plain silly, beg your pardon,” Overholser said. “Sheep do crop grass close, aye, but then we send the cows over it to water. The manure they drop is full of seed.”

  “Ah,” Eddie said. He couldn’t think of anything else. Put that way, the whole idea of range wars seemed exquisitely stupid.

  “Come on,” Overholser said. “Daylight’s wasting, do ya, and there’s a feast laid on for us at the Pavilion. The whole town’ll be there to meet you.”

  And to give us a good looking-over, too, Eddie thought.

  “Lead on,” Roland said. “We can be there by late day. Or am I wrong?”

  “Nup,” Overholser said, then drove his feet into his horse’s sides and yanked its head around (just looking at this made Eddie wince). He headed down the path. The others followed.

  Five

  Eddie never forgot their first encounter with those of the Calla; that was one memory always within easy reach. Because everything that happened had been a surprise, he supposed, and when everything’s a surprise, experience takes on a dreamlike quality. He remembered the way the torches changed when the speaking was done—their strange, varied light. He remembered Oy’s unexpected salute to the crowd. The upturned faces and his suffocating panic and his anger at Roland. Susannah hoisting herself onto the piano bench in what the locals called the musica. Oh yeah, that memory always. You bet. But even more vivid than this memory of his beloved was that of the gunslinger.

  Of Roland dancing.

  But before any of these things came the ride down the Calla’s high street, and his sense of foreboding. His premonition of bad days on the way.

  Six

  They reached the town proper an hour before sunset. The clouds parted and let through the day’s last red light. The street was empty. The surface was oiled dirt. The horses’ hooves made muffled thuds on the wheel-marked hardpack. Eddie saw a livery stable, a place called the Travelers’ Rest that seemed a combination lodging-house and eating-house, and, at the far end of the street, a large two-story that just about had to be the Calla’s Gathering Hall. Off to the right of this was the flare of torches, so he supposed there were people waiting there, but at the north end of town where they entered there were none.

  The silence and the empty board sidewalks began to give Eddie the creeps. He remembered Roland’s tale of Susan’s final ride into Mejis in the back of a cart, standing with her hands tied in front of her and a noose around her neck. Her road had been empty, too. At first. Then, not far from the intersection of the Great Road and the Silk Ranch Road, Susan and her captors had passed a single farmer, a man with what Roland had called lamb-slaughterer’s eyes. Later she would be pelted with vegetables and sticks, even with stones, but this lone farmer had been first, standing there with his handful of cornshucks, which he had tossed almost gently at her as she passed on her way to…well, on her way to charyou tree, the Reap Fair of the Old People.

  As they rode into Calla Bryn Sturgis, Eddie kept expecting that man, those lamb-slaughterer’s eyes, and the handful of cornshucks. Because this town felt bad to him. Not evil—evil as Mejis had likely been on the night of Susan Delgado’s death—but bad in a simpler way. Bad as in bad luck, bad choices, bad omens. Bad ka, maybe.

  He leaned toward Slightman the Elder. “Where in the heck is everyone, Ben?”

  “Yonder,
” Slightman said, and pointed to the flare of the torches.

  “Why are they so quiet?” Jake asked.

  “They don’t know what to expect,” Callahan said. “We’re cut off here. The outsiders we do see from time to time are the occasional peddler, harrier, gambler…oh, and the lake-boat marts sometimes stop in high summer.”

  “What’s a lake-boat mart?” Susannah asked.

  Callahan described a wide flatboat, paddlewheel-driven and gaily painted, covered with small shops. These made their slow way down the Devar-Tete Whye, stopping to trade at the Callas of the Middle Crescent until their goods were gone. Shoddy stuff for the most part, Callahan said, but Eddie wasn’t sure he trusted him entirely, at least on the subject of the lake-boat marts; he spoke with the almost unconscious distaste of the longtime religious.

  “And the other outsiders come to steal their children,” Callahan concluded. He pointed to the left, where a long wooden building seemed to take up almost half the high street. Eddie counted not two hitching rails or four, but eight. Long ones. “Took’s General Store, may it do ya fine,” Callahan said, with what might have been sarcasm.

  They reached the Pavilion. Eddie later put the number present at seven or eight hundred, but when he first saw them—a mass of hats and bonnets and boots and work-roughened hands beneath the long red light of that day’s evening sun—the crowd seemed enormous, untellable.

  They will throw shit at us, he thought. Throw shit at us and yell “Charyou tree.” The idea was ridiculous but also strong.

  The Calla-folk moved back on two sides, creating an aisle of green grass which led to a raised wooden platform. Ringing the Pavilion were torches caught in iron cages. At that point, they still all flared a quite ordinary yellow. Eddie’s nose caught the strong reek of oil.

  Overholser dismounted. So did the others of his party. Eddie, Susannah, and Jake looked at Roland. Roland sat as he was for a moment, leaning slightly forward, one arm cast across the pommel of his saddle, seeming lost in his own thoughts. Then he took off his hat and held it out to the crowd. He tapped his throat three times. The crowd murmured. In appreciation or surprise? Eddie couldn’t tell. Not anger, though, definitely not anger, and that was good. The gunslinger lifted one booted foot across the saddle and lightly dismounted. Eddie left his horse more carefully, aware of all the eyes on him. He’d put on Susannah’s harness earlier, and now he stood next to her mount, back-to. She slipped into the harness with the ease of long practice. The crowd murmured again when they saw her legs were missing from just above the knees.

  Overholser started briskly up the path, shaking a few hands along the way. Callahan walked directly behind him, occasionally sketching the sign of the cross in the air. Other hands reached out of the crowd to secure the horses. Roland, Eddie, and Jake walked three abreast. Oy was still in the wide front pocket of the poncho Benny had loaned Jake, looking about with interest.

  Eddie realized he could actually smell the crowd—sweat and hair and sunburned skin and the occasional splash of what the characters in the Western movies usually called (with contempt similar to Callahan’s for the lake-boat marts) “foo-foo water.” He could also smell food: pork and beef, fresh bread, frying onions, coffee and graf. His stomach rumbled, yet he wasn’t hungry. No, not really hungry. The idea that the path they were walking would disappear and these people would close in on them wouldn’t leave his mind. They were so quiet! Somewhere close by he could hear the first nightjars and whippoor-wills tuning up for evening.

  Overholser and Callahan mounted the platform. Eddie was alarmed to see that none of the others of the party which had ridden out to meet them did. Roland walked up the three broad wooden steps without hesitation, however. Eddie followed, conscious that his knees were a little weak.

  “You all right?” Susannah murmured in his ear.

  “So far.”

  To the left of the platform was a round stage with seven men on it, all dressed in white shirts, blue jeans, and sashes. Eddie recognized the instruments they were holding, and although the mandolin and banjo made him think their music would probably be of the shitkicking variety, the sight of them was still reassuring. They didn’t hire bands to play at human sacrifices, did they? Maybe just a drummer or two, to wind up the spectators.

  Eddie turned to face the crowd with Susannah on his back. He was dismayed to see that the aisle that had begun where the high street ended was indeed gone now. Faces tilted up to look at him. Women and men, old and young. No expression on those faces, and no children among them. These were faces that spent most of their time out in the sun and had the cracks to prove it. That sense of foreboding would not leave him.

  Overholser stopped beside a plain wooden table. On it was a large billowy feather. The farmer took it and held it up. The crowd, quiet to begin with, now fell into a silence so disquietingly deep that Eddie could hear the rattling rales in some old party’s chest as he or she breathed.

  “Put me down, Eddie,” Susannah said quietly. He didn’t like to, but he did.

  “I’m Wayne Overholser of Seven-Mile Farm,” Overholser said, stepping to the edge of the stage with the feather held before him. “Hear me now, I beg.”

  “We say thankee-sai,” they murmured.

  Overholser turned and held one hand out to Roland and his tet, standing there in their travel-stained clothes (Susannah didn’t stand, exactly, but rested between Eddie and Jake on her haunches and one propped hand). Eddie thought he had never felt himself studied more eagerly.

  “We men of the Calla heard Tian Jaffords, George Telford, Diego Adams, and all others who would speak at the Gathering Hall,” Overholser said. “There I did speak myself. ‘They’ll come and take the children,’ I said, meaning the Wolves, a’course, ‘then they’ll leave us alone again for a generation or more. So ’tis, so it’s been, I say leave it alone.’ I think now those words were mayhap a little hasty.”

  A murmur from the crowd, soft as a breeze.

  “At this same meeting we heard Pere Callahan say there were gunslingers north of us.”

  Another murmur. This one was a little louder. Gunslingers…Mid-World…Gilead.

  “It was taken among us that a party should go and see. These are the folk we found, do ya. They claim to be…what Pere Callahan said they were.” Overholser now looked uncomfortable. Almost as if he were suppressing a fart. Eddie had seen this expression before, mostly on TV, when politicians faced with some fact they couldn’t squirm around were forced to backtrack. “They claim to be of the gone world. Which is to say…”

  Go on, Wayne, Eddie thought, get it out. You can do it.

  “…which is to say of Eld’s line.”

  “Gods be praised!” some woman shrieked. “Gods’ve sent em to save our babbies, so they have!”

  There were shushing sounds. Overholser waited for quiet with a pained look on his face, then went on. “They can speak for themselves—and must—but I’ve seen enough to believe they may be able to help us with our problem. They carry good guns—you see em—and they can use em. Set my watch and warrant on it, and say thankya.”

  This time the murmur from the crowd was louder, and Eddie sensed goodwill in it. He relaxed a little.

  “All right, then, let em stand before’ee one by one, that ye might hear their voices and see their faces very well. This is their dinh.” He lifted a hand to Roland.

  The gunslinger stepped forward. The red sun set his left cheek on fire; the right was painted yellow with torchglow. He put out one leg. The thunk of the worn bootheel on the boards was very clear in the silence; Eddie for no reason thought of a fist knocking on a coffintop. He bowed deeply, open palms held out to them. “Roland of Gilead, son of Steven,” he said. “The Line of Eld.”

  They sighed.

  “May we be well-met.” He stepped back, and glanced at Eddie.

  This part he could do. “Eddie Dean of New York,” he said. “Son of Wendell.” At least that’s what Ma always claim
ed, he thought. And then, unaware he was going to say it: “The Line of Eld. The ka-tet of Nineteen.”

  He stepped back, and Susannah moved forward to the edge of the platform. Back straight, looking out at them calmly, she said, “I am Susannah Dean, wife of Eddie, daughter of Dan, the Line of Eld, the ka-tet of Nineteen, may we be well-met and do ya fine.” She curtsied, holding out her pretend skirts.

  At this there was both laughter and applause.

  While she spoke her piece, Roland bent to whisper a brief something in Jake’s ear. Jake nodded and then stepped forward confidently. He looked very young and very handsome in the day’s end light.

  He put out his foot and bowed over it. The poncho swung comically forward with Oy’s weight. “I am Jake Chambers, son of Elmer, the Line of Eld, the ka-tet of the Ninety and Nine.”

  Ninety-nine? Eddie looked at Susannah, who offered him a very small shrug. What’s this ninety-nine shit? Then he thought what the hell. He didn’t know what the ka-tet of Nineteen was, either, and he’d said it himself.

  But Jake wasn’t done. He lifted Oy from the pocket of Benny Slightman’s poncho. The crowd murmured at the sight of him. Jake gave Roland a quick glance—Are you sure? it asked—and Roland nodded.

  At first Eddie didn’t think Jake’s furry pal was going to do anything. The people of the Calla—the folken—had gone completely quiet again, so quiet that once again the evensong of the birds could be heard clearly.

  Then Oy rose up on his rear legs, stuck one of them forward, and actually bowed over it. He wavered but kept his balance. His little black paws were held out with the palms up, like Roland’s. There were gasps, laughter, applause. Jake looked thunderstruck.