The Waste Lands (42 page)

He opened his mouth to say some of these things, but Jake spoke before he could.

“I don’t think we can go around,” he said, then blushed a little when they all turned to look at him. Oy shifted at his feet.

“No?” Aunt Talitha said. “And why do ye think that, pray tell?”

“Do you know about trains?” Jake asked.

There was a long silence. Bill and Till exchanged an uneasy glance. Aunt Talitha only looked at Jake steadily. Jake did not drop his eyes.

“I heard of one,” she said. “Mayhap even saw it. Over there.” She pointed in the direction of the Send. “Long ago, when I was but a child and the world hadn’t moved on . . . or at least not s’far’s it has now. Is it Blaine ye speak of, boy?”

Jake’s eyes flashed in surprise and recognition. “Yes! Blaine!” Roland was studying Jake closely.

“And how would ye know of Blaine the Mono?” Aunt Talitha asked.

“Mono?” Jake looked blank.

“Ay, so it was called. How would you know of that old lay?”

Jake looked helplessly at Roland, then back at Aunt Talitha. “I don’t know
how
I know.”

And that’s the truth, Eddie thought suddenly,
but it’s not all the truth. He knows more than he wants to tell here . . . and I think he’s scared
.

“This is our business, I think,” Roland said in a dry, brisk administrator’s voice. “You must let us work it out for ourselves, Old Mother.”

“Ay,” she agreed quickly. “You’ll keep your own counsel. Best that such-as us not know.”

“What of the city?” Roland prompted. “What do you know of Lud?”

“Little now, but what we know, ye shall hear.” And she poured herself another cup of coffee.

IT WAS THE TWINS, Bill and Till, who actually did most of the talking, one taking up the tale smoothly whenever the other left off. Every now and then Aunt Talitha would add something or correct something, and the twins would wait respectfully until they were sure she was done. Si didn’t speak at all-merely sat with his untouched coffee in front of him, plucking at the pieces of straw which bristled up from the wide brim of his sombrero.

They knew little, indeed, Roland realized quickly, even about the history of their own town (nor did this surprise him; in these latter days, memories faded rapidly and all but the most recent past seemed not to exist), but what they did know was disturbing. Roland was not surprised by this, either.

In the days of their great-great-grandparents, River Crossing had been much the town Susannah had imagined: a trade-stop at the Great Road, modestly prosperous, a place where goods were sometimes sold but more often exchanged. It had been at least nominally part of River Barony, although even then such things as Baronies and Estates o’ Land had been passing.

There had been buffalo-hunters in those days, although the trade had been dying out; the herds were small and badly mutated. The meat of these mutant beasts was not poison, but it had been rank and bitter. Yet River Crossing, located between a place they simply called The Landing and the village of Jimtown, had been a place of some note. It was on the Great Road and only six days travel from the city by land and three by barge. “Unless the river were low,” one of the twins said. “Then it took longer, and my gran’da said there was times when there was barges grounded all the way upriver to Tom’s Neck.”

The old people knew nothing of the city’s original residents, of course, or the technologies they had used to build the towers and turrets; these were the Great Old Ones, and their history had been lost in the furthest reaches of the past even when Aunt Talitha’s great-great-grandfather had been a boy.

“The buildings are still standing,” Eddie said. “I wonder if the machines the Great Golden Oldies used to build them still run.”

“Mayhap,” one of the twins said. “If so, young fella, there don’t be ary man or woman that lives there now who’d still know how to run em . . . or so I believe, so I do.”

“Nay,” his brother said argumentatively, “I doubt the old ways are entirely lost to the Grays ’n Pubes, even now.” He looked at Eddie. “Our da’ said there was once electric candles in the city. There are those who say they mought still burn.”

“Imagine that,” Eddie replied wonderingly, and Susannah pinched his leg, hard, under the table.

“Yes,” the other twin said. He spoke seriously, unaware of Eddie’s sarcasm. “You pushed a button and they came on—bright, heatless candles with ary wicks or reservoirs for oil. And I’ve heard it said that once, in the old days, Quick, the outlaw prince, actually flew up into the sky in a mechanical bird. But one of its wings broke and he died in a great fall, like Icarus.”

Susannah’s mouth dropped open. “You know the story of Icarus?”

“Ay, lady,” he said, clearly surprised she should find this strange. “He of the beeswax wings.”

“Children’s stories, both of them,” Aunt Talitha said with a sniff. “I know the story of the endless lights is true, for I saw them with my own eyes when I was but a green girl, and they may still glow from time to time, ay; there are those I trust who say they’ve seen them on clear nights, although it’s been long years since I have myself. But no man ever flew, not even the Great Old Ones.”

Nonetheless, there
were
strange machines in the city, built to do peculiar and sometimes dangerous things. Many of them might still run, but the elderly twins reckoned that none now in the city knew how to start them up, for they hadn’t been heard in years.

Maybe that could change, though,
Eddie thought, his eyes gleaming
. If, that is, an enterprising, travelminded young man with a little knowledge of strange machinery and endless lights came along. It could be just a matter of finding the ON switches. I mean, it really could be that simple. Or maybe they just blew a bunch of fuses-think of that, friends and neighbors! Just replace half a dozen 400-amp Busses and light the whole place up like a Reno Saturday night!

Susannah elbowed him and asked, in a low voice, wheat was so funny. Eddie shook his head and put a finger to his lips, earning an irritated look from the love of his life. The albinos, meanwhile, were continuing their story, handing its thread back and forth with the unconscious ease which probably nothing but lifetime twinship can provide.

Four or five generations ago, they said, the city had still been quite heavily populated and reasonably civilized, although the residents drove wagons and buck-boards along the wide boulevards the Great Old Ones had constructed for their fabulous horseless vehicles. The city-dwellers were artisans and what the twins called “manufactories,” and trade both on the river and over it had been brisk.

“Over it?” Roland asked.

“The bridge over the Send still stands,” Aunt Talitha said, “or did twenty year ago.”

“Ay, old Bill Muffin and his boy saw it not ten year agone,” Si agreed, making his first contribution to the conversation.

“What sort of bridge?” the gunslinger asked.

“A great thing of steel cables,” one of the twins said. “It stands in the sky like the web of some great spider.” He added shyly: “I should like to see it again before I die.”

“Probably fallen in by now,” Aunt Talitha said dismissively, “and good riddance. Devil’s work.” She turned to the twins. “Tell them what’s happened since, and why the city’s so dangerous now-apart from any haunts that may den there, that is, and I’ll warrant there’s a power of em. These folks want to get on, and the sun’s on the wester.”

THE REST OF THE story was but another version of a tale Roland of Gilead had heard many times and had, in some measure, lived through himself. It was fragmentary and incomplete, undoubtedly shot through with myth and misinformation, its linear progress distorted by the odd changes—both temporal and directional—which were now taking place in the world, and it could be summed up in a single compound sentence:
Once there was a world we knew, but that world has moved on.

These old people of River Crossing knew of Gilead no more than Roland knew of the River Barony, and the name of John Farson, the man who had brought ruin and anarchy on Roland’s land, meant nothing to them, but all stories of the old world’s passing were similar . . . too similar, Roland thought, to be coincidence.

A great civil war—perhaps in Garian, perhaps in a more distant land called Porla—had erupted three, perhaps even four hundred years ago. Its ripples had spread slowly outward, pushing anarchy and dissension ahead of them. Few if any kingdoms had been able to stand against those slow waves, and anarchy had come to this part of the world as surely as night follows sunset. At one time, whole armies had been on the roads, sometimes in advance, sometimes in retreat, always confused and without long-term goals. As time passed, they crumbled into smaller groups, and these degenerated into roving bands of harriers. Trade faltered, then broke down entirely. Travel went from a matter of inconvenience to one of danger. In the end, it became almost impossible. Communication with the city thinned steadily and had all but ceased a hundred and twenty years ago.

Like a hundred other towns Roland had ridden through—first with Cuthbert and the other gunslingers cast out of Gilead, then alone, in pursuit of the man in black—River Crossing had been cut off and thrown on its own resources.

At this point Si roused himself, and his voice captured the travellers at once. He spoke in the hoarse, cadenced tones of a lifelong teller of tales-one of those divine fools born to merge memory and mendacity into dreams as airily gorgeous as cobwebs strung with drops of dew.

“We last sent tribute to the Barony castle in the time of my great-gran’da,” he said. “Twenty-six men went with a wagon of hides-there was no hard coin anymore by then, o’ course, and ’twas the best they could do. It was a long and dangerous journey of almost eighty wheels, and six died on the way. Half fell to harriers bound for the war in the city; the other half died either of disease or devilgrass.

“When they finally arrived, they found the castle deserted but for the rooks and black-birds. The walls had been broken; weeds o’ergrew the Court o’ State. There had been a great slaughter on the fields to the west; it were white with bones and red with rusty armor, so my da’s gran’da said, and the voices of demons cried out like the east wind from the jawbones o’ those who’d fallen there. The village beyond the castle had been burned to the ground and a thousand or more skulls were posted along the walls of the keep. Our folk left their bounty o’ hides without the shattered barbican gate—for none would venture inside that place of ghosts and moaning voices-and began the homeward way again. Ten more fell on that journey, so that of the six-and-twenty who left only ten returned, my great-gran’da one of them . . . but he picked up a ring-worm on his neck and bosom that never left until the day he died. It were the radiation sickness, or so they said. After that, gunslinger, none left the town. We were on our own.”

They grew used to the depredations of the harriers, Si continued in his cracked but melodious voice. Watches were posted; when bands of riders were seen approaching—almost always moving southeast along the Great Road and the path of the Beam, going to the war which raged endlessly in Lud—the townspeople hid in a large shelter they had dug beneath the church. Casual damages to the town were not repaired, lest they make those roving bands curious. Most were beyond curiosity; they only rode through at a gallop, bows or battle-axes slung over their shoulders, bound for the killing-zones.

“What war is it that you speak of?” Roland asked.

“Yes,” Eddie said, “and, what about that drumming sound?”

The twins again exchanged a quick, almost superstitious glance.

“We know not of the god-drums,” Si told them. “Ary word or watch. The war of the city, now . . .”

The war had originally been the harriers and outlaws against a loose confederation of artisans and “manufactories” who lived in the city. The residents had decided to fight instead of allowing the harriers to, loot them, burn their shops, and then turn the survivors out into the Big Empty, where they would almost certainly die. And for some years they had successfully defended Lud against the vicious but badly organized groups of raiders which tried to storm across the bridge or invade by boat and barge. “The city-folk used the old weapons,” one of the twins said, “and though their numbers were small, the harriers could not stand against such things with their bows and maces and battle-axes.”

“Do you mean the city-people used guns?” Eddie asked.

One of the albinos nodded. “Ay, guns, but not
just
guns. There were things that hurled the firebangs over a mile or more. Explosions like dynamite, only more powerful. The outlaws—who are now the Grays, as you must ken-could do nothing but lay siege beyond the river, and that was what they did.”

Lud became, in effect, the last fortress-refuge of the latter world. The brightest and most able travelled there from the surrounding countryside by ones and twos. When it came to intelligence tests, sneaking through the tangled encampments and front lines of the besiegers was the newcomers’ final exam. Most came unarmed across the no-man’s-land of the bridge, and those who made it that far were let through. Some were found wanting and sent packing again, of course, but those who had a trade or a skill (or brains enough to learn one) were allowed to stay. Farming skills were particularly prized; according to the stories, every large park in Lud had been turned into a vegetable garden. With the countryside cut off, it was grow food in the city or starve amid the glass towers and metal alleys. The Great Old Ones were gone, their machines were a mystery, and the silent wonders which remained were inedible.

Little by little, the character of the war began to change. The balance of power had shifted to the besieging Grays—so called because they were, on average, much older than the city-dwellers. Those latter were also growing older, of course. They were still known as Pubes, but in most cases their puberty was long behind them. And they eventually either forgot how the old weapons worked or used them up.