The Waste Lands (45 page)

Jake rolled over on his back and lay looking up at the stars.
Blaine is more than a pain,
he thought
. It’s dangerous.
Very
dangerous.

Yes, perhaps.

No perhaps about it!
his mind insisted frantically.

All right, Blaine was a pain—given. But his Final Essay had had something else to say on the subject of Blaine, hadn’t it?

“Oh Jeez, what a mess,” Jake whispered. He closed his eyes and was asleep again in seconds. This time his sleep was dreamless.

AROUND NOON THE NEXT day they reached the top of another drumlin and saw the bridge for the first time. It crossed the Send at a point where the river narrowed, bent due south, and passed in front of the city.

“Holy Jesus,” Eddie said softly. “Does that look familiar to you, Suze?”

“Yes.”

“Jake?”

“Yes—it looks like the George Washington Bridge.”

“It sure does,” Eddie agreed.

“But what’s the GWB doing in Missouri?” Jake asked.

Eddie looked at him. “Say
what,
sport?”

Jake looked confused. “Mid-World, I mean. You know.”

Eddie was looking at him harder than ever. “How do you know this is Mid-World? You weren’t with us when we came to that marker.”

Jake stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked down at his moccasins. “Dreamed it,” he said briefly. “You don’t think I booked this trip with my dad’s travel-agent, do you?”

Roland touched Eddie’s shoulder. “Let it alone for now.” Eddie glanced briefly at Roland and nodded.

They stood looking at the bridge a little longer. They’d had time to get used to the city skyline, but this was something new. It dreamed in the distance, a faint shape sketched against the blue midmorning sky. Roland could make out four sets of impossibly tall metal towers-one set at each end of the bridge and two in the middle. Between them, gigantic cables swooped through the air in long arcs. Between these arcs, and the base of the bridge were many vertical lines-either more cables or metal beams, he could not tell which. But he also saw gaps, and realized after a long time that the bridge was no longer perfectly level.

“Yonder bridge is going to be in the river soon, I think,” Roland said.

“Well, maybe,” Eddie said reluctantly, “but it doesn’t really look that bad to me.”

Roland sighed. “Don’t hope for too much, Eddie.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eddie heard the touchiness in his voice, but it was too late to do anything about it now.

“It means that I want you to believe your eyes, Eddie-that’s all. There was a saying when I was growing up: ‘Only a fool believes he’s dreaming before he wakes up.’ Do you understand?”

Eddie felt a sarcastic reply on his tongue and banished it after a brief struggle. It was just that Roland had a way-it was unintentional, he was sure, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with-of making him feel like such a
kid.

“I guess I do,” he said at last. “It means the same thing as my mother’s favorite saying.”

“And what was that?”

“Hope for the best and expect the worst,” Eddie said sourly.

Roland’s face lightened in a smile. “I think I like your mother’s saying better.”

“But it
is
still standing!” Eddie burst out. “I agree it’s not in such fantastic shape—probably nobody’s done a really thorough maintenance check on it for a thousand years or so—but it is still there. The whole city is! Is it so wrong to hope we might find some things that’ll help us there? Or some people that’ll feed us and talk to us, like the old folks back in River Crossing, instead of shooting at us? Is it so wrong to hope our luck might be turning?”

In the silence which followed, Eddie realized with embarrassment that he had been making a speech.

“No.” There was a kindness in Roland’s voice-that kindness which always surprised Eddie when it came. “It’s never wrong to hope.” He looked around at Eddie and the others like a man coming out of a deep dream. “We’re done travelling for today. It’s time we had our own palaver, I think, and it’s going to take awhile.”

The gunslinger left the road and walked into the high grass without looking back. After a moment, the other three followed.

UNTIL THEY MET THE old people in River Crossing, Susannah had seen Roland strictly in terms of television shows she rarely watched:
Cheyenne, The Riffeman
, and, of course, the archetype of them all,
Gunsmoke
. That was one she had sometimes listened to on the radio with her father before it came on TV (she thought of how foreign the idea of radio drama would be to Eddie and Jake and smiled—Roland’s was not the only world which had moved on). She could still remember what the narrator said at the beginning of every one of those radio playlets: “It makes a man watchful . . . and a little lonely.”

Until River Crossing, that had summed Roland up perfectly for her. He was not broad-shouldered, as Marshal Dillon had been, nor anywhere near as tall, and his face seemed to her more that of a tired poet than a wild-west lawman, but she had still seen him as an existential version of that make-believe Kansas peace officer, whose only mission in life (other than an occasional drink in The Longbranch with his friends Doc and Kitty) had been to Clean Up Dodge.

Now she understood that Roland had once been much more than a cop riding a Dalíesque range at the end of the world. He had been a diplomat; a mediator; perhaps even a teacher. Most of all, he had been a soldier of what these people called “the White,” by which she guessed they meant the civilizing forces that kept people from killing each other enough of the time to allow some sort of progress. In his time he had been more wandering knight-errant than bounty hunter. And in many ways, this still was his time; the people of River Crossing had certainly thought so. Why else would they have knelt in the dust to receive his blessing?

In light of this new perception, Susannah could see how cleverly the gunslinger had managed them since that awful morning in the speaking ring. Each time they had begun a line of conversation which would lead to the comparing of notes—and what could be more natural, given the cataclysmic and inexplicable “drawing” each of them had experienced?—Roland had been there, stepping in quickly and turning the conversation into other channels so smoothly that none of them (even she, who had spent almost four years up to her neck in the civil-rights movement) had noticed what he was doing.

Susannah thought she understood why—he had done it in order to give Jake time to heal. But understanding his motives didn’t change her own feelings—astonishment, amusement, chagrin—about how neatly he had handled them. She remembered something Andrew, her chauffeur, had said shortly before Roland had drawn her into this world. Something about President Kennedy being the last gunslinger of the western world. She had scoffed then, but now she thought she understood. There was a lot more JFK than Matt Dillon in Roland. She suspected that Roland possessed little of Kennedy’s imagination, but when it came to romance . . . dedication . . . charisma . . .

And guile
, she thought.
Don’t forget guile
.

She surprised herself by suddenly bursting into laughter.

Roland had seated himself cross-legged. Now he turned toward her, raising his eyebrows. “Something funny?”

“Very. Tell me something—how many languages can you speak?”

The gunslinger thought it over. “Five,” he said at last. “I used to speak the Sellian dialects fairly well, buf I believe I’ve forgotten everything but the curses.”

Susannah laughed again. It was a cheerful, delighted sound. “You a fox, Roland,” she said. “Indeed you are.”

Jake looked interested. “Say a swear in Strelleran,” he said.

“
Sellian
, ” Roland corrected. He thought a minute, then said something very fast and greasy—to Eddie it sounded a little as if he was gargling with some very thick liquid. Week-old coffee, say. Roland grinned as he said it.

Jake grinned back. “What does it mean?”

Roland put an arm around the boy’s shoulders for a moment. “That we have a lot of things to talk about.”

“
WE ARE KA-TET
,” ROLAND began, “which means a group of people bound together by fate. The philosophers of my land said a
ka-tet
could only be broken by death or treachery. My great teacher, Cort, said that since death and treachery are also spokes on the wheel of
ka
, such a binding can never be broken. As the years pass and I see more, I come more and more to Cort’s way of looking at it.

“Each member of a
ka-tet
is hoke a piece in a puzzle. Taken by itself, each piece is a mystery, but when they are put together, they make a picture . . . or
part
of a picture. It may take a great many
ka-tets
to finish one picture. You mustn’t be surprised if you discover your lives have been touching in ways you haven’t seen until now. For one thing, each of you three is capable of knowing each other’s thoughts-”

“What?” Eddie cried.

“It’s true. You share your thoughts so naturally that you haven’t even been aware it’s happening, but it has been. It’s easier for me to see, no doubt, because I am not a full member of this
ka-tet
—possibly because I am not from your world—and so cannot take part completely in the thought-sharing ability. But I
can
send. Susannah . . . do you remember when we were in the circle?”

“Yes. You told me to let the demon go when you told me. But you didn’t say that out loud.”

“Eddie . . . do you remember when we were in the bear’s clearing, and the mechanical bat came at you?”

“Yes. You told me to get down.”

“He never opened his mouth, Eddie,” Susannah said.

“Yes, you did! You
yelled
! I
heard
you, man!”

“I yelled, all right, but I did it with my mind.” The gunslinger turned to Jake. “Do you remember? In the house?”

“When the board I was pulling on wouldn’t come up, you told me to pull on the other one. But if you can’t read my mind, Roland, how did you know what kind of trouble I was in?”

“I saw. I heard nothing, but I
saw
—just a little, as if through a dirty window.” His eyes surveyed them. “This closeness and sharing of minds is called
khef,
a word that means many other things in the original tongue of the Old World—water, birth, and life-force are only three of them. Be aware of it. For now, that’s all I want”

“Can you be aware of something you don’t believe in?” Eddie asked.

Roland smiled. “Just keep an open mind.”

“That I can do.”

“Roland?” It was Jake. “Do you think Oy might be part of our
ka-tet
?”

Susannah smiled. Roland didn’t. “I’m not prepared to even guess right now, but I’ll tell you this, Jake—I’ve been thinking about your furry friend a good deal.
Ka
does not rule all, and coincidences still happen . . . but the sudden appearance of a billy-bumbler that still remembers people doesn’t seem completely coincidental to me.”

He glanced around at them.

“I’ll begin. Eddie will speak next, taking up from the place where I leave off. Then Susannah. Jake, you’ll speak last. All right?”

They nodded.

“Fine,” Roland said. “We are
ka-tet
—one from many. Let the palaver begin.”

THE TALK WENT ON until sundown, stopping only long enough for them to eat a cold meal, and by the time it was over, Eddie felt as if he had gone twelve hard rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard. He no longer doubted that they had been “sharing
khef
,” as Roland put it; he and Jake actually seemed to have been living each other’s life in their dreams, as if they were two halves of the same whole.

Roland began with what had happened under the mountains, where Jake’s first life in this world had ended. He told of his own palaver with the man in black, and Walter’s veiled words about a Beast and someone he called the Ageless Stranger. He told of the strange, daunting dream which had come to him, a dream in which the whole universe had been swallowed in a beam of fantastic white light. And how, at the end of that dream, there had been a single blade of purple grass.

Eddie glanced sideways at Jake and was stunned by the knowledge—the
recognition
—in the boy’s eyes.

ROLAND HAD BABBLED PARTS of this story to Eddie in his time of delirium, but it was entirely new to Susannah, and she listened with wide eyes. As Roland repeated the things Walter had told him, she caught glints of her own world, like reflections in a smashed mirror: automobiles, cancer, rockets to the moon, artificial insemination. She had no idea who the Beast might be, but she recognized the name of the Ageless Stranger as a variation upon the name of Merlin, the magician who had supposedly orchestrated the career of King Arthur. Curiouser and curiouser.

Roland told of how he had awakened to find Walter long years dead—time had somehow slipped forward, perhaps a hundred years, perhaps five hundred. Jake listened in fascinated silence as the gunslinger told of reaching the edge of the Western Sea, of how he had lost two of the fingers on his right hand, and how he had drawn Eddie and Susannah before encountering Jack Mort, the dark third.

The gunslinger motioned to Eddie, who took up the tale with the coming of the great bear.

“Shardik?” Jake interjected. “But that’s the name of a
book
! A book in
our
world! It was written by the man who wrote that famous book about the rabbits—”

“Richard Adams!” Eddie shouted. “And the book about the bunnies was
Watership Down
! I
knew
I knew that name! But how can that be, Roland? How is it that the people in your world know about things in ours?”