“That time wasn’t long after the noon-bell from the Gathering Hall. We know the day because Andy knows the day, and that much he tells us. Then we hear the thunder of their hooves as they come out of the east and see the rooster-tail of dust they raise—”
“So you know when they’re coming,” Roland said. “In fact, you know three ways: Andy, the sound of their hoofbeats, the rise of their dust.”
Overholser, taking Roland’s implication, had flushed a dull brick color up the slopes of his plump cheeks and down his neck. “They come armed, Roland, do ya. With guns—rifles as well as the revolvers yer own tet carries, grenados, too—and other weapons, as well. Fearsome weapons of the Old People. Light-sticks that kill at a touch, flying metal buzz-balls called drones or sneetches. The sticks burn the skin black and stop the heart—electrical, maybe, or maybe—”
Eddie heard Overholser’s next word as ant-NOMIC. At first he thought the man was trying to say “anatomy.” A moment later he realized it was probably “atomic.”
“Once the drones smell you, they follow no matter how fast you run,” Slightman’s boy said eagerly, “or how much you twist and turn. Right, Da’?”
“Yer-bugger,” Slightman the Elder said. “Then sprout blades that whirl around so fast you can’t see em and they cut you apart.”
“All on gray horses,” Roland mused. “Every one of em the same color. What else?”
Nothing, it seemed. It was all told. They came out of the east on the day Andy foretold, and for a terrible hour—perhaps longer—the Calla was filled with the thunderous hoofbeats of those gray horses and the screams of desolated parents. Green cloaks swirled. Wolf-masks that looked like metal and rotted in the sun like skin snarled. The children were taken. Sometimes a few pair were overlooked and left whole, suggesting that the Wolves’ prescience wasn’t perfect. Still, it must have been pretty goddam good, Eddie thought, because if the kids were moved (as they often were) or hidden at home (as they almost always were), the Wolves found them anyway, and in short order. Even at the bottom of sharproot piles or haystacks they were found. Those of the Calla who tried to stand against them were shot, fried by the light-sticks—lasers of some kind?—or cut to pieces by the flying drones. When trying to imagine these latter, he kept recalling a bloody little film Henry had dragged him to. Phantasm, it had been called. Down at the old Majestic. Corner of Brooklyn and Markey Avenue. Like too much of his old life, the Majestic had smelled of piss and popcorn and the kind of wine that came in brown bags. Sometimes there were needles in the aisles. Not good, maybe, and yet sometimes—usually at night, when sleep was long in coming—a deep part of him still cried for the old life of which the Majestic had been a part. Cried for it as a stolen child might cry for his mother.
The children were taken, the hoofbeats receded the way they had come, and that was the end of it.
“No, can’t be,” Jake said. “They must bring them back, don’t they?”
“No,” Overholser said. “The roont ones come back on the train, hear me, there’s a great junkpile of em I could show’ee, and—What? What’s wrong?” Jake’s mouth had fallen open, and he’d lost most of his color.
“We had a bad experience on a train not so very long ago,” Susannah said. “The trains that bring your children back, are they monos?”
They weren’t. Overholser, the Jaffordses, and the Slightmans had no idea what a mono was, in fact. (Callahan, who had been to Disneyland as a teenager, did.) The trains which brought the children back were hauled by plain old locomotives (hopefully none of them named Charlie, Eddie thought), driverless and attached to one or perhaps two open flatcars. The children were huddled on these. When they arrived they were usually crying with fear (from sunburns as well, if the weather west of Thunderclap was hot and clear), covered with food and their own drying shit, and dehydrated into the bargain. There was no station at the railhead, although Overholser opined there might have been, centuries before. Once the children had been offloaded, teams of horses were used to pull the short trains from the rusty railhead. It occurred to Eddie that they could figure out the number of times the Wolves had come by counting the number of junked engines, sort of like figuring out the age of a tree by counting the rings on the stump.
“How long a trip for them, would you guess?” Roland asked. “Judging from their condition when they arrive?”
Overholser looked at Slightman, then at Tian and Zalia. “Two days? Three?”
They shrugged and nodded.
“Two or three days,” Overholser said to Roland, speaking with more confidence than was perhaps warranted, judging from the looks of the others. “Long enough for sunburns, and to eat most of the rations they’re left—”
“Or paint themselves with em,” Slightman grunted.
“—but not long enough to die of exposure,” Overholser finished. “If ye’d judge from that how far they were taken from the Calla, all I can say is I wish’ee joy of the riddle, for no one knows what speed the train draws when it’s crossing the plains. It comes slow and stately enough to the far side of the river, but that means little.”
“No,” Roland agreed, “it doesn’t.” He considered. “Twenty-seven days left?”
“Twenty-six now,” Callahan said quietly.
“One thing, Roland,” Overholser said. He spoke apologetically, but his jaw was jutting. Eddie thought he’d backslid to the kind of guy you could dislike on sight. If you had a problem with authority figures, that was, and Eddie always had.
Roland raised his eyebrows in silent question.
“We haven’t said yes.” Overholser glanced at Slightman the Elder, as if for support, and Slightman nodded agreement.
“Ye must ken we have no way of knowing y’are who you say y’are,” Slightman said, rather apologetically. “My family had no books growing up, and there’s none out at the ranch—I’m foreman of Eisenhart’s Rocking B—except for the stockline books, but growing up I heard as many tales of Gilead and gunslingers and Arthur Eld as any other boy . . . heard of Jericho Hill and such blood-and-thunder tales of pretend . . . but I never heard of a gunslinger missing two of his fingers, or a brown-skinned woman gunslinger, or one who won’t be old enough to shave for years yet.”
His son looked shocked, and in an agony of embarrassment as well. Slightman looked rather embarrassed himself, but pushed on.
“I cry your pardon if what I say offends, indeed I do—”
“Hear him, hear him well,” Overholser rumbled. Eddie was starting to think that if the man’s jaw jutted out much further, it would snap clean off.
“—but any decision we make will have long echoes. Ye must see it’s so. If we make the wrong one, it could mean the death of our town, and all in it.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing!” Tian Jaffords cried indignantly. “Do you think ’ese’re a fraud? Good gods, man, have’ee not looked at him? Do’ee not have—”
His wife grasped his arm hard enough to pinch white marks into his farmer’s tan with the tips of her fingers. Tian looked at her and fell quiet, though his lips were pressed together tightly.
Somewhere in the distance, a crow called and a rustie answered in its slightly shriller voice. Then all was silent. One by one they turned to Roland of Gilead to see how he would reply.
FIVE
It was always the same, and it made him tired. They wanted help, but they also wanted references. A parade of witnesses, if they could get them. They wanted rescue without risk, just to close their eyes and be saved.
Roland rocked slowly back and forth with his arms wrapped around his knees. Then he nodded to himself and raised his head. “Jake,” he said. “Come to me.”
Jake glanced at Benny, his new friend, then got up and walked across to Roland. Oy walked at his heel, as always.
“Andy,” Roland said.
“Sai?”
“Bring me four of the plates we ate from.” As Andy did this, Roland spoke to Overholser: “You’re going to lose some crockery. When gunslingers come to town, sai, things get broken. It’s a simple fact of life.”
“Roland, I don’t think we need—”
“Hush now,” Roland said, and although his voice was gentle, Overholser hushed at once. “You’ve told your tale; now we tell ours.”
Andy’s shadow fell over Roland. The gunslinger looked up and took the plates, which hadn’t been rinsed and still gleamed with grease. Then he turned to Jake, where a remarkable change had taken place. Sitting with Benny the Kid, watching Oy do his small clever tricks and grinning with pride, Jake had looked like any other boy of twelve—carefree and full of the old Dick, likely as not. Now the smile had fallen away and it was hard to tell just what his age might have been. His blue eyes looked into Roland’s, which were of almost the same shade. Beneath his shoulder, the Ruger Jake had taken from his father’s desk in another life hung in its docker’s clutch. The trigger was secured with a rawhide loop which Jake now loosened without looking. It took only a single tug.
“Say your lesson, Jake, son of Elmer, and be true.”
Roland half-expected either Eddie or Susannah to interfere, but neither did. He looked at them. Their faces were as cold and grave as Jake’s. Good.
Jake’s voice was also without expression, but the words came out hard and sure.
“I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand—”
“I don’t see what this—” Overholser began.
“Shut up,” Susannah said, and pointed a finger at him.
Jake seemed not to have heard. His eyes never left Roland’s. The boy’s right hand lay on his upper chest, the fingers spread. “He who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind. I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.”
Jake paused. Drew in breath. And let it out speaking.
“I kill with my heart.”
“Kill these,” Roland remarked, and with no more warning than that, slung all four of the plates high into the air. They rose, spinning and separating, black shapes against the white sky.
Jake’s hand, the one resting on his chest, became a blur. It pulled the Ruger from the docker’s clutch, swung it up, and began pulling the trigger while Roland’s hand was still in the air. The plates did not seem to explode one after the other but rather all at once. The pieces rained down on the clearing. A few fell into the fire, puffing up ash and sparks. One or two clanged off Andy’s steel head.
Roland snatched upward, open hands moving in a blur. Although he had given them no command, Eddie and Susannah did the same, did it even while the visitors from Calla Bryn Sturgis cringed, shocked by the loudness of the gunfire. And the speed of the shots.
“Look here at us, do ya, and say thankee,” Roland said. He held out his hands. Eddie and Susannah did the same. Eddie had caught three pottery shards. Susannah had five (and a shallow cut on the pad of one finger). Roland had snatched a full dozen pieces of falling shrapnel. It looked like almost enough to make a whole plate, were the pieces glued back together.
The six from the Calla stared, unbelieving. Benny the Kid still had his hands over his ears; now he lowered them slowly. He was looking at Jake as one might look at a ghost or an apparition from the sky.
“My . . . God,” Callahan said. “It’s like a trick in some old Wild West show.”
“It’s no trick,” Roland said, “never think it. It’s the Way of the Eld. We are of that an-tet, khef and ka, watch and warrant. Gunslingers, do ya. And now I’ll tell you what we will do.” His eyes sought Overholser’s. “What we will do, I say, for no man bids us. Yet I think nothing I say will discomfort you too badly. If mayhap it does—” Roland shrugged. If it does, too bad, that shrug said.
He dropped the pottery shards between his boots and dusted his hands.
“If those had been Wolves,” he said, “there would have been fifty-six left to trouble you instead of sixty. Four of them lying dead on the ground before you could draw a breath. Killed by a boy.” He gazed at Jake. “What you would call a boy, mayhap.” Roland paused. “We’re used to long odds.”
“The young fella’s a breathtaking shot, I’d grant ye,” said Slightman the Elder. “But there’s a difference between clay dishes and Wolves on horseback.”
“For you, sai, perhaps. Not for us. Not once the shooting starts. When the shooting starts, we kill what moves. Isn’t that why you sought us?”
“Suppose they can’t be shot?” Overholser asked. “Can’t be laid low by even the hardest of hard calibers?”
“Why do you waste time when time is short?” Roland asked evenly. “You know they can be killed or you never would have come out here to us in the first place. I didn’t ask, because the answer is self-evident.”
Overholser had once more flushed dark red. “Cry your pardon,” he said.
Benny, meanwhile, continued to stare at Jake with wide eyes, and Roland felt a minor pang of regret for both boys. They might still manage some sort of friendship, but what had just happened would change it in fundamental ways, turn it into something quite unlike the usual lighthearted khef boys shared. Which was a shame, because when Jake wasn’t being called upon to be a gunslinger, he was still only a child. Close to the age Roland himself had been when the test of manhood had been thrust on him. But he would not be young much longer, very likely. And it was a shame.
“Listen to me now,” Roland said, “and hear me very well. We leave you shortly to go back to our own camp and take our own counsel. Tomorrow, when we come to your town, we’ll put up with one of you—”
“Come to Seven-Mile,” Overholser said. “We’ll have you and say thankee, Roland.”
“Our place is much smaller,” Tian said, “but Zalia and I—”
“We’d be so pleased to have’ee,” Zalia said. She had flushed as deeply as Overholser. “Aye, we would.”
Roland said, “Do you have a house as well as a church, sai Callahan?”
Callahan smiled. “I do, and tell God thankya.”
“We might stay with you on our first night in Calla Bryn Sturgis,” Roland said. “Could we do that?”
“Sure, and welcome.”
“You could show us your church. Introduce us to its mysteries.”
Callahan’s gaze was steady. “I’d welcome the chance to do that.”
“In the days after,” Roland said, smiling, “we shall throw ourselves on the hospitality of the town.”
“You’ll not find it wanting,” Tian said. “That I promise ye.” Overholser and Slightman were nodding.
“If the meal we’ve just eaten is any sign, I’m sure that’s true. We say thankee, sai Jaffords; thankee one and all. For a week we four will go about your town, poking our noses here and there. Mayhap a bit longer, but likely a week. We’ll look at the lay of the land and the way the buildings are set on it. Look with an eye to the coming of these Wolves. We’ll talk to folk, and folk will talk to us—those of you here now will see to that, aye?”
Callahan was nodding. “I can’t speak for the Manni, but I’m sure the rest will be more than willing to talk to you about the Wolves. God and Man Jesus knows they’re no secret. And those of the Crescent are frightened to death of them. If they see a chance you might be able to help us, they’ll do all you ask.”
“The Manni will speak to me as well,” Roland said. “I’ve held palaver with them before.”
“Don’t be carried away with the Old Fella’s enthusiasm, Roland,” Overholser said. He raised his plump hands in the air, a gesture of caution. “There are others in town you’ll have to convince—”
“Vaughn Eisenhart, for one,” said Slightman.
“Aye, and Eben Took, do ya,” Overholser said. “The General Store’s the only thing his name’s on, ye ken, but he owns the boarding house and the restaurant out front of it . . . as well’s a half-interest in the livery . . . and loan-paper on most of the smallholds hereabouts.
“When it comes to the smallholds, ’ee mustn’t neglect Bucky Javier,” Overholser rumbled. “He ain’t the biggest of em, but only because he gave away half of what he had to his young sister when she married.” Overholser leaned toward Roland, his face alight with a bit of town history about to be passed on. “Roberta Javier, Bucky’s sissa, she’s lucky,” he said. “When the Wolves came last time, she and her twin brother were but a year old. So they were passed over.”
“Bucky’s own twin brother was took the time before,” Slightman said. “Bully’s dead now almost four year. Of the sickness. Since then, there ain’t enough Bucky can do for those younger two. But you should talk to him, aye. Bucky’s not got but eighty acre, yet he’s trig.”
Roland thought, They still don’t see.
“Thank you,” he said. “What lies directly ahead for us comes down to looking and listening, mostly. When it’s done, we’ll ask that whoever is in charge of the feather take it around so that a meeting can be called. At that meeting, we’ll tell you if the town can be defended and how many men we’ll want to help us, if it can be done.”
Roland saw Overholser puffing up to speak and shook his head at him.
“It won’t be many we’d want, in any case,” he said. “We’re gunslingers, not an army. We think differently, act differently, than armies do. We might ask for as many as five to stand with us. Probably fewer—only two or three. But we might need more to help us prepare.”
“Why?” Benny asked.
Roland smiled. “That I can’t say yet, son, because I haven’t seen how things are in your Calla. But in cases like this, surprise is always the most potent weapon, and it usually takes many people to prepare a good surprise.”
“The greatest surprise to the Wolves,” Tian said, “would be if we fought at all.”
“Suppose you decide the Calla can’t be defended?” Overholser asked. “Tell me that, I beg.”
“Then I and my friends will thank you for your hospitality and ride on,” Roland said, “for we have our own business farther along the Path of the Beam.” He observed Tian’s and Zalia’s crestfallen faces for a moment, then said: “I don’t think that’s likely, you know. There’s usually a way.”
“May the meeting receive your judgment favorably,” Overholser said.
Roland hesitated. This was the point where he could hammer the truth home, should he want to. If these people still believed a tet of gunslingers would be bound by what farmers and ranchers decided in a public meeting, they really had lost the shape of the world as it once was. But was that so bad? In the end, matters would play out and become part of his long history. Or not. If not, he would finish his history and his quest in Calla Bryn Sturgis, moldering beneath a stone. Perhaps not even that; perhaps he’d finish in a dead heap somewhere east of town, he and his friends with him, so much rotting meat to be picked over by the crows and the rusties. Ka would tell. It always did.
Meanwhile, they were looking at him.
Roland stood up, wincing at a hard flare of pain in his right hip as he did so. Taking their cues from him, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake also rose.
“We’re well-met,” Roland said. “As for what lies ahead, there will be water if God wills it.”
Callahan said, “Amen.”