“No honey tonight,” Roland said. “What we took from yonder comb might taste sweet, but it would poison us as surely as night follows day.” One of the grotesque white bees lumbered heavily past Jake’s head. He ducked away with an expression of loathing.
“What did it?” Eddie asked. “What did it to them, Roland?” “The same thing that has emptied this whole land; the thing that’s still causing many of the buffalo to be born as sterile freaks. I’ve heard it called the Old War, the Great Fire, the Cataclysm, and the Great Poisoning. Whatever it was, it was the start of all our troubles and it happened long ago, a thousand years before the great-great-grandfathers of the River Crossing folk were born. The physical effects—the two-headed buffalo and the white bees and such—have grown less as time passes. I have seen this for myself. The other changes are greater, if harder to see, and they are still going on.” They watched the white bees crawl, dazed and almost completely helpless, about their hive. Some were apparently trying to work; most simply wandered about, butting heads and crawling over one another. Eddie found himself remembering a newsclip he’d seen once. It had shown a crowd of survivors leaving the area where a gas-main had exploded, flattening almost a whole city block in some California town. These bees reminded him of those dazed, shellshocked survivors. “You had a nuclear war, didn’t you?” he asked—almost accused. “These Great Old Ones you like to talk about . . . they blew their great old asses straight to hell. Didn’t they?”
“I don’t know what happened. No one knows. The records of those times are lost, and the few stories are confused and conflicting.” “Let’s get out of here,” Jake said in a trembling voice. “Looking at those things makes me sick.”
“I’m with you, sugar,” Susannah said.
So they left the bees to their aimless, shattered life in the grove of ancient trees, and there was no honey that night.
“WHEN ARE YOU GOING to tell us what you do know?” Eddie asked the next morning. The day was bright and blue, but there was a bite in the air; their first autumn in this world was almost upon them.
Roland glanced at him. “What do you mean?” “I’d like to hear your whole story, from beginning to end, starting with Gilead. How you grew up there and what happened to end it all. I want to know how you found out about the Dark Tower and why you started chasing after it in the first place. I want to know about your first bunch of friends, too. And what happened to them.”
Roland removed his hat, armed sweat from his brow, then replaced it. “You have the right to know all those things, I suppose, and I’ll tell them to you . . . but not now. It’s a very long story. I never expected to tell it to anyone, and I’ll only tell it once.”
“When?” Eddie persisted.
“When the time is right,” Roland said, and with that they had to be content.
ROLAND CAME AWAKE THE moment before Jake began to shake him. He sat up and looked around, but Eddie and Susannah were still fast asleep and in the first faint light of morning, he could see nothing amiss. “What is it?” he asked Jake in a low voice. “I don’t know. Fighting, maybe. Come and listen.” Roland threw his blanket aside and followed Jake out to the road. He reckoned they were now only three days’ walk from the place where the Send passed in front of the city, and the bridge—built squarely along the path of the Beam—dominated the horizon. Its pronounced tilt was more clearly visible than ever, and he could see at least a dozen gaps where over-stressed cables had snapped like the strings of a lyre.
Tonight the wind blew directly into their faces as they looked toward the city, and the sounds it carried to them were faint but clear. “Is it fighting?” Jake asked.
Roland nodded and held a finger to his lips. He heard faint shouts, a crash that sounded like some huge object falling, and—of course—the drums. Now there was another crash, this one more musical: the sound of breaking glass.
“Jeepers,” Jake whispered, and moved closer to the gunslinger. Then came the sounds which Roland had hoped not to hear: a fast, sandy rattle of small-arms fire followed by a loud hollow bang—clearly an explosion of some land. It rolled across the flatlands toward them like an invisible bowling ball. After that, the shouts, thuds, and sounds of breakage quickly sank below the level of the drums, and when the drums quit a few minutes later with their usual unsettling suddenness, the city was silent again. But now that silence had an unpleasant waiting quality.
Roland put an arm around Jake’s shoulders. “Still not too late to detour around,” he said.
Jake glanced up at him. “We can’t.”