“Oy,” the billy-bumbler said feebly, and Susannah, who was watch-ing over Roland’s shoulder, could have sworn she heard gratitude in that voice. Another gust of wind struck them. The weather was turning dirty, and fast. “Eddie, we have to get off the bridge. Can you walk?” “No, massa; I’sa gwinter shuffle.” The pain in his groin and the pit of his stomach was still bad, but not quite so bad as it had been a minute ago. “All right. Let’s move. Fast as we can.” Roland turned, began to take a step, and stopped. A man was now standing on the far side of the gap, watching them expressionlessly. The newcomer had approached while their attention was focused on Jake and Oy. A crossbow was slung across his back. He wore a bright yellow scarf around his head; the ends streamed out like banners in the freshening wind. Gold hoops with crosses in their centers dangled from his ears. One eye was covered with a white silk patch. His face was blotched with purple sores, some of them open and festering. He might have been thirty, forty, or sixty. He held one hand high over his head. In it was something Roland could not make out, except that its shape was too regular to be a stone.
Behind this apparition, the city loomed with a kind of weird clarity in the darkening day. As Eddie looked past the huddles of brick buildings on the other shore—warehouses long since scooped empty by looters, he had no doubt—and into those shadowy canyons and stone mazes, he understood for the first time how terribly mistaken, how terribly foolish, his dreams of hope and help had been. Now he saw the shattered facades and broken roofs; now he saw the shaggy birds’ nests on cornices and in glassless, gaping windows; now hr allowed himself to actually smell the city, and that odor was not of fabulous spices and savory foods of the sort his mother had sometimes brought home from Zabar’s but rather the stink of a mattress that has caught fire, smoldered awhile, and then been put out with sewer-water. He suddenly understood Lud, understood it completely. The grinning pirate who had appeared while their attention was elsewhere was probably as close to a wise old elf as this broken, dying place could provide. Roland pulled his revolver.
“Put it away, my cully,” the man in the yellow scarf said in an accent so thick that the sense of his words was almost lost. “Put it away, my dear heart. Ye’re a fierce trim, ay, that’s clear, but this time you’re outmatched.”
THE NEWCOMER’S PANTS WERE patched green velvet, and as he stood on the edge of the hole in the bridge, he looked like a buccaneer at the end of his days of plunder: sick, ragged, and still dangerous. “Suppose I choose not to?” Roland asked. “Suppose I choose to simply put a bullet through your scrofulous head?”
“Then I’ll get to hell just enough ahead of ye to hold the door,” the man in the yellow scarf said, and chuckled chummily. He wiggled the hand he held in the air. “It’s all the same jolly fakement to me, one way or t’other.” Roland guessed that was the truth. The man looked as if he might have a year to live at most . . . and the last few months of that year would probably be very unpleasant. The oozing sores on his face had nothing to do with radiation; unless Roland was badly deceived, this man was in the late stages of what the doctors called mandrus and everyone else called whore’s blossoms. Facing a dangerous man was always a bad busi-ness, but at least one could calculate the odds in such an encounter. When you were facing the dead, however, everything changed.
“Do yer know what I’ve got here, my dear ones?” the pirate asked. “Do yer ken whatcher old friend Gasher just happens to have laid his hands on? It’s a grenado, something pretty the Old Folks left behind, and I’ve already tipped its cap—for to wear one’s cap before the introductin’ is complete would be wery bad manners, so it would!”
He cackled happily for a moment, and then his face grew still and grave once more. All humor left it, as if a switch had been turned some-where in his degenerating brains.
“My finger is all that’s holdin the pin now, dearie. If you shoot me, there’s going to be a wery big bang. You and the cunt-monkey on yer back will be vaporized. The squint, too, I reckon. The young buck stand-ing behind you and pointing that toy pistol in my face might live, but only until he hits the water . . . and hit it he would, because this bridge has been hangin by a thread these last forty year, and all it’d take to finish it is one little push. So do ye want to put away your iron, or shall we all toddle off to hell on the same handcart?”
Roland briefly considered trying to shoot the object Gasher called a grenado out of his hand, saw how tightly the man was gripping it, and bolstered his gun. “Ah, good!” Gasher cried, cheerful once more. “I knew ye was a trig cove, just lookin at yer! Oh yes! So I did!”
“What do you want?” Roland asked, although he thought he already knew this, too. Gasher raised his free hand and pointed a dirty finger at Jake. “The squint. Gimme the squint and the rest of you go free.” “Go f**k yourself,” Susannah said at once. “Why not?” the pirate cackled. “Gimme a chunk of mirror and I’ll rip it right off and stick it right in—why not, for all the good it’s a-doin me these days? Why, I can’t even run water through it without it burns me all the way to the top of my gullywash!” His eyes, which were a strange calm shade of gray, never left Roland’s face. “What do you say, my good old mate?” “What happens to the rest of us if I hand over the boy?” “Why, you go on yer way without no trouble from us!” the man in the yellow headscarf returned promptly. “You have the Tick-Tock Man’s word on that. It comes from his lips to my lips to your ears, so it does, and Tick-Tock’s a trig cove, too, what don’t break his word once it’s been given. I can’t say ary word nor watch about any Pubies you might run into, but you’ll have no trouble with the Tick-Tock Man’s Grays.”