"Death," he whispered to the stones surrounding him. "Death for you, life for my crop. Charyou tree. That's what he said, Charyou tree. Come, Reap."
Orange, gunslinger, a cracked old voice laughed inside his head. The voice of the Coos. The color of bonfires. Charyou tree, fin de ano, these are the old ways of which only the stuffy-guys with their red hands remain . . . until tonight. Tonight the old ways are refreshed, as the old ways must be, from time to time. Charyou tree, you damned babby, Charyou tree: tonight you pay for my sweet Ermot. Tonight you pay for all. Come, Reap.
"Climb!" he screamed, reaching up and slapping Alain's behind. "Climb, climb! For your father's sake, climb!"
"Roland, what - ?" Alain's voice was dazed, but he did begin to climb, going from handhold to handhold and rattling small pebbles down into Roland's upturned face. Squinting against their fall, Roland reached and swatted Al's bottom again, driving him like a horse.
"Climb, gods damn you!" he cried. "It mayn't be too late, even now!"
But he knew better. Demon Moon had risen, he had seen its orange light shining on Cuthbert's face like delirium, arid he knew better. In his head the lunatic buzz of the thinny, that rotting sore eating through the flesh of reality, joined with the lunatic laughter of the witch, and he knew better.
Death for you, life for the crop. Charyou tree.
Oh, Susan -
23
Nothing was clear to Susan until she saw the man with the long red hair and the straw hat which did not quite obscure his lamb-slaughterer's eyes; the man with the cornshucks in his hands. He was the first, just a farmer (she had glimpsed him in the Lower Market, she thought; had even nodded to him, as countryfolk do, and he back to her), standing by himself not far from the place where Silk Ranch Road and the Great Road intersected, standing in the light of the rising moon. Until they came upon him, nothing was clear; after he hurled his bundle of cornshucks at her as she passed, standing in the slowly rolling cart with her hands bound in front of her and her head lowered and a rope around her neck, everything was clear.
"Charyou tree, " he called, almost sweetly uttering words of the Old People she hadn't heard since her childhood, words that meant "Come, Reap" . . . and something else, as well. Something hidden, something secret, something to do with that root word, char, that word which meant only death. As the dried shucks fluttered around her boots, she understood the secret very well; understood also that there would be no baby for her, no wedding for her in the fairy-distant land of Gilead, no hall in which she and Roland would be joined and then saluted beneath the electric lights, no husband, no more nights of sweet love; all that was over. The world had moved on and all that was over, done before fairly begun.
She knew that she had been put in the back of the cart, stood in the back of the cart, and that the surviving Coffin Hunter had looped a noose around her neck. "Don't try to sit," he had said, sounding almost apologetic. "I have no desire to choke you, girly. If the wagon bumps and you fall, I'll try to keep the knot loose, but if you try to sit, I'll have to give you a pinching. Her orders." He nodded to Rhea, who sat erect on the seat of the cart, the reins in her warped hands. "She's in charge now."
And so she had been; so, as they neared town, she still was. Whatever the possession of her glam had done to her body, whatever the loss of it had done to her mind, it had not broken her power; that seemed to have increased, if anything, as if she'd found some other source from which she could feed, at least for awhile. Men who could have broken her over one knee like a stick of kindling followed her commands as unquestioningly as children.
There were more and more men as that Reaping afternoon wound its shallow course to night: half a dozen ahead of the cart, riding with Rimer and the man with the cocked eye, a full dozen riding behind it with Reynolds, the rope leading to her neck wound around his tattooed hand, at their head. She didn't know who these men were, or how they had been summoned.
Rhea had taken this rapidly increasing party north a little farther, then turned southwest on the old Silk Ranch Road, which wound back toward town. On the eastern edge of Hambry, it rejoined the Great Road. Even in her dazed state, Susan had realized the harridan was moving slowly, measuring the descent of the sun as they went, not clucking at the pony to hurry but actually reining it in, at least until afternoon's gold had gone. When they passed the farmer, thin-faced and alone, a good man, no doubt, with a freehold farm he worked hard from first gleam to last glow and a family he loved (but oh, there were those lamb-slaughterer eyes below the brim of his battered hat), she understood this leisurely course of travel, too. Rhea had been waiting for the moon.