too much. I’d guess the fighting men who are still there are old and demoralized. It may he
that yon have the straight of it, and some will even offer to help us on our way, as the River
Crossing ka-tet did. Mayhap we won’t see them at all—they’ll see MS, see we’re packing
iron, and just put their heads down and let us go our way. If that fails, I’m hoping that they’ll scatter like rats if we gun a few.”
“And if they decide to make a fight of it?”
Roland smiled grimly. “Then, Eddie, we’ll all remember the faces of our fathers.”
Eddie’s eyes gleamed in the darkness, and Roland was once more reminded forcibly of
Cuthbert—Cuthbert who had once said he would believe in ghosts when he could catch
one in his teeth, Cuthbert with whom he had once scattered breadcrumbs beneath the
hangman’s gibbet.
“Have I answered all your questions?”
“Nope—but I think you played straight with me this time.”
“Then goodnight, Eddie.”
“Goodnight.”
Eddie turned and walked away. Roland watched him go. Now that he was listening, he
could hear him . . . but just barely. He started back himself, then turned toward the darkness
where the city of Lud was.
He’s what the old woman called a Pube. She said both sides would want him.
You won’t let me drop this time?
No. Not this time, not ever again.
But he knew something none of the others did. Perhaps, after the talk he’d just had with
Eddie, he should tell them . . . yet he thought he would keep the knowledge to himself a
little while longer.
In the old tongue which had once been his world’s lingua franca, most words, like khef and
ka, had many meanings. The word char, how- ever—char as in Charlie the
Choo-Choo—had only one.
Char meant death.
V
BRIDGE AND
CITY
V
BRIDGE AND CITY
1
THEY CAME UPON THE downed airplane three days later.
Jake pointed it out first at midmorning—a flash of light about ten miles away, as if a
mirror lay in the grass. As they drew closer, they saw a large dark object at the side of the
Great Road.
“It looks like a dead bird,” Roland said. “A big one.”
“That’s no bird,” Eddie said. “That’s an airplane. I’m pretty sure the glare is sunlight bouncing off the canopy.”
An hour later they stood silently at the edge of the road, looking at the ancient wreck.
Three plump crows stood on the tattered skin of the fuselage, staring insolently at the
newcomers. Jake pried a cobble from the edge of the road and shied it at them. The crows
lumbered into the air, cawing indignantly.
One wing had broken off in the crash and lay thirty yards away, a shadow like a diving
board in the tall grass. The rest of the plane was pretty much intact. The canopy had
cracked in a starburst pattern where the pilot’s head had struck it. There was a large,
rust-colored stain there.
Oy trotted over to where three rusty propeller blades rose from the grass, sniffed at them,
then returned hastily to Jake.
The man in the cockpit was u dust-dry mummy wearing a padded leather vest and a helmet
with a spike on top. His lips were gone, his teeth exposed in a final desperate grimace.
Fingers which had once been as large as sausages but were now only skin-covered bones
clutched the wheel. His skull was caved in where it had hit the canopy, and Roland guessed
that the greenish-gray scales which coated the left side of his face were all that remained of
his brains. The dead man’s head was tilted back, as if he had been sure, even at the moment
of his death, that he could regain the sky again. The plane’s remaining wing still jutted from
the encroaching grass. On it was a fading insignia which depicted a fist holding a
thunderbolt.
“Looks like Aunt Talitha was wrong and the old albino man had the right of it, after all,”
Susannah said in an awed voice. “That must be David Quick, the outlaw prince. Look at the
size of him, Roland—they must have had to grease him to get him into the cockpit!”
Roland nodded. The heat and the years had wasted the man in the mechanical bird to no
more than a skeleton wrapped in dry hide, but he could still see how broad the shoulders
had been, and the misshapen head was massive. “So fell Lord Perth,” he said, “and the countryside did shake with that thunder.”
Jake looked at him questioningly.
“It’s from an old poem. Lord Perth was a giant who went forth to war with a thousand men,
but he was still in his own country when a little boy threw a stone at him and hit him in the
knee. He stumbled, the weight of his armor bore him down, and he broke his neck in the
fall.”
Jake said, “Like our story of David and Goliath.”
“There was no fire,” Eddie said. “I bet he just ran out of gas and tried a dead-stick landing on the road. He might have been an outlaw and a barbarian, but he had a yard of guts.”
Roland nodded, and looked at Jake. “You all right with this?”
“Yes. If the guy was still, you know, runny, I might not be.” Jake looked from the dead man in the airplane to the city. Lud was much closer and clearer now, and although they
could see many broken win- dows in the towers, he, like Eddie, had not entirely given up
hope of finding some sort of help there. “I bet things sort of fell apart in the city once he was gone.”
“I think you’d win that bet,” Roland said.
“You know something?” Jake was studying the plane again. “The people who built that city might have made their own airplanes, but I’m pretty sure this is one of ours. I did a
school paper on air combat when I was in the fifth grade, and I think I recognize it. Roland,
can I take a closer look?”
Roland nodded. “I’ll go with you.”
Together they walked over to the plane with the high grass swishing at their pants. “Look,”
Jake said. “See the machine-gun under the wing? That’s an air-cooled German model, and
this is a Focke-Wulf from just before World War II. I’m sure it is. So what’s it doing here?”
“Lots of planes disappear,” Eddie said. “Take the Bermuda Triangle, for instance. That’s a place over one of our oceans, Roland. It’s supposed to be jinxed. Maybe it’s a great big
doorway between our worlds—one that’s almost always open.” Eddie hunched his
shoulders and essayed a bad Rod Serling imitation. “Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for
turbu- lence: you’re flying into . . . the Roland Zone!”
Jake and Roland, who were now standing beneath the plane’s remaining wing, ignored
him.
“Boost me up, Roland.”
Roland shook his head. “That wing looks solid, but it’s not—this thing has been here a long time, Jake. You’d fall.”
“Make a step, then.”
Eddie said, “I’ll do it, Roland.”
Roland studied his diminished right hand for a moment, shrugged, then laced his hands
together. “This’ll do. He’s light.”
Jake shook off his moccasin and then stepped lightly into the stirrup Roland had made. Oy
began to bark shrilly, though whether in excitement or alarm, Roland couldn’t tell.
Jake’s chest was now pressing against one of the airplane’s rusty flaps, and he was looking
right at the fist-and-thunderbolt design. It had peeled up a little from the surface of the wing along one edge. He seized this flap and pulled. It came off the wing so easily that he would
have fallen backward if Eddie, standing directly behind him, hadn’t steadied him with a
hand on the butt.
“I knew it,” Jake said. There was another symbol beneath the fist-and-thunderbolt, and now it was almost totally revealed. It was a swastika. “I just wanted to see it. You can put me down now.”
They started out again, but they could see the tail of the plane every time they looked back
that afternoon, looming out of the high grass like Lord Perth’s burial monument.
2
IT WAS JAKE’S TURN to make the fire that night. When the wood was laid to the
gunslinger’s satisfaction, he handed Jake his flint and steel. “Let’s see how you do.”
Eddie and Susannah were sitting off to one side, their arms linked companionably about
each other’s waist. Toward the end of the day, Eddie had found a bright yellow flower
beside the road and had picked it for her. Tonight Susannah was wearing it in her hair, and
every time she looked at Eddie, her lips curved in a small smile and her eyes filled with
light. Roland had noted these things, and they pleased him. Their love was deepening, strengthening. That was good. It would have to be deep and strong indeed if it was to