—then hang all our hopes of coming out of this alive on it. I don’t like it but see no choice. The assumption is that only Ben Slightman and Andy are working against us. That if we take care of them when the time comes, we can move in secrecy.”
“Don’t kill him,” Jake said in a voice almost too low to hear. He had drawn Oy close and was petting the top of his head and his long neck with a kind of compulsive, darting speed. Oy bore this patiently.
“Cry pardon, Jake,” Susannah said, leaning forward and tipping a hand behind one ear. “I didn’t—”
“Don’t kill him!” This time his voice was hoarse and wavering and close to tears. “Don’t kill Benny’s Da’.
Please.”
Eddie reached out and cupped the nape of the boy’s neck gently. “Jake, Benny Slightman’s Da’ is willing to send a hundred kids off into Thunderclap with the Wolves, just to spare his own. And you know how they’d come back.”
“Yeah, but in his eyes he doesn’t have any choice because—”
“His choice could have been to stand with us,” Roland said. His voice was dull and dreadful. Almost dead.
“But—”
But what? Jake didn’t know. He had been over this and over this and he still didn’t know. Sudden tears spilled from his eyes and ran down his cheeks. Callahan reached out to touch him. Jake pushed his hand away.
Roland sighed. “We’ll do what we can to spare him. That much I promise you. I don’t know if it will be a mercy or not— the Slightmans are going to be through in this town, if there’s a town left after the end of next week—but perhaps they’ll go north or south along the Crescent and start some sort of new life. And Jake, listen: there’s no need for Ben Slightman to ever know you overheard Andy and his father last night.”
Jake was looking at him with an expression that didn’t quite dare to be hope. He didn’t care a hill of beans about Slightman the Elder, but he didn’t want Benny to know it was him. He supposed that made him a coward, but he didn’t want Benny to know. “Really? For sure?”
“Nothing about this is for sure, but—”
Before he could finish, the singing children swept around the corner. Leading them, silver limbs and golden body gleaming mellowly in the day’s subdued light, was Andy the Messenger Robot. He was walking backward. In one hand was a bah-bolt wrapped in banners of bright silk. To Susannah he looked like a parade-marshal on the Fourth of July. He waved his baton extravagantly from side to side, leading the
children in their song while a reedy bagpipe accompaniment issued from the speakers in his chest and head.
“Holy shit,” Eddie said. “It’s the Pied Piper of Hamelin.”
“Commala-come-one!
Mamma had a son!
Dass-a time ‘at Daddy
Had d ‘mos ‘fun!”
Andy sang this part alone, then pointed his baton at the crowd of children. They joined in boisterously.
“Commala-come-come!
Daddy had one!
Dass-a time ‘at Mommy
Had d ‘mos’ fun!”
Gleeful laughter. There weren’t as many kids as Susannah would have thought, given the amount of noise they were putting out. Seeing Andy there at their head, after hearing Jake’s story, chilled her heart. At the same time, she felt an angry pulse begin to beat in her throat and her left temple. That he should lead them down the street like this! Like the Pied Piper, Eddie was right—like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
Now he pointed his makeshift baton at a pretty girl who looked thirteen or fourteen. Susannah thought she was one of the Anselm kids, from the smallhold just south of Tian Jaffords’s place. She sang out the next verse bright and clear to that same heavily rhythmic beat, which was almost (but not quite) a skip-rope chant:
“Commala-come-two!
You know what to do!
Plant the rice commala,
Don’t ye be… no . . . foo’!
Then, as the others joined in again, Susannah realized that the group of children was bigger than she’d thought when they came around the corner, quite a bit bigger. Her ears had told her truer than her eyes, and there was a perfectly good reason for that.
” Commala-come-two! [they sang]
Daddy no foo’!
Mommy plant commala
cause she know jus’ what to do!”
The group looked smaller at first glance because so many of the faces were the same—the face of the Anselm
girl, for instance, was nearly the face of the boy next to her. Her twin brother. Almost all the kids in Andy’s group were twins. Susannah suddenly realized how eerie this was, like all the strange doublings they’d encountered caught in a bottle. Her stomach turned over. And she felt the first twinge of pain above her left eye. Her hand began to rise toward the tender spot.
No, she told herself, I don’t feel that. She made the hand go back down. There was no need to rub her brow.
No need to rub what didn’t hurt.
Andy pointed his baton at a strutting, pudgy little boy who couldn’t have been more than eight. He sang the words out in a high and childish treble that made the other kids laugh.
“Commala-come-t’ree!
You know what’t ‘be
Plant d’rice commala
and d’rice’ll make ya free!”
To which the chorus replied:
“Commala-come-t ‘ree!
Rice’ll make ya free!
When ya plant the rice commala
You know jus’ what to be! ”
Andy saw Roland’s ka-tet and waved his baton cheerily. So did the children… half of whom would come back drooling and roont if the parade-marshal had his way. They would grow to the size of giants, screaming with pain, and then die early.
“Wave back,” Roland said, and raised his hand. “Wave back, all of you, for the sake of your fathers.”
Eddie flashed Andy a happy, toothy grin. “How you doing, you cheapshit Radio Shack dickweed?” he asked.
The voice coming through his grin was low and savage. He gave Andy a double thumbs-up. “How you doing, you robot psycho? Say fine? Say thankya! Say bite my bag!”
Jake burst out laughing at that. They all continued waving and smiling. The children waved and smiled back.
Andy also waved. He led his merry band down the high street, chanting Commala-come-four! River’s at the door!
“They love him,” Callahan said. There was a strange, sick expression of disgust on his face. “Generations of children have loved Andy.”
“That,” Roland remarked, “is about to change.”
FOUR
“Further questions?” Roland asked when Andy and the children were gone. “Ask now if you will. It could be your last chance.”
“What about Tian Jaffords?” Callahan asked. “In a very real sense it was Tian who started this. There ought to be a place for him at the finish.”
Roland nodded. “I have a job for him. One he and Eddie will do together. Pere, that’s a fine privy down below Rosalita’s cottage. Tall. Strong.”
Callahan raised his eyebrows. “Aye, say thankya. ‘Twas Tian and his neighbor, Hugh Anselm, who built it.”
“Could you put a lock on the outside of it in the next few days?”
“I could but—”
“If things go well no lock will be necessary, but one can never be sure.”
“No,” Callahan said. “I suppose one can’t. But I can do as you ask.”
“What’s your plan, sugar?” Susannah asked. She spoke in a quiet, oddly gentle voice.
“There’s precious little plan in it. Most times that’s all to the good. The most important thing I can tell you is not to believe anything I say once we get up from here, dust off our bottoms, and rejoin the folken. Especially nothing I say when I stand up at the meeting with the feather in my hand. Most of it will be lies.” He gave them a smile. Above it, his faded blue eyes were as hard as rocks. “My Da’ and Cuthbert’s Da’ used to have a rule between em: first the smiles, then the lies. Last comes gunfire.”
“We’re almost there, aren’t we?” Susannah asked. “Almost to the shooting.”
Roland nodded. “And the shooting will happen so fast and be over so quick that you’ll wonder what all the planning and palaver was for, when in the end it always comes down to the same five minutes’ worth of blood, pain, and stupidity.” He paused, then said: “I always feel sick afterward. Like I did when Bert and I went to see the hanged man.”
“I have a question,” Jake said.
“Ask it,” Roland told him.
“Will we win?”
Roland was quiet for such a long time that Susannah began to be afraid. Then he said: “We know more than they think we know, Far more. They’ve grown complacent. If Andy and Slightman are the only rats in the woodpile, and if there aren’t too many in the Wolfpack—if we don’t run out of plates and cartridges—then yes, Jake, son of Elmer. We’ll win.”