Rosa came out of the bedroom, also naked, and stood in the doorway looking at him. “How’re y’bones, tell me, I beg?”
Roland nodded. “That oil of yours is a wonder.”
‘”Twon’tlast.”
“No,” Roland said. “But there’s another world—my friends’ world—and maybe they have something there that will. I’ve got a feeling we’ll be going there soon.”
“More fighting to do?”
“I think so, yes.”
“You won’t be back this way in any case, will you?”
Roland looked at her. “No.”
“Are you tired, Roland?”
“To death,” said he.
“Come back to bed a little while, then, will ya not?”
He crushed out his smoke and stood. He smiled. It was a younger man’s smile. “Say thankya.”
“Thee’s a good man, Roland of Gilead.”
He considered this, then slowly shook his head. “All my life I’ve had the fastest hands, but at being good I was always a little too slow.”
She held out a hand to him. “Come ye, Roland. Come commala.” And he went to her.
FIFTEEN
Early that afternoon, Roland, Eddie, Jake, and Pere Callahan rode out the East Road—which was actually a north road at this point along the winding Devar-Tete Whye—with shovels concealed in the bedrolls at the backs of their saddles. Susannah had been excused from this duty on account of her pregnancy. She had joined the Sisters of Oriza at the Pavilion, where a larger tent was being erected and preparations for a huge evening meal were already going forward. When they left, Calla Bryn Sturgis had already begun to fill up, as if for a Fair-Day. But there was no whooping and hollering, no impudent rattle of firecrackers, no rides being set up on the Green. They had seen neither Andy nor Ben Slightman, and that was good.
“Tian?” Roland asked Eddie, breaking the rather heavy silence among them.
“He’ll meet me at the rectory. Five o’clock.”
“Good,” Roland said. “If we’re not done out here by four, you’re excused to ride back on your own.”
“I’ll go with you, if you like,” Callahan said. The Chinese believed that if you saved a man’s life, you were responsible for him ever after. Callahan had never given the idea much thought, but after pulling Eddie back from the ledge above the Doorway Cave, it seemed to him there might be truth in the notion.
“Better you stay with us,” Roland said. “Eddie can take care of this. I’ve got another job for you out here.
Besides digging, I mean.”
“Oh? And what might that be?” Callahan asked.
Roland pointed at the dust-devils twisting and whirling ahead of them on the road. “Pray away this damned wind. And the sooner the better. Before tomorrow morning, certainly.”
“Are you worried about the ditch?” Jake asked.
“The ditch’ll be fine,” Roland said. “It’s the Sisters’ Orizas I’m worried about. Throwing the plate is delicate work under the best of circumstances. If it’s blowing up a gale out here when the Wolves come, the possibilities for things to go wrong—” He tossed his hand at the dusty horizon, giving it a distinctive (and fatalistic) Calla twist. ” Delah.”
Callahan, however, was smiling. “I’ll be glad to offer a prayer,” he said, “but look east before you grow too concerned. Doya, I beg.”
They turned that way in their saddles. Corn—the crop now over, the picked plants standing in sloping, skeletal rows—ran down to the rice-fields. Beyond the rice was the river. Beyond the river was the end of the borderlands. There, dust-devils forty feet high spun and jerked and sometimes collided. They made the ones dancing on their side of die river look like naughty children by comparison.
“The seminon often reaches the Whye and then turns back,” Callahan said. “According to the old folks, Lord Seminon begs Lady Oriza to make him welcome when he reaches the water and she often bars his passage out of jealousy. You see—”
“Seminon married her sissa,” Jake said. “Lady Riza wanted him for herself—a marriage of wind and rice—
and she’s still p.o.’d about it.”
“How did you know that?” Callahan asked, both amused and astonished.
“Benny told me,” Jake said, and said no more. Thinking of their long discussions (sometimes in the hayloft, sometimes lazing on the bank of the river) and their eager exchanges of legend made him feel sad and hurt.
Callahan was nodding. “That’s the story, all right. I imagine it’s actually a weather phenomenon—cold air over there, warm air rising off the water, something like that—but whatever it is, this one shows every sign of going back where it came from.”
The wind dashed grit in his face, as if to prove him wrong, and Callahan laughed. “This’ll be over by first light tomorrow, I almost guarantee you. But—”
“Almost’s not good enough, Pere.”
“What I was going to say, Roland, is that since I know almost’s not good enough, I’ll gladly send up a prayer.”
“Tell ya thanks.” The gunslinger turned to Eddie, and pointed the first two fingers of his left hand at his own face. “The eyes, right?”
“The eyes,” Eddie agreed. “And the password. If it’s not nineteen, it’ll be ninety-nine.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I know,” Eddie said.
“Still… be careful.”
“I will.”
A few minutes later they reached the place where, on their right, a rocky track wandered off into the arroyo country, toward the Gloria and Redbirds One and Two. The folken assumed that the buckas would be left here, and they were correct. They also assumed that the children and their minders would then walk up the track to one mine or the other. In this they were wrong.
Soon three of them were digging on the west side of the road, a fourth always standing watch. No one came
—the folken from this far out were already in town—and the work went quickly enough. At four o’clock, Eddie left the others to finish up and rode back to town to meet Tian Jaffords with one of Roland’s revolvers holstered on his hip.
SIXTEEN
Tian had brought his bah. When Eddie told him to leave it on the Pere’s porch, the farmer gave him an unhappy, uncertain stare.
“He won’t be surprised to see me packing iron, but he might have questions if he saw you with that thing,”
Eddie said. This was it, the true beginning of their stand, and now that it had come, Eddie felt calm. His heart was beating slowly and steadily. His vision seemed to have clarified; he could see each shadow cast by each individual blade of grass on the rectory lawn. “He’s strong, from what I’ve heard. And very quick when he needs to be. Let it be my play.”
“Then why am I here?”
Because even a smart robot won’t expect trouble if I’ve got a clodhopper like you with me was the actual answer, but giving it wouldn’t be very diplomatic.
“Insurance,” Eddie said. “Come on.”
They walked down to the privy. Eddie had used it many times during the last few weeks, and always with pleasure—there were stacks of soft grasses for the clean-up phase, and you didn’t have to concern yourself with poison flurry—but he’d not examined the outside closely until now. It was a wood structure, tall and solid, but he had no doubt Andy could demolish it in short order if he really wanted to. If they gave him a chance to.
Rosa came to the back door of her cottage and looked out at them, holding a hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun. “How do ya, Eddie?”
“Fine so far, Rosie, but you better go back inside. There’s gonna be a scuffle.”
“Say true? I’ve got a stack of plates—”
“I don’t think Rizas’d help much in this case,” Eddie said. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt if you stood by, though.”
She nodded and went back inside without another word.
The men sat down, flanking the open door of the privy with its new bolt-lock. Tian tried to roll a smoke. The first one fell apart in his shaking fingers and he had to try again. “I’m not good at this sort of thing,” he said, and Eddie understood he wasn’t talking about the fine art of cigarette-making.
“It’s all right.”
Tian peered at him hopefully. “Do ya say so?”
“I do, so let it be so.”
Promptly at six o’clock ( The bastard’s probably got a clock set tight down to millionths of a second inside him, Eddie thought), Andy came around the rectory-house, his shadow trailing out long and spidery on the grass in front of him. He saw them. His blue eyes flashed. He raised a hand in greeting. The setting sun reflected off his arm, making it look as though it had been dipped in blood. Eddie raised his own hand in return and stood up, smiling. He wondered if all the thinking-machines that still worked in this rundown world had turned against their masters, and if so, why.