survive the months and years ahead.
Jake struck a spark, but it flashed inches away from the kindling.
“Move your flint in closer,” Roland said, “and hold it steady. And don’t hit it with the steel, Jake; scrape it.”
Jake tried again, and this time the spark flashed directly into the kindling. There was a
little tendril of smoke but no fire.
“I don’t think I’m very good at this.”
“You’ll get it. Meantime, think on this. What’s dressed when night falls and undressed
when day breaks?”
“Huh?”
Roland moved Jake’s hands even closer to the little pile of kindling. “I guess that one’s not in your book.”
“Oh, it’s a riddle!” Jake struck another spark. This time a small flame glowed in the
kindling before dying out. “You know some of those, too?”
Roland nodded. “Not just some—a lot. As a boy, I must have known a thousand. They
were part of my studies.”
“Really? Why would anyone study riddles?”
“Vannay, my tutor, said a boy who could answer a riddle was a boy who could think
around corners. We had riddling contests every Friday noon, and the boy or girl who won
could leave school early.”
“Did you get to leave early often, Roland?” Susannah asked.
He shook his head, smiling a little himself. “I enjoyed riddling, but I was never very good at it. Vannay said it was because I thought too deeply. My father said it was because I had
too little imagination. I think they were both right . . . but I think my father had a little more of the truth. I could always haul a gun faster than any of my mates, and shoot straighter, but
I’ve never been much good at thinking around corners.”
Susannah, who had watched closely as Roland dealt with the old people of River Crossing,
thought the gunslinger was underrating himself, but she said nothing.
“Sometimes, on winter nights, there would be riddling competitions in the great hall.
When it was just the younkers, Alain always won. When the grownups played as well, it was always Cort. He’d forgotten more riddles than the rest of us ever knew, and after the
Fair-Day Riddling, Cort always carried home the goose. Riddles have great power, and
every- one knows one or two.”
“Even me,” Eddie said. “For instance, why did the dead baby cross the road?”
“That’s dumb, Eddie,” Susannah said, but she was smiling.
“Because it was stapled to the chicken!” Eddie yelled, and grinned when Jake burst into laughter, knocking his little pile of kindling apart. “Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk, I got a million of em, folks!”
Roland, however, didn’t laugh. He looked, in fact, a trifle offended. “Pardon me for saying so, Eddie, but that is rather silly.”
“Jesus, Roland, I’m sorry,” Eddie said. He was still smiling, but he sounded slightly
peeved. “I keep forgetting you got your sense of humor shot off in the Children’s Crusade,
or whatever it was.”
“It’s just that I take riddling seriously. I was taught that the ability to solve them indicates a sane and rational mind.”
“Well, they’re never going to replace the works of Shakespeare or the Quadratic
Equation,” Eddie said. “I mean, let’s not get carried away.”
Jake was looking at Roland thoughtfully. “My book said riddling is the oldest game people
still play. In our world, I mean. And riddles used to be really serious business, not just jokes.
People used to get killed over them.”
Roland was looking out into the growing darkness. “Yes. I’ve seen it happen.” He was
remembering a Fair-Day Riddling which had ended not with the giving of the prize goose
but with a cross-eyed man in a cap of bells dying in the dirt with a dagger in his chest.
Cort’s dagger. The man had been a wandering singer and acrobat who had attempted to
cheat Cort by stealing the judge’s pocket-book, in which the answers were kept on small
scraps of bark.
“Well, excyooose me” Eddie said.
Susannah was looking at Jake. “I forgot all about the book of riddles you carried over. May I look at it now?”
“Sure. It’s in my pack. The answers are gone, though. Maybe that’s why Mr. Tower gave it
to me for fr—”
His shoulder was suddenly seized, and with painful force.
“What was his name?” Roland asked.
“Mr. Tower,” Jake said. “Calvin Tower. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“No.” Roland slowly relaxed his grip on Jake’s shoulder. “But now that I hear it, I suppose I’m not surprised.”
Eddie had opened Jake’s pack and found Riddle-De-Dum! He tossed it to Susannah. “You
know,” he said, “I always thought that dead-baby joke was pretty good. Tasteless, maybe, but pretty good.”
“I don’t care about taste,” Roland said. “It’s senseless and unsolvable, and that’s what makes it silly. A good riddle is neither.”
“Jesus! You guys did take this stuff seriously, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
Jake, meanwhile, had been restacking the kindling and mulling over the riddle which had
started the discussion. Now he suddenly smiled. “A fire. That’s the answer, right? Dress it at night, undress it in the morning. If you change ‘dress’ to ‘build,’ it’s simple.”
“That’s it.” Roland returned Jake’s smile, but his eyes were on Susannah, watching as she thumbed through the small, tattered book. He thought, looking at her studious frown and
the absent way she read- justed the yellow flower in her hair when it tried to slip free, that
she alone might sense that the tattered book of riddles could be as important as Charlie the
Choo-Choo . . . maybe more important. He looked from her to Eddie and felt a recurrence
of his irritation at Eddie’s foolish riddle. The young man bore another resemblance to
Cuthbert, this one rather unfortunate: Roland sometimes felt like shaking him until his nose
bled and his teeth fell out.
Soft, gunslinger—soft! Cort’s voice, not quite laughing, spoke up in his head, and Roland
resolutely put his emotions at arm’s length. It was easier to do that when he remembered
that Eddie couldn’t help his occasional forays into nonsense; character was also at least
partly formed by ka, and Roland knew well that there was more to Eddie than non- sense.
Anytime he started to make the mistake of thinking that wasn’t so, he would do well to
remember their conversation by the side of the road three nights before, when Eddie had
accused him of using them as markers on his own private game-board. That had angered
him . . . but it had been close enough to the truth to shame him, as well.
Blissfully unaware of these long thoughts, Eddie now inquired: “What’s green, weighs a
hundred tons, and lives at the bottom of the ocean?”
“I know,” Jake said. “Moby Snot, the Great Green Whale.”
“Idiocy,” Roland muttered.
“Yeah—but that’s what’s supposed to make it funny,” Eddie said. “Jokes are supposed to make you think around comers, too. You see . . .” He looked at Roland’s face, laughed, and
threw up his hands. “Never mind. I give up. You wouldn’t understand. Not in a million
years. Let’s look at the damned book. I’ll even try to take it seriously … if we can eat a little supper first, that is.”
“Watch Me,” the gunslinger said with a flicker of a smile.
“Huh?”
“That means you have a deal.”
Jake scraped the steel across the flint. A spark jumped, and this time the kindling caught
fire. He sat back contentedly and watched the flames spread, one arm slung around Oy’s
neck. He felt well pleased with him- self. He had started the evening fire . . . and he had
guessed the answer to Roland’s riddle.
3
“I•VE GOT ONE,” JAKE said as they ate their evening burritos.
“Is it a foolish one?” Roland asked.
“Nah. It’s a real one.”
“Then try me with it.”
“Okay. What can run but never walks, has a mouth but never talks, has a bed but never
sleeps, has a head but never weeps?”
“A good one,” Roland said kindly, “but an old one. A river.”
Jake was a little crestfallen. “You really are hard to stump.”
Roland tossed the last bite of his burrito to Oy, who accepted it eagerly. “Not me. I’m what Eddie calls an overpush. You should have seen Alain. He collected riddles the way a lady
collects fans.”
“That’s pushover, Roland, old buddy,” Eddie said.
“Thank you. Try this one: What lies in bed, and stands in bed?/ First white, then red/ The
plumper it gets/ The better the old woman likes it?”
Eddie burst out laughing. “A dork!” he yelled. “Crude, Roland! But I like it! I liyyyke it!”
Roland shook his head. “Your answer is wrong. A good riddle is sometimes a puzzle in
words, like Jake’s about the river, but sometimes it’s more like a magician’s trick, making
you look in one direction while it’s going somewhere else.”
“It’s a double,” Jake said. He explained what Aaron Deepneau had said about the Riddle of Samson. Roland nodded.