“Slow down, sug, you’ll give yourself a heart attack!” Susannah shouted, laughing.
Oy seemed to take this as an order to speed up. He arrived at Susannah’s wheelchair in less than two minutes, jumped up into her lap, then jumped down again and looked at them cheerfully. “Olan! Ed! Suze!”
“Hile, Sir Throcken,” Roland said, using the ancient word for bumbler he’d first heard in a book read to him by his mother: The Throcken and the Dragon.
Oy lifted his leg, watered a patch of grass, then faced back the way they had come, scenting at the air, eyes on the horizon.
“Why does he keep doing that, Roland?” Eddie asked.
“I don’t know.” But he almost knew. Was it some old story, not The Throcken and the Dragon but one like it? Roland thought so. For a moment he thought of green eyes, watchful in the dark, and a little shiver went through him-not of fear, exactly (although that might have been a part of it), but of remembrance. Then it was gone.
There’ll be water if God wills it, he thought, and only realized he had spoken aloud when Eddie said, “Huh?”
“Never mind,” Roland said. “Let’s have a little palaver with Jake’s new friend, shall we? Perhaps he has an extra popkin or two.”
Eddie, tired of the chewy staple they called gunslinger burritos, brightened immediately. “Hell, yeah,” he said, and looked at an imaginary watch on his tanned wrist. “Goodness me, I see it’s just gobble o’clock.”
“Shut up and push, honeybee,” Susannah said.
Eddie shut up and pushed.
3
The old man was sitting when they entered the boathouse, standing when they emerged on the river side. He saw the guns Roland and Eddie were wearing-the big irons with the sandalwood grips-and his eyes widened. He dropped to one knee. The day was still, and Roland actually heard his bones creak.
“Hile, gunslinger,” he said, and put an arthritis-swollen fist to the center of his forehead. “I salute thee.”
“Rise up, friend,” Roland said, hoping the old man was a friend-Jake seemed to think so, and Roland had come to trust his instincts. Not to mention the billy-bumbler’s. “Rise up, do.”
The old man was having trouble managing it, so Eddie stepped aboard and gave him an arm.
“Thankee, son, thankee. Be you a gunslinger as well, or are you a ’prentice?”
Eddie looked at Roland. Roland gave him nothing, so Eddie looked back at the old man, shrugged, and grinned. “Little of both, I guess. I’m Eddie Dean, of New York. This is my wife, Susannah. And this is Roland Deschain. Of Gilead.”
The riverman’s eyes widened. “Gilead that was? Do you say so?”
“Gilead that was,” Roland agreed, and felt an unaccustomed sorrow rise up from his heart. Time was a face on the water, and like the great river before them, it did nothing but flow.
“Step aboard, then. And welcome. This young man and I are already fast friends, so we are.” Oy stepped onto the big raft and the old man bent to stroke the bumbler’s raised head. “And we are, too, aren’t we, fella? Does thee remember my name?”
“Bix!” Oy said promptly, then turned to the northwest again, raising his snout. His gold-ringed eyes stared raptly at the moving column of clouds that marked the Path of the Beam.
4
“Will’ee eat?” Bix asked them. “What I have is poor and rough, but such as there is, I’d be happy to share.”
“With thanks,” Susannah said. She looked at the overhead cable that ran across the river on a diagonal. “This is a ferry, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Bix told me there are people on the other side. Not close, but not far, either. He thinks they’re rice farmers, but they don’t come this way much.”
Bix stepped off the big raft and went into the boathouse. Eddie waited until he heard the old guy rummaging around, then bent to Jake and said in a low voice, “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” Jake said. “It’s the way we’re going, and he’s happy to have someone to take across. He says it’s been years.”
“I’ll bet it has been,” Eddie agreed.
Bix reappeared with a wicker basket, which Roland took from him-otherwise the old man might have tumbled into the water. Soon they were all sitting in the wicker chairs, munching popkins filled with some sort of pink fish. It was seasoned and delicious.
“Eat all you like,” Bix said. “The river’s filled with shannies, and most are true-threaded. The muties I throw back. Once upon a time we were ordered to throw the bad ’uns up a-bank so they wouldn’t breed more, and for a while I did, but now…” He shrugged. “Live and let live is what I say. As someone who’s lived long himself, I feel like I can say it.”
“How old are you?” Jake asked.
“I turned a hundred and twenty quite some time ago, but since then I’ve lost count, so I have. Time’s short on this side of the door, kennit.”
On this side of the door. That memory of some old story tugged at Roland again, and then was gone.
“Do you follow that?” The old man pointed to the moving band of clouds in the sky.
“We do.”
“To the Callas, or beyond?”
“Beyond.”
“To the great darkness?” Bix looked both troubled and fascinated by the idea.
“We go our course,” Roland said. “What fee would you take to cross us, sai ferryman?”
Bix laughed. The sound was cracked and cheerful. “Money’s no good with nothing to spend it on, you have no livestock, and it’s clear as day that I have more to eat than you do. And you could always draw on me and force me to take you across.”
“Never,” Susannah said, looking shocked.
“I know that,” Bix said, waving a hand at her. “Harriers might-and then burn my ferry for good measure once they got t’other side-but true men of the gun, never. And women too, I suppose. You don’t seem armed, missus, but with women, one can never tell.”
Susannah smiled thinly at this and said nothing.
Bix turned to Roland. “Ye come from Lud, I wot. I’d hear of Lud, and how things go there. For it was a marvelous city, so it was. Crumbling and growing strange when I knew it, but still marvelous.”
The four of them exchanged a look that was all an-tet, that peculiar telepathy they shared. It was a look that was also dark with shume, the old Mid-World term that can mean shame, but also means sorrow.
“What?” Bix asked. “What have I said? If I’ve asked for something you’d not give, I cry your pardon.”
“Not at all,” Roland said, “but Lud…”
“Lud is dust in the wind,” Susannah said.
“Well,” Eddie said, “not dust, exactly.”
“Ashes,” Jake said. “The kind that glow in the dark.”
Bix pondered this, then nodded slowly. “I’d hear anyway, or as much as you can tell in an hour’s time. That’s how long the crossing takes.”
5
Bix bristled when they offered to help him with his preparations. It was his job, he said, and he could still do it-just not as quickly as once upon a time, when there had been farms and a few little trading posts on both sides of the river.
In any case, there wasn’t much to do. He fetched a stool and a large ironwood ringbolt from the boathouse, mounted the stool to attach the ringbolt to the top of the post, then hooked the ringbolt to the cable. He took the stool back inside and returned with a large metal crank shaped like a block Z. This he laid with some ceremony by a wooden housing on the far end of the raft.
“Don’t none of you kick that overboard, or I’ll never get home,” he said.
Roland squatted on his hunkers to study it. He beckoned to Eddie and Jake, who joined him. He pointed to the words embossed on the long stroke of the Z. “Does it say what I think it does?”
“Yep,” Eddie said. “North Central Positronics. Our old pals.”
“When did you get that, Bix?” Susannah asked.
“Ninety year ago, or more, if I were to guess. There’s an underground place over there.” He pointed vaguely in the direction of the Green Palace. “It goes for miles, and it’s full of things that belonged to the old people, perfectly preserved. Strange music still plays from overhead, music such as you’ve never heard. It scrambles your thinking, like. And you don’t dare stay there long, or you break out in sores and puke and start to lose your teeth. I went once. Never again. I thought for a while I was going to die.”
“Did you lose your hair as well as your chompers?” Eddie asked.
Bix looked surprised, then nodded. “Yar, some, but it grew back. That crank, it’s still, you know.”