7

EDDIE THOUGHT THE MEAL, he ate that day was the best he had had since the mythic birthday feasts of his childhood, when his mother had made it her business to serve everything he liked - meatloaf and roasted potatoes and corn on the cob and devil's food cake with vanilla ice cream on the side.

The sheer variety of the edibles put before them - especially after the months they had spent eating nothing but lobster meat, deer meat, and the few bitter greens which Roland pronounced safe - undoubtedly had something to do with the pleasure he took in the food, but Eddie didn't think that was the sole answer; he noticed that the kid was packing it away by the plateful (and feeding a chunk of something to the bumbler crouched at his feet every couple of minutes), and Jake hadn't been here a week yet.

There were bowls of stew (chunks of buffalo meat floating in a rich brown gravy loaded with vegetables), platters of fresh biscuits, crocks of sweet white butter, and bowls of leaves that looked like spinach but weren't... exactly. Eddie had never been crazy about greens, but at the first taste of these, some deprived part of him awoke and cried for them. He ate well of everything, but his need for the green stuff approached greed, and he saw Susannah was also helping herself to them again and again. Among the four of them, the travellers emptied three bowls of the leaves.

The dinner dishes were swept away by the old women and the albino twins. They returned with chunks of cake piled high on two thick white plates and a bowl of whipped cream. The cake gave off a sweetly fragrant smell that made Eddie feel as if he had died and gone to heaven.

"Only buffaler cream," Aunt Talitha said dismissively. "No more cows - last one croaked thirty year ago. Buffaler cream ain't no prize-winner, but better'n nothin, by Daisy!"

The cake turned out to be loaded with blueberries. Eddie thought it beat by a country mile any cake he'd ever had. He finished three pieces, leaned back, and belched ringingly before he could clap a hand over his mouth. He looked around guiltily.

Mercy, the blind woman, cackled. "I heard that! Someone be thankin' the cook, Auntie!"

"Ay," Aunt Talitha said, laughing herself. "So he do."

The two women who had served the food were returning yet again. One carried a steaming jug; the other had a number of thick ceramic cups balanced precariously on her tray.

Aunt Talitha was sitting at the head of the table with Roland by her right hand. Now he leaned over and murmured something in her ear. She listened, her smile fading a little, then nodded.

"Si, Bill, and Till," she said. "You three stay. We are going to have us a little palaver with this gunslinger and his friends, on account of they mean to move along this very afternoon. The rest of you take your coffee in the kitchen and so cut down the babble. Mind you make your manners before you go!"

Bill and Till, the albino twins, remained sitting at the foot of the table. The others formed a line and moved slowly past the travellers. Each of them shook hands with Eddie and Susannah, then kissed Jake on the cheek. The boy accepted this with good grace, but Eddie could see he was both surprised and embarrassed.

When they reached Roland, they knelt before him and touched the sandalwood butt of the revolver which jutted from the holster he wore on his left hip. He put his hands on their shoulders and kissed their old brows. Mercy was the last; she flung her arms around Roland's waist and baptized his cheek with a wet, ringing kiss.

"Gods bless and keep ye, gunslinger! If only I could see ye!"

"Mind your manners, Mercy!" Aunt Talitha said sharply, but Roland ignored her and bent over the blind woman.

He took her hands gently but firmly in his own, and raised them to his face. "See me with these, beauty," he said, and closed his eyes as her fingers, wrinkled and misshapen with arthritis, patted gently over his brow, his cheeks, his lips and chin.

"Ay, gunslinger!" she breathed, lifting the sightless sockets of her eyes to his faded blue ones. "I see you very well! 'Tis a good face, but full of sadness and care. I fear for you and yours."

"Yet we are well met, are we not?" he asked, and planted a gentle kiss on the smooth, worn skin of her forehead.

"Ay - so we are. So we are. Thank'ee for your kiss, gunslinger. From my heart I thank'ee."

"Go on, Mercy," Aunt Talitha said in a gentler voice. "Get your coffee."

Mercy rose to her feet. The old man with the crutch and peg leg guided her hand to the waistband of his pants. She seized it and, with a final salute to Roland and his band, allowed him to lead her away.

Eddie wiped at his eyes, which were wet. "Who blinded her?" he asked hoarsely.

"Harriers," Aunt Talitha said. "Did it with a branding-iron, they did. Said it was because she was looking at em pert. Twenty-five years agone, that was. Drink your coffee, now, all of you! It's nasty when it's hot, but it ain't nothin but roadmud once it's cold."

Eddie lifted the cup to his mouth and sipped experimentally. He wouldn't have gone so fur us to call it roadmud, hut it wasn't exactly Blue Mountain Blend, either.

Susannah tasted hers and looked amazed. "Why, this is chicory!" Talitha glanced at her. "I know it not. Dockey is all I know, and dockey-coffee's all we've had since I had the woman's curse - and that curse was lifted from me long, long ago."

"How old are you, ma'am?" Jake asked suddenly.

Aunt Talitha looked at him, surprised, then cackled. "In truth, lad, I disremember. I recall sitting in this same place and having a party to celebrate my eighty, but there were over fifty people settin out on this lawn that day, and Mercy still had her eyes." Her own eyes dropped to the humbler lying at Jake's feet. Oy didn't remove his muzzle from Jake's ankle, but he raised his gold-ringed eyes to gaze at her. "A billy-bumbler, by Daisy! It's been long and long since I've seen a humbler in company with people... seems they have lost the memory of the days when they walked with men."

One of the albino twins bent down to pat Oy. Oy pulled away from him.

"Once they used to herd sheep," Bill (or perhaps it was Till) said to Jake. "Did ye know that, youngster?"

Jake shook his head.

"Do he talk?" the albino asked. "Some did, in the old days."

"Yes, he does." He looked down at the humbler, who had returned his head to Jake's ankle as soon as the strange hand left his general area. "Say your name, Oy."

Oy only looked up at him.

"Oy!" Jake urged, but Oy was silent. Jake looked at Aunt Talitha and the twins, mildly chagrined. "Well, he does... but I guess he only does it when he wants to."

"That boy doesn't look as if he belongs here," Aunt Talitha said to Roland. "His clothes are strange... and his eyes are strange, as well."

"He hasn't been here long." Roland smiled at Jake, and Jake smiled uncertainly back. "In a month or two, no one will be able to see his strangeness."

"Ay? I wonder, so I do. And where does he come from?"

"Far from here," the gunslinger said. "Very far."

She nodded. "And when will he go back?"   ^

"Never," Jake said. "This is my home now."

"Gods pity you, then," she said, "for the sun is going down on the world. It's going down forever."

At that Susannah stirred uneasily; one hand went to her belly, as if her stomach was upset.

"Suze?" Eddie asked. "You all right?"

She tried to smile, but it was a weak effort; her normal confidence and self-possession seemed to have temporarily deserted her. "Yes, of course. A goose walked over my grave, that's all."

Aunt Talitha gave her a long, assessing look that seemed to make Susannah uncomfortable... and then smiled. " 'A goose on my grave' -  ha! I haven't heard that one in donkey's years."

"My dad used to say it all the time." Susannah smiled at Eddie - a stronger smile this time. "And anyway, whatever it was is gone now. I'm fine."

"What do you know about the city, and the lands between here and there?" Roland asked, picking up his coffee cup and sipping. "Are there harriers? And who are these others? These Grays and Pubes?"

Aunt Talitha sighed deeply.

8

"YE'D HEAR MUCH, GUNSLINGER, and we know but little. One thing I do know is this: the city's an evil place, especially for this youngster. Any youngster. Is there any way you can steer around it as you go your course?"

Roland looked up and observed the now familiar shape of the clouds as they flowed along the path of the Beam. In this wide plains sky, that shape, like a river in the sky, was impossible to miss.

"Perhaps," he said at last, but his voice was oddly reluctant. "I suppose we could skirt around Lud to the southwest and pick up the Beam on the far side."

"It's the Beam ye follow," she said. "Ay, I thought so."

Eddie found his own consideration of the city colored by the steadily strengthening hope that when and if they got there, they would find help - abandoned goodies which would aid them in their quest, or maybe even some people who could tell them a little more about the Dark Tower and what they were supposed to do when they got there. The ones called the Grays, for instance - they sounded like the sort of wise old elves he kept imagining.

The drums were creepy, true enough, reminding him of a hundred low-budget jungle epics (mostly watched on TV with Henry by his side and a bowl of popcorn between them) where the fabulous lost cities the explorers had come looking for were in ruins and the natives had degen-erated into tribes of blood-thirsty cannibals, but Eddie found it impossible to believe something like that could have happened in a city that looked, at least from a distance, so much like New York. If there were not wise old elves or abandoned goodies, there would surely be books, at least; he had listened to Roland talk about how rare paper was here, hut every city Eddie had ever been in was absolutely drowning in books. They might even find some working transportation; the equivalent of a Land Rover would be nice. That was probably just a silly dream, but when you had thousands of miles of unknown territory to cover, a few silly dreams were undoubtedly in order, if only to keep your spirits up. And weren't those things at least possible, damn it?

He opened his mouth to say some of these things, but Jake spoke before he could.

"I don't think we can go around," he said, then blushed a little when they all turned to look at him. Oy shifted at his feet.

"No?" Aunt Talitha said. "And why do ye think that, pray tell?"

"Do you know about trains?" Jake asked.

There was a long silence. Bill and Till exchanged an uneasy glance. Aunt Talitha only looked at Jake steadily. Jake did not drop his eyes.

"I heard of one," she said. "Mayhap even saw it. Over there." She pointed in the direction of the Send. "Long ago, when I was but a child and the world hadn't moved on ... or at least not s'far's it has now. Is it Blaine ye speak of, boy?"

Jake's eyes flashed in surprise and recognition. "Yes! Blaine !" Roland was studying Jake closely.

"And how would ye know of Blaine the Mono?" Aunt Talitha asked.

"Mono?" Jake looked blank.

"Ay, so it was called. How would you know of that old lay?"

Jake looked helplessly at Roland, then back at Aunt Talitha. "I don't know how I know."

And that's the truth, Eddie thought suddenly, but it's not all the truth. He knows more than he wants to tell here... and I think he's scared.

"This is our business, I think," Roland said in a dry, brisk administra-tor's voice. "You must let us work it out for ourselves, Old Mother."

"Ay," she agreed quickly. "You'll keep your own counsel. Best that such as us not know."

"What of the city?" Roland prompted. "What do you know of Lud?"

"Little now, but what we know, ye shall hear." And she poured herself another cup of coffee.