2
   IT WAS JAKE'S TURN to make the fire that night. When the wood was laid to the gunslinger's satisfaction, he handed Jake his flint and steel. "Let's see how you do."
   Eddie and Susannah were sitting off to one side, their arms linked companionably about each other's waist. Toward the end of the day, Eddie had found a bright yellow flower beside the road and had picked it for her. Tonight Susannah was wearing it in her hair, and every time she looked at Eddie, her lips curved in a small smile and her eyes filled with light. Roland had noted these things, and they pleased him. Their love was deepening, strengthening. That was good. It would have to be deep and strong indeed if it was to 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 every­one 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 read­justed 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 non­sense. 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 him­self. 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.
   "Is it a strawberry?" Susannah asked, then answered her own ques­tion. "Of course it is. It's like the fire-riddle. There's a metaphor hidden inside it. Once you understand the metaphor, you can solve the riddle."
   "I metaphor sex, but she slapped my face and walked away when I asked," Eddie told them sadly. They all ignored him.
   "If you change 'gets' to 'grows,' " Susannah went on, "it's easy. First white, then red. Plumper it grows, the better the old woman likes it." She looked pleased with herself.
   Roland nodded. "The answer I always heard was a wenberry, but I'm sure both answers mean the same thing."
   Eddie picked up Riddle-De-Dum! and began flipping through it. "How about this one, Roland? When is a door not a door?"
   Roland frowned. "Is it another piece of your stupidity? Because my patience-"
   "No. I promised to take it seriously, and I am—I'm trying, at least. It's in this book, and I just happen to know the answer. I heard it when I was a kid."
   Jake, who also knew the answer, winked at Eddie. Eddie winked back, and was amused to see Oy also trying to wink. The humbler kept shutting both eyes, and eventually gave up.
   Roland and Susannah, meanwhile, were puzzling over the question. "It must have something to do with love," Roland said. "A door, adore. When is adore not adore... hmmm..."
   "Hmmm," Oy said. His imitation of Roland's thoughtful tone was perfect. Eddie winked at Jake again. Jake covered his mouth to hide a smile.
   "Is the answer false love?" Roland asked at last.
   "Nope."
   "Window," Susannah said suddenly and decisively. "When is a door not a door? When it's a window."
   "Nope." Eddie was grinning broadly now, but Jake was struck by how far from the real answer both of them had wandered. There was magic at work here, he thought. Pretty common stuff, as magic went, no flying carpets or disappearing elephants, but magic, all the same. He suddenly saw what they were doing—a simple game of riddles around a campfire—in an entirely new light. It was like playing blind-man's bluff, only in this game the blindfold was made of words.
   "I give up," Susannah said.
   "Yes," Roland said. "Tell if you know."
   "The answer is a jar. A door is not a door when it's ajar. Get it?" Eddie watched as comprehension dawned on Roland's face and asked, a little apprehensively, "Is it a bad one? I was trying to be serious this time, Roland—really."
   "Not bad at all. On the contrary, it's quite good. Cort would have gotten it, I'm sure... probably Alain, too, it's still very clever. I did what I always used to do in the schoolroom: made it more complicated than it really was and shot right past the answer."
   "There really is something to it, isn't there?" Eddie mused. Roland nodded, but Eddie didn't see; he was looking into the depths of the fire, where dozens of roses bloomed and faded in the coals.
   Roland said, "One more, and we'll turn in. Only from tonight on, we'll stand a watch. You first, Eddie, then Susannah. I'll take the last one."
   "What about me?" Jake asked.
   "Later on you may have to take a rum. Right now it's more impor­tant for you to get your sleep."
   "Do you really think sentry-duty is necessary?" Susannah asked.
   "I don't know. And that's the best reason of all to do it. Jake, choose us a riddle from your book."
   Eddie handed Riddle-De-Dum! to Jake, who thumbed through the pages and finally stopped near the back. "Whoa! This one's a killer."
   "Let's hear it," Eddie said. "If I don't get it, Suze will. We're known at Fair-Days all across the land as Eddie Dean and His Riddling Queen."
   "We're witty tonight, ain't we?" Susannah said. "Let's see how witty you are after settin by the side o' the road until midnight or so, honeychild."
   Jake read: " 'There is a thing that nothing is, and yet it has a name. It's sometimes tall and sometimes short, joins our talks, joins our sport, and plays at every game.' "
   They discussed this riddle for almost fifteen minutes, but none of them could even hazard an answer.
   "Maybe it’ll come to one of us while we're asleep," Jake said. "That's how I got the one about the river."
   "Cheap book, with the answers torn out," Eddie said. He stood up and wrapped a hide blanket around his shoulders like a cloak.
   "Well, it was cheap. Mr. Tower gave it to me for free."
   "What am I looking for, Roland?" Eddie asked.
   Roland shrugged as he lay down. "I don't know, but I think you'll know it if you see it or hear it."
   "Wake me up when you start feeling sleepy," Susannah said.
   "You better believe it."

4
   A GRASSY DITCH RAN along the side of the road and Eddie sat on the far side of it with his blanket around his shoulders. A thin scud of clouds had veiled the sky tonight, dimming the starshow. A strong west wind was blowing. When Eddie turned his face in that direction, he could clearly smell the buffalo which now owned these plains—a mixed per­fume of hot fur and fresh dung. The clarity which had returned to his senses in these last few months was amazing, . . and, at times like these, a little spooky, as well.
   Very faintly, he could hear a buffalo calf bawling.
   He turned toward the city, and after a while he began to think he might be seeing distant sparks of light there—the electric candles of the twins' story—but he was well aware that he might be seeing nothing more than his own wishful thinking.
   You're a long way from Forty-second Street, sweetheart—hope is a great thing, no matter what anyone says, but don't hope so hard you lose sight of that one thought: you're a long way from Forty-second Street . That's not New York up ahead, no matter how much you might wish it was. That's Lud, and it'll be whatever it is. And if you keep that in mind, maybe you'll be okay.
   He passed his time on watch trying to think of an answer to the last riddle of the evening. The scolding Roland had given him about his dead-baby joke had left him feeling disgruntled, and it would please him to be able to start off the morning by giving them a good answer. Of course they wouldn't be able to check any answer against the back of the book, but he had an idea that with good riddles a good answer was usually self-evident.
   Sometimes tall and sometimes short. He thought that was the key and all the rest was probably just misdirection. What was sometimes tall and sometimes short? Pants? No. Pants were sometimes short and some­times long, but he had never heard of tall pants. Tales? Like pants, it only fit snugly one way. Drinks were sometimes both tall and short—
   "Order," he murmured, and thought for a moment that he must have stumbled across the solution—both adjectives fit the noun glove-tight. A tall order was a big job; a short order was something you got on the quick in a restaurant—a hamburger or a tuna melt. Except that tall orders and tuna melts didn't join our talk or play at every game.
   He felt a rush of frustration and had to smile at himself, getting all wound up about a harmless word-game in a kid's book. All the same, he found it a little easier to believe that people might really kill each other over riddles … if the stakes were high enough and cheating was involved.
   Let it go—you're doing exactly what Roland said, thinking right past it.
   Still, what else did he have to think about?
   Then the drumming from the city began again, and he did have something else. There was no build-up; at one moment it wasn't there, and at the next it was going full force, as if a switch had been turned. Eddie walked to the edge of the road, turned toward the city, and lis­tened. After a few moments he looked around to see if the drums had awakened the others, but he was still alone. He turned toward Lud again and cupped his ears forward with the sides of his hands.
   Bump... ba-bump... ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.
   Bump... ba-bump... ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.
   Eddie became more and more sure that he had been right about what it was; that he had, at least, solved this riddle.
   Bump... ba-bump... ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.
   The idea that he was standing by a deserted road in an almost empty world, standing some one hundred and seventy miles from a city which had been built by some fabulous lost civilization and listening to a rock-and-roll drum-line... that was crazy, but was it any crazier than a traffic-light that dinged and dropped a rusty green flag with the word GO printed on it? Any crazier than discovering the wreck of a German plane from the 1930s?
   Eddie sang the words to the Z.Z. Top song in a whisper:
   "You need just enough of that sticky stuff
   To hold the seam on your fine blue-jeans
   I say yeah, yeah …"
   They fit the beat perfectly. It was the disco-pulse percussion of "Velcro Fly." Eddie was sure of it.
   A short time later the sound ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and he could hear only the wind, and, more faintly, the Send River, which had a bed but never slept.

5
   THE NEXT FOUR DAYS were uneventful. They walked; they watched the bridge and the city grow larger and define themselves more clearly; they camped; they ate; they riddled; they kept watch turn and turn about (Jake had pestered Roland into letting him keep a short watch in the two hours just before dawn); they slept. The only remarkable incident had to do with the bees.
   Around noon on the third day after the discovery of the downed plane, a buzzing sound came to them, growing louder and louder until it dominated the day. At last Roland stopped. "There," he said, and pointed toward a grove of eucalyptus trees.
   "It sounds like bees," Susannah said.
   Roland's faded blue eyes gleamed. "Could be we'll have a little dessert tonight."
   "I don't know how to tell you this, Roland," Eddie said, "but I have this aversion to being stung."
   "Don't we all," Roland agreed, "but the day is windless. I think we can smoke them to sleep and steal their comb right out from under them without setting half the world on fire. Let's have a look."
   He carried Susannah, who was as eager for the adventure as the gunslinger himself, toward the grove. Eddie and Jake lagged behind, and Oy, apparently having decided that discretion was the better part of valor, remained sitting at the edge of the Great Road, panting like a dog and watching them carefully.
   Roland paused at the edge of the trees. "Stay where you are," he told Eddie and Jake, speaking softly. "We're going to have a look. I'll give you a come-on if all's well." He carried Susannah into the dappled shadows of the grove while Eddie and Jake remained in the sunshine, peering after them.
   It was cooler in the shade. The buzzing of the bees was a steady, hypnotic drone. "There are too many," Roland murmured. "This is late summer; they should be out working. I don't—"
   He caught sight of the hive, bulging tumorously from the hollow of a tree in the center of the clearing, and broke off.
   "What's the matter with them?" Susannah asked in a soft, horrified voice. "Roland, what's the matter with them?"
   A bee, as plump and slow-moving as a horsefly in October, droned past her head. Susannah flinched away from it.
   Roland motioned for the others to join them. They did, and stood looking at the hive without speaking. The chambers weren't neat hexa­gons but random holes of all shapes and sizes; the beehive itself looked queerly melted, as if someone had turned a blowtorch on it. The bees which crawled sluggishly over it were as white as snow.
   "No honey tonight," Roland said. "What we took from yonder comb might taste sweet, but it would poison us as surely as night follows day."
   One of the grotesque white bees lumbered heavily past Jake's head. He ducked away with an expression of loathing.
   "What did it?" Eddie asked. "What did it to them, Roland?"
   "The same thing that has emptied this whole land; the thing that's still causing many of the buffalo to be born as sterile freaks. I've heard it called the Old War, the Great Fire, the Cataclysm, and the Great Poisoning. Whatever it was, it was the start of all our troubles and it happened long ago, a thousand years before the great-great-grandfathers of the River Crossing folk were born. The physical effects—the two-headed buffalo and the white bees and such—have grown less as time passes. I have seen this for myself. The other changes are greater, if harder to see, and they are still going on."
   They watched the white bees crawl, dazed and almost completely helpless, about their hive. Some were apparently trying to work; most simply wandered about, butting heads and crawling over one another. Eddie found himself remembering a newsclip he'd seen once. It had shown a crowd of survivors leaving the area where a gas-main had exploded, flattening almost a whole city block in some California town. These bees reminded him of those dazed, shellshocked survivors.
   "You had a nuclear war, didn't you?" he asked—almost accused. "These Great Old Ones you like to talk about... they blew their great old asses straight to hell. Didn't they?"
   "I don't know what happened. No one knows. The records of those times are lost, and the few stories are confused and conflicting."
   "Let's get out of here," Jake said in a trembling voice. "Looking at those things makes me sick."
   "I'm with you, sugar," Susannah said.
   So they left the bees to their aimless, shattered life in the grove of ancient trees, and there was no honey that night.

6
   "WHEN ARE YOU GOING to tell us what you do know?" Eddie asked the next morning. The day was bright and blue, but there was a bite in the air; their first autumn in this world was almost upon them.
   Roland glanced at him. "What do you mean?"
   "I'd like to hear your whole story, from beginning to end, starting with Gilead . How you grew up there and what happened to end it all. I want to know how you found out about the Dark Tower and why you started chasing after it in the first place. I want to know about your first bunch of friends, too. And what happened to them."
   Roland removed his hat, armed sweat from his brow, then replaced it. "You have the right to know all those things, I suppose, and I'll tell them to you... but not now. It's a very long story. I never expected to tell it to anyone, and I'll only tell it once."
   "When?" Eddie persisted.
   "When the time is right," Roland said, and with that they had to be content.

7
   ROLAND CAME AWAKE THE moment before Jake began to shake him. He sat up and looked around, but Eddie and Susannah were still fast asleep and in the first faint light of morning, he could see nothing amiss.
   "What is it?" he asked Jake in a low voice.
   "I don't know. Fighting, maybe. Come and listen."
   Roland threw his blanket aside and followed Jake out to the road. He reckoned they were now only three days' walk from the place where the Send passed in front of the city, and the bridge—built squarely along the path of the Beam—dominated the horizon. Its pronounced tilt was more clearly visible than ever, and he could see at least a dozen gaps where over-stressed cables had snapped like the strings of a lyre.
   Tonight the wind blew directly into their faces as they looked toward the city, and the sounds it carried to them were faint but clear.
   “Is it fighting?" Jake asked.
   Roland nodded and held a finger to his lips.
   He heard faint shouts, a crash that sounded like some huge object falling, and—of course—the drums. Now there was another crash, this one more musical: the sound of breaking glass.
   "Jeepers," Jake whispered, and moved closer to the gunslinger.
   Then came the sounds which Roland had hoped not to hear: a fast, sandy rattle of small-arms fire followed by a loud hollow bang—clearly an explosion of some land. It rolled across the flatlands toward them like an invisible bowling ball. After that, the shouts, thuds, and sounds of breakage quickly sank below the level of the drums, and when the drums quit a few minutes later with their usual unsettling suddenness, the city was silent again. But now that silence had an unpleasant waiting quality.
   Roland put an arm around Jake's shoulders. "Still not too late to detour around," he said.
   Jake glanced up at him. "We can't."
   "Because of the train?"
   Jake nodded and singsonged: " Blaine is a pain, but we have to take the train. And the city's the only place where we can get on."
   Roland looked thoughtfully at Jake. "Why do you say we have to? Is it ka? Because, Jake, you have to understand that you don't know much about ka yet—it's the sort of subject men study all their lives."
   "I don't know if it's ka or not, but I do know that we can't go into the waste lands unless we're protected, and that means Blaine . Without him we'll die, like those bees we saw are going to die when winter comes. We have to be protected. Because the waste lands are poison."
   "How do you know these things?"
   "I don't know!" Jake said, almost angrily. "I just do."
   "All right," Roland said mildly. He looked toward Lud again. "But we'll have to be damned careful. It's unlucky that they still have gunpow­der. If they have that, they may have things that are even more powerful. I doubt if they know how to use them, but that only increases the danger. They could get excited and blow us all to hell."
   "Ell," a grave voice said from behind them. They glanced around and saw Oy sitting by the side of the road, watching them.

8
   LATER THAT DAY THEY came to a new road which swept toward them out of the west and joined their own way. Beyond this point, the Great Road—now much wider and split down the middle by a median divider of some polished dark stone—began to sink, and the crumbling concrete embankments which rose on either side of them gave the pilgrims a claustrophobic trapped feeling. They stopped at a point where one of these concrete dikes had born broken open, affording a comforting line of sight to the open land beyond, and ate a light, unsatisfying meal.
   "Why do you think they dropped the road down like this, Eddie?" Jake asked. "I mean, someone did do it this way on purpose, didn't they?"
   Eddie looked through the break in the concrete, where the flatlands stretched on as smoothly as ever, and nodded.
   "Then why?"
   "Dunno, champ," Eddie said, but he thought he did. He glanced at Roland and guessed that he knew, too. The sunken road leading to the bridge had been a defensive measure. Troops placed atop the concrete slopes were in control of two carefully engineered redoubts. If the defenders didn't like the look of the folks approaching Lud along the Great Road, they could rain destruction down on them.
   "You sure you don't know?" Jake asked.
   Eddie smiled at Jake and tried to stop imagining that there was some nut up there right now, getting ready to roll a large, rusty bomb down one of those decayed concrete ramps. "No idea," he said.
   Susannah whistled disgustedly between her teeth. "This road's goin to hell, Roland. I was hoping we were done with that damn harness, but you better get it out again." He nodded and rummaged in his purse for it without a word.
   The condition of the Great Road deteriorated as other, smaller roads joined it like tributaries joining a great river. As they neared the bridge, the cobbles were replaced with a surface Roland thought of as metal and the rest of them thought of as asphalt or hot-top. It had not held up as well as the cobbles. Time had done some damage; the passage of count­less horses and wagons since the last repairs were made had done more. The surface had been chewed into treacherous rubble. Foot travel would be difficult, and the idea of pushing Susannah's wheelchair over that crumbled surface was ridiculous.
   The banks oh either side had grown steadily steeper, and now, at their tops, they could see slim, pointed shapes looming against the sky. Roland thought of arrowheads—huge ones, weapons made by a tribe of giants. To his companions, they looked like rockets or guided missiles. Susannah thought of Redstones fired from Cape Canaveral; Eddie thought about SAMs, some built to be fired from the backs of flatbed trucks, stored all over Europe; Jake thought of ICBMs hiding in rein­forced concrete silos under the plains of Kansas and the unpopulated mountains of Nevada, programmed to hit back at China or the USSR in the event of nuclear armageddon. All of them felt as if they had passed into a dark and woeful zone of shadow, or into a countryside laboring under some old but still powerful curse.
   Some hours after they entered this area— Jake called it The Gauntlet—the concrete embankments ended at a place where half a dozen access roads drew together, like the strands of a spiderweb, and here the land opened out again … a fact which relieved all of them, although none of them said so out loud. Another traffic-light swung over the junc­tion. This one was more familiar to Eddie, Susannah, and Jake; it had once had lenses on its four faces, although the glass had been broken out long ago.
   "I'll bet this road was the eighth wonder of the world, once upon a time," Susannah said, "and look at it now. It's a minefield."
   "Old ways are sometimes the best ways," Roland agreed.
   Eddie was pointing west. "Look."
   Now that the high concrete barriers were gone, they could see exactly what old Si had described to them over cups of bitter coffee in River Crossing. "One track only," he had said, "set up high on a colyum of man-made stone, such as the Old Ones used to make their streets and walls." The track raced toward them out of the west in a slim, straight line, then flowed across the Send and into the city on a narrow golden trestle. It was a simple, elegant construction—and the only one they had seen so far which was totally without rust—but it was badly marred, all the same. Halfway across, a large piece of the trestle had fallen into the rushing river below. What remained were two long, jutting piers that pointed at each other like accusing fingers. Jutting out of the water below the hole was a streamlined tube of metal. Once it had been bright blue, but now the color had been dimmed by spreading scales of rust. It looked very small from this distance.
   "So much for Blaine," Eddie said. "No wonder they stopped hearing it. The supports finally gave way while it was crossing the river and it fell in the drink. It must have been decelerating when it happened, or it would have carried straight across and all we'd see would be a big hole like a bomb-crater in the far bank. Well, it was a great idea while it lasted."
   "Mercy said there was another one," Susannah reminded him.
   "Yeah. She also said she hadn't heard it in seven or eight years, and Aunt Talitha said it was more like ten. What do you think, Jake... Jake? Earth to Jake, Earth to Jake, come in, little buddy."
   Jake, who had been staring intently at the remains of the train in the river, only shrugged.
   "You're a big help, Jake," Eddie said. "Valuable input—that's why I love you. Why we all love you."
   Jake paid no attention. He knew what he was seeing, and it wasn't Blaine . The remains of the mono sticking out of the river were blue. In his dream, Blaine had been the dusty, sugary pink of the bubblegum you got with baseball trading cards.
   Roland, meanwhile, had cinched the straps of Susannah's carry-har­ness across his chest. "Eddie, boost your lady into this contraption. It's time we moved on and saw for ourselves."
   Jake now shifted his gaze, looking nervously toward the bridge loom­ing ahead. He could hear a high, ghostly humming noise in the distance— the sound of the wind playing in the decayed steel hangers which con­nected the overhead cables to the concrete deck below.
   "Do you think it'll be safe to cross?" Jake asked.
   "We'll find out tomorrow," Roland replied.

 9
   THE NEXT MORNING, ROLAND'S band of travellers stood at the end of the long, rusty bridge, gazing across at Lud. Eddie's dreams of wise old elves who had preserved a working technology on which the pilgrims could draw were disappearing. Now that they were this close, he could see holes in the city-scape where whole blocks of buildings appeared to have been either burned or blasted. The skyline reminded him of a diseased jaw from which many teeth have already fallen.
   It was true that most of the buildings were still standing, but they had a dreary, disused look that filled Eddie with an uncharacteristic gloom, and the bridge between the travellers and that shuttered maze of steel and concrete looked anything but solid and eternal. The vertical hangers on the left sagged slackly; the ones remaining on the right almost screamed with tension. The deck had been constructed of hollow con­crete boxes shaped like trapezoids. Some of these had buckled upward, displaying empty black interiors; others had slipped askew. Many of these latter had merely cracked, but others were badly broken, leaving gaps big enough to drop trucks—big trucks—into. In places where the bottoms of the box-sections as well as the tops had shattered, they could see the muddy riverbank and the gray-green water of the Send beyond it. Eddie put the distance between the deck and the water as three hundred feet at the center of the bridge. And that was probably a conservative estimate.
   Eddie peered at the huge concrete caissons to which the main cables were anchored and thought the one on the right side of the bridge looked as if it had been pulled partway out of the earth. He decided he might do well not to mention this fact to the others; it was bad enough that the bridge was swaying slowly but perceptibly back and forth. Just looking at it made him feel seasick. "Well?" he asked Roland. "What do you think?"
   Roland pointed to the right side of the bridge. Here was a canted walkway about five feet wide. It had been constructed atop a series of smaller concrete boxes and was, in effect, a separate deck. This seg­mented deck appeared to be supported by an undercable—or perhaps it was a thick steel rod—anchored to the main support cables by huge bow-clamps. Eddie inspected the closest one with the avid interest of a man who may soon be entrusting his life to the object he is studying. The bow-clamp appeared rusty but still sound. The words LaMERK FOUNDRY had been stamped into its metal. Eddie was fascinated to realize he no longer knew if the words were in the High Speech or in English.
   "I think we can use that," Roland said. "There's only one bad place. Do you see it?"
   "Yeah—it's land of hard to miss."
   The bridge, which had to be at least three quarters of a mile long, might not have had any proper maintenance for over a thousand years, but Roland guessed that the real destruction might have been going on for only the last fifty or so. As the hangers on the right snapped, the bridge had listed farther and farther to the left. The greatest twist had occurred in the center of the bridge, between the two four-hundred-foot cable-towers. At the place where the pressure of the twist was the great­est, a gaping, eye-shaped hole ran across the deck. The break in the walkway was narrower, but even so, at least two adjoining concrete box-sections had fallen into the Send, leaving a gap at least twenty or thirty feet wide. Where these boxes had been, they could clearly see the rusty steel rod or cable which supported the walkway. They would have to use it to get across the gap.
   "I think we can cross," Roland said, calmly pointing. "The gap is inconvenient, but the side-rail is still there, so we'll have something to hold onto."
   Eddie nodded, but he could feel his heart pounding hard. The exposed walkway support looked like a big pipe made of jointed steel, and was probably four feet across at the top. In his mind's eye he could see how they would have to edge across, feet on the broad, slightly curved back of the support, hands clutching the rail, while the bridge swayed slowly like a ship in a mild swell.
   "Jesus," he said. He tried to spit, but nothing came out. His mouth was too dry. "You sure, Roland?"
   "So far as I can see, it's the only way." Roland pointed downriver and Eddie saw a second bridge. This one had fallen into the Send long ago. The remains stuck out of the water in a rusted tangle of ancient steel.
   “What about you, Jake?" Susannah asked.
   "Hey, no problem," Jake said at once. He was actually smiling.
   "I hate you, kid," Eddie said.
   Roland was looking at Eddie with some concern. "If you feel you can't do it, say so now. Don't get halfway across and then freeze up."
   Eddie looked along the twisted surface of the bridge for a long time, then nodded. "I guess I can handle it. Heights have never been my favorite thing, but I'll manage."
   "Good." Roland surveyed them. "Soonest begun, soonest done. I'll go first, with Susannah. Then Jake, and Eddie's drogue. Can you handle the wheelchair?"
   "Hey, no problem," Eddie said giddily.
   "Let's go, then."

10
   As SOON AS HE stepped onto the walkway, fear filled up Eddie's hollow places like cold water and he began to wonder if he hadn't made a very dangerous mistake. From solid ground, the bridge seemed to be swaying only a little, but once he was actually on it, he felt as if he were standing on the pendulum of the world's biggest grandfather clock. The movement was very slow, but it was regular, and the length of the swings was much longer than he had anticipated. The walkway's surface was badly cracked and canted at least ten degrees to the left. His feet gritted in loose piles of powdery concrete, and the low squealing sound of the box-segments grinding together was constant. Beyond the bridge, the city skyline tilted slowly back and forth like the artificial horizon of the world's slowest-moving video game.
   Overhead, the wind hummed constantly in the taut hangers. Below, the ground fell away sharply to the muddy northwest bank of the river. He was thirty feet up … then sixty... then a hundred and ten. Soon he would be over the water. The wheelchair banged against his left leg with every step.
   Something furry brushed between his feet and he clutched madly for the rusty handrail with his right hand, barely holding in a scream. Oy went trotting past him with a brief upward glance, as if to say Excuse me—-just passing.
   "Fucking dumb animal," Eddie said through gritted teeth.
   He discovered that, although he didn't like looking down, he had an even greater aversion to looking at the hangers which were still managing to hold the deck and the overhead cables together. They were sleeved with rust and Eddie could see snarls of metal thread poking out of most—these snarls looked like metallic puffs of cotton. He knew from his Uncle Reg, who had worked on both the George Washington and Triborough bridges as a painter, that the hangers and overhead cables were "spun" from thousands of steel threads. On this bridge, the spin was finally letting go. The hangers were quite literally becoming unravelled, and as they did, the threads were snapping, one interwoven strand at a time.
   It's held this long, it'll hold a little longer. You think this thing's going to fall into the river just because you're crossing it? Don't flatter yourself.
   He wasn't comforted, however. For all Eddie knew, they might be the first people to attempt the crossing in decades. And the bridge, after all, would have to collapse sometime, and from the look of things, it was going to be soon. Their combined weight might be the straw that broke the camel's back.
   His moccasin struck a chunk of concrete and Eddie watched, sick­ened but helpless to look away, as the chunk fell down and down and down, turning over as it went. There was a small—very small—splash when it hit the river. The freshening wind gusted and stuck his shirt against his sweaty skin. The bridge groaned and swayed. Eddie tried to remove his hands from the side-rail, but they seemed frozen to the pitted metal in a deathgrip.
   He closed his eyes for a moment. You're not going to freeze. You're not. I … I forbid it. If you need something to look at, make it long tall and ugly. Eddie opened his eyes again, fixed them on the gunslinger, forced his hands to open, and began to move forward again.

   

11
   ROLAND REACHED THE GAP and looked back. Jake was five feet behind him. Oy was at his heels. The bumbler was crouched down with his neck stretched forward. The wind was much stronger over the river-cut, and Roland could see it rippling Oy's silky fur. Eddie was about twenty-five feet behind Jake. His face was tightly drawn, but he was still shuffling grimly along with Susannah's collapsed wheelchair in his left hand. His right was clutching the rail like grim death.
   "Susannah?"
   "Yes," she responded at once. "Fine."
   "Jake?"
   Jake looked up. He was still grinning, and the gunslinger saw there was going to be no problem there. The boy was having the time of his life. His hair blew back from his finely made brow in waves, and his eyes sparkled. He jerked one thumb up. Roland smiled and returned the gesture.
   "Eddie?"
   "Don't worry about me."
   Eddie appeared to be looking at Roland, but the gunslinger decided he was really looking past him, at the windowless brick buildings which crowded the riverbank at the far end of the bridge. That was all right; given his obvious fear of heights, it was probably the best thing he could do to keep his head.
   "All right, I won't," Roland murmured. "We're going to cross the hole now, Susannah. Sit easy. No quick movements. Understand?"
   "Yes."
   "If you want to adjust your position, do it now."
   "I'm fine, Roland," she said calmly. "I just hope Eddie will be all right."
   "Eddie's a gunslinger now. He'll behave like one."
   Roland turned to the right, so he was facing directly downriver, and grasped the handrail. Then he began to edge out across the hole, shuffling his boots along the rusty cable.