him, aye. Bucky's not got but eighty acre, yet he's trig."
Roland thought, They still don't see.
"Thank you," he said. "What lies directly ahead for us comes down to looking and listening, mostly. When
it's done, we'll ask that whoever is in charge of the feather take it around so that a meeting can be called. At
that meeting, we'll tell you if the town can be defended and how many men we'll want to help us, if it can be
done."
Roland saw Overholser puffing up to speak and shook his head at him.
"It won't be many we'd want, in any case," he said. "We're gunslingers, not an army. We think differently, act
differently, than armies do. We might ask for as many as five to stand with us. Probably fewer—only two or
three. But we might need more to help us prepare."
"Why?" Benny asked.
Roland smiled. "That I can't say yet, son, because I haven't seen how things are in your Calla. But in cases
like this, surprise is always the most potent weapon, and it usually takes many people to prepare a good
surprise."
"The greatest surprise to the Wolves," Tian said, "would be if we fought at all."
"Suppose you decide the Calla can't be defended?" Over-holser asked. "Tell me that, I beg."
"Then I and my friends will thank you for your hospitality and ride on," Roland said, "for we have our own
business farther along the Path of the Beam." He observed Tian's and Zalia's crestfallen faces for a moment,
then said: "I don't think that's likely, you know. There's usually a way."
"May the meeting receive your judgment favorably," Over-holser said.
Roland hesitated. This was the point where he could hammer the truth home, should he want to. If these
people still believed a tet of gunslingers would be bound by what farmers and ranchers decided in a public
meeting, they really had lost the shape of the world as it once was. But was that so bad? In the end, matters
would play out and become part of his long history. Or not. If not, he would finish his history and his quest in
Calla Bryn Sturgis, moldering beneath a stone. Perhaps not even that; perhaps he'd finish in a dead heap
somewhere east of town, he and his friends with him, so much rotting meat to be picked over by the crows
and the rusties. Ka would tell. It always did.
Meanwhile, they were looking at him.
Roland stood up, wincing at a hard flare of pain in his right hip as he did so. Taking their cues from him,
Eddie, Susannah, and Jake also got to their feet.
"We're well-met," Roland said. "As for what lies ahead, there will be water if God wills it."
Callahan said, "Amen."
Contents -Prev / Next
Chapter VII: Todash
ONE
"Gray horses," Eddie said.
"Aye," Roland agreed.
"Fifty or sixty of them, all on gray horses."
"Aye, so they did say."
"And didn't think it the least bit strange," Eddie mused.
"No. They didn't seem to."
"Is it?"
"Fifty or sixty horses, all the same color? I'd say so, yes."
"These Calla-folk raise horses themselves."
"Aye."
"Brought some for us to ride." Eddie, who had never ridden a horse in his life, was grateful that at least had
been put off, but didn't say so.
"Aye, tethered over the hill."
"You know that for a fact?"
"Smelled em. I imagine the robot had the keeping of them."
"Why would these folks take fifty or sixty horses, all the same shade, as a matter of course?"
"Because they don't really think about the Wolves or anything to do with them," Roland said. "They're too
busy being afraid, I think."
Eddie whistled five notes that didn't quite make a melody. Then he said, "Gray horses."
Roland nodded. "Gray horses."
They looked at each other for a moment, then laughed. Eddie loved it when Roland laughed. The sound was
dry, as ugly as the calls of those giant blackbirds he called rusties… but he loved it. Maybe it was just that
Roland laughed so seldom.
It was late afternoon. Overhead, the clouds had thinned enough to turn a pallid blue that was almost the color
of sky. The Overholser party had returned to their camp. Susannah and Jake had gone back along the forest
road to pick more muffin-balls. After the big meal they'd packed away, none of them wanted anything
heavier. Eddie sat on a log, whittling. Beside him sat Roland, with all their guns broken down and spread out
before him on a piece of deerskin. He oiled the pieces one by one, holding each bolt and cylinder and barrel
up to the daylight for a final look before setting it aside for reassembly.
"You told them it was out of their hands," Eddie said, "but they didn't ken that any more than they did the
business about all those gray horses. And you didn't press it."
"Only would have distressed them," Roland said. "There was a saying in Gilead: Let evil wait for the day on
which it must fall."
"Uh-huh," Eddie said. "There was a saying in Brooklyn: You can't get snot off a suede jacket." He held up the
object he was making. It would be a top, Roland thought, a toy for a baby. And again he wondered how much
Eddie might know about the woman he lay down with each night. The women. Not on the top of his mind,
but underneath. "If you decide we can help them, then we have to help them. That's what Eld's Way really
boils down to, doesn't it?"
"Yes," Roland said.
"And if we can't get any of them to stand with us, we stand alone."
"Oh, I'm not worried about that," Roland said. He had a saucer filled with light, sweet gun-oil. Now he
dipped the corner of a chamois rag into it, picked up the spring-clip of Jake's Ruger, and began to clean it.
"Tian Jaffords would stand with us, come to that. Surely he has a friend or two who'd do the same regardless
of what their meeting decides. In a pinch, there's his wife."
"And if we get them both killed, what about their kids? They have five. Also, I think there's an old guy in the
picture. One of em's Grampy. They probably take care of him, too."
Roland shrugged. A few months ago, Eddie would have mistaken that gesture—and the gunslinger's
expressionless face— for indifference. Now he knew better. Roland was as much a prisoner of his rules and
traditions as Eddie had ever been of heroin.
"What if we get killed in this little town, screwing around with these Wolves?" Eddie asked. "Isn't your last
thought gonna be something like, 'I can't believe what a putz I was, throwing away my chance to get to the
Dark Tower in order to take up for a bunch of snotnose brats.' Or similar sentiments."
"Unless we stand true, we'll never get within a thousand miles of the Tower," Roland said. "Would you tell
me you don't feel that?"
Eddie couldn't, because he did. He felt something else, as well: a species of bloodthirsty eagerness. He
actually wanted to fight again. Wanted to have a few of these Wolves, whatever they were, in the sights of
one of Roland's big revolvers. There was no sense kidding himself about the truth: he wanted to take a few
scalps.
Or wolf-masks.
"What's really troubling you, Eddie? I'd have you speak while it's just you and me." The gunslinger's mouth
quirked in a thin, slanted smile. "Do ya, I beg."
"Shows, huh?"
Roland shrugged and waited.
Eddie considered the question. It was a big question. Facing it made him feel desperate and inadequate,
pretty much the way he'd felt when faced with the task of carving the key that would letjake Chambers
through into their world. Only then he'd had the ghost of his big brother to blame, Henry whispering deep
down in his head that he was no good, never had been, never would be. Now it was just the enormity of what
Roland was asking. Because everything was troubling him, everything was wrong. Everything. Or maybe
wrong was the wrong word, and by a hundred and eighty degrees. Because in another way things seemed too
right, too perfect, too…
"Arrrggghh," Eddie said. He grabbed bunches of hair on both sides of his head and pulled. "I can't think of a
way to say it."
"Then say the first thing that comes into your mind. Don't hesitate."
"Nineteen," Eddie said. "This whole deal has gone nineteen."
He fell backward onto the fragrant forest floor, covered his eyes, and kicked his feet like a kid doing a
tantrum. He thought: Maybe killing a few Wolves will set me right. Maybe that's all it will take.
TWO
Roland gave him a full minute by count and then said, "Do you feel better?"
Eddie sat up. "Actually I do."
Roland nodded, smiling a little. "Then can you say more? If you can't, we'll let it go, but I've come to respect
your feelings, Eddie—far more than you realize—and if you'd speak, I'd hear."
What he said was true. The gunslinger's initial feelings for Eddie had wavered between caution and contempt
for what Roland saw as his weakness of character. Respect had come more slowly. It had begun in Balazar's
office, when Eddie had fought naked. Very few men Roland had known could have done that. It had grown
with his realization of how much Eddie was like Cuthbert. Then, on the mono, Eddie had acted with a kind of
desperate creativity that Roland could admire but never equal. Eddie Dean was possessed of Cuthbert
Allgood's always puzzling and sometimes annoying sense of the ridiculous; he was also possessed of Alain
Johns's deep flashes of intuition. Yet in the end, Eddie was like neither of Roland's old friends. He was
sometimes weak and self-centered, but possessed of deep reservoirs of courage and courage's good sister,
what Eddie himself sometimes called "heart."
But it was his intuition Roland wanted to tap now.
"All right, then," Eddie said. "Don't stop me. Don't ask questions. Just listen."
Roland nodded. And hoped Susannah and Jake wouldn't come back, at least not just yet.
"I look in the sky—up there where the clouds are breaking right this minute—and I see the number nineteen
written in blue."
Roland looked up. And yes, it was there. He saw it, too. But he also saw a cloud like a turtle, and another
hole in the thinning dreck that looked like a gunnywagon.
"I look in the trees and see nineteen. Into the fire, see nineteen. Names make nineteen, like Overholser's and
Callahan's. But that's just what I can say, what I can see, what I can get hold of." Eddie was speaking with
desperate speed, looking directly into Roland's eyes. "Here's another thing. It has to do with todash. I know
you guys sometimes think everything reminds me of getting high, and maybe that's right, but Roland, going
todash is like being stoned."
Eddie always spoke to him of these things as if Roland had never put anything stronger than graf into his
brain and body in all his long life, and that was far from the truth. He might remind Eddie of this at another
time, but not now.
"Just being here in your world is like going todash. Because… ah, man, this is hard… Roland, everything
here is real, but it's not."
Roland thought of reminding Eddie this wasn't his world, not anymore—for him the city of Lud had been the
end of Mid-World and the beginning of all the mysteries that lay beyond— but again kept his mouth closed.
Eddie grasped a handful of duff, scooping up fragrant needles and leaving five black marks in the shape of a
hand on the forest floor. "Real," he said. "I can feel it and smell it." He put the handful of needles to his
mouth and ran out his tongue to touch them. "I can taste it. And at the same time, it's as unreal as a nineteen
you might see in the fire, or that cloud in the sky that looks like a turtle. Do you understand what I'm
saying?"
"I understand it very well," Roland murmured.
"The people are real. You… Susannah…Jake… that guy Gasher who snatched Jake… Overholser and the
Slightmans.
"But the way stuff from my world keeps showing up over here, that's not real. It's not sensible or logical,
either, but that's not what I mean. It's just not real Why do people over here sing 'Hey Jude'? I don't know.
That cyborg bear, Shardik—where do I know that name from? Why did it remind me of rabbits? All that shit
about the Wizard of Oz, Roland—all that happened to us, I have no doubt of it, but at the same time it doesn't
seem real to me. It seems like todash. Like nineteen. And what happens after the Green Palace? Why, we
walk into the woods, just like Hansel and Gretel. There's a road for us to walk on. Muffin-balls for us to pick.
Civilization has ended. Everything is coming unraveled. You told us so. We saw it in Lud. Except guess
what? It's not! Booya, assholes, gotcha again!"
Eddie gave a short laugh. It sounded shrill and unhealthy. When he brushed his hair back from his forehead,
he left a dark smear of forest earth on his brow.
"The joke is that, out here a billion miles from nowhere, we come upon a storybook town. Civilized. Decent.
The kind of folks you feel you know. Maybe you don't like em all—Overholser's a little hard to swallow—
but you feel you know em."
Eddie was right about that, too, Roland thought. He hadn't even seen Calla Bryn Sturgis yet, and already it
reminded him of Mejis. In some ways that seemed perfectly reasonable— farming and ranching towns the
world over bore similarities to each other—but in other ways it was disturbing. Disturbing as hell. The
