mounts and then tumbled it off the side. While he worked and Susannah did what Daddy Mose would have called the heavy looking-on, Oy sat forty paces outside the arch through which they had exited, clearly on guard against the thing that had followed them in the dark.
“No more than fifteen pounds,” Roland said, wiping his hands on his jeans and looking at the tumbled motor, “but I reckon I’ll be glad we got rid of it by the time we’re done with this thing.”
“When do we start?” she asked.
“As soon as we’ve loaded as much canned stuff into the back as I think I can carry,” he said, and fetched a heavy sigh. His face was pale and stubbly. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, new lines carving his cheeks and descending to his jaw from the corners of his mouth. He looked as thin as a whip.
“Roland, you can’t! Not so soon! You’re done up!”
He gestured at Oy, sitting so patiently, and at the maw of darkness forty paces beyond him. “Do you want to be this close to that hole when dark comes?”
“We can build a fire-”
“It may have friends,” he said, “that aren’t shy of fire. While we were in yonder shaft, that thing wouldn’t have wanted to share us because it didn’t think it had to share. Now it might not care, especially if it’s vengeance-minded.”
“A thing like that can’t think. Surely not.” This was easier to believe now that they were out. But she knew she might change her mind once the shadows began to grow long and pool together.
“I don’t think it’s a chance we can afford to take,” Roland said.
She decided, very reluctandy, that he was right.
FOUR
Luckily for them, this first stretch of the narrow path winding into the Badlands was mosdy level, and when they did come to an uphill stretch, Roland made no objection to Susannah’s getting out and hopping gamely along behind what she had dubbed Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi until they reached die crest of die hill. Little by litde, Castle Discordia fell behind them. Roland kept going after the rocks had blocked the blasted tower from their view, but when the odier one was gone as well, he pointed to a stony bower beside the path and said, “That’s where we’ll camp tonight, unless you have objections.”
She had none. They’d brought along enough bones and khaki rags to make a fire, but Susannah knew the fuel wouldn’t last long. The bits of clodi would burn as rapidly as newspaper and the bones would be gone before the hands of Roland’s fancy new watch (which he had shown her with something like reverence) stood together at midnight. And tomorrow night there would likely be no fire at all and cold food eaten directly from the cans. She was aware that things could have been ever so much worse-she put the daytime temperature at forty-five degrees, give or take, and they did have food-but she would have given a great deal for a sweater; even more for a pair of longjohns.
“Probably we’ll find more stuff we can use for fuel as we go along,” she said hopefully once the fire was lit (the burning bones gave off a nasty smell, and they were careful to sit downwind)
“Weeds… bushes… more bones… maybe even deadwood.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not on this side of the Crimson King’s castle. Not even devilgrass, which grows damned near anywhere in Mid- World.”
“You don’t know that. Not for sure.” She couldn’t bear thinking about days and days of unvarying chill, with the two of them dressed for nothing more challenging than a spring day in Central Park.
“I think he murdered this land when he darkened Thunderclap,”
Roland mused. “It probably wasn’t much of a shake to begin with, and it’s sterile now. But count your blessings.” He reached over and touched a pimple that had popped out of her skin beside her full lower lip. “A hundred years ago this might have darkened and spread and eaten your skin right off your bones. Gotten into your brain and run you mad before you died.”
“Cancer? Radiation?”
Roland shrugged as if to say it didn’t matter. “Somewhere beyond the Crimson King’s castle we may come to grasslands and even forests again, but the grass will likely be buried under snow when we get there, for the season’s wrong. I can feel it in the air, see it in the way the day’s darkening so quickly.”
She groaned, striving for comic effect, but what came out was a sound of fear and weariness so real that it frightened her.
Oy pricked up his ears and looked around at them. “Why don’t you cheer me up a little, Roland?”
“You need to know the truth,” he said. “We can get on as we are for a good long while, Susannah, but it isn’t going to be pleasant. We have food enough in yonder cart to keep us for a month or more, if we stretch it out… and we will. When we come again to land that’s alive, we’ll find animals even if there is snow. And that’s what I want. Not because we’ll be hungry for fresh meat by then, although we will be, but because we’ll need the hides. I hope we won’t need them desperately, that it won’t be that near a thing, but-”
“But you’re afraid it will.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid it will. For over a long period of time there’s little in life so disheartening as constant cold-not deep enough to kill, mayhap, but always there, stealing your energy and your will and your body-fat, an ounce at a time. I’m afraid we’re in for a very hard stretch. You’ll see.”
“She did.
FIVE
There’s little in life that’s so disheartening as constant cold.
The days weren’t so bad. They were on the move, at least, exercising and keeping their blood up. Yet even during the days she began to dread the open areas they sometimes came to, where the wind howled across miles of broken bushless rock and between the occasional butte or mesa. These stuck up into the unvarying blue sky like the red fingers of otherwise buried stone giants. The wind seemed to grow ever sharper as they trudged below the milky swirls of cloud moving along the Path of the Beam. She would hold her chapped hands up to shield her face from it, hating the way her fingers would never go completely numb but instead turned into dazed things full of buried buzzings. Her eyes would well up with water, and then the tears would gush down her cheeks. These tear-tracks never froze; the cold wasn’t that bad. It was just deep enough to make their lives a slowly escalating misery. For what pittance would she have sold her immortal soul during those unpleasant days and horrible nights? Sometimes she thought a single sweater would have purchased it; at other times she thought No, honey, you got too much self-respect, even now. Would you be willing to spend an eternity in hell-or maybe in the todash darkness-for a single sweater? Surely not!
Well, maybe not. But if the devil tempting her were to throw in a pair of earmuffs-
And it would have taken so little, really, to make them comfortable.
She thought of this constantly. They had the food, and they had water, too, because at fifteen-mile intervals along the path they came to pumps that still worked, pulling great cold gushes of mineral-tasting water from deep under the Badlands.
Badlands. She had hours and days and, ultimately, weeks to meditate on that word. What made lands bad? Poisoned water?
The water out here wasn’t sweet, not by any means, but it wasn’t poisoned, either. Lack of food? They had food, although she guessed it might become a problem later on, if they didn’t find more. In the meantime she was getting almighty tired of corned beef hash, not to mention raisins for breakfast and raisins if you wanted dessert. Yet it was food. Body-gasoline. What made the Badlands bad when you had food and water? Watching the sky turn first gold and then russet in the west; watching it turn purple and then starshot black in the east. She watched the days end with increasing dread: the thought of another endless night, the three of them huddled together while the wind whined and twined its way through the rocks and the stars glared down. Endless stretches of cold purgatory while your feet and fingers buzzed and you thought If I only had a sweater and a pair of gloves, I could be comfortable. That’s all it would take, just a sweater and a pair of gloves. Because it’s really not that cold.
Exactly how cold did it get after sundown? Never below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, she knew, because the water she put out for Oy never froze solid. She guessed that the temperature dropped to around forty in the hours between midnight and dawn; on a couple of nights it might have fallen into the thirties, because she saw tiny spicules of ice around the edge of the pot that served Oy as a dish.
She began to eye his fur coat. At first she told herself this was nothing but a speculative exercise, a way of passing the time-exactly how hot did the bumbler’s metabolism run, and exactly how warm did that coat (that thick, luxuriantly thick, that amazingly thick coat) keep him? Little by little she recognized her feelings for what they were: jealousy that muttered in Detta’s voice. L’il buggah doanfeel no pain after the sun go down, do he? No, not him! You reckon you could git two sets o’ mittens outta that hide’?
She would thrust these thoughts away, miserable and horrified, wondering if there was any lower limit to the human spirit at its nasty, calculating, self-serving worst, not wanting to know.
Deeper and deeper that cold worked into them, day by day and night by night. It was like a splinter. They would sleep huddled together with Oy between them, then turn so the sides of them that had been facing the night were turned inward again.
Real restorative sleep never lasted long, no matter how tired they were. When the moon began to wax, brightening the dark, they spent two weeks walking at night and sleeping in the daytime.
That was a little better.
The only wildlife they saw were large black birds either flying against the southeastern horizon or gathered in a sort of convention atop the mesas. If the wind was right, Roland and Susannah could hear their shrill, gabby conversation.
“You think those things’d be any good to eat?” Susannah asked the gunslinger once. The moon was almost gone and they had reverted to traveling during the daytime so they could see any potential hazards (on several occasions deep crevasses had crossed the path, and once they came upon a sinkhole that appeared to be bottomless).
“What do you think?” Roland asked her.
“Prob’ly not, but I wouldn’t mind tryin one and finding out.” She paused. “What do you reckon they live on?”
Roland only shook his head. Here the path wound through a fantastic petrified garden of needle-sharp rock formations.
