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
