give it a bite. I knew an old groom once who said a good bumbler is good luck. This looks like a good one.”
“Yes,” Jake agreed. “It does.”
“Once they were tame, and every barony had half a dozen roaming around the castle or manor-house. They weren’t good for much except amusing the children and keeping the rat population down. They can be quite faithful—or were in the old days—although I never heard of one that would remain as loyal as a good dog. The wild ones are scavengers. Not dangerous, but a pain in the ass.”
“Ass!” cried the bumbler. Its anxious eyes continued to flick back and forth between Jake and the gunslinger.
Jake reached into his pack, slowly, afraid to startle the creature, and drew out the remains of a gunslinger burrito. He tossed it toward the billy-bumbler. The bumbler flinched back and then turned with a small, childlike cry, exposing its furry corkscrew tail. Jake felt sure it would run, but it stopped, looking doubtfully back over its shoulder.
“Come on,” Jake said. “Eat it, boy.”
“Oy,” the bumbler muttered, but it didn’t move.
“Give it time,” Roland said. “It’ll come, I think.”
The bumbler stretched forward, revealing a long and surprisingly graceful neck. Its slender black nose twitched as it sniffed the food. At last it trotted forward, and Jake noticed it was limping a little. The bumbler sniffed the burrito, then used one paw to separate the chunk of deermeat from the leaf. It carried out this operation with a delicacy that was oddly solemn. Once the meat was clear of the leaf, the bumbler wolfed it in a single bite, then looked up at Jake. “Oy!” it said, and when Jake laughed, it shrank away again.
“That’s a skinny one,” Eddie said sleepily from behind them. At the sound of his voice, the bumbler immediately turned and was gone into the mist.
“You scared it away!” Jake accused.
“Jeez, I’m sorry,” Eddie said. He ran a hand through his sleep-corkscrewed hair. “If I’d known it was one of your close personal friends, Jake, I would have dragged out the goddam coffee-cake.”
Roland clapped Jake briefly on the shoulder. “It’ll be back.”
Before Jake could reply, the sound of the drums began again. This was the third morning they had heard them, and twice the sound had come to them as afternoon slipped down toward evening: a faint, toneless thudding from the direction of the city. The sound was clearer this morning, if no more comprehensible. Jake hated it. It was as if, somewhere out in that thick and featureless blanket of morning mist, the heart of some big animal was beating.
“You still don’t have any idea what that is, Roland?” Susannah asked. She had slipped on her shift, tied back her hair, and was now folding the blankets beneath which she and Eddie had slept.
“No. But I’m sure we’ll find out.”
“How reassuring,” Eddie said sourly.
Roland got to his feet. “Come on. Let’s not waste the day.”
2
THE FOG BEGAN TO unravel after they had been on the road for an hour or so. They took turns pushing Susannah’s chair, and it jolted unhappily along, for the road was now mined with large, rough cobblestones. By midmorning the day was fair, hot, and cloudless; the city skyline stood out clearly on the southeastern horizon. To Jake it didn’t look much different from the skyline of New York, although he thought these buildings might not be as high. If the place had fallen apart, as most things in Roland’s world apparently had, you certainly couldn’t tell it from here. Like Eddie, Jake had begun to entertain the unspoken hope that they might find help there . . . or at least a good hot meal.
To their left, thirty or forty miles away, they could see the broad sweep of the Send River. Birds circled above it in large flocks. Every now and then one would fold its wings and drop like a stone, probably on a fishing expedition. The road and the river were moving slowly toward one another, although the junction point could not yet be seen.
They could see more buildings ahead. Most looked like farms, and all appeared deserted. Some of them had fallen down, but these wrecks seemed to be the work of time rather than violence, furthering Eddie’s and Jake’s hopes of what they might find in the city—hopes each had kept strictly within himself, lest the others scoff. Small herds of