He’s what the old woman called a Pube. She said both sides would want him.
You won’t let me drop this time?
No. Not this time, not ever again.
But he knew something none of the others did. Perhaps, after the talk he’d just had with Eddie, he should tell them . . . yet he thought he would keep the knowledge to himself a little while longer.
In the old tongue which had once been his world’s lingua franca, most words, like khef and ka, had many meanings. The word char, however— char as in Charlie the Choo-Choo—had only one.
Char meant death.
V BRIDGE AND CITY
V
BRIDGE AND CITY
1
THEY CAME UPON THE downed airplane three days later.
Jake pointed it out first at midmorning—a flash of light about ten miles away, as if a mirror lay in the grass. As they drew closer, they saw a large dark object at the side of the Great Road.
“It looks like a dead bird,” Roland said. “A big one.”
“That’s no bird,” Eddie said. “That’s an airplane. I’m pretty sure the glare is sunlight bouncing off the canopy.”
An hour later they stood silently at the edge of the road, looking at the ancient wreck. Three plump crows stood on the tattered skin of the fuselage, staring insolently at the newcomers. Jake pried a cobble from the edge of the road and shied it at them. The crows lumbered into the air, cawing indignantly.
One wing had broken off in the crash and lay thirty yards away, a shadow like a diving board in the tall grass. The rest of the plane was pretty much intact. The canopy had cracked in a starburst pattern where the pilot’s head had struck it. There was a large, rust-colored stain there.
Oy trotted over to where three rusty propeller blades rose from the grass, sniffed at them, then returned hastily to Jake.
The man in the cockpit was a dust-dry mummy wearing a padded leather vest and a helmet with a spike on top. His lips were gone, his teeth exposed in a final desperate grimace. Fingers which had once been as large as sausages but were now only skin-covered bones clutched the wheel. His skull was caved in where it had hit the canopy, and Roland guessed that the greenish-gray scales which coated the left side of his face were all that remained of his brains. The dead man’s head was tilted back, as if he had been sure, even at the moment of his death, that he could regain the sky again. The plane’s remaining wing still jutted from the encroaching grass. On it was a fading insignia which depicted a fist holding a thunderbolt.
“Looks like Aunt Talitha was wrong and the old albino man had the right of it, after all,” Susannah said in an awed voice. “That must be David Quick, the outlaw prince. Look at the size of him, Roland—they must have had to grease him to get him into the cockpit!”
Roland nodded. The heat and the years had wasted the man in the mechanical bird to no more than a skeleton wrapped in dry hide, but he could still see how broad the shoulders had been, and the misshapen head was massive. “So fell Lord Perth,” he said, “and the countryside did shake with that thunder.”
Jake looked at him questioningly.
“It’s from an old poem. Lord Perth was a giant who went forth to war with a thousand men, but he was still in his own country when a little boy threw a stone at him and hit him in the knee. He stumbled, the weight of his armor bore him down, and he broke his neck in the fall.”
Jake said, “Like our story of David and Goliath.”
“There was no fire,” Eddie said. “I bet he just ran out of gas and tried a dead-stick landing on the road. He might have been an outlaw and a barbarian, but he had a yard of guts.”
Roland nodded, and looked at Jake. “You all right with this?”
“Yes. If the guy was still, you know, runny, I might not be.” Jake looked from the dead man in the airplane to the city. Lud was much closer and clearer now, and although they could see many broken windows in the towers, he, like Eddie, had not entirely given up hope of finding some sort of help there. “I bet things sort of fell apart in the city once he was gone.”
“I think you’d win that bet,” Roland said.
“You know something?” Jake was studying the plane again.