“The people who built that city might have made their own airplanes, but I’m pretty sure this is one of ours. I did a school paper on air combat when I was in the fifth grade, and I think I recognize it. Roland, can I take a closer look?”
Roland nodded. “I’ll go with you.”
Together they walked over to the plane with the high grass swishing at their pants. “Look,” Jake said. “See the machine-gun under the wing? That’s an air-cooled German model, and this is a Focke-Wulf from just before World War II. I’m sure it is. So what’s it doing here?”
“Lots of planes disappear,” Eddie said. “Take the Bermuda Triangle, for instance. That’s a place over one of our oceans, Roland. It’s supposed to be jinxed. Maybe it’s a great big doorway between our worlds—one that’s almost always open.” Eddie hunched his shoulders and essayed a bad Rod Serling imitation. “Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for turbulence: you’re flying into . . . the Roland Zone!”
Jake and Roland, who were now standing beneath the plane’s remaining wing, ignored him.
“Boost me up, Roland.”
Roland shook his head. “That wing looks solid, but it’s not—this thing has been here a long time, Jake. You’d fall.”
“Make a step, then.”
Eddie said, “I’ll do it, Roland.”
Roland studied his diminished right hand for a moment, shrugged, then laced his hands together. “This’ll do. He’s light.”
Jake shook off his moccasin and then stepped lightly into the stirrup Roland had made. Oy began to bark shrilly, though whether in excitement or alarm, Roland couldn’t tell.
Jake’s chest was now pressing against one of the airplane’s rusty flaps, and he was looking right at the fist-and-thunderbolt design. It had peeled up a little from the surface of the wing along one edge. He seized this flap and pulled. It came off the wing so easily that he would have fallen backward if Eddie, standing directly behind him, hadn’t steadied him with a hand on the butt.
“I knew it,” Jake said. There was another symbol beneath the fist-and-thunderbolt, and now it was almost totally revealed. It was a swastika. “I just wanted to see it. You can put me down now.”
They started out again, but they could see the tail of the plane every time they looked back that afternoon, looming out of the high grass like Lord Perth’s burial monument.
2
IT WAS JAKE’S TURN to make the fire that night. When the wood was laid to the gunslinger’s satisfaction, he handed Jake his flint and steel. “Let’s see how you do.”
Eddie and Susannah were sitting off to one side, their arms linked companionably about each other’s waist. Toward the end of the day, Eddie had found a bright yellow flower beside the road and had picked it for her. Tonight Susannah was wearing it in her hair, and every time she looked at Eddie, her lips curved in a small smile and her eyes filled with light. Roland had noted these things, and they pleased him. Their love was deepening, strengthening. That was good. It would have to be deep and strong indeed if it was to survive the months and years ahead.
Jake struck a spark, but it flashed inches away from the kindling.
“Move your flint in closer,” Roland said, “and hold it steady. And don’t hit it with the steel, Jake; scrape it.”
Jake tried again, and this time the spark flashed directly into the kindling. There was a little tendril of smoke but no fire.
“I don’t think I’m very good at this.”
“You’ll get it. Meantime, think on this. What’s dressed when night falls and undressed when day breaks?”
“Huh?”
Roland moved Jake’s hands even closer to the little pile of kindling. “I guess that one’s not in your book.”
“Oh, it’s a riddle!” Jake struck another spark. This time a small flame glowed in the kindling before dying out. “You know some of those, too?”
Roland nodded. “Not just some—a lot. As a boy, I must have known a thousand. They were part of my studies.”
“Really? Why would anyone study riddles?”
“Vannay, my tutor, said a boy who could answer a riddle was a boy who could think around corners. We had riddling contests every Friday noon, and the boy or girl who won could leave school early.”
“Did you get to leave early often, Roland?” Susannah asked.
He shook his head, smiling a little himself. “I enjoyed riddling, but I was never very good at it. Vannay said it was because I thought too deeply. My father said it was because I had too little imagination.