I think they were both right . . . but I think my father had a little more of the truth. I could always haul a gun faster than any of my mates, and shoot straighter, but I’ve never been much good at thinking around corners.”
Susannah, who had watched closely as Roland dealt with the old people of River Crossing, thought the gunslinger was underrating himself, but she said nothing.
“Sometimes, on winter nights, there would be riddling competitions in the great hall. When it was just the younkers, Alain always won. When the grownups played as well, it was always Cort. He’d forgotten more riddles 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