although it would have been the most natural thing in the world for him to have done so.
“Leave him alone,” Jake said, and wrapped the encircling arm more tightly about Oy’s body. “It wasn’t his fault. It was my fault for forgetting him. The wind blew him off.”
“I’m not going to hurt him,” Roland said. He was positive the billy-bumbler wasn’t rabid, but he still did not intend for Oy to taste any more of Jake’s blood than he already had. As for any other diseases Oy might be carrying in his blood . . . well, ka would decide, as, in the end, it always did. Roland pulled his neckerchief free and wiped Oy’s lips and muzzle. “There,” he said. “Good fellow. Good boy.”
“Oy,” the billy-bumbler said feebly, and Susannah, who was watching over Roland’s shoulder, could have sworn she heard gratitude in that voice.
Another gust of wind struck them. The weather was turning dirty, and fast. “Eddie, we have to get off the bridge. Can you walk?”
“No, massa; I’sa gwinter shuffle.” The pain in his groin and the pit of his stomach was still bad, but not quite so bad as it had been a minute ago.
“All right. Let’s move. Fast as we can.”
Roland turned, began to take a step, and stopped. A man was now standing on the far side of the gap, watching them expressionlessly.
The newcomer had approached while their attention was focused on Jake and Oy. A crossbow was slung across his back. He wore a bright yellow scarf around his head; the ends streamed out like banners in the freshening wind. Gold hoops with crosses in their centers dangled from his ears. One eye was covered with a white silk patch. His face was blotched with purple sores, some of them open and festering. He might have been thirty, forty, or sixty. He held one hand high over his head. In it was something Roland could not make out, except that its shape was too regular to be a stone.
Behind this apparition, the city loomed with a kind of weird clarity in the darkening day. As Eddie looked past the huddles of brick buildings on the other shore—warehouses long since scooped empty by looters, he had no doubt—and into those shadowy canyons and stone mazes, he understood for the first time how terribly mistaken, how terribly foolish, his dreams of hope and help had been. Now he saw the shattered facades and broken roofs; now he saw the shaggy birds’ nests on cornices and in glassless, gaping windows; now he allowed himself to actually smell the city, and that odor was not of fabulous spices and savory foods of the sort his mother had sometimes brought home from Zabar’s but rather the stink of a mattress that has caught fire, smouldered awhile, and then been put out with sewer-water. He suddenly understood Lud, understood it completely. The grinning pirate who had appeared while their attention was elsewhere was probably as close to a wise old elf as this broken, dying place could provide.
Roland pulled his revolver.
“Put it away, my cully,” the man in the yellow scarf said in an accent so thick that the sense of his words was almost lost. “Put it away, my dear heart. Ye’re a fierce trim, ay, that’s clear, but this time you’re outmatched.”
14
THE NEWCOMER’S PANTS WERE patched green velvet, and as he stood on the edge of the hole in the bridge, he looked like a buccaneer at the end of his days of plunder: sick, ragged, and still dangerous.
“Suppose I choose not to?” Roland asked. “Suppose I choose to simply put a bullet through your scrofulous head?”
“Then I’ll get to hell just enough ahead of ye to hold the door,” the man in the yellow scarf said, and chuckled chummily. He wiggled the hand he held in the air. “It’s all the same jolly fakement to me, one way or t’other.”
Roland guessed that was the truth. The man looked as if he might have a year to live at most . . . and the last few months of that year would probably be very unpleasant. The oozing sores on his face had nothing to do with radiation; unless Roland was badly deceived, this man was in the late stages of what the doctors called mandrus and everyone else called whore’s blossoms. Facing a dangerous man was always a bad business, but at least one could calculate the odds in such an encounter. When you were facing