24

Their horses, led by Rusher, had come to the sound of Roland’s dismayed shout. They stood not far away, their manes rippling in the wind, shaking their heads and whinnying their displeasure whenever the wind dropped enough for them to get a whiff of the thick white smoke rising from the canyon.

Roland paid no attention to the horses or the smoke. His eyes were fixed on the drawstring sack slung over Alain’s shoulder. The ball inside had come alive again; in the growing dark, the bag seemed to pulse like some weird pink firefly. He held out his hands for it.

“Give it to me!”

“Roland, I don’t know if-”

“Give it to me, damn your face!”

Alain looked at Cuthbert, who nodded… then lifted his hands skyward in a weary, distracted gesture.

Roland tore the bag away before Alain could do more than begin to shrug it off his shoulder. The gunslinger dipped into it and pulled the glass out. It was glowing fiercely, a pink Demon Moon instead of an orange one.

Behind and below them, the nagging whine of the thinny rose and fell, rose and fell.

“Don’t look directly into that thing,” Cuthbert muttered to Alain. “Don’t, for your father’s sake.”

Roland bent his face over the pulsing ball, its light running over his cheeks and brow like liquid, drowning his eyes in its dazzle.

In Maerlyn’s Rainbow he saw her-Susan, horse-drover’s daughter, lovely girl at the window. He saw her standing in the back of a black cart decorated with gold symbols, the old witch’s cart. Reynolds rode behind her, holding the end of a rope that was noosed around her neck. The cart was rolling toward Green Heart, making its way with processional slow-ness. Hill Street was lined with people of whom the farmer with the lamb-slaughterer’s eyes had been only the first-all those folk of Hambry and Mejis who had been deprived of their fair but were now given this ancient dark attraction in its stead: Charyou tree, come, Reap, death for you, life for our crops.

A soundless whispering ran through them like a gathering wave, and they began to pelt her-first with cornhusks, then with rotting tomatoes, then with potatoes and apples. One of these latter struck her cheek. She reeled, almost fell, then stood straight again, now raising her swollen but still lovely face so the moon painted it. She looked straight ahead.

“Charyou tree,” they whispered. Roland couldn’t hear them, but he could see the words on their lips. Stanley Ruiz was there, and Pettie, and Gert Moggins, and Frank Claypool, the deputy with the broken leg; Jamie McCann, who was to have been this year’s Reap Lad. Roland saw a hundred people he had known (and mostly liked) during his time in Mejis. Now these people pelted his love with cornshucks and vegetables as she stood, hands bound before her, in the back of Rhea’s cart.

The slowly rolling cart reached Green Heart, with its colored paper lanterns and silent carousel where no laughing children rode… no, not this year. The crowd, still speaking those two words-chanting them now, it appeared-parted. Roland saw the heaped pyramid of wood that was the unlit bonfire. Sitting around it, their backs propped on the central column, their lumpy legs outstretched, was a ring of red-handed stuffy-guys. There was a single hole in the ring; a single waiting vacancy.

And now a woman emerged from the crowd. She wore a rusty black dress and held a pail in one hand. A smear of ash stood out on one of her cheeks like a brand. She-

Roland began to shriek. It was a single word, over and over again:

No, no, no, no, no, no! The ball’s pink light flashed brighter with each repetition, as if his horror refreshed and strengthened it. And now, with each of those pulses, Cuthbert and Alain could see the shape of the gunslinger’s skull beneath his skin.

“We have to take it away from him,” Alain said. “We have to, it’s sucking him dry. It’s killing him!”

Cuthbert nodded and stepped forward. He grabbed the ball, but couldn’t take it from Roland’s hands. The gunslinger’s fingers seemed welded to it.

“Hit him!” he told Alain. “Hit him again, you have to!”

But Alain might as well have been hitting a post. Roland didn’t even rock back on his heels. He continued to cry out that single negative- “No! No! No! No”-and the ball flashed faster and faster, eating its way into him through the wound it had opened, sucking up his grief like blood.

25

“Charyou tree!” Cordelia Delgado cried, darting forward from where she had been waiting. The crowd cheered her, and beyond her left shoulder Demon Moon winked, as if in complicity. “Charyou tree, ye faithless bitch! Charyou tree!”

She flung the pail of paint at her niece, splattering her pants and dressing her tied hands in a pair of wet scarlet gloves. She grinned up at Susan as the cart rolled past. The smear of ash stood out on her cheek; in the center of her pale forehead, a single vein pulsed like a worm.

“Bitch!” Cordelia screamed. Her fists were clenched; she danced a kind of hilarious jig, feet jumping, bony knees pumping beneath her skirt. “Life for the crops! Death for the bitch! Charyou tree! Come, Reap!”

The cart rolled past her; Cordelia faded from Susan’s sight, just one more cruel phantasm in a dream that would soon end. Bird and bear and hare and fish, she thought. Be safe, Roland; go with my love. That’s my fondest wish.

“Take her!” Rhea screamed. “Take this murdering bitch and cook her red-handed! Charyou tree!”

“Charyou tree!” the crowd responded. A forest of willing hands grew in the moonlit air; somewhere firecrackers rattled and children laughed excitedly.

Susan was lifted from the cart and handed toward the waiting woodpile above the heads of the crowd, passed by uplifted hands like a heroine returned triumphantly home from the wars. Her hands dripped red tears upon their straining, eager faces. The moon overlooked it all, dwarfing the glow of the paper lanterns.

“Bird and bear and hare and fish,” she murmured as she was first lowered and then slammed against the pyramid of dry wood, put in the place which had been left for her-the whole crowd chanting in unison now, “Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE!”

“Bird and bear and hare and fish.”

Trying to remember how he had danced with her that night. Trying to remember how he had loved with her in the willow grove. Trying to remember that first meeting on the dark road: Thankee-sai, we ’re well met, he had said, and yes, in spite of everything, in spite of this miserable ending with the folk who had been her neighbors turned into prancing goblins by moonlight, in spite of pain and betrayal and what was coming, he had spoken the truth: they had been well met, they had been very well met, indeed.

“Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE! Charyou TREE!”

Women came and piled dry cornshucks around her feet. Several of them slapped her (it didn’t matter; her bruised and puffy face seemed to have gone numb), and one-it was Misha Alvarez, whose daughter Susan had taught to ride-spat into her eyes and then leaped prankishly away, shaking her hands at the sky and laughing. For a moment she saw Coral Thorin, festooned with reap-charms, her arms filled with dead leaves which she threw at Susan; they fluttered down around her in a crackling, aromatic shower.

And now came her aunt again, and Rhea beside her. Each held a torch. They stood before her, and Susan could smell sizzling pitch.

Rhea raised her torch to the moon. “CHARYOU TREE!” she screamed in her rusty old voice, and the crowd responded, “CHARYOU TREE!”

Cordelia raised her own torch. “COME, REAP!”

“COME, REAP!” they cried back to her.

“Now, ye bitch,” Rhea crooned. “Now comes warmer kisses than any yer love ever gave ye.”

“Die, ye faithless,” Cordelia whispered. “Life for the crops, death for you.”