3
"I'VE GOT ONE," JAKE said as they ate their evening burritos.
"Is it a foolish one?" Roland asked.
"Nah. It's a real one."
"Then try me with it."
"Okay. What can run but never walks, has a mouth but never talks, has a bed but never sleeps, has a head but never weeps?"
"A good one," Roland said kindly, "but an old one. A river."
Jake was a little crestfallen. "You really are hard to stump."
Roland tossed the last bite of his burrito to Oy, who accepted it eagerly. "Not me. I'm what Eddie calls an overpush. You should have seen Alain. He collected riddles the way a lady collects fans."
"That's pushover, Roland, old buddy," Eddie said.
"Thank you. Try this one: What lies in bed, and stands in bed?/ First white, then red/ The plumper it gets/ The better the old woman likes it?"
Eddie burst out laughing. "A dork!" he yelled. "Crude, Roland! But I like it! I liyyyke it!"
Roland shook his head. "Your answer is wrong. A good riddle is sometimes a puzzle in words, like Jake's about the river, but sometimes it's more like a magician's trick, making you look in one direction while it's going somewhere else."
"It's a double," Jake said. He explained what Aaron Deepneau had said about the Riddle of Samson. Roland nodded.
"Is it a strawberry?" Susannah asked, then answered her own ques-tion. "Of course it is. It's like the fire-riddle. There's a metaphor hidden inside it. Once you understand the metaphor, you can solve the riddle."
"I metaphor sex, but she slapped my face and walked away when I asked," Eddie told them sadly. They all ignored him.
"If you change 'gets' to 'grows,' " Susannah went on, "it's easy. First white, then red. Plumper it grows, the better the old woman likes it." She looked pleased with herself.
Roland nodded. "The answer I always heard was a wenberry, but I'm sure both answers mean the same thing."
Eddie picked up Riddle-De-Dum! and began flipping through it. "How about this one, Roland? When is a door not a door?"
Roland frowned. "Is it another piece of your stupidity? Because my patience-"
"No. I promised to take it seriously, and I am - I'm trying, at least. It's in this book, and I just happen to know the answer. I heard it when I was a kid."
Jake, who also knew the answer, winked at Eddie. Eddie winked back, and was amused to see Oy also trying to wink. The humbler kept shutting both eyes, and eventually gave up.
Roland and Susannah, meanwhile, were puzzling over the question. "It must have something to do with love," Roland said. "A door, adore. When is adore not adore... hmmm..."
"Hmmm," Oy said. His imitation of Roland's thoughtful tone was perfect. Eddie winked at Jake again. Jake covered his mouth to hide a smile.
"Is the answer false love?" Roland asked at last.
"Nope."
"Window," Susannah said suddenly and decisively. "When is a door not a door? When it's a window."
"Nope." Eddie was grinning broadly now, but Jake was struck by how far from the real answer both of them had wandered. There was magic at work here, he thought. Pretty common stuff, as magic went, no flying carpets or disappearing elephants, but magic, all the same. He suddenly saw what they were doing - a simple game of riddles around a campfire - in an entirely new light. It was like playing blind-man's bluff, only in this game the blindfold was made of words.
"I give up," Susannah said.
"Yes," Roland said. "Tell if you know."
"The answer is a jar. A door is not a door when it's ajar. Get it?" Eddie watched as comprehension dawned on Roland's face and asked, a little apprehensively, "Is it a bad one? I was trying to be serious this time, Roland - really."
"Not bad at all. On the contrary, it's quite good. Cort would have gotten it, I'm sure... probably Alain, too, it's still very clever. I did what I always used to do in the schoolroom: made it more complicated than it really was and shot right past the answer."
"There really is something to it, isn't there?" Eddie mused. Roland nodded, but Eddie didn't see; he was looking into the depths of the fire, where dozens of roses bloomed and faded in the coals.
Roland said, "One more, and we'll turn in. Only from tonight on, we'll stand a watch. You first, Eddie, then Susannah. I'll take the last one."
"What about me?" Jake asked.
"Later on you may have to take a rum. Right now it's more impor-tant for you to get your sleep."
"Do you really think sentry-duty is necessary?" Susannah asked.
"I don't know. And that's the best reason of all to do it. Jake, choose us a riddle from your book."
Eddie handed Riddle-De-Dum! to Jake, who thumbed through the pages and finally stopped near the back. "Whoa! This one's a killer."
"Let's hear it," Eddie said. "If I don't get it, Suze will. We're known at Fair-Days all across the land as Eddie Dean and His Riddling Queen."
"We're witty tonight, ain't we?" Susannah said. "Let's see how witty you are after settin by the side o' the road until midnight or so, honeychild."
Jake read: " 'There is a thing that nothing is, and yet it has a name. It's sometimes tall and sometimes short, joins our talks, joins our sport, and plays at every game.' "
They discussed this riddle for almost fifteen minutes, but none of them could even hazard an answer.
"Maybe it'll come to one of us while we're asleep," Jake said. "That's how I got the one about the river."
"Cheap book, with the answers torn out," Eddie said. He stood up and wrapped a hide blanket around his shoulders like a cloak.
"Well, it was cheap. Mr. Tower gave it to me for free."
"What am I looking for, Roland?" Eddie asked.
Roland shrugged as he lay down. "I don't know, but I think you'll know it if you see it or hear it."
"Wake me up when you start feeling sleepy," Susannah said.
"You better believe it."
4
A GRASSY DITCH RAN along the side of the road and Eddie sat on the far side of it with his blanket around his shoulders. A thin scud of clouds had veiled the sky tonight, dimming the starshow. A strong west wind was blowing. When Eddie turned his face in that direction, he could clearly smell the buffalo which now owned these plains - a mixed per-fume of hot fur and fresh dung. The clarity which had returned to his senses in these last few months was amazing, . . and, at times like these, a little spooky, as well.
Very faintly, he could hear a buffalo calf bawling.
He turned toward the city, and after a while he began to think he might be seeing distant sparks of light there - the electric candles of the twins' story - but he was well aware that he might be seeing nothing more than his own wishful thinking.
You're a long way from Forty-second Street, sweetheart - hope is a great thing, no matter what anyone says, but don't hope so hard you lose sight of that one thought: you're a long way from Forty-second Street . That's not New York up ahead, no matter how much you might wish it was. That's Lud, and it'll be whatever it is. And if you keep that in mind, maybe you'll be okay.
He passed his time on watch trying to think of an answer to the last riddle of the evening. The scolding Roland had given him about his dead-baby joke had left him feeling disgruntled, and it would please him to be able to start off the morning by giving them a good answer. Of course they wouldn't be able to check any answer against the back of the book, but he had an idea that with good riddles a good answer was usually self-evident.
Sometimes tall and sometimes short. He thought that was the key and all the rest was probably just misdirection. What was sometimes tall and sometimes short? Pants? No. Pants were sometimes short and some-times long, but he had never heard of tall pants. Tales? Like pants, it only fit snugly one way. Drinks were sometimes both tall and short -
"Order," he murmured, and thought for a moment that he must have stumbled across the solution - both adjectives fit the noun glove-tight. A tall order was a big job; a short order was something you got on the quick in a restaurant - a hamburger or a tuna melt. Except that tall orders and tuna melts didn't join our talk or play at every game.
He felt a rush of frustration and had to smile at himself, getting all wound up about a harmless word-game in a kid's book. All the same, he found it a little easier to believe that people might really kill each other over riddles ... if the stakes were high enough and cheating was involved.
Let it go - you're doing exactly what Roland said, thinking right past it.
Still, what else did he have to think about?
Then the drumming from the city began again, and he did have something else. There was no build-up; at one moment it wasn't there, and at the next it was going full force, as if a switch had been turned. Eddie walked to the edge of the road, turned toward the city, and lis-tened. After a few moments he looked around to see if the drums had awakened the others, but he was still alone. He turned toward Lud again and cupped his ears forward with the sides of his hands.
Bump... ba-bump... ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.
Bump... ba-bump... ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.
Eddie became more and more sure that he had been right about what it was; that he had, at least, solved this riddle.
Bump... ba-bump... ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.
The idea that he was standing by a deserted road in an almost empty world, standing some one hundred and seventy miles from a city which had been built by some fabulous lost civilization and listening to a rock-and-roll drum-line... that was crazy, but was it any crazier than a traffic-light that dinged and dropped a rusty green flag with the word GO printed on it? Any crazier than discovering the wreck of a German plane from the 1930s?
Eddie sang the words to the Z.Z. Top song in a whisper:
"You need just enough of that sticky stuff
To hold the seam on your fine blue-jeans
I say yeah, yeah ..."
They fit the beat perfectly. It was the disco-pulse percussion of "Velcro Fly." Eddie was sure of it.
A short time later the sound ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and he could hear only the wind, and, more faintly, the Send River, which had a bed but never slept.