Silverlock (Prologue Books)

  His death would mean that I might escape from these vicious fanatics. Of course, I would be glad to get away from them; but all the same I didn’t feel any upsurge of joy when I picked up the keys from beside his lifeless body to unlock my manacles and shackles. My feelings were more those of a suicide, escaping from something unbearable with no guarantee that worse wasn’t waiting.

  Confident that the friars and soldiers, lacking dogs, would not be able to track me, I took to the woods beyond the stream. The lateness of the day was in my favor where pursuit was concerned. It was dark by the time I had reached the crest of the next hill and dipped down into the valley on the other side.

  By that time I had left one set of fears pretty well behind. New ones took over. As I had not dared to wait to take the clothes of the man I had slain, I was naked in a country which the warmth of day had deserted. It was fall in the hills, and even that far south there might be a frost. There might also be other things. I had taken my victim’s spear, but it wouldn’t be much good to me against an attack in the dark.

  That night I lived as a brute whose only hope was to see the sun again; and when it rose, I was too miserable to be glad. I had only escaped freezing to death by keeping in motion. Long before morning I had sickened from hunger, weariness, and exposure. I had stubbed the toes of my road-broken feet, and branches and brambles had found the whip scars on my legs. In stumbling across a stretch of bog I had lost my spear. When it happened, I was too far gone to care.

  Just after sunrise I came out into open country between the foothills and the Titans themselves. There was grazing land, but what took my eye was a field, with what I thought to be ripe wheat ears showing above the rail fence around it. It turned out to be oats, but I didn’t care. The raw grain was the first edible thing I had found since noon of the day before. I commenced stripping the stalks and cramming the stuff into my mouth, chaff and all.

  It took a while to make a meal of such provender, but I stuck at it. As soon as the sun got high enough to suck the chill out of me, I planned to lie out in it and sleep. After that — well, my mind wasn’t capable of thinking beyond the next clump of oats.

  Weariness, in fact, had so numbed my faculties that I didn’t hear anything until I felt myself shoved from behind. “Hey!” a voice said. “Get out of that, you blasted Yahoo!”

  In the state of my mind it didn’t astonish me to turn and find a large, dapple-gray horse. The important thing was that I had been pushed and roughly addressed.

  “Who the hell are you calling a Yahoo?” I demanded. Then I noticed two other nags bearing down on me. “G’wan, beat it!” I ordered them.

  My words had no effect. The beast who had first addressed me reached out with a foreleg and got a grip on my wrist. Meanwhile the others closed in.

  “A typical Yahoo trick,” one of them grumbled. “He’s eaten just enough from every ear to spoil it for anybody else. Is he one of ours?”

  About then it really came home to me that those horses were using words. Moreover, other things were going on which didn’t belong to the normal order. The horse was supposed to be a domesticated animal, prone to take instructions from man. These three did not seem to be aware of the fact. Their attitude was rather that of policemen who have cornered a petty thief. The whole business was upsetting, and I checked my impulse to shout at them. They wouldn’t obey me, and I could think of no reason why animals so much bigger and stronger than I should do so. I stared at them uneasily as they examined me.

  “You know, I could have sworn he actually said words when I sneaked up behind him,” the one that had hold of me remarked.

  “You better get the wax out of your ears,” the sorrel standing to my left advised. “I don’t recognize the critter, do you?”

  “He’s some runaway,” the black nag on my right stated. “The boss won’t let us really take the leather to our Yahoos, though God knows most of them’ve got it coming to them most of the time. Whoever gave this one a lacing knew how to chop meat.”

  “Yeah, and look at his feet and the way his legs’ve been scratched up. He come through the woods all right.”

  “What do you suppose we ought to do with him?” the gray asked.

  “If I had my way, we’d work him over until he got religion,” the sorrel responded, “but you know the boss. He’ll want to do everything legal and give him back unharmed to whoever the thing belongs to.”

  “Well, let’s take him to the house and get it over with.” The gray turned me around and rapped me on the prat. “Giddap!” he commanded.

  I looked around wildly at my captors. It simply wasn’t possible that I was being pushed around by horses. But I was. When the sorrel and the black sidled toward me, baring their teeth, I moved forward.

  My wrath was my only comfort in my humiliation. Maybe I didn’t know how to manage animals — hell, I hadn’t spent my life wading around in manure — but wait till I met the man who owned these brutes. By Jesus, he’d hear something that would make him wish he didn’t have ears. And if he didn’t like it, I’d mop up the barnyard with him, beat out as I was.

  Almost out of my head with fatigue, pain, shame, and rage, I gave insufficient thought to the most notable fact about my captors. It was undeniable that these horses talked. Aside from that idiosyncrasy, though, there was nothing to distinguish them from the normal run of domesticated hay burners. I was thoroughly unprepared, therefore, when those nags choused me to a massive log dwelling. It seemed strange to find a white horse taking his ease on the verandah, but I was still waiting for a man to step outside when the gray spoke.

  “Boss, we found this Yahoo scrabbling in that field of second-crop oats we was just getting ready to harvest.”

  “He don’t belong to us,” the black volunteered. “We think he come from some spread on the other side of the woods.”

  The sorrel chuckled. “Jake here thinks he heard it talk.”

  The words gave my dumbfounded mind something to brace on. “God damn it, I can talk better than you can!” I glared at the white horse. “Better than you, too.”

  This outburst drew startled exclamations from my three captors. The one they called Boss, however, didn’t lose his look of polite detachment.

  “Most interesting,” he decided, after gazing at me thoughtfully. “Now where did a Yahoo acquire the gift of speech?”

  Suddenly it became all too much for me, and I lost control of myself. “Quit calling me a Yahoo!” I shouted. “I’m a man!”

  Unperturbed, he considered that statement. “It is true that Yahoo is our own name for you: we have never hitherto known what you call yourselves. Yahoo — Man. Man — Yahoo. It doesn’t make any difference, of course. Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.”

  “They’re not!” I shrieked. “That is, who cares what a bunch of dumb animals think anyhow? Horses don’t run men. Men own horses, and tell ’em what to do, and beat the devil out of them if they don’t toe the mark.”

  The sorrel gave a raucous laugh, and even Boss looked amused. “Really? And is it your intention to tell us what to do?”

  “I don’t want anything to do with you,” I blustered. “But I could if I wanted to. It’s the way things work. It’s only right for men to — to order horses around.”

  “Shut up!” the gray commanded.

  “No, let him speak,” the white nag said. “I’ve often wondered what lay below the muddy depths of a Yahoo’s — excuse me — a Man’s intelligence.” He stared at me with good-humored interest. “And just why is it right for men to direct horses? Do you think that they conduct themselves so nobly as to fit them to be the guardians and guides of others?”

  In an effort to answer him in a convincing fashion my mind quieted dreadfully. What, in truth, had the world of men to boast of that I could be eloquent as its champion? Typical was the chicanery that had left me naked, browbeaten, and humbled. Typical also was the arrogant self-righteousness that had left me a patchwork of scars.

  So I
had no answer as those horses looked at me, the white one with kindly contempt, the other three with open derision. After a little I passed my hand wearily in front of my eyes. Now that I no longer had anger to sustain me, I felt that I couldn’t stand. My knees began to give, and I swayed.

  “We might have known it,” the sorrel jeered. “Trying to think is more than any stinker of a Yahoo can take.”

  “Possibly he deserved it,” the white nag said, “but he has patently been misused. You’d better tie him up, so he won’t scratch or bite while you doctor those sores; then put him in a box stall, so the others won’t bother him. Keep him on bran and milk for today anyhow. Meanwhile I’ll try to find out who his owner is.”

  “Lets go,” the sorrel said, “as long as you’re smart enough to talk language. And if you try to make a break for it, I’ll kick you into the afternoon of next Thursday.”

  A road ran between the house and the barns. As I started to stagger across it, the gray pulled me back.

  “Watch it!” he said. “Can’t you hear that wagon?”

  I wasn’t interested enough to look toward the vehicle. A sign, however, caught my attention as we halted. I had to blink away the lights that were dancing in front of my eyes before I could read it. “To the Dark Tower,” it said.

  My mind had hardly absorbed that message when the wagon drew abreast of us. Aghast, I glanced from the horse which held the reins to the several teams he controlled. Although they were digging in on all fours, and although they were shaggy and brutish looking, these were men I was looking at. No, not all men, either. The pendant breasts of at least two of them told me that there were women in harness also.

  “A likely looking turn-out,” the black commented.

  Something had to give to make room for the horror which suffused me. For a moment I thought it would be my reason, or even life itself; but it was only my stomach. With a great sob I vomited.

  “Trust a Yahoo to make a mess,” the gray said. He steadied me as I began to collapse. “Take hold; we’ll have to carry the varmint.”

  My sanity stayed with me the first forty-eight hours largely because I was in a feverish daze most of the time. My conditions saved me from being given the carrion on which the nags fed the other humans in their keeping. It also spared me association with the latter, though I could smell them and could hear them shrieking and snarling.

  But the immediate degradation wasn’t the hardest thing to bear. The cancer which ate my mind, feverish or lucid, was the recollection of the moment when I had vainly tried to say a word for manhood. With Lorel I thought I had regained the armor of cynicism and the shield of being proud of it. In the clutch they had crumbled. I had longed to speak boldly for the moral strength and wisdom of my kind. Yet in the face of sneering enemies I had been crushed by my own silence.

  Dreadful as my captivity was, I nevertheless needed the enforced rest. The grease the gray horse applied to my welts was healing and prevented infection. The milk and bran they gave me, while not the food I would order, turned out to be nourishing. When the fever left me I played possum for one more day, so I could get my strength back. That night I meant to get out of there.

  Like the box stalls in most stables, mine, I had observed when they came in to tend to me, had a door which was held shut by only a pivot latch. The mechanical knowledge of the men they called Yahoos must have been limited indeed for this to be an effective restraint. Once I was ready to leave, it did not hold me five minutes. Working like the primitive animal those nags took me to be, I chewed a sizeable sliver from the sill of the small air vent. Then I thrust this between the door and the jamb and worked it up until it came in contact with the latch.

  The Yahoos, luckily not nocturnal, slept solidly and noisily in their stanchions. I found the stable door locked, but I remembered enough about boyhood romps in barns not to be discouraged. After a while I located the ladder to the hay loft. I ascended and in due course felt my way to what I was searching for. Unlike the one below, the door to the loft was fastened on the inside. Lifting the bar from its brackets, I pushed and peered out. Seeing nothing to alarm me, I lowered myself as fast as I could and dropped to the soft mud of the barnyard.

  I knew where I was going. There was only one bearing left to me in the Commonwealth — or in the world, for that matter. The sign showing the way to the Dark Tower had pointed left down the highway. It was easy to find the road, a ribbon of lesser darkness twisting away under the stars. Once on it, I fled.

  When my wind gave out, I still pushed myself as hard as my strength would allow, although confident I was safe from pursuit. It was not that I wanted to get to the unimaginable tower as such. Instinctively I dreaded the place. And yet it had come to represent a sanctuary from even more appalling evils. It offered me a possible toe-hold in chaos, for the simple but all powerful reason that I could conceive of no other.

  25

  A Guide of Sorts

  WITHIN AN HOUR the road started to wind up into the Titans. A cold wind nagged me, once I was clear of the valley, and I was glad to wrap myself in the stinking Yahoo blanket with which the gray always covered me at sunset. Before the sun rose again I was over a shoulder of the first mountain, crossing a gulley-chewed plain. Daylight showed me that I was on a mesa covered with bunch grass, tumble weeds, and spiny shrubbery.

  It seemed to me that educated nags, such as the ones which had held me captive, would find the foraging too rough for them here. Nevertheless, when I saw smoke on the horizon, I approached with caution.

  Having reached a vantage point, I surveyed a ravine containing that treasure of an arid country, a large spring. It could have watered, I should say, a considerable herd of stock. No cattle were drinking there, however, and the ones I could see would not do so again. Even the buzzards had got tired of them.

  The buildings of what must have once been a prosperous ranch looked much like skeletons, too. Some were roofless, and the adobe was melting. Part of the ranch house itself had caved in, although the section from which smoke was rising looked dismally habitable. If I hadn’t been so hungry, I would have visited the spring only. Being starved, I next followed the weed-smothered path to the residence.

  When I had knocked a few times, a voice told me to enter. A bearded man in a loin cloth was hugging a fire at one side of a large room. The fireplace was without a chimney, leaving the smoke to find its way out of a hole in the roof. Windows opening on a patio were the principal sources of light in the room, which was scantily furnished.

  After a minute the man slowly twisted his neck so he could look at me. My eyes had become accustomed to the dimness of the interior, and I was scarcely able to repress a gasp. Above the beard his face was a mass of boils. Next I saw that almost every visible inch of him was tortured by the same affliction.

  “Good morning,” I said, when he failed to greet me.

  “Maybe for you,” he replied.

  There was no use in explaining to him that it wasn’t. “I just came out of the valley, and this is the first place I’ve seen after walking all night. Would it be possible to get something to eat here?”

  There was a sleep-walker’s air about him, as he swayed back and forth, apparently thinking that over. “Yes, we still eat here, though I couldn’t say why. Food will be brought to me here in a while, and you will be free to prolong your own existence, if you see fit.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, though he made it sound silly to eat. There was another seat by the fire, and I commandeered it. “It’s cold outside this early in the day.”

  “That isn’t much of a coat you have,” he commented after his usual delay.

  “No, but it’s the best I’ve got.” I thought talk had died there, but in a little while he pointed to a cape or cloak hanging from a peg on the wall. “You’re welcome to that one of my son’s.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, adding as a matter of routine: “I hope he won’t mind.”

  “There is little chance that he’ll tell you about it,
” the fellow assured me in his dull, measured tones. “He’s — all my sons are dead.”

  I was glad to be able to cover the gash in conversation left by that remark by reaching for the garment he had offered. It was a long camel’s hair cloak, light and warm.

  “This is swell!” I said with a false heartiness I promptly wished I hadn’t attempted. “By the way, my name’s Shandon.”

  He left me hanging before he turned his disfigured face toward mine again. I wasn’t ready for the anger in his hot eyes, though I knew instinctively it wasn’t directed at me.

  “Job,” he said.

  Forgetting about his boils I put out my hand, but he was already looking elsewhere. It was plain that he wasn’t anxious for company, but I wasn’t going away without that meal he had promised.

  “Well,” I said, “thanks again, Mr. Job.”

  “Just Job. The name is the one thing that hasn’t been warped or taken from me.” He didn’t acknowledge my thanks, but he did a better thing. “I’ll get you sandals before you leave,” he declared, picking up a piece of wood to prod the fire with.

  Watching him, I saw that his poker was not just a chunk of split kindling. It was a board. Part of it was burnt away, but there was printing on it. The letters were upside down, but having nothing else to do, I began spelling them out.

  “The Dar — ” was all that was left to be read. I sat up. “Was there ‘tower’ on that stick when you first saw it? Did it say ‘The Dark Tower’?”

  “Why yes, it did.”

  “Where was it,” I persisted, “and which way was it pointing?”

  “I found it nailed to an old cottonwood when I bought this place.” He pointed a finger lumpy with boils in the direction of the road. “Then after the plague wiped out my herd and things started going to pieces, the poker somehow got lost, too. So we began using this signboard. Unlike the native wood of these parts, it’s reasonably durable.”