“Don’t we all,” Roland agreed, “but the day is windless. I think we can smoke them to sleep and steal their comb right out from under them without setting half the world on fire. Let’s have a look.”

He carried Susannah, who was as eager for the adventure as the gunslinger himself, toward the grove. Eddie and Jake lagged behind, and Oy, apparently having decided that discretion was the better part of valor, remained sitting at the edge of the Great Road, panting like a dog and watching them carefully.

Roland paused at the edge of the trees. “Stay where you are,” he told Eddie and Jake, speaking softly. “We’re going to have a look. I’ll give you a come-on if all’s well.” He carried Susannah into the dappled shadows of the grove while Eddie and Jake remained in the sunshine, peering after them.

It was cooler in the shade. The buzzing of the bees was a steady, hypnotic drone. “There are too many,” Roland murmured. “This is late summer; they should be out working. I don’t—”

He caught sight of the hive, bulging tumorously from the hollow of a tree in the center of the clearing, and broke off.

“What’s the matter with them?” Susannah asked in a soft, horrified voice. “Roland, what’s the matter with them?”

A bee, as plump and slow-moving as a horsefly in October, droned past her head. Susannah flinched away from it.

Roland motioned for the others to join them. They did, and stood looking at the hive without speaking. The chambers weren’t neat hexagons but random holes of all shapes and sizes; the beehive itself looked queerly melted, as if someone had turned a blowtorch on it. The bees which crawled sluggishly over it were as white as snow.

“No honey tonight,” Roland said. “What we took from yonder comb might taste sweet, but it would poison us as surely as night follows day.”

One of the grotesque white bees lumbered heavily past Jake’s head. He ducked away with an expression of loathing.

“What did it?” Eddie asked. “What did it to them, Roland?”

“The same thing that has emptied this whole land; the thing that’s still causing many of the buffalo to be born as sterile freaks. I’ve heard it called the Old War, the Great Fire, the Cataclysm, and the Great Poisoning. Whatever it was, it was the start of all our troubles and it happened long ago, a thousand years before the great-great-grandfathers of the River Crossing folk were born. The physical effects—the two-headed buffalo and the white bees and such—have grown less as time passes. I have seen this for myself. The other changes are greater, if harder to see, and they are still going on.”

They watched the white bees crawl, dazed and almost completely helpless, about their hive. Some were apparently trying to work; most simply wandered about, butting heads and crawling over one another. Eddie found himself remembering a newsclip he’d seen once. It had shown a crowd of survivors leaving the area where a gas-main had exploded, flattening almost a whole city block in some California town. These bees reminded him of those dazed, shellshocked survivors.