by Stephen King
“How long was I out?” Roland touched the bruise in the center of his forehead with the tips of his fingers and winced.
“Not long,” Alain said. “Five minutes, maybe. Roland, I’m sorry I hit you, but I had to. It was… I thought it was killing you.”
“Mayhap ’twas. Is it safe?”
Alain pointed wordlessly to the drawstring bag.
“Good. It’s best one of you carry it for now. I might be… “He searched for the right word, and when he found it, a small, wintry smile touched the comers of his mouth-“tempted,” he finished. “Let’s ride for Hanging Rock. We’ve got work yet to finish.”
“Roland…” Cuthbert began.
Roland turned, one hand on the horn of his horse’s saddle.
Cuthbert licked his lips, and for a moment Alain didn’t think he would be able to ask. If you don’t, I will, Alain thought… but Bert managed, bringing the words out in a rush.
“What did you see?”
“Much,” Roland said. “I saw much, but most of it is already fading out of my mind, the way dreams do when you wake up. What I do remember I’ll tell you as we ride. You must know, because it changes everything. We’re going back to Gilead, but not for long.”
“Where after that?” Alain asked, mounting.
“West. In search of the Dark Tower. If we survive today, that is. Come on. Let’s take those tankers.”
9
The two vaqs were rolling smokes when there was a loud bang from upstairs. They both jumped and looked at each other, the tobacco from their works-in-progress sifting down to the floor in small brown flurries. A woman shrieked. The doors burst open. It was the Mayor’s widow again, this time accompanied by a maid. The vaqs knew her well-Maria Tomas, the daughter of an old compadre from the Piano Ranch.
“The thieving bastards have set the place on fire!” Maria cried, speaking to them in crunk. “Come and help!”
“Maria, sai, we have orders to guard-”
“A putina locked in the pantry?” Maria shouted, her eyes blazing. “Come, ye stupid old donkey, before the whole place catches! Then ye can explain to Senor Lengyll why ye stood here using yer thumbs for fart-corks while Seafront burned down around yer ears!”
“Go on!” Olive snapped. “Are you cowards?”
There were several smaller bangs as, above them in the great parlor, Sheemie set off the lady-fingers. He used the same match to light the drapes.
The two viejos exchanged a glance. “Andelay,” said the older of the two, then looked back at Maria. He no longer bothered with the crunk. “Watch this door,” he said.
“Like a hawk,” she agreed.
The two old men bustled out, one gripping the cords of his bolas, the other pulling a long knife from the scabbard on his belt.
As soon as the women heard their footsteps on the stairs at the end of the hall, Olive nodded to Maria and they crossed the room. Maria threw the bolts; Olive pulled the door open. Susan came out at once, looking from one to the other, then smiling tentatively. Maria gasped at the sight of her mistress’s swelled face and the blood crusted around her nose.
Susan took Maria’s hand before the maid could touch her face and squeezed her fingers gently. “Do ye think Thorin would want me now?” she asked, and then seemed to realize who her other rescuer was. “Olive… sai Thorin… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be cruel. But ye must believe that Roland, him ye know as Will Dearborn, would never-”
“I know it well,” Olive said, “and there’s no time for this now. Come on.”
She and Maria led Susan out of the kitchen, away from the stairs ascending to the main house and toward the storage rooms at the far north end of the lower level. In the drygoods storage room, Olive told the two of them to wait. She was gone for perhaps five minutes, but to Susan and Maria it seemed an eternity.
When she came back, Olive was wearing a wildly colored scrape much too big for her-it might have been her husband’s, but Susan thought it looked too big for the late Mayor, as well. Olive had tucked a piece of it into the side of her jeans to keep from stumbling over it. Slung over her arm like blankets, she had two more, both smaller and lighter. “Put these on,” she said. “It’s going to be cold.”
Leaving the drygoods store, they went down a narrow servants’ passageway toward the back courtyard. There, if they were fortunate (and if Miguel was still unconscious), Sheemie would be waiting for them with mounts. Olive hoped with all her heart that they would be fortunate. She wanted Susan safely away from Hambry before the sun went down.
And before the moon rose.
10
“Susan’s been taken prisoner,” Roland told the others as they rode west toward Hanging Rock. “That’s the first thing I saw in the glass.”
He spoke with such an air of absence that Cuthbert almost reined up. This wasn’t the ardent lover of the last few months. It was as if Roland had found a dream to ride through the pink air within the ball, and part of him rode it still. Or is it riding him? Cuthbert wondered.
“What?” Alain asked. “Susan taken? How? By whom? Is she all right?'”
“Taken by Jonas. He hurt her some, but not too badly. She’ll heal… and she’ll live. I’d turn around in a second if I thought her life was in any real danger.”
Ahead of them, appearing and disappearing in the dust like a mirage, was Hanging Rock. Cuthbert could see the sunlight pricking hazy sun-stars on the tankers, and he could see men. A lot of them. A lot of horses, as well. He patted the neck of his own mount, then glanced across to make sure Alain had Lengyll’s machine-gun. He did. Cuthbert reached around to the small of his back, making sure of the slingshot. It was there. Also his deerskin ammunition bag, which now contained a number of the big-bangers Sheemie had stolen as well as steel shot.
He’s using every ounce of his will to keep from going back, anyway, Cuthbert thought. He found the realization comforting-sometimes Roland scared him. There was something in him that went beyond steel. Something like madness. If it was there, you were glad to have it on your side… but often enough you wished it wasn’t there at all. On anybody’s side.
“Where is she?” Alain asked.
“Reynolds took her back to Seafront. She’s locked in the pantry… or was locked there. I can’t say which, exactly, because… “Roland paused, thinking. “The ball sees far, but sometimes it sees more. Sometimes it sees a future that’s already happening.”
“How can the future already be happening?” Alain asked. “I don’t know, and I don’t think it was always that way. I think it’s more to do with the world than Maerlyn’s Rainbow. Time is strange now. We know that, don’t we? How things sometimes seem to… slip. It’s almost as if there’s a thinny everywhere, breaking things down. But Susan’s safe. I know that, and that’s enough for me. Sheemie is going to help her… or is helping her. Somehow Jonas missed Sheemie, and he followed Susan all the way back.”
“Good for Sheemie!” Alain said, and pumped his fist into the air. “Hurrah!” Then: “What about us? Did you see us in this future?”
“No. This part was all quick-I hardly snatched more than a glance before the ball took me away. Flew me away, it seemed. But… I saw smoke on the horizon. I remember that. It could have been the smoke of burning tankers, or the brush piled in front of Eyebolt, or both. I think we’re going to succeed.”
Cuthbert was looking at his old friend in a queerly distraught way. The young man so deeply in love that Bert had needed to knock him into the dust of the courtyard in order to wake him up to his responsibilities… where was that young man, exactly? What had changed him, given him those disturbing strands of white hair?
“If we survive what’s ahead,” Cuthbert said, watching the gunslinger closely, “she’ll meet us on the road. Won’t she, Roland?”
He saw the pain on Roland’s face, and now understood: the lover was here, but the ball had taken away his joy and left only grief. That, and some new purpose-yes, Cuthbert felt it very well-which had yet to be sta
ted.
“I don’t know,” Roland said. “I almost hope not, because we can never be as we were.”
“What?” This time Cuthbert did rein up.
Roland looked at him calmly enough, but now there were tears in his eyes.
“We are fools of ka” the gunslinger said. “Ka like a wind, Susan calls it.” He looked first at Cuthbert on his left, then at Alain on his right. “The Tower is our ka; mine especially. But it isn’t hers, nor she mine. No more is John Parson our ka. We’re not going toward his men to defeat him, but only because they’re in our way.” He raised his hands, then dropped them again, as if to say, What more do you need me to tell you?
“There is no Tower, Roland,” Cuthbert said patiently. “I don’t know what you saw in that glass ball, but there is no Tower. Well, as a symbol, I suppose-like Arthur’s Cup, or the Cross of the man-Jesus-but not as a real thing, a real building-”
“Yes,” Roland said. “It’s real.”
They looked at him uncertainly, and saw no doubt on his face. “It’s real, and our fathers know. Beyond the dark land-I can’t remember its name now, it’s one of the things I’ve lost-is End-World, and in End-World stands the Dark Tower. Its existence is the great secret our fathers keep; it’s what has held them together as ka-tet across all the years of the world’s decline. When we return to Gilead-if we return, and I now think we will-I’ll tell them what I’ve seen, and they’ll confirm what I say.”
“You saw all that in the glass?” Alain asked in an awe-hushed voice.
“I saw much.”
“But not Susan Delgado,” Cuthbert said.
“No. When we finish with yonder men and she finishes with Mejis, her part in our ka-tet ends. Inside the ball, I was given a choice: Susan, and my life as her husband and father of the child she now carries… or the Tower.” Roland wiped his face with a shaking hand. “I would choose Susan in an instant, if not for one thing: the Tower is crumbling, and if it falls, everything we know will be swept away. There will be chaos beyond our imagining. We must go… and we will go.” Above his young and unlined cheeks, below his young and unlined brow, were the ancient killer’s eyes that Eddie Dean would first glimpse in the mirror of an airliner’s bathroom. But now they swam with childish tears.
There was nothing childish in his voice, however.
“I choose the Tower. I must. Let her live a good life and long with someone else-she will, in time. As for me, I choose the Tower.”
11
Susan mounted on Pylon, which Sheemie had hastened to bring around to the rear courtyard after lighting the draperies of the great parlor on fire. Olive Thorin rode one of the Barony geldings with Sheemie double-mounted behind her and holding onto Capi’s lead. Maria opened the back gate, wished them good luck, and the three trotted out. The sun was westering now, but the wind had pulled away most of the smoke that had risen earlier. Whatever had happened in the desert, it was over now… or happening on some other layer of the same present time.
Roland, be thee well, Susan thought. I’ll see thee soon, dear… as soon as I can.
“Why are we going north?” she asked after half an hour’s silent riding.
“Because Seacoast Road’s best.”
“But-”
“Hush! They’ll find you gone and search the house first… if t'asn’t burned flat, that is. Not finding you there, they’ll send west, along the Great Road.” She cast an eye on Susan that was not much like the dithery, slightly confabulated Olive Thorin that folks in Hambry knew… or thought they knew. “If I know that’s the direction you’d choose, so will others we’d do well to avoid.”
Susan was silent. She was too confused to speak, but Olive seemed to know what she was about, and Susan was grateful for that.
“By the time they get around to sniffing west, it’ll be dark. Tonight we’ll stay in one of the sea-cliff caves five miles or so from here. I grew up a fisherman’s daughter, and I know all those caves, none better.” The thought of the caves she’d played in as a girl seemed to cheer her. “Tomorrow we’ll cut west, as you like. I’m afraid you’re going to have a plump old widow as a chaperone for a bit. Better get used to the idea.”
“Thee’s too good,” Susan said. “Ye should send Sheemie and I on alone, sai.”
“And go back to what? Why, I can’t even get two old trailhands on kitchen-duty to follow my orders. Fran Lengyll’s boss of the shooting-match now, and I’ve no urge to wait and see how he does at it. Nor if he decides he’d be better off with me adjudged mad and put up safe in a haci with bars on the windows. Or shall I stay to see how Hash Renfrew does as Mayor, with his boots up on my tables?” Olive actually laughed.
“Sai, I’m sorry.”
“We shall all be sorry later on,” Olive said, sounding remarkably cheery about it. “For now, the most important thing is to reach those caves unobserved. It must seem that we vanished into thin air. Hold up.”
Olive checked her horse, stood in the stirrups, looked around to make sure of her position, nodded, then twisted in the saddle so she could speak to Sheemie.
“Young man, it’s time for ye to mount yer trusty mule and go back to Seafront. If there are riders coming after us, ye must turn em aside with a few well-chosen words. Will'ee do that?”
Sheemie looked stricken. “I don’t have any well-chosen words, sai Thorin, so I don’t. I hardly have any words at all.”
“Nonsense,” Olive said, and kissed Sheemie’s forehead. “Go back at a goodish trot. If'ee spy no one coming after us by the time the sun touches the hills, then turn north again and follow. We shall wait for ye by the signpost. Do ye know where I mean?”
Sheemie thought he did, although it marked the outmost northern boundary of his little patch of geography. “The red 'un? With the sombrero on it, and the arrow pointing back for town?”
“The very one. Ye won’t get that far until after dark, but there’ll be plenty of moonlight tonight. If ye don’t come right away, we’ll wait. But ye must go back, and shift any men that might be chasing us off our track. Do ye understand?”
Sheemie did. He slid off Olive’s horse, clucked Caprichoso forward, and climbed on board, wincing as the place the mule had bitten came down. “So it’ll be, Olive-sai.”
“Good, Sheemie. Good. Off'ee go, then.”
“Sheemie?” Susan said. “Come to me a moment, please.”
He did, holding his hat in front of him and looking up at her worship-fully. Susan bent and kissed him not on the forehead but firmly on the mouth. Sheemie came close to fainting.
“Thankee-sai,” Susan said. “For everything.”
Sheemie nodded. When he spoke, he could manage nothing above a whisper.” ’twas only ka,” he said. “I know that… but I love you, Susan-sai. Go well. I’ll see you soon.”
“I look forward to it.”
But there was no soon, and no later for them, either. Sheemie took one look back as he rode his mule south, and waved. Susan lifted her own hand in return. It was the last Sheemie ever saw of her, and in many ways, that was a blessing.
12
Latigo had set pickets a mile out from Hanging Rock, but the blond boy Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain encountered as they closed in on the tankers looked confused and unsure of himself, no danger to anyone. He had scurvy-blossoms around his mouth and nose, suggesting that the men Farson had sent on this duty had ridden hard and fast, with little in the way of fresh supplies.
When Cuthbert gave the Good Man’s sigul-hands clasped to the chest, left above right, then both held out to the person being greeted-the blond picket did the same, and with a grateful smile.
“What spin and raree back there?” he asked, speaking with a strong In-World accent-to Roland, the boy sounded like a Nordite.
“Three boys who killed a couple of big bugs and then hied for the hills.” Cuthbert replied. He was an eerily good mimic, and gave the boy back his own accent faultlessly. “'I here were a tight. It be over now, but they did fight fearful.”
&nb
sp; “What-”
“No time,” Roland said brusquely. “We have dispatches.” He crossed his hands on his chest, then held them out. “Hile! Farson!”
“Good Man!” the blond returned smartly. He gave back the salute with a smile that said he would have asked Cuthbert where he was from and who he was related to, if there had been more time. Then they were past him and inside Latigo’s perimeter. As easy as that.
“Remember that it’s hit-and-run,” Roland said. “Slow down for nothing. What we don’t get must be left-there’ll be no second pass.”
“Gods, don’t even suggest such a thing,” Cuthbert said, but he was smiling. He pulled his sling out of its rudimentary holster and tested its elastic draw with a thumb. Then he licked the thumb and hoisted it to the wind. Not much problem there, if they came in as they were; the wind was strong, but at their backs.
Alain unslung Lengyll’s machine-gun, looked at it doubtfully, then yanked back the slide-cock. “I don’t know about this, Roland. It’s loaded, and I think I see how to use it, but-”
“Then use it,” Roland said. The three of them were picking up speed now, the hooves of their horses drumming against the hardpan. The wind gusted, belling the fronts of their scrapes. “This is the sort of work it was meant for. If it jams, drop it and use your revolver. Are you ready?”
“Yes, Roland.”
“Bert?”
“Aye,” Cuthbert said in a wildly exaggerated Hambry accent, “so I am, so I am.”
Ahead of them, dust puffed as groups of riders passed before and behind the tankers, readying the column for departure. Men on foot looked around at the oncomers curiously but with a fatal lack of alarm.
Roland drew both revolvers. “Gilead!” he cried. “Hile! Gilead!”
He spurred Rusher to a gallop. The other two boys did the same. Cuthbert was in the middle again, sitting on his reins, slingshot in hand, lucifer matches radiating out of his tightly pressed lips.