Part 14 (2/2)

Jake was trembling violently and his face had gone pale.

”What's the matter?”

”Let's go back,” Jake whispered. ”Let's go back quick.”

The gunslinger's face was wooden.

”Please?” The boy's face was drawn, and his jawline shook with suppressed agony. Through the heavy blanket of stone they still heard thunder, as steady as machines in the earth. The slice of sky they could see had itself a.s.sumed a turbulent, gothic gray above them as warm and cold currents met and warred.

”Please, please! please!” The boy raised a fist, as if to strike the gunslinger's chest.

”No.”

The boy's face took on wonder. ”You're going to kill me. He killed me the first time and you're going to kill me this time. And I think you know it. And I think you know it.”

The gunslinger felt the lie on his lips, then spoke it: ”You'll be all right.” And a greater lie yet. ”I'll take care.”

Jake's face went gray, and he said no more. He put an unwilling hand out, and he and the gunslinger went around the elbow-bend that way, hand in hand. On the other side they came face-to-face with that final rising wall and the man in black.

He stood no more than twenty feet above them, just to the right of the waterfall that crashed and spilled from a huge ragged hole in the rock. Unseen wind rippled and tugged at his hooded robe. He held a staff in one hand. The other hand he held out to them in a mocking gesture of welcome. He seemed a prophet, and below that rus.h.i.+ng sky, mounted on a ledge of rock, a prophet of doom, his voice the voice of Jeremiah.

”Gunslinger! How well you fulfill the prophecies of old! Good day and good day and good day!” He laughed and bowed, the sound echoing over the bellow of the falling water.

Without a thought the gunslinger had drawn his pistols. The boy cowered to his right and behind, a small shadow.

Roland fired three times before he could gain control of his traitor hands-the echoes bounced their bronze tones against the rock valley that rose around them, over the sound of the wind and water.

A spray of granite puffed over the head of the man in black; a second to the left of his hood; a third to the right. He had missed cleanly all three times.

The man in black laughed-a full, hearty laugh that seemed to challenge the receding echo of gunshots. ”Would you kill all your answers so easily, gunslinger?”

”Come down,” the gunslinger said. ”Do that I beg ya, and we'll have answers all around.”

Again that huge, derisive laugh. ”It's not your bullets I fear, Roland. It's your idea of answers that scares me.”

”Come down.”

”We'll speak on the other side, I think,” the man in black said. ”On the other side we will hold much council and long palaver.”

His eyes flicked to Jake and he added: ”Just the two of us.”

Jake flinched away from him with a small, whining cry, and the man in black turned, his robe swirling in the gray air like a batwing. He disappeared into the cleft in the rock from which the water spewed at full force. The gunslinger exercised grim will and did not send a bullet after him-would you kill all your answers so easily, gunslinger?

There was only the sound of wind and water, a sound that had been in this place of desolation for a thousand years. Yet the man in black had stood there. Twelve years after his last glimpse, Roland had seen him close-up again, had spoken to him. And the man in black had laughed.

On the other side we will hold much council and long palaver.

The boy looked up at him, his body trembling. For a moment the gunslinger saw the face of Allie, the girl from Tull, superimposed over Jake's, the scar standing out on her forehead like a mute accusation, and felt brute loathing for them both (it wouldn't occur to him until much later that both the scar on Alice's forehead and the nail he saw spiked through Jake's forehead in his dreams were in the same place). Jake perhaps caught a whiff of his thought; a moan slipped from his throat. Then he twisted his lips and cut the sound off. He held the makings of a fine man, perhaps a gunslinger in his own right if given time.

Just the two of us.

The gunslinger felt a great and unholy thirst in some deep unknown pit of his body, one no draft of water or wine could touch. Worlds trembled, almost within reach of his fingers, and in some instinctual way he strove not to be corrupted, knowing in his colder mind that such strife was vain and always would be. In the end there was only ka.

It was noon. He looked up, letting the cloudy, unsettled daylight s.h.i.+ne for the last time on the all-too-vulnerable sun of his own righteousness. No one ever really pays for betrayal in silver, No one ever really pays for betrayal in silver, he thought. he thought. The price of any betrayal always comes due in flesh. The price of any betrayal always comes due in flesh.

”Come with me or stay,” the gunslinger said.

The boy responded to this with a hard and humorless grin-his father's grin, had he but known it. ”And I'll be fine if I stay,” he said. ”Fine all by myself, here in the mountains. Someone will come and save me. They'll have cake and sandwiches. Coffee in a Thermos, too. Do you say so?”

”Come with me or stay,” the gunslinger repeated, and felt something happen in his mind. An uncoupling. That was the moment at which the small figure before him ceased to be Jake and became only the boy, an impersonality to be moved and used.

Something screamed in the windy stillness; he and the boy both heard.

The gunslinger began to climb, and after a moment Jake came after. Together they mounted the tumbled rock beside the steely-cold falls, and stood where the man in black had stood before them. And together they entered in where he had disappeared. The darkness swallowed them.

The SLOW MUTANTS.

CHAPTER FOUR.

The Slow Mutants

I.

The gunslinger spoke slowly to Jake in the rising and falling inflections of one who speaks in his sleep: ”There were three of us that night: Cuthbert, Alain, and me. We weren't supposed to be there, because none of us had pa.s.sed from the time of children. We were still in our clouts, as the saying went. If we'd been caught, Cort would have striped us b.l.o.o.d.y. But we weren't. I don't think any of the ones that went before us were caught, either. Boys must put on their fathers' pants in private, strut them in front of the mirror, and then sneak them back on their hangers; it was like that. The father pretends he doesn't notice the new way the pants are hung up, or the traces of boot-polish mustaches still under their noses. Do you see?”

The boy said nothing. He'd said nothing since they had pa.s.sed from the daylight. The gunslinger, on the other hand, had talked hectically, feverishly, to fill the silence. He had not looked back at the light as they pa.s.sed into the land beneath the mountains, but the boy had. The gunslinger had read the failing of day in the soft mirror of Jake's cheek: now faint rose, now milk-gla.s.s, now pallid silver, now the last dusk-glow touch of evening, now nothing. The gunslinger had struck a false light and they had gone on.

Finally they camped. No echo from the man in black returned to them. Perhaps he had stopped to rest, too. Or perhaps he floated onward and without running lights, through nighted chambers.

”The Sowing Night Cotillion-the Commala, some of the older folk called it, after the word for rice-was held once a year in the West'rd Hall,” the gunslinger went on. ”The proper name was The Hall of Grandfathers, but to us it was only the West'rd Hall.”

The sound of dripping water came to their ears.

”A courting rite, as any spring dance surely is.” The gunslinger laughed deprecatingly; the insensate walls turned the sound into a loon-like wheeze. ”In the old days, the books say, it was the welcoming of spring, what was sometimes called New Earth or Fresh Commala. But civilization, you know...”

He trailed off, unable to describe the change inherent in that featureless noun, the death of romance and the lingering of its sterile, carnal revenant, a world living on the forced respiration of glitter and ceremony; the geometric steps of make-believe courts.h.i.+p during the Sowing Night Cotil' that had replaced the truer, madder, scribble-scrabble of love which he could only intuit dimly; hollow grandeur in place of true pa.s.sions which might once have built kingdoms and sustained them. He found the truth with Susan Delgado in Mejis, only to lose it again. Once there was a king, Once there was a king, he might have told the boy; he might have told the boy; the Eld whose blood, attenuated though it may be, still flows in my veins. But kings are done, lad. In the world of light, anyway. the Eld whose blood, attenuated though it may be, still flows in my veins. But kings are done, lad. In the world of light, anyway.

”They made something decadent out of it,” the gunslinger said at last. ”A play. A game.” In his voice was all the unconscious distaste of the ascetic and the eremite. His face, had there been stronger light to illumine it, would have shown harshness and sorrow, the purest kind of condemnation. His essential force had not been cut or diluted by the pa.s.sage of years. The lack of imagination that still remained in that face was remarkable.

”But the Ball,” the gunslinger said. ”The Sowing Night Cotil'...”

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