Stephen King – The Dark Tower

me alive so long after John and Aaron passed. Let loose of me a minute, Marian, let loose!

There’s something I have to do!”

Marian Carver let go of him and looked at Roland. He didn’t hear her voice in his head and

didn’t need to; what she wanted to tell him was clear in her eyes:Catch him if he falls, sai .

But the man Susannah had called Daddy Mose didn’t fall. He put his loosely clenched,

arthritic fist to his forehead, then bent his right knee, taking all of his weight on his

trembling right leg. “Hile you last gunslinger, Roland Deschain out of Gilead, son of

Steven and true descendent of Arthur Eld. I, the last of what was called among ourselves the Ka-Tet of the Rose, salute you.”

Roland put his own fisted hand to his forehead and did more than make a leg; he went to

his knee. “Hile Daddy Mose, godfather of Susannah, dinh of the Ka-Tet of the Rose, I

salute you with my heart.”

“Thankee,” said the old man, and then laughed like a boy. “We’re well met in the House of

the Rose! What was once meant to be the Grave of the Rose! Ha! Tell me we’re not! Can

you?”

“Nay, for it would be a lie.”

“Speak it!” the old man cried, then uttered that cheery go-to-hell laugh once again. “But

I’m f’gettin my manners in my awe, gunslinger. This handsome stretch of woman standing

beside me, it’d be natural for you to call her my granddaughter, ’cause I was sem’ty in the

year she was born, which was nineteen-and-sixty-nine. But the truth is”—But’na troof

iswas what reached Roland’s ear—“that sometimes the best things in life are started late,

and having children”—Chirrun—“is one of’m, in my opinion. Which is a long-winded

way of saying this is my daughter, Marian Odetta Carver, President of the Tet Corporation

since I stepped down in ’97, at the age of ninety-eight. And do you think it would frost

some country-club balls, Roland, to know that this business, now worth just about ten

billion dollars, is run by a Negro?” His accent, growing deeper as his excitement and joy

grew, turned the last intoDis bid’ness, now wuth jus ’bout tin binnion dolla, is run bah

NEE-grow?

“Stop, Dad,” the tall woman beside him said. Her voice was kind but brooked no denial.

“You’ll have that heart monitor you wear sounding the alarm if you don’t, and this man’s

time is short.”

“She run me like a ray’road!” the old man cried indignantly. At the same time he turned

his head slightly and dropped Roland a wink of inexpressible slyness and good humor with

the eye his daughter could not see.

As if she wasn’t onto your tricks, old man,Roland thought, amused even in his sorrow.As

if she hasn’t been on to them for many and many a year—say delah.

Marian Carver said, “We’d palaver with you for just a little while, Roland, but first there’s something I need to see.”

“Ain’t a bit o’ need for that!” the old man said, his voice cracking with indignation. “Not a bit o’ need, and you know it! Did I raise a jackass?”

“He’s very likely right,” Marian said, “but always safe—”

“—never sorry,” the gunslinger said. “It’s a good rule, aye. What is it you’d see? What

will tell you that I am who I say I am, and you believe I am?”

“Your gun,” she said.

Roland took the Old Home Days shirt out of the leather bag, then pulled out the holster. He

unwrapped the shell-belt and pulled out his revolver with the sandalwood grips. He heard

Marian Carver draw in a sharp, awed breath and chose to ignore it. He noticed that the two

guards in their well-cut suits had drawn close, their eyes wide.

“You see it!” Moses Carver shouted. “Aye, every one of you here! SayGod ! Might as well

tell your gran-babbies you saw Excalibur, the Sword of Arthur, for’t comes to the same!”

Roland held his father’s revolver out to Marian. He knew she would need to take it in order

to confirm who he was, that she must do this before leading him into the Tet Corporation’s

soft belly (where the wrong someone could do terrible damage), but for a moment she was

unable to fulfill her responsibility. Then she steeled herself and took the gun, her eyes

widening at the weight of it. Careful to keep all of her fingers away from the trigger, she

brought the barrel up to her eyes and then traced a bit of the scrollwork near the muzzle:

“Will you tell me what this means, Mr. Deschain?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said, “if you will call me Roland.”

“If you ask, I’ll try.”

“This is Arthur’s mark,” he said, tracing it himself. “The only mark on the door of his

tomb, do ya. ’Tis his dinh mark, and means WHITE.”

The old man held out his trembling hands, silent but imperative.

“Is it loaded?” she asked Roland, and then, before he could answer: “Of course it is.”

“Give it to him,” Roland said.

Marian looked doubtful, the two guards even more so, but Daddy Mose still held his hands

out for the widowmaker, and Roland nodded. The woman reluctantly held the gun out to

her father. The old man took it, held it in both hands, and then did something that both

warmed and chilled the gunslinger’s heart: he kissed the barrel with his old, folded lips.

“What does thee taste?” Roland asked, honestly curious.

“The years, gunslinger,” Moses Carver said. “So I do.” And with that he held the gun out

to the woman again, butt first.

She handed it back to Roland as if glad to be rid of its grave and killing weight, and he wrapped it once more in its belt of shells.

“Come in,” she said. “And although our time is short, we’ll make it as joyful as your grief

will allow.”

“Amen to that!” the old man said, and clapped Roland on the shoulder. “She’s still alive,

my Odetta—she you call Susannah. There’s that. Thought you’d be glad to know it, sir.”

Rolandwas glad, and nodded his thanks.

“Come now, Roland,” Marian Carver said. “Come and be welcome in our place, for it’s

your place as well, and we know the chances are good that you’ll never visit it again.”

Ten

Marian Carver’s office was on the northwest corner of the ninety-ninth floor. Here the

walls were all glass unbroken by a single strut or muntin, and the view took the

gunslinger’s breath away. Standing in that corner and looking out was like hanging in

midair over a skyline more fabulous than any mind could imagine. Yet it was one he had

seen before, for he recognized yonder suspension bridge as well as some of the tall

buildings on this side of it. Heshould have recognized the bridge, for they’d almost died on

it in another world. Jake had been kidnapped off it by Gasher, and taken to the Tick-Tock

Man. This was the City of Lud as it must have been in its prime.

“Do you call it New York?” he asked. “You do, yes?”

“Yes,” Nancy Deepneau said.

“And yonder bridge, that swoops?”

“The George Washington,” Marian Carver said. “Or just the GWB, if you’re a native.”

So yonder lay not only the bridge which had taken them into Lud but the one beside which

Pere Callahan had walked when he left New York to start his wandering days. That Roland

remembered from his story, and very well.

“Would you care for some refreshment?” Nancy asked.

He began to say no, took stock of how his head was swimming, and changed his mind.

Something, yes, but only if it would sharpen wits that needed to be sharp. “Tea, if you have

it,” he said. “Hot, strong tea, with sugar or honey. Can you?”

“We can,” Marian said, and pushed a button on her desk. She spoke to someone Roland

couldn’t see, and all at once the woman in the outer office—the one who had appeared to

be talking to herself—made more sense to him.

When the ordering of hot drinks and sandwiches (what Roland supposed he would always

think of as popkins) was done, Marian leaned forward and captured Roland’s eye. “We’re

well-met in New York, Roland, so I hope, but our time here isn’t…isn’tvital . And I suspect

you know why.”

The gunslinger considered this, then nodded. A trifle cautiously, but over the years he had

built a degree of caution into his nature. There were others—Alain Johns had been one,

Jamie DeCurry another—for whom a sense of caution had been inbred, but that had never

been the case with Roland, whose tendency had been to shoot first and ask questions later.

“Nancy told you to read the plaque in the Garden of the Beam,” Marian said. “Did—”

“Garden of the Beam, sayGawd! ” Moses Carver interjected. On the walk down the