their way was finally leading downward. Roland actually dared hope the worst was over.
And crossing the White Lands had not been too bad—at least, not yet. There was plenty of
game, there was plenty of wood for their nightly fire, and on the four occasions when the
weather turned nasty and blizzards blew, they had simply laid up and waited for the storms
to wear themselves out on the wooded ridges that marched southeast. Eventually they did,
although the angriest of these blizzards lasted two full days, and when they once more took
to the Path of the Beam, they found another three feet of new snow on the ground. In the
open places where the shrieking nor’east wind had been able to rage fully, there were drifts
like ocean waves. Some of these had buried tall pines almost to their tops.
After their first day in the White Lands, with Roland struggling to pull her (and then the
snow had been less than a foot deep), Susannah saw that they were apt to spend months
crossing those high, forested ridges unless Roland had a pair of snowshoes, so that first
night she’d set out to make him a pair. It was a trial-and-error process (“By guess and by
gosh” was how Susannah put it), but the gunslinger pronounced her third effort a success.
The frames were made of limber birch branches, the centers of woven, overlapping
deerskin strips. To Roland they looked like teardrops.
“How did you know to do this?” he asked her after his first day of wearing them. The
increase in distance covered was nothing short of amazing, especially once he had learned
to walk with a kind of rolling, shipboard stride that kept the snow from accumulating on the
latticed surfaces.
“Television,” Susannah said. “There used to be this program I watched when I was a
kid,Sergeant Preston of the Yukon . Sergeant Preston didn’t have a billy-bumbler to keep
him company, but hedid have his faithful dog, King. Anyway, I closed my eyes and tried to
remember what the guy’s snowshoes looked like.” She pointed to the ones Roland was
wearing. “That’s the best I could do.”
“You did fine,” he said, and the sincerity she heard in his simple compliment made her
tingle all over. This was not necessarily the way she wanted Roland (or any other man, for
that matter) to make her feel, but she seemed stuck with it. She wondered if that was nature
or nurture, and wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“They’ll be all right as long as they don’t fall apart,” she allowed. Her first effort had done just that.
“I don’t feel the strips loosening,” he told her. “Stretching a little, maybe, but that’s all.”
Now, as they crossed the great open space, that third pair of snowshoes was still holding
together, and because she felt as though she’d made some sort of contribution, Susannah
was able to let Roland pull her along without too much guilt. Shedid wonder about
Mordred from time to time, and one night about ten days after they had crossed the
snow-boundary, she came out and asked Roland to tell her what he knew. What prompted
her was his declaration that there was no need to set a watch, at least for awhile; they could both get a full ten hours’ worth of sleep, if that’s what their bodies could use. Oy would
wake them if they needed waking.
Roland had sighed and looked into the fire for nearly a full minute, his arms around his
knees and his hands clasped loosely between them. She had just about decided he wasn’t
going to answer at all when he said, “Still following, but falling further and further behind.
Struggling to eat, struggling to catch up, struggling most of all to stay warm.”
“To staywarm ?” To Susannah this seemed hard to believe. There were trees all around
them.
“He has no matches and none of the Sterno stuff, either. I believe that one night—early on,
this would have been—he came upon one of our fires with live coals still under the ash, and
he was able to carry some with him for a few days after that and so have a fire at night. It’s how the ancient rock-dwellers used to carry fire on their journeys, or so I was told.”
Susannah nodded. She had been taught roughly the same thing in a high school science
class, although the teacher had admitted a lot of what they knew about how Stone Age
people got along wasn’t true knowledge at all, but only informed guesswork. She
wondered how much of what Roland had just told her was also guesswork, and so she
asked him.
“It’s not guessing, but I can’t explain it. If it’s the touch, Susannah, it’s not such as Jake had. Not seeing and hearing, or even dreaming. Although…do you believe we have dreams
sometimes we don’t remember after we awaken?”
“Yes.” She thought of telling him about rapid eye movement, and the REM sleep
experiments she’d read about inLook magazine, then decided it would be too complex. She
contented herself with saying that she was sure folks had dreams every single night that
they didn’t remember.
“Mayhap I see him and hear him in those,” Roland said. “All I know is that he’s struggling
to keep up. He knows so little about the world that it’s really a wonder he’s still alive at
all.”
“Do you feel sorry for him?”
“No. I can’t afford pity, and neither can you.”
But his eyes had left hers when he said that, and she thought he was lying. Maybe he
didn’twant to feel sorry for Mordred, but she was sure he did, at least a little. Maybe he
wanted to hope that Mordred would die on their trail—certainly there were plenty of
chances it would happen, with hypothermia being the most likely cause—but Susannah
didn’t think he was quite able to do it. They might have outrun ka, but she reckoned that
blood was still thicker than water.
There was something else, however, more powerful than even the blood of relation. She
knew, because she could now feel it beating in her own head, both sleeping and waking. It
was the Dark Tower. She thought that they were very close to it now. She had no idea what
they were going to do about its mad guardian when and if they got there, but she found she
no longer cared. For the present, all she wanted was to see it. The idea of entering it was
still more than her imagination could deal with, but seeing it? Yes, she could imagine that.
And she thought that seeing it would be enough.
Two
They made their way slowly down the wide white downslope with Oy first hurrying at Roland’s heel, then dropping behind to check on Susannah, then bounding back to Roland
again. Bright blue holes sometimes opened above them. Roland knew that was the Beam at
work, constantly pulling the cloud-cover southeast. Otherwise, the sky was white from
horizon to horizon, and had a lowfull look both of them now recognized. More snow was
on the come, and the gunslinger had an idea this storm might be the worst they’d seen. The
wind was getting up, and the moisture in it was enough to numb all his exposed skin (after
three weeks of diligent needlework, that amounted to not much more than his forehead and
the tip of his nose). The gusts lifted long diaphanous scarves of white. These raced past
them and then on down the slope like fantastical, shape-changing ballet-dancers.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Susannah asked from behind him, almost wistfully.
Roland of Gilead, no judge of beauty (except once, in the outland of Mejis), grunted. He
knew what would be beautiful to him: decent cover when the storm overtook them,
something more than just a thick grove of trees. So he almost doubted what he saw when
the latest gust of wind blew itself out and the snow settled. He dropped the tow-band,
stepped out of it, went back to Susannah (their gunna, now on the increase again, was
strapped to the sledge behind her), and dropped on one knee next to her. Dressed in hides
from top to toe, he looked more like a mangy bigfoot than a man.
“What do you make of that?” he asked her.
The wind kicked up again, harder than ever, at first obscuring what he had seen. When it
dropped, a hole opened above them and the sun shone briefly through, lighting the
snowfield with billions of diamond-chip sparkles. Susannah shaded her eyes with one hand
and looked long downhill. What she saw was an invertedT carved in the snow. The cross
arm, closest to them (but still at least two miles away) was relatively short, perhaps two
hundred feet on either side. The long arm, however, wasvery long, going all the way to the