Stephen King – The Dark Tower

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