was how Bill the robot had called the boy). “Nay, I was wrong—again—and will not scold
thee. But…”
He walked to where Patrick was sitting. Patrick cringed away from him with a doglike,
placatory smile that made Roland angry all over again, but he quashed the emotion easily
enough this time. Patrick had loved Oy too, and this was the only way he had of dealing
with his sorrow.
Little that mattered to Roland now.
He reached down and gently plucked the eraser out of the boy’s fingers. Patrick looked at
him questioningly, then reached out his empty hand, asking with his eyes that the
wonderful (and useful) new toy be given back.
“Nay,” Roland said, as gently as he could. “You made do for the gods only know how
many years without ever knowing such things existed; you can make do the rest of this one
day, I think. Mayhap there’ll be something for you to draw—and then undraw—later on.
Do’ee ken, Patrick?”
Patrick did not, but once the eraser was safely deposited in Roland’s pocket along with the
watch, he seemed to forget about it and just went back to his drawing.
“Put thy picture aside for a little, too,” Roland told him.
Patrick did so without argument. He pointed first to the cart, then to the Tower Road, and
made his interrogative hooting sound.
“Aye,” Roland said, “but first we should see what Mordred had for gunna—there may be
something useful there—and bury our friend. Will’ee help me see Oy into the ground,
Patrick?”
Patrick was willing, and the burial didn’t take long; the body was far smaller than the heart it had held. By mid-morning they had begun to cover the last few miles on the long road
which led to the Dark Tower.
Chapter III:
The Crimson King
and the Dark Tower
One
The road and the tale have both been long, would you not say so? The trip has been long
and the cost has been high…but no great thing was ever attained easily. A long tale, like a
tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time. Now, however, as the end draws closer, you
must mark yon two travelers walking toward us with great care. The older man—he with
the tanned, lined face and the gun on his hip—is pulling the cart they call Ho Fat II. The
younger one—he with the oversized drawing pad tucked under his arm that makes him
look like a student in days of old—is walking along beside it. They are climbing a long,
gently upsloping hill not much different from hundreds of others they have climbed. The
overgrown road they follow is lined on either side with the remains of rock walls; wild
roses grow in amiable profusion amid the tumbles of fieldstone. In the open, brush-dotted
land beyond these fallen walls are strange stone edifices. Some look like the ruins of castles; others have the appearance of Egyptian obelisks; a few are clearly Speaking Rings of the
sort where demons may be summoned; one ancient ruin of stone pillars and plinths has the
look of Stone-henge. One almost expects to see hooded Druids gathered in the center of
that great circle, perhaps casting the runes, but the keepers of these monuments, these
precursors of the Great Monument, are all gone. Only small herds of bannock graze where
once they worshipped.
Never mind. It’s not old ruins we’ve come to observe near the end of our long journey, but
the old gunslinger pulling the handles of the cart. We stand at the crest of the hill and wait
as he comes toward us. He comes. And comes. Relentless as ever, a man who always learns to speak the language of the land (at least some of it) and the customs of the country; he is still a man who would straighten pictures in strange hotel rooms. Much about him has
changed, but not that. He crests the hill, so close to us now that we can smell the sour tang of his sweat. He looks up, a quick and automatic glance he shoots first ahead and then to
either side as he tops any hill—Always con yer vantagewas Cort’s rule, and the last of his
pupils has still not forgotten it. He looks up without interest, looks down…and stops. After
a moment of staring at the broken, weed-infested paving of the road, he looks up again,
more slowly this time. Much more slowly. As if in dread of what he thinks he has seen.
And it’s here we must join him—sink into him—although how we will ever con the
vantage of Roland’s heart at such a moment as this, when the single-minded goal of his
lifetime at last comes in sight, is more than this poor excuse for a storyman can ever tell.
Some moments are beyond imagination.
Two
Roland glanced up quickly as he topped the hill, not because he expected trouble but
because the habit was too deeply ingrained to break.Always con yer vantage, Cort had told
them, drilling it into their heads from the time when they had been little more than babbies.
He looked back down at the road—it was becoming more and more difficult to swerve
among the roses without crushing any, although he had managed the trick so far—and then,
belatedly, realized what he had just seen.
What youthoughtyou saw, Roland told himself, still looking down at the road.It’s
probably just another of the strange ruins we’ve been passing ever since we started moving
again.
But even then Roland knew it wasn’t so. What he’d seen was not to either side of the
Tower Road, but dead ahead.
He looked up again, hearing his neck creak like hinges in an old door, and there, still miles ahead but now visible on the horizon, real as roses, was the top of the Dark Tower. That
which he had seen in a thousand dreams he now saw with his living eyes. Sixty or eighty
yards ahead, the road rose to a higher hill with an ancient Speaking Ring moldering in the
ivy and honeysuckle on one side and a grove of ironwood trees on the other. At the center
of this near horizon, the black shape rose in the near distance, blotting out a tiny portion of the blue sky.
Patrick came to a stop beside Roland and made one of his hooting sounds.
“Do you see it?” Roland asked. His voice was dusty, cracked with amazement. Then,
before Patrick could answer, the gunslinger pointed to what the boy wore around his neck.
In the end, the binoculars had been the only item in Mordred’s little bit of gunna worth
taking.
“Give them over, Pat.”
Patrick did, willingly enough. Roland raised them to his eyes, made a minute adjustment
to the knurled focus knob, and then caught his breath as the top of the Tower sprang into
view, seemingly close enough to touch. How much was visible over the horizon? How
much was he looking at? Twenty feet? Perhaps as much as fifty? He didn’t know, but he
could see at least three of the narrow slit-windows which ascended the Tower’s barrel in a
spiral, and he could see the oriel window at the top, its many colors blazing in the spring
sunshine, the black center seeming to peer back down the binoculars at him like the very
Eye of Todash.
Patrick hooted and held out a hand for the binoculars. He wanted his own look, and Roland
handed the glasses over without a murmur. He felt light-headed, not really there. It
occurred to him that he had sometimes felt like that in the weeks before his battle with Cort, as though he were a dream or a moonbeam. He had sensed something coming, some vast
change, and that was what he felt now.
Yonder it is,he thought.Yonder is my destiny, the end of my life’s road. And yet my heart
still beats (a little faster than before, ’tis true), my blood still courses, and no doubt when I bend over to grasp the handles of this becurst cart my back will groan and I may pass a little gas. Nothing at all has changed.
He waited for the disappointment this thought surely presaged—the letdown. It didn’t
come. What he felt instead was a queer, soaring brightness that seemed to begin in his mind
and then spread to his muscles. For the first time since setting out at mid-morning, thoughts of Oy and Susannah left his mind. He felt free.
Patrick lowered the binoculars. When he turned to Roland, his face was excited. He
pointed to the black thumb jutting above the horizon and hooted.
“Yes,” Roland said. “Someday, in some world, some version of you will paint it, along
with Llamrei, Arthur Eld’s horse. That I know, for I’ve seen the proof. As for now, it’s
where we must go.”
Patrick hooted again, then pulled a long face. He put his hands to his temples and swayed