It was the story he’d promised to tell them that Roland was thinking about, and he was a lot more than worried.
By the time they stopped for their noon meal, they could clearly see the building ahead—a many-turreted palace which appeared to be made entirely of reflective glass. The thinny lay close around it, but the palace rose serenely above all, its turrets trying for the sky. Madly strange here in the flat countryside of eastern Kansas, of course it was, but Susannah thought it the most beautiful building she had ever seen in her life; even more beautiful than the Chrysler Building, and that was going some.
As they drew closer, she found it more and more difficult to look elsewhere.
Watching the reflections of the puffy clouds sailing across the glass castle’s blue-sky wains and walls was like watching some splendid illusion … yet there was a solidity to it, as well. An inarguability. Some of that was probably just the shadow it threw—mirages did not, so far as she knew, create shadows—but not all. It just was. She had no idea what such a fabulosity was doing out here in the land of Stuckey’s and Hardee’s (not to mention Boing Boing Burgers), but there it was.
She reckoned that time would tell the rest.
13
They made camp in silence, watched Roland build the wooden chimney that would be their fire in silence, then sat before it in silence, watching the sunset turn the huge glass edifice ahead of them into a castle of fire. Its towers and battlements glowed first a fierce red, then orange, then a gold which cooled rapidly to ocher as Old Star appeared in the firmament above them—
No, she thought in Delta’s voice. Ain’t dat one, girl. Not ‘tall. That’s the North Star.
Same one you seen back home, sittin on yo’ daddy’s lap.
But it was Old Star she wanted, she discovered; Old Star and Old Mother. She was astounded to find herself homesick for Roland’s world, and then wondered why she should be so surprised. It was a world, after all, where no one had called her a nigger bitch (at least not yet), a world where she had found someone to love . . .
and made good friends as well. That last made her feel a little bit like crying, and she hugged Jake to her. He let himself be hugged, smiling, his eyes half-closed. At some distance, unpleasant but bearable even without bullet earplugs, the thinny warbled its moaning song.
When the last traces of yellow began to fade from the castle up the road, Roland left them to sit in the turnpike travel lane and returned to his fire. He cooked more leaf-wrapped deermeat, and handed the food around. They ate in silence (Roland actually ate almost nothing, Susannah observed). By the time they were finished, they could see the Milky Way scattered across the walls of the castle ahead of them, fierce points of reflection that burned like fire in still water.
Eddie was the one who finally broke the silence. “You don’t have to,” he said.
“You’re excused. Or absolved. Or whatever the hell it is you need to take that look off your face.”
Roland ignored him. He drank, tilting the waterskin up on his elbow like some hick drinking moonshine from a jug, head back, eyes on the stars. The last mouthful he spat to the roadside.
“Life for your crop,” Eddie said. He did not smile.
Roland said nothing, but his cheek went pale, as if he had seen a ghost. Or heard one.
14
The gunslinger turned to Jake, who looked back at him seriously. “I went through the trial of manhood at the age of fourteen, the youngest of my ka-tel— of my class, you would say—and perhaps the youngest ever. I told you some of that, Jake. Do you remember?”
You told all of us some of that, Susannah thought, but kept her mouth shut, and warned Eddie with her eyes to do the same. Roland hadn’t been himself during that telling; with Jake both dead and alive within his head, the man had been fighting madness.
“You mean when we were chasing Walter,” Jake said. “After the way station but before I… I took my fall.”
“That’s right.”
“I remember a little, but that’s all. The way you remember the stuff you dream about.”
Roland nodded. “Listen, then. I would tell you more this time, Jake, because you are older. I suppose we all are.”
Susannah was no less fascinated with the story the second time: how the boy Roland had chanced to discover Marten, his father’s advisor (his father’s wizard) in his mother’s apartment. Only none of it had been by chance, of course; the boy would have passed her door with no more than a glance had Marten not opened it and invited him in. Marten had told Roland that his mother wanted to see him, but one look at her rueful smile and downcast eyes as she sat in her low-back chair told the boy he was the last person in the world Gabrielle Deschain wanted to see just then.
The flush on her cheek and the love-bite on the side of her neck told him everything else.
Thus had he been goaded by Marten into an early trial of manhood, and by employing a weapon his teacher had not expected—his hawk, David—Roland had defeated Cort, taken his stick … and made the enemy of his life in Marten Broadcloak.
Beaten badly, face swelling into something that looked like a child’s goblin mask, slipping toward a coma, Cort had fought back unconsciousness long enough to offer his newest apprentice gunslinger counsel: stay away from Marten yet awhile, Cort had said.
“He told me to let the story of our battle grow into a legend,” the gunslinger told Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. “To wait until my shadow had grown hair on its face and haunted Marten in his dreams.”
“Did you take his advice?” Susannah asked.
“I never got a chance,” Roland said. His face cracked in a rueful, painful smile. “I meant to think about it, and seriously, but before I even got started on my thinking, things … changed.”
“They have a way of doing that, don’t they?” Eddie said. “My goodness, yes.”
“I buried my hawk, the first weapon I ever wielded, and perhaps the finest.
Then—and this part I’m sure I didn’t tell you before, Jake—I went into the lower town. That summer’s heat broke in storms full of thunder and hail, and in a room above one of the brothels where Cort had been wont to roister, I lay with a woman for the first time.”
He poked a stick thoughtfully into the fire, seemed to become aware of the unconscious symbolism in what he was doing, and threw it away with a lopsided grin. It landed, smoldering, near the tire of an abandoned Dodge Aspen and went out.
“It was good. The sex was good. Not the great thing I and my friends had thought about and whispered about and wondered about, of course—”
“I think store-bought pussy tends to be overrated by the young, sugar,” Susannah said.
“I fell asleep listening to the sots downstairs singing along with the piano and to the sound of hail on the window. I awoke the next morning in … well. . . let’s just say I awoke in a way I never would have expected to awake in such a place.”
Jake fed fresh fuel to the fire. It flared up, painting highlights on Roland’s cheeks, brushing crescents of shadow beneath his brows and below his lower lip. And as he talked, Susannah found she could almost see what had happened on that long-ago morning that must have smelled of wet cobblestones and rain-sweetened summer air; what had happened in a whore’s crib above a drinking-dive in the lower town of Gilead, Barony seat of New Canaan, one small mote of land located in the western regions of Mid-World.
One boy, still aching from his battle of the day before and newly educated in the mysteries of sex. One boy, now looking twelve instead of fourteen, his lashes dusting down thick upon his cheeks, the lids shuttering those extraordinary blue eyes; one boy with his hand loosely cupping a whore’s breast, his hawk-scarred wrist lying tanned upon the counterpane. One boy in the final instants of his life’s last good sleep, one boy who will shortly be in motion, who will be falling as a dislodged pebble falls on a steep and broken slope of scree; a falling pebble that strikes another, and another, and another, those pebbles striking yet more, until the whole slope is in motion and the earth shakes with the sound of the landslide.
One boy, one pebble on a slope loose and ready to slide.
A knot exploded in the fire. Somewhere in this dream of Kansas, an animal yipped. Susannah watched sparks swirl up past Roland’s incredibly ancient face