found a temporary refuge.
Before time began, Roland said, Old Star and Old Mother had been young and passionate
newlyweds. Then one day there had been a terrible argument. Old Mother (who in those
long-ago days had been known by her real name, which was Lydia) had caught Old Star
(whose real name was Apon) hanging about a beautiful young woman named Cassiopeia.
They’d had a real bang-up fight, those two, a hair-pulling, eye-gouging, crockery-throwing
fight. One of those thrown bits of crockery had become the earth; a smaller shard the moon,
a coal from their kitchen stove had become the sun. In the end, the gods had stepped in so
Apon and Lydia might not, in their anger, destroy the universe before it was fairly begun.
Cassiopeia, the saucy jade who caused the trouble in the first place (“Yeah, right—it’s
always the woman,” Susannah had said at this point), had been banished to a rocking-chair
made of stars forever and ever. Yet not even this had solved the problem. Lydia had been
willing to try again, but Apon was stiffnecked and full of pride (“Yeah, always blame the
man,” Eddie had grunted at this point). So they had parted, and now they look at each other in mingled hatred and longing from across the star-strewn wreckage of their divorce. Apon
and Lydia are three billion years gone, the gunslinger told them; they have become Old
Star and Old Mother, the north and south, each pining for the other but both now too proud
to beg for reconciliation . . . and Cassiopeia sits off to the side in her chair, rocking and
laughing at them both.
Eddie was startled by a soft touch on his arm. It was Susannah. “Come on,” she said.
“We’ve got to make him talk.”
Eddie carried her to the campfire and put her down carefully on Roland’s right side. He sat
on Roland’s left. Roland looked first at Susan- nah, then at Eddie.
“How close you both sit to me,” he remarked. “Like lovers … or warders in a gaol.”
“It’s time for you to do some talking.” Susannah’s voice was low, clear, and musical. “If we’re your companions, Roland—and it seems like we are, like it or not—it’s time you
started treating us as companions. Tell us what’s wrong …”
“… and what we can do about it,” Eddie finished.
Roland sighed deeply. “I don’t know how to begin,” he said. “It’s been so long since I’ve had companions … or a tale to tell …”
“Start with the bear,” Eddie said.
Susannah leaned forward and touched the jawbone Roland held in his hands. It frightened
her, but she touched it anyway. “And finish with this.”
“Yes.” Roland lifted the bone to eye-level and looked at it for a moment before dropping it back into his lap. “We’ll have to speak of this, won’t we? It’s the center of the thing.”
But the bear came first.
12
“THIS IS THE STORY I was told when I was a child,” Roland said. “When everything
was new, the Great Old Ones—they weren’t gods, but people who had almost the
knowledge of gods—created Twelve Guardians to stand watch at the twelve portals which
lead in and out of the world. Sometimes I heard that these portals were natural things, like
the constel- lations we see in the sky or the bottomless crack in the earth we called Dragon’s
Grave, because of the great burst of steam they gave off every thirty or forty days. But
other people—one I remember in particular, the head cook in my father’s castle, a man named Hax—said they were not natural, that they had been created by the Great Old Ones
themselves, in the days before they hanged themselves with pride like a noose and
disappeared from the earth. Hax used to say that the creation of the Twelve Guardians was
the last act of the Great Old Ones, their attempt to atone for the great wrongs they had done
to each other, and to the earth itself.”
“Portals,” Eddie mused. “Doors, you mean. We’re back to those again. Do these doors that lead in and out of the world open on the world Suze and I came from? Like the ones we
found along the beach?”
“I don’t know,” Roland said. “For every thing I do know, there are a hundred things I don’t.
You—both of you—will have to reconcile your- selves to that fact. The world has moved
on, we say. When it did, it went like a great receding wave, leaving only wreckage
behind . . . wreckage that sometimes looks like a map.”
“Well, make a guess!” Eddie exclaimed, and the raw eagerness in his voice told the
gunslinger that Eddie had not given up the idea of returning to his own world—and
Susannah’s—even now. Not entirely.
“Leave him be, Eddie,” Susannah said. “The man don’t guess.”
“Not true—sometimes the man does,” Roland said, surprising them both. “When
guessing’s the only thing left, sometimes he does. The answer is no. I don’t think—I don’t
guess—that these portals are much like the doors on the beach. I don’t guess they go to a
where or when that we would recognize. I think the doors on the beach—the ones that led
into the world you both came from—were like the pivot at the center of a child’s
teeterboard. Do you know what that is?”
“Seesaw?” Susannah asked, and tipped her hand back and forth to demonstrate.
“Yes!” Roland agreed, looking pleased. “Just so. On one end of this sawsee-”
“Seesaw,” Eddie said, smiling a little.
“Yes. On one end, my ka. On the other, that of the man in black— Walter. The doors were
the center, creations of the tension between two opposing destinies. These other portals are
things far greater than Walter, or me, or the little fellowship we three have made.”
“Are you saying,” Susannah asked hesitantly, “that the portals where these Guardians stand watch are outside ka? Beyond ka?”
“I’m saying that I believe so.” He offered his own brief smile, a thin sickle in the firelight.
“That I guess so.”
He was silent a moment, then he picked up a stick of his own. He brushed away the carpet
of pine needles and used the stick to draw in the dirt beneath:
“Here is the world as I was told it existed when I was a child. The Xs are the portals
standing in a ring at its eternal edge. If one drew six lines, connecting these portals in
pairs—so—”
He looked up. “Do you see where the lines cross in the center?”
Eddie felt gooseflesh crawl up his back and down his arms. His mouth was suddenly dry.
“Is that it, Roland? Is that—?”
Roland nodded. His long, lined face was grave. “At this nexus lies the Great Portal, the
so-called Thirteenth Gate which rules not just this world but all worlds.”
He tapped the center of the circle.
“Here is the Dark Tower for which I’ve searched my whole life.”
13
THE GUNSLINGER RESUMED: “At each of the twelve lesser portals the Great Old
Ones set a Guardian. In my childhood I could have named them all in the rimes my
nursemaid—and Hax the cook—taught to me . . . but my childhood was long ago. There
was the Bear, of course, and the Fish . . . the Lion . . . the Bat. And the Turtle—he was an
important one . . .”
The gunslinger looked up into the starry sky, his brow creased in deep thought. Then an
amazingly sunny smile broke across his features and he recited:
“See the TURTLE of enormous girth!
On his shell he holds the earth.
His thought is slow but always kind;
He holds us all within his mind.
On his back all vows are made;
He sees the truth but mayn’t aid.
He loves the land and loves the sea,
And even loves a child like me.”
Roland uttered a small, bemused laugh. “Hax taught that to me, singing it as he stirred the frosting for some cake and gave me little nips of the sweet from the edge of his spoon.
Amazing what we remember, isn’t it? Anyway, as I grew older, I came to believe that the
Guardians didn’t really exist—that they were symbols rather than substance. It seems that I
was wrong.”
“I called it a robot,” Eddie said, “but that’s not what it really was. Susannah’s right—the only thing robots bleed when you shoot them is Quaker State 10-40. I think it was what
people of my world call a cyborg, Roland—a creature that’s part machine and part flesh and
blood. There was a movie I saw . . . we told you about movies, didn’t we?” ‘
Smiling a little, Roland nodded.
“Well, this movie was called Robocop, and the guy in it wasn’t a lot different from the bear
Susannah killed. How did you know where she should shoot it?”