own mount, then glanced across to make sure Alain had Lengyll’s machine-gun.
He did. Cuthbert reached around to the small of his back, making sure of the slingshot. It was there. Also his deerskin ammunition bag, which now contained a number of the big-bangers Sheemie had stolen as well as steel shot.
He’s using every ounce of his will to keep from going back, anyway, Cuthbert thought. He found the realization comforting—sometimes Roland scared him.
There was something in him that went beyond steel. Something like madness. If it was there, you were glad to have it on your side … but often enough you wished it wasn’t there at all. On anybody’s side.
“Where is she?” Alain asked.
“Reynolds took her back to Seafront. She’s locked in the pantry … or was locked there. I can’t say which, exactly, because . . .” Roland paused, thinking. “The ball sees far, but sometimes it sees more. Sometimes it sees a future that’s already happening.”
“How can the future already be happening?” Alain asked. “I don’t know, and I don’t think it was always that way. I think it’s more to do with the world than Maerlyn’s Rainbow. Time is strange now. We know that, don’t we? How things sometimes seem to … slip. It’s almost as if there’s a thinny everywhere, breaking things down. But Susan’s safe. I know that, and that’s enough for me. Sheemie is going to help her … or is helping her. Somehow Jonas missed Sheemie, and he followed Susan all the way back.”
“Good for Sheemie!” Alain said, and pumped his fist into the air. “Hurrah!” Then:
“What about us? Did you see us in this future?”
“No. This part was all quick—I hardly snatched more than a glance before the ball took me away. Flew me away, it seemed. But … I saw smoke on the horizon. I remember that. It could have been the smoke of burning tankers, or the brush piled in front of Eyebolt, or both. I think we’re going to succeed.”
Cuthbert was looking at his old friend in a queerly distraught way. The young man so deeply in love that Bert had needed to knock him into the dust of the courtyard in order to wake him up to his responsibilities . . . where was that young man, exactly? What had changed him, given him those disturbing strands of white hair?
“If we survive what’s ahead,” Cuthbert said, watching the gunslinger closely,
“she’ll meet us on the road. Won’t she, Roland?”
He saw the pain on Roland’s face, and now understood: the lover was here, but the
ball had taken away his joy and left only grief. That, and some new purpose—yes, Cuthbert felt it very well—which had yet to be stated.
“I don’t know,” Roland said. “I almost hope not, because we can never be as we were.”
“What? ” This time Cuthbert did rein up.
Roland looked at him calmly enough, but now there were tears in
his eyes.
“We are fools of ka” the gunslinger said. “Ka like a wind, Susan calls it.” He looked first at Cuthbert on his left, then at Alain on his right. “The Tower is our ka; mine especially. But it isn’t hers, nor she mine. No more is John Parson our ka.
We’re not going toward his men to defeat him, but only because they’re in our way.” He raised his hands, then dropped them again, as if to say, What more do you need me to tell you?
“There is no Tower, Roland,” Cuthbert said patiently. “I don’t know what you saw in that glass ball, but there is no Tower. Well, as a symbol, I suppose—like Arthur’s Cup, or the Cross of the man-Jesus—but not as a real thing, a real building—”
“Yes,” Roland said. “It’s real.”
They looked at him uncertainly, and saw no doubt on his face. “It’s real, and our fathers know. Beyond the dark land—I can’t remember its name now, it’s one of the things I’ve lost—is End-World, and in End-World stands the Dark Tower. Its existence is the great secret our fathers keep; it’s what has held them together as ka
tet across all the years of the world’s decline. When we return to Gilead— if we return, and I now think we will—I’ll tell them what I’ve seen, and they’ll confirm what I say.”
“You saw all that in the glass?” Alain asked in an awe-hushed voice.
“I saw much.”
“But not Susan Delgado,” Cuthbert said.
“No. When we finish with yonder men and she finishes with Mejis, her part in our ka-tet ends. Inside the ball, I was given a choice: Susan, and my life as her husband and father of the child she now carries … or the Tower.” Roland wiped his face with a shaking hand. “I would choose Susan in an instant, if not for one thing: the Tower is crumbling, and if it falls, everything we know will be swept away.
There will be chaos beyond our imagining. We must go … and we will go.”
Above his young and unlined cheeks, below his young and unlined brow, were the ancient killer’s eyes that Eddie Dean would first glimpse in the mirror of an airliner’s bathroom. But now they swam with childish tears.
There was nothing childish in his voice, however.
“I choose the Tower. I must. Let her live a good life and long with someone else—she will, in time. As for me, I choose the Tower.”
11
Susan mounted on Pylon, which Sheemie had hastened to bring around to the rear courtyard after lighting the draperies of the great parlor on fire. Olive Thorin rode one of the Barony geldings with Sheemie double-mounted behind her and holding onto Capi’s lead. Maria opened the back gate, wished them good luck, and the three trotted out. The sun was westering now, but the wind had pulled away most of the smoke that had risen earlier. Whatever had happened in the desert, it was over now … or happening on some other layer of the same present time.
Roland, be thee well, Susan thought. I’ll see thee soon, dear . . . as soon as I can.
“Why are we going north?” she asked after half an hour’s silent riding.
“Because Seacoast Road’s best.”
“But—”
“Hush! They’ll find you gone and search the house first . . . if t’asn’t burned flat, that is. Not finding you there, they’ll send west, along the Great Road.” She cast an eye on Susan that was not much like the dithery, slightly confabulated Olive Thorin that folks in Hambry knew … or thought they knew. “If I know that’s the direction you’d choose, so will others we’d do well to avoid.”
Susan was silent. She was too confused to speak, but Olive seemed to know what she was about, and Susan was grateful for that.
“By the time they get around to sniffing west, it’ll be dark. Tonight we’ll stay in one of the sea-cliff caves five miles or so from here. I grew up a fisherman’s daughter, and I know all those caves, none better.” The thought of the caves she’d played in as a girl seemed to cheer her. “Tomorrow we’ll cut west, as you like. I’m afraid you’re going to have a plump old widow as a chaperone for a bit. Better get used to the idea.”
“Thee’s too good,” Susan said. “Ye should send Sheemie and I on alone, sai.”
“And go back to what? Why, I can’t even get two old trailhands on kitchen-duty to follow my orders. Fran Lengyll’s boss of the shooting-match now, and I’ve no urge to wait and see how he does at it. Nor if he decides he’d be better off with me adjudged mad and put up safe in a haci with bars on the windows. Or shall I stay to see how Hash Renfrew does as Mayor, with his boots up on my tables?” Olive actually laughed.
“Sai, I’m sorry.”
“We shall all be sorry later on,” Olive said, sounding remarkably cheery about it.
“For now, the most important thing is to reach those caves unobserved. It must seem that we vanished into thin air. Hold up.”
Olive checked her horse, stood in the stirrups, looked around to make sure of her position, nodded, then twisted in the saddle so she could speak to Sheemie.
“Young man, it’s time for ye to mount yer trusty mule and go back to Seafront. If there are riders coming after us, ye must turn em aside with a few well-chosen words. Will’ee do that?”
Sheemie looked stricken. “I don’t have any well-chosen words, sai Thorin, so I don’t. I hardly have any words at all.”
“Nonsense,” Olive said, and kissed Sheemie’s forehead. “Go back at a goodish trot. If’ee spy no one coming after us by the time the sun touches the hills, then turn north again and follow. We shall wait for ye by the signpost. Do ye know where I mean?”