Alain picked up the ball, hating the feel of its smooth, curved surface, expecting it to come alive under his touch. It didn’t, though. He put it in the bag, and looped it over his shoulder again. Then he knelt beside Roland.
He didn’t know how long they tried unsuccessfully to bring him around—until the moon had risen high enough in the sky to turn silver again, and the smoke roiling out of the canyon had begun to dissipate, that was all he knew. Until Cuthbert told him it was enough; they would have to sling him over Rusher’s saddle and ride with him that way. If they could get into the heavily forested lands west o’ Barony before dawn, Cuthbert said, they would likely be safe . . . but they had to get at least that far. They had smashed Parson’s men apart with stunning ease, but the remains would likely knit together again the following day. Best they be gone
before that happened.
And that was how they left Eyebolt Canyon, and the seacoast side of Mejis; riding west beneath the Demon Moon, with Roland laid across his saddle like a corpse.
27
The next day they spent in II Bosque, the forest west of Mejis, waiting for Roland to wake up. When afternoon came and he remained unconscious, Cuthbert said:
“See if you can touch him.”
Alain took Roland’s hands in his own, marshalled all his concentration, bent over his friend’s pale, slumbering face, and remained that way for almost half an hour.
Finally he shook his head, let go of Roland’s hands, and stood up.
“Nothing?” Cuthbert asked.
Alain sighed and shook his head.
They made a travois of pine branches so he wouldn’t have to spend another night riding oversaddle (if nothing else, it seemed to make Rusher nervous to be carrying his master in such a way), and went on, not travelling on the Great Road—that would have been far too dangerous—but parallel to it. When Roland remained unconscious the following day (Mejis falling behind them now, and both boys feeling a deep tug of homesickness, inexplicable but as real as tides), they sat on either side of him, looking at each other over the slow rise and fall of his chest.
“Can an unconscious person starve, or die of thirst?” Cuthbert asked. “They can’t, can they?”
“Yes,” Alain said. “I think they can.”
It had been a long, nerve-wracking night of travel. Neither boy had slept well the previous day, but on this one they slept like the dead, with blankets over their heads to block the sun. They awoke minutes apart as the sun was going down and Demon Moon, now two nights past the full, was rising through a troubled rack of clouds that presaged the first of the great autumn storms.
Roland was sitting up. He had taken the glass from the drawstring bag. He sat with it cradled in his arms, a darkened bit of magic as dead as the glass eyes of The Romp. Roland’s own eyes, also dead, looked indifferently off into the moonlit corridors of the forest. He would eat but not sleep. He would drink from the
streams they passed but not speak. And he would not be parted from the piece of Maerlyn’s Rainbow which they had brought out of Mejis at such great price. It did not glow for him, however. Not, Cuthbert thought once, while Al and I are awake to see it, anyway.
Alain couldn’t get Roland’s hands off the ball, and so he laid his own on Roland’s cheeks, touching him that way. Except there was nothing to touch, nothing there.
The thing which rode west with them toward Gilead was not Roland, or even a ghost of Roland. Like the moon at the close of its cycle, Roland had gone.
PART FOUR
ALL GOD’S
CHILLUN GOT
SHOES
CHAPTER I
KANSAS IN
THE MORNING
1
For the first time in
(hours? days?)
the gunslinger fell silent. He sat for a moment looking toward the building to the east of them (with the sun behind it, the glass palace was a black shape surrounded by a gold nimbus) with his forearms propped on his knees. Then he took the waterskin which lay on the pavement beside him, held it over his face, opened his mouth, and upended it.
He drank what happened to go in his mouth—the others could see his adam’s apple working as he lay back in the breakdown lane, still pouring—but drinking didn’t seem to be his primary purpose. Water streamed down his deeply lined forehead and bounced off his closed eyelids. It pooled in the triangular hollow at the base of his throat and ran back from his temples, wetting his hair and turning it darker.
At last he put the waterskin aside and only lay there, eyes closed, arms stretched out high above his head, like a man surrendering in his sleep. Steam rose in delicate tendrils from his wet face.
“Ahhh,” he said.
“Feel better?” Eddie asked.
The gunslinger’s lids rose, disclosing those faded yet somehow alarming blue eyes.
“Yes. I do. I don’t understand how that can be, as much as I dreaded this telling . . .
but I do.”
“An ologist-of-the-psyche could probably explain it to you,” Susannah said, “but I doubt you’d listen.” She put her hands in the small of her back, stretched and winced … but the wince was only reflex. The pain and stiffness she’d expected weren’t there, and although there was one small creak near the base other spine, she didn’t get the satisfying series of snaps, crackles, and pops she had expected.
“Tell you one thing,” Eddie said, “this gives a whole new meaning to ‘Get it off your chest.’ How long have we been here, Roland?”
“Just one night.”
” ‘The spirits have done it all in a single night,’ ” Jake said in a dreamy voice. His legs were crossed at the ankles; Oy sat in the diamond shape made by the boy’s bent knees, looking at him with his bright gold-black eyes.
Roland sat up, wiping at his wet cheeks with his neckerchief and looking at Jake sharply. “What is it you say?”
“Not me. A guy named Charles Dickens wrote that. In a story called A Christmas Carol. All in a single night, huh?”
“Does any part of your body say it was longer?”
Jake shook his head. No, he felt pretty much the way he did any morning—better than on some. He had to take a leak, but his back teeth weren’t exactly floating, or anything like that.
“Eddie? Susannah?”
“I feel good,” Susannah said. “Surely not as if I stayed up all night, let alone many of em.”
Eddie said, “It reminds me of the time I spent as a junkie, in a way—”
“Doesn’t everything?” Roland asked dryly.
“Oh, that’s funny,” Eddie said. “A real howl. Next train that goes crazy on us, you can ask it the silly questions. What I meant was that you’d spend so many nights high that you got used to feeling like ten pounds of shit in a nine-pound bag when you got up in the morning—bad head, stuffy nose, thumping heart, glass in the old spine. Take it from your pal Eddie, you can tell just from the way you feel in the morning how good dope is for you. Anyway, you’d get so used to that—/did, anyway—that when you actually took a night off, you’d wake up the next morning and sit there on the edge of the bed, thinking, ‘What the flick’s wrong with me? Am I sick? I feel weird. Did I have a stroke in the night?’ ”
Jake laughed, then clapped a hand over his mouth so violently that it was as if he wanted not just to hold the sound in but call it back. “Sorry,” he said. “That made me think of my dad.”
“One of my people, huh?” Eddie said. “Anyway, I expect to be sore, I expect to be tired, I expect to creak when I walk… but I actually think all I need to put me right is a quick pee in the bushes.”
“And a bite to eat?” Roland asked.
Eddie had been wearing a ^mall smile. Now it faded. “No,” he said. “After that story, I’m not all that hungry. In fact, I’m not hungry at all.”
2
Eddie carried Susannah down the embankment and popped her behind a stand of laurel bushes to do her necessary. Jake was sixty or seventy yards east, in a grove of birches. Roland had said he would use the remedial strip to do his morning necessary, then raised his eyebrows when his New York friends laughed.
Susannah wasn’t laughing when she came out of the bushes. Her face was streaked with tears. Eddie didn’t ask her; he knew. He had been fighting the feeling himself. He took her gently in his arms and she put her face against the side of his neck. They stayed that way for a little while.