Twenty minutes later, Rusher unloaded and rubbed down and set to forage with Buckskin and Glue Boy (Cuthbert could not even name his horse as a normal person would), Roland lay on his back in his bedroll, looking up at the late stars overhead. Cuthbert had gone back to sleep as easily as he had awakened at the sound of Rusher’s hoofs, but Roland had never felt less sleepy in his life.
His mind turned back a month, to the whore’s room, to his father sitting on the whore’s bed and watching him dress. The words his father had spoken— I have known for two years— had reverberated like a struck gong in Roland’s head. He
suspected they might continue to do so for the rest of his life.
But his father had had much more to say. About Marten. About Roland’s mother, who was, perhaps, more sinned against than sinning. About harriers who called themselves patriots. And about John Farson, who had indeed been in Cressia, and who was gone from that place now—vanished, as he had a way of doing, like smoke in a high wind. Before leaving, he and his men had burned Indrie, the Barony seat, pretty much to the ground. The slaughter had been in the hundreds, and perhaps it was no surprise that Cressia had since repudiated the Affiliation and spoken for the Good Man. The Barony Governor, the Mayor of Indrie, and the High Sheriff had all ended the early summer day which concluded Farson’s visit with their heads on the wall guarding the town’s entrance. That was, Steven Deschain had said, “pretty persuasive politics.”
It was a game of Castles where both armies had come out from behind their Hillocks and the final moves had commenced, Roland’s father had said, and as was so often the case with popular revolutions, that game was apt to be over before many in the Baronies of Mid-World had begun to realize that John Farson was a serious threat… or, if you were one of those who believed passionately in his vision of democracy and an end to what he called “class slavery and ancient fairy-tales,” a serious agent of change.
His father and his father’s small ka-tet of gunslingers, Roland was amazed to learn, cared little about Farson in either light; they looked upon him as small cheese.
Looked upon the Affiliation itself as small cheese; come to that.
I’m going to send you away, Steven had said, sitting there on the bed and looking somberly at his only son. the one who had lived. There is no true safe place left in Mid- World, hut the Barony of Mejis on the Clean Sea is as close to true safety as any place may be these days . . . so it’s there you’ll go, along with at least two of your mates. Alain, I suppose, for one. Just not that laughing boy for the other, I beg of you. You ‘d be better off with a barking dog.
Roland, who on any other day in his life would have been overjoyed at the prospect of seeing some of the wider world, had protested hotly. If the final battles against the Good Man were at hand, he wanted to fight them at his father’s side.
He was a gunslinger now, after all, if only a ‘prentice, and—
His father had shaken his head, slowly and emphatically. No, Roland. You don’t understand. You shall, however; as well as possible, you shall.
Later, the two of them had walked the high battlements above Mid-World’s last living city—green and gorgeous Gilead in the morning sun, with its pennons flapping and the vendors in the streets of the Old Quarter and horses trotting on the bridle paths which radiated out from the palace standing at the heart of everything. His father had told him more (not everything), and he had understood more (far from everything—nor did his father understand everything). The Dark Tower had not been mentioned by either of them, but already it hung in Roland’s mind, a possibility like a storm cloud far away on the horizon.
Was the Tower what all of this was really about? Not a jumped-up harrier with dreams of ruling Mid-World, not the wizard who had enchanted his mother, not the glass ball which Steven and his posse had hoped to find in Cressia . . . but the Dark Tower?
He hadn’t asked.
He hadn’t dared ask.
Now he shifted in his bedroll and closed his eyes. He saw the girl’s face at once; he felt her lips pressed firmly against his own again, and smelled the scent of her skin. He was instantly hot from the top of his head to the base of his spine, cold from the base of his spine to the tips of his toes. Then he thought of the way her legs had flashed as she slid from Rusher’s back (also the glimmer of the undergarments beneath her briefly raised dress), and his hot half and cold half changed places.
The whore had taken his virginity but wouldn’t kiss him; had turned her face aside when he tried to kiss her. She’d allowed him to do whatever else he wanted, but not that. At the time he’d been bitterly disappointed. Now he was glad.
The eye of his adolescent mind, both restless and clear, considered (he braid which fell down her back to her waist, the soft dimples which had formed at the comers of her mouth when she smiled, the lilt of her voice, her old-fashioned way of saying aye and nay, ye and yer and da. He thought of how her hands had felt on his shoulders as she stretched up to kiss him, and thought he would give everything he owned to feel her hands there again, so light and so firm. And her mouth on his. It was a mouth that knew only a little about kissing, he guessed, but that was a little more than he knew himself.
Be careful, Roland—don’t let your feeling for this girl tip anything over. She’s not free, anyway—she said as much. Not married, but spoken for in some other way.
Roland was far from the relentless creature he would eventually become, but the seeds of that relentlessness were there—small, stony things that would, in their time, grow into trees with deep roots . . . and bitter fruit. Now one of these seeds cracked open and sent up its first sharp blade.
What’s been spoken for may be unspoken, and what’s done may be undone.
Nothing’s sure, but . . . I want her.
Yes. That was the one thing he did know, and he knew it as well as he knew the face of his father: he wanted her. Not as he had wanted the whore when she lay naked on her bed with her legs spread and her half-lidded eyes looking up at him, but in the way he wanted food when he was hungry or water when he was thirsty.
In the way, he supposed, that he wanted to drag Marten’s dusty body behind his horse down Gilead’s High Road in payment for what the wizard had done to his mother.
He wanted her; he wanted the girl Susan.
Roland turned over on his other side, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. His rest was thin and lit by the crudely poetic dreams only adolescent boys have, dreams where sexual attraction and romantic love come together and resonate more powerfully than they ever will again. In these thirsty visions Susan Delgado put her hands on Roland’s shoulders over and over, kissed his mouth over and over, told him over and over to come to her for the first time, to be with her for the first time, to see her for the first time, to see her very well.
2
Five miles or so from where Roland slept and dreamed his dreams, Susan Delgado lay in her bed and looked out her window and watched Old Star begin to grow pale with the approaching dawn. Sleep was no closer now than it had been when she lay down, and there was a throb between her legs where the old woman had touched her. It was distracting but no longer unpleasant, because she now associated it with the boy she’d met on the road and impulsively kissed by starlight. Every time she shifted her legs, that throb flared into a brief sweet ache.
When she’d got home, Aunt Cord (who would have been in her own bed an hour before on any ordinary night) had been sitting in her rocking chair by the fireplace—dead and cold and swept clean of ashes at this time of year—with a
lapful of lace that looked like wave-froth against her dowdy black dress. She was edging it with a speed that seemed almost supernatural to Susan, and she hadn’t looked up when the door opened and her niece came in on a swirl of breeze.