...
What shall I call you, then? Star-slut? Whore of the Winds?
Some live on love that comes to the ancient places... even in these sad and evil times. Some, gunslinger, live on blood. Even, I understand, on the blood of young boys.
May he not be spared?
Yes.
How?
Cease, gunslinger. Strike your camp and turn back northwest. In the northwest there is still a need for men who live by the bullet.
I am sworn by my father’s guns and by the treachery of Marten.
Marten is no more. The man in black has eaten his soul. This you know.
I am sworn.
Then you are damned.
Have your way with me, bitch.
VI
Eagerness.
The shadow swung over him, enfolded him. There was sudden ecstasy broken only by a galaxy of pain, as faint and bright as ancient stars gone red with collapse. Faces came to him unbidden at the climax of their coupling: Sylvia Pittston; Alice, the woman from Tull; Susan; a dozen others.
And finally, after an eternity, he pushed her away from him, once again in his right mind, bone-weary and disgusted.
No! It isn’t enough! It—
“Let me be,” the gunslinger said. He sat up and almost fell off the altar before regaining his feet. She touched him tentatively
(honeysuckle, jasmine, sweet attar)
and he pushed her violently, falling to his knees.
He made his drunken way to the perimeter of the circle. He staggered through, feeling a huge weight fall from his shoulders. He drew a shuddering, weeping breath. Had he learned enough to justify this feeling of defilement? He didn’t know. In time he supposed he would. As he started away, he could feel her standing at the bars of her prison, watching him go from her. He wondered how long it might be before someone else crossed the desert and found her, hungry and alone. For a moment he felt dwarfed by the possibilities of time.
VII
“You’re sick!”
Jake stood up fast when the gunslinger shambled back through the last trees and came into camp. He’d been huddled by the ruins of the tiny fire, the jawbone across his knees, gnawing disconsolately on the bones of the rabbit. Now he ran toward the gunslinger with a look of distress that made Roland feel the full, ugly weight of a coming betrayal.
“No,” he said. “Not sick. Just tired. Whipped.” He gestured absently at the jawbone. “You can let go of that, Jake.”
The boy threw it down quickly and violently, rubbing his hands across his shirt after doing it. His upper lip rose and fell in a snarl that was, the gunslinger believed, perfectly unconscious.
The gunslinger sat down—almost fell down—feeling the aching joints and the pummeled, thick mind that was the unlovely afterglow of mescaline. His crotch also pulsed with a dull ache. He rolled a cigarette with careful, unthinking slowness. Jake watched. The gunslinger had a sudden impulse to speak to the boy dan-dinh after telling him all he had learned, then thrust the idea away with horror. He wondered if a part of him—mind or soul—might not be disintegrating. To open one’s mind and heart to the command of a child? The idea was insane.
“We sleep here tonight. Tomorrow we start climbing. I’ll go out a little later and see if I can’t shoot something for supper. We need to make strength. I’ve got to sleep now. Okay?”
“Sure. Knock yourself out.”
“I don’t understand you.”
