“Do what you want.”
“Ah.” The gunslinger nodded and lay back.Knock myself out,he thought.Knock. Myself out.
When he woke up the shadows were long across the small grass clearing. “Build up the fire,” he told Jake and tossed him his flint and steel. “Can you use that?”
“Yes, I think so.”
The gunslinger walked toward the willow grove and then stopped at the sound of the boy’s voice. Stopped dead.
“Spark-a-dark, where’s my sire?” the boy murmured, and Roland heard the sharpchik!chik!chik!of the flint. It sounded like the cry of a small mechanical bird. “Will I lay me? Will I stay me? Bless this camp with fire.”
Picked it up from me,the gunslinger thought, not in the least surprised to discover he was all over goosebumps and on the verge of shivering like a wet dog.Picked it up from me, words I don’t even remember saying, and will I betray such? Ah, Roland, will thee betray such true thread as this in a sad unthreaded world? Could anything justify it?
’Tis just words.
Aye, but old ones. Good ones.
“Roland?” the boy called. “Are you all right?”
“Yar,” he said gruffly, and the tang of smoke stung faintly in his nose. “Thee’s made fire.”
“Yes,” the boy said simply, and Roland did not need to turn to know the boy was smiling.
The gunslinger got moving and bore left, this time skirting the willow grove. At a place where the ground opened out and upward in heavy open grass, he stepped back into the shadows and stood silently. Faintly, clearly, he could hear the crackle of the campfire Jake had rekindled. The sound made him smile.
He stood without moving for ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. Three rabbits came, and once they were at silflay the gunslinger pulled leather. He took them down, skinned them, gutted them, and brought them back to the camp. Jake had water already steaming over the low flames.
The gunslinger nodded to him. “That’s a good piece of work.”
Jake flushed with pleasure and silently handed back the flint and steel.
While the stew cooked, the gunslinger used the last of the light to go back into the willow grove. Near the first pool he began to hack at the tough vines that grew near the water’s marshy verge. Later, as the fire burned down to coals and Jake slept, he would plait them into ropes that might be of some limited use later. But his intuition was that the climb would not be a particularly difficult one. He felt ka at work on the surface of things and no longer even considered it odd.
The vines bled green sap over his hands as he carried them back to where Jake waited.
They were up with the sun and packed in half an hour. The gunslinger hoped to shoot another rabbit in the meadow as they fed, but time was short and no rabbit showed itself. The bundle of their remaining food was now so small and light that Jake carried it easily. He had toughened up, this boy; you could see it.
The gunslinger carried their water, freshly drawn from one of the springs. He looped his three vine ropes around his belly. They gave the circle of stones a wide berth (the gunslinger was afraid the boy might feel a recurrence of fear, but when they passed above it on a stony rise, Jake only offered it a passing glance and then looked at a bird that hovered upwind). Soon enough, the trees began to lose their height and lushness. Trunks were twisted and roots seemed to struggle with the earth in a tortured hunt for moisture.
“It’s all so old,” Jake said glumly when they paused for a rest. “Isn’t there anything young in this world?”
The gunslinger smiled and gave Jake an elbow. “You are,” he said.
Jake responded with a wan smile. “Will it be hard to climb?”
The gunslinger looked at him, curious. “The mountains are high. Don’t you think it will be a hard climb?”
Jake looked back at him, his eyes clouded, puzzled.
“No.”
They went on.
VIII
The sun climbed to its zenith, seemed to hang there more briefly than it ever had during the desert crossing, and then passed on, returning them their shadows. Shelves of rock protruded from the rising land like the arms of giant easy-chairs buried in the earth. The scrub grass turned yellow and sere. Finally they were faced with a deep, chimney-like crevasse in their path and they scaled a short, peeling rise of rock to get around and above it. The ancient granite had faulted on lines that were step-like, and as they had both intuited, the beginning of their climb, at least, was easy. They paused on the four-foot-wide scarp at the top and looked back over the land to the desert, which curled around the upland like a huge yellow paw. Further off it gleamed at them in a white shield that dazzled the eye, receding into dim waves of rising heat. The gunslinger felt faintly amazed at the realization that this desert had nearly murdered him. From where they stood, in a new coolness, the desert certainly appeared momentous, but not deadly.
They turned back to the business of the climb, scrambling over jackstraw falls of rock and crouch-walking up inclined planes of stone shot with glitters of quartz and mica. The rock was pleasantly warm to the touch, but the air was definitely cooler. In the late afternoon the gunslinger heard the faint sound of thunder. The rising line of the mountains obscured the sight of the rain on the other side, however.
