When the shadows began to turn purple, they camped in the overhang of a jutting brow of rock. The gunslinger anchored their blanket above and below, fashioning a kind of shanty lean-to. They sat at the mouth of it, watching the sky spread a cloak over the world. Jake dangled his feet over the drop. The gunslinger rolled his evening smoke and eyed Jake half humorously. “Don’t roll over in your sleep,” he said, “or you may wake up in hell.”
“I won’t,” Jake replied seriously. “My mother says—” He broke it off.
“She says what?”
“That I sleep like a dead man,” Jake finished. He looked at the gunslinger, who saw that the boy’s mouth was trembling as he strove to keep back tears—only a boy,he thought, and pain smote him, the icepick that too much cold water can sometimes plant in the forehead.Only a boy. Why?Silly question. When a boy, wounded in body or spirit, called that question out to Cort, that ancient, scarred battle-engine whose job it was to teach the sons of gunslingers the beginning of what they had to know, Cort would answer:Why is a crooked letter and can’t be made straight... never mind why, just get up, pus-head! Get up! The day’s young!
“Why am I here?” Jake asked. “Why did I forget everything from before?”
“Because the man in black has drawn you here,” the gunslinger said. “And because of the Tower. The Tower stands at a kind of... power-nexus. In time.”
“I don’t understand that!”
“Nor do I,” the gunslinger said. “But something has been happening. Just in my own time. ‘The world has moved on,’ we say... we’ve always said. But it’s moving on faster now. Something has happened to time. It’s softening.”
They sat in silence. A breeze, faint but with an edge, picked at their legs. Somewhere it made a hollowwhoooooin a rock fissure.
“Where do you come from?” Jake asked.
“From a place that no longer exists. Do you know the Bible?”
“Jesus and Moses. Sure.”
The gunslinger smiled. “That’s right. My land had a Biblical name—New Canaan, it was called. The land of milk and honey. In the Bible’s Canaan, there were supposed to be grapes so big that men had to carry them on sledges. We didn’t grow them that big, but it was sweet land.”
“I know about Ulysses,” Jake said hesitantly. “Was he in the Bible?”
“Maybe,” the gunslinger said. “I was never a scholar of it, and can’t say for sure.”
“But the others... your friends—”
“No others,” the gunslinger said. “I’m the last.”
A tiny wasted moon began to rise, casting its slitted gaze down into the tumble of rocks where they sat.
“Was it pretty? Your country... your land?”
“It was beautiful,” the gunslinger said. “There were fields and forests and rivers and mists in the morning. But that’s only pretty. My mother used to say that the only real beauty is order and love and light.”
Jake made a noncommittal noise.
The gunslinger smoked and thought of how it had been—the nights in the huge central hall, hundreds of richly clad figures moving through the slow, steady waltz steps or the faster, light ripples of thepol-kam,Aileen Ritter on his arm, the one his parents had chosen for him, he supposed, her eyes brighter than the most precious gems, the light of the crystal-enclosed spark-lights shining in the newly done hair of the courtesans and their half-cynical amours. The hall had been huge, an island of light whose age was beyond telling, as was the whole Central Place, which was made up of nearly a hundred stone castles. It had been unknown years since he had seen it, and leaving for the last time, Roland had ached as he turned his face away from it and began his first cast for the trail of the man in black. Even then the walls had fallen, weeds grew in the courtyards, bats roosted amongst the great beams of the central hall, and the galleries echoed with the soft swoop and whisper of swallows. The fields where Cort had taught them archery and gunnery and falconry were gone to hay and timothy and wild vines. In the huge kitchen where Hax had once held his fuming and aromatic court, a grotesque colony of Slow Mutants nested, peering at him from the merciful darkness of pantries and shadowed pillars. The warm steam that had been filled with the pungent odors of roasting beef and pork had changed to the clammy damp of moss. Giant white toadstools grew in corners where not even the Slow Muties dared to encamp. The huge oak subcellar bulkhead stood open, and the most poignant smell of all had issued from that, an odor that seemed to express with a flat finality all the hard facts of dissolution and decay: the high sharp odor of wine gone to vinegar. It had been no struggle to turn his face to the south and leave it behind—but it had hurt his heart.
“Was there a war?” Jake asked.
“Even better,” the gunslinger said and pitched the last smoldering ember of his cigarette away. “There was a revolution. We won every battle, and lost the war. No one won the war, unless maybe it was the scavengers. There must have been rich pickings for years after.”
“I wish I’d lived there,” Jake said wistfully.
“Do you say so?”
“I do.”
“Time to turn in, Jake.”
The boy, now only a dim shadow, turned on his side and curled up with the blanket tossed loosely over him. The gunslinger sat sentinel over him for perhaps an hour after, thinking his long, sober thoughts. Such meditation was a novel thing for him, sweet in a melancholy sort of way, but still utterly without practical value: there was no solution to the problem of Jake other than the one the Oracle had offered—and turning away was simply not possible. There might have been tragedy in the situation, but the gunslinger did not see that; he saw only the predestination that had always been there. And finally, his more natural character reasserted itself and he slept deeply, with no dreams.
IX
