“Come down,” the gunslinger said. “Do that I beg ya, and we’ll have answers all around.”
Again that huge, derisive laugh. “It’s not your bullets I fear, Roland. It’s your idea of answers that scares me.”
“Come down.”
“We’ll speak on the other side, I think,” the man in black said. “On the other side we will hold much council and long palaver.”
His eyes flicked to Jake and he added:
“Just the two of us.”
Jake flinched away from him with a small, whining cry, and the man in black turned, his robe swirling in the gray air like a batwing. He disappeared into the cleft in the rock from which the water spewed at full force. The gunslinger exercised grim will and did not send a bullet after him—would you kill all your answers so easily, gunslinger?
There was only the sound of wind and water, a sound that had been in this place of desolation for a thousand years. Yet the man in black had stood there. Twelve years after his last glimpse, Roland had seen him close-up again, had spoken to him. And the man in black had laughed.
On the other side we will hold much council and long palaver.
The boy looked up at him, his body trembling. For a moment the gunslinger saw the face of Allie, the girl from Tull, superimposed over Jake’s, the scar standing out on her forehead like a mute accusation, and felt brute loathing for them both (it wouldn’t occur to him until much later that both the scar on Alice’s forehead and the nail he saw spiked through Jake’s forehead in his dreams were in the same place). Jake perhaps caught a whiff of his thought; a moan slipped from his throat. Then he twisted his lips and cut the sound off. He held the makings of a fine man, perhaps a gunslinger in his own right if given time.
Just the two of us.
The gunslinger felt a great and unholy thirst in some deep unknown pit of his body, one no draft of water or wine could touch. Worlds trembled, almost within reach of his fingers, and in some instinctual way he strove not to be corrupted, knowing in his colder mind that such strife was vain and always would be. In the end there was only ka.
It was noon. He looked up, letting the cloudy, unsettled daylight shine for the last time on the all-too-vulnerable sun of his own righteousness.No one ever really pays for betrayal in silver,he thought.The price of any betrayal always comes due in flesh.
“Come with me or stay,” the gunslinger said.
The boy responded to this with a hard and humorless grin—his father’s grin, had he but known it. “And I’ll be fine if I stay,” he said. “Fine all by myself, here in the mountains. Someone will come and save me. They’ll have cake and sandwiches. Coffee in a Thermos, too. Do you say so?”
“Come with me or stay,” the gunslinger repeated, and felt something happen in his mind. An uncoupling. That was the moment at which the small figure before him ceased to be Jake and became only the boy, an impersonality to be moved and used.
Something screamed in the windy stillness; he and the boy both heard.
The gunslinger began to climb, and after a moment Jake came after. Together they mounted the tumbled rock beside the steely-cold falls, and stood where the man in black had stood before them. And together they entered in where he had disappeared. The darkness swallowed them.
THE SLOW MUTANTS
CHAPTER 4
The Slow Mutants
I
The gunslinger spoke slowly to Jake in the rising and falling inflections of one who speaks in his sleep:
“There were three of us that night: Cuthbert, Alain, and me. We weren’t supposed to be there, because none of us had passed from the time of children. We were still in our clouts, as the saying went. If we’d been caught, Cort would have striped us bloody. But we weren’t. I don’t think any of the ones that went before us were caught, either. Boys must put on their fathers’ pants in private, strut them in front of the mirror, and then sneak them back on their hangers; it was like that. The father pretends he doesn’t notice the new way the pants are hung up, or the traces of boot-polish mustaches still under their noses. Do you see?”
The boy said nothing. He’d said nothing since they had passed from the daylight. The gunslinger, on the other hand, had talked hectically, feverishly, to fill the silence. He had not looked back at the light as they passed into the land beneath the mountains, but the boy had. The gunslinger had read the failing of day in the soft mirror of Jake’s cheek: now faint rose, now milk-glass, now pallid silver, now the last dusk-glow touch of evening, now nothing. The gunslinger had struck a false light and they had gone on.
Finally they camped. No echo from the man in black returned to them. Perhaps he had stopped to rest, too. Or perhaps he floated onward and without running lights, through nighted chambers.
“The Sowing Night Cotillion—the Commala, some of the older folk called it, after the word for rice—was held once a year in the Great Hall,” the gunslinger went on. “The proper name was The Hall of Grandfathers, but to us it was only the Great Hall.”
The sound of dripping water came to their ears.
“A courting rite, as any spring dance surely is.” The gunslinger laughed deprecatingly; the insensate walls turned the sound into a loon-like wheeze. “In the old days, the books say, it was the welcoming of spring, what was sometimes called New Earth or Fresh Commala. But civilization, you know...”
He trailed off, unable to describe the change inherent in that featureless noun, the death of romance and the lingering of its sterile, carnal revenant, a world living on the forced respiration of glitter and ceremony; the geometric steps of make-believe courtship during the Sowing Night Cotil’ that had replaced the truer, madder, scribble-scrabble of love which he could only intuit dimly; hollow grandeur in place of true passions which might once have built kingdoms and sustained them. He found the truth with Susan Delgado in Mejis, only to lose it again.Once there was a king,he might have told the boy;the Eld whose blood, attenuated though it may be, still flows in my veins. But kings are done, lad. In the world of light, anyway.
