“The advice was to wait. It was bad advice. For even then my plans against your father had proceeded. He sent you away and when you returned—”
“I’d not hear you speak of that,” the gunslinger said, and in his mind he heard his mother singing:Baby-bunting, baby dear, baby bring your basket here.
“Then hear this: when you returned, Marten had gone west, to join the rebels. So all said, anyway, and so you believed. Yet he and a certain witch left you a trap and you fell into it. Good boy! And although Marten was long gone by then, there was a man who sometimes made you think of him, was there not? A man who affected the dress of a monk and the shaven head of a penitent—”
“Walter,” the gunslinger whispered. And although he had come so far in his musings, the bald truth still amazed him. “You.Marten never left at all.”
The man in black tittered. “At your service.”
“I ought to kill you now.”
“That would hardly be fair. Besides, all of that was long ago. Now comes the time of sharing.”
“You never left,” the gunslinger repeated, stunned. “You only changed.”
“Sit,” the man in black invited. “I’ll tell you stories, as many as you would hear. Your own stories, I think, will be much longer.”
“I don’t talk of myself,” the gunslinger muttered.
“Yet tonight you must. So that we may understand.”
“Understand what? My purpose? You know that. To find the Tower is my purpose. I’m sworn.”
“Not your purpose, gunslinger. Your mind. Your slow, prodding, tenacious mind. There has never been one quite like it, in all the history of the world. Perhaps in the history of creation.
“This is the time of speaking. This is the time of histories.”
“Then speak.”
The man in black shook the voluminous arm of his robe. A foil-wrapped package fell out and caught the dying embers in many reflective folds.
“Tobacco, gunslinger. Would you smoke?”
He had been able to resist the rabbit, but he could not resist this. He opened the foil with eager fingers. There was fine crumbled tobacco inside, and green leaves to wrap it in, amazingly moist. He had not seen such tobacco for ten years.
He rolled two cigarettes and bit the ends of each to release the flavor. He offered one to the man in black, who took it. Each of them took a burning twig from the fire.
The gunslinger lit his cigarette and drew the aromatic smoke deep into his lungs, closing his eyes to concentrate the senses. He blew out with long, slow satisfaction.
“Is it good?” the man in black inquired.
“Yes. Very good.”
“Enjoy it. It may be the last smoke for you in a very long time.”
The gunslinger took this impassively.
“Very well,” the man in black said. “To begin then:
“You must understand the Tower has always been, and there have always been boys who know of it and lust for it, more than power or riches or women... boys who look for the doors that lead to it...”
VIII
There was talk then, a night’s worth of talk and God alone knew how much more (or how much was true), but the gunslinger remembered little of it later... and to his oddly practical mind, little of it seemed to matter. The man in black told him again that he must go to the sea, which lay no more than twenty easy miles to the west, and there he would be invested with the power ofdrawing.
“But that’s not exactly right, either,” the man in black said, pitching his cigarette into the remains of the campfire. “No one wants to invest you with a power of any kind, gunslinger; it is simplyinyou, and I am compelled to tell you, partly because of the sacrifice of the boy, and partly because it is the law; the natural law of things. Water must run downhill, and you must be told. You will draw three, I understand... but I don’t really care, and I don’t really want to know.”
“The three,” the gunslinger murmured, thinking of the Oracle.
