14

The gunslinger turned to Jake, who looked back at him seriously. “I went through the trial of manhood at the age of fourteen, the youngest of my ka-tel-of my class, you would say-and perhaps the youngest ever. I told you some of that, Jake. Do you remember?”

You told all of us some of that, Susannah thought, but kept her mouth shut, and warned Eddie with her eyes to do the same. Roland hadn’t been himself during that telling; with Jake both dead and alive within his head, the man had been fighting madness.

“You mean when we were chasing Walter,” Jake said. “After the way station but before I… I took my fall.”

“That’s right.”

“I remember a little, but that’s all. The way you remember the stuff you dream about.”

Roland nodded. “Listen, then. I would tell you more this time, Jake, because you are older. I suppose we all are.”

Susannah was no less fascinated with the story the second time: how the boy Roland had chanced to discover Marten, his father’s advisor (his father’s wizard) in his mother’s apartment. Only none of it had been by chance, of course; the boy would have passed her door with no more than a glance had Marten not opened it and invited him in. Marten had told Roland that his mother wanted to see him, but one look at her rueful smile and downcast eyes as she sat in her low-back chair told the boy he was the last person in the world Gabrielle Deschain wanted to see just then.

The flush on her cheek and the love-bite on the side of her neck told him everything else.

Thus had he been goaded by Marten into an early trial of manhood, and by employing a weapon his teacher had not expected-his hawk, David-Roland had defeated Cort, taken his stick… and made the enemy of his life in Marten Broadcloak.

Beaten badly, face swelling into something that looked like a child’s goblin mask, slipping toward a coma, Cort had fought back unconsciousness long enough to offer his newest apprentice gunslinger counsel: stay away from Marten yet awhile, Cort had said.

“He told me to let the story of our battle grow into a legend,” the gunslinger told Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. “To wait until my shadow had grown hair on its face and haunted Marten in his dreams.”

“Did you take his advice?” Susannah asked.

“I never got a chance,” Roland said. His face cracked in a rueful, painful smile. “I meant to think about it, and seriously, but before I even got started on my thinking, things… changed.”

“They have a way of doing that, don’t they?” Eddie said. “My goodness, yes.”

“I buried my hawk, the first weapon I ever wielded, and perhaps the finest. Then-and this part I’m sure I didn’t tell you before, Jake-I went into the lower town. That summer’s heat broke in storms full of thunder and hail, and in a room above one of the brothels where Cort had been wont to roister, I lay with a woman for the first time.”

He poked a stick thoughtfully into the fire, seemed to become aware of the unconscious symbolism in what he was doing, and threw it away with a lopsided grin. It landed, smoldering, near the tire of an abandoned Dodge Aspen and went out.

“It was good. The sex was good. Not the great thing I and my friends had thought about and whispered about and wondered about, of course-”

“I think store-bought pussy tends to be overrated by the young, sugar,” Susannah said.

“I fell asleep listening to the sots downstairs singing along with the piano and to the sound of hail on the window. I awoke the next morning in… well… let’s just say I awoke in a way I never would have expected to awake in such a place.”

Jake fed fresh fuel to the fire. It flared up, painting highlights on Roland’s cheeks, brushing crescents of shadow beneath his brows and below his lower lip. And as he talked, Susannah found she could almost see what had happened on that long-ago morning that must have smelled of wet cobblestones and rain-sweetened summer air; what had happened in a whore’s crib above a drinking-dive in the lower town of Gilead, Barony seat of New Canaan, one small mote of land located in the western regions of Mid-World.

One boy, still aching from his battle of the day before and newly educated in the mysteries of sex. One boy, now looking twelve instead of fourteen, his lashes dusting down thick upon his cheeks, the lids shuttering those extraordinary blue eyes; one boy with his hand loosely cupping a whore’s breast, his hawk-scarred wrist lying tanned upon the counterpane. One boy in the final instants of his life’s last good sleep, one boy who will shortly be in motion, who will be falling as a dislodged pebble falls on a steep and broken slope of scree; a falling pebble that strikes another, and another, and another, those pebbles striking yet more, until the whole slope is in motion and the earth shakes with the sound of the landslide.

One boy, one pebble on a slope loose and ready to slide.

A knot exploded in the fire. Somewhere in this dream of Kansas, an animal yipped. Susannah watched sparks swirl up past Roland’s incredibly ancient face and saw in that face the sleeping boy of a summer’s mom, lying in a bawd’s bed. And then she saw the door crash open, ending Gilead’s last troubled dream.

15

The man who strode in, crossing the room to the bed before Roland could open his eyes (and before the woman beside him had even begun to register the sound), was tall, slim, dressed in faded jeans and a dusty shirt of blue chambray. On his head was a dark gray hat with a snakeskin band. Lying low on his hips were two old leather holsters. Jutting from them were the sandalwood grips of the pistols the boy would someday bear to lands of which this scowling man with the furious blue eyes would never dream.

Roland was in motion even before he was able to unseal his eyes, rolling to the left, groping beneath the bed for what was there. He was fast, so fast it was scary, but-and Susannah saw this, too, saw it clearly- the man in the faded jeans was faster yet. He grabbed the boy’s shoulder and yanked, turning him naked out of bed and onto the floor. The boy sprawled there, reaching again for what was beneath the bed, lightning-quick. The man in the jeans stamped down on his fingers before they could grasp.

“Bastard!” the boy gasped. “Oh, you bas-”

But now his eyes were open, he looked up, and saw that the invading bastard was his father.

The whore was sitting up now, her eyes puffy, her face slack and petulant. “Here!” she cried. “Here, here! You can’t just be a-comin in like that, so you can’t! Why, if I was to raise my voice-”

Ignoring her, the man reached beneath the bed and dragged out two gunbelts. Near the end of each was a bolstered revolver. They were large, and amazing in this largely gunless world, but they were not so large as those worn by Roland’s father, and the grips were eroded metal plates rather than inlaid wood. When the whore saw the guns on the invader’s hips and the ones in his hands-the ones her young customer of the night before had been wearing until she had taken him upstairs and divested him of all weapons save for the one with which she was most familiar- the expression of sleepy petulance left her face. What replaced it was the foxlike look of a born survivor. She was up, out of bed, across the floor, and out the door before her bare bum had more than a brief moment to twinkle in the morning sun.

Neither the father standing by the bed nor the son lying naked upon the floor at his feet so much as looked at her. The man in the jeans held out the gunbelts which Roland had taken from the fuzer beneath the apprentices’ barracks on the previous afternoon, using Cort’s key to open the arsenal door. The man shook the belts under Roland’s very nose, as one might hold a torn garment beneath the nose of a feckless puppy that has chewed. He shook them so hard that one of the guns tumbled free. Despite his stupefaction, Roland caught it in midair.