The Dark Tower (Page 119)

This instinctive gesture did no good; more of them alit on his upraised arms until the very weight of the birds forced them down. Bills nipped and needled at the old man’s face, drawing blood in tiny tattoo stipples.

"No!" Mordred shouted. "Save the skin for me… but you may have his eyes."

It was then, as the eager rooks tore Rando Thoughtful’s eyes from their living sockets, that the ex-Minister of State uttered the rising howl Roland and Susannah heard as they neared the edge of Castle-town. The birds who couldn’t find a roostingplace hung around him in a living thunderhead. They turned him on his levitating heels and carried him toward the changeling, who had now advanced to die center of the bridge and squatted there. The boots and rotted pillowtick coat had been left behind for the nonce on the town side of the bridge; what waited for sai Thoughtful, reared up on its back legs, forelegs pawing the air, red mark on its hairy belly all too visible, was Dan-Tete, the Little Red King.

The man floated to his fate, shrieking and eyeless. He thrust his hands out in front of him, making warding-off gestures, and the spider’s front legs seized one of them, guided it into the bristling maw of its mouth, and bit it off with a candy-cane crunch.

Sweet!

EIGHT

That night, beyond the last of the oddly narrow, oddly unpleasant townhouses, Roland stopped in front of what had probably been a smallhold farm. He stood facing the ruin of the main building, sniffing.

"What, Roland? What?"

"Can you smell the wood of that place, Susannah?"

She sniffed. "I can, as a matter of fact-what of it?"

He turned to her, smiling. "If we can smell it, we can burn it."

This turned out to be correct. They had trouble kindling the fire, even aided by Roland’s slyest tricks of trailcraft and half a can of Sterno, but in die end they succeeded. Susannah sat as close to it as she could, turning at regular intervals in order to toast bodi sides equally, relishing die sweat diat popped out first on her face and her br**sts, then on her back. She had forgotten what it was to be warm, and went on feeding wood to die flames until the campfire was a roaring bonfire. To animals in the open lands furdier along die Padi of die healing Beam, diat fire must have looked like a comet that had fallen to Earth, still blazing. Oy sat beside her, ears cocked, looking into the fire as if mesmerized. Susannah kept expecting Roland to object-to tell her to stop feeding the damned thing and start letting it burn down, for her father’s sake-but he didn’t. He only sat with his disassembled guns before him, oiling the pieces. When the fire grew too hot, he moved back a few feet. His shadow danced a skinny, wavering commala in the firelight.

"Can you stand one or two more nights of cold?" he asked her at last.

She nodded. "If I have to."

"Once we start climbing toward the snowlands, it will be really cold," he said. "And while I can’t promise you we’ll have to go fireless for only a single night, I don’t believe it’ll be any longer than two."

"You think it’ll be easier to take game if we don’t build a fire, don’t you?"

Roland nodded and began putting his guns back together.

"Will there be game as early as day after tomorrow?"

"Yes."

"How do you know?"

He considered this, then shook his head. "I can’t say-but I do."

"Can you smell it?"

"No."

"Touch their minds?"

"It’s not that, either."

She let it go. "Roland, what if Mordred sends the birds against us tonight?"

He smiled and pointed to the flames. Below them, a deepening bed of bright red coals waxed and waned like dragon’s breath. "They’ll not come close to thy bonfire."

"And tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow we’ll be further from Le Casse Roi Russe than even Mordred can persuade them to go."

"And how do you know that?"

He shook his head yet again, although he thought he knew the answer to her question. What he knew came from the Tower. He could feel the pulse of it awakening in his head. It was like green coming out of a dry seed. But it was too early to say so.

"Lie down, Susannah," he said. "Take your rest. I’ll watch until midnight, then wake you."

"So now we keep a watch," she said.

He nodded.

"Is he watching us?"

Roland wasn’t sure, but thought that Mordred was. What his imagination saw was a skinny boy (but with a potbelly pooched out in front of him now, for he’d have eaten well), naked inside the rags of a filthy, torn coat. A skinny boy laid up in one of those unnaturally skinny houses, perhaps on the third floor, where the sightline was good. He sits at a window with his knees pulled up against his chest for warmth, the scar on his side perhaps aching in the bony cold, looking out at the flare of their fire, jealous of it. Jealous of their companionship, as well.

Half-mother and White Father, with their backs turned to him.

"It’s likely," he said.

She started to lie down, then stopped. She touched the sore beside her mouth. "This isn’t a pimple, Roland."

"No?" He sat quiet, watching her.

"I had a friend in college who got one just like it," Susannah said. "It’d bleed, then stop, then almost heal up, then darken and bleed a little more. At last she went to see a doctor-a special kind we call a dermatologist-and he said it was an angioma. A blood-tumor. He gave her a shot of novocaine and took it off with a scalpel. He said it was a good thing she came when she did, because every day she waited that thing was sinking its roots in a litde deeper. Eventually, he said, it would have worked its way right through the roof of her mouth, and maybe into her sinuses, too."

Roland was silent, waiting. The term she had used clanged in his head: blood-tumor. He thought it might have been coined to describe the Crimson King himself. Mordred, as well.

"We don’t have no novocaine, Baby-Boots," Detta Walker said, "and Ah know dat, sho! But if de time come and Ah tell you, you goan whip out yo’ knife and cut dat ugly mahfah right off’n me. Goan do it faster than yon bum’blah c’n snatch a fly out de air. You unnerstand me? Kitch mah drift?"

"Yes. Now lie over. Take some rest."

She lay over. Five minutes after she had appeared to go to sleep, Detta Walker opened her eyes and gave him

(I watchin you, xuhite boy)

a glare. Roland nodded to her and she closed her eyes again. A minute or two later, they opened a second time. Now it was Susannah who looked at him, and this time when her eyes closed, they didn’t open again.

He had promised to wake her at midnight, but let her sleep two hours longer, knowing that in the heat of the fire her body was really resting, at least for this one night. At what his fine new watch said was one O’The clock, he finally felt the gaze of their pursuer slip away. Mordred had lost his fight to stay awake through the darkest watches of the night, as had innumerable children before him. Wherever his room was, the unwanted, lonely child now slept in it with his wreck of a coat pulled around him and his head in his arms.

And does his mouth, still caked with sai Thoughtful’s blood, purse and quiver, as if dreaming of the nipple it knew but once, the milk it never tasted"?

Roland didn’t know. Didn’t particularly want to know. He was only glad to be awake in the stillwatch of the night, feeding the occasional piece of wood to the lowering fire. It would die quickly, he thought. The wood was newer than that of which the townhouses were constructed, but it was still ancient, hardened to a substance that was nearly stone.

Tomorrow they would see trees. The first since Calla Bryn Sturgis, if one set aside those growing beneath Algul Siento’s artificial sun and those he’d seen in Stephen King’s world.

That would be good. Meanwhile, the dark held hard. Beyond the circle of the dying fire a wind moaned, lifting Roland’s hair from his temples and bringing a faint, sweet smell of snow. He tilted his head back and watched the clock of the stars turn in the blackness overhead.

Chapter IV:HIDES

ONE

They had to go fireless three nights instead of one or two. The last was the longest, most wretched twelve hours of Susannah’s life. Is it worse than the night Eddie died? she asked herself at one point. Are you really saying this is worse than lying awake in one of those dormitory rooms, knowing that was how you ‘d be lying from then on? Worse than washing his face and hands and feet? Washing them for the ground?

Yes. This was worse. She hated knowing it, and would never admit it to anyone else, but the deep, endless cold of that last night was far worse. She came to dread every light breath of breeze from the snowlands to the east and soudi. It was both terrible and oddly humbling to realize how easily physical discomfort could take control, expanding like poison gas until it owned all the floor-space, took over the entire playing field. Grief?

Loss? What were those things when you could feel cold on the march, moving in from your fingers and toes, crawling up your motherfucking nose, and moving where? Toward the brain, do it please ya. And toward the heart. In the grip of cold like that, grief and loss were nothing but words. No, not even that. Only sounds. So much meaningless quack as you sat shuddering under the stars, waiting for a morning that would never come.

What made it worse was knowing there were potential bonfires all around them, for they’d reached the live region Roland called "the undersnow." This was a series of long, grassy slopes