SIX
Took’s General Store featured no Guardians of the Beam such as Roland had told of in Mejis, but rockers were lined up the long length of the porch, as many as two dozen of them. And all three sets of steps were flanked by stuffy-guys in honor of the season. When Roland’s ka-mates came out, they took three rockers in the middle of the porch. Oy lay down contentedly between Jake’s feet and appeared to go to sleep with his nose on his paws.
Eddie cocked a thumb back over his shoulder in Eben Took’s general direction. “Too bad Detta Walker wasn’t here to shoplift a few things from the son of a bitch.”
“Don’t think I wasn’t tempted on her behalf,” Susannah said.
“Folks coming,” Jake said. “I think they want to talk to us.”
“Sure they do,” Eddie said. “It’s what we’re here for.” He smiled, his handsome face growing handsomer still. Under his breath he said, “Meet the gunslingers, folks. Come-come-commala, shootin’s gonna folla.”
“Hesh up that bad mouth of yours, son,” Susannah said, but she was laughing.
They’re crazy, Jake thought. But if he was the exception, why was he laughing, too?
SEVEN
Henchick of the Manni and Roland of Gilead nooned in the shadow of a massive rock outcrop, eating cold chicken and rice wrapped in tortillas and drinking sof’ cider from a jug which they passed back and forth between them. Henchick set them on with a word to what he called both The Force and The Over, then fell silent. That was fine with Roland. The old man had answered aye to the one question the gunslinger had needed to ask.
By the time they’d finished their meal, the sun had gone behind the high cliffs and escarpments. Thus they walked in shadow, making their way up a path that was strewn with rubble and far too narrow for their horses, which had been left in a grove of yellow-leaf quaking aspen below. Scores of tiny lizards ran before them, sometimes darting into cracks in the rocks.
Shady or not, it was hotter than the hinges of hell out here. After a mile of steady climbing, Roland began to breathe hard and use his bandanna to wipe the sweat from his cheeks and throat. Henchick, who appeared to be somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty, walked ahead of him with steady serenity. He breathed with the ease of a man strolling in a park. He’d left his cloak below, laid over the branch of a tree, but Roland could see no patches of sweat spreading on his black shirt.
They reached a bend in the path, and for a moment the world to the north and west opened out below them in gauzy splendor. Roland could see the huge taupe rectangles of graze-land, and tiny toy cattle. To the south and east, the fields grew greener as they marched toward the river lowlands. He could see the Calla village, and even—in the dreaming western distance—the edge of great forest through which they had come to get here. The breeze that struck them on this stretch of the path was so cold it made Roland gasp. Yet he raised his face into it gratefully, eyes mostly closed, smelling all the things that were the Calla: steers, horses, grain, river water, and rice rice rice.
Henchick had doffed his broad-brimmed, flat-crowned hat and also stood with his head raised and his eyes mostly closed, a study in silent thanksgiving. The wind blew back his long hair and playfully divided his waist-length beard into forks. They stood so for perhaps three minutes, letting the breeze cool them. Then Henchick clapped his hat back on his head. He looked at Roland. “Do’ee say the world will end in fire or in ice, gunslinger?”
Roland considered this. “Neither,” he said at last. “I think in darkness.”
“Do’ee say so?”
“Aye.”
Henchick considered a moment, then turned to continue on up the path. Roland was impatient to get to where they were going, but he touched the Manni’s shoulder, nevertheless. A promise was a promise. Especially one made to a lady.
“I stayed with one of the forgetful last night,” Roland said. “Isn’t that what you call those who choose to leave thy ka-tet?”
“We speak of the forgetful, aye,” Henchick said, watching him closely, “but not of ka-tet. We know that word, but it is not our word, gunslinger.”
“In any case, I—”
“In any case, thee slept at the Rocking B with Vaughn Eisenhart and our daughter, Margaret. And she threw the dish for’ee. I didn’t speak of these things when we talked last night, for I knew them as well as you did. Any ro’, we had other matters to discuss, did we not? Caves, and such.”
“We did.” Roland tried not to show his surprise. He must have failed, because Henchick nodded slightly, the lips just visible within his beard curving in a slight smile.
“The Manni have ways of knowing, gunslinger; always have.”
“Will you not call me Roland?”
“Nay.”
“She said to tell thee that Margaret of the Redpath Clan does fine with her heathen man, fine still.”
Henchick nodded. If he felt pain at this, it didn’t show. Not even in his eyes. “She’s damned,” he said. His tone was that of a man saying Looks like it might come off sunny by afternoon.
“Are you asking me to tell her that?” Roland asked. He was amused and aghast at the same time.
Henchick’s blue eyes had faded and grown watery with age, but there was no mistaking the surprise that came into them at this question. His bushy eyebrows went up. “Why would I bother?” he asked. “She knows. She’ll have time to repent her heathen man at leisure in the depths of Na’ar. She knows that, too. Come, gunslinger. Another quarter-wheel and we’re there. But it’s upsy.”
EIGHT
Upsy it was, very upsy indeed. Half an hour later, they came to a place where a fallen boulder blocked most of the path. Henchick eased his way around it, dark pants rippling in the wind, beard blowing out sideways, long-nailed fingers clutching for purchase. Roland followed. The boulder was warm from the sun, but the wind was now so cold he was shivering. He sensed the heels of his worn boots sticking out over a blue drop of perhaps two thousand feet. If the old man decided to push him, all would end in a hurry. And in decidedly undramatic fashion.
But it wouldn’t, he thought. Eddie would carry on in my place, and the other two would follow until they fell.
On the far side of the boulder, the path ended in a ragged, dark hole nine feet high and five wide. A draft blew out of it into Roland’s face. Unlike the breeze that had played with them as they climbed the path, this air was smelly and unpleasant. Coming with it, carried upon it, were cries Roland couldn’t make out. But they were the cries of human voices.
“Is it the cries of folks in Na’ar we’re hearing?” he asked Henchick.
No smile touched the old man’s mostly hidden lips now. “Speak not in jest,” he said. “Not here. For you are in the presence of the infinite.”
Roland could believe it. He moved forward cautiously, boots gritting on the rubbly scree, his hand dropping to the butt of his gun—he always wore the left one now, when he wore any; below the hand that was whole.
The stench breathing from the cave’s open mouth grew stronger yet. Noxious if not outright toxic. Roland held his bandanna against his mouth and nose with his diminished right hand. Something inside the cave, there in the shadows. Bones, yes, the bones of lizards and other small animals, but something else as well, a shape he knew—
“Be careful, gunslinger,” Henchick said, but stood aside to let Roland enter the cave if he so desired.
My desires don’t matter, Roland thought. This is just something I have to do. Probably that makes it simpler.
The shape in the shadows grew clearer. He wasn’t surprised to see it was a door exactly like those he’d come to on the beach; why else would this have been called Doorway Cave? It was made of ironwood (or perhaps ghostwood), and stood about twenty feet inside the entrance to the cave. It was six and a half feet high, as the doors on the beach had been. And, like those, it stood freely in the shadows, with hinges that seemed fastened to nothing.
Yet it would turn on those hinges easily, he thought. Will turn. When the time comes.
There was no keyhole. The knob appeared to be crystal. Etched upon it was a rose. On the beach of the Western Sea, the three doors had been marked with the High Speech: THE PRISONER on one, THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS on another, THE PUSHER on the third. Here were the hieroglyphs he had seen on the box hidden in Callahan’s church: