They made their way slowly down the wide white downslope with Oy first hurrying at Roland's heel, then dropping behind to check on Susannah, then bounding back to Roland again.
Bright blue holes sometimes opened above them. Roland knew that was the Beam at work, constantly pulling the cloud-cover southeast. Otherwise, the sky was white from horizon to horizon, and had a low full look both of them now recognized. More snow was on the come, and the gunslinger had an idea this storm might be the worst they'd seen. The wind was getting up, and the moisture in it was enough to numb all his exposed skin
(after three weeks of diligent needlework, that amounted to not much more than his forehead and the tip of his nose). The gusts lifted long diaphanous scarves of white. These raced past them and then on down the slope like fantastical, shape-changing ballet-dancers.
"They're beautiful, aren't they?" Susannah asked from behind him, almost wistfully.
Roland of Gilead, no judge of beauty (except once, in the ntland of Mejis), grunted. He knew what would be beautiful to him: decent cover when the storm overtook them, something more than just a thick grove of trees. So he almost doubted what he saw when the latest gust of wind blew itself out and the snow settled. He dropped the tow-band, stepped out of it, went back to Susannah (their gunna, now on the increase again, was strapped to the sledge behind her), and dropped on one knee next to her. Dressed in hides from top to toe, he looked more like a mangy bigfoot than a man.
"What do you make of that?" he asked her.
The wind kicked up again, harder than ever, at first obscuring what he had seen. When it dropped, a hole opened above them and the sun shone briefly through, lighting the snowfield with billions of diamond-chip sparkles. Susannah shaded her eyes with one hand and looked long downhill. What she saw was an inverted T carved in the snow. The cross arm, closest to them
(but still at least two miles away) was relatively short, perhaps two hundred feet on either side. The long arm, however, was very long, going all the way to the horizon and then disappearing over it.
"Those are roads!" she said. "Someone's plowed a couple of roads down there, Roland!"
He nodded. "I thought so, but I wanted to hear you say it. I see something else, as well."
"What? Your eyes are sharper than mine, and by a lot."
"When we get a little closer, you'll see for yourself."
He tried to rise and she tugged impatiently at his arm.
"Don't you play that game with me. What is it?"
"Roofs," he said, giving in to her. "I think there are cottages down there. Mayhap even a town."
"People? Are you saying people?"
"Well, it looks like there's smoke coming from one of the houses. Although it's hard to tell for sure with the sky so white."
She didn't know if she wanted to see people or not. Certainly such would complicate things. "Roland, we'll have to be careful."
"Yes," he said, and went back to the tow-band again. Before he picked it up, he paused to readjust his gunbelt, dropping the holster a bit so it lay more comfortably near his left hand.
An hour later they came to the intersection of the lane and the road. It was marked by a snowbank easily eleven feet high, one that had been built by some sort of plow. Susannah could see tread-marks, like those made by a bulldozer, pressed into the packed snow. Rising out of this hardpack was a pole.
The street sign on top was no different from those she'd seen in all sorts of towns; at intersections in New York City, for that matter.
The one indicating the short road said ODDS LANE.
It was the other that thrilled her heart, however.
TOWER ROAD,
it read.
THREE
All but one of the cottages clustered around the intersection were deserted, and many lay in half-buried heaps, broken beneath the weight of accumulating snow. One, however-it was about three-quarters of the way down the lefthand arm of Odd's Lane-was clearly different from the others. The roof had been mostly cleared of its potentially crushing weight of snow, and a path had been shoveled from the lane to the front door. It was from the chimney of this quaint, tree-surrounded cottage that the smoke was issuing, feather-white. One window was lit a wholesome butter-yellow, too, but it was the smoke diat captured Susannah's eye. As far as she was concerned, it was the final touch. The only question in her mind was who would answer the door when they knocked. Would it be Hansel or his sister Gretel? (And were those two twins? Had anyone ever searched the matter?) Perhaps it would be Little Red Riding Hood, or Goldilocks, wearing a guilty goatee of porridge.
"Maybe we should just pass it by," she said, aware that she had dropped her voice to a near-whisper, even though they were still on the high snowbank created by the plow. "Give it a miss and say thank ya." She gestured to the sign reading TOWER ROAD. "We've got a clear way, Roland-maybe we ought to take it."