They caught him, they formed a protective ring around him, and the gunslinger felt hot with guilt and self-loathing. What had he done to deserve such enthusiastic protectors? What, besides tear them out of their known and ordinary lives as ruthlessly as a man might tear weeds out of his garden?
He tried to tell them he was all right, they could stand back, he was fine, but no words would come out; that terrible wavery sound had transported him back to the box canyon west of Hambry all those years ago. Depape and Reynolds and old limping Jonas. Yet most of all it was the woman from the hill he hated, and from black depths of feeling only a very young man can reach. Ah, but how could he have done aught else but hate them? His heart had been broken. And now, all these years later, it seemed to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended.
My first thought was, he lied in every word/That hoary cripple, with malicious eye ...
What words? Whose poem?
He didn't know, but he knew that women could lie, too; women who hopped and grinned and saw too much from the comers of their rheumy old eyes. It didn't matter who had written the lines of poesy; the words were true words, and that was all that mattered. Neither Eldred Jonas nor the crone on the hill had been of Marten's stature - nor even of Walter's - when it came to evil, but they had been evil enough.
Then, after... in the box canyon west of town . . . that sound . . . that, and the screams of wounded men and horses . . . for once in his life, even the normally voluble Cuthbert had been struck silent.
But all that had been long ago, in another when; in the here and now, the warbling sound was either gone or had temporarily fallen below the threshold of audibility. They would hear it again, though. He knew that as well as he knew the fact that he walked a road leading to damnation.
He looked up at the others and managed a smile. The trembling at the comer of his mouth had quit, and that was something.
"I'm all right," he said. "But hear me well: this is very close to where Mid-World ends, very close to where End-World begins. The first great course of our quest is finished. We have done well; we have remembered the faces of our fathers; we have stood together and been true to one another. But now we have come to a thinny. We must be very careful."
"A thinny?" Jake asked, looking around nervously.
"Places where the fabric of existence is almost entirely worn away. There are more since the force of the Dark Tower began to fail. Do you remember what we saw below us when we left Lud?"
They nodded solemnly, remembering ground which had fused to black glass, ancient pipes which gleamed with turquoise witchlight, misshapen bird-freaks with wings like great leathern sails. Roland suddenly could not bear to have them grouped around him as they were, looking down on him as folk might look down on a rowdy who had fallen in a barroom brawl.
He lifted his hands to his friends - his new friends. Eddie took them and helped him to his feet. The gunslinger fixed his enormous will on not swaying and stood steady.
"Who was Susan?" Susannah asked. The crease down the center of her forehead suggested she was troubled, and probably by more than a coincidental similarity of names.
Roland looked at her, then at Eddie, then at Jake, who had dropped to one knee so he could scratch behind Oy's ears.
"I'll tell you," he said, "but this isn't the place or time."
"You keep sayin that," Susannah said. "You wouldn't just be putting us off again, would you?"
Roland shook his head. "You shall hear my tale - this part of it, at least - but not on top of this metal carcass."
"Yeah," Jake said. "Being up here is like playing on a dead dinosaur or something. I keep thinking Blaine's going to come back to life and start, I don't know, screwing around with our heads again."
"That sound is gone," Eddie said. "The thing that sounded like a wah-wah pedal."
"It reminded me of this old guy I used to see in Central Park,"
Jake said.
"The man with the saw?" Susannah asked. Jake looked up at her, his eyes round with surprise, and she nodded. "Only he wasn't old when I used to see him. It's not just the geography that's wacky here. Time's kind of funny, too."
Eddie put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a brief squeeze. "Amen to that."
Susannah turned to Roland.her look was not accusing, but there was a level and open measurement in her eyes that the gunslinger could not help but admire. "I'm holding you to your promise, Roland. I want to know about this girl that got my name."
"You shall hear," Roland repeated. "For now, though, let's get off this monster's back."
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