Alain sighed and shook his head.
They made a travois of pine branches so he wouldn't have to spend another night riding oversaddle (if nothing else, it seemed to make Rusher nervous to be carrying his master in such a way), and went on, not travelling on the Great Road - that would have been far too dangerous - but parallel to it. When Roland remained unconscious the following day (Mejis falling behind them now, and both boys feeling a deep tug of homesickness, inexplicable but as real as tides), they sat on either side of him, looking at each other over the slow rise and fall of his chest.
"Can an unconscious person starve, or die of thirst?" Cuthbert asked. "They can't, can they?"
"Yes," Alain said. "I think they can."
It had been a long, nerve-wracking night of travel. Neither boy had slept well the previous day, but on this one they slept like the dead, with blankets over their heads to block the sun. They awoke minutes apart as the sun was going down and Demon Moon, now two nights past the full, was rising through a troubled rack of clouds that presaged the first of the great autumn storms.
Roland was sitting up. He had taken the glass from the drawstring bag. He sat with it cradled in his arms, a darkened bit of magic as dead as the glass eyes of The Romp. Roland's own eyes, also dead, looked indifferently off into the moonlit corridors of the forest. He would eat but not sleep. He would drink from the streams they passed but not speak. And he would not be parted from the piece of Maerlyn's Rainbow which they had brought out of Mejis at such great price. It did not glow for him, however. Not, Cuthbert thought once, while Al and I are awake to see it, anyway.
Alain couldn't get Roland's hands off the ball, and so he laid his own on Roland's cheeks, touching him that way. Except there was nothing to touch, nothing there. The thing which rode west with them toward Gilead was not Roland, or even a ghost of Roland. Like the moon at the close of its cycle, Roland had gone.
PART FOUR ALL GOD'S CHILLUN GOT SHOES
CHAPTER I KANSAS IN THE MORNING
1
For the first time in
(hours? days?)
the gunslinger fell silent. He sat for a moment looking toward the building to the east of them (with the sun behind it, the glass palace was a black shape surrounded by a gold nimbus) with his forearms propped on his knees. Then he took the waterskin which lay on the pavement beside him, held it over his face, opened his mouth, and upended it.
He drank what happened to go in his mouth - the others could see his adam's apple working as he lay back in the breakdown lane, still pouring - but drinking didn't seem to be his primary purpose. Water streamed down his deeply lined forehead and bounced off his closed eyelids. It pooled in the triangular hollow at the base of his throat and ran back from his temples, wetting his hair and turning it darker.
At last he put the waterskin aside and only lay there, eyes closed, arms stretched out high above his head, like a man surrendering in his sleep. Steam rose in delicate tendrils from his wet face.
"Ahhh," he said.
"Feel better?" Eddie asked.
The gunslinger's lids rose, disclosing those faded yet somehow alarming blue eyes. "Yes. I do. I don't understand how that can be, as much as I dreaded this telling . . . but I do."
"An ologist-of-the-psyche could probably explain it to you," Susannah said, "but I doubt you'd listen." She put her hands in the small of her back, stretched and winced ... but the wince was only reflex. The pain and stiffness she'd expected weren't there, and although there was one small creak near the base other spine, she didn't get the satisfying series of snaps, crackles, and pops she had expected.
"Tell you one thing," Eddie said, "this gives a whole new meaning to 'Get it off your chest.' How long have we been here, Roland?"
"Just one night."
" 'The spirits have done it all in a single night,' " Jake said in a dreamy voice. His legs were crossed at the ankles; Oy sat in the diamond shape made by the boy's bent knees, looking at him with his bright gold-black eyes.
Roland sat up, wiping at his wet cheeks with his neckerchief and looking at Jake sharply. "What is it you say?"
"Not me. A guy named Charles Dickens wrote that. In a story called A Christmas Carol. All in a single night, huh?"
"Does any part of your body say it was longer?"
Jake shook his head. No, he felt pretty much the way he did any morning - better than on some. He had to take a leak, but his back teeth weren't exactly floating, or anything like that.
"Eddie? Susannah?"
"I feel good," Susannah said. "Surely not as if I stayed up all night, let alone many of em."
Eddie said, "It reminds me of the time I spent as a junkie, in a way - "