Yet for awhile Eddie was incapable of doing that. Images flashed in his mind, like bits of broken mirror in bright sunlight. The Calla, lying spread out below them beneath the cloudy sky, the Devar-Tete Whye a gray ribbon. The green beds at its edge: rice come a-falla. Jake and Benny Slightman looking at each other and laughing without a word passed between them to account for it. The aisle of green grass between the high street and the Pavilion. The torches changing color. Oy, bowing and speaking (Eld! Thankee!) with perfect clarity. Susannah singing: "I've known sorrow all my days ."
Yet what he remembered most clearly was Roland standing slim and gunless on the boards with his arms crossed at the chest and his hands pressed against his cheeks; those faded blue eyes looking out at the folken . Roland asking questions, two of three. And then the sound of his boots on the boards, slow at first, then speeding up. Faster and faster, until they were a blur in the torchlight. Clapping. Sweating. Smiling. Yet his eyes didn't smile, not those blue bombardier's eyes; they were as cold as ever.
Yet how he had danced! Great God, how he had danced in the light of the torches.
Come-come-commala, rice come a-falla , Eddie thought.
Beside him, Susannah moaned in some dream.
Eddie turned to her. Slipped his hand beneath her arm so he could cup her breast His last thought was for Jake. They had better take care of him out at that ranch. If they didn't, they were going to be one sorry-ass bunch of cowpunchers.
Eddie slept. There were no dreams. And beneath them as the night latened and die moon set, this borderland world turned like a dying clock.
Chapter II: Dry Twist
ONE
Roland awoke from another vile dream of Jericho Hill in the hour before dawn. The horn. Something about Arthur Eld's horn. Beside him in the big bed, the Old Fella slept with a frown on his face, as if caught in his own bad dream. It creased his broad brow zigzag, breaking the arms of the cross scarred into the skin there.
It was pain that had wakened Roland, not his dream of the horn spilling from Cuthbert's hand as his old friend fell. The gunslinger was caught in a vise of it from the hips all the way down to his ankles. He could visualize the pain as a series of bright and burning rings. This was how he paid for his outrageous exertions of the night before. If that was all, all would have been well, but he knew there was more to this than just having danced the commala a little too enthusiastically. Nor was it the rheumatiz, as he had been telling himself these last few weeks, his body's necessary period of adjustment to the damp weather of this fall season. He was not blind to the way his ankles, especially the right one, had begun to thicken. He had observed a similar thickening of his knees, and although his hips still looked fine, when he placed his hands on them, he could feel the way the right one was changing under the skin. No, not the rheumatiz that had afflicted Cort so miserably in his last year or so, keeping him inside by his fire on rainy days. This was something worse. It was arthritis, the bad kind, the dry kind. It wouldn't be long before it reached his hands. Roland would gladly have fed his right one to the disease, if that would have satisfied it; he had taught it to do a good many things since the lobstrosities had taken the first two fingers, but it was never going to be what it was. Only ailments didn't work that way, did they? You couldn't placate them with sacrifices. The arthritis would come when it came and go where it wanted to go.
I might have a year , he thought, lying in bed beside the sleeping religious from Eddie and Susannah and Jake's world. I might even have two .
No, not two. Probably not even one. What was it Eddie sometimes said? Quit kidding yourself . Eddie had a lot of sayings from his world, but that was a particularly good one. A particularly apt one.
Not that he would cry off the Tower if Old Bone-Twist Man took his ability to shoot, saddle a horse, cut a strip of rawhide, even to chop wood for a campfire, so simple a thing as that; no, he was in it until the end. But he didn't relish the picture of riding along behind the others, dependent upon them, perhaps tied to his saddle with the reins because he could no longer hold the pommel. Nothing but a drag-anchor. One they wouldn't be able to pull up if and when fast sailing was required.
If it gets to that, I'll kill myself.
But he wouldn't. That was the truth. Quit kidding yourself .
Which brought Eddie to mind again. He needed to talk to Eddie about Susannah, and right away. This was the knowledge with which he had awakened, and perhaps worth the pain. It wouldn't be a pleasant talk, but it had to be done. It was time Eddie knew about Mia. She would find it more difficult to slip away now that they were in a town - in a house - but she would have to, just the same. She could argue with her baby's needs and her own cravings no more than Roland could argue with the bright rings of pain which circled his right hip and knee and both ankles but had so far spared his talented hands. If Eddie wasn't warned, there might be terrible trouble. More trouble was something they didn't need now; it might sink them.
Roland lay in the bed, and throbbed, and watched the sky lighten. He was dismayed to see that brightness no longer bloomed dead east; it was a little off to the south, now.
Sunrise was also in drift.
TWO