“Tell me what you can remember,” he told Jake.
   “It’s only a little. It doesn’t seem to make any sense any more.”
   “Tell me. Maybe I can pick up the sense.
   “There was a place… the one before this one. A high
   place with lots of rooms and a patio where you could look at tall buildings and water. There was a statue that stood in the water.”
   “A statue in the water?”
   “Yes. A lady with a crown and a torch.”
   “Are you making this up?”
   “I guess I must be,” the boy said hopelessly. “There were things to ride in on the streets. Big ones and little ones. Yellow ones. A lot of yellow ones. I walked to school. There were cement paths beside the streets. Windows to look in and more statues wearing clothes. The statues sold the clothes. I know it sounds crazy, but the statues sold the clothes.”
   The gunslinger shook his head and looked for a lie on the boy’s face. He saw none.
   “I walked to school,” the boy repeated fixedly. “And I had a – “His eyes tilted closed and his lips moved gropingly.” – a brown… book… bag. I carried a lunch. And I wore – “the groping again, agonized groping” – a tie.”
   “A what?”
   “I don’t know.” The boy’s fingers made a slow, unconscious clinching motion at his throat – a gesture the gun-
   slinger associated with hanging. “I don’t know. It’s just all gone.” And he looked away.
   “May I put you to sleep?” The gunslinger asked. “I’m not sleepy.”
   “I can make you sleepy, and I can make you remember.”
   Doubtfully, Jake asked, “How could you do that?”
   “With this.”
   The gunslinger removed one of the shells from his gunbelt and twirled it in his fingers. The movement was dexterous, as flowing as oil. The shell cartwheeled effortlessly from thumb and index and index and second, to second and ring, to ring and pinky. It popped out of sight and reappeared; seemed to float briefly, and then reversed. The shell walked across the gunslinger’s fingers. The fingers themselves moved like a beaded curtain in a breeze. The boy watched, his initial doubt replaced with plain delight, then by raptness, then by a dawning mute blankness. The eyes slipped shut The shell danced back and forth. Jake’s eyes opened again, caught the steady, limpid dance between the gunslinger’s fingers for a while longer, and then his eyes closed once more. The gunslinger continued, but Jake’s eyes did not open again. The boy breathed with steady, bovine calmness. Was this part of it? Yes. There was a certain beauty, a logic, like the lacy frettings that fringe hard blue ice-packs. He seemed to hear the sound of wind-chimes. Not for the first time the gunslinger tasted the smooth, loden taste of soul-sickness. The shell in his fingers, manipulated with such unknown grace, was suddenly undead, horrific, the spoor of a monster. He dropped it into his palm and closed it into a fist with painful force. There were such things as rape in the world. Rape and murder and unspeakable practices, and all of them were for the good, the bloody good, for the myth, for the grail, for the Tower. Ah, the Tower stood somewhere, rearing its black bulk to
   the sky, and in his desert-scoured ears, the gunslinger heard the faint sweet sound of wind-chimes.
   “Where are you?” he asked.
   Jake Chambers is going downstairs with his book bag There is Earth Science, there is Economic Geography, there is a notepad, a pencil, a lunch his mother’s cook, Mrs. Greta Shaw, has made for him in the chrome-and-formica kitchen where a fan whirrs eternally, sucking up alien odors. In his lunch sack he has a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bologna, lettuce, and onion sandwich, and four Oreo cookies. His parents do not hate him, but they seem to have overlooked him. They have abdicated and left him to Mrs. Greta Shaw, to nannies, to a tutor in the summer and The School (which is Private and Nice, and most of all, White) the rest of the time. None of these people have ever pretended to be more than what they are – professional people, the best in their fields. None have folded him to a particularly warm bosom as usually happens in the historical novels his mother reads and which fake has dipped into, looking for the “hot parts. “Hysterical novels, his fat her sometimes calls them, and sometimes, “bodice-rippers.” You should talk, his mother says with infinite scorn from behind some closed door where Jake listens. His father works for The Network, and Jake could pick him out of a line-up. Probably.
   Jake does not know that he hates all the professional people, but he does. People have always bewildered him. He likes stairs and will not use the self-service elevator in his building His mother, who is scrawny in a sexy way, often goes to bed with sick friends.
   Now he is on the street, Jake Chambers is on the street, he has “Hit the bricks.” He is clean and well-mannered, comely, sensitive. He has no friends; only acquaintances. He has never bothered to think about this, but it hurts him. He does not know or understand that a long association with professional people has caused him to take many of their traits. Mrs. Greta Shaw makes
   hands folded in his lap, still breathing calmly. He had told his tale without much emotion, although his voice had trembled near the end, when he had come to the part about the “priest” and the “Act of Contrition.” He had not, of course, told the gunslinger about his family and his own sense of bewildered dichotomy, but that had seeped through anyway – enough had seeped through to make out its shape. The fact that there had never been such a city as the boy described (or, if so, it had only existed in the myth of prehistory) was not the most upsetting part of the story, but it was disturbing. It was all disturbing. The gunslinger was afraid of the implications.
   “Jake?”
   “Uh-huh?”
   “Do you want to remember this when you wake up, or forget it?”
   “Forget it,” the boy said promptly. “I bled.”
   “All right You’re going to sleep, understand? Go ahead and lie over.”
   Jake laid over, looking small and peaceful and harm less. The gunslinger did not believe he was harmless. There was a deadly feeling about him, and the stink of pre destination. He didn’t like the feeling, but he liked the boy. He liked him a great deal.
   “Jake?”
   “Shhh. I want to sleep.”
   “Yes. And when you wake up you won’t remember any of this.”
   “Kay.”
   The gunslinger watched him for a brief time, thinking of own boyhood, which usually seemed to have happened to another person – to a person who had jumped through some osmotic lens and become someone else —but which now seemed poignantly close. It was very hot in the stable of the way station, and he carefully drank some
   more water. He got up and walked to the back of the building, pausing to look into one of the horse stalls. There was a small pile of white hay in the corner, and a neatly folded blanket, but there was no smell of horse. There was no smell of anything in the stable. The sun had bled away every smell and left nothing. The air was perfectly neutral.
   At the back of the stable was a small, dark room with a stainless steel machine in the center. It was untouched by rust or rot. It looked like a butter churn. At the left, a chrome pipe jutted from it, terminating over a drain in the floor. The gunslinger had seen pumps like it in other dry places, but never one so big. He could not contemplate how deep they must have drilled before they struck water, secret and forever black under the desert
   Why hadn’t they removed the pump when the way station had been abandoned?
   Demons, perhaps.
   He shuddered abruptly, an abrupt twisting of his back. Heatflesh poked out on his skin, then receded. He went to the control switch and pushed the ON button. The machine began to hum. After perhaps half a minute, a stream of cool, clear water belched from the pipe and went down the drain to be recirculated. Perhaps three gallons flowed out of the pipe before the pump shut itself down with a final click. It was a thing as alien to this place and time as true love, and yet as concrete as a Judgment, a silent reminder of the time when the world had not yet moved on. It probably ran on an atomic slug, as there was no electricity within a thousand miles of here and even dry batteries would have lost their charge long ago. The gunslinger didn’t like it
   He went back and sat down beside the boy, who had put one hand under his cheek. Nice-looking boy. The gunslinger drank some more water and crossed his legs so he was sitting Indian fashion. The boy, like the squatter on the edge of the desert who kept the bird (Zoltan, the gunslinger
   remembered abruptly, the bird’s name was Zoltan), had lost his sense of time, but the fact that the man in black was closer seemed beyond doubt Not for the first time, the gunslinger wondered if the man in black was letting him catch up for some reason of his own. Perhaps the gunslinger was playing into his hands. He tried to imagine what the confrontation might be like, and could not
   He was very hot, but he no longer felt sick. The nursery rhyme occurred to him again, but this time instead of his mother, he thought of Cort – Cort, with his face hem-stitched with the scars of bricks and bullets and blunt instruments. The scars of war. He wondered if Cort had ever had a love to match those monumental scars. He doubted it He thought of Aileen, and of Marten, that incomplete enchanter.
   The gunslinger was not a man to dwell on the past; only a shadowy conception of the future and of his own emotional make-up saved him from being a creature without imagination, a dullard. His present run of thought therefore rather amazed him. Each name called up others – Cuthbert, Paul, the old man Jonas; and Susan, the lovely girl at the window.
   The piano player in Tull (also dead, all dead in Tull, and by his hand) had been fond of the old songs, and the gunslinger hummed one tunelessly under his breath:
   Love o love o careless love
   See what careless love has done.
   The gunslinger laughed, bemused. Jam the last of that green and warm-hued world. And for all his nostalgia, he felt no self-pity. The world had moved on mercilessly, but his legs were still strong, and the man in black was closer. The gunslinger nodded out
   When he woke up it was almost dark and the boy was gone. The gunslinger got up, hearing his joints pop, and went
   to the stable door. There was a small flame dancing in darkness on the porch of the inn. He walked toward it, his shadow long and black and trailing in the ochre light of the sunset.
   Jake was sitting by a kerosene lamp. “The oil was in a drum,” he said, “but I was scared to burn it in the house. Everything’s so dry —“
   “You did just right.” The gunslinger sat down, seeing but not thinking about the dust of years that puffed up around his rump. The flame from the lamp shadowed the boy’s face with delicate tones. The gunslinger produced his poke and rolled a cigarette.
   “We have to talk,” he said.
   Jake nodded.
   “I guess you know I’m on the prod for that man you saw.”
   “Are you going to kill him?”
   “I don’t know. I have to make him tell me something. I may have to make him take me someplace.”
   “Where?”
   “To find a tower,” the gunslinger said. He held his cigarette over the chimney of the lamp and drew on it; the smoke drifted away on the rising night breeze. Jake watched it. His face showed neither fear nor curiosity, certainly not enthusiasm.
   “So I’m going on tomorrow,” the gunslinger said. “You’ll have to come with me. How much of that meat is left?”
   “Only a handful.”
   “Corn?”
   “A little.”
   The gunslinger nodded. “Is there a cellar?”
   “Yes.” Jake looked at him. The pupils of his eyes had grown to a huge, fragile size. “You pull up on a ring in the floor, but I didn’t go down. I was afraid the ladder would
   break and I wouldn’t be able to get up again. And it smells bad. It’s the only thing around here that smells at all.”
   “We’ll get up early and see if there’s anything down there worth taking. Then we’ll bug out”
   “All right” The boy paused and then said, “I’m glad I didn’t kill you when you were sleeping. I had a pitchfork and I thought about doing it. But I didn’t, and now I won’t have to be afraid to go to sleep.”
   “What would you be afraid of?”
   The book looked at him ominously. “Spooks. Of him coming back.”
   “The man in black,” the gunslinger said. Not a question.
   “Yes. Is he a bad man?”
   “That depends on where you’re standing,” the gunslinger said absently. He got up and pitched his cigarette out onto the hardpan. “I’m going to sleep.”
   The boy looked at him timidly. “Can I sleep in the stable with you?”
   “Of course.”

   The gunslinger stood on the steps, looking up, and the boy joined him. Polaris was up there, and Mars. It seemed to the gunslinger that, if he closed his eyes he would be able to hear the croaking of the first spring peepers, smell the green and almost-summer smell of the court lawns after their first cutting (and hear, perhaps, the indolent click of croquet balls as the ladies of the East Wing, attired only in their shifts as dusk glimmered toward dark, played at Points), could almost see Aileen as she came through the break in the hedges —It was not like him to think so much of the past.
   He turned back and picked up the lamp. “Let’s go to sleep,” he said.
   They crossed to the stable together.
   The next morning he explored the cellar.
   Jake was right; it smelled bad. It had a wet, swampy smell that made the gunslinger feel nauseous and a little lightheaded after the antiseptic odorlessness of the desert and the stable. The cellar smelled of cabbages and turnips and potatoes with long, sightless eyes gone to everlasting rot The ladder, however, seemed quite sturdy, and he climbed down.
   The floor was earthen, and his head almost touched the overhead beams. Down here spiders still lived, disturbingly big ones with mottled gray bodies. Many of them had mutated. Some had eyes on stalks, some had what might have been as many as sixteen legs.
   The gunslinger peered around and waited for his nighteyes.
   “You all right?” Jake called down nervously.
   “Yes. He focused on the corner. “There are cans. Wait”
   He went carefully to the corner, ducking his head. There was an old box with one side folded down. The cans were vegetables – green beans, yellow beans… and three cans of corned beef.
   He scooped up an armload and went back to the ladder. He climbed halfway up and handed them to Jake, who knelt to receive them. He went back for more.
   It was on the third trip that he heard the groaning in the foundations.
   He turned, looked, and felt a kind of dreamy terror wash over him, a feeling both languid and repellent, like sex in the water – one drowning within another.
   The foundation was composed of huge sandstone blocks that had probably been evenly cornered when the way station was new, but which were now at every zigzag, drunken angle. It made the wall look as if it were inscribed with strange, meandering hierogliphics. And from the joining of two of these abstruse cracks, a thin spill of sand was running, as if something on the other side was digging
   itself through with slobbering, agonized intensity.
   The groaning rose and fell, becoming louder, until the whole cellar was full of the sound, an abstract noise of ripping pain and dreadful effort.
   “Come up!” Jake screamed. “0 Jesus, mister, come up!”
   “Go away,” the gunslinger said calmly.
   “Come up!” Jake screamed again.
   The gunslinger did not answer. He pulled leather with his right hand.
   There was a hole in the wall now, a hole as big as a coin. He could hear, through the curtain of his own terror, Jake’s pattering feet as the boy ran. Then the spill of sand stopped. The groaning ceased, but there was a sound of steady, labored breathing.
   “Who are you?” The gunslinger asked.
   No answer.
   And in the High Speech, his voice filling with the old thunder of command, Roland demanded: “Who are you, Demon? Speak, if you would speak. My time is short; my hands lose patience.”
   “Go slow,” a dragging, clotted voice said from within the wall. And the gunslinger felt the dreamlike terror deepen and grow almost solid. It was the voice of Alice, the woman he had stayed with in the town of Tull. But she was dead; he had seen her go down himself, a bullet hole between her eyes. Fathoms seemed to swim by his eyes, descending. “Go slow past the Drawers, gunslinger. While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.”
   “What do you mean? Speak on!”
   But the breathing was gone.
   The gunslinger stood for a moment, frozen, and then one of the huge spiders dropped on his arm and scrambled frantically up to his shoulder. With an involuntary grunt he brushed it away and got his feet moving. He did not want
   To do it, but custom was strict, inviolable. The dead from the dead, as the old proverb has it; only a corpse may speak. He went to the hole and punched at it. The sandstone crumbled easily at the edges, and with a bare stiffening of muscles, he thrust his hand through the wall.
   And touched something solid, with raised and fretted knobs. He drew it out. He held a jawbone, rotted at the far hinge. The teeth leaned this way and that.
   “All right,” he said softly. He thrust it rudely into his back pocket and went back up the ladder, carrying the last cans awkwardly. He left the trapdoor open. The sun would get in and kill the spiders.
   Jake was halfway across the stable yard, cowering on the cracked, rubbly hardpan. He screamed when he saw the gunslinger, backed away a step or two, and then ran to him, crying.
   “I thought it got you, that it got you, I thought —“
   “It didn’t.” He held the boy to him, feeling his face, hot against his chest, and his hands, dry against his ribcage. It occurred to him later that this was when he began to love the boy – which was, of course, what the man in black must have planned all along.
   “Was it a demon?” The voice was muffled.
   “Yes. A speaking-demon. We don’t have to go back there anymore. Come on.”
   They went to the stable, and the gunslinger made a rough pack from the blanket he had slept under – it was hot and prickly, but there was nothing else. That done, he filled the waterbags from the pump.
   “You carry one of the waterbags,” the gunslinger said. “Wear it around your shoulders – like a fakir carries his snake. See?”
   “Yes.” The boy looked up at him worshipfully. He slung one of the bags.
   “Is it too heavy?”
   “No. It’s fine.”
   “Tell me the truth, now. I can’t carry you if you get a sunstroke.”
   “I won’t have a sunstroke. I’ll be okay.”
   The gunslinger nodded.
   “We’re going to the mountains, aren’t we?”
   “Yes.”

   They walked out into the steady smash of the sun. Jake, his head as high as the swing of the gunslinger’s elbows, walked to his right and a little ahead, the rawhide-wrapped ends of the waterbag hanging nearly to his shins. The gunslinger had crisscrossed two more waterbags across his shoulders and carried the sling of food in his armpit, his left arm holding it against his body.
   They passed through the far gate of the way station and found the blurred ruts of the stage track again. They had walked perhaps fifteen minutes when Jake turned around and waved at the two buildings. They seemed to huddle in the titanic space of the desert.
   “Goodbye!” Jake cried. “Goodbye!”
   They walked. The stage track breasted a frozen sand drumlin, and when. the gunslinger looked around, the way station was gone. Once again there was the desert, and that only.
   They were three days out of the way station; the mountains were deceptively clear now. They could see the rise of the desert into foothills, the first naked slopes, the bedrock bursting through the skin of the earth in sullen, eroded triumph. Further up, the land gentled off briefly again, and for the first time in months or years the gunslinger could see green – real, living green. Grass, dwarf spruces, perhaps even willows, all fed by snow runoff from further up.
   Beyond that the rock took over again, rising in cyclopean, tumbled splendor to the blinding snowcaps. Off to the left, a huge slash showed the way to the smaller, eroded sandstone cliffs and mesas and buttes on the far side. This draw was obscured in the almost continual gray membrane of showers. At night, Jake would sit fascinated for the few minutes before he fell into sleep, watching the brilliant swordplay of the far-off lightning, white and purple, startling in the clarity of the night air.
   The boy was fine on the trail. He was tough, but more than that, he seemed to fight exhaustion with a calm and professional reservoir of will which the gunslinger fully appreciated. He did not talk much and he did not ask questions, not even about the jawbone, which the gunslinger turned over and over in his hands during his evening smoke. He caught a sense that the boy felt highly flattered by the gunslinger’s companionship – perhaps even exalted by it – and this disturbed him. The boy had been placed in his path – While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket – and the fact that Jake was not slowing him down only opened the way to more sinister possibilities.
   They passed the symmetrical campfire leavings of the man in black at regular intervals, and it seemed to the gunslinger that these leavings were much fresher now. On the third night, the gunslinger was sure that he could see the distant spark of another campfire, somewhere in the first rising swell of the foothills.
   Near two o’clock on the fourth day out from the way station, Jake reeled and almost fell.
   “Here, sit down,” the gunslinger said.
   “No, I’m okay.”
   “Sit down.”
   The boy sat obediently. The gunslinger squatted close by, so Jake would be in his shadow.
   “Drink.”
   “I’m not supposed to until – “
   “Drink.”
   The boy drank, three swallows. The gunslinger wet the tail of the blanket, which was lighter now, and applied the damp fabric to the boy’s wrists and forehead, which were fever-dry.
   “From now on we rest every afternoon at this time. Fifteen minutes. Do you want to sleep?”
   “No.” The boy looked at him with shame. The gunslinger looked back blandly. In an abstracted way he withdrew one of the bullets from his belt and began to twirl it between his fingers. The boy watched, fascinated.
   “That’s neat,” he said.
   The gunslinger nodded. “Sure it is.” he paused. “When I was your age, I lived in a walled city, did I tell you that?”
   The boy shook his head sleepily.
   “Sure. And there was an evil man – “
   “The priest?”
   “No,” the gunslinger said, “but the two of them had some relationship, I think now. Maybe even half-brothers. Marten was a wizard… like Merlin. Do they tell of Merlin where you come from, Jake?”
   “Merlin and Arthur and the knights of the round table,” Jake said dreamily.
   The gunslinger felt a nasty jolt go through him. “Yes,” he said. “I was very young, …“
   But the boy was asleep sitting up, his hands folded neatly in his lap.
   “When I snap my fingers, you’ll wake up. You’ll be rested and fresh. Do you understand?”
   “Yes.”
   “Lay over, then.”
   The gunslinger got makings from his poke and rolled a cigarette. There was something missing. He searched for it in his diligent, careful way and located it. The missing thing was that maddening sense of hurry, the feeling that he might be left behind at any time, that the trail would die out and he would be left with only a broken piece of string. All that was gone now, and the gunslinger was slowly becoming sure that the man in black wanted to be caught.
   What would follow?
   The question was too vague to catch his interest. Cuthbert would have found interest in it, lively interest, but Cuthbert was gone, and the gunslinger could only go forward in the way he knew.
   He watched the boy as he smoked, and his mind turned back on Cuthbert, who had always laughed – to his death he had gone laughing – and Cort, who never laughed, and on Marten, who sometimes smiled – a thin, silent smile that had its own disquieting gleam… like an eye that slips open in the dark and discloses blood. And there had been the falcon, of course. The falcon was named David, after the legend of the boy with the sling. David, he was quite sure, knew nothing but the need for murder, rending, and terror. Like the gunslinger himself. David was no dilettante; he played the center of the court.
   Perhaps, though, in some final accounting, David the falcon had been closer to Marten than to anyone else… and perhaps his mother, Gabrielle, had known it.
   The gunslinger’s stomach seemed to rise painfully against his heart, but his face didn’t change. He watched the smoke of his cigarette rise into the hot desert air and disappear, and his mind went back.
   II
   The sky was white, perfectly white, and the smell of rain was in the air. The smell of hedges and growing green was strong and sweet. It was deep spring.
   David sat on Cuthbert’s arm, a small engine of destruction with bright golden eyes that glared outward at nothing. The rawhide leash attached to his jesses was looped carelessly about Cuthbert’s arm.
   Cort stood aside from the two boys, a silent figure in patched leather trousers and a green cotton shirt that had been cinched high with his old, wide infantry belt. The green of his shirt merged with the hedges and the rolling turf of the Back Courts, where the ladies had not yet begun to play at Points.
   “Get ready,” Roland whispered to Cuthbert.
   “We’re ready,” Cuthbert said confidently. “Aren’t we, Davey?”
   They spoke the low speech, the language of both scullions and squires; the day when they would be allowed to use their own tongue in the presence of others was still far. “It’s a beautiful day for it. Can you smell the rain? It’s —“
   Cort abruptly raised the trap in his hands and let the side fall open. The dove was out and up, trying for the sky in a quick, fluttering blast of its wings. Cuthbert pulled the leash, but he was slow; the hawk was already up and his takeoff was awkward. With a brief twitch of its wings the hawk had recovered. It struck upward, gaining altitude over the dove, moving bullet-swift.
   Cort walked over to where the boys stood, casually, and swung his huge and twisted fist at Cuthbert’s ear. The boy fell over without a sound, although his lips writhed back from his gums. A trickle of blood flowed slowly from his ear and onto the rich green grass.
   “You were slow,” he said.
   Cuthbert was struggling to his feet. “I’m sorry, Cort. It’s just that I —Cort swung again, and Cuthbert fell over again. The
   blood flowed more swiftly now.
   “Speak the High Speech,” he said softly. His voice was flat. with a slight, drunken rasp. “Speak your act of contrition in the speech of civilization for which better men than you will ever be have died, maggot.”
   Cuthbert was getting up again. Tears stood brightly in his eyes, but his lips were pressed tightly together in a bright line of hate which did not quiver.
   “I grieve,” Cuthbert said in a voice of breathless control. “I have forgotten the face of my father, whose guns I hope someday to bear.”
   “That’s right, brat,” Cort said. “You’ll consider what you did wrong, and bookend your reflections with hunger. No supper. No breakfast.”
   “Look!” Roland cried. He pointed up.
   The hawk had climbed above the soaring dove. It glided for a moment, its stubby, muscular wings outstretched and without movement on the still, white spring air. Then it folded its wings and dropped like a stone. The two bodies came together, and for a moment Roland fancied he could see blood in the air… but it might have been his imagination. The hawk gave a brief scream of triumph. The dove fluttered, twisting, to the ground, and Roland ran toward the kill, leaving Cort and the chastened Cuthbert behind him.
   The hawk had landed beside its prey and was complacently tearing into its plump white breast. A few feathers seesawed slowly downward.
   “David!” The boy yelled, and tossed the hawk a piece of rabbit flesh from his poke. The hawk caught it on the fly,
   ingested it with an upward shaking of its back and throat, and Roland attempted to re-leash the bird.
   The hawk whirled, almost absentmindedly, and ripped skin from Roland’s arm in a long, dangling gash. Then it went back to its meal.
   With a grunt, Roland looped the leash again, this time catching David’s diving, slashing beak on the leather gauntlet he wore. He gave the hawk another piece of meat, then hooded it. Docilely, David climbed onto his wrist.
   He stood up proudly, the hawk on his arm.
   “What’s this?” Cort asked, pointing to the dripping slash on Roland’s forearm. The boy stationed himself to receive the blow, locking his throat against any possible cry, but no blow fell.

   “He struck me,” Roland said.
   “You pissed him off,” Cort said. “The hawk does not fear you, boy, and the hawk never will. The hawk is God’s gunslinger.”
   Roland merely looked at Cort. He was not an imaginative boy, and if Cort had intended to imply a moral, it was lost on him; he was pragmatic enough to believe that it might have been one of the few foolish statements he had ever heard Cort make.
   Cuthbert came up behind them and stuck his tongue out at Cort, safely on his blind side. Roland did not smile, but nodded to him.
   “Go in now,” Cort said, taking the hawk. He pointed at Cuthbert “But remember your reflection, maggot And your fast. Tonight and tomorrow morning.”
   “Yes,” Cuthbert said, stiltedly formal now. “Thank you for this instructive day.”
   “You learn,” Cort said, “but your tongue has a bad habit of lolling from your stupid mouth when your instructor’s back is turned. Mayhap the day will come when it and you will learn their respective places.” He struck Cuthbert again, this time solidly between the eyes and hard enough so that Roland heard a dull thud – the sound a mallet makes when a scullion taps a keg of beer. Cuthbert fell backward onto the lawn, his eyes cloudy and dazed at first. Then they cleared and he stared burningly up at Cort, his hatred unveiled, a pinprick as bright as the dove’s blood in the center of each eye.
   Cuthbert nodded and parted his lips in a scarifying smile that Roland had never seen.
   “Then there’s hope for you,” Cort said. “When you think you can, you come for me, maggot.”
   “How did you know?” Cuthbert said between his teeth. Cort turned toward Roland so swiftly that Roland almost fell back a step – and then both of them would have been on the grass, decorating the new green with their blood. “I saw it reflected in this maggot’s eyes,” he said. “Remember it, Cuthbert. Last lesson for today.”
   Cuthbert nodded again, the same frightening smile on his face. “I grieve,” he said. “I have forgotten the face —“
   “Cut that shit,” Cort said, losing interest. He turned to Roland. “Go on, now. The both of you. If I have to look at your stupid maggot faces any longer I’ll puke my guts.”
   “Come on,” Roland said.
   Cuthbert shook his head to clear it and got to his feet Cort was already walking down the hill in his squat, bowlegged stride, looking powerful and somehow prehistoric. The shaved and grizzled spot at the top of his head loomed at a slant, hunched.
   “I’ll kill the son of a bitch,” Cuthbert said, still smiling. A large goose egg, purple and knotted, was rising mysti cally on his forehead.
   “Not you or me,” Roland said, suddenly bursting into a grin. “You can have supper in the west kitchen with me. Cook will give us some.”
   “He’ll tell Cort.”
   “He’s no friend of Cort’s.” Roland said, and then shrugged. “And what if he did?”
   Cuthbert grinned back. “Sure. Right. I always wanted to know how the world looked when your head was on backwards and upside down.”
   They started back together over the green lawns, casting shadows in the fine white spring light.
   The cook in the west kitchen was named Hax. He stood huge in food stained whites, a man with a crude-oil complexion whose ancestry was a quarter black, a quarter yellow, a quarter from the South Islands, now almost forgotten (the world had moved on), and a quarter God knew what He shuffled about three high-ceilinged steamy rooms like a tractor in low gear, wearing huge, Caliph-like slippers. He was one of those quite rare adults who communicate with small children fairly well and who love them all impartially – not in a sugary way but in a businesslike fashion that may sometimes entail a hug, in the same way that closing a big business deal may call for a handshake. He even loved the boys who had begun The Training, although they were different from other children – not always demonstrative and somehow dangerous, not in an adult way, but rather as if they were ordinary children with a slight touch of madness – and Cuthbert was not the first of Cort’s students whom he had fed on the sly. At this moment he stood in front of his huge, rambling electric stove
   – one of six working appliances left on the whole estate. It was his personal domain, and he stood there watching the two boys bolt the gravied meat scraps he had produced. Be-
   hind, before, and all around, cookboys, scullions, and various underlings rushed through the foaming, humid air, rattling pans, stirring stew, slaving over potatoes and vegetables in nether regions. In the dimly lit pantry alcove, a washerwoman with a doughy, miserable face and hair caught up in a rag splashed water around on the floor with a mop.
   One of the scullery boys rushed up with a man from the Guards in tow. “This man, he wantchoo, Hax.”
   “All right” Hax nodded to the Guard, and he nodded back. “You boys,” he said. “Go over to Maggie, she’ll give you some pie. Then scat”
   They nodded and went over to Maggie, who gave them huge wedges of pie on dinner plates… but gingerly, as if they were wild dogs that might bite her.
   “Let’s eat it on the stairs,” Cuthbert said.
   “All right”
   They sat behind a huge, sweating stone colonnade, out of sight of the kitchen, and gobbled their pie with their fingers. It was only moments later that they saw shadows fall on the far curving wall of the wide staircase. Roland grabbed Cuthbert’s arm. “Come on,” he said. “Someone’s coming.” Cuthbert looked up, his face surprised and berry-stained.
   But the shadows stopped, still out of sight It was Hax and the man from the Guards. The boys sat where they were. If they moved now, they might be heard.
   “… . the good man,” the Guard was saying.
   “In Farson?”
   “In two weeks,” the Guard replied. “Maybe three. You have to come with us. There’s a shipment from the freight depot…. “A particularly loud crash of pots and pans and a volley of catcalls directed at the hapless potboy who had dropped them blotted out some of the rest; then the boys heard the Guard finish: “.. . poisoned meat”
   “Risky.”
   “Ask not what the good man can do for you – “the Guard began.
   “– but what you can do for him,” Hax sighed. “Soldier, ask not”
   “You know what it could mean,” the Guard said quietly.
   “Yes. And I know my responsibilities to him; you don’t need to lecture me. I love him just as you do.”
   “All right The meat will be marked for short-term storage in your coldrooms. But you’ll have to be quick. You must understand that.”
   “There are children in Farson?” The cook asked sadly. It was not really a question.
   “Children everywhere,” the Guard said gently. “It’s the children we – and he – care about.”
   “Poisoned meat. Such a strange way to care for children.” Hax uttered a heavy, whistling sigh. “Will they curdle and hold their bellies and cry for their mammas? I suppose they will.”
   “It will be like a going to sleep,” the Guard said, but his voice was too confidently reasonable.
   “Of course,” Hax said, and laughed.
   “You said it yourself. ‘Soldier, ask not’ Do you enjoy seeing children under the rule of the gun, when they could be under his hand who makes the lion lie down with the lamb?”
   Hax did not reply.
   “I go on duty in twenty minutes,” the Guard said, his voice once more calm. “Give me a joint of mutton and I will pinch one of your girls and make her giggle. When I leave – “My mutton will give no cramps to your belly, Robeson.”
   “Will you… “But the shadows moved away and the voices were lost.
   I could have killed them, Roland thought, frozen and fascinated. I could have killed them both with my knife, slit their throats like hogs. He looked at his hands, now stained with gravy and berries as well as dirt from the day’s lessons.
   “Roland.”
   He looked at Cuthbert. They looked at each other for a long moment in the fragrant semidarkness, and a taste of warm despair rose in Roland’s throat. What he felt might have been a sort of death – something as brutal and final as the death of the dove in the white sky over the games field. Hax? He thought, bewildered. Hax who put a poultice on my leg that time? Hax? And then his mind snapped closed, cutting the subject off.
   What he saw, even in Cuthbert’s humorous, intelligent face, was nothing – nothing at all. Cuthbert’s eyes were flat with Hax’s doom. In Cuthbert’s eyes, it had already happened. He had fed them and they had gone to the stairs to eat and then Hax had brought the Guard named Robeson to the wrong corner of the kitchen for their treasonous little tete-a-tete. That was all. In Cuthbert’s eyes Roland saw that Hax would die for his treason as a viper dies in a pit. That, and nothing else. Nothing at all.
   They were gunslinger’s eyes.
   Roland’s father was only just back from the uplands, and he looked out of place amid the drapes and the chiffon fripperies of the main receiving hall that the boy had only lately been granted access to, as a sign of his apprenticeship.
   His father was dressed in black jeans and a blue work shirt. His cloak, dusty and streaked, torn to the lining in one place, was slung carelessly over his shoulder with no
   regard for the way it and he clashed with the elegance of the room. He was desperately thin and the heavy handlebar mustache below his nose seemed to weight his head as he looked down at his son. The guns crisscrossed over the wings of his hips hung at the perfect angle for his hands, the worn sandalwood handles looking dull and sleepy in this languid indoor light
   “The head cook,” his father said softly. “Imagine it! The tracks that were blown upland at the railhead. The dead stock in Hendrickson. And perhaps even.., imagine! Im agine!”
   He looked more closely at his son.
   “It preys on you.”
   “Like the hawk,” Roland said. “It preys on you.” He laughed – at the startling appropriateness of the image rather than at any lightness in the situation.
   His father smiled.
   “Yes,” Roland said. “I guess it… it preys on me.
   “Cuthbert was with you,” his father said. “He will have told his father by now.”
   “Yes.”
   “He fed both of you when Cort – “
   “Yes.”
   “And Cuthbert. Does it prey on him, do you think?”
   “I don’t know.” Such an avenue of comparison did not really interest him. He was not concerned with how his feelings compared with those of others.
   “It preys on you because you feel you’ve killed?”
   Roland shrugged unwillingly, all at once not content with this probing of his motivations.
   “Yet you told. Why?”
   The boy’s eyes widened. “How could I not? Treason was – “
   His father waved a hand curtly. “If you did it for something as cheap as a schoolbook idea, you did it unworthily. I would rather see all of Farson poisoned.”
   “I didn’t!” The words jerked out of him violently. “I wanted to kill him – both of them! Liars! Snakes! They —“Go ahead.”
   “They hurt me,” he finished, defiant. “They did something to me. Changed something. I wanted to kill them for it.”
   His father nodded. “That is worthy. Not moral, but it is not your place to be moral. In fact… “ He peered at his son. “Morals may always be beyond you. You are not quick, like Cuthbert or Wheeler’s boy. It will make you formidable.”
   The boy, impatient before this, felt both pleased and troubled. “He will – “
   “Hang.”
   The boy nodded. “I want to see it.”
   Roland the elder threw his head back and roared laughter. “Not as formidable as I thought… or perhaps just stupid.” He closed his mouth abruptly. An arm shot out like a bolt of lightning and grabbed the boy’s upper arm painfully. He grimaced but did not flinch. His father peered at him steadily, and the boy looked back, although it was more difficult than hooding the hawk had been.
   “All right,” he said, and turned abruptly to go.
   “Father?”
   “What?”
   “Do you know who they were talking about? Do you know who the good man is?”
   His father turned back and looked at him speculatively. “Yes. I think I do.”
   “If you caught him,” Roland said in his thoughtful, near-plodding way, “no one else like Cook would have to . . . have to be neck-popped.”
   His father smiled thinly. “Perhaps not for a while. But in the end, someone always has to have his or her neck popped, as you so quaintly put it. The people demand it. Sooner or later, if there isn’t a turncoat, the people make one.”
   “Yes,” Roland said, grasping the concept instantly —it was one he never forgot. “But if you got him – “
   “No,” his father said flatly.
   “Why?”
   For a moment his father seemed on the verge of saying why, but he bit it back. “We’ve talked enough for now, I think. Go out from me. “
   He wanted to tell his father not to forget his promise when the time came for Hax to step through the trap, but he was sensitive to his father’s moods. He suspected his father wanted to fuck. He closed that door quickly. He was aware that his mother and father did that . . . that thing together, and he was reasonably well informed as to what that act was, but the mental picture that always condensed with the thought made him feel both uneasy and oddly guilty. Some years later, Susan would tell him the story of Oedipus, and he would absorb it in quiet thoughtfulness, thinking of the odd and bloody triangle formed by his father, his mother, and by Marten – known in some quarters as the good man. Or perhaps it was a quadrangle, if one wished to add himself.
   “Good night, father,” Roland said.
   “Good night, son,” his father said absently, and began unbuttoning his shirt In his mind, the boy was already gone. Like father, like son.
   Gallows Hill was on the Farson Road, which was nicely poetic – Cuthbert might have appreciated this, but Roland did not. He did appreciate the splendidly ominous scaffold which climbed into the brilliantly blue sky, a black and angular silhouette which overhung the coach road.
   The two boys had been let out of Morning Exercises —Cort had read the notes from their fathers laboriously, lips moving, nodding here and there. When he finished with them both, he had looked up at the blue-violet dawn sky and had nodded again.
   “Wait here,” he said, and went toward the leaning stone hut that was his living quarters. He came back with a slice of rough, unleavened bread, broke it in two, and gave half to each.
   “When it’s over, each of you will put this beneath his shoes. Mind you do exactly as I say, or I’ll clout you into next week.”
   They had not understood until they arrived, riding double on Cuthbert’s gelding. They were the first, fully two hours ahead of anyone else and four hours before the hanging, and Gallows Hill stood deserted – except for the rooks and ravens. The birds were everywhere, and of course they were all black. They roosted noisily on the hard, jutting bar that overhung the trap – the armature of death. They sat in a row along the edge of the platform, they jostled for position on the stairs.
   “They leave them,” Cuthbert muttered. “For the birds.”
   “Let’s go up,” Roland said.
   Cuthbert looked at him with something like horror. “Do you think – “
   Roland cut him off with a gesture of his hands. “We’re years early. No one will come.”
   “All right.”

   They walked slowly toward the gibbet, and the birds took indignant wing, cawing and circling like a mob of angry dispossessed peasants. Their bodies were flat and black against the pure dawnlight of the sky.
   For the first time Roland felt the enormity of his responsibility in the matter; this wood was not noble, not part of the awesome machine of Civilization, but merely warped
   pine covered with splattered white bird droppings. It was splashed everywhere – stairs, railing, platform – and it stank.
   The boy turned to Cuthbert with startled, terrified eyes and saw Cuthbert looking back at him with the same expression.
   “I can’t,” Cuthbert whispered. “I can’t watch it.”
   Roland shook his head slowly. There was a lesson here, he realized, not a shining thing but something that was old and rusty and misshapen. It was why their fathers had let them come. And with his usual stubborn and inarticulate doggedness, Roland laid mental hands on whatever it was.
   “You can, Bert.”
   “I won’t sleep tonight”
   “Then you won’t,” Roland said, not seeing what that had to do with it
   Cuthbert suddenly seized Roland’s hand and looked at him with such mute agony that Roland’s own doubt came back, and he wished sickly that they had never gone to the west kitchen that night His father had been right Better every man, woman, and child in Farson than this.
   But whatever the lesson was, rusty, half-buried thing, he would not let it go or give up his grip on it
   “Let’s not go up,” Cuthbert said. “We’ve seen everything.”
   And Roland nodded reluctantly, feeling his grip on that thing – whatever it was – weaken. Cort, he knew, would have knocked them both sprawling and then forced them up to the platform step by cursing step . . . and sniffing fresh blood back up their noses as they went Cort would probably have looped new hemp over the yardarm itself and put the noose around each of their necks in turn, would have made them stand on the trap to feel it; and Cort would have been ready to strike them again if either wept or lost control of his bladder. And Cort, of course, would have been right For the first time in his life, Roland found himself hating his own childhood. He wished for the size and calluses and sureness of age.
   He deliberately pried a splinter from the railing and placed it in his breast pocket before turning away.
   “Why did you do that?” Cuthbert asked.
   He wished to answer something swaggering: Oh, the luck of the gallows . . . but he only looked at Cuthbert and shook his head. “Just so I’ll have it,” he said. “Always have it”
   They walked away from the gallows, sat down, and waited. In an hour or so the first of them began to gather, mostly families who had come in broken-down wagons and shays, carrying their breakfasts with them – hampers of cold pancakes folded over fillings of wild strawberry jam. Roland felt his stomach growl hungrily and wondered again, with despair, where the honor and the nobility of it was. It seemed to him that Hax in his dirty whites, walk-king around and around his steaming, subterranean kitchen, had more honor than this. He fingered the splinter from the gallows tree with sick bewilderment Cuthbert lay beside him with his face made impassive.
   In the end it was not so much, and Roland was glad. Hax was carried in an open cart, but only his huge girth gave him away; he had been blindfolded with a wide black cloth that hung down over his face. A few threw stones, but most merely continued with their breakfasts.
   A gunslinger whom the boy did not know (he was glad his father had not drawn the lot) led the fat cook carefully up the steps. Two Guards of the Watch had gone ahead and stood on either side of the trap. When Hax and the gunslinger reached the top, the gunslinger threw the noosed
   rope over the crosstree and then put it over the cook’s head, dropping the knot until it lay just below the left ear. The birds had all flown, but Roland knew they were waiting.
   “Do you wish to make confession?” the gunslinger asked.
   “I have nothing to confess,” Hax said. His words carried well, and his voice was oddly dignified in spite of the muffle of cloth which hung over

   his lips. The cloth ruffled slightly in the faint, pleasant breeze that had blown up. “I have not forgotten my father’s face; it has been with me through all.”
   Roland glanced sharply at the crowd and was disturbed by what he saw there – a sense of sympathy? Perhaps admiration? He would ask his father. When traitors are called heroes (or heroes traitors, he supposed in his frowning way), dark times must have fallen. He wished he understood better. His mind flashed to Cort and the bread Cort had given them. He felt contempt; the day was coming when Cort would serve him. Perhaps not Cuthbert; perhaps Cuthbert would buckle under Cort’s steady fire and remain a page or a horseboy (or infinitely worse, a perfumed diplomat, dallying in receiving chambers or looking into bogus crystal balls with doddering kings and princes), but he would not. He knew it.
   “Roland?”
   “I’m here.” He took Cuthbert’s hand, and their fingers locked together like iron.
   The trap dropped. Hax plummeted through. And in the sudden stillness, there was a sound: that sound an exploding pineknot makes on the hearth during a cold winter night.
   But it was not so much. The cook’s legs kicked out once in a wide Y; the crowd made a satisfied whistling noise; the Guards of the Watch dropped their military pose and began
   to gather things up negligently. The gunslinger walked back down the steps slowly, mounted his horse, and rode off, cutting roughly through one gaggle of picnickers, making them scurry.
   The crowd dispersed rapidly after that, and in forty minutes the two boys were left alone on the small hill they had chosen. The birds were returning to examine their new prize. One lit on Hax’s shoulder and sat there chummily, darting its beak at the bright and shiny hoop Hax had always worn in his right ear.
   “It doesn’t look like him at all,” Cuthbert said.
   “Oh, yes, it does,” Roland said confidently as they walked toward the gallows, the bread in their hands. Cuthbert looked abashed.
   They paused beneath the crosstree, looking up at the dangling, twisting body. Cuthbert reached up and touched one hairy ankle, defiantly. The body started on a new, twisting arc.
   Then, rapidly, they broke the bread and spread the crumbs beneath the dangling feet. Roland looked back just once as they rode away. Now there were thousands of birds. The bread – he grasped this only dimly – was symbolic, then.
   “It was good,” Cuthbert said suddenly. “It . . . I . . . I liked it. I did.”
   Roland was not shocked by this, although he had not particularly cared for the scene. But he thought he could perhaps understand it.
   “I don’t know about that,” he said, “but it was something. It surely was.”
   The land did not fall to the good man for another ten years, and by that time he was a gunslinger, his father was dead, he himself had become a matricide – and the world had moved on.
   III
   “Look, “ Jake said, pointing upward.
   The gunslinger looked up and felt an obscure joint in his back pop. They had been in the foothills two days now, and although the waterskins were almost empty again, it didn’t matter now. There would soon be all the water they could drink.
   He followed the vector of Jake’s finger upward, past the rise of the green plain to the naked and flashing cliffs and gorges above it . . . and on up toward the snowcap itself.
   Faint and far, nothing but a tiny dot (it might have been one of those motes that dance perpetually in front of the eyes, except for its constancy), the gunslinger beheld the man in black, moving up the slopes with deadly progress, a minuscule fly on a huge granite wall.
   “Is that him?” Jake asked.
   The gunslinger looked at the depersonalized mote doing its faraway acrobatics, feeling nothing but a premonition of sorrow.
   “That’s him, Jake.”
   “Do you think we’ll catch him?”
   “Not on this side. On the other. And not if we stand here talking about it.”
   “They’re so high,” Jake said. “What’s on the other side?”
   “I don’t know,” the gunslinger said. “I don’t think anybody does. Maybe they did once. Come on, boy.”
   They began to move upward again, sending small runnels of pebbles and sand down toward the desert that washed away behind them in a flat bake-sheet that seemed to never end. Above them, far above, the man in black moved up and up and up. It was impossible to see if he looked back. He seemed to leap across impossible gulfs,
   to scale sheer faces. Once or twice he disappeared, but always they saw him again, until the violet curtain of dusk shut him out of their view. When they made their camp for the evening, the boy spoke little, and the gunslinger wondered if the boy knew what he had already intuited. He thought of Cuthbert’s face, hot, dismayed, excited. He thought of the crumbs. He thought of the birds. It ends this way, he thought. Again and again it ends this way. There are quests and roads that lead ever onward, and all of them end in the same place – upon the killing ground.
   Except, perhaps, the road to the Tower.
   The boy, the sacrifice, his face innocent and very young in the light of their tiny fire, had fallen asleep over his beans. The gunslinger covered him with the horse blanket and then curled up to sleep himself.

The Oracle And The Mountains

   The boy found the oracle and it almost destroyed him.
   Some thin instinct brought the gunslinger up from sleep to the velvet darkness, which had fallen on them at dusk like a shroud of well water. That had been when he and Jake reached the grassy, nearly level oasis above the first rise of tumbled foothills. Even on the hardscrabble below, where they had toiled and fought for every foot in the killer sun, they had been able to hear the sound of crickets rubbing their legs seductively together in the perpetual green of willow groves above them. The gunslinger remained calm in his mind, and the boy had kept up at least the pretense of a facade, and that had made the gunslinger proud. But Jake hadn’t been able to hide the wildness in his eyes, which were white and starey, the eyes of a horse scenting water and held back from bolting only by the tenuous chain of its master’s mind; like a horse at the point where only understanding, not the spur, could hold it steady. The gunslinger could gauge the need in Jake by the madness the sounds of the crickets bred in his own body. His arms seemed to seek out shale to scrape on, and his knees seemed to beg to be ripped in tiny, maddening, salty gashes.
   The sun trampled down on them all the way; even when it turned a swollen, feverish red with sunset, it shone perversely through the knife-cut in the hills off to their left,
   blinding them and making every teardrop of sweat into a prism of pain.
   Then there was grass: at first only yellow scrub, clinging to the bleak soil where the last of the runoff reached with gruesome vitality. Further up there was witchgrass, sparse, then green and rank… then the first sweet smell of real grass, mixed with timothy and shaded by the first of the dwarfed firs. There the gunslinger saw an arc of brown movements in the shadows. He drew, fired, and felled the rabbit all before Jake could begin to cry out his surprise. A moment later he had reholstered the gun.
   “Here,” the gunslinger said. Up ahead the grass deepened into a jungle of green willows that was shocking after the parched sterility of the endless hardpan. There would be a spring, perhaps several of them, and it would be even cooler, but it was better out here in the open. The boy had pushed every step he could push, and there might be sucker bats in the deeper shadows of the grove. The bats might break the boy’s sleep, no matter how deep it was, and if they were vampires, neither of them might awaken… at least, not in this world.
   The boy said, “I’ll get some wood.”
   The gunslinger smiled. “No, you won’t. Sit yourself, Jake.” Whose phrase had that been? Some woman.
   The boy sat When the gunslinger got back, Jake was asleep in the grass. A large praying mantis was performing ablutions on the springy stem of Jake’s cowlick. The gun slinger set the fire and went after water.
   The willow jungle was deeper than he had suspected, and confusing in the failing light. But he found a spring, richly guarded by frogs and peepers. He filled one of their waterskins… and paused. The sounds that filled the night awoke an uneasy sensuality in him, a feeling that not even Allie, the woman he had bedded with in Tull, had been able
   to bring to the fore. Sensuality and fucking are, after all, cousins of the most tenuous relation. He chalked it up to the sudden blinding change from the desert. The softness of the dark seemed nearly decadent
   He returned to the camp and skinned the rabbit while water boiled over the fire. Mixed with the last of their canned food, the rabbit made an excellent stew. He woke Jake and watched him as he ate, bleary but ravenous.
   “We stay here tomorrow,” the gunslinger said.
   “But that man you’re after.., that priest”
   “He’s no priest And don’t worry. We’ve got him.”
   “How do you know that?”
   The gunslinger could only shake his head. The knowledge was strong in him.., but it was not a good knowledge.
   After the meal, he rinsed the cans they had eaten from (marveling again at his own water extravagance), and when he turned around, Jake was asleep again. The gunslinger felt the now-familiar rising and falling in his chest that he could only identify with Cuthbert. Cuthbert had been Roland's own age, but he had seemed so much younger.
   His cigarette drooped toward the grass, and he tossed it into the fire. He looked at it, the clear yellow burn so different, so much cleaner, from the way the devil-grass burned. The air was wonderfully cool, and he lay down with his back to the fire. Far away, through the gash that led the way into the mountains, he heard the thick mouth of the perpetual thunder. He slept And dreamed.
   Susan, his beloved, was dying before his eyes:
   As he watched, his arms held by two villagers on each side, his neck dog-caught in a huge, rusty iron collar, she was dying. Even through the thick stench of the fire Roland could smell the dankness of the pit… and he could see the color of his own madness. Susan, lovely girl at the window, horse-drover’s daughter.
   She was turning black in the flames, her skin cracking open.
   “The boy!” She was screaming. “Roland, the boy!”
   He whirled, pulling his captors with him. The collar ripped at his neck and he heard the hitching, strangled sounds that were coming from his own throat. There was a sickish-sweet smell of barbecuing meat on the air.
   The boy was looking down at him from a window high above the courtyard, the same window where Susan, who had taught him to be a man, had once sat and sung the old songs; “Hey Jude” and “Ease on Down the Road” and “A Hundred Leagues to Ban-berry Cross. “He looked out from the window like the statue of an alabaster saint in a cathedral. His eyes were marble. A spike had been driven through fake ‘s forehead.
   The gunslinger felt the strangling ripping scream that signaled the beginning of his lunacy pull up from the root of his belly.
   “Nnnnnnnnnn —Roland grunted a cry as he felt the fire singe him. He
   sat bolt upright in the dark, still feeling the dream around him, strangling him like the collar he had worn. In his twist ings and turnings he had thrown one hand against the dying coals of the fire. He put the hand to his face, feeling the dream flee, leaving only the stark picture of Jake, plaster-white, a saint for demons.
   “Nnnnnnnnnn —He glared around at the mystic darkness of the willow
   grove, both guns out and ready. His eyes were red loopholes in the last glow from the fire.
   “Nnnnnn-nnn —Jake.
   The gunslinger was up and on the run. A bitter circle of moon had risen and he could follow the boy’s track in the dew. He ducked under the first of the willows, splashed
   through the spring, and legged up the far bank, skidding in the dampness (even now his body could relish it). Willow withes slapped at his face. The trees were thicker here, and the moon was blotted out Tree trunks rose in lurching shadows. The grass, now knee-high, slapped against him. Half rotted dead branches reached for his shins, his cojones. He paused for a moment, lifting his head and scenting at the air. A ghost of a breeze helped him. The boy did not smell good, of course; neither of them did. The gunslinger’s nostrils flared like those of an ape. The odor of sweat was faint, oily, unmistakable. He crashed over a deadfall of grass and bramble and downed branches, sprinted down a tunnel of overhanging willow and sumac. Moss struck his shoulders. Some clung in sighing gray tendrils.
   He clawed through a last barricade of willows and came to a clearing that looked up at the stars and the highest peak of the range, gleaming skull-white at an impossible altitude.
   There was a ring of tall, black stones which looked like some sort of surreal animal-trap in the moonlight In the center was a table of stone… an altar. Very old, rising out of the ground on a powerful arm of basalt
   The boy stood before it, trembling back and forth. His hands shook at his sides as if infused with static electricity. The gunslinger called his name sharply, and Jake responded with that inarticulate sound of negation. The faint smear of face, almost hidden by the boy’s left shoulder, looked both terrified and exalted. And there was something else.
   The gunslinger stepped inside the ring and Jake screamed, recoiling and throwing up his arms. Now his face could be seen clearly, and indexed. The gunslinger saw fear and terror warring with an almost excruciating grimace of pleasure.
   The gunslinger felt it touch him – the spirit of the
   oracle, the succubus. His loins were suddenly filled with rose light, a light that was soft yet hard. He felt his head twisting, his tongue thickening and becoming excruciatingly sensitive to even the spittle that coated it
   He did not think when he pulled the half-rotted jawbone from the pocket where he had carried it since he found it in the lair of the Speaking Demon at the way station. He did not think, but it did not frighten him to operate on pure instinct He held the jawbone’s frozen, prehistoric grin up in front of him, holding his other arm out stiffly, first and last fingers poked out in the ancient forked talisman, the ward against the evil eye.
   The current of sensuality was whipped away from him like a drape.
   Jake screamed again.
   The gunslinger walked to him, and held the jawbone in front of Jake’s warring eyes. A wet sound of agony. The boy tried to pull his gaze away, could not And suddenly both eyes rolled up to show the whites. Jake collapsed. His body struck the earth limply, one hand almost touching the altar. The gunslinger dropped to one knee and picked him up. He was amazingly light, as dehydrated as a November leaf from their long walk through the desert
   Around him Roland could feel the presence that dwelt in the circle of stones, whirring with a jealous anger – its prize had been taken from it When the gunslinger passed out of the circle, the sense of frustrated jealousy faded. He carried Jake back to their camp. By the time they got there, the boy’s twitching unconsciousness had become deep sleep. The gunslinger paused for a moment above the gray ruin of the fire. The moonlight on Jake’s face reminded him again of a church saint, alabaster purity all unknown. He suddenly hugged the boy, knowing that he loved him. And it seemed that he could almost feel the laughter from the man in black, someplace far above them.
   Jake was calling him; that was how he awoke. He had tied the boy firmly to one of the tough bushes that grew nearby, and the boy was hungry and upset By the sun, it was almost nine-thirty.
   “Why’d you tie me up?” Jake asked indignantly as the gunslinger loosened the thick knots in the blanket “I wasn’t going to run away!”
   “You did run away,” the gunslinger said, and the expression on Jake’s face made him smile. “I had to go out and get you. You were sleepwalking.”
   “I was?” Jake looked at him suspiciously.
   The gunslinger nodded and suddenly produced the jawbone. He held it in front of Jake’s face and Jake flinched away from it, raising his arm.
   “See?”
   Jake nodded, bewildered.
   “I have to go off for a while now. I may be gone the whole day. So listen to me, boy. It’s important If sunset comes and I’m not back – “
   Fear flashed on Jake’s face. “You’re leaving me!”
   The gunslinger only looked at him.
   “No,” Jake said after a moment “I guess you’re not.”
   “I want you to stay right here while I’m gone. And if you feel strange – funny in any way – you pick up this bone and hold it in your hands.”
   Hate and disgust crossed Jake’s face, mixed with bewilderment. “I couldn’t. I . . . I just couldn’t”
   “You can. You may have to. Especially after midday. It’s important. Dig?”
   “Why do you have to go away?” Jake burst out.
   “I just do.”
   The gunslinger caught another fascinating glimpse of the steel that lay under the boy’s surface, as enigmatic as the story he had told about coming from a city where the buildings were so tall they actually scraped the sky.
   “All right,” Jake said.
   The gunslinger laid the jawbone carefully on the ground next to the ruins of the fire, where it grinned up through the grass like some eroded fossil that has seen the light of day after a night of five thousand years. Jake would not look at it His face was pale and miserable. The gunslinger wondered if it would profit them for him to put the boy to sleep and question him, but he decided there would be little gain. He knew well enough that the spirit of the stone circle was surely a demon, and very likely an oracle as well. A demon with no shape, only a kind of unformed sexual glare with the eye of prophecy. He wondered sardonically if it might not be the soul of Sylvia Pittston, the giant woman whose religious huckstering had led to the final showdown in Tull… but knew it was not. The stones in the circle had been ancient, this particular demon’s territory staked out long before the earliest shade of pre-history. But the gunslinger knew the forms of speaking quite well and did not think the boy would have to use the jawbone mojo. The voice and mind of the oracle would be more than occupied with him. And the gunslinger needed to know things, in spite of the risk… and the risk was high. For both Jake and himself, he needed desperately to know.
   The gunslinger opened his tobacco poke and pawed through it, pushing the dry strands of leaf aside until he came to a minuscule object wrapped in a fragment of white paper. He hefted it in his hand, looking absently up at the sky. Then he unwrapped it and held the contents – a tiny white pill with edges that had been much worn with traveling – in his hand.
   Jake looked at it curiously. “What’s that?”
   The gunslinger uttered a short laugh. “The philosopher's stone,” he said. “The story that Cort used to tell us was that the Old Gods pissed over the desert and made mescaline.”
   Jake only looked puzzled.
   “A drug,” the gunslinger said. “But not one that puts you to sleep. One that wakes you up all the way for a little while.”
   “Like LSD,” the boy agreed instantly and then looked puzzled.




   “What’s that?”
   “I don’t know,” Jake said. “It just popped out I think it came from… you know, before.”




   The gunslinger nodded, but he was doubtful. He had never heard of mescaline referred to as LSD, not even in Marten’s old books.
   “Will it hurt you?” Jake asked.
   “It never has,” the gunslinger said, conscious of the evasion.
   “I don’t like it”
   “Never mind.”
   The gunslinger squatted in front of the waterskin, took a mouthful, and swallowed the pill. As always, he felt an immediate reaction in his mouth; it seemed overloaded with saliva. He sat down before the dead fire.
   “When does something happen to you?” Jake asked.
   “Not for a little while. Be quiet.”
   So Jake was quiet, watching with open suspicion as the gunslinger went calmly about the ritual of cleaning his guns.
   He reholstered them and said, “Your shirt, Jake. Take it off and give it to me.”
   Jake pulled his faded shirt reluctantly over his head and gave it to the gunslinger.
   The gunslinger produced a needle that had been threaded into the side-seam of his jeans, and thread from an empty cartridge-loop in his gunbelt He began to sew up a long rip in one of the sleeves of the boy’s shirt. As he finished and handed the shirt back, he felt the mesc beginning to take hold – there was a tightening in his stomach and a feeling that all the muscles in his body were being cranked up a notch.
   “I have to go,” he said, getting up.
   The boy half rose, his face a shadow of concern, and then he settled back. “Be careful,” he said. “Please.”
   “Remember the jawbone,” the gunslinger said. He put his hand on Jake’s head as he went by and touseled the corn-colored hair. The gesture startled him into a short laugh. Jake watched after him with a troubled smile until he was gone into the willow jungle.
   The gunslinger walked deliberately toward the circle of stones, pausing once to get a cool drink from the spring. He could see his own reflection in a tiny pool edged with moss and lilypads, and he looked at himself for a moment, as fascinated as Narcissus. The mind-reaction was beginning to settle in, slowing down his chain of thought by seeming to increase the connotations of every idea and every bit of sensory input. Things began to take on weight and thickness that had been heretofore invisible. He paused, getting to his feet again, and looked through the tangled snarl of willows. Sunlight slanted through in a golden, dusty bar, and he watched the interplay of motes and tiny flying things for a moment before going on.
   The drug often had disturbed him: his ego was too strong (or perhaps just too simple) to enjoy being eclipsed and peeled back, made a target for more sensitive emotions
   – they tickled at him like a cat’s whiskers. But this time he felt fairly calm. That was good.
   He stepped into the clearing and walked straight into the circle. He stood, letting his mind run free. Yes, it was coming harder now, faster. The grass screamed green at him; it seemed that if he bent over and rubbed his hands in it he would stand up with green paint all over his fingers and palms. He resisted a puckish urge to try the experiment
   But there was no voice from the oracle. No sexual stirring.
   He went to the altar, stood beside it for a moment coherent thought was now almost impossible. His teeth felt strange in his head. The world held too much light. He climbed up on the altar and lay back. His mind was becoming a jungle full of strange thought-plants that he had never seen or suspected before, a willow-jungle that had grown up around a mescaline spring. The sky was water and he hung suspended over it The thought gave him a vertigo that seemed faraway and unimportant.
   A line of old poetry occurred to him, not a nursery verse now, no; his mother had feared the drugs and the necessity of them (as she had feared Cort and the necessity for this beater of boys); this verse came from one of the Dens to the north of the desert, where men still lived among the machines that usually didn’t work… and which sometimes ate the men when they did. The lines played again and again, reminding him (in an unconnected way that was typical of the mescaline rush) of snow falling in a globe he had owned as a child, mystic and half fantastical:
   Beyond the reach of human range
   A drop of hell, a touch of strange…
   The trees which overhung the altar contained faces. He watched them with abstracted fascination: Here was a dragon, green and twitching. Here a wood-nymph with beckoning branch arms. Here a living skull overgrown with slime. Faces. Faces.
   The grasses of the clearing suddenly whipped and bent
   I come.
   I come.
   Vague stirrings within his flesh. How far I have come,
   he thought From couching with Susan in sweet hay to this. She pressed over him, a body made of the wind, a breast
   of sudden fragrant jasmine, rose, and honeysuckle.
   “Make your prophecy,” he said. His mouth felt full of metal.
   A sigh. A faint sound of weeping. The gunslinger’s genitals felt drawn and hard. Over him and beyond the faces in the leaves, he could see the mountains – hard and brutal and full of teeth.
   The body moved against him, struggled with him. He felt his hands curl into fists. She had sent him a vision of Susan. It was Susan above him, lovely Susan at the window, waiting for him with her hair spilled down her back and over her shoulders. He tossed his head, but her face followed.
   Jasmine, rose, honeysuckle, old hay.., the smell of love. Love me.
   “Speak prophecy,” he said.
   Please, the oracle wept. Don’t be cold. It is always so cold here —Hands slipping over his flesh, manipulating, lighting
   him on fire. Pulling him. Drawing. A black crevice. The ultimate wanton. Wet and warm —No. Dry. Cold. Sterile.
   Have a touch of mercy, gunslinger. Ah, please, I beg your favor! Mercy!
   Would you have mercy on the boy?
   What boy? I know no boy. It’s not boys I need. 0 please. Jasmine, rose, honeysuckle. Dry hay with its ghost of summer clover. Oil decanted from ancient urns. A riot for flesh.
   “After,” he said.
   Now. Please. Now.
   He let his mind coil out at her, the antithesis of emotion. The body that hung over him froze and seemed to scream.
   There was a brief, vicious tug-of-war between his temples
   – his mind was the rope, gray and fibrous. For long moments there was no sound but the quiet hush of his breathing and the faint breeze which made the green faces in the trees shift, wink, and grimace. No bird sang.
   Her hold loosened. Again there was the sound of sobbing. It would have to be quick, or she would leave him. To stay now meant attenuation; perhaps her own kind of death. Already he felt her drawing away to leave the circle of stones. Wind rippled the grass in tortured patterns.
   “Prophecy,” he said – a bleak noun.
   A weeping, tired sigh. He could almost have granted the mercy she begged, but – there was Jake. He would have found Jake dead or insane if he had been any later last night
   Sleep, then.
   “No.”
   Then half-sleep.
   The gunslinger turned his eyes up to the faces in the leaves. A play was being enacted there for his amusement Worlds rose and fell before him. Empires were built across shining sands where forever machines toiled in abstract electronic frenzies. Empires declined and fell. Wheels that had spun like silent liquid moved more slowly, began to squeak, began to scream, stopped. Sand choked the stainless steel gutters of concentric streets below dark skies full of stars like beds of cold jewels. And through it all, a dying wind of change blew, bringing with it the cinnamon smell of late October. The gunslinger watched as the world moved on.
   And half-slept
   Three. This is the number of your/ate.
   Three?
   Yes, three is mystic. Three stands at the heart 0/the mantra.
   Which three?
   ‘We see in part, and thus is the mirror of prophecy darkened.’
   Tell me what you can.
   The first is young, dark-haired. He stands on the brink of robbery and murder. A demon has infested him. The name of the demon is HEROIN
   Which demon is that? I know it not, even from nursery stories.
   ‘We see in part, and thus is the mirror of prophecy darkened. ‘There are other worlds, gunslinger, and other demons. These waters are deep.
   The second?
   She comes on wheels. Her mind is iron but her heart and eyes are soft. I see no more.
   The third?
   In chains.
   The man in black? Where is he?
   Near. You will speak with him.
   Of what will we speak?
   The Tower.
   The boy? Jake?
   Tell me of the boy!
   The boy is your gateway to the man in black. The man in black is your gate to the three. The three are your way to the Dark Tower.
   How? How can that be? Why must it be? ‘We see in part, and thus is the mirror —God damn you.
   No god damned me.
   “Don’t patronize me, Thing. I’m stronger than you.
   What do they call you, then? Star-slut? Whore of the Winds?
   Some live on love that comes to the ancient places… even
   in these sad and evil times. Some, gunslinger, live on blood. Even, I understand, on the blood 0/young boys.
   May he not be spared?
   Yes.
   How?
   Cease, gunslinger. Strike your camp and turn west. In the west there is still a need for men who live by the bullet.
   I am sworn by my father’s guns and by the treachery of Marten.
   Marten is no more. The man in black has eaten his soul. This you know.
   I am sworn.
   Then you are damned.
   Have your way with me, bitch.
   Eagerness.
   The shadow swung over him, enfolded him. Suddenly ecstasy broken only by a galaxy of pain, as faint and bright as ancient stars gone red with collapse. Faces came to him unbidden at the climax of their coupling: Sylvia Pittston, Alice, the woman from Tull, Susan, Aileen, a hundred others.
   And finally, after an eternity, he pushed her away from him, once again in his right mind, bone-weary and disgusted.
   No! It isn’t enough! It —“Let me be,” the gunslinger said. He sat up and almost
   fell off the altar before regaining his feet. She touched him tentatively
   (honeysuckle, jasmine, sweet attar)
   and he pushed her violently, falling to his knees.
   He staggered up and made his drunken way to the perimeter of the circle. He staggered through, feeling a huge weight fall from his shoulders. He drew a shuddering, weeping breath. As he started away he could feel
   her standing at the bars of her prison, watching him go from her. He wondered how long it might be before someone else crossed the desert and found her, hungry and alone. For a moment he felt dwarfed by the possibilities of time.
   “You’re sick!”
   Jake stood up fast when the gunslinger shambled back through the last trees and came into camp. Jake had been huddled by the ruins of the tiny fire, the jawbone across his knees, gnawing disconsolately on the bones of the rabbit. Now he ran toward the gunslinger with a look of distress that made Roland feel the full, ugly weight of a coming betrayal – one he sensed which might only be the first of many.
   “No,” he said. “Not sick. Just tired. I’m whipped.” He gestured absently at the jawbone. “You can throw that away.”
   Jake threw it quickly and violently, rubbing his hands across his shirt after doing it.
   The gunslinger sat down – almost fell down – feeling the aching joints and the pummeled, thick mind that was the unlovely afterglow of mescaline. His crotch also pulsed with a dull ache. He rolled a cigarette with careful, unthinking slowness. Jake watched. The gunslinger had a sudden impulse to tell him what he had learned, then thrust the idea away with horror. He wondered if a part of him – mind or soul – might not be disintegrating.
   “We sleep here tonight,” the gunslinger said. “Tomorrow we climb. I’ll go out a little later and see if I can’t shoot something for supper. I’ve got to sleep now. Okay?”
   “Sure.”
   The gunslinger nodded and lay back. When he woke up the shadows were long across the small grass clearing. “Build up the fire,” he told Jake and tossed him his flint and steel. “Can you use that?”
   “Yes, I think so.”
   The gunslinger walked toward the willow grove and then turned left, skirting it. At a place where the ground opened out and upward in heavy open grass, he stepped back into the shadows and stood silently. Faintly, clearly, he could hear the clik-clink-clik-clink of Jake striking sparks. He stood without moving for ten minutes, fifteen, twenty. Three rabbits came, and the gunslinger pulled leather. He took down the two plumpest, skinned them and gutted them, brought them back to the camp. Jake had the fire going and the water was already steaming over it.
   The gunslinger nodded to him. “That’s a good piece of work.”
   Jake flushed with pleasure and silently handed back the flint and steel.
   While the stew cooked, the gunslinger used the last of the light to go back into the willow grove. Near the first pool he began to hack at the tough vines that grew near the water’s marshy verge. Later, as the fire burned down to coals and Jake slept, he would plait them into ropes that might be of some limited use later. But he did not think somehow that the climb would be a particularly difficult one. He felt a sense of fate that he no longer even considered odd.
   The vines bled green sap over his hands as he carried them back to where Jake waited.
   They were up with the sun and packed in half an hour. The gunslinger hoped to shoot another rabbit in the meadow as they fed, but time was short and no rabbit showed itself. The bundle of their remaining food was now so small and light that Jake carried it easily. He had toughened up, this boy; you could see it.
   The gunslinger carried their water, freshly drawn from one of the springs. He looped his three vine ropes
   around his belly. They gave the circle of stones a wide berth (the gunslinger was afraid the boy might feel a recurrence of fear, but when they passed above it on a stony rise, Jake only offered it a passing glance and then looked at a bird that hovered upwind). Soon enough, the trees began to lose their height and lushness. Trunks were twisted and roots seemed to struggle with the earth in a tortured hunt for moisture.
   “It’s all so old,” Jake said glumly when they paused for a rest. “Isn’t there anything young?”
   The gunslinger smiled and gave Jake an elbow. “You are,” he said.
   “Will it be a hard climb?”
   The gunslinger looked at him, curious. “The mountains are high. Don’t you think it will be a hard climb?”
   Jake looked back at him, his eyes clouded, puzzled. “No.”
   They went on.
   The sun climbed to its zenith, seemed to hang there more briefly than it ever had during the desert crossing, and then passed on, giving them back their shadows. Shelves of rock protruded from the rising land like the arms of giant easychairs buried in the earth. The scrub grass turned yellow and sere. Finally they were faced with a deep, chim neylike crevasse in their path and they scaled a short, peeling rise of rock to get around and above it. The ancient granite had faulted on lines that were steplike, and as they had both intuited, the climb was an easy one. They paused on the four-foot-wide scarp at the top and looked back over the falling land to the desert, which curled around the up land like a huge yellow paw. Further off it gleamed at them in a white shield that dazzled the eye, receding into dim waves of rising heat. The gunslinger felt faintly amazed at the realization that this desert had nearly murdered him.
   From where they stood, in a new coolness, the desert certainly appeared momentous, but not deadly.
   They turned back to the business of the climb, scrambling over jackstraw falls of rock and crouch-walking up inclined planes of stone shot with glitters of quartz and mica. The rock was pleasantly warm to the touch, but the air was definitely cooler. In the late afternoon the gunslinger heard the faint sound of thunder. The rising line of the mountains obscured the sight of the rain on the other side, however.
   When the shadows began to turn purple, they camped in the overhang of a jutting brow of rock. The gunslinger anchored their blanket above and below, fashioning a kind of shanty lean-to. They sat at the mouth of it, watching the sky spread a cloak over the world. Jake dangled his feet over the drop. The gunslinger rolled his evening smoke and eyed Jake half humorously. “Don’t roll over in your sleep,” he said, “or you may wake up in hell.”
   “I won’t,” Jake replied seriously. “My mother says —He broke it off.
   “She says what?”
   “That I sleep like a dead man,” Jake finished. He looked at the gunslinger, who saw that the boy’s mouth was trembling as he strove to keep back tears – only a boy, he thought, and pain smote him, like the ice pick that too much cold water can sometimes plant in the forehead. Only a boy. Why? Silly question. When a boy, wounded in body or spirit, called that question out to Cort, that ancient, scarred baffle-engine whose job it was to teach the sons of gunslingers the beginning of what they had to know, Cort would answer:
   Why is a crooked letter and can’t be made straight… never mind why, just get up, pus-head! Gel up! The day’s young!
   “Why am I here?” Jake asked. “Why did I forget everything from before?”
   “Because the man in black has drawn you here,” the gunslinger said. “And because of the Tower. The Tower stands at a kind of… power-nexus. In time. “
   “I don’t understand that!”
   “Nor do I,” the gunslinger said. “But something has been happening. Just in my own time. ‘The world has moved on,’ we say… we’ve always said. But it’s moving on faster now. Something has happened to time.”
   They sat in silence. A breeze, faint but with an edge, picked at their legs. Somewhere it made a hollow whooooo in a rock fissure.
   “Where do you come from?” Jake asked.
   “From a place that no longer exists. Do you know the Bible?”
   “Jesus and Moses. Sure.”
   The gunslinger smiled. “That’s right. My land had a Biblical name – New Canaan, it was called. The land of milk and honey. In the Bible’s Canaan, there were supposed to be grapes so big that men had to carry them on sledges. We didn’t grow them that big, but it was a sweet land.”
   “I know about Ulysses,” Jake said hesitantly. “Was he in the Bible?”
   “Maybe,” the gunslinger said. “The Book is lost now
   – all except the parts I was forced to memorize.
   “But the others – “
   “No others,” the gunslinger said. “I’m the last.”
   A tiny wasted moon began to rise, casting its slitted gaze down into the tumble of rocks where they sat.
   “Was it pretty? Your country.., your land?”
   “It was beautiful,” the gunslinger said absently. “There were fields and rivers and mists in the morning. But that’s only pretty. My mother used to say that.., and that the only real beauty is order and love and light.”
   Jake made a noncommittal noise.
   The gunslinger smoked and thought of how it had been
   – the nights in the huge central hall, hundreds of richly clad figures moving through the slow, steady waltz steps or the faster, light ripples of the pol-kam, Aileen on his arm, her eyes brighter than the most precious gems, the light of the crystal-enclosed electric lights making highlights in the newly done hair of the courtesans and their half-cynical amours. The hall had been huge, an island of light whose age was beyond telling, as was the whole Central Place, which was made up of nearly a hundred stone castles. It had been twelve years since he had seen it, and leaving for the last time, Roland had ached as he turned his face away from it and began his first cast for the trail of the man in black. Even then, twelve years ago, the walls had fallen, weeds grew in the courtyards, bats roosted amongst the great beams of the central hall, and the galleries echoed with the soft swoop and whisper of swallows. The fields where Cort had taught them archery and gunnery and falconry were gone to hay and timothy and wild vines. In the huge and echoey kitchen where Hax had once held his own fuming and aromatic court, a grotesque colony of Slow Mutants nested, peering at him from the merciful darkness of pantries and shadowed pillars. The warm steam that had been filled with the pungent odors of roasting beef and pork had been transmuted to the clammy damp of moss and huge white toadstools grew in corners where not even the Slow Muties dared to encamp. The huge oak subcellar bulkhead stood open, and the most poignant smell of all had issued from that, and odor that seemed to symbolize with a flat finality all the hard facts of dissolution and decay: the high sharp odor of wine gone to vinegar. It had been no struggle to turn his face to the south and leave it behind – but it had hurt his heart.
   “Was there a war?” Jake asked.
   “Even better,” the gunslinger said and pitched the last smoldering ember of his cigarette away. “There was a revolution. We won every battle, and lost the war. No one won the war, unless maybe it was the scavengers. There must have been rich pickings for years after.”
   “I wish I’d lived there,” Jake said wistfully.
   “It was another world,” the gunslinger said. “Time to turn in.”
   The boy, now only a dim shadow, turned on his side and curled up with the blanket tossed loosely over him. The gunslinger sat sentinel over him for perhaps an hour after, thinking his long, sober thoughts. Such meditation was a new thing for him, novel, sweet in a melancholy sort of way, but still utterly without practical value: there was no solution to the problem of Jake other than the one the Oracle had offered – and that was simply not possible. There might have been tragedy in the situation, but the gunslinger did not see that; he saw only the predestination that had always been there. And finally, his more natural character reasserted itself and he slept deeply, with no dreams.
   The climb became grimmer on the following day as they continued to angle toward the narrow V of the pass through the mountains. The gunslinger pushed slowly, still with no sense of hurry. The dead stone beneath their feet left no trace of the man in black, but the gunslinger knew he had been this way before them – and not only from the path of his climb as he and Jake had observed him, tiny and bug-like, from the foothills. His aroma was printed on every cold downdraft of air. It was an oily, sardonic odor, as bitter. to his nose as the aroma of devil-grass.
   Jake’s hair had grown much longer, and it curled slightly at the base of his sunburned neck. He climbed tough, moving with sure-footedness and no apparent acrophobia
   as they crossed gaps or scaled their way up ledged facings. Twice already he had gone up in places the gunslinger could not have managed. Jake had anchored one of the ropes so that the gunslinger could climb up hand over hand.
   The following morning they climbed through a coldly damp snatch of cloud that began blotting out the tumbled slopes below them. Patches of hard, granulated snow began to appear nestled in some of the deeper pockets of stone. It glittered like quartz and its texture was as dry as sand. That afternoon they found a single footprint in one of these snow patches. Jake stared at it for a moment with awful fascination, then looked up frightfully, as if expecting to see the man in black materialize into his own footprint. The gunslinger tapped him on the shoulder then and pointed ahead. “Go. The day’s getting old.”
   Later, they made camp in the last of the daylight on a wide, flat ledge to the east and north of the cut that slanted into the heart of the mountains. The air was frigid; they could see the puffs of their breath, and the humid sound of thunder in the red-and-purple afterglow of the day was surreal, slightly lunatic.
   The gunslinger thought the boy might begin to question him, but there were no questions from Jake. The boy fell almost immediately into sleep. The gunslinger followed his example. He dreamed again of the dark place in the earth, the dungeon, and again of Jake as an alabaster saint with a nail through his forehead. He awoke with a gasp, instinctively reaching for the jawbone that was no longer there, expecting to feel the grass of that ancient grove. He felt rock instead, and the cold thinness of altitude in his lungs. Jake was asleep beside him, but his sleep was not easy: he twisted and mumbled inarticulate words to himself, chasing his own phantoms. The gunslinger laid over uneasily, and slept again.
   They were another week before they reached the end of the beginning – for the gunslinger, a twisted prologue of twelve years, from the final crash of his native place and the gathering of the other three. For Jake, the gateway had been a strange death in another world. For the gunslinger it had been a stranger death yet – the endless hunt for the man in black through a world with neither map nor memory. Cuthbert and the others were gone, all of them gone:
   Randolph, Jamie de Curry, Aileen, Susan, Marten (yes, they had dragged him down, and there had been gunplay, and even that grape had been bitter). Until finally only three remained of the old world, three like dreadful cards from a terrible deck of tarot cards: gunslinger, man in black, and the Dark Tower.
   A week after Jake saw the footstep, they faced the man in black for a brief moment of time. In that moment, the gunslinger felt he could almost understand the gravid implication of the Tower itself, for that moment seemed to stretch out forever.
   They continued southwest, reaching a point perhaps halfway through the Cyclopean mountain range, and just as the going seemed about to become really difficult for the first time (above them, seeming to lean out, the icy ledges and screaming buttes made the gunslinger feel an unpleasant reverse vertigo), they began to descend again along the side of the narrow pass. An angular, zigzagging path led them toward a canyon floor where an ice-edged stream boiled with slaty, headlong power from higher country still.
   On that afternoon the boy paused and looked back at the gunslinger, who had paused to wash his face in the stream.
   “I smell him,” Jake said.
   “So do I.”
   Ahead of them the mountain threw up its final defense
   – a huge slab of insurmountable granite facing that climbed into cloudy infinity. At any moment the gunslinger expected a twist in the stream to bring them upon a high waterfall and the insurmountable smoothness of rock – dead end. But the air here had that odd magnifying quality that is common to high places, and it was another day before they reached that great granite face.
   The gunslinger began to feel the dreadful tug of anticipation again, the feeling that it was all finally in his grasp. Near the end, he had to fight himself to keep from breaking into a trot.
   “Wait!” The boy had stopped suddenly. They faced a sharp elbow-bend in the stream; it boiled and frothed with high energy around the eroded hang of a giant sandstone boulder. All that morning they had been in the shadow of the mountains as the canyon narrowed.
   Jake was trembling violently and his face had gone pale.
   “What’s the matter?”
   “Let’s go back,” Jake whispered. “Let’s go back quick.”
   The gunslinger’s face was wooden.
   “Please?” The boy’s face was drawn, and his jawline shook with suppressed agony. Through the heavy blanket of stone they still heard thunder, as steady as machines in the earth. The slice of sky they could see had itself assumed a turbulent, gothic gray above them as warm and cold currents met and warred.
   “Please, please!” The boy raised a fist, as if to strike the gunslinger’s chest.
   “No.”
   The boy’s face took on wonder. “You’re going to kill me. He killed me the first time and you are going to kill me now.”
   The gunslinger felt the lie on his lips. He spoke it:
   “You’ll be all right” And a greater lie. “I’ll take care. “
   Jake’s face went gray, and he said no more. He put an unwilling hand out, and he and the gunslinger went around the elbow-bend. They came face to face with that final rising wall and the man in black.
   He stood no more than twenty feet above them, just to the right of the waterfall that crashed and spilled from a huge ragged hole in the rock. Unseen wind rippled and tugged at his hooded robe. He held a staff in one hand. The other hand he held out to them in a mocking gesture of wel come. He seemed a prophet, and below that rushing sky, mounted on a ledge of rock, a prophet of doom, his voice the voice of Jeremiah.
   “Gunslinger! How well you fulfill the prophecies of old! Good day and good day and good day!” He laughed, the sound echoing ever over the bellow of the falling water.
   Without a thought and seemingly without a click of motor relays, the gunslinger had drawn his pistols. The boy cowered to his right and behind, a small shadow.
   Roland fired three times before he could gain control of his traitor hands – the echoes bounced their bronze tones against the rock valley that rose around them, over the sound of the wind and water.
   A spray of granite puffed over the head of the man in black; a second to the left of his hood; a third to the right. He had missed cleanly all three times.
   The man in black laughed – a full, hearty laugh that seemed to challenge the receding echo of gunshots. “Would you kill all your answers so easily, gunslinger?”
   “Come down,” the gunslinger said. “Answers all around.”
   Again that huge, derisive laugh. “It’s not your bullets I fear, Roland. It’s your idea of answers that scares me. “
   “Come down.”
   “The other side, I think,” the man in black said. “On the other side we will hold much council.”
   His eyes flicked to Jake and he added:
   “Just the two of us.”
   Jake flinched away from him with a small, whining cry, and the man in black turned, his robe swirling in the gray air like a batwing. He disappeared into the cleft in the rock from which the water spewed at full force. The gunslinger exercised grim will and did not send a bullet after him – would you kill all your answers so easily, gunslinger?
   There was only the sound of wind and water, sounds that had been in this place of desolation for a thousand years. Yet the man in black had been here. After these twelve years, Roland had seen him close-up, spoken to him. And the man in black had laughed at him.
   On the other side we will hold much council.
   The boy looked up at him with dumbly submissive sheep’s eyes, his body trembling. For a moment the gunslinger saw the face of Alice, the girl from Tull, superimposed over Jake’s, the scar standing out on her forehead like a mute accusation, and felt brute loathing for them both (it would not occur to him until much later that both the scar on Alice’s forehead and the nail he saw spiked through Jake’s forehead in his dreams were in the same place). Jake seemed to catch a whiff of his thought and a moan was dragged from his throat. But it was short; he twisted his lips shut over it. He held the makings of a fine man, perhaps a gunslinger in his own right if given time.
   Just the two of us.
   The gunslinger felt a great and unholy thirst in some deep unknown pit of his body, a thirst no wine could touch. Worlds trembled, almost within reach of his fingers, and
   in some instinctual way he strove not to be corrupted, knowing in his colder mind that such strife was vain and always would be.
   It was noon. He looked up, letting the cloudy, unsettled daylight shine for the last time on the all-too-vulnerable sun of his own righteousness. No one ever really pays for it in silver, he thought. The price of any evil – necessary or otherwise – comes due in flesh.
   “Come with me or stay,” the gunslinger said.
   The boy only looked at him mutely. And to the gunslinger, in that final and vital moment of uncoupling from a moral principle, he ceased to be Jake and became only the boy, an impersonality to be moved and used.
   Something screamed in the windy stillness; he and the boy both heard.
   The gunslinger began, and after a moment Jake came after. Together they climbed the tumbled rock beside the steely-cold falls, and stood where the man in black had stood before them. And together they entered in where he had disappeared. The darkness swallowed them.

The Slow Mutants

   The gunslinger spoke slowly to Jake in the rising and falling inflections of a dream:
   “There were three of us: Cuthbert, Jamie, and I. We weren’t supposed to be there, because none of us had passed from the time of children. If we had been caught, Cort would have striped us. But we weren’t. I don’t think any of the ones that went before us were caught, either. Boys must put on their fathers’ pants in private, strut them in front of the mirror, and then sneak them back on their hangers; it was like that. The father pretends he doesn't notice the new way they are hung up, or the traces of boot-polish mustaches still under their noses. Do you see?”
   The boy said nothing. He had said nothing since they had relinquished the daylight. The gunslinger had talked hectically, feverishly, to fill his silence. He had not looked back at the lights as they passed into the lightlessness beneath the mountains, but the boy had. The gunslinger had read the failing of day in the soft mirror of Jake’s cheek:
   Now faint rose; now milk-glass; now pallid silver; now the last dusk-glow touch of evening; now nothing. The gunslinger had struck a false light and they had gone on.
   Now they were camped. No echo from the man in black returned to them. Perhaps he had stopped to rest, too. Or perhaps he floated onward and without running-lights, through nighted chambers.
   “It was held once a year in the Great Hall,” the gunslinger went on. “We called it The Hall of Grandfathers. But it was only the Great Hall.”
   The sound of dripping water came to their ears.
   “A courting rite.” The gunslinger laughed deprecatingly, and the insensate walls made the sound into a loon-like wheeze. “In the old days, the books say, it was the welcoming of spring. But civilization, you know….
   He trailed off, unable to describe the change inherent
   in that mechanized noun, the death of the romantic and its sterile, carnal revenant, living only a forced respiration of glitter and ceremony; the geometric steps of courtship during the Easter-night dance at the Great Hall which had replaced the mad scribble of love which he could only intuit dimly – hollow grandeur in the place of mean and sweeping passions which might once have erased souls.
   “They made something decadent out of it,” the gunslinger said. “A play. A game.” In his voice was all the unconscious distaste of the ascetic. His face, had there been stronger light to illumine it, would have shown change —harshness and sorrow. But his essential force had not been cut or diluted. The lack of imagination that still remained in that face was remarkable.
   “But the Ball,” the gunslinger said. “The Ball. . .“
   The boy did not speak.
   “There were five crystal chandeliers, heavy glass with electric lights. It was all light, it was an island of light.
   “We had sneaked into one of the old balconies, the ones that were supposed to be unsafe. But we were still boys. We were above everything, and we could look down on it I don’t remember that any of us said anything. We only looked, and we looked for hours.
   “There was a great stone table where the gunslingers and their women sat, watching the dancers. A few of the gunslingers danced, but only a few. And they were the young ones. The other ones only sat, and it seemed to me they were half embarrassed in all that light, that civilized light. They were revered ones, the feared ones, the guardians, but they seemed like hostlers in that crowd of cavaliers with their soft women. . . .
   “There were four circular tables loaded with food, and they turned all the time. The cooks’ boys never stopped coming and going from seven until three the next morning. The tables rotated like clocks, and we could smell roast pork, beef, lobster, chickens, baked apples. There were ices and candies. There were great flaming skewers of meat.
   “And Marten sat next to my mother and father – I knew them even from so high above – and once she and Marten danced, slowly and revolvingly, and the others cleared the floor for them and clapped when it was over. The gunslingers did not clap, but my father stood slowly and held his hands out to her. And she went, smiling.
   “It was a moment of passage, boy. A time such as must be at the Tower itself, when things come together and hold and make power in time. My father had taken control, had been acknowledged and singled out. Marten was the acknowledger; my father was the mover. And his wife my mother, went to him, the connection between them. Betrayer.
   “My father was the last lord of light.”
   The gunslinger looked down at his hands. The boy still said nothing. His face was only thoughtful.
   “I remember how they danced,” the gunslinger said softly. “My mother and Marten the enchanter. I remember how they danced, revolving slowly together and apart, in the old steps of courtship.”
   He looked at the boy, smiling. “But it meant nothing, you know. Because power had been passed in some way that none of them knew but all understood, and my mother was locked root and rind to the holder and wielder of that power. Was it not so? She went to him when the dance was over, didn’t she? And clasped his hand? Did they applaud? Did the hall ring with it as those pansy-boys and their soft ladies applauded and lauded him? Did it? Did it?”
   Bitter water dripped distantly in the darkness. The boy said nothing.
   “I remember how they danced,” the gunslinger said softly. “I remember how they danced. . . . “He looked up at the unseeable stone roof and it seemed for a moment that he might scream at it, rail at it, challenge it blindly – those dumb tonnages of insensible granite that bore their tiny lives in its stone intestine.
   “What hand could have held the knife that did my father to his death?”
   “I’m tired,” the boy said wistfully.
   The gunslinger lapsed into silence, and the boy laid over and put one hand between his cheek and the stone. The little flame in front of them guttered. The gunslinger rolled a smoke. It seemed he could see the crystal light still, in the sardonic hall of his memory; hear the shout of accolade, empty in a husked land that stood even then hopeless against a gray ocean of time. The island of light hurt him bitterly, and he wished he had never held witness to it, or to his father’s cuckoldry.
   He passed smoke between his mouth and nostrils, looking down at the boy. How we make large circles in earth for ourselves, he thought. How long before the daylight again?
   He slept.
   After the sound of his breathing had become long and steady and regular, the boy opened his eyes and looked at the gunslinger with an expression that was very much like love. The last light of the fire caught in one pupil for a moment and was drowned there. He went to sleep.
   The gunslinger had lost most of his time sense in the desert, which was changeless; he lost the rest of it here in these chambers under the mountains, which were lightless. Neither of them had any means of telling time, and the concept of hours became meaningless. In a sense, they stood outside of time. A day might have been a week, or a week a day. They walked, they slept, they ate thinly. Their only companion was the steady thundering rush of the water, drilling its auger path through the stone. They followed it, drank from its flat, mineral-salted depth. At times the gunslinger thought he saw fugitive drifting lights like corpse-lamps beneath its surface, but supposed they were only projections of his brain, which had not forgotten the light. Still, he cautioned the boy not to put his feet in the water.
   The range finder in his head took them on steadily.
   The path beside the river (for it was a path; smooth, sunken to a slight concavity) led always upward, toward the river’s head. At regular intervals they came to curved stone pylons with sunken ringbolts; perhaps once oxen or stage-horses had tethered there. At each was a steel flagon holding an electric torch, but these were all barren of life and light.
   During the third period of rest-before-sleep, the boy wandered away a little. The gunslinger could hear small conversation of rattled pebbles as he moved cautiously. “
   “Careful,” he said. “You can’t see where you are.
   “I’m crawling. It’s . . . say!”
   “What is it?” The gunslinger half crouched, touching the haft of one gun.
   There was a slight pause. The gunslinger strained his eyes uselessly.
   “I think it’s a railroad,” the boy said dubiously.
   The gunslinger got up and walked slowly toward the sound of Jake’s voice, leading with one foot lightly to test for pitfalls.
   “Here.” A hand reached out and cat’s-pawed the gunslinger's face. The boy was very good in the dark, better than the gunslinger himself. His eyes seemed to dilate until there was no color left in them: the gunslinger saw this as he struck a meager light. There was no fuel in this rock womb, and what they had brought with them was going rapidly to ash. At times the urge to strike a light was well-nigh insatiable.
   The boy was standing beside a curved rock wall that was lined with parallel metal staves off into the darkness. Each carried black bulbs that might once have been conductors of electricity. And beside and below, set only inches off the stone floor, were tracks of bright metal. What might have run on those tracks at one time? The gunslinger could only imagine black electric bullets, flying through this forever night with affrighted searchlight eyes going before. He had never heard of such things. But there were skeletons in the world, just as there were demons. He had once come upon a hermit who had gained a quasi-religious power over a miserable flock of kine-keepers by possession of an ancient gasoline pump. The hermit crouched beside it, one arm wrapped possessively around it, and preached wild, guttering, sullen sermons. He occasionally placed the still-bright steel nozzle, which was attached to a rotted rubber hose, between his legs. On the pump, in perfectly legible (although rust-clotted) letters, was a legend of unknown meaning: AMOCO. Lead Free. Amoco had become the totem of a thundergod, and they had worshipped Him with the half-mad slaughter of sheep.
   Hulks, the gunslinger thought. Only meaningless hulks in sands that once were seas.
   And now a railroad.
   “We’ll follow it,” he said.
   The boy said nothing.
   The gunslinger extinguished the light and they slept. When the gunslinger awoke the boy was up before him, sitting on one of the rails and watching him sightlessly in the dark.
   They followed the rails like blindmen, the gunslinger leading, the boy following. They slipped their feet along one rail always, also like blindmen. The steady rush of the river off to the right was their companion. They did not speak, and this went on for three periods of waking. The gunslinger felt no urge to think coherently, or to plan. His sleep was dreamless.
   During the fourth period of waking and walking, they literally stumbled on a handcar.
   The gunslinger ran into it chest-high, and the boy, walking on the other side, struck his forehead and went down with a cry.
   The gunslinger made a light immediately. “Are you all right?” The words sounded sharp, almost waspish, and he winced at them.
   “Yes.” The boy was holding his head gingerly. He shook it once to make sure he had told the truth. They turned to look at what they had run into.
   It was a flat square of metal that sat mutely on the tracks. There was a see-saw handle in the center of the square. The gunslinger had no immediate sense of it, but the boy knew immediately.
   “It’s a handcar.”
   “What?”
   “Handcar,” the boy said impatiently, “like in the old movies. Look.”
   He pulled himself up and went to the handle. He managed to push it down, but it was necessary to hang all his
   weight on the handle. He grunted briefly. The handcar moved a foot, with silent timelessness, on the rails.
   “It works a little hard,” the boy said, as if apologizing for it.
   The gunslinger pulled himself up and pushed the handle down. The handcar moved forward obediently, then stopped. he could feel a drive-shaft turn beneath his feet. The operation pleased him – it was the first old machine other than the pump at the way station that he had seen in years which still worked well, but it disquieted him, too. It would take them to their destination that much quicker. The curse-kiss again, he thought, and knew the man in black had meant them to find this, too.
   “Neat, huh?” The boy said, and his voice was full of loathing.
   “What are movies?” The gunslinger asked again.
   Jake still did not answer and they stood in a black silence, like in a tomb where life had fled. The gunslinger could hear his organs at work inside his body and the boy’s respiration. That was all.
   “You stand on one side. I stand on the other side,” Jake said. “You’ll have to push by yourself until it gets rolling good. Then I can help. First you push, then I push. We’ll go right along. Get it?”
   “I get it,” the gunslinger said. His hands were in helpless, despairing fists.
   “But you’ll have to push by yourself until it gets rolling good,” the boy repeated, looking at him.
   The gunslinger had a sudden vivid picture of the Great Hall a year after the spring Ball, in the shattered, hulked shards of revolt, civil strife, and invasion. It was followed with the memory of Allie, the woman from Tull with the scar, pushed and pulled by the bullets that were killing her in reflex. It was followed by Jamie’s face, blue in death, by
   Susan’s, twisted and weeping. All my old friends, the gunslinger thought, and smiled hideously.
   “I’ll push,” the gunslinger said.
   He began to push.
   They rolled on through the dark, faster now, no longer having to feel their way. Once the awkwardness of a buried age had been run off the handcar, it went smoothly. The boy tried to do his share, and the gunslinger allowed him small shifts – but mostly he pumped by himself, in large and chest-stretching rises and failings. The river was their companion, sometimes closer on their right, sometimes further away. Once it took on huge and thunderous hollowness, as if passing through a prehistoric cathedral narthex. Once the sound of it disappeared almost altogether.
   The speed and the made wind against their faces seemed to take the place of sight and to put them once again in a frame of time and reference. The gunslinger estimated they were making anywhere from ten to fifteen miles an hour, always on a shallow, almost imperceptible uphill grade that wore him out deceptively. When they stopped he slept like the stone itself. Their food was almost gone again. Neither of them worried about it.
   For the gunslinger, the tenseness of a coming climax was as unperceivable but as real and as accretive as the fatigue of propelling the handcar. They were close to the end of the beginning. He felt like a performer placed on center stage minutes before the rise of the curtain; settled in position with his first line held in his mind, he heard the unseen audience rattling programs and settling in seats. He lived with a tight, tidy ball of unholy anticipation in his belly and welcomed the exercise that let him sleep.
   The boy spoke less and less; but at their stopping place one sleep-period before they were attacked by the Slow
   Mutants, he asked the gunslinger almost shyly about his coming of age.
   The gunslinger had been leaning against the handle, a cigarette from his dwindling supply of tobacco clamped in his mouth. He had been on the verge of his usual unthinking sleep when the boy asked his question.
   “Why would you want to know that?” He asked.
   The boy’s voice was curiously stubborn, as if hiding embarrassment. “I just do.” And after a pause, he added:
   “I always wondered about growing up. It’s mostly lies.”
   “It wasn’t growing up,” the gunslinger said. “I never grew up all at once. I did it one place and another along the way. I saw a man hung once. That was part of it, though I didn’t know it then. I left a girl in a place called King’s Town twelve years ago. That was another part. I never knew any of the parts when they happened. Only later I knew that.”

   He realized with some unease that he was avoiding.
   “I suppose the coming of age was part, too,” he said, almost grudgingly. “It was formal. Almost stylized; like a dance.” He laughed unpleasantly. “Like love.
   “Love and dying have been my life.”
   The boy said nothing.
   “It was necessary to prove one’s self in battle,” the gunslinger began.
   Summer and hot.
   August had come to the land like a vampire lover, killing the land and the crops of the tenant farmers, turning the fields of the castle-city white and sterile. In the west, some miles distant and near the borders that were the end of the civilized world, fighting had already begun. All reports were bad, and all of them palled before the heat that rested over this place of the center. Cattle lolled
   empty-eyed in the pens of the stockyards. Pigs grunted listlessly, unmindful of knives whetted for the coming fall. People whined about taxes and conscription, as they always have; but there was an emptiness beneath the apathetic passion play of politics. The center had frayed like a rag rug that had been washed and walked on and shaken and hung and dried. The lines and nets of mesh which held the last jewel at the breast of the world were unraveling. Things were not holding together. The earth drew in its breath in the summer of the coming eclipse.
   The boy idled along the upper corridor of this stone place which was home, sensing these things, not understanding. He was also empty and dangerous.
   It had been three years since the hanging of the cook who had always been able to find snacks for hungry boys, and he had filled out. Now, dressed only in faded denim pants, fourteen years old, he had already come to the widened chest-span and lengthening legs that would characterize his manhood. He was still unbedded, but two of the younger slatterns of a West-Town merchant had cast eyes on him. He had felt a response and felt it more strongly now. Even in the coolness of the passage, he felt sweat on his body.
   Ahead were his mother’s apartments and he approached them incuriously, meaning only to pass them and go upward to the roof, where a thin breeze and the pleasure of his hand awaited.
   He had passed the door when a voice called him:
   “You. Boy.”
   It was Marten, the enchanter. He was dressed with a suspicious, upsetting casualness – black whipcord trousers almost as tight as leotards, and a white shirt open halfway down his chest His hair was tousled.
   The boy looked at him silently.
   “Come in, come in! Don’t stand in the hall! Your mother wants to speak to you.” He was smiling with his mouth, but the lines of his face held a deeper, more sardonic humor. Beneath that there was only coldness.
   But his mother did not seem to want to see him. She sat in the low-backed chair by the large window in the central parlor of her apartments, the one which overlooked the hot blank stone of the central courtyard. She was dressed in a loose, informal gown and looked at the boy only once
   – a quick, glinting rueful smile, like autumn sun on stream water. During the rest of the interview she studied her hands.
   He saw her seldom now, and the phantom of cradle songs had almost faded from his brain. But she was a beloved stranger. He felt an amorphous fear, and an uncoalesced hatred for Marten, his father’s right-hand man (or was it the other way around?), was born.
   And, of course, there had already been some back street talk – talk which he honestly thought he hadn’t heard.
   “Are you well?” She asked him softly, studying her hands. Marten stood beside her, a heavy, disturbing hand near the juncture of her white shoulder and white neck, smiling on them both. His brown eyes were dark to the point of blackness with smiling.
   “Yes,” he said.
   “Your studies go well?”
   “I’m trying,” he said. They both knew he was not flash ingly intelligent like Cuthbert, or even quick, like Jamie. He was a plodder and a bludgeoner.
   “And David?” She knew his affection for the hawk.
   The boy looked up at Marten, still smiling paternally down on all this. “Past his prime.”
   His mother seemed to wince; for a moment Marten’s face seemed to darken, his grip on her shoulder tighten.
   Then she looked out into the hot whiteness of the day, and all was as it had been.
   It’s a charade, he thought. A game. Who is playing with whom?
   “You have a scar on your forehead,” Marten said, still smiling. “Are you going to be a fighter like your father or are you just slow?”
   This time she did wince.
   “Both,” the boy said. He looked steadily at Marten and smiled painfully. Even in here, it was very hot.
   Marten stopped smiling abruptly. “You can go to the roof now, boy. I believe you have business there.”
   But Marten had misunderstood, underestimated. They had been speaking in the low tongue, a parody of informality. But now the boy flashed into High Speech:
   “My mother has not yet dismissed me, bondsman!”
   Marten’s face twisted as if quirt-lashed. The boy heard his mother’s dreadful, woeful gasp. She spoke his name.
   But the painful smile remained intact on the boy’s face and he stepped forward. “Will you give me a sign of fealty, bondsman? In the name of my father whom you serve?»
   Marten stared at him, rankly unbelieving.
   “Go,” Marten said gently. “Go and find your hand.”
   Smiling, the boy went.
   As he closed the door and went back the way he came, he heard his mother wail. It was a banshee sound.
   Then he heard Marten’s laugh.
   The boy continued to smile as he went to his test.
   Jamie had come from the shop-wives, and when he saw the boy crossing the exercise yard, he ran to tell Roland the latest gossips of bloodshed and revolt to the west. But he fell aside, the words all unspoken. They had known each other since the time of infancy, and as boys they had dared
   each other, cuffed each other, and made a thousand explorations of the walls within which they had both been birthed.
   The boy strode past him, staring without seeing, grinning his painful grin. He was walking toward Cort’s cottage, where the shades were drawn to ward off the savage afternoon heat. Cort napped in the afternoon so that he could enjoy his evening tomcat forays into the mazed and filthy brothels of the lower town to the fullest extent
   Jamie knew in a flash of intuition, knew what was to come, and in his fear and ecstasy he was torn between following Roland and going after the others.
   Then his hypnotism was broken and he ran toward the main buildings, screaming. “Cuthbert! Allen! Thomas!” His screams sounded puny and thin in the heat. They had known, all of them, in that invisible way boys have, that the boy would be the first of them to try the line. But this was too soon.
   The hideous grin on Roland’s face galvanized him as no news of wars, revolts, and witchcrafts could have done. This was more than words from a toothless mouth given over fly-specked heads of lettuce.
   Roland walked to the cottage of his teacher and kicked the door open. It slammed backward, hit the plain rough plaster of the wall and rebounded.
   He had never been here before. The entrance opened on an austere kitchen that was cool and brown. A table. Two straight chairs. Two cabinets. A faded linoleum floor, tracked in black paths from the cooler set in the floor to the counter where knives hung, to the table.
   A public man’s privacy here. The last faded sobriety of a violent midnight carouser who had loved the boys of three generations roughly, and made some of them into gunslingers.
   “Cort!”
   He kicked the table, sending it across the room and into the counter. Knives from the wall rack fell in twinkling jackstraws.
   There was thick stirring in the other room, a half-sleep clearing of the throat. The boy did not enter, knowing it was sham, knowing that Cort had awakened immediately in the cottage’s other room and stood with one glittering eye beside the door, waiting to break the intruder’s un wary neck.
   “Cort, I want you, bondsman!”
   Now he spoke the High Speech, and Cort swung the door open. He was dressed only in thin underwear shorts, a squat man with bow legs, runneled with scars from top to toe, thick with twists of muscle. There was a round, bulging belly. The boy knew from experience that it was spring steel. The one good eye glared at him from the bashed and dented hairless head.
   The boy saluted formally. “Teach me no more, bonds-
   ,,
   man. Today I teach you.
   “You are early, puler,” he said casually, but he also spoke the High Speech. “Five years early, I should judge. I will ask only once. Will you renege?”
   The boy only smiled his hideous, painful smile. For Cort, who had seen the smile on a score of bloodied, scarlet-skied fields of honor and dishonor, it was answer enough
   – perhaps the only answer he would have believed.
   “It’s too bad,” the teacher said absently. “You have been a most promising pupil – the best in two dozen years, I should say. It will be sad to see you broken and set upon a blind path. But the world has moved on. Bad times are on horseback.”
   The boy still did not speak (and would have been incapable of any coherent explanation, had it been required), but for the first time the awful smile softened a little.
   “Still, there is the line of blood,” Cort said somberly, “revolt and witchcraft to the west or no. I am your bondsman, boy. I recognize your command and bow to it now —if never again – with my heart.”
   And Cort, who had cuffed him, kicked him, bled him, cursed him, made mock of him and called him the very eye of syphilis, bent to one knee and bowed his head.
   The boy touched the leathery, vulnerable flesh of his neck with wonder, “Rise, bondsman. In love.”
   Cort stood slowly, and there might have been pain behind the impassive mask of his reamed features. “This is waste. Renege, boy. I break my own oath. Renege, and wait!”
   The boy said nothing.
   “Very well.” Cort’s voice became dry and businesslike. “One hour. And the weapon of your choice. “
   “You will bring your stick?”
   “I always have.”
   “How many sticks have been taken from you, Cort?” Which was tantamount to asking: How many boys have entered the square yard beyond the Great Hall and returned as gunslinger apprentices?
   “No stick will be taken from me today,” Cort said slowly. “I regret it. There is only the once, boy. The penalty for overeagerness is the same as the penalty for unworthiness. Can you not wait?”
   The boy recalled Marten standing over him, tall as mountains. “No.”
   “Very well. What weapon do you choose?”
   The boy said nothing.
   Cort’s smile showed a jagged ring of teeth. “Wise enough to begin. In an hour. You realize you will in all probability never see the others, or your father, or this place again?”
   “I know what exile means,” he said softly.
   “Go now.”
   The boy went, without looking back.
   The cellar of the barn was spuriously cool, dank, smelling of cobwebs and earthwater. It was lit from the ubiquitous sun, but felt none of the day’s heat; the boy kept the hawk here and the bird seemed comfortable enough.
   David was old, now, and no longer hunted the sky. His feathers had lost the radiant animal brightness of three years ago, but the eyes were still as piercing and motionless as ever. You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them. The hawk pays no coinage to morals.
   David was an old hawk now. The boy hoped (or was he too unimaginative to hope? Did he only know?) that he himself was a young one.
   “Hai,” he said softly and extended his arm to the tethered perch.
   The hawk stepped onto the boy’s arm and stood motionless, unhooded. With his other hand the boy reached into his pocket and fished out a bit of dried jerky. The hawk snapped it deftly from between his fingers and made it disappear.
   The boy began to stroke David very carefully. Cort most probably would not have believed it if he had seen it, but Cort did not believe the boy’s time had come, either.
   “I think you die today,” he said, continuing to stroke. “I think you will be made sacrifice, like all those little birds we trained you on. Do you remember? No? It doesn’t matter. After today, I am the hawk.”
   David stood on his arm, silent and unblinking, indifferent to his life or death.
   “You are old,” the boy said reflectively. “And perhaps not my friend. Even a year ago you would have had my eyes instead of that little string of meat, isn’t it so? Cortwould laugh. But if we get close enough . . . which is it, bird? Age . or friendship?”
   David did not say.
   The boy hooded him and found the jesses, which were looped at the end of David’s perch. They left the barn.
   The yard behind the Great Hall was not really a yard at all, but only a green corridor whose walls were formed by tangled, thick-grown hedges. It had been used for the rite of coming of age since time out of mind, long before Cort and his predecessor, who had died of a stab-wound from an overzealous hand in this place. Many boys had left the corridor from the east end, where the teacher always entered, as men. The east end faced the Great Hall and all the civilization and intrigue of the lighted world. Many more had slunk away, beaten and bloody, from the west end, where the boys always entered, as boys forever. The west end faced the mountains and the hut-dwellers; beyond that, the tangled barbarian forests; and beyond that the desert. The boy who became a man progressed from darkness and unlearning to light and responsibility. The boy who was beaten could only retreat, forever and forever. The hallway was as smooth and green as a gaming field. It was exactly fifty yards long.
   Each end was usually clogged with tense spectators and relatives, for the ritual was usually forecast with great accuracy – eighteen was the most common age (those who had not made their test by the age of twenty-five usually slipped into obscurity as freeholders, unable to face the brutal all-or-nothing fact of the field and the test). But

  this day there were none but Jamie, Cuthbert, Allen, and Thomas. They clustered at the boy’s end, gape-mouthed and frankly terrified.
   “Your weapon, stupid!” Cuthbert hissed, in agony. “You forgot your weapon!”
   “I have it,” the boy said distantly. Dimly he wondered if the news of this had reached yet to the central buildings, to his mother – and Marten. His father was on a hunt, not due back for weeks. In this he felt a sense of shame, for he felt that in his father he would have found understanding, if not approval. “Has Cort come?”
   “Cort is here.” The voice came from the far end of the corridor, and Cort stepped into view, dressed in a short singlet. A heavy leather band encircled his forehead to keep sweat from his eyes. He held an ironwood stick in one hand, sharp on one end, heavily blunted and spatulate on the other. He began the litany which all of them, chosen by the blind blood of their fathers, had known since early childhood, learned against the day when they would, perchance, become men.
   “Have you come here for a serious purpose, boy?”
   “I have come for a serious purpose, teacher.”
   “Have you come as an outcast from your father’s house?”
   “I have so come, teacher.” And would remain outcast until he had bested Cort. If Cort bested him, he would remain outcast forever.
   “Have you come with your chosen weapon?”
   “I have so come, teacher.”
   “What is your weapon?” This was the teacher’s advantage, his chance to adjust his plan of battle to the sling or the spear or the net.
   “My weapon is David, teacher.”
   Cort halted only briefly.
   “So then have you at me, boy?”
   “I do.”
   “Be swift, then.”
   And Cort advanced into the corridor, switching his pike from one hand to the other. The boys sighed flutteringly, like birds, as their compatriot stepped to meet him.
   My weapon is David, teacher.
   Did Cort remember? Had he fully understood? If so, perhaps it was all lost. It turned on surprise – and on whatever stuff the hawk had left in him. Would he only sit, disinterested, on the boy’s arm, while Cort struck him brainless with the ironwood? Or seek the high, hot sky?
   They drew close together, and the boy loosened the hawk’s hood with nerveless fingers. It dropped to the green grass, and the boy halted in his tracks. He saw Cort’s eyes drop to the bird and widen with surprise and slow-dawning comprehension.
   Now, then.
   “At him!” The boy cried and raised his arm.
   And David flew like a silent brown bullet, stubby wings pumping once, twice, three times, before crashing into Cort’s face, talons and beak searching.
   “Hai! Roland!” Cuthbert screamed deliriously.
   Cort staggered backwards, off balance. The ironwood staff rose and beat futilely at the air about his head. The hawk was an undulating, blurred bundle of feathers.
   The boy arrowed forward, his hand held out in a straight wedge, his elbow locked.
   Still, Cort was almost too quick for him. The bird had covered ninety percent of his vision, but the ironwood came up again, spatulate end forward, and Cort cold bloodly performed the only action that could turn events at that point. He beat his own face three times, biceps flexing mercilessly.
   David fell away, broken and twisted. One wing flapped at the ground frantically. His cold, predator’s eyes stared fiercely into the teacher’s bloody, streaming face. Cort’s bad eye now bulged blindly from its socket.
   The boy delivered a kick to Cort’s temple, connecting solidly. It should have ended it; his leg had been numbed by Cort’s only blow, but it still should have ended it. It did not. For a moment Cort’s face went slack, and then he lunged, grabbing for the boy’s foot.
   The boy skipped back and tripped over his own feet. He went down asprawl. He heard, from far away the sound of Jamie’s scream.
   Cort was up, ready to fall on him and finish it. He had lost his advantage. For a moment they looked at each other, the teacher standing over the pupil, with gouts of blood pouring from the left side of his face, the bad eye now closed except for a thin slit of white. There would be no brothels for Cort this night.
   Something ripped jaggedly at the boy’s hand. It was the hawk, David, tearing blindly. Both wings were broken. It was incredible that he still lived.
   The boy grabbed him like a stone, unmindful of the jabbing, diving beak that was taking the flesh from his wrist in ribbons. As Cort flew at him, all spread-eagled, the boy threw the hawk upward.
   “Hai! David! Kill!”
   Then Cort blotted out the sun and came down atop of him.
   The bird was smashed between them, and the boy felt a calloused thumb probe for the socket of his eye. He turned it, at the same time bringing up the slab of his thigh to block Cort’s crotch-seeking knee. His own hand flailed against the tree of Cort’s neck in three hard chops. It was like hitting ribbed stone.
   Then Cort made a thick grunting. His body shuddered. Faintly, the boy saw one hand flailing for the dropped stick, and with a jackknifing lunge, he kicked it out of reach. David had hooked one talon into Cort’s right ear. The other battered mercilessly at the teacher’s cheek, making it a ruin. Warm blood splattered the boy’s face, smelling of sheared copper.
   Cort’s fist struck the bird once, breaking it’s back. Again, and the neck snapped away at a crooked angle. And still the talon clutched. There was no ear now; only a red hole tunneled into the side of Cort’s skull. The third blow sent the bird flying, clearing Cort’s face.
   The boy brought the edge of his hand across the bridge of Cort’s nose, breaking the thin bone. Blood sprayed.
   Cort’s grasping, unseeing hand ripped at the boy’s buttocks and Roland rolled away blindly, finding Cort’s stick, rising to his knees.
   Cort came to his own knees, grinning. His face was curtained with gore. The one seeing eye rolled madly in its socket. The nose was smashed over to a haunted, leaning angle. Both cheeks hung in flaps.
   The boy held his stick like a baseball player waiting for the pitch.
   Cort double-feinted, then came directly at him.
   The boy was ready. The ironwood swung in a flat arc, striking Cort’s skull with a dull thudding noise. Cort fell on his side, looking at the boy with a lazy unseeing expression. A tiny trickle of spit came from his mouth.
   “Yield or die,” the boy said. His mouth was filled with wet cotton.
   And Cort smiled. Nearly all consciousness was gone, and he would remain tended in his cottage for a week afterward, wrapped in the blackness of coma, but now he held on with all the strength of his pitiless, shadowless life.
   “I yield, gunslinger. I yield smiling.”
   Cort’s clear eye closed.
   The gunslinger shook him gently, but with persistence. The others were around him now, their hands trembling to thump his back and hoist him to their shoulders; but they held back, afraid, sensing a new gulf. Yet it was not as strange as it could have been, because there had always been a gulf between this one and the rest.
   Cort’s eye fluttered open again, weakly.
   “The key,” the gunslinger said. “My birthright, teacher. I need it.”
   His birthright was the guns – not the heavy ones of his father, weighted with sandalwood – but guns, all the same. Forbidden to all but a few. The ultimate, the final weapon. In the heavy vault under the barracks where he by ancient law was now required to abide, away from his mother’s breast, hung his apprentice weapons, heavy cumbersome things of steel and nickel. Yet they had seen his father through his apprenticeship, and his father now ruled at least in name.
   “Is it so fearsome, then?” Cort muttered, as if in his sleep. “So pressing? I feared so. And yet you won.”
   “The key.”
   “The hawk . . . a fine ploy. A fine weapon. How long did it take you to train the bastard?”
   “I never trained David. I friended him. The key.”
   “Under my belt, gunslinger.” The eye closed again.
   The gunslinger reached under Cort’s belt, feeling the heavy press of his belly, the huge muscles there now slack and asleep. The key was on a brass ring. He clutched it in his hand, restraining the mad urge to thrust it up to the sky in a salutation of victory.
   He got to his feet and was finally turning to the others
   when Cort’s hand fumbled for his foot. For a moment the gunslinger feared some last attack and tensed, but Cort only looked up at him and beckoned with one crusted finger.
   “I’m going to sleep now,” Cort whispered calmly. “Perhaps forever, I don’t know. I teach you no more, gunslinger. You have surpassed me, and two years younger than your father, who was the youngest. But let me counsel.”
   “What?” Impatiently.
   “Wait.”
   “Huh?” The word was startled out of him.
   “Let the word and the legend go before you. There are those who will carry both.” His eyes flicked over the gunslinger's shoulder. “Fools, perchance. Let the word go before you. Let your shadow grow. Let it grow hair on its face. Let it become dark.” He smiled grotesquely. “Given time, words may even enchant an enchanter. Do you take my meaning, gunslinger?”
   “Yes.”
   “Will you take my last counsel?”
   The gunslinger rocked back on his heels, a hunkered, thinking posture that foreshadowed the man. He looked at the sky. It was deepening, purpling. The heat of the day was failing and thunderheads in the west foretold rain. Lightning tines jabbed the placid flank of the rising foot hills miles distant. Beyond that, the mountains. Beyond that, the rising fountains of blood and unreason. He was tired, tired into his bones and beyond.
   He looked back at Cort. “I will bury my hawk tonight, teacher. And later go into lower town to inform those in the brothels that will wonder about you.”
   Cort’s lips parted in a pained smile. And then he slept.
   The gunslinger got to his feet and turned to the others. “Make a litter and take him to his house. Then bring a nurse. No, two nurses. Okay?”
   They still watched him, caught in a bated moment that was not yet able to be broken. They still looked for a corona of fire, or a werewolf change of features.
   “Two nurses,” the gunslinger repeated, and then smiled. They smiled.
   “You god-damned horse drover!” Cuthbert suddenly yelled, grinning. “You haven’t left enough meat for the rest of us to pick off the bone!”
   “The world won’t move on tomorrow,” the gunslinger said, quoting the old adage with a smile. “Allen, you butter ass. Move your freight”
   Allen set about making the litter; Thomas and Jamie went together to the main hall and the infirmary.
   The gunslinger and Cuthbert looked at each other. They had always been the closest – or as close as they could be under the particular shades of their characters. There was a speculative, open light in Cuthbert’s eyes, and the gunslinger controlled only with great difficulty the need to tell him not to call for the test for a year or even eighteen months, lest he go west. But they had been through a great deal together, and the gunslinger did not feel he could risk it without an expression that might be taken for patronization. I’ve begun to scheme, he thought, and was a little dismayed. Then he thought of Marten, of his mother, and he smiled a deceiver’s smile at his friend.
   I am to be the first, he thought, knowing it for the first time, although he had thought of it(in a bemused way) many times before. I am to be first
   “Let’s go,” he said.
   “With pleasure, gunslinger.”
   They left by the east end of the hedge-bordered corridor; Thomas and Jamie were returning with the nurses already. They looked like ghosts in their heavy white robes, crossed at the breast with red.
   “Shall I help you with the hawk?” Cuthbert asked.
   “Yes,” the gunslinger said.
   And later, when darkness had come and the rushing thundershowers with it; while huge, phantom caissons rolled across the sky and lightning washed the crooked streets of the lower town in blue fire; while horses stood at hitching rails with their heads down and their tails drooping, the gunslinger took a woman and lay with her.
   It was quick and good. When it was over and they lay side by side without speaking, it began to hail with a brief, rattling ferocity. Downstairs and far away, someone was playing Hey Jude ragtime. The gunslinger’s mind turned reflectively inward. It was in that hail-splattered silence, just before sleep overtook him, that he first thought that he might also be the last.
   The gunslinger did not, of course, tell the boy all of this, but perhaps most of it had come through anyway. He had already realized that this was an extremely perceptive boy, not so different from Cuthbert, or even Jamie.
   “You asleep?” the gunslinger asked.
   “No.”
   “Did you understand what I told you?”
   “Understand it?” The boy asked, with cautious scorn. “Understand it? Are you kidding?”
   “No.” But the gunslinger felt defensive. He had never told anyone about his coming of age before, because he felt ambivalent about it. Of course, the hawk had been a perfectly acceptable weapon, yet it had been a trick, too. And a betrayal. The first of many: Am I readying to throw this boy at the man in black?
   “I understood it,” the boy said. “It was a game, wasn’t it? Do grown men always have to play games? Does everything have to be an excuse for another kind of game? Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?”
   “You don’t know everything,” the gunslinger said, trying to hold his slow anger.
   “No. But I know what I am to you.”
   “And what is that?” The gunslinger asked tightly.
   “A poker chip.”
   The gunslinger felt an urge to find a rock and brain the boy. Instead, he held his tongue.
   “Go to sleep,” he said. “Boys need their sleep.”
   And in his mind he heard Marten’s echo: Go and find your hand.
   He sat stiffly in the darkness, stunned with horror and terrified (for the first time in his existence; of anything) of the self-loathing that might come.
   During the next period of waking, the railway angled closer to the underground river, and they came upon the Slow Mutants.
   Jake saw the first one and screamed aloud.
   The gunslinger’s head, which had been fixed straight forward as he pumped the handcar, jerked to the right. There was a rotten jack-o-lantern greenness below and away from them, circular and pulsating faintly. For the first time he became aware of odor – faint, unpleasant, wet.
   The greenness was a face, and the face was abnormal. Above the flattened nose was an insectile node of eyes, looking at them expressionlessly. The gunslinger felt an atavistic crawl in his intestines and privates. He stepped up the rhythm of arms and handcar handle slightly.
   The glowing face faded.
   “What was it?” the boy asked, crawling. “What – “The words stopped dumb in his throat as they came up upon and passed a group of three faintly glowing forms, standing between the rails and the invisible river, watching them, motionless.
   “They’re Slow Mutants,” the gunslinger said. “I don’t
   think they’ll bother us. They’re probably just as frightened of us as we are of – “
   One of the forms broke free and shambled toward them, glowing and changing. The face was that of a starving idiot. The faint naked body had been transformed into a knotted mess of tentacular limbs with suckers.
   The boy screamed again and crowded against the gunslinger’s leg like an affrighted dog.
   One of the tentacles pawed across the flat platform of the handcar. It reeked of the wet and the dark and of strangeness. The gunslinger let loose of the handle and drew. He put a bullet through the forehead of the starving idiot face. It fell away, its faint swamp-fire glow fading, an eclipsed moon. The gunflash lay bright and branded on their dark retinas, fading only reluctantly. The smell of expended powder was hot and savage and alien in this buried place.
   There were others, more of them. None moved against them overtly, but they were closing in on the tracks, a silent, hideous party of rubberneckers.
   “You may have to pump for me,” the gunslinger said. “Can you?”
   “Yes.”
   “Then be ready.”
   The boy stood close to him, his body poised. His eyes took in the Slow Mutants only as they passed, not traversing, not seeing more than they had to. The boy assumed a psychic bulge of terror, as if his very id had somehow sprung out through his pores to form a telepathic shield.
   The gunslinger pumped steadily but did not increase his speed. The Slow Mutants could smell their terror, he knew that, but he doubted if terror would be enough for them. He and the boy were, after all, creatures of the light, and whole. How they must hate us, he thought, and wondered if they had hated the man in black in the same way.
   He thought not, or perhaps he had passed among them and through their pitiful hive colony unknown, only the shadow of a dark wing.
   The boy made a noise in his throat and the gunslinger turned his head almost casually. Four of them were charging the handcar in a stumbling way – one of them in the process of finding a handgrip.
   The gunslinger let go of the handle and drew again, with the same sleepy casual motion. He shot the lead mutant in the head. The mutant made a sighing, sobbing noise and began to grin. Its hands were limp and fishlike, dead; the fingers clove to one another like the fingers of a glove long immersed in drying mud. One of these corpse-hands found the boy’s foot and began to pull.

   The boy shrieked aloud in the granite womb.
   The gunslinger shot the mutant in the chest. It began to slobber through the grin. Jake was going off the side. The gunslinger caught one of his arms and was almost pulled off balance himself. The thing was amazingly strong. The gunslinger put another bullet in the mutant’s head. One eye went out like a candle. Still it pulled. They engaged in a silent tug of war for Jake’s jerking, wriggling body. They yanked on him like a wishbone.
   The handcar was slowing down. The others began to close in – the lame, the halt, the blind. Perhaps they only looked for a Jesus to heal them, to raise them Lazarus-like from the darkness.
   It’s the end for the boy, the gunslinger thought with perfect coldness. This is the end he meant. Let go and pump or hold on and be buried. The end for the boy.
   He gave a tremendous yank on the boy’s arm and shot the mutant in the belly. For one frozen moment its grip grew even tighter and Jake began to slide off the edge again. Then the dead mud-hands loosened, and the Slow Mutie fell on its face between the tracks behind the slowing handcar, still grinning.
   “I thought you’d leave me,” the boy was sobbing. “I thought . . . I thought. …“
   “Hold onto my belt,” the gunslinger said. “Hold on just as tight as you can.”
   The hand worked into his belt and clutched there; the boy was breathing in great convulsive, silent gasps.
   The gunslinger began to pump steadily again, and the handcar picked up speed. The Slow Mutants fell back a step and watched them go with faces hardly human (or pathetically so), faces that generated the weak phosphorescence common to those weird deep-sea fishes that live under incredible black pressure, faces that held no anger or hate on their senseless orbs, but only what seemed to be a semiconscious, idiot regret.
   “They’re thinning,” the gunslinger said. The drawn-up muscles of his lower belly and privates relaxed the smallest bit. “They’re —“
   The Slow Mutants had put rocks across the track. The way was blocked. It had been a quick, poor job, perhaps the work of only a minute to clear, but they were stopped. And someone would have to get down and move them. The boy moaned and shuddered closer to the gunslinger. The gunslinger let go of the handle and the handcar coasted noiselessly to the rocks, where it thumped to rest.
   The Slow Mutants began to close in again, almost casually, almost as if they had been passing by, lost in a dream of darkness, and had found someone of whom to ask directions. A street-corner congregation of the damned beneath the ancient rock.
   “Are they going to get us?” The boy asked calmly.
   “No. Be quiet a second.”
   He looked at the rocks. The mutants were weak, of course, and had not been able to drag any of the boulders to block their way. Only small rocks. Only enough to stop them, to make someone get down.
   “Get down,” the gunslinger said. “You’ll have to move them. I’ll cover you.
   “No,” the boy whispered. “Please.”
   “I can’t give you a gun and I can’t move the rocks and shoot too. You have to get down.”
   Jake’s eyes rolled terribly; for a moment his body shuddered in tune with the turnings of his mind, and then he wriggled over the side and began to throw rocks to the right and the left madly, not looking.
   The gunslinger drew and waited.
   Two of them, lurching rather than walking, went for the boy with arms like dough. The guns did their work, stitching the darkness with red-white lances of light that pushed needles of pain into the gunslinger’s eyes. The boy screamed and continued to throw away rocks. Witch-glow leaped and danced. Hard to see, now, that was the worst. Everything had gone to shadows.
   One of them, glowing hardly at all, suddenly reached for the boy with rubber boogeyman arms. Eyes that ate up half the mutie’s head rolled wetly.
   Jake screamed again and turned to struggle.
   The gunslinger fired without allowing himself to think, before his spotty vision could betray his hands into a terrible quiver; the two heads were only inches apart. It was the mutie who fell, slitheringly.
   Jake threw rocks wildly. The mutants milled just outside the invisible line of trespass, closing a little at a time, now very close. Others had caught up, swelling their number.
   “All right,” the gunslinger said. “Get on. Quick.”
   When the boy moved, the mutants came at them. Jake
   was over the side and scrambling to his feet; the gunslinger was already pumping again, all out. Both guns were holstered now. They must run.
   Strange hands slapped the metal plane of the car’s surface. The boy was holding his belt with both hands now, his face pressed tightly into the small of the gunslinger’s back.
   A group of them ran onto the tracks, their faces full of that mindless, casual anticipation. The gunslinger was pumped full of adrenalin; the car was flying along the tracks into the darkness. They struck the four or five pitiful hulks full force. They flew like rotten bananas struck from the stem.
   On and on, into the soundless, flying, banshee darkness.
   After an age, the boy raised his face into the made wind, dreading and yet needing to know. The ghost of gun-flashes still lingered on his retinas. There was nothing to see but the darkness and nothing to hear but the rumble of the river.
   “They’re gone,” the boy said, suddenly fearing an end to the tracks in the darkness, and the wounding crash as they jumped the rails and plunged to twisted ruin. He had ridden in cars; once his humorless father had driven at ninety on the New Jersey Turnpike and had been stopped. But he had never ridden like this, with the wind and the blindness and the terrors behind and ahead, with the sound of the river like a chuckling voice – the voice of the man in black. The gunslinger’s arms were pistons in a lunatic human factory.
   “They’re gone,” the boy said timidly, the words ripped from his mouth by the wind. “You can slow down now. We left them behind.”
   But the gunslinger did not hear. They careened onward into the strange dark.
   They went on three periods of waking and sleeping without incident.
   During the fourth period of waking (halfway through? three-quarters? they didn’t know – only that they weren’t tired enough yet to stop) there was a sharp thump beneath them, the handcar swayed, and their bodies immediately leaned to the right with gravity as the rails took a gradual turn to the left.
   There was a light ahead – a glow so faint and alien that it seemed at first to be a totally new element, neither earth, air, fire, or water. It had no color and could only be discerned by the fact that they had regained their hands and faces in a dimension beyond that of touch. Their eyes had become so light-sensitive that they noticed the glow over five miles before they approached it.
   “The end,” the boy said tightly. “It’s the end.”
   “No.” The gunslinger spoke with odd assurance. “It isn’t.”
   And it was not. They reached light but not day.
   As they approached the source of the glow, they saw for the first time that the rock wall to the left had fallen away and their tracks had been joined by others which crossed in a complex spider web. The light laid them in burnished vectors. On some of them there were dark boxcars, passenger coaches, a stage that had been adapted to rails. They made the gunslinger nervous, like ghost galleons trapped in an underground Sargasso.
   The light grew stronger, hurting their eyes a little, but growing slowly enough to allow them to adapt. They came from dark to light like divers coming up from deep fathoms in slow stages.
   Ahead, drawing nearer, was a huge hangar stretching up into the dark. Cut into it, showing yellow squares of
   light, were a series of perhaps twenty-four entranceways, growing from the size of toy windows to a height of twenty feet as they drew closer. They passed inside through one of the middle ways. Written above were a series of characters, in various languages, the gunslinger presumed. He was astounded to find that he could read the last one; it was an ancient root of the High Speech itself and said:
   TRACK 10 TO SURFACE AND POINTS WEST
   The light inside was brighter; the tracks met and merged through a series of switchings. Here some of the traffic lanterns still worked, flashing eternal reds and greens and ambers.
   They rolled between rising stone piers caked black with the passage of thousands of vehicles, and then they were in some kind of central terminal. The gunslinger let the hand-car coast slowly to a stop, and they peered around.
   “It’s like the subway,” the boy said.
   “Subway?”
   “Never mind.”
   The boy climbed up and onto the hard cement. They looked at silent, deserted booths where newspapers and books had once been vended; an ancient bootery; a weapon shop (the gunslinger, with a sudden burst of excitement, saw revolvers and rifles; closer inspection showed that their barrels had been filled with lead; he did, however, pick out a bow, which he slung over his back, and a quiver of almost useless, badly weighted arrows); a women’s apparel shop. Somewhere a converter was turning the air over and over, as it had for thousands of years – but perhaps not for much longer. It had a grating noise somewhere in the middle of its cycle which served to remind that perpetual motion, even under strictly controlled conditions, is still a fool’s dream. The air had a mechanized taste. Their shoes made flat echoes.
   The boy cried out: “Hey! Hey….”
   The gunslinger turned around and went to him. The boy was standing, transfixed, at the book stall. Inside, sprawled in the far corner, was a mummy. The mummy was wearing a blue uniform with gold piping – a trainman’s uniform by the look. There was an ancient, perfectly preserved newspaper on the mummy’s lap, which crumbled to dust when the gunslinger attempted to look at it. The mummy’s face was like an old, shriveled apple. Cautiously, the gunslinger touched the cheek. There was a small puff of dust, and they looked through the cheek and into the mummy’s mouth. A gold tooth twinkled.
   “Gas,” the gunslinger murmured. “They used to be able to make a gas that would do this.”
   “They fought wars with it,” the boy said darkly.
   “Yes.”
   There were other mummies, not a great many, but a few. They were all wearing blue and gold ornamental uniforms. The gunslinger supposed that the gas had been used when the place was empty of all incoming and outgoing traffic. Perhaps, in some dim day, the station had been a military objective of some long-gone army and cause.
   The thought depressed him.
   “We had better go on,” he said, and started toward Track 10 and the handcar again. But the boy stood rebelliously behind him.
   “Not going.”
   The gunslinger turned back, surprised.
   The boy’s face was twisted and trembling. “You won’t get what you want until I’m dead. I’ll take my chances by myself.”
   The gunslinger nodded noncommittally, hating himself. “Okay.” He turned around and walked across to the stone piers and leaped easily down onto the handcar.
   “You made a deal!” The boy screamed after him. “I know you did!”
   The gunslinger, not replying, carefully put the bow in front of the T-post rising out of the handcar’s floor, out of harm’s way.
   The boy’s fists were clenched, his features drawn in agony.
   How easily you bluff this young boy, the gunslinger told himself dryly. Again and again his intuition has led him to this point, and again and again you have led him on by the nose – after all, he has no friends but you.
   In a sudden, simple thought (almost a vision) it came to him that all he had to do was give it over, turn around, take the boy with him, make him the center of a new force. The Tower did not have to be obtained in this humiliating, nose-rubbing way. Let it come after the boy had a growth of years, when the two of them could cast the man in black aside like a cheap wind-up toy.
   Surely, he thought cynically. Surely.
   He knew with sudden coldness that going backward would mean death for both of them – death or worse: entombment with the living dead behind them. Decay of all the faculties. With, perhaps, the guns of his father living long after both of them, kept in rotten splendor as totems not unlike the unforgotten gas pump.
   Show some guts, he told himself falsely.
   He reached for the handle and began to pump it. The handcar moved away from the stone piers.
   The boy screamed: “Wait!» And began running on the diagonal, toward where the handcar would emerge toward the darkness ahead. The gunslinger had an impulse to speed up, to leave the boy alone yet at least with an uncertainty.
   Instead, he caught him as he leaped. The heart beneath
   the thin shirt thrummed and fluttered as Jake clung to him. It was like the beat of a chicken’s heart.
   It was very close now.
   The sound of the river had become very loud, filling even their dreams with its steady thunder. The gunslinger, more as a whim than anything else, let the boy pump them ahead while he shot a number of arrows into the dark, tethered by fine white lengths of thread.
   The bow was very bad, incredibly preserved but with a terrible pull and aim despite that, and the gunslinger knew that very little would improve it. Even re-stringing would not help the tired wood. The arrows would not fly far into the dark, but the last one he sent out came back wet and slick. The gunslinger only shrugged when the boy asked him how far, but privately he didn’t think the arrow could have traveled more than a hundred yards from the rotted bow – and lucky to get that.
   And still the sound grew louder.
   During the third waking period after the station, a spectral radiance began to grow again. They had entered a long tunnel of some weird phosphorescent rock, and the wet walls glittered and twinkled with thousands of minute starbursts. They saw things in a kind of eerie, horror-house surreality.
   The brute sound of the river was channeled to them by the confining rock, magnified in its own natural amplifier. Yet the sound remained oddly constant, even as they approached the crossing point the gunslinger was sure lay ahead, because the walls were widening, drawing back. The angle of their ascent became more pronounced.
   The tracks arrowed straight ahead in the new light. To the gunslinger they looked like the captive tubes of swamp
   gas sometimes sold for a pretty at the Feast of Joseph fair-time; to the boy they looked like endless streamers of neon tubing. But in its glow they could both see that the rock that had enclosed them so long ended up ahead in ragged twin peninsulas that pointed toward a gulf of darkness ahead —the chasm over the river.
   The tracks continued out and over the unknowable drop, supported by a trestle aeons old. And beyond, what seemed an incredible distance, was a tiny pinprick of light; not phosphorescence or fluorescence, but the hard, true light of day. It was as tiny as a needle-prick in a dark cloth, yet weighted with frightful meaning.
   “Stop,” the boy said. “Stop for a minute. Please.”
   Unquestioning, the gunslinger let the handcar coast to a rest. The sound of the river was a steady, booming roar, coming from beneath and ahead. The artificial glow from the wet rock was suddenly hateful. For the first time he felt a claustrophobic hand touch him, and the urge to get out, to get free of this living burial, was strong and nearly undeniable.
   “We’ll go through,” the boy said. “Is that what he wants? For us to drive the handcar out over . . . that . . . and fall down?”
   The gunslinger knew it was not but said: “I don’t know what he wants.”
   “We’re close now. Can’t we walk?”
   They got down and approached the lip of the drop carefully. The stone beneath their feet continued to rise until, with a sudden, angling drop, the floor fell away from the tracks and the tracks continued alone, across blackness.
   The gunslinger dropped to his knees and peered down. He could dimly make out a complex, nearly incredible webwork of steel girders and struts, disappearing down
   toward the roar of the river, all in support of the graceful arch of the tracks across the void.
   In his mind’s eye he could imagine the work of time and water on the steel, in deadly tandem. How much support was left? Little? Hardly any? None? He suddenly saw the face of the mummy again, and the way the flesh, seemingly solid, had crumbled effortlessly to powder at the bare touch of his finger.
   “We’ll walk,” the gunslinger said.
   He half expected the boy to balk again, but he preceded the gunslinger calmly out onto the rails, crossing on the welded steel slats calmly, with sure feet. The gunslinger followed him, ready to catch him if Jake should put foot wrong.
   They left the handcar behind them and walked precariously out over darkness.
   The gunslinger felt a fine slick of sweat cover his skin. The trestle was rotten, very rotten. It thrummed beneath his feet with the heady motion of the river far beneath, swaying a little on unseen guy wires. We’re acrobats, he thought. Look, mother, no net. I’m flying. He knelt once and examined the crossties they were walking on. They were caked and pitted with rust (he could feel the reason on his face; fresh air, the friend of corruption: very close to the surface now), and a strong blow of the fist made the metal quiver sickly. Once he heard a warning groan beneath his feet and felt the steel settle preparatory to giving way, but he had already moved on.
   The boy, of course, was over a hundred pounds lighter and safe enough, unless the going became progressively worse.
   Behind them, the handcar had melted into the general gloom. The stone pier on the left extended out perhaps twenty feet. Further than the one on the right, but this was also left behind and they were alone over the gulf.
   At first it seemed that the tiny prick of daylight remained mockingly constant (perhaps drawing away from them at the exact pace they approached it – that would be wonderful magic indeed), but gradually the gunslinger realized that it was widening, becoming more defined. They were still below it, but the tracks were still rising.
   The boy gave a surprised grunt and suddenly lurched to the side, arms pinwheeling in slow, wide revolutions. It seemed that he tottered on the brink for a very long time indeed before stepping forward again.
   “It almost went on me,” he said softly, without emotion. “Step over.”
   The gunslinger did so. The crosstie the boy had stepped on had given way almost entirely and flopped downward lazily, swinging easily on a disintegrating rivet, like a shutter on a haunted window.
   Upward, still upward. It was a nightmare walk and so seemed to go on much longer than it did; the air itself seemed to thicken and become like taffy, and the gunslinger felt as if he might be swimming rather than walking. Again and again his mind tried to turn itself to thoughtful, lunatic consideration of the awful space between this trestle and the river below. His brain viewed it in spectacular detail, and how it would be: The scream of twisting metal, the lurch as his body slid off to the side, the grabbing for nonexistent handholds with the fingers, the swift rattle of bootheels on treacherous, rotted steel – and then down, turning over and over, the warm spray in his crotch as his bladder let go, the rush of wind against his face, rippling his hair up in cartoon fright, pulling his eyelids back, the dark water rushing to meet him, faster, outstripping even his own scream —
   Metal screamed beneath him and he stepped past it unhurriedly, shifting his weight, not thinking of the drop, or of how far they had come, or of how far was left. Not thinking that the boy was expendable and that the sale of his honor was now, at last, nearly negotiated.
   “Three ties out here,” the boy said coolly. “I’m going to jump. Here! Here!”
   The gunslinger saw him silhouetted for a moment against the daylight, an awkward, hunched spread-eagle. He landed and the whole edifice swayed drunkenly. Metal beneath them protested and something far below fell, first with a crash, then with the sound of deep water.
   “Are you over?” The gunslinger asked.
   “Yes,” the boy said remotely, “but it’s very rotten. I don’t think it will hold you. Me, but not you. Go back now. Go back now and leave me alone.”
   His voice was hysterical, cold but hysterical.
   The gunslinger stepped over the break. One large step did it. The boy was shuddering helplessly. “Go back. I don’t want you to kill me.”
   “For Christ’s sake, walk,” the gunslinger said roughly. ‘‘It’s going to fall down.”
   The boy walked drunkenly now, his hands held out shudderingly before him, fingers splayed.
   They went up.
   Yes, it was much more rotten now. There were frequent breaks of one, two, even three ties, and the gunslinger expected again and again that they would find the long empty space between rails that would either force them back or make them walk on the rails themselves, balanced giddily over the chasm.
   He kept his eyes fixed on the daylight.
   The glow had taken on a color – blue – and as it came closer it became softer, paling the radiance of the phosphor
   as it mixed with it. Fifty yards or a hundred? He could not say.
   They walked, and now he looked at his feet, crossing from tie to tie. When he looked again, the glow had grown to a hole, and it was not a light but a way out. They were almost there.
   Thirty yards, yes. Ninety short feet. It could be done. Perhaps they would have the man in black yet. Perhaps, in the bright sunlight the evil flowers in his mind would shrivel and anything would be possible.
   The sunlight was blocked out.
   He looked up, startled, staring, and saw a silhouette filling the light, eating it up, allowing only chinks of mocking blue around the outline of shoulders, the fork of crotch.
   “Hello, boys!”
   The man in black’s voice echoed to them, amplified in this natural throat of stone, the sarcasm taking on mighty overtones. Blindly, the gunslinger sought the jawbone, but it was gone, lost somewhere, used up.
   He laughed above them and the sound crashed around them, reverberating like surf in a filling cave. The boy screamed and tottered, a windmill again, arms gyrating through the scant air.
   Metal ripped and sloughed beneath them; the rails canted through a slow and dreamy twisting. The boy plunged, and one hand flew up like a gull in the darkness, up, up, and then he hung over the pit; he dangled there, his dark eyes staring up at the gunslinger in final blind lost knowledge.
   “Help me.”
   Booming, racketing: “Come now, gunslinger. Or catch me never!”
   All chips on the table. Every card up but one. The boy dangled, a living Tarot card, the hanged man, the Phoenician sailor, innocent lost and barely above the wave of a stygian sea.
   Wait then, wait awhile.
   “Do I go?” The voice so loud, he makes it hard to think, the power to cloud men’s minds. . . .
   Don’t make it bad, take a sad song and make it better. . . . “Help me.”
   The trestle had begun to twist further, screaming, pulling loose from itself, giving —“Then I shall leave you.”
   “No!”
   His legs carried him in a sudden leap through the entropy that held him, above the dangling boy, into a skidding, plunging rush toward the light that offered, the Tower frozen on the retina of his mind’s eye in a black frieze, suddenly silence, the silhouette gone, even the beat of his heart gone as the trestle settled further, beginning its final slow dance to the depths, tearing loose, his hand finding the rocky, lighted lip of damnation; and behind him, in the dreadful silence, the boy spoke from too far beneath him.
   “Go then. There are other worlds than these.”
   It tore away from him, the whole weight of it; and as he pulled himself up and through to the light and the breeze and the reality of a new karma (we all shine on), he twisted his head back, for a moment in his agony striving to be Janus– but there was nothing, only plummeting silence, for the boy made no sound.
   Then he was up, pulling his legs through onto the rocky escarpment that looked toward a grassy plain at the descending foot, toward where the man in black stood spread-legged, with arms crossed.
   The gunslinger stood drunkenly, pallid as a ghost, eyes huge and swimming beneath his forehead, shirt smeared with the white dust of his final, lunging crawl. It came to
   him that he would always flee murder. It came to him that there would be further degradations of the spirit ahead that might make this one seem infinitesimal, and yet he would still flee it, down corridors and through cities, from bed to bed; he would flee the boy’s face and try to bury it in cunts or even in further destruction, only to enter one final room and find it looking at him over a candle flame. He had become the boy; the boy had become him. He was a wurderlak, lycanthropus of his own making, and in deep dreams he would become the boy and speak strange tongues.
   This is death. Is it? Is it?
   He walked slowly, drunkenly down the rocky hill toward where the man in black waited. Here the tracks had been worn away, under the sun of reason, and it was as if they had never been.
   The man in black pushed his hood away with the backs of both hands, laughing.
   “So!” he cried. “Not an end, but the end of the beginning, eh? You progress, gunslinger! You progress! Oh, how I admire you!”
   The gunslinger drew with blinding speed and fired twelve times. The gun-flashes dimmed the sun itself, and the pounding of the explosions slammed back from the rock-faced escarpments behind them.
   “Now,” the man in black said, laughing. “Oh, now. We make great magic together, you and I. You kill me no more than you kill yourself.”
   He withdrew, walking backwards, facing the gunslinger, grinning. “Come. Come. Come.”
   The gunslinger followed him in broken boots to the place of counseling.