Further off, a hundred or more black, crowlike birds either circled a flat-topped mesa or sat on its edge looking in Roland and Susannah’s direction, like a beady-eyed panel of jurors.
“Maybe we ought to make a detour,” she said. “See if we can’t find out.”
“If we lost the path, we might not be able to find it again,”
Roland said.
“That’s bullshit! Oy would-”
“Susannah, I don’t want to hear any more about it!” He spoke in a sharply angry tone she had never heard before.
Angry, yes, she had heard Roland angry many times. But there was a pettiness in this, a sulkiness that worried her. And frightened her a little, as well.
They went on in silence for the next half an hour, Roland pulling Ho Fat’s Luxury Taxi and Susannah riding. Then the narrow path (Badlands Avenue, she’d come to call it) tilted upward and she hopped down, catching up with him and then going along beside. For such forays she’d torn his Old Home Days tee-shirt in half and wore it wrapped around her hands. It protected her from sharp stones, and also warmed her fingers, at least a little.
He glanced down at her, then back at the path ahead. His lower lip was stuck out a bit and Susannah thought that surely he couldn’t know how absurdly willful that expression was-like a three-year-old who has been denied a trip to the beach. He couldn’t know and she wouldn’t tell him. Later, maybe, when they could look back on this nightmare and laugh. When they could no longer remember what, exactly, was so terrible about a night when the temperature was forty-one degrees and you lay awake, shivering on the cold ground, watching the occasional meteor scrape cold fire across the sky, thinking Just a sweater, that’s all I need. Just a sweater and I’d go along as happy as a parakeet at feeding time. And wondering if there was enough hide on Oy to make them each a pair of underdrawers and if killing him might not actually be doing the poor litde beastie a favor; he’d just been so sad since Jake passed into the clearing.
“Susannah,” Roland said. “I was sharp with you just now, and I cry your pardon.”
“There’s no need,” she said.
“I think there is. We’ve enough problems without making problems between us. Without making resentments between us.”
She was quiet. Looking up at him as he looked off into the southeast, at the circling birds.
“Those rooks,” he said.
She was quiet, waiting.
“In my childhood, we sometimes called them Gan’s Blackbirds.
I told you and Eddie about how my friend Cuthbert and I spread bread for the birds after the cook was hanged, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“They were birds exactly like those, named Casde Rooks by some. Never Royal Rooks, though, for they were scavenger birds. You asked what yonder rooks live on. Could be they’re scavenging in the yards and streets of his casde, now that he’s departed.”
“Le Casse Roi Russe, or Roi Rouge, or whatever you call it.”
“Aye. I don’t say for sure, but…”
Roland didn’t finish and didn’t need to. After that she kept an eye on the birds, and yes, they seemed to be both coming and going from the southeast. The birds might mean that they were making progress after all. It wasn’t much, but enough to buoy her spirits for the rest of that day and deep into another shivering rotten-cold night.
SIX
The following morning, as they were eating another cold breakfast in another fireless camp (Roland had promised that tonight they would use some of the Sterno and have food that was at least warm), Susannah asked if she could look at the watch he had been given by the Tet Corporation. Roland passed it over to her willingly enough. She looked long at the three siguls cut into the cover, especially the Tower with its ascending spiral of windows. Then she opened it and looked inside. Without looking up at Roland she said, “Tell me again what they said to you.”
“They were passing on what one of their good-minds told them. An especially talented one, by their accounts, although I don’t remember his name. According to him, the watch may stop when we near the Dark Tower, or even begin to run backward.”
“Hard to imagine a Patek Philippe running backward,” she said. “According to this, it’s eight-sixteen AM or PM back in New York. Here it looks about six-thirty AM, but I don’t guess that means much, one way or the other. How’re we supposed to know if this baby is running fast or slow?”
Roland had stopped storing goods in his gunna and was considering her question. “Do you see the tiny hand at the bottom?
The one that runs all by himself?”
“The second-hand, yes.”
“Tell me when he’s straight up.”
She looked at the second-hand racing around in its own circle, and when it was in the noon position, she said, “Right now.”
Roland was hunkered down, a position he could accomplish easily now that the pain in his hip was gone. He closed his eves and wrapped his arms around his knees. Each breath he exhaled emerged in a thin mist. Susannah tried not to look at this; it was as if the hated cold had actually grown strong enough to appear before them, still ghostlike but visible.
“Roland, what’re you d-”
He raised a hand to her, palm out, not opening his eyes, and she hushed.
The second-hand hurried around its circle, first dipping down, then rising until it was straight up again. And when it had arrived there-
Roland opened his eyes and said, “That’s a minute. A true minute, as I live beneath the Beam.”
Her mouth dropped open. “How in the name of heaven did you do that?”
Roland shook his head. He didn’t know. He only knew that Cort had told them they must always be able to keep time in their heads, because you couldn’t depend on watches, and a sundial was no good on a cloudy day. Or at midnight, for that matter. One summer he had sent them out into the Baby Forest west of the castle night after uncomfortable night (and it was scary out there, too, at least when one was on one’s own, although of course none of them would ever have said so out loud, even to each other), until they could come back to the yard behind the Great Hall at the very minute Cort had specified.
It was strange how that clock-in-the-head thing worked. The thing was, at first it didn’t. And didn’t. And didn’t. Down would come Cort’s callused hand, down it would come a-clout, and Cort would growl Am; maggot, back to the woods tomorrow night! You must like it out there! But once that headclock started ticking, it always seemed to run true. For awhile Roland had lost it, just as the world had lost its points of the compass, but now it was back and that cheered him greatly.
“Did you count the minute?” she asked. “Mississippi-one,
Mississippi-two, like that?”
He shook his head. “I just know. When a minute’s up, or an hour.”
“Bol-she-veckyl” she scoffed. ’You guessed!”
“If I’d guessed, would I have spoken after exactly one revolution of the hand?”
“You mought got lucky,” Detta said, and eyed him shrewdly with one eye mostly closed, an expression Roland detested. (But never said so; that would only cause Detta to goad him with it on those occasions when she peeked out.)
“Do you want to try it again?” he asked.
“No,” Susannah said, and sighed. “I take your word for it that your watch is keeping perfect time. And that means we’re not close to the Dark Tower. Not yet.”
“Perhaps not close enough to affect the watch, but closer than I’ve ever been,” Roland said quietly. “Comparatively speaking, we’re now almost in its shadow. Believe me, Susannah-I
know.”
“But-”
From over their heads came a cawing that was both harsh and oddly muffled: Croo, croo! instead of Caw, caw! Susannah looked up and saw one of the huge blackbirds-the sort Roland had called Castle Rooks-flying overhead low enough so that they could hear the labored strokes of its wings. Dangling from its long hooked bill was a limp strand of something yellowygreen.
To Susannah it looked like a piece of dead seaweed. Only not entirely dead.
She turned to Roland, looked at him widi excited eyes.
He nodded. “Devilgrass. Probably bringing it back to feather his mate’s nest. Certainly not for the babies to eat. Not that stuff.
But devilgrass always goes last when you’re walking into the Nowhere Lands, and always shows up first when you’re walking back out of them, as we are. As we finally are. Now listen to me,
Susannah, I’d have you listen, and I’d have you push that tiresome bitch Detta as far back as possible. Nor would I have you waste my time by telling me she’s not there when I can see her dancing the commala in your eyes.”
Susannah looked surprised, then piqued, as if she would protest. Then she looked away without saying anything. When she looked back at him again, she could no longer feel the presence of the one Roland had called “that tiresome bitch.”
And Roland must no longer have detected her presence, because he went on.
“I think it will soon look like we’re coming out of the Badlands, but you’d do well not to trust what you see-a few buildings and maybe a little paving on the roads doesn’t make for safety or civilization. And before too long we’re going to come to his castle, Le Casse Roi Russe. The Crimson King is almost certainly gone from there, but he may have left a trap for us. I want you to look and listen. If there’s talking to be done, I want you to let me do it.”
“What do you know that I don’t?” she asked. “What are you holding back?”
“Nothing,” he said (with what was, for him, a rare earnestness)
