healing Beam, diat fire must have looked like a comet that had fallen to Earth, still blazing. Oy sat beside her, ears cocked, looking into the fire as if mesmerized. Susannah kept expecting Roland to object-to tell her to stop feeding the damned thing and start letting it burn down, for her father’s sake-but he didn’t. He only sat with his disassembled guns before him, oiling the pieces. When the fire grew too hot, he moved back a few feet. His shadow danced a skinny, wavering commala in the firelight.
“Can you stand one or two more nights of cold?” he asked her at last.
She nodded. “If I have to.”
“Once we start climbing toward the snowlands, it will be really cold,” he said. “And while I can’t promise you we’ll have to go fireless for only a single night, I don’t believe it’ll be any longer than two.”
“You think it’ll be easier to take game if we don’t build a fire, don’t you?”
Roland nodded and began putting his guns back together.
“Will there be game as early as day after tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
He considered this, then shook his head. “I can’t say-but I do.”
“Can you smell it?”
“No.”
“Touch their minds?”
“It’s not that, either.”
She let it go. “Roland, what if Mordred sends the birds against us tonight?”
He smiled and pointed to the flames. Below them, a deepening bed of bright red coals waxed and waned like dragon’s breath. “They’ll not come close to thy bonfire.”
“And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow we’ll be further from Le Casse Roi Russe than even Mordred can persuade them to go.”
“And how do you know that?”
He shook his head yet again, although he thought he knew the answer to her question. What he knew came from the Tower. He could feel the pulse of it awakening in his head. It was like green coming out of a dry seed. But it was too early to say so.
“Lie down, Susannah,” he said. “Take your rest. I’ll watch until midnight, then wake you.”
“So now we keep a watch,” she said.
He nodded.
“Is he watching us?”
Roland wasn’t sure, but thought that Mordred was. What his imagination saw was a skinny boy (but with a potbelly pooched out in front of him now, for he’d have eaten well), naked inside the rags of a filthy, torn coat. A skinny boy laid up in one of those unnaturally skinny houses, perhaps on the third floor, where the sightline was good. He sits at a window with his knees pulled up against his chest for warmth, the scar on his side perhaps aching in the bony cold, looking out at the flare of their fire, jealous of it. Jealous of their companionship, as well.
Half-mother and White Father, with their backs turned to him.
“It’s likely,” he said.
She started to lie down, then stopped. She touched the sore beside her mouth. “This isn’t a pimple, Roland.”
“No?” He sat quiet, watching her.
“I had a friend in college who got one just like it,” Susannah said. “It’d bleed, then stop, then almost heal up, then darken and bleed a little more. At last she went to see a doctor-a special kind we call a dermatologist-and he said it was an angioma. A blood-tumor. He gave her a shot of novocaine and took it off with a scalpel. He said it was a good thing she came when she did, because every day she waited that thing was sinking its roots in a litde deeper. Eventually, he said, it would have worked its way right through the roof of her mouth, and maybe into her sinuses, too.”
Roland was silent, waiting. The term she had used clanged in his head: blood-tumor. He thought it might have been coined to describe the Crimson King himself. Mordred, as well.
“We don’t have no novocaine, Baby-Boots,” Detta Walker said, “and Ah know dat, sho! But if de time come and Ah tell you, you goan whip out yo’ knife and cut dat ugly mahfah right off’n me. Goan do it faster than yon bum’blah c’n snatch a fly out de air. You unnerstand me? Kitch mah drift?”
“Yes. Now lie over. Take some rest.”
She lay over. Five minutes after she had appeared to go to sleep, Detta Walker opened her eyes and gave him
(I watchin you, xuhite boy)
a glare. Roland nodded to her and she closed her eyes again. A minute or two later, they opened a second time. Now it was Susannah who looked at him, and this time when her eyes closed, they didn’t open again.
He had promised to wake her at midnight, but let her sleep two hours longer, knowing that in the heat of the fire her body was really resting, at least for this one night. At what his fine new watch said was one O’The clock, he finally felt the gaze of their pursuer slip away. Mordred had lost his fight to stay awake through the darkest watches of the night, as had innumerable children before him. Wherever his room was, the unwanted, lonely child now slept in it with his wreck of a coat pulled around him and his head in his arms.
And does his mouth, still caked with sai Thoughtful’s blood, purse and quiver, as if dreaming of the nipple it knew but once, the milk it never tasted'?
Roland didn’t know. Didn’t particularly want to know. He was only glad to be awake in the stillwatch of the night, feeding the occasional piece of wood to the lowering fire. It would die quickly, he thought. The wood was newer than that of which the townhouses were constructed, but it was still ancient, hardened to a substance that was nearly stone.
Tomorrow they would see trees. The first since Calla Bryn Sturgis, if one set aside those growing beneath Algul Siento’s artificial sun and those he’d seen in Stephen King’s world.
That would be good. Meanwhile, the dark held hard. Beyond the circle of the dying fire a wind moaned, lifting Roland’s hair from his temples and bringing a faint, sweet smell of snow. He tilted his head back and watched the clock of the stars turn in the blackness overhead.
Chapter IV:
HIDES
ONE
They had to go fireless three nights instead of one or two. The last was the longest, most wretched twelve hours of Susannah’s life. Is it worse than the night Eddie died? she asked herself at one point. Are you really saying this is worse than lying awake in one of those dormitory rooms, knowing that was how you ’d be lying from then on? Worse than washing his face and hands and feet? Washing them for the ground?
Yes. This was worse. She hated knowing it, and would never admit it to anyone else, but the deep, endless cold of that last night was far worse. She came to dread every light breath of breeze from the snowlands to the east and soudi. It was both terrible and oddly humbling to realize how easily physical discomfort could take control, expanding like poison gas until it owned all the floor-space, took over the entire playing field. Grief?
Loss? What were those things when you could feel cold on the march, moving in from your fingers and toes, crawling up your motherfucking nose, and moving where? Toward the brain, do it please ya. And toward the heart. In the grip of cold like that, grief and loss were nothing but words. No, not even that. Only sounds. So much meaningless quack as you sat shuddering under the stars, waiting for a morning that would never come.
What made it worse was knowing there were potential bonfires all around them, for they’d reached the live region Roland called “the undersnow.” This was a series of long, grassy slopes
(most of the grass now white and dead) and shallow valleys where there were isolated stands of trees, and brooks now plugged with ice. Earlier, in daylight, Roland had pointed out several holes in the ice and told her they’d been made by deer.
He pointed out several piles of scat, as well. In daylight such sign had been interesting, even hopeful. But in this endless ditch of night, listening to the steady low click of her chattering teeth, it meant nothing. Eddie meant nothing. Jake, neither. The Dark Tower meant nothing, nor did the bonfire they’d had out the outskirts of Castle-town. She could remember the look of it, but the feel of heat warming her skin until it brought an oil of sweat was utterly lost. Like a person who has died for a moment or two and has briefly visited some shining afterlife, she could only say that it had been wonderful.
Roland sat with his arms around her, sometimes voicing a dry, harsh cough. Susannah thought he might be getting sick, but this thought also had no power. Only the cold.
Once-shortly before dawn finally began to stain the sky in the east, this was-she saw orange lights swirl-dancing far ahead, past the place where the snow began. She asked Roland if he had any idea what they were. She had no real interest, but hearing her voice reassured her that she wasn’t dead. Not yet, at least.
“I think they’re hobs.”
“W-What are th-they?” She now stuttered and stammered everything.
“I don’t know how to explain them to you,” he said. “And there’s really no need. You’ll see them in time. Right now if you listen, you’ll hear something closer and more interesting.”
