ROLAND'S SMALL BAND OF travellers reached the crest of the long, gentle hill they had been climbing and stood looking southeast. For a long time none of them spoke. Susannah opened her mouth twice, then closed it again. For the first time in her life as a woman, she was completely speechless.
Before them, an almost endless plain dozed in the long golden light of a summer's afternoon. The grass was lush, emerald green, and very high. Groves of trees with long, slender trunks and wide, spreading tops dotted the plain. Susannah had once seen similar trees, she thought, in a travelogue film about Australia.
The road they had been following swooped down the far side of the hill and then ran straight as a string into the southeast, a bright white lane cutting through the grass. To the west, some miles off, she could see a herd of large animals grazing peacefully. They looked like buffalo. To the east, the last of the forest made a curved peninsula into the grassland. This incursion was a dark, tangled shape that looked like a forearm with a cocked fist at the end.
That was the direction, she realized, in which all the creeks and streams they had encountered had been flowing. They were tributaries of the vast river that emerged from that jutting arm of forest and flowed, placid and dreaming under the summer sun, toward the eastern edge of the world. It was wide, that river—perhaps two miles from bank to bank.
And she could see the city.
It lay dead ahead, a misty collection of spires and towers rising above the far edge of the horizon. Those airy ramparts might have been a hundred miles away, or two hundred, or four hundred. The air of this world seemed to be totally clear, and that made judging distances a fool's game. All she knew for sure was that the sight of those dim towers filled her with silent wonder . . . and a drop, aching homesickness for New York. She thought, I believe I'd do most anything just to see the Manhattan skyline from the Triborough Bridge again.
Then she had to smile, because that wasn't the truth. The truth was that she wouldn't trade Roland's world for anything. Its silent mystery and empty spaces were intoxicating. And her lover was here. In New York— the New York of her own time, at least—they would have been objects of scorn and anger, the butt of every idiot's crude, cruel jokes: a black woman of twenty-six and her whitebread lover who was three years younger and who had a tendency to talk like dis and dat when he got excited. Her whitebread lover who had been carrying a heavy monkey on his back only eight months before. Here, there was no one to jeer or laugh. Here, no one was pointing a finger. Here, there were only Roland, Eddie, and herself, the world's last three gunslingers.
She took Eddie's hand and felt it close over hers, warm and reassuring.
Roland pointed. 'That must be the Send River,' he said in a low voice. 'I never thought to see it in my life . . . wasn't even sure it was real, like the Guardians.'
'It's so lovely,' Susannah murmured. She was unable to take her eyes from the vast landscape before her, dreaming richly in the cradle of summer. She found her eyes tracing the shadows of the trees, which trailed across the plain for what seemed miles as the sun sank toward the horizon. 'It's the way our Great Plains must have looked before they were settled—even before the Indians came.' She raised her free hand and pointed toward the place where the Great Road narrowed to a point. 'There's your city,' she said. 'Isn't it?'
'Yes.'
'It looks okay,' Eddie said. 'Is that possible, Roland? Could it still be pretty much intact. Did the old- timers build that well?'
'Anything is possible in these times,' Roland said, but he sounded doubtful. 'You shouldn't get your hopes up, though, Eddie.'
'Huh? No.' But Eddie's hopes were up. That dimly sketched skyline had awakened homesickness in Susannah's heart; in Eddie's it kindled a sudden blaze of supposition. If the city was still there—and it clearly was— it might still be populated, and maybe not just by the subhuman things Roland had met under the mountains, either. The city-dwellers might be
(Americans, Eddie's subconscious whispered)
intelligent and helpful; they might, in fact, spell the difference between success and failure for the quest of the pilgrims … or even between life and death. In Eddie's mind a vision (partly cribbed from movies like The Last Starfighter and The Dark Crystal) gleamed brightly: a council of gnarled but dignified City Elders who would serve them a whopping meal drawn from the unspoiled stores of the city (or perhaps from special gardens cradled within environmental bubbles) and who would, as he and Roland and Susannah ate themselves silly, explain exactly what lay ahead and what it all meant. Their parting gift to the wayfarers would be an AAA-approved Tour Guide map with the best route to the Dark Tower marked in red.
Eddie did not know the phrase deus ex machina, but he knew—had now grown up enough to know— that such wise and kindly folk lived mostly in comic books and B-movies. The idea was intoxicating, all the same: an enclave of civilization in this dangerous, mostly empty world; wise old elf-men who would tell them just what the fuck it was they were supposed to be doing. And the fabulous shapes of the city disclosed in that hazy skyline made the idea seem at least possible. Even if the city was totally deserted, the population wiped out by some long-ago plague or outbreak of chemical warfare, it might still serve them as a kind of giant toolbox—a huge Army-Navy Surplus Store where they could outfit themselves for the hard passages Eddie was sure must lie ahead. Besides, he was a city boy, born and bred, and the sight of all those tall towers just naturally got him up.
'All right!' he said, almost laughing out loud in his excitement. 'Hey-ho, let's go! Bring on those wise fuckin elves!'
Susannah looked at him, puzzled but smiling. 'What you ravin about, white boy?'
'Nothing. Never mind. I just want to get moving. What do you say, Roland? Want to—'
But something on Roland's face or just beneath it—some lost, dreaming thing—caused him to fall silent and put one arm around Susannah's shoulders, as if to protect her.
15
AFTER ONE BRIEF, DISMISSIVE glance at the city skyline, Roland's gaze had been caught by something a good deal closer to their current position, something that filled him with disquiet and foreboding. He had seen such things before, and the last time he'd come across one, Jake had been with him. He remembered how they had finally come out of the desert, the trail of the man in black leading them through the foothills and toward the mountains. Hard going, it had been, but at least there had been water again. And grass.
One night he had awakened to find Jake gone. He had heard strangled, desperate cries coming from a willow-grove hard by a narrow trickle of stream. By the time he had fought his way through to the clearing at the center of the grove, the boy's cries had ceased. Roland had found him standing in a place exactly like the one which lay below and ahead. A place of stones; a place of sacrifice; a place where an Oracle lived . . . and spoke when it was forced to … and killed whenever it could.
'Roland?' Eddie asked. 'What is it? What's wrong?'
'Do you see that?' Roland pointed. 'It's a speaking ring. The shapes you see are tall standing stones.' He found himself staring at Eddie, whom he had first met in the frightening but wonderful air-carriage of that strange other world where the gunslingers wore blue uniforms and there was an endless supply of sugar, paper, and wonderful drugs like astin. Some strange expression—some foreknowledge—was dawning on Eddie's face. The bright hope which had lit his eyes as he surveyed the city whiffed out, leaving him with a look both gray and bleak. It was the expression of a man studying the gallows on which he will soon be hanged.
First Jake, and now Eddie, the gunslinger thought. The wheel which turns our lives is remorseless; always it comes around to the same place again.
'Oh shit,' Eddie said. His voice was dry and scared. 'I think that's the place where the kid is going to try and come through.'
The gunslinger nodded. 'Very likely. They're thin places, and they're also attractive places. I followed him to such a place once before. The Oracle that kept there came very close to killing him.'
'How do you know this?' Susannah asked Eddie. 'Was it a dream?'
He only shook his head. 'I don't know. But the minute Roland pointed that goddamn place out . . .' He broke off and looked at the gunslinger. 'We have to get there, just as fast as we can.' Eddie sounded both frantic and fearful.
