'If you mean us,' Eddie said, 'lemme tell you something, Roland—you're not exacdy Norman Normal yourself.'
'I suppose not,' Roland said. 'If it's a group that crosses— two, a trio, perhaps all of us—we should join hands when the chimes start.'
'Andy said we had to concentrate on each other,' Eddie said. 'To keep from getting lost.'
Susannah surprised them all by starting to sing. Only to Roland, it sounded more like a galley-chorus—a thing made to be shouted out verse by verse—than an actual song. Yet even without a real tune to carry, her voice was melodious enough: 'Children, when ye hear the music of the clarinet. . . Children, when ye hear the music of the flute! Children, when ye hear the music of the tam-bou-rine… Ye must bow down and worship the iyyy-DOL !'
'What is it?'
'A field-chant,' she said. 'The sort of thing my grandparents and great-grandparents might have sung while they were picking ole massa's cotton. But times change.' She smiled. 'I first heard it in a Greenwich Village coffee-house, back in 1962. And the man who sang it was a white blues-shouter named Dave Van Ronk.'
'I bet Aaron Deepneau was there, too,' Jake breathed. 'Hell, I bet he was sitting at the next damn table .'
Susannah turned to him, surprised and considering. 'Why do you say so, sugar?'
Eddie said, 'Because he overheard Calvin Tower saying this guy Deepneau had been hanging around the Village since… what'd he say, Jake?'
'Not the Village, Bleecker Street,' Jake said, laughing a little. 'Mr. Tower said Mr. Deepneau was hanging around Bleecker Street back before Bob Dylan knew how to blow more than open G on his Hohner. That must be a harmonica.'
'It is,' Eddie said, 'and while I might not bet the farm on what Jake's saying, I'd go a lot more than pocket-change. Sure, Deepneau was there. It wouldn't even surprise me to find out that Jack Andolini was tending the bar. Because that's just how things work in the Land of Nineteen.'
'In any case,' Roland said, 'those of us who cross should stay together. And I mean within a hand's reach, all the time.'
'I don't think I'll be there,' Jake said.
'Why do you say so, Jake?' the gunslinger asked, surprised.
'Because I'll never fall asleep,' Jake said. 'I'm too excited.'
But eventually they all slept.
FOUR He knows it's a dream, something brought on by no more than Slightman's chance remark, and yet he can't escape it . Always look for the back door, Cort used to tell them, but if there's a back door in this dream, Roland cannot find it . I heard of Jericho Hill and such blood-and- thunder tales of pretend, that was what Eisenhart's foreman had said, only Jericho Hill had seemed real enough to Roland. Why would it not? He had been there. It had been the end of them. The end of a whole world .
The day is suffocatingly hot; the sun reaches its roofpeak and then seems to stay there, as if the hours have been suspended. Below them is a long sloping field filled with great gray-black stone faces, eroded statues left by people who are long gone, and Grissom's men advance relentlessly among them as Roland and his final few companions withdraw ever upward, shooting as they go. The gunfire is constant, unending, the sound of bullets whining off the stone faces a shrill counterpoint that sinks into their heads like the bloodthirsty whine of mosquitoes. Jamie DeCurry has been killed by a sniper, perhaps Grissom's eagle-eyed son or Grissom himself. With Alain the end was far worse; he was shot in the dark the night before the final battle by his two best friends, a stupid error, a horrible death. There was no help. DeMullet's column was ambushed and slaughtered at Rimrocks and when Alain rode back after midnight to tell them, Roland and Cuthbert… the sound of their guns… and oh, when Alain cried out their names —
And now they're at the top and there's nowhere left to run. Behind them to the east is a shale-crumbly drop to the Salt —what five hundred miles south of here is called the Clean Sea. To the west is the hill of the stone faces, and Grissom's screaming, advancing men. Roland and his own men have killed hundreds, but there are still two thousand left, and that's a conservative estimate. Two thousand men, their howling faces painted blue, some armed with guns and even a few with Bolts — against a dozen. That's all that's left of them now, here at the top of Jericho Hill, under the burning sky. Jamie dead, Alain dead under the guns of his best friends —stolid, dependable Alain, who could have ridden on to safety but chose not to —and Cuthbert has been shot. How many times'? Five'? Six? His shirt is soaked crimson to his skin. One side of his face has been drowned in blood; the eye on that side bulges sightlessly on his cheek. Yet he still has Roland's horn, the one which was blown by Arthur Eld, or so the stories did say. He will not give it back. 'For I blow it sweeter than you ever did, ' he tells Roland, laughing. 'You can have it again when I'm dead. Neglect not to pluck it up, Roland, for it's your property .'
Cuthbert Allgood, who had once ridden into the Barony of Mejis with a rook's skull mounted on the pommel of his saddle. 'The lookout, ' he had called it, and talked to it just as though it were alive, for such was his fancy and sometimes he drove Roland half-mad with his foolishness, and here he is under the burning sun, staggering toward him with a smoking revolver in one hand and Eld's Horn in the other, blood-bolted and half- blinded and dying… but still laughing. Ah dear gods, laughing and laughing.
'Roland!'he cries. 'We've been betrayed! We're outnumbered! Our backs are to the sea! We've got em right where we want em! Shall we charge?'
And Roland understands he is right. If their quest for the Dark Tower is really to end here on Jericho Hill —betrayed by one of their own and then overwhelmed by this barbaric remnant of John Farson's army —then let it end splendidly .
'Aye!' he shouts. 'Aye, very well. Ye of the castle, to me! Gunslingers, to me! To me, I say!'
'As for gunslingers, Roland,' Cuthbert says, 'I am here. And we are the last .'
Roland first looks at him, then embraces him under that hideous sky. He can feel Cuthbert's burning body, its suicidal trembling thinness. And yet he's laughing. Bert is still laughing.
'All right ,' Roland says hoarsely, looking around at his few remaining men. 'We're going into them. And will accept no quarter. '
'Nope, no quarter, absolutely none , ' Cuthbert says .
'We will not accept their surrender if offered. '
