thought. And more pain in his head. His skull felt like a badly
cracked egg. He cried out, and could hardly believe that the harsh
crow's caw he heard came from his own throat. He thought he
could also hear, very faintly, the barking of the cross-dog, but
surely that was his imagination.
Am I dying? Have I awakened once more at the very end?
A hand stroked his brow. He could feel it but not see it - fingers
trailing across his skin ' pausing here and there to massage a knot
or a line. Delicious, like a drink of cool water on a hot day. He
began to close his eyes, and then a horrible idea came to him:
suppose that hand were green, its owner wearing a tattered red vest
over her hanging dugs?
What if it is? What could you do?
'Hush, man,' a young woman's voice said ... or perhaps it was the
voice of a girl. Certainly the first person Roland thought of was
Susan, the girl from Mejis, she who had spoken to him as thee.
'Where ... where . . .'
'Hush, stir not. 'Tis far too soon.'
The pain in his back was subsiding now, but the image of the pain
as a tree remained, for his very skin seemed to be moving like
leaves in a light breeze. How could that be?
He let the question go - let all questions go - and concentrated on
the small, cool hand stroking his brow.
'Hush, pretty man, God's love be upon ye. Yet it's sore hurt ye are.
Be still. Heal.'
The dog had hushed its barking (if it had ever been there in the first
place), and Roland became aware of that low, creaking sound
again. It reminded him of horse-tethers, or something - hangropes -
he didn't like to think of. Now he believed he could feel pressure
beneath his thighs, his buttocks, and perhaps . . . yes ... his
shoulders.
I'm not in a bed at all. I think I'm above a bed. Can that be?
He supposed he could be in a sling. He seemed to remember once,
as a boy, that some fellow had been suspended that way in the
horse-doctor's room behind the Great Hall. A stablehand who had
been burned too badly by kerosene to be laid in a bed. The man
had died, but not soon enough; for two nights, his shrieks had filled
the sweet summer air of the Gathering Fields.
Am I burned, then, nothing but a cinder with legs, hanging in a
sling?
The fingers touched the centre of his brow, rubbing away the
frown forming there. And it was as if the voice which went with
the hand had read his thoughts, picking them up with the tips of her
clever, soothing fingers.
'Ye'll be fine if God wills, sai,' the voice which went with the hand
said. 'But time belongs to God, not to you.'
No, he would have said, if he had been able. Time belongs to the
Tower.
Then he slipped down again, descending as smoothly as he had
risen, going away from the hand and the dreamlike sounds of the
singing insects and chiming bells. There was an interval that might
have been sleep, or perhaps unconsciousness, but he never went all
the way back down.
At one point he thought he heard the girl's voice, although he
couldn't be sure, because this time it was raised in fury, or fear, or
both. 'No!' she cried. 'Ye can't have it off him and ye know it! Go
your course and stop talking of it, do!'
When he rose back to consciousness the second time, he was no
stronger in body, but a little more himself in mind. What he saw
when he opened his eyes wasn't the inside of a cloud, but at first
that same phrase - white beauty - recurred to him. It was in some
ways the most beautiful place Roland had ever been in his life ...
partially because he still had a life, of course, but mostly because it
was so fey and peaceful.
It was a huge room, high and long. When Roland at last turned his
head - cautiously, so cautiously - to take its measure as well as he
could, he thought it must run at least two hundred yards from end
to end. It was built narrow, but its height gave the place a feeling
of tremendous airiness.
There were no walls or ceilings such as those he was familiar with,
although it was a little like being in a vast tent. Above him, the sun
struck and diffused its light across billowy panels of thin white
silk, turning them into the bright swags which he had first mistaken
for clouds. Beneath this silk canopy, the room was as grey as
twilight. The walls, also silk, rippled like sails in a faint breeze.
Hanging from each wall-panel was a curved rope bearing small
bells. These lay against the fabric and rang in low and charming
unison, like wind-chimes, when the walls rippled.
An aisle ran down the centre of the long room; on either side of it
were scores of beds, each made up with clean white sheets and
headed with crisp white pillows. There were perhaps forty on the
far side of the aisle, all empty, and another forty on Roland's side.
There were two other occupied beds here, one next to Roland on
his left. This fellow
It's the boy. The one who was in the trough.
The idea ran goosebumps up Roland's arms and gave him a nasty,
superstitious start. He peered more closely at the sleeping boy.
Can't be. You're just dazed, that's all; it can't be.
Yet closer scrutiny refused to dispel the idea. It certainly seemed to
be the boy from the trough, probably ill (why else would he be in a
place like this?) but far from dead; Roland could see the slow rise
and fall of his chest, and the occasional twitch of the fingers which
dangled over the side of the bed.
You didn't get a good enough look at him to be sure of anything,
and after a few days in that trough, his own mother couldn't have
said for sure who it was.
But Roland, who'd had a mother, knew better than that. He also
knew that he'd seen the gold medallion around the boy's neck. just
before the attack of the green folk, he had taken it from this lad's
corpse and put it in his pocket. Now someone - the proprietors of
this place, most likely, they who had sorcerously restored the lad
named James to his interrupted life - had taken it back from Roland
and put it around the boy's neck again.
Had the girl with the wonderfully cool hand done that? Did she in
consequence think Roland a ghoul who would steal from the dead?
He didn't like to think so. In fact, the notion made him more
uncomfortable than the idea that the young cowboy's bloated body
had been somehow returned to its normal size and then reanimated.
Further down the aisle on this side, perhaps a dozen empty beds
away from the boy and Roland Deschain, the gunslinger saw a
third inmate of this queer infirmary. This fellow looked at least
four times the age of the lad, twice the age of the gunslinger. He
had a long beard, more grey than black, that hung to his upper
chest in two straggly forks. The face above it was sun-darkened,
heavily lined, and pouched beneath the eyes. Running from his left
cheek and across the bridge of his nose was a thick dark mark
which Roland took to be a scar. The bearded man was either asleep
or unconscious - Roland could hear him snoring - and was
suspended three feet above his bed, held up by a complex series of
white belts that glimmered in the dim air. These crisscrossed each
other, making a series of figure eights all the way around the man's
body. He looked like a bug in some exotic spider's web. He wore a
gauzy white bed-dress. One of the belts ran beneath his buttocks,
elevating his crotch in a way that seemed to offer the bulge of his
privates to the grey and dreaming air. Further down his body,
Roland could see the dark shadow-shapes of his legs. They