“Don’t get so busy you forget to eat that,” Roland said. “You mind me, now.” He got another distracted nod for his pains and gave up. “I’m going to snooze, Patrick. It’ll be a long afternoon.” And an even longer night, he added to himself… and yet he had the same consolation as Mordred: tonight would likely be the last. He didn’t know for sure what waited for him in the Dark Tower at the end of the field of roses, but even if he managed to put paid to the Crimson King, he felt quite sure that this was his last march. He didn’t believe he would ever leave Can’-Ka No Rey, and that was all right. He was very tired. And, despite the power of the rose, sad.
Roland of Gilead put an arm over his eyes and was asleep at once.
Four
He didn’t sleep for long before Patrick woke him with a child’s enthusiasm to show him the first picture of the rose he’d drawn—the sun suggested no more than ten minutes had passed, fifteen at most.
Like all of his drawings, this one had a queer power. Patrick had captured the rose almost to the life, even though he had nothing but a pencil to work with. Still, Roland would much have preferred another hour’s sleep to this exercise in art appreciation. He nodded his approval, though—no more grouch and grump in the presence of such a lovely thing, he promised himself—and Patrick smiled, happy even with so little. He tossed back the sheet and began drawing the rose again. One picture for each of them, just as Roland had asked.
Roland could have slept again, but what was the point? The mute boy would be done with the second picture in a matter of minutes and would only wake him again. He went to Oy instead, and stroked the bumbler’s dense fur, something he rarely did.
“I’m sorry I spoke rough to’ee, fella,” Roland said. “Will you not set me on with a word?”
But Oy would not.
Fifteen minutes later, Roland re-packed the few things he’d taken out of the cart, spat into his palms, and hoisted the handles again. The cart was lighter now, had to be, but it felt heavier.
Of course it’s heavier, he thought. It’s got my grief in it. I pull it along with me everywhere I go, so I do.
Soon Ho Fat II had Patrick Danville in it, as well. He crawled up, made himself a little nest, and fell asleep almost at once. Roland plodded on, head down, shadow growing longer at his heels. Oy walked beside him.
One more night, the gunslinger thought. One more night, one more day to follow, and then it’s done. One way or t’ other.
He let the pulse of the Tower and its many singing voices fill his head and lighten his heels… at least a little. There were more roses now, dozens scattered on either side of the road and brightening the otherwise dull countryside. A few were growing in the road itself and he was careful to detour around them. Tired though he might be, he would not crush a single one, or roll a wheel over a single fallen petal.
Five
He stopped for the night while the sun was still well above the horizon, too weary to go farther even though there would be at least another two hours of daylight. Here was a stream that had gone dry, but in its bed grew a riot of those beautiful wild roses. Their songs didn’t diminish his weariness, but they revived his spirit to some extent. He thought this was true for Patrick and Oy, as well, and that was good. When Patrick had awakened he’d looked around eagerly at first. Then his face had darkened, and Roland knew he was realizing all over again that Susannah was gone. The boy had cried a little then, but perhaps there would be no crying here.
There was a grove of cottonwood trees on the bank—at least the gunslinger thought they were cottonwoods—but they had died when the stream from which their roots drank had disappeared. Now their branches were only bony, leafless snarls against the sky. In their silhouettes he could make out the number nineteen over and over again, in both the figures of Susannah’s world and those of his own. In one place the branches seemed to clearly spell the word CHASSIT against the deepening sky.
Before making a fire and cooking them an early supper—canned goods from Dandelo’s pantry would do well enough tonight, he reckoned—Roland went into the dry streambed and smelled the roses, strolling slowly among the dead trees and listening to their song. Both the smell and the sound were refreshing.
Feeling a little better, he gathered wood from beneath the trees (snapping off a few of the lower branches for good measure, leaving dry, splintered stumps that reminded him a little of Patrick’s pencils) and piled kindling in the center. Then he struck a light, speaking the old catechism almost without hearing it: “Spark-a-dark, who’s my sire? Will I lay me? Will I stay me? Bless this camp with fire.”
While he waited for the fire to first grow and then die down to a bed of rosy embers, Roland took out the watch he had been given in New York. Yesterday it had stopped, although he had been assured the battery that ran it would last for fifty years.
Now, as late afternoon faded to evening, the hands had very slowly begun to move backward.
He looked at this for a little while, fascinated, then closed the cover and looked at the siguls inscribed there: key and rose and Tower. A faint and eldritch blue light had begun to gleam from the windows that spiraled upward.
They didn’t know it would do that, he thought, and then put the watch carefully back in his lefthand front pocket, checking first (as he always did) that there was no hole for it to fall through. Then he cooked. He and Patrick ate well.
Oy would touch not a single bite.
Six
Other than the night he had spent in palaver with the man in black—the night during which Walter had read a bleak fortune from an undoubtedly stacked deck—those twelve hours of dark by the dry stream were the longest of Roland’s life. The weariness settled over him ever deeper and darker, until it felt like a cloak of stones. Old faces and old places marched in front of his heavy eyes: Susan, riding hellbent across the Drop with her blond hair flying out behind; Cuthbert running down the side of Jericho Hill in much the same fashion, screaming and laughing; Alain Johns raising a glass in a toast; Eddie and Jake wrestling in the grass, yelling, while Oy danced around them, barking.
Mordred was somewhere out there, and close, yet again and again Roland found himself drifting toward sleep. Each time he jerked himself awake, staring around wildly into the dark, he knew he had come nearer to the edge of unconsciousness. Each time he expected to see the spider with the red mark on its belly bearing down on him and saw nothing but the hobs, dancing orange in the distance. Heard nothing but the sough of the wind.
But he waits. He bides. And if I sleep—when I sleep—he’ll be on us.
Around three in the morning he roused himself by willpower alone from a doze that was on the very verge of tumbling him into deeper sleep. He looked around desperately, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his palms hard enough to make mirks and fouders and sankofites explode across his field of vision. The fire had burned very low. Patrick lay about twenty feet from it, at the twisted base of a cottonwood tree. From where Roland sat, the boy was no more than a hide-covered hump. Of Oy there was no immediate sign. Roland called to the bumbler and got no response. The gunslinger was about to try his feet when he saw Jake’s old friend a little beyond the edge of the failing firelight—or at least the gleam of his gold-ringed eyes. Those eyes looked at Roland for a moment, then disappeared, probably when Oy put his snout back down on his paws.
He’s tired, too, Roland thought, and why not?
The question of what would become of Oy after tomorrow tried to rise to the surface of the gunslinger’s troubled, tired mind, and Roland pushed it away. He got up (in his weariness his hands slipped down to his formerly troublesome hip, as if expecting to find the pain still there), went to Patrick, and shook him awake. It took some doing, but at last the boy’s eyes opened. That wasn’t good enough for Roland. He grasped Patrick’s shoulders and pulled him up to a sitting position. When the boy tried to slump back down again, Roland shook him. Hard. He looked at Roland with dazed incomprehension.