Patrick interrupted his thoughts, once more pointing at the road. Pointing back the way they had come.
Roland shook his head wearily. “Even if I could fight the pull of the thing—and I couldn’t, it’s all I can do to bide here—retreat would do us no good. Once we’re no longer in cover, he’ll use whatever else he has. He has something, I’m sure of it. And whatever it is, the bullets of my revolver aren’t likely to stop it.”
Patrick shook his head hard enough to make his long hair fly from side to side. The grip on Roland’s arm tightened until the boy’s fingernails bit into the gunslinger’s flesh even through three layers of hide clothing. His eyes, always gentle and usually puzzled, now peered at Roland with a look close to fury. He pointed again with his free hand, three quick jabbing gestures with the grimy forefinger. Not at the road, however.
Patrick was pointing at the roses.
“What about them?” Roland asked. “Patrick, what about them?”
This time Patrick pointed first to the roses, then to the eyes in his picture.
And this time Roland understood.
Nine
Patrick didn’t want to get them. When Roland gestured to him to go, the boy shook his head at once, whipping his hair once more from side to side, his eyes wide. He made a whistling noise between his teeth that was a remarkably good imitation of an oncoming sneetch.
“I’ll shoot anything he sends,” Roland said. “You’ve seen me do it. If there was one close enough so that I could pick it myself, I would. But there’s not. So it has to be you who picks the rose and me who gives you cover.”
But Patrick only cringed back against the ragged side of the pyramid. Patrick would not. His fear might not have been as great as his talent, but it was surely a close thing. Roland calculated the distance to the nearest rose. It was beyond their scant cover, but perhaps not by too much. He looked at his diminished right hand, which would have to do the plucking, and asked himself how hard it could be. The fact, of course, was that he didn’t know. These were not ordinary roses. For all he knew, the thorns growing up the green stem might have a poison in them that would drop him paralyzed into the tall grass, an easy target.
And Patrick would not. Patrick knew that Roland had once had friends, and that now all his friends were dead, and Patrick would not. If Roland had had two hours to work on the boy—possibly even one—he might have broken through his terror. But he didn’t have that time. Sunset had almost come.
Besides, it’s close. I can do it if I have to… and I must.
The weather had warmed enough so there was no need for the clumsy deerskin gloves Susannah had made them, but Roland had been wearing his that morning, and they were still tucked in his belt. He took one of them and cut off the end, so his two remaining fingers would poke through. What remained would at least protect his palm from the thorns. He put it on, then rested on one knee with his remaining gun in his other hand, looking at the nearest rose. Would one be enough? It would have to be, he decided. The next was fully six feet further away.
Patrick clutched his shoulder, shaking his head frantically.
“I have to,” Roland said, and of course he did. This was his job, not Patrick’s, and he had been wrong to try and make the boy do it in the first place. If he succeeded, fine and well. If he failed and was blown apart here at the edge of Can’-Ka No Rey, at least that dreadful pulling would cease.
The gunslinger took a deep breath, then leaped from cover and at the rose. At the same moment, Patrick clutched at him again, trying to hold him back. He grabbed a fold of Roland’s coat and twisted him off-true. Roland landed clumsily on his side. The gun flew out of his hand and fell in the tall grass. The Crimson King screamed (the gunslinger heard both triumph and fury in that voice) and then came the approaching whine of another sneetch. Roland closed his mittened right hand around the stem of the rose. The thorns bit through the tough deerskin as if it were no more than a coating of cobwebs. Then into his hand. The pain was enormous, but the song of the rose was sweet. He could see the blaze of yellow deep in its cup, like the blaze of a sun. Or a million of them. He could feel the warmth of blood filling the hollow of his palm and running between the remaining fingers. It soaked the deerskin, blooming another rose on its scuffed brown surface. And here came the sneetch that would kill him, blotting out the rose’s song, filling his head and threatening to split his skull.
The stem never did break. In the end, the rose tore free of the ground, roots and all. Roland rolled to his left, grabbed his gun, and fired without looking. His heart told him there was no longer time to look. There was a shattering explosion, and the warm air that buffeted his face this time was like a hurricane.
Close. Very close, that time.
The Crimson King screamed his frustration—
“EEEEEEEEEEE!”—and the cry was followed by multiple approaching whistles. Patrick pressed himself against the pyramid, face-first. Roland, clutching the rose in his bleeding right hand, rolled onto his back, raised his gun, and waited for the sneetches to make their turn. When they did, he took care of them: one and two and three.
“STILL HERE!” he cried at the old Red King. “STILL HERE, YOU OLD COCKSUCKER, MAY IT DO YA FINE!”
The Crimson King gave another of his terrible howls, but sent no more sneetches.
“SO NOW YOU HAVE A ROSE!” he screamed. “LISTEN TO IT, ROLAND! LISTEN WELL, FOR IT SINGS THE SAME SONG! LISTEN AND COMMALA-COME-COME!”
Now that song was all but imperative in Roland’s head. It burned furiously along his nerves. He grasped Patrick and turned him around. “Now,” he said. “For my life, Patrick. For the lives of every man and woman who ever died in my place so I could go on.”
And child, he thought, seeing Jake in the eye of his memory. Jake first hanging over darkness, then falling into it.
He stared into the mute boy’s terrified eyes. “Finish it! Show me that you can.”
Ten
Now Roland witnessed an amazing thing: when Patrick took the rose, he wasn’t cut. Not so much as scratched. Roland pulled his own lacerated glove off with his teeth and saw that not only was his palm badly slashed, but one of his remaining fingers now hung by a single bloody tendon. It drooped like something that wants to go to sleep. But Patrick was not cut. The thorns did not pierce him. And the terror had gone out of his eyes. He was looking from the rose to his drawing, back and forth with tender calculation.
“ROLAND! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? COME, GUNSLINGER, FOR SUNSET’S ALMOST NIGH!”
And yes, he would come. One way or the other. Knowing it was so eased him somewhat, enabled him to remain where he was without trembling too badly. His right hand was numb to the wrist, and Roland suspected he would never feel it again. That was all right; it hadn’t been much of a shake since the lobstrosities had gotten at it.
And the rose sang Yes, Roland, yes—you’ll have it again. You’ll be whole again. There will be renewal. Only come.
Patrick plucked a petal from the rose, judged it, then plucked another to go with it. He put them in his mouth. For a moment his face went slack with a peculiar sort of ecstasy, and Roland wondered what the petals might taste like. Overhead the sky was growing dark. The shadow of the pyramid that had been hidden by the rocks stretched nearly to the road. When the point of that shadow touched the way that had brought him here, Roland supposed he would go whether the Crimson King still held the Tower approach or not.
“WHAT’S THEE DOING? EEEEEEEEE! WHAT DEVILTRY WORKS IN THY MIND AND THY HEART?”
You’re a great one to speak of deviltry, Roland thought. He took out his watch and snapped back the cover. Beneath the crystal, the hands now sped backward, five o’clock to four, four to three, three to two, two to one, and one to midnight.
“Patrick, hurry,” he said. “Quick as you can, I beg, for my time is almost up.”