Wizard and Glass

“I cry your pardon, gunslinger,” Cuthbert said, his eyes and hands still turned humbly down.

The smile on Roland’s face died. “And don’t call me that again, Cuthbert. Please. Not here, not anywhere. Not if you value me.”

Cuthbert dropped his pose at once and came quickly to where Roland sat his horse. He looked honestly humbled.

“Roland-Will-I’m sorry.”

Roland clapped him on the shoulder. “No harm done. Just remember from here on out. Mejis may be at the end of the world… but it still is the world. Where’s Alain?”

“Dick, do you mean? Where do you think?” Cuthbert pointed across the clearing, to where a dark hulk was either snoring or slowly choking to death.

“That one,” Cuthbert said, “would sleep through an earthquake.”

“But you heard me coming and woke.”

“Yes,” Cuthbert said. His eyes were on Roland’s face, searching it with an intensity that made Roland feel a little uneasy. “Did something happen to you? You look different.”

“Do I?”

“Yes. Excited. Aired out, somehow.”

If he was going to tell Cuthbert about Susan, now was the time. He decided without really thinking about it (most of his decisions, certainly the best of them, were made in this same way) not to tell. If he met her at Mayor’s House, it would be the first time as far as Cuthbert and Alain knew, as well. What harm in that?

“I’ve been properly aired, all right,” he said, dismounting and bending to uncinch the girths of his saddle. “I’ve seen some interesting things, too.”

“Ah? Speak, companion of my bosom’s dearest tenant.”

“I’ll wait until tomorrow, I think, when yon hibernating bear is finally awake. Then I only have to tell once. Besides, I’m tired. I’ll share you one thing, though: there are too many horses in these parts, even for a Barony renowned for its horseflesh. Too many by far.”

Before Cuthbert could ask any questions, Roland pulled the saddle from Rusher’s back and set it down beside three small wicker cages which had been bound together with rawhide, making them into a carrier which could be secured to a horse’s back. Inside, three pigeons with white rings around their necks cooed sleepily. One took his head out from beneath his wing, had a peek at Roland, and then tucked himself away again.

“These fellows all right?” Roland asked.

“Fine. Pecking and shitting happily in their straw. As far as they’re concerned, they’re on vacation. What did you mean about-”

“Tomorrow,” Roland said, and Cuthbert, seeing that there would be no more, only nodded and went to find his lean and bony lookout.

Twenty minutes later, Rusher unloaded and rubbed down and set to forage with Buckskin and Glue Boy (Cuthbert could not even name his horse as a normal person would), Roland lay on his back in his bedroll, looking up at the late stars overhead. Cuthbert had gone back to sleep as easily as he had awakened at the sound of Rusher’s hoofs, but Roland had never felt less sleepy in his life.

His mind turned back a month, to the whore’s room, to his father sitting on the whore’s bed and watching him dress. The words his father had spoken-I have known for two years-had reverberated like a struck gong in Roland’s head. He suspected they might continue to do so for the rest of his life.

But his father had had much more to say. About Marten. About Roland’s mother, who was, perhaps, more si

It was a game of Castles where both armies had come out from behind their Hillocks and the final moves had commenced, Roland’s father had said, and as was so often the case with popular revolutions, that game was apt to be over before many in the Baronies of Mid-World had begun to realize that John Farson was a serious threat… or, if you were one of those who believed passionately in his vision of democracy and an end to what he called “class slavery and ancient fairy-tales,” a serious agent of change.

His father and his father’s small ka-tet of gunslingers, Roland was amazed to learn, cared little about Farson in either light; they looked upon him as small cheese. Looked upon the Affiliation itself as small cheese; come to that.

I’m going to send you away, Steven had said, sitting there on the bed and looking somberly at his only son. the one who had lived. There is no true safe place left in Mid- World, hut the Barony of Mejis on the Clean Sea is as close to true safety as any place may be these days… so it’s there you’ll go, along with at least two of your mates. Alain, I suppose, for one. Just not that laughing boy for the other, I beg of you. You ’d be better off with a barking dog.

Roland, who on any other day in his life would have been overjoyed at the prospect of seeing some of the wider world, had protested hotly. If the final battles against the Good Man were at hand, he wanted to fight them at his father’s side. He was a gunslinger now, after all, if only a 'prentice, and-

His father had shaken his head, slowly and emphatically. No, Roland. You don’t understand. You shall, however; as well as possible, you shall.

Later, the two of them had walked the high battlements above Mid-World’s last living city-green and gorgeous Gilead in the morning sun, with its pe

Was the Tower what all of this was really about? Not a jumped-up harrier with dreams of ruling Mid-World, not the wizard who had enchanted his mother, not the glass ball which Steven and his posse had hoped to find in Cressia… but the Dark Tower?

He hadn’t asked.

He hadn’t dared ask.

Now he shifted in his bedroll and closed his eyes. He saw the girl’s face at once; he felt her lips pressed firmly against his own again, and smelled the scent of her skin. He was instantly hot from the top of his head to the base of his spine, cold from the base of his spine to the tips of his toes. Then he thought of the way her legs had flashed as she slid from Rusher’s back (also the glimmer of the undergarments beneath her briefly raised dress), and his hot half and cold half changed places.

The whore had taken his virginity but wouldn’t kiss him; had turned her face aside when he tried to kiss her. She’d allowed him to do whatever else he wanted, but not that. At the time he’d been bitterly disappointed. Now he was glad.

The eye of his adolescent mind, both restless and clear, considered (he braid which fell down her back to her waist, the soft dimples which had formed at the comers of her mouth when she smiled, the lilt of her voice, her old-fashioned way of saying aye and nay, ye and yer and da. He thought of how her hands had felt on his shoulders as she stretched up to kiss him, and thought he would give everything he owned to feel her hands there again, so light and so firm. And her mouth on his. It was a mouth that knew only a little about kissing, he guessed, but that was a little more than he knew himself.