The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower #2)(123)

The gunslinger had wakened from a tired doze and seen the woman yanking at a handful of grass he recognized all too well.

"No! Not that!" he croaked. "Never that! Mark it, and remember it! Never that!"

She looked at him for a long moment and put it aside without asking for an explanation.

The gunslinger lay back, cold with the closeness of it. Some of the other grasses might kill them, but what the woman had pulled would damn her. It had been devil-weed.

The Keflex had brought on explosions in his bowels, and he knew Eddie had been worried about that, but eating the grasses had controlled it.

Eventually they had reached real woods, and the sound of the Western Sea diminished to a dull drone they heard only when the wind was right.

And now ... meat.

3

The gunslinger reached the deer and tried to gut it with the knife held between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand. No good. His fingers weren't strong enough. He switched the knife to his stupid hand, and managed a clumsy cut from the deer's groin to its chest. The knife let out the steaming blood before it could congeal in the meat and spoil it ... but it was still a bad cut. A puking child could have done better.

You are going to learn to be smart, he told his left hand, and prepared to cut again, deeper.

Two brown hands closed over his one and took the knife.

Roland looked around.

"I'll do it," Susannah said.

"Have you ever?"

"No, but you'll tell me how."

"All right."

"Meat," she said, and smiled at him.

"Yes," he said, and smiled back. "Meat."

"What's happening?" Eddie called. "I heard a shot."

"Thanksgiving in the making!" she called back. "Come help!"

Later they ate like two kings and a queen, and as the gunslinger drowsed toward sleep, looking up at the stars, feeling the clean coolness in this upland air, he thought that this was the closest he had come to contentment in too many years to count.

He slept. And dreamed.

4

It was the Tower. The Dark Tower .

It stood on the horizon of a vast plain the color of blood in the violent setting of a dying sun. He couldn't see the stairs which spiraled up and up and up within its brick shell, but he could see the windows which spiraled up along that staircase's way, and saw the ghosts of all the people he had ever known pass through them. Up and up they marched, and an arid wind brought him the sound of voices calling his name.

Roland...come...Roland...come...come... come...

"I come," he whispered, and awoke sitting bolt upright, sweating and shivering as if the fever still held his flesh.

"Roland?"

Eddie.

"Yes."

"Bad dream?"

"Bad. Good. Dark."

"The Tower?"

"Yes."

They looked toward Susannah, but she slept on, undisturbed. Once there had been a woman named Odetta Susannah Holmes; later, there had been another named Detta Susannah Walker. Now there was a third: Susannah Dean.

Roland loved her because she would fight and never give in; he feared for her because he knew he would sacrifice her - Eddie as well - without a question or a look back.

For the Tower.

The God-Damned Tower .

"Time for a pill," Eddie said.

"I don't want them anymore."

"Take it and shut up."

Roland swallowed it with cold stream-water from one of the skins, then burped. He didn't mind. It was a meaty burp.

Eddie asked, "Do you know where we're going?"

"To the Tower."

"Well, yeah," Eddie said, "but that's like me being some ignoramus from Texas without a road-map saying he's going to Achin' Asshole, Alaska . Where is it? Which direction?"

"Bring me my purse."

Eddie did. Susannah stirred and Eddie paused, his face red planes and black shadows in the dying embers of the campfire. When she rested easy again, he came back to Roland.

Roland rummaged in the purse, heavy now with shells from that other world. It was short enough work to find what he wanted in what remained of his life.

The jawbone.

The jawbone of the man in black.

"We'll stay here awhile," he said, "and I'll get well."

"You'll know when you are?"

Roland smiled a little. The shakes were abating, the sweat drying in the cool night breeze. But still, in his mind, he saw those figures, those knights and friends and lovers and enemies of old, circling up and up, seen briefly in those windows and then gone; he saw the shadow of the Tower in which they were pent struck black and long across a plain of blood and death and merciless trial.

"I won't," he said, and nodded at Susannah. "But she will."

"And then?"

Roland held up the jawbone of Walter. "This once spoke."

He looked at Eddie.

"It will speak again."

"It's dangerous." Eddie's voice was flat.

"Yes."

"Not just to you."

"No."

"I love her, man."

"Yes."

"If you hurt her - "

"I'll do what I need to," the gunslinger said.