The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (46 page)

True love, like any other strong and addicting drug, is boring—once the tale of encounter and discovery is told, kisses quickly grow stale and caresses tiresome . . . except, of course, to those who share the kisses, who give and take the caresses while every sound and color of the world seems to deepen and brighten around them. As with any other strong drug, true first love is really only interesting to those who have become its prisoners.

And, as is true of any other strong and addicting drug, true first love is dangerous.

Some called the Huntress the last moon of summer; some called it the first of fall. Whichever it was, it signalled a change in the life of the Barony. Men put out into the bay wearing sweaters beneath their oilskins as the winds began to turn more and more firmly into autumn’s east-west alley, and to sharpen as they turned. In the great Barony orchards north of Hambry (and in smaller orchards owned by John Croydon, Henry Wertner, Jake White, and the morose but wealthy Coral Thorin), the pickers began to appear in the rows, carrying their odd, off-kilter ladders; they were followed by horse-drawn carts full of empty barrels. Downwind of the cider-houses—especially downwind of the great Barony cider-mansion a mile north of Seafront—the breezy air was filled with the sweet tang of blems being pressed by the basketload. Away from the
shore of the Clean Sea, the days remained warm as the Huntress waxed, skies were clear day and night, but summer’s real heat had departed with the Peddler. The last cutting of hay began and was finished in the run of a week—that last one was always scant, and ranchers and freeholders alike would curse it, scratching their heads and asking themselves why they even bothered . . . but come rainy, blowsy old March, with the barn lofts and bins rapidly emptying, they always knew. In the Barony’s gardens—the great ones of the ranchers, the smaller ones of the freeholders, and the tiny backyard plots of the townsfolk—men and women and children appeared in their old clothes and boots, their
sombreros
and
sombreras
. They came with the legs of their pants tied down firmly at the ankles, for in the time of the Huntress, snakes and scorpions in plentiful numbers wandered east from the desert. By the time old Demon Moon began to fatten, a line of rattlers would hang from the hitching posts of both the Travellers’ Rest and the mercantile across the street. Other businesses would similarly decorate their hitching posts, but when the prize for the most skins was given on Reaping Day, it was always the inn or the market that won it. In the fields and gardens, baskets to pick into were cast along the rows by women with their hair tied up in kerchiefs and reap-charms hidden in their bosoms. The last of the tomatoes were picked, the last of the cucumbers, the last of the corn, the last of the parey and mingo. Waiting behind them, as the days sharpened and the autumn storms began to near, would come squash, sharproot, pumpkins, and potatoes. In Mejis the time of reaping had begun, while overhead, clearer and clearer on each starry night, the Huntress pulled her bow and looked east over those strange, watery leagues no man or woman of Mid-World had ever seen.

Those in the grip of a strong drug—heroin, devil grass, true love—often find themselves trying to maintain a precarious balance between secrecy and ecstasy as they walk the tightrope of their lives. Keeping one’s balance on a tightrope is difficult under the soberest circumstances; doing so while in a state of delirium is all but impossible.
Completely
impossible, in the long run.

Roland and Susan were delirious, but at least had the thin
advantage of knowing it. And the secret would not have to be kept forever, but only until Reaping Day Fair, at the very longest. Things might end even sooner than that, if the Big Coffin Hunters broke cover. The actual first move might be made by one of the other players, Roland thought, but no matter who moved first, Jonas and his men would be there, a part of it. The part apt to be most dangerous to the three boys.

Roland and Susan were careful—as careful as delirious people could be, at any rate. They never met in the same place twice in a row, they never met at the same time twice in a row, they never skulked on their way to their trysts. In Hambry, riders were common but skulkers were noticed. Susan never tried to cover her “riding out” by enlisting the help of a friend (although she had friends who would have done her this service); people who needed alibis were people keeping secrets. She had a sense that Aunt Cord was growing increasingly uneasy about her rides—particularly the ones she took in the early evenings—but so far she accepted Susan’s oft-repeated reason for them: she needed time to be solitary, to meditate on her promise and to accept her responsibility. Ironically, these suggestions had originally come from the witch of the Cöos.

They met in the willow grove, in several of the abandoned boathouses which stood crumbling at the northern hook of the bay, in a herder’s hut far out in the desolation of the Cöos, in an abandoned squatter’s shack hidden in the Bad Grass. The settings were, by and large, as sordid as any of those in which addicts come together to practice their vice, but Susan and Roland didn’t see the rotting walls of the shack or the holes in the roof of the hut or smell the mouldering nets in the corners of the old soaked boathouses. They were drugged, stone in love, and to them, every scar on the face of the world was a beauty-mark.

Twice, early on in those delirious weeks, they used the red rock in the wall at the back of the pavillion to arrange meetings, and then some deep voice spoke inside Roland’s head, telling him there must be no more of it—the rock might have been just the thing for children playing at secrets, but he and his love were no longer children; if they were discovered, banishment would be the luckiest punishment they could hope for. The red rock was too conspicuous, and writing things down—even messages that were unsigned and deliberately vague—was horribly dangerous.

Using Sheemie felt safer to both of them. Beneath his smiling light-mindedness there was a surprising depth of . . . well, discretion. Roland had thought long and hard before settling on that word, and it was the right word: an ability to keep silent that was more dignified than mere cunning. Cunning was out of Sheemie’s reach in any case, and always would be—a man who couldn’t tell a lie without shifting his eyes away from yours was a man who would never be considered cunning.

They used Sheemie half a dozen times over the five weeks when their physical love burned at its hottest—three of those times were to make meetings, two were to change meeting-places, and one was to cancel a tryst when Susan spied riders from the Piano Ranch sweeping for strays near the shack in the Bad Grass.

That deep, warning voice never spoke to Roland about Sheemie as it had about the dangers of the red rock . . . but his conscience spoke to him, and when he finally mentioned this to Susan (the two of them wrapped in a saddle-blanket and lying naked in each other’s arms), he found that her conscience had been troubling her, as well. It wasn’t fair to put the boy in the way of their possible trouble. After coming to that conclusion, Roland and Susan arranged their meetings strictly between the two of them. If she could not meet him, Susan said, she would hang a red shirt over the sill of her window, as if to dry. If he could not meet her, he was to leave a white stone in the northeast corner of the yard, diagonally across the road from Hookey’s Livery, where the town pump stood. As a last resort, they would use the red rock in the pavillion, risky or not, rather than bringing Sheemie into their affairs—their
affair
—again.

Cuthbert and Alain watched Roland’s descent into addiction first with disbelief, envy, and uneasy amusement, then with a species of silent horror. They had been sent to what was supposed to have been safety and had discovered a place of conspiracy, instead; they had come to take census in a Barony where most of the aristocracy had apparently switched its allegiance to the Affiliation’s bitterest enemy; they had made personal enemies of three hard men who had probably killed enough folks to populate a fair-sized graveyard. Yet they had felt equal to the situation, because they had come here under the leadership of their friend, who had attained
near-mythic status in their minds by besting Cort—with a hawk as his weapon!—and becoming a gunslinger at the unheard-of age of fourteen. That they had been given guns themselves for this mission had meant a great deal to them when they set out from Gilead, and nothing at all by the time they began to realize the scope of what was going on in Hambrytown and the Barony of which it was a part. When that realization came, Roland was the weapon they counted on. And now—

“He’s like a revolver cast into water!” Cuthbert exclaimed one evening, not long after Roland had ridden away to meet Susan. Beyond the bunkhouse porch, Huntress rose in her first quarter. “Gods know if it’ll ever fire again, even if it’s fished out and dried off.”

“Hush, wait,” Alain said, and looked toward the porch rail. Hoping to jolly Cuthbert out of his bad temper (a task that was quite easy under ordinary circumstances), Alain said: “Where’s the lookout? Gone to bed early for once, has he?”

This only irritated Cuthbert more. He hadn’t seen the rook’s skull in days—he couldn’t exactly say how many—and he took its loss as an ill omen. “Gone, but not to bed,” he replied, then looked balefully to the west, where Roland had disappeared aboard his big old galoot of a horse. “Lost, I reckon. Like a certain fellow’s mind and heart and good sense.”

“He’ll be all right,” Alain said awkwardly. “You know him as well as I do, Bert—known him our whole lives, we have. He’ll be all right.”

Quietly, without even a trace of his normal good humor, Cuthbert said: “I don’t feel I know him now.”

They had both tried to talk to Roland in their different ways; both received a similar response, which was no real response at all. The dreamy (and perhaps slightly troubled) look of abstraction in Roland’s eyes during these one-sided discussions would have been familiar to anyone who has ever tried to talk sense to a drug addict. It was a look that said Roland’s mind was occupied by the shape of Susan’s face, the smell of Susan’s skin, the feel of Susan’s body. And
occupied
was a silly word for it, one that fell short. It wasn’t an occupation but an obsession.

“I hate her a little for what she’s done,” Cuthbert said, and there was a note in his voice Alain had never heard before—a
mixture of jealousy, frustration, and fear. “Perhaps more than a little.”

“You mustn’t!” Alain tried not to sound shocked, but couldn’t help it. “She isn’t responsible for—”

“Is she not? She went out to Citgo with him. She saw what he saw. God knows how much else he’s told her after they’ve finished making the beast with two backs. And she’s all the way around the world from stupid. Just the way she’s managed her side of their affair shows that.” Bert was thinking, Alain guessed, of her tidy little trick with the
corvette.
“She must know she’s become part of the problem herself. She must
know
that!”

Now his bitterness was frighteningly clear.
He’s jealous of her for stealing his best friend,
Alain thought,
but it doesn’t stop there. He’s jealous of his best friend, as well, because his best friend has won the most beautiful girl any of us have ever seen.

Alain leaned over and grasped Cuthbert’s shoulder. When Bert turned away from his morose examination of the dooryard to look at his friend, he was startled by the grimness on Alain’s face. “It’s
ka,
” Alain said.

Cuthbert almost sneered. “If I had a hot dinner for every time someone blamed theft or lust or some other stupidity on
ka—
”

Alain’s grip tightened until it became painful. Cuthbert could have pulled away but didn’t. He watched Alain closely. The joker was, temporarily, at least, gone. “Blame is exactly what we two can’t afford,” Alain said. “Don’t you see that? And if it’s
ka
that’s swept them away, we needn’t blame. We
can’t
blame. We must rise above it. We need him. And we may need her, too.”

Cuthbert looked into Alain’s eyes for what seemed to be a very long time. Alain saw Bert’s anger at war with his good sense. At last (and perhaps only for the time being), good sense won out.

“All right, fine. It’s
ka,
everybody’s favorite whipping-boy. That’s what the great unseen world’s for, after all, isn’t it? So we don’t have to take the blame for our acts of stupidity? Now let go of me, Al, before you break my shoulder.”

Alain let go and sat back in his chair, relieved. “Now if we only knew what to do about the Drop. If we don’t start counting there soon—”

“I’ve had an idea about that, actually,” Cuthbert said. “It just needs a little working out. I’m sure Roland could help . . . if either of us can get his attention for a few minutes, that is.”

They sat for awhile without speaking, looking out at the dooryard. Inside the bunkhouse, the pigeons—another bone of contention between Roland and Bert these days—cooed. Alain rolled himself a smoke. It was slow work, and the finished product looked rather comical, but it held together when he lit it.

“Your father would stripe you raw if he saw that in your hand,” Cuthbert remarked, but he spoke with a certain admiration. By the time the following year’s Huntress came around, all three of them would be confirmed smokers, tanned young men with most of the boyhood slapped out of their eyes.

Alain nodded. The strong Outer Crescent tobacco made him swimmy in the head and raw in the throat, but a cigarette had a way of calming his nerves, and right now his nerves could use some calming. He didn’t know about Bert, but these days he smelled blood on the wind. Possibly some of it would be their own. He wasn’t exactly frightened—not yet, at least—but he was very, very worried.

Although they had been honed like hawks toward the guns since early childhood, Cuthbert and Alain still carried an erroneous belief common to many boys their age: that their elders were also their betters, at least in such matters as planning and wit; they actually believed that grownups knew what they were doing. Roland knew better, even in his lovesickness, but his friends had forgotten that in the game of Castles,
both
sides wear the blindfold. They would have been surprised to find that at least two of the Big Coffin Hunters had grown extremely nervous about the three young men from In-World, and extremely tired of the waiting game both sides had been playing.