The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (59 page)

Roland nodded. “Four could scramble up that way without too much trouble. At the top, we’ll pile a fair amount of rock. Enough to start a landslide down on any that should try following us.”

“That’s horrible,” Susan said.

“It’s survival,” Alain replied. “If they’re allowed to have the oil and put it to use, they’ll slaughter every Affiliation man that gets in range of their weapons. The Good Man takes no prisoners.”

“I didn’t say wrong, only horrible.”

They were silent for a moment, four children contemplating the murders of two hundred men. Except they wouldn’t all be men; many (perhaps even most) would be boys roughly their own ages.

At last she said, “Those not caught in your rockslide will only ride back out of the canyon again.”

“No, they won’t.” Alain had seen the lay of the land and now understood the matter almost completely. Roland was nodding, and there was a trace of a smile on his mouth.

“Why not?”

“The brush at the front of the canyon. We’re going to set it on fire, aren’t we, Roland? And if the prevailing winds are prevailing that day . . . the smoke . . .”

“It’ll drive them the rest of the way in,” Roland agreed. “Into the thinny.”

“How will you set the brush-pile alight?” Susan asked. “I
know it’s dry, but surely you won’t have time to use a sulfur match or your flint and steel.”

“You can help us there,” Roland said, “just as you can help us set the tankers alight. We can’t count on touching off the oil with just our guns, you know; crude oil is a lot less volatile than people might think. And Sheemie’s going to help you, I hope.”

“Tell me what you want.”

They talked another twenty minutes, refining the plan surprisingly little—all of them seemed to understand that if they planned too much and things changed suddenly, they might freeze.
Ka
had swept them into this; it was perhaps best that they count on
ka
—and their own courage—to sweep them back out again.

Cuthbert was reluctant to involve Sheemie, but finally went along—the boy’s part would be minimal, if not exactly low-risk, and Roland agreed that they could take him with them when they left Mejis for good. A party of five was as fine as a party of four, he said.

“All right,” Cuthbert said at last, then turned to Susan. “It ought to be you or me who talks to him.”

“I will.”

“Make sure he understands not to tell Coral Thorin so much as a word,” Cuthbert said. “It isn’t that the Mayor’s her brother; I just don’t trust that bitch.”

“I can give ye a better reason than Hart not to trust her,” Susan said. “My aunt says she’s taken up with Eldred Jonas. Poor Aunt Cord! She’s had the worst summer of her life. Nor will the fall be much better, I wot. Folk will call her the aunt of a traitor.”

“Some will know better,” Alain said. “Some always do.”

“Mayhap, but my Aunt Cordelia’s the sort of woman who never hears good gossip. No more does she speak it. She fancied Jonas herself, ye ken.”

Cuthbert was thunderstruck. “Fancied Jonas! By all the fiddling gods! Can you imagine it! Why, if they hung folk for bad taste in love, your auntie would go early, wouldn’t she?”

Susan giggled, hugged her knees, and nodded.

“It’s time we left,” Roland said. “If something chances that
Susan needs to know right away, we’ll use the red stone in the rock wall at Green Heart.”

“Good,” Cuthbert said. “Let’s get out of here. The cold in this place eats into the bones.”

Roland stirred, stretching life back into his legs. “The important thing is that they’ve decided to leave us free while they round up and run. That’s our edge, and it’s a good one. And now—”

Alain’s quiet voice stopped him. “There’s another matter. Very important.”

Roland sank back down on his hunkers, looking at Alain curiously.

“The witch.”

Susan started, but Roland only barked an impatient laugh. “She doesn’t figure in our business, Al—I can’t see how she could. I don’t believe she’s a part of Jonas’s conspiracy—”

“Neither do I,” Alain said.

“—and Cuthbert and I persuaded her to keep her mouth shut about Susan and me. If we hadn’t, her aunt would have raised the roof by now.”

“But don’t you see?” Alain asked. “Who Rhea might have told isn’t really the question. The question is
how she knew in the first place.
”

“It’s pink,” Susan said abruptly. Her hand was on her hair, fingers touching the place where the cut ends had begun to grow out.

“What’s pink?” Alain asked.

“The moon,” she said, and then shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Brainless as Pinch and Jilly, I am . . . Roland? What’s wrong? What ails thee?”

For Roland was no longer hunkering; he had collapsed into a loose sitting position on the petal-strewn stone floor. He looked like a young man trying not to faint. Outside the mausoleum there was a bony rattle of fall leaves and the cry of a nightjar.

“Dear gods,” he said in a low voice. “It can’t be.
It can’t be true.
” His eyes met Cuthbert’s.

All the humor had washed out of the latter young man’s face, leaving a ruthless and calculating bedrock his own mother might not have recognized . . . or might not have wanted to.

“Pink,” Cuthbert said. “Isn’t that interesting—the same word your father happened to mention just before we left, Roland, wasn’t it? He warned us about the pink one. We thought it was a joke.
Almost.
”

“Oh!” Alain’s eyes flew wide open. “Oh,
fuck!
” he blurted. He realized what he had said while sitting leg-to-leg with his best friend’s lover and clapped his hands over his mouth. His cheeks flamed red.

Susan barely noticed. She was staring at Roland in growing fear and confusion. “What?” she asked. “What is it ye know? Tell me!
Tell me!
”

“I’d like to hypnotize you again, as I did that day in the willow grove,” Roland said. “I want to do it right now, before we talk of this more and drag mud across what you remember.”

Roland had reached into his pocket while she was speaking. Now he took out a shell, and it began to dance across the back of his hand once more. Her eyes went to it at once, like steel drawn to a magnet.

“May I?” he asked. “By your leave, dear.”

“Aye, as ye will.” Her eyes were widening and growing glassy. “I don’t know why ye think this time should be any different, but . . .” She stopped talking, her eyes continuing to follow the dance of the shell across Roland’s hand. When he stopped moving it and clasped it in his fist, her eyes closed. Her breath was soft and regular.

“Gods, she went like a stone,” Cuthbert whispered, amazed.

“She’s been hypnotized before. By Rhea, I think.” Roland paused. Then: “Susan, do you hear me?”

“Aye, Roland, I hear ye very well.”

“I want you to hear another voice, too.”

“Whose?”

Roland beckoned to Alain. If anyone could break through the block in Susan’s mind (or find a way around it), it would be him.

“Mine, Susan,” Alain said, coming to Roland’s side. “Do you know it?”

She smiled with her eyes closed. “Aye, you’re Alain. Richard Stockworth that was.”

“That’s right.” He looked at Roland with nervous, questioning eyes—
What shall I ask her?
—but for a moment
Roland didn’t reply. He was in two other places, both at the same time, and hearing two different voices.

Susan, by the stream in the willow grove:
She says, “Aye, lovely, just so, it’s a good girl y’are,” then everything’s pink.

His father, in the yard behind the Great Hall:
It’s the grapefruit. By which I mean it’s the pink one.

The pink one.

Their horses were saddled and loaded; the three boys stood before them, outwardly stolid, inwardly feverish to be gone. The road, and the mysteries that lie along it, calls out to none as it calls to the young.

They were in the courtyard which lay east of the Great Hall, not far from where Roland had bested Cort, setting all these things in motion. It was early morning, the sun not yet risen, the mist lying over the green fields in gray ribbons. At a distance of about twenty paces, Cuthbert’s and Alain’s fathers stood sentry with their legs apart and their hands on the butts of their guns. It was unlikely that Marten (who had for the time being absented himself from the palace, and, so far as any knew, from Gilead itself) would mount any sort of attack on them—not here—but it wasn’t entirely out of the question, either.

So it was that only Roland’s father spoke to them as they mounted up to begin their ride east to Mejis and the Outer Arc.

“One last thing,” he said as they adjusted their saddle girths. “I doubt you’ll see anything that touches on our interests—not in Mejis—but I’d have you keep an eye out for a color of the rainbow. The Wizard’s Rainbow, that is.” He chuckled, then added: “It’s the grapefruit. By which I mean it’s the pink one.”

“Wizard’s Rainbow is just a fairy-tale,” Cuthbert said, smiling in response to Steven’s smile. Then—perhaps it was something in Steven Deschain’s eyes—Cuthbert’s smile faltered. “Isn’t it?”

“Not all the old stories are true, but I think that of Maerlyn’s Rainbow is,” Steven replied. “It’s said that once there were thirteen glass balls in it—one for each of the Twelve Guardians, and one representing the nexus-point of the Beams.”

“One for the Tower,” Roland said in a low voice, feeling gooseflesh. “One for the Dark Tower.”

“Aye, Thirteen it was called when I was a boy. We’d tell stories about the black ball around the fire sometimes, and scare ourselves silly . . . unless our fathers caught us at it. My own da said it wasn’t wise to talk about Thirteen, for it might hear its name called and roll your way. But Black Thirteen doesn’t matter to you three . . . not now, at least. No, it’s the pink one. Maerlyn’s Grapefruit.”

It was impossible to tell how serious he was . . . or if he was serious at all.

“If the other balls in the Wizard’s Rainbow
did
exist, most are broken now. Such things never stay in one place or one pair of hands for long, you know, and even enchanted glass has a way of breaking. Yet at least three or four bends o’ the Rainbow may still be rolling around this sad world of ours. The blue, almost certainly. A desert tribe of slow mutants—the Total Hogs, they called themselves—had that one less than fifty years ago, although it’s slipped from sight again since. The green and the orange are reputed to be in Lud and Dis, respectively. And, just maybe, the pink one.”

“What exactly do they do?” Roland asked. “What are they good for?”

“For seeing. Some colors of the Wizard’s Rainbow are reputed to look into the future. Others look into the other worlds—those where the demons live, those where the Old People are supposed to have gone when they left our world. These may also show the location of the secret doors which pass between the worlds. Other colors, they say, can look far in our own world, and see things people would as soon keep secret. They never see the good; only the ill. How much of this is true and how much is myth no one knows for sure.”

He looked at them, his smile fading.

“But this we do know: John Farson is said to have a talisman, something that glows in his tent late at night . . . sometimes before battles, sometimes before large movements of troop and horse, sometimes before momentous decisions are announced. And it glows pink.”

“Maybe he has an electric light and puts a pink scarf over it when he prays,” Cuthbert said. He looked around at his friends, a little defensively. “I’m not joking; there are people who do that.”

“Perhaps,” Roland’s father said. “Perhaps that’s all it is, or something like. But perhaps it’s a good deal more. All I can say of my own knowledge is that he keeps beating us, he keeps slipping away from us, and he keeps turning up where he’s least expected. If the magic is in him and not in some talisman he owns, gods help the Affiliation.”

“We’ll keep an eye out, if you like,” Roland said, “but Farson’s in the north or west. We’re going east.” As if his father did not know this.

“If it’s a bend o’ the Rainbow,” Steven replied, “it could be anywhere—east or south’s as likely as west. He can’t keep it with him all the time, you see. No matter how much it would ease his mind and heart to do so. No one can.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re alive, and hungry,” Steven said. “One begins using em; one ends being used
by
em. If Farson has a piece of the Rainbow, he’ll send it away and call it back only when he needs it. He understands the risk of losing it, but he also understands the risk of keeping it too long.”

There was a question which the other two, constrained by politeness, couldn’t ask. Roland could, and did. “You
are
serious about this, Dad? It’s not just a leg-pull, is it?”

“I’m sending you away at an age when many boys still don’t sleep well if their mothers don’t kiss them goodnight,” Steven said. “I expect to see all three of you again, alive and well—Mejis is a lovely, quiet place, or was when I was a boy—but I can’t be sure of it. As things are these days, no one can be sure of anything. I wouldn’t send you away with a joke and a laugh. I’m surprised you think it.”

“Cry your pardon,” Roland said. An uneasy peace had descended between him and his father, and he would not rupture it. Still, he was wild to be off. Rusher jigged beneath him, as if seconding that.

“I don’t expect you boys to see Maerlyn’s glass . . . but I didn’t expect to be seeing you off at fourteen with revolvers tucked in your bedrolls, either.
Ka
’s at work here, and where
ka
works, anything is possible.”

Slowly, slowly, Steven took off his hat, stepped back, and swept them a bow. “Go in peace, boys. And return in health.”

“Long days and pleasant nights, sai,” Alain said.

“Good fortune,” Cuthbert said.

“I love you,” Roland said.

Steven nodded. “Thankee-sai—I love you, too. My blessings, boys.” He said this last in a loud voice, and the other two men—Robert Allgood and Christopher Johns, who had been known in the days of his savage youth as Burning Chris—added their own blessings.