The gunslinger - Stephen King [59]
“It’s all so old,” Jake said glumly when they paused for a rest. “Isn’t there anything young in this world?”
The gunslinger smiled and gave Jake an elbow. “You are,” he said.
Jake responded with a wan smile. “Will it be hard to climb?”
The gunslinger looked at him, curious. “The mountains are high. Don’t you think it will be a hard climb?”
Jake looked back at him, his eyes clouded, puzzled.
“No.”
They went on.
VIII
The sun climbed to its zenith, seemed to hang there more briefly than it ever had during the desert crossing, and then passed on, returning them their shadows. Shelves of rock protruded from the rising land like the arms of giant easychairs buried in the earth. The scrub grass turned yellow and sere. Finally they were faced with a deep, chimney-like crevasse in their path and they scaled a short, peeling rise of rock to get around and above it. The ancient granite had faulted on lines that were step-like, and as they had both intuited, the beginning of their climb, at least, was easy. They paused on the four-foot-wide scarp at the top and looked back over the land to the desert, which curled around the upland like a huge yellow paw. Further off it gleamed at them in a white shield that dazzled the eye, receding into dim waves of rising heat. The gunslinger felt faintly amazed at the realization that this desert had nearly murdered him. From where they stood, in a new coolness, the desert certainly appeared momentous, but not deadly.
They turned back to the business of the climb, scrambling over jackstraw falls of rock and crouch-walking up inclined planes of stone shot with glitters of quartz and mica. The rock was pleasantly warm to the touch, but the air was definitely cooler. In the late afternoon the gunslinger heard the faint sound of thunder. The rising line of the mountains obscured the sight of the rain on the other side, however.
When the shadows began to turn purple, they camped in the overhang of a jutting brow of rock. The gunslinger anchored their blanket above and below, fashioning a kind of shanty lean-to. They sat at the mouth of it, watching the sky spread a cloak over the world. Jake dangled his feet over the drop. The gunslinger rolled his evening smoke and eyed Jake half humorously. “Don’t roll over in your sleep,” he said, “or you may wake up in hell.”
“I won’t,” Jake replied seriously. “My mother says—” He broke it off.
“She says what?”
“That I sleep like a dead man,” Jake finished. He looked at the gunslinger, who saw that the boy’s mouth was trembling as he strove to keep back tears—only a boy, he thought, and pain smote him, the icepick that too much cold water can sometimes plant in the forehead. Only a boy. Why? Silly question. When a boy, wounded in body or spirit, called that question out to Cort, that ancient, scarred battle-engine whose job it was to teach the sons of gunslingers the beginning of what they had to know, Cort would answer: Why is a crooked letter and can’t be made straight . . . never mind why, just get up, pus-head! Get up! The day’s young!
“Why am I here?” Jake asked. “Why did I forget everything from before?”
“Because the man in black has drawn you here,” the gunslinger said. “And because of the Tower. The Tower stands at a kind of . . . power-nexus. In time.”
“I don’t understand that!”
“Nor do I,” the gunslinger said. “But something has been happening. Just in my own time. ‘The world has moved on,’ we say . . . we’ve always said. But it’s moving on faster now. Something has happened to time. It’s softening.”
They sat in silence. A breeze, faint but with an edge, picked at their legs. Somewhere it made a hollow whooooo in a rock fissure.
“Where do you come from?” Jake asked.
“From a place that no longer exists. Do you know the Bible?”
“Jesus and Moses. Sure.”
The gunslinger smiled. “That’s right. My land had a Biblical name—New Canaan, it was called. The land of milk and honey. In the Bible’s