The waste lands - Stephen King [23]
Roland sighed deeply. “I don’t know how to begin,” he said. “It’s been so long since I’ve had companions . . . or a tale to tell . . .”
“Start with the bear,” Eddie said.
Susannah leaned forward and touched the jawbone Roland held in his hands. It frightened her, but she touched it anyway. “And finish with this.”
“Yes.” Roland lifted the bone to eye-level and looked at it for a moment before dropping it back into his lap. “We’ll have to speak of this, won’t we? It’s the center of the thing.”
But the bear came first.
12
“THIS IS THE STORY I was told when I was a child,” Roland said. “When everything was new, the Great Old Ones—they weren’t gods, but people who had almost the knowledge of gods—created Twelve Guardians to stand watch at the twelve portals which lead in and out of the world. Sometimes I heard that these portals were natural things, like the constellations we see in the sky or the bottomless crack in the earth we called Dragon’s Grave, because of the great burst of steam they gave off every thirty or forty days. But other people—one I remember in particular, the head cook in my father’s castle, a man named Hax—said they were not natural, that they had been created by the Great Old Ones themselves, in the days before they hanged themselves with pride like a noose and disappeared from the earth. Hax used to say that the creation of the Twelve Guardians was the last act of the Great Old Ones, their attempt to atone for the great wrongs they had done to each other, and to the earth itself.”
“Portals,” Eddie mused. “Doors, you mean. We’re back to those again. Do these doors that lead in and out of the world open on the world Suze and I came from? Like the ones we found along the beach?”
“I don’t know,” Roland said. “For every thing I do know, there are a hundred things I don’t. You—both of you—will have to reconcile yourselves to that fact. The world has moved on, we say. When it did, it went like a great receding wave, leaving only wreckage behind . . . wreckage that sometimes looks like a map.”
“Well, make a guess!” Eddie exclaimed, and the raw eagerness in his voice told the gunslinger that Eddie had not given up the idea of returning to his own world—and Susannah’s—even now. Not entirely.
“Leave him be, Eddie,” Susannah said. “The man don’t guess.”
“Not true—sometimes the man does,” Roland said, surprising them both. “When guessing’s the only thing left, sometimes he does. The answer is no. I don’t think—I don’t guess—that these portals are much like the doors on the beach. I don’t guess they go to a where or when that we would recognize. I think the doors on the beach—the ones that led into the world you both came from—were like the pivot at the center of a child’s teeterboard. Do you know what that is?”
“Seesaw?” Susannah asked, and tipped her hand back and forth to demonstrate.
“Yes!” Roland agreed, looking pleased. “Just so. On one end of this sawsee—”
“Seesaw,” Eddie said, smiling a little.
“Yes. On one end, my ka. On the other, that of the man in black— Walter. The doors were the center, creations of the tension between two opposing destinies. These other portals are things far greater than Walter, or me, or the little fellowship we three have made.”
“Are you saying,” Susannah asked hesitantly, “that the portals where these Guardians stand watch are outside ka? Beyond ka?”
“I’m saying that I believe so.” He offered his own brief smile, a thin sickle in the firelight. “That I guess so.”
He was silent a moment, then he picked up a stick of his own. He brushed away the carpet of pine needles and used the stick to draw in the dirt beneath:
“Here is the world as I was told it existed when I was a child. The Xs are the portals standing in a ring at its eternal edge. If one drew six lines, connecting these portals in pairs—so—”
He looked up. “Do you see where the lines cross in the center?”
Eddie felt gooseflesh crawl up his back and down his arms. His mouth was suddenly dry. “Is that it, Roland? Is that—?”
Roland nodded. His long, lined face was grave. “At this nexus lies the Great