Wizard and glass - Stephen King [62]
Roland looked at his father, shocked and amazed. Steven looked back, saying nothing for a long time. But now he wore the face Roland remembered from earliest childhood: calm and sure. The weariness and the look of half-distracted fury had passed away like last night’s thunderstorms.
At last his father spoke. “I was wrong in what I said, and I apologize. You did not forget my face, Roland. But still you were foolish—you allowed yourself to be driven by one far slyer than you will ever be in your life. It’s only by the grace of the gods and the working of ka that you have not been sent west, one more true gunslinger out of Marten’s road . . . out of John Farson’s road . . . and out of the road which leads to the creature that rules them.” He stood and held out his arms. “If I had lost you, Roland, I should have died.”
Roland got to his feet and went naked to his father, who embraced him fiercely. When Steven Deschain kissed him first on one cheek and then the other, Roland began to weep. Then, in Roland’s ear, Steven Deschain whispered six words.
16
“What?” Susannah asked. “What six words?”
“ ‘I have known for two years,’ ” Roland said. “That was what he whispered.”
“Holy Christ,” Eddie said.
“He told me I couldn’t go back to the palace. If I did, I’d be dead by nightfall. He said, ‘You have been born to your destiny in spite of all Marten could do; yet he has sworn to kill you before you can grow to be a problem to him. It seems that, winner in the test or no, you must leave Gilead anyway. For only awhile, though, and you’ll go east instead of west. I’d not send you alone, either, or without a purpose.’ Then, almost as an afterthought, he added: ‘Or with a pair of sorry ’prentice revolvers.’ ”
“What purpose?” Jake asked. He had clearly been captivated by the story; his eyes shone nearly as bright as Oy’s. “And which friends?”
“These things you must now hear,” Roland said, “and how you judge me will come in time.”
He fetched a sigh—the deep sigh of a man who contemplates some arduous piece of work—and then tossed fresh wood on the fire. As the flames flared up, driving the shadows back a little way, he began to talk. All that queerly long night he talked, not finishing the story of Susan Delgado until the sun was rising in the east and painting the glass castle yonder with all the bright hues of a fresh day, and a strange green cast of light which was its own true color.
PART TWO
SUSAN
CHAPTER I
BENEATH THE KISSING MOON
1
A perfect disc of silver—the Kissing Moon, as it was called in Full Earth—hung above the ragged hill five miles east of Hambry and ten miles south of Eyebolt Canyon. Below the hill the late summer heat still held, suffocating even two hours after sundown, but atop the Cöos, it was as if Reap had already come, with its strong breezes and frost-pinched air. For the woman who lived here with no company but a snake and one old mutie cat, it was to be a long night.
Never mind, though; never mind, my dear. Busy hands are happy hands. So they are.
She waited until the hoofbeats of her visitors’ horses had faded, sitting quietly by the window in the hut’s large room (there was only one other, a bedroom little bigger than a closet). Musty, the six-legged cat, was on her shoulder. Her lap was full of moonlight.
Three horses, bearing away three men. The Big Coffin Hunters, they called themselves.
She snorted. Men were funny, aye, so they were, and the most amusing thing about them was how little they knew it. Men, with their swaggering, belt-hitching names for themselves. Men, so proud of their muscles, their drinking capacities, their eating capacities; so everlastingly proud of their pricks. Yes, even in these times, when a good many of them could shoot