I'm dead, he thought at some point during this process ... when the
power to think had been at least partially restored to him. Dead
and rising into whatever afterlife there is. That's what it must be.
The singing I hear is the singing of dead souls.
Total blackness gave way to the dark grey of rainclouds, then to
the lighter grey of fog. This brightened to the uniform clarity of a
heavy mist moments before the sun breaks through. And through it
all was that sense of rising, as if he had been caught in some mild
but powerful updraught.
As the sense of rising began to diminish and the brightness behind
his eyelids grew, Roland at last began to believe he was still alive.
It was the singing that convinced him. Not dead souls, not the
heavenly host of angels sometimes described by the Jesus-man
preachers, but only those bugs. A little like crickets, but sweeter-
voiced. The ones he had heard in Eluria.
On this thought, he opened his eyes.
His belief that he was still alive was severely tried, for Roland
found himself hanging suspended in a world of white beauty - his
first bewildered thought was that he was in the sky, floating within
a fair-weather cloud. All around him was the reedy singing of the
bugs. Now he could hear the tinkling of bells, too.
He tried to turn his head and swayed in some sort of harness. He
could hear it creaking. The soft singing of the bugs, like crickets in
the grass at the end of day back home in Gilead, hesitated and
broke rhythm. When it did, what felt like a tree of pain grew up
Roland's back. He had no idea what its burning branches might be,
but the trunk was surely his spine. A far deadlier pain sank into one
of his lower legs ~ in his confusion, the gunslinger could not tell
which one. That's where the club with the nails in it got me, he
thought. And more pain in his head. His skull felt like a badly
cracked egg. He cried out, and could hardly believe that the harsh
crow's caw he heard came from his own throat. He thought he
could also hear, very faintly, the barking of the cross-dog, but
surely that was his imagination.
Am I dying? Have I awakened once more at the very end?
A hand stroked his brow. He could feel it but not see it - fingers
trailing across his skin ' pausing here and there to massage a knot
or a line. Delicious, like a drink of cool water on a hot day. He
began to close his eyes, and then a horrible idea came to him:
suppose that hand were green, its owner wearing a tattered red vest
over her hanging dugs?
What if it is? What could you do?
'Hush, man,' a young woman's voice said ... or perhaps it was the
voice of a girl. Certainly the first person Roland thought of was
Susan, the girl from Mejis, she who had spoken to him as thee.
'Where ... where . . .'
'Hush, stir not. 'Tis far too soon.'
The pain in his back was subsiding now, but the image of the pain
as a tree remained, for his very skin seemed to be moving like
leaves in a light breeze. How could that be?
He let the question go - let all questions go - and concentrated on
the small, cool hand stroking his brow.
'Hush, pretty man, God's love be upon ye. Yet it's sore hurt ye are.
Be still. Heal.'
The dog had hushed its barking (if it had ever been there in the first
place), and Roland became aware of that low, creaking sound
again. It reminded him of horse-tethers, or something - hangropes -
he didn't like to think of. Now he believed he could feel pressure
beneath his thighs, his buttocks, and perhaps . . . yes ... his
shoulders.
I'm not in a bed at all. I think I'm above a bed. Can that be?
He supposed he could be in a sling. He seemed to remember once,
as a boy, that some fellow had been suspended that way in the
horse-doctor's room behind the Great Hall. A stablehand who had
been burned too badly by kerosene to be laid in a bed. The man
had died, but not soon enough; for two nights, his shrieks had filled
the sweet summer air of the Gathering Fields.
Am I burned, then, nothing but a cinder with legs, hanging in a
sling?
The fingers touched the centre of his brow, rubbing away the
frown forming there. And it was as if the voice which went with
the hand had read his thoughts, picking them up with the tips of her
clever, soothing fingers.
'Ye'll be fine if God wills, sai,' the voice which went with the hand
said. 'But time belongs to God, not to you.'
No, he would have said, if he had been able. Time belongs to the
Tower.
Then he slipped down again, descending as smoothly as he had
risen, going away from the hand and the dreamlike sounds of the
singing insects and chiming bells. There was an interval that might
have been sleep, or perhaps unconsciousness, but he never went all
the way back down.
At one point he thought he heard the girl's voice, although he
couldn't be sure, because this time it was raised in fury, or fear, or
both. 'No!' she cried. 'Ye can't have it off him and ye know it! Go
your course and stop talking of it, do!'
When he rose back to consciousness the second time, he was no
stronger in body, but a little more himself in mind. What he saw
when he opened his eyes wasn't the inside of a cloud, but at first
that same phrase - white beauty - recurred to him. It was in some
ways the most beautiful place Roland had ever been in his life ...
partially because he still had a life, of course, but mostly because it
was so fey and peaceful.
It was a huge room, high and long. When Roland at last turned his
head - cautiously, so cautiously - to take its measure as well as he
could, he thought it must run at least two hundred yards from end
to end. It was built narrow, but its height gave the place a feeling
of tremendous airiness.
There were no walls or ceilings such as those he was familiar with,
although it was a little like being in a vast tent. Above him, the sun
struck and diffused its light across billowy panels of thin white
silk, turning them into the bright swags which he had first mistaken
for clouds. Beneath this silk canopy, the room was as grey as
twilight. The walls, also silk, rippled like sails in a faint breeze.
Hanging from each wall-panel was a curved rope bearing small
bells. These lay against the fabric and rang in low and charming
unison, like wind-chimes, when the walls rippled.
An aisle ran down the centre of the long room; on either side of it
were scores of beds, each made up with clean white sheets and
headed with crisp white pillows. There were perhaps forty on the
far side of the aisle, all empty, and another forty on Roland's side.
There were two other occupied beds here, one next to Roland on
his left. This fellow
It's the boy. The one who was in the trough.
The idea ran goosebumps up Roland's arms and gave him a nasty,
superstitious start. He peered more closely at the sleeping boy.
Can't be. You're just
dazed, that's all; it can't be.
Yet closer scrutiny refused to dispel the idea. It certainly seemed to
be the boy from the trough, probably ill (why else would he be in a
place like this?) but far from dead; Roland could see the slow rise
and fall of his chest, and the occasional twitch of the fingers which
dangled over the side of the bed.
You didn't get a good enough look at him to be sure of anything,
and after a few days in that trough, his own mother couldn't have
said for sure who it was.
But Roland, who'd had a mother, knew better than that. He also
knew that he'd seen the gold medallion around the boy's neck. just
before the attack of the green folk, he had taken it from this lad's
corpse and put it in his pocket. Now someone - the proprietors of
this place, most likely, they who had sorcerously restored the lad
named James to his interrupted life - had taken it back from Roland
and put it around the boy's neck again.
Had the girl with the wonderfully cool hand done that? Did she in
consequence think Roland a ghoul who would steal from the dead?
He didn't like to think so. In fact, the notion made him more
uncomfortable than the idea that the young cowboy's bloated body
had been somehow returned to its normal size and then reanimated.
Further down the aisle on this side, perhaps a dozen empty beds
away from the boy and Roland Deschain, the gunslinger saw a
third inmate of this queer infirmary. This fellow looked at least
four times the age of the lad, twice the age of the gunslinger. He
had a long beard, more grey than black, that hung to his upper
chest in two straggly forks. The face above it was sun-darkened,
heavily lined, and pouched beneath the eyes. Running from his left
cheek and across the bridge of his nose was a thick dark mark
which Roland took to be a scar. The bearded man was either asleep
or unconscious - Roland could hear him snoring - and was
suspended three feet above his bed, held up by a complex series of
white belts that glimmered in the dim air. These crisscrossed each
other, making a series of figure eights all the way around the man's
body. He looked like a bug in some exotic spider's web. He wore a
gauzy white bed-dress. One of the belts ran beneath his buttocks,
elevating his crotch in a way that seemed to offer the bulge of his
privates to the grey and dreaming air. Further down his body,
Roland could see the dark shadow-shapes of his legs. They
appeared to be twisted like ancient dead trees. Roland didn't like to
think in how many places they must have been broken to look like
that. And yet they appeared to be moving. How could they be, if
the bearded man was unconscious? It was a trick of the light,
perhaps, or of the shadows ... perhaps the gauzy singlet the man
was wearing was stirring in a light breeze, or ...
Roland looked away, up at the billowy silk panels high above,
trying to control the accelerating beat of his heart. What he saw
hadn't been caused by the wind, or a shadow, or anything else. The
man's legs were somehow moving without moving ... as Roland
had seemed to feel his own back moving without moving. He
didn't know what could cause such a phenomenon, and didn't want
to know, at least not yet.
'I'm not ready,' he whispered. His lips felt very dry. He closed his
eyes again, wanting to sleep, wanting not to think about what the
bearded man's twisted legs might indicate about his own condition.
But
But you'd better get ready.
That was the voice that always seemed to come when he tried to
slack off, to scamp a job, or take the easy way around an obstacle.
It was the voice of Cort, his old teacher. The man whose stick they
had all feared, as boys. They hadn't feared his stick as much as his
mouth, however. His jeers when they were weak, his contempt
when they complained or tried whining about their lot.
Are you a gunslinger, Roland? If you are, you better get ready.
Roland opened his eyes again and turned his head to the left again.
As he did, he felt something shift against his chest.
Moving very slowly, he raised his right hand out of the sling that
held it. The pain in his back stirred and muttered. He stopped
moving until he decided the pain was going to get no worse (if he
was careful, at least), then lifted the hand the rest of the way to his
chest. It encountered finely-woven cloth. Cotton. He lowered his
chin to his breastbone and saw he was wearing a bed-dress like the
one draped on the body of the bearded man.
Roland reached beneath the neck of the gown and felt a fine chain.
A little further down, his fingers encountered a rectangular metal
shape. He thought he knew what it was, but had to be sure. He
pulled it out, still moving with great care, trying not to engage any
of the muscles in his back. A gold medallion. He dared the pain,
lifting it until he could read what was engraved upon it:
James
Loved of family, Loved of GOD
He tucked it into the top of the bed-dress again and looked back at
the sleeping boy in the next bed - in it, not suspended over it. The
sheet was only pulled up to the boy's ribcage, and the medallion
lay on the pristine white breast of his bed-dress. The same
medallion Roland now wore. Except ...
Roland thought he understood, and understanding was a relief.
He looked back at the bearded man, and saw an exceedingly
strange thing: the thick black line of scar across the bearded man's
cheek and nose was gone. Where it had been was the pinkish-red
mark of a healing wound ... a cut, or perhaps a slash.
I imagined it.
No, gunslinger, Cort's voice returned. Such as you was not made to
imagine. As you well know.
The little bit of movement had tired him out again ... or perhaps it
was the thinking which had really tired him out. The singing bugs
and chiming bells combined and made something too much like a
lullaby to resist. This time when Roland closed his eyes, he slept.
III. Five Sisters. Jenna. The Doctors of Eluria.
The Medallion. A Promise of Silence.
When Roland awoke again, he was at first sure that he was still
sleeping. Dreaming. Having a nightmare.
Once, at the time he had met and fallen in love with Susan
Delgado, he had known a witch named Rhea - the first real witch
of Mid-World he had ever met. It was she who had caused Susan's
death, although Roland had played his own part. Now, opening his
eyes and seeing Rhea not just once but five times over, he thought:
This is what comes of remembering those old times. By conjuring
Susan, I've conjured Rhea of the Coos, as well. Rhea and her
sisters.
The five were dressed in billowing habits as white as the walls and
the panels of the ceiling. Their antique crones' faces were framed
in wimples just as white, their skin as grey and runnelled as
droughted earth by comparison. Hanging like phylacteries from the
bands of silk imprisoning their hair (if they indeed had hair) were
/>
lines of tiny bells which chimed as they moved or spoke. Upon the
snowy breasts of their habits was embroidered a blood-red rose ...
the sigil of the Dark Tower. Seeing this, Roland thought: I am not
dreaming. These harridans are real.
'He wakes!' one of them cried in a gruesomely coquettish voice.
'Oooo!'
'Ooooh!'
'Ah!'
They fluttered like birds. The one in the centre stepped forward,
and as she did, their faces seemed to shimmer like the silk walls of
the ward. They weren't old after all, he saw - middle-aged, perhaps,
but not old.
Yes. They are old. They changed.
The one who now took charge was taller than the others, and with
a broad, slightly bulging brow. She bent towards Roland, and the
bells which fringed her forehead tinkled. The sound made him feel
sick, somehow, and weaker than he had felt a moment before. Her
hazel eyes were intent. Greedy, mayhap. She touched his cheek for
a moment, and a numbness seemed to spread there. Then she
glanced down, and a look which could have been disquiet cramped
her face. She took her hand back.
'Ye wake, pretty man. So ye do. 'Tis well.'
'Who are you? Where am l?'
'We are the Little Sisters of Eluria,' she said. 'I am Sister Mary.
Here is Sister Louise, and Sister Michela, and Sister Coquina -'
'And Sister Tamra,' said the last. 'A lovely lass of one-and-twenty.'
She giggled. Her face shimmered, and for a moment she was again
as old as the world. Hooked of nose, grey of skin. Roland thought
once more of Rhea.
They moved closer, encircling the complication of harness in
which he lay suspended, and when Roland shrank away, the pain
roared up his back and injured leg again. He groaned. The straps
holding him creaked.
'Ooooo!'
'It hurts!'
'Hurts him!'
'Hurts so fierce!'
They pressed even closer, as if his pain fascinated them. And now
he could smell them, a dry and earthy smell. The one named Sister
Michela reached out
'Go away! Leave him! Have I not told ye before?'
They jumped back from this voice, startled. Sister Mary looked
particularly annoyed. But she stepped back, with one final glare
(Roland would have sworn it) at the medallion lying on his chest.
He had tucked it back under the bed-dress at his last waking, but it
was out again now.
The Collective Page 21
