CHAPTER 1 #10
The sky was an ugly, bruised purple, weirdly lit from above with the first fingers of dawn.
Allie moved about like a wraith, lighting lamps, tending corn fritters that sputtered in the skillet.
He had loved her hard after she had told him what he had to know, and she had sensed the coming end and had given more than she had ever given, and she had given it with desperation against the coming of dawn, given it with the tireless energy of sixteen.
But she was pale this morning, on the brink of menopause again.
She served him without a word. He ate rapidly, chewing, swallowing, chasing each bite with hot coffee. Allie went to the batwings and stood staring out at the morning, at the silent battalions of slow-moving clouds.
“It’s going to dust up today.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Are you ever?” she asked ironically, and turned to watch him get his hat. He clapped it on his head and brushed past her.
“Sometimes,” he told her. He only saw her once more alive.
XV
By the time he reached Sylvia Pittston’s shack, the wind had died utterly and the whole world seemed to wait. He had been in desert country long enough to know that the longer the lull, the harder the blow when it finally came. A queer, flat light hung over everything.
There was a large wooden cross nailed to the door of the place, which was leaning and tired.
He rapped and waited. No answer. He rapped again.
No answer. He drew back and kicked in the door with one hard shot of his right boot.
A small bolt on the inside ripped free. The door banged against a haphazardly planked wall and scared rats into skittering flight.
Sylvia Pittston sat in the hall, in a mammoth ironwood rocker, and looked at him calmly with those great and dark eyes.
The stormlight fell on her cheeks in crazy half-tones.
She wore a shawl. The rocker made tiny squeaking noises.
They looked at each other for a long, clockless moment.
“You will never catch him,” she said. “You walk in the way of evil.”
“He came to you,” the gunslinger said.
“And to my bed. He spoke to me in the Tongue. The High Speech. He—”
“He screwed you. In every sense of the word.”
She did not flinch. “You walk an evil way, gunslinger. You stand in shadows. You stood in the shadows of the holy place last night. Did you think I couldn’t see you?”
“Why did he heal the weed-eater?”
“He’s an angel of God. He said so.”
“I hope he smiled when he said it.”
She drew her lip back from her teeth in an unconsciously feral gesture. “He told me you would follow. He told me what to do. He said you are the Antichrist.”
The gunslinger shook his head. “He didn’t say that.”
She smiled up at him lazily. “He said you would want to bed me. Is it true?”
“Did you ever meet a man who didn’t want to bed you?”
“The price of my flesh would be your life, gunslinger. He has got me with child. Not his, but the child of a great king. If you invade me . . .” She let the lazy smile complete her thought.
At the same time she gestured with her huge, mountainous thighs.
They stretched beneath her garment like pure marble slabs. The effect was dizzying.
The gunslinger dropped his hands to the butts of his pistols. “You have a demon, woman, not a king. Yet fear not. I can remove it.”
The effect was instantaneous. She recoiled against the chair, and a weasel look flashed on her face. “Don’t touch me! Don’t come near me! You dare not touch the Bride of God!”
“Want to bet?” the gunslinger said. He stepped toward her. “As the gambler said when he laid down a handful of cups and wands, just watch me.”
The flesh on the huge frame quaked. Her face had become a caricature of terror, and she stabbed the sign of the Eye at him with pronged fingers.
“The desert,” the gunslinger said. “What after the desert?”
“You’ll never catch him! Never! Never! You’ll burn! He told me so!”
“I’ll catch him,” the gunslinger said. “We both know it. What is beyond the desert?”
“No!”
“Answer me!”
“No!”
He slid forward, dropped to his knees, and grabbed her thighs. Her legs locked like a vise. She made strange, lustful keening noises.
“The demon, then,” he said. “Out it comes.”
“No—”
He pried the legs apart and unholstered one of his guns.
“No! No! No!” Her breath came in short, savage grunts.
“Answer me.”
She rocked in the chair and the floor trembled. Prayers and garbled bits of scripture flew from her lips.
He rammed the barrel of the gun forward.
He could feel the terrified wind sucked into her lungs more than he could hear it.
Her hands beat at his head; her legs drummed against the floor.
And at the same time the huge body tried to suck the invader in.
Outside nothing watched them but the bruised and dusty sky.
She screamed something, high and inarticulate.
“What?”
“Mountains!”
“What about them?”
“He stops . . . on the other side . . . s-s-sweet Jesus! . . . to m-make his strength. Med-m-meditation, do you understand? Oh . . . I’m . . . I’m . . .”
The whole huge mountain of flesh suddenly strained forward and upward, yet he was careful not to let her secret flesh touch him.
Then she seemed to wilt and grow smaller, and she wept with her hands in her lap.
“So,” he said, getting up. “The demon is served, eh?”
“Get out. You’ve killed the child of the Crimson King. But you will be repaid. I set my watch and warrant on it. Now get out. Get out.”
He stopped at the door and looked back. “No child,” he said briefly. “No angel, prince, no demon.”
“Leave me alone.”
He did.
XVI
By the time he arrived at Kennerly’s, a queer obscurity had come over the northern horizon and he knew it was dust. Over Tull the air was still dead quiet.
Kennerly was waiting for him on the chaff-strewn stage that was the floor of his barn. “Leaving?” He grinned abjectly at the gunslinger.
“Yar.”
“Not before the storm?”
“Ahead of it.”
“The wind goes faster than any man on a mule. In the open it can kill you.”
“I’ll want the mule now,” the gunslinger said simply.
“Sure.” But Kennerly did not turn away, merely stood as if searching for something further to say, grinning his groveling, hate-filled grin, and his eyes flicked up and over the gunslinger’s shoulder.
The gunslinger sidestepped and turned at the same time, and the heavy stick of stovewood that the girl Soobie held swished through the air, grazing his elbow only.
She lost hold of it with the force of her swing and it clattered over the floor.
In the explosive height of the loft, barnswallows took shadowed wing.
The girl looked at him bovinely. Her breasts thrust with overripe grandeur at the wash-faded shirt she wore. One thumb sought the haven of her mouth with dream-like slowness.
The gunslinger turned back to Kennerly. Kennerly’s grin was huge. His skin was waxy yellow. His eyes rolled in their sockets. “I . . .” he began in a phlegm-filled whisper and could not continue.
“The mule,” the gunslinger prodded gently.
“Sure, sure, sure,” Kennerly whispered, the grin now touched with incredulity that he should still be alive. He shuffled to get it.
The gunslinger moved to where he could watch the man go. The hostler brought the mule back and handed him the bridle. “You get in an’ tend your sister,” he said to Soobie.
Soobie tossed her head and didn’t move.
The gunslinger left them there, staring at each other across the dusty, droppings-strewn floor, he with his sick grin, she with dumb, inanimate defiance. Outside the heat was still like a hammer.
XVII
He walked the mule up the center of the street, his boots sending up squirts of dust. His waterbags, swollen with water, were strapped across the mule’s back.
He stopped at the tonk, but Allie was not there. The place was deserted, battened down for the storm, but still dirty from the night before. It stank of sour beer.
He filled his tote sack with corn meal, dried and roasted corn, and half of the raw hamburg in the cooler.
He left four gold pieces stacked on the planked counter.
Allie did not come down. Sheb’s piano bid him a silent, yellow-toothed toodle-oo.
He stepped back out and cinched the tote sack across the mule’s back.
There was a tight feeling in his throat.
He might still avoid the trap, but the chances were small. He was, after all, The Interloper.
He walked past the shuttered, waiting buildings, feeling the eyes that peered through cracks and chinks. The man in black had played God in Tull. He had spoken of a King’s child, a red prince. Was it only a sense of the cosmic comic, or a matter of desperation? It was a question of some importance.
There was a shrill, harried scream from behind him, and doors suddenly threw themselves open.
Forms lunged. The trap was sprung. Men in longhandles and men in dirty dungarees.
Women in slacks and in faded dresses. Even children, tagging after their parents.
And in every hand there was a chunk of wood or a knife.
His reaction was automatic, instantaneous, inbred.
He whirled on his heels while his hands pulled the guns from their holsters, the butts heavy and sure in his hands.
It was Allie, and of course it had to be Allie, coming at him with her face distorted, the scar a hellish purple in the lowering light.
He saw that she was held hostage; the distorted, grimacing face of Sheb peered over her shoulder like a witch’s familiar.
She was his shield and sacrifice. He saw it all, clear and shadowless in the frozen, deathless light of the sterile calm, and heard her:
“Kill me, Roland, kill me! I said the word, nineteen, I said, and he told me . . . I can’t bear it—”