CHAPTER 4
The Slow Mutants
I
The gunslinger spoke slowly to Jake in the rising and falling inflections of one who speaks in his sleep:
“There were three of us that night: Cuthbert, Alain, and me. We weren’t supposed to be there, because none of us had passed from the time of children.
We were still in our clouts, as the saying went.
If we’d been caught, Cort would have striped us bloody.
But we weren’t. I don’t think any of the ones that went before us were caught, either.
Boys must put on their fathers’ pants in private, strut them in front of the mirror, and then sneak them back on their hangers; it was like that.
The father pretends he doesn’t notice the new way the pants are hung up, or the traces of boot-polish mustaches still under their noses. Do you see?”
The boy said nothing. He’d said nothing since they had passed from the daylight.
The gunslinger, on the other hand, had talked hectically, feverishly, to fill the silence.
He had not looked back at the light as they passed into the land beneath the mountains, but the boy had.
The gunslinger had read the failing of day in the soft mirror of Jake’s cheek: now faint rose, now milk-glass, now pallid silver, now the last dusk-glow touch of evening, now nothing.
The gunslinger had struck a false light and they had gone on.
Finally they camped. No echo from the man in black returned to them. Perhaps he had stopped to rest, too. Or perhaps he floated onward and without running lights, through nighted chambers.
“The Sowing Night Cotillion—the Commala, some of the older folk called it, after the word for rice—was held once a year in the Great Hall,” the gunslinger went on. “The proper name was The Hall of Grandfathers, but to us it was only the Great Hall.”
The sound of dripping water came to their ears.
“A courting rite, as any spring dance surely is.” The gunslinger laughed deprecatingly; the insensate walls turned the sound into a loon-like wheeze.
“In the old days, the books say, it was the welcoming of spring, what was sometimes called New Earth or Fresh Commala. But civilization, you know . . .”
He trailed off, unable to describe the change inherent in that featureless noun, the death of romance and the lingering of its sterile, carnal revenant, a world living on the forced respiration of glitter and ceremony; the geometric steps of make-believe courtship during the Sowing Night Cotil’ that had replaced the truer, madder, scribble-scrabble of love which he could only intuit dimly; hollow grandeur in place of true passions which might once have built kingdoms and sustained them.
He found the truth with Susan Delgado in Mejis, only to lose it again.
Once there was a king, he might have told the boy; the Eld whose blood, attenuated though it may be, still flows in my veins.
But kings are done, lad. In the world of light, anyway.
“They made something decadent out of it,” the gunslinger said at last. “A play. A game.” In his voice was all the unconscious distaste of the ascetic and the eremite.
His face, had there been stronger light to illumine it, would have shown harshness and sorrow, the purest kind of condemnation.
His essential force had not been cut or diluted by the passage of years.
The lack of imagination that still remained in that face was remarkable.
“But the Ball,” the gunslinger said. “The Sowing Night Cotil’ . . .”
The boy did not speak, did not ask.
“There were crystal chandeliers, heavy glass with electric spark-lights. It was all light, it was an island of light.
“We sneaked into one of the old balconies, the ones that were supposed to be unsafe and roped off.
But we were boys, and boys will be boys, so they will.
To us everything was dangerous, but what of that?
Had we not been made to live forever? We thought so, even when we spoke to each other of our glorious deaths.
“We were above everyone and could look down on everything. I don’t remember that any of us said anything. We only drank it up with our eyes.
“There was a great stone table where the gunslingers and their women sat at meat, watching the dancers.
A few of the gunslingers also danced, but only a few.
And they were the young ones. The one who sprang the trap on Hax was one of the dancers, I seem to recall.
The elders only sat, and it seemed to me they were half embarrassed in all that light, all that civilized light.
They were revered ones, the feared ones, the guardians, but they seemed like hostlers in that crowd of cavaliers with their soft women . . .
“There were four circular tables loaded with food, and they turned all the time. The cooks’ boys never stopped coming and going from seven until three o’ the clock the next morning.
The tables were like clocks, and we could smell roast pork, beef, lobster, chickens, baked apples.
The odors changed as the tables turned. There were ices and candies.
There were great flaming skewers of meat.
“Marten sat next to my mother and father—I knew them even from so high above—and once she and Marten danced, slowly and revolvingly, and the others cleared the floor for them and clapped when it was over.
The gunslingers did not clap, but my father stood slowly and held his hands out to her.
And she went to him, smiling, holding out her own.
“It was a moment of enormous gravity, even we felt it in our high hiding place. My father had by then taken control of his ka-tet, you must ken—the Tet of the Gun—and was on the verge of becoming Dinh of Gilead, if not all In-World. The rest knew it. Marten knew it better than any . . . except, perhaps, for Gabrielle Verriss that was.”
The boy spoke at last, and with seeming reluctance. “She was your mother?”
“Aye. Gabrielle-of-the-Waters, daughter of Alan, wife of Steven, mother of Roland.” The gunslinger spread his hands apart in a mocking little gesture that seemed to say Here I am, and what of it? Then he dropped them into his lap again.
“My father was the last lord of light.”
The gunslinger looked down at his hands. The boy said nothing more.
“I remember how they danced,” the gunslinger said. “My mother and Marten, the gunslingers’ counselor. I remember how they danced, revolving slowly together and apart, in the old steps of courtship.”
He looked at the boy, smiling. “But it meant nothing, you know. Because power had been passed in some way that none of them knew but all understood, and my mother was grown root and branch to the holder and wielder of that power. Was it not so? She went to him when the dance was over, didn’t she?
And clasped his hands. Did they applaud?
Did the hall ring with it as those pretty boys and their soft ladies applauded and lauded him? Did it? Did it?”
Bitter water dripped distantly in the darkness. The boy said nothing.
“I remember how they danced,” the gunslinger said softly.
“I remember how they danced.” He looked up at the unseeable stone roof and it seemed for a moment that he might scream at it, rail at it, challenge it blindly—those blind and tongueless tonnages of granite that now bore their tiny lives like microbes in its stone intestine.
“What hand could have held the knife that did my father to his death?”
“I’m tired,” the boy said, and then again said no more.
The gunslinger lapsed into silence, and the boy laid over and put one hand between his cheek and the stone.
The little flame in front of them guttered.
The gunslinger rolled a smoke. It seemed he could see the crystal light still, in the eye of his memory; hear the shout of accolade, empty in a husked land that stood even then hopeless against a gray ocean of time.
Remembering that island of light hurt him bitterly, and he wished he had never held witness to it, or to his father’s cuckoldry.
He passed smoke between his mouth and nostrils, looking down at the boy. How we make large circles in earth for ourselves, he thought. Around we go, back to the start and the start is there again: resumption, which was ever the curse of daylight.
How long before we see daylight again?
He slept.
After the sound of his breathing had become long and steady and regular, the boy opened his eyes and looked at the gunslinger with an expression of sickness and love. The last light of the fire caught in one pupil for a moment and was drowned there. He went to sleep.
II
The gunslinger had lost most of his time sense in the desert, which was changeless; he lost the rest of it here in the passage under the mountains, which was lightless.
Neither of them had any means of telling the clock, and the concept of hours became meaningless, abnegate.
In a sense, they stood outside of time. A day might have been a week, or a week a day.
They walked, they slept, they ate thin meals that did not satisfy their bellies.
Their only companion was a steady thundering rush of the water, drilling its auger path through the stone.
They followed it and drank from its flat, mineral-salted depth, hoping there was nothing in it that would make them sick or kill them.
At times the gunslinger thought he saw fugitive drifting lights like corpse-lamps beneath its surface, but supposed they were only projections of his brain, which had not forgotten the light.
Still, he cautioned the boy not to put his feet in the water.
The range-finder in his head took them on steadily.