And Her Hair In Golden Fire

When she comes back over the ridge in the valley of bones, her horse is drinking from a silver basin. The man in black is there, eating oatcakes off his lap in the middle of her encampment — they’re a hundred wheels away from a storehouse, a thousand wheels away from anywhere oatweeds can grow, and still. It seems unlikely he’ll share.

Susan draws back the hammer on her gun. The sound is as loud as a gunshot in this desolate place, but the man does not seem to notice, nor care. He licks a finger and plucks up a couple crumbs. The horse nickers.

Susan takes a few careful paces forward, scattering the skeleton of some small creature with her steps. The man looks not a little like Roland — the shape of him in the dark is approximately right, but he doesn’t have Roland’s long coat swinging around his legs or Roland’s arid sweetness. He wears a cloak with a hood, and his long legs are clad in denim; his face could be any age at all, a strapping young man of nineteen with money in his pocket and ill intentions, or a carved-bone doll turned up by a plough from the bowels of the old earth.

She clears her throat in a hard sharp cough, and his head swivels up. His eyes scrape over her.

“Hile, Susan of Mejis. Come, take off your coat and stay a while.”

*

The pair of them make a palaver there among the bones. The man in black produces a deck of cards, passing it from hand to hand in a strange gesture.

“The spread is one of my own ideas. It came to me in a dream. Did I ever come to you in a dream, Susan? I forget.”

Susan thinks, and determines not to lie. “We met there once.”

Not in a good dream, the kind you get after you burn an apple-peel and find out which snotnosed boy in your barony has the right initial R in his name. A bad dream, the kind that leaves you unsettled beneath the quilts with your legs pressed together at the knees

“I came through Hambry once before you were ever born. Death and taxes. Hunker down by the fire, missy, I’m going to read your fortune.”

The cards are broad-backed and busy with decoration — the man in black slips the top card out to show her like he is letting her in on some brilliant trick. “The cards themselves are strictly orthodox. You’re from Hambry, after all, where they do it the old way. Seven cards, gunslinger, all of them for you. Beginning with the old maid.” The man in black lays down two cards on the packed dirt between them. Two broidered backs, staring up at her like eyes. “Are you watching, gunslinger?”

Susan settles in on crossed legs, her drawn gun still balanced across her knee. He sets out three more cards, one after the other, in a downward chevron. Two more, bracketing downward and outward. It doesn’t look like anything to her — no geometry she’s ever known, and no brand. The man in black must notice the tracing of her eyes; he traces a shape in the air with a stabbing index finger.

“A splitten hoop. A broken ring. A knot. A braid. The ladies of Gilead love card tricks. You’re halfway there already.”

He chuckles at her, for an unlikely lady: a broad-shouldered woman in heavy denim and a chambray shirt bloused out at the waist, a man’s hat that perches on her knee where she rests. Hard places make hard women, and strange places have made Susan strange.

The man in black turns over the first card — its face is like a window, and it takes a moment for it to register that the design on it is the wrong way around. Susan turns her head to peer at the image.

The card shows a thin woman counting silver pieces in one hand. With her other hand she washes her fingers in a silver basin. But the pieces seem to fall upwards into her hand, and the water that splashes from the basin is rust-red.

“Queen of Bells,” the man in black remarks. “Upside-down and inside-out, which in this case indicates a reversal of meaning and an upending of sense. But she made you what you are, Miss Oh-So-Young-And-Pretty, and she fed the witch. Don’t ask about that; it’s not pleasant.”

That one’s clear enough. It makes Susan’s gut twist.

“Nay,” Susan says. “Show me another.”

The next card shows a naked hairless man and maid, side by side. In the middle of a rugged landscape, the two of them cross a pair of pistols.

“The Lovers. Or the Twins, if you prefer, the choice of valentines. This one’s not so esoteric. This path wasn’t meant for you, but you chose it just the same.”

The next card is upside-down too — this one the man in black lifts in a flicker between his fingertip and nail to show her it right-ways-up, before laying it back down again where it first fell. The card face shows a lank-haired girl in a scarlet dress, with a silver crown upon her head. The ground around her feet is heaped with stones.

“The Queen of Cups,” the man in black remarks, “but the cup’s poured out. Tenderness unwarranted, intuition unheeded. The raven was loosed on the world, and his name was Sin, and the first sin was pride. Whoredoms and pestilences. You don’t know her yet, but you will, gunslinger.”

The next card turns.

“The Sun.” A freckled young girl in the middle of a coppice of trees, pointing skyward to a friendly yellow sun as big as a house. “Success by the skin of your teeth. Everything’s going to be all right now, everything. But is that the light at the end of the tunnel for her, or the clearing at the end of the path?

The next card turns.

“The Hermit. He can’t forget. But I bet he’d like to!”

A dark young boy slouching homeward on a city street, with a torch in his hand and a hand in his pocket marking the pages of a book — the hood of his waxed coat is pulled up, but he looks back over his shoulder. Even in miniature his face is exquisitely troubled.

“Three for three. All young, like you. All foolish.”

“Show me the next one, wizard.”

“The sixth card is Judgment. A reckoning, gunslinger, but not for you. Resumption and rebirth.”

Arthur Eld blowing his horn over a battlefield of torn banners, the churned-up bloody ground clustered with the unmistakable shapes of slow mutants — too many arms and too many eyes, darkly shining as they rise up. It makes the breath catch in Susan’s throat.

“Why are you showing me this?”

“For fun, of course. There’s still a seventh card.”

“Then show it to me and be damned.”

“The seventh card is the Tower, reversed. The world turned upside-down. Nothing less than the end of an age, a last crusade, a final outrage.”

The dark tower stands like a needle stabbing downward, like a funnel into the earth. Another naked man and woman fleeing from the shattering fall of a lightning bolt, but neither of them is looking where they’re going — they look backwards over their naked shoulders, toward the tower. Susan gazes on the last card for a long time.

Seven cards, each one faintly overlaid by the memory of another, like a phantasmal double. The man in black whistles.

“Now, would you look at that. No four of swords or nine of wands here. Much easier for me and more lucid for you.” One insolent figure stabs out, marking the cards of the periphery — the two nearest to himself, and the two in front of Susan. “Past, present, future, return. The last puts it all in flux — you could change the order around on any of the outer four and it’d be as true. That should trouble you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The man in black scoops up his cards and shuffles them from hand to hand. “Nothing at all, sugar, nothing at all. Are you thinking about Roland yet?” The malicious curiosity in his voice could strip paint.

There’s no answering that. Susan unties her hair and ties it up again. The man in black watches her, not without interest.

“The out-of-town brat abandoned to the charyou tree. But not all was lost, he left some things with his faithful lover for safekeeping — he’d never have left his guns behind, not even on pain of death by fire.”

“He meant me to have them,” Susan says, staunchly. “It was his wish, and I live by it.”

“They meant you to have them. Steven’s son might burn to ash but the last of the gunslingers must persevere. There’s always the last of the gunslingers. And you never knew the rest of them that well to begin with.”

“So it is.”

“It’s a terrible way to die, burning to death, did you know that? I wonder how it felt. The little tongues of fire creeping up his legs. The smoke in his eyes. Teeth cracking in the heat.”

“He didn’t feel it. I made sure of that.”

You don’t let animals suffer. You could nurse and mend a threaded mare with a broken leg, but some things have to end sooner rather than later. She’ll see it in her dreams until the day she dies.

“Right, right. You put a bullet through his eye, you gallant girl, you. I’m sure he’d thank you if he could. If you’re going to stare, I might as well give you something worth staring at. Look.”

He shuffles his deck and Susan leans forward despite herself. In the passing of the cards — the flicker of images barely glimpsed, the flashing of gilt edges becomes like the passing of a juggler’s ball, flickering like firelight.

Susan looks, and sees.

Another when and another where — a grown man with Roland’s frosty eyes and Steven Deschain’s guns, standing in the midst of an emerald city. Other faces in the passing of the cards — a dirty man in a dirty room rolling up his sleeve to the elbow beside a crouching ape, a woman in a wheeled chair raising her voice in song or just to cry a warning, a dead boy lying on a tarred road with his guts hanging out in a red spool, like he’d been trodden on by a gigantic foot. A dead billy-bumbler, with its tail curling around it like a sliver moon.

Another when and another where —matched maid and man, boy and girl, upside-down and inside-out. There are correspondences — matches, unions, pairings. If she doesn’t tear her eyes away she’ll be drawn away into it somehow, like a current draws boats downstream.

She can’t keep looking like this. Susan comes back to wakefulness with a shudder. The loose hairs on the back of her neck are prickling.

The man in black stretches his arms out behind his head.

“You’re cold, and the nights are long this deep in the west. Let me warm you up.” He is laughing at his own proposition.

“I’ve seen all I need to see today, sai.”

“Let me, let me, let me. Nights are long here, and you haven’t had a good screw since Roland died. Sometimes I’ve felt that way myself — Roland the man, not Roland the boy. But I digress.”

Roland had not been a man at fourteen, except in the most approximate sense, she’s old enough to know that now —

“You must think I’m stupid.”

“Or hungry. There’s spirits in such empty places that can smell an unsatisfied woman even at a great distance.”

“I’ve two hands, haven’t I?” Her private places are thoroughly familiar to her now. What would the old hag think? Rhea of the Cöos and this fellow are much alike.

In her dream, he had not been so handsome. He hadn’t been handsome at all, and still she’d mounted him like a she-devil until he’d been the one crying her pardon. That must be his truer face — he’s not a man but a thing, an old and knotted thing, why would a demon trying to drag a slimy shiver out of a sleeping girl make himself uglier than he really was?

“You’re a resourceful type, aren’t you?” He laughs at her, making a familiar gesture with one hand. “Still, it’s a cold night. The offer still stands. Don’t die wondering.”

“I don’t wonder.”

“What a fix he’s put you in. All you wanted was a bus ticket out of town and to dodge getting fingered by a man old enough to be your father and instead you’re dead by the end of the first act. That’s a raw deal if I ever heard of one.”

(She didn’t die in Hambry. She didn’t die in Hambry, she nearly died, and yet —)

She doesn’t know what a bus is, either. Susan crosses and uncrosses her arms, weighing the opportunity.

“Does that really strike you as wise?”

He’ll put a child in her out in this hideous desert place, or something worse than that. Another mistaken thing to love and lose. She doesn’t love him in the least, but the lean shape of him makes her prickle with heat, the crystal-edge of his high hard laugh.

“There are other ways to fuck. Some world-worn wanderer you turned out to be. Open your legs and unbutton your fly. The sun is setting.”

He snags her in an awful kiss — his mouth tastes like something bright and pink, his tongue roves over her teeth and she meets it like a striking rattlesnake. Susan draws her gun from her waistband and shoots him twice in the stomach, piercing two neat holes in his unremarkable black shirt. The man in black does not still himself, or jerk away, or cry out.

“Try me now,” Susan says.

“Here,” the man in black remarks — Susan thrusts her fingers in the wounds, two neat places, and he gasps with outrageous laughter. “That’s my vote of confidence. I’ll be quick.”

Misfire, misfire somehow. The bloody tips of her fingers mark the denim of his coat as she pushes him back — Susan thrusts her gun back in its holster and slides back in the dirt.

His hand thrusts past the buttons of her fly, in a tangle with her own — she lifts her hips against him and turns her face away, fumbling for a grip, for anything. They come together there for a moment, chafing crazily at each other — his wounds only produce a sluggish trickle of blood, not even enough to stain the shirt she wears, which is just as well. It was her father’s once.

Susan twists like an animal, they grapple — not like how men are accustomed to grapple with women, twisting wrists and blackening eyes, but strangely and in earnest. His tapered fingers rub her out urgently, nearly scratching her raw —Susan crushes his questing hand between their bodies and grinds out an angry flicker of heat. He mouths against her breasts through her shirt, busy and biting, catching at her to make her twitch and moan.

“Did he come to you like this?” There’s a thready edge of desperation in his voice, weird pathos. “Tell me how it was between you. Or don’t tell me, I can picture it already.”

Her with Roland? Her before? It’s quick, but they lie there together a long while, curled up by her fire on the spill of a woolen poncho. He leaves an oblong purple bruise on the swell of her breast — Susan brings her hand to the inner seam of his leg and he tsks at her sharply until she withdraws it.

“It wasn’t like this at all.” No, not like this at all, full of uncertainty and the first blush of blood.

“Was it sweet?”

Sweet as honey — there’s blood in his teeth, she can see it even as close as this, in the weird shadows of the fire. Susan finds the pierced place in his side and covers it with her hand, without affection.

“A long time ago, now. I couldn’t tell you.”