that means many other things in the original tongue of the Old World—water, birth, and life-force are only three of them. Be aware of it. For now, that’s all I want.”
“Can you be aware of something you don’t believe in?” Eddie asked. Roland smiled. “Just keep an open mind.”
“That I can do.”
“Roland?” It was Jake. “Do you think Oy might be part of our ka-tet?”
Susannah smiled. Roland didn’t. “I’m not prepared to even guess right now, but I’ll tell you this, Jake—I’ve been thinking about your furry friend a good deal. Ka does not rule all, and coincidences still happen . . . but the sudden appearance of a billy-bumbler that still remembers people doesn’t seem completely coincidental to me.”
He glanced around at them.
“I’ll begin. Eddie will speak next, taking up from the place where I leave off. Then Susannah. Jake, you’ll speak last. All right?”
They nodded.
“Fine,” Roland said. “We are ka-tet—one from many. Let the palaver begin.”
20
THE TALK WENT ON until sundown, stopping only long enough for them to eat a cold meal, and by the time it was over, Eddie felt as if he had gone twelve hard rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard. He no longer doubted that they had been “sharing khef,” as Roland put it; he and Jake actually seemed to have been living each other’s life in their dreams, as if they were two halves of the same whole.
Roland began with what had happened under the mountains, where Jake’s first life in this world had ended. He told of his own palaver with the man in black, and Walter’s veiled words about a Beast and someone he called the Ageless Stranger. He told of the strange, daunting dream which had come to him, a dream in which the whole universe had been swallowed in a beam of fantastic white light. And how, at the end of that dream, there had been a single blade of purple grass.
Eddie glanced sideways at Jake and was stunned by the knowledge— the recognition—in the boy’s eyes.
21
ROLAND HAD BABBLED PARTS of this story to Eddie in his time of delirium, but it was entirely new to Susannah, and she listened with wide eyes. As Roland repeated the things Walter had told him, she caught glints of her own world, like reflections in a smashed mirror: automobiles, cancer, rockets to the moon, artificial insemination. She had no idea who the Beast might be, but she recognized the name of the Ageless Stranger as a variation upon the name of Merlin, the magician who had supposedly orchestrated the career of King Arthur. Curiouser and curiouser.
Roland told of how he had awakened to find Walter long years dead—time had somehow slipped forward, perhaps a hundred years, perhaps five hundred. Jake listened in fascinated silence as the gunslinger told of reaching the edge of the Western Sea, of how he had lost two of the fingers on his right hand, and how he had drawn Eddie and Susannah before encountering Jack Mort, the dark third.
The gunslinger motioned to Eddie, who took up the tale with the coming of the great bear.
“Shardik?” Jake interjected. “But that’s the name of a book! A book in our world! It was written by the man who wrote that famous book about the rabbits—”
“Richard Adams!” Eddie shouted. “And the book about the bunnies was Watership Down! I knew I knew that name! But how can that be, Roland? How is it that the people in your world know about things in ours?”
“There are doors, aren’t there?” Roland responded. “Haven’t we seen four of them already? Do you think they never existed before, or never will again?”
“But—”
“All of us have seen the leavings of your world in mine, and when I was in your city of New York, I saw the marks of my world in yours. I saw gunslingers. Most were lax and slow, but they were gunslingers all the same, clearly members of their own ancient ka-tet.”
“Roland, they were just cops. You ran rings around them.”
“Not the last one. When Jack Mort and I were in the underground railway station, that one almost took me down. Except for blind luck— Mort’s flint-and-steel—he would have done. That one . . . I saw his eyes. He knew the face of his father. I believe he knew it very well. And then . . . do you remember the name of Balazar’s nightclub?”
“Sure,” Eddie said uneasily. “The Leaning Tower. But it could have been coincidence; you yourself said ka doesn’t