Mother (who in those long-ago days had been known by her real name, which was Lydia) had caught Old Star (whose real name was Apon) hanging about a beautiful young woman named Cassiopeia. They’d had a real bang-up fight, those two, a hair-pulling, eye-gouging, crockery-throwing fight. One of those thrown bits of crockery had become the earth; a smaller shard the moon; a coal from their kitchen stove had become the sun. In the end, the gods had stepped in so Apon and Lydia might not, in their anger, destroy the universe before it was fairly begun. Cassiopeia, the saucy jade who caused the trouble in the first place (“Yeah, right—it’s always the woman,” Susannah had said at this point), had been banished to a rocking-chair made of stars forever and ever. Yet not even this had solved the problem. Lydia had been willing to try again, but Apon was stiffnecked and full of pride (“Yeah, always blame the man,” Eddie had grunted at this point). So they had parted, and now they look at each other in mingled hatred and longing from across the star-strewn wreckage of their divorce. Apon and Lydia are three billion years gone, the gunslinger told them; they have become Old Star and Old Mother, the north and south, each pining for the other but both now too proud to beg for reconciliation . . . and Cassiopeia sits off to the side in her chair, rocking and laughing at them both.
Eddie was startled by a soft touch on his arm. It was Susannah. “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got to make him talk.”
Eddie carried her to the campfire and put her down carefully on Roland’s right side. He sat on Roland’s left. Roland looked first at Susannah, then at Eddie.
“How close you both sit to me,” he remarked. “Like lovers . . . or warders in a gaol.”
“It’s time for you to do some talking.” Susannah’s voice was low, clear, and musical. “If we’re your companions, Roland—and it seems like we are, like it or not—it’s time you started treating us as companions. Tell us what’s wrong . . .”
“. . . and what we can do about it,” Eddie finished.
Roland sighed deeply. “I don’t know how to begin,” he said. “It’s been so long since I’ve had companions . . . or a tale to tell . . .”
“Start with the bear,” Eddie said.
Susannah leaned forward and touched the jawbone Roland held in his hands. It frightened her, but she touched it anyway. “And finish with this.”
“Yes.” Roland lifted the bone to eye-level and looked at it for a moment before dropping it back into his lap. “We’ll have to speak of this, won’t we? It’s the center of the thing.”
But the bear came first.
12
“THIS IS THE STORY I was told when I was a child,” Roland said. “When everything was new, the Great Old Ones—they weren’t gods, but people who had almost the knowledge of gods—created Twelve Guardians to stand watch at the twelve portals which lead in and out of the world. Sometimes I heard that these portals were natural things, like the constellations we see in the sky or the bottomless crack in the earth we called Dragon’s Grave, because of the great burst of steam they gave off every thirty or forty days. But other people—one I remember in particular, the head cook in my father’s castle, a man named Hax—said they were not natural, that they had been created by the Great Old Ones themselves, in the days before they hanged themselves with pride like a noose and disappeared from the earth. Hax used to say that the creation of the Twelve Guardians was the last act of the Great Old Ones, their attempt to atone for the great wrongs they had done to each other, and to the earth itself.”
“Portals,” Eddie mused. “Doors, you mean. We’re back to those again. Do these doors that lead in and out of the world open on the world Suze and I came from? Like the ones we found along the beach?”
“I don’t know,” Roland said. “For every thing I do know, there are a hundred things I don’t. You—both of you—will have to reconcile yourselves to that fact. The world has moved on, we say. When it did, it went like a great receding wave, leaving only wreckage behind . . . wreckage that sometimes looks like a map.”
“Well, make a guess!” Eddie exclaimed, and the raw eagerness in his