peacefully. They looked like buffalo. To the east, the last of the forest made a curved peninsula into the grassland. This incursion was a dark, tangled shape that looked like a forearm with a cocked fist at the end.
That was the direction, she realized, in which all the creeks and streams they had encountered had been flowing. They were tributaries of the vast river that emerged from that jutting arm of forest and flowed, placid and dreaming under the summer sun, toward the eastern edge of the world. It was wide, that river—perhaps two miles from bank to bank.
And she could see the city.
It lay dead ahead, a misty collection of spires and towers rising above the far edge of the horizon. Those airy ramparts might have been a hundred miles away, or two hundred, or four hundred. The air of this world seemed to be totally clear, and that made judging distances a fool’s game. All she knew for sure was that the sight of those dim towers filled her with silent wonder . . . and a deep, aching homesickness for New York. She thought, I believe I’d do most anything just to see the Manhattan skyline from the Triborough Bridge again.
Then she had to smile, because that wasn’t the truth. The truth was that she wouldn’t trade Roland’s world for anything. Its silent mystery and empty spaces were intoxicating. And her lover was here. In New York—the New York of her own time, at least—they would have been objects of scorn and anger, the butt of every idiot’s crude, cruel jokes: a black woman of twenty-six and her whitebread lover who was three years younger and who had a tendency to talk like dis and dat when he got excited. Her whitebread lover who had been carrying a heavy monkey on his back only eight months before. Here, there was no one to jeer or laugh. Here, no one was pointing a finger. Here, there were only Roland, Eddie, and herself, the world’s last three gunslingers.
She took Eddie’s hand and felt it close over hers, warm and reassuring.
Roland pointed. “That must be the Send River,” he said in a low voice. “I never thought to see it in my life . . . wasn’t even sure it was real, like the Guardians.”
“It’s so lovely,” Susannah murmured. She was unable to take her eyes from the vast landscape before her, dreaming richly in the cradle of summer. She found her eyes tracing the shadows of the trees, which trailed across the plain for what seemed miles as the sun sank toward the horizon. “It’s the way our Great Plains must have looked before they were settled—even before the Indians came.” She raised her free hand and pointed toward the place where the Great Road narrowed to a point. “There’s your city,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“It looks okay,” Eddie said. “Is that possible, Roland? Could it still be pretty much intact. Did the old-timers build that well?”
“Anything is possible in these times,” Roland said, but he sounded doubtful. “You shouldn’t get your hopes up, though, Eddie.”
“Huh? No.” But Eddie’s hopes were up. That dimly sketched skyline had awakened homesickness in Susannah’s heart; in Eddie’s it kindled a sudden blaze of supposition. If the city was still there—and it clearly was—it might still be populated, and maybe not just by the subhuman things Roland had met under the mountains, either. The city-dwellers might be
(Americans, Eddie’s subconscious whispered)
intelligent and helpful; they might, in fact, spell the difference between success and failure for the quest of the pilgrims . . . or even between life and death. In Eddie’s mind a vision (partly cribbed from movies like The Last Starfighter and The Dark Crystal) gleamed brightly: a council of gnarled but dignified City Elders who would serve them a whopping meal drawn from the unspoiled stores of the city (or perhaps from special gardens cradled within environmental bubbles) and who would, as he and Roland and Susannah ate themselves silly, explain exactly what lay ahead and what it all meant. Their parting gift to the wayfarers would be an AAA-approved TourGuide map with the best route to the Dark Tower marked in red.
Eddie did not know the phrase deus ex machina, but he knew—had now grown up enough to know—that such wise and kindly folk lived mostly in comic books and B-movies. The idea was intoxicating, all the same: an enclave of civilization in this dangerous, mostly empty world; wise old elf-men