German vampire who swilled the life's blood of a Frenchman might speak French for a week or ten days, speak it like a native, and then the ability, like his victim's memories, would begin to fade...
How could he know a thing like that?
Did it matter?
Now he watched them sleep. The boy Jake had awakened, but only briefly. Earlier Mordred had watched them eat, four fools and a bumbler-full of blood, full of energy-dining in a circle together. Always they would sit in a circle, they would make that circle even when they stopped to rest five minutes on the trail, doing it without even being aware of it, their circle that kept die rest of the world out. Mordred had no circle. Although he was new, he already understood that outsidewas his ka, just as it was the ka of winter's wind to swing through only half die compass: from north to east and then back again to bleak north once more. He accepted this, yet he still looked at them with the outsider's resentment, knowing he would hurt them and that the satisfaction would be bitter. He was of two worlds, the foretold joining of Prim and Am, of gadosh and godosh, of Gan and Gilead. He was in a way like Jesus Christ, but in a way he was purer than the sheepgod-man, for the sheepgod-man had but one true father, who was in the highly hypothetical heaven, and a stepfather who was on Earth. Poor old Joseph, who wore horns put on him by God Himself.
Mordred Deschain, on the other hand, had two fathers.
One of whom now slept on the screen before him.
You're old, Father, he thought. It gave him vicious pleasure to think so; it also made him feel small and mean, no more than... well, no more than a spider, looking down from its web. Mordred was twins, and would remain twins until Roland of the Eld was dead and the last ka-tet broken. And the longing voice that told him to go to Roland, and call him father? To call Eddie and Jake his brothers, Susannah his sister? That was the gullible voice of his mother. They'd kill him before he could get a single word out of his mouth (assuming he had reached a stage where he could do more than gurgle baby-talk). They'd cut off his balls and feed them to the brat's bumbler. They'd bury his castrated corpse, and shit on the ground where he lay, and then move on.
You 're finally old, Father, and now you walk with a limp, and at end of day I see you rub your hip with a hand that's picked up the tiniest bit of a shake.
Look, if you would. Here sits a baby with blood streaking his fair skin. Here sits a baby weeping his silent, eerie tears. Here sits a baby that knows both too much and too little, and although we must keep our fingers away from his mouth (he snaps, this one; snaps like a baby crocodile), we are allowed to pity him a litde.
If ka is a train-and it is, a vast, hurding mono, maybe sane, maybe not-then this nasty litde lycanthrope is its most vulnerable hostage, not tied to the tracks like little Nell but strapped to the thing's very headlight.
He may tell himself he has two fathers, and diere may be some truth to it, but there is no father here and no mother, either. He ate his mother alive, say true, ate her big-big, she was his first meal, and what choice did he have about that? He is the last miracle ever to be spawned by the still-standing Dark Tower, the scarred wedding of the rational and the irrational, the natural and die supernatural, and yet he is alone, and he is a-hungry. Destiny might have intended him to rule a chain of universes (or destroy them all), but so far he has succeeded in establishing dominion over nothing but one old domestic robot who has now gone to the clearing at the end of the path.
He looks at the sleeping gunslinger with love and hate, loathing and longing. But suppose he went to them and was not killed? What if they were to welcome him in? Ridiculous idea, yes, but allow it for the sake of argument. Even then he would be expected to set Roland above him, accept Roland as dinh, and that he will never do, never do, no, never do.
Part Two