youth and the days of my manhood, before my apotheosis. You are that apotheosis, gunslinger. You are my climax.” He tittered. “You see, someone has taken you seriously.”
“And this Stranger, does he have a name?”
“O, he is named.”
“And what is his name?”
“Legion,” the man in black said softly, and somewhere in the easterly darkness where the mountains lay, a rockslide punctuated his words and a puma screamed like a woman. The gunslinger shivered and the man in black flinched. “Yet I do not think that is what you wished to ask, either. It is not your nature to think so far ahead.”
The gunslinger knew the question; it had gnawed him all this night, and he thought, for years before. It trembled on his lips but he didn’t ask it . . . not yet.
“This Stranger is a minion of the Tower? Like yourself?”
“Yar. He darkles. He tincts. He is in all times. Yet there is one greater than he.”
“Who?”
“Ask me no more!” the man in black cried. His voice aspired to sternness and crumbled into beseechment. “I know not! I do not wish to know. To speak of the things in End-World is to speak of the ruination of one’s own soul.”
“And beyond the Ageless Stranger is the Tower and whatever the Tower contains?”
“Yes,” whispered the man in black. “But none of these things are what you wish to ask.”
True.
“All right,” the gunslinger said, and then asked the world’s oldest question. “Will I succeed? Will I win through?”
“If I answered that question, gunslinger, you’d kill me.”
“I ought to kill you. You need killing.” His hands had dropped to the worn butts of his guns.
“Those do not open doors, gunslinger; those only close them forever.”
“Where must I go?”
“Start west. Go to the sea. Where the world ends is where you must begin. There was a man who gave you advice . . . the man you bested so long ago—”
“Yes, Cort,” the gunslinger interrupted impatiently.
“The advice was to wait. It was bad advice. For even then my plans against your father had proceeded. He sent you away and when you returned—”
“I’d not hear you speak of that,” the gunslinger said, and in his mind he heard his mother singing: Baby-bunting, baby dear, baby bring your basket here.
“Then hear this: when you returned, Marten had gone west, to join the rebels. So all said, anyway, and so you believed. Yet he and a certain witch left you a trap and you fell into it. Good boy! And although Marten was long gone by then, there was a man who sometimes made you think of him, was there not? A man who affected the dress of a monk and the shaven head of a penitent—”
“Walter,” the gunslinger whispered. And although he had come so far in his musings, the bald truth still amazed him. “You. Marten never left at all.”
The man in black tittered. “At your service.”
“I ought to kill you now.”
“That would hardly be fair. Besides, all of that was long ago. Now comes the time of sharing.”
“You never left,” the gunslinger repeated, stunned. “You only changed.”
“Sit,” the man in black invited. “I’ll tell you stories, as many as you would hear. Your own stories, I think, will be much longer.”
“I don’t talk of myself,” the gunslinger muttered.
“Yet tonight you must. So that we may understand.”
“Understand what? My purpose? You know that. To find the Tower is my purpose. I’m sworn.”
“Not your purpose, gunslinger. Your mind. Your slow, prodding, tenacious mind. There has never been one quite like it, in all the history of the world. Perhaps in the history of creation.
“This is the time of speaking. This is the time of histories.”
“Then speak.”
The man in black shook the voluminous arm of his robe. A foil-wrapped package fell out and caught the dying embers in many reflective folds.
“Tobacco, gunslinger. Would you smoke?”
He had been able to resist the rabbit, but he could not resist this. He opened the foil with eager fingers. There was fine crumbled tobacco inside, and green leaves to wrap it in, amazingly moist. He had not seen such tobacco for ten years.
He rolled two cigarettes and bit the ends of each to release the flavor. He offered one to the man in black, who took it. Each of them took a burning twig from the fire.
The gunslinger lit his cigarette and drew the aromatic smoke deep into his lungs, closing his eyes to concentrate the senses. He blew out with long, slow satisfaction.
“Is it good?” the man in