Dark Tower 3 - The Waste Lands by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King [King, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fantasy, Horror, Good and Evil, Epic, Heroes, Parallel Universes, Roland (Fictitious Character)
ISBN: 9780451210869
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1991-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Darktower 3 - The Waste Lands

Oy gave his shrill, whistling bark. Jake turned and saw more people coming up the street—five or six in all. Like Si and Mercy, they were all old, and one of them, a woman hobbling over a cane like a witch in a fairy-tale, looked positively ancient. As they neared, Jake realized that two of the men were identical twins. Long white hair spilled over the shoulders of their patched homespun shirts. Their skin was as white as fine linen, and their eyes were

pink. Albinos, he thought.

The crone appeared to be their leader. She hobbled toward Roland’s party on her cane, staring at them with gimlet eyes as green as emeralds. Her toothless mouth was tucked deeply into itself. The hem of the old shawl she wore fluttered in the prairie breeze. Her eyes settled upon Roland. “Hail, gunslinger! Well met!” She spoke the High Speech herself, and, like Eddie and Susannah, Jake understood the words perfectly, although he guessed they would have been gibberish to him in his own world. “Welcome to River Crossing!” The gunslinger had removed his own hat, and now he bowed to her, tapping his throat three times, rapidly, with his diminished right hand. “Thankee-sai, Old Mother.”

She cackled freely at this and Eddie suddenly realized Roland had at the same time made a joke and paid a compliment. The thought which had already occurred to Susannah now came to him: This is how he was . . . and this is what he did. Part of it, anyway.

“Gunslinger ye may be, but below your clothes you’re but another foolish man,” she said, lapsing into low speech.

Roland bowed again. “Beauty has always made me foolish, mother.” This time she positively cawed laughter. Oy shrank against Jake’s leg. One of the albino twins rushed forward to catch the ancient as she rocked backward within her dusty cracked shoes. She caught her balance on her own, however, and made an imperious shooing gesture with one hand. The albino retreated. “Be ye on a quest, gunslinger?” Her green eyes gleamed shrewdly at him; the puckered pocket of her mouth worked in and out. “Ay,” Roland said. “We go in search of the Dark Tower.” The others only looked puzzled, but the old woman recoiled and forked the sign of the evil eye—not at them, Jake realized, but to the southeast, along the path of the Beam.

“I’m sorry to hear it!” she cried. “For no one who ever went in search of that black dog ever came back! So said my grandfather, and his grandfather before him! Not ary one!”

“Ka,” the gunslinger said patiently, as if this explained everything . . . and, Jake was coming to realize, to Roland it did. “Ay,” she agreed, “black dog ka! Well-a-well; ye’ll do as ye’re called, and live along your path, and die when it comes to the clearing in the trees. Will ye break bread with us before you push on, gunslinger? You and your band of knights?”

Roland bowed again.

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