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.He had no dreams.The next morning the wind was gone and the sun was its usual bright and forgetful self.The bodies had gone south like tumbleweeds with the wind.At midmorning, after he had bound all his cuts, he moved on as well.XVIIIHe thought Brown had fallen asleep.The fire was down to no more than a spark and the bird, Zoltan, had put his head under his wing.Just as he was about to get up and spread a pallet in the corner, Brown said, “There.You’ve told it.Do you feel better?”The gunslinger started.“Why would I feel bad?”“You’re human, you said.No demon.Or did you lie?”“I didn’t lie.” He felt the grudging admittance in him: he liked Brown.Honestly did.And he hadn’t lied to the dweller in any way.“Who are you, Brown? Really, I mean.”“Just me,” he said, unperturbed.“Why do you have to think you’re in the middle of such a mystery?”The gunslinger lit a smoke without replying.“I think you’re very close to your man in black,” Brown said.“Is he desperate?”“I don’t know.”“Are you?”“Not yet,” the gunslinger said.He looked at Brown with a shade of defiance.“I go where I have to go, do what I have to do.”“That’s good then,” Brown said and turned over and went to sleep.XIXThe next morning, Brown fed him and sent him on his way.In the daylight he was an amazing figure with his scrawny, sunburnt chest, pencil-like collarbones, and loony shock of red hair.The bird perched on his shoulder.“The mule?” the gunslinger asked.“I’ll eat it,” Brown said.“Okay.”Brown offered his hand and the gunslinger shook it.The dweller nodded to the southeast.“Walk easy.Long days and pleasant nights.”“May you have twice the number.”They nodded at each other and then the man Allie had called Roland walked away, his body festooned with guns and water.He looked back once.Brown was rooting furiously at his little cornbed.The crow was perched on the low roof of his dwelling like a gargoyle.XXThe fire was down, and the stars had begun to pale off.The wind walked restlessly, told its tale to no one.The gunslinger twitched in his sleep and was still again.He dreamed a thirsty dream.In the darkness the shape of the mountains was invisible.Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded.The desert had baked them out.He found himself thinking more and more about Cort, who had taught him to shoot.Cort had known black from white.He stirred again and woke.He blinked at the dead fire with its own shape superimposed over the other, more geometrical one.He was a romantic, he knew it, and he guarded the knowledge jealously.It was a secret he had shared with only a few over the years.The girl named Susan, the girl from Mejis, had been one of them.That, of course, made him think of Cort again.Cort was dead.They were all dead, except for him.The world had moved on.The gunslinger shouldered his gunna and moved on with it.THE WAY STATIONChapter TwoThe Way StationIA nursery rhyme had been playing itself through his mind all day, the maddening kind of thing that will not let go, that mockingly ignores all commands of the conscious mind to cease and desist.The rhyme was:The rain in Spain falls on the plain.There is joy and also painbut the rain in Spain falls on the plain.Time’s a sheet, life’s a stain,All the things we know will changeand all those things remain the same,but be ye mad or only sane,the rain in Spain falls on the plain.We walk in love but fly in chainsAnd the planes in Spain fall in the rain.He didn’t know what a plane was in the context of the rhyme’s last couplet, but knew why the rhyme had occurred to him in the first place.There had been the recurring dream of his room in the castle and of his mother, who had sung it to him as he lay solemnly in the tiny bed by the window of many colors.She did not sing it at bedtimes because all small boys born to the High Speech must face the dark alone, but she sang to him at naptimes and he could remember the heavy gray rainlight that shivered into rainbows on the counterpane; he could feel the coolness of the room and the heavy warmth of blankets, love for his mother and her red lips, the haunting melody of the little nonsense lyric, and her voice.Now it came back maddeningly, like a dog chasing its own tail in his mind as he walked.All his water was gone, and he knew he was very likely a dead man.He had never expected it to come to this, and he was sorry.Since noon he had been watching his feet rather than the way ahead.Out here even the devil-grass had grown stunted and yellow.The hardpan had disintegrated in places to mere rubble.The mountains were not noticeably clearer, although sixteen days had passed since he had left the hut of the last homesteader, a loony-sane young man on the edge of the desert.He had had a bird, the gunslinger remembered, but he couldn’t remember the bird’s name.He watched his feet move up and down like the heddles of a loom, listened to the nonsense rhyme sing itself into a pitiful garble in his mind, and wondered when he would fall down for the first time.He didn’t want to fall, even though there was no one to see him.It was a matter of pride.A gunslinger knows pride, that invisible bone that keeps the neck stiff.What hadn’t come to him from his father had been kicked into him by Cort, a boy’s gentleman if there ever was one.Cort, yar, with his red bulb of a nose and his scarred face.He stopped and looked up suddenly.It made his head buzz and for a moment his whole body seemed to float.The mountains dreamed against the far horizon.But there was something else up ahead, something much closer.Perhaps only five miles away [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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