A Rose, a Hill, a Horn

Visions. The old James would have said we were following visions like a bunch of hippies chasing rainbows, except it’s real. It’s not unicorns and sunshine but demons and todash darkness. When the turtle showed us the path out of darkness and showed us the vision of the White in the ruins of the Dixie Pig I only felt how right it was. Wasn’t I the one who stopped the tet and said we should look? Wasn’t I the first one off the path?

This must be how Carrie feels all the time. Maybe it’s made me a little more understanding. Or maybe it’s the Rose taking the bite out of a real world-class asshole like James Cain. But when she tells us her vision about a horn dropped on a battlefield I know that’s right too.

The Horn and the White. The horn of Arthur Eld and something else below the Dixie Pig. It’s ka.

Again it’s Carries vision that tells us we need the Horn first. The Horn of Du Lac isn’t powerful enough to win our way through the Dixie Pig. We have a little conference with Haystack and he tells us what he knows about the horn and about the Battle of Jericho Hill. It tickles a memory that makes me shudder.

That faded poster… “See the Battle of Jericho Hill! The outcome has already been written, but it’s still fun for the whole family! See the fall of Cuthbert the Mad! Witness the betrayal of Alain the Slow! Guided tours available!”

It doesn’t help that I know Roland Deschain will survive. He lived to draw Eddie Dean who started the Tet Corporation so he can’t die, can he? Well, I’ll leave that up to Ka. It’s our Ka to get the Horn of Eld when he drops it so that’s what we’ll fucking do.

I sit back, quiet for the most part. I’m listening, but I’m also watching Eden. Since she’s come back, she’s slowly adjusted to the loss of twenty years of time. The cell phone I gave her makes a lump in her front pocket and she hardly glances at the laptop set up on the shiny tabletop. Now she’s in control of herself and I have an idea of what she was like in ‘Nam. Her and a bunch of scared nurses out in the jungle and Eden keeping them all from loosing it. She listens to Haystack carefully, absorbing his story and starting to lay out plans for our part.

I wasn’t quite ready to ask myself if she was our Dinh. Of course, there were other things to think about. Haystack said that the Rose was a doorway. Well not quite, but close enough to send us to Jericho Hill. And I knew that I couldn’t go that way. Penny didn’t want to go without me and I wasn’t crazy about her being in Mid-World without me to look out for her either, but the other way was more dangerous.

Dutch Hill. Dutch Hill to Jericho Hill. But there was the Doorkeeper that almost stopped Jake, and we had no key. We could go, and maybe Haystack could sort of pick the lock on the door and make it take us where we needed to go, but I thought that the Doorkeeper there was like nothing we’d faced yet. Beyond the power of the Horn of Du Lac probably.

That was what decided it in the end. If we used the Rose, it would probably kill me. I’m a creature of the Red. A beast of the Prim. There are nights when I can hear the song of the Rose and I think that it might kill me with that sweet voice even from my room down in the basement. Just snuff me out like a candle. To actually stand in its presence… But going that way risked only my life. Dutch Hill put everyone in danger.

Carrie asked me to stay after the conference. I could tell that she wanted to talk to me how Lex would have called an-tet. Something deep and important. Maybe it was about Ashleigh, she’d come to me about her attempts at a real relationship before. But she wanted to talk about the Rose. She said that she’d seen a vision – not a possibility, not some tangled future memory – that I was going to die in front of the Rose.

I took a deep breath. There are worse ways to die and few better. I slipped my hand into my pocket and I felt the cool silver of my old coin. Wasn’t silver supposed to kill vampires in some myths? It reminded me that Alistair would probably shit himself for just a glance at it. I should show it to him. I pulled it out and started walking it along my fingers like Lex showed me. The eagle spread its wings on one side, the face of Alaric Deschain looked up from the other.

She went under easily, as if she’d been hypnotized before. It alarmed me at first, but there was nothing in her book or what little she’d talked about of her life to hint that she might have been under a trance before. I didn’t think about it long, though not much later I would kick myself for that. I’d pulled out the coin for another reason. Steven King wrote about a memory tower in one of his books. I’d been reading them whenever I could since Tet spared my life and Penny spared my soul. It reminded me of the Dark Tower even though the book didn’t really seem to touch it, so it stuck in my memory.

Carefully I tried to help Carrie file away her memories. This future about an Alistair that hadn’t been beaten into a retard goes here, this memory where he’d been beaten all the way to death goes there. Separating and filing them away so that they didn’t mix and confuse her, but would still be there at her finger tips if she needed to remember. I was astonished at her memory. She never lost a single detail. And I was amazed at how quickly she divided the visions. I didn’t know it then and neither did she, but it was natural for her.

I left quickly. Too quickly maybe, since she was almost still blinking away the trance when I closed the door behind me. But I didn’t have much time left and I had things to do. I promised myself that I’d apologize later, but I knew I’d break that promise. After all, I was going to die tonight.

Penny was right outside the conference room, waiting. I hoped that’d just teleported there, but she’d been listening. We went shopping for tents and canteens and outdoors clothes, things that I didn’t think I was going to need. I got Penny a birthday card. What I was really doing was saying goodbye.

The moment came quickly. I’d tried to say goodbye to my ka-tet, but mostly the words wouldn’t come. Then we were walking towards the Rose and I was at war with myself. A part of me wanted to run forward and only hoped that I’d get close enough to the Rose to actually see it before it ended my damnation. But part of me fought that other side with strength that surprised and frightened me. I wasn’t ready to leave Penny behind. I wasn’t ready to leave these people (friends?) behind.

I was probably hurting her hand, but I couldn’t help it. Penny looked up at me and held my eyes with her own. It was almost too much, but then there was White light, blinding, shining, throwing stark black shadows behind us that leapt and twisted. “Let’s go” I cried and pled at the same time. We jumped.

Mid-World. Fucking-A, we made it.

Haystack was with us, but that didn’t surprise me. He wasn’t a part of our ka-tet and this wasn’t his ka. We weren’t on the path of the beam, but we were on the right track alright. We were spotted by a wounded scout and we got him back to camp with his message.

Jericho Hill reared up above the Clean Sea, just a rocky rise in the land with a broken watchtower silhouetted against the sky. “Two riders were approaching/and the wind began to howl.” Jimi Hendrix wasn’t quite singing about this battle, but it was close enough to send a shiver down my spine.

Roland Deschain stood at the top of the hill in front of the tower looking over maps sprawling over a tabletop like drunks at closing time. A dark-haired man laughed, but by the way no one else smiled the joke was his own and was only funny to him. There was a third gunslinger with a wine stain birthmark on his face, a bow over his shoulder in addition to the Sandalwoods that had to be Jamie DeCurry.

My eyes were on their guns as we approached bearing up the messenger. They hung low and heavy, weighted down with years and blood. They were like swords somehow. As noble as they were deadly. I thought of my own guns with just a touch of shame. Then Roland turned towards us and his faded blue eyes flashed. I’d read the books and I knew more about this man than anyone outside his own ka-tet did. Things that the man didn’t even know about himself yet. But being looked at with those eyes is something that not even Steven King could capture. I honestly almost kneeled.

“Who is your dinh?” He asked us. I wasn’t ready for the question. I don’t think any of us were. I glanced at Eden out of the corner of my eye. Back at our conference I realized I’d been comparing her to Lex, trying to see what she would be like as a dinh. As I learned it, the dinh is the person that everyone else looks to for leadership. The person who looks around to ask people what to do and finds everyone looking back at them. For a second, I had to consider that maybe people were looking at me.

Then Eden spoke up. She didn’t answer his question, probably because she didn’t know what he was asking, but I wasn’t sure if maybe she was answering after all. We were going to have to talk because everyone was going to be looking at her now and she had to be up to it. Or we were all going to die.

We all but fled the gunslinger’s presence. I was worried he’d dig too deep, or question us too closely and find out who we were. If he could somehow sense what I was I wouldn’t last a heartbeat. But they were too preoccupied with the coming battle and grave news we’d helped deliver. Roland bent back over the table. I think he knew that the reinforcements were not going to arrive ahead of the barbarians. But his eyes told the story of his life. He would not stop, would not cry off. The fall of Gilead was coming, but he would go on.

I shivered again.

The sun came up over a hill that was already more battlefield than encampment. Demons had come in the night and taken men. They’d thrown them over the tower and then used their corpses as weapons. The morning stank of gunpowder and blood. But we still lived. Battered but not broken. We still had a chance to win the Horn and go on. I still had a chance to apologize to Carrie and to learn how to say goodbye to everyone…