6th Stanza: The Castle Allure
One
All at once she was falling into her body again and the sensation provoked a memory of blinding brilliance: Odetta Holmes at sixteen, sitting on her bed in her slip, sitting in a brilliant bar of sun and pulling up a silk stocking. For the moment this memory held, she could smell White Shoulders perfume and Pond's Beauty Bar, her mother's soap and her mother's borrowed perfume, so grown-up to be allowed perfume, and she thought:It's the Spring Hop! I'm going with Nathan Freeman !
Then it was gone. The sweet smell of Pond's soap was replaced by a clean and cold (but somehow dank) night breeze, and all that remained was that sense, so queer and perfect, of stretching into a new body as if it were a stocking one was pulling up over one's calf and knee.
She opened her eyes. The wind gusted, blowing a fine grit in her face. She squinted against it, grimacing and raising an arm, as if she might have to ward off a blow.
"Over here!" a woman's voice called. It wasn't the voice Susannah would have expected. Not strident, not a triumphant caw. "Over here, out of the wind!"
She looked and saw a tall and comely woman beckoning to her. Susannah's first look at Mia in the flesh astounded her, because the chap's mother waswhite. Apparently Odetta-that-was now had a Caucasian side to her personality, and how that must frost Detta Walker's racially sensitive butt!
She herself was legless again, and sitting in a kind of rude one-person cart. It had been parked at a notch in a low parapet wall. She looked out at the most fearsome, forbidding stretch of countryside she had ever seen in her life. Huge rock formations sawed at the sky and jostled into the distance. They glistened like alien bone beneath the glare of a savage sickle moon. Away from the glare of that lunar grin, a billion stars burned like hot ice. Amid the rocks with their broken edges and gaping crevices, a single narrow path wound into the distance. Looking at it, Susannah thought that a party would have to travel that path in single file. And bring plenty of supplies. No mushrooms to pick along the way; no pokeberries, either. And in the distance - dim and baleful, its source somewhere over the horizon - a dark crimson light waxed and waned. Heart of the rose, she thought, and then:No, not that. Forge of the King. She looked at the pulsing sullen light with helpless, horrified fascination. Flex. . . and loosen. Wax. . . and wane. An infection announcing itself to the sky.
"Come to me now, if you'd come at all, Susannah of New York," said Mia. She was dressed in a heavy serape and what looked like leather pants that stopped just below the knee. Her shins were scabbed and scratched. She wore thick-soledhuaraches on her feet. "For the King can fascinate, even at a distance. We're on the Discordia side of the Castle. Would you like to end your life on the needles at the foot of this wall? If he fascinates you and tells you to jump, you'll do just that. Your bossy gunslinger-men aren't here to help you now, are they? Nay, nay. You're on your own, so y'are. "
Susannah tried to pull her gaze from that steadily pulsing glow and at first couldn't do it. Panic bloomed in her mind
(if he fascinates you and tells you to jump)
and she seized it as a tool, compressing it to an edge with which to cut through her frightened immobility. For a moment nothing happened, and then she threw herself backward so violently in the shabby little cart that she had to clutch the edge in order to keep herself from tumbling to the cobbles. The wind gusted again, blowing stone-dust and grit against her face and into her hair, seeming to mock her.
But that pull. . . fascination. . . glammer. . . whatever it had been, it was gone.
She looked at the dog-cart (so she thought it, whether that was the right name or not) and saw at once how it worked. Simple enough, too. With no mule to draw it,she was the mule. It was miles from the sweet, light little chair they'd found in Topeka, and light-years from being able to walk on the strong legs that had conveyed her from the little park to the hotel. God, she missed having legs. Missed it already.
But you made do.
She seized hold of the cart's wooden wheels, strained, produced no movement, strained harder. Just as she was deciding she'd have to get out of the chair and hop-crawl her ignominious way to where Mia waited, the wheels turned with a groaning, oilless creak. She rumbled toward Mia, who was standing behind a squat stone pillar. There were a great many of these, marching away into the dark along a curve. Susannah supposed that once upon a time (before the world had moved on), archers would have stood behind them for protection while the assaulting army fired their arrows or red-hot catapults or whatever you called them. Then they'd step into the gaps and fire their own weapons. How long ago had that been? What worldwas this? And how close to the Dark Tower?
Susannah had an idea it might be very close indeed.
She pushed the balky, gawky, protesting cart out of the wind and looked at the woman in the serape, ashamed to be so out of breath after moving less than a dozen yards but unable to help panting. She drew down deep breaths of the dank and somehow stony air. The pillars - she had an idea they were called merlons, or something like that - were on her right. On her left was a circular pool of darkness surrounded by crumbling stone walls. Across the way, two towers rose high above the outer wall, but one had been shattered, as if by lightning or some powerful explosive.
"This where we stand is the allure," Mia said. "The wall-walk of the Castle on the Abyss, once known as Castle Discordia. You said you wanted fresh air. I hope this does ya, as they say in the Calla. This is far beyond there, Susannah, this is deep in End-World, near the place where your quest ends, for good or for ill. " She paused and then said, "For ill, almost surely. Yet I care nothing for that, no, not I. I am Mia, daughter of none, mother of one. I care for my chap and nothing more. Chap be enough for me, aye! Would you palaver? Fine. I'll tell you what I may and be true. Why not? What is it to me, one way or the other?"
Susannah looked around. When she faced in toward the center of the castle - what she supposed was the courtyard - she caught an aroma of ancient rot. Mia saw her wrinkle her nose and smiled.
"Aye, they're long gone, and the machines the later ones left behind are mostly stilled, but the smell of their dying lingers, doesn't it? The smell of death always does. Ask your friend the gunslinger, thetrue gunslinger. He knows, for he's dealt his share of it. He is responsible for much, Susannah of New York. The guilt of worlds hangs around his neck like a rotting corpse. Yet he's gone far enough with his dry and lusty determination to finally draw the eyes of the great. He will be destroyed, aye, and all those who stand with him. I carry his doom in my own belly, and I care not. " Her chin jutted forward in the starlight. Beneath the serape her breasts heaved. . . and, Susannah saw, her belly curved. In this world, at least, Mia was very clearly pregnant. Ready to burst, in fact.
"Ask your questions, have at me," Mia said. "Just remember, we exist in the other world, too, the one where we're bound together. We're lying on a bed in the inn, as if asleep. . . but we don't sleep, do we, Susannah? Nay. And when the telephone rings, when my friends call, we leave this place and go to them. If your questions have been asked and answered, fine. If not, that's also fine. Ask. Or. . . are you not a gunslinger?" Her lips curved in a disdainful smile. Susannah thought she was pert, yes, pert indeed. Especially for someone who wouldn't be able to find her way from Forty-sixth Street to Forty-seventh in the world they had to go back to. "Soshoot! I should say. "
Susannah looked once more into the darkened, broken well that was the castle's soft center, where lay its keeps and lists, its barbicans and murder holes, its God-knew-what. She had taken a course in medieval history and knew some of the terms, but that had been long ago. Surely there was a banqueting hall somewhere down there, one that she herself had supplied with food, at least for awhile. But her catering days were done. If Mia tried to push her too hard or too far, she'd find that out for herself.
Meantime, she thought she'd start with something relatively easy.
"If this is the Castle on the Abyss," she said, "where
's the Abyss? I don't see anything out that way except for a minefield of rocks. And that red glow on the horizon. "
Mia, her shoulder-length black hair flying out behind her (not a bit of kink in that hair, as there was in Susannah's; Mia's was like silk), pointed across the inner chasm below them to the far wall, where the towers rose and the allure continued its curve.
"This is the inner keep," she said. "Beyond it is the village of Fedic, now deserted, all dead of the Red Death a thousand years ago and more. Beyond that - "
"The Red Death?" Susannah asked, startled (also frightened in spite of herself). "Poe'sRed Death? Like in the story?" And why not? Hadn't they already wandered into - and then back out of - L. Frank Baum's Oz? What came next? The White Rabbit and the Red Queen?
"Lady, I know not. All I can tell you is that beyond the deserted village is the outer wall, and beyond the outer wall is a great crack in the earth filled with monsters that cozen, diddle, increase, and plot to escape. Once there was a bridge across, but it fell long ago. 'In the time before counting,' as 'tis said. They're horrors that might drive an ordinary man or woman mad at a glance. "
She favored Susannah with a glance of her own. A decidedly satiric one.
"But not agunslinger. Surely not one such asthee. "
"Why do you mock me?" Susannah asked quietly.