CHAPTER 2 #7
They sat behind a huge, sweating stone colonnade, out of sight of the kitchen, and gobbled their pie with their fingers.
It was only moments later that they saw shadows fall on the far curving wall of the wide staircase.
Roland grabbed Cuthbert’s arm. “Come on,” he said.
“Someone’s coming.” Cuthbert looked up, his face surprised and berry-stained.
But the shadows stopped, still out of sight. It was Hax and the man from the Guards. The boys sat where they were. If they moved now, they might be heard.
“. . . the good man,” the Guard was saying.
“Farson?”
“In two weeks,” the Guard replied. “Maybe three. You have to come with us. There’s a shipment from the freight depot .
. .” A particularly loud crash of pots and pans and a volley of catcalls directed at the hapless potboy who had dropped them blotted out some of the rest; then the boys heard the Guard finish: “. . . poisoned meat.”
“Risky.”
“Ask not what the good man can do for you—” the Guard began.
“But what you can do for him.” Hax sighed. “Soldier, ask not.”
“You know what it could mean,” the Guard said quietly.
“Yar. And I know my responsibilities to him; you don’t need to lecture me. I love him just as you do. Would foller him into the sea if he asked; so I would.”
“All right. The meat will be marked for short-term storage in your coldrooms. But you’ll have to be quick. You must understand that.”
“There are children in Taunton?” the cook asked. It was not really a question.
“Children everywhere,” the Guard said gently. “It’s the children we—and he—care about.”
“Poisoned meat. Such a strange way to care for children.” Hax uttered a heavy, whistling sigh. “Will they curdle and hold their bellies and cry for their mammas? I suppose they will.”
“It will be like going to sleep,” the Guard said, but his voice was too confidently reasonable.
“Of course,” Hax said, and laughed.
“You said it yourself. ‘Soldier, ask not.’ Do you enjoy seeing children under the rule of the gun, when they could be under his hands, ready to start making a new world?”
Hax did not reply.
“I go on duty in twenty minutes,” the Guard said, his voice once more calm. “Give me a joint of mutton and I’ll pinch one of your girls and make her giggle. When I leave—”
“My mutton will give no cramps to your belly, Robeson.”
“Will you . . .” But the shadows moved away and the voices were lost.
I could have killed them, Roland thought, frozen and fascinated. I could have killed them both with my knife, slit their throats like hogs. He looked at his hands, now stained with gravy and berries as well as dirt from the day’s lessons.
“Roland.”
He looked at Cuthbert. They looked at each other for a long moment in the fragrant semidarkness, and a taste of warm despair rose in Roland’s throat.
What he felt might have been a sort of death—something as brutal and final as the death of the dove in the white sky over the games field.
Hax? he thought, bewildered. Hax who put a poultice on my leg that time?
Hax? And then his mind snapped closed, cutting the subject off.
What he saw, even in Cuthbert’s humorous, intelligent face, was nothing—nothing at all.
Cuthbert’s eyes were flat with Hax’s doom.
In Cuthbert’s eyes, it had already happened.
He had fed them and they had gone understairs to eat and then Hax had brought the Guard named Robeson to the wrong corner of the kitchen for their treasonous little tete-a-tete.
Ka had worked as ka sometimes did, as suddenly as a big stone rolling down a hillside. That was all.
Cuthbert’s eyes were gunslinger’s eyes.
X
Roland’s father was only just back from the uplands, and he looked out of place amid the drapes and the chiffon fripperies of the main receiving hall to which the boy had only lately been granted access, as a sign of his apprenticeship.
Steven Deschain was dressed in black jeans and a blue work shirt.
His cloak, dusty and streaked, torn to the lining in one place, was slung carelessly over his shoulder with no regard for the way it and he clashed with the elegance of the room.
He was desperately thin and the heavy handlebar mustache below his nose seemed to weight his head as he looked down at his son.
The guns crisscrossed over the wings of his hips hung at the perfect angle for his hands, the worn sandalwood grips looking dull and sleepy in this languid indoor light.
“The head cook,” his father said softly. “Imagine it! The tracks that were blown upland at the railhead. The dead stock in Hendrickson. And perhaps even . . . imagine! Imagine!”
He looked more closely at his son. “It preys on you.”
“Like the hawk,” Roland said. “It preys on you.” He laughed—at the startling appropriateness of the image rather than at any lightness in the situation.
His father smiled.
“Yes,” Roland said. “I guess it . . . it preys on me.”
“Cuthbert was with you,” his father said. “He will have told his father by now.”
“Yes.”
“He fed both of you when Cort—”
“Yes.”
“And Cuthbert. Does it prey on him, do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Nor did he care. He was not concerned with how his feelings compared with those of others.
“It preys on you because you feel you’ve caused a man’s death?”
Roland shrugged unwillingly, all at once not content with this probing of his motivations.
“Yet you told. Why?”
The boy’s eyes widened. “How could I not? Treason was—”
His father waved a hand curtly. “If you did it for something as cheap as a schoolbook idea, you did it unworthily. I would rather see all of Taunton poisoned.”
“I didn’t!” The words jerked out of him violently. “I wanted to kill him—both of them! Liars! Black liars! Snakes! They—”
“Go ahead.”
“They hurt me,” he finished, defiant. “They changed something and it hurt. I wanted to kill them for it. I wanted to kill them right there.”
His father nodded. “That’s crude, Roland, but not unworthy. Not moral, either, but it is not your place to be moral. In fact . . .” He peered at his son. “Morals may always be beyond you. You are not quick, like Cuthbert or Vannay’s boy. That’s all right, though. It will make you formidable.”
The boy felt both pleased and troubled by this. “He’ll—”
“Oh, he’ll hang.”
The boy nodded. “I want to see it.”
The elder Deschain threw his head back and roared laughter.
“Not as formidable as I thought . . . or perhaps just stupid.” He closed his mouth abruptly.
An arm shot out and grabbed the boy’s upper arm painfully.
Roland grimaced but didn’t flinch. His father peered at him steadily, and the boy looked back, although it was more difficult than hooding the hawk had been.
“All right,” he said, “thee may.” And turned abruptly to go.
“Father?”
“What?”
“Do you know who they were talking about? Do you know who the good man is?”
His father turned back and looked at him speculatively. “Yes. I think I do.”
“If you caught him,” Roland said in his thoughtful, near-plodding way, “no one else like Cook would have to be neck-popped.”
His father smiled thinly. “Perhaps not for a while. But in the end, someone always has to have his or her neck popped, as you so quaintly put it. The people demand it. Sooner or later, if there isn’t a turncoat, the people make one.”
“Yes,” Roland said, grasping the concept instantly—it was one he never forgot. “But if you got the good man—”
“No,” his father said flatly.
“Why not? Why wouldn’t that end it?”
For a moment his father seemed on the verge of saying why, but then shook his head. “We’ve talked enough for now, I think. Go out from me.”
He wanted to tell his father not to forget his promise when the time came for Hax to step through the trap, but he was sensitive to his father’s moods.
He put his fist to his forehead, crossed one foot in front of the other, and bowed.
Then he went out, closing the door quickly.
He suspected that what his father wanted now was to fuck.
He was aware that his mother and father did that, and he was reasonably well informed as to how it was done, but the mental picture that always condensed with the thought made him feel both uneasy and oddly guilty.
Some years later, Susan would tell him the story of Oedipus, and he would absorb it in quiet thoughtfulness, thinking of the odd and bloody triangle formed by his father, his mother, and by Marten—known in some quarters as Farson, the good man.
Or perhaps it was a quadrangle, if one wished to add himself.
XI
Gallows Hill was on the Taunton Road, which was nicely poetic; Cuthbert might have appreciated this, but Roland did not. He did appreciate the splendidly ominous scaffold which climbed into the brilliantly blue sky, an angular silhouette which overhung the coach road.
The two boys had been let out of Morning Exercises—Cort had read the notes from their fathers laboriously, lips moving, nodding here and there.
When he finished with them, he had carefully put the papers away in his pocket.
Even here in Gilead, paper was easily as valuable as gold.
When these two sheets of it were safe, he’d looked up at the blue-violet dawn sky and nodded again.
“Wait here,” he said, and went toward the leaning stone hut that served him as living quarters. He came back with a slice of rough, unleavened bread, broke it in two, and gave half to each.
“When it’s over, each of you will put this beneath his shoes. Mind you do exactly as I say or I’ll clout you into next week.”