CHAPTER 4 #5
Cort staggered backwards, off balance. The ironwood staff rose and beat futilely at the air about his head. The hawk was an undulating, blurred bundle of feathers.
The boy, meanwhile, arrowed forward, his hand held out in a straight wedge, his elbow locked. This was his chance, and very likely the only one he’d have.
Still, Cort was almost too quick for him. The bird had covered ninety percent of his vision, but the ironwood came up again, spatulate end forward, and Cort cold-bloodly performed the only action that could turn events at that point. He beat his own face three times, biceps flexing mercilessly.
David fell away, broken and twisted. One wing flapped frantically at the ground. His cold, predator’s eyes stared fiercely into the teacher’s bloody, streaming face. Cort’s bad eye now bulged blindly from its socket.
The boy delivered a kick to Cort’s temple, connecting solidly. It should have ended it, but it did not. For a moment Cort’s face went slack; and then he lunged, grabbing for the boy’s foot.
The boy skipped back and tripped over his own feet. He went down asprawl. He heard, from far away, the sound of Jamie screaming in dismay.
Cort was ready to fall on him and finish it.
Roland had lost his advantage and both of them knew it.
For a moment they looked at each other, the teacher standing over the pupil with gouts of blood pouring from the left side of his face, the bad eye now closed except for a thin slit of white.
There would be no brothels for Cort this night.
Something ripped jaggedly at the boy’s hand. It was David, tearing blindly at whatever he could reach. Both wings were broken. It was incredible that he still lived.
The boy grabbed him like a stone, unmindful of the jabbing, diving beak that was taking the flesh from his wrist in ribbons. As Cort flew at him, all spread-eagled, the boy threw the hawk upward.
“Hai! David! Kill!”
Then Cort blotted out the sun and came down atop of him.
VIII
The bird was smashed between them, and the boy felt a callused thumb probe for the socket of his eye.
He turned it, at the same time bringing up the slab of his thigh to block Cort’s crotch-seeking knee.
His own hand flailed against the tree of Cort’s neck in three hard chops. It was like hitting ribbed stone.
Then Cort made a thick grunting. His body shuddered.
Faintly, the boy saw one hand flailing for the dropped stick, and with a jackknifing lunge, he kicked it out of reach.
David had hooked one talon into Cort’s right ear.
The other battered mercilessly at the teacher’s cheek, making it a ruin.
Warm blood splattered the boy’s face, smelling of sheared copper.
Cort’s fist struck the bird once, breaking its back. Again, and the neck snapped away at a crooked angle. And still the talon clutched. There was no ear now; only a red hole tunneled into the side of Cort’s skull. The third blow sent the bird flying, at last clearing Cort’s face.
The moment it was clear, the boy brought the edge of his hand across the bridge of his teacher’s nose, using every bit of his strength and breaking the thin bone. Blood sprayed.
Cort’s grasping, unseeing hand ripped at the boy’s buttocks, trying to pull his trousers down, trying to hobble him. Roland rolled away, found Cort’s stick, and rose to his knees.
Cort came to his own knees, grinning. Incredibly, they faced each other that way from either side of the line, although they had switched positions and Cort was now on the side where Roland had begun the contest. The old warrior’s face was curtained with gore.
The one seeing eye rolled furiously in its socket.
The nose was smashed over to a haunted, leaning angle. Both cheeks hung in flaps.
The boy held the man’s stick like a Gran’ Points player waiting for the pitch of the rawhide bird.
Cort double-feinted, then came directly at him.
Roland was ready, not fooled in the slightest by this last trick, which both knew was a poor one.
The ironwood swung in a flat arc, striking Cort’s skull with a dull thudding noise.
Cort fell on his side, looking at the boy with a lazy unseeing expression.
A tiny trickle of spit came from his mouth.
“Yield or die,” the boy said. His mouth was filled with wet cotton.
And Cort smiled. Nearly all consciousness was gone, and he would remain tended in his cottage for a week afterward, wrapped in the blackness of a coma, but now he held on with all the strength of his pitiless, shadowless life.
He saw the need to palaver in the boy’s eyes, and even with a curtain of blood between the two of them, understood that the need was desperate.
“I yield, gunslinger. I yield smiling. You have this day remembered the face of your father and all those who came before him. What a wonder you have done!”
Cort’s clear eye closed.
The gunslinger shook him gently, but with persistence.
The others were around him now, their hands trembling to thump his back and hoist him to their shoulders; but they held back, afraid, sensing a new gulf.
Yet this was not as strange as it could have been, because there had always been a gulf between this one and the rest.
Cort’s eye rolled open again.
“The key,” the gunslinger said. “My birthright, teacher. I need it.”
His birthright was the guns, not the heavy ones of his father—weighted with sandalwood—but guns, all the same.
Forbidden to all but a few. In the heavy vault under the barracks where he by ancient law was now required to abide, away from his mother’s breast, hung his apprentice weapons, heavy cumbersome barrel-shooters of steel and nickel.
Yet they had seen his father through his apprenticeship, and his father now ruled—at least in name.
“Is your need so fearsome, then?” Cort muttered, as if in his sleep. “So pressing? Aye, I feared so. So much need should have made you stupid. And yet you won.”
“The key.”
“The hawk was a fine ploy. A fine weapon. How long did it take you to train the bastard?”
“I never trained David. I friended him. The key.”
“Under my belt, gunslinger.” The eye closed again.
The gunslinger reached under Cort’s belt, feeling the heavy press of the man’s belly, the huge muscles there now slack and asleep. The key was on a brass ring. He clutched it in his hand, restraining the mad urge to thrust it up to the sky in a salutation of victory.
He got to his feet and was finally turning to the others when Cort’s hand fumbled for his foot. For a moment the gunslinger feared some last attack and tensed, but Cort only looked up at him and beckoned with one crusted finger.
“I’m going to sleep now,” Cort whispered calmly. “I’m going to walk the path. Perhaps all the way to the clearing at the end of it, I don’t know. I teach you no more, gunslinger. You have surpassed me, and two years younger than your father, who was the youngest. But let me counsel.”
“What?” Impatiently.
“Wipe that look off your face, maggot.”
In his surprise, Roland did as he was bid (although, being crouched hidden behind his face as we all are, could not know it).
Cort nodded, then whispered a single word. “Wait.”
“What?”
The effort it took the man to speak lent his words great emphasis.
“Let the word and the legend go before you. There are those who will carry both.” His eyes flicked over the gunslinger’s shoulder.
“Fools, perchance. Let your shadow grow hair on its face. Let it become dark.” He smiled grotesquely.
“Given time, words may even enchant an enchanter. Do you take my meaning, gunslinger?”
“Yes. I think I do.”
“Will you take my last counsel as your teacher?”
The gunslinger rocked back on his heels, a hunkered, thinking posture that foreshadowed the man.
He looked at the sky. It was deepening, purpling.
The heat of the day was failing and thunderheads in the west foretold rain.
Lightning tines jabbed the placid flank of the rising foothills miles distant.
Beyond that, the mountains. Beyond that, the rising fountains of blood and unreason.
He was tired, tired into his bones and beyond.
He looked back at Cort. “I will bury my hawk tonight, teacher. And later go into lower town to inform those in the brothels that will wonder about you. Perhaps I will comfort one or two a little.”
Cort’s lips parted in a pained smile. And then he slept.
The gunslinger got to his feet and turned to the others. “Make a litter and take him to his house. Then bring a nurse. No, two nurses. Okay?”
They still watched him, caught in a bated moment that none of them could immediately break. They still looked for a corona of fire, or a magical change of features.
“Two nurses,” the gunslinger repeated, and then smiled. They smiled in return. Nervously.
“You goddamned horse drover!” Cuthbert suddenly yelled, grinning. “You haven’t left enough meat for the rest of us to pick off the bone!”
“The world won’t move on tomorrow,” the gunslinger said, quoting the old adage with a smile. “Alain, you butter-butt! Move your freight.”
Alain set about the business of making the litter; Thomas and Jamie went together to the main hall and the infirmary.