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."
They had not understood until they arrived, riding double on Cuthbert's gelding. They were the first, fully two hours ahead of anyone else and four hours before the hanging, so Gallows Hill stood deserted--except for the rooks and ravens. The birds were everywhere. They roosted noisily on the hard, jutting bar that overhung the trap--the armature of death. They sat in a row along the edge of the platform, they jostled for position on the stairs.
"They leave the bodies," Cuthbert muttered. "For the birds."
"Let's go up," Roland said.
Cuthbert looked at him with something like horror. "Up there? Do you think--"
Roland cut him off with a gesture of his hands. "We're years early. No one will come."
"All right."
They walked slowly toward the gibbet, and the birds took wing, cawing and circling like a mob of angry dispossessed peasants. Their bodies were flat black against the pure dawnlight of the In-World sky.
For the first time Roland felt the enormity of his responsibility in the matter; this wood was not noble, not part of the awesome machine of Civilization, but merely warped pine from the Forest o' Barony, covered with splattered white bird droppings. It was splashed everywhere--stairs, railing, platform--and it stank.
The boy turned to Cuthbert with startled, terrified eyes and saw Cuthbert looking back at him with the same expression.
"I can't," Cuthbert whispered. "Ro', I can't watch it."
Roland shook his head slowly. There was a lesson here, he realized, not a shining thing but something that was old and rusty and misshapen. It was why their fathers had let them come. And with his usual stubborn and inarticulate doggedness, Roland laid mental hands on whatever it was.
"You can, Bert."
"I won't sleep tonight if I do."
"Then you won't," Roland said, not seeing what that had to do with it.
Cuthbert suddenly seized
Roland's hand and looked at him with such mute agony that Roland's own doubt came back, and he wished sickly that they had never gone to the west kitchen that night. His father had been right. Better not to know. Better every man, woman, and child in Taunton dead and stinking than this.
But still. Still. Whatever the lesson was, rusty, whatever half-buried thing with sharp edges, he would not let it go or give up his grip on it.
"Let's not go up," Cuthbert said. "We've seen everything."
And Roland nodded reluctantly, feeling his grip on that thing--whatever it was--weaken. Cort, he knew, would have knocked them both sprawling and then forced them up to the platform step by cursing step . . . and sniffing fresh blood back up their noses and down their throats like salty jam as they went. Cort would probably have looped new hemp over the yardarm itself and put the noose around each of their necks in turn, would have made them stand on the trap to feel it; and Cort would have been ready to strike them again if either wept or lost control of his bladder. And Cort, of course, would have been right. For the first time in his life, Roland found himself hating his own childhood. He wished for the long boots of age.
He deliberately pried a splinter from the railing and placed it in his breast pocket before turning away.
"Why did you do that?" Cuthbert asked.
He wished to answer something swaggering: Oh, the luck of the gallows . . . , but he only looked at Cuthbert and shook his head. "Just so I'll have it," he said. "Always have it."
They walked away from the gallows, sat down, and waited. In an hour or so the first of the townfolk began to gather, mostly families who had come in broken-down wagons and beat-up buckas, carrying their breakfasts with them--hampers of cold pancakes folded over fillings of wild pokeberry jam. Roland felt his stomach growl hungrily and wondered again, with despair, where the honor and the nobility was. He had been taught of such things, and was now forced to wonder if they had been lies all along, or only treasures buried deep by the wise. He wanted to believe that, but it seemed to him that Hax in his dirty whites, walking around and around his steaming, subterranean kitchen and yelling at the potboys, had more honor than this. He fingered the splinter from the gallows tree with sick bewilderment. Cuthbert lay beside him with his face drawn impassive.