The Gunslinger

The boy's eyes widened. "How could I not? Treason was �C "



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 Farson poisoned."



"I didn't!" The words jerked out of him violently. "I wanted to kill him �C both of them! Liars! Snakes! They  - "Go ahead."



"They hurt me," he finished, defiant. "They did something to me. Changed something. I wanted to kill them for it."



His father nodded. "That is worthy. Not moral, 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 Wheeler's boy. It will make you formidable."



The boy, impatient before this, felt both pleased and troubled. "He will �C "



"Hang."



The boy nodded. "I want to see it."



Roland the elder 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 like a bolt of lightning and grabbed the boy's upper arm painfully. He grimaced but did not 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, 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 . . . 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 him �C "



"No," his father said flatly.



"Why?"



For a moment his father seemed on the verge of saying why, but he bit it back. "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 suspected his father wanted to fuck. He closed that door quickly. He was aware that his mother and father did that . . . that thing together, and he was reasonably well informed as to what that act was, 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 �C known in some quarters as the good man. Or perhaps it was a quadrangle, if one wished to add himself.



"Good night, father," Roland said.



"Good night, son," his father said absently, and began unbuttoning his shirt In his mind, the boy was already gone. Like father, like son.



Gallows Hill was on the Farson Road, which was nicely poetic �C Cuthbert might have appreciated this, but Roland did not. He did appreciate the splendidly ominous scaffold which climbed into the brilliantly blue sky, a black and 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 both, he had looked up at the blue-violet dawn sky and had nodded again.



"Wait here," he said, and went toward the leaning stone hut that was his 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, and Gallows Hill stood deserted �C except for the rooks and ravens. The birds were everywhere, and of course they were all black. They roosted noisily on the hard, jutting bar that overhung the trap �C the armature of death. They sat in a row along the edge of the platform, they jostled for position on the stairs.



"They leave them," Cuthbert muttered. "For the birds."



"Let's go up," Roland said.



Cuthbert looked at him with something like horror. "Do you think �C "



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 indignant wing, cawing and circling like a mob of angry dispossessed peasants. Their bodies were flat and black against the pure dawnlight of the 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 covered with splattered white bird droppings. It was splashed everywhere �C stairs, railing, platform �C 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. "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"



"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 every man, woman, and child in Farson than this.



But whatever the lesson was, rusty, half-buried thing, 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 �C whatever it was �C 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 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 size and calluses and sureness 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 them began to gather, mostly families who had come in broken-down wagons and shays, carrying their breakfasts with them �C hampers of cold pancakes folded over fillings of wild strawberry jam. Roland felt his stomach growl hungrily and wondered again, with despair, where the honor and the nobility of it was. It seemed to him that Hax in his dirty whites, walk-king around and around his steaming, subterranean kitchen, had more honor than this. He fingered the splinter from the gallows tree with sick bewilderment Cuthbert lay beside him with his face made impassive.



In the end it was not so much, and Roland was glad. Hax was carried in an open cart, but only his huge girth gave him away; he had been blindfolded with a wide black cloth that hung down over his face. A few threw stones, but most merely continued with their breakfasts.



A gunslinger whom the boy did not know (he was glad his father had not drawn the lot) led the fat cook carefully up the steps. Two Guards of the Watch had gone ahead and stood on either side of the trap. When Hax and the gunslinger reached the top, the gunslinger threw the noosed



rope over the crosstree and then put it over the cook's head, dropping the knot until it lay just below the left ear. The birds had all flown, but Roland knew they were waiting.



"Do you wish to make confession?" the gunslinger asked.



"I have nothing to confess," Hax said. His words carried well, and his voice was oddly dignified in spite of the muffle of cloth which hung over







his lips. The cloth ruffled slightly in the faint, pleasant breeze that had blown up. "I have not forgotten my father's face; it has been with me through all."



Roland glanced sharply at the crowd and was disturbed by what he saw there �C a sense of sympathy? Perhaps admiration? He would ask his father. When traitors are called heroes (or heroes traitors, he supposed in his frowning way), dark times must have fallen. He wished he understood better. His mind flashed to Cort and the bread Cort had given them. He felt contempt; the day was coming when Cort would serve him. Perhaps not Cuthbert; perhaps Cuthbert would buckle under Cort's steady fire and remain a page or a horseboy (or infinitely worse, a perfumed diplomat, dallying in receiving chambers or looking into bogus crystal balls with doddering kings and princes), but he would not. He knew it.



"Roland?"



"I'm here." He took Cuthbert's hand, and their fingers locked together like iron.



The trap dropped. Hax plummeted through. And in the sudden stillness, there was a sound: that sound an exploding pineknot makes on the hearth during a cold winter night.



But it was not so much. The cook's legs kicked out once in a wide Y; the crowd made a satisfied whistling noise; the Guards of the Watch dropped their military pose and began



to gather things up negligently. The gunslinger walked back down the steps slowly, mounted his horse, and rode off, cutting roughly through one gaggle of picnickers, making them scurry.



The crowd dispersed rapidly after that, and in forty minutes the two boys were left alone on the small hill they had chosen. The birds were returning to examine their new prize. One lit on Hax's shoulder and sat there chummily, darting its beak at the bright and shiny hoop Hax had always worn in his right ear.



"It doesn't look like him at all," Cuthbert said.



"Oh, yes, it does," Roland said confidently as they walked toward the gallows, the bread in their hands. Cuthbert looked abashed.



They paused beneath the crosstree, looking up at the dangling, twisting body. Cuthbert reached up and touched one hairy ankle, defiantly. The body started on a new, twisting arc.



Then, rapidly, they broke the bread and spread the crumbs beneath the dangling feet. Roland looked back just once as they rode away. Now there were thousands of birds. The bread �C he grasped this only dimly �C was symbolic, then.



"It was good," Cuthbert said suddenly. "It . . . I . . . I liked it. I did."



Roland was not shocked by this, although he had not particularly cared for the scene. But he thought he could perhaps understand it.



"I don't know about that," he said, "but it was something. It surely was."



The land did not fall to the good man for another ten years, and by that time he was a gunslinger, his father was dead, he himself had become a matricide �C and the world had moved on.



III



"Look, " Jake said, pointing upward.



The gunslinger looked up and felt an obscure joint in his back pop. They had been in the foothills two days now, and although the waterskins were almost empty again, it didn't matter now. There would soon be all the water they could drink.