The Gunslinger

"Love and dying have been my life."



The boy said nothing.



"It was necessary to prove one's self in battle," the gunslinger began.



Summer and hot.



August had come to the land like a vampire lover, killing the land and the crops of the tenant farmers, turning the fields of the castle-city white and sterile. In the west, some miles distant and near the borders that were the end of the civilized world, fighting had already begun. All reports were bad, and all of them palled before the heat that rested over this place of the center. Cattle lolled



empty-eyed in the pens of the stockyards. Pigs grunted listlessly, unmindful of knives whetted for the coming fall. People whined about taxes and conscription, as they always have; but there was an emptiness beneath the apathetic passion play of politics. The center had frayed like a rag rug that had been washed and walked on and shaken and hung and dried. The lines and nets of mesh which held the last jewel at the breast of the world were unraveling. Things were not holding together. The earth drew in its breath in the summer of the coming eclipse.



The boy idled along the upper corridor of this stone place which was home, sensing these things, not understanding. He was also empty and dangerous.



It had been three years since the hanging of the cook who had always been able to find snacks for hungry boys, and he had filled out. Now, dressed only in faded denim pants, fourteen years old, he had already come to the widened chest-span and lengthening legs that would characterize his manhood. He was still unbedded, but two of the younger slatterns of a West-Town merchant had cast eyes on him. He had felt a response and felt it more strongly now. Even in the coolness of the passage, he felt sweat on his body.



Ahead were his mother's apartments and he approached them incuriously, meaning only to pass them and go upward to the roof, where a thin breeze and the pleasure of his hand awaited.



He had passed the door when a voice called him:



"You. Boy."



It was Marten, the enchanter. He was dressed with a suspicious, upsetting casualness �C black whipcord trousers almost as tight as leotards, and a white shirt open halfway down his chest His hair was tousled.



The boy looked at him silently.



"Come in, come in! Don't stand in the hall! Your mother wants to speak to you." He was smiling with his mouth, but the lines of his face held a deeper, more sardonic humor. Beneath that there was only coldness.



But his mother did not seem to want to see him. She sat in the low-backed chair by the large window in the central parlor of her apartments, the one which overlooked the hot blank stone of the central courtyard. She was dressed in a loose, informal gown and looked at the boy only once



�C a quick, glinting rueful smile, like autumn sun on stream water. During the rest of the interview she studied her hands.



He saw her seldom now, and the phantom of cradle songs had almost faded from his brain. But she was a beloved stranger. He felt an amorphous fear, and an uncoalesced hatred for Marten, his father's right-hand man (or was it the other way around?), was born.



And, of course, there had already been some back street talk �C talk which he honestly thought he hadn't heard.



"Are you well?" She asked him softly, studying her hands. Marten stood beside her, a heavy, disturbing hand near the juncture of her white shoulder and white neck, smiling on them both. His brown eyes were dark to the point of blackness with smiling.



"Yes," he said.



"Your studies go well?"



"I'm trying," he said. They both knew he was not flash ingly intelligent like Cuthbert, or even quick, like Jamie. He was a plodder and a bludgeoner.



"And David?" She knew his affection for the hawk.



The boy looked up at Marten, still smiling paternally down on all this. "Past his prime."



His mother seemed to wince; for a moment Marten's face seemed to darken, his grip on her shoulder tighten.



Then she looked out into the hot whiteness of the day, and all was as it had been.



It's a charade, he thought. A game. Who is playing with whom?



"You have a scar on your forehead," Marten said, still smiling. "Are you going to be a fighter like your father or are you just slow?"



This time she did wince.



"Both," the boy said. He looked steadily at Marten and smiled painfully. Even in here, it was very hot.



Marten stopped smiling abruptly. "You can go to the roof now, boy. I believe you have business there."



But Marten had misunderstood, underestimated. They had been speaking in the low tongue, a parody of informality. But now the boy flashed into High Speech:



"My mother has not yet dismissed me, bondsman!"



Marten's face twisted as if quirt-lashed. The boy heard his mother's dreadful, woeful gasp. She spoke his name.



But the painful smile remained intact on the boy's face and he stepped forward. "Will you give me a sign of fealty, bondsman? In the name of my father whom you serve??



Marten stared at him, rankly unbelieving.



"Go," Marten said gently. "Go and find your hand."



Smiling, the boy went.



As he closed the door and went back the way he came, he heard his mother wail. It was a banshee sound.



Then he heard Marten's laugh.



The boy continued to smile as he went to his test.



Jamie had come from the shop-wives, and when he saw the boy crossing the exercise yard, he ran to tell Roland the latest gossips of bloodshed and revolt to the west. But he fell aside, the words all unspoken. They had known each other since the time of infancy, and as boys they had dared



each other, cuffed each other, and made a thousand explorations of the walls within which they had both been birthed.



The boy strode past him, staring without seeing, grinning his painful grin. He was walking toward Cort's cottage, where the shades were drawn to ward off the savage afternoon heat. Cort napped in the afternoon so that he could enjoy his evening tomcat forays into the mazed and filthy brothels of the lower town to the fullest extent



Jamie knew in a flash of intuition, knew what was to come, and in his fear and ecstasy he was torn between following Roland and going after the others.



Then his hypnotism was broken and he ran toward the main buildings, screaming. "Cuthbert! Allen! Thomas!" His screams sounded puny and thin in the heat. They had known, all of them, in that invisible way boys have, that the boy would be the first of them to try the line. But this was too soon.



The hideous grin on Roland's face galvanized him as no news of wars, revolts, and witchcrafts could have done. This was more than words from a toothless mouth given over fly-specked heads of lettuce.



Roland walked to the cottage of his teacher and kicked the door open. It slammed backward, hit the plain rough plaster of the wall and rebounded.



He had never been here before. The entrance opened on an austere kitchen that was cool and brown. A table. Two straight chairs. Two cabinets. A faded linoleum floor, tracked in black paths from the cooler set in the floor to the counter where knives hung, to the table.



A public man's privacy here. The last faded sobriety of a violent midnight carouser who had loved the boys of three generations roughly, and made some of them into gunslingers.



"Cort!"



He kicked the table, sending it across the room and into the counter. Knives from the wall rack fell in twinkling jackstraws.



There was thick stirring in the other room, a half-sleep clearing of the throat. The boy did not enter, knowing it was sham, knowing that Cort had awakened immediately in the cottage's other room and stood with one glittering eye beside the door, waiting to break the intruder's un wary neck.



"Cort, I want you, bondsman!"



Now he spoke the High Speech, and Cort swung the door open. He was dressed only in thin underwear shorts, a squat man with bow legs, runneled with scars from top to toe, thick with twists of muscle. There was a round, bulging belly. The boy knew from experience that it was spring steel. The one good eye glared at him from the bashed and dented hairless head.



The boy saluted formally. "Teach me no more, bonds-



,,



man. Today I teach you.



"You are early, puler," he said casually, but he also spoke the High Speech. "Five years early, I should judge. I will ask only once. Will you renege?"



The boy only smiled his hideous, painful smile. For Cort, who had seen the smile on a score of bloodied, scarlet-skied fields of honor and dishonor, it was answer enough



�C perhaps the only answer he would have believed.



"It's too bad," the teacher said absently. "You have been a most promising pupil �C the best in two dozen years, I should say. It will be sad to see you broken and set upon a blind path. But the world has moved on. Bad times are on horseback."



The boy still did not speak (and would have been incapable of any coherent explanation, had it been required), but for the first time the awful smile softened a little.



"Still, there is the line of blood," Cort said somberly, "revolt and witchcraft to the west or no. I am your bondsman, boy. I recognize your command and bow to it now  - if never again �C with my heart."



And Cort, who had cuffed him, kicked him, bled him, cursed him, made mock of him and called him the very eye of syphilis, bent to one knee and bowed his head.



The boy touched the leathery, vulnerable flesh of his neck with wonder, "Rise, bondsman. In love."



Cort stood slowly, and there might have been pain behind the impassive mask of his reamed features. "This is waste. Renege, boy. I break my own oath. Renege, and wait!"



The boy said nothing.



"Very well." Cort's voice became dry and businesslike. "One hour. And the weapon of your choice. "



"You will bring your stick?"



"I always have."



"How many sticks have been taken from you, Cort?" Which was tantamount to asking: How many boys have entered the square yard beyond the Great Hall and returned as gunslinger apprentices?



"No stick will be taken from me today," Cort said slowly. "I regret it. There is only the once, boy. The penalty for overeagerness is the same as the penalty for unworthiness. Can you not wait?"



The boy recalled Marten standing over him, tall as mountains. "No."



"Very well. What weapon do you choose?"