by Stephen King
“That one,” Cuthbert said, “would sleep through an earthquake.”
“But you heard me coming and woke.”
“Yes,” Cuthbert said. His eyes were on Roland’s face, searching it with an intensity that made Roland feel a little uneasy. “Did something happen to you? You look different.”
“Do I?”
“Yes. Excited. Aired out, somehow.”
If he was going to tell Cuthbert about Susan, now was the time. He decided without really thinking about it (most of his decisions, certainly the best of them, were made in this same way) not to tell. If he met her at Mayor’s House, it would be the first time as far as Cuthbert and Alain knew, as well. What harm in that?
“I’ve been properly aired, all right,” he said, dismounting and bending to uncinch the girths of his saddle. “I’ve seen some interesting things, too.”
“Ah? Speak, companion of my bosom’s dearest tenant.”
“I’ll wait until tomorrow, I think, when yon hibernating bear is finally awake. Then I only have to tell once. Besides, I’m tired. I’ll share you one thing, though: there are too many horses in these parts, even for a Barony renowned for its horseflesh. Too many by far.”
Before Cuthbert could ask any questions, Roland pulled the saddle from Rusher’s back and set it down beside three small wicker cages which had been bound together with rawhide, making them into a carrier which could be secured to a horse’s back. Inside, three pigeons with white rings around their necks cooed sleepily. One took his head out from beneath his wing, had a peek at Roland, and then tucked himself away again.
“These fellows all right?” Roland asked.
“Fine. Pecking and shitting happily in their straw. As far as they’re concerned, they’re on vacation. What did you mean about-”
“Tomorrow,” Roland said, and Cuthbert, seeing that there would be no more, only nodded and went to find his lean and bony lookout.
Twenty minutes later, Rusher unloaded and rubbed down and set to forage with Buckskin and Glue Boy (Cuthbert could not even name his horse as a normal person would), Roland lay on his back in his bedroll, looking up at the late stars overhead. Cuthbert had gone back to sleep as easily as he had awakened at the sound of Rusher’s hoofs, but Roland had never felt less sleepy in his life.
His mind turned back a month, to the whore’s room, to his father sitting on the whore’s bed and watching him dress. The words his father had spoken-I have known for two years-had reverberated like a struck gong in Roland’s head. He suspected they might continue to do so for the rest of his life.
But his father had had much more to say. About Marten. About Roland’s mother, who was, perhaps, more sinned against than sinning. About harriers who called themselves patriots. And about John Farson, who had indeed been in Cressia, and who was gone from that place now-vanished, as he had a way of doing, like smoke in a high wind. Before leaving, he and his men had burned Indrie, the Barony seat, pretty much to the ground. The slaughter had been in the hundreds, and perhaps it was no surprise that Cressia had since repudiated the Affiliation and spoken for the Good Man. The Barony Governor, the Mayor of Indrie, and the High Sheriff had all ended the early summer day which concluded Farson’s visit with their heads on the wall guarding the town’s entrance. That was, Steven Deschain had said, “pretty persuasive politics.”
It was a game of Castles where both armies had come out from behind their Hillocks and the final moves had commenced, Roland’s father had said, and as was so often the case with popular revolutions, that game was apt to be over before many in the Baronies of Mid-World had begun to realize that John Farson was a serious threat… or, if you were one of those who believed passionately in his vision of democracy and an end to what he called “class slavery and ancient fairy-tales,” a serious agent of change.
His father and his father’s small ka-tet of gunslingers, Roland was amazed to learn, cared little about Farson in either light; they looked upon him as small cheese. Looked upon the Affiliation itself as small cheese; come to that.
I’m going to send you away, Steven had said, sitting there on the bed and looking somberly at his only son. the one who had lived. There is no true safe place left in Mid- World, hut the Barony of Mejis on the Clean Sea is as close to true safety as any place may be these days… so it’s there you’ll go, along with at least two of your mates. Alain, I suppose, for one. Just not that laughing boy for the other, I beg of you. You ’d be better off with a barking dog.
Roland, who on any other day in his life would have been overjoyed at the prospect of seeing some of the wider world, had protested hotly. If the final battles against the Good Man were at hand, he wanted to fight them at his father’s side. He was a gunslinger now, after all, if only a 'prentice, and-
His father had shaken his head, slowly and emphatically. No, Roland. You don’t understand. You shall, however; as well as possible, you shall.
Later, the two of them had walked the high battlements above Mid-World’s last living city-green and gorgeous Gilead in the morning sun, with its pennons flapping and the vendors in the streets of the Old Quarter and horses trotting on the bridle paths which radiated out from the palace standing at the heart of everything. His father had told him more (not everything), and he had understood more (far from everything-nor did his father understand everything). The Dark Tower had not been mentioned by either of them, but already it hung in Roland’s mind, a possibility like a storm cloud far away on the horizon.
Was the Tower what all of this was really about? Not a jumped-up harrier with dreams of ruling Mid-World, not the wizard who had enchanted his mother, not the glass ball which Steven and his posse had hoped to find in Cressia… but the Dark Tower?
He hadn’t asked.
He hadn’t dared ask.
Now he shifted in his bedroll and closed his eyes. He saw the girl’s face at once; he felt her lips pressed firmly against his own again, and smelled the scent of her skin. He was instantly hot from the top of his head to the base of his spine, cold from the base of his spine to the tips of his toes. Then he thought of the way her legs had flashed as she slid from Rusher’s back (also the glimmer of the undergarments beneath her briefly raised dress), and his hot half and cold half changed places.
The whore had taken his virginity but wouldn’t kiss him; had turned her face aside when he tried to kiss her. She’d allowed him to do whatever else he wanted, but not that. At the time he’d been bitterly disappointed. Now he was glad.
The eye of his adolescent mind, both restless and clear, considered (he braid which fell down her back to her waist, the soft dimples which had formed at the comers of her mouth when she smiled, the lilt of her voice, her old-fashioned way of saying aye and nay, ye and yer and da. He thought of how her hands had felt on his shoulders as she stretched up to kiss him, and thought he would give everything he owned to feel her hands there again, so light and so firm. And her mouth on his. It was a mouth that knew only a little about kissing, he guessed, but that was a little more than he knew himself.
Be careful, Roland-don’t let your feeling for this girl tip anything over. She’s not free, anyway-she said as much. Not married, but spoken for in some other way.
Roland was far from the relentless creature he would eventually become, but the seeds of that relentlessness were there-small, stony things that would, in their time, grow into trees with deep roots… and bitter fruit. Now one of these seeds cracked open and sent up its first sharp blade.
What’s been spoken for may be unspoken, and what’s done may be undone. Nothing’s sure, but… I want her.
Yes. That was the one thing he did know, and he knew it as well as he knew the face of his father: he wanted her. Not as he had wanted the whore when she lay naked on her bed with her legs spread and her half-lidded eyes looking up at him, but in the way he wanted food when he was hungry or water when he was thirsty. In the way, he supposed, that he wanted to drag Marten’s dusty body behind his horse down Gilead’s High R
oad in payment for what the wizard had done to his mother.
He wanted her; he wanted the girl Susan.
Roland turned over on his other side, closed his eyes, and fell asleep. His rest was thin and lit by the crudely poetic dreams only adolescent boys have, dreams where sexual attraction and romantic love come together and resonate more powerfully than they ever will again. In these thirsty visions Susan Delgado put her hands on Roland’s shoulders over and over, kissed his mouth over and over, told him over and over to come to her for the first time, to be with her for the first time, to see her for the first time, to see her very well.
2
Five miles or so from where Roland slept and dreamed his dreams, Susan Delgado lay in her bed and looked out her window and watched Old Star begin to grow pale with the approaching dawn. Sleep was no closer now than it had been when she lay down, and there was a throb between her legs where the old woman had touched her. It was distracting but no longer unpleasant, because she now associated it with the boy she’d met on the road and impulsively kissed by starlight. Every time she shifted her legs, that throb flared into a brief sweet ache.
When she’d got home, Aunt Cord (who would have been in her own bed an hour before on any ordinary night) had been sitting in her rocking chair by the fireplace-dead and cold and swept clean of ashes at this time of year-with a lapful of lace that looked like wave-froth against her dowdy black dress. She was edging it with a speed that seemed almost supernatural to Susan, and she hadn’t looked up when the door opened and her niece came in on a swirl of breeze.
“I expected ye an hour ago,” Aunt Cord said. And then, although she didn’t sound it: “I was worried.”
“Aye?” Susan said, and said no more. She thought that on any other night she would have offered one of her fumbling excuses which always sounded like a lie to her own ears-it was the effect Aunt Cord had had on her all her life-but this hadn’t been an ordinary night. Never in her life had there been a night like this. She found she could not get Will Dearborn out of her mind.
Aunt Cord had looked up then, her close-set, rather beady eyes sharp and inquisitive above her narrow blade of a nose. Some things hadn’t changed since Susan had set out for the Coos; she had still been able to feel her aunt’s eyes brushing across her face and down her body, like little whisk-brooms with sharp bristles.
“What took ye so long?” Aunt Cord had asked. “Was there trouble?”
“No trouble,” Susan had replied, but for a moment she thought of how the witch had stood beside her in the doorway, pulling her braid through the gnarled tube of one loosely clenched fist. She remembered wanting to go, and she remembered asking Rhea if their business was done.
Mayhap there’s one more little thing, the old woman had said… or so Susan thought. But what had that one more little thing been? She couldn’t remember. And, really, what did it matter? She was shut of Rhea until her belly began to rise with Thorin’s child… and if there could be no baby-making until Reap-Night, she’d not be returning to the Coos until late winter at the soonest. An age! And it would be longer than that, were she slow to kindle…
“I walked slowly coming home, Aunt. That’s all.”
“Then why look ye so?” Aunt Cord had asked, scant brows knitting toward the vertical line which creased her brow.
“How so?” Susan had asked, taking off her apron and knotting the strings and hanging it on the hook just inside the kitchen door.
“Flushy. Frothy. Like milk fresh out of the cow.”
She’d almost laughed. Aunt Cord, who knew as little about men as Susan did about the stars and planets, had struck it directly. Flushy and frothy was exactly how she felt. “Only the night air, I suppose,” she had said. “I saw a meteor, Aunt. And heard the thinny. The sound’s strong tonight.”
“Aye?” her aunt asked without interest, then returned to the subject which did interest her. “Did it hurt?”
“A little.”
“Did ye cry?”
Susan shook her head.
“Good. Better not. Always better. She likes it when they cry, I’ve heard. Now, Sue-did she give you something? Did the old pussy give you something?”
“Aye.” She reached into her pocket and brought out the paper with
written upon it. She held it out and her aunt snatched it away with a greedy look. Cordelia had been quite the sugarplum over the last month or so, but now that she had what she wanted (and now that Susan had come too far and promised too much to have a change of heart), she’d reverted to the sour, supercilious, often suspicious woman Susan had grown up with; the one who’d been driven into almost weekly bouts of rage by her phlegmatic, life-goes-as-'twill brother. In a way, it was a relief. It had been nervewracking to have Aunt Cord playing Cybilla Good-Sprite day after day.
“Aye, aye, there’s her mark, all right,” her aunt had said, tracing her fingers over the bottom of the sheet. “A devil’s hoof’s what it means, some say, but what do we care, eh. Sue? Nasty, horrid creature that she is, she’s still made it possible for two women to get on in the world a little longer. And ye’ll only have to see her once more, probably around Year’s End, when ye’ve caught proper.”
“It will be later than that,” Susan had told her. “I’m not to lie with him until the full of the Demon Moon. After the Reaping Fair and the bonfire.”
Aunt Cord had stared, eyes wide, mouth open. “Said she so?”
Are you calling me a liar. Auntie? she had thought with a sharpness that wasn’t much like her; usually her nature was more like her father’s.
“Aye.”
“But why? Why so long?” Aunt Cord was obviously upset, obviously disappointed. There had so far been eight pieces of silver and four of gold out of this; they were tucked up wherever it was that Aunt Cord squirreled her money away (and Susan suspected there was a fair amount of it, although Cordelia liked to plead poverty at every opportunity), and twice that much was still owed… or would be, once the bloodstained sheet went to the Mayor’s House laundress. That same amount would be paid yet again when Rhea had confirmed the baby, and the baby’s honesty. A lot of money, all told. A great lot, for a little place like this and little folk like them. And now, to have the paying of it put back so far…
Then came a sin Susan had prayed over (although without much enthusiasm) before getting into her bed: she had rather enjoyed the cheated, frustrated look on Aunt Cord’s face-the look of the thwarted miser. “Why so long?” she repeated.
“I suppose you could go up the Coos and ask her.”
Cordelia Delgado’s lips, thin to begin with, had pressed together so tightly they almost disappeared. “Are you pert, missy? Are you pert with me?”
“No. I’m much too tired to be pert with anyone. I want to wash-I can still feel her hands on me, so I can-and go to bed.”
“Then do so. Perhaps in the morning we can discuss this in more ladylike fashion. And we must go and see Hart, of course.” She folded the paper Rhea had given Susan, looking pleased at the prospect of visiting Hart Thorin, and moved her hand toward her dress pocket.
“No,” Susan said, and her voice had been unusually sharp-enough so to freeze her aunt’s hand in midair. Cordelia had looked at her, frankly startled. Susan had felt a little embarrassed by that look, but she hadn’t dropped her eyes, and when she held out her own hand, it had been steady enough.
“I’m to have the keeping of that. Aunt.”
“Who tells ye to speak so?” Aunt Cord had asked, her voice almost whining with outrage-it was close to blasphemy, Susan supposed, but for a moment Aunt Cord’s voice had reminded her of the sound the thinny made. “Who tells ye to speak so to the woman who raised a motherless girl? To the sister of that girl’s poor dead father?”
“You know who,” Susan said. She still held her hand out. “I’m to keep it, and I’m to give it to Mayor Thorin. She said she didn’t care what happened to it then, he could wipe his bum with it for all of her,” (the flush which suffused her aunt’s face
at that had been very enjoyable) “but until then, it was to be in my keeping.”
“I never heard of such a thing,” Aunt Cordelia had huffed… but she had handed the grimy scrap of paper back. “Giving the keep of such an important document to a mere scrap of a girl.”
Yet not too mere a scrap to be his gilly, am I? To lie under him and listen to his bones creak and take his seed and mayhap bear his child.
She’d dropped her eyes to her pocket as she put the paper away again, not wanting Aunt Cord to see the resentment in them.
“Go up,” Aunt Cord had said, brushing the froth of lace off her lap and into her workbasket, where it lay in an unaccustomed tangle. “And when you wash, do your mouth with especial care. Cleanse it of its impudence and disrespect toward those who have given up much for love of its owner.”
Susan had gone silently, biting back a thousand retorts, mounting the stairs as she had so often, throbbing with a mixture of shame and resentment.
And now here she was, in her bed and still awake as the stars paled away and the first brighter shades began to color the sky. The events of the night just past slipped through her mind in a kind of fantastical blur, like shuffled playing cards-and the one which turned up with the most persistence was the face of Will Dearborn. She thought of how that face could be hard at one moment and soften so unexpectedly at the next. And was it a handsome face? Aye, she thought so. For herself, she knew so.
I’ve never asked a girl to ride out with me, or if she would accept a visit of me. I would ask you, Susan, daughter of Patrick.
Why now? Why should I meet him now, when no good can come of it?
If it’s ka, it ’ll come like a wind. Like a cyclone.
She tossed from one side of the bed to the other, then at last rolled onto her back again. There would be no sleep for her in what remained of this night, she thought. She might as well walk out on the Drop and watch the sun come up.
Yet she continued to lie in bed, feeling somehow sick and well at the same time, looking into the shadows and listening to the first cries of the morning birds, thinking of how his mouth had felt against hers, the tender grain of it and the feeling of his teeth below his lips; the smell of his skin, the rough texture of his shirt under her palms.
