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  “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.

  XII

  In the end it wasn’t such of a 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 as they watched.

  A gunslinger whom the boy did not know well (he was glad his father had not drawn the black stone) 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—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. Dark times, indeed. 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 Bert 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. He was for the open lands and long rides. That this seemed a good fate was something he would marvel over later, in his solitude.

  “Roland?”

  “I’m here.” He took Cuthbert’s hand, and their fingers locked together like iron.

  “Charge be capital murder and sedition,” the gunslinger said. “You have crossed the white, and I, Charles son of Charles, consign you ever to the black.”

  The crowd murmured, some in protest.

  “I never—”

  “Tell your tale in the underworld, maggot,” said Charles of Charles, and yanked the lever with both yellow-gauntleted hands.

  The trap dropped. Hax plummeted through, still trying to talk. Roland never forgot that. The cook went still trying to talk. And where did he finish the last sentence he would ever begin on earth? His words were ended by the sound an exploding pineknot makes on the hearth in the cold heart of a winter night.

  But on the whole he thought it 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. Charles son of Charles walked back down the steps slowly, mounted his horse, and rode off, cutting roughly through one gaggle of picnickers, quirting a few of the slowcoaches, 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. Bert 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 rough chunks beneath the dangling feet. Roland looked back just once as they rode away. Now there were thousands of birds. The bread—he grasped this only dimly—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 per
haps understand what Bert was saying. Perhaps he’d not finish as a diplomat after all, jokes and easy line of talk or not.

  “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 five years, and by that time Roland was a gunslinger, his father was dead, he himself had become a matricide—and the world had moved on.

  The long years and long rides had begun.

  XIII

  “Look,” Jake said, pointing upward.

  The gunslinger looked up and felt a twinge in his right hip. He winced. 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.

  He followed the vector of Jake’s finger upward, past the rise of the green plain to the naked and flashing cliffs and gorges above it . . . on up toward the snowcap itself.

  Faint and far, nothing but a tiny dot (it might have been one of those motes that dance perpetually in front of the eyes, except for its constancy), the gunslinger beheld the man in black, moving up the slopes with deadly progress, a minuscule fly on a huge granite wall.

  “Is that him?” Jake asked.

  The gunslinger looked at the depersonalized mote doing its faraway acrobatics, feeling nothing but a premonition of sorrow.

  “That’s him, Jake.”

  “Do you think we’ll catch him?”

  “Not on this side. On the other. And not if we stand here talking about it.”

  “They’re so high,” Jake said. “What’s on the other side?”

  “I don’t know,” the gunslinger said. “I don’t think anybody does. Maybe they did once. Come on, boy.”

  They began to move upward again, sending small runnels of pebbles and sand down toward the desert that washed away behind them in a flat bake-sheet that seemed to never end. Above them, far above, the man in black moved up and up and up. It was impossible to see if he looked back. He seemed to leap across impossible gulfs, to scale sheer faces. Once or twice he disappeared, but always they saw him again, until the violet curtain of dusk shut him from their view. When they made their camp for the evening, the boy spoke little, and the gunslinger wondered if the boy knew what he himself had already intuited. He thought of Cuthbert’s face, hot, dismayed, excited. He thought of the bread. He thought of the birds. It ends this way, he thought. Again and again it ends this way. There are quests and roads that lead ever onward, and all of them end in the same place—upon the killing ground.

  Except, perhaps, the road to the Tower. There ka might show its true face.

  The boy, the sacrifice, his face innocent and very young in the light of their tiny fire, had fallen asleep over his beans. The gunslinger covered him with the horse blanket and then curled up to sleep himself.

  THE ORACLE AND THE MOUNTAINS

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  The Oracle and the Mountains

  I

  The boy found the oracle and it almost destroyed him.

  Some thin instinct brought the gunslinger up from sleep to the velvet darkness which had fallen on them at dusk. That had been when he and Jake reached the grassy, nearly level oasis above the first rise of tumbled foothills. Even on the hardscrabble below, where they had toiled and fought for every foot in the killer sun, they had been able to hear the sound of crickets rubbing their legs seductively together in the perpetual green of willow groves above them. The gunslinger remained calm in his mind, and the boy had kept up at least the pretense of a façade, and that had made the gunslinger proud. But Jake hadn’t been able to hide the wildness in his eyes, which were white and starey, the eyes of a horse scenting water and held back from bolting only by the tenuous chain of its master’s mind; like a horse at the point where only understanding, not the spur, could hold it steady. The gunslinger could gauge the need in Jake by the madness the sounds of the crickets bred in his own body. His arms seemed to seek out shale to scrape on, and his knees seemed to beg to be ripped in tiny, maddening, salty gashes.

  The sun trampled them all the way; even when it turned a swollen, feverish red with sunset, it shone perversely through the knife-cut in the hills off to their left, blinding them and making every teardrop of sweat into a prism of pain.

  Then there was sawgrass: at first only yellow scrub, clinging with gruesome vitality to the bleak soil where the last of the runoff reached. Further up there was witch-grass, first sparse, then green and rank . . . then the sweet smell of real grass, mixed with timothy and shaded by the first of the dwarfed firs. There the gunslinger saw an arc of brown moving in the shadows. He drew, fired, and felled the rabbit all before Jake could begin to cry out his surprise. A moment later he had reholstered the gun.

  “Here,” the gunslinger said. Up ahead the grass deepened into a jungle of green willows that was shocking after the parched sterility of the endless hardpan. There would be a spring, perhaps several of them, and it would be even cooler, but it was better out here in the open. The boy had pushed every step he could push, and there might be suckerbats in the deeper shadows of the grove. The bats might break the boy’s sleep, no matter how deep it was, and if they were vampires, neither of them might awaken . . . at least, not in this world.

  The boy said, “I’ll get some wood.”

  The gunslinger smiled. “No, you won’t. Sit yourself, Jake.” Whose phrase had that been? Some woman. Susan? He couldn’t remember. Time’s the thief of memory: that one he knew. That one had been Vannay’s.

  The boy sat. When the gunslinger got back, Jake was asleep in the grass. A large praying mantis was performing ablutions on the springy stem of the kid’s cowlick. The gunslinger snorted laughter—the first in gods knew how long—and set the fire and went after water.

  The willow jungle was deeper than he had suspected, and confusing in the failing light. But he found a spring, richly guarded by frogs and peepers. He filled one of their waterskins . . . and paused. The sounds that filled the night awoke an uneasy sensuality in him, a feeling that not even Allie, the woman he had bedded with in Tull, had been able to bring out—too much of his time with Allie had been business. He chalked it up to the sudden blinding change from the desert. After all those miles of bleak hardpan, the softness of the dark seemed nearly decadent.

  He returned to the camp and skinned the rabbit while water boiled over the fire. Mixed with the last of their canned veg, the rabbit made an excellent stew. He woke Jake and watched him as he ate, bleary but ravenous.

  “We stay here tomorrow,” the gunslinger said.

  “But that man you’re after . . . that priest . . .”

  “He’s no priest. And don’t worry. He’ll keep.”

  “How do you know that?”

  The gunslinger could only shake his head. The intuition was strong in him . . . but it was not a good intuition.

  After the meal, he rinsed the cans from which they had eaten (marveling again at his own water extravagance), and when he turned around, Jake was asleep again. The gunslinger felt the now-familiar rising and falling in his chest that he could only identify with Cuthbert. Cuthbert had been Roland’s own age, but he had seemed so much younger.

  His cigarette drooped toward the grass, and he tossed it into the fire. He looked at it, the clear yellow burn so different, so much cleaner, from the way the devil-grass burned. The air was wonderfully cool, and he lay down with his back to the fire.

  Far away, through the gash that led the way into the mountains, he heard the thick mouth of the perpetual thunder. He slept. And dreamed.

  II

  Susan Delgado, his beloved, was dying before his eyes.

  He watched, his arms held by two villagers on each side, his neck dog-caught in a huge, rusty iron collar. This wasn’t the way it had happened—he hadn’t even been there—but dreams had their own logic, didn’t they?

  She was dying. He could smell her burning hair, could hear their cries of Charyou tree. And he co
uld see the color of his own madness. Susan, lovely girl at the window, horseman’s daughter. How she had flown across the Drop, her shadow that of horse and girl merged, a fabulous creature out of an old story, something wild and free! How they had flown together in the corn! Now they were flinging cornhusks at her and the husks caught fire even before they caught in her hair. Charyou tree, charyou tree, they cried, these enemies of light and love, and somewhere the witch was cackling. Rhea, the witch’s name had been, and Susan was turning black in the flames, her skin cracking open, and—

  And what was she calling?

  “The boy!” she was screaming. “Roland, the boy!”

  He whirled, pulling his captors with him. The collar ripped at his neck and he heard the hitching, strangled sounds that were coming from his own throat. There was a sickish-sweet smell of barbecuing meat on the air.

  The boy was looking down at him from a window high above the funeral pyre, the same window where Susan, who had taught him to be a man, had once sat and sung the old songs: “Hey Jude” and “Ease on Down the Road” and “Careless Love.” He looked out from the window like the statue of an alabaster saint in a cathedral. His eyes were marble. A spike had been driven through Jake’s forehead.

  The gunslinger felt the strangling, ripping scream that signaled the beginning of his lunacy pull up from the bottom of his belly.

  “Nnnnnnnnnn—”

  III

  Roland grunted a cry as he felt the fire singe him. He sat bolt upright in the dark, still feeling the dream of Mejis around him, strangling him like the collar he’d worn. In his twistings and turnings he had thrown one hand against the dying coals of the fire. He put the hand to his face, feeling the dream flee, leaving only the stark picture of Jake, plaster-white, a saint for demons.