The gunslinger - Stephen King [45]
Cuthbert came up behind them and stuck his tongue out at Cort, safely on his blind side. Roland did not smile, but nodded to him.
“Go in now,” Cort said, taking the hawk. He turned and pointed at Cuthbert. “But remember your reflection, maggot. And your fast. Tonight and tomorrow morning.”
“Yes,” Cuthbert said, stiltedly formal now. “Thank you for this instructive day.”
“You learn,” Cort said, “but your tongue has a bad habit of lolling from your stupid mouth when your instructor’s back is turned. Mayhap the day will come when it and you will learn their respective places.” He struck Cuthbert again, this time solidly between the eyes and hard enough so that Roland heard a dull thud—the sound a mallet makes when a scullion taps a keg of beer. Cuthbert fell backward onto the lawn, his eyes cloudy and dazed at first. Then they cleared and he stared burningly up at Cort, his usual easy grin nowhere to be seen, his hatred unveiled, a pinprick as bright as the dove’s blood in the center of each eye. He nodded and parted his lips in a scarifying smile that Roland had never seen.
“Then there’s hope for you,” Cort said. “When you think you can, you come for me, maggot.”
“How did you know?” Cuthbert said between his teeth.
Cort turned toward Roland so swiftly that Roland almost fell back a step—and then both of them would have been on the grass, decorating the new green with their blood. “I saw it reflected in this maggot’s eyes,” he said. “Remember it, Cuthbert Allgood. Last lesson for today.”
Cuthbert nodded again, the same frightening smile on his face. “I grieve,” he said. “I have forgotten the face—”
“Cut that shit,” Cort said, losing interest. He turned to Roland. “Go on, now. The both of you. If I have to look at your stupid maggot faces any longer I’ll puke my guts and lose a good dinner.”
“Come on,” Roland said.
Cuthbert shook his head to clear it and got to his feet. Cort was already walking down the hill in his squat, bowlegged stride, looking powerful and somehow prehistoric. The shaved and grizzled spot at the top of his head glimmered.
“I’ll kill the son of a bitch,” Cuthbert said, still smiling. A large goose egg, purple and knotted, was rising mystically on his forehead.
“Not you or me,” Roland said, suddenly bursting into a grin. “You can have supper in the west kitchen with me. Cook will give us some.”
“He’ll tell Cort.”
“He’s no friend of Cort’s,” Roland said, and then shrugged. “And what if he did?”
Cuthbert grinned back. “Sure. Right. I always wanted to know how the world looked when your head was on backwards and upside down.”
They started back together over the green lawns, casting shadows in the fine white springlight.
IX
The cook in the west kitchen was named Hax. He stood huge in foodstained whites, a man with a crude-oil complexion whose ancestry was a quarter black, a quarter yellow, a quarter from the South Islands, now almost forgotten (the world had moved on), and a quarter gods-knew-what. He shuffled about three high-ceilinged steamy rooms like a tractor in low gear, wearing huge, Caliph-like slippers. He was one of those quite rare adults who communicate with small children fairly well and who love them all impartially—not in a sugary way but in a business-like fashion that may sometimes entail a hug, in the same way that closing a big business deal may call for a handshake. He even loved the boys who had begun the way of the gun, although they were different from other children—undemonstrative and always slightly dangerous, not in an adult way, but rather as if they were ordinary children with a slight touch of madness—and Bert was not the first of Cort’s students whom he had fed on the sly. At this moment he stood in front of his huge, rambling electric stove—one of six working appliances left on the whole estate. It was his personal domain, and he stood there watching the two boys bolt the gravied meat scraps he