The gunslinger - Stephen King [46]
One of the scullery boys rushed up with a man from the Guards in tow. “This man, he wantchoo, Hax.”
“All right.” Hax nodded to the Guard, and he nodded back. “You boys,” he said. “Go over to Maggie, she’ll give you some pie. Then scat. Don’t get me in trouble.”
Later they would both remember he’d said that: Don’t get me in trouble.
They nodded and went over to Maggie, who gave them huge wedges of pie on dinner plates—but gingerly, as if they were wild dogs that might bite her.
“Let’s eat it understairs,” Cuthbert said.
“All right.”
They sat behind a huge, sweating stone colonnade, out of sight of the kitchen, and gobbled their pie with their fingers. It was only moments later that they saw shadows fall on the far curving wall of the wide staircase. Roland grabbed Cuthbert’s arm. “Come on,” he said. “Someone’s coming.” Cuthbert looked up, his face surprised and berry-stained.
But the shadows stopped, still out of sight. It was Hax and the man from the Guards. The boys sat where they were. If they moved now, they might be heard.
“. . . the good man,” the Guard was saying.
“Farson?”
“In two weeks,” the Guard replied. “Maybe three. You have to come with us. There’s a shipment from the freight depot . . .” A particularly loud crash of pots and pans and a volley of catcalls directed at the hapless potboy who had dropped them blotted out some of the rest; then the boys heard the Guard finish: “. . . poisoned meat.”
“Risky.”
“Ask not what the good man can do for you—” the Guard began.
“But what you can do for him.” Hax sighed. “Soldier, ask not.”
“You know what it could mean,” the Guard said quietly.
“Yar. And I know my responsibilities to him; you don’t need to lecture me. I love him just as you do. Would foller him into the sea if he asked; so I would.”
“All right. The meat will be marked for short-term storage in your coldrooms. But you’ll have to be quick. You must understand that.”
“There are children in Taunton?” the cook asked. It was not really a question.
“Children everywhere,” the Guard said gently. “It’s the children we—and he—care about.”
“Poisoned meat. Such a strange way to care for children.” Hax uttered a heavy, whistling sigh. “Will they curdle and hold their bellies and cry for their mammas? I suppose they will.”
“It will be like going to sleep,” the Guard said, but his voice was too confidently reasonable.
“Of course,” Hax said, and laughed.
“You said it yourself. ‘Soldier, ask not.’ Do you enjoy seeing children under the rule of the gun, when they could be under his hands, ready to start making a new world?”
Hax did not reply.
“I go on duty in twenty minutes,” the Guard said, his voice once more calm. “Give me a joint of mutton and I’ll pinch one of your girls and make her giggle. When I leave—”
“My mutton will give no cramps to your belly, Robeson.”
“Will you . . .” But the shadows moved away and the voices were lost.
I could have killed them, Roland thought, frozen and fascinated. I could have killed them both with my knife, slit their throats like hogs. He looked at his hands, now stained with gravy and berries as well as dirt from the day’s lessons.
“Roland.”
He looked at Cuthbert. They looked at each other for a long moment in the fragrant semidarkness, and a taste of warm despair rose in Roland’s throat. What he felt might have been a sort of death—something as brutal and final as the death of the dove in the white sky over the games field. Hax? he thought, bewildered. Hax who put a poultice on my leg that time? Hax? And then his mind snapped closed, cutting the subject off.
What he saw, even in Cuthbert’s humorous, intelligent face, was nothing—nothing at all. Cuthbert’s eyes were flat with Hax’s doom. In Cuthbert