The gunslinger - Stephen King [50]
“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 perhaps 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 miniscule 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