The gunslinger - Stephen King [69]
He saw her seldom now, and the phantom of cradle songs (chussit, chissit, chassit)
had almost faded from his brain. But she was a beloved stranger. He felt an amorphous fear, and an inchoate hatred for Marten, his father’s closest advisor, was born.
“Are you well, Ro’?” she asked him softly. Marten stood beside her, a heavy, disturbing hand near the juncture of her white shoulder and white neck, smiling on them both. His brown eyes were dark to the point of blackness with smiling.
“Yes,” he said.
“Your studies go well? Vannay is pleased? And Cort?” Her mouth quirked at this second name, as if she had tasted something bitter.
“I’m trying,” he said. They both knew he was not flashingly intelligent like Cuthbert, or even quick like Jamie. He was a plodder and a bludgeoner. Even Alain was better at studies.
“And David?” She knew his affection for the hawk.
The boy looked up at Marten, still smiling paternally down on all this. “Past his prime.”
His mother seemed to wince; for a moment Marten’s face seemed to darken, his grip on her shoulder to tighten. Then she looked out into the hot whiteness of the day, and all was as it had been.
It’s a charade, he thought. A game. Who is playing with whom?
“You have a cut on your forehead,” Marten said, still smiling, and pointed a negligent finger at the mark of Cort’s latest
(thank you for this instructive day)
bashing. “Are you going to be a fighter like your father or are you just slow?”
This time she did wince.
“Both,” the boy said. He looked steadily at Marten and smiled painfully. Even in here, it was very hot.
Marten stopped smiling abruptly. “You can go to the roof now, boy. I believe you have business there.”
“My mother has not yet dismissed me, bondsman!”
Marten’s face twisted as if the boy had lashed him with a quirt. The boy heard his mother’s dreadful, woeful gasp. She spoke his name.
But the painful smile remained intact on the boy’s face and he stepped forward. “Will you give me a sign of fealty, bondsman? In the name of my father whom you serve?”
Marten stared at him, rankly unbelieving.
“Go,” Marten said gently. “Go and find your hand.”
Smiling rather horribly, the boy went.
As he closed the door and went back the way he came, he heard his mother wail. It was a banshee sound. And then, unbelievably, the sound of his father’s man striking her and telling her to shut her quack.
To shut her quack!
And then he heard Marten’s laugh.
The boy continued to smile as he went to his test.
V
Jamie had come from the shops, and when he saw the boy crossing the exercise yard, he ran to tell Roland the latest gossip of bloodshed and revolt to the west. But he fell aside, the words all unspoken. They had known each other since the time of infancy, and as boys they had dared each other, cuffed each other, and made a thousand explorations of the walls within which they had both been birthed.
The boy strode past him, staring without seeing, grinning his painful grin. He was walking toward Cort’s cottage, where the shades were drawn to ward off the savage afternoon heat. Cort napped in the afternoon so that he could enjoy to the fullest extent his evening tomcat forays into the mazed and filthy brothels of the lower town.
Jamie knew in a flash of intuition, knew what was to come, and in his fear and ecstasy he was torn between following Roland and going after the others.
Then his hypnotism was broken and he ran toward the main buildings, screaming, “Cuthbert! Alain! Thomas!” His screams sounded puny and thin in the heat. They had known, all of them, in that intuitive way boys have, that Roland would be the first of them to try the line. But this was too soon.
The hideous grin on Roland’s face galvanized him as no news of wars, revolts, and witchcrafts could have done. This was more than words from a toothless mouth given over fly-specked heads of lettuce.
Roland walked