The gunslinger - Stephen King [70]
He had never been inside before. The entrance opened on an austere kitchen that was cool and brown. A table. Two straight chairs. Two cabinets. A faded linoleum floor, tracked in black paths from the cooler set in the floor to the counter where knives hung, and to the table.
Here was a public man’s privacy. The faded refuge of a violent midnight carouser who had loved the boys of three generations roughly, and made some of them into gunslingers.
“Cort!”
He kicked the table, sending it across the room and into the counter. Knives from the wall rack fell in twinkling jackstraws.
There was a thick stirring in the other room, a half-sleep clearing of the throat. The boy did not enter, knowing it was sham, knowing that Cort had awakened immediately in the cottage’s other room and stood with one glittering eye beside the door, waiting to break the intruder’s unwary neck.
“Cort, I want you, bondsman!”
Now he spoke the High Speech, and Cort swung the door open. He was dressed in thin underwear shorts, a squat man with bow legs, runneled with scars from top to toe, thick with twists of muscle. There was a round, bulging belly. The boy knew from experience that it was spring steel. The one good eye glared at him from the bashed and dented hairless head.
The boy saluted formally. “Teach me no more, bondsman. Today I teach you.”
“You are early, puler,” Cort said casually, but he also spoke the High Speech. “Two years early at the very best, I should judge. I will ask only once. Will you cry off?”
The boy only smiled his hideous, painful smile. For Cort, who had seen the smile on a score of bloodied, scarlet-skied fields of honor and dishonor, it was answer enough—perhaps the only answer he would have believed.
“It’s too bad,” the teacher said absently. “You have been a most promising pupil—the best in two dozen years, I should say. It will be sad to see you broken and set upon a blind path. But the world has moved on. Bad times are on horseback.”
The boy still did not speak (and would have been incapable of any coherent explanation, had it been required), but for the first time the awful smile softened a little.
“Still, there is the line of blood,” Cort said, “revolt and witchcraft to the west or no. I am your bondsman, boy. I recognize your command and bow to it now—if never again—with all my heart.”
And Cort, who had cuffed him, kicked him, bled him, cursed him, made mock of him, and called him the very eye of syphilis, bent to one knee and bowed his head.
The boy touched the leathery, vulnerable flesh of his neck with wonder. “Rise, bondsman. In love.”
Cort stood slowly, and there might have been pain behind the impassive mask of his reamed features. “This is waste. Cry off, you foolish boy. I break my own oath. Cry off and wait.”
The boy said nothing.
“Very well; if you say so, let it be so.” Cort’s voice became dry and business-like. “One hour. And the weapon of your choice.”
“You will bring your stick?”
“I always have.”
“How many sticks have been taken from you, Cort?” Which was tantamount to asking: How many boys have entered the square yard beyond the Great Hall and returned as gunslinger apprentices?
“No stick will be taken from me today,” Cort said slowly. “I regret it. There is only the once, boy. The penalty for overeagerness is the same as the penalty for unworthiness. Can you not wait?”
The boy recalled Marten standing over him. The smile. And the sound of the blow from behind the closed door. “No.”
“Very well. What weapon do you choose?”
The boy said nothing.
Cort’s smile showed a jagged ring of teeth. “Wise enough to begin. In an hour. You realize you will in all probability never see your father, your mother, or your ka-babbies again?”
“I know what exile means,” Roland said softly.
“Go now, and meditate on your father’s face. Much good will it do ya.”
The boy went, without looking back.
VI
The cellar of the barn was spuriously cool, dank, smelling of cobwebs