The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (32 page)

There was no gun or knife drawn, however. Jonas turned toward Roland and held out his hand.

“He’s right, lad,” Jonas said in his reedy, quavering voice.

“Yes.”

“Will you shake with an old man, and vow to start over?”

“Yes.” Roland held out his hand.

Jonas took it. “I cry your pardon.”

“I cry your own, Mr. Jonas.” Roland tapped left-hand at his throat, as was proper when addressing an elder in such fashion.

As the two of them sat down, Alain and Reynolds rose, as neatly as men in a prerehearsed ceremony. Last of all, Cuthbert and Depape rose. Roland was all but positive that Cuthbert’s foolishness would pop out like Jack from his box—the
idiot would simply not be able to help himself, although he must surely realize that Depape was no man to make sport of tonight.

“Cry your pardon,” Bert said, with an admirable lack of laughter in his voice.

“Cryerown,” Depape mumbled, and held out his blood-streaked hand. Roland had a nightmare vision of Bert squeezing down on it as hard as he could, making the redhead yowl like an owl on a hot stove, but Bert’s grip was as restrained as his voice.

Avery sat on the edge of the stage with his pudgy legs hanging down, watching it all with avuncular good cheer. Even Deputy Dave was smiling.

“Now I propose to shake hands with yer all myself, ’n then send yer on yer ways, for the hour’s late, so it is, and such as me needs my beauty rest.” He chuckled, and again looked uncomfortable when no one joined in. But he slipped off the stage and began to shake hands, doing so with the enthusiasm of a minister who has finally succeeded in marrying a headstrong couple after a long and stormy courtship.

When they stepped outside, the moon was down and the first lightening in the sky had begun to show at the far edge of the Clean Sea.

“Mayhap we’ll meet again, sai,” Jonas said.

“Mayhap we will,” Roland said, and swung up into his saddle.

The Big Coffin Hunters were staying in the watchman’s house about a mile south of Seafront—five miles out of town, this was.

Halfway there, Jonas stopped at a turnout beside the road. From here the land made a steep, rocky descent to the brightening sea.

“Get down, mister,” he said. It was Depape he was looking at.

“Jonas . . . Jonas, I . . .”

“Get down.”

Biting his lip nervously, Depape got down.

“Take off your spectacles.”

“Jonas, what’s this about? I don’t—”

“Or if you want em broke, leave em on. It’s all the same to me.”

Biting his lip harder now, Depape took off his gold-rimmed spectacles. They were barely in his hand before Jonas had fetched him a terrific clip on the side of the head. Depape cried out and reeled toward the drop. Jonas drove forward, moving as fast as he had struck, and seized him by the shirt just before he went tumbling over the edge. Jonas twisted his hand into the shirt material and yanked Depape toward him. He breathed deep, inhaling the scent of pine-tar and Depape’s sweat.

“I ought to toss you right over the edge,” he breathed. “Do you know how much harm you’ve done?”

“I . . . Jonas, I never meant . . . just a little fun is all I . . . how was we supposed to know they . . .”

Slowly, Jonas’s hand relaxed. That last bit of babble had gone home. How was they supposed to know, that was ungrammatical but right. And if not for tonight, they might
not
have known. If you looked at it that way, Depape had actually done them a favor. The devil you knew was always preferable to the devil you didn’t. Still, word would get around, and people would laugh. Maybe even that was all right, though. The laughter would stop in due time.

“Jonas, I cry your pardon.”

“Shut up,” Jonas said. In the east, the sun would shortly heave itself over the horizon, casting its first gleams on a new day in this world of toil and sorrow. “I ain’t going to toss you over, because then I’d have to toss Clay over and follow along myself. They got the drop on us the same as you, right?”

Depape wanted to agree, but thought it might be dangerous to do so. He was prudently silent.

“Get down here, Clay.”

Clay slid off his mount.

“Now hunker.”

The three of them hunkered on their bootsoles, heels up. Jonas plucked a shoot of grass and put it between his lips. “Affiliation brats is what we were told, and we had no reason not to believe it,” he said. “The bad boys are sent all the way
to Mejis, a sleepy Barony on the Clean Sea, on a make-work detail that’s two parts penance and three parts punishment. Ain’t that what we were told?”

They nodded.

“Either of you believe it after tonight?”

Depape shook his head. So did Clay.

“They may be rich boys, but that’s not all they are,” Depape said. “The way they were tonight . . . they were like . . .” He trailed off, not quite willing to finish the thought. It was too absurd.

Jonas was willing. “They acted like gunslingers.”

Neither Jonas nor Reynolds replied at first. Then Clay Reynolds said, “They’re too young, Eldred. Too young by
years
.”

“Not too young to be ’prentices, mayhap. In any case, we’re going to find out.” He turned to Depape. “You’ve got some riding to do, cully.”

“Aww, Jonas—!”

“None of us exactly covered ourselves with glory, but you were the fool that started the pot boiling.” He looked at Depape, but Depape only looked down at the ground between them. “You’re going to ride their backtrail, Roy, and you’re going to ask questions until you’ve got the answers you think will satisfy my curiosity. Clay and I are mostly going to wait. And watch. Play Castles with em, if you like. When I feel like enough time’s gone by for us to be able to do a little snooping without being trigged, mayhap we’ll do it.”

He bit on the piece of grass in his mouth. The larger piece tumbled out and lay between his boots.

“Do you know why I shook his hand? That boy Dearborn’s damned hand? Because we can’t rock the boat, boys. Not just when it’s edging in toward harbor. Latigo and the folks we’ve been waiting for will be moving toward us very soon, now. Until they get into these parts, it’s in our interest to keep the peace. But I tell you this: no one puts a knife to Eldred Jonas’s back and lives. Now listen, Roy. Don’t make me tell you any of this twice.”

Jonas began to speak, leaning forward over his knees toward Depape as he did. After awhile, Depape began to nod. He might like a little trip, actually. After the recent comedy in the Travellers’ Rest, a change of air might be just the ticket.

The boys were almost back to the Bar K and the sun was coming over the horizon before Cuthbert broke the silence. “Well! That was an amusing and instructive evening, was it not?” Neither Roland nor Alain replied, so Cuthbert leaned over to the rook’s skull, which he had returned to its former place on the horn of his saddle. “What say
you,
old friend? Did we enjoy our evening? Dinner, a circle-dance, and almost killed to top things off. Did you enjoy?”

The lookout only stared ahead of Cuthbert’s horse with its great dark eyes.

“He says he’s too tired for talk,” Cuthbert said, then yawned. “So’m I, actually.” He looked at Roland. “I got a good look into Mr. Jonas’s eyes after he shook hands with you, Will. He means to kill you.”

Roland nodded.

“They mean to kill all of us,” Alain said.

Roland nodded again. “We’ll make it hard for them, but they know more about us now than they did at dinner. We’ll not get behind them that way again.”

He stopped, just as Jonas had stopped not three miles from where they now were. Only instead of looking directly out over the Clean Sea, Roland and his friends were looking down the long slope of the Drop. A herd of horses was moving from west to east, barely more than shadows in this light.

“What do you see, Roland?” Alain asked, almost timidly.

“Trouble,” Roland said, “and in our road.” Then he gigged his horse and rode on. Before they got back to the Bar K bunkhouse, he was thinking about Susan again. Five minutes after he dropped his head on his flat burlap pillow, he was dreaming of her.

Three weeks had passed since the welcoming dinner at Mayor’s House and the incident at the Travellers’ Rest. There had been no more trouble between Roland’s
ka-tet
and Jonas’s. In the night sky, Kissing Moon had waned and Peddler’s Moon had made its first thin appearance. The days were bright and warm; even the oldtimers admitted it was one of the most beautiful summers in memory.

On a mid-morning as beautiful as any that summer, Susan Delgado galloped a two-year-old
rosillo
named Pylon north along the Drop. The wind dried the tears on her cheeks and yanked her unbound hair out behind her as she went. She urged Pylon to go faster yet, lightly thumping his sides with her spurless boots. Pylon turned it up a notch at once, ears flattening, tail flagging. Susan, dressed in jeans and the faded, oversized khaki shirt (one of her da’s) that had caused all the trouble, leaned over the light practice saddle, holding to the horn with one hand and rubbing the other down the side of the horse’s strong, silky neck.

“More!” she whispered. “More and faster! Go on, boy!”

Pylon let it out yet another notch. That he had at least one more in him she knew; that he had even one more beyond that she suspected.

They sped along the Drop’s highest ridge, and she barely saw the magnificent slope of land below her, all green and gold, or the way it faded into the blue haze of the Clean Sea. On any other day the view and the cool, salt-smelling breeze would have uplifted her. Today she only wanted to hear the
steady low thunder of Pylon’s hoofs and feel the flex of his muscles beneath her; today she wanted to outrun her own thoughts.

And all because she had come downstairs this morning dressed for riding in one of her father’s old shirts.

Aunt Cord had been at the stove, wrapped in her dressing gown and with her hair still netted. She dished herself up a bowl of oatmeal and brought it to the table. Susan had known things weren’t good as soon as her aunt turned toward her, bowl in hand; she could see the discontented twitch of Aunt Cord’s lips, and the disapproving glance she shot at the orange Susan was peeling. Her aunt was still rankled by the silver and gold she had expected to have in hand by now, coins which would be withheld yet awhile due to the witch’s prankish decree that Susan should remain a virgin until autumn.

But that wasn’t the main thing, and Susan knew it. Quite simply put, the two of them had had enough of each other. The money was only one of Aunt Cord’s disappointed expectations; she had counted on having the house at the edge of the Drop to herself this summer . . . except, perhaps, for the occasional visit from Mr. Eldred Jonas, with whom Cordelia seemed quite taken. Instead, here they still were, one woman growing toward the end of her courses, thin, disapproving lips in a thin, disapproving face, tiny apple-breasts under her high-necked dresses with their choker collars (The Neck, she frequently told Susan, is the First Thing to Go), her hair losing its former chestnut shine and showing wire-threads of gray; the other young, intelligent, agile, and rounding toward the peak of her physical beauty. They grated against each other, each word seeming to produce a spark, and that was not surprising. The man who had loved them both enough to make them love each other was gone.

“Are ye going out on that horse?” Aunt Cord had said, putting her bowl down and sitting in a shaft of early sun. It was a bad location, one she never would have allowed herself to be caught in had Mr. Jonas been in attendance. The strong light made her face look like a carved mask. There was a cold-sore growing at one corner of her mouth; she always got them when she was not sleeping well.

“Aye,” Susan said.

“Ye should eat more’n that, then. ’Twon’t keep ye til nine o’ the clock, girl.”

“It’ll keep me fine,” Susan had replied, eating the sections of orange faster. She could see where this was tending, could see the look of dislike and disapproval in her aunt’s eyes, and wanted to get away from the table before trouble could begin.

“Why not let me get ye a dish of this?” Aunt Cord asked, and plopped her spoon into her oatmeal. To Susan it sounded like a horse’s hoof stamping down in mud—or shit—and her stomach clenched. “It’ll hold ye to lunch, if ye plan to ride so long. I suppose a fine young lady such as yerself can’t be bothered with chores—”

“They’re done.”
And you know they’re done,
she did not add.
I did em while you were sitting before your glass, poking at that sore on your mouth.

Aunt Cord dropped a chunk of creamery butter into her muck—Susan had no idea how the woman stayed so thin, really she didn’t—and watched it begin to melt. For a moment it seemed that breakfast might end on a reasonably civilized note, after all.

Then the shirt business had begun.

“Before ye go out, Susan, I want ye to take off that rag you’re wearing and put on one of the new riding blouses Thorin sent ye week before last. It’s the least ye can do to show yer—”

Anything her aunt might have said past that point would have been lost in anger even if Susan hadn’t interrupted. She passed a hand down the sleeve of her shirt, loving its texture—it was almost velvety from so many washings. “This
rag
belonged to my father!”

“Aye, Pat’s.” Aunt Cord sniffed. “It’s too big for ye, and worn out, and not proper, in any case. When you were young it was mayhap all right to wear a man’s button-shirt, but now that ye have a woman’s bustline . . .”

The riding blouses were on hangers in the corner; they had come four days ago and Susan hadn’t even deigned to take them up to her room. There were three of them, one red, one green, one blue, all silk, all undoubtedly worth a small fortune. She loathed their pretension, and the overblown, blushy-frilly look of them: full sleeves to flutter artistically in the wind, great floppy foolish collars . . . and, of course, the
low-scooped fronts which were probably all Thorin would see if she appeared before him dressed in one. As she wouldn’t, if she could possibly help it.

“My ‘woman’s bust-line,’ as you call it, is of no interest to me and can’t possibly be of any interest to anyone else when I’m out riding,” Susan said.

“Perhaps, perhaps not. If one of the Barony’s drovers should see you—even Rennie, he’s out that way all the time, as ye well know—it wouldn’t hurt for him to mention to Hart that he saw ye wearing one of the
camisas
that he so kindly gave to ye. Now would it? Why do ye have to be such a stiff-kins, girl? Why always so unwilling, so unfair?”

“What does it matter to ye, one way or t’other?” Susan had asked. “Ye have the money, don’t ye? And ye’ll have more yet. After he fucks me.”

Aunt Cord, her face white and shocked and furious, had leaned across the table and slapped her. “How dare thee use that word in my house, ye
malhablada
? How
dare
ye?”

That was when her tears began to flow—at hearing her call it her house. “It was my
father’s
house! His and mine! Ye were all on yer own with no real place to go, except perhaps to the Quarters, and he took ye in!
He took ye in, Aunt!
”

The last two orange sections were still in her hand. She threw them into her aunt’s face, then pushed herself back from the table so violently that her chair tottered, tipped, and spilled her to the floor. Her aunt’s shadow fell over her. Susan crawled frantically out of it, her hair hanging, her slapped cheek throbbing, her eyes burning with tears, her throat swelled and hot. At last she found her feet.

“Ye ungrateful girl,” her aunt said. Her voice was soft and so full of venom it was almost caressing. “After all I have done for thee, and all Hart Thorin has done for thee. Why, the very nag ye mean to ride this morning was Hart’s gift of respect to—”

“PYLON WAS OURS!”
she shrieked, almost maddened with fury at this deliberate blurring of the truth.
“ALL OF THEM WERE! THE HORSES, THE LAND—THEY WERE OURS!”

“Lower thy voice,” Aunt Cord said.

Susan took a deep breath and tried to find some control. She swept her hair back from her face, revealing the red print
of Aunt Cord’s hand on her cheek. Cordelia flinched a little at the sight of it.

“My father never would have allowed this,” Susan said. “He never would have allowed me to go as Hart Thorin’s gilly. Whatever he might have felt about Hart as the Mayor . . . or as his
patrono
 . . . he never would have allowed this. And ye know it.
Thee
knows it.”

Aunt Cord rolled her eyes, then twirled a finger around her ear as if Susan had gone mad. “Thee agreed to it yerself, Miss Oh So Young and Pretty. Aye, so ye did. And if yer girlish megrims now cause ye to want to cry off what’s been done—”

“Aye,” Susan agreed. “I agreed to the bargain, so I did. After ye’d dunned me about it day and night, after ye’d come to me in tears—”

“I never did!” Cordelia cried, stung.

“Have ye forgotten so quick, Aunt? Aye, I suppose. As by tonight ye’ll have forgotten slapping me at breakfast. Well,
I
haven’t forgotten. Thee cried, all right, cried and told me ye feared we might be turned off the land, since we had no more legal right to it, that we’d be on the road, thee wept and said—”

“Stop calling me that!”
Aunt Cord shouted. Nothing on earth maddened her so much as having her own thees and thous turned back at her. “Thee has no more right to the old tongue than thee has to thy stupid sheep’s complaints! Go on! Get out!”

But Susan went on. Her rage was at the flood and would not be turned aside.

“Thee wept and said we’d be turned out, turned west, that we’d never see my da’s homestead or Hambry again . . . and then, when I was frightened enough, ye talked of the cunning little baby I’d have. The land that was ours to begin with given back again. The horses that were ours likewise given back. As a sign of the Mayor’s honesty, I have a horse
I myself helped to foal
. And what have I done to deserve these things that would have been mine in any case, but for the loss of a single paper? What have I done so that he should give ye money? What have I done save promise to fuck him while his wife of forty year sleeps down the hall?”

“Is it the money ye want, then?” Aunt Cord asked, smiling
furiously. “Do ye and do ye and aye? Ye shall have it, then. Take it, keep it, lose it, feed it to the swine, I care not!”

She turned to her purse, which hung on a post by the stove. She began to fumble in it, but her motions quickly lost speed and conviction. There was an oval of mirror mounted to the left of the kitchen doorway, and in it Susan caught sight of her aunt’s face. What she saw there—a mixture of hatred, dismay, and greed—made her heart sink.

“Never mind, Aunt. I see thee’s loath to give it up, and I wouldn’t have it, anyway. It’s whore’s money.”

Aunt Cord turned back to her, face shocked, her purse conveniently forgotten. “ ’Tis not whoring, ye stupid get! Why, some of the greatest women in history have been gillys, and some of the greatest men have been born
of
gillys.
’Tis not whoring!
”

Susan ripped the red silk blouse from where it hung and held it up. The shirt moulded itself to her breasts as if it had been longing all the while to touch them. “Then why does he send me these whore’s clothes?”

“Susan!” Tears stood in Aunt Cord’s eyes.

Susan flung the shirt at her as she had the orange slices. It landed on her shoes. “Pick it up and put it on yerself, if ye fancy.
You
spread yer legs for him, if ye fancy.”

She turned and hurled herself out the door. Her aunt’s half-hysterical shriek had followed her: “Don’t thee go off thinking foolish thoughts, Susan! Foolish thoughts lead to foolish deeds, and it’s too late for either! Thee’s agreed!”

She knew that. And however fast she rode Pylon along the Drop, she could not outrace her knowing. She had agreed, and no matter how horrified Pat Delgado might have been at the fix she had gotten herself into, he would have seen one thing clear—she had made a promise, and promises must be kept. Hell awaited those who would not do so.

She eased the
rosillo
back while he still had plenty of wind. She looked behind her, saw that she had come nearly a mile, and brought him down further—to a canter, a trot, a fast walk. She took a deep breath and let it out. For the first time that morning she registered the day’s bright beauty—gulls circling in the hazy air off to the west, high grasses all around her, and flowers
in every shaded cranny: cornflowers and lupin and phlox and her favorites, the delicate blue silkflowers. From everywhere came the somnolent buzz of bees. The sound soothed her, and with the high surge of her emotions subsiding a little, she was able to admit something to herself . . . admit it, and then voice it aloud.

“Will Dearborn,” she said, and shivered at the sound of his name on her lips, even though there was no one to hear it but Pylon and the bees. So she said it again, and when the words were out she abruptly turned her own wrist inward to her mouth and kissed it where the blood beat close to the surface. The action shocked her because she hadn’t known she was going to do it, and shocked her more because the taste of her own skin and sweat aroused her immediately. She felt an urge to cool herself off as she had in her bed after meeting him. The way she felt, it would be short work.

Instead, she growled her father’s favorite cuss—“Oh, bite it!”—and spat past her boot. Will Dearborn had been responsible for all too much upset in her life these last three weeks; Will Dearborn with his unsettling blue eyes, his dark tumble of hair, and his stiff-necked, judgmental attitude.
I can be discreet, madam. As for propriety? I’m amazed you even know the word.

Every time she thought of that, her blood sang with anger and shame. Mostly anger. How dare he presume to make judgments? He who had grown up possessing every luxury, no doubt with servants to tend his every whim and so much gold that he likely didn’t even need it—he would be given the things he wanted free, as a way of currying favor. What would a boy like that—for that was all he was, really, just a boy—know about the hard choices she had made? For that matter, how could such as Mr. Will Dearborn of Hemphill understand that she hadn’t really made those choices at all? That she had been carried to them the way a mother cat carries a wayward kitten back to the nesting-box, by the scruff of the neck?