1
So now comes to Mejisfin de ano, known in toward the center of Mid-World as closing the year. It comes as it has a thousand times before ... or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand. No one can tell for sure; the world has moved on and time has grown strange. In Mejis their saying is "Time is a face on the water."
In the fields, the last of the potatoes are being picked by men and women who wear gloves and their heaviest scrapes, for now the wind has turned firmly, blowing east to west, blowing hard, and always there's the smell of salt in the chilly air - a smell like tears. Los campesinos harvest the final rows cheerfully enough, talking of the things they'll do and the capers they'll cut at Reaping Fair, but they feel all of autumn's old sadness in the wind; the going of the year. It runs away from them like water in a stream, and although none speak of it, all know it very well.
In the orchards, the last and highest of the apples are picked by laughing young men (in these not-quite-gales, the final days of picking belong only to them) who bob up and down like crow's nest lookouts. Above them, in skies which hold a brilliant, cloudless blue, squadrons of geese fly south, calling their rusty adieux.
The small fishing boats are pulled from the water; their hulls are scraped and painted by singing owners who mostly work stripped to the waist in spite of the chill in the air. They sing the old songs as they work -
I am a man of the bright blue sea,
All I see, all I see,
I am a man of the Barony,
All I see is mine-o!
Iam a man of the bright blue hay,
All I say, all I say,
Until my nets are full I stay
All I say is fine-o!
- and sometimes a little cask ofgraf is tossed from dock to dock. On the bay itself only the large boats now remain, pacing about the big circles which mark their dropped nets as a working dog may pace around a flock of sheep. At noon the bay is a rippling sheet of autumn fire and the men on the boats sit cross-legged, eating their lunches, and know that all they see is theirs-o ... at least until the gray gales of autumn come swarming over the horizon, coughing out their gusts of sleet and snow.
Closing, closing the year.
Along the streets of Hambry, the Reap-lights now bum at night, and the hands of the stuffy-guys are painted red. Reap-charms hang everywhere, and although women often kiss and are kissed in the streets and in both marketplaces - often by men they do not know - sexual intercourse has come to an almost complete halt. It will resume (with a bang, you might say) on Reap-Night. There will be the usual crop of Full Earth babies the following year as a result.
On the Drop, the horses gallop wildly, as if understanding (very likely they do) that their time of freedom is coming to an end. They swoop and then stand with their faces pointing west when the wind gusts, showing their asses to winter. On the ranches, porch-nets are taken down and shutters rehung. In the huge ranch kitchens and smaller farmhouse kitchens, no one is stealing Reap-kisses, and no one is even thinking about sex. This is the time of putting up and laying by, and the kitchens fume with steam and pulse with heat from before dawn until long after dark. There is the smell of apples and beets and beans and sharproot and curing strips of meat. Women work ceaselessly all day and then sleepwalk to bed, where they lie like corpses until the next dark morning calls them back to their kitchens.
Leaves are burned in town yards, and as the week goes on and Old Demon's face shows ever more clearly, red-handed stuffy-guys are thrown on the pyres more and more frequently. In the fields, cornshucks flare like torches, and often stuffies bum with them, their red hands and white-cross eyes rippling in the heat. Men stand around these fires, not speaking, their faces solemn. No one will say what terrible old ways and unspeakable old gods are being propitiated by the burning of the stuffy-guys, but they all know well enough. From time to time one of these men will whisper two words under his breath: charyou tree.
They are closing, closing, closing the year.
The streets rattle with firecrackers - and sometimes with a heftier "big-hang" that makes even placid carthorses rear in their traces - and echo with the laughter of children. On the porch of the mercantile and across the street at the Travellers' Rest, kisses - sometimes humidly open and with much sweet lashing of tongues - are exchanged, but Coral Thorin's whores ("cotton-gillies" is what the airy-fairy ones like Gert Moggins like to call themselves) are bored. They will have little custom this week.
This is not Year's End, when the winterlogs will bum and Mejis will be bam-dances from one end to the other . . . and yet it is. This is the real year's end, charyou tree, and everyone, from Stanley Ruiz standing at the bar beneath The Romp to the farthest of Fran Lengyll's vaqueros out on the edge of the Bad Grass, knows it. There is a kind of echo in the bright air, a yearning for other places in the blood, a loneliness in the heart that sings like the wind.
But this year there's something else, as well: a sense of wrongness that no one can quite voice. Folks who never had a nightmare in their lives will awake screaming with them during the week offin de ano; men who consider themselves peaceful will find themselves not only in fist-fights but instigating them; discontented boys who would only have dreamed of running away in other years will this year actually do it, and most will not come back after the first night spent sleeping raw.
There is a sense - inarticulate but very much there - that things have gone amiss this season. It is the closing of the year; it is also the closing of the peace. For it is here, in the sleepy Out-World Barony of Mejis, that Mid-World's last great conflict will shortly begin; it is from here that the blood will begin to flow. In two years, no more, the world as it has been will be swept away. It starts here. From its field of roses, the Dark Tower cries out in its beast's voice. Time is a face on the water.
2
Coral Thorin was coming down the High Street from the Bayview Hotel when she spied Sheemie, leading Caprichoso and heading in the opposite direction. The boy was singing "Careless Love" in a voice both high and sweet. His progress was slow; the barrels slung over Capi's back were half again as large as the ones he had carried up to the Coos not long before.
Coral hailed her boy-of-all-work cheerily enough. She had reason to be cheery; Eldred Jonas had no use forfin de ano abstinence. And for a man with a bad leg, he could be very inventive.
"Sheemie!" she called. "Where go ye? Seafront?"
"Aye," Sheemie said. "I've got the graf them asked for. All parties come Reaping Fair, aye, tons of em. Dance a lot, get hot a lot, drink graf to cool off a lot! How pretty you look, sai Thorin, cheeks all pinky-pink, so they are."
"Oh, law! How kind of you to say, Sheemie!" She favored him with a dazzling smile. "Go on, now, you flatterer - don't linger."
"Noey-no, off I go."
Coral stood watching after him and smiling. Dance a lot, get hot a lot, Sheemie had said. About the dancing Coral didn't know, but she was sure this year's Reaping would be hot, all right. Very hot indeed.
3
Miguel met Sheemie at Seafront's archway, gave him the look of lofty contempt he reserved for the lower orders, then pulled the cork from first one barrel and then the other. With the first, he only sniffed from the bung; at the second, he stuck his thumb in and then sucked it thoughtfully. With his wrinkled cheeks hollowed inward and his toothless old mouth working, he looked like an ancient bearded baby.
"Tasty, ain't it?" Sheemie asked. "Tasty as a pasty, ain't it, good old Miguel, been here a thousand years?"
Miguel, still sucking his thumb, favored Sheemie with a sour look. "Andale. Andale, simplon. "
Sheemie led his mule around the house to the kitchen. Here the breeze off the ocean was sharp and shiversome. He waved to the women in the kitchen, but not a one waved back; likely they didn't even see him. A pot boiled on every trink of the enormous stove, and the women - working in loose long-sleeved cotton garments like shifts and wearing their hair tied up in brightly colored clouts - moved about like phantoms glimpsed in fog.
Sheemie took first one barrel from Capi's back, then the other. Grunting, he carried them to the huge oak tank by the back door. He opened the tank's lid, bent over it, and then backed away from the eye-wateringly strong smell of elderly graf.
"Whew!" he said, hoisting the first barrel. "Ye could get drunk just on
the smell o' that lot!"
He emptied in the fresh graf, careful not to spill. When he was finished, the tank was pretty well topped up. That was good, for on Reaping Night, apple-beer would flow out of the kitchen taps like water.
He slipped the empty barrels into their carriers, looked into the kitchen once more to be sure he wasn't being observed (he wasn't; Coral's simple-minded tavern-boy was the last thing on anyone's minds that morning), and then led Capi not back the way they'd come but along a path which led to Seafront's storage sheds.
There were three of them in a row, each with its own red-handed stuffy-guy sitting in front. The guys appeared to be watching Sheemie, and that gave him the shivers. Then he remembered his trip to crazy old bitch-lady Rhea's house. She had been scary. These were just old duds stuffed full of straw.
"Susan?" he called, low. "Are ye here?"
The door of the center shed was ajar. Now it trundled open a little. "Come in!" she called, also low. "Bring the mule! Hurry!"
He led Capi into a shed which smelled of straw and beans and tack ... and something else. Something sharper. Fireworks, he thought. Shooting-powder, too.
Susan, who had spent the morning enduring final fittings, was dressed in a thin silk wrapper and large leather boots. Her hair was done up in curling papers of bright blue and red.
Sheemie tittered. "You look quite amusing, Susan, daughter of Pat. Quite a chuckle for me, I think."
"Yes, I'm a picture for an artist to paint, all right," Susan said, looking distracted. "We have to hurry. I have twenty minutes before I'm missed. I'll be missed before, if that randy old goat is looking for me ...let's be quick!"
They lifted the barrels from Capi's back. Susan took a broken horse-bit from the pocket of her wrapper and used the sharp end to pry off one of the tops. She tossed the bit to Sheemie, who pried off the other. The apple-tart smell of graf filled the shed.
"Here!" She tossed Sheemie a soft cloth. "Dry it out as well as you can. Doesn't have to be perfect, they're wrapped, but it's best to be safe."
They wiped the insides of the barrels, Susan stealing nervous glances at the door every few seconds. "All right," she said. "Good. Now ... there's two kinds. I'm sure they won't be missed; there's enough stuff back there to blow up half the world." She hurried back into the dimness of the shed, holding the hem of her wrapper up with one hand, her boots clomping. When she came back, her arms were full of wrapped packages.
"These are the bigger ones," she said.
He stored them in one of the casks. There were a dozen packages in all, and Sheemie could feel round things inside, each about the size of a child's fist. Big-bangers. By the time he had finished packing and putting the top back on the barrel, she had returned with an armload of smaller packages. These he stored in the other barrel. They were the little 'uns, from the feel, the ones that not only banged but flashed colored fire.
She helped him resling the barrels on Capi's back, still shooting those little glances at the shed door. When the barrels were secured to Caprichoso's sides, Susan sighed with relief and brushed her sweaty forehead with the backs of her hands. "Thank the gods that part's over," she said. "Now ye know where ye're to take them?"
"Aye, Susan daughter of Pat. To the Bar K. My friend Arthur Heath will put em safe."
"And if anyone asks what ye're doing out that way?" "Taking sweet graf to the In-World boys, 'cause they've decided not to come to town for the Fair . . . why won't they, Susan? Don't they like Fairs?"
"Ye'll know soon enough. Don't mind it now, Sheemie. Go on - best be on your way."
Yet he lingered.
"What?" she asked, trying not to be impatient. "Sheemie, what is it?"
"I'd like to take afin de ano kiss from ye, so I would." Sheemie's face had gone an alarming shade of red.
Susan laughed in spite of herself, then stood on her toes and kissed the comer of his mouth. With that, Sheemie floated out to the Bar K with his load of fire.
4
Reynolds rode out to Citgo the following day, galloping with a scarf wrapped around his face so only his eyes peered out. He would be very glad to get out of this damned place that couldn't decide if it was ranch-land or seacoast. The temperature wasn't all that low, but after coming in over the water, the wind cut like a razor. Nor was that all - there was a brooding quality to Hambry and all of Mejis as the days wound down toward the Reap; a haunted feeling he didn't care for a bit. Roy felt it, too. Reynolds could see it in his eyes.
No, he'd be glad to have those three baby knights so much ash in the wind and this place just a memory.
He dismounted in the crumbling refinery parking lot, tied his horse to the bumper of a rusty old hulk with the mystery-word chevrolet barely readable on its tailboard, then walked toward the oilpatch. The wind blew hard, chilling him even through the ranch-style sheepskin coat he wore, and twice he had to yank his hat down around his ears to keep it from blowing off. On the whole, he was glad he couldn't see himself; he probably looked like a fucking farmer.
The place seemed fine, though . . . which was to say, deserted. The wind made a lonely soughing sound as it combed through the firs on either side of the pipe. You'd never guess that there were a dozen pairs of eyes looking out at you as you strolled.
"Hai!" he called. "Come on out here, pard, and let's have some palaver."
For a moment there was no response; then Hiram Quint of the Piano Ranch and Barkie Callahan of the Travellers' Rest came ducking their way out through the trees. Holy shit, Reynolds thought, somewhere between awe and amusement. There ain't that much beef in a butcher shop.
There was a wretched old musketoon stuck into the waistband of Quint's pants; Reynolds hadn't seen one in years. He thought that if Quint was lucky, it would only misfire when he pulled the trigger. If he was unlucky, it would blow up in his face and blind him.
"All quiet?" he asked.
Quint replied in Mejis bibble-babble. Barkie listened, then said: "All well, sai. He say he and his men grow impatient." Smiling cheerfully, his face giving no indication of what he was saying, Barkie added: "If brains was blackpowder, this ijit couldn't blow his nose."
"But he's a trustworthy idiot?"
Barkie shrugged. It might have been assent.
They went through the trees. Where Roland and Susan had seen almost thirty tankers, there were now only half a dozen, and of those six, only two actually had oil in them. Men sat on the ground or snoozed with their sombreros over their faces. Most had guns that looked about as trustworthy as the one in Quint's waistband. A few of the poorer vaqs had bolas. On the whole, Reynolds guessed they would be more effective.
"Tell Lord Perth here that if the boys come, it's got to be an ambush, and they'll only have one chance to do the job right," Reynolds said to Barkie.
Barkie spoke to Quint. Quint's lips parted in a grin, revealing a scarifying picket of black and yellow fangs. He spoke briefly, then put his hands out in front of them and closed them into huge, scarred fists, one above the other, as if wringing the neck of an invisible enemy. When Barkie began to translate, Clay Reynolds waved it away. He had caught only one word, but it was enough: muerto.
5
All that pre-Fair week, Rhea sat in front of the glass, peering into its depths. She had taken time to sew Ermot's head back onto his body with clumsy stitches of black thread, and she sat with the decaying snake around her neck as she watched and dreamed, not noticing the stench that began to arise from the reptile as time passed. Twice Musty came nigh, mewing for food, and each time Rhea batted the troublesome thing away without so much as a glance. She herself grew more and more gaunt, her eyes now looking like the sockets of the skulls stored in the net by the door to her bedroom. She dozed occasionally as she sat with the ball in her lap and the stinking snakeskin looped about her throat, her head down, the sharp point of her chin digging at her chest, runners of drool hanging from the loose puckers of her lips, but she never really slept. There was too much to see, far too much to see.
And it was hers for the seeing. These days she didn't even have to pass her hands above the glass to open its pink mists. All the Barony's meanness, all its petty (and not so petty) cruelties, all its cozening and lying lay before her. Most of what she saw was small and demeaning stuff - masturbating boys peeking through knotholes at their undressed sisters, wives going through husbands' pockets, looking for extra money or tobacco, Sheb the piano-player licking the seat of the chair where his favorite whore had sat for awhile, a maid at Seafront spitting into Kimba Rimer's pillowcase after the Chancellor had kicked her for being slow in getting out of his way.
These were all things which confirmed her opinion of the society she had left behind. Sometimes she laughed wildly; sometimes she spoke to the people she saw in the glass ball, as if they could hear her. By the third day of the week before Reaping, she had ceased her trips to the privy, even though she could carry the ball with her when she went, and the sour stench of urine began to rise from her.
By the fourth day, Musty had ceased coming near her. Rhea dreamed in the ball and lost herself in her dreams, as others had done before her; deep in the petty pleasures of far seeing, she was unaware that the pink ball was stealing the wrinkled remains of her anima. She likely would have considered it a fair trade if she had known. She saw all the things people did in the shadows, and they were the only things she cared for, and for them she almost certainly would have considered her life's force a fair trade.
6
"Here," the boy said, "let me light it, gods damn you." Jonas would have recognized the speaker; he was the lad who had waved a severed dog's tail across the street at Jonas and called, We're Big Coffin Hunters just like you!
The boy to whom this charming child had spoken tried to hold onto the piece of liver they had copped from the knacker's behind the Low Market. The first boy seized his ear and twisted. The second boy howled and held the chunk of liver out, dark blood running down his grimy knuckles as he did.
"That's better," the first boy said, taking it. "You want to remember who the capataz is, round here."
They were behind a bakery stall in the Low Market. Nearby, drawn by the smell of hot fresh bread, was a mangy mutt with one blind eye. He stared at them with hungry hope.
There was a slit in the chunk of raw meat. Poking out of it was a green big-bang fuse. Below the fuse, the liver bulged like the stomach of a pregnant woman. The first boy took a sulfur match, stuck it between his protruding front teeth, and lit it.
"He won't never!" said a third boy, in an agony of hope and anticipation.
"Thin as he is?" the first boy said. "Oh yes he will. Bet ye my deck of cards against yer hosstail."
The third boy thought it over and shook his head.
The first boy grinned. "It's a wise child ye are," he said, and lit the big-bang's fuse. "Hey, cully!" he called to the dog. "Want a bite o' sumpin good? Here ye go!"
He threw the chunk of raw liver. The scrawny dog never hesitated at the hissing fuse, but lunged forward with its one good eye fixed on the first decent food it had seen in days. As it snatched the liver out of the air, the big-bang the boys had slipped into it went off. There was a roar and a flash. The dog's head disintegrated from the jaws down. For a moment it continued to stand there, dripping, staring at them with its one good eye, and then it collapsed.
"Toadjer!" the first boy jeered. "Toadjer he'd take it! Happy Reap to us, eh?"
"What are you boys doing?" a woman's voice called sharply. "Get out of there, ye ravens!"
The boys fled, cackling, into the bright afternoon. They did sound like ravens.
7
Cuthbert and Alain sat their horses at the mouth of Eyebolt. Even with the wind blowing the sound of the thinny away from them, it got inside your head and buzzed there, rattling your teeth.
"I hate it," Cuthbert said through clenched teeth. "Gods, let's be quick."
"Aye," Alain said. They dismounted, bulky in their ranch-coats, and tied their horses to the brush which lay across the front of the canyon. Ordinarily, tethering wouldn't have been necessary, but both boys could see the horses hated the whining, grinding sound as much as they did. Cuthbert seemed to hear the thinny in his mind, speaking words of invitation in a groaning, horribly persuasive voice.
Come on, Bert. Leave all this foolishness behind: the drums, the pride, the fear of death, the loneliness you laugh at because laughing's all you can think to do. And the girl, leave her, too. You love her, don't you? And even if you don't, you want her. It's sad that she loves your friend instead of you, but if you come to me, all that will stop bothering you very soon. So come on. What are you waiting for?
"What am I waiting for?" he muttered.
"Huh?"
"I said, what are we waiting for? Let's get this done and get the holy hell out of here."
From their saddlebags they each took a small cotton bag. These contained gunpowder extracted from the smaller firecrackers Sheemie had brought them two days before. Alain dropped to his knees, pulled his knife, and began to crawl backward, digging a trench as far under the roll of brush as he could.
"Dig it deep," Cuthbert said. "We don't want the wind to blow it away."
Alain gave him a look which was remarkably hot. "Do you want to do it? Just so you can make sure it's done right?"
It's the thinny, Cuthbert thought. It's working on him, too.
"No, Al," he said humbly. "You're doing fine for someone who's both blind and soft in the head. Go on."
Alain looked at him fiercely a moment longer, then grinned and resumed the trench under the brush. "You'll die young, Bert."
"Aye, likely." Cuthbert dropped to his own knees and began to crawl after Alain, sprinkling gunpowder into the trench and trying to ignore the buzzy, cajoling voice of the thinny. No, the gunpowder probably wouldn't blow away, not unless there was a full gale. But if it rained, even the rolls of brush wouldn't be much protection. If it rained -
Don't think of that, he told himself. That's ka.
They finished loading gunpowder trenches under both sides of the brush barrier in only ten minutes, but it felt longer. To the horses as well, it seemed; they were stamping impatiently at the far end of their tethers, their ears laid back and their eyes rolling. Cuthbert and Alain untied them and mounted up. Cuthbert's horse actually bucked twice . . . except it felt more to Cuthbert as if the poor old thing were shuddering.
In the middle distance, bright sunshine twanged of bright steel. The tankers at Hanging Rock. They had been pulled in as light to the sandstone outcrop as possible, but when the sun was high, most of the shadow disappeared, and concealment disappeared with it.
"I really can't believe it," Alain said as they started back. It would be a long ride, including a wide swing around Hanging Rock to make sure they weren't seen. "They must think we're blind."
"It's stupid they think we are," Cuthbert said, "but I suppose it comes to the same." Now that Eyebolt Canyon was falling behind them, he felt almost giddy with relief. Were they going in there a few days from now? Actually going in, riding to within mere yards of where that cursed puddle started? He couldn't believe it ... and he made himself stop thinking about it before he could start believing it.
"More riders heading out to Hanging Rock," Alain said, pointing back toward the woods beyond the canyon. "Do you see them?"
They were small as ants from this distance, but Bert saw them very well. "Changing the guard. The important thing is that they don't see us - you don't think they can, do you?"
"Over here? Not likely."
Cuthbert didn't think so, either.
"They'll all be down come Reap, won't they?" Alain asked. "It won't do us much good to only catch a few."
"Yes - I'm pretty sure they all will."
"Jonas and his pals?"
"Them, too."
Ahead of them, the Bad Grass grew closer. The wind blew hard in their faces, making their eyes water, but Cuthbert didn't mind. The sound of the thinny was down to a faint drone behind him, and would soon be gone completely. Right now that was all he needed to make him happy.
"Do you think we'll get away with it, Bert?"
"Dunno," Cuthbert said. Then he thought of the gunpowder trenches lying beneath the dry rolls of brush, and grinned. "But I'll tell you one thing, Al: they'll know we were here."
8
In Mejis, as in every other Barony of Mid-World, the week before a Fair-Day was a political week. Important people came in from the farther corners of the Barony, and there were a good many Conversationals leading up to the main Conversational on Reaping Day. Susan was expected to be present at these - mostly as a decorative testimony to the Mayor's continuing puissance. Olive was also present, and, in a cruelly comic dumb-show that only the women truly appreciated, they sat on either side of the aging cockatoo, Susan pouring the coffee, Olive passing the cake, both of them gracefully accepting compliments on food and drink they'd had no hand in preparing.
Susan found it almost impossible to look at Olive's smiling, unhappy face. Her husband would never lie with Pat Delgado's daughter . . . but sai Thorin didn't know that, and Susan couldn't tell her. She had only to glimpse the Mayor's wife from the comer other eye to remember what Roland had said that day on the Drop: For a moment I thought she was my mother. But that was the problem, wasn't it? Olive Thorin was nobody's mother. That was what had opened the door to this horrible situation in the first place.
There had been something much on Susan's mind to do, but with the round of activities at Mayor's House, it was but three days to Reaping before she got the chance. Finally, following this latest Conversational, she was able to slip out of Pink Dress with Applique (how she hated it! how she hated them all!) and jump back into jeans, a plain riding shirt, and a ranch-coat. There was no time to braid her hair, as she was expected back for Mayor's Tea, but Maria tied it back for her and off she had gone to the house she would shortly be leaving forever.
Her business was in the back room of the stable - the room her father had used as an office - but she went into the house first and heard what she'd hoped to hear: her aunt's ladylike, whistling snores. Lovely.
Susan got a slice of bread and honey and took it out to the barn-stable, protecting it as best she could from the clouds of dust that blew across the yard in the wind. Her aunt's stuffy-guy rattled on his post in the garden.
She ducked into the sweet-smelling shadows of the barn. Pylon and Felicia nickered hello, and she divided what she hadn't eaten between them. They seemed pleased enough to get it. She made especially of Felicia, whom she would soon be leaving behind.
She had avoided the little office since her father died, afraid of exactly the sort of pang that struck her when she lifted the latch and went in. The narrow windows were now covered with cobwebs, but they still let in autumn's bright light, more than enough for her to be able to see the pipe in the ashtray - the red one, his favorite, the one he called his thinking-pipe - and a bit of tack laid over the back of his desk chair. He had probably been mending it by gaslight, had put it by thinking to finish the next day ... then the snake had done its dance under Foam's hoofs and there had never been a next day. Not for Pat Delgado.
"Oh, Da," she said in a small and broken voice. "How I do miss thee."
She crossed to the desk and ran her fingers along its surface, leaving trails of dust. She sat down in his chair, listened to it creak under her as it had always creaked under him, and that pushed her over the edge. For the next five minutes she sat there and wept, screwing her fists into her eyes as she had as a wee shim. Only now, of course, there was no Big Pat to come upon her and jolly her out of it, taking her on his lap and kissing her in that sensitive place under her chin (especially sensitive to the bristles on his upper lip, it had been) until her tears turned to giggles. Time was a face on the water, and this time it was the face of her father.
At last her tears tapered to sniffles. She opened the desk drawers, one after another, finding more pipes (many rendered useless by his constant stem-chewing), a hat, one of her own dolls (it had a broken arm Pat had apparently never gotten around to putting right), quill-pens, a little flask - empty but with a faint smell of whiskey still present around its neck. The only item of interest was in the bottom drawer: a pair of spurs. One still had its star rowel, but the other had been broken off. These were, she was almost positive, the spurs he had been wearing on the day he died.
If my da was here, she had begun that day on the Drop. But he's not, Roland had said. He's dead.
A pair of spurs, a broken-off rowel.
She bounced them in her hand, in her mind's eye seeing Ocean Foam rear, spilling her father (one spur catches in a stirrup; the rowel breaks free), then stumbling sideways and falling atop him. She saw this clearly, but she didn't see the snake Fran Lengyll had told them about. That she didn't see at all.
She put the spurs back where she had found them, got up, and looked at the shelf to the right of the desk, handy to Pat Delgado's smart hand. Here was a line of leather-bound ledgers, a priceless trove of books in a society that had forgotten how to make paper. Her father had been the man in charge of the Barony's horse for almost thirty years, and here were his stockline books to prove it.
Susan took down the last one and began to page through it. This time she almost welcomed the pang that struck her as she saw her father's familiar hand - the labored script, the steep and somehow more confident numbers.
Born of HENRIETTA, (2) foals both well
Stillborn of DELIA, a roan (MUTANT)
Born of YOLANDA, a THOROUGHBRED, a GOOD MALE COLT
And, following each, the date. So neat, he had been. So thorough. So ...
She stopped suddenly, aware that she had found what she was looking for even without any clear knowledge of what she was doing in here. I he last dozen pages of her da's final stockline book had been torn out.
Who had done it? Not her father; a largely self-taught man, he revered paper the way some people revered gods or gold.
And why had it been done?
That she thought she knew: horses, of courses. There were too many on the Drop. And the ranchers - Lengyll, Croydon, Renfrew - were lying about the threaded quality of the stockline. So was Henry Wertner, the man who had succeeded to her father's job.
If my da was here -
But he's not. He's dead.
She had told Roland she couldn't believe Fran Lengyll would lie about her father's death . . . but she could believe it now.
Gods help her, she could believe it now.
"What are ye doing in here?"
She gave a little scream, dropped the book, and whirled around. Cordelia stood there in one of her rusty black dresses. The top three buttons were undone, and Susan could see her aunt's collarbones sticking out above the plain white cotton of her shift. It was only on seeing those protruding bones that Susan realized how much weight Aunt Cord had lost over the last three months or so. She could see the red imprint of the pillow on her aunt's left cheek, like the mark of a slap. Her eyes glittered from dark, bruised-looking hollows of flesh.
"Aunt Cord! You startled me! You - "
"What are ye doing in here?" Aunt Cord repeated.
Susan bent and picked up the book. "I came to remember my father," she said, and put the book back on the shelf. Who had torn those pages out? Lengyll? Rimer? She doubted it. She thought it more likely that the woman standing before her right now had done it. Perhaps for as little as a single piece of red gold. Nothing asked, nothing told, so all is well, she would have thought, popping the coin into her money-box, after first biting its edge to make sure it was true.
"Remember him? It's ask his forgiveness, ye should do. For ye've forgotten his face, so ye have. Most grievous have ye forgotten it, Sue."
Susan only looked at her.
"Have ye been with him today?" Cordelia asked in a brittle, laughing voice. Her hand went to the red pillow-mark on her cheek and began rubbing it. She had been getting bad by degrees, Susan realized, but had become ever so much worse since the gossip about Jonas and Coral Thorin had started. "Have ye been with sai Dearborn? Is yer crack still dewy from his spend? Here, let me see for myself!"
Her aunt glided forward - spectral in her black dress, her bodice open, her slippered feet peeping - and Susan pushed her back. In her fright and disgust, she pushed hard. Cordelia struck the wall beside the cobwebbed window.
"Ye should ask forgiveness yerself," Susan said. "To speak to his daughter so in this place. In this place." She let her eyes turn to the shelf of ledgers, then return to her aunt. The look of frightened calculation she saw on Cordelia Delgado's face told her all she wanted or needed to know. She hadn't been a party to her brother's murder, that Susan could not believe, but she had known something of it. Yes, something.
"Ye faithless bitch," Cordelia whispered.
"No," Susan said, "I have been true."
And so, she realized, she had been. A great weight seemed to slip off her shoulders at the thought. She walked to the door of the office and turned back to her aunt. "I've slept my last night here," she said. "I'll not listen to more such as this. Nor look at ye as ye are now. It hurts my heart and steals the love I've kept for ye since I was little, when ye did the best ye could to be my ma."
Cordelia clapped her hands over her face, as if looking at Susan hurt her.
"Get out, then!" she screamed. "Go back to Seafront or wherever it is thee rolls with that boy! If I never see thy trollop's face again, I'll count my life good!"
Susan led Pylon from the stable. When she got him into the yard, she was sobbing almost too hard to mount up. Yet mount she did, and she couldn't deny that there was relief in her heart as well as sorrow. When she turned onto the High Street and booted Pylon into a gallop, she didn't look back.
9
In a dark hour of the following morning, Olive Thorin crept from the room where she now slept to the one she had shared for almost forty years with her husband. The floor was cold under her bare feet and she was shivering by the time she reached the bed ... but the chilly floor wasn't the only reason she was shivering. She slid in beside the gaunt, snoring man in the nightcap, and when he turned away from her (his knees and back crackling loudly as he did), she pressed against him and hugged him tightly. There was no passion in this, but only a need to share a bit of his warmth. His chest - narrow but almost as well-known to her as her own plump one - rose and fell under her hands, and she began to quiet a little. He stirred, and she thought for a moment he would wake and find her sharing his bed for the first time in gods knew how long.
Yes, wake, she thought, do. She didn't dare wake him of her own - all her courage had been exhausted just getting here, creeping through the dark following one of the worst dreams she had ever had in her life - but if he woke, she would take it as a sign and tell him she had dreamed of a vast bird, a cruel golden-eyed roc that flew above the Barony on wings that dripped blood.
Wherever its shadow fell, there was blood, she would tell him, and its shadow fell everywhere. The Barony ran with it, from Hambry all the way out to Eyebolt. And I swelled big fire in the wind. I ran to tell you and you were dead in your study, sitting by the hearth with your eyes gouged out and a skull in your lap.
But instead of waking, in his sleep he took her hand, as he had used to, do before he had begun to look at the young girls - even the serving-wenches - when they passed, and Olive decided she would only lie here, and be still and let him hold her hand. Let it be like the old days for a bit, when everything had been right between them.
She slept a little herself. When she woke, dawn's first gray light was creeping in through the windows. He had dropped her hand - had, in fact, scooted away from her entirely, to his edge of the bed. It wouldn't do for him to wake and find her here, she decided, and the urgency of her nightmare was gone. She turned back the covers, swung her feet out, then looked at him once more. His nightcap had come askew. She put it right, her hands smoothing the cloth and the bony brow beneath. He stirred again. Olive waited until he had quieted, then got up. She slipped back to her own room like a phantom.
10
The midway booths opened in Green Heart two days before Reaping-Fair, and the first folks came to try their luck at the spinning wheel and the bottle-toss and the basket-ring. There was also a pony-train - a cart filled with laughing children, pulled along a figure eight of narrow-gauge rails.
("Was the pony named Charlie?" Eddie Dean asked Roland.
("I think not," Roland said. "We have a rather unpleasant word that sounds like that in the High Speech."
("What word?" Jake asked.
("The one," said the gunslinger, "that means death.")
Roy Depape stood watching the pony plod its appointed rounds for a couple of turns, remembering with some nostalgia his own rides in such a cart as a child. Of course, most of his had been stolen.
When he had looked his fill, Depape sauntered on down to the Sheriff's office and went in. Herk Avery, Dave, and Frank Claypool were cleaning an odd and fantastical assortment of guns. Avery nodded at Depape and went back to what he was doing. There was something strange about the man, and after a moment or two Depape realized what it was: the Sheriff wasn't eating. It was the first time he'd ever come in here that the Sheriff didn't have a plate of grub close at hand.
"All ready for tomorrow?" Depape asked.
Avery gave him a half-irritated, half-smiling look. "What the hell kind of question is that?"
"One that Jonas sent me to ask," Depape said, and at that Avery's queer, nervy smile faltered a little.
"Aye, we're ready." Avery swept a meaty arm over the guns. "Don't ye see we are?"
Depape could have quoted the old saying about how the proof of the pudding was in the eating, but what was the point? Things would work out if the three boys were as fooled as Jonas thought they were; if they weren't fooled, they would likely carve Herk Avery's fat butt off the top of his legs and feed it to the handiest pack of wolverines. It didn't make much never mind to Roy Depape one way or the other.
"Jonas also ast me to remind you it's early."
"Aye, aye, we'll be there early," Avery agreed. "These two and six more good men. Fran Lengyll's asked to go along, and he's got a machine-gun." Avery spoke this last with ringing pride, as if he himself had invented the machine-gun. Then he looked at Depape slyly. "What about you, coffin-hand? Want to go along? Won't take me more'n an eyeblink to deputize ye."
"I have another chore. Reynolds, too." Depape smiled. "There's plenty of work for all of us. Sheriff - after all, it's Reaping."
11
That afternoon, Susan and Roland met at the hut in the Bad Grass. She told him about the book with the torn-out pages, and Roland showed her what he'd left in the hut's north corner, secreted beneath a mouldering pile of skins.
She looked first at this, then at him with wide and frightened eyes. "What's wrong? What does thee suspect is wrong?"
He shook his head. Nothing was wrong ... not that he could tell, anyway. And yet he had felt a strong need to do what he'd done, to leave what he'd left. It wasn't the touch, nothing like it, but only intuition.
"I think everything is all right ... or as right as things can be when the odds may turn out fifty of them for each of us. Susan, our only chance is to take them by surprise. You're not going to risk that, are you? Not planning to go to Lengyll, waving your father's stockline book around?"
She shook her head. If Lengyll had done what she now suspected, he'd get his payback two days from now. There would be reaping, all right. Reaping aplenty. But this ... this frightened her, and she said so.
"Listen." Roland took her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. "I'm only trying to be careful. If things go badly - and they could - you're the one most likely to get away clean. You and Sheemie. If that happens, Susan, you - thee - must come here and take my guns. Take them west to Gilead. Find my father. He'll know thee are who thee says by what thee shows. Tell him what happened here. That's all."
"If anything happens to thee, Roland, I won't be able to do anything. Except die."
His hands were still on her face. Now he used them to make her head shake slowly, from side to side. "You won't die," he said. There was a coldness in his voice and eyes that struck her not with fear but awe. She thought of his blood - of how old it must be, and how cold it must sometimes flow. "Not with this job undone. Promise me."
"I... I promise, Roland. I do."
"Tell me aloud what you promise."
"I'll come here. Get yer guns. Take them to yer da. Tell him what happened."
He nodded and let go of her face. The shapes of his hands were printed faintly on her cheeks.
"Ye frightened me," Susan said, and then shook her head. That wasn't right. "Ye do frighten me."
"I can't help what I am."
"And I wouldn't change it." She kissed his left cheek, his right cheek, his mouth. She put her hand inside his shirt and caressed his nipple. It grew instantly hard beneath the tip of her finger. "Bird and bear and hare and fish," she said, now making soft butterfly kisses all over his face. "Give your love her fondest wish."
After, they lay beneath a bearskin Roland had brought along and listened to the wind sough through the grass.
"I love that sound," she said. "It always makes me wish I could be part of the wind ... go where it goes, see what it sees."
"This year, if ka allows, you will."
"Aye. And with thee." She turned to him, up on one elbow. Light fell through the ruined roof and dappled her face. "Roland, I love thee." She kissed him . . . and then began to cry.
He held her, concerned. "What is it? Sue, what troubles thee?"
"I don't know," she said, crying harder. "All I know is that there's a shadow on my heart." She looked at him with tears still flowing from her eyes. "Thee'd not leave me, would ye, dear? Thee'd not go without Sue, would ye?"
"No."
"For I've given all I have to ye, so I have. And my virginity's the very least of it, thee knows."
"I'd never leave you." But he felt cold in spite of the bearskin, and the wind outside - so comforting a moment ago - sounded like beast's breath. "Never, I swear."
"I'm frightened, though. Indeed I am."
"You needn't be," he said, speaking slowly and carefully ... for suddenly all the wrong words wanted to come tumbling out of his mouth. We 'II leave this, Susan - not day after tomorrow, on Reaping, but now, this minute. Dress and we'll go crosswise to the wind; it's south we'll ride and never look back. We'll be -
- haunted.
That's what they would be. Haunted by the faces of Alain and Cuthbert; haunted by the faces of all the men who might die in the Shaved Mountains, massacred by weapons torn from the armory-crypts where they should have been left. Haunted most of all by the faces of their fathers, for all the rest of their lives. Not even the South Pole would be far enough to escape those faces.
"All you need do day after tomorrow is claim indisposition at lunch." They had gone over all this before, but now, in his sudden, pointless fright, it was all he could think of to say. "Go to your room, then leave as you did on the night we met in the graveyard. Hide up a little. Then, when it's three o' the clock, ride here, and look under the skins in yon comer. If my guns are gone - and they will be, I swear they will - then everything's all right. You'll ride to meet us. Come to the place above the canyon, the one we told you of. We'll - "
"Aye, I know all that, but something's wrong." She looked at him, touched the side of his face. "I fear for thee and me, Roland, and know not why."
"All will work out," he said. "Ka - "
"Speak not to me of ka !" she cried. "Oh please don't! Ka like a wind, my father said, it takes what it will and minds the plea of no man or woman. Greedy old ka, how I hate it!"
"Susan - "
"No, say no more." She lay back and pushed the bearskin down to her knees, exposing a body that far greater men than Hart Thorin might have given away kingdoms for. Beads of sunlight ran over her bare skin like rain. She held her arms out to him. Never had she looked more beautiful to Roland than she did then, with her hair spread about her and that haunted look on her face. He would think later: She knew. Some part of her knew.
"No more talking," she said. "Talking's done. If you love me, then love me."
And for the last time, Roland did. They rocked together, skin to skin and breath to breath, and outside the wind roared into the west like a tidal wave.
12
That evening, as the grinning Demon rose in the sky, Cordelia left her house and walked slowly across the lawn to her garden, detouring around the pile of leaves she had raked that afternoon. In her arms was a bundle of clothes. She dropped them in front of the pole to which her stuffy-guy was bound, then looked raptly up at the rising moon: the knowing wink of the eye, the ghoul's grin; silver as bone was that moon, a white button against violet silk.
It grinned at Cordelia; Cordelia grinned back. Finally, with the air of a woman awakening from a trance, she stepped forward and pulled the stuffy-guy off its pole. His head lolled limply against her shoulder, like the head of a man who has found himself too drunk to dance. His red hands dangled.
She stripped off the guy's clothes, uncovering a bulging, vaguely humanoid shape in a pair of her dead brother's longhandles. She took one of the things she had brought from the house and held it up to the moonlight. A red silk riding shirt, one of Mayor Thorin's presents to Miss Oh So Young and Pretty. One of those she wouldn't wear. Whore's clothes, she had called them. And what did that make Cordelia Delgado, who had taken care of her even after her bullheaded da had decided he must stand against the likes of Fran Lengyll and John Croydon? It made her a whorehouse madam, she supposed.
This thought led to an image of Eldred Jonas and Coral Thorin, naked and striving while a honky-tonk piano planked out "Red Dirt Boogie" below them, and Cordelia moaned like a dog.
She yanked the silk shirt over the stuffy's head. Next came one of Susan's split riding skirts. After the skirt, a pair of her slippers. And last, replacing the sombrero, one of Susan's spring bonnets.
Presto! The stuffy-guy was now a stuffy-gal.
"And caught red-handed ye are," she whispered. "I know. Oh yes, I know. I wasn't born yesterday."
She carried the stuffy from the garden to the pile of leaves on the lawn. She laid it close by the leaves, then scooped some up and pushed them into the bodice of the riding shirt, making rudimentary breasts. That done, she took a match from her pocket and struck it alight.
The wind, as if eager to cooperate, dropped. Cordelia touched the match to the dry leaves. Soon the whole pile was blazing. She picked the stuffy-gal up in her arms and stood with it in front of the fire. She didn't hear the rattling firecrackers from town, or the wheeze of the steam-organ in Green Heart, or the mariachi band playing in the Low Market; when a burning leaf rose and swirled past her hair, threatening to set it alight, she didn't seem to notice. Her eyes were wide and blank.
When the fire was at its height, she stepped to its edge and threw the stuffy on. Flame whumped up around it in bright orange gusts; sparks and burning leaves swirled skyward in a funnel.
"So let it be done!" Cordelia cried. The firelight on her face turned her tears to blood. "Charyou tree! Aye, just so!"
The thing in the riding clothes caught fire, its face charring, its red hands blazing, its white-cross eyes turning black. Its bonnet flared; the face began to bum.
Cordelia stood and watched, fists clenching and unclenching, heedless of the sparks that lit on her skin, heedless of the blazing leaves that swirled toward the house. Had the house caught tire, she would likely have ignored that as well.
She watched until the stuffy dressed in her niece's clothes was nothing but ashes lying atop more ashes. Then, as slowly as a robot with rust in its works, she walked back to the house, lay down on the sofa, and slept like the dead.
13
It was three-thirty in the morning of the day before Reaping, and Stanley Ruiz thought he was finally done for the night. The last music had quit twenty minutes ago - Sheb had outlasted the mariachis by an hour or so, and now lay snoring with his face in the sawdust. Sai Thorin was upstairs, and there had been no sign of the Big Coffin Hunters; Stanley had an idea those were up to Seafront tonight. He also had an idea there was black work on offer, although he didn't know that for sure. He looked up at the glassy, two-headed gaze of The Romp. "Nor want to, old pal," he said. "All I want is about nine hours of sleep - tomorrow comes the real party, and they won't leave till dawn. So - "
A shrill scream rose from somewhere behind the building. Stanley jerked backward, thumping into the bar. Beside the piano, Sheb raised his head briefly, muttered "Wuzzat?" and dropped it back with a thump.
Stanley had absolutely no urge to investigate the source of the scream, but he supposed he would, just the same. It had sounded like that sad old bitch Pettie the Trotter. "I'd like to trot your saggy old ass right out of town," he muttered, then bent down to look under the bar. There were two stout ashwood clubs here, The Calmer and The Killer. The Calmer was smooth buried wood, guaranteed to put out the lights for two hours any time you tapped some boisterous cull's head in the right place with it.
Stanley consulted his feelings and took the other club. It was shorter than The Calmer, wider at the top. And the business end of The Killer was studded with nails.
Stanley went down to the end of the bar, through the door, and across a dim supply-room stacked with barrels smelling of graf and whiskey. At the rear was a door giving on the back yard. Stanley approached it, took a deep breath, and unlocked it. He kept expecting Pettie to voice another head-bursting scream, but none came. There was only the sound of the wind.
Maybe you got lucky and she's kilt, Stanley thought. He opened the door, stepping back and raising the nail-studded club at the same time.
Pettie wasn't kilt. Dressed in a stained shift (a Pettie-skirt, one might say), the whore was standing on the path which led to the back privy, her hands clutched together above the swell of her bosom and below the drooping turkey-wattles of her neck. She was looking up at the sky.
"What is it?" Stanley asked, hurrying down to her. "Near scared ten years off my life, ye did."
"The moon, Stanley!" she whispered. "Oh, look at the moon, would ye!"
He looked up, and what he saw set his heart thumping, but he tried to speak reasonably and calmly. "Come now, Pettie, it's dust, that's all. Be reasonable, dear, ye know how the wind's blown these last few days, and no rain to knock down what it carries; it's dust, that's all."
Yet it didn't look like dust.
"I know what I see," whispered Pettie.
Above them, Demon Moon grinned and winked one eye through what appeared to be a shifting scrim of blood.
