“All right,” he said, “thee may.” And turned abruptly to go.
“Father?”
“What?”
“Do you know who they were talking about? Do you know who the good man is?”
His father turned back and looked at him speculatively. “Yes. I think I do.”
“If you caught him,” Roland said in his thoughtful, near-plodding way, “no one else like Cook would have to be neck-popped.”
His father smiled thinly. “Perhaps not for a while. But in the end, someone always has to have his or her neck popped, as you so quaintly put it. The people demand it. Sooner or later, if there isn’t a turncoat, the people make one.”
“Yes,” Roland said, grasping the concept instantly—it was one he never forgot. “But if you got the good man—”
“No,” his father said flatly.
“Why not? Why wouldn’t that end it?”
For a moment his father seemed on the verge of saying why, but then shook his head. “We’ve talked enough for now, I think. Go out from me.”
He wanted to tell his father not to forget his promise when the time came for Hax to step through the trap, but he was sensitive to his father’s moods. He put his fist to his forehead, crossed one foot in front of the other, and bowed. Then he went out, closing the door quickly. He suspected that what his father wanted now was to fuck. He was aware that his mother and father did that, and he was reasonably well informed as to how it was done, but the mental picture that always condensed with the thought made him feel both uneasy and oddly guilty. Some years later, Susan would tell him the story of Oedipus, and he would absorb it in quiet thoughtfulness, thinking of the odd and bloody triangle formed by his father, his mother, and by Marten—known in some quarters as Farson, the good man. Or perhaps it was a quadrangle, if one wished to add himself.
XI
Gallows Hill was on the Taunton Road, which was nicely poetic; Cuthbert might have appreciated this, but Roland did not. He did appreciate the splendidly ominous scaffold which climbed into the brilliantly blue sky, an angular silhouette which overhung the coach road.
The two boys had been let out of Morning Exercises—Cort had read the notes from their fathers laboriously, lips moving, nodding here and there. When he finished with them, he had carefully put the papers away in his pocket. Even here in Gilead, paper was easily as valuable as gold. When these two sheets of it were safe, he’d looked up at the blue-violet dawn sky and nodded again.
“Wait here,” he said, and went toward the leaning stone hut that served him as living quarters. He came back with a slice of rough, unleavened bread, broke it in two, and gave half to each.
“When it’s over, each of you will put this beneath his shoes. Mind you do exactly as I say or I’ll clout you into next week.”
They had not understood until they arrived, riding double on Cuthbert’s gelding. They were the first, fully two hours ahead of anyone else and four hours before the hanging, so Gallows Hill stood deserted—except for the rooks and ravens. The birds were everywhere. They roosted noisily on the hard, jutting bar that overhung the trap—the armature of death. They sat in a row along the edge of the platform, they jostled for position on the stairs.
“They leave the bodies,” Cuthbert muttered. “For the birds.”
“Let’s go up,” Roland said.
Cuthbert looked at him with something like horror. “Upthere?Do you think—”
Roland cut him off with a gesture of his hands. “We’reyearsearly. No one will come.”
“All right.”
They walked slowly toward the gibbet, and the birds took wing, cawing and circling like a mob of angry dispossessed peasants. Their bodies were flat black against the pure dawnlight of the In-World sky.
For the first time Roland felt the enormity of his responsibility in the matter; this wood was not noble, not part of the awesome machine of Civilization, but merely warped pine from the Forest o’ Barony, covered with splattered white bird droppings. It was splashed everywhere—stairs, railing, platform—and it stank.
The boy turned to Cuthbert with startled, terrified eyes and saw Cuthbert looking back at him with the same expression.
“I can’t,” Cuthbert whispered. “Ro’, I can’t watch it.”
Roland shook his head slowly. There was a lesson here, he realized, not a shining thing but something that was old and rusty and misshapen. It was why their fathers had let them come. And with his usual stubborn and inarticulate doggedness, Roland laid mental hands on whatever it was.
“You can, Bert.”
“I won’t sleep tonight if I do.”
