“I suppose the coming of agewaspart of it, at that,” he said, almost grudgingly. “It was formal. Almost stylized; like a dance.” He laughed unpleasantly.
The boy said nothing.
“It was necessary to prove one’s self in battle,” the gunslinger began.
IV
Summer, and hot.
Full Earth had come to the land like a vampire lover that year, killing the land and the crops of the tenant farmers, turning the fields of the castle-city of Gilead white and sterile. In the west, some miles distant and near the borders that were the end of the civilized world, fighting had already begun. All reports were bad, and all of them paled to insignificance before the heat that rested over this place of the center. Cattle lolled empty-eyed in the pens of the stockyards. Pigs grunted lustlessly, unmindful of sows and sex and knives whetted for the coming fall. People whined about taxes and conscription, as they always did; but there was an apathy beneath the empty passion-play of politics. The center had frayed like a rag rug that had been washed and walked on and shaken and hung and dried. The thread that held the last jewel at the breast of the world was unraveling. Things were not holding together. The earth drew in its breath in the summer of the coming eclipse.
The boy idled along the upper corridor of this stone place which was home, sensing these things, not understanding. He was also dangerous and empty, waiting to be filled.
It was three years since the hanging of the cook who had always been able to find snacks for hungry boys; Roland had lengthened and filled out both at shoulder and hip. Now, dressed only in faded denim pants, fourteen years old, he had come to look like the man he would become: lean and lank and quick on his feet. He was still unbedded, but two of the younger slatterns of a West-Town merchant had cast eyes on him. He had felt a response and felt it more strongly now. Even in the coolness of the passage, he felt sweat on his body.
Ahead were his mother’s apartments and he approached them incuriously, meaning only to pass them and go upward to the roof, where a thin breeze and the pleasure of his hand awaited.
He had passed the door when a voice called him: “You. Boy.”
It was Marten, the counselor. He was dressed with a suspicious, upsetting casualness—black whipcord trousers almost as tight as leotards, and a white shirt open halfway down his hairless chest. His hair was tousled.
The boy looked at him silently.
“Come in, come in! Don’t stand in the hall! Your mother wants to speak to you.” He was smiling with his mouth, but the lines of his face held a deeper, more sardonic humor. Beneath that—and in his eyes—there was only coldness.
In truth, his mother did not seem to want to see him. She sat in the low-backed chair by the large window in the central parlor of her apartments, the one which overlooked the hot blank stone of the central courtyard. She was dressed in a loose, informal gown that kept slipping from one white shoulder and looked at the boy only once—a quick, glinting rueful smile, like autumn sun on a rill of water. During the interview which followed, she studied her hands rather than her son.
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.
