“Is your need so fearsome, then?” Cort muttered, as if in his sleep. “So pressing? Aye, I feared so. So much need should have made you stupid. And yet you won.”
“The key.”
“The hawk was a fine ploy. A fine weapon. How long did it take you to train the bastard?”
“I never trained David. I friended him. The key.”
“Under my belt, gunslinger.” The eye closed again.
The gunslinger reached under Cort’s belt, feeling the heavy press of the man’s belly, the huge muscles there now slack and asleep. The key was on a brass ring. He clutched it in his hand, restraining the mad urge to thrust it up to the sky in a salutation of victory.
He got to his feet and was finally turning to the others when Cort’s hand fumbled for his foot. For a moment the gunslinger feared some last attack and tensed, but Cort only looked up at him and beckoned with one crusted finger.
“I’m going to sleep now,” Cort whispered calmly. “I’m going to walk the path. Perhaps all the way to the clearing at the end of it, I don’t know. I teach you no more, gunslinger. You have surpassed me, and two years younger than your father, who was the youngest. But let me counsel.”
“What?” Impatiently.
“Wipe that look off your face, maggot.”
In his surprise, Roland did as he was bid (although, being crouched hidden behind his face as we all are, could not know it).
Cort nodded, then whispered a single word. “Wait.”
“What?”
The effort it took the man to speak lent his words great emphasis. “Let the word and the legend go before you. There are those who will carry both.” His eyes flicked over the gunslinger’s shoulder. “Fools, perchance. Let your shadow grow hair on its face. Let it become dark.” He smiled grotesquely. “Given time, words may even enchant an enchanter. Do you take my meaning, gunslinger?”
“Yes. I think I do.”
“Will you take my last counsel as your teacher?”
The gunslinger rocked back on his heels, a hunkered, thinking posture that foreshadowed the man. He looked at the sky. It was deepening, purpling. The heat of the day was failing and thunderheads in the west foretold rain. Lightning tines jabbed the placid flank of the rising foothills miles distant. Beyond that, the mountains. Beyond that, the rising fountains of blood and unreason. He was tired, tired into his bones and beyond.
He looked back at Cort. “I will bury my hawk tonight, teacher. And later go into lower town to inform those in the brothels that will wonder about you. Perhaps I will comfort one or two a little.”
Cort’s lips parted in a pained smile. And then he slept.
The gunslinger got to his feet and turned to the others. “Make a litter and take him to his house. Then bring a nurse. No, two nurses. Okay?”
They still watched him, caught in a bated moment that none of them could immediately break. They still looked for a corona of fire, or a magical change of features.
“Two nurses,” the gunslinger repeated, and then smiled. They smiled in return. Nervously.
“You goddamned horse drover!” Cuthbert suddenly yelled, grinning. “You haven’t left enough meat for the rest of us to pick off the bone!”
“The world won’t move on tomorrow,” the gunslinger said, quoting the old adage with a smile. “Alain, you butter-butt! Move your freight.”
Alain set about the business of making the litter; Thomas and Jamie went together to the main hall and the infirmary.
The gunslinger and Cuthbert looked at each other. They had always been the closest—or as close as they could be under the particular shades of their characters. There was a speculative, open light in Bert’s eyes, and the gunslinger controlled only with great difficulty the need to tell him not to call for the test for a year or even eighteen months, lest he go west. But they had been through a great ordeal together, and the gunslinger did not feel he could risk saying such a thing without a look on his face that might be taken for arrogance.I’ve begun to scheme,he thought, and was a little dismayed. Then he thought of Marten, of his mother, and he smiled a deceiver’s smile at his friend.
I am to be the first,he thought, knowing it for the first time, although he had thought of it idly many times before.Iamthe first.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“With pleasure, gunslinger.”
They left by the east end of the hedge-bordered corridor; Thomas and Jamie were returning with the nurses already. They looked like ghosts in their white and gauzy summer robes, crossed at the breast with red.
