by Stephen King
And Cort, who had cuffed him, kicked him, bled him, cursed him, made mock of him, and called him the very eye of syphilis, bent to one knee and bowed his head.
The boy touched the leathery, vulnerable flesh of his neck with wonder. “Rise, bondsman. In love.”
Cort stood slowly, and there might have been pain behind the impassive mask of his reamed features. “This is waste. Cry off, you foolish boy. I break my own oath. Cry off and wait.”
The boy said nothing.
“Very well; if you say so, let it be so.” Cort’s voice became dry and business-like. “One hour. And the weapon of your choice.”
“You will bring your stick?”
“I always have.”
“How many sticks have been taken from you, Cort?” Which was tantamount to asking: How many boys have entered the square yard beyond the Great Hall and returned as gunslinger apprentices?
“No stick will be taken from me today,” Cort said slowly. “I regret it. There is only the once, boy. The penalty for overeagerness is the same as the penalty for unworthiness. Can you not wait?”
The boy recalled Marten standing over him. The smile. And the sound of the blow from behind the closed door. “No.”
“Very well. What weapon do you choose?”
The boy said nothing.
Cort’s smile showed a jagged ring of teeth. “Wise enough to begin. In an hour. You realize you will in all probability never see your father, your mother, or your ka-babbies again?”
“I know what exile means,” Roland said softly.
“Go now, and meditate on your father’s face. Much good will it do ya.”
The boy went, without looking back.
VI
The cellar of the barn was spuriously cool, dank, smelling of cobwebs and earthwater. The sun lit it in dusty rays from narrow windows, but here was none of the day’s heat. The boy kept the hawk here and the bird seemed comfortable enough.
David no longer hunted the sky. His feathers had lost the radiant animal brightness of three years ago, but the eyes were still as piercing and motionless as ever. You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are half a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them. The hawk pays no coinage to love or morals.
David was an old hawk now. The boy hoped that he himself was a young one.
“Hai,” he said softly and extended his arm to the tethered perch.
The hawk stepped onto the boy’s arm and stood motionless, unhooded. With his other hand the boy reached into his pocket and fished out a bit of dried jerky. The hawk snapped it deftly from between his fingers and made it disappear.
The boy began to stroke David very carefully. Cort most probably would not have believed it if he had seen it, but Cort did not believe the boy’s time had come, either.
“I think you die today,” he said, continuing to stroke. “I think you will be made a sacrifice, like all those little birds we trained you on. Do you remember? No? It doesn’t matter. After today I am the hawk and each year on this day I’ll shoot the sky in your memory.”
David stood on his arm, silent and unblinking, indifferent to his life or death.
“You are old,” the boy said reflectively. “And perhaps not my friend. Even a year ago you would have had my eyes instead of that little string of meat, isn’t it so? Cort would laugh. But if we get close enough . . . close enough to that chary man . . . if he don’t suspect . . . which will it be, David? Age or friendship?”
David did not say.
The boy hooded him and found the jesses, which were looped at the end of David’s perch. They left the barn.
VII
The yard behind the Great Hall was not really a yard at all, but only a green corridor whose walls were formed by tangled, thick-grown hedges. It had been used for the rite of coming of age since time out of mind, long before Cort and his predecessor, Mark, who had died of a stab-wound from an overzealous hand in this place. Many boys had left the corridor from the east end, where the teacher always entered, as men. The east end faced the Great Hall and all the civilization and intrigue of the lighted world. Many more had slunk away, beaten and bloody, from the west end, where the boys always entered, as boys forever. The west end faced the farms and the hut-dwellers beyond the farms; beyond that, the tangled barbarian forests; beyond that, Garlan; and beyond Garlan, the Mohaine Desert. The boy who became a man progressed from darkness and unlearning to light and responsibility. The boy who was beaten could only retreat, forever and forever. The hallway was as smooth and green as a gaming field. It was exactly fifty yards long. In the middle was a swatch of shaven earth. This was the line.
Each end was usually clogged with tense spectators and relatives, for the ritual was usually forecast with great accuracy—eighteen was the most common age (those who had not made their test by the age of twenty-five usually slipped into obscurity as freeholders, unable to face the brutal all-or-nothing fact of the field and the test). But on this day there were none but Jamie DeCurry, Cuthbert Allgood, Alain Johns, and Thomas Whitman. They clustered at the boy’s end, gape-mouthed and frankly terrified.
“Your weapon, stupid!” Cuthbert hissed, in agony. “You forgot your weapon!”
“I have it,” the boy said. Dimly he wondered if the news of this lunacy had reached yet to the central buildings, to his mother—and to Marten. His father was on a hunt, not due back for days. In this he felt a sense of shame, for he felt that in his father he would have found understanding, if not approval. “Has Cort come?”
“Cort is here.” The voice came from the far end of the corridor, and Cort stepped into view, dressed in a short singlet. A heavy leather band encircled his forehead to keep sweat from his eyes. He wore a dirty girdle to hold his back straight. He held an ironwood stick in one hand, sharp on one end, heavily blunted and spatulate on the other. He began the litany which all of them, chosen by the blind blood of their fathers all the way back to the Eld, had known since early childhood, learned against the day when they would, perchance, become men.
“Have you come here for a serious purpose, boy?”
“I have come for a serious purpose.”
“Have you come as an outcast from your father’s house?”
“I have so come.” And would remain outcast until he had bested Cort. If Cort bested him, he would remain outcast forever.
“Have you come with your chosen weapon?”
“I have.”
“What is your weapon?” This was the teacher’s advantage, his chance to adjust his plan of battle to the sling or spear or bah or bow.
“My weapon is David.”
Cort halted only briefly. He was surprised, and very likely confused. That was good.
Might be good.
“So then have you at me, boy?”
“I do.”
“In whose name?”
“In the name of my father.”
“Say his name.”
“Steven Deschain, of the line of Eld.”
“Be swift, then.”
And Cort advanced into the corridor, switching his stick from one hand to the other. The boys sighed flutteringly, like birds, as their dan-dinh stepped to meet him.
My weapon is David, teacher.
Did Cort understand? And if so, did he understand fully? If he did, very likely all was lost. It turned on surprise—and on whatever stuff the hawk had left in him. Would he only sit, disinterested and stupid, on the boy’s arm, while Cort struck him brainless with the ironwood? Or seek escape in the high, hot sky?
As they drew close together, each for the nonce still on his side of the line, the boy loosened the hawk’s hood with nerveless fingers. It dropped to the green grass, and Cort halted in his tracks. He saw the old warrior’s eyes drop to the bird and widen with surprise and slow-dawning comprehension. Now he understood.
“Oh, you little fool,” Cort nearly groaned, and Roland was suddenly furious that he should be spoken to so.
“At him!” he cried, raising his arm.
And David flew like a silent brown bullet, stubby wings pumping once, twice, three times, before crashing into Cort’s face, talons searching, beak digging. Red drops flew up into the hot air.
“Hai! Roland!” Cuthbert screamed deliriously. “First blood! First blood to my bosom!” He struck his chest hard enough to leave a bruise there that would not fade for a week.
Cort staggered backwards, off balance. The ironwood staff rose and beat futilely at the air about his head. The hawk was an undulating, blurred bundle of feathers.
The boy, meanwhile, arrowed forward, his hand held out in a straight wedge, his elbow locked. This was his chance, and very likely the only one he’d have.
Still, Cort was almost too quick for him. The bird had covered ninety percent of his vision, but the ironwood came up again, spatulate end forward, and Cort cold-bloodly performed the only action that could turn events at that point. He beat his own face three times, biceps flexing mercilessly.
David fell away, broken and twisted. One wing flapped frantically at the ground. His cold, predator’s eyes stared fiercely into the teacher’s bloody, streaming face. Cort’s bad eye now bulged blindly from its socket.
The boy delivered a kick to Cort’s temple, connecting solidly. It should have ended it, but it did not. For a moment Cort’s face went slack; and then he lunged, grabbing for the boy’s foot.
The boy skipped back and tripped over his own feet. He went down asprawl. He heard, from far away, the sound of Jamie screaming in dismay.
Cort was ready to fall on him and finish it. Roland had lost his advantage and both of them knew it. For a moment they looked at each other, the teacher standing over the pupil with gouts of blood pouring from the left side of his face, the bad eye now closed except for a thin slit of white. There would be no brothels for Cort this night.
Something ripped jaggedly at the boy’s hand. It was David, tearing blindly at whatever he could reach. Both wings were broken. It was incredible that he still lived.
The boy grabbed him like a stone, unmindful of the jabbing, diving beak that was taking the flesh from his wrist in ribbons. As Cort flew at him, all spread-eagled, the boy threw the hawk upward.
“Hai! David! Kill!”
Then Cort blotted out the sun and came down atop of him.
VIII
The bird was smashed between them, and the boy felt a callused thumb probe for the socket of his eye. He turned it, at the same time bringing up the slab of his thigh to block Cort’s crotch-seeking knee. His own hand flailed against the tree of Cort’s neck in three hard chops. It was like hitting ribbed stone.
Then Cort made a thick grunting. His body shuddered. Faintly, the boy saw one hand flailing for the dropped stick, and with a jackknifing lunge, he kicked it out of reach. David had hooked one talon into Cort’s right ear. The other battered mercilessly at the teacher’s cheek, making it a ruin. Warm blood splattered the boy’s face, smelling of sheared copper.
Cort’s fist struck the bird once, breaking its back. Again, and the neck snapped away at a crooked angle. And still the talon clutched. There was no ear now; only a red hole tunneled into the side of Cort’s skull. The third blow sent the bird flying, at last clearing Cort’s face.
The moment it was clear, the boy brought the edge of his hand across the bridge of his teacher’s nose, using every bit of his strength and breaking the thin bone. Blood sprayed.
Cort’s grasping, unseeing hand ripped at the boy’s buttocks, trying to pull his trousers down, trying to hobble him. Roland rolled away, found Cort’s stick, and rose to his knees.
Cort came to his own knees, grinning. Incredibly, they faced each other that way from either side of the line, although they had switched positions and Cort was now on the side where Roland had begun the contest. The old warrior’s face was curtained with gore. The one seeing eye rolled furiously in its socket. The nose was smashed over to a haunted, leaning angle. Both cheeks hung in flaps.
The boy held the man’s stick like a Gran’ Points player waiting for the pitch of the rawhide bird.
Cort double-feinted, then came directly at him.
Roland was ready, not fooled in the slightest by this last trick, which both knew was a poor one. The ironwood swung in a flat arc, striking Cort’s skull with a dull thudding noise. Cort fell on his side, looking at the boy with a lazy unseeing expression. A tiny trickle of spit came from his mouth.
“Yield or die,” the boy said. His mouth was filled with wet cotton.
And Cort smiled. Nearly all consciousness was gone, and he would remain tended in his cottage for a week afterward, wrapped in the blackness of a coma, but now he held on with all the strength of his pitiless, shadowless life. He saw the need to palaver in the boy’s eyes, and even with a curtain of blood between the two of them, understood that the need was desperate.
“I yield, gunslinger. I yield smiling. You have this day remembered the face of your father and all those who came before him. What a wonder you have done!”
Cort’s clear eye closed.
The gunslinger shook him gently, but with persistence. The others were around him now, their hands trembling to thump his back and hoist him to their shoulders; but they held back, afraid, sensing a new gulf. Yet this was not as strange as it could have been, because there had always been a gulf between this one and the rest.
Cort’s eye rolled open again.
“The key,” the gunslinger said. “My birthright, teacher. I need it.”
His birthright was the guns, not the heavy ones of his father—weighted with sandalwood—but guns, all the same. Forbidden to all but a few. In the heavy vault under the barracks where he by ancient law was now required to abide, away from his mother’s breast, hung his apprentice weapons, heavy cumbersome barrel-shooters of steel and nickel. Yet they had seen his father through his apprenticeship, and his father now ruled—at least in name.
“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 postur
e 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. I am the first.