by Stephen King
She looked at the horse. Rusher looked back mildly, then dipped his head as if to say he was also sorry for having startled her.
Foolishness, girl, she thought, hearing the hearty, no-nonsense voice of her father. He wants to know why you ’re being so standoffy, that’s all. And so do I. ’tisn’t like you, so it’s not.
“Mr. Dearborn, I’ve changed my mind,” she said. “I’d like to ride.”
3
He turned his back and stood looking out at Citgo with his hands in his pockets while Susan first laid the poncho over the cantle of the saddle (the plain black saddle of a working cowboy, without a Barony brand or even a ranch brand to mark it), and then mounted into the stirrup. She lifted her skirt and glanced around sharply, sure he would be stealing a peek, but his back was still to her. He seemed fascinated with the rusty oil derricks.
What’s so interesting about them, cully? she thought, a trifle crossly- it was the lateness of the hour and the residue of her stirred-up emotions, she supposed. Filthy old things have been there six centuries and more, and I’ve been smelling their stink my whole life.
“Stand easy now, my boy,” she said once she had her foot fixed in the stirrup. One hand held the top of the saddle’s pommel, the other the reins. Rusher, meanwhile, flicked his ears as if to say he would stand easy all night, were that what she required.
She swung up, one long bare thigh flashing in the starlight, and felt the exhilaration of being horsed that she always felt… only tonight it seemed a little stronger, a little sweeter, a little sharper. Perhaps because the horse was such a beauty, perhaps because the horse was a stranger…
Perhaps because the horse’s owner is a stranger, she thought, and fair.
That was nonsense, of course… and potentially dangerous nonsense. Yet it was also true. He was fair.
As she opened the poncho and spread it over her legs, Dearborn began to whistle. And she realized, with a mixture of surprise and superstitious fear, what the tune was: “Careless Love.” The very lay she had been singing on her way up to Rhea’s hut.
Mayhap it’s ka, girl, her father’s voice whispered.
No such thing, she thought right back at him. I’ll not see ka in every passing wind and shadow, like the old ladies who gather in Green Heart of a summer’s evening. It’s an old tune: everyone knows it.
Mayhap better if you’re right. Pat Delgado’s voice returned. For if it’s ka, it’ll come like a wind, and your plans will stand before it no more than my da’s barn stood before the cyclone when it came.
Not ka; she would not be seduced by the dark and the shadows and the grim shapes of the oil derricks into believing it was. Not ka but only a chance meeting with a nice young man on the lonely road back to town.
“I’ve made myself decent,” she said in a dry voice that didn’t sound much like her own. “Ye may turn back if you like, Mr. Dearborn.”
He did turn and gazed at her. For a moment he said nothing, but she could see the look in his eyes well enough to know that he found her fair as well. And although this disquieted her-perhaps because of what he’d been whistling-she was also glad. Then he said, “You look well up there. You sit well."
“And I shall have horses of my own to sit before long,” she said. Now the questions will come, she thought.
But he only nodded, as though he had known this about her already, and began to walk toward town again. Feeling a little disappointed and not knowing exactly why, she clucked sidemouth at Rusher and twitched her knees at him. He got moving, catching up with his master, who gave Rusher’s muzzle a companionable little caress.
“What do they call that place yonder?” he asked, pointing at the derricks.
“The oil patch? Citgo.”
“Some of the derricks still pump?”
“Aye, and no way to stop them. Not that anyone still knows.”
“Oh,” he said, and that was all-just oh. But he left his place by Rusher’s head for a moment when they came to the weedy track leading into Citgo, walking across to look at the old disused guard-hut. In her childhood there had been a sign on it reading authorized personnel only, but it had blown away in some windstorm or other. Will Dearborn had his look and then came ambling back to the horse, boots puffing up summer dust, easy in his new clothes.
They went toward town, a young walking man in a flat-crowned hat, a young riding woman with a poncho spread over her lap and legs. The starlight rained down on them as it has on young men and women since time’s first hour, and once she looked up and saw a meteor flash overhead-a brief and brilliant orange streak across the vault of heaven. Susan thought to wish on it, and then, with something like panic, realized she had no idea what to wish for. None at all.
4
She kept her own silence until they were a mile or so from town, and then asked the question which had been on her mind. She had planned to ask hers after he had begun asking his, and it irked her to be the one to break the silence, but in the end her curiosity was too much.
“Where do ye come from, Mr. Dearborn, and what brings ye to our little bit o’ Mid-World… if ye don’t mind me asking?”
“Not at all,” he said, looking up at her with a smile. “I’m glad to talk and was only trying to think how to begin. Talk’s not a specialty of mine.” Then what is. Will Dearborn? she wondered. Yes, she wondered very much, for in adjusting her position on the saddle, she had put her hand on the rolled blanket behind… and had touched something hidden inside that blanket. Something that felt like a gun. It didn’t have to be, of course, but she remembered the way his hands had dropped instinctively toward his belt when she had cried out in surprise.
“I come from the In-World. I’ve an idea you probably guessed that much on your own. We have our own way of talking.”
“Aye. Which Barony is yer home, might I ask?”
“New Canaan.”
She felt a flash of real excitement at that. New Canaan! Center of the Affiliation! That did not mean all it once had, of course, but still-
“Not Gilead?” she asked, detesting the hint of a girlish gush she heard in her voice. And more than just a hint, mayhap.
“No,” he said with a laugh. “Nothing so grand as Gilead. Only Hemphill, a village forty or so wheels west of there. Smaller than Hambry, I wot.”
Wheels, she thought, marvelling at the archaism. He said wheels.
“And what brings ye to Hambry, then? May ye tell?”
“Why not? I’ve come with two of my friends, Mr. Richard Stock-worth of Pennilton, New Canaan, and Mr. Arthur Heath, a hilarious young man who actually does come from Gilead. We’re here at the order of the Affiliation, and have come as counters.”
“Counters of what?”
“Counters of anything and everything which may aid the Affiliation in the coming years,” he said, and she heard no lightness in his voice now.” The business with the Good Man has grown serious.”
“Has it? We hear little real news this far to the south and east of the hub.”
He nodded. “The Barony’s distance from the hub is the chief reason we’re here. Mejis has been ever loyal to the Affiliation, and if supplies need to be drawn from this part of the Outers, they’ll be sent. The question that needs answering is how much the Affiliation can count on.”
“How much of what?”
“Yes,” he agreed, as if she’d made a statement instead of asking a question. “And how much of what.”
“Ye speak as though the Good Man were a real threat. He’s just a bandit, surely, frosting his thefts and murders with talk of 'democracy' and 'equality'?”
Dearborn shrugged, and she thought for a moment that would be his only comment on the matter, but then he said, reluctantly:” ’twas once so, perhaps. Times have changed. At some point the bandit became a general, and now the general would become a ruler in the name of the people.” He paused, then added gravely, “The Northern and West'rd Baronies are in flames, lady.”
“But those are thousands of miles awa
y, surely!” This talk was upsetting, and yet strangely exciting, too. Mostly it seemed exotic, after the pokey all-days-the-same world of Hambry, where someone’s dry well was good for three days of animated conversation.
“Yes,” he said. Not aye but yes-the sound was both strange and pleasing to her ear. “But the wind is blowing in this direction.” He turned to her and smiled. Once more it softened his hard good looks, and made him seem no more than a child, up too late after his bedtime. “But I don’t think we’ll see John Farson tonight, do you?”
She smiled back. “If we did, Mr. Dearborn, would ye protect me from him?”
“No doubt,” he said, still smiling, “but I should do so with greater enthusiasm, I wot, if you were to let me call you by the name your father gave you.”
“Then, in the interests of my own safety, ye may do so. And I suppose I must call ye Will, in those same interests.”
“Tis both wise and prettily put,” he said, the smile becoming a grin, wide and engaging. “I-” Then, walking as he was with his face turned back and up to her, Susan’s new friend tripped over a rock Jutting out of the road and almost fell. Rusher whinnied through his nose and reared a little. Susan laughed merrily. The poncho shifted, revealing one bare leg, and she took a moment before putting matters right again. She liked him, aye, so she did. And what harm could there be in it? He was only a boy, after all. When he smiled, she could see he was only a year or two removed from jumping in haystacks. (The thought that she had recently graduated from haystack-jumping herself had somehow fled her mind.)
“I’m usually not clumsy,” he said. “I hope I didn’t startle you.”
Not at all. Will; boys have been stubbing their toes around me ever since I grew my breasts.
“Not at all,” she said, and returned to the previous topic. It interested her greatly. “So ye and yer friends come at the behest of the Affiliation to count our goods, do you?”
“Yes. The reason I took particular note of yon oil patch is because one of us will have to come back and count the working derricks-”
“I can spare ye that, Will. There are nineteen.”
He nodded. “I’m in your debt. But we’ll also need to make out-if we can-how much oil those nineteen pumps are bringing up.”
“Are there so many oil-fired machines still working in New Canaan that such news matters? And do ye have the alchemy to change the oil into the stuff yer machines can use?”
“It’s called refinery rather than alchemy in this case-at least I think so-and I believe there is one that still works. But no, we haven’t that many machines, although there are still a few working filament-lights in the Great Hall at Gilead.”
“Fancy it!” she said, delighted. She had seen pictures of filament-lights and electric flambeaux, but never the lights themselves. The last ones in Hambry (they had been called “spark-lights” in this part of the world, but she felt sure they were the same) had burned out two generations ago.
“You said your father managed the Mayor’s horses until his death,” Will Dearborn said. “Was his name Patrick Delgado? It was, wasn’t it?”
She looked down at him, badly startled and brought back to reality in an instant. “How do ye know that?”
“His name was in our lessons of calling. We’re to count cattle, sheep, pigs, oxen… and horses. Of all your livestock, horses are the most important. Patrick Delgado was the man we were to see in that regard. I’m sorry to hear he’s come to the clearing at the end of the path, Susan. Will you accept my condolence?”
“Aye, and with thanks.”
“Was it an accident?”
“Aye.” Hoping her voice said what she wanted it to say, which was leave this subject, ask no more.
“Let me be honest with you,” he said, and for the first time she thought she heard a false note there. Perhaps it was only her imagination. Certainly she had little experience of the world (Aunt Cord reminded her of this almost daily), but she had an idea that people who set on by saying Let me be honest with you were apt to go on by telling you straight-faced that rain fell up, money grew on trees, and babies were brought by the Grand Featherex.
“Aye, Will Dearborn,” she said, her tone just the tiniest bit dry. “They say honesty’s the best policy, so they do.”
He looked at her a bit doubtfully, and then his smile shone out again. That smile was dangerous, she thought-a quicksand smile if ever there was one. Easy to wander in; perhaps more difficult to wander back out.
“There’s not much Affiliation in the Affiliation these days. That’s part of the reason Parson’s gone on as long as he has; that’s what has allowed his ambitions to grow. He’s come a far way from the harrier who began as a stage-robber in Garlan and Desoy, and he’ll come farther yet if the Affiliation isn’t revitalized. Maybe all the way to Mejis.”
She couldn’t imagine what the Good Man could possibly want with her own sleepy little town in the Barony which lay closest to the Clean Sea, but she kept silent.
“In any case, it wasn’t really the Affiliation that sent us,” he said. “Not all this way to count cows and oil derricks and hectares of land under cultivation.”
He paused a moment, looking down at the road (as if for more rocks in the way of his boots) and stroking Rusher’s nose with absentminded gentleness. She thought he was embarrassed, perhaps even ’shamed. “We were sent by our fathers.”
“Yer-” Then she understood. Bad boys, they were, sent out on a make-work quest that wasn’t quite exile. She guessed their real job in Hambry might be to rehabilitate their reputations. Well, she thought, it certainly explains the quicksand smile, doesn’t it? 'Ware this one, Susan; he’s the sort to burn bridges and upset mail-carts, then go on his merry way without a single look back. Not in meanness but in plain old boy-carelessness.
That made her think of the old song again, the one she’d been singing, the one he’d been whistling.
“Our fathers, yes.”
Susan Delgado had cut a caper or two (or perhaps it was two dozen) other own in her time, and she felt sympathy for Will Dearborn as well as caution. And interest. Bad boys could be amusing… up to a point. The question was, how bad had Will and his cronies been?
“Helling?” she asked.
“Helling,” he agreed, still sounding glum but perhaps brightening just a bit about the eyes and mouth. “We were warned; yes, warned very well. There was… a certain amount of drinking.”
And a few girls to squeeze with the hand not busy squeezing the ale-pot? It was a question no nice girl could outright ask, but one that couldn’t help occurring to her mind.
Now the smile which had played briefly around the comers of his mouth dropped away. “We pushed it too far and the fun stopped. Fools have a way of doing that. One night there was a race. One moonless night. After midnight. All of us drunk. One of the horses caught his hoof in a gopher-hole and snapped a foreleg. He had to be put down.”
Susan winced. It wasn’t the worst thing she could think of, but bad enough. And when he opened his mouth again, it got worse.
“The horse was a thoroughbred, one of just three owned by my friend Richard’s father, who is not well-to-do. There were scenes in our households which I haven’t any desire to remember, let alone talk about. I’ll make a long story short and say that, after much talk and many proposals for punishment, we were sent here, on this errand. It was Arthur’s father’s idea. I think Arthur’s da has always been a bit appalled by Arthur. Certainly Arthur’s ructions didn’t come from George Heath’s side.”
Susan smiled to herself, thinking of Aunt Cordelia saying, “She certainly doesn’t get it from our side of the family.” Then the calculated pause, followed by: “She had a great-aunt on her mother’s side who ran crazy… you didn’t know? Yes! Set herself on fire and threw herself over the Drop. In the year of the comet, it was.”
“Anyway,” Will resumed, “Mr. Heath set us on with a saying from his own father-'One should meditate in purgatory.' And here we are.”
“Hambry’s far from purgatory.”
He sketched his funny little how again. “If it were, all should want to be bad enough to come here and meet the pretty denizens.”
“Work on that one a bit,” she said in her driest voice. “It’s still rough, 1 fear. Perhaps-”
She fell silent as a dismaying realization occurred to her: she was going to have to hope this boy would enter into a limited conspiracy with her. Otherwise, she was apt to be embarrassed.
“Susan?”
“I was just thinking. Are you here yet, Will? Officially, I mean?”
“No,” he said, taking her meaning at once. And likely already seeing where this was going. He seemed sharp enough, in his way. “We only arrived in Barony this afternoon, and you’re the first person any of us has spoken to… unless, that is, Richard and Arthur have met folks. I couldn’t sleep, and so came out to ride and to think things over a little. We’re camped over there.” He pointed to the right. “On that long slope that runs toward the sea.”
“Aye, the Drop, it’s called.” She realized that Will and his mates might even be camped on what would be her own land by law before much more time had passed. The thought was amusing and exciting and a little startling.
“Tomorrow we ride into town and present our compliments to My Lord Mayor, Hart Thorin. He’s a bit of a fool, according to what we were told before leaving New Canaan.”
“Were ye indeed told so?” she asked, raising one eyebrow.
“Yes-apt to blabber, fond of strong drink, even more fond of young girls,” Will said. “Is it true, would you say?”
“I think ye must judge for yerself,” said she, stifling a smile with some effort.
“In any case, we’ll also be presenting to the Honorable Kimba Rimer, Thorin’s Chancellor, and I understand he knows his beans. And counts his beans, as well.”
“Thorin will have ye to dinner at Mayor’s House,” Susan said. “Perhaps not tomorrow night, but surely the night after.”
“A dinner of state in Hambry,” Will said, smiling and still stroking Rusher’s nose. “Gods, how shall I bear the agony of my anticipation?”