by Stephen King
Contrary to what the High Sheriff had told them the day before, several of the men were wearing sashes of various colors, but Roland didn’t feel too out of place in his white silk shirt, black string tie, and one pair of stovepipe dress trousers. For every man wearing a sash, he saw three wearing the sort of dowdy, box-tailed coats that he associated with stockmen at church, and he saw several others (younger men, for the most part) who weren’t wearing coats at all. Some of the women wore jewelry (though nothing so expensive as sai Thorin’s firedim earrings), and few looked as if they’d missed many meals, but they also wore clothes Roland recognized: the long, round-collared dresses, usually with the lace fringe of a colored underskirt showing below the hem, the dark shoes with low heels, the snoods (most sparkling with gem-dust, as those of Olive and Coral Thorin had been).
And then he saw one who was very different.
It was Susan Delgado, of course, shimmering and almost too beautiful to look at in a blue silk dress with a high waist and a square-cut bodice which showed the tops of her breasts. Around her neck was a sapphire pendant that made Olive Thorin’s earrings look like paste. She stood next to a man wearing a sash the color of coals in a hot woodfire. That deep orange-red was the Barony’s color, and Roland supposed that the man was their host, but for the moment Roland barely saw him. His eye was held by Susan Delgado: the blue dress, the tanned skin, the triangles of color, too pale and perfect to be makeup, which ran lightly up her cheeks; most of all her hair, which was unbound tonight and fell to her waist like a shimmer of palest silk. He wanted her, suddenly and completely, with a desperate depth of feeling that felt like sickness. Everything he was and everything he had come for, it seemed, was secondary to her.
She turned a little, then, and spied him. Her eyes (they were gray, he saw) widened the tiniest bit. He thought that the color in her cheeks deepened a little. Her lips-lips that had touched his as they stood on a dark road, he thought with wonder-parted a little. Then the man standing next to Thorin (also tall, also skinny, with a mustache and long white hair lying on the dark shoulders of his coat) said something, and she turned back to him. A moment later the group around Thorin was laughing, Susan included. The man with the white hair didn’t join them, but smiled thinly.
Roland, hoping his face did not give away the fact that his heart was pounding like a hammer, was led directly to this group, which stood close to the punchbowls. Distantly, he could feel Rimer’s bony confederation of fingers clamped to his arm above the elbow. More clearly he could smell mingled perfumes, the oil from the lamps on the walls, the aroma of the ocean. And thought, for no reason at all, Oh, I am dying. I am dying.
Take hold of yourself, Roland of Gilead. Stop this foolishness, for your father’s sake. Take hold!
He tried… to some degree succeeded… and knew he would be lost the next time she looked at him. It was her eyes. The other night, in the dark, he hadn’t been able to see those fog-colored eyes. I didn’t know how lucky I was, he thought wryly.
“Mayor Thorin?” Rimer asked. “May I present our guests from the Inner Baronies?”
Thorin turned away from the man with the long white hair and the woman standing next to him, his face brightening. He was shorter than his Chancellor but just as thin, and his build was peculiar: a short and narrow-shouldered upper body over impossibly long and skinny legs, He looked, Roland thought, like the sort of bird you should glimpse in a marsh at dawn, bobbing for its breakfast.
“Aye, you may!” he cried in a strong, high voice. “Indeed you may, we’ve been waiting with impatience, great impatience, for this moment! Well met we are, very well met! Welcome, sirs! May your evening in this house of which I am the fleeting proprietor be happy, and may your days be long upon the earth!”
Roland took the bony outstretched hand, heard the knuckles crack beneath his grip, looked for an expression of discomfort on the Mayor’s face, and was relieved to see none. He bowed low over his outstretched leg.
“William Dearborn, Mayor Thorin, at your service. Thank you for your welcome, and may your own days be long upon the earth.”
“Arthur Heath” made his manners next, then “Richard Stockworth.” Thorin’s smile widened at each deep bow. Rimer did his best to beam, but looked unused to it. The man with the long white hair took a glass of punch, passed it to his female companion, and continued to smile thinly. Roland was aware that everyone in the room-the guests numbered perhaps fifty in all-was looking at them, but what he felt most upon his skin, beating like a soft wing, was her regard. He could see the blue silk of her dress from the side of one eye, but did not dare look at her more directly.
“Was your trip difficult?” Thorin was asking. “Did you have adventures and experience perils? We would hear all the details at dinner, so we would, for we have few guests from the Inner Arc these days.” His eager, slightly fatuous smile faded; his tufted brows drew together. “Did ye encounter patrols of Farson?”
“No, Excellency,” Roland said. “We-”
“Nay, lad, nay-no Excellency, I won’t have it, and the fisherfolk and hoss-drovers I serve wouldn’t, even if I would. Just Mayor Thorin, if you please.”
“Thank you. We saw many strange things on our journey, Mayor Thorin, but no Good Men.”
“Good Men!” Rimer jerked out, and his upper lip lifted in a smile which made him look doglike. “Good Men, indeed!”
“We would hear it all, every word,” Thorin said. “But before I forget my manners in my eagerness, young gentlemen, let me introduce you to these close around me. Kimba you’ve met; this formidable fellow to my left is Eldred Jonas, chief of my newly installed security staff.” Thorin’s smile looked momentarily embarrassed. “I’m not convinced that I need extra security, Sheriff Avery’s always been quite enough to keep the peace in our comer of the world, but Kimba insists. And when Kimba insists, the Mayor must bow.”
“Very wise, sir,” Rimer said, and bowed himself. They all laughed, save for Jonas, who simply held onto his narrow smile.
Jonas nodded. “Pleased, gents, I’m sure.” The voice was a reedy quaver. He then wished them long days upon the earth, all three, coming to Roland last in his round of handshaking. His grip was dry and firm, utterly untouched by the tremor in his voice. And now Roland noticed the queer blue shape tattooed on the back of the man’s right hand, in the webbing between thumb and first finger. It looked like a coffin.
“Long days, pleasant nights,” Roland said with hardly a thought. It was a greeting from his childhood, and it was only later that he would realize it was one more apt to be associated with Gilead than with any such rural place as Hemphill. Just a small slip, but he was beginning to believe that their margin for such slips might be a good deal less than his father had thought when he had sent Roland here to get him out of Marten’s way.
“And to you,” Jonas said. His bright eyes measured Roland with a thoroughness that was close to insolence, still holding his hand. Then he released it and stepped back.
“Cordelia Delgado,” Mayor Thorin said, next bowing to the woman who had been speaking to Jonas. As Roland also bowed in her direction, he saw the family resemblance… except that what looked generous and lovely on Susan’s face looked pinched and folded on the face before him now. Not the girl’s mother; Roland guessed that Cordelia Delgado was a bit too young for that.
“And our especial friend, Miss Susan Delgado,” Thorin finished, sounding flustered (Roland supposed she would have that effect on any man, even an old one like the Mayor). Thorin urged her forward, bobbing his head and grinning, one of his knuckle-choked hands pressed against the small of her back, and Roland felt an instant of poisonous jealousy. Ridiculous, given this man’s age and his plump, pleasant wife, but it was there, all right, and it was sharp. Sharp as a bee’s ass, Cort would have said.
Then her face tilted up to his, and he was looking into her eyes again.
He had heard of drowning in a woman’s eyes in some poem or story, and thought it ridiculous. He still
thought it ridiculous, but understood it was perfectly possible, nonetheless. And she knew it. He saw concern in her eyes, perhaps even fear.
Promise me that if we meet at Mayor’s House, we meet for the first time.
The memory of those words had a sobering, clarifying effect, and seemed to widen his vision a little. Enough for him to be aware that the woman beside Jonas, the one who shared some of Susan’s features, was looking at the girl with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.
He bowed low, but did little more than touch her ringless outstretched hand. Even so, he felt something like a spark jump between their fingers. From the momentary widening of those eyes, he thought that she felt it, too.
“Pleased to meet you, sai,” he said. His attempt to be casual sounded tinny and false in his own ears. Still, he was begun, it felt like the whole world was watching him (them), and there was nothing to do but go on with it. He tapped his throat three times. “May your days be long-”
“Aye, and yours, Mr. Dearborn. Thankee-sai.”
She turned to Alain with a rapidity that was almost rude, then to Cuthbert, who bowed, tapped, then said gravely: “Might I recline briefly at your feet, miss? Your beauty has loosened my knees. I’m sure a few moments spent looking up at your profile from below, with the back of my head on these cool tiles, would put me right.”
They all laughed at that-even Jonas and Miss Cordelia. Susan blushed prettily and slapped the back of Cuthbert’s hand. For once Roland blessed his friend’s relentless sense of foolery.
Another man joined the party by the punchbowl. This newcomer was blocky and blessedly un-thin in his boxtail coat. His cheeks burned with high color that looked like windburn rather than drink, and his pale eyes lay in nets of wrinkles. A rancher; Roland had ridden often enough with his father to know the look.
“There’ll be maids a-plenty to meet you boys tonight,” the newcomer said with a friendly enough smile. “Ye’ll find y’selves drunk on perfume if ye’re not careful. But I’d like my crack at you before you meet em. Fran Lengyll, at your service.”
His grip was strong and quick; no bowing or other nonsense went with it.
“I own the Rocking B… or it owns me, whichever way ye want to look at it. I’m also boss of the Horsemen’s Association, at least until they fire me. The Bar K was my idea. Hope it’s all right.”
“It’s perfect, sir,” Alain said. “Clean and dry and room for twenty. Thank you. You’ve been too kind.”
“Nonsense,” Lengyll said, looking pleased all the same as he knocked back a glass of punch. “We’re all in this together, boy. John Farson’s but one bad straw in a field of wrong-headedness these days. The world’s moved on, folks say. Huh! So it has, aye, and a good piece down the road to hell is where it’s moved on to. Our job is to hold the hay out of the furnace as well as we can, as long as we can. For the sake of our children even more than for that of our fathers.”
“Hear, hear,” Mayor Thorin said in a voice that strove for the high ground of solemnity and fell with a splash into fatuity instead. Roland noticed the scrawny old fellow was gripping one of Susan’s hands (she seemed almost unaware of it; was looking intently at Lengyll instead), and suddenly he understood: the Mayor was either her uncle or perhaps a cousin of some close degree. Lengyll ignored both, looking at the three newcomers instead, scrutinizing each in turn and finishing with Roland.
“Anything us in Mejis can do to help, lad, just ask-me, John Croydon, Hash Renfrew, Jake White, Hank Wertner, any or all. Ye’ll meet em tonight, aye, their wives and sons and daughters as well, and ye need only ask. We may be a good piece out from the hub of New Canaan here, but we’re strong for the Affiliation, all the same. Aye, very strong.”
“Well spoken,” Rimer said quietly.
“And now,” Lengyll said, “we’ll toast your arrival proper. And ye’ve had to wait too long already for a dip of punch. It’s dry as dust ye must be.”
He turned to the punchbowls and reached for the ladle in the larger and more ornate of the two, waving off the attendant, clearly wanting to honor them by serving them himself.
“Mr. Lengyll,” Roland said quietly. Yet there was a force of command in that voice; Fran Lengyll heard it and turned.
“The smaller bowl is soft punch, is it not?”
Lengyll considered this, at first not understanding. Then his eyebrow went up. For the first time he seemed to consider Roland and the others not as living symbols of the Affiliation and the Inner Baronies, but as actual human beings. Young ones. Only boys, when you got right down to it.
“Aye?”
“Draw ours from that, if you’d be so kind.” He felt all eyes upon them now. Her eyes particularly. He kept his own firmly fixed on the rancher, but his peripheral vision was good, and he was very aware that Jonas’s thin smile had resurfaced. Jonas knew what this was about already. Roland supposed Thorin and Rimer did, as well. These country mice knew a lot. More than they should, and he would need to think about that carefully later. It was the least of his concerns at the current moment, however.
“We have forgotten the faces of our fathers in a matter that has some bearing on our posting to Hambry.” Roland was uncomfortably aware that he was now making a speech, like it or not. It wasn’t the whole room he was addressing-thank the gods for little blessings-but the circle of listeners had grown well beyond the original group. Yet there was nothing for it but to finish; the boat was launched. “I needn’t go into details-nor would you expect them, I know-but I should say that we promised not to indulge in spirits during our time here. As penance, you see.”
Her gaze. He could still feel it on his skin, it seemed.
For a moment there was complete quiet in the little group around the punchbowls, and then Lengyll said: “Your father would be proud to hear ye speak so frank, Will Dearborn-aye, so he would. And what boy worth his salt didn’t get up to a little noise ’ wind from time to time?” He clapped Roland on the shoulder, and although the grip of his hand was firm and his smile looked genuine, his eyes were hard to read, only gleams of speculation deep in those beds of wrinkles. “In his place, may I be proud for him?”
“Yes,” Roland said, smiling in return. “And with my thanks.”
“And mine,” Cuthbert said.
“Mine as well,” Alain said quietly, taking the offered cup of soft punch and bowing to Lengyll.
Lengyll filled more cups and handed them rapidly around. Those already holding cups found them plucked away and replaced with fresh cups of the soft punch. When each of the immediate group had one, Lengyll turned, apparently intending to offer the toast himself. Rimer tapped him on the shoulder, shook his head slightly, and cut his eyes toward the Mayor. That worthy was looking at them with his eyes rather popped and his jaw slightly dropped. To Roland he looked like an enthralled playgoer in a penny seat; all he needed was a lapful of orange-peel. Lengyll followed the Chancellor’s glance and then nodded.
Rimer next caught the eye of the guitar player standing at the center of the musicians. He stopped playing; so did the others. The guests looked that way, then back to the center of the room when Thorin began speaking. There was nothing ridiculous about his voice when he put it to use as he now did-it was carrying and pleasant.
“Ladies and gentlemen, my friends,” he said. “I would ask you to help me in welcoming three new friends-young men from the Inner Baronies, fine young men who have dared great distances and many perils on behalf of the Affiliation, and in the service of order and peace.”
Susan Delgado set her punch-cup aside, retrieved her hand (with some difficulty) from her uncle’s grip, and began to clap. Others joined in. The applause which swept the room was brief but warm. Eldred Jonas did not, Roland noticed, put his cup aside to join in.
Thorin turned to Roland, smiling. He raised his cup. “May I set you on with a word, Will Dearborn?”
“Aye, so you may, and with thanks,” Roland said. There was laughter and fresh applause at his usage.
Thorin ra
ised his cup even higher. Everyone else in the room followed suit; crystal gleamed like starpoints in the light of the chandelier.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you William Dearborn of Hemphill, Richard Stockworth of Pennilton, and Arthur Heath of Gilead.”
Gasps and murmurs at that last, as if their Mayor had announced Arthur Heath of Heaven.
“Take of them well, give to them well, make their days in Mejis sweet, and their memories sweeter. Help them in their work and to advance the causes which are so dear to all of us. May their days be long upon the earth. So says your Mayor.”
“SO SAY WE ALL!” they thundered back.
Thorin drank; the rest followed his example. There was fresh applause. Roland turned, helpless to stop himself, and found Susan’s eyes again at once. For a moment she looked at him fully, and in her frank gaze he saw that she was nearly as shaken by his presence as he was by hers. Then the older woman who looked like her bent and murmured something into her ear. Susan turned away, her face a composed mask… but he had seen her regard in her eyes. And thought again that what was done might be undone, and what was spoken might be unspoken.
8
As they passed into the dining hall, which had tonight been set with four long trestle tables (so close there was barely room to move between them), Cordelia tugged her niece’s hand, pulling her back from the Mayor and Jonas, who had fallen into conversation with Fran Lengyll.
“Why looked you at him so, miss?” Cordelia whispered furiously. The vertical line had appeared on her forehead. Tonight it looked as deep as a trench. “What ails thy pretty, stupid head?” Thy. Just that was enough to tell Susan that her aunt was in a fine rage.