1
The Peddler's Moon began to wane; it would take the hottest, fairest part of the summer with it when it went. On an afternoon four days past the full, the old mozo from Mayor's House (Miguel had been there long before Hart Thorin's time and would likely be there long after Thorin had gone back to his ranch) showed up at the house Susan shared with her aunt. He was leading a beautiful chestnut mare by a hack'. It was the second of the three promised horses, and Susan recognized Felicia at once. The mare had been one other childhood's favorites.
Susan embraced Miguel and covered his bearded cheeks with kisses. The old man's wide grin would have showed every tooth in his head, if he'd had any left to show. "Gracias, gracias, a thousand thanks, old father," she told him.
"Da nada, " he replied, and handed her the bridle. "It is the Mayor's earnest gift."
She watched him away, the smile slowly fading from her lips. Felicia stood docilely beside her, her dark brown coat shining like a dream in the summer sunlight. But this was no dream. It had seemed like one at first - that sense of unreality had been another inducement to walk into the trap, she now understood - but it was no dream. She had been proved honest; now she found herself the recipient of "earnest gifts" from a rich man. The phrase was a sop to conventionality, of course ... or a bitter joke, depending on one's mood and outlook. Felicia was no more a gift than Pylon had been - they were step-by-step fulfillments of the contract into which she had entered. Aunt Cord could express shock, but Susan knew the truth: what lay directly ahead was whoring, pure and simple.
Aunt Cord was in the kitchen window as Susan walked her gift (which was really just returned property, in her view) to the stable. She called out something passing cheery about how the horse was a good thing, that caring for it would give Susan less time for her megrims. Susan felt a hot reply rise to her lips and held it back. There had been a wary truce between the two of them since the shouting match about the shirts, and Susan didn't want to be the one to break it. There was too much on her mind and heart. She thought that one more argument with her aunt and she might simply snap like a dry twig under a boot. Because often silence is best, her father had told her when, at age ten or so, she had asked him why he was always so quiet. The answer had puzzled her then, but now she understood better.
She stabled Felicia next to Pylon, rubbed her down, fed her. While the mare munched oats, Susan examined her hooves. She didn't care much for the look of the iron the mare was wearing - that was Seafront for you - and so she took her father's shoebag from its nail beside the stable door, slung the strap over her head and shoulder so the bag hung on her hip, and walked the two miles to Hockey's Stable and Fancy Livery. Feeling the leather bag bang against her hip brought back her father in a way so fresh and clear that grief pricked her again and made her feel like crying. She thought he would have been appalled at her current situation, perhaps even disgusted. And he would have liked Will Dearborn, of that she was sure - liked him and approved of him for her. It was the final miserable touch.
2
She had known how to shoe most of her life, and even enjoyed it, when her mood was right; it was dusty, elemental work, with always the possibility of a healthy kick in the slats to relieve the boredom and bring a girl back to reality. But of making shoes she knew nothing, nor wished to. Brian Hookey made them at the forge behind his barn and hostelry, however; Susan easily picked out four new ones of the right size, enjoying the smell of horseflesh and fresh hay as she did. Fresh paint, too. Hockey's Stable & Smithy looked very well, indeed. Glancing up, she saw not so much as a single hole in the barn roof. Times had been good for Hookey, it seemed.
He wrote the new shoes up on a beam, still wearing his blacksmith's apron and squinting horribly out of one eye at his own figures. When Susan began to speak haltingly to him about payment, he laughed, told her he knew she'd settle her accounts as soon as she could, gods bless her, yes. 'Sides, they weren't any of them going anywhere, were they? Nawp, nawp. All the time gently propelling her through the fragrant smells of hay and horses toward the door. He would not have treated even so small a matter as four iron shoes in such a carefree manner a year ago, but now she was Mayor Thorin's good friend, and things had changed.
The afternoon sunlight was dazzling after the dimness of Hockey's barn, and she was momentarily blinded, groping forward toward the street with the leather bag bouncing on her hip and the shoes clashing softly inside. She had just a moment to register a shape looming in the brightness, and then it thumped into her hard enough to rattle her teeth and make Felicia's new shoes clang. She would have fallen, but for strong hands that quickly reached out and grasped her shoulders. By then her eyes were adjusting and she saw with dismay and amusement that the young man who had almost knocked her sprawling into the dirt was one of Will's friends - Richard Stockworth.
"Oh, sai, your pardon!" he said, brushing the arms of her dress as if he had knocked her over. "Are you well? Are you quite well?"
"Quite well," she said, smiling. "Please don't apologize." She felt a sudden wild impulse to stand on tiptoe and kiss his mouth and say, Give that to Will and tell him to never mind what I said! Tell him there are a thousand more where that came from! Tell him to come and get every one!
Instead, she fixed on a comic image: this Richard Stockworth smacking Will full on the mouth and saying it was from Susan Delgado. She began to giggle. She put her hands to her mouth, but it did no good. Sai Stockworth smiled back at her . . . tentatively, cautiously. He probably thinks I'm mad . . . and I am! I am!
"Good day, Mr. Stockworth," she said, and passed on before she could embarrass herself further.
"Good day, Susan Delgado," he called in return.
She looked back once, when she was fifty yards or so farther up the street, but he was already gone. Not into Hockey's, though; of that she was quite sure. She wondered what Mr. Stockworth had been doing at that end of town to begin with.
Half an hour later, as she took the new iron from her da's shoebag, she found out. There was a folded scrap of paper tucked between two of the shoes, and even before she unfolded it, she understood that her collision with Mr. Stockworth hadn't been an accident.
She recognized Will's handwriting at once from the note in the bouquet.
Susan,
Can you meet me at Citgo this evening or tomorrow evening? Very important. Has to do with what we discussed before. Please.
W.
P.S. Best you bum this note.
She burned it at once, and as she watched the flames first flash up and then die down, she murmured over and over the one word in it which had struck her the hardest: Please.
3
She and Aunt Cord ate a simple, silent evening meal - bread and soup - and when it was done, Susan rode Felicia out to the Drop and watched the sun go down. She would not be meeting him this evening, no. She already owed too much sorrow to impulsive, unthinking behavior. But tomorrow?
Why Citgo?
Has to do with what we discussed before.
Yes, probably. She did not doubt his honor, although she had much come to wonder if he and his friends were who they said they were. He probably did want to see her for some reason which bore on his mission (although how the oilpatch could have anything to do with too many horses on the Drop she did not know), but there was something between them now, something sweet and dangerous. They might start off talking but would likely end up kissing ... and kissing would just be the start. Knowing didn't change feeling, though; she wanted to see him. Needed to see him.
So she sat astride her new horse - another of Hart Thorin's payments-in-advance on her virginity - and watched the sun swell and turn red in the west. She listened to the faint grumble of the thinny, and for the first time in her sixteen years was truly torn by indecision. All she wanted stood against all she believed of honor, and her mind roared with conflict. Around all, like a rising wind around an unstable house, she felt the idea of ka growing. Yet to give over one's honor for that reason was so easy, wasn't it? To excuse the fall of virtue by invoking all-powerful ka. It was soft thinking.
Susan felt as blind as she'd been when leaving the darkness of Brian Hockey's bam for the brightness of the street. At one point she cried silently in frustration without even being aware of it, and pervading her every effort to think clearly and rationally was her desire to kiss him again, and to feel his hand cupping her breast.
She had never been a religious girl, had little faith in the dim gods of Mid-World, so at the last of it, with the sun gone and the sky above its point of exit going from red to purple, she tried to pray to her father. And an answer came, although whether from him or from her own heart she didn't know.
Let ka mind itself, the voice in her mind said. It will, anyway; it always does. If ka. should overrule your honor, so it will be; in the meantime, Susan, there's no one to mind it but yourself. Let ka go and mind the virtue of your promise, hard as that may be.
"All right," she said. In her current state she discovered that any decision - even one that would cost her another chance to see Will - was a relief. "I'll honor my promise. Ka can take care of itself."
In the gathering shadows, she clucked sidemouth to Felicia and turned for home.
4
The next day was Sanday, the traditional cowboys' day of rest. Roland's little band took this day off as well. "It's fair enough that we should," Cuthbert said, "since we don't know what the hell we're doing in the first place."
On this particular Sanday - their sixth since coming to Hambry - Cuthbert was in the upper market (lower market was cheaper, by and large, but too fishy-smelling for his liking), looking at brightly colored scrapes and trying not to cry. For his mother had a serape, it was a great favorite others, and thinking of how she would ride out sometimes with it flowing back from her shoulders had filled him with homesickness so strong it was savage. "Arthur Heath," Roland's ka-mai, missing his mama so badly his eyes were wet! It was a joke worthy of... well, worthy of Cuthbert Allgood.
As he stood so, looking at the serapes and a hanging rack of dolina blankets with his hands clasped behind his back like a patron in an art gallery (and blinking back tears all the while), there came a light tap on his shoulder. He turned, and there was the girl with the blonde hair.
Cuthbert wasn't surprised that Roland was smitten with her. She was nothing short of breathtaking, even dressed in jeans and a farmshirt. Her hair was tied back with a series of rough rawhide hanks, and she had eyes of the brightest gray Cuthbert had ever seen. Cuthbert thought it was a wonder that Roland had been able to continue with any other aspect of his life at all, even down to the washing of his teeth. Certainly she came with a cure for Cuthbert; sentimental thoughts of his mother disappeared in an instant.
"Sai," he said. It was all he could manage, at least to start with.
She nodded and held out what the folk of Mejis called a corvette - "little packet" was the literal definition; "little purse" was the practical one. These small leather accessories, big enough for a few coins but not much more, were more often carried by ladies than gentlemen, although that was not a hard-and-fast rule of fashion.
"Ye dropped this, cully," she said.
"Nay, thankee-sai." This one well might have been the property of a man - plain black leather, and unadorned by foofraws - but he had never seen it before. Never carried a corvette, for that matter.
"It's yours," she said, and her eyes were now so intense that her gaze felt hot on his skin. He should have understood at once, but he had been blinded by her unexpected appearance. Also, he admitted, by her cleverness. You somehow didn't expect cleverness from a girl this beautiful; beautiful girls did not, as a rule, have to be clever. So far as Bert could tell, all beautiful girls had to do was wake up in the morning. "It is."
"Oh, aye," he said, almost snatching the little purse from her. He could feel a foolish grin overspreading his face. "Now that you mention it, sai - "
"Susan." Her eyes were grave and watchful above her smile. "Let me be Susan to you, I pray."
"With pleasure. I cry your pardon, Susan, it's just that my mind and memory, realizing it's Sanday, have joined hands and gone off on holiday together - eloped, you might say - and left me temporarily without a brain in my head."
He might well have rattled on like that for another hour (he had before; to that both Roland and Alain could testify), but she stopped him with the easy briskness of an older sister. "I can easily believe ye havenocontrol over yer mind, Mr. Heath - or the tongue hung below it - but perhaps ye'll take better care of yer purse in the future. Good day." She was gone before he could get another word out.
5
Bert found Roland where he so often was these days: out on the part of the Drop that was called Town Lookout by many of the locals. It gave a fair view of Hambry, dreaming away its Sanday afternoon in a blue haze, but Cuthbert rather doubted the Hambry view was what drew his oldest friend back here time after time. He thought that its view of the Delgado house was the more likely reason.
This day Roland was with Alain, neither of them saying a word. Cuthbert had no trouble accepting the idea that some people could go long periods of time without talking to each other, but he did not think he would ever understand it.
He came riding up to them at a gallop, reached inside his shirt, and pulled out the corvette. "From Susan Delgado. She gave it to me in the upper market. She's beautiful, and she's also as wily as a snake. I say that with utmost admiration."
Roland's face filled with light and life. When Cuthbert tossed him the corvette, he caught it one-handed and pulled the lace-tie with his teeth. Inside, where a travelling man would have kept his few scraps of money, there was a single folded piece of paper. Roland read this quickly, the light going out of his eyes, the smile fading off his mouth.
"What does it say?" Alain asked.
Roland handed it to him and then went back to looking out at the Drop. It wasn't until he saw the very real desolation in his friend's eyes that Cuthbert fully realized how far into Roland's life - and hence into all their lives - Susan Delgado had come.
Alain handed him the note. It was only a single line, two sentences:
It's best we don't meet. I'm sorry.
Cuthbert read it twice, as if rereading might change it, then handed it back to Roland. Roland put the note back into the corvette, tied the lace, and then tucked the little purse into his own shirt.
Cuthbert hated silence worse than danger (it was danger, to his mind), but every conversational opening he tried in his mind seemed callow and unfeeling, given the look on his friend's face. It was as if Roland had been poisoned. Cuthbert was disgusted at the thought of that lovely young girl bumping hips with the long and bony Mayor of Hambry, but the look on Roland's face now called up stronger emotions. For that he could hate her.
At last Alain spoke up, almost timidly. "And now, Roland? Shall we have a hunt out there at the oilpatch without her?"
Cuthbert admired that. Upon first meeting him, many people dismissed Alain Johns as something of a dullard. That was very far from the truth. Now, in a diplomatic way Cuthbert could never have matched, he had pointed out that Roland's unhappy first experience with love did not change their responsibilities.
And Roland responded, raising himself off the saddle-horn and sitting up straight. The strong golden light of that summer's afternoon lit his face in harsh contrasts, and for a moment that face was haunted by the ghost of the man he would become. Cuthbert saw that ghost and shivered - not knowing what he saw, only knowing that it was awful.
"The Big Coffin Hunters," he said. "Did you see them in town?"
"Jonas and Reynolds," Cuthbert answered. "Still no sign of Depape. I think Jonas must have choked him and thrown him over the sea cliffs in a fit of pique after that night in the bar."
Roland shook his head. "Jonas needs the men he trusts too much to waste them - he's as far out on thin ice as we are. No, Depape's just been sent off for awhile."
"Sent where?" Alain asked.
"Where he'll have to shit in the bushes and sleep in the rain if the weather's bad." Roland laughed shortly, without much humor. "Jonas has got Depape running our backtrail, more likely than not."
Alain grunted softly, in surprise that wasn't really surprise. Roland sat easily astride Rusher, looking out over the dreamy depths of land, at the grazing horses. With one hand he unconsciously rubbed the corvette he had tucked into his shirt. At last he looked around at them again.
"We'll wait a bit longer," he said. "Perhaps she'll change her mind."
"Roland - " Alain began, and his tone was deadly in its gentleness.
Roland raised his hands before Alain could go on. "Doubt me not, Alain - I speak as my father's son."
"All right." Alain reached out and briefly gripped Roland's shoulder. As for Cuthbert, he reserved judgment. Roland might or might not be acting as his father's son; Cuthbert guessed that at this point Roland hardly knew his own mind at all.
"Do you remember what Cort used to say was the primary weakness of maggots such as us?" Roland asked with a trace of a smile.
" 'You run without consideration and fall in a hole,' " Alain quoted in a gruff imitation that made Cuthbert laugh aloud.
Roland's smile broadened a touch. "Aye. They're words I mean to remember, boys. I'll not upset this cart in order to see what's in it ... not unless there's no other choice. Susan may come around yet, given time to think. I believe she would have agreed to meet me already, if not for ... other matters between us."
He paused, and for a little while there was quiet among them.
"I wish our fathers hadn't sent us," Alain said at last... although it was Roland's father who had sent them, and all three knew it. "We're too young for matters such as these. Too young by years."
"We did all right that night in the Rest," Cuthbert said.
"That was training, not guile - and they didn't take us seriously. That won't happen again."
"They wouldn't have sent us - not my father, not yours - if they'd known what we'd find," Roland said. "But now we've found it, and now we're for it. Yes?"
Alain and Cuthbert nodded. They were for it, all right - there no longer seemed any doubt of that.
"In any case, it's too late to worry about it now. We'll wait and hope for Susan. I'd rather not go near Citgo without someone from Hambry who knows the lay of the place ... but if Depape comes back, we'll have to take our chance. God knows what he may find out, or what stories he may invent to please Jonas, or what Jonas may do after they palaver. There may be shooting."
"After all this creeping around, I'd almost welcome it," Cuthbert said.
"Will you send her another note, Will Dearborn?" Alain asked.
Roland thought about it. Cuthbert laid an interior bet with himself on which way Roland would go. And lost.
"No," he said at last. "We'll have to give her time, hard as that is. And hope her curiosity will bring her around."
With that he turned Rusher toward the abandoned bunkhouse which now served them as home. Cuthbert and Alain followed.
6
Susan, worked herself hard the rest of that Sanday, mucking out the stables, carrying water, washing down all the steps. Aunt Cord watched all this in silence, her expression one of mingled doubt and amazement. Susan cared not a bit for how her aunt looked - she wanted only to exhaust herself and avoid another sleepless night. It was over. Will would know it as well now, and that was to the good. Let done be done.
"Are ye daft, girl?" was all Aunt Cord asked her as Susan dumped her last pail of dirty rinse-water behind the kitchen. "It's Sanday!"
"Not daft a bit," she replied shortly, without looking around.
She accomplished the first half of her aim, going to bed just after moonrise with tired arms, aching legs, and a throbbing back - but sleep still did not come. She lay in bed wide-eyed and unhappy. The hours passed, the moon set, and still Susan couldn't sleep. She looked into the dark and wondered if there was any possibility, even the slightest, that her father had been murdered. To stop his mouth, to close his eyes.
Finally she reached the conclusion Roland had already come to: if there had been no attraction for her in those eyes of his, or the touch of his hands and lips, she would have agreed in a flash to the meeting he wanted. If only to set her troubled mind to rest.
At this realization, relief overspread her and she was able to sleep.
7
Late the next afternoon, while Roland and his friends were at fives in the Travellers' Rest (cold beef sandwiches and gallons of white iced tea - not as good as that made by Deputy Dave's wife, but not bad), Sheemie came in from outside, where he had been watering his flowers. He was wearing his pink sombrero and a wide grin. In one hand he held a little packet.
"Hello, there, you Little Coffin Hunters!" he cried cheerfully, and made a bow which was an amusingly good imitation of their own. Cuthbert particularly enjoyed seeing such a bow done in gardening sandals. "How be you? Well, I'm hoping, so I do!"
"Right as rainbarrels," Cuthbert said, "but none of us enjoys being called Little Coffin Hunters, so maybe you could just play soft on that, all right?"
"Aye," Sheemie said, as cheerful as ever. "Aye, Mr. Arthur Heath, good fella who saved my life!" He paused and looked puzzled for a moment, as if unable to remember why he had approached them in the first place. Then his eyes cleared, his grin shone out, and he held the packet out to Roland. "For you, Will Dearborn!"
"Really? What is it?"
"Seeds! So they are!"
"From you, Sheemie?"
"Oh, no."
Roland took the packet - just an envelope which had been folded over and sealed. There was nothing written on the front or back, and the tips of his fingers felt no seeds within.
"Who from, then?"
"Can't remember," said Sheemie, who then cast his eyes aside. His brains had been stirred just enough, Roland reflected, so that he would never be unhappy for long, and would never be able to lie at all. Then his eyes, hopeful and timid, came back to Roland's. "I remember what I was supposed to say to you, though."
"Aye? Then say it, Sheemie."
Speaking as one who recites a painfully memorized line, both proud and nervous, he said: "These are the seeds you scattered on the Drop."
Roland's eyes blazed so fiercely that Sheemie stumbled back a step. He gave his sombrero a quick tug, turned, and hurried back to the safety of his flowers. He liked Will Dearborn and Will's friends (especially Mr. Arthur Heath, who sometimes said things that made Sheemie laugh fit to split), but in that moment he saw something in Will-sai's eyes that frightened him badly. In that instant he understood that Will was as much a killer as the one in the cloak, or the one who had wanted Sheemie to lick his boots clean, or old white-haired Jonas with the trembly voice.
As bad as them, or even worse.
8
Roland slipped the "seed-packet" into his shirt and didn't open it until the three of them were back on the porch of the Bar K. In the distance, the thinny grumbled, making their horses twitch their ears nervously.
"Well?" Cuthbert asked at last, unable to restrain himself any longer. Roland took the envelope from inside his shirt, and tore it open. As he did, he reflected that Susan had known exactly what to say. To a nicety.
The others bent in, Alain (mm his left and Cuthbert from his right, as he unfolded the single scrap of paper. Again he saw her simple, neatly made writing, the message not much longer than the previous one. Very different in content, however.
There is an orange grove a mile off the road on the town side of Citgo. Meet me there at moonrise. Come alone. S.
And below that, printed in emphatic little letters: burn this.
"We'll keep a lookout," Alain said.
Roland nodded. "Aye. But from a distance."
Then he burned the note.
9
The orange grove was a neatly kept rectangle of about a dozen rows at the end of a partly overgrown cart-track. Roland arrived there after dark but still a good half hour before the rapidly thinning Peddler would haul himself over the horizon once more.
As the boy wandered along one of the rows, listening to the somehow skeletal sounds from the oilpatch to the north (squealing pistons, grinding gears, thudding driveshafts), he was struck by deep homesickness. It was the fragile fragrance of orange-blossoms - a bright runner laid over the darker stench of oil - that brought it on. This toy grove was nothing like the great apple orchards of New Canaan . . . except somehow it was. There was the same feeling of dignity and civilization here, of much time devoted to something not strictly necessary. And in this case, he suspected, not very useful, either. Oranges grown this far north of the warm latitudes were probably almost as sour as lemons. Still, when the breeze stirred the trees, the smell made him think of Gilead with bitter longing, and for the first time he considered the possibility that he might never see home again - that he had become as much a wanderer as old Peddler Moon in the sky.
He heard her, but not until she was almost on top of him - if she'd been an enemy instead of a friend, he might still have had time to draw and fire, but it would have been close. He was filled with admiration, and as he saw her face in the starlight, he felt his heart gladden.
She halted when he turned and merely looked at him, her hands linked before her at her waist in a way that was sweetly and unconsciously childlike. He took a step toward her and they came up in what he took for alarm. He stopped, confused. But he had misread her gesture in the chancy light. She could have stopped then, but chose not to. She stepped toward him deliberately, a tall young woman in a split riding skirt and plain black boots. Her sombrero hung down on her back, against the bound rope of her hair.
"Will Dearborn, we are met both fair and ill," she said in a trembling voice, and then he was kissing her; they burned against one another as the Peddler rose in the famine of its last quarter.
10
Inside her lonely hut high on the Coos, Rhea sat at her kitchen table, bent over the glass the Big Coffin Hunters had brought her a month and a half ago. Her face was bathed in its pink glow, and no one would have mistaken it for the face of a girl any longer. She had extraordinary vitality, and it had carried her for many years (only the longest-lived residents of Hambry had any idea of how old Rhea of the Coos actually was, and they only the vaguest), but the glass was finally sapping it - sucking it out of her as a vampire sucks blood. Behind her, the hut's larger room was even dingier and more cluttered than usual. These days she had no time for even a pretense of cleaning; the glass ball took up all her time. When she wasn't looking into it, she was thinking of looking into it ... and, oh! Such things she had seen!
Ermot twined around one of her scrawny legs, hissing with agitation, but she barely noticed him. Instead she bent even closer into the ball's poison pink glow, enchanted by what she saw there.
It was the girl who had come to her to be proved honest, and the young man she had seen the first time she'd looked into the ball. The one she had mistaken for a gunslinger, until she had realized his youth.
The foolish girl, who had come to Rhea singing and left in a more proper silence, had proved honest, and might well be honest yet (certainly she kissed and touched the boy with a virgin's mingled greed and timidity), but she wouldn't be honest much longer if they kept on the way they were going. And wouldn't Hart Thorin be in for a surprise when he took his supposedly pure young gilly to bed? There were ways to fool men about that (men practically begged to be fooled about that), a thimble of pig's blood would serve nicely, but she wouldn't know that. Oh, this was too good! And to think she could watch Miss Haughty brought low, right here, in this wonderful glass! Oh, it was too good! Too wonderful!
She leaned closer still, the deep sockets of her eyes filling with pink fire. Ermot, sensing that she remained immune to his blandishments, crawled disconsolately away across the floor, in search of bugs. Musty pranced away from him, spitting feline curses, his six-legged shadow huge and misshapen on the firestruck wall.
11
Roland sensed the moment rushing at them. Somehow he managed to step away from her, and she stepped back from him, her eyes wide and her cheeks flushed - he could see that flush even in the light of the newly risen moon. His balls were throbbing. His groin felt full of liquid lead.
She half-turned away from him, and Roland saw that her sombrero had gone askew on her back. He reached out one trembling hand and straightened it. She clasped his fingers in a brief but strong grip, then bent to pick up her riding gloves, which she had stripped off in her need to touch him skin to skin. When she stood again, the wash of blood abruptly left her face, and she reeled. But for his hands on her shoulders, steadying her, she might have fallen. She turned toward him, eyes rueful.
"What are we to do? Oh, Will, what are we to do?"
"The best we can," he said. "As we both always have. As our fathers taught us."
"This is mad."
Roland, who had never felt anything so sane in his life - even the deep ache in his groin felt sane and right - said nothing.
"Do ye know how dangerous 'tis?" she asked, and went on before he could reply. "Aye, ye do. I can see ye do. If we were seen together at all, 'twould be serious. To be seen as we just were - "
She shivered. He reached for her and she stepped back. "Best ye don't, Will. If ye do, won't be nothing done between us but spooning. Unless that was your intention?"
"You know it wasn't."
She nodded. "Have ye set your friends to watch?"
"Aye," he said, and then his face opened in that unexpected smile she loved so well. "But not where they can watch us."
"Thank the gods for that," she said. and laughed rather distractedly. Then she stepped closer to him, so close that he was hard put not to take her in his arms again. She looked curiously up into his face. "Who are you, really. Will?"
"Almost who I say I am. That's the joke of this, Susan. My friends and I weren't sent here because we were drunk and belling, but we weren't sent here to uncover any fell plot or secret conspiracy, either. We were just boys to be put out of the way in a time of danger. All that's happened since - " He shook his head to show how helpless he felt, and Susan thought again of her father saying ka was like a wind - when it came it might take your chickens, your house, your bam. Even your life.
"And is Will Dearborn your real name?"
He shrugged. "One name's as good as another, I wot, if the heart that answers to it is true. Susan, you were at Mayor's House today, for my friend Richard saw you ride up - "
"Aye, fittings," she said. "For I am to be this year's Reaping Girl - it's Hart's choice, nothing I ever would have had on my own, mark I say it. A lot of foolishness, and hard on Olive as well, I warrant."
"You will make the most beautiful Reap-Girl that ever was," he said, and the clear sincerity in his voice made her tingle with pleasure; her cheeks grew warm again. There were five changes of costume for the Reaping Girl between the noon feast and the bonfire at dusk, each more elaborate than the last (in Gilead there would have been nine; in that way, Susan didn't know how lucky she was), and she would have worn all five happily for Will, had he been the Reaping Lad. (This year's Lad was Jamie McCann, a pallid and whey-faced stand-in for Hart Thorin, who was approximately forty years too old and gray for the job.) Even more happily would she have worn the sixth - a silvery shift with wisp-thin straps and a hem that stopped high on her thighs. This was a costume no one but Maria, her maid, Conchetta, her seamstress, and Hart Thorin would ever see. It was the one she would be wearing when she went to the old man's couch as his gilly, after the feast was over.
"When you were up there, did you see the ones who call themselves the Big Coffin Hunters?"
"I saw Jonas and the one with the cloak, standing together in the courtyard and talking," she said. "Not Depape? The redhead?" She shook her head.
"Do you know the game Castles. Susan?"
"Aye. My father showed me when I was small."
"Then you know how the red pieces stand at one end of the board and the white at the other. How they come around the Hillocks and creep toward each other, setting screens for cover. What's going on here in Ham-Dry is very like that. And, as in the game, it has now become a question of who will break cover first. Do you understand?"
She nodded at once. "In the game, the first one around his Hillock is vulnerable."
"In life, too. Always. But sometimes even staying in cover is difficult. My friends and I have counted nearly everything we dare count. To count the rest - "
"The horses on the Drop, for instance."
"Aye, just so. To count them would be to break cover. Or the oxen we know about - "
Her eyebrows shot up. "There are no oxen in Hambry. Ye must be mistaken about that."
"No mistake."
"Where?"
"The Rocking H."
Now her eyebrows drew back down, and knitted in a thoughtful frown. "That's Laslo Rimer's place."
"Aye - Kimba's brother. Nor are those the only treasures hidden away in Hambry these days. There are extra wagons, extra tack hidden in barns belonging to members of the Horsemen's Association, extra caches of feed - "
"Will, no!"
"Yes. All that and more. But to count them - to be seen counting them - is to break cover. To risk being Castled. Our recent days have been pretty nightmarish - we try to look profitably busy without moving over to the Drop side of Hambry, where most of the danger lies. It's harder and harder to do. Then we received a message - "
"A message? How? From whom?"
"Best you not know those things, I think. But it's led us to believe that some of the answers we're looking for may be at Citgo."
"Will, d'ye think that what's out here may help me to know more about what happened to my da?"
"I don't know. It's possible, I suppose, but not likely. All I know for sure is that I finally have a chance to count something that matters and not be seen doing it." His blood had cooled enough for him to hold out his hand to her; Susan's had cooled enough for her to take it in good confidence. She had put her glove back on again, however. Better safe than sorry.
"Come on," she said. "I know a path."
12
In the moon's pale half-light, Susan led him out of the orange grove and toward the thump and squeak of the oilpatch. Those sounds made Roland's back prickle; made him wish for one of the guns hidden under the bunk-house floorboards back at the Bar K.
"Ye can trust me, Will, but that doesn't mean I'll be much help to ye," she said in a voice just a notch above a whisper. "I've been within hearing distance of Citgo my whole life, but I could count the number of times I've actually been in it on the fingers of both hands, so I could. The first two or three were on dares from my friends."
"And then?"
"With my da. He were always interested in the Old People, and my Aunt Cord always said he'd come to a bad end, meddling in their leavings." She swallowed hard. "And he did come to a bad end, although I doubt it were the Old People responsible. Poor Da."
They had reached a smoothwire fence. Beyond it, the gantries of the oil wells stood against the sky like sentinels the size of Lord Perth. How many had she said were still working? Nineteen, he thought. The sound of them was ghastly - the sound of monsters being choked to death. Of course it was the kind of place that kids dared each other to go into; a kind of open-air haunted house.
He held two of the wires apart so she could slip between them, and she did the same for him. As he passed through, he saw a line of white porcelain cylinders marching down the post closest to him. A fencewire went through each.
"You understand what these are? Were?" he asked Susan, tapping one of the cylinders.
"Aye. When there was electricity, some went through here." She paused, then added shyly: "It's how I feel when you touch me."
He kissed her cheek just below her ear. She shivered and pressed a hand briefly against his check before drawing away. "I hope your friends will watch well." "They will." "Is there a signal?"
"The whistle of the nighthawk. Let's hope we don't hear it." "Aye, be it so." She took his hand and drew him into the oilpatch.
13
The first time the gas-jet flared ahead of them, Will spat a curse under his breath (an obscenely energetic one she hadn't heard since her father died) and dropped the hand not holding hers to his belt.
"Be easy! It's only the candle! The gas-pipe!"
He relaxed slowly. "That they use, don't they?"
"Aye. To run a few machines - little more than toys, they are. To make ice, mostly."
"I had some the day we met the Sheriff."
When the flare licked out again - bright yellow with a bluish core - he didn't jump. He glanced at the three gas-storage tanks behind what Hambry-folk called "the candle" without much interest. Nearby was a stack of rusty canisters in which the gas could be bottled and carried.
"You've seen such before?" she asked.
He nodded.
"The Inner Baronies must be very strange and wonderful," Susan said. ?
"I'm beginning to think they're no stranger than those of the Outer Arc," he said, turning slowly. He pointed. "What's yon building down there? Left over from the Old People?"
"Aye."
To the east of Citgo, the ground dropped sharply down a thickly wooded slope with a lane cut through the middle of it - this lane was as clear in the moonlight as a part in hair. Not far from the bottom of the slope was a crumbling building surrounded by rubble. The tumble-and-strew was the detritus of many fallen smokestacks - that much could be extrapolated from the one which still stood. Whatever else the Old People had done, they had made lots of smoke.
"There were useful things in there when my da was a child," she said.
"Paper and such - even a few ink-writers that would still work ... for a little while, at least. If you shook them hard." She pointed to the left of the building, where there was a vast square of crumbled paving, and a few rusting hulks that had been the Old People's weird, horseless mode of travel. "Once there were things over there that looked like the gas-storage tanks, only much, much larger. Like huge silver cans, they were. They didn't rust like those that are left. I can't think what became of them, unless someone hauled them off for water storage. I never would. 'Twould be unlucky, even if they weren't contaminated."
She turned her face up to his, and he kissed her mouth in the moonlight.
"Oh, Will. What a pity this is for you."
"What a pity for both of us," he said, and then passed between them one of those long and aching looks of which only teenagers are capable. They looked away at last and walked on again, hand-in-hand.
She couldn't decide which frightened her more - the few derricks that were still pumping or those dozens which had fallen silent. One thing she knew for sure was that no power on the face of the earth could have gotten her within the fence of this place without a friend close beside her. The pumps wheezed; every now and then a cylinder screamed like someone being stabbed; at periodic intervals "the candle" would fire off with a sound like dragon's breath, throwing their shadows out long in front of them. Susan kept her ears pitched for the nighthawk's piercing two-note whistle, and heard nothing.
They came to a wide lane - what had once undoubtedly been a maintenance road - that split the oilpatch in two. Running down the center was a steel pipe with rusting joints. It lay in a deep concrete trough, with the upper arc of its rusty circumference protruding above ground level.
"What's this?" he asked.
"The pipe that took the oil to yon building, I reckon. It means nothing, 'tis been dry for years."
He dropped to one knee, slid his hand carefully into the space between the concrete sleeve and the pipe's rusty side. She watched him nervously, biting her lip to keep herself from saying something which would surely come out sounding weak or womanish: What if there were biting spiders down there in the forgotten dark? Or what if his hand got stuck? What would they do then?
Of that latter there had been no chance, she saw when he pulled his hand free. It was slick and black with oil.
"Dry for years?" he asked with a little smile.
She could only shake her head, bewildered.
14
They followed the pipe toward a place where a rotten gate barred the road. The pipe (she could now see oil bleeding out of its old joints, even in the weak moonlight) ducked under the gate; they went over it. She thought his hands rather too intimate for polite company in their helping, and rejoiced at each touch. If he doesn't stop, the top of my head will explode like "the candle, " she thought, and laughed.
"Susan?"
" 'Tis nothing, Will, only nerves."
Another of those long glances passed between them as they stood on the far side of the gate, and then they went down the hill together. As they walked, she noticed an odd thing: many of the pines had been stripped of their lower branches. The hatchet marks and scabs of pine resin were clear in the moonlight, and looked new. She pointed this out to Will, who nodded but said nothing.
At the bottom of the hill, the pipe rose out of the ground and, supported on a series of rusty steel cradles, ran about seventy yards toward the abandoned building before stopping with the ragged suddenness of a battlefield amputation. Below this stopping point was what looked like a shallow lake of drying, tacky oil. That it had been there for awhile Susan could tell from the numerous corpses of birds she could see scattered across it - they had come down to investigate, become stuck, and stayed to die in what must have been an unpleasantly leisurely fashion.
She stared at this with wide, uncomprehending eyes until Will tapped her on the leg. He had hunkered down. She joined him knee-to-knee and followed the sweeping movement of his finger with growing disbelief and confusion. There were tracks here. Very big ones. Only one thing could have made them.
"Oxen," she said.
"Aye. They came from there." He pointed at the place where the pipe ended. "And they go - " He turned on the soles of his boots, still hunkered, and pointed back toward the slope where the woods started. Now that he pointed them out, she easily saw what she should have seen at once, horseman's daughter that she was. A perfunctory effort had been made to hide the tracks and the churned-up ground where something heavy had been dragged or rolled. Time had smoothed away more of the mess, but the marks were still clear. She even thought she knew what the oxen had been dragging, and she could see that Will knew, as well.
The tracks split off from the end of the pipe in two arcs. Susan and "Will Dearborn" followed the right-hand one. She wasn't surprised to see ruts mingled in with the tracks of the oxen. They were shallow - it had been a dry summer, by and large, and the ground was nearly as hard as concrete - but they were there. To still be able to see them at all meant that some goodly amount of weight had been moved. And aye, of course; why else would oxen be needed?
"Look," Will said as they neared the hem of forest at the foot of the slope. She finally saw what had caught his attention, but she had to get down on her hands and knees to do it - how sharp his eyes were! Almost supernaturally so. There were boot-tracks here. Not fresh, but they were a lot newer than the tracks of the oxen and the wheelruts.
"This was the one with the cape," he said, indicating a clear pair of tracks. "Reynolds."
"Will! Thee can't know it!"
He looked surprised, then laughed. "Sure I can. He walks with one foot turned in a little - the left foot. And here it is." He stirred the air over the tracks with the tip of his finger, then laughed again at the way she was looking at him. " 'Tisn't sorcery, Susan daughter of Patrick; only trailcraft."
"How do ye know so much, so young?" she asked. "Who are ye, Will?"
He stood up and looked down into her eyes. He didn't have to look far; she was tall for a girl. "My name's not Will but Roland," he said. "And now I've put my life in your hands. That I don't mind, but mayhap I've put your own life at risk, as well. You must keep it a dead secret."
"Roland," she said wonderingly. Tasting it.
"Aye. Which do you like better?"
"Your real one," she said at once. " 'Tis a noble name, so it is."
He grinned, relieved, and this was the grin that made him look young again.
She raised herself on her toes and put her lips on his. The kiss, which was chaste and close-mouthed to begin with, bloomed like a flower: became open and slow and humid. She felt his tongue touch her lower lip and met it, shyly at first, with her own. His hands covered her back, then slipped around to her front. He touched her breasts, also shy to begin with, then slid his palms up their lower slopes to their tips. He uttered a small, moaning sigh directly into her mouth. And as he drew her closer and began to trail kisses down her neck, she felt the stone hardness of him below the buckle of his belt, a slim, warm length which exactly matched the melting she felt in the same place; those two places were meant for each other, as she was for him and he for her. It was ka, after all - ka like the wind, and she would go with it willingly, leaving all honor and promises behind.
She opened her mouth to tell him so, and then a queer but utterly persuasive sensation enfolded her: they were being watched. It was ridiculous, but it was there; she even felt she knew who was watching. She stepped back from Roland, her booted heels rocking unsteadily on the half-eroded oxen tracks. "Get out, ye old bitch," she breathed. "If ye be spying on us in some way, I know not how, get thee gone!"
15
On the hill of the Coos, Rhea drew back from the glass, spitting curses in a voice so low and harsh that she sounded like her own snake. She didn't know what Susan had said - no sound came through the glass, only sight - but she knew that the girl had sensed her. And when she did, all sight had been wiped out. The glass had flashed a brilliant pink, then had gone dark, and none of the passes she made over it would serve to brighten it again.
"Aye, fine, let it be so," she said at last, giving up. She remembered the wretched, prissy girl (not so prissy with the young man, though, was she?) standing hypnotized in her doorway, remembered what she had told the girl to do after she had lost her maidenhead, and began to grin, all her good humor restored. For if she lost her maidenhead to this wandering boy instead of to Hart Thorin, Lord High Mayor of Mejis, the comedy would be even greater, would it not?
Rhea sat in the shadows of her stinking hut and began to cackle.
16
Roland stared at her, wide-eyed, and as Susan explained about Rhea a little more fully (she left out the humiliating final examinations which lay at the heart of "proving honesty"), his desire cooled just enough for him to reassert control. It had nothing to do with jeopardizing the position he and his friends were trying to maintain in Hambry (or so he told himself) and everything to do with maintaining Susan's - her position was important, her honor even more so.
"I imagine it was your imagination," he said when she had finished.
"I think not." With a touch of coolness.
"Or conscience, even?"
At that she lowered her eyes and said nothing.
"Susan, I would not hurt you for the world."
"And ye love me?" Still without looking up.
"Aye, I do."
"Then it's best you kiss and touch me no more - not tonight. I can't stand it if ye do."
He nodded without speaking and held out his hand. She took it, and they walked on in the direction they had been going when they had been so sweetly distracted.
While they were still ten yards from the hem of the forest, both saw the glimmer of metal despite the dense foliage - too dense, she thought. Too dense by far.
It was the pine-boughs, of course; the ones which had been whacked from the trees on the slope. What they had been interlaced to camouflage were the big silver cans now missing from the paved area. The silver storage containers had been dragged over here - by the oxen, presumably - and then concealed. But why?
Roland inspected along the line of tangled pine branches, then stopped and plucked several aside. This created an opening like a doorway, and he gestured her to go through. "Be sharp in your looks," he said. "I doubt if they've bothered to set traps or tripwires, but 'tis always best to be careful."
Behind the camouflaging boughs, the tankers had been as neatly lined up as toy soldiers at the end of the day, and Susan at once saw one reason why they had been hidden: they had been re-equipped with wheels, well-made ones of solid oak which came as high as her chest. Each had been rimmed with a thin iron strip. The wheels were new, so were the strips, and the hubs had been custom-made. Susan knew only one blacksmith in Barony capable of such fine work: Brian Hookey, to whom she had gone for Felicia's new shoes. Brian Hookey, who had smiled and clapped her on the shoulder like a compadre when she had come in with her da's shoebag hanging on her hip. Brian Hookey, who had been one of Pat Delgado's best friends.
She recalled looking around and thinking that times had been good for sai Hookey, and of course she had been right. Work in the blacksmithing line had been plentiful. Hookey had been making lots of wheels and rims, for one thing, and someone must have been paying him to do it. Eldred Jonas was one possibility; Kimba Rimer an even better one. Hart? She simply couldn't believe that. Hart had his mind - what little there was of it - fixed on other matters this summer.
There was a kind of rough path behind the tankers. Roland walked slowly along it, pacing like a preacher with his hands clasped at the small of his back, reading the incomprehensible words writ upon the tankers' rear decks: citgo. sunoco. exxon. conoco. He paused once and read aloud, haltingly: "Cleaner fuel for a better tomorrow." He snorted softly. "Rot! This is tomorrow."
"Roland - Will, I mean - what are they for? "
He didn't answer at first, but turned and walked back down the line of bright steel cans. Fourteen on this side of the mysteriously reactivated oil-supply pipe, and, she assumed, a like number on the other. As he walked, he rapped his fist on the side of each. The sound was dull and clunky. They were full of oil from the Citgo oilpatch.
"They were trigged quite some time ago, I imagine," he said. "I doubt if the Big Coffin Hunters did it all themselves, but they no doubt oversaw it ... first the fitting of the new wheels to replace the old rotten rubber ones, then the filling. They used the oxen to line them up here, at the base of the hill, because it was convenient. As it's convenient to let the extra horses run free out on the Drop. Then, when we came, it seemed prudent to take the precaution of covering these up. Stupid babies we might be, but perhaps smart enough to wonder about twenty-eight loaded oil-carts with new wheels. So they came out here and covered them."
"Jonas, Reynolds, and Depape."
"Aye."
"But why?" She took him by the arm and asked her question again. "What are they for? "
"For Parson," Roland said with a calm he didn't feel. "For the Good Man. The Affiliation knows he's found a number of war-machines; they come either from the Old People or from some other where. Yet the Affiliation fears them not, because they don't work. They're silent. Some feel Farson has gone mad to put his trust in such broken things, but..."
"But mayhap they're not broken. Mayhap they only need this stuff. And mayhap Farson knows it."
Roland nodded.
She touched the side of one of the tankers. Her fingers came away oily. She rubbed the tips together, smelled them, then bent and picked up a swatch of grass to wipe her hands. "This doesn't work in our machines. It's been tried. It clogs them."
Roland nodded again. "My fa - my folk in the Inner Crescent know that as well. And count on it. But if Farson has gone to this trouble - and split aside a troop of men to come and get these tankers, as we have word he has done - he either knows a way to thin it to usefulness, or he thinks he does. If he's able to lure the forces of the Affiliation into a battle in some close location where rapid retreat is impossible, and if he can use machine-weapons like the ones that go on treads, he could win more than a battle. He could slaughter ten thousand horse-mounted fighting men and win the war."
"But surely yer fathers know this .. . ?"
Roland shook his head in frustration. How much their fathers knew was one question. What they made of what they knew was another. What forces drove them - necessity, fear, the fantastic pride which had also been handed down, father to son, along the line of Arthur Eld - was yet a third. He could only tell her his clearest surmise.
"I think they daren't wait much longer to strike Farson a mortal blow. If they do, the Affiliation will simply rot out from the inside. And if that happens, a good deal of Mid-World will go with it."
"But . . ." She paused, biting her lip, shaking her head. "Surely even Farson must know . .. understand ..." She looked up at him with wide eyes. "The ways of the Old People are the ways of death. Everyone knows that, so they do."
Roland of Gilead found himself remembering a cook named Hax, dangling at the end of a rope while the rooks pecked up scattered breadcrumbs from beneath the dead man's feet. Hax had died for Farson. But before that, he had poisoned children for Farson.
"Death," he said, "is what John Parson's all about."
17
In the orchard again.
It seemed to the lovers (for so they now were, in all but the most physical sense) that hours had passed, but it had been no more than forty-live minutes. Summer's last moon, diminished but still bright, continued to shine above them.
She led him down one of the lanes to where she had tied her horse. Pylon nodded his head and whickered softly at Roland. He saw the horse had been rigged for silence - every buckle padded, and the stirrups themselves wrapped in felt.
Then he turned to Susan.
Who can remember the pangs and sweetness of those early years? We remember our first real love no more clearly than the illusions that caused us to rave during a high fever. On that night and beneath that fading moon, Roland Deschain and Susan Delgado were nearly torn apart by their desire for each other; they floundered for what was right and ached with feelings that were both desperate and deep.
All of which is to say that they stepped toward each other, stepped back, looked into each other's eyes with a kind of helpless fascination, stepped forward again, and stopped. She remembered what he had said with a kind of horror: that he would do anything for her but share her with another man. She would not - perhaps could not - break her promise to Mayor Thorin, and it seemed that Roland would not (or could not) break it for her. And here was the most horrible thing of all: strong as the wind of ka might be, it appeared that honor and the promises they had made would prove stronger.
"What will ye do now?" she asked through dry lips.
"I don't know. I must think, and I must speak with my friends. Will you have trouble with your aunt when you go home? Will she want to know where you've been and what you've been doing?"
"Is it me you're concerned about or yourself and yer plans, Willy?"
He didn't respond, only looked at her. After a moment, Susan dropped her eyes.
"I'm sorry, that was cruel. No, she'll not tax me. I often ride at night, although not often so far from the house."
"She won't know how far you've ridden?"
"Nay. And these days we tread carefully around each other. It's like having two powder magazines in the same house." She reached out her hands. She had tucked her gloves into her belt, and the fingers which grasped his fingers were cold. "This'll have no good end," she said in a whisper.
"Don't say that, Susan."
"Aye, I do. I must. But whatever comes, I love thee, Roland."
He took her in his arms and kissed her. When he released her lips, she put them to his ear and whispered, "If you love me, then love me. Make me break my promise."
For a long moment when her heart didn't beat, there was no response from him, and she allowed herself to hope. Then he shook his head - only the one time, but firmly. "Susan, I cannot."
"Is yer honor so much greater than yer professed love for me, then? Aye? Then let it be so." She pulled out of his arms, beginning to cry, ignoring his hand on her boot as she swung up into the saddle - his low call to wait, as well. She yanked free the slipknot with which Pylon had been tethered and turned him with one spurless foot. Roland was still calling to her, louder now, but she flung Pylon into a gallop and away from him before her brief flare of rage could go out. He would not take her used, and her promise to Thorin had been made before she knew Roland walked the face of the earth. That being so, how dare he insist that the loss of honor and consequent shame be hers alone? Later, lying in her sleepless bed, she would realize he had insisted nothing. And she was not even clear of the orange grove before raising her left hand to the side of her face, feeling the wetness there, and realizing that he had been crying, too.
18
Roland rode the lanes outside town until well past moonset, trying to get his roaring emotions under some kind of control. He would wonder for awhile what he was going to do about their discovery at Citgo, and then his thoughts would shift to Susan again. Was he a fool for not taking her when she wanted to be taken? For not sharing what she wanted to share? If you love me, then love me. Those words had nearly torn him open. Yet in the deep rooms of his heart rooms where the clearest voice was that of his father he felt he had not been wrong. Nor was it just a matter of honor, whatever she might think. But let her think that if she would; better she should hate him a little, perhaps, than realize how deep the danger was for both of them.
Around three o' the clock, as he was about to turn for the Bar K, he heard the rapid drumming of hoofbeats on the main road, approaching from the west. Without thinking about why it seemed so important to do so, Roland swung back in that direction, then brought Rusher to a stop behind a high line of run-to-riot hedges. For nearly ten minutes the sound of the hoofbeats continued to swell - sound carried far in the deep quiet of early morning - and that was quite enough time for Roland to feel he knew who was riding toward Hambry hell-for-leather just two hours before dawn. Nor was he mistaken. The moon was down, but he had no trouble, even through the brambly interstices of the hedge, recognizing Roy Depape. By dawn the Big Coffin Hunters would be three again.
Roland turned Rusher back the way he had been heading, and rode to rejoin his own friends.
