“I’ve been a fool,” he said. His voice trembled like his hands.
“Yes, indeed,” Cuthbert said. “So you have.” He dropped to his knees in the dust, facing Roland. “Now if you want to hit me, hit away. Hard as you want and as many as you can manage. I’ll not hit back. I’ve done all I can to wake you up to your responsibilities. If you still sleep, so be it. Either way, I still love you.” Bert put his hands on Roland’s shoulders and briefly kissed his friend’s cheek.
Roland began to cry. They were partly tears of gratitude, but mostly those of mingled shame and confusion; there was even a small, dark part of him that hated Cuthbert and always would. That part hated Cuthbert more on account of the kiss than because of the unexpected punch on the jaw; more for the forgiveness than the awakening.
He got to his feet, still holding the letter in one dusty hand, the other ineffectually brushing his cheeks and leaving damp smears there. When he staggered and Cuthbert put out a hand to steady him, Roland pushed him so hard that Cuthbert himself would have fallen, if Alain hadn’t caught hold of his shoulders.
Then, slowly, Roland went back down again-this time in front of Cuthbert with his hands up and his head down.
“Roland, no!” Cuthbert cried.
“Yes,” Roland said. “I have forgotten the face of my father, and cry your pardon.”
“Yes, all right, for gods’ sake, yes!” Cuthbert now sounded as if he were crying himself. “Just… please get up! It breaks my heart to see you so!”
And mine to be so, Roland thought. To be humbled so. But I brought it on myself, didn’t I? This dark yard, with my head throbbing and my heart full of shame and fear. This is mine, bought and paid for.
They helped him up and Roland let himself be helped. “That’s quite a left, Bert,” he said in a voice that almost passed for normal.
“Only when it’s going toward someone who doesn’t know it’s coming,” Cuthbert replied.
“This letter-how did you come by it?”
Cuthbert told of meeting Sheemie, who had been dithering along in his own misery, as if waiting for ka to intervene… and, in the person of “Arthur Heath,” ka had.
“From the witch,” Roland mused. “Yes, but how did she know? For she never leaves the Coos, or so Susan has told me.”
“I can’t say. Nor do I much care. What I’m most concerned about right now is making sure that Sheemie isn’t hurt because of what he told me and gave me. After that, I’m concerned that what old witch Rhea has tried to tell once she doesn’t try to tell again.”
“I’ve made at least one terrible mistake,” Roland said, “but I don’t count loving Susan as another. That was beyond me to change. As it was beyond her. Do you believe that?”
“Yes,” Alain said at once, and after a moment, almost reluctantly, Cuthbert said, “Aye, Roland.”
“I’ve been arrogant and stupid. If this note had reached her aunt, she could have been sent into exile.”
“And we to the devil, by way of hangropes,” Cuthbert added dryly. “Although I know that’s a minor matter to you by comparison.”
“What about the witch?” Alain asked. “What do we do about her?” Roland smiled a little, and turned toward the northwest. “Rhea,” he said. “Whatever else she is, she’s a first-class troublemaker, is she not? And troublemakers must be put on notice.”
He started back toward the bunkhouse, trudging with his head down. Cuthbert looked at Alain, and saw that Al was also a little teary-eyed. Bert put out his hand. For a moment Alain only looked at it. Then he nodded-to himself rather than to Cuthbert, it seemed-and shook it.
“You did what you had to,” Alain said. “I had my doubts at first, but not now.”
Cuthbert let out his breath. “And I did it the way I had to. If I hadn’t surprised him-”
“-he would have beaten you black and blue.”
“So many more colors than that,” Cuthbert said. “I would have looked like a rainbow.”
“The Wizard’s Rainbow, even,” Alain said. “Extra colors for your penny.”
That made Cuthbert laugh. The two of them walked back toward the bunkhouse, where Roland was unsaddling Bert’s horse.
Cuthbert turned in that direction to help, but Alain held him back. “Leave him alone for a little while,” he said. “It’s best you do.”
They went on ahead, and when Roland came in ten minutes later, he found Cuthbert playing his hand. And winning with it.
“Bert,” he said.
Cuthbert looked up.
“We have a spot of business tomorrow, you and I. Up on the Coos.” “Are we going to kill her?”
Roland thought, and thought hard. At last he looked up, biting his lip. “We should.”
“Aye. We should. But are we going to?”
“Not unless we have to, I reckon.” Later he would regret this decision-if it was a decision-bitterly, but there never came a time when he did not understand it. He had been a boy not much older than Jake Chambers during that Mejis fall, and the decision to kill does not come easily or naturally to most boys. “Not unless she makes us.”
“Perhaps it would be best if she did,” Cuthbert said. It was hard gunslinger talk, but he looked troubled as he said it.
“Yes. Perhaps it would. It’s not likely, though, not in one as sly as her. Be ready to get up early.”
“All right. Do you want your hand back?”
“When you’re on the verge of knocking him out? Not at all.”
Roland went past them to his bunk. There he sat, looking at his folded hands in his lap. He might have been praying; he might only have been thinking hard. Cuthbert looked at him for a moment, then turned back to his cards.
16
The sun was just over the horizon when Roland and Cuthbert left the next morning. The Drop, still drenched with morning dew, seemed to bum with orange fire in the early light. Their breath and that of their horses puffed frosty in the air. It was a morning neither of them ever forgot. For the first time in their lives they went forth wearing bolstered revolvers; for the first time in their lives they went into the world as gunslingers.
Cuthbert said not a word-he knew that if he started, he’d do nothing but babble great streams of his usual nonsense-and Roland was quiet by nature. There was only one exchange between them, and it was brief.
“I said I made at least one very bad mistake,” Roland told him. “One that this note”-he touched his breast pocket-“brought home to me. Do you know what that mistake was?”
“Not loving her-not that,” Cuthbert said. “You called that ka, and I call it the same.” It was a relief to be able to say this, and a greater one to believe it. Cuthbert thought he could even accept Susan herself now, not us his best friend’s lover, a girl he had wanted himself the first time he saw her, but as a part of their entwined fate.
“No,” Roland said. “Not loving her, but thinking that love could somehow be apart from everything else. That I could live two lives-one with you and Al and our job here, one with her. I thought that love could lilt me above ka, the way a bird’s wings can take it above all the things that would kill it and eat it, otherwise. Do you understand?”
“It made you blind.” Cuthbert spoke with a gentleness quite foreign to the young man who had suffered through the last two months.
“Yes,” Roland said sadly. “It made me blind… but now I see. Come on, a little faster, if you please. I want to get this over.”
17
They rode up the rutty cart-track along which Susan (a Susan who had known a good deal less about the ways of the world) had come singing “Careless Love” beneath the light of the Kissing Moon. Where the track opened into Rhea’s yard, they stopped.
“Wonderful view,” Roland murmured. “You can see the whole sweep of the desert from here.”
“Not much to say about the view right here in front of us, though.”
That was true. The garden was full of unpicked mutie vegetables, the stuffy-guy presiding over them either a bad joke or a bad omen. The yard supported just one tree, now moulting sickly-looking fall leaves like an old vulture shedding its feathers. Beyond the tree was the hut itself, made of rough stone and topped by a single sooty pot of a chimney with a hex-sign painted on it in sneering yellow. At the rear comer, beyond one overgrown window, was a woodpile.