Part 16 (1/2)

”Come in, come in! Don't stand in the hall! Your mother wants to speak to you.” He was smiling with his mouth, but the lines of his face held a deeper, more sardonic humor. Beneath that-and in his eyes-there was only coldness.

In truth, his mother did not seem to want to see him. She sat in the low-backed chair by the large window in the central parlor of her apartments, the one which overlooked the hot blank stone of the central courtyard. She was dressed in a loose, informal gown that kept slipping from one white shoulder and looked at the boy only once-a quick, glinting rueful smile, like autumn sun on a rill of water. During the interview which followed, she studied her hands rather than her son.

He saw her seldom now, and the phantom of cradle songs (chussit, chissit, cha.s.sit) (chussit, chissit, cha.s.sit) had almost faded from his brain. But she was a beloved stranger. He felt an amorphous fear, and an inchoate hatred for Marten, his father's closest advisor, was born.

”Are you well, Ro'?” she asked him softly. Marten stood beside her, a heavy, disturbing hand near the juncture of her white shoulder and white neck, smiling on them both. His brown eyes were dark to the point of blackness with smiling.

”Yes,” he said.

”Your studies go well? Vannay is pleased? And Cort?” Her mouth quirked at this second name, as if she had tasted something bitter.

”I'm trying,” he said. They both knew he was not flas.h.i.+ngly intelligent like Cuthbert, or even quick like Jamie. He was a plodder and a bludgeoner. Even Alain was better at studies.

”And David?” She knew his affection for the hawk.

The boy looked up at Marten, still smiling paternally down on all this. ”Past his prime.”

His mother seemed to wince; for a moment Marten's face seemed to darken, his grip on her shoulder to tighten. Then she looked out into the hot whiteness of the day, and all was as it had been.

It's a charade, he thought. he thought. A game. Who is playing with whom? A game. Who is playing with whom?

”You have a cut on your forehead,” Marten said, still smiling, and pointed a negligent finger at the mark of Cort's latest (thank you for this instructive day) bas.h.i.+ng. ”Are you going to be a fighter like your father or are you just slow?”

This time she did wince.

”Both,” the boy said. He looked steadily at Marten and smiled painfully. Even in here, it was very hot.

Marten stopped smiling abruptly. ”You can go to the roof now, boy. I believe you have business there.”

”My mother has not yet dismissed me, bondsman!”

Marten's face twisted as if the boy had lashed him with a quirt. The boy heard his mother's dreadful, woeful gasp. She spoke his name.

But the painful smile remained intact on the boy's face and he stepped forward. ”Will you give me a sign of fealty, bondsman? In the name of my father whom you serve?”

Marten stared at him, rankly unbelieving.

”Go,” Marten said gently. ”Go and find your hand.”

Smiling rather horribly, the boy went.

As he closed the door and went back the way he came, he heard his mother wail. It was a banshee sound. And then, unbelievably, the sound of his father's man striking her and telling her to shut her quack.

To shut her quack!

And then he heard Marten's laugh.

The boy continued to smile as he went to his test.

V.

Jamie had come from the shops, and when he saw the boy crossing the exercise yard, he ran to tell Roland the latest gossip of bloodshed and revolt to the west. But he fell aside, the words all unspoken. They had known each other since the time of infancy, and as boys they had dared each other, cuffed each other, and made a thousand explorations of the walls within which they had both been birthed.

The boy strode past him, staring without seeing, grinning his painful grin. He was walking toward Cort's cottage, where the shades were drawn to ward off the savage afternoon heat. Cort napped in the afternoon so that he could enjoy to the fullest extent his evening tomcat forays into the mazed and filthy brothels of the lower town.

Jamie knew in a flash of intuition, knew what was to come, and in his fear and ecstasy he was torn between following Roland and going after the others.

Then his hypnotism was broken and he ran toward the main buildings, screaming, ”Cuthbert! Alain! Thomas!” His screams sounded puny and thin in the heat. They had known, all of them, in that intuitive way boys have, that Roland would be the first of them to try the line. But this was too soon.

The hideous grin on Roland's face galvanized him as no news of wars, revolts, and witchcrafts could have done. This was more than words from a toothless mouth given over fly-specked heads of lettuce.

Roland walked to the cottage of his teacher and kicked the door open. It slammed backward, hit the plain rough plaster of the wall, and rebounded.

He had never been inside before. The entrance opened on an austere kitchen that was cool and brown. A table. Two straight chairs. Two cabinets. A faded linoleum floor, tracked in black paths from the cooler set in the floor to the counter where knives hung, and to the table.

Here was a public man's privacy. The faded refuge of a violent midnight carouser who had loved the boys of three generations roughly, and made some of them into gunslingers.

”Cort!”

He kicked the table, sending it across the room and into the counter. Knives from the wall rack fell in twinkling jackstraws.

There was a thick stirring in the other room, a half-sleep clearing of the throat. The boy did not enter, knowing it was sham, knowing that Cort had awakened immediately in the cottage's other room and stood with one glittering eye beside the door, waiting to break the intruder's unwary neck.

”Cort, I want you, bondsman!”

Now he spoke the High Speech, and Cort swung the door open. He was dressed in thin underwear shorts, a squat man with bow legs, runneled with scars from top to toe, thick with twists of muscle. There was a round, bulging belly. The boy knew from experience that it was spring steel. The one good eye glared at him from the bashed and dented hairless head.

The boy saluted formally. ”Teach me no more, bondsman. Today I teach you.”

”You are early, puler,” Cort said casually, but he also spoke the High Speech. ”Two years early at the very best, I should judge. I will ask only once. Will you cry off?”

The boy only smiled his hideous, painful smile. For Cort, who had seen the smile on a score of bloodied, scarlet-skied fields of honor and dishonor, it was answer enough-perhaps the only answer he would have believed.

”It's too bad,” the teacher said absently. ”You have been a most promising pupil-the best in two dozen years, I should say. It will be sad to see you broken and set upon a blind path. But the world has moved on. Bad times are on horseback.”

The boy still did not speak (and would have been incapable of any coherent explanation, had it been required), but for the first time the awful smile softened a little.

”Still, there is the line of blood,” Cort said, ”revolt and witchcraft to the west or no. I am your bondsman, boy. I recognize your command and bow to it now-if never again-with all my heart.”

And Cort, who had cuffed him, kicked him, bled him, cursed him, made mock of him, and called him the very eye of syphilis, bent to one knee and bowed his head.

The boy touched the leathery, vulnerable flesh of his neck with wonder. ”Rise, bondsman. In love.”

Cort stood slowly, and there might have been pain behind the impa.s.sive mask of his reamed features. ”This is waste. Cry off, you foolish boy. I break my own oath. Cry off and wait.”

The boy said nothing.

”Very well; if you say so, let it be so.” Cort's voice became dry and business-like. ”One hour. And the weapon of your choice.”

”You will bring your stick?”