Her delighted laughter made him smile. He liked Olive Thorin on sight, and it was perhaps well he met someone of that sort early on, for, with the problematic exception of Susan Delgado, he met no one else he liked, no one else he trusted, all that night.
6
It was warm enough even with the seabreeze, and the cloak- and coat-collector in the foyer looked as though he’d had little or no custom. Roland wasn’t entirely surprised to see that it was Deputy Dave, his remaining bits of hair slicked back with some sort of gleaming grease and his monocle now lying on the snow-white breast of a houseman’s jacket. Roland gave him a nod. Dave, his hands clasped behind his back, returned it.
Two men—Sheriff Avery and an elderly gent as gaunt as Old Doctor Death in a cartoon—came toward them. Beyond, through a pair of double doors now open wide, a whole roomful of people stood about with crystal punch-cups in their hands, talking and taking little bits of food from the trays which were circulating.
Roland had time for just one narrow-eyed glance toward Cuthbert:
Everything. Every name, every face . . . every nuance. Especially those.
Cuthbert raised an eyebrow—his discreet version of a nod—and then Roland was pulled, willy-nilly, into the evening, his first real evening of service as a working gunslinger. And he had rarely worked harder.
Old Doctor Death turned out to be Kimba Rimer, Thorin’s Chancellor and Minister of Inventory (Roland suspected the title had been made up special for their visit).
He was easily five inches taller than Roland, who was considered tall in Gilead, and his skin was pale as candlewax. Not unhealthy-looking; just pale. Wings of iron-gray hair floated away from either side of his head, gossamer as cobwebs.
The top of his skull was completely bald. Balanced on his whelk of a nose was a pince-nez.
“My boys!” he said, when the introductions had been made. He had the smooth, sadly sincere voice of a politician or an undertaker. “Welcome to Mejis! To Hambry! And to Seafront, our humble Mayor’s House!”
“If this is humble, I should wonder at the palace your folk might build,” Roland said. It was a mild enough remark, more pleasantry than witticism (he ordinarily left the wit to Bert), but Chancellor Rimer laughed hard. So did Sheriff Avery.
“Come, boys!” Rimer said, when he apparently felt he had expressed enough amusement. “The Mayor awaits you with impatience, I’m sure.”
“Aye,” said a timid voice from behind them. The skinny sister-in-law, Coral, had
disappeared, but Olive Thorin was still there, looking up at the newcomers with her hands decorously clasped before that area of her body which might once have been her waist. She was still smiling her hopeful, pleasant smile. “Very eager to meet you, Hart is, very eager, indeed. Shall I conduct them, Kimba, or—”
“Nay, nay, you mustn’t trouble yourself with so many other guests to attend,”
Rimer said.
“I suppose you’re right.” She curtseyed to Roland and his companions a final time, and although she still smiled and although the smile looked completely genuine to Roland, he thought: She’s unhappy about something, all the same.
Desperately so, I think.
“Gentlemen?” Rimer asked. The teeth in his smile were almost disconcertingly huge. “Will ye come?”
He led them past the grinning Sheriff and into the reception hall.
7
Roland was hardly overwhelmed by it; he had, after all, been in the Great Hall of Gilead—the Hall of the Grandfathers, it was sometimes called—and had even peeped down on the great party which was held there each year, the so-called Dance of Easterling, which marked the end of Wide Earth and the advent of Sowing. There were five chandeliers in the Great Hall instead of just one, and lit with electric bulbs rather than oil lamps. The dress of the partygoers (many of them expensive young men and women who had never done a hand’s turn of work in their lives, a fact of which John Farson spoke at every opportunity) had been richer, the music had been fuller, the company of older and nobler lines which grew closer and closer together as they stretched back toward Arthur Eld, he of the white horse and unifying sword.
Yet there was life here, and plenty of it. There was a robustness that had been missing in Gilead, and not just at Easterling, either. The texture he felt as he stepped into the Mayor’s House reception room was the sort of thing, Roland reflected, that you didn’t entirely miss when it was gone, because it slipped away quietly and painlessly. Like blood from a vein cut in a tub filled with hot water.
The room—almost but not quite grand enough to be a hall—was circular, its panelled walls decorated by paintings (most quite bad) of previous Mayors. On a
raised stand to the right of the doors leading into the dining area, four grinning guitarists in tati jackets and sombreros were playing something that sounded like a waltz with pepper on it. In the center of the floor was a table supporting two cut-glass punchbowls, one vast and grand, the other smaller and plainer. The white-jacketed fellow in charge of the dipping-out operations was another of Avery’s deputies.
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.