more. Bert looked at Alain and saw a queer, musing expression on the boy’s face.
As they drew closer to the bunkhouse, a sense of foreboding filled Cuthbert. They topped a rise, and looked down at the Bar K. The bunk-house door stood open.
“Roland!” Alain cried. He was pointing to the cottonwood grove where the ranch’s spring was. Their clothes, neatly hung to dry when they left, were now scattered hell-to-breakfast.
Cuthbert dismounted and ran to them. Picked up a shirt, sniffed it, flung it away.
“Pissed on!” he cried indignantly.
“Come on,” Roland said. “Let’s look at the damage.”
8
There was a lot of damage to look at. As you expected, Cuthbert thought, gazing at Roland. Then he turned to Alain, who appeared gloomy but not really surprised.
As you both expected.
Roland bent toward one of the dead pigeons, and plucked at something so fine Cuthbert at first couldn’t see what it was. Then he straightened up and held it out to his friends. A single hair. Very long, very white. He opened the pinch of his thumb and forefinger and let it waft to the floor. There it lay amid the shredded remains of Cuthbert Allgood’s mother and father.
“If you knew that old corbie was here, why didn’t we come back and end his breath?” Cuthbert heard himself ask.
“Because the time was wrong,” Roland said mildly.
“He would have done it, had it been one of us in his place, destroying his things.”
“We’re not like him,” Roland said mildly.
“I’m going to find him and blow his teeth out the back of his head.”
“Not at all,” Roland said mildly.
If Bert had to listen to one more mild word from Roland’s mouth, he would run mad. All thoughts of fellowship and ka-tet left his mind, which sank back into his body and was at once obliterated by simple red fury. Jonas had been here. Jonas had pissed on their clothes, called Alain’s mother a cunt, torn up their most treasured pictures, painted childish obscenities on their walls, killed their pigeons.
Roland had known . . . done nothing . . . intended to continue doing nothing.
Except fuck his gilly-girl. He would do plenty of that, aye, because now that was
all he cared about.
But she won’t like the look of your face the next time you climb into the saddle, Cuthbert thought. I’ll see to that.
He drew back his fist. Alain caught his wrist. Roland turned away and began picking up scattered blankets, as if Cuthbert’s furious face and cocked fist were simply of no account to him.
Cuthbert balled up his other fist, meaning to make Alain let go of him, one way or the other, but the sight of his friend’s round and honest face, so guileless and dismayed, quieted his rage a little. His argument wasn’t with Alain. Cuthbert was sure the other boy had known something bad was happening here, but he was also sure that Roland had insisted Alain do nothing until Jonas was gone.
“Come with me,” Alain muttered, slinging an arm around Bert’s shoulders.
“Outside. For your father’s sake, come. You have to cool off. This is no time to be fighting among ourselves.”
“It’s no time for our leader’s brains to drain down into his prick, either,” Cuthbert said, making no effort to lower his voice. But the second time Alain tugged him, Bert allowed himself to be led toward the door.
I’ll stay my rage at him this one last time, he thought, but I think—I know— that is all I can manage. I’ll have Alain tell him so.
The idea of using Alain as a go-between to his best friend—of knowing that things had come to such a pass—filled Cuthbert with an angry, despairing rage, and at the door to the porch he turned back to Roland. “She has made you a coward, ” he said in the High Speech. Beside him, Alain drew in his breath sharply.
Roland stopped as if suddenly turned to stone, his back to them, his arms full of blankets. In that moment Cuthbert was sure Roland would turn and rush toward him. They would fight, likely until one of them was dead or blind or unconscious.
Likely that one would be him, but he no longer cared.
But Roland never turned. Instead, in the same speech, he said: “He came to steal our guile and our caution. With you, he has succeeded. ”
“No,” Cuthbert said, lapsing back into the low speech. “I know that part of you really believes that, but it’s not so. The truth is, you’ve lost your compass. You’ve called your carelessness love and made a virtue of irresponsibility. I—”
“For gods’ sake, come!” Alain nearly snarled, and yanked him out the door.
9
With Roland out of sight, Cuthbert felt his rage veering toward Alain in spite of himself; it turned like a weathervane when the wind shifts. The two of them stood facing each other in the sunshiny dooryard, Alain looking unhappy and distracted, Cuthbert with his hands knotted into fists so tight they trembled at his sides.
“Why do you always excuse him? Why?”
“Out on the Drop, he asked if I trusted him. I said I did. And I do.”
“Then you’re a fool.”
“And he’s a gunslinger. It he says we must wait longer, we must.”
“He’s a gunslinger by accident! A freak! A mutie!”
Alain stared at him in silent shock.
“Come with me, Alain. It’s time to end this mad game. We’ll find Jonas and kill him. Our ka-tet is broken. We’ll make a new one, you and I.”
“It’s not broken. If it does break, it’ll be you responsible. And for that I’ll never forgive you.”
Now it was Cuthbert’s turn to be silent.
“Go for a ride, why don’t you? A long one. Give yourself time to cool off. So much depends on our fellowship—”
“Tell him that!”
“No, I’m telling you. Jonas wrote a foul word about my mother. Don’t you think I’d go with you just to avenge that, if I didn’t think that Roland was right? That it’s what Jonas wants? For us to lose our wits and come charging blindly around our Hillock?”
“That’s right, but it’s wrong, too,” Cuthbert said. Yet his hands were slowly unrolling, fists becoming fingers again. “You don’t see and I don’t have the words to explain. If I say that Susan has poisoned the well of our ka-tet, you would call me jealous. Yet I think she has, all unknowing and unmeaning. She’s poisoned his mind, and the door to hell has opened. Roland feels the heat from that open door and thinks it’s only his feeling for her . . . but we must do better, Al. We must think better. For him as well as for ourselves and our fathers.”
“Are you calling her our enemy?”
“No! It would be easier if she was.” He took a deep breath, let it out, took another, let it out, took a third and let it out. With each one he felt a little saner, a little more himself. “Never mind. There’s no more to say on’t for now. Your advice is good—I think I will take a ride. A long one.”
Bert started toward his horse, then turned back.
“Tell him he’s wrong. Tell him that even if he’s right about waiting, he’s right for the wrong reasons, and that makes him all the way wrong.” He hesitated. “Tell him what I said about the door to hell. Say that’s my piece of the touch. Will you tell him?”
“Yes. Stay away from Jonas, Bert.”
Cuthbert mounted up. “I promise nothing.”
“You’re not a man.” Alain sounded sorrowful; on the point of tears, in fact. “None of us are men.”
“You better be wrong about that,” Cuthbert said, “because men’s work is coming.”
He turned his mount and rode away at a gallop.
10
He went far up the Seacoast Road, to begin with trying not to think at all. He’d found that sometimes unexpected things wandered into your head if you left the door open for them. Useful things, often.
This afternoon that didn’t happen. Confused, miserable, and without a fresh idea in his head (or even the hope of one), Bert at last turned back to Hambry. He rode the High Street from end to end, waving or speaking to people who hiled him. The three of them had met a lot of good people here. Some he counted as friends, and he rather felt the common folk of Hambrytown had adopted them—young fellows who were far from their own homes and families. And the more Bert knew and saw of these common folk, the less he suspected that they were a part of Rimer’s and Jonas’s nasty little game. Why else had the Good Man chosen Hambry in the first place, if not because it provided such excellent cover?