The Wind Through The Keyhole (5 page)

BOOK: The Wind Through The Keyhole
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Roland was awake and sitting by the fire. Jake was with him. Between them, Oy was asleep with one paw over his snout. Susannah joined them. The fire had burned down a little, but this close it threw a comforting heat on her face and arms. She took a board, thought about snapping it in two, decided it might wake Eddie, and tossed it onto the fire as it was. Sparks gushed up the chimney, swirling as the draft caught them.

She could have spared the consideration, because while the sparks were still swirling, a hand caressed the back of her neck just below the hairline. She didn’t have to look; she would have known that touch anywhere. Without turning, she took the hand, brought it to her mouth, and kissed the cup of the palm. The
white
palm. Even after all this time together and all the lovemaking, she could sometimes hardly believe that. Yet there it was.

At least I won’t have to bring him home to meet my parents,
she thought.

“Can’t sleep, sugar?”

“A little. Not much. I had funny dreams.”

“The wind brings them,” Roland said. “Anyone in Gilead would tell you the same. But I love the sound of the wind. I always have. It soothes my heart and makes me think of old times.”

He looked away, as if embarrassed to have said so much.

“None of us can sleep,” Jake said. “So tell us a story.”

Roland looked into the fire for a while, then at Jake. The gunslinger was once more smiling, but his eyes were distant. A knot popped in the fireplace. Outside the stone walls, the wind screamed as if furious at its inability to get in. Eddie put an arm around Susannah’s waist and she laid her head on his shoulder.

“What story would you hear, Jake, son of Elmer?”

“Any.” He paused. “About the old days.”

Roland looked at Eddie and Susannah. “And you? Would you hear?”

“Yes, please,” Susannah said.

Eddie nodded. “Yeah. If you want to, that is.”

Roland considered. “Mayhap I’ll tell you two, since it’s long until dawn and we can sleep tomorrow away, if we like. These tales nest inside each other. Yet the wind blows through both, which is a good thing. There’s nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.”

He took a broken piece of wood paneling, poked the glowing embers with it, then fed it to the flames. “One I know is a true story, for I lived it along with my old ka-mate, Jamie DeCurry. The other, ‘The Wind Through the Keyhole,’ is one my mother read to me when I was still sma’. Old stories can be useful, you know, and I should have thought of this one as soon as I saw Oy scenting the air as he did, but that was long ago.” He sighed. “Gone days.”

In the dark beyond the firelight, the wind rose to a howl. Roland waited for it to die a little, then began. Eddie, Susannah, and Jake listened, rapt, all through that long and contentious night. Lud, the Tick-Tock Man, Blaine the Mono, the Green Palace—all were forgotten. Even the Dark Tower itself was forgotten for a bit. There was only Roland’s voice, rising and falling.

Rising and falling like the wind.

“Not long after the death of my mother, which as you know came by my own hand . . .”

T
HE
S
KIN
-M
AN

(Part 1)

Not long after the death of my mother, which as you know came by my own hand, my father—Steven, son of Henry the Tall—summoned me to his study in the north wing of the palace. It was a small, cold room. I remember the wind whining around the slit windows. I remember the high, frowning shelves of books—worth a fortune, they were, but never read. Not by him, anyway. And I remember the black collar of mourning he wore. It was the same as my own. Every man in Gilead wore the same collar, or a band around his shirtsleeve. The women wore black nets on their hair. This would go on until Gabrielle Deschain was six months in her tomb.

I saluted him, fist to forehead. He didn’t look up from the papers on his desk, but I knew he saw it. My father saw everything, and very well. I waited. He signed his name several times while the wind whistled and the rooks cawed in the courtyard. The fireplace was a dead socket. He rarely called for it to be lit, even on the coldest days.

At last he looked up.

“How is Cort, Roland? How goes it with your teacher that was? You must know, because I’ve been given to understand that you spend most of your time in his hut, feeding him and such.”

“He has days when he knows me,” I said. “Many days he doesn’t. He still sees a little from one eye. The other . . .” I didn’t need to finish. The other was gone. My hawk, David, had taken it from him in my test of manhood. Cort, in turn, had taken David’s life, but that was to be his last kill.

“I know what happened to his other peep. Do you truly feed him?”

“Aye, Father, I do.”

“Do you clean him when he messes?”

I stood there before his desk like a chastened schoolboy called before the master, and that is how I felt. Only how many chastened schoolboys have killed their own mothers?

“Answer me, Roland. I am your dinh as well as your father and I’d have you answer.”

“Sometimes.” Which was not really a lie. Sometimes I changed his dirty clouts three and four times a day, sometimes, on the good days, only once or not at all. He could get to the jakes if I helped him. And if he remembered he had to go.

“Does he not have the white ammies who come in?”

“I sent them away,” I said.

He looked at me with real curiosity. I searched for contempt in his face—part of me wanted to see it—but there was none that I could tell. “Did I raise you to the gun so you could become an ammie and nurse a broken old man?”

I felt my anger flash at that. Cort had raised a moit of boys to the tradition of the Eld and the way of the gun. Those who were unworthy he had bested in combat and sent west with no weapons other than what remained of their wits. There, in Cressia and places even deeper in those anarchic kingdoms, many of those broken boys had joined with Farson, the Good Man. Who would in time overthrow everything my father’s line had stood for.
Farson
had armed them, sure. He had guns, and he had plans.

“Would you throw him on the dungheap, Father? Is that to be his reward for all his years of service? Who next, then? Vannay?”

“Never in this life, as you know. But done is done, Roland, as thee also knows. And thee doesn’t nurse him out of love. Thee knows that, too.”

“I nurse him out of respect!”

“If ’twas only respect, I think you’d visit him, and read to him—for you read well, your mother always said so, and about that she spoke true—but you’d not clean his shit and change his bed. You are scourging yourself for the death of your mother, which was not your fault.”

Part of me knew this was true. Part of me refused to believe it. The publishment of her death was simple: “Gabrielle Deschain, she of Arten, died while possessed of a demon which troubled her spirit.” It was always put so when someone of high blood committed suicide, and so the story of her death was given. It was accepted without question, even by those who had, either secretly or not so secretly, cast their lot with Farson. Because it became known—gods know how, not from me or my friends—that she had become the consort of Marten Broadcloak, the court magis and my father’s chief advisor, and that Marten had fled west. Alone.

“Roland, hear me very well. I know you felt betrayed by your lady mother. So did I. I know that part of you hated her. Part of me hated her, too. But we both also loved her, and love her still. You were poisoned by the toy you brought back from Mejis, and you were tricked by the witch. One of those things alone might not have caused what happened, but the pink ball and the witch together . . . aye.”

“Rhea.” I could feel tears stinging my eyes, and I willed them back. I would not weep before my father. Never again. “Rhea of the Cöos.”

“Aye, she, the black-hearted cunt. It was she who killed your mother, Roland. She turned you into a gun . . . and then pulled the trigger.”

I said nothing.

He must have seen my distress, because he resumed shuffling his papers, signing his name here and there. Finally he raised his head again. “The ammies will have to see to Cort for a while. I’m sending you and one of your ka-mates to Debaria.”

“What? To Serenity?”

He laughed. “The retreat where your mother stayed?”

“Yes.”

“Not there, not at all. Serenity, what a joke. Those women are the
black
ammies. They’d flay you alive if you so much as trespassed their holy doors. Most of the sisters who bide there prefer the longstick to a man.”

I had no idea what he meant—remember I was still very young, and very innocent about many things, in spite of all I’d been through. “I’m not sure I’m ready for another mission, Father. Let alone a quest.”

He looked at me coldly. “I’ll be the judge of what you’re ready for. Besides, this is nothing like the mess you walked into in Mejis. There may be danger, it may even come to shooting, but at bottom it’s just a job that needs to be done. Partly so that people who’ve come to doubt can see that the White is still strong and true, but mostly because what’s wrong cannot be allowed to stand. Besides, as I’ve said, I won’t be sending you alone.”

“Who’ll go with me? Cuthbert or Alain?”

“Neither. I have work for Laughing Boy and Thudfoot right here. You go with Jamie DeCurry.”

I considered this and thought I would be glad to ride with Jamie Red-Hand. Although I would have preferred either Cuthbert or Alain. As my father surely knew.

“Will you go without argument, or will you annoy me further on a day when I have much to do?”

“I’ll go,” I said. In truth, it would be good to escape the palace—its shadowy rooms, its whispers of intrigue, its pervasive sense that darkness and anarchy were coming and nothing could stop them. The world would move on, but Gilead would not move on with it. That glittering, beautiful bubble would soon burst.

“Good. You’re a fine son, Roland. I may never have told you that, but it’s true. I hold nothing against you. Nothing.”

I lowered my head. When this meeting was finally over, I would go somewhere and let my heart free, but not just then. Not as I stood before him.

“Ten or twelve wheels beyond the hall of the women—Serenity, or whatever they call it—is the town of Debaria itself, on the edge of the alkali flats. Nothing serene about Debaria. It’s a dusty, hide-smelling railhead town where cattle and block salt are shipped south, east, and north—in every direction except the one where that bastard Farson’s laying his plans. There are fewer traildrive herds these days, and I expect Debaria will dry up and blow away like so many other places in Mid-World before long, but now it’s still a busy place, full of saloons, whoredens, gamblers, and confidence men. Hard as it might be to believe, there are even a few good people there. One is the High Sheriff, Hugh Peavy. It’s him that you and DeCurry will report to. Let him see your guns and a
sigul
which I will give to you. Do you ken everything I’ve told you so far?”

“Yes, Father,” I said. “What’s so bad there that it warrants the attention of gunslingers?” I smiled a little, a thing I had done seldom in the wake of my mother’s death. “Even baby gunslingers such as us?”

“According to the reports I have”—he lifted some of the papers and shook them at me—“there’s a skin-man at work. I have my doubts about that, but there’s no doubt the folk are terrified.”

“I don’t know what that is,” I said.

“Some sort of shape-changer, or so the old tales say. Go to Vannay when you leave me. He’s been collecting reports.”

“All right.”

“Do the job, find this lunatic who goes around wearing animal skins—that’s probably what it amounts to—but be not long about it. Matters far graver than this have begun to teeter. I’d have you back—you and all your ka-mates—before they fall.”

* * *

Two days later, Jamie and I led our horses onto the stable-car of a special two-car train that had been laid on for us. Once the Western Line ran a thousand wheels or more, all the way to the Mohaine Desert, but in the years before Gilead fell, it went to Debaria and no farther. Beyond there, many tracklines had been destroyed by washouts and ground-shakers. Others had been taken up by harriers and roving bands of outlaws who called themselves land-pirates, for that part of the world had fallen into bloody confusion. We called those far western lands Out-World, and they served John Farson’s purposes well. He was, after all, just a land-pirate himself. One with pretensions.

The train was little more than a steam-driven toy; Gilead folk called it Sma’ Toot and laughed to see it puffing over the bridge to the west of the palace. We could have ridden faster a-horseback, but the train saved the mounts. And the dusty velveteen seats of our car folded out into beds, which we felt was a fine thing. Until we tried to sleep in them, that was. At one particularly hard jounce, Jamie was thrown right off his makeshift bed and onto the floor. Cuthbert would have laughed and Alain would have cursed, but Jamie Red-Hand only picked himself up, stretched out again, and went back to sleep.

We spoke little that first day, only looked out the wavery isinglass windows, watching as Gilead’s green and forested land gave way to dirty scrub, a few struggling ranches, and herders’ huts. There were a few towns where folk—many of them muties—gaped at us as Sma’ Toot wheezed slowly past. A few pointed at the centers of their foreheads, as if at an invisible eye. It meant they stood for Farson, the Good Man. In Gilead, such folk would have been imprisoned for their disloyalty, but Gilead was now behind us. I was dismayed by how quickly the allegiance of these people, once taken for granted, had thinned.

On the first day of our journey, outside Beesford-on-Arten, where a few of my mother’s people still lived, a fat man threw a rock at the train. It bounced off the closed stable-car door, and I heard our horses whinny in surprise. The fat man saw us looking at him. He grinned, grabbed his crotch with both hands, and waddled away.

“Someone has eaten well in a poor land,” Jamie remarked as we watched his butters jounce in the seat of his old patched pants.

The following morning, after the servant had put a cold breakfast of porridge and milk before us, Jamie said, “I suppose you’d better tell me what it’s about.”

“Will you tell me something, first? If you know, that is?”

“Of course.”

“My father said that the women at the retreat in Debaria prefer the longstick to a man. Do you know what he meant?”

Jamie regarded me in silence for a bit—as if to make sure I wasn’t shaking his knee—and then his lips twitched at the corners. For Jamie this was the equivalent of holding his belly, rolling around the floor, and howling with glee. Which Cuthbert Allgood certainly would have done. “It must be what the whores in the low town call a diddlestick. Does that help?”

“Truly? And they . . . what? Use it on each other?”

“So ’tis said, but much talk is just la-la-la. You know more of women than I do, Roland; I’ve never lain with one. But never mind. Given time, I suppose I will. Tell me what we’re about in Debaria.”

“A skin-man is supposedly terrorizing the good folk. Probably the bad folk, as well.”

“A man who becomes some sort of animal?”

It was actually a little more complicated in this case, but he had the nub of it. The wind was blowing hard, flinging handfuls of alkali at the side of the car. After one particularly vicious gust, the little train lurched. Our empty porridge bowls slid. We caught them before they could fall. If we hadn’t been able to do such things, and without even thinking of them, we would not have been fit to carry the guns we wore. Not that Jamie preferred the gun. Given a choice (and the time to make it), he would reach for either his bow or his bah.

“My father doesn’t believe it,” I said. “But Vannay does. He—”

At that moment, we were thrown forward into the seats ahead of us. The old servant, who was coming down the center aisle to retrieve our bowls and cups, was flung all the way back to the door between the car and his little kitchen. His front teeth flew out of his mouth and into his lap, which gave me a start.

Jamie ran up the aisle, which was now severely tilted, and knelt by him. As I joined him, Jamie plucked up the teeth and I saw they were made of painted wood and held together by a cunning clip almost too small to see.

“Are you all right, sai?” Jamie asked.

The old fellow got slowly to his feet, took his teeth, and filled the hole behind his upper lip with them. “I’m fine, but this dirty bitch has derailed again. No more Debaria runs for me, I have a wife. She’s an old nag, and I’m determined to outlive her. You young men had better check your horses. With luck, neither of them will have broken a leg.”

* * *

Neither had, but they were nervous and stamping, anxious to get out of confinement. We lowered the ramp and tethered them to the connecting bar between the two cars, where they stood with their heads lowered and their ears flattened against the hot and gritty wind blowing out of the west. Then we clambered back inside the passenger car and collected our gunna. The engineer, a broad-shouldered, bowlegged plug of a man, came down the side of his listing train with the old servant in tow. When he reached us, he pointed to what we could see very well.

BOOK: The Wind Through The Keyhole
10.68Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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