"Father?"
"What?"
"Do you know who they were talking about? Do you know who the good man is?"
His father turned back and looked at him speculatively. "Yes. I think I do."
"If you caught him," Roland said in his thoughtful, near-plodding way, "no one else like Cook would have to . . . have to be neck-popped."
His father smiled thinly. "Perhaps not for a while. But in the end, someone always has to have his or her neck popped, as you so quaintly put it. The people demand it. Sooner or later, if there isn't a turncoat, the people make one."
"Yes," Roland said, grasping the concept instantly - it was one he never forgot. "But if you got him - "
"No," his father said flatly.
"Why?"
For a moment his father seemed on the verge of saying why, but he bit it back. "We've talked enough for now, I think. Go out from me. "
He wanted to tell his father not to forget his promise when the time came for Hax to step through the trap, but he was sensitive to his father's moods. He suspected his father wanted to f**k. He closed that door quickly. He was aware that his mother and father did that . . . that thing together, and he was reasonably well informed as to what that act was, but the mental picture that always condensed with the thought made him feel both uneasy and oddly guilty. Some years later, Susan would tell him the story of Oedipus, and he would absorb it in quiet thoughtfulness, thinking of the odd and bloody triangle formed by his father, his mother, and by Marten - known in some quarters as the good man. Or perhaps it was a quadrangle, if one wished to add himself.
"Good night, father," Roland said.
"Good night, son," his father said absently, and began unbuttoning his shirt In his mind, the boy was already gone. Like father, like son.
Gallows Hill was on the Farson Road, which was nicely poetic - Cuthbert might have appreciated this, but Roland did not. He did appreciate the splendidly ominous scaffold which climbed into the brilliantly blue sky, a black and angular silhouette which overhung the coach road.
The two boys had been let out of Morning Exercises - Cort had read the notes from their fathers laboriously, lips moving, nodding here and there. When he finished with them both, he had looked up at the blue-violet dawn sky and had nodded again.
"Wait here," he said, and went toward the leaning stone hut that was his living quarters. He came back with a slice of rough, unleavened bread, broke it in two, and gave half to each.
"When it's over, each of you will put this beneath his shoes. Mind you do exactly as I say, or I'll clout you into next week."
They had not understood until they arrived, riding double on Cuthbert's gelding. They were the first, fully two hours ahead of anyone else and four hours before the hanging, and Gallows Hill stood deserted - except for the rooks and ravens. The birds were everywhere, and of course they were all black. They roosted noisily on the hard, jutting bar that overhung the trap - the armature of death. They sat in a row along the edge of the platform, they jostled for position on the stairs.
"They leave them," Cuthbert muttered. "For the birds."
"Let's go up," Roland said.
Cuthbert looked at him with something like horror. "Do you think - "
Roland cut him off with a gesture of his hands. "We're years early. No one will come."
"All right."
They walked slowly toward the gibbet, and the birds took indignant wing, cawing and circling like a mob of angry dispossessed peasants. Their bodies were flat and black against the pure dawnlight of the sky.
For the first time Roland felt the enormity of his responsibility in the matter; this wood was not noble, not part of the awesome machine of Civilization, but merely warped pine covered with splattered white bird droppings. It was splashed everywhere - stairs, railing, platform - and it stank.
The boy turned to Cuthbert with startled, terrified eyes and saw Cuthbert looking back at him with the same expression.
"I can't," Cuthbert whispered. "I can't watch it."
Roland shook his head slowly. There was a lesson here, he realized, not a shining thing but something that was old and rusty and misshapen. It was why their fathers had let them come. And with his usual stubborn and inarticulate doggedness, Roland laid mental hands on whatever it was.
"You can, Bert."
"I won't sleep tonight"
"Then you won't," Roland said, not seeing what that had to do with it
Cuthbert suddenly seized Roland's hand and looked at him with such mute agony that Roland's own doubt came back, and he wished sickly that they had never gone to the west kitchen that night His father had been right Better every man, woman, and child in Farson than this.
But whatever the lesson was, rusty, half-buried thing, he would not let it go or give up his grip on it