Cuthbert let out his breath. "And I did it the way I had to. If I hadn't surprised him - "
" - he would have beaten you black and blue."
"So many more colors than that," Cuthbert said. "I would have looked like a rainbow."
"The Wizard's Rainbow, even," Alain said. "Extra colors for your penny."
That made Cuthbert laugh. The two of them walked back toward the bunkhouse, where Roland was unsaddling Bert's horse.
Cuthbert turned in that direction to help, but Alain held him back. "Leave him alone for a little while," he said. "It's best you do."
They went on ahead, and when Roland came in ten minutes later, he found Cuthbert playing his hand. And winning with it.
"Bert," he said.
Cuthbert looked up.
"We have a spot of business tomorrow, you and I. Up on the Coos." "Are we going to kill her?"
Roland thought, and thought hard. At last he looked up, biting his lip. "We should."
"Aye. We should. But are we going to?"
"Not unless we have to, I reckon." Later he would regret this decision - if it was a decision - bitterly, but there never came a time when he did not understand it. He had been a boy not much older than Jake Chambers during that Mejis fall, and the decision to kill does not come easily or naturally to most boys. "Not unless she makes us."
"Perhaps it would be best if she did," Cuthbert said. It was hard gunslinger talk, but he looked troubled as he said it.
"Yes. Perhaps it would. It's not likely, though, not in one as sly as her. Be ready to get up early."
"All right. Do you want your hand back?"
"When you're on the verge of knocking him out? Not at all."
Roland went past them to his bunk. There he sat, looking at his folded hands in his lap. He might have been praying; he might only have been thinking hard. Cuthbert looked at him for a moment, then turned back to his cards.
16
The sun was just over the horizon when Roland and Cuthbert left the next morning. The Drop, still drenched with morning dew, seemed to bum with orange fire in the early light. Their breath and that of their horses puffed frosty in the air. It was a morning neither of them ever forgot. For the first time in their lives they went forth wearing bolstered revolvers; for the first time in their lives they went into the world as gunslingers.
Cuthbert said not a word - he knew that if he started, he'd do nothing but babble great streams of his usual nonsense - and Roland was quiet by nature. There was only one exchange between them, and it was brief.
"I said I made at least one very bad mistake," Roland told him. "One that this note" - he touched his breast pocket - "brought home to me. Do you know what that mistake was?"
"Not loving her - not that," Cuthbert said. "You called that ka, and I call it the same." It was a relief to be able to say this, and a greater one to believe it. Cuthbert thought he could even accept Susan herself now, not us his best friend's lover, a girl he had wanted himself the first time he saw her, but as a part of their entwined fate.
"No," Roland said. "Not loving her, but thinking that love could somehow be apart from everything else. That I could live two lives - one with you and Al and our job here, one with her. I thought that love could lilt me above ka, the way a bird's wings can take it above all the things that would kill it and eat it, otherwise. Do you understand?"
"It made you blind." Cuthbert spoke with a gentleness quite foreign to the young man who had suffered through the last two months.
"Yes," Roland said sadly. "It made me blind . . . but now I see. Come on, a little faster, if you please. I want to get this over."
17
They rode up the rutty cart-track along which Susan (a Susan who had known a good deal less about the ways of the world) had come singing "Careless Love" beneath the light of the Kissing Moon. Where the track opened into Rhea's yard, they stopped.
"Wonderful view," Roland murmured. "You can see the whole sweep of the desert from here."
"Not much to say about the view right here in front of us, though."
That was true. The garden was full of unpicked mutie vegetables, the stuffy-guy presiding over them either a bad joke or a bad omen. The yard supported just one tree, now moulting sickly-looking fall leaves like an old vulture shedding its feathers. Beyond the tree was the hut itself, made of rough stone and topped by a single sooty pot of a chimney with a hex-sign painted on it in sneering yellow. At the rear comer, beyond one overgrown window, was a woodpile.
Roland had seen plenty of huts like it - the three of them had passed any number on their way here from Gilead - but never one that felt as powerfully wrong as this. He saw nothing untoward, yet there was a feeling, too strong to be denied, of a presence. One that watched and waited.
Cuthbert felt it, too. "Do we have to go closer?" lie swallowed. "Do we have to go in? Because . . . Roland, the door is open. Do you see?"
He saw. As if she expected them. As if she was inviting them in, wanting them to sit down with her to some unspeakable breakfast.
"Stay here." Roland gigged Rusher forward.