“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.
“Aye, you may!” he cried in a strong, high voice. “Indeed you may, we’ve been waiting with impatience, great impatience, for this moment! Well met we are, very well met! Welcome, sirs! May your evening in this house of which I am the fleeting proprietor be happy, and may your days be long upon the earth!”
Roland took the bony outstretched hand, heard the knuckles crack beneath his grip, looked for an expression of discomfort on the Mayor’s face, and was relieved to see none. He bowed low over his outstretched leg.
“William Dearborn, Mayor Thorin, at your service. Thank you for your welcome, and may your own days be long upon the earth.”
“Arthur Heath” made his manners next, then “Richard Stockworth.” Thorin’s smile widened at each deep bow. Rimer did his best to beam, but looked unused to it. The man with the long white hair took a glass of punch, passed it to his female companion, and continued to smile thinly. Roland was aware that everyone in the room-the guests numbered perhaps fifty in all-was looking at them, but what he felt most upon his skin, beating like a soft wing, was her regard. He could see the blue silk of her dress from the side of one eye, but did not dare look at her more directly.
“Was your trip difficult?” Thorin was asking. “Did you have adventures and experience perils? We would hear all the details at dinner, so we would, for we have few guests from the Inner Arc these days.” His eager, slightly fatuous smile faded; his tufted brows drew together. “Did ye encounter patrols of Farson?”
“No, Excellency,” Roland said. “We-”
“Nay, lad, nay-no Excellency, I won’t have it, and the fisherfolk and hoss-drovers I serve wouldn’t, even if I would. Just Mayor Thorin, if you please.”
“Thank you. We saw many strange things on our journey, Mayor Thorin, but no Good Men.”
“Good Men!” Rimer jerked out, and his upper lip lifted in a smile which made him look doglike. “Good Men, indeed!”
“We would hear it all, every word,” Thorin said. “But before I forget my manners in my eagerness, young gentlemen, let me introduce you to these close around me. Kimba you’ve met; this formidable fellow to my left is Eldred Jonas, chief of my newly installed security staff.” Thorin’s smile looked momentarily embarrassed. “I’m not convinced that I need extra security, Sheriff Avery’s always been quite enough to keep the peace in our comer of the world, but Kimba insists. And when Kimba insists, the Mayor must bow.”
“Very wise, sir,” Rimer said, and bowed himself. They all laughed, save for Jonas, who simply held onto his narrow smile.
Jonas nodded. “Pleased, gents, I’m sure.” The voice was a reedy quaver. He then wished them long days upon the earth, all three, coming to Roland last in his round of handshaking. His grip was dry and firm, utterly untouched by the tremor in his voice. And now Roland noticed the queer blue shape tattooed on the back of the man’s right hand, in the webbing between thumb and first finger. It looked like a coffin.
“Long days, pleasant nights,” Roland said with hardly a thought. It was a greeting from his childhood, and it was only later that he would realize it was one more apt to be associated with Gilead than with any such rural place as Hemphill. Just a small slip, but he was beginning to believe that their margin for such slips might be a good deal less than his father had thought when he had sent Roland here to get him out of Marten’s way.
“And to you,” Jonas said. His bright eyes measured Roland with a thoroughness that was close to insolence, still holding his hand. Then he released it and stepped back.
“Cordelia Delgado,” Mayor Thorin said, next bowing to the woman who had been speaking to Jonas. As Roland also bowed in her direction, he saw the family resemblance… except that what looked generous and lovely on Susan’s face looked pinched and folded on the face before him now. Not the girl’s mother; Roland guessed that Cordelia Delgado was a bit too young for that.
“And our especial friend, Miss Susan Delgado,” Thorin finished, sounding flustered (Roland supposed she would have that effect on any man, even an old one like the Mayor). Thorin urged her forward, bobbing his head and grinning, one of his knuckle-choked hands pressed against the small of her back, and Roland felt an instant of poisonous jealousy. Ridiculous, given this man’s age and his plump, pleasant wife, but it was there, all right, and it was sharp. Sharp as a bee’s ass, Cort would have said.
Then her face tilted up to his, and he was looking into her eyes again.
He had heard of drowning in a woman’s eyes in some poem or story, and thought it ridiculous. He still thought it ridiculous, but understood it was perfectly possible, nonetheless. And she knew it. He saw concern in her eyes, perhaps even fear.
Promise me that if we meet at Mayor’s House, we meet for the first time.
The memory of those words had a sobering, clarifying effect, and seemed to widen his vision a little. Enough for him to be aware that the woman beside Jonas, the one who shared some of Susan’s features, was looking at the girl with a mixture of curiosity and alarm.
He bowed low, but did little more than touch her ringless outstretched hand. Even so, he felt something like a spark jump between their fingers. From the momentary widening of those eyes, he thought that she felt it, too.
“Pleased to meet you, sai,” he said. His attempt to be casual sounded tinny and false in his own ears. Still, he was begun, it felt like the whole world was watching him (them), and there was nothing to do but go on with it. He tapped his throat three times. “May your days be long-”
“Aye, and yours, Mr. Dearborn. Thankee-sai.”
She turned to Alain with a rapidity that was almost rude, then to Cuthbert, who bowed, tapped, then said gravely: “Might I recline briefly at your feet, miss? Your beauty has loosened my knees. I’m sure a few moments spent looking up at your profile from below, with the back of my head on these cool tiles, would put me right.”
They all laughed at that-even Jonas and Miss Cordelia. Susan blushed prettily and slapped the back of Cuthbert’s hand. For once Roland blessed his friend’s relentless sense of foolery.
Another man joined the party by the punchbowl. This newcomer was blocky and blessedly un-thin in his boxtail coat. His cheeks burned with high color that looked like windburn rather than drink, and his pale eyes lay in nets of wrinkles. A rancher; Roland had ridden often enough with his father to know the look.
“There’ll be maids a-plenty to meet you boys tonight,” the newcomer said with a friendly enough smile. “Ye’ll find y’selves drunk on perfume if ye’re not careful. But I’d like my crack at you before you meet em. Fran Lengyll, at your service.”
His grip was strong and quick; no bowing or other nonsense went with it.
“I own the Rocking B… or it owns me, whichever way ye want to look at it. I’m also boss of the Horsemen’s Association, at least until they fire me. The Bar K was my idea. Hope it’s all right.”
“It’s perfect, sir,” Alain said. “Clean and dry and room for twenty. Thank you. You’ve been too kind.”
“Nonsense,” Lengyll said, looking pleased all the same as he knocked back a glass of punch. “We’re all in this together, boy. John Farson’s but one bad straw in a field of wrong-headedness these days. The world’s moved on, folks say. Huh! So it has, aye, and a good piece down the road to hell is where it’s moved on to. Our job is to hold the hay out of the furnace as well as we can, as long as we can. For the sake of our children even more than for that of our fathers.”
