At first, as he spun her through a figure (his feet moved with all their usual grace and precision, numb or not), he felt like a man made of glass. Then he became aware of her body touching his, and the rustle of her dress, and he was all too human again.
She moved closer for just a moment, and when she spoke, her breath tickled in his ear. He wondered if a woman could drive you mad-literally mad. He wouldn’t have believed so before tonight, but tonight everything had changed.
“Thank you for your discretion and your propriety,” she whispered.
He pulled back from her a little and at the same time twirled her, his hand against the small of her back-palm resting on cool satin, fingers touching warm skin. Her feet followed his with never a pause or stutter; they moved with perfect grace, unafraid of his great and booted clod-stompers even in their flimsy silk slippers.
“I can be discreet, sai,” he said. “As for propriety? I’m amazed you even know the word.”
She looked up into his cold face, her smile fading. He saw anger come in to fill it, but before anger there was hurt, as if he had slapped her. He felt both glad and sorry at the same time.
“Why do you speak so?” she whispered.
The music stopped before he could answer… although how he might have answered, he had no idea. She curtseyed and he bowed, while those surrounding them clapped and whistled. They went back to their places, to their separate circles, and the guitars began again. Roland felt his hands grasped on either side and began to turn with the circle once more.
Laughing. Kicking. Clapping on the beat. Feeling her somewhere behind him, doing the same. Wondering if she wanted as badly as he did to be out of here, to be in the dark, to be alone in the dark, where he could put his false face aside before the real one beneath could grow hot enough to set it afire.
Chapter VI
SHEEMIE
1
Around ten o’ the clock, the trio of young men from the Inner Baronies made their manners to host and hostess, then slipped off into the fragrant summer night. Cordelia Delgado, who happened to be standing near Henry Wertner, the Barony’s stockliner, remarked that they must be tired. Wertner laughed at this and replied in an accent so thick it was almost comic: “Nay, ma’am, byes that age’re like rats explorin en woodpile after hokkut rain, so they are. It’ll be hours yet before the bunks out'ta Bar K sees em.”
Olive Thorin left the public rooms shortly after the boys, pleading a headache. She was pale enough to be almost believable.
By eleven, the Mayor, his Chancellor, and the chief of his newly inaugurated security staff were conversing in the Mayor’s study with the last few late-staying guests (all ranchers, all members of the Horsemen’s Association). The talk was brief but intense. Several of the ranchers present expressed relief that the Affiliation’s emissaries were so young. Eldred Jonas said nothing to this, only looked down at his pale, long-fingered hands and smiled his narrow smile.
By midnight, Susan was at home and undressing for bed. She didn’t have the sapphire to worry about, at least; that was a Barony jewel, and had been tucked back into the strongbox at Mayor’s House before she left, despite what Mr. Ain’t-We-Fine Will Dearborn might think about it and her. Mayor Thorin (she couldn’t bring herself to call him Hart, although he had asked her to do so-not even to herself could she do it) had taken it back from her himself. In the hallway just off from the reception room, that had been, by the tapestry showing Arthur Eld carrying his sword out of the pyramid in which it had been entombed. And he (Thorin, not the Eld) had taken the opportunity to kiss her mouth and have a quick fumble at her breasts-a part of her that had felt much too naked during that entire interminable evening. “1 burn for Reaping,” he had whispered melodramatically in her ear. His breath had been redolent of brandy. “Each day of this summer seems an age.”
Now, in her room, brushing her hair with harsh, quick strokes and looking out at the waning moon, she thought she had never been so angry in her life as she was at this moment: angry at Thorin, angry at Aunt Cord, furious with that self-righteous prig of a Will Dearborn. Most of all, however, she was angry at herself.
“There’s three things ye can do in any situation, girl,” her father had told her once. “Ye can decide to do a thing, ye can decide not to do a thing… or ye can decide not to decide.” That last, her da had never quite come out and said (he hadn’t needed to) was the choice of weaklings and fools. She had promised herself she would never elect it herself… and yet she had allowed herself to drift into this ugly situation. Now all the choices seemed bad and honorless, all the roads either filled with rocks or hub-deep in mud.
In her room at Mayor’s House (she had not shared a chamber with Hart for ten years, or a bed, even briefly, for five), Olive sat in a night-dress of undecorated white cotton, also looking out at the waning moon. After closing herself into this safe and private place, she had wept… but not for long. Now she was dry-eyed, and felt as hollow as a dead tree.
And what was the worst? That Hart didn’t understand how humiliated she was, and not just for herself. He was too busy strutting and preening (also too busy trying to look down the front of sai Delgado’s dress at every opportunity) to know that people-his own Chancellor among them-were laughing at him behind his back. That might stop when the girl had returned to her aunt’s with a big belly, but that wouldn’t be for months yet. The witch had seen to that. It would be even longer if the girl kindled slowly. And what was the silliest, most humiliating thing of all? That she, John Haverty’s daughter Olive, still loved her husband. Hart was an overweening, vainglorious, prancing loon of a man, but she still loved him.
There was something else, something quite apart from the matter of Hart’s turning into George o’ Goats in his late middle age: she thought there was an intrigue of some sort going on, something dangerous and quite likely dishonorable. Hart knew a little about it, but she guessed he knew only what Kimba Rimer and that hideous limping man wanted him to know.
There was a time, and not so long ago, when Hart wouldn’t have allowed himself to be fobbed off in such fashion by the likes of Rimer, a time when he would have taken one look at Eldred Jonas and his friends and sent them west ere they had so much as a single hot dinner in them. But that was before Hart had become besotted with sai Delgado’s gray eyes. high bosom, and flat belly.
Olive turned down the lamp, blew out the flame, and crept off to bed, where she would lie wakeful until dawn.
By one o’ the clock, no one was left in the public rooms of Mayor’s House except for a quartet of cleaning women, who performed their chores silently (and nervously) beneath the eye of Eldred Jonas. When one of them looked up and saw him gone from the window-seat where he had been sitting and smoking, she murmured softly to her friends, and they all loosened up a little. But there was no singing, no laughter. Il spectra, the man with the blue coffin on his hand, might only have stepped hack into the shadows. He might still be watching.
By two o’ the clock, even the cleaning women were gone. It was an hour at which a party in Gilead would just have been reaching its apogee of glitter and gossip, but Gilead was far away, not just in another Barony hut almost in another world. This was the Outer Arc, and in the Outers, even gentry went to bed early.
There was no gentry on view at the Travellers’ Rest, however, and beneath the all-encompassing gaze of The Romp, the night was still fairly young.
2
At one end of the saloon, fishermen still wearing their rolled-down boots drank and played Watch Me for small stakes. To their right was a poker table; to their left, a knot of yelling, exhorting men-cowpokes, mostly- stood along Satan’s Alley, watching the dice bounce down the velvet incline. At the room’s other end, Sheb McCurdy was pounding out jagged boogie, right hand flying, left hand pumping, the sweat pouring down his neck and pale cheeks. Beside and above him, standing drunk on a stool, Pettie the Trotter shook her enormous bottom and bawled out the words to the song at the top of her voice: “Come on over, baby, we got chicken in the hum, what hum. whose barn, my burn! Come on over, baby, baby got the bull by the horns…”
Sheemie stopped beside the piano, the camel bucket in one hand, grinning up at her and attempting to sing along. Pettie swatted him on his way, never missing a word, bump, or grind, and Sheemie went with his peculiar laugh, which was shrill but somehow not unpleasant.
A game of darts was in progress; in a booth near the back, a whore who styled herself Countess Jillian of Up’ard Killian (exiled royalty from distant Garlan, my dears, oh how special we are) was managing to give two handjobs at the same time while smoking a pipe. And at the bar, a whole line of assorted toughs, drifters, cowpunchers, drovers, drivers, carters, wheelwrights, stagies, carpenters, conmen, stockmen, boatmen, and gunmen drank beneath The Romp’s double head.
The only real gunmen in the place were at the end of the bar, a pair drinking by themselves. No one attempted to join them, and not just because they wore shooting irons in holsters that were slung low and tied down gunslinger fashion. Guns were uncommon but not unknown in Mejis at that time, and not necessarily feared, but these two had the sullen look of men who have spent a long day doing work they didn’t want to do-the look of men who would pick a fight on no account at all, and be glad to end their day by sending some new widow’s husband home in a hurry-up wagon.
Stanley the bartender served them whiskey after whiskey with no attempt to make conversation, not so much as a “Hot day, gents, wa'n’t it?” They reeked of sweat, and their hands were pitchy with pine-gum. Not enough to keep Stanley from being able to see the blue coffin-shapes tattooed on them, though. Their friend, the old limping buzzard with the girl’s hair and the gimp leg, wasn’t here, at least. In Stanley’s view, Jonas was easily the worst of the Big Coffin Hunters, but these two were bad enough, and he had no intention of getting aslant of them if he could help it. With luck, no one would; they looked tired enough to call it a night early.
Reynolds and Depape were tired, all right-they had spent the day out at Citgo, camouflaging a line of empty steel tankers with nonsense words (texaco, citgo, sunoco, exxon) printed on their sides, a billion pine-boughs they’d hauled and stacked, it seemed-but they had no consequent plans to finish their drinking early. Depape might have done so if Her Nibs had been available, but that young beauty (actual name: Gert Moggins) had a ranch-job and wouldn’t be back until two nights hence. “And it’ll be a week if there’s hard cash on offer,” Depape said morosely. He pushed his spectacles up on his nose.
“Fuck her,” Reynolds said.
“That’s just what I’d do if I could, but I can’t.”
“I’m going to get me a plate of that free lunch,” Reynolds said, pointing down to the other end of the bar, where a tin bucket of steamed clams had just come out of the kitchen. “You want some?”
“Them look like hocks of snot and go down the same way. Bring me a strip of beef jerky.”
“All right, partner.” Reynolds went off down the bar. People gave him wide passage; gave even his silk-lined cloak wide passage.
Depape, more morose than ever now that he had thought of Her Nibs gobbling cowboy spareribs out there at the Piano Ranch, downed his drink, winced at the stench of pine-gum on his hand, then held his glass out in Stanley Ruiz’s direction. “Fill this up, you dog!” he shouted. A cowhand leaning with his back, butt, and elbows against the bar jerked forward at the sound of Depape’s bellow, and that was all it took to start trouble.
Sheemie was bustling toward the pass through from which the steamers had just appeared, now holding the camel bucket out before him in both hands. Later, when the Travellers’ began to empty out, his job would he to clean up. For now, however, it was simply to circulate with the camel bucket, dumping in every unfinished drink he found. This combined elixir ended up in a jug behind
