“Ye like it, don’t ye?” Jonas asked, putting on a hick Hambry accent. “Aye, ye like it very much, I can see ye do, my cully. Ye know what they say in Cressia? 'Ifye’d steal the silver from the dining room, first put the dog in the pantry.'”
Reynolds nodded. It was good advice. “And those trucks? Those what-do-you-callums, tankers?”
“Fine where they are,” Jonas said. “Not that we could move em now without attracting the wrong kind of attention, eh? You and Roy want to go out there and cover them with brush. Lay it on nice and thick. Day after tomorrow you’ll do it.”
“And where will you be while we’re flexing our muscles out at Citgo?”
“By daylight? Preparing for dinner at Mayor’s House, you clod-the dinner Thorin will be giving to introduce his guests from the Great World to the shitpicky society of the smaller one.” Jonas began making another cigarette. He gazed up at The Romp rather than at what he was doing, and still spilled barely a scrap of tobacco. “A bath, a shave, a trim of these tangled old man’s locks… I might even wax my mustache, Clay, what do you say to that?”
“Don’t strain yourself, Eldred.”
Jonas laughed, the sound shrill enough to make Barkie mutter and Pettie stir uneasily on her makeshift bar-top bed. “So Roy and I aren’t invited to this fancy do.” “You’ll be invited, oh yes, you’ll be invited very warmly,” Jonas said, and handed Reynolds the fresh cigarette. He began making another for himself. “I’ll offer your excuses. I’ll do you boys proud, count on me. Strong men may weep.”
“All so we can spend the day out there in the dust and stink, covering those hulks. You’re too kind, Jonas.”
“I’ll be asking questions, as well,” Jonas said dreamily. “Drifting here and there… looking spruce, smelling of baybemes… and asking my little questions. I’ve known folks in our line of trade who’ll go to a fat, jolly fellow to find out the gossip-a saloon-keeper or bartender, perhaps a livery stable owner or one of the chubby fellows who always hangs about the jail or the courthouse with his thumbs tucked into his vest pockets. As for myself. Clay, I find that a woman’s best, and the narrower the better-one with more nose than tits sticking off her. I look for one who don’t paint her lips and keeps her hair scrooped back against her head.” “You have someone in mind?”
“Yar. Cordelia Delgado’s her name.” “Delgado?”
“You know the name, it’s on the lips of everyone in this town, I reckon. Susan Delgado, our esteemed Mayor’s soon-to-be gilly. Cordelia’s her auntie. Now here’s a fact of human nature I’ve found: folk are more apt to talk to someone like her, who plays them close, than they are to the local jolly types who’ll buy you a drink. And that lady plays them close. I’m going to slip in next to her at that dinner, and I’m going to compliment her on the perfume I doubt like hell she’ll be wearing, and I’m going to keep her wineglass full. Now, how sounds that for a plan?”
“A plan for what? That’s what I want to know.”
“For the game of Castles we may have to play,” Jonas said, and all the lightness dropped out of his voice. “We’re to believe that these boys have been sent here more as punishment than to do any real job of work. It sounds plausible, too. I’ve known rakes in my time, and it sounds plausible, indeed. I believe it each day until about three in the morning, and then a little doubt sets in. And do you know what, Clay?”
Reynolds shook his head.
“I’m right to doubt. Just as I was right to go with Rimer to old man Thorin and convince him that Farson’s glass would be better with the witch-woman, for the nonce. She’ll keep it in a place where a gunslinger couldn’t find it, let alone a nosy lad who’s yet to have his first piece of arse. These are strange times. A storm’s coming. And when you know the wind is going to blow, it’s best to keep your gear battened down.”
He looked at the cigarette he had made. He had been dancing it along the backs of his knuckles, as Reynolds had done earlier. Jonas pushed back the fall of his hair and tucked the cigarette behind his ear.
“I don’t want to smoke,” he said, standing up and stretching. His back made small crackling sounds. “I’m crazy to smoke at this hour of the morning. Too many cigarettes are apt to keep an old man like me awake.”
He walked toward the stairs, squeezing Pettie’s bare leg as he went by, also as Reynolds had done. At the foot of the stairs he looked back.
“I don’t want to kill them. Things are delicate enough without that. I’ll smell quite a little wrong on them and not lift a finger, no, not a single finger of my hand. But… I’d like to make them clear on their place in the great scheme o’ things.”
“Give them a sore paw.”
Jonas brightened. “Yessir, partner, maybe a sore paw’s just what I’d like to give them. Make them think twice about tangling with the Big Coffin Hunters later on, when it matters. Make them swing wide around us when they see us in their road. Yessir, that’s something to think about. It really is.”
He started up the stairs, chuckling a little, his limp quite pronounced- it got worse late at night. It was a limp Roland’s old teacher, Cort, might have recognized, for Cort had seen the blow which caused it. Cort’s own father had dealt it with an ironwood club, breaking Eldred Jonas’s leg in the yard behind the Great Hall of Gilead before taking the boy’s weapon and sending him west, gunless, into exile.
Eventually, the man the boy had become had found a gun, of course; the exiles always did, if they looked hard enough. That such guns could never be quite the same as the big ones with the sandalwood grips might haunt them for the rest of their lives, but those who needed guns could still find them, even in this world.
Reynolds watched until he was gone, then took his seat at Coral Thorin’s desk, shuffled the cards, and continued the game which Jonas had left half-finished.
Outside, the sun was coming up.
Chapter V
WELCOME TO TOWN
1
Two nights after arriving in the Barony of Mejis, Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain rode their mounts beneath an adobe arch with the words come in peace inscribed above it. Beyond was a cobblestone courtyard lit with torches. The resin which coated these had been doctored somehow so that the torches glowed different colors: green, orangey-red, a kind of sputtery pink that made Roland think of fireworks. He could hear the sound of guitars, the murmur of voices, the laughter of women. The air was redolent of those smells which would always remind him of Mejis: sea-salt, oil, and pine.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Alain muttered. He was a big boy with a mop of unruly blond hair spilling out from under his stockman’s hat. He had cleaned up well-they all had-but Alain, no social butterfly under the best of circumstances, looked scared to death. Cuthbert was doing better, but Roland guessed his old friend’s patina of insouciance didn’t go very deep. If there was to be leading done here, he would have to do it.
“You’ll be fine,” he told Alain. “Just-”
“Oh, he looks fine,” Cuthbert said with a nervous laugh as they crossed the courtyard. Beyond it was Mayor’s House, a sprawling, many-winged adobe hacienda that seemed to spill light and laughter from every window. “White as a sheet, ugly as a-”
“Shut up,” Roland said curtly, and the teasing smile tumbled off Cuthbert’s face at once. Roland noted this, then turned to Alain again. “Just don’t drink anything with alcohol in it. You know what to say on that account. Remember the rest of our story, too. Smile. Be pleasant. Use what social graces you have. Remember how the Sheriff fell all over himself to make us feel welcome.”
Alain nodded at that, looking a little more confident.