Then his father would demonstrate how he had let loose by raising his leg and farting, even as he mimed drawing back a bowstring and letting fly. And he would laugh an old man’s shrill, unpleasant cackle.
Thomas would slide the little panels back after awhile and slink down the corridor again, his head pounding and an uneasy grin on his face-the head and grin of a boy who has been eating green apples and knows he may be sicker by morning than he is now.
This was the father he had always loved and feared?
He was an old man who farted out stinking clouds of steam.
This was the King his loyal subjects called Roland the Good?
He pissed into the fire, sending up more clouds of steam.
This was the man who made his heart break by not liking his boat?
He talked to the stuffed heads on his walls, calling them silly names like Bonsey and Stag-Pool and Puckerstring; he picked his nose and sometimes ate the boogers.
I don’t care for you anymore, Thomas would think, checking the peephole to make sure the corridor was empty and then creeping back to his room like a felon. You’re a filthy, silly old man and you’re nothing to me! Nothing at all! No!
But he was something to Thomas. Some part of him went on loving Roland just the same-some part of him wanted to go to his father so his father would have something better to talk to than a bunch of stuffed heads on the walls.
Still, there was that other part of him that liked spying better.
28
The night that Flagg came to King Roland’s private rooms with the glass of poisoned wine was the first occasion in a very long time that Thomas had dared spy. There was a good reason for this.
One night about three months before, Thomas found himself unable to sleep. He tossed and turned until he heard the keep watchman cry eleven. Then he got up, dressed, and left his rooms. Less than ten minutes later, he was looking down into his father’s den. He had thought his father might be asleep, but he was not. Roland was awake, and very, very drunk.
Thomas had seen his father drunk many times before, but he had never seen him in anything remotely like his current state. The boy was flabbergasted and badly frightened.
There are people much older than Thomas was then who harbor the idea that old age is always a gentle time-that an old person may exhibit gentle wisdom, gentle crabbiness or craftiness, perhaps the gentle confusion of senility. They will grant these, but find it hard to credit any real fire. They have an illusion that by the seventies, any real fire must have faded to coals. That may be true, but on this night Thomas discovered that coals may sometimes flare up violently.
His father was striding rapidly up and down the length of his sitting room, his fur robe flying out behind him. His nightcap had fallen off; his remaining hair hung down in tangled locks, mostly about his ears. He was not staggering, as he had done on other nights, moving tentatively with one hand out to keep from running into the furniture. He was rolling like a sailor, but he was not staggering. When he did happen to run into one of the high-backed chairs which stood near the walls beneath the snarling head of a lynx, Roland threw the chair aside with a roar that made Thomas cringe. The hairs on his arms prickled. The chair flew across the room and hit the far wall. Its iron-wood back splintered down the middle-in this bitter drunk-enness, the old King had regained the strength of his middle years.
He looked up at the lynx head with red, glaring eyes.
“Bite me!” he roared at it. The raw hoarseness in his voice made Thomas cringe again. “Bite me, are you afeard? Come down out of that wall, Craker! Jump! Here’s my chest, see?” He tore open the robe, revealing his scrawny chest. He bared his few teeth at Craker’s many, and lifted his head. “Here’s my neck! Come on, jump! I’ll do you with my bare hands! I’ll RIP your STINKING GUTS OUT!”
He stood for a moment, chest out and head up, looking like an animal himself-an ancient stag, perhaps, that has been brought to bay and can now hope for nothing better than to die well. Then he whirled away, stopping at a bear’s head to shake a fist at it and roar a string of curses at it-curses so terrible that Thomas, cringing in the dark, believed that the bear’s outraged spirit might swoop down, reanimate the stuffed head, and tear his father open while he watched.
But Roland was away again. He seized his mug, drained it, then whirled with brew dripping from his chops. He hurled the silver mug across the room, where it struck a stone angle of the fireplace hard enough to leave a dent in the metal.
Now his father came down the room toward him, throwing another chair out of the way, then kicking a table aside with his bare foot. His eyes flicked up… and met Thomas’s own. Yes-they met his own eyes. Thomas felt their gazes lock, and a gray, swooning terror filled him like frozen breath.
His father stalked toward him, his yellowed teeth bared, his remaining hair hanging over his ears, beer dripping from his chin and the corners of his mouth.
“You,” Roland whispered in a low, terrible voice. “Why do you stare at me? What do you hope to see?”
Thomas could not move. Found out, his mind gibbered, found out, by all the gods that ever were or shall be, I am found out and I will surely be exiled!
His father stood there, his eyes fixed on the mounted dragon’s head. In his guilt, Thomas was sure his father had spoken to him, but this was not so-Roland had only spoken to Niner as he had spoken to the other heads. Yet if Thomas could see out of the tinted glass eyeballs, then his father could see in, at least to some degree. If Thomas hadn’t been utterly paralyzed with fear, he would have run away in a panic-even if he had sum-moned enough presence of mind to hold his ground, his eyes surely would have moved. And if Roland had seen the eyes of the dragon move, what might he have thought? That the dragon was coming to life again? Perhaps. In his drunken state, I even think that likely. If Thomas had so much as blinked his eyes on that occasion, Flagg would have needed no poison later. The King, old and frail in spite of the temporary potency the drink had given him, would almost surely have died of fright.
Roland suddenly leaped forward.
“WHY Do You STARE AT ME?” he shrieked, and in his drunk-enness it was Niner, Delain’s last dragon, that he shrieked at, but of course, Thomas did not know that. “WHY Do YOU STARE AT ME SO? I’VE DONE THE BEST I COULD, ALWAYS THE BEST I COULD! DID I ASK FOR THIS? DID I ASK FOR IT? ANSWER ME, DAMN YOU! I DID THE BEST I COULD AND LOOK AT ME NOW! LOOK AT ME NOW!”
He pulled his robe wide open, showing his naked body, its gray skin blotchily flushed with drink.
“LOOK AT ME NOW!” he shrieked again, and looked down at himself, weeping.
Thomas could take no more. He slammed shut the panels behind the dragon’s glass eyes at the same moment his father took his eyes from Niner to look down at his own wasted body. Thomas crashed and blundered down the black corridor and slammed full force into the closed door, braining himself and falling in a heap. He was up in a moment, unaware of the blood pouring down his face from a cut in his forehead, pounding at the secret spring until the door popped open. He rushed out into the corridor, not even thinking to check if anyone was there to see him. All he could see was his father’s glaring, bloodshot eyes, all he could hear was his father screaming Why do you stare at me?
He had no way of knowing that his father had already fallen into a sleep of deep drunkenness. When Roland woke up the next morning, he was still on the floor, and the first thing he did, in spite of his fiercely aching head and his throbbing, bruised body (Roland was far too old for such strenuous revels), was to look at the dragon’s head. He rarely dreamed when he was drunk -there was only an interval of sodden darkness. But last night a terrible dream had come to him: the glass eyes of the dragon’s head had moved and Niner came to life. The worm breathed its deadly breath down on him, and although he could not see that fire, he could feel it deep down inside him, hot and getting hotter.