The Eyes Of The Dragon

The Eyes Of The Dragon.

by Stephen King.

Once, in a kingdom called Detain, there was a King with two sons. Detain was a very old kingdom and it had had hundreds of Kings, perhaps even thousands; when time goes on long enough, not even historians can remember everything. Roland the Good was neither the best nor the worst King ever to rule the land. He tried very hard not to do anyone great evil and mostly succeeded. He also tried very hard to do great works, but, unfortunately, he didn"t succeed so well at that. The result was a very mediocre King; he doubted if he would be remembered long after he was dead. And his death might come at any time now, because he had grown old, and his heart was failing. He had perhaps one year left, perhaps three. Everyone who knew him, and everyone who observed his gray face and shaking hands when he held court, agreed that in five years at the very most a new King would be crowned in the great plaza at the foot of the Needle* and it would only be five years with G.o.d"s grace. So everyone in the Kingdom, from the richest baron and the most foppishly dressed courtier to the poorest serf and his ragged wife, thought and talked about the King in waiting, Roland"s elder son, Peter.

And one man thought and planned and brooded on something else: how to make sure that Roland"s younger son, Thomas, should be crowned King instead. This man was Flagg, the King"s magician.

Although Roland the King was old-he admitted to seventy years but was surely older than that-his sons were young. He had been allowed to marry late because he had met no woman who pleased his fancy, and because his mother, the great Dowager Queen of Delain, had seemed immortal to Roland and to everyone else-and that included her. She had ruled the Kingdom for almost fifty years when, one day at tea, she put a freshly cut lemon in her mouth to ease a troublesome cough that had been plaguing her for a week or better. At that particular teatime, a juggler had been performing for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the Dowager Queen and her court. He was juggling five cunningly made crystal b.a.l.l.s. Just as the Queen put the slice of lemon into her mouth, the juggler dropped one of his gla.s.s spheres. It shattered on the tiled floor of the great East Courtroom with a loud report. The Dowager Queen gasped at the sound. When she gasped, she pulled the lemon slice down her throat and choked to death very quickly. Four days later, the coronation of Roland was held in the Plaza of the Needle. The juggler did not see it; he had been beheaded on the executioner"s block behind the Needle three days before that.

A King without heirs makes everybody nervous, especially when the King is fifty and balding. It was thus in Roland"s best interest to marry soon, and to make an heir soon. His close advisor, Flagg, made Roland very aware of this. He also pointed out that at fifty, the years left to him in which he could hope to create a child in a woman"s belly were only a few. Flagg advised him to take a wife soon, and never mind waiting for a lady of n.o.ble birth who would take his fancy. If such a lady had not come into view by the time a man was fifty, Flagg pointed out, she probably never would.

Roland saw the wisdom of this and agreed, never knowing that Flagg, with his lank hair and his white face that was almost always hidden behind a hood, understood his deepest secret: that he had never met the woman of his fancy because he had never really fancied women at all. Women worried him. And he had never fancied the act that puts babies in the bellies of women. That act worried him, too.

But he saw the wisdom of the magician"s advice, and six months after the Dowager Queen"s funeral, there was a much happier event in the Kingdom-the marriage of King Roland to Sasha, who would become the mother of Peter and Thomas.

Roland was neither loved nor hated in Delain. Sasha, however, was loved by all. When she died giving birth to the second son, the Kingdom was plunged into darkest mourning that lasted a year and a day. She had been one of six women Flagg had suggested to his King as possible brides. Roland had known none of these women, who were all similar in birth and station. They were all of n.o.ble blood but none of royal blood; all were meek and pleasant and quiet. Flagg suggested no one who might take his place as the mouth closest to the King"s ear. Roland chose Sasha because she seemed the quietest and meekest of the half- dozen, and the least likely to frighten him. So they were wed. Sasha of the Western Barony (a very small barony indeed) was then seventeen years old, thirty-three years younger than her husband. She had never seen a man with his drawers off before her wedding night. When, on that occasion, she observed his flaccid p.e.n.i.s, she asked with great interest: "What"s that, Husband?" If she had said anything else, or if she had said what she said in a slightly different tone of voice, the events of that night- and this entire history-might have taken another course; in spite of the special drink Flagg had given him an hour before, at the end of the wedding feast, Roland might simply have slunk away. But he saw her then exactly as she was-a very young girl who knew even less about the baby-making act than he did-and observed her mouth was kind, and began to love her, as everyone in Delain would grow to love her.

"It is King"s Iron," he said.

"It doesn"t look like iron," said Sasha, doubtfully.

"It is before the forge," he said.

"Ali!" said she. "And where is the forge?"

"If you will trust me," said he, getting into bed with her, "I will show you, for you have brought it from the Western Barony with you but did not know it."

The people of Delain loved her because she was kind and good. It was Queen Sasha who created the Great Hospital, Queen Sasha who wept so over the cruelty of the bear baiting in the Plaza that King Roland finally outlawed the practice, Queen Sasha who pleaded for a Remission of King"s Taxes in the year of the great drought, when even the leaves of the Great Old Tree went gray. Did Flagg plot against her, you might ask? Not at first. These were relatively small things in his view, because he was a real magician, and had lived hundreds and hundreds of years.

He even allowed the Remission of Taxes to pa.s.s, because the year before, Delain"s navy had smashed the Anduan pirates, who had plagued the Kingdom"s southern coast for over a hundred years. The skull of the Anduan pirate-king grinned from a spike outside the palace walls and Delain"s treasury was rich with re-covered plunder. In larger matters, matter of state, it was still Flagg"s mouth which was closest to King Roland"s ear, and so Flagg was at first content.

Although Roland grew to love his wife, he never grew to love that activity which most men consider sweet, the act which produces both the lowliest cook"s "prentice and the heir to the highest throne. He and Sasha slept in separate bed-rooms, and he did not visit her often. These visits would happen no more than five or six times in a year, and on some of those occasions no iron could be made at the forge, in spite of Flagg"s ever more potent drinks and Sasha"s unfailing sweetness.

But, four years after the marriage, Peter was made in her bed. And on that one night, Roland had no need of Flagg"s drink, which was green and foaming and which always made him feel a little strange in his head, as if he had gone crazy. He had been hunting that day in the Preserves with twelve of his men. Hunting was the thing that Roland had always loved most of all -the smell of the forest, the crisp tang of the air, the sound of the horn, and the feel of the bow as an arrow left on a true, hard course. Gunpowder was known but rare in Delain, and to hunt game with an iron tube was considered low and contemptible in any case.

Sasha was reading in bed when he came to her, his ruddy, bearded face alight, but she laid her book on her bosom and listened raptly to his story as he told it, his hands moving. Near the end, he drew back to show her how he had drawn back the bow and had let Foe-Hammer, his father"s great arrow, fly across the little glen. When he did this, she laughed and clapped and won his heart.

The King"s Preserves had almost been hunted out. In these modern days it was rare to find so much as a good-sized deer in them, and no one had seen a dragon since time out of mind. Most men would have laughed if you had suggested there might still be such a mythy creature left in that tame forest. But an hour before sundown on that day, as Roland and his party were about to turn back, that was just what they found* or what found them.

The dragon came crashing and blundering out of the under-brush, its scales glowing a greenish copper color, its soot-caked nostrils venting smoke. It had not been a small dragon, either, but a male just before its first molting. Most of the party were thunderstruck, unable to draw an arrow or even to move.

It stared at the hunting party, its normally green eyes went yellow, and it fluttered its wings. There was no danger that it could fly away from them-its wings would not be well developed enough to support it in the air for at least another fifty years and two more moltings -but the baby-webbing which holds the wings against a dragon"s body until its tenth or twelfth year had fallen away, and a single flutter stirred enough wind to topple the head huntsman backward out of his saddle, his horn flying from his hand.

Roland was the only one not stunned to utter movelessness, and although he was too modest to say so to Sasha, there was real heroism in his next few actions, as well as a sportsman"s zest for the kill. The dragon might well have roasted most of the surprised party alive, if not for Roland"s prompt action. He gigged his horse forward five steps, and nocked his great arrow. He drew and fired. The arrow went straight to the mark-that one gill-like soft spot under the dragon"s throat, where it takes in air to create fire. The worm fell dead with a final fiery gust, which set all the bushes around it alight. The squires put this out quickly, some with water, some with beer, and not a few with p.i.s.s and, now that I think of it, most of the p.i.s.s was really beer, because when Roland went a-hunting, he took a great lot of beer with him, and he was not stingy with it, either.

The fire was out in five minutes, the dragon gutted in fifteen. You still could have boiled a kettle over its steaming nostrils when its tripes were let out upon the ground. The dripping nine-chambered heart was carried to Roland with great ceremony. He ate it raw, as was the custom, and found it delicious. He only regretted the sad knowledge that he would almost certainly never have another. *dragon image page 7*

Perhaps it was the dragon"s heart that made him so strong that night. Perhaps it was only his joy in the hunt, and in knowing he had acted quickly and cool-headedly when all the others were sitting stunned in their saddles (except, of course, for the head huntsman, who had been lying stunned on his back). For whatever reason, when Sasha clapped her hands and cried, "Well done, my brave Husband!," he fairly leaped into her bed. Sasha greeted him with open eyes and a smile that reflected his own triumph. That night was the first and only time Roland enjoyed his wife"s embrace in sobriety. Nine months later-one month for each chamber of the dragon"s heart-Peter was born in that same bed, and the Kingdom rejoiced-there was an heir to the throne.

You probably think if you have bothered to think about it at all-that Roland must have stopped taking Flagg"s strange green drink after the birth of Peter. Not so. He still took it occasionally. This was because he loved Sasha, and wanted to please her. In some places, people a.s.sume that only men enjoy s.e.x, and that a woman would be grateful to be left alone. The people of Delain, however, held no such peculiar ideas-they a.s.sumed that a woman took normal pleasure in that act which produced earth"s most pleasurable creatures. Roland knew he was not properly attentive to his wife in this matter, but he resolved to be as attentive as he could, even if this meant taking Flagg"s drink. Only Flagg himself knew how rarely the King went to his Queen"s bed.

Some four years after the birth of Peter, on New Year"s Day, a great blizzard visited Delain. It was the greatest, save one, in living memory-the other I"ll tell you of later. Heeding an impulse he could not explain even to himself, Flagg mixed the King a draught of double strength-perhaps it was something in the wind that urged him to do it. Ordinarily, Roland would have made a grimace at the awful taste and perhaps put it aside, but the excitement of the storm had caused the annual New Year"s Day party to be especially gay, and Roland had become very drunk. The blazing fire on the hearth reminded him of the dragon"s final explosive breath, and he had toasted the head, which was mounted on the wall, many times. So he drank the green potion off at a single gulp, and an evil l.u.s.t fell upon him. He left the dining hall at once and visited Sasha. In the course of trying to love her, he hurt her.

"Please, Husband," she cried, sobbing.

"I"m sorry," he mumbled. " Huzzz*" He fell heavily asleep beside her and remained insensible for the next twenty hours. She never forgot the strange smell that had been on his breath that night. It had been a smell like rotten meat, a smell like death. Whatever, she wondered, had he been eating* or drinking?

Roland never touched Flagg"s drink again, but Flagg was well satisfied, nevertheless. Nine months later, Sasha gave birth to Thomas, her second son. She died bringing him forth. Such things happened, of course, and while everyone was saddened, no one was really surprised. They believed they knew what had happened. But the only people in the Kingdom who really knew the circ.u.mstances of Sasha"s death were Anna Crookbrows, the midwife, and Flagg, the King"s magician. Flagg"s patience with Sasha"s meddling had finally run out.

Peter was only five when his mother died, but he remembered her dearly. He thought her sweet, tender, loving, full of mercy. But five is a young age, and most of his memories were not very specific. There was one clear memory which he held in his mind, however-it was of a reproach she had made to him. Much later, the memory of this reproach became vital to him. It had to do with his napkin.

Every first of Five-month, a feast was held at court to celebrate the spring plantings. In his fifth year, Peter was allowed to attend for the first time. Custom decreed that Roland should sit at the head of the table, the heir to the throne at his right hand, the Queen at the foot of the table. The practical result of this was that Peter would be out of her reach during the meal, and so Sasha coached him carefully beforehand on how he should behave. She wanted him to show up well, and to be mannerly. And, of course, she knew that during the meal he would be on his own, because his father had no idea of manners at all.

Some of you may wonder why the task of instructing Peter on his manners fell to Sasha. Did the boy not have a governess? (Yes, as a matter of fact he had two.) Were there no servants whose service was dedicated wholly to the little prince? (Battalions of them.) The trick was not to get these people to take care of Peter but to keep them away. Sasha wanted to raise him herself, at least as much as she could. She had very definite ideas about how her son should be raised. She loved him dearly and wanted to be with him for her own selfish reasons. But she also realized that she had a deep and solemn responsibility in the matter of Peter"s nurture. This little boy would be King someday, and above all else, Sasha wanted him to be good. A good boy, she thought, would be a good King.

Great banquets in the King"s Hall were not very neat affairs, and most nannies wouldn"t have been very concerned about the little boy"s table manners. Why, he is to be the King! they would have said, a little shocked at the idea that they should correct him in such piddling matters. Who cares if he spills the gravy boat? Who cares if he dribbles on his ruff, or even wipes his hands on it? Did not King Alan in the old days sometimes vomit into his plate and then command his court jester to come nigh and "drink this nice hot soup"? Did not King John often bite the heads off live trout and then put the flopping bodies into the bodices of the serving girls" dresses? Will not this banquet end up, as most banquets do, with the partic.i.p.ants" throwing food across the table at each other?

Undoubtedly it would, but by the time things degenerated to the food-throwing stage, she and Peter would long since have retired. What concerned Sasha was that att.i.tude of who cares. She thought it was the worst idea anyone could ever plant in the head of a little boy destined to be King.

So Sasha instructed Peter carefully, and she observed him carefully on the night of the banquet. And later, as-he lay sleepy in his bed, she talked to him.

Because she was a good mother, she first complimented him lovingly on his behavior and manners-and this was right, because for the most part they had been exemplary. But she knew that no one would correct him where he went wrong unless she did it herself, and she knew she must do it now, in these few years when he idolized her. So when she was finished complimenting him, she said: "You did one thing wrong, Pete, and I never want to see you do it again."

Peter lay in his bed, his dark blue eyes looking at her solemnly. "What was that, Mother?"

"You didn"t use your napkin," said she. "You left it folded by your plate, and it made me sorry to see it. You ate the roast chicken with your fingers, and that was fine, because that is how men do it. But when you put the chicken down again, you wiped your fingers on your shirt, and that is not right."

"But Father* and Mr. Flagg* and the other n.o.bles*"

"Bother Flagg, and bother all the n.o.bles in Delain!" she cried with such force that Peter cringed back in his bed a little. He was afraid and ashamed for having made those roses bloom in her cheeks. "What your father does is right, for he is the King, and what you do when you are King will always be right. But Flagg is not King, no matter how much he would like to be, and the n.o.bles are not Kings, and you are not King yet, but only a little boy who forgot his manners."

She saw he was afraid, and smiled. She laid her hand on his brow.

"Be calm, Peter," she said. "It is a small thing, but still important because you"ll be King in your own time. Now run and fetch your slate."

"But it"s bedtime-"

"Bother bedtime, too. Bedtime can wait. Bring your slate."

Peter ran for his slate.

Sasha took the chalk tied to the side and carefully printed three letters. "Can you read this word, Peter?"

Peter nodded. There were only a few words that he could read, although he knew most of the Great Letters. This happened to be one of the words. "It says con."

Yes that"s right. Now write it backward and see what you fin "";:.. Backward a: Peter said doubtfully.

"Yes, that"s right.

Peter did so, his letters staggering childishly across the slate below his mother"s neat printing. He was astounded to find another of the few words he could read.

DOG! Mamma! It says DOG!"

"Yes. It says dog." The sadness in her voice quenched Peter"s excitement at once. His mother pointed from G.o.d to DOG. "These are the two natures of man," she said. "Never forget them, because someday you will be King and Kings grow to be great and tall-as great and tall as dragons in their ninth moltings."

"Father isn"t great and tall," objected Peter. Roland was, in fact, short and rather bowlegged. Also, he carried a great belly in front of him from all the beer and mead he had consumed.

Sasha smiled.

"He is, though. Kings grow invisibly, Peter, and it happens all at once, as soon as they grasp the scepter and the crown is put on their heads in the Plaza of the Needle!"

"They do?" Peter"s eyes grew large and round. He thought that the subject had wandered far from his failure to use his napkin at the banquet, but he was not sorry to see such an embarra.s.sing topic lost in favor of this tremendously interesting one. Besides, he had already resolved that he would never forget to use his napkin again-if it was important to his mother, then it was important to him.

"Oh yes, they do. Kings grow most awfully big, and that"s why they have to be specially careful, for a very big person could crush smaller ones under his feet just taking a walk, or turning around, or sitting down quickly in the wrong place. Bad Kings do such things often. I think even good Kings cannot avoid doing them sometimes."

"I don"t think I understand-"

"Then listen a moment longer." She tapped the slate again. "Our preachers say that our natures are partly of G.o.d and partly of Old Man Splitfoot. Do you know who Old Man Splitfoot Is, Peter?"

"He"s the devil."

"Yes. But there are few devils outside of made-up stories, Pete-most bad people are more like dogs than devils. Dogs are friendly but stupid, and that"s the way most men and women are when they are drunk. When dogs are excited and confused, they may bite; when men are excited and confused, they may fight. Dogs are great pets because they are loyal, but if a pet is all a man is, he is a bad man, I think. Dogs can be brave, but they may also be cowards that will howl in the dark or run away from danger with their tails between their legs. A dog is just as eager to lick the hand of a bad master as he is to lick the hand of a good one, because dogs don"t know the difference between good and bad. A dog will eat slops, vomit up the part his stomach can"t stand, and then go back for more."

She fell silent for a moment, perhaps thinking of what was going on in the banqueting hall right now-men and women roaring with good-natured drunken laughter, flinging food at each other, and sometimes turning aside to vomit casually on the floor beside their chairs. Roland was much the same, and sometimes this made her sad, but she did not hold it against him, nor did she tax him with it. It was his way. He might promise to reform in order to please her, and he might even do it, but he would not be the same man afterward.

"Do you understand these things, Peter?"

Peter nodded.

"Fine! Now, tell me." She leaned toward him. "Does a dog use a napkin?"

Humbled and ashamed, Peter looked down at the counterpane and shook his head. Apparently the conversation hadn"t wandered as far as he had thought. Perhaps because the evening had been very full and because he was now very tired, tears rose in his eyes and spilled down his cheeks. He struggled against the sobs that wanted to come. He locked them in his chest. Sasha saw this and admired it.

"Don"t cry over an unused napkin, my love," said Sasha, "for that was not my intention." She rose, her full and pregnant belly before her. The delivery of Thomas was now very near. "Your behavior was otherwise exemplary. Any mother in the Kingdom would have been proud of a young son who behaved himself half so well, and my heart is full with admiration for you. I only tell you these things because I am the mother of a prince. That is sometimes hard, but it cannot be changed, and i " truth, I would not change it if I could. But remember that someday lives will depend on your every waking motion; lives may even depend on dreams which come to you in sleep. Lives may not depend on whether or not you use your napkin after the roast chicken* but they may. They may. Lives have depended on less, at times. All I ask is that in everything you do, you try to remember the civilized side of your nature. The good side-the G.o.d side. Will you promise to do that, Peter?"

"I promise."

"Then all is well." She kissed him lightly. "Luckily, I am young and you are young. We will talk of these things more, when you have more understanding."

They never did, but Peter never forgot the lesson: he always used his napkin, even when those around him did not.

So Sasha died.

She has little more part in this story, yet there is one further thing about her you should know: she had a dollhouse. This dollhouse was very large and very fine, almost a castle in miniature. When the time of her marriage came round, Sasha mustered as much cheer as she could, but she was sad to be leaving everyone and everything at the great house in the Western Barony where she had grown up-and she was a little bit nervous, too. She told her mother, "I have never been married before and do not know if I shall like it."

But of all the childish things she left behind, the one she regretted most was the dollhouse she had had ever since she was a little girl.

Roland, who was a kind man, somehow discovered this, and although he was also nervous about his future life (after all, he had never been married before, either), he found time to commission Quentin Ellender, the greatest craftsman in the land, to build his new wife a new dollhouse. "I want it to be the finest dollhouse a young lady ever had," he told Ellender. "I want her to look at it once and forget about her old dollhouse forever."

As you"ll no doubt realize, if Roland really meant this, it was a foolish thing to say. No one ever forgets a toy that made him or her supremely happy as a child, even if that toy is replaced by one like it that is much nicer. Sasha never forgot her old dollhouse, but she was quite impressed with the new one. Anyone who was not a total idiot would have been. Those who saw it declared it was Quentin Ellender"s best work, and it may have been. It was a country house in miniature, very like the one Sasha had lived in with her parents in rolling Western Barony. Everything in it was small, but so cunningly made you would swear it must really work* and most things in it did!

The stove, for instance, really got hot and would even cook tiny portions of food. If you put a piece of hard coal no bigger than a matchbox in it, it would burn all day* and if you reached into the kitchen with your clumsy big-person"s finger and happened to touch the stove while the coal was burning, it would give you a burn for your pains. There were no faucets and no flushing toilets, because the Kingdom of Delain did not know about such things-and doesn"t even to this day-but if you were very careful, you could pump water from a hand pump that stood not much taller than your pinkie finger. There was a sewing room with a spinning wheel that really spun and a loom that really wove. The spinet in the parlor would really play, if you touched the keys with a toothpick, and the tone was true. People who saw this said it was a miracle, and surely Flagg must have been involved somehow. When Flagg heard such stories, he only smiled and said nothing. He had not been involved in the dollhouse at all-he thought it a silly project, in truth-but he also knew it was not always necessary to make claims and tell people how wonderful you were to achieve greatness. Sometimes all you had to do was look wise and keep your mouth shut.

In Sasha"s dollhouse were real Kashamin rugs, real velvet curtains, real china plates; the cold cabinet really kept things cold. The wainscoting in the receiving parlor and the front hall was of cherished ironwood. There was gla.s.s in all the windows and a many-colored fanlight over the wide front doors.

All in all it was the jolliest dollhouse any child ever dreamed of. Sasha clapped her hands over it with real delight at the wedding party when it was unveiled, and thanked her husband for it. Later she went to Ellender"s workshop and not only thanked him but curtsied deeply before him, an act that was almost unheard of-in that day and age, Queens did not curtsy to mere artisans. Roland was pleased and Ellender, whose sight had failed noticeably in the course of the project, was deeply touched.

But it did not make her forget her old dear dollhouse at home, as ordinary as it seemed when compared with this one, and she did not spend as many rainy afternoons playing with it-rearranging the furniture, lighting the stove and watching the chimneys smoke, pretending that there was a high tea going on or that there was to be a great dinner party for the Queen-as she had before, even as an older girl of fifteen and sixteen. One of the reasons was very simple. There was no fun making ready for a pretend party at which the Queen would be in attendance when she was the Queen. And maybe that one reason was really all the reasons. She was a grown-up now, and she discovered that being a grown-up was not quite what she had suspected it would be when she was a child. She had thought then that she. would make a conscious decision one day to simply put her toy and games and little make-believes away. Now she discovered that was not what happened at all. Instead, she discovered, interest simply faded. It became less and less and less, until a dust of years drew over the bright pleasures of childhood, and they were forgotten.

Peter, a little boy who would someday be King, had dozens of toys-no, if I am to tell you the truth, he had thousands of toys. He had hundreds of lead soldiers with which he fought great battles, and dozens of play horses. He had games and b.a.l.l.s and jacks and marbles. He had stilts that made him five feet high. He had a magical spring-stick on which he could bounce, and all the drawing paper he wanted in a time when paper was extremely hard to make and only wealthy people could afford to have it.

But of all the toys in the castle, the one he loved the best was his mother"s dollhouse. He had never known the one in the Western Barony, and so to him this was the dollhouse of dollhouses. He would sit before it for hours on end when the rain poured down outside, or when the winter wind shrieked out of a blue throat filled with snow. When he fell ill with Children"s Tattoo (a disease which we call chicken pox), he had a servant bring it to him on a special table that went over his bed and played with it almost ceaselessly until he was well.

He loved to imagine the tiny people that would fill the house; sometimes they were almost so real he could see them. He talked for them in different voices and invented them all. They were the King family. There was Roger King, who was brave and powerful (if not very tall, and slightly bowlegged), and who had once killed a dragon. There was lovely Sarah King, his wife. And there was their little boy, Petie, who loved and was loved by them. Not to mention, of course, all the servants he invented to make the beds, stoke the stove, fetch the water, cook the meals, and mend the clothes.

Because he was a boy, some of the stories he made up to go with the house were a little more bloodthirsty than the stories Sasha had made up to go with hers as a little girl. In one of them, the Anduan pirates were all around the house, wanting to get in and slaughter the family. There was a famous fight. Dozens of pirates were killed, but in the end they were too many. They made to attack for the final time. But just before they did, the King"s Own Guard-this part was played by Peter"s lead soldiers-arrived and killed every one of those rotten Anduan se dogs. In another story, a nest of dragons burst out of a nearby wood (usually the nearby wood was under Sasha"s sofa by the window), meaning to burn up the house with their furious breath.

But Roger and Petie rushed out with their bows and killed every one. "Until the ground was black with their icky old blood,"

Peter told his father the King that night at dinner, and this made Roland roar with approval.

After Sasha died, Flagg told Roland that he did not believe it was right for a boy to be playing with dollhouses. It might not make him a sissy, Flagg said, but then again, it might. Certainly it would not sound well, if the tale got out to the general population. And such stories always did. The castle was full of servants. Servants saw everything, and their tongues wagged.

"He"s only six," Roland said, uneasy. Flagg, with his white, hungry face far back in his deep hood and his magical spells, always made him uneasy.

"Six is old enough to train a boy in the way he should go, Sire," Flagg said. "Think you well on it. Your judgment will be right in this, as in all things."

Think you well on it, Flagg said, and that was just what King Roland did, In fact, I should think it fair to say that he never thought on anything so hard during his entire twenty-some-year reign as King of Delain.

That probably sounds strange to you, if you have thought of all the duties a King has-weighty matters such as putting taxes on some things or ending them on others, whether or not to declare war, whether to pardon or condemn. What, you might say, was a decision over whether or not to allow a little boy to play with a dollhouse next to those other things?

Maybe nothing, maybe much. I will let you make up your mind on that. I will tell you that Roland was not the smartest King who had ever ruled in Delain. Thinking well had always been very hard work for him. It made him feel as if boulders were rolling around in his head. It made his eyes water and his temples throb. When he thought deeply, his nose got stuffed up.

As a boy, his studies in composition and mathematics and history had made his head ache so badly that he had been allowed to give them up at twelve and do what he did best, which was to hunt. He tried very hard to be a good King, but he had a feeling that he could never be good enough, or smart enough, to solve the Kingdom"s problems or to make many decisions the right way, and he knew if he made them the wrong way, people would suffer for it. If he had heard Sasha telling Peter about Kings after the banquet, he would have agreed completely. Kings really were bigger than other people, and sometimes-a lot o times-he wished he were smaller. If you have ever in your life had serious questions about whether or not you were good enough for some task, then you will know how he felt. What you may not know is that such worries start to feed on themselves after awhile. Even if that feeling that you aren"t good enough to get the job done isn"t true at first, it can become true in time. This had happened to Roland, and over the years he had come to rely more and more on Flagg. He was sometimes troubled by the idea that Flagg was King in all but name-but these worries came only late at night. In the daytime he was only grateful for Flagg"s support.

If not for Sasha, Roland might have been a much worse King than he really was, and that was because the little voice he sometimes heard in the night when he couldn"t sleep held much more of the truth than his daytime grat.i.tudes. Flagg really was running the Kingdom, and Flagg was a very bad man. We will have to speak more of him later, unfortunately, but we"ll let him go for now, and good riddance.

Sasha had broken Flagg"s power over Roland a little. Her own advice was good and practical, and it was much more kind and just than the magician"s. She never really liked Flagg-few in Delain did, and many shuddered at his very name-but her dislike was mild. Her feelings might have been much different if she had known how carefully Flagg watched her, and with what growing, poisonous hate.

Once Flagg really did set out to poison Sasha. This was after she asked Roland to pardon a pair of army deserters whom Flagg had wanted beheaded in the Plaza of the Needle. Deserters, he had argued, were a bad example. If one or two were allowed to get away without paying the full penalty, other might try it. The only way to discourage them, he said, was to show them the heads of those who had already tried it. Other would-be deserters would look at those flyblown heads with their staring eyes and think twice about the seriousness of their service to the King. Sasha, however, had discovered facts about the case from one of her maids that Roland didn"t know. The mother of the older boy had fallen gravely ill. There were three younger brothers and two younger sisters in the family. All might have died in the bitter cold of the Delain winter if the boy hadn"t left his encampment, gone home, and chopped wood for his mother. The younger boy had gone because he was the older"s best friend, and his sworn blood brother. Without the younger boy, it might have taken two weeks to chop enough wood to keep the family through the winter. With both of them working at top speed, it had taken only six days.

This was putting it in a different light. Roland had loved his own mother very much, and would gladly have died for her. He made inquiries and found out that Sasha had the right of the story. He also found out that the deserters had left only after a s.a.d.i.s.tic sergeant major had repeatedly refused to relay their re-quests for compa.s.sionate leave to their superior, and that as soon as four cords of wood had been chopped, they had gone back, although both had known they must be court-martialed and face the headsman"s axe.

Roland pardoned them. Flagg nodded, smiled, and said only: "Your will is Delain"s will, Sire." Not for all the gold in the Four Kingdoms would he have allowed Roland to see the sick fury that rose in his heart when his will was balked. Roland"s pardon of the boys was greatly praised in Delain, because many of Roland"s subjects also knew the true facts and those who didn"t know them were quickly informed by the rest. Roland"s wise and compa.s.sionate pardon of the two was remembered when other, less humane decrees (which were, as a rule, also the magician"s ideas) were imposed. All of this made no difference t Flagg. He had wanted him killed, and Sasha had interfered. Why could Roland not have married another? He had known none of them, and cared for women not at all. Why not another? Well, it didn"t matter. Flagg smiled at the pardon, but he swore in his heart then that he would attend Sasha"s funeral.