Wolves of the Calla (48 page)

She shook her head. “He can’t or won’t, I know not which. It’s the ladies of Calla Sen Chre who make them, and send them to the Callas all round about. Although Divine is as far south as that sort of trading reaches, I think.”

“The ladies make these,” Roland mused. “The
ladies
.”

“Somewhere there’s a machine that still makes em, that’s all it is,” Eisenhart said. Roland was amused at his tone of stiff defensiveness. “Comes down to no more than pushing a button, I ’magine.”

Margaret, looking at him with a woman’s smile, said nothing to this, either for or against. Perhaps she didn’t know, but she certainly knew the politics that keep a marriage sweet.

“So there are Sisters north and south of here along the Arc,” Roland said. “And all of them throw the plate.”

“Aye—from Calla Sen Chre to Calla Divine south of us. Farther south or north, I don’t know. We like to help and we like to talk. We throw our plates once a month, in memory of how Lady Oriza did for Gray Dick, but few of us are any good at it.”

“Are
you
good at it, sai?”

She was silent, biting at the corner of her lip again.

“Show him,” Eisenhart growled. “Show him and be done.”

They walked down the steps, the rancher’s wife leading the way, Eisenhart behind her, Roland third. Behind them the kitchen door opened and banged shut.

“Gods-a-glory, missus Eisenhart’s gonna throw the dish!” Benny Slightman cried gleefully. “Jake! You won’t believe it!”

“Send em back in, Vaughn,” she said. “They don’t need to see this.”

“Nar, let em look,” Eisenhart said. “Don’t hurt a boy to see a woman do well.”

“Send them back, Roland, aye?” She looked at him, flushed and flustered and very pretty. To Roland she looked ten years younger than when she’d come out on the porch, but he wondered how she’d fling in such a state. It was something he much wanted to see, because ambushing was brutal work, quick and emotional.

“I agree with your husband,” he said. “I’d let them stay.”

“Have it as you like,” she said. Roland saw she was actually pleased, that she
wanted
an audience, and his hope grew. He thought it increasingly likely that this pretty middle-aged wife with her small breasts and salt-and-pepper hair had a hunter’s heart. Not a gunslinger’s heart, but at this point he would settle for a few hunters—a few
killers
—male or female.

She marched toward the barn. When they were fifty yards from the stuffy-guys flanking the barn door, Roland touched her shoulder and made her stop.

“Nay,” she said, “this is too far.”

“I’ve seen you fling as far and half again,” her husband said, and stood firm in the face of her angry look. “So I have.”

“Not with a gunslinger from the Line of Eld standing by my right elbow, you haven’t,” she said, but she stood where she was.

Roland went to the barn door and took the grinning sharproot head from the stuffy on the left side. He went into the barn. Here was a stall filled with freshly picked sharproot, and beside it one of potatoes. He took one of the potatoes and set it atop the stuffy-guy’s shoulders, where the sharproot had been. It was a good-sized spud, but the contrast was still comic; the stuffy-guy now looked like Mr. Tinyhead in a carnival show or street-fair.

“Oh, Roland, no!” she cried, sounding genuinely shocked. “I could never!”

“I don’t believe you,” he said, and stood aside. “Throw.”

For a moment he thought she wouldn’t. She looked around for her husband. If Eisenhart had still been standing beside her, Roland thought, she would have thrust the plate into his hands and run for the house and never mind if he cut himself on it, either. But Vaughn Eisenhart had withdrawn to the foot of the steps. The boys stood above him, Benny Slightman watching with mere interest, Jake with closer attention, his brows drawn together and the smile now gone from his face.

“Roland, I—”

“None of it, missus, I beg. Your talk of leaping was all very fine, but now I’d see you do it.
Throw
.”

She recoiled a little, eyes widening, as if she had been slapped. Then she turned to face the barn
door and drew her right hand above her left shoulder. The plate glimmered in the late light, which was now more pink than red. Her lips had thinned to a white line. For a moment all the world held still.

“Riza!”
she cried in a shrill, furious voice, and cast her arm forward. Her hand opened, the index finger pointing precisely along the path the plate would take. Of all of them in the yard (the cowpokes had also stopped to watch), only Roland’s eyes were sharp enough to follow the flight of the dish.

True!
he exulted.
True as ever was!

The plate gave a kind of moaning howl as it bolted above the dirt yard. Less than two seconds after it had left her hand, the potato lay in two pieces, one by the stuffy-guy’s gloved right hand and the other by its left. The plate itself stuck in the side of the barn door, quivering.

The boys raised a cheer. Benny hoisted his hand as his new friend had taught him, and Jake slapped him a high five.

“Great going, sai Eisenhart!” Jake called.

“Good hit! Say thankya!” Benny added.

Roland observed the way the woman’s lips drew back from her teeth at this hapless, well-meant praise—she looked like a horse that has seen a snake. “Boys,” he said, “I’d go inside now, were I you.”

Benny was bewildered. Jake, however, took another look at Margaret Eisenhart and understood. You did what you had to . . . and then the reaction set in. “Come on, Ben,” he said.

“But—”

“Come
on
.” Jake took his new friend by the shirt and tugged him back toward the kitchen door.

Roland let the woman stay where she was for a moment, head down, trembling with reaction. Strong color still blazed in her cheeks, but everywhere else her skin had gone as pale as milk. He thought she was struggling not to vomit.

He went to the barn door, grasped the plate at the grasping-place, and pulled. He was astounded at how much effort it took before the plate first wiggled and then pulled loose. He brought it back to her, held it out. “Thy tool.”

For a moment she didn’t take it, only looked at him with a species of bright hate. “Why do you mock me, Roland? How do’ee know Vaughn took me from the Manni Clan? Tell us that, I beg.”

It was the rose, of course—an intuition left by the touch of the rose—and it was also the tale of her face, which was a womanly version of the old Henchick’s. But how he knew what he knew was no part of this woman’s business, and he only shook his head. “Nay. But I do not mock thee.”

Margaret Eisenhart abruptly seized Roland by the neck. Her grip was dry and so hot her skin felt feverish. She pulled his ear to her uneasy, twitching mouth. He thought he could smell every bad dream she must have had since deciding to leave her people for Calla Bryn Sturgis’s big rancher.

“I saw thee speak to Henchick last night,” she said. “Will’ee speak to him more? Ye will, won’t you?”

Roland nodded, transfixed by her grip. The strength of it. The little puffs of air against his ear. Did a lunatic hide deep down inside everyone, even such a woman as this? He didn’t know.

“Good. Say thankya. Tell him Margaret of the Redpath Clan does fine with her heathen man, aye, fine still.” Her grip tightened. “Tell him she regrets
nothing
! Will’ee do that for me?”

“Aye, lady, if you like.”

She snatched the plate from him, fearless of its lethal edge. Having it seemed to steady her. She looked at him from eyes in which tears swam, unshed. “Is it the cave ye spoke of with my Da’? The Doorway Cave?”

Roland nodded.

“What would ye visit on us, ye chary gunstruck man?”

Eisenhart joined them. He looked uncertainly at his wife, who had endured exile from her people for his sake. For a moment she looked at him as though she didn’t know him.

“I only do as ka wills,” Roland said.

“Ka!” she cried, and her lip lifted. A sneer transformed her good looks to an ugliness that was almost startling. It would have frightened the boys. “Every troublemaker’s excuse! Put it up your bum with the rest of the dirt!”

“I do as ka wills and so will you,” Roland said.

She looked at him, seeming not to comprehend. Roland took the hot hand that had gripped him and squeezed it, not quite to the point of pain.

“And so will you.”

She met his gaze for a moment, then dropped her eyes. “Aye,” she muttered. “Oh aye, so do we all.” She ventured to look at him again. “Will ye give Henchick my message?”

“Aye, lady, as I said.”

The darkening dooryard was silent except for
the distant call of a rustie. The cowpokes still leaned at the remuda fence. Roland ambled over to them.

“Evening, gents.”

“Hope ya do well,” one said, and touched his forehead.

“May you do better,” Roland said. “Missus threw the plate, and she threw it well, say aye?”

“Say thankya,” another of them agreed. “No rust on the missus.”

“No rust,” Roland agreed. “And will I tell you something now, gents? A word to tuck beneath your hats, as we do say?”

They looked at him warily.

Roland looked up, smiled at the sky. Then looked back at them. “Set my watch and warrant on’t. You might want to speak of it. Tell what you saw.”

They watched him cautiously, not liking to admit to this.

“Speak of it and I’ll kill every one of you,” Roland said. “Do you understand me?”

Eisenhart touched his shoulder. “Roland, surely—”

The gunslinger shrugged his hand off without looking at him. “Do you understand me?”

They nodded.

“And believe me?”

They nodded again. They looked frightened. Roland was glad to see it. They were right to be afraid. “Say thankya.”

“Say thanks,” one of them repeated. He had broken a sweat.

“Aye,” said the second.

“Thankya big-big,” said the third, and shot a nervous stream of tobacco to one side.

Eisenhart tried again. “Roland, hear me, I beg—”

But Roland didn’t. His mind was alight with ideas. All at once he saw their course with perfect clarity. Their course on
this
side, at least. “Where’s the robot?” he asked the rancher.

“Andy? Went in the kitchen with the boys, I think.”

“Good. Do you have a stockline office in there?” He nodded toward the barn.

“Aye.”

“Let’s go there, then. You, me, and your missus.”

“I’d like to take her into the house a bit,” Eisenhart said.
I’d like to take her anywhere that’s away from you,
Roland read in his eyes.

“Our palaver won’t be long,” Roland said, and with perfect honesty. He’d already seen everything he needed.

The stockline office only had a single chair, the one behind the desk. Margaret took it. Eisenhart sat on a footstool. Roland squatted on his hunkers with his back to the wall and his purse open before him. He had shown them the twins’ map. Eisenhart hadn’t immediately grasped what Roland had pointed out (might not grasp it even now), but the woman did. Roland thought it no wonder she hadn’t been able to stay with the Manni. The Manni were peaceful. Margaret Eisenhart was not. Not once you got below her surface, at any rate.

“You’ll keep this to yourselves,” he said.

“Or thee’ll kill us, like our cowpokes?” she asked.

Roland gave her a patient look, and she colored beneath it.

“I’m sorry, Roland. I’m upset. It comes of throwing the plate in hot blood.”

Eisenhart put an arm around her. This time she accepted it gladly, and laid her head on his shoulder.

“Who else in your group can throw as well as that?” Roland asked. “Any?”

“Zalia Jaffords,” she said at once.

“Say true?”

She nodded emphatically. “Zalia could have cut that tater in two ten-for-ten, at twenty paces farther back.”

“Others?”

“Sarey Adams, wife of Diego. And Rosalita Munoz.”

Roland raised his eyebrows at that.

“Aye,” she said. “Other than Zalia, Rosie’s best.” A brief pause. “And me, I suppose.”

Roland felt as if a huge weight had rolled off his back. He’d been convinced they’d somehow have to bring back weapons from New York or find them on the east side of the river. Now it looked as if that might not be necessary. Good. They had other business in New York—business involving Calvin Tower. He didn’t want to mix the two unless he absolutely had to.

“I’d see you four women at the Old Fella’s rectory-house. And
just
you four.” His eyes flicked briefly to Eisenhart, then back to Eisenhart’s sai. “No husbands.”

“Now wait just a damn minute,” Eisenhart said.

Roland held up his hand. “Nothing’s been decided yet.”

“It’s the
way
it’s not been decided I don’t care for,” Eisenhart said.

“Hush a minute,” Margaret said. “When would you see us?”

Roland calculated. Twenty-four days left, perhaps only twenty-three, and still much left to see. And there was the thing hidden in the Old Fella’s church, that to deal with, too. And the old Manni, Henchick . . .

Yet in the end, he knew, the day would come and things would play out with shocking suddenness. They always did. Five minutes, ten at most, and all would be finished, for good or ill.

The trick was to be ready when those few minutes came around.

“Ten days from now,” he said. “In the evening. I’d see the four of you in competition, turn and turn about.”

“All right,” she said. “That much we can do. But Roland . . . I’ll not throw so much as a single plate or raise a single finger against the Wolves if my husband still says no.”

“I understand,” Roland said, knowing she would do as he said, like it or not. When the time came they all would.

There was one small window in the office wall, dirty and festooned with cobwebs but clear enough for them to be able to see Andy marching across the yard, his electric eyes flashing on and off in the deepening twilight. He was humming to himself.

“Eddie says robots are programmed to do certain tasks,” he said. “Andy does the tasks you bid him?”