Wolves of the Calla (70 page)

“Are you complaining?” Roland asked. “Don’t like him anymore?”

“I like him fine, Roland, but if there’s something I’m supposed to be doing besides jumping in the hay, teaching Oy to do somersaults, or seeing who can skip a flat rock on the river the most times, I think you ought to tell me what it is.”

“There’s nothing else,” Roland said. Then, as an afterthought: “And get your sleep. Growing boys need plenty of sleep.”

“Why am I out there?”

“Because it seems right to me that you should be,” Roland said. “All I want is for you to keep your eyes open and tell me if you see something you don’t like or don’t understand.”

“Anyway, kiddo, don’t you see enough of us during the days?” Eddie asked him.

They
were
together during those next five days, and the days were long. The novelty of riding sai Overholser’s horses wore off in a hurry. So did complaints of sore muscles and blistered butts. On one of these rides, as they approached the place where Andy would be waiting, Roland asked Susannah
bluntly if she had considered abortion as a way of solving her problem.

“Well,” she said, looking at him curiously from her horse, “I’m not going to tell you the thought never crossed my mind.”

“Banish it,” he said. “No abortion.”

“Any particular reason why not?”

“Ka,” said Roland.

“Kaka,” Eddie replied promptly. This was an old joke, but the three of them laughed, and Roland was delighted to laugh with them. And with that, the subject was dropped. Roland could hardly believe it, but he was glad. The fact that Susannah seemed so little disposed to discuss Mia and the coming of the baby made him grateful indeed. He supposed there were things—quite a few of them—which she felt better off not knowing.

Still, she had never lacked for courage. Roland was sure the questions would have come sooner or later, but after five days of canvassing the town as a quartet (a quintet counting Oy, who always rode with Jake), Roland began sending her out to the Jaffords smallhold at midday to try her hand with the dish.

Eight days or so after their long palaver on the rectory porch—the one that had gone on until four in the morning—Susannah invited them out to the Jaffords smallhold to see her progress. “It’s Zalia’s idea,” she said. “I guess she wants to know if I pass.”

Roland knew he only had to ask Susannah herself if he wanted an answer to that question, but he was curious. When they arrived, they found the entire family gathered on the back porch, and several of Tian’s neighbors, as well: Jorge Estrada and
his wife, Diego Adams (in chaps), the Javiers. They looked like spectators at a Points practice. Zalman and Tia, the roont twins, stood to one side, goggling at all the company with wide eyes. Andy was also there, holding baby Aaron (who was sleeping) in his arms.

“Roland, if you wanted all this kept secret, guess what?” Eddie said.

Roland was not put out of countenance, although he realized now that his threat to the cowboys who’d seen sai Eisenhart throw the dish had been utterly useless. Country-folk talked, that was all. Whether in the borderlands or the baronies, gossip was ever the chief sport.
And at the very least,
he mused,
those humpies will spread the news that Roland’s a hard boy, strong commala, and not to be trifled with.

“It is what it is,” he said. “The Calla-
folken
have known for donkey’s years that the Sisters of Oriza throw the dish. If they know Susannah throws it, too—and well—maybe it’s to the good.”

Jake said, “I just hope she doesn’t, you know, mess up.”

There were respectful greetings for Roland, Eddie, and Jake as they mounted the porch. Andy told Jake a young lady was pining for him. Jake blushed and said he’d just as soon not know about stuff like that, if that did Andy all right.

“As you will, soh.” Jake found himself studying the words and numbers stamped on Andy’s midsection like a steel tattoo and wondering again if he was really in this world of robots and cowboys, or if it was all some sort of extraordinarily vivid dream. “I hope this baby will wake up soon, so I
do. And cry! Because I know several soothing cradle-songs—”

“Hush up, ye creakun steel bandit!” Gran-pere said crossly, and after crying the old man’s pardon (in his usual complacent, not-a-bit-sorry tone of voice), Andy did.
Messenger, Many Other Functions,
Jake thought.
Is one of your other functions teasing folks, Andy, or is that just my imagination?

Susannah had gone into the house with Zalia. When they came out, Susannah was wearing not one reed pouch, but two. They hung to her hips on a pair of woven straps. There was another strap, too, Eddie saw, running around her waist and holding the pouches snug. Like holster tie-downs.

“That’s quite the hookup, say thankya,” Diego Adams remarked.

“Susannah thought it up,” Zalia said as Susannah got into her wheelchair. “She calls it a docker’s clutch.”

It wasn’t, Eddie thought, not quite, but it was close. He felt an admiring smile lift the corners of his mouth, and saw a similar one on Roland’s. And Jake’s. By God, even Oy appeared to be grinning.

“Will it draw water, that’s what
I
wonder,” Bucky Javier said. That such a question should even be asked, Eddie thought, only emphasized the difference between the gunslingers and the Calla-
folken
. Eddie and his mates had known from first look what the hookup was and how it would work. Javier, however, was a smallhold farmer, and as such, saw the world in a very different way.

You need us,
Eddie thought toward the little cluster of men standing on the porch—the farmers in their dirty white pants, Adams in his chaps and
manure-splattered shor’boots.
Boy, do you ever
.

Susannah wheeled to the front of the porch and folded her stumps beneath her so she appeared almost to be standing in her chair. Eddie knew how much this posture hurt her, but no discomfort showed on her face. Roland, meanwhile, was looking down into the pouches she wore. There were four dishes in each, plain things with no pattern on them. Practice-dishes.

Zalia walked across to the barn. Although Roland and Eddie had noted the blanket tacked up there as soon as they arrived, the others noticed it for the first time when Zalia pulled it down. Drawn in chalk on the barnboards was the outline of a man—or a manlike being—with a frozen grin on his face and the suggestion of a cloak fluttering out behind him. This wasn’t work of the quality produced by the Tavery twins, nowhere near, but those on the porch recognized a Wolf when they saw one. The older children oohed softly. The Estradas and the Javiers applauded, but looked apprehensive even as they did so, like people who fear they may be whistling up the devil. Andy complimented the artist (“whoever she may be,” he added archly), and Gran-pere told him again to shut his trap. Then he called out that the Wolves
he’d
seen were quite a spot bigger. His voice was shrill with excitement.

“Well, I drew it to man-size,” Zalia said (she had actually drawn it to
husband
-size). “If the real thing turns out to make a bigger target, all to the good. Hear me, I beg.” This last came out uncertainly, almost as a question.

Roland nodded. “We say thankya.”

Zalia shot him a grateful look, then stepped away
from the outline on the wall. Then she looked at Susannah. “When you will, lady.”

For a moment Susannah only remained where she was, about sixty yards from the barn. Her hands lay between her breasts, the right covering the left. Her head was lowered. Her ka-mates knew exactly what was going on in that head:
I aim with my eye, shoot with my hand, kill with my heart
. Their own hearts went out to her, perhaps carried by Jake’s touch or Eddie’s love, encouraging her, wishing her well, sharing their excitement. Roland watched fiercely. Would one more dab hand with the dish turn things in their favor? Perhaps not. But he was what he was, and so was she, and he wished her true aim with every last bit of his will.

She raised her head. Looked at the shape chalked on the barn wall. Still her hands lay between her breasts. Then she cried out shrilly, as Margaret Eisenhart had cried out in the yard of the Rocking B, and Roland felt his hard-beating heart rise. In that moment he had a clear and beautiful memory of David, his hawk, folding his wings in a blue summer sky and dropping at his prey like a stone with eyes.

“Riza!”

Her hands dropped and became a blur. Only Roland, Eddie, and Jake were able to mark how they crossed at the waist, the right hand seizing a dish from the left pouch, the left hand seizing one from the right. Sai Eisenhart had thrown from the shoulder, sacrificing time in order to gain force and accuracy. Susannah’s arms crossed below her ribcage and just above the arms of her wheelchair, the dishes finishing their cocking arc at about the
height of her shoulderblades. Then they flew, crisscrossing in midair a moment before thudding into the side of the barn.

Susannah’s arms finished straight out before her; for a moment she looked like an impresario who has just introduced the featured act. Then they dropped and crossed, seizing two more dishes. She flung them, dipped again, and flung the third set. The first two were still quivering when the last two bit into the side of the barn, one high and one low.

For a moment there was utter silence in the Jaffordses’ yard. Not even a bird called. The eight plates ran in a perfectly straight line from the throat of the chalked figure to what would have been its upper midsection. They were all two and a half to three inches apart, descending like buttons on a shirt. And she had thrown all eight in no more than three seconds.

“Do’ee mean to use the dish against the Wolves?” Bucky Javier asked in a queerly breathless voice. “Is that it?”

“Nothing’s been decided,” Roland said stolidly.

In a barely audible voice that held both shock and wonder, Deelie Estrada said: “But if that’d been a man, hear me, he’d be cutlets.”

It was Gran-pere who had the final word, as perhaps gran-peres should: “Yer-
bugger
!”

On their way back out to the main road (Andy walked at a distance ahead of them, carrying the folded wheelchair and playing something bagpipey through his sound system), Susannah said musingly:
“I may give up the gun altogether, Roland, and just concentrate on the dish. There’s an elemental satisfaction to giving that scream and then throwing.”

“You reminded me of my hawk,” Roland admitted.

Susannah’s teeth flashed white in a grin. “I
felt
like a hawk. Riza! O-
Riza
! Just saying the word puts me in a throwing mood.”

To Jake’s mind this brought some obscure memory of Gasher (“Yer old pal, Gasher,” as the gentleman himself had been wont to say), and he shivered.

“Would you really give up the gun?” Roland asked. He didn’t know if he was amused or aghast.

“Would you roll your own smokes if you could get tailor-mades?” she asked, and then, before he could answer: “No, not really. Yet the dish is a lovely weapon. When they come, I hope to throw two dozen. And bag my limit.”

“Will there be a shortage of plates?” Eddie asked.

“Nope,” she said. “There aren’t very many fancy ones—like the one sai Eisenhart threw for you, Roland—but they’ve hundreds of practice-plates. Rosalita and Sarey Adams are sorting through them, culling out any that might fly crooked.” She hesitated, lowered her voice. “They’ve all been out here, Roland, and although Sarey’s brave as a lion and would stand fast against a tornado . . . ”

“Hasn’t got it, huh?” Eddie asked sympathetically.

“Not quite,” Susannah agreed. “She’s good, but not like the others. Nor does she have quite the same ferocity.”

“I may have something else for her,” Roland said.

“What would that be, sugar?”

“Escort duty, mayhap. We’ll see how they shoot, day after tomorrow. A little competition always livens things up. Five o’ the clock, Susannah, do they know?”

“Yes. Most of the Calla would turn up, if you allowed them.”

This
was
discouraging . . . but he should have expected it.
I’ve been too long out of the world of people,
he thought.
So I have
.

“No one but the ladies and ourselves,” Roland said firmly.

“If the Calla-
folken
saw the women throw well, it could swing a lot of people who are on the fence.”

Roland shook his head. He didn’t
want
them to know how well the women threw, that was very nearly the whole point. But that the town knew they
were
throwing . . . that might not be such a bad thing. “How good are they, Susannah? Tell me.”

She thought about it, then smiled. “Killer aim,” she said. “Every one.”

“Can you teach them that crosshand throw?”

Susannah considered the question. You could teach anyone just about anything, given world enough and time, but they had neither. Only thirteen days left now, and by the day the Sisters of Oriza (including their newest member, Susannah of New York) met for the exhibition in Pere Callahan’s back yard, there would be only a week and a half. The crosshand throw had come naturally to her, as everything about shooting had. But the others . . .

“Rosalita will learn it,” she said at last. “Margaret
Eisenhart
could
learn it, but she might get flustered at the wrong time. Zalia? No. Best she throw one plate at a time, always with her right hand. She’s a little slower, but I guarantee every plate she throws will drink something’s blood.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Until a sneetch homes in on her and blows her out of her corset, that is.”

Susannah ignored this. “We can hurt them, Roland. Thou knows we can.”

Roland nodded. What he’d seen had encouraged him mightily, especially in light of what Eddie had told him. Susannah and Jake also knew Granpere’s ancient secret now. And, speaking of Jake . . .

“You’re very quiet today,” Roland said to the boy. “Is everything all right?”