Wolves of the Calla (49 page)

“Mostly, yes,” Eisenhart said. “Not always. And he’s not always around, ye ken.”

“Hard to believe he was built to do no more than sing foolish songs and tell horoscopes,” Roland mused.

“Perhaps the Old People gave him hobbies,” Margaret Eisenhart said, “and now that his main tasks are gone—lost in time, do ya ken—he concentrates on the hobbies.”

“You think the Old People made him.”

“Who else?” Vaughn Eisenhart asked. Andy was gone now, and the back yard was empty.

“Aye, who else,” Roland said, still musing. “Who else would have the wit and the tools? But the Old People were gone two thousand years before the Wolves began raiding into the Calla. Two thousand or more. So what I’d like to know is who or what programmed Andy not to talk about them,
except to tell you folks when they’re coming
. And here’s another question, not as interesting as that but still curious: why does he tell you that much if he cannot—or will not—tell you anything else?”

Eisenhart and his wife were looking at each other, thunderstruck. They’d not gotten past the first part of what Roland had said. The gunslinger wasn’t surprised, but he was a little disappointed in them. Really, there was much here that was obvious. If, that was, one set one’s wits to work. In fairness to the Eisenharts, Jaffordses, and Overholsers of the Calla, he supposed, straight thinking wasn’t so easy when your babbies were at stake.

There was a knock at the door. Eisenhart called, “Come!”

It was Ben Slightman. “Stock’s all put to bed, boss.” He took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. “And the boys’re off with Benny’s tent. Andy was stalkin em close, so that’s well.” Slightman looked at Roland. “It’s early for rock-cats, but if one
were
to come, Andy’d give my boy at least one shot at it with his bah—he’s been told so and comes back ‘Order recorded.’ If Benny were to miss, Andy’d get between the boys and the cat. He’s programmed strictly for defense and we’ve never been able to change that, but if the cat were to keep coming—”

“Andy’d rip it to pieces,” Eisenhart said. He spoke with a species of gloomy satisfaction.

“Fast, is he?” Roland asked.

“Yer-bugger,” Slightman said. “Don’t look it, do he, all tall and gangly like he is? But aye, he can move like greased lightning when he wants to. Faster than any rock-cat. We believe he must run on ant-nomics.”

“Very likely,” Roland said absently.

“Never mind that,” Eisenhart said, “but listen, Ben—why d’you suppose it is that Andy won’t talk about the Wolves?”

“His programming—”

“Aye, but it’s as Roland pointed out to us just before’ee came in—and we should have seen it for ourselves long before this—if the Old People set him a-going and then the Old People died out or moved on . . .
long
before the Wolves showed themselves . . . do you see the problem?”

Slightman the Elder nodded, then put his glasses back on. “Must have been something like the Wolves in the elden days, don’t you think?
Enough like em so Andy can’t tell em apart. It’s all I can figure.”

Is it really?
Roland thought.

He produced the Tavery twins’ map, opened it, and tapped an arroyo in the hill country northeast of town. It wound its way deeper and deeper into those hills before ending in one of the Calla’s old garnet mines. This one was a shaft that went thirty feet into a hillside and then stopped. The place wasn’t really much like Eyebolt Canyon in Mejis (there was no thinny in the arroyo, for one thing), but there was one crucial similarity: both were dead ends. And, Roland knew, a man will try to take service again from that which has served him once. That he should pick this arroyo, this dead-end mineshaft, for his ambush of the Wolves made perfect sense. To Eddie, to Susannah, to the Eisenharts, and now to the Eisenharts’ foreman. It would make sense to Sarey Adams and Rosalita Munoz. It would make sense to the Old Fella. He would disclose this much of his plan to others, and it would make sense to them, as well.

And if things were left out? If some of what he said was a lie?

If the Wolves got wind of the lie and believed it?

That would be good, wouldn’t it? Good if they lunged and snapped in the right direction, but at the wrong thing?

Yes, but I’ll need to trust someone with the whole truth eventually. Who?

Not Susannah, because Susannah was now two again, and he didn’t trust the other one.

Not Eddie, because Eddie might let something crucial slip to Susannah, and then Mia would know.

Not Jake, because Jake had become fast friends with Benny Slightman.

He was on his own again, and this condition had never felt more lonely to him.

“Look,” he said, tapping the arroyo. “Here’s a place you might think of, Slightman. Easy to get in, not so easy to get back out. Suppose we were to take all the children of a certain age and tuck them away safe in this little bit of a mine?”

He saw understanding begin to dawn in Slightman’s eyes. Something else, too. Hope, maybe.

“If we hide the children, they know where,” Eisenhart said. “It’s as if they smell em, like ogres in a kid’s cradle-story.”

“So I’m told,” Roland said. “What I suggest is that we could use that.”

“Make em bait, you mean. Gunslinger, that’s hard.”

Roland, who had no intention of putting the Calla’s children in the abandoned garnet mine—or anywhere near it—nodded his head. “Hard world sometimes, Eisenhart.”

“Say thankya,” Eisenhart replied, but his face was grim. He touched the map. “Could work. Aye, could work . . .
if
ye could suck all the Wolves in.”

Wherever the children wind up, I’ll need help putting them there,
Roland thought.
There’ll have to be people who know where to go and what to do. A plan. But not yet. For now I can play the game I’m playing. It’s like Castles. Because someone’s hiding.

Did he
know
that? He did not.

Did he smell it? Aye, he did.

Now it’s twenty-three,
Roland thought.
Twenty-three days until the Wolves.

It would have to be enough.

Eddie, a city boy to the core, was almost shocked by how much he liked the Jaffords place on the River Road.
I could live in a place like this,
he thought.
That’d be okay. It’d do me fine.

It was a long log cabin, craftily built and chinked against the winter winds. Along one side there were large windows which gave a view down a long, gentle hill to the rice-fields and the river. On the other side was the barn and the dooryard, beaten dirt that had been prettied up with circular islands of grass and flowers and, to the left of the back porch, a rather exotic little vegetable garden. Half of it was filled with a yellow herb called madrigal, which Tian hoped to grow in quantity the following year.

Susannah asked Zalia how she kept the chickens out of the stuff, and the woman laughed ruefully, blowing hair back from her forehead. “With great effort, that’s how,” she said. “Yet the madrigal
does
grow, you see, and where things grow, there’s always hope.”

What Eddie liked was the way it all seemed to work together and produce a feeling of home. You couldn’t exactly say what caused that feeling, because it was no one thing, but—

Yeah, there
is
one thing. And it doesn’t have anything
to do with the rustic log-cabin look of the place or the vegetable garden and the pecking chickens or the beds of flowers, either.

It was the kids. At first Eddie had been a little stunned by the number of them, produced for his and Suze’s inspection like a platoon of soldiers for the eye of a visiting general. And by God, at first glance there looked like almost enough of them to
fill
a platoon . . . or a squad, at least.

“Them on the end’re Heddon and Hedda,” Zalia said, pointing to the pair of dark blonds. “They’re ten. Make your manners, you two.”

Heddon sketched a bow, at the same time tapping his grimy forehead with the side of an even grimier fist.
Covering all the bases,
Eddie thought. The girl curtsied.

“Long nights and pleasant days,” said Heddon.

“That’s
pleasant days
and
long lives,
dummikins,” Hedda stage-whispered, then curtsied and repeated the sentiment in what she felt was the correct manner. Heddon was too overawed by the outworlders to glower at his know-it-all sister, or even really to notice her.

“The two young’uns is Lyman and Lia,” Zalia said.

Lyman, who appeared all eyes and gaping mouth, bowed so violently he nearly fell in the dirt. Lia actually did tumble over while making her curtsy. Eddie had to struggle to keep a straight face as Hedda picked her sister out of the dust, hissing.

“And this ’un,” she said, kissing the large baby in her arms, “is Aaron, my little love.”

“Your singleton,” Susannah said.

“Aye, lady, so he is.”

Aaron began to struggle, kicking and twisting. Zalia put him down. Aaron hitched up his diaper and trotted off toward the side of the house, yelling for his Da’.

“Heddon, go after him and mind him,” Zalia said.

“Maw-Maw,
no
!” He sent her frantic eye-signals to the effect that he wanted to stay right here, listening to the strangers and eating them up with his eyes.

“Maw-Maw,
yes,
” Zalia said. “Garn and mind your brother, Heddon.”

The boy might have argued further, but at that moment Tian Jaffords came around the corner of the cabin and swept the little boy up into his arms. Aaron crowed, knocked off his Da’s straw hat, pulled at his Da’s sweaty hair.

Eddie and Susannah barely noticed this. They had eyes only for the overall-clad giants following along in Jaffords’s wake. Eddie and Susannah had seen maybe a dozen extremely large people on their tour of the smallhold farms along the River Road, but always at a distance. (“Most of em’re shy of strangers, do ye ken,” Eisenhart had said.) These two were less than ten feet away.

Man and woman or boy and girl?
Both at the same time,
Eddie thought.
Because their ages don’t matter.

The female, sweaty and laughing, had to be six-six, with breasts that looked twice as big as Eddie’s head. Around her neck on a string was a wooden crucifix. The male had at least six inches on his sister-in-law. He looked at the newcomers shyly, then began sucking his thumb with one hand and squeezing his crotch with the other. To Eddie the
most amazing thing about them wasn’t their size but their eerie resemblance to Tian and Zalia. It was like looking at the clumsy first drafts of some ultimately successful work of art. They were so clearly idiots, the both of them, and so clearly, so
closely,
related to people who weren’t.
Eerie
was the only word for them.

No,
Eddie thought,
the word is
roont.

“This is my brother, Zalman,” Zalia said, her tone oddly formal.

“And my sister, Tia,” Tian added. “Make your manners, you two galoots.”

Zalman just went ahead sucking one piece of himself and kneading the other. Tia, however, gave a huge (and somehow ducklike) curtsy. “Long days long nights long earth!” she cried.
“WE GET TATERS AND GRAVY!”

“Good,” Susannah said quietly. “Taters and gravy is good.”

“TATERS AND GRAVY IS GOOD!”
Tia wrinkled her nose, pulling her upper lip away from her teeth in a piglike sneer of good fellowship.
“TATERS AND GRAVY! TATERS AND GRAVY! GOOD OL’ TATERS AND GRAVY!”

Hedda touched Susannah’s hand hesitantly. “She go on like that all day unless you tell her shush, missus-sai.”

“Shush, Tia,” Susannah said.

Tia gave a honk of laughter at the sky, crossed her arms over her prodigious bosom, and fell silent.

“Zal,” Tian said. “You need to go pee-pee, don’t you?”

Zalia’s brother said nothing, only continued squeezing his crotch.

“Go pee-pee,” Tian said. “You go on behind the barn. Water the sharproot, say thankya.”

For a moment nothing happened. Then Zalman set off, moving in a wide, shambling gait.

“When they were young—” Susannah began.

“Bright as polished agates, the both of em,” Zalia said. “Now she’s bad and my brother’s even worse.”

She abruptly put her hands over her face. Aaron gave a high laugh at this and covered his own face in imitation (“Peet-a-boo!” he called through his fingers), but both sets of twins looked grave. Alarmed, even.

“What’s wrong ’it Maw-Maw?” Lyman asked, tugging at his father’s pantsleg. Zalman, heedless of all, continued toward the barn, still with one hand in his mouth and the other in his crotch.

“Nothing, son. Your Maw-Maw’s all right.” Tian put the baby down, then ran his arm across his eyes. “Everything’s fine. Ain’t it, Zee?”

“Aye,” she said, lowering her hands. The rims of her eyes were red, but she wasn’t crying. “And with the blessing, what ain’t fine will be.”

“From your lips to God’s ear,” Eddie said, watching the giant shamble toward the barn. “From your lips to God’s ear.”

“Is he having one of his bright days, your Granpere?” Eddie asked Tian a few minutes later. They had walked around to where Tian could show Eddie the field he called Son of a Bitch, leaving Zalia and Susannah with all children great and small.

“Not so’s you’d notice,” Tian said, his brow darkening. “He ain’t half-addled these last few years, and won’t have nobbut to do with me, anyway.
Her,
aye, because she’ll hand-feed him, then wipe the drool off his chin for him and tell him thankya. Ain’t enough I got two great roont galoots to feed, is it? I’ve got to have that bad-natured old man, as well. Head’s gone as rusty as an old hinge. Half the time he don’t even know where he is, say any small-small!”

They walked, high grass swishing against their pants. Twice Eddie almost tripped over rocks, and once Tian seized his arm and led him around what looked like a right leg-smasher of a hole.
No wonder he calls it Son of a Bitch,
Eddie thought. And yet there were signs of cultivation. Hard to believe anyone could pull a plow through this mess, but it looked as if Tian Jaffords had been trying.