Wolves of the Calla (6 page)

He passed the feather.

“We all appreciate young sai Jaffords’s passion, and certainly no one doubts his courage,” George Telford said. He spoke with the feather held against the left side of his chest, over his heart. His eyes roved the audience, seeming to make eye contact—
friendly
eye contact—with each man. “But we have to think of the kiddies who’d be left as well as those who’d be taken, don’t we? In fact, we have to protect
all
the kiddies, whether they be twins, triplets, or singletons like sai Jaffords’s Aaron.”

Telford turned to Tian now.

“What will you tell your children as the Wolves shoot their mother and mayhap set their Gran-pere on fire with one of their light-sticks? What can you say to make the sound of those shrieks all right? To sweeten the smell of burning skin and burning crops? That it’s
souls
we’re a-saving? Or the heart’s wood of some make-believe
tree
?”

He paused, giving Tian a chance to reply, but Tian had no reply to make. He’d almost had them . . . but he’d left Telford out of his reckoning. Smooth-voiced sonofabitch Telford, who was also far past the age when he needed to be concerned about the Wolves calling into his dooryard on their great gray horses.

Telford nodded, as if Tian’s silence was no more than he expected, and turned back to the benches. “When the Wolves come,” he said, “they’ll come with fire-hurling weapons—the light-sticks, ye ken—and guns, and flying metal things. I misremember the name of those—”

“The buzz-balls,” someone called.

“The sneetches,” called someone else.

“Stealthies!” called a third.

Telford was nodding and smiling gently. A teacher with good pupils. “Whatever they are, they fly through the air, seeking their targets, and when they lock on, they put forth whirling blades as sharp as razors. They can strip a man from top to toe in five seconds, leaving nothing around him but a circle of blood and hair. Do not doubt me,
for I have seen it happen
.”

“Hear him, hear him well!”
the men on the benches shouted. Their eyes had grown huge and frightened.

“The Wolves themselves are terrible fearsome,” Telford went on, moving smoothly from one campfire story to the next. “They look sommat like men, and yet they are
not
men but something bigger and far more awful. And those they serve in far Thunderclap are more terrible by far. Vampires, I’ve heard. Men with the heads of birds and animals, mayhap. Broken-helm undead ronin. Warriors of the Scarlet Eye.”

The men muttered. Even Tian felt a cold scamper of rats’ paws up his back at the mention of the Eye.

“The Wolves I’ve seen; the rest I’ve been told,” Telford went on. “And while I don’t believe it all, I believe much. But never mind Thunderclap and what may den there. Let’s stick to the Wolves. The Wolves are our problem, and problem enough. Especially when they come armed to the teeth!” He shook his head, smiling grimly. “What would we do? Perhaps we could knock them from their greathorses with hoes, sai Jaffords? D’ee think?”

Derisive laughter greeted this.

“We have no weapons that can stand against them,” Telford said. He was now dry and businesslike, a man stating the bottom line. “Even if we had such, we’re farmers and ranchers and stockmen, not fighters. We—”

“Stop that yellow talk, Telford. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

Shocked gasps greeted this chilly pronouncement. There were cracking backs and creaking
necks as men turned to see who had spoken. Slowly, then, as if to give them exactly what they wanted, the white-haired latecomer in the long black coat and turned-around collar rose slowly from the bench at the very back of the room. The scar on his forehead—it was in the shape of a cross—was bright in the light of the kerosene lamps.

It was the Old Fella.

Telford recovered himself with relative speed, but when he spoke, Tian thought he still looked shocked. “Beg pardon, Pere Callahan, but I have the feather—”

“To hell with your heathen feather and to hell with your cowardly counsel,” Pere Callahan said. He walked down the center aisle, stepping with the grim gait of arthritis. He wasn’t as old as the Manni elder, nor
nearly
so old as Tian’s Gran-pere (who claimed to be the oldest person not only here but in Calla Lockwood to the south), and yet he seemed somehow older than both. Older than the ages. Some of this no doubt had to do with the haunted eyes that looked out at the world from below the scar on his forehead (Zalia claimed it had been self-inflicted). More had to do with the
sound
of him. Although he had been here enough years to build his strange Man Jesus church and convert half the Calla to his way of spiritual thinking, not even a stranger would have been fooled into believing Pere Callahan was
from
here. His alienness was in his flat and nasal speech and in the often obscure slang he used (“street-jive,” he called it). He had undoubtedly come from one of those other worlds the Manni were always babbling about, although he never spoke of it and Calla Bryn Sturgis was now his
home. He had the sort of dry and unquestionable authority that made it difficult to dispute his right to speak, with or without the feather.

Younger than Tian’s Gran-pere he might be, but Pere Callahan was still the Old Fella.

Now he surveyed the men of Calla Bryn Sturgis, not even glancing at George Telford. The feather sagged in Telford’s hand. He sat down on the first bench, still holding it.

Callahan began with one of his slang-terms, but they were farmers and no one needed to ask for an explanation.

“This is chickenshit.”

He surveyed them longer. Most would not return his look. After a moment, even Eisenhart and Adams dropped their eyes. Overholser kept his head up, but under the Old Fella’s hard gaze, the rancher looked petulant rather than defiant.

“Chickenshit,” the man in the black coat and turned-around collar repeated, enunciating each syllable. A small gold cross gleamed below the notch in the backwards collar. On his forehead, that other cross—the one Zalia believed he’d carved in his flesh with his own thumbnail in partial penance for some awful sin—glared under the lamps like a tattoo.

“This young man isn’t one of mine, but he’s right, and I think you all know it. You know it in your hearts. Even you, Mr. Overholser. And you, George Telford.”

“Know no such thing,” Telford said, but his voice
was weak and stripped of its former persuasive charm.

“All your lies will cross your eyes, that’s what my mother would have told you.” Callahan offered Telford a thin smile Tian wouldn’t have wanted pointed in his direction. And then Callahan
did
turn to him. “I never heard it put better than you put it tonight, boy. Thankee-sai.”

Tian raised a feeble hand and managed an even more feeble smile. He felt like a character in a silly festival play, saved at the last moment by some improbable supernatural intervention.

“I know a bit about cowardice, may it do ya,” Callahan said, turning to the men on the benches. He raised his right hand, misshapen and twisted by some old burn, looked at it fixedly, then dropped it to his side again. “I have personal experience, you might say. I know how one cowardly decision leads to another . . . and another . . . and another . . . until it’s too late to turn around, too late to change. Mr. Telford, I assure you the tree of which young Mr. Jaffords spoke is not make-believe. The Calla is in dire danger. Your
souls
are in danger.”

“Hail Mary, full of grace,” said someone on the left side of the room, “the Lord is with thee. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, J—”

“Bag it,” Callahan snapped. “Save it for Sunday.” His eyes, blue sparks in their deep hollows, studied them. “For this night, never mind God and Mary and the Man Jesus. Never mind the light-sticks and the buzz-bugs of the Wolves, either. You must fight. You’re the men of the Calla, are you not? Then
act
like men. Stop behaving like dogs crawling on their bellies to lick the boots of a cruel master.”

Overholser went dark red at that, and began to stand. Diego Adams grabbed his arm and spoke in his ear. For a moment Overholser remained as he was, frozen in a kind of crouch, and then he sat back down. Adams stood up.

“Sounds good,
padrone,
” Adams said in his heavy accent. “Sounds brave. Yet there are still a few questions, mayhap. Haycox asked one of em. How can ranchers and farmers stand against armed killers?”

“By hiring armed killers of our own,” Callahan replied.

There was a moment of utter, amazed silence. It was almost as if the Old Fella had lapsed into another language. At last Diego Adams said—cautiously, “I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t,” the Old Fella said. “So listen and gain wisdom. Rancher Adams and all of you, listen and gain wisdom. Not six days’ ride nor’west of us, and bound southeast along the Path of the Beam, come three gunslingers and one ’prentice.” He smiled at their amazement. Then he turned to Slightman. “The ’prentice isn’t much older than your boy Ben, but he’s already as quick as a snake and as deadly as a scorpion. The others are quicker and deadlier by far. I have it from Andy, who’s seen them. You want hard calibers? They’re at hand. I set my watch and warrant on it.”

This time Overholser made it all the way to his feet. His face burned as if with a fever. His great pod of a belly trembled. “What children’s goodnight story is this?” he asked. “If there ever were such men, they passed out of existence with Gilead. And Gilead has been dust in the wind for a thousand years.”

There were no mutterings of support or dispute. No mutterings of any kind. The crowd was still frozen, caught in the reverberation of that one mythic word:
gunslingers
.

“You’re wrong,” Callahan said, “but we don’t need to fight over it. We can go and see for ourselves. A small party will do, I think. Jaffords here . . . myself . . . and what about you, Overholser? Want to come?”

“
There ain’t no gunslingers!”
Overholser roared.

Behind him, Jorge Estrada stood up. “Pere Callahan, God’s grace on you—”

“—and you, Jorge.”

“—but even if there
were
gunslingers, how could three stand against forty or sixty? And not forty or sixty normal men, but forty or sixty
Wolves
?”

“Hear him, he speaks sense!” Eben Took, the storekeeper, called out.

“And why would they fight for us?” Estrada continued. “We make it from year to year, but not much more. What could we offer them, beyond a few hot meals? And what man agrees to die for his dinner?”

“Hear him, hear him!”
Telford, Overholser, and Eisenhart cried in unison. Others stamped rhythmically up and down on the boards.

The Old Fella waited until the stomping had quit, and then said: “I have books in the rectory. Half a dozen.”

Although most of them knew this, the thought of books—all that paper—still provoked a general sigh of wonder.

“According to one of them, gunslingers were forbidden to take reward. Supposedly because they descend from the line of Arthur Eld.”

“The Eld! The Eld!” the Manni whispered, and several raised fists into the air with the first and fourth fingers pointed.
Hook em horns,
the Old Fella thought.
Go, Texas
. He managed to stifle a laugh, but not the smile that rose on his lips.

“Are ye speaking of hardcases who wander the land, doing good deeds?” Telford asked in a gently mocking voice. “Surely you’re too old for such tales, Pere.”

“Not hardcases,” Callahan said patiently, “
gunslingers
.”

“How can three men stand against the Wolves, Pere?” Tian heard himself ask.

According to Andy, one of the gunslingers was actually a woman, but Callahan saw no need to muddy the waters further (although an impish part of him wanted to, just the same). “That’s a question for their dinh, Tian. We’ll ask him. And they wouldn’t just be fighting for their suppers, you know. Not at all.”

“What else, then?” Bucky Javier asked.

Callahan thought they would want the thing that lay beneath the floorboards of his church. And that was good, because that thing had awakened. The Old Fella, who had once run from a town called Jerusalem’s Lot in another world, wanted to be rid of it. If he wasn’t rid of it soon, it would kill him.

Ka had come to Calla Bryn Sturgis. Ka like a wind.

“In time, Mr. Javier,” Callahan said. “All in good time, sai.”

Meantime, a whisper had begun in the Gathering Hall. It slipped along the benches from mouth to mouth, a breeze of hope and fear.

Gunslingers.

Gunslingers to the west, come out of Mid-World.

And it was true, God help them. Arthur Eld’s last deadly children, moving toward Calla Bryn Sturgis along the Path of the Beam. Ka like a wind.

“Time to be men,” Pere Callahan told them. Beneath the scar on his forehead, his eyes burned like lamps. Yet his tone was not without compassion. “Time to stand up, gentlemen. Time to stand and be true.”