Wolves of the Calla

The bottle shattered on the stone floor. Things ran in squeaking surprise beneath the table.

'Yeah, you bettahrun!' she screamed. 'Get ye gone, whatever y'are! Here's Mia, daughter of none, and not in a good mood! Yet I will be fed! Yes! Yes I will!'

This was bold talk, but at first she saw nothing on the table that she could eat. There was bread, but the one piece she bothered to pick up had turned to stone. There was what appeared to be the remains of a fish, but it had putrefied and lay in a greenish-white simmer of maggots.

Her stomach growled, undeterred by this mess. Worse, something below her stomach turned restlessly, and kicked, and cried out to be fed. It did this not with its voice but by turning certain switches inside her, back in the most primitive sections of her nervous system. Her throat grew dry; her mouth puckered as if she had drunk the turned wine; her vision sharpened as her eyes widened and bulged outward in their sockets. Every thought, every sense, and every instinct tuned to the same simple idea: food.

Beyond the far end of the table was a screen showing Arthur Eld, sword held high, riding through a swamp with three of his knight-gunslingers behind him. Around his neck was Saita, the great snake, which presumably he had just slain. Another successful quest! Do ya fine! Men and their quests! Bah! What was slaying a magical snake to her? She had a chap in her belly, and the chap was hungry.

Hongry, she thought in a voice that wasn't her own. It's be hongry.

Behind the screen were double doors. She shoved through them, still unaware of the boy Jake standing at the far end of the dining hall in his underwear, looking at her, afraid.

The kitchen was likewise empty, likewise dusty. The counters were tattooed with critter-tracks. Pots and pans and cooking-racks were jumbled across the floor. Beyond this litter were four sinks, one filled with stagnant water that had grown a scum of algae. The room was lit by fluorescent tubes. Only a few still glowed steadily. Most of them flickered on and off, giving these shambles a surreal and nightmarish aspect.

She worked her way across the kitchen, kicking aside the pots and pans that were in her way. Here stood four huge ovens all a-row. The door of the third was ajar. From it came a faint shimmer of heat, as one might feel coming from a hearth six or eight hours after the last embers have burned out, and a smell that set her stomach clamoring all over again. It was the smell of freshly roasted meat.

Mia opened the door. Inside was indeed some sort of roast. Feeding on it was a rat the size of a tomcat. It turned its head at the clunk of the opening oven door and looked at her with black, fearless eyes. Its whiskers, bleary with grease, twitched. Then it turned back to the roast. She could hear the muttering smack of its lips and the sound of tearing flesh.

Nay, Mr. Rat. It wasn't left for you. It was left for me and my chap.

'One chance, my friend!' she sang as she turned toward the counters and storage cabinets beneath them. 'Better go while you can! Fair warning!' Not that it would. Mr. Rat be hongry, too.

She opened a drawer and found nothing but breadboards and a rolling pin. She considered the rolling pin briefly, but had no wish to baste her dinner with more rat-blood than she absolutely had to. She opened the cabinet beneath and found tins for muffins and molds for fancy desserts. She moved to her left, opened another drawer, and here was what she was looking for.

Mia considered the knives, took one of the meat-forks instead. It had two six-inch steel tines. She took it back to the row of ovens, hesitated, and checked the other three. They were empty, as she had known they would be. Something-some fate some providence some ka-had left fresh meat, but only enough for one. Mr. Rat thought it was his. Mr. Rat had made a mistake. She did not think he would make another. Not this side of the clearing, anyway.

She bent and once again the smell of freshly cooked pork filled her nose. Her lips spread and drool ran from the corners of her smile. This time Mr. Rat didn't look around. Mr. Rat had decided she was no threat. That was all right. She bent further forward, drew a breath, and impaled it on the meat-fork. Rat-kebab! She drew it out and held it up in front of her face. It squealed furiously, its legs spinning in the air, its head lashing back and forth, blood running down the meat-fork's handle to pool around her fist. She carried it, still writhing, to the sinkful of stagnant water and flipped it off the fork. It splashed into the murk and disappeared. For a moment the tip of its twitching tale stuck up, and then that was gone, too.

She went down the line of sinks, trying the faucets, and from the last one got a feeble trickle of water. She rinsed her bloody hand under it until the trickle subsided. Then she walked back to the oven, wiping her hand dry on the seat of her britches. She did not see Jake, now standing just inside the kitchen doors and watching her, although he made no attempt to hide; she was totally fixated on the smell of the meat. It wasn't enough, and not precisely what her chap needed, but it would do for the time being.

She reached in, grasped the sides of the roasting pan, then pulled back with a gasp, shaking her fingers and grinning. It was a grin of pain, yet not entirely devoid of humor. Mr. Rat had either been a trifle more immune to the heat than she was, or maybe hongrier. Although it was hard to believe anyone or anything could be hongrier than she was right now.

'I'se hongry!' she yelled, laughing, as she went down the line of drawers, opening and closing them swiftly. 'Mia's one hongry lady, yessir! Didn't go to Morehouse, didn't go to no house, but I'se hongryl And my chap's hongry, too!'

In the last drawer (wasn't that always the way), she found the hotpads she'd been looking for. She hurried back to the oven with them in her hands, bent down, and pulled the roast out. Her laughter died in a sudden shocked gasp… and then burst out again, louder and stronger than ever. What a goose she was! What a damned silly-billy! For one instant she'd thought the roast, which had been done to a skin-crackling turn and only gnawed by Mr. Rat in one place, was the body of a child. And yes, she supposed that a roasted pig did look a little bit like a child… a baby… someone's chap… but now that it was out and she could see the closed eyes and the charred ears and the baked apple in the open mouth, there was no question about what it was.

As she set it on the counter, she thought again about the reflection she'd seen in the foyer. But never mind that now. Her gut was a roar of famishment. She plucked a butcher's knife out of the drawer from which she had taken the meat-fork and cut off the place where Mr. Rat had been eating the way you'd cut a wormhole out of an apple. She tossed this piece back over her shoulder, then picked up the roast entire and buried her face in it.

From the door, Jake watched her.

When the keenest edge had been taken off her hunger, Mia looked around the kitchen with an expression that wavered between calculation and despair. What was she supposed to do when the roast was gone? What was she supposed to eat the next time this sort of hunger came? And where was she supposed to find what her chap really wanted, really needed? She'd do anything to locate that stuff and secure a good supply of it, that special food or drink or vitamin or whatever it was. The pork was close (close enough to put him to sleep again, thank all the gods and the Man Jesus), but not close enough.

She banged sai Piggy back into the roasting pan for the nonce, pulled the shirt she was wearing off over her head, and turned it so she could look at the front. There was a cartoon pig, roasted bright red but seeming not to mind; it was smiling blissfully. Above it, in rustic letters made to look like barn-board, was this: THE DIXIE PIG, LEX AND 61st. Below it:

'BEST RIBS IN NEW YORK'-GOURMET MAGAZINE.

The Dixie Pig, she thought. The Dixie Pig. Where have I heard that before'?

She didn't know, but she believed she could find Lex if she had to. 'It be right there between Third and Park,' she said. 'That's right, ain't it?'

The boy, who had slipped back out but left the door ajar, heard this and nodded miserably. That was where it was, all right.

Well-a-well, Mia thought. It all does fine for now, good as it can do, anyway, and like that woman in the book said, tomorrow's another day. Worry about it then. Right?

Right. She picked up the roast again and began to eat. The smacking sounds she made were really not much different from those made by the rat. Really not much different at all.

TWO

Tian and Zalia had tried to give Eddie and Susannah their bedroom. Convincing them that their guests really didn't want their bedroom-that sleeping there would actually make them uncomfortable-hadn't been easy. It was Susannah who finally turned the trick, telling the Jaffordses in a hesitant, confiding voice that something awful had happened to them in the city of Lud, something so traumatic that neither of them could sleep easily in a house anymore. A barn, where you could see the door open to the outside world any time you wanted to take a look, was much better.

It was a good tale, and well told. Tian and Zalia listened with a sympathetic credulity that made Eddie feel guilty. A lot of bad things had happened to them in Lud, that much was true, but nothing which made either of them nervous about sleeping indoors. At least he guessed not; since leaving their own world, the two of them had only spent a single night (the previous) under the actual roof of an actual house.

Now he sat cross-legged on one of the blankets Zalia had given them to spread on the hay, the other two cast aside. He was looking out into the yard, past the porch where Gran-pere had told his tale, and toward the river. The moon flitted in and out of the clouds, first brightening the scene to silver, then darkening it. Eddie hardly saw what he was looking at. His ears were trained on the floor of the barn below him, where the stalls and pens were. She was down there somewhere, he was sure she was, but God, she was so quiet.

And by the way, who is she? Mia, Roland says, but that's just a name. Who is she really?

But it wasn't just a name. It means mother in the High Speech, the gunslinger had said.

It means mother.

Yeah. But she's not the mother of my kid. The chap is not my son.

A soft clunk from below him, followed by the creak of a board. Eddie stiffened. She was down there, all right. He'd begun to have his doubts, but she was.

He had awakened after perhaps six hours of deep and dreamless sleep to discover she was gone. He went to the barn's bay door, which they'd left open, and looked out. There she was. Even by moonlight he'd known that wasn't really Susannah down there in the wheelchair; not his Suze, not Odetta Holmes or Detta Walker, either. Yet she wasn't entirely unfamiliar. She-

You saw her in New York, only then she had legs and she knew how to use them. She had legs and she didn't want to go too close to