Wolves of the Calla

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-four , Roland thought. Twenty-four days until the Wolves .

It would have to be enough.

Chapter VI: Gran-pere's Tale

ONE

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 violendy 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. ;