Wolves of the Calla

by Stephen King

  " 'Tis a fine tale," she said.

  "It is," Roland said. "I'll not fence, lady-sai. Will'ee come out on the line with your dish when the time comes?"

  Tian's eyes widened. He opened his mouth, then shut it again. He looked at his wife like a man who has suddenly been visited by a great revelation.

  "Aye," Zalia said.

  Tian dropped the harness and hugged her. She hugged him back, briefly and hard, then turned to Roland and his friends once more.

  Roland was smiling. Eddie was visited by a faint sense of unreality, as he always was when he observed this phenomenon. "Good. And will you show Susannah how to throw it?"

  Zalia looked thoughtfully at Susannah. "Would she learn?"

  "I don't know," Susannah said. "Is it something I'm supposed to learn, Roland?"

  "Yes."

  "When, gunslinger?" Zalia asked.

  Roland calculated. "Three or four days from now, if all goes well. If she shows no aptitude, send her back to me and we'll try Jake."

  Jake started visibly.

  "I think she'll do fine, though. I never knew a gunslinger who didn't take to new weapons like birds to a new pond. And I must have at least one who can either throw the dish or shoot the bah, for we are four with only three guns we can rely on. And I like the dish. I like it very well."

  "I'll show what I can, sure," Zalia said, and gave Susannah a shy look.

  "Then, in nine days' time, you and Margaret and Rosalita and Sarey Adams will come to the Old Fella's house and we'll see what we'll see."

  "You have a plan?" Tian asked. His eyes were hot with hope.

  "I will by then," Roland said.

  FOUR

  They rode toward town four abreast at that same ambling gait, but where the East Road crossed another, this one going north and south, Roland pulled up. "Here I leave you for a little while," he told them. He pointed north, toward the hills. "Two hours from here is what some of the Seeking Folk call Manni Calla and others call Manni Redpath. It's their place by either name, a little town within the larger one. I'll meet with Henchick there."

  "Their dinh," Eddie said.

  Roland nodded. "Beyond the Manni village, another hour or less, are a few played-out mines and a lot of caves."

  "The place you pointed out on the Tavery twins' map?" Susannah asked.

  "No, but close by. The cave I'm interested in is the one they call Doorway Cave. We'll hear of it from Callahan tonight when he finishes his story."

  "Do you know that for a fact, or is it intuition?" Susannah asked.

  "I know it from Henchick. He spoke of it last night. He also spoke of the Pere. I could tell you, but it's best we hear it from Callahan himself, I think. In any case, that cave will be important to us."

  "It's the way back, isn't it?" Jake said. "You think it's the way back to New York."

  "More," the gunslinger said. "With Black Thirteen, I think it might be the way to everywhere and everywhen."

  "Including the Dark Tower?" Eddie asked. His voice was husky, barely more than a whisper.

  "I can't say," Roland replied, "but I believe Henchick will show me the cave, and I may know more then. Meanwhile, you three have business in Took's, the general store."

  "Do we?" Jake asked.

  "You do." Roland balanced his purse on his lap, opened it, and dug deep. At last he came out with a leather drawstring bag none of them had seen before.

  "My father gave me this," he said absently. "It's the only thing I have now, other than the ruins of my younger face, that I had when I rode into Mejis with my ka-mates all those years ago."

  They looked at it with awe, sharing the same thought: if what the gunslinger said was true, the little leather bag had to be hundreds of years old. Roland opened it, looked in, nodded. "Susannah, hold out your hands."

  She did. Into her cupped palms he poured perhaps ten pieces of silver, emptying the bag.

  "Eddie, hold out yours."

  "Uh, Roland, I think the cupboard's bare."

  "Hold out your hands."

  Eddie shrugged and did so. Roland tipped the bag over them and poured out a dozen gold pieces, emptying the bag.

  "Jake?"

  Jake held out his hands. From the pocket in the front of the poncho, Oy looked on with interest. This time the bag disgorged half a dozen bright gemstones before it was empty. Susannah gasped.

  "They're but garnets," Roland said, almost apologetically. "A fair medium of exchange out here, from what they say. They won't buy much, but they will buy a boy's needs, I think."

  "Cool!" Jake was grinning broadly. "Say thankya! Big-big!"

  They looked at the empty sack with silent wonder, and Roland smiled. "Most of the magic I once knew or had access to is gone, but you see a little lingers. Like soaked leaves in the bottom of a teapot."

  "Is there even more stuff inside?" Jake asked.

  "No. In time, there might be. It's a grow-bag." Roland returned the ancient leather sack to his purse, came out with the fresh supply of tobacco Callahan had given him, and rolled a smoke. "Go in the store. Buy what you fancy. A few shirts, perhaps--and one for me, if it does ya; I could use one. Then you'll go out on the porch and take your ease, as town folk do. Sai Took won't care much for it, there's nothing he'd like to see so well as our backs going east toward Thunderclap, but he'll not shoo you off."

  "Like to see him try," Eddie grunted, and touched the butt of Roland's gun.

  "You won't need that," Roland said. "Custom alone will keep him behind his counter, minding his till. That, and the temper of the town."

  "It's going our way, isn't it?" Susannah said.

  "Yes, Susannah. If you asked them straight on, as I asked sai Jaffords, they'd not answer, so it's best not to ask, not yet. But yes. They mean to fight. Or to let us fight for them. Which can't be held against them. Fighting for those who can't fight for themselves is our job."

  Eddie opened his mouth to tell Roland what Granpere had told him, then closed it again. Roland hadn't asked him, although that had been the reason he had sent them to the Jaffordses'. Nor, he realized, had Susannah asked him. She hadn't mentioned his conversation with old Jamie at all.

  "Will you ask Henchick what you asked Mrs. Jaffords?" Jake asked.

  "Yes," Roland said. "Him I'll ask."

  "Because you know what he'll say."

  Roland nodded and smiled again. This was not a smile that held any comfort; it was as cold as sunlight on snow. "A gunslinger never asks that question until he knows what the answer will be," he said. "We meet at the Pere's house for the evening meal. If all goes well, I'll be there just when the sun comes a-horizon. Are you all well? Eddie? Jake?" A slight pause. "Susannah?"

  They all nodded. Oy nodded, too.

  "Then until evening. Do ya fine, and may the sun never fall in your eyes."

  He gigged his horse and turned off on the neglected little road leading north. They watched him go until he was out of sight, and as always when he was gone and they were on their own, the three of them shared a complex feeling that was part fear, part loneliness, and part nervous pride.

  They rode on toward town with their horses a little closer together.

  FIVE

  "Nayyup, nayyup, don'tchee bring that dairty bumble-beast in 'ere, don'tchee never!" Eben Took cried from his place behind the counter. He had a high, almost womanish voice; it scratched the dozy quiet of the mercantile like splinters of glass. He was pointing at Oy, who was peering from the front pocket of Jake's poncho. A dozen desultory shoppers, most of them women dressed in homespun, turned to look.

  Two farm workers, dressed in plain brown shirts, dirty white pants, and zoris, had been standing at the counter. They backed away in a hurry, as if expecting the two outworlders carrying guns to immediately slap leather and blow sai Took all the way to Calla Boot Hill.

  "Yessir," Jake said mildly. "Sorry." He lifted Oy from the pocket of the poncho and set him down on the sunny porch, just outside the door. "Stay, boy."

  "Oy s
tay," the bumbler said, and curled his clockspring of a tail around his haunches.

  Jake rejoined his friends and they made their way into the store. To Susannah, it smelled like ones she'd been in during her time in Mississippi: a mingled aroma of salted meat, leather, spice, coffee, mothballs, and aged cozenry. Beside the counter was a large wooden barrel with the top slid partway aside and a pair of tongs hanging on a nail nearby. From the keg came the strong and tearful smell of pickles in brine.

  "No credit!" Took cried in that same shrill, annoying voice. "Ah en't ever give credit to no one from away and Ah never will! Say true! Say thankya!"

  Susannah grasped Eddie's hand and gave it a warning squeeze. Eddie shook it off impatiently, but when he spoke, his voice was as mild as Jake's had been. "Say thankya, sai Took, we'd not ask it." And recalled something he'd heard from Pere Callahan: "Never in life."

  There was a murmur of approval from some of those in the store. None of them was any longer making even the slightest pretense of shopping. Took flushed. Susannah took Eddie's hand again and this time gave him a smile to go with the squeeze.

  At first they shopped in silence, but before they finished, several people--all of whom had been at the Pavilion two nights before--said hello and asked (timidly) how they did. All three said they did fine. They got shirts, including two for Roland, denim pants, underwear singlets, and three sets of shor'boots which looked ugly but serviceable. Jake got a bag of candy, picking it out by pointing while Took put it in a bag of woven grass with grudging and disagreeable slowness. When he tried to buy a sack of tobacco and some rolling papers for Roland, Took refused him with all too evident pleasure. "Nayyup, nayyup, Ah'll not sell smokeweed to a boy. Never have done."

  "Good idea, too," Eddie said. "One step below devil grass, and the Surgeon General says thankya. But you'll sell it to me, won't you, sai? Our dinh enjoys a smoke in the evening, while he's planning out new ways to help folks in need."

  There were a few titters at this. The store had begun to fill up quite amazingly. They were playing to a real audience now, and Eddie didn't mind a bit. Took was coming off as a shithead, which wasn't surprising. Took clearly was a shithead.

  "Never seen no one dance a better commala than he did!" a man called from one of the aisles, and there were murmurs of assent.

  "Say thankya," Eddie said. "I'll pass it on."

  "And your lady sings well," said another.

  Susannah dropped a skirtless curtsy. She finished her own shopping by pushing the lid a little further off the pickle barrel and dipping out an enormous specimen with the tongs. Eddie leaned close and said, "I might have gotten something that green from my nose once, but I can't really remember."

  "Don't be grotesque, dear one," Susannah replied, smiling sweetly all the while.

  Eddie and Jake were content to let her assume responsibility for the dickering, which Susannah did with relish. Took tried his very best to overcharge her for their gunna, but Eddie had an idea this wasn't aimed at them specifically but was just part of what Eben Took saw as his job (or perhaps his sacred calling). Certainly he was smart enough to gauge the temperature of his clientele, for he had pretty much laid off nagging them by the time the trading was finished. This did not keep him from ringing their coins on a special square of metal which seemed reserved for that sole purpose, and holding Jake's garnets up to the light and rejecting one of them (which looked like all the others, so far as Eddie, Jake, and Susannah could see).

  "How long'll 'ee be here, folks?" he asked in a marginally cordial voice when the dickering was done. Yet his eyes were shrewd, and Eddie had no doubt that whatever they said would reach the ears of Eisenhart, Overholser, and anyone else who mattered before the day was done.

  "Ah, well, that depends on what we see," Eddie said. "And what we see depends on what folks show us, wouldn't you say?"

  "Aye," Took agreed, but he looked mystified. There were now perhaps fifty people in the roomy mercantile-and-grocery, most of them simply gawking. There was a powdery sort of excitement in the air. Eddie liked it. He didn't know if that was right or wrong, but yes, he liked it very well.

  "Also depends on what folks want," Susannah amplified.

  "Ah'll tell you what they 'unt, brownie!" Took said in his shrill shards-of-glass voice. "They 'unt peace, same as ever! They 'unt t'town t'still be here arter you four--"

  Susannah seized the man's thumb and bent it back. It was dextrously done. Jake doubted if more than two or three folken, those closest to the counter, saw it, but Took's face went a dirty white and his eyes bulged from their sockets.

  "I'll take that word from an old man who's lost most of his sense," she said, "but I won't take it from you. Call me brownie again, fatso, and I'll pull your tongue out of your head and wipe your ass with it."

  "Cry pardon!" Took gasped. Now sweat broke on his cheeks in large and rather disgusting drops. "Cry'er pardon, so Ah do!"

  "Fine," Susannah said, and let him go. "Now we might just go out and sit on your porch for a bit, for shopping's tiring work."

  SIX

  Took's General Store featured no Guardians of the Beam such as Roland had told of in Mejis, but rockers were lined up the long length of the porch, as many as two dozen of them. And all three sets of steps were flanked by stuffy-guys in honor of the season. When Roland's ka-mates came out, they took three rockers in the middle of the porch. Oy lay down contentedly between Jake's feet and appeared to go to sleep with his nose on his paws.

  Eddie cocked a thumb back over his shoulder in Eben Took's general direction. "Too bad Detta Walker wasn't here to shoplift a few things from the son of a bitch."

  "Don't think I wasn't tempted on her behalf," Susannah said.

  "Folks coming," Jake said. "I think they want to talk to us."

  "Sure they do," Eddie said. "It's what we're here for." He smiled, his handsome face growing handsomer still. Under his breath he said, "Meet the gunslingers, folks. Come-come-commala, shootin's gonna folla."

  "Hesh up that bad mouth of yours, son," Susannah said, but she was laughing.

  They're crazy, Jake thought. But if he was the exception, why was he laughing, too?

  SEVEN

  Henchick of the Manni and Roland of Gilead nooned in the shadow of a massive rock outcrop, eating cold chicken and rice wrapped in tortillas and drinking sof' cider from a jug which they passed back and forth between them. Henchick set them on with a word to what he called both The Force and The Over, then fell silent. That was fine with Roland. The old man had answered aye to the one question the gunslinger had needed to ask.

  By the time they'd finished their meal, the sun had gone behind the high cliffs and escarpments. Thus they walked in shadow, making their way up a path that was strewn with rubble and far too narrow for their horses, which had been left in a grove of yellow-leaf quaking aspen below. Scores of tiny lizards ran before them, sometimes darting into cracks in the rocks.

  Shady or not, it was hotter than the hinges of hell out here. After a mile of steady climbing, Roland began to breathe hard and use his bandanna to wipe the sweat from his cheeks and throat. Henchick, who appeared to be somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty, walked ahead of him with steady serenity. He breathed with the ease of a man strolling in a park. He'd left his cloak below, laid over the branch of a tree, but Roland could see no patches of sweat spreading on his black shirt.

  They reached a bend in the path, and for a moment the world to the north and west opened out below them in gauzy splendor. Roland could see the huge taupe rectangles of graze-land, and tiny toy cattle. To the south and east, the fields grew greener as they marched toward the river lowlands. He could see the Calla village, and even--in the dreaming western distance--the edge of great forest through which they had come to get here. The breeze that struck them on this stretch of the path was so cold it made Roland gasp. Yet he raised his face into it gratefully, eyes mostly closed, smelling all the things that were the Calla: steers, horses, grain, river water, and rice ri
ce rice.

  Henchick had doffed his broad-brimmed, flat-crowned hat and also stood with his head raised and his eyes mostly closed, a study in silent thanksgiving. The wind blew back his long hair and playfully divided his waist-length beard into forks. They stood so for perhaps three minutes, letting the breeze cool them. Then Henchick clapped his hat back on his head. He looked at Roland. "Do'ee say the world will end in fire or in ice, gunslinger?"

  Roland considered this. "Neither," he said at last. "I think in darkness."

  "Do'ee say so?"

  "Aye."

  Henchick considered a moment, then turned to continue on up the path. Roland was impatient to get to where they were going, but he touched the Manni's shoulder, nevertheless. A promise was a promise. Especially one made to a lady.

  "I stayed with one of the forgetful last night," Roland said. "Isn't that what you call those who choose to leave thy ka-tet?"

  "We speak of the forgetful, aye," Henchick said, watching him closely, "but not of ka-tet. We know that word, but it is not our word, gunslinger."

  "In any case, I--"

  "In any case, thee slept at the Rocking B with Vaughn Eisenhart and our daughter, Margaret. And she threw the dish for'ee. I didn't speak of these things when we talked last night, for I knew them as well as you did. Any ro', we had other matters to discuss, did we not? Caves, and such."

  "We did." Roland tried not to show his surprise. He must have failed, because Henchick nodded slightly, the lips just visible within his beard curving in a slight smile.

  "The Manni have ways of knowing, gunslinger; always have."

  "Will you not call me Roland?"

  "Nay."

  "She said to tell thee that Margaret of the Redpath Clan does fine with her heathen man, fine still."

  Henchick nodded. If he felt pain at this, it didn't show. Not even in his eyes. "She's damned," he said. His tone was that of a man saying Looks like it might come off sunny by afternoon.

  "Are you asking me to tell her that?" Roland asked. He was amused and aghast at the same time.

  Henchick's blue eyes had faded and grown watery with age, but there was no mistaking the surprise that came into them at this question. His bushy eyebrows went up. "Why would I bother?" he asked. "She knows. She'll have time to repent her heathen man at leisure in the depths of Na'ar. She knows that, too. Come, gunslinger. Another quarter-wheel and we're there. But it's upsy."