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Dark Tower V
by Stephen King
Prologue: Calla Bryn Sturgis
Tian was blessed (although few farmers would use such a word) with three patches: River Field, where his family had grown rice since time out of mind; Roadside Field, where ka-Jaffords had grown sharproot, pumpkin, and corn for those same long years and generations; and Son of a Bitch, a thankless tract which mostly grew rocks and blisters and busted hopes. Tian wasn’t the first Jaffords determined to make something of the twenty acres behind the home place; his gran-pere, pefectly sane in all other respects, had been convinced there was gold there. Tian’s mother had been equally positive it would grow porin, a spice of great worth. Tian’s insanity was madrigal. Of course madrigal would grow in Son of a Bitch. Must grow there. He had gotten hold of a thousand seeds (and a dear penny they had cost him) which were now hidden beneath the floorboards of his bedroom. All that remained before planting next year was to break ground in Son of a Bitch. This was a chore easier spoken of than accomplished.
Tian was blessed with livestock, including three mules, but a man would be mad to try using a mule out in Son of a Bitch; the beast unlucky enough to draw such duty would likely be lying legbroke or stung to death by noon of the first day. One of Tian’s uncles had almost met this latter fate some years before. He had come running back to the home place, screaming at the top of his lungs and pursued by huge mutie wasps with stingers the size of nails.
They had found the nest (well, Andy had found it; Andy wasn’t bothered by wasps no matter how big they were) and burned it with kerosene, but there might be others. Then there were the holes. You couldn’t burn holes, could you? No. And Son of a Bitch sat on what the old folks called "loose ground." It was consequently possessed of almost as many holes as rocks, not to mention at least one cave that puffed out draughts of nasty, decay-smelling air. Who knew what boggarts might lurk down its dark throat?
As for the holes, the worst of them weren’t out where a man (or a mule) could see them. Not at all, sir. Never think so, thankee-sai. The leg-breakers were always
concealed in innocent-seeming nestles of weeds and high grass. Your mule would step in, there would come a bitter crack like a snapping branch, and then the damned thing would be lying there on the ground, teeth bared, eyes rolling, braying its agony at the sky. Until you put it out of its misery, that was, and stock was valuable in Calla Bryn Sturgis, even stock that wasn’t precisely threaded.
Tian therefore plowed with his sister in the traces. No reason not to. Tia was roont, hence good for little else. She was a big girl—the roont ones often grew to prodigious size—and she was willing, Man Jesus love her. The Old Fella had made her a Jesus-tree, what he called a crucifix, and she wore it everywhere. It swung back and forth now, thumping against her sweating skin as she pulled.
The plow was attached to her shoulders by a rawhide harness. Behind her, alternately guiding the plow by its old ironwood handles and his sister by the hame-traces, Tian grunted and yanked and pushed when the blade of the plow dropped down and verged on becoming stuck. It was the end of Full Earth but as hot as midsummer here in Son of a Bitch; Tia’s overalls were dark and damp and stuck to her long and meaty thighs. Each time Tian tossed his head to get his hair out of his eyes, sweat flew out of the mop in a spray.
"Gee, ye bitch!" he cried. "Yon rock’s a plow-breaker, are ye blind?"
Not blind; not deaf, either; just stupid. Roont. She heaved to the left, and hard. Behind her, Tian stumbled forward with a neck-snapping jerk and barked his shin on another rock, one he hadn’t seen and the plow had, for a wonder, missed. As he felt the first warm trickles of blood running down to his ankle, he wondered (and not for the first time) what madness it was that always got the Jaffordses out here. In his deepest heart he had an idea that madrigal would sow no more than the porin had before it, although you could grow devil-grass; yep, he could have bloomed all twenty acres with that shit, had he wanted. The trick was to keep it out, and it was always New Earth’s first chore. It—
The plow rocked to the right and then jerked forward, almost pulling his arms out of their sockets. "Arr!" he cried. "Go easy, girl! I can’t grow em back if you pull em out, can I?"
Tia turned her broad, sweaty, empty face up to a sky full of low-hanging clouds and honked laughter. Man Jesus, but she even sounded like a donkey. Yet it was laughter, human laughter. Tian wondered, as he sometimes couldn’t help doing, if that laughter meant anything. Did she understand some of what he was saying, or did she only respond to his tone of voice? Did any of the roont ones—
"Good day, sai," said a loud and almost completely toneless voice from behind
"Yes!" Andy said, smiling. "Andy, your friend! Back from a goodish wander and at your service. Would you like your horoscope, sai Tian? It is Full Earth. The moon is red, what is called the Huntress Moon in Mid-World that was. A friend will call! Business affairs prosper! You will have two ideas, one good and one bad—"
"The bad one was coming out here to turn this field," Tian said. "Never mind my goddam horoscope, Andy. Why are you here?"
Andy’s smile probably could not become troubled—he was a robot, after all, the last one in Calla Bryn Sturgis or for miles and wheels around—but to Tian it seemed to grow troubled, just the same. The robot looked like a young child’s stick-figure of an adult, impossibly tall and impossibly thin. His legs and arms were silvery. His head was a stainless steel barrel with electric eyes. His body, no more than a cylinder seven feet high, was gold. Stamped in the middle—what would have been a man’s chest—was this legend:
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD. IN ASSOCIATION WITH LaMERK INDUSTRIES PRESENTS
ANDY
Design: MESSENGER (Many Other Functions) Serial # DNF 34821 V 63
Why or how this silly thing had survived when all the rest of the robots were gone—gone for generations—Tian neither knew nor cared. You were apt to see him anywhere in the Calla (he would not venture beyond its borders) striding on his impossibly long silver legs, looking everywhere, occasionally clicking to himself as he stored (or perhaps purged—who knew?) information. He sang songs, passed on gossip and rumor from one end of town to the other—a tireless walker was Andy the robot—and seemed to enjoy the giving of horoscopes above all things, although there was general agreement in the village that they meant little.
He had one other function, however, and that meant much.
"Why are ye here, ye bag of bolts and beams? Answer me! Is it the Wolves? Are they coming from Thunderclap?"
Tian stood there looking up into Andy’s stupid smiling metal face, the sweat growing cold on his skin, praying with all his might that the foolish thing would say no, then offer to tell his horoscope again, or perhaps to sing "The Green Corn
A-Dayo," all twenty or thirty verses.
But all Andy said, still smiling, was: "Yes, sai."
"Christ and the Man Jesus," Tian said (he’d gotten an idea from the Old Fella that those were two names for the same thing, but had never bothered pursuing the question). "How long?"
"One moon of days before they arrive," Andy replied, still smiling.
"From full to full?"
"Yes, sai."
Thirty days, then. Thirty days to the Wolves. And there was no sense hoping Andy was wrong. No one kenned how the robot could know they were coming out of Thunderclap so far in advance of their arrival, but he did know. And he was never wrong.
"Fuck you for your bad news!" Tian cried, and was furious at the waver he heard in his own voice. "What use are you?"
"I’m sorry that the news is bad," Andy said. His guts clicked audibly, his eyes flashed a brighter blue, and he took a step backward. "Would you not like me to tell your horoscope? This is the end of Wide Earth, a time particularly propitious for finishing old business and meeting new people—"
"And fuck your false prophecy, too!!" Tian bent, picked up a clod of earth, and threw it at the robot. A pebble buried in the clod clanged off Andy’s metal hide. Tia gasped, then began to cry. Andy backed off another step, his shadow trailing out spider-long in Son of a Bitch field. But his hateful, stupid smile remained.
"What about a song? I have learned an amusing one from the Manni far north of town; it is called ‘In Time of Loss, Make God Your Boss.’ " From somewhere deep in Andy’s guts came the wavering honk of a pitch-pipe, followed by a ripple of piano keys. "It goes—"
Sweat rolling down his cheeks and sticking his itchy balls to his thighs. Tia blatting her stupid face at the sky. And this idiotic, bad-news-bearing robot getting ready to sing him some sort of Manni hymn.
"Be quiet, Andy." He spoke reasonably enough, but through clamped teeth.
"Sai," the robot agreed, then fell mercifully silent.
"Lunch at home place?" She looked at him in a muddled, hopeful way. "Taters?" A pause. "Gravy?"
"Shore," Tian said. "Why the hell not?"
Tia let out a whoop and began running toward the house. There was something almost awe-inspiring about her when she ran. As their father had once observed, not long before the brain-storm that carried him off, "Bright or dim, that’s a lot of meat in motion."
Tian walked slowly after her, head down, watching for the holes which his sister seemed to avoid without even looking, as if some strange deep part of her had mapped the location of each one. That strange new feeling kept growing and growing. He knew about anger—any farmer who’d ever lost cows to the milk-sick or watched a summer hailstorm beat his corn flat knew plenty about anger—but this was deeper. This was rage, and it was a new thing. He walked slowly, head down, fists clenched. He wasn’t aware of Andy following along behind him until the robot said, "There’s other news, sai. Northwest of town, along the path of the Beam, strangers from Out-World—"
"Bugger the Beam, bugger the strangers, and bugger your good self," Tian said. "Let me be, Andy."
Andy stood where he was for a moment, surrounded by the rocks and weeds and useless knobs of Son of a Bitch, that thankless tract of Jaffrey land. Relays inside him clicked. His eyes flashed. And he decided to go and talk to the Old Fella. The Old Fella never told him to bugger his good self. The Old Fella was always willing to hear his horoscope.
And he was always interested in strangers.
Andy started toward town and Our Lady of Serenity.
Zalia Jaffords didn’t see her husband and sister-in-law come back from Son of a Bitch; didn’t hear Tia plunging her head repeatedly into the rain-barrel outside the barn and then blowing moisture off her lips like a horse. Zalia was on the south side of the house, hanging out wash and keeping an eye on the children. She wasn’t aware that Tian was back until she saw him looking out the kitchen window at her. She was surprised to see him there at all and much more than surprised at the look of him. His face was ashy pale except for two bright blots of color high up on his cheeks and a third glaring in the center of his forehead like a brand.
She dropped the few pins she was still holding back into her clothes basket and started for the house.
"Where goin, Ma?" Heddon called, and "Where goin, Maw-Maw?" Hedda echoed.
"Never mind," she said. "Just keep a eye on your ka-babbies."
"Why-yyy?" Hedda whined. She had that whine down to a science. One of these days she would draw it out a little too long and her mother would clout her over the hills and far away.
"Because ye’re the oldest," she said.
"But—"
"Shut your mouth, Hedda Jaffords."
"We’ll watch em, Ma," Heddon said. Always agreeable was her Heddon; probably not quite so bright as his sister, but bright wasn’t everything. Far from it. "Want us to finish hanging the wash?"
"Hed-donnnn..." From his sister. That irritating whine again. But she had no time for them. She just took one glance at the others: Lyman and Lia, who were five, and Aaron, who was two. Aaron sat naked in the dirt, happily chunking two stones together. He was the rare singleton, and how the women of the village envied her on account of him! Because Aaron would always be safe. The others, however, Heddon and Hedda...Lyman and Lia...
She suddenly understood what it might mean, him back at the house in the middle of the day like this. She prayed to the gods it wasn’t so, but when she came into the kitchen and saw the way he was looking out at the kiddies, she feared it was.
"Tell me it isn’t the Wolves," she said in a dry and frantic voice. "Say it’s not."
"It is," Tian replied. "Thirty days, Andy says—moon to moon. And on that Andy’s never—"
Before he could go on, Zalia Jaffords clapped her hands to her temples and voiced a shriek. In the side yard, Hedda jumped up. In another moment she would have been running for the house, but Heddon held her back.
"They won’t take any as young as Lymon and Lia, will they?" she asked him. "Hedda or Heddon, maybe, but surely not the babbies? Not my little ones? Why, they won’t see their sixth for another half-year!"
"Bugger time out of mind, too!" Tian cried. "They’s children! Our children!"
"Would you have the Wolves burn the Calla to the ground, then? Leave us all with our throats cut? That or worse? For it’s happened in other places. You know it has."
He knew, all right. And who would put matters right, if not the men of Calla Bryn Sturgis? Certainly there were no authorities, not so much as a sheriff, either high or low, in these parts. They were on their own. Even long ago, when the Inner Baronies had glowed with light and culture, they would have seen precious little sign of that bright-life out here. These were the borderlands, and life here had always been strange. Then the Wolves had begun coming and life had grown far stranger. How long ago had it begun? How many generations? Tian didn’t know, but he thought "time out of mind" was too long. The Wolves had been raiding into the borderland villages when Gran-pere was young, certainly—Gran-pere’s own twin had been snatched as the two of them sat in the dust, playing at jacks. "Dey tuk eem cos he closah to de rud," Gran-pere had told them (many times). "Eef Ah come out of dee house firs’ da’ day, Ah be closah to de rud an dey take me, God is good!" Then he would kiss the wooden cross the Old Fella had given him, hold it skyward, and cackle.
Yet Gran-pere’s own Gran-pere had told him that in his day—which would have been five or perhaps even six generations back, if Tian’s calculations were right—that there had been no Wolves sweeping out of Thunderclap on their horrible gray horses. Once Tian had asked the old man, And did all but a few of the babbies come in twos back then? Did yer Old Fella ever say? Gran-pere had considered this long, then had shaken his head. No, he couldn’t remember that his Gran-pere had ever said about that, one way or the other.
Zalia was looking at him anxiously. "Ye’re in no mood to think of such things, I wot, after spending your morning in that rocky patch."
"My frame of mind won’t change when they come or who they’ll take," Tian said.
"Ye’ll not do something foolish, T, will you? Something foolish and all on your own?"
"No," he said.
No hesitation. He’s already begun to lay plans, she thought, and allowed herself a thin gleam of hope. Surely there was nothing Tian could do against the Wolves—nothing any of them could do—but he was far from stupid. In a farming village where most men could think no further than hoeing the next row or planting
their stiffies on Saturday night, Tian was something of an anomaly. He could write his name; he could write words which said I LOVE YOU ZALLIE (and had won her by so doing, even though she couldn’t read them there in the dirt); he could add the numbers and also call them back from big to small, which he said was even more difficult. Was it possible...?
Part of her didn’t want to complete that thought. And yet, when she turned her mother’s heart and mind to Hedda and Heddon, Lia and Lyman, part of her wanted to hope. "What, then?"
"I’m going to call a meeting at the Town Gathering Hall," he said. "I’ll send the feather. "
"Willl they come?"
"When they hear this news, every man in the Calla will turn up. We’ll talk it over. Mayhap they’ll want to fight this time. Mayhap they’ll want to fight for their babbies."
From behind them, a cracked old voice said, "Ye foolish killin."
Tian and Zalia turned, hand in hand, to look at the old man. Killin was a harsh word, but Tian judged the old man was looking at them—at him—kindly enough.
"Why d’ye say so, Gran-pere?" he asked.
"Men’d go forrad from such a meetin as ye plan on and burn down hat’ countryside, were dey in drink," the old man said. "Men sober—" He shook his head. "Ye’ll never move such."
"I think this time you might be wrong, Grand-pere," Tian said, and Zalia felt cold terror squeeze her heart. He believed it. He really did.
There would have been less grumbling if he’d given them at least one night’s notice, but Tian wouldn’t do that. One moon of days before they arrive, Andy had said, and that was all the horoscope Tian Jaffords needed. They didn’t have the luxury of even a single fallow night. And when he sent Heddon and Hedda with the feather, they did come. He’d known they would. It had been over twenty years since the Wolves last came calling to Calla Bryn Sturgis, and times had been good. If they were allowed to reap this time, the crop would be a large one.
The Calla’s Gathering Hall was an adobe at the end of the village high street,
his hands did not tremble. When he spoke, his words followed each other easily, naturally, and coherently. They might not do as he hoped they would—Gran-pere might be right about that—but he saw they were willing enough to listen. And wasn’t that the necessary first step?
"You all know who I am," he said as he stood there with his hands clasped around the reddish feather’s ancient stalk. "Tian Jaffords, son of Alan Jaffords, husband of Zalia Hoonik that was. She and I have five, two pairs and a singleton."
Low murmurs at that, most probably having to do with how lucky Tian and Zalia were, how lucky with their Aaron. Tian waited for the voices to die away.
"I’ve lived in the Calla all my life. I’ve shared your khef and you have shared mine. Now hear what I say, I beg you."
"We say thankee-sai," they murmured. It was little more than a stock response, yet Tian was encouraged.
"The Wolves are coming," he said. "I have this news from Andy. Thirty days from moon to moon and then they’re here."
More low murmurs. Tian heard dismay and outrage, but no surprise. When it came to spreading news, Andy was extremely efficient.
"Even those of us who can read and write a little have almost no paper to write on," Tian said, "so I cannot tell ye with any real certainty when last they came. There are no records, ye ken, just one mouth to another. I know I was well-breeched, so it’s longer than twenty years—"
"It’s twenty-four," said a voice in the back of the room.
"Nay, twenty-three," said a voice closer to the front, and Reuben Caverra stood up. He was a plump man with a round, cheerful face. The cheer was gone from it now, however, and it showed only distress. "They took Ruth, my sissy: hear me, I beg."
A murmur—really no more than a vocalized sigh of agreement—came from the men sitting crammed together on the benches. They could have spread out, but had chosen shoulder-to-shoulder instead. Sometimes there was comfort in discomfort, Tian reckoned.
Reuben said, "We were playing under the big pine in the front yard when they came. I made a mark on that tree each year after. Even after they brung her back, I went on with em. It’s twenty-three marks and twenty-three years." With that he sat down.
"Twenty-three or twenty-four, makes no difference," Tian said. "Those who were babbies—or kiddies—when the Wolves came last time have grown up since and had kiddies of their own. There’s a fine crop here for those bastards. A fine crop of children." He paused, giving them a chance to think of the next idea for themselves before speaking it aloud. "If we let it happen," he said at last. "If we let the Wolves take our children into Thunderclap and then send them back to us roont."
"What the hell else can we do?" cried a man sitting on one of the middle benches. "They’s not human!" At this there was a general (and miserable) mumble of agreement.
One of the Manni stood up, pulling his dark blue cloak tight against his bony shoulders. He looked around at the others with baleful eyes. They weren’t mad, those eyes, but to Tian they looked a long league from reasonable. "Hear me, I beg," he said.
"We say thankee-sai." Respectful but reserved. To see a Manni up close was a rare thing, and here were eight, all in a bunch. Tian was delighted they had come. If anything would underline the deadly seriousness of this business, the appearance of the Manni would do it.
The Gathering Hall door opened and one more man slipped inside. None of them, including Tian, noticed. They were watching the Manni.
"Hear what the Book says: When the Angel of Death passed over Aegypt, he killed the firstborn in every house where the blood of a sacrificial lamb hadn’t been daubed on the doorposts. So says the Book."
"Praise the Book," said the rest of the Manni.
"Perhaps we should do likewise," the Manni spokesman went on. His voice was calm, but a pulse beat wildly in his forehead. "Perhaps we should turn these next thirty days into a festival of joy for the wee ones, and then put them to sleep, and let their blood out upon the earth. Let the Wolves take their corpses into the West, should they desire."
"You’re insane," Benito Cash said, indignant and at the same time almost laughing. "You and all your kind. We ain’t gonna kill our babbies!"
"Would the ones that come back not be better off dead?" the Manni responded. "Great useless hulks! Scooped-out shells!"
"Aye, and what about their brothers and sisters?" asked Vaughn Eisenhart. "For the Wolves only take one out of every two, as ye very well know."
was about to respond himself when Eben Took, the storekeeper’s son, did it for him. Tian was relieved. He hoped to be silent as long as possible. When they were talked out, he’d tell them what was left.
"Are ye mad?" Eben asked. "Wolves’d come in, see us gone, and burn all to the ground—farms and ranches, crops and stores, root and branch. What would we come back to?"
"And what if they came after us?" Jorge Estrada chimed in. "Do’ee think we’d be hard to follow, for such as the Wolves? They’d burn us out as Took says, ride our backtrail, and take the kiddies anyway!"
Louder agreement. The stomp of shor’-boots on the plain pine floorboards. And a few cries of Hear him, hear him!
"Besides," Neil Faraday said, standing and holding his vast and filthy sombrero in front of him, "they never steal all our children." He spoke in a frightened let’s-be-reasonable tone that set Tian’s teeth on edge. It was this counsel he feared above all others. Its deadly-false call to reason.
One of the Manni, this one younger and beardless, uttered a sharp and contemptuous laugh. "Ah, one saved out of every two! And that make it all right, does it? God bless thee!" He might have said more, but White-Beard clamped a gnarled hand on the young man’s arm. That worthy said no more, but he didn’t lower his head submissively, either. His eyes were hot, his lips a thin white line.
"I don’t mean it’s right," Neil said. He had begun to spin his sombrero in a way that made Tian feel a little dizzy. "But we have to face the realities, don’t we? Aye. And they don’t take em all. Why my daughter, Georgina, she’s just as apt and canny—"
"Yar, and yer son George is a great empty-headed galoot," Ben Slightman said. Slightman was Eisenhart’s foreman, and he did not suffer fools lightly. "I seen him settin on the steps in front of Tooky’s when I rode downstreet. Seen him very well. Him and some others equally empty-brained."
"But—"
"I know," Slightman said. "You have a daughter who’s as apt as an ant and canny as the day is long. I give you every joy of her. I’m just pointin out, like, that if not for the Wolves, you’d mayhap have a son just as apt and canny. Nor would he eat a peck a day, winter and summer, to no good end for ye, not even a brace o’ grandbabbies."
Cries of Hear him and Say thankee as Ben Slightman sat down.
"They always leave us enough to go on with, don’t they?" asked a smallhold farmer whose place was just west of Tian’s, near the edge of the Calla. His name was Louis Haycox, and he spoke in a musing, bitter tone of voice. Below his moustache, his lips curved in a smile that didn’t have much humor in it. "We won’t kill our children," he said, looking at the Manni. "All God’s grace to ye, gentlemen, but I don’t believe even you could do so, came it right down to the killin-floor. Or not all of ye. We can’t pull up bag and baggage and go east—or in any other direction—because we leave our farms behind. They’d burn us out, all right, and come after the children just the same. They need em, gods know why.
"It always comes back to the same thing: we’re farmers, most of us. Strong when our hands are in the soil, weak when they ain’t. I got two kiddies of my own, four years old, and I love em both well. Should hate to lose either. But I’d give one to keep the other. And my farm." Murmurs of agreement met this. "What other choice do we have? I say this: it would be the world’s worst mistake to anger the Wolves. Unless, of course, we can stand against them. If t’were possible, I’d stand. But I just don’t see how it is."
Tian felt his heart shrivel with each of Haycox’s words. How much of his thunder had the man stolen? Gods and the Man Jesus!
Wayne Overholser got to his feet. He was Calla Bryn Sturgis’s most successful farmer, and had a vast sloping belly to prove it. "Hear me, I beg."
"We say thankee-sai," they murmured.
"Tell you what we’re going to do," he said, looking around. "What we always done, that’s what. Do any of you want to talk about standing against the Wolves? Are any of you that mad? With what? Spears and rocks and a few bows? Maybe four rusty old soft-calibers like that?" He jerked a thumb toward Eisenhart’s rifle.
"Don’t be making fun of my shooting-iron, son," Eisenhart said, but he was smiling ruefully.
"They’ll come and they’ll take the children," Overholser said, looking around. "Some of the children. Then they’ll leave us alone again for a generation or even longer. So it is, so it has been, and I say leave it alone."
Disapproving rumbles rose at this, but Overholser waited them out.
"Twenty-three years or twenty-four, it don’t matter," he said when they were quiet again. "Either way it’s a long time. A long time of peace. Could be you’ve
response. Tian had an idea sai Overholser was learning—and remarkably late in the game—that there was often a deep-running resentment of a village’s richest and most successful. Those less fortunate or less canny might tug their hats off when the rich folk passed in their buckboards or lowcoaches, they might send thank-you delegations when the rich folk loaned their hired hands to help with a house- or barn-raising, the well-to-do might be cheered at Year End Gathering for helping to buy the piano that now sat in the pavillion’s musica. Yet the men of the Calla tromped their shor’-boots to drown Overholser out with a certain savage satisfaction. Even those who undoubtedly supported what he’d said (Neil Faraday, for one) were tromping hard enough to break a sweat.
Overholser, unused to being balked in such a way—flabbergasted, in fact—tried one more time. "I’d have the feather, do ye, I beg!"
"No," Tian said. "In your time, but not now."
There were actual cheers at this, mostly from the smallest of the smallhold farmers and some of their hands. The Manni did not join in. They were now drawn so tightly together that they looked like a dark blue inkstain in the middle of the hall. They were clearly bewildered by this turn. Vaughn Eisenhart and Diego Adams, meanwhile, moved to flank Overholser and speak low to him.
You’ve got a chance, Tian thought. Better make the most of it.
He raised the feather and they quieted.
"Everyone will have a chance to speak," he said. "As for me, I say this: we can’t go on this way, simply bowing our necks and standing quiet when the Wolves come and take our children. They—"
"They always return them," a hand named Farren Posella said timidly.
"They return husks!" Tian cried, and there were a few cries of Hear him. Not enough, however, Tian judged. Not enough by far. Not yet. The bulk of his work was yet to do.
He lowered his voice again—he did not want to harangue them. Overholser had tried that and gotten nowhere, a thousand acres or not.
"They return husks. And what of us? What is this doing to us? Some might say nothing, that the Wolves have always been a part of our life in Calla Bryn Sturgis, like the occasional cyclone or earthshake. Yet that is not true. They’ve been coming for six generations, at most. But the Calla’s been here a thousand years and more."
The old Manni with the bony shoulders and baleful eyes half-rose. "He says true, folken. There were farmers here—and Manni-folk among em—when the darkness in Thunderclap hadn’t yet come, let alone the Wolves."
They received this with looks of wonder. Their awe seemed to satisfy the old man, who nodded and sat back down.
"So the Wolves are almost a new thing," Tian said. "Six times have they come over mayhap a hundred and twenty or a hundred and forty years. Who can say? For as ye ken, time has softened, somehow."
A low rumble. A few nods.
"In any case, once a generation," Tian went on. He was aware that a hostile contingent was coalescing around Overholser, Eisenhart, and Adams. These men he would not move even if he were gifted with the tongue of an angel. Well, he could do without them, maybe. If he caught the rest. "Once a generation they come, and how many children do they take? Twelve? Eighteen? Maybe as many as thirty?
"Sai Overholser may not have babbies this time, but I do—not one set of twins but two. Heddon and Hedda, Lyman and Lia. I love all four, but in a month of days, two of them will be taken away. And when those two come back, they’ll be roont. Whatever spark there is that makes a complete human being, it’ll be out forever."
Hear him, hear him swept through the room like a sigh.
"How many of you have twins with no hair except that which grows on their heads?" Tian demanded. "Raise yer hands!"
Six men raised their hands. Then eight. A dozen. Every time Tian began to think they were done, another reluctant hand went up. In the end, he counted twenty-two hands. He could see that Overholser was dismayed by such a large count. Diego Adams had his hand raised, and Tian was pleased to see he’d moved away a little bit from Overholser and Eisenhart. Three of the Manni had their hands up. Jorge Estrada. Louis Haycox. Many others he knew, which was not surprising, really; he knew these men. Probably all of them except for a few wandering fellows working smallhold farms for short wages and hot dinners.
"Each time they come and take our children, they take a little more of of our hearts and our souls," Tian said.
"Oh come on, now, son," Eisenhart said. "That’s laying it on a bit th—"
