TWO
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 by 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, Maw?” 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 right down dead.
“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 Zalia 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 became almost sure it was.
“Tell me it isn’t the Wolves,” she said in a dry and frantic voice. “Say it ain’t.”
“ ’Tis,” 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 shrieked. 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 Lyman and Lia, will they?” she asked him. “Hedda or Heddon, maybe, but surely not my little ones? Why, they won’t see their sixth for another half-year!”
“The Wolves have taken em as young as three, and you know it,” Tian said. His hands opened and closed, opened and closed. That feeling inside him continued to grow—the feeling that was deeper than mere anger.
She looked at him, tears spilling down her face.
“Mayhap it’s time to say no.” Tian spoke in a voice he hardly recognized as his own.
“How can we?” she whispered. “How in the name of the gods can we?”
“Dunno,” he said. “But come here, woman, I beg ya.”
She came, throwing one last glance over her shoulder at the five children in the back yard—as if to make sure they were still all there, that no Wolves had taken them yet—and then crossed the living room. Granpere sat in his corner chair by the dead fire, head bent over, dozing and drizzling from his folded, toothless mouth.
From this room the barn was visible. Tian drew his wife to the window and pointed. “There,” he said. “Do you mark em, woman? Do you see em very well?”
Of course she did. Tian’s sister, six and a half feet tall, now standing with the straps of her overalls lowered and her big breasts sparkling with water as she splashed them from the rain barrel. Standing in the barn doorway was Zalman, Zalia’s very own brother. Almost seven feet tall was he, big as Lord Perth, tall as Andy, and as empty of face as the girl. A strapping young man watching a strapping young woman with her breasts out on show like that might well have been sporting a bulge in his pants, but there was none in Zally’s. Nor ever would be. He was roont.
She turned back to Tian. They looked at each other, a man and a woman not roont, but only because of dumb luck. So far as either of them knew, it could just as easily have been Zal and Tia standing in here and watching Tian and Zalia out by the barn, grown large of body and empty of head.
“Of course I see,” she told him. “Does thee think I’m blind?”
“Don’t it sometimes make you wish you was?” he asked. “To see em so?”
Zalia made no reply.
“Not right, woman. Not right. Never has been.”
“But since time out of mind—”
“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 and our eyes fried in our heads? For it’s happened before. You know it has.”
He knew, all right. But 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 order, 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 Granpere was young, certainly—Granpere’s own twin had been snatched as the two of them sat in the dust, playing at jacks. “Dey tuk im cos he closer to de rud,” Granpere had told them (many times). “If Ah come out of dee house firs’ dat day, Ah be closer to de rud an dey take me, God is good!” Then he would kiss the wooden crucie the Old Fella had given him, hold it skyward, and cackle.
Yet Granpere’s own Granpere had told him that in his day—which would have been five or perhaps even six generations back, if Tian’s calculations were right—there had been no Wolves sweeping out of Thunderclap on their gray horses. Once Tian had asked the old man, And did all but a few of the babbies come in twos back then? Did any of the old folks ever say? Granpere had considered this long, then had shaken his head. No, he couldn’t remember what the old-timers 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 planting 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 that 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 Town Gathering. I’ll send the feather.”
“Will 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, Granpere?” he asked.
“Men’d go forrad from such a meetin as ye plan on and burn down half the 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, Granpere,” Tian said, and Zalia felt cold terror squeeze her heart. And yet buried in it, warm, was that hope.