shortage of tack for human beings in most livery barns) and turned toward the home place. "And not farmers,
in any case. Show me a farmer who can afford a jilly and I'll kiss your shiny ass. Garn, Tia. Lift em up and
put em down."
"Home place?" she asked.
"That's right."
"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 fall 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 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 that—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 Jaffords 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.
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. Gran-pere 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 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 im cos he closer to de rud," Gran-pere 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 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—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? Gran-pere 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 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 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, Grand-pere," Tian said, and Zalia felt cold terror squeeze her heart.
And yet buried in it, warm, was that hope.
THREE
There would have been less grumbling it he'd given them at least one night's notice, but Tian wouldn't do
that. 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.
The Calla's Gathering Hall stood at the end of the village high street, beyond Took's General Store and eater-
corner from the town Pavilion, which was now dusty and dark with the end of summer. Soon enough the
ladies of the town would begin decorating it for Reap, but they'd never made a lot of Reaping Night in the
Calla. The children always enjoyed seeing the stuffy-guys thrown on the fire, of course, and the bolder
fellows would steal their share of kisses as the night itself approached, but that was about it. Your fripperies
and festivals might do for Mid-World and In-World, but this was neither. Out here they had more serious
things to worry about than Reaping Day Fairs.
Things like the Wolves.
Some of the men—from the well-to-do farms to the west and the three ranches to the south—came on horses.
Eisenhart of the Rocking B even brought his rifle and wore crisscrossed ammunition bandoliers. (Tian
Jaffords doubted if the bullets were any good, or that the ancient rifle would fire even if some of them were.)
A delegation of the Manni-folk came crammed into a bucka drawn by a pair of mutie geldings—one with
three eyes, the other with a pylon of raw pink flesh poking out of its back. Most of the Calla men came on
donks and burros, dressed in their white pants and long, colorful shirts. They knocked their dusty sombreros
back on the tugstrings with callused thumbs as they stepped into the Gathering Hall, looking uneasily at each
other. The benches were of plain pine. With no womenfolk and none of the roont ones, the men filled fewer
than thirty of the ninety benches. There was some talk, but no laughter at all.
Tian stood out front with the feather now in his hands, watching the sun as it sank toward the horizon, its
gold steadily deepening to a color that was like infected blood. When it touched the land, he took one more
look up the high street. It was empty except for three or four roont fellas sitting on the steps of Took's. All of
them huge and good for nothing more than yanking rocks out of the ground. He saw no more men, no more
approaching donkeys. He took a deep breath, let it out, then drew in another and looked up at the deepening
sky.
"Man Jesus, I don't believe in you," he said. "But if you're there, help me now. Tell God thankee."
Then he went inside and closed the Gathering Hall doors a little harder than was stricty necessary. The talk
stopped. A hundred and forty men, most of them farmers, watched him walk to the front of the hall, the wide
legs of his white pants swishing, his shor'boots clacking on the hardwood floor. He had expected to be
terrified by this point, perhaps even to find himself speechless. He was a farmer, not a stage performer or a
