“Kinda hard on him, weren’t you?” Eddie asked.
“He’s but a piece of machinery,” Overholser said, breaking the last word into syllables, as if speaking to a child.
“And he can be annoying,” Tian said. “But tell me, sais, what do you think of our Calla?”
Roland eased his horse in between Eddie’s and Callahan’s. “It’s very beautiful,” he said. “Whatever the gods may be, they have favored this place. I see corn, sharproot, beans, and… potatoes? Are those potatoes?”
“Aye, spuds, do ya,” Slightman said, clearly pleased by Roland’s eye.
“And yon’s all that gorgeous rice,” Roland said.
“All smallholds by the river,” Tian said, “where the water’s sweet and slow. And we know how lucky we are.
When the rice comes ready—either to plant or to harvest—all the women go together. There’s singing in the fields, and even dancing.”
“Come-come-commala,” Roland said. At least that was what Eddie heard.
Tian and Zalia brightened with surprise and recognition. The Slightmans exchanged a glance and grinned.
“Where did you hear The Rice Song?” die Elder asked. “When?”
“In my home,” said Roland. “Long ago. Come-come-commala, rice come a-falla.” He pointed to the west, away from the river. “There’s the biggest farm, deep in wheat. Yours, sai Overholser?”
“So it is, say thankya.”
“And beyond, to the south, more farms… and then the ranches. That one’s cattle… that one sheep… that one cattle… more cattle… more sheep…”
“How can you tell the difference from so far away?” Susannah asked.
“Sheep eat the grass closer to the earth, lady-sai,” Overholser said. “So where you see the light brown patches of earth, that’s sheep-graze land. The others—what you’d call ocher, I guess—that’s cattle-graze.”
Eddie thought of all the Western movies he’d seen at the Majestic: Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Lee Van Cleef. “In my land, they tell legends of range-wars between the ranchers and the sheep-farmers,” he said. “Because, it was told, the sheep ate the grass too close. Took even the roots, you ken, so it wouldn’t grow back again.”
“That’s plain silly, beg your pardon,” Overholser said. “Sheep do crop grass close, aye, but then we send the cows over it to water. The manure they drop is full of seed.”
“Ah,” Eddie said. He couldn’t think of anything else. Put that way, the whole idea of range wars seemed exquisitely stupid.
“Come on,” Overholser said. “Daylight’s wasting, do ya, and there’s a feast laid on for us at the Pavilion. The whole town’ll be there to meet you.”
And to give us a good looking-over, too, Eddie thought.
“Lead on,” Roland said. “We can be there by late day. Or am I wrong?”
“Nup,” Overholser said, then drove his feet into his horse’s sides and yanked its head around (just looking at this made Eddie wince). He headed down the path. The others followed.
FIVE
Eddie never forgot their first encounter with those of the Calla; that was one memory always within easy reach. Because everything that happened had been a surprise, he supposed, and when everything’s a surprise, experience takes on a dreamlike quality. He remembered the way the torches changed when the speaking was done—their strange, varied light. He remembered Oy’s unexpected salute to the crowd. The upturned faces and his suffocating panic and his anger at Roland. Susannah hoisting herself onto the piano bench in what the locals called the musica. Oh yeah, that memory always. You bet. But even more vivid than this memory of his beloved was that of the gunslinger.
Of Roland dancing.
But before any of these things came the ride down the Calla’s high street, and his sense of forboding. His premonition of bad days on the way.
SIX
They reached the town proper an hour before sunset. The clouds parted and let through the day’s last red light. The street was empty. The surface was oiled dirt. The horses’ hooves made muffled thuds on the wheel-marked hardpack. Eddie saw a livery stable, a place called the Travelers’ Rest that seemed a combination lodging-house and eating-house, and, at the far end of the street, a large two-story that just about had to be the Calla’s Gathering Hall. Off to the right of this was the flare of torches, so he supposed there were people waiting there, but at the north end of town where they entered there were none.
The silence and the empty board sidewalks began to give Eddie the creeps. He remembered Roland’s tale of Susan’s final ride into Mejis in the back of a cart, standing with her hands tied in front of her and a noose around her neck. Her road had been empty, too. At first. Then, not far from the intersection of the Great Road and the Silk Ranch Road, Susan and her captors had passed a single farmer, a man with what Roland had called lamb-slaughterer’s eyes. Later she would be pelted with vegetables and sticks, even with stones, but this lone farmer had been first, standing there with his handful of cornshucks, which he had tossed almost gently at her as she passed on her way to… well, on her way to charyou tree, the Reap Fair of the Old People.
As they rode into Calla Bryn Sturgis, Eddie kept expecting that man, those lamb-slaughterer’s eyes, and the handful of cornshucks. Because this town felt bad to him. Not evil—evil as Mejis had likely been on the night of Susan Delgado’s death— but bad in a simpler way. Bad as in bad luck, bad choices, bad omens. Bad ka, maybe.
He leaned toward Slightman the Elder. “Where in the heck is everyone, Ben?”
“Yonder,” Slightman said, and pointed to the flare of the torches.
“Why are they so quiet?” Jake asked.
“They don’t know what to expect,” Callahan said. “We’re cut off here. The outsiders we do see from time to time are the occasional peddler, harrier, gambler… oh, and the lake-boat marts sometimes stop in high summer.”
“What’s a lake-boat mart?” Susannah asked.
Callahan described a wide flatboat, paddlewheel-driven and gaily painted, covered with small shops. These made their slow way down the Devar-Tete Whye, stopping to trade at the Callas of the Middle Crescent until their goods were gone. Shoddy stuff for the most part, Callahan said, but Eddie wasn’t sure he trusted him entirely, at least on the subject of the lake-boat marts; he spoke with the almost unconscious distaste of the longtime religious.
“And the other outsiders come to steal their children,” Callahan concluded. He pointed to the left, where a long wooden building seemed to take up almost half the high street. Eddie counted not two hitching rails or four, but eight. Long ones. “Took’s General Store, may it do ya fine,” Callahan said, with what might have been sarcasm.
They reached the Pavilion. Eddie later put the number present at seven or eight hundred, but when he first saw them— a mass of hats and bonnets and boots and work-roughened hands beneath the long red light of that day’s evening sun—the crowd seemed enormous, untellable.
They will throw shit at us, he thought. Throw shit at us and yell “Charyou tree.” The idea was ridiculous but also strong.
The Calla-folk moved back on two sides, creating an aisle of green grass which led to a raised wooden platform. Ringing the Pavilion were torches caught in iron cages. At that point, they still all flared a quite ordinary yellow. Eddie’s nose caught the strong reek of oil.
Overholser dismounted. So did the others of his party. Eddie, Susannah, and Jake looked at Roland. Roland sat as he was for a moment, leaning slightly forward, one arm cast across the pommel of his saddle, seeming lost in his own thoughts. Then he took off his hat and held it out to the crowd. He tapped his throat three times. The crowd murmured. In appreciation or surprise? Eddie couldn’t tell. Not anger, though, definitely not anger, and that was good. The gunslinger lifted one booted foot across the saddle and lightly dismounted.
Eddie left his horse more carefully, aware of all the eyes on him. He’d put on Susannah’s harness earlier, and now he stood next to her mount, back-to. She slipped into the harness with the ease of long practice. The crowd murmured again when they saw her legs were missing from just above the knees.
Overholser started briskly up the path, shaking a few hands along the way. Callahan walked directly behind him, occasionally sketching the sign of the cross in the air. Other hands reached out of the crowd to secure the horses. Roland, Eddie, and Jake walked three abreast. Oy was still in the wide front pocket of the poncho Benny had loaned Jake, looking about with interest.
Eddie realized he could actually smell the crowd—sweat and hair and sunburned skin and the occasional splash of what the characters in the Western movies usually called (with contempt similar to Callahan’s for the lake-boat marts) “foo-foo water.” He could also smell food: pork and beef, fresh bread, frying onions, coffee and graf. His stomach rumbled, yet he wasn’t hungry. No, not really hungry. The idea that the path they were walking would disappear and these people would close in on them wouldn’t leave his mind. They were so quiet! Somewhere close by he could hear the first nightjars and whippoor-wills tuning up for evening.