Roland turned the plate over. Beneath, in the center, was a small metal pod. To Jake, it might have looked like the plastic pencil-sharpener he’d taken to school in his pocket as a first-grader. To Roland, who had never seen a pencil-sharpener, it looked a little like the abandoned egg-case of some insect.
“That makes the whistling noise when the plate flies, do ya ken,” she said. She had seen Roland’s honest admiration and was reacting to it, her color high and her eye bright. Roland had heard that tone of eager explanation many times before, but not for a long time now.
“It has no other purpose?”
“None,” she said. “But it must whistle, for it’s part of the story, isn’t it?”
Roland nodded. Of course it was.
The Sisters of Oriza, Margaret Eisenhart said, was a group of women who liked to help others—
“And gossip amongst theirselves,” Eisenhart growled, but he sounded good-humored.
“Aye, that too,” she allowed.
They cooked for funerals and festivals (it was the Sisters who had put on the previous night’s banquet at the Pavilion). They sometimes held sewing circles and quilting bees after a family had lost its belongings to fire or when one of the river-floods came every six or eight years and drowned the smallholders closest to Devar-Tete Whye. It was the Sisters who kept the Pavilion well-tended and the Town Gathering Hall well swept on the inside and well-kept on the outside. They put on dances for the young people, and chaperoned them. They were sometimes hired by the richer folk (“Such as the Tooks and their kin, do ya,” she said) to cater wedding celebrations, and such affairs were always fine, the talk of the Calla for months afterward, sure. Among themselves they did gossip, aye, she’d not deny it; they also played cards, and Points, and Castles.
“And you throw the plate,” Roland said.
“Aye,” said she, “but ye must understand we only do it for the fun of the thing. Hunting’s men’s work, and they do fine with the bah.” She was stroking her husband’s shoulder again, this time a bit nervously, Roland
thought. He also thought that if the men really did do fine with the bah, she never would have come out with that pretty, deadly thing held under her apron in the first place. Nor would Eisenhart have encouraged her.
Roland opened his tobacco-pouch, took out one of Rosalita’s cornshuck pulls, and drifted it toward the plate’s sharp edge. The square of cornshuck fluttered to the porch a moment later, cut neatly in two. Only for the fun of the thing, Roland thought, and almost smiled.
“What metal?” he asked. “Does thee know?”
She raised her eyebrows slightly at this form of address but didn’t comment on it. “Titanium is what Andy calls it. It comes from a great old factory building, far north, in Calla Sen Chre.
There are many ruins there. I’ve never been, but I’ve heard the tales. It sounds spooky.”
Roland nodded. “And the plates—how are they made? Does Andy do it?”
She shook her head. “He can’t or won’t, I know not which. It’s the ladies of Calla Sen Chre who make them, and send them to the Callas all round about. Although Divine is as far south as that sort of trading reaches, I think.”
“The ladies make these,” Roland mused. “The ladies.”
“Somewhere there’s a machine that still makes em, that’s all it is,” Eisenhart said. Roland was amused at his tone of stiff defensiveness. “Comes down to no more than pushing a button, I ‘magine.”
Margaret, looking at him with a woman’s smile, said nothing to this, either for or against. Perhaps she didn’t know, but she certainly knew the politics that keep a marriage sweet.
“So there are Sisters north and south of here along the Arc,” Roland said. “And all of them throw the plate.”
“Aye—from Calla Sen Chre to Calla Divine south of us. Farther south or north, I don’t know. We like to help and we like to talk. We throw our plates once a month, in memory of how Lady Oriza did for Gray Dick, but few of us are any good at it.”
“Are you good at it, sai?”
She was silent, biting at the corner of her lip again.
“Show him,” Eisenhart growled. “Show him and be done.”
FIVE
They walked down the steps, the rancher’s wife leading the way, Eisenhart behind her, Roland third. Behind them the kitchen door opened and banged shut.
“Gods-a-glory, missus Eisenhart’s gonna throw the dish!” Benny Slightman cried gleefully. “Jake! You won’t believe it!”
“Send em back in, Vaughn,” she said. “They don’t need to see this.”
“Nar, let em look,” Eisenhart said. “Don’t hurt a boy to see a woman do well.”
“Send them back, Roland, aye?” She looked at him, flushed and flustered and very pretty. To Roland she looked ten years younger than when she’d come out on the porch, but he wondered how she’d fling in such a state. It was something he much wanted to see, because ambushing was brutal work, quick and emotional.
“I agree with your husband,” he said. “I’d let them stay.”
“Have it as you like,” she said. Roland saw she was actually pleased, that she wanted an audience, and his hope grew. He thought it increasingly likely that this pretty middle-aged wife with her small breasts and salt-and-pepper hair had a hunter’s heart. Not a gunslinger’s heart, but at this point he would settle for a few hunters—a few killers—male or female.
She marched toward the barn. When they were fifty yards from the stuffy-guys flanking the barn door, Roland touched her shoulder and made her stop.
“Nay,” she said, “this is too far.”
“I’ve seen you fling as far and half again,” her husband said, and stood firm in the face of her angry look. “So I have.”
“Not with a gunslinger from the Line of Eld standing by my right elbow, you haven’t,” she said, but she stood where she was.
Roland went to the barn door and took the grinning sharp-root head from the stuffy on the left side. He went into the barn. Here was a stall filled with freshly picked sharproot, and beside it one of potatoes. He took one of the potatoes and set it atop the stuffy-guy’s shoulders, where the sharproot had been. It was a good-sized spud, but the contrast was still comic; the stuffy-guy now looked like Mr. Tinyhead in a carnival show or street-fair.
“Oh, Roland, no!” she cried, sounding genuinely shocked. “I could never!”
“I don’t believe you,” he said, and stood aside. “Throw.”
For a moment he diought she wouldn’t. She looked around for her husband. If Eisenhart had still been standing beside her, Roland thought, she would have thrust the plate into his hands and run for the house and never mind if he cut himself on it, either. But Vaughn Eisenhart had withdrawn to the foot of the steps. The boys stood above him, Benny Slightman watching with mere interest, Jake with closer attention, his brows drawn together and the smile now gone from his face.
“Roland, I—”
“None of it, missus, I beg. Your talk of leaping was all very fine, but now I’d see you do it. Throw.”
She recoiled a little, eyes widening, as if she had been slapped. Then she turned to face the barn door and drew her right hand above her left shoulder. The plate glimmered in the late light, which was now more pink than red. Her lips had thinned to a white line. For a moment all the world held still.
” Riza!” she cried in a shrill, furious voice, and cast her arm forward. Her hand opened, the index finger pointing precisely along the path the plate would take. Of all of them in the yard (the cowpokes had also
stopped to watch), only Roland’s eyes were sharp enough to follow the flight of the dish.
True! he exulted. True as ever was!
The plate gave a kind of moaning howl as it bolted above the dirt yard. Less than two seconds after it had left her hand, the potato lay in two pieces, one by the stuffy-guy’s gloved right hand and the other by its left. The plate itself stuck in the side of the barn door, quivering.
The boys raised a cheer. Benny hoisted his hand as his new friend had taught him, and Jake slapped him a high five.
“Great going, sai Eisenhart!” Jake called.
“Good hit! Say thankya!” Benny added.
Roland observed the way the woman’s lips drew back from her teeth at this hapless, well-meant praise—she looked like a horse that has seen a snake. “Boys,” he said, “I’d go inside now, were I you.”
Benny was bewildered. Jake, however, took another look at Margaret Eisenhart and understood. You did what you had to… and then the reaction set in. “Come on, Ben,” he said.