“Yar, reckon,” Tian said. He suddenly felt dispirited. Telford wasn’t a rancher on a scale with Vaughn Eisenhart, but he had a silver tongue. Tian had an idea he was going to lose this, after all.
“May I have the feather, then?”
Tian thought of holding onto it, but what good would it do? He’d said his best. Had tried. Perhaps he and Zalia should pack up the kids and go out west themselves, back toward the Mids. Moon to moon before the Wolves came, according to Andy. A person could get a hell of a head start on trouble in thirty days.
He passed the feather.
“We all appreciate young sai Jaffords’s passion, and certainly no one doubts his courage,” George Telford said. He spoke with the feather held against the left side of his chest, over his heart. His eyes roved the
audience, seeming to make eye contact— friendly eye contact—with each man. “But we have to think of the kiddies who’d be left as well as those who’d be taken, don’t we? In fact, we have to protect all the kiddies, whether they be twins, triplets, or singletons like sai Jaffords’s Aaron.”
Telford turned to Tian now.
“What will you tell your children as the Wolves shoot their mother and mayhap set their Gran-pere on fire with one of their light-sticks? What can you say to make the sound of those shrieks all right? To sweeten the smell of burning skin and burning crops? That it’s souls we’re a-saving? Or the heart’s wood of some make-believe tree?”
He paused, giving Tian a chance to reply, but Tian had no reply to make. He’d almost had them… but he’d left Telford out of his reckoning. Smooth voiced sonofabitch Telford, who was also far past the age when he needed to be concerned about the Wolves calling into his dooryard on their great gray horses.
Telford nodded, as if Tian’s silence was no more than he expected, and turned back to the benches. “When the Wolves come,” he said, “they’ll come with fire-hurling weapons—the light-sticks, ye ken—and guns, and flying metal things. I misremember the name of those—”
“The buzz-balls,” someone called.
“The sneetches,” called someone else
“Stealthies!” called a third.
Telford was nodding and smiling gently. A teacher with good pupils. “Whatever they are, they fly through the air, seeking their targets, and when they lock on, they put forth whirling blades as sharp as razors. They can strip a man from top to toe in five seconds, leaving nothing around him but a circle of blood and hair. Do not doubt me, for I have seen it happen.”
” Hear him, hear him well!” the men on the benches shouted. Their eyes had grown huge and frightened.
“The Wolves themselves are terrible fearsome,” Telford went on, moving smoothly from one campfire story to the next. “They look sommat like men, and yet they are not men but something bigger and far more awful.
And those they serve in far Thunderclap are more terrible by far. Vampires, I’ve heard. Men with the heads of birds and animals, mayhap. Broken-helm undead ronin. Warriors of the Scarlet Eye.”
The men muttered. Even Tian felt a cold scamper of rats’ paws up his back at the mention of the Eye.
“The Wolves I’ve seen; the rest I’ve been told,” Telford went on. “And while I don’t believe it all, I believe much. But never mind Thunderclap and what may den there. Let’s stick to the Wolves. The Wolves are our problem, and problem enough. Especially when they come armed to the teeth!” He shook his head, smiling grimly. “What would we do? Perhaps we could knock them from their greathorses with hoes, sai Jaffords?
D’ee think?”
Derisive laughter greeted this.
“We have no weapons that can stand against them,” Telford said. He was now dry and businesslike, a man stating the bottom line. “Even if we had such, we’re farmers and ranchers and stockmen, not fighters. We—”
“Stop that yellow talk, Telford. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Shocked gasps greeted this chilly pronouncement. There were cracking backs and creaking necks as men turned to see who had spoken. Slowly, then, as if to give them exactly what they wanted, the white-haired latecomer in the long black coat and turned-around collar rose slowly from the bench at the very back of the room. The scar on his forehead—it was in the shape of a cross—was bright in the light of the kerosene lamps. It was the Old Fella.
Telford recovered himself with relative speed, but when he spoke, Tian thought he still looked shocked. “Beg pardon, Pere Callahan, but I have the feather—”
“To hell with your heathen feather and to hell with your cowardly counsel,” Pere Callahan said. He walked down the center aisle, stepping with the grim gait of arthritis. He wasn’t as old as the Manni elder, nor nearly so old as Tian’s Gran-pere (who claimed to be the oldest person not only here but in Calla Lockwood to the south), and yet he seemed somehow older than both. Older than the ages. Some of this no doubt had to do with the haunted eyes that looked out at the world from below the scar on his forehead (Zalia claimed it had been self-inflicted) . More had to do with the sound of him. Although he had been here enough years to build his strange Man Jesus church and convert half the Calla to his way of spiritual thinking, not even a stranger would have been fooled into believing Pere Callahan was from here. His alienness was in his flat and nasal speech and in the often obscure slang he used (“street-jive,” he called it). He had undoubtedly come from one of those other worlds the Manni were always babbling about, although he never spoke of it and Calla Bryn Sturgis was now his home. He had the sort of dry and unquestionable authority that made it difficult to dispute his right to speak, with or without the feather.
Younger than Tian’s Gran-pere he might be, but Pere Callahan was still the Old Fella.
FOUR
Now he surveyed the men of Calla Bryn Sturgis, not even glancing at George Telford. The feather sagged in Telford’s hand. He sat down on the first bench, still holding it.
Callahan began with one of his slang-terms, but they were farmers and no one needed to ask for an explanation.
“This is chickenshit.”
He surveyed them longer. Most would not return his look. After a moment, even Eisenhart and Adams dropped their eyes. Overholser kept his head up, but under the Old Fella’s hard gaze, the rancher looked petulant rather than defiant.
“Chickenshit,” the man in the black coat and turned-around collar repeated, enunciating each syllable. A small gold cross gleamed below the notch in the backwards collar. On his forehead, that other cross—the one Zalia believed he’d carved in his flesh with his own thumbnail in partial penance for some awful sin—glared under the lamps like a tattoo.
“This young man isn’t one of my flock, but he’s right, and I think you all know it. You know it in your hearts.
Even you, Mr. Overholser. And you, George Telford.”
“Know no such thing,” Telford said, but his voice was weak and stripped of its former persuasive charm.
“All your lies will cross your eyes, that’s what my mother would have told you.” Callahan offered Telford a thin smile Tian wouldn’t have wanted pointed in his direction. And then Callahan did turn to him. “I never
heard it put better than you put it tonight, boy. Thankee-sai.”
Tian raised a feeble hand and managed an even more feeble smile. He felt like a character in a silly festival play, saved at the last moment by some improbable supernatural intervention.
“I know a bit about cowardice, may it do ya,” Callahan said, turning to the men on the benches. He raised his right hand, misshapen and twisted by some old burn, looked at it fixedly, then dropped it to his side again. “I have personal experience, you might say. I know how one cowardly decision leads to another… and another… and another… until it’s too late to turn around, too late to change. Mr. Telford, I assure you the tree of which young Mr. Jaffords spoke is not make-believe. The Calla is in dire danger. Your souls are in danger.”
“Hail Mary, full of grace,” said someone on the left side of the room, “the Lord is with thee. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, J—”
“Bag it,” Callahan snapped. “Save it for Sunday.” His eyes, blue sparks in their deep hollows, studied them.
“For this night, never mind God and Mary and the Man Jesus. Never mind the light-sticks and the buzz-bugs of the Wolves, either. You must fight. You’re the men of the Calla, are you not? Then act like men. Stop behaving like dogs crawling on their bellies to lick the boots of a cruel master.