SIX
Jake and his companions reached the place where the trail split quickly and without incident. Jake had held back two items, and when they reached the fork, he threw a broken rattle toward the Gloria and a little girl’s woven string bracelet toward the Redbird. Choose, he thought, and be damned to you either way.
When he turned, he saw the Tavery twins had already started back. Benny was waiting for him, his face pale and his eyes shining. Jake nodded to him and made himself return Benny’s smile. “Let’s go,” he said.
Then they heard Roland’s whistle and the twins broke into a run, despite the scree and fallen rock which littered the path. They were still holding hands, weaving their way around what they couldn’t simply scramble over.
“Hey, don’t run!” Jake shouted. “He said not to run and mind your f—”
That was when Frank Tavery stepped into the hole. Jake heard the grinding, snapping sound his ankle made when it broke, knew from the horrified wince on Benny’s face that he had, too. Then Frank let out a low, screaming moan and pitched sideways. Francine grabbed for him and got a hand on his upper arm, but the boy was too heavy. He fell through her grip like a sashweight. The thud of his skull colliding with the granite outcrop beside him was far louder than the sound his ankle had made. The blood which immediately began to flow from the wound in his scalp was brilliant in the early morning light.
Trouble, Jake thought. And in our road.
Benny was gaping, his cheeks the color of cottage cheese. Francine was already kneeling beside her brother, who lay at a twisted, ugly angle with his foot still caught in the hole. She was making high, breathless keening sounds. Then, all at once, the keening stopped. Her eyes rolled up in their sockets and she pitched forward over her unconscious twin brother in a dead faint.
“Come on,” Jake said, and when Benny only stood there, gawping, Jake punched him in the shoulder. “For your father’s sake!”
That got Benny moving.
SEVEN
Jake saw everything with a gunslinger’s cold, clear vision. The blood splashed on the rock. The clump of hair stuck in it. The foot in the hole. The spittle on Frank Tavery’s lips. The swell of his sister’s new breast as she lay awkwardly across him. The Wolves were coming now. It wasn’t Roland’s whistle that told him this, but the touch. Eddie, he thought. Eddie wants to come over here.
Jake had never tried using the touch to send, but he did now: Stay where you are! If we can’t get back in time we’ll try to hide while they go past BUT DON’T YOU COME DOWN HERE! DON’T YOU SPOIL THINGS!
He had no idea if the message got through, but he did know it was all he had time for. Meanwhile, Benny was . . . what? What was le mot juste? Ms. Avery back at Piper had been very big on le mot juste. And it came to him. Gibbering. Benny was gibbering.
“What are we gonna do, Jake? Man Jesus, both of them! They were fine! Just running, and then . . . what if the Wolves come? What if they come while we’re still here? We better leave em, don’t you think?”
“We’re not leaving them,” Jake said. He leaned down and grabbed Francine Tavery by the shoulders. He yanked her into a sitting position, mostly to get her off her brother so Frank could breathe. Her head lolled back, her hair streaming like dark silk. Her eyelids fluttered, showing glabrous white beneath. Without thinking, Jake slapped her. And hard.
“Ow! Ow!” Her eyes flew open, blue and beautiful and shocked.
“Get up!” Jake shouted. “Get off him!”
How much time had passed? How still everything was, now that the children had gone back to the road! Not a single bird cried out, not even a rustie. He waited for Roland to whistle again, but Roland didn’t. And really, why would he? They were on their own now.
Francine rolled aside, then staggered to her feet. “Help him . . . please, sai, I beg . . . ”
“Benny. We have to get his foot out of the hole.” Benny dropped to one knee on the other side of the awkwardly sprawled boy. His face was still pale, but his lips were pressed together in a tight straight line that Jake found encouraging. “Take his shoulder.”
Benny grasped Frank Tavery’s right shoulder. Jake took the left. Their eyes met across the unconscious boy’s body. Jake nodded.
“Now.”
They pulled together. Frank Tavery’s eyes flew open—they were as blue and as beautiful as his sister’s—and he uttered a scream so high it was soundless. But his foot did not come free.
It was stuck deep.
EIGHT
Now a gray-green shape was resolving itself out of the dust-cloud and they could hear the drumming of many hooves on hardpan. The three Calla women were in the hide. Only Roland, Eddie, and Susannah still remained in the ditch, the men standing, Susannah kneeling with her strong thighs spread. They stared across the road and up the arroyo path. The path was still empty.
“I heard something,” Susannah said. “I think one of em’s hurt.”
“Fuck it, Roland, I’m going after them,” Eddie said.
“Is that what Jake wants or what you want?” Roland asked.
Eddie flushed. He had heard Jake in his head—not the exact words, but the gist—and he supposed Roland had, too.
“There’s a hundred kids down there and only four over there,” Roland said. “Get under cover, Eddie. You too, Susannah.”
“What about you?” Eddie asked.
Roland pulled in a deep breath, let it out. “I’ll help if I can.”
“You’re not going after him, are you?” Eddie looked at Roland with mounting disbelief. “You’re really not.”
Roland glanced toward the dust-cloud and the gray-green cluster beneath it, which would resolve itself into individual horses and riders in less than a minute. Riders with snarling wolf faces framed in green hoods. They weren’t riding toward the river so much as they were swooping down on it.
“No,” Roland said. “Can’t. Get under cover.”
Eddie stood where he was a moment longer, hand on the butt of the big revolver, pale face working. Then, without a word, he turned from Roland and grasped Susannah’s arm. He knelt beside her, then slid into the hole. Now there was only Roland, the big revolver slung low on his left hip, looking across the road at the empty arroyo path.
NINE
Benny Slightman was a well-built lad, but he couldn’t move the chunk of rock holding the Tavery boy’s foot. Jake saw that on the first pull. His mind (his cold, cold mind) tried to judge the weight of the imprisoned boy against the weight of the imprisoning stone. He guessed the stone weighed more.
“Francine.”
She looked at him from eyes which were now wet and a little blinded by shock.
“You love him?” Jake asked.
“Aye, with all my heart!”
He is your heart, Jake thought. Good. “Then help us. Pull him as hard as you can when I say. Never mind if he screams, pull him anyway.”
She nodded as if she understood. Jake hoped she did.
“If we can’t get him out this time, we’ll have to leave him.”
“I’ll never!” she shouted.
It was no time for argument. Jake joined Benny beside the flat white rock. Beyond its jagged edge, Frank’s bloody shin disappeared into a black hole. The boy was fully awake now, and gasping. His left eye rolled in terror. The right one was buried in a sheet of blood. A flap of scalp was hanging over his ear.
“We’re going to lift the rock and you’re going to pull him out,” Jake told Francine. “On three. You ready?”
When she nodded, her hair fell across her face in a curtain. She made no attempt to get it out of the way, only seized her brother beneath the armpits.
“Francie, don’t hurt me,” he moaned.
“Shut up,” she said.
“One,” Jake said. “You pull this fucker, Benny, even if it pops your balls. You hear me?”
“Yer-bugger, just count.”
“Two. Three.”
They pulled, crying out at the strain. The rock moved. Francine yanked her brother backward with all her force, also crying out.
Frank Tavery’s scream as his foot came free was loudest of all.
TEN
Roland heard hoarse cries of effort, overtopped by a scream of pure agony. Something had happened over there, and Jake had done something about it. The question was, had it been enough to put right whatever had gone wrong?
Spray flew in the morning light as the Wolves plunged into the Whye and began galloping across on their gray horses. Roland could see them clearly now, coming in waves of five and six, spurring their mounts. He put the number at sixty. On the far side of the river, they’d disappear beneath the shoulder of a grass-covered bluff. Then they’d reappear, less than a mile away. They would disappear one last time, behind one final hill—all of them, if they stayed bunched up as they were now—and that would be the last chance for Jake to come, for all of them to get under cover.
He stared up the path, willing the children to appear—willing Jake to appear—but the path remained empty.
Wolves streaming up the west bank of the river now, their horses casting off showers of droplets which glittered in the morning sun like gold. Clods of earth and sprays of sand flew. Now the hoofbeats were an approaching thunder.
ELEVEN
Jake took one shoulder, Benny the other. They carried Frank Tavery down the path that way, plunging ahead with reckless speed, hardly even looking down at the tumbles of rock. Francine ran just behind them.
They came around the final curve, and Jake felt a surge of gladness when he saw Roland in the ditch opposite, still Roland, standing watch with his good left hand on the butt of his gun and his hat tipped back from his brow.
“It’s my brother!” Francine was shouting at him. “He fell down! He got his foot caught in a hole!”
Roland suddenly dropped out of sight.
Francine looked around, not frightened, exactly, but uncomprehending. “What—?”
“Wait,” Jake said, because that was all he knew to say. He had no other ideas. If that was true of the gunslinger as well, they’d probably die here.
“My ankle . . . burning,” Frank Tavery gasped.
“Shut up,” Jake said.
Benny laughed. It was shock-laughter, but it was also real laughter. Jake looked at him around the sobbing, bleeding Frank Tavery . . . and winked. Benny winked back. And, just like that, they were friends again.
TWELVE
As she lay in the darkness of the hide with Eddie on her left and the acrid smell of leaves in her nose, Susannah felt a sudden cramp seize her belly. She had just time to register it before an icepick of pain, blue and savage, plunged into the left side of her brain, seeming to numb that entire side of her face and neck. At the same instant the image of a great banquet hall filled her mind: steaming roasts, stuffed fish, smoking steaks, magnums of champagne, frigates filled with gravy, rivers of red wine. She heard a piano, and a singing voice. That voice was charged with an awful sadness. “Someone saved, someone saved, someone saved my li-iife tonight,” it sang.
No! Susannah cried to the force that was trying to engulf her. And did that force have a name? Of course it did. Its name was Mother, its hand was the one that rocked the cradle, and the hand that rocks the cradle rules the w—
No! You have to let me finish this! Afterward, if you want to have it, I’ll help you! I’ll help you have it! But if you try to force this on me now, I’ll fight you tooth and nail! And if it comes to getting myself killed, and killing your precious chap along with me, I’ll do it! Do you hear me, you bitch?
For a moment there was nothing but the darkness, the press of Eddie’s leg, the numbness in the left side of her face, the thunder of the oncoming horses, the acrid smell of the leaves, and the sound of the Sisters breathing, getting ready for their own battle. Then, each of her words articulated clearly from a place above and behind Susannah’s left eye, Mia for the first time spoke to her.
Fight your fight, woman. I’ll even help, if I can. And then keep your promise.
“Susannah?” Eddie murmured from beside her. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she said. And she was. The icepick was gone. The voice was gone. So was the terrible numbness. But close by, Mia was waiting.