Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [300]
“Tian?” Roland asked Eddie, breaking the rather heavy silence among them.
“He’ll meet me at the rectory. Five o’clock.”
“Good,” Roland said. “If we’re not done out here by four, you’re excused to ride back on your own.”
“I’ll go with you, if you like,” Callahan said. The Chinese believed that if you saved a man’s life, you were responsible for him ever after. Callahan had never given the idea much thought, but after pulling Eddie back from the ledge above the Doorway Cave, it seemed to him there might be truth in the notion.
“Better you stay with us,” Roland said. “Eddie can take care of this. I’ve got another job for you out here. Besides digging, I mean.”
“Oh? And what might that be?” Callahan asked.
Roland pointed at the dust-devils twisting and whirling ahead of them on the road. “Pray away this damned wind. And the sooner the better. Before tomorrow morning, certainly.”
“Are you worried about the ditch?” Jake asked.
“The ditch’ll be fine,” Roland said. “It’s the Sisters’ Orizas I’m worried about. Throwing the plate is delicate work under the best of circumstances. If it’s blowing up a gale out here when the Wolves come, the possibilities for things to go wrong—” He tossed his hand at the dusty horizon, giving it a distinctive (and fatalistic) Calla twist. “Delah.”
Callahan, however, was smiling. “I’ll be glad to offer a prayer,” he said, “but look east before you grow too concerned. Do ya, I beg.”
They turned that way in their saddles. Corn—the crop now over, the picked plants standing in sloping, skeletal rows—ran down to the rice-fields. Beyond the rice was the river. Beyond the river was the end of the borderlands. There, dust-devils forty feet high spun and jerked and sometimes collided. They made the ones dancing on their side of the river look like naughty children by comparison.
“The seminon often reaches the Whye and then turns back,” Callahan said. “According to the old folks, Lord Seminon begs Lady Oriza to make him welcome when he reaches the water and she often bars his passage out of jealousy. You see—”
“Seminon married her sissa,” Jake said. “Lady Riza wanted him for herself—a marriage of wind and rice—and she’s still p.o.’d about it.”
“How did you know that?” Callahan asked, both amused and astonished.
“Benny told me,” Jake said, and said no more. Thinking of their long discussions (sometimes in the hayloft, sometimes lazing on the bank of the river) and their eager exchanges of legend made him feel sad and hurt.
Callahan was nodding. “That’s the story, all right. I imagine it’s actually a weather phenomenon—cold air over there, warm air rising off the water, something like that—but whatever it is, this one shows every sign of going back where it came from.”
The wind dashed grit in his face, as if to prove him wrong, and Callahan laughed. “This’ll be over by first light tomorrow, I almost guarantee you. But—”
“Almost’s not good enough, Pere.”
“What I was going to say, Roland, is that since I know almost’s not good enough, I’ll gladly send up a prayer.”
“Tell ya thanks.” The gunslinger turned to Eddie, and pointed the first two fingers of his left hand at his own face. “The eyes, right?”
“The eyes,” Eddie agreed. “And the password. If it’s not nineteen, it’ll be ninety-nine.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I know,” Eddie said.
“Still…be careful.”
“I will.”
A few minutes later they reached the place where, on their right, a rocky track wandered off into the arroyo country, toward the Gloria and Redbirds One and Two. The folken assumed that the buckas would be left here, and they were correct. They also assumed that the children and their minders would then walk up the track to one mine or the other. In this they were wrong.
Soon three of them were digging on the west side of the road, a fourth always standing watch. No one came—the folken from this far out were already in town—and the work went quickly