Wolves of the Calla Read Online Free

sister’s broad shoulders. “I’m married, as I’m sure ye very well know.”
    “Many a married man has had his jilly,” Andy observed. To Tian he sounded almost smug.
    “Not those who love their wives.” Tian shouldered the harness (he’d made it himself, there being a marked shortage of tack for human beings in most livery barns) and turned toward the homeplace. “And not farmers, in any case. Show me a farmer who can afford a jilly and I’ll kiss your shiny ass. Garn, Tia. Lift em up and put em down.”
    “Home place?” she asked.
    “That’s right.”
    “Lunch at home place?” She looked at him in a muddled, hopeful way. “Taters?” A pause. “Gravy?”
    “Shore,” Tian said. “Why the hell not?”
    Tia let out a whoop and began running toward the house. There was something almost awe-inspiring about her when she ran. As their father had once observed, not long before the fall that carried him off, “Bright or dim, that’s a lot of meat in motion.”
    Tian walked slowly after her, head down, watching for the holes which his sister seemed to avoid without even looking, as if some deep part of her had mapped the location of each one. That strange new feeling kept growing and growing. He knew about anger—any farmer who’d ever lost cows to the milk-sick or watched a summer hailstorm beat his corn flat knew plenty about that—but this was deeper. This was rage, and it was a new thing. He walked slowly, head down, fists clenched. He wasn’t aware of Andy following along behind him until the robot said, “There’s other news, sai. Northwest of town, along the Path of the Beam, strangers from Out-World—”
    “Bugger the Beam, bugger the strangers, and bugger your good self,” Tian said. “Let me be, Andy.”
    Andy stood where he was for a moment, surrounded by the rocks and weeds and useless knobs of Son of a Bitch, that thankless tract of Jaffords land.Relays inside him clicked. His eyes flashed. And he decided to go and talk to the Old Fella. The Old Fella never told him to bugger his good self. The Old Fella was always willing to hear his horoscope.
    And he was always interested in strangers.
    Andy started toward town and Our Lady of Serenity.
TWO
    Zalia Jaffords didn’t see her husband and sister-in-law come back from Son of a Bitch; didn’t hear Tia plunging her head repeatedly into the rain-barrel outside the barn and then blowing moisture off her lips like a horse. Zalia was on the south side of the house, hanging out wash and keeping an eye on the children. She wasn’t aware that Tian was back until she saw him looking out the kitchen window at her. She was surprised to see him there at all and much more than surprised by the look of him. His face was ashy pale except for two bright blots of color high up on his cheeks and a third glaring in the center of his forehead like a brand.
    She dropped the few pins she was still holding back into her clothes basket and started for the house.
    “Where goin, Maw?” Heddon called, and “Where goin, Maw-Maw?” Hedda echoed.
    “Never mind,” she said. “Just keep a eye on your ka-babbies.”
    “ Why -yyy?” Hedda whined. She had that whine down to a science. One of these days she would draw it out a little too long and her mother would clout her right down dead.
    “Because ye’re the oldest,” she said.
    “But—”
    “Shut your mouth, Hedda Jaffords.”
    “We’ll watch em, Ma,” Heddon said. Always agreeable was her Heddon; probably not quite so bright as his sister, but bright wasn’t everything. Far from it. “Want us to finish hanging the wash?”
    “ Hed -donnnn . . . ” From his sister. That irritating whine again. But Zalia had no time for them. She just took one glance at the others: Lyman and Lia, who were five, and Aaron, who was two. Aaron sat naked in the dirt, happily chunking two stones together. He was the rare singleton, and how the women of the village envied her on account of him! Because Aaron would always