McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

by Michael Chabon

  “Being lucky doesn’t make a man stupid,” Eisenhart said. “Quite the contrary, is what I think. Cool eyes see clear.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, watching the boys run back into the barn. They were bumping shoulders and laughing, each trying to get to the ladder first. “Perhaps, aye. But the heart must call for its rights, too, and a man or woman who doesn’t listen is a fool. Sometimes ’tis best to swing on the rope, even if it’s too dark to see if the hay’s there or not.”

  Roland reached out and touched her hand.

  She gave him a small, distracted smile. It was only a moment before she returned her attention to the boys, but it was long enough for Roland to see that she was frightened. Terrified, in fact. Knowing your gold or your crops were at risk was one thing. Knowing it was your children, that was another.

  “Ben, Jake!” she called. “Enough! Time to wash and then come in! There’s pie for those can eat it, and cream to go on top!”

  Benny came to the open bay. “My da’ says we can sleep in my tent over on the bluff, sai, if it’s all right with you.”

  Margaret Eisenhart looked at her husband. Eisenhart nodded. “All right,” she said, “tent it is and give you joy of it, but come in now if you’d have pie. Last warning! And wash first, mind’ee! Hands and faces!”

  “Aye, say thankya,” Benny said. “Can Oy have pie?”

  Margaret Eisenhart thudded the pad of her left hand against her brow, as if she had a headache. The right, Roland was interested to note, stayed beneath her apron. “Aye,” she said, “pie for the bumblerdog too, as I’m sure he’s Arthur Eld in disguise and will reward me with jewels and gold and the healing touch.”

  “Thankee, sai,” Jake called. “Could we have one more swing first? It’s the quickest way down.”

  “Well,” Eisenhart said, “the broken leg usually hides in the last caper, but have on, if’ee must.”

  They had on, and there were no broken legs. Both boys hit the haypile squarely, popped up laughing and looking at each other, then footraced for the kitchen with Oy running behind them appearing to herd them.

  “It’s wonderful how quickly children can become friends,” Margaret Eisenhart said, but she didn’t look like one contemplating something wonderful. She looked sad.

  “Yes,” Roland said. “Wonderful it is.” He laid his purse across his lap, seemed on the verge of pulling the knot that anchored the laces, then didn’t. “Which are your men good with?” he asked Eisenhart. “Bow or bah? For I know it’s surely not the rifle or revolver.”

  “We favor the bah,” Eisenhart said. “Fit the bolt, wind it, aim it, fire it, ’tis done.”

  Roland nodded. It was as he had expected. Not good, because the bah was rarely accurate at a distance greater than twenty-five yards, and that only on a still day. On one when a strong breeze was kicking up . . . or, gods help us, a gale . . .

  But Eisenhart was looking at his wife. Looking at her with a kind of reluctant admiration. She stood with her eyebrows raised, looking back at her man. Looking him back a question. What was this? It surely had to do with the hand under the apron.

  “Garn, tell ’im,” Eisenhart said. Then he pointed an almost-angry finger at Roland, like the barrel of a pistol. “It changes nothing, though. Nothing! Say thankya!” This last with the lips drawn back in a kind of savage grin. Roland was more puzzled than ever, but he felt a faint stirring of hope. It might be false hope, probably would be, but anything was better than the worries and confusions— and the aches—that had beset him lately.

  “Nay,” Margaret said with maddening modesty. “’Tis not my place to tell. To show, perhaps, but not to tell.”

  Eisenhart sighed, considered, then turned to Roland. “Ye know Lady Oriza.”

  Roland nodded. The Lady of the Rice, in some places considered a goddess, in others a heroine, in some, both.

  “And ye know how she did away with Gray Dick, who killed her father?”

  Roland nodded again.

  According to the story—a good one that he must remember to tell Jake, when once more there was time for storytelling— Lady Oriza invited Gray Dick, a famous outlaw prince, to a vast dinner party in Waydon, her castle by the River Send. She wanted to forgive him for the murder of her father, she said, for she had accepted the Man Jesus into her heart and such was according to His teachings.

  Ye’ll get me there and kill me, be I stupid enough to come, said Gray Dick.

  Nay, nay, said the Lady Oriza, never think it. All weapons will be left outside the castle. And when we sit in the banqueting hall below, there will be only me, at one end of the table, and thee, at the other.

  You’ll conceal a dagger in your sleeve or a bola beneath your dress, said Gray Dick. And if you don’t, I will.

  Nay, nay, said the Lady Oriza, never think it, for we shall both be naked.

  At this Gray Dick was overcome with lust, for Lady Oriza was fair. It excited him to think of his prick getting hard at the sight of her bare breasts and bush, and no breeches on him to conceal his excitement from her maiden’s eye. And he thought he understood why she would make such a proposal. “His haughty heart will undo him,” Lady Oriza told her maid (whose name was Marian and who went on to have many fanciful adventures of her own).

  The lady was right. I’ve killed Lord Grenfall, wiliest lord in all the river baronies, Gray Dick told himself. And who is left to avenge him but one weak daughter? (Oh, but she was fair.) So she sues for peace. And maybe even for marriage, if she has audacity and imagination as well as beauty.

  So he accepted her offer. His men searched the banquet hall downstairs before he arrived and found no weapons—not on the table, not under the table, not behind the tapestries. What none of them could know was that for weeks before the banquet, Lady Oriza had practiced throwing a specially weighted dinner plate. She did this for hours a day. She was athletically inclined to begin with, and her eyes were keen. Also, she hated Gray Dick with all her heart and had determined to make him pay no matter what the cost.

  The dinner plate wasn’t just weighted; its rim had been sharpened. Dick’s men overlooked this, as she and Marian had been sure they would. And so they banqueted, and what a strange banquet that must have been, with the laughing, handsome outlaw naked at one end of the table and the demurely smiling but exquisitely beautiful maiden thirty feet from him at the other end, equally naked. They toasted each other with Lord Grenfall’s finest rough red. It infuriated the lady to the point of madness to watch him guzzle that exquisite country wine down as though it were water, scarlet drops rolling off his chin and splashing to his hairy chest, but she gave no sign; simply smiled coquettishly and sipped from her own glass. She could feel the weight of his eyes on her breasts. It was like having unpleasant bugs lumbering on her skin.

  How long did this charade go on? Some tale-tellers had her putting an end to Gray Dick after the second toast. (His: May your beauty ever increase. Hers: May your first day in hell last ten thousand years, and may it be the shortest.) Others—the sort of spinners who enjoyed drawing out the suspense—recounted a meal of a dozen courses before Lady Oriza gripped the special plate, looking Gray Dick in the eyes and smiling at him while she turned it, feeling for the dull place on the rim where it would be safe to grip.

  No matter how long the tale, it always ended the same way, with Lady Oriza flinging the plate. Little fluted channels had been carved on its underside, beneath the sharpened rim, to help it fly true. And it did fly true, humming weirdly as it went, casting its fleeting shadow on the roast pork and turkey, the heaping bowls of vegetables, the fresh fruit piled on crystal serving dishes.

  A moment after she flung the plate on its slightly rising course—her arm still outstretched, her first finger and cocked thumb pointing at her father’s assassin—Gray Dick’s head flew out through the open door and into the foyer behind him. For a moment longer Gray Dick’s body stood. For a moment longer Gray Dick’s penis pointed at her like an accusing finger. But a dick can’t stand stiff
for long when the neck of its Dick is spouting blood in a geyser. It shriveled with shocking suddenness. For a moment longer the body stood where it was, and then Gray Dick crashed forward onto a huge roast of beef and a mountain of herbed rice.

  Lady Oriza, whom Roland would hear referred to as the Lady of the Plate in some of his wanderings, raised her glass of wine and toasted the body. She said . . .

  “May your first day in hell last ten thousand years,” Roland murmured. Margaret nodded. “Aye, and let that one be the shortest. A terrible toast, but one I’d gladly give each of the outlaws who dare to take our babies. Each and every one!” Her visible hand clenched. In the fading red light she looked feverish and ill. And, Roland thought, she looked like her father. “We had six, do ya. An even half-dozen. Has my husband told you why none of them are here, to help with the reap-tide slaughtering and penning? Has he told you that, gunslinger?”

  “Margaret, there’s no need,” Eisenhart said. He shifted uncomfortably in his rocker.

  “Ah, but mayhap there is. It goes back to what we were saying before. Mayhap ye pay a price for leaping, but sometimes ye pay an even higher one for looking. Our children grew up free and clear, with no child-thieves to worry about. I gave birth to my first two, Tom and Tessa, less than a month before the Wolves came last time. The others followed along, neat as peas out of a pod. The youngest be only fifteen, do ya see. And I’d never turn my back on ’em, or my face from ’em, as some would to their get, simply because they have the audacity to wriggle out from beneath a hard fist. Some ye may have visited even this day, gunslinger, or am I wrong?”

  “Margaret—” her husband began.

  She ignored him. “But ours’d not be s’lucky with their own children, and they knew it. And so they’re gone. Some north along the Arc, some south. Looking for a place where the Wolves don’t come.”

  She turned to Eisenhart, and although she spoke to Roland, it was her husband she looked at as she had her final word.

  “One of every two; that’s the outlaw bounty. That’s what they take every twenty-some years. Except for us. They took all of our children, although they never laid their hands on a single one.”

  Silence fell on the back porch. The condemned steers in the slaughter-pen mooed moronically. From the kitchen came the sound of boy-laughter.

  Eisenhart had dropped his head. Roland could see nothing but the extravagant bush of his mustache, but he didn’t need to see the man’s face to know that he was either weeping or struggling very hard not to.

  “I’d not make’ee feel bad for all the rice of the Arc,” she said, and stroked her husband’s shoulder with infinite tenderness. “And they come back betimes, aye, which is more than the dead do, except in our dreams. They’re not so old that they don’t miss their mother, or have how-do-ye-do-it questions for their da’. But they’re gone, nevertheless. And that’s the price of safety.” She looked down at Eisenhart for a moment, one hand on his shoulder and the other still beneath her apron. “Now tell how angry with me you are,” she said, “for I’d know.”

  Eisenhart shook his head. “Not angry,” he said in a muffled voice.

  “And have’ee changed your mind?”

  Eisenhart shook his head again.

  “Stubborn old thing,” she said, but she spoke with good-humored affection. “Stubborn as a stick, aye, and we all say thankya.”

  “I’m thinking about it,” he said, still not looking up. “Still thinking, which is more than I expected at this late date—usually I make up my mind and there’s the end of it.

  “Roland, I understand young Jake showed Overholser and the rest of ’em some shooting out in the woods. Might be we could show you something right here that’d raise your eyebrows. Maggie, go in and get your Oriza.”

  “No need,” she said, at last taking her hand from beneath her apron, “for I brought it out with me, and here ’tis.”

  It was a blue plate with a delicate webbed pattern. A for-special plate. After a moment Roland recognized the webbing for what it was: young oriza, the seedling rice plant. When sai Eisenhart tapped her knuckles on the plate, it gave out a peculiar high ringing. It looked like china, but wasn’t. Glass, then? Some sort of glass?

  He held his hand out for it with the solemn, respectful mien of one who knows and respects weapons. She hesitated, biting the corner of her lip. Roland reached into his holster, which he’d strapped back on before leaving this woman’s father, and pulled his revolver. He held it out to her, butt first.

  “Nay,” she said, letting the word out on a long breath of sigh. “No need to offer me a hostage, Roland. I reckon I c’n trust you with my Oriza. But mind how you touch, or you’ll lose another finger, and I think you could ill afford that, for I see you’re already two shy on your right hand.”

  A single look at the blue plate—the sai’s Oriza—made it clear how wise that warning was. At the same time, Roland felt a bright spark of excitement and appreciation. It had been long years since he’d seen a new weapon of worth, and never one like this.

  The plate was metal, not glass—some light, strong alloy. It was the size of an ordinary dinner plate, a foot in diameter. Three-quarters of the edge (or perhaps a bit more) had been sharpened to suicidal keenness.

  “There’s never a question of where to grip, even if ye’re in a hurry,” Margaret said. “For, do’ee see—”

  “Yes,” Roland said in a tone of deepest admiration. Two of the rice-stalks crossed in what could have been the great letter “Hn,” which by itself means both here and now. At the point where these stalks crossed (only a sharp eye would pick them out of the bigger pattern to begin with), the rim of the plate was not only dull but slightly thicker. Good to grip.

  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 eyes bright. She looked thus more like her father than ever.

  “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. 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 the 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 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. (How Henchick’s brow would have furrowed at the thought of gossip, Roland thought. How his eye, cold to begin with, would have chilled at the mention of cards!)

  “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. Nor would Eisenhart have encouraged her.

  Roland opened his tobacco pouch, took out one of Rosalita’s rice-pulls, an
d drifted it toward the plate’s sharp edge. The square of thin paper 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 Manni 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?”

  “It’s the ladies of Calla Sen Chre who make them, and send them to the Callas all round about. Although Calla 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 gruff defensive-ness. “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 about the manufacture of the plates, 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 Sen Chre to Divine south of us. Further 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.”