Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V (44 page)

“Let’s get her out of here,” said Calhoun. “We’ve got hours of work ahead of us, and it’s obvious she needs to be interrogated as a member of the conspiracy. Her husband, too, and this child.”

Margaret and Alvin looked at each other and laughed. Arthur, on the other hand, was too busy gazing at the magnificence of the council room to care much about what was going on. He didn’t really notice the King until now, when Alvin pointed him out. “There you are, Arthur Stuart. That’s the man you were named for. The King of England, in exile in the Crown Colonies. Behold the majesty of the crownèd head.”

“Nice to meet you, sir,” said Arthur Stuart to the King.

Calhoun’s outrage reached a new level. “You dare to mock the King in this fashion? Not to mention naming a Black child after him in the first place.”

“Since you’ve already got me hanged in your mind,” said Alvin, “what harm will it do if I compound the crime?”

“Compound nothing, Alvin,” Margaret said to him. “He’s been warned that if he takes retribution against this revolt that didn’t even happen, killing slaves without reference to guilt or innocence, it will lead to war.”

“I have no fear of war,” said Arthur Stuart. “That’s when kings get to show their mettle.”

“You’re thinking of chess,” said Margaret. “In war, everyone has their chance to bleed.” She turned to Alvin. “My message was delivered. It’s out of my hands. And your brother needs you.”

Alvin nodded. He turned to the company surrounding him. “Gentlemen, you may return to your deliberations. I ran down here from New England this afternoon and I have no more time to spend with you. Good evening.”

Alvin took Arthur by one hand and Margaret by the other. “Make way please,” he said.

The men blocking his path didn’t move.

And then, suddenly, they did. Or rather, their feet did, sliding right out from under them. Alvin took another stride toward the door.

The King drew a sword. So did the other men, though they had to get them from the wall where they hung during the meeting. And two guards by the door drew pistols.

“Really, Your Majesty,” said Alvin, “the essence of courtesy is that one must allow one’s guests to leave.”

Before he finished talking, he already reached out to change the iron in the swords and the pistols. To their horror, the armed men found their weapons dissolving and dribbling into pools of cold wet iron on the floor. They dropped their weapons and recoiled.

“What are you, sir!” cried the King.

“Isn’t it obvious?” said Calhoun. “It’s the devil, the devil’s dam, and their bastard son!”

“Hey,” protested Arthur Stuart. “I may be a bastard, but I’m not
their
bastard.”

“Sorry we have to be on our way so quickly,” said Alvin. “Have a nice future, Your Majesty.” With that, Alvin reached down, pulled the lockset out of the massive door, and then pushed gently on it, making it fall away from its dissolving hinges and land with a crash on the floor outside the council room. They walked away unmolested.

The stink of Calvin’s dead body filled the attic when Margaret led Alvin and Arthur into the place. Alvin went at once to the corpse and knelt by it, weeping. “Calvin, I came as fast as I could.”

“You want to cry,” said Denmark, “cry for the dead.”

“I already explained to him about holding Calvin’s heartfire in the box,” Margaret said.

“I can’t repair the body without the heartfire in it,”
said Alvin. “And it can’t hold the heartfire until it’s repaired.”

“Do both at once,” said Margaret. “You can do it, can’t you, Gullah Joe? Feed the heartfire back into the body, bit by bit?”

“You lose you mind?” asked Gullah Joe. “How many miracle you want tonight?”

“I’ll just do my best,” said Alvin.

He worked on Calvin’s body for three hours. No sooner did he start in on one repair than the one he just completed started to decay again. Working steadily and methodically, though, he was able to get the heart and brain back into working order. “Now,” he said.

Gullah Joe slid off the box, carried it close to Calvin’s body, and opened it.

Alvin and Margaret both saw the heartfire leap into the body. The heart beat convulsively. Once. Twice. Blood moved through the collapsing arteries. Alvin paid no heed to that problem—it was the lungs he had to repair now, quickly, instantly. But with the heartfire inside the body, it became far easier, for now he could make a pattern and the body would imitate it, passing the information along through the living tissues. A half-ruined diaphragm contracted, then expanded the lungs. The blood that pumped feebly through the body now bore steadily increasing amounts of oxygen.

That was only the beginning. Dawn had fully come before Alvin’s work was done. Calvin breathed easily and normally. The flesh had healed, leaving no scars. He was as clean as a newborn.

“What I see this night,” said Gullah Joe. “What god you be?”

Alvin shook his head. “Is there a god of weariness?”

Someone started pounding on the door downstairs.

“Ignore them,” said Margaret. “There are only two of them. They won’t break in until there are more soldiers to back them up.”

“How long do we have?” asked Alvin.

“Not long,” said Margaret. “I suggest we leave now.”

“Is there no rest for the devil?” asked Alvin.

“You a devil too?” asked Gullah Joe.

“That was a joke,” said Alvin. “Margaret, who
are
these people?”

“Time enough to explain on the road.” Margaret turned to the others. “It’s not safe for you to stay here, Denmark, Gullah Joe. Come away with us. Alvin can keep you safe until you’re in the North, out of this miserable place.” She turned to Fishy and Denmark’s wife. “You aren’t in the same danger, but why should you stay? We’ll take you north with us. If you like, you can go on to Vigor Church. Or Hatrack River.” Margaret looked at Gullah Joe and smiled. “I’d like to see what all the knackish folk in Hatrack River would make of
you
.”

Denmark tugged at Alvin’s sleeve. “What you done for your brother. Raise him from the dead. What about my wife?” He brought her forward.

Alvin closed his eyes and studied her for a few moments. “It’s an old injury, and it’s all connected with the brain. I don’t know. Let’s get away from here, and when we’re safely in the North, I’ll do what I can.”

They all agreed to come along. What choice did they have? “Can’t you take all us?” asked Fishy. “All the slave in this place, take us!”

Margaret put her arm around Fishy. “If it was in our power, we’d take them. But such a large group—who would take so many thousands of free Blacks all at once? We’d bring them north, only to have them turned away.
You
we can bring with us.”

Fishy nodded. “I know you mean to do good. It never be enough.”

“No,” said Margaret. “Never enough. But we do our best, and pray that in the long run, it
will
be enough.”

Alvin knelt again by Calvin, shook him gently, woke him. Calvin opened his eyes and saw Alvin. He laughed in delight. “You,” he said. “You came and saved me.”

Mike Fink and Jean-Jacques Audubon waited a discreet distance away as Hezekiah Study led Verily and Purity through the graveyard. The graves were located in a curious alcove in the wall of the cemetery. Purity knelt at her parents’ graves and wept for them. Verily knelt beside her, and after a while she reached for Hezekiah and drew him down with her as well. “You’re all I have left of them,” she said to Hezekiah. “Since I have no memories of my own, I have to rely on yours. Come with us.”

“I’ll travel with you as far as Philadelphia,” said Hezekiah. “Beyond that I can’t promise.”

“Once Alvin starts talking about the Crystal City, you’ll catch the vision of it,” said Verily. “I promise.”

Hezekiah smiled ruefully. “Will there be a need for an old Puritan minister?”

“No doubt of it,” said Verily. “But a scholar like you—I think we’ll have to tear you away from the things
you can learn there in order to get a sermon out of you.”

“My heart isn’t much in sermonizing anyway,” said Hezekiah. “I’m tired of the sound of my own mouth.”

“Then don’t listen,” said Purity. “Why should we miss out on your sermons just because
you
don’t want to hear them?”

They lingered near the graves for some time. Only when they were leaving did it occur to Verily how odd it was to have such an- alcove enclosing just those two graves. Otherwise the graveyard walls marked out a simple rectangle.

Hezekiah heard the question and nodded. “Well, you see, when they were buried, the witcher insisted the graves had to be outside the churchyard. Can’t have witches in hallowed ground. Then the witchers left, and all the neighbors who knew them and loved them, they tore down the wall at that place, and laid out a new course, and now they’re inside the wall of the churchyard after all.”

They stood on the south bank of the Potomac, waiting for the ferry to return to their shore to carry them across into the United States—specifically New Sweden, which despite its name was now almost as thoroughly English-speaking as Pennsylvania. A long-legged waterbird swept down into the water, elegant in its graceful passage from a creature of air to a creature of water.

“Too bad Audubon ain’t here to tell us what bird that is,” said Alvin.

Arthur Stuart took Margaret by the hand. “You were there,” he said. “You know. What kind of bird was it that carried me?”

Margaret looked at him in puzzlement. “What do you mean?”

“I remember flying,” said Arthur. “Hour after hour, all the way north. What kind of bird was that?”

“It wasn’t a bird,” she said. “It was your mother. She knew some of the witchy lore that Gullah Joe uses.
She made wings and she flew, carrying you the whole way.”

“But I saw a bird,” said Arthur.

“You were a newborn,” said Margaret. “How could you possibly remember?”

“Wings, so wide,” said Arthur. “It was so beautiful to fly. I still dream about it all the time.”

“Your mother wasn’t a bird, Arthur Stuart,” said Margaret.

“Yes she was,” said Arthur. “A bird in the air, and then a woman when she came to earth.”

Alvin remembered now how a question had nagged at Arthur the whole time he was with Audubon, a question that he could never quite frame in a way to get the answer he needed. Now Alvin had the answer for him. “She
is
waiting for you, Arthur Stuart,” said Alvin. “With wings or without, your mother bird is still alive, waiting for you when the time comes.”

Arthur Stuart nodded. “I think you’re right,” he said. “I feel her sometimes in the sky, so high I can’t see her, but she’s looking down and she sees me.” He looked to Alvin and Margaret for reassurance. “That’s not silly, is it?”

“They’d have to have a thousand angels watching her every minute in heaven,” said Margaret, “to keep your mama from watching over you.”

Arthur Stuart nodded. “When I see her,” he said, “that’s when I’ll find out my true name.”

“All names are true on that day,” said Alvin. “When we see each other for what we really are.”

Margaret said nothing. She took no comfort in thinking of a day of resurrection far in the distant future, for she had never seen that day in any heartfire. All her visions ended, sooner or later, in death. That’s what was real to her.

Real and yet not terribly important. She felt her own swelling abdomen, where the baby’s tiny heartfire was growing. As long as she had enough time to see this
through, to bring this girl into the world and raise her to adulthood, she’d have no complaint when death came for her.

The ferry pulled in and the people from the New Sweden side disembarked noisily. Alvin, Margaret, and Arthur walked back to where Fishy, Gullah Joe, and Denmark and his wife waited for them. Fast as they were traveling, news had already reached them of mass hangings of rebel slaves in Camelot. They feared the worst—John Calhoun’s proposal to hang one in every three. But it turned out to be only twenty.

Only twenty.

In addition, a warrant had been issued for a scoundrel named Denmark Vesey, an illegally freed half-Black who had plotted the whole thing, meeting every slave ship that came to port. Well, that would never happen again. Blacktown was cleaned out and the laws concerning the movements of slaves without their masters were going to be tightened considerably. The days of soft treatment were over for the slaves of the Crown Colonies. They’d learn who was boss.

Once the stories crossed the Potomac, however, they changed. The facts were the same, but now the story was told with growing anger. Even Blacks want to be free, that’s what the Northerners said. Whatever they might have planned, they didn’t kill a single White. And now the Crown Colonies are cracking down even harder on these poor souls. Enough. The line had to be drawn. No slavery in the western territories. And no more rights for Slave Finders in the United States. Repudiate the treaty. If the Congress we’ve got won’t do it, then we’ll elect one that will. Never again will a human being on northern territory be the property of another man. People might not know it yet, but this was the rumor of war, and soon enough these seeds would bear fruit. Margaret had spent many months trying to forestall it. Now she knew that war was the only hope of ending slavery. Dreadful as it might be, it was a war that had to be
fought. And here in New Sweden, the chatter of war was from the right side. It was her people talking.