The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (20 page)

Didn’t she have any idea how hurtful it was to say such a thing? “Well, it’s a good thing I did learn something, don’t you think?” he said. “Or we’d have to have a bunch of watchmen out tonight, and in this group, how many reliable guards do you think we’d find?”

“So you really made the fog? He didn’t do it?”

“He started it, to show me how. I made the rest.”

“And you can do it tomorrow?”

“I hope so,” said Arthur Stuart, “ ’cause we got to leave this fog behind. If we stayed a second night here, this plantation wouldn’t have anything left to eat and the Cottoners would starve.”

“They won’t starve—they don’t have all those slaves to feed now, remember?” She lay back on the grass. “If I could travel with him, I would be happy every minute of every day.”

“Don’t work that way for me,” said Arthur Stuart. “About every other day, I stub my toe or eat something that makes me queasy. Otherwise, though, it’s pretty much ecstasy.”

“Why do you tease me? All I’m doing is telling you what’s in my heart.”

“He’s a married man,” said Arthur Stuart. “And his wife is my sister.”

“Don’t be jealous for your sister,” said Dead Mary. “I don’t love him that way.”

Yes you do, thought Arthur Stuart. “Glad to hear it,” he said.

“Can you help me?” she said.

“Help you what?”

“This globe of crystal water he made, that I’ve been carrying with me—”

“As I recall, you had a couple of boys who were sweet on you pushing that wheelbarrow most of the day.”

She waved his tease away. “I look in it and what I see frightens me.”

“What do you see?”

“All the deaths in the world,” she said. “So many I can’t even tell who is doing the dying.”

Arthur Stuart shuddered. “I don’t know how the thing works. Maybe you only see what you’ve been trained to see. You already know how to see death, so that’s what you see.”

She nodded. “That makes sense. I was going to ask you what
you
see.”

“My mother,” said Arthur Stuart. “Flying. Carrying me to freedom.”

“So you were born in slavery.”

“My mother spent all her strength and died of it, getting me away.”

“How brave of her. How sad for you.”

“I had family. A couple of families. A black one, the Berrys, they pretended they were my real parents for awhile, so folks wouldn’t tag me as a runaway. And the Guesters, the white family that actually raised me. Alvin’s mother-in-law, Old Peg, she adopted me. She meant it, too. Though I reckon Alvin’s been more my father than Peggy’s father was. He’s an innkeeper, and a good man. Helped a lot of slaves get to freedom. And he always made me feel welcome, but it was Alvin took me everywhere and showed me everything.”

“And all before you were twenty.”

“I don’t reckon we’re done yet,” said Arthur Stuart.

“So you can tease me, but I can’t tease you?”

“I didn’t know you were teasing.”

“So you don’t speak
all
the languages.” She laughed at him.

“If you don’t mind, maybe it’s time for sleep.”

“Don’t be mad at me, Prentice Maker. We have a lot of work to do together. We should be friends.”

“We are,” said Arthur Stuart. “If you want to be.”

“I do.”

He thought, but did not say: Just so you can use me to stay close to Alvin, I reckon.

“Do you?” she said.

Does it matter what I want? “Of course,” he said. “This is all going to work better if we’re friends.”

“And someday you’ll help me understand what I see in Alvin’s globe?”

“I don’t even understand what I see in my soup,” said Arthur Stuart. “But I’ll try.”

She rolled onto one arm and leaned toward him and kissed his forehead. “I will sleep better knowing you’re my friend and I can learn from you.”

Then she got up and left.

You might sleep better, thought Arthur Stuart, but I won’t.

Alvin found it hard to hear the greensong in this place. It wasn’t just the disharmony of field after field of cotton tended by slaves, which droned a bitter, complaining monotone under the songs of life. It was also his own fears and worries, distracting him so he couldn’t listen to the life around him as he needed to.

Leaving Arthur in charge of all the makery that this exodus required was dangerous, not because there was any ill will in the young man, but because there was simply so much he didn’t know. Not just about makery, either, but about life, about what the consequences of each action were likely to be. Not that Alvin was any expert himself—nor was Margaret, for even she saw many paths and wasn’t sure which ones led to good places in the end. But he knew more than Arthur Stuart did simply by virtue of having lived years longer, with a watchful eye.

Worse, the actual authority in the camp was held by La Tia, and—to a lesser extent—by Dead Mary and her mother. La Tia he had only met the day before the crossing of the lake. She was a woman who was used to being more powerful than anyone around her—how would she deal with Arthur Stuart when Alvin wasn’t there to look after him? If only Alvin could see into people’s hearts. La Tia was fearless, but that could mean either that she had no guile or that she had no conscience.

And Dead Mary. It was obvious she was enamored of Arthur Stuart—the way she watched him, enjoyed his company, laughed at his wit. Of course the boy would never see that, he wasn’t used to the company of women, and since Dead Mary wasn’t a flirt or a tart, the signs would be hard for him to recognize, being so inexperienced. But what if, in Alvin’s absence, she did something to make it obvious after all? What would Arthur Stuart do, unsupervised, in the company of a woman who might be a great deal more experienced than he was?

He also had misgivings about bringing along the slaves from the plantations where they stopped along the way. But as La Tia said, when he suggested they might not want to swell their numbers: “This a march of freedom, man! Who you gonna leave behind? These folk need less freedom? Why we the chosen ones? They as much Israelites as us!”

Israelites. Of course everybody was comparing this to the exodus from Egypt, complete with the drowning of some of “Pharaoh’s” army when the bridge collapsed. The fog was the pillar of smoke. And what did that make Alvin? Moses? Not likely. But that’s how a lot of the people felt.

But not all. There was a lot of anger in this group. A lot of people who had come to hate all authority, and not just that of the Spanish or the slaveowners. The anger in Old Bart, the butler in the Cottoner house—there was so much fury in his heart, Alvin wondered how he had managed to contain it all these years. Old Bart was still in control of himself, and had calmed down considerable since he’d had a chance to see how big a job it was, getting all these folks safely through slave country. Didn’t hurt that he’d seen Arthur Stuart and La Tia use powers he’d never seen black folks using—and that there was plenty of white folks in the company who was doing what Arthur Stuart and La Tia told them. It was already a new world.

But then they’d come to a new plantation where slaves had suffered worse than they did on the Cottoner place, and Old Bart’s anger would rekindle, and the others from his old plantation would see the fire in him and it would stir it up in them, too. That was just human nature, and it made the situation dangerous.

How many others were there, with bits of authority like Old Bart’s? Not to mention the ones that would like to make trouble just because they liked stirring things up. It’s not like they’d get to say, at each plantation, We’re gonna free all of you what’s nice and forgiving, anybody who’s got any nastiness in them, or is too angry to act peaceful, you’re gonna stay here under the lash.

Like Moses, they’d take everybody that had been in bondage. And like Moses, they couldn’t guess if some of them might find some way of making a golden calf that would destroy the exodus before they got to the promised land.

Promised land. That was the biggest worry. Where in the world was he going to take them? Where was the land of milk and honey? It’s not as if the Lord had appeared to Alvin in a burning bush. The closest he’d ever come to seeing an angel was the dark night when Tenskwa-Tawa—then a perpetually drunken red named Lolla-Wossiky—appeared in his room and Alvin had healed his blind eye. But Lolla-Wossiky wasn’t God or even an angel like the one that wrestled with Jacob. He was a man who groaned with the pain of his people.

And yet he was the only angel Alvin had ever seen, or even heard about, unless you counted whatever it was that his sister’s husband, Armor-of-God Weaver, had seen in Reverend Thrower’s church back when Alvin was a child. Something shimmering and racing around inside the walls of the church, and it like to made Thrower crazy to see whatever it was he saw, but Armor-of-God could never make it out. And that was as close to seeing a supernatural creature as anyone of Alvin’s acquaintance had ever come.

Oh, there had been miracles enough in Alvin’s life, plenty of strange doings, and some of them wonderful. Peggy watching out for him throughout his childhood without his even knowing it. The powers he had found inside himself, the ability to see into the heart of the world and persuade it to change and become better. But not one of them had given him the knowledge of what he ought to be doing from one moment to the next. He was left to muddle through as best he could, taking what advice he could get. But nobody, not even Margaret, had the truth—truth so true that you
knew
it was true, and knew that what you knew was bound to be right. Alvin always had a shadow of doubt because nobody truly knew anything, not even their own heart.

With all this running through his mind, over and over again, reaching no conclusion, he soon found that his legs were tired and his feet were sore—something that hadn’t happened to him while running since Ta-Kumsaw had first taught him to hear the greensong and let it fill him with the strength of all the life around him.

This won’t do, he realized. If I run like a normal man, I’ll cover ground so slowly it will be more than one night before I reach the river. I have to shut all this out of my mind and let the song have me.

So he did the only thing he could think of that would shut all else out of his mind.

He reached out, searching for Margaret’s heartfire, which he always knew as well as a man might know his own self. There she was…and there, just under her own heartfire, was that glowing spark of the baby that they had made together. Alvin concentrated on the baby, on finding his way through its small body, feeling the heartbeat, the flow of blood, the strength coming into the baby from Margaret’s body, the way his little muscles flexed and extended as he tested them.

Exploring this new life, this manling-to-be, all other worries left Alvin and then the greensong came to him, and his son was part of it, that beating heart was part of the rhythm of the trees and small animals and grass and, yes, even the slave-grown cotton, all of it alive. The birds overhead, the insects crawling in and on the earth, the flies and skeeters, they were all part of the music. The gators in the banks of languid rivers and stagnant pools, the deer that still browsed in the stands of wood that had not yet made way for the cotton fields, the small herbs with healing and poison in them, the fish in the water, and the hum, hum, hum of sleeping people who, in the nighttime, became part of the world again instead of fighting against it the way most folks did the livelong day.

So it was that he was not tired, not sore, but alert and filled with vigor and well-being when he reached the shores of the Mizzippy. He had crossed many a wagon track but nothing so fine as to be called a road, for in these parts the best road was the water, and the greatest highway of all was the Mizzippy.

Though it was night, there were stars enough, and a sliver of moon. Alvin could see the broad river stretching away to the left and right, each ripple in the water catching a bit of light. Halfway across, though, there was the perpetual fog that guarded the west bank from the endless restless ambition of the Europeans.

There was no doubt that Tenskwa-Tawa knew Alvin was coming. His sister-in-law, Becca, was a weaver of the threads of life. She would have noticed Alvin’s thread and how it moved over to be at the boundary between white men and red. Tenskwa-Tawa would have been told. He would know that if Alvin came here, straight toward the river, and not traveling north or south along it, it meant he wanted to cross the water. It meant he wanted to talk.

It wasn’t something Alvin did often. He didn’t want to be a bother. It had to matter, before he’d come. And so Tenskwa-Tawa would trust his judgment and come to meet him.

Or not. After all, it’s not as if Tenskwa-Tawa came and went at Alvin’s bidding. If he was busy, then Alvin would have to wait. It hadn’t happened yet, or not much of a wait, anyway. But Alvin knew that it
could
happen, and was prepared to wait if he needed to. For a while.

But if Tenskwa-Tawa didn’t come at all, what would that mean? That his answer was no? That he would not let these five thousand children of Israel—or at least children of God, or maybe Tenskwa-Tawa saw them as nothing more than the children of their powerless parents, but human beings all the same—was it possible he would not let them pass? What would Alvin do then?

He looked toward his left, not with his eyes, but searching for the heartfires of the northbound expedition that had left Barcy that afternoon to bring these runaway slaves back home. Good—they hadn’t made much progress on the first day, and were still far off. There was a lot of anger and discomfort in the group, too, as drunks vomited and former drunks suffered from headaches and men who wished they were drunk grumbled at the tedium of the journey and the poor quality of the pleasures aboard a military boat.

Even farther was the ship that carried Calvin. Plenty of anger on that ship, too—but of a different kind, a sort of bitter sense of entitlements long delayed. Calvin had found a likeminded bunch, people who felt the world owed them something and was slow to pay up. Were they really going to Mexico? Was Calvin so foolish as to put in with that mad expedition? Wherever they went, he knew they’d cause trouble when they got there.

Mostly, though, Alvin wondered how he was going to cross the river.

Building a bridge for just himself didn’t seem to have much point to it. But it was a long swim, and a hard one to do wearing all his clothes and carrying a golden plow—which would make a pretty good anchor but a mighty poor raft.

So he began to make his way up the river. The trouble was that close to the water, all was a tangle of trees and brush, while farther back, he couldn’t see whether there was any boat tied up. This wasn’t hospitable country for farming or fishing, and it was doubtful anybody lived too close. And there were gators—he could see their heartfires, dimmed a bit by sleep, except the hungry ones. Wouldn’t they just like a piece of manflesh to digest as they lay on the riverbank through the heat of the day tomorrow.

Don’t wake up for
me
, he murmured to a nearby wakeful gator. Keep your place, I’m not for you today.

Finally he realized there was going to be no boat unless he made one.

So he found a dead, half-fallen tree—no shortage of those in this untended land—and got it to let go of its roots’ last hold in the earth. With a great splash it fell into the water, and after a short while, Alvin had shorn it of all the branches he didn’t want it to have. The tree had been propped up there, mostly dead, for long enough that it was dry wood, and floated well. He gave it a bit more shaping, and then picked his way between bushes and stepping on roots until he was near enough to the log that he didn’t have to splash far in the water to reach it.

Mounting it was a bit of a trouble, since it was inclined to roll, and it occurred to Alvin that it probably wasn’t much different in appearance from the great tree that had been swept downstream on the Hatrack River flood the day that he was born. What killed my brother Vigor is now my vehicle to cross.

But thinking about the past reminded him of all those years of childhood, when it seemed that every bad accident that befell him was related somehow to water. His father had remarked upon it, and not as some kind of superstition about coincidence, either. Water was out to get him, that’s what Alvin Senior said.

And it wasn’t altogether false. No, the water itself had no will or wish to harm him or anything. But water naturally tore and rusted and eroded and melted and mudded up everything it passed over or under or through. It was a natural tool of the Unmaker.

At the thought of his ancient enemy, who had so often brought him to the edge of death, he got that old feeling from his childhood. The sense that something was watching him from just out of sight, just on the edge of vision. But when he turned his head, the watcher seemed to flee to where the new edge of his vision was. Nothing was ever there. But that was the problem—the Unmaker
was
nothing, or at least was a lover of nothing, and wished to make everything into nothing, and would not rest until it all was broken down and swept away and gone.

Alvin stood against him. A futile, pathetic weakling, that’s what I am, thought Alvin. I can’t build up faster than the Unmaker tears down. Yet he still hates me for trying.

Or maybe he doesn’t hate me. Maybe he’s a wild creature, hungry all the time, and I simply smell like his prey. No malice in it. Wasn’t tearing down just a part of building up? All part of the same great flow of nature. Why should he be the enemy of the Unmaker, when really they worked together, the maker and unmaker, the maker making things out of the rubble of whatever the unmaker tore down.

Alvin shuddered. What had he been about to do? What had he been thinking about?

There was a heartfire near him. A hungry one indeed. That gator that he had told to stay away. Apparently it changed its mind, what with Alvin standing there thigh-deep in the Mizzippy, resting his hands on a floating log and burdened with a heavy poke slung over his shoulder.