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Introduction
It's 1825, in a version of America's past that doesn't look like the history books. The folk magic of the American people really works, though whites, blacks, and reds go about their acts of power in different ways. 

The land we call America isn't just one nation. New England is still a colony of an England ruled over by the Lord Protector. The slave states of the south are the Crown Colonies, ruled over by the King in exile. In the middle is the United States, struggling to exist half slave and half free. This story, however, takes place in Nueva Barcelona -- once called New Orleans, when the French founded it. 

To this city comes Alvin Smith, the seventh son of a seventh son, who makes his living as a journeyman blacksmith; and beside him is Arthur Stuart, a free young man, half white and half black, pretending to be Alvin's servant while they're in slave country. They're on a mission here, and they're determined to accomplish it ... if they can figure out what it is. 

"Walking on Water" is the first third of The Crystal City, the penultimate novel in the Tales of Alvin Maker. It will be serialized on the Hatrack River site in 14 parts, a new one appearing every five days or so. (The first two parts of this serialization appeared previously in The Rhinoceros Times.) 


Part 1
Nueva Barcelona
It seemed like everybody and his brother was in Nueva Barcelona these days. It was steamboats, mostly, that brought them. Even though the fog on the Mizzippy made it so a white man couldn't cross the river to the west bank, the steamboats could make the trip up and down the channel, carrying goods and passengers -- which was the same as saying they carried money and laid it into the laps of whoever happened to be running things at the river's mouth. 

These days that meant the Spanish, officially, anyway. They owned Nueva Barcelona and it had their troops all over it. 

But the very presence of those troops said something. One thing it said was that the Spanish weren't so sure they could hold on to the city. Wasn't that many years since the place was called New Orleans and there was still plenty of places in the city where you better speak French or you couldn't find a bite to eat or a place to sleep -- and if you spoke Spanish there, you might just wake up with your throat slit. 

It didn't surprise Alvin much to hear Spanish and French mingling on the docks. What surprised him was that practically everybody was talking English -- usually with heavy accents, but it was English, all the same. 

"Guess you learnt all that Spanish for nothing, Arthur Stuart," said Alvin to the half-black boy who was pretending to be his slave. 

"Maybe so, maybe not," said Arthur Stuart. "Not like it cost me nothing to learn it." 

Which was true. It had been disconcerting to Alvin to realize how easily the boy had picked up Spanish from a Cuban slave on the steamboat that brought them downriver. It was a good knack to have, and Alvin didn't have it himself, not a lick. Being a maker was good, but it wasn't everything. Not that Alvin needed reminding of that. There were days when he thought being a maker wasn't worth a wad of chawn tobackey on the parlor floor. With all his power, he hadn't been able to save the life of his baby, had he? Oh, he tried, but when it was born a couple of months too soon, he couldn't figure out how to fix its lungs from the inside so it could breathe. Turned blue and died without ever drawing air into it. No, being a maker wasn't worth that much. 

Now Margaret was pregnant again, but neither she nor Alvin saw much of each other these days. Her so busy trying to prevent a bloody war over slavery. Him so busy trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with his life. Nothing he'd ever tried to do had worked out too well. And this trip to Nueva Barcelona was gonna end up just as pointless, he was sure of it. 

Only good thing about it was running into Abe and Coz on the journey. But now they were in Barcy, he'd lose track of them and it'd just be him and Arthur Stuart, continuing in their long term project of showing that you can have all the power in the world, but it wasn't worth much if you was too dumb to figure out what to do with it or how to share it with anybody else. 

"You got that look again, Alvin," said Arthur Stuart. 

"What look is that?" 

"Like you need to piss but you're afraid it's gonna come out in chunks." 

Alvin slapped him lightly upside his head. "You can't talk that way to me in this town." 

"Nobody heard me." 

"They don't have to hear you to see your attitude," said Alvin. "Cocky as a squirrel. Look around you -- you see any black folks actin' like that?" 

"I'm only half black." 

"You only got to be one-sixteenth black to be black in this town." 

"Dang it, Alvin, how do any of these folks know they ain't one-sixteenth black? Nobody knows their great-great-grandparents." 

"What do you want to bet all the white folks in Barcy can recite their ancestry back all the way?" 

"What do you want to bet they made up most of it?" 

"Act like you're afraid I'll whip you, Arthur Stuart." 

"Why should I, when you never act like you're gonna?" 

Now, that was a challenge, and Alvin took it up. He meant just to pretend to be mad, just a kind of roar and raise up his hand and that's that. Only when he did it, there was more in that roar than he meant to put there. And the anger was real and strong and he had to force himself not to lash out at the boy. 

It was all so real that Arthur Stuart get a look of genuine fear in his eyes, and he really did cower under the threatened blow. 

But Alvin got control of himself and the blow didn't fall. 

"You did a pretty good job of looking scared," said Alvin, laughing nervously. 

"I wasn't acting," said Arthur Stuart softly. "Were you?" 

"Am I that good at it you have to ask?" 

"No. You're a pretty bad liar, most times. You was mad." 

"Yep, I was. But not at you, Arthur Stuart." 

"At who, then?" 

"Tell you the truth, I don't know. Didn't even know I was mad, till I started trying to mime it." 

At that moment, a large hand took a hold of Alvin's shoulder -- not a harsh grip, but a strong one all the same. Not many men had hands so big they could hold a blacksmith's shoulder afore and behind. 

"Abe," said Alvin. 

"I was just wonderin' what I just saw here," said Abe. "I look over at my two friends pretendin' to be master and slave, and what do I see?" 

"Oh, he beats me all the time," said Arthur Stuart, "when no one's looking." 

"I reckon I might have to start," said Alvin, "just so's you won't be such a liar." 

"So it was play-acting?" asked Abe. 

It shamed Alvin to have this good man even wonder, specially after spending a week together going down the Mizzippy. And maybe some of that pent-up anger was still close to the surface, because he found himself answering right sharp. "Not only was it play-acting," said Alvin, "but it was also our business." 

"And none of mine?" said Abe. "Reckon so. None of my business when one of my friends reaches out to strike another. Guess a good man's gotta just stand by and watch." 

"Didn't hit him," said Alvin. "Wasn't going to." 

"But now you want to hit me," said Abe. 

"No," said Alvin. "Now I want to go find me a cheap inn and put up my poke afore we find something to eat. I hear Barcy's a good town for eatin', as long as you don't mind having fish that looks like bugs." 

"Was that an invitation to a meal?" said Abe. "Or an invitation to go away and let you get about your business?" 

"Mostly it was an invitation to change the subject," said Alvin. "Though I'd be glad to have you and Coz dine with us at whatever fine establishment we locate." 

"Oh, Coz won't be joinin' us. Coz just found the love of his life, a-waitin' for him right on the pier." 

"You mean that trashy lady he was a-talkin' to?" asked Arthur Stuart. 

"I suggested to him that he might hold out for a cleaner grade of whore," said Abe, "but he denied that she was one, and she agreed that she had plain fallen in love with him the moment she saw him. So I figger I'll see Coz sometime tomorrow morning, drunk and robbed." 

"Glad to know he's got you to look out for him, Abe," said Alvin. 

"But I did," said Abe. He held up a wallet. "I picked his pocket first, so he's got no more than three dollars left on him for her to rob." 

Alvin and Arthur both laughed at that. 

"Is that your knack?" asked Arthur Stuart. "Pickin' pockets?" 

"No sir," said Lincoln. "It don't take no knack to rob Coz. He wouldn't notice if you picked his nose. Not if there was a girl making big-eyes at him." 

"But the girl would notice," said Alvin. 

"Mebbe, but she didn't say nothing." 

"And since she was planning on getting what was in that wallet herself," said Alvin, "seeing as how you two already sold your whole cargo and she no doubt saw you get the money and divvy it up, don't you think she would have said something?" 

"So I reckon she didn't see me." 

"Or she did but didn't care." 

Abe thought about that for a second. "I reckon what you're saying is I oughta look inside this-here wallet." 

"You could do that," said Alvin. 

Abe opened it up. "I'm jiggered," he said. Of course it was empty. 

"You're jug-eared, too," said Alvin, "but your real friends would never point that out." 

"So she already got him." 

"Oh, I don't suppose she ever laid a hand on him," said Alvin. "But a girl like that, she probably doesn't work alone. She makes big-eyes ..." 

"And her partner goes for the pockets," said Arthur Stuart. 

"You sound experienced," said Abe. 

"We watch for it," said Arthur Stuart. "We both kind of like to catch 'em at it, iffen we can." 

"So why didn't you catch them robbin' Coz?" 

"We didn't know you needed lookin' after," said Arthur Stuart. 

Abe looked at him with calculated indignation. "Next time you go to beatin' this boy, Al Smith, would you be so kind as to lay down one extra wallop on my behalf?" 

"Get your own half-black adopted brother-in-law to beat," said Alvin. 

"Besides," said Arthur Stuart, "you do need lookin' after." 

"What makes you think so?" 

"Because you still haven't thought about how Coz wasn't the only one distracted by her big fluttery eyes." 

Abe slapped at his jacket pocket. For a moment he was relieved to find his wallet still there. But then he realized that Coz's wallet had been there, too. It took only a moment to discover that he and Coz had both been robbed. 

"And they had the sass to put the wallets back," said Abe, sounding awestruck. 

"Well, don't feel bad," said Arthur Stuart. "It was probably the pickpocket's knack, so what could you do about it?" 

Abe sat himself right down on the dock, which was quite an operation, seeing how he was so tall and bony that just getting himself into a sitting position involved nearly knocking three or four people into the water. 

"Well, ain't this a grand holiday," said Abe. "Ain't I just the biggest rube you ever saw. First I made a raft that can't be steered, so you had to save me. And then when I sell my cargo and make the money I came for, I let somebody take it away from us first thing." 

"So," said Alvin, "let's go eat." 

"How?" said Abe. "I haven't got a penny. I haven't even got a return passage." 

"Oh, we'll treat you to supper," said Alvin. 

"I can't let you do that," said Abe. 

"Why not?" 

"Because then I'd be in your debt." 

"We saved your stupid life on the river, Abe Lincoln," said Alvin. "You're already so far in my debt that you owe me interest on your breath." 

Abe thought about that for a moment. "Well, then, I reckon it's in for a penny, in for a pound." 

"The American version of that is 'in for a dime, in for a dollar,'" said Arthur Stuart helpfully. 

"But my mama's version was the one I said," retorted Abe. "And since I got exactly as many pennies and pounds as I got dimes and dollars, I reckon I can please myself which ones to cuss with." 

"You mean that was cussin'?" said Arthur Stuart. 

"Inside me there was cussin' so bad it'd make a sailor poke sticks in his own ears to keep from hearin' it," said Abe. "Pennies and pounds was just the part I let out." 

All this while, of course, Alvin had been using his doodlebug to go in search of the thieves. First thing was to find Coz, of course, partly because the woman might still be with him, and partly to make sure he hadn't been harmed. Alvin found his heartfire just as he was getting clubbed in the head in a back alley. It wasn't no hard thing to make it so the club didn't do him much harm. Put him down on the ground convincingly enough, so they wouldn't feel no need to give him another lick with it, but Coz'd wake up without so much as a headache. 

Meanwhile, though, the woman and the man was strolling off as easy as you please. So Alvin searched them with his doodlebug and found the money fast enough. It was no great difficulty to make the man's pocket and the woman's bag unweave themselves a little, and it wasn't much harder to make the gold coins all slippery. Nor was it so hard to keep them from making a single sound when they hit the wharf. The tricky thing was to keep the coins from slipping through the cracks between the planks and falling into the slack water under the dock. 

Arthur Stuart, of course, had enough experience and training now that he was able to follow pretty much what Alvin was doing. That was why he was stringing out the conversation long enough to give Alvin time to get the job done. 

In a way, thought Alvin, we're just like that pair of thieves. Arthur Stuart's the stall, keeping Abe busy so he doesn't have a clue what's going on, and I'm the cutpurse and pickpocket. Only difference is, we're sort of unstealing what was already stolen. 

"Let's go eat, then," said Arthur Stuart, "instead of talking about eatin'." 

"Where shall we go to find food that we can stand to eat?" said Alvin. 

"This way, I think," said Arthur Stuart, heading directly toward the alleyway where the coins had all been spilled. 

"Oh, that doesn't look too promising," said Abe. 

"Trust me," said Arthur Stuart. "I got a nose for good food." 

"He does," said Alvin. "And I got the tongue and lips and teeth for it." 

"I'll happily provide the belly," offered Abe. 

They had him lead the way down the alley. And blamed if he didn't just walk right past the money. 

"Abe," said Alvin. "Didn't you see them gold coins a-lyin' there?" 

"They ain't mine," said Abe. 

"Finders keepers, losers weepers," said Arthur Stuart. 

"I may be a loser," said Abe, "but I ain't weepin'." 

"But you're a finder now," said Arthur Stuart, "and I don't see you doin' no keepin'." 

Abe looked at them a bit askance. "I reckon we ought to pick up these coins and search out their proper owner. No doubt somebody's going to be right sorry for a hole in his pocket." 

"Reckon so," said Alvin, bending over to pick up a few coins. Arthur Stuart was doing the same, and pretty soon they had them all. It was quite a bit of money, when you had it all together. 

"Gotta carry it somewhere," said Alvin. "Why don't you put it into those empty wallets you got?" 

Alvin fully expected that Abe would realize, when he started loading it in, that it was exactly the amount that had been stolen. 

But he didn't. Because the money didn't fit. There was too blamed much of it. 

Arthur Stuart started laughing and kept laughing till he had tears running down his cheeks. 

"So now who's the weeper?" said Abe. 

"He's laughing at me," said Alvin. 

"Why?" 

"Because I clean forgot that you and Coz probably wasn't the first folks they robbed today." 

Abe looked down at the full wallets and the coins that Alvin and Arthur Stuart were still holding and it finally dawned on him. "You robbed the robbers." 

Alvin shook his head. "You was supposed to think they just dropped your money and ran or something," he said. "But I can't pretend that when you go finding more money than they took." 

Abe shook his head. "Well, I'm beginning to get the idea that you got you some kind of knack, Mr. Smith." 

"I just know how to work with metals some," said Alvin. 

"Including metal that's in somebody else's pocket or purse some six rods off." 

"Let's go find Coz," said Alvin. "Since I reckon he's due to wake up soon." 

"He's sleeping?" asked Abe. 

"He had some encouragement," said Alvin. "But he'll be fine." 

Abe gave him a look but said nothing. 

"What about all this extra money?" asked Arthur Stuart. 

"I'm not taking it," said Abe. "I'll keep what's rightfully mine and Coz's, but the rest you can just leave there on the planks. Let the thieves come back and find it." 

"But it wasn't theirs, neither," said Arthur Stuart. 

"That's between them and their maker on Judgment Day," said Abe. "I ain't gettin' involved. I don't want to have any money I can't account for." 

"To the Lord?" asked Alvin. 

"Or to the magistrate," said Abe. "I gave a receipt for this amount, and it can be proved that it's mine. Just drop the rest of that. Or keep it, if you don't mind being thieves yourselves." 

Alvin couldn't believe that the man whose money he had just saved was calling him a thief. But after he thought about it for a moment, he realized that he couldn't very well pretend that he simply happened to find the money. Nor that it belonged to him by any stretch of the imagination. 

"I expect if you rob a robber," said Alvin, "it doesn't make you any less of a robber." 

"I expect not," said Abe. 

Alvin and Arthur Stuart let the money dribble out of their hands and back down onto the planks. Once again, Alvin made sure that none of it fell through the cracks. Money wouldn't do no good to anybody down in the water. 

"You always this honest?" said Alvin. 

"About money, yes sir," said Abe. 

"But not about everything." 

"I have to admit that there's parts of some stories I tell that aren't strictly speaking the absolute God's-own truth." 

"Well, no, of course not," said Alvin, "but you can't tell a good story without improving it here and there." 

"Well, you can," said Abe. "But then what do you do when you need to tell the same story to the same people? You gotta change it then, so it'll still be entertaining." 

"So it's really for their benefit to fiddle with the truth." 

"Pure Christian charity." 

Coz was still asleep when they found him, but it wasn't the sleep of the newly knocked-upside-the-head, it was a snorish sleep of a weary man. So Abe paused a moment to put a finger to his lips, to let Alvin and Arthur Stuart know that they should let him do the talking. Only when they nodded did he start nudging Coz with his toe. 

Coz sputtered and awoke. "Oh, man," he said. "What am I doing here?" 

"Waking up," said Abe. "But a minute ago, you was sleeping." 

"I was? Why was I sleeping here?" 

"I was going to ask you the same question," said Abe. "Did you have a good time with that lady you fell so much in love with?" 

Coz started to brag. "Oh, you bet I did." Only they could all see from his face that he actually had no memory of what might have happened. "It was amazing. She was -- only maybe I shouldn't tell you all about it in front of the boy." 

"No, best not," said Abe. "You must have got powerful drunk last night." 

"Last night?" asked Coz, looking around. 

"It's been a whole night and a day since you took off with her. I reckon you probably spent every dime of your half of the money. But I'm a-tellin' you, Coz, I'm not giving you any of my half, I'm just not." 

Coz patted himself and realized his wallet was missing. "Oh, that snickety-pickle. That blimmety-blam." 

"Coz has him a knack for swearing in front of children," said Abe. 

"My wallet's gone," he said. 

"I reckon that includes the money in it," said Abe. 

"Well she wouldn't steal the wallet and leave the money, would she?" said Coz. 

"So you're sure she stole it?" said Abe. 

"Well how else would my wallet turn up missing?" said Coz. 

"You spent a whole night and day carousing. How do you know you didn't spend it all? Or give it to her as a present? Or make six more friends and buy them drinks till you ran out of money, and then you traded the wallet for one last drink?" 

Coz looked like he'd been kicked in the belly, he was so stunned and forlorn. "Do you think I did, Abe? I got to admit, I have no memory of what I did last night." 

Then he reached up and touched his head. "I must have slept my way clear past the hangover." 

"You don't look too steady," said Abe. "Maybe you don't have a hangover cause you're still drunk." 

"I am a little wobbly," said Coz. "Tell me, the three of you, am I talking slurry? Do I sound drunk?" 

Alvin shrugged. "Maybe you sound like a man as just woke up." 

"Kind of a frog in your throat," said Arthur Stuart. 

"I've seen you drunker," said Abe. 

"Oh, I'm never gonna live down the shame of this, Abe," said Coz. "You warned me not to go off with her. And whether she robbed me or somebody else did or I spent it all or I clean lost it from being so stupid drunk, I'm going home empty-handed and Ma'll kill me, she'll just ream me out a new ear, she'll cuss me up so bad." 

"Oh, Coz, you know I won't leave you in such a bad way," said Abe. 

"Won't you? You mean it? You'll give me a share of your half?" 

"Enough to be respectable," said Abe. "We'll just say you ... invested the rest of it, on speculation, kind of, but it went bad. They'll believe that, right? That's better than getting robbed or spending it on likker." 

"Oh, it is, Abe. You're a saint. You're my best friend. And you won't have to lie for me, Abe. I know you hate to lie, so you just tell folks to ask me and I'll do all the lyin'." 

Abe reached into his pocket and took out Coz's own wallet and handed it to him. "You just take from that wallet as much as you think you'll need to make your story stick." 

Coz started counting out the twenty-dollar gold pieces, but it only took a few before his conscience started getting to him. "Every coin I take is taken from you, Abe. I can't do this. You decide how much you can spare for me." 

"No, you do the calculatin'," said Abe. "You know I'm no good at accounts, or my store wouldn't have gone bust the way it did last year." 

"But I feel like I'm robbing you, taking money out of your wallet like this." 

"Oh, that ain't my wallet," said Abe. 

Coz looked at him like he was crazy. "You took it out of your own pocket," he said. "And if it ain't yours, then whose is it?" 

When Abe didn't answer, Coz looked at the wallet again. 

"It's mine," he said. 

"It does look like yours," said Abe. 

"You took it out of my own pocket when I was sleeping!" said Coz, outraged. 

"I can tell you honestly that I did not," said Abe. "And these gentlemen can affirm that I did not touch you with more than the toe of my boot as you laid there snoring like a choir of angels." 

"Then how'd you get it?" 

"I stole it from you before you even went off with that girl," said Abe. 

"You ... but then ... then how could I have done all those things last night?" 

"Last night?" said Abe. "As I recall, last night you were on the boat with us." 

"What're you ..." And then it all came clear. "You dad-blasted gummer-huggit! You flim-jiggy swip-swapp!" 

Abe put a hand to his ear. "Hark! The song of the chuckle-headed Coz-bird!" 

"It's the same day! I wasn't asleep half an hour!" 

"Twenty minutes," offered Alvin. "At least that's my guess." 

"And this is all my own money!" Coz said. 

Abe nodded gravely. "It is, my friend, at least until another girl makes big-eyes at you." 

Coz looked up and down the little alleyway. "But what happened to Fannie? One minute I was walking down this alleyway with my hand on her ... hand, and the next minute you're pokin' me with your toe." 

"You know something, Coz?" said Abe. "You don't have much of a love life." 

"Look who's talkin'," said Coz sullenly. 

But that seemed to be something of a sore spot with Abe, for though the smile didn't leave his face, the mirth did, and instead of coming back with some jest or jape, he sort of seemed to wander off inside himself somewhere. 

"Come on, let's eat," said Arthur Stuart. "All this talkin' don't fill me up much." 

And that being the most honest and sensible thing that had been said that half hour, they all agreed to it and followed their noses till they found a place that sold food that was mostly dead, didn't have too many legs, wasn't poisonous when alive, and seemed cooked enough to eat. Not an easy search in Barcy. 

"Walking on Water" is Copyright © 2003 by Orson Scott Card. All rights reserved. 


Part 2
Squirrel and Moose
After dinner they said good-bye to Abe and Coz, with promises to keep in touch that Alvin found he actually meant. But now it was time for Alvin to get down to business, which was complicated by the fact that he didn't know what his business was. 

But it wasn't Margaret's fault, for not telling him why she sent him here. Alvin's ignorance ran much deeper than that. He had no idea why God had singled him out to be the seventh son of a seventh son in the first place, and whatever God's plan might have been, Alvin must have muffed it by now, because even the Unmaker seemed to be leaving him alone. Once he had been so formidable that he was surrounded by enemies. Now even his enemies had lost interest in him. What clearer sign of failure could you find than that? 

It was this dark mood that rode in his heart all the way into Barcy proper, as he searched for a place for him and Arthur Stuart to stay. And perhaps it was the cloud that it put in his visage that made the first two houses turn them away. 

He was so darkhearted by the time they come to the third house that he didn't even try to be personable. "I'm a journeyman smith from up north," he said, "and this boy is passing as my slave but he's not, he's free, and I'm blamed if I'm going to make him sleep down with the servants. I want a room with two good beds, and I'll pay faithful but I won't have anybody treating this young fellow like a servant." 

The woman at the door looked from him to Arthur Stuart and back again. "If you make that speech at every door, I'm surprised you ain't got you a mob of men with clubs and a rope followin' behind." 

"Mostly I just ask for a room," said Alvin, "but I'm in a bad mood." 

"Well, control your tongue in future," said the woman. "It happens you chose the right door for that speech, by sheer luck or perversity. I have the room you want, with the two beds, and this being a house where slavery is hated as an offense against God, you'll find no one quarrels with you for treating this young man as an equal." 

Alvin held out his hand. "Alvin Smith, ma'am." 

She shook hands with him. "I heard of an Alvin Smith what has a wife named Margaret, who goes from place to place striking terror into the hearts of them as loves to tell a lie." 

"She puts a bit of a scare into them as hates lying, too," said Arthur Stuart. 

"As for me," said Alvin, "I'm neutral on lying, seeing as how there's times when the truth just hurts people." 

"I'm none too fanatic about telling the truth, myself," said the woman. "For instance, I believe every girl ought to grow up in the firm belief that she's clever and pretty, and every boy that he's strong and good-hearted. In my experience, what starts out as a fib turns into a hope and if you keep it up long enough, it starts to be mostly true." 

"Wish I'd known that fifteen years ago," said Alvin. "Too late to do much with this boy here." 

"I'm pretty," said Arthur Stuart. "I figure that's all I need to get by in this world." 

"You see the problem?" said Alvin. 

"If you're Margaret Larner's husband," said the woman, "then I'll bet this pretty lad here is her brother, Arthur Stuart, who from the look of him is born to be royalty." 

"I wouldn't cross the road to be a king," said Arthur Stuart. "Though if they brought the throne to me, I might sit in it for a spell." 

By now they were inside the house, Alvin holding onto his poke, but Arthur surrendering his bag to the woman readily enough. 

"Y'all afraid of climbing stairs?" she asked. 

"I always climb six flights before breakfast, just so I can be closer to heaven when I say my prayers," said Alvin. 

She looked at him sharply. "I didn't know you was a praying man." 

Alvin was abashed. His light-hearted joke had apparently struck something dear to her. 

"I've been known to pray, ma'am," said Alvin. "I didn't mean to talk light about it, if this is a praying house." 

"It is," said the woman. 

"Seems to me," said Arthur Stuart, "that it's also a house where folks are all named 'you,' cause they haven't heard about 'names' yet." 

She laughed. "I've had so many names in my life that I've lost track by now. Around here, folks just call me Mama Squirrel. And let's have no idle speculation about how I got that name. My husband gave it to me, when he decided that he was Papa Moose." 

"Always good to accept the hospitality of moose and squirrel," said Alvin, "though this is the first time I've been able to do it under a roof." 

"This ain't no hospitality here," said Mama Squirrel. "You're paying for it, and not cheap, either. We've got a lot of mouths to feed." 

It wasn't till they got to the third floor that they saw what she meant. In a large open room with windows all along one wall, a sturdy brown-haired man with a look of beatific patience was standing in front of about thirty-five children from five to twelve, who were sitting shoulder to shoulder on four rows of benches. About a quarter of the children where black, a few were red, some were white with hints of France or Spain or England, but more than half were of races so mixed that it was hard to guess what land on earth had not contributed to their parentage. 

Mama Squirrel silently mouthed the words "Papa Moose," and pointed at the man. 

Only when her husband took a step, which dipped and rolled like a boat caught in a sudden breeze, did Alvin notice that his right foot was crippled. There had been no attempt to find a shoe to fit his twisted foot. Instead the foot was sheathed and bound to the man's shin with leather straps, which also held a thick pad under his heel. But he showed no sign of pain or embarrassment, and the children did not titter or mock. Either the children were miraculously good or Papa Moose was a man of impenetrable dignity. 

He was leading the children in silent recitation of words on a slate. He would print four or five words, hold them up so all could see, and then point to a child. The child would then rise, and mouth -- but not speak aloud -- each word as Papa Moose pointed at it. He would nod or shake his head, depending on correctness, and then point at another child. In the silence, the faint popping and smacking of lips and tongue sounded surprisingly loud. 

The words currently on the slate were "measure," "assemble," "serene," and "peril." Without meaning to, Alvin found himself making them into some kind of poem or song. The words seemed to belong to him somehow. Of course, it helped that the first word, measure, was the name of Alvin's beloved older brother. Assemble was what he was trying to do, drawing together those who might be able to learn the knack of makery. But he had walked away from his community of makers in Vigor Church because he could not be patient with his own inabilities as a teacher. Serene, therefore, was what he most needed to become. And peril? He seemed to find it wherever he went. 

Mama Squirrel led them up to the garret, which was hot, with a ceiling that sloped in only one direction, from the east-facing front of the house to the back. 

"It's an oven up here on a hot day," said Mama Squirrel. "And it gets mighty cold in winter. But it keeps off the rain, which around here is no mean gift, and the beds and linens are clean and the floor is swept once a week -- more often, if you know how to handle a broom." 

"I been known to kill spiders with one," said Alvin. 

"We kill no living thing in this house," said Mama Squirrel. 

"I don't know how you can eat a blamed thing without causing something that was once alive to die," said Alvin. 

"You got me there," said Mama Squirrel. "We got no mercy on the plant kingdom, except we're loath to cut down a living tree." 

"But spiders are safe here." 

"They live out their natural span," said Mama Squirrel. "This is a house of peace." 

"A house of silence, too, judging by the school downstairs." 

"School?" asked Mama Squirrel. "I hope you won't accuse us of breaking the law and holding a school that might teach blacks and reds and mixes how to read and write and cipher." 

Alvin grinned. "I reckon there must be a law that defines a school as a place where children are required to recite aloud." 

"I'm surprised at the breadth of your knowledge of the legal code of Nueva Barcelona," said Mama Squirrel. "The law forbids us to cause a child to read or recite aloud, or to write on slate or paper, or to do sums." 

"So you only teach them to subtract and multiply and divide?" said Arthur Stuart. 

"And count," said Mama Squirrel. "We're law-abiding people." 

"And these children -- from the neighborhood?" 

"From this house," said Mama Squirrel. "They're all mine." 

"You are a truly amazing woman," said Alvin. 

"What God gives me, who am I to refuse?" she said. 

"This is an orphanage, isn't it?" said Alvin. 

"It's a boardinghouse," said Mama Squirrel. "For travelers. And, of course, my husband and I and all our children live here." 

"I suppose it's illegal to operate an orphanage," said Alvin. 

"An orphanage," said Mama Squirrel, "would be obliged to teach the Catholic religion to all the white children, while the children of color must be auctioned off by the age of six." 

"So I imagine that many a poor black woman would rather leave her impossible baby at your door than at the door of any orphanage," said Alvin. 

"I have no idea what you're talking about," said Mama Squirrel. "I gave birth to every one of these children myself. Otherwise they'd be taken away from me and turned over to an orphanage." 

"From the ages, I'd say you had them in bunches of five or six at a time," said Alvin. 

"I give birth when they're still very small," said Mama Squirrel. "It's my knack." 

Alvin set down his poke, took a step closer, and enfolded her in a wide-armed embrace. "I'm glad to be paying for the privilege of staying in such a merciful house." 

"My, what strong arms you have," said Mama Squirrel. 

"Oh, now you done it," said Arthur Stuart. "He'll be bragging on them arms all month now." 

"You wouldn't need any wood-chopping," said Alvin. "Of wood from trees as died naturally, of course. And no stomping any ticks or snakes as come out of the woodpile." 

"The biggest help," said Mama Squirrel, "would be the hauling of water." 

"I heard there wasn't no wells in Nueva Barcelona," said Alvin. "On account of the ground water being brackish." 

"We collect rain like everybody else, but it's not enough, even without washing the children more than once a week. So for poor folks, the water wagon fills up the public fountain twice a week. Today's a water day." 

"You show me what to tote it in, and I'll come back full as many times as you want," said Alvin. 

"I'll go along with him to whisper encouragement," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Arthur Stuart is so noble of heart," said Alvin, "that he drinks his fill, then comes back here and pisses it out pure." 

"You two bring lying to the level of music." 

"You should hear my concerto for two liars and a whipped dog," said Alvin. 

"But we don't actually whip no dog," Arthur Stuart assured her quickly. "We trained an irritable cat to do the dog's part." 

Mama Squirrel laughed out loud and shook her head. "I swear I don't know why Margaret Larner would marry such a one as you." 

"It was an act of faith," said Alvin. 

"But Margaret Larner is such a torch, she needs no faith to judge a man's heart." 

"It's his head she had to take on faith," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Let's go get some water," said Alvin. 

"Not unless I get me to a privy house first," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Oh, fie on me," said Mama Squirrel. "I'm not much of hospitaler, specially in front of an innkeeper's son and son-in-law." She bustled over to the stairs and led Arthur Stuart down. 

Alone in the garret, Alvin looked about for a place to store his poke while he lived in this place. There wasn't much in the way of hiding places there. The floorboards didn't fit tight together, so there was a chance someone might catch a glimpse of something if he hid the golden plow in the floor. 

So he had no choice but to go to the chimney and pull out a few loose bricks. Not that they were loose to start with. He sort of helped them to achieve looseness until he had a gap big enough to push the plow through. 

He pulled the plow from the sack. In his hand it was warm, and he felt a faint kind of motion inside it, as if some thin golden fluid swirled within. 

"I wonder what you're good for," Alvin whispered to the plow. "I been carrying you asleep in my poke for lo these many years, and I still ain't found a use for you." 

The plow didn't answer. It might be alive, in some fashion, but that didn't give it the power to speak. 

Alvin pushed it through the opening into the sooty coolness of the chimney. There being no convenient shelf to set it on, and Alvin not being disposed to let it drop three-and-a-half stories to the hearth on the main floor, he had no choice but to wedge it into a corner. He had to let his doodlebug into the bricks to soften them up like cork while he pushed the plow in, then harden them up around the plow to hold it firmly in place. Then he closed the hole and bound bricks to mortar once again. There was no sign that this corner of the chimney had been changed in any way. It was as good a hiding place as he was likely to find. Depending on who was doing the looking. 

Now his poke contained nothing but a change of clothes and his writing materials. He could leave it lying on his bed without a second thought. 

Downstairs, he found Arthur Stuart just washing up after using the privy. Two three-year-old girls were watching him like they'd never seen handwashing before. 

When he was done, instead of reaching for a towel -- and there was a cloth not one step away, hanging from a hook -- Arthur Stuart just held his hands over the basin. Alvin watched as the water evaporated so rapidly that Arthur Stuart suddenly screeched and rubbed his hands on his pants. To warm them up. 

"Sometimes," said Alvin, "even a maker lets things happen naturally." 

Arthur Stuart turned around, embarrassed. "I didn't know it would get so cold." 

"You can get frostbite doing it so fast," said Alvin. 

"Now you tell me." 

"How was I supposed to know you were too lazy to reach for a towel?" 

Arthur Stuart sniffed. "I got to practice, you know." 

"In front of witnesses, no less." He looked at the two girls. 

"They don't know what I done," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Which makes it all the more pathetic that you were showing off for them." 

"Someday I'll get sick of you bossing and judging me all the time," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Maybe then you won't come along on journeys I told you not to come on." 

"That would be obeying," said Arthur Stuart. "I got no particular interest in doing much of that." 

"Well then set your butt down and wait here and don't help me one bit while I go haul water from the public fountain." 

"I'm not that easily fooled," said Arthur Stuart. "I'll obey you when you tell me to do what I already want." 

"And I thought all you were was pretty." 


Part 3
Public Fountain
This being water day, and the neighborhood having no shortage of people who could use some water beyond what their rain barrels held, Alvin didn't need to ask directions. Each of them held a couple of empty water jars. Alvin wasn't sure Arthur could carry them both full -- but it would be better to have two half-full jars and balance the load on his shoulders than to have just one full one that he'd have to carry in front. 

Alvin wasn't much impressed when they got to the fountain. It was pretty enough, in a simple kind of way: a watering trough for animals around the base, and two spigots to let down water from the main basin. But the water in the trough was greenish, and swarms of skeeters hovered around the main fountain. 

Alvin examined the water closer, and as he expected, it was all aswarm with tiny animals and plants and the eggs of skeeters and other kinds of insects. He knew from experience that water like this was likely to make folks sick, if they didn't boil it first to kill these things. But since they were invisible to most folks, who couldn't see so small, they wouldn't feel much urgency to do it. 

He reckoned that Mama Squirrel's law against killing animals didn't apply this far from her house, and besides, what she didn't know wouldn't offend her. So he spent a few minutes working on the water, breaking down all the tiny creatures into bits so small they couldn't do no harm. Not that he broke them one by one -- that would have taken half his life. He just talked to them, silently, showing them in his mind what he wanted them to do. Break themselves apart. Spill their inner parts into the water. He explained it was to keep folks from coming to harm by drinking. He wasn't sure just what these tiny creatures actually understood. What mattered was that they did Alvin's will. Even the skeeter eggs. 

As if the skeeters understood that he'd just wiped out their progeny, they made him pay in blood for having cleaned the water. Well, he'd live with that, itch welts and all. He didn't use his knack to make himself comfy. 

"I know you're doing something," said Arthur Stuart. "But I can't tell what." 

"I'm fetching water for Mama Squirrel," said Alvin. 

"You're standing there looking at the fountain like you was seeing a vision. Either that or trying real hard not to break wind." 

"Hard to tell those things apart," said Alvin. "It gives visionaries a bad name." 

"Get bad enough gas, though, and you can start a church," said Arthur Stuart. 

They filled the jugs, taking their turns along with the other folks, some of whom looked at them curiously, the rest just minding their own business. One of the lookers, a young woman not much older than Arthur Stuart, bumped into Alvin as she reached to fill a jar. Then, her jar full, she walked up to Arthur with a bit of a swagger and, in a French accent, said, "Person rich enough to own a slave got no right to draw from this fountain. There is cisterns uptown for them with the money." 

"We're not drawing for ourselves," said Arthur Stuart, mildly enough. "We're hauling this for Mama Squirrel's house." 

The girl spat in the dust. "Hexy house." 

An older woman joined in. "You pretty bad trained, boy," she said. "You talk to a white girl and never say ma'am." 

"Sorry ma'am," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Where we come from," said Alvin, "polite folks talk to the master." 

The woman glared at him and moved away. 

The teenage girl, though, was still curious. "That Mama Squirrel, is it true she has babies of all colors?" 

"I don't know about that," said Alvin. "Seems she has some children that tan real dark in the sun, and some that just freckle." 

"Personne know where they get the money to live," said the girl. "Some folks say they teach them kids to steal, send them into the city at night. Dark faces, you can't see them so good." 

"Nothing like that," said Arthur Stuart. "See, they own the patent on stupid, and every time somebody in the city says something dumb, they get three cents." 

The girl looked at him with squinty eyes. "They be the richest people in town, then, so I think you lie." 

"I reckon you owe a dollar a day to whoever has the patent on no-sense-of-humor." 

"You are not a slave," said the girl. 

"I'm a slave to fortune," said Arthur Stuart. "I'm in bondage to the universe, and my only manumission will be death." 

"You gone to school, you." 

"I only learned whatever my sister taught me," said Arthur Stuart truthfully. 

"I have a knack," said the girl. 

"Good for you," said Arthur Stuart. 

"This was sick water," she said, "and now is healthy. Your master healed it." 

Alvin realized that this conversation had taken far too dangerous a turn. To Arthur he said, "If you're done offending everybody in the neighborhood by talking face to face with a white girl, and not looking down and saying ma'am, it's time to haul this water back." 

"I was not offended," said the girl. "But if you heal the water, maybe you come home with me and heal my mama." 

"I'm no healer," said Alvin. 

"I think what she got," said the girl, "is the yellow fever." 

If anybody had thought nobody was paying attention to this conversation, they'd have got their wake-up when she said that. It was like every nose on every face was tied to a string that got pulled when she said "yellow fever." 

"Did you say yellow fever?" asked an old woman. 

The girl looked at her blankly. 

"She did," said another woman. "Marie la Morte a dit." 

"Dead Mary says her ma's got yellow fever!" called someone. 

And now the strings were pulled in the opposite direction. Every head turned to face away from the girl -- Dead Mary was her name, apparently -- and then all the feet set to pumping and in a few minutes, Alvin, Arthur, and Dead Mary were the only humans near the fountain. Some folks quit the place so fast their jugs was left behind. 

"I reckon nobody's going to steal these jars if we don't leave them here too long," said Alvin. "Let's go see your mother." 

"They will be stole for sure," said Dead Mary. 

"I'll stay and watch them," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Sir and ma'am," said Alvin. "And never look a white person in the eye." 

"When there's nobody around, can I just set here and pretend to be human?" 

"Please yourself," said Alvin. 

It took a while to get to Dead Mary's house. Down streets until they ran out of streets, and then along paths between shacks, and finally into swampy land till they came to a little shack on stilts. Skeeters were thick as smoke in some spots. 

"How can you live with all these skeeters?" asked Alvin. 

"I breathe them in and cough them out," said Dead Mary. 

"How come they call you that?" asked Alvin. "Dead Mary, I mean." 

"Marie la Morte? Cause I know when someone is sick before he know himself. And I know how the sickness will end." 

"Am I sick?" 

"Not yet, no," said the girl. 

"What makes you think I can heal your mother?" 

"She will die if somebody does not help, and the yellow fever, personne who live here knows how to cure it." 

It took Alvin a moment to decide that the French word she said must mean nobody. "I don't know a thing about yellow fever." 

"It's a terrible thing," said the girl. "Quick hot fever. Then freezing cold. My mother's eyes turn yellow. She screams with pain in her neck and shoulders and back. And then when she's not screaming, she looks sad." 

"Yellow and fevery," said Alvin. "I reckon the name kind of says it all." Alvin knew better than to ask what caused the disease. The two leading theories about the cause of disease were punishment for sin and a curse from somebody you offended. Course, if either one was right, it was out of Alvin's league. 

Alvin was a healer, of a sort -- that was just natural for a maker, being sort of included in the knack. But what he was good at healing was broken bones and failing organs. A man tore a muscle or chopped his foot, and Alvin could heal him up good. Or if gangrene set in, Alvin could clean it out, make the good flesh get shut of the bad. With gangrene, too, he knew the pus was full of all kinds of little animals, and he knew which ones didn't belong in the body. But he couldn't do like he did with the water and just tell everything alive to break apart -- that would kill the person right along with the sickness. 

Diseases that made your nose or bowels run were hard to track down, and Alvin never knew whether they were serious or something that would just get better if you left it alone or slept a lot. The stuff that went on inside a living body was just too complicated, and most of the important things was way too small for Alvin to understand what all was going on. 

If he was a real healer, he could have saved his newborn baby when it was born too young and couldn't breathe. But he just didn't understand what was going on inside the lungs. The baby was dead before he figured out a single thing. 

"I'm not going to be able to do much good," said Alvin. "Healing sick folks is hard." 

"I touch her lying on her bed, and I see nothing but she dead of yellow fever," said Dead Mary. "But I touch you by the fountain, I see my mother living." 

"When did you touch me?" said Alvin. "You didn't touch me." 

"I bump you when I draw water," she said. "I have to be sneaky. Personne lets me touch him now, if he sees me." 

That was no surprise. Though Alvin figured it was better to know you're sick and dying in time to say good-bye to your loved ones. But folks always seemed to think that as long as they didn't know about something bad, it wasn't happening, so whoever told them actually caused it to be true. 

Illness or adultery, Alvin figured ignorance worked about as well in both cases. Not knowing just meant it was going to get worse. 

There was a plank leading from a hummock of dry land to the minuscule porch of the house, and Dead Mary fair to danced along it. Alvin couldn't quite manage that, as he looked down at the thick sucking mud under the plank. But the board didn't wobble much, and he made it into the house all right. 

It stank inside, but not much worse than the swamp outside. The odor of decay was natural here. Still, it was worse around the woman's bed. Old woman, Alvin thought at first, the saddest looking woman he had ever seen. Then realized that she wasn't very old at all. She was ravaged by worse things than age. 

"I'm glad she's sleeping," said Dead Mary. "Most times the pain does not let her sleep." 

Alvin got his doodlebug inside her and found that her liver was half rotted away. Not to mention that blood was seeping everywhere inside her, pooling and rotting under the skin. She was close to death -- could have died already, if she'd been willing to let go. Whatever she was holding on for, Alvin couldn't guess. Maybe love for this girl here. Maybe just a stubborn determination to fight till the last possible moment. 

The cause of all this ruin was impossible for Alvin to find. Too small, or of a nature he didn't know how to recognize. But that didn't mean there was nothing he could do. The seeping blood -- he could repair the blood vessels, clear away the pooling fluids. This sort of work, reconstructing injured bodies, he'd done that before and he knew how. He worked quickly, moved on, moved on. And soon he knew that he was well ahead of the disease, rebuilding faster than it could tear down. 

Until at last he could get to work on the liver. Livers were mysterious things and all he could do was try to get the sick parts to look more like the healthy parts. And maybe that was enough, because soon enough the woman coughed -- with strength now, not feebly -- and then sat up. "J'ai soif," she said. 

"She's thirsty," said the girl. 

"Marie," the woman said, and then reached for her with a sob. "Ma Marie d'Espoir!" 

Alvin had no idea what she was saying, but the embrace was plain enough, and so were the tears. 

He walked to the doorway, leaving them their privacy. From the position of the sun, he'd been there an hour. A long time to leave Arthur Stuart alone by the well. 

And these skeeters were bound to suck all the blood out of him and turn him into one big itch iffen he didn't get out of this place. 

He was nearly to the end of the plank when he felt it tremble with someone else's feet. And then something hit him from behind and he was on the damp grassy mound with Dead Mary lying on top of him covering him with kisses. 

"Vous avez sauvé ma mere!" she cried. "You saved her, you saved her, vous êtes un ange, vous êtes un dieu!" 

"Here now, let up, get off me, I'm a married man," said Alvin. 

The girl got up. "I'm sorry, but I'm so full of joy." 

"Well I'm not sure I did anything," said Alvin. "Your mother may feel better but I didn't cure whatever caused the fever. She's still sick, and she still needs to rest and let her body work on whatever's wrong." 

Alvin was on his feet now, and he looked back to see the mother standing in the doorway, tears still running down her cheeks. 

"I mean it," said Alvin. "Send her back to bed. She keeps standing there, the skeeters'll eat her alive." 

"I love you," said the girl. "I love you forever, you good man!" 


*
Back in the plaza, Arthur Stuart was sitting on top of the four water jars -- which he had moved some twenty yards away from the fountain. Which was a good thing, because there must have been a hundred people or more jostling around it now. 

Alvin didn't worry about the crowd -- he was mostly just relieved that they weren't jostling around some uppity young black man. 

"Took you long enough," Arthur Stuart whispered. 

"Her mother was real sick," said Alvin. 

"Yeah, well, word got out that this was the sweetest-tasting water ever served up in Barcy, and now folks are saying it can heal the sick or Jesus turned the water into wine or it's a sign of the second coming or the devil was cast out of it and I had to tell five different people that our water came from the fountain before it got all hexed or healed or whatever they happen to believe. I was about to throw dirt into it just to make it convincing." 

"So stop talking and pick up your jars." 

Arthur Stuart stood up and reached for a jar, but then stopped and puzzled over it. "How do I pick up the second one, while I got the first one on my shoulder?" 

Alvin solved the problem by picking up both the half-filled jars by the lip and putting them on Arthur's shoulders. Then Alvin picked up the two full ones and hoisted them onto his own shoulders. 

"Well, don't you make it look easy," said Arthur Stuart. 

"I can't help it that I've got the grip and the heft of a blacksmith," said Alvin. "I earned them the hard way -- you could do it too, if you wanted." 

"I haven't heard you offering to make me no apprentice blacksmith." 

"Because you're an apprentice maker, and not doing too bad at it." 

"Did you heal the woman?" 

"Not really. But I healed some of the damage the disease did." 

"Meaning she can run a mile without panting, right?" 

"Where she lives, it's more like splash a couple of dozen yards. That mud looked like it could swallow up whole armies and spit them back out as skeeters." 

"Well, you done what you could, and we're done with it," said Arthur Stuart. 

They got back to the house of Squirrel and Moose and poured the water into the cistern. Mixed in with what they already had, the cleaned water improved the quality only a little, but that was fine with Alvin. People kept overreacting. He was just a fellow using his knack. 


*
Back at the house of Dead Mary -- or Marie d'Espoir -- nobody was following Alvin's advice. The woman he had saved was outside checking crawfish traps, getting bitten by skeeter after skeeter. She didn't mind anymore -- in a swamp full of gators and cottonmouths, what was a little itching and a few dozen welts? 

Meanwhile, the skeeters, engorged with her blood, spread out over the swamp. Some of them ended up in the city, and each person they bit ended up with a virulent dose of yellow fever growing in their blood. 


Part 4
Fever
Supper that evening was bedlam, the children moving in and out of the kitchen in shifts with the normal amount of shoving and jostling and complaining. It reminded Alvin of growing up with his brothers and sisters, only because there were so many more children, and of nearly the same age, it was even more confusing. A few quarrels even flared, white-hot in an instant, then promptly silenced by Mama Squirrel flinging a bit of water at the offenders or by Papa Moose speaking a name. The children didn't seem to fear punishment; it was his disapproval that they dreaded. 

The food was plain and poor, but healthy and there was plenty of it. So much, in fact, that both serving pots had soup left in them. Mama Squirrel poured them back into the big cauldron by the fire. "I never made but one batch of soup in all the years we've lived here," she said. 

Even the old bread and the half-eaten scraps from the children's bowls were scraped into the big pot. "As long as I bring the pot to a long hard boil before serving it again, there's no harm from adding it back into the soup." 

"It's like life," said Papa Moose, who was scouring dishes at the sink. "Dust to dust, pot to pot, one big round, it never ends." Then he winked. "I throw some cayenne peppers in it from time to time, that's what makes it all edible." 

Then the children were herded upstairs into the dormitories, kissing their parents as they passed. Papa Moose beckoned Alvin to come with him as he followed the children up. It wasn't quick, following him up the stairs, but not slow, either. He seemed to bob up the stairs on his good foot, the clubbed foot somewhat extended so it stayed out of the way and, perhaps, balanced him a bit. It was wise not to follow too close behind him, or you could find out just how much of a club that foot could be. 

They all lay down on mats on the floor -- a floor well-limed and clean-swept. But not to sleep. One-hour candles were lighted all around the room, and all the children lay there, pretending to be asleep while Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel made a pantomime of tiptoeing out of the room. Naturally, Alvin glanced back into the room and saw that every single child pulled a book or pamphlet out from under their mat and began to read. 

Alvin came back downstairs with Moose and Squirrel, grinning as he went. "It's a shame none of your children can read," he said. 

Papa Moose held to the banister and half hopped, half slid down the stairs on his good foot. "It's not as if there were anything worth reading in the world," he said. 

"Though I wish they could read the holy scriptures," said Mama Squirrel. 

"Of course, they might be reading on the sly," said Alvin. 

"Oh, no," said Papa Moose. "They are strictly forbidden to do such a thing." 

"Papa Moose showed our ragged little collection of books to all the children and told them they must never borrow those books and carefully return them as soon as they're done." 

"It's good to teach children to obey," said Alvin. 

"'Obedience is better than sacrifice,'" quoted Papa Moose. 

They sat down at the kitchen table, where Arthur Stuart was already seated, reading a book. Alvin realized after a moment that it was written in Spanish. "You're taking this new language of yours pretty serious." 

"Since you know everything there is to know in English," said Arthur Stuart, "I reckon this is the only way to get one up on you." 

They talked for a while about the children -- how they supported them, mostly. They depended a lot on donations from likeminded persons, but since those were in short supply in Barcy, it was always nip and tuck, allowing nothing to go to waste. "Use it up," intoned Papa Moose, "wear it out, make it do or do without." 

"We have one cow," said Mama Squirrel, "so we only get enough milk for the little ones, and for a little butter. But even if we had another cow or two, we don't have any means of feeding them." She shrugged. "Our children are never noted for being fat." 

After a few minutes the conversation turned to Alvin's business -- whatever it was. "Did Margaret send you here for a report?" 

"I have no idea," said Alvin. "I usually don't know all that much more about her plans than a knight does in a game of chess." 

"At least you're not a pawn," said Papa Moose. 

"No, I'm the one she can send jumping around wherever she wants." He said it with a chuckle, but realized as he spoke that he actually resented it, and more than a little. 

"I suppose she doesn't tell you everything so you don't go improving on her plan," said Squirrel. "Moose always thinks he knows better." 

"I'm not always wrong," said Papa Moose. 

"Margaret sees my death down a lot of roads," said Alvin, "and she knows that I don't always take her warnings seriously." 

"So instead of giving you warnings, she asks you to help her," said Squirrel. 

Alvin shrugged. "If she ever said so, it would stop working." 

"The woman is the subtlest beast in the garden," said Papa Moose, "now that snakes can't talk." 

Alvin grinned. "But just in case she actually sent me here for a purpose, do you have anything to report to her?" 

"Meaning," said Arthur Stuart, looking up from his book, "do you have anything you'd be willing to tell Old Alvin here, so he can figure out what's going on?" 

"Isn't that what I said?" 

"There's all kinds of plots in this city," said Papa Moose. "The older children eavesdrop for us during the day, as they can, and we have friends who come calling. So we know about a good number of them. There's a Spanish group trying to revolt and get Barcy annexed by Mexico. And of course the French are always plotting a revolution, though it don't come to much, since they can't come to any agreement among the parties." 

"Parties?" 

"Them as favor being part of an independent Canada, and them as want to conquer Haiti, and them as want to be an independent city-state on the Mizzippy, and them as wish to restore the royal family to the throne of France, and two different Bonapartist factions that hate each other worst of all." 

"And that don't even touch the split between Catholics and Huguenots," said Squirrel. "And between Bretons and Normans and Provençals and Parisians and a weird little group of Poitevin fanatics." 

"That's the French," said Moose. "They may not know what's right, but they know everybody else is wrong." 

"What about the Americans?" asked Alvin. "I hear English on the street more than French or Spanish." 

"That depends on the street," said Moose. "But you're right, this city has more English-speakers than any other language. Most of them know they're just visitors here. The Americans and Yankees and English care about money, mostly. Make their fortune and head back home." 

"The dangerous plotters are the Cavaliers," said Squirrel. "They're hungry for more land to put into cotton." 

"To be worked by more and more slaves," said Alvin. 

"And to restore some glory to a king who can't get his country back," said Squirrel. 

"The Cavaliers are the ones who want to start a fight," said Papa Moose. "They're the ones who hope that a revolution here would make the king step in to bail them out -- or maybe they're already sponsored by the king so he'd just use them as an excuse to send in an army. There's rumors of an army gathering in the Crown Colonies, supposedly to guard the border with the United States but maybe it's bound for Barcy. It's one and the same -- if the King came in here, in control of the mouth of the Mizzippy ..." 

Alvin understood. "The United States would have to fight, just to keep the river open." 

"And any war between the U.S. and the Crown Colonies would turn into a war over slavery," said Papa Moose. "Even though parts of the United States allow slavery, too. Free-state Americans may not care enough to go to war to free the blacks, but if they won the war, I doubt they'd be so stone-hearted as to leave the slaves in chains." 

"Does all this have anything to do with Steve Austin's expedition to Mexico?" asked Alvin. 

They both hooted with laughter. "Austin the Conqueror!" said Papa Moose. "Thinks he can take over Mexico with a couple of hundred Cavaliers and Americans." 

"He thinks dark-skinned people are no match for white," said Squirrel. "It's the kind of thing slaveowners can fool themselves into believing, what with black folks cowering to them all day." 

"So you don't think Austin and his friends amount to anything." 

"I think," said Papa Moose, "that if they try to invade Mexico, they'll be killed to the last man." 

Alvin thought back to his encounter with Austin, and, more memorably, with Jim Bowie, one of Austin's men. A killer, he was. And the world wouldn't be impoverished if the Mexica killed him, though Alvin couldn't wish such a cruel death on anyone. Still, given what Alvin knew about Bowie, he wondered if the man would ever let himself be taken by such enemies. For all Alvin knew, Bowie would emerge from the encounter with half the Mexica worshiping him as a particularly bloodthirsty new god. 

"Doesn't sound like there's much useful for me to do," said Alvin. "Margaret don't need me to gather information -- she always knows more than I do about what other folks aim to do." 

"It kind of reassures me to have you here," said Squirrel. "Iffen your Peggy sent you here, stands to reason this is the safest place to be." 

Alvin bowed his head. He would have been angry if he didn't fear that what she said was so. Hadn't Margaret watched over him from her childhood on? Back when she was Horace Guester's daughter Little Peggy, didn't she use his birth caul to use his own powers to save him from the dealings of the Unmaker? But it galled him to think that she might be sheltering him, and shamed him to think that other folks assumed that it was so. 

Arthur Stuart spoke up sharp. "You don't know Peggy iffen you think that," he said. "She don't send Alvin, not nowhere. Now and then she asks him to go, and when she does, it's because it's a place where his knack is needed. She sends him into danger as often as not, and them as think otherwise don't know Peggy and they don't know Al." 

Al, thought Alvin. First time the boy ever called him by that nickname. But he couldn't be mad at him for disrespect in the midst of the boy defending him so hot. 

Papa Moose chuckled. "I sort of stopped listening at 'not nowhere.' I thought Margaret Larner would've done a better job of learning you good grammar." 

"Did you understand me or not?" said Arthur Stuart. 

"Oh, I understood, all right." 

"Then my grammar was sufficient to the task." 

At that echo of Margaret's teaching they all laughed -- including, after a moment, Arthur Stuart himself. 

During the day Alvin busied himself with repairs around the house. With his mind he convinced the termites and borers to leave, and shucked off the mildew on the walls. He found the weak spots in the foundation and with his mind reshaped them till they were strong. When he was done with his doodlebug examining the roof, there wasn't a leak or a spot where light shone through, and all around the house every window was tight, with not a draft coming in or out. Even the privy was spic and span, though the privy pot itself could still be found with your eyes closed. 

All the while he used his makery to heal the house, he used his arms to chop and stack wood and do other outward tasks -- turning the cow out to eat such grass as there was, milking it, skimming the milk, cheesing some of it, churning the cream into butter. He had learned to be a useful man, not just a man of one trade. And if, when he was done milking her, the cow was remarkably healthy with udders that gave far more milk than normal from eating the same amount of hay, who was to say it was Alvin did anything to cause it? 

Only one part of the household did Alvin leave unhealed: Papa Moose's foot. You don't go meddling with a man's body, not unless he asks. And besides, this man was well known in Barcy. If he suddenly walked like a normal man, what would people think? 


*
Meanwhile, Arthur Stuart ran such errands for the house as a sharp-witted, trusted slave boy might be sent on. And as he went he kept his ears open. People said things in front of slaves. English-speakers especially said things in front of slaves who seemed to speak only Spanish, and Spanish-speakers in front of English-speaking slaves. The French talked in front of anybody. 

Barcy was an easy town for a young half-black bilingual spy. Being far more educated and experienced in great affairs than the children of the house of Moose and Squirrel, Arthur Stuart was able to recognize the significance of things that would have sailed right past them. 

The tidbits he brought home about this party or that, rebellions and plots and quarrels and reconciliations, they added but little to what Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel already knew about the goings on in Barcy. 

The only information they might not have had was of a different nature: rumors and gossip about them and their house. And this was hardly of a nature that he would be happy to bring home to them. 

All their elaborate efforts to abide by the strict letter of the law had paid off well enough. Nobody wasted any breath wondering whether their house was an orphanage or a school for bastard children of mixed races, nor did anyone do more than scoff at the idea that Mama Squirrel was the natural mother of any of the children, let alone all of them. Nobody was much exercised about it one way or another. The law might be filled with provisions to keep black folks ignorant and chained, but it was only enforced when somebody cared enough to complain, and nobody did. 

Not because anybody approved, but because they had much darker worries about the house of Moose and Squirrel. The fact that the miracle water a few days ago had appeared in the public fountain nearest that house had been duly noted. So had the traffic in strangers, and nobody was fooled by the fact that it was a boardinghouse -- too many of the visitors came and went in only an hour. "How fast can a body sleep, anyway?" said one of the skeptics. "They're spies, that's what they are." 

But spies for whom? Some were close to the target, guessing that they were abolitionists or Quakers or New England Puritans, here to subvert the Proper Order of Man, as slavery was euphemistically called in pulpits throughout the slave lands. Others had them as spies for the King or for the Lord Protector or even, in the most fanciful version, for the evil Reds of Lolla-Wossiky across the fog-covered river. It didn't help that Papa Moose was crippled. His strange dipping-and-rolling walk made him all the more suspicious in their eyes. 

There were more than a few who believed like gospel the story that Moose and Squirrel trained their houseful of children as pickpockets and cutpurses, sneakthieves and nightburglars. They were full of talk about how there was coin and silverware and jewelry and strange golden artifacts hidden all in the walls and crawlspaces of the house, or under the privy, or even buried in the ground, though it would take six kinds of fool to try to bury anything in Barcy, the land being so low and wet that anything buried in it was likely to drift away in underground currents or bob to the surface like the corpse of a drowned man. 

Most of the stories, though, were darker still -- tales of children being taken into the house for dark rites that required the eyes or tongues or hearts or private parts of little children, the younger the better, and black only when white wasn't available. With such vile sacrifices they conjured up the devil, or the gods of the Mexica, or African gods, or ancient hobgoblins of European myth. They sent succubi and incubi abroad in Barcy -- as if it took magic to make folks in Barcy get humpty thoughts. They cursed any citizens of Barcy as interfered with anyone from that house, so those wandering children was best left alone -- lessen you wanted your soup to always boil over, or a plague of flies or skeeters, or some sickness to fall upon you, or your cow to die, or your house to sink into the ground as happened from time to time. 

Most folks didn't quite believe these tales, Arthur Stuart guessed, and them as did believe was too scared to do anything about it, not by themselves, not in a way that their identity might be discovered and vengeance taken. Still, it was a dangerous situation, and even though Mama Squirrel joked about some of the rumors, Arthur Stuart reckoned they didn't have any idea of how important their house was in the dark mythology of Nueva Barcelona. 

It was a sure thing they never heard such talk directly. While he was still introducing himself as being the servant of a man staying at the house of Moose and Squirrel, people would be real cooperative but say nothing in his presence about that house. That was no help, so he soon started telling folks the equally true story that he was the servant of an American trader who came down the Mizzippy last week, and then it didn't take much to get folks talking about strange things in Barcy, or dangers to avoid. And it wasn't just slave chat. White folks told all the same stories of Moose and Squirrel. 

"Don't you think it's dangerous?" Arthur Stuart asked Alvin one night, as they were both in bed and going to sleep. "I mean, anything bad goes wrong, and folks are gonna blame these good people for it. Do they know what folks think of them?" 

"I expect they do, but as with many warnings and ill portents, they get used to them and stop taking them serious till all of a sudden it's too late," said Alvin. "It's how cats stalk their prey, if you've noticed. They don't hide. They move up so slow and hold still so long that their prey gets used to them and thinks, well, it hasn't harmed me so far. And then all at once they pounce, no warning at all. Except there's been plenty of warning, iffen that poor bird or mouse had had the brains to just get up and move." 

"So you see it my way. They gotta get out of here," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Oh, sure," said Alvin. "They think so, too. The only difference of opinion is about when this great migration ought to occur. And how they're supposed to get some fifty children of every race out of town without nobody taking notice of just how far they've flouted the race laws. And what about money? Think they've got the passage for a riverboat north? Think they can swim Lake Pontchartrain and fetch up in some friendly plantation that'll be oh so happy to let a whole passel of free black children stay the night in their barn?" 

Arthur was annoyed that Alvin made it sound like he was dumb to have wanted them to git. "I didn't say it'd be easy." 

"I know," said Alvin. "I was exasperated at my own self. Because you know what I think? I think Peggy sent me here for exactly that purpose. To get them out of here. Only I didn't guess it till you thought of it." 

"Three things," said Arthur Stuart. 

"I'm listening." 

"First. It's about time you realized what a brilliant asset I am on this trip." 

"Shiny as a gallstone," said Alvin. 

"Second. There's no chance this is what Peggy sent you for. Because if that was what she had in mind, she would've told you. And then you could have told them that she'd given warning, and they'd do whatever it took. As it is, they're just gonna fight you every step of the way, since they don't think you and me is so almighty smart that we can see how things are in Barcy better than they can." 

Alvin grinned. "Hey, you're getting to be almost worth how much it costs to feed you." 

"Good thing, cause I got no plan to eat less." 

"Well, it'll still take you ten years to make up for how much I've wasted on you up to now when you wasn't worth a hair on a pig's butt." 

"So this ain't what Peggy wants us to do," said Arthur Stuart, "and we can be pretty sure Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel don't want us to do it. So the way I see it, that makes it just about our number one priority." 

"I'll talk to them." 

"That always works." 

"It's a start." 

"And then you'll sing to them? Cause that might do more toward getting them to move out." 

"So what's the third thing?" asked Alvin. "You said three things." 

Arthur had to think for a second. Oh, yes. He wanted to ask Alvin why he hadn't done anything about Papa Moose's foot. But now it seemed pretty silly to ask. Because wasn't as if Alvin hadn't noticed Moose's club foot. He'd have to be blind not to notice it. And it's not as if Alvin didn't know what he could or couldn't heal. 

And besides, there was something else. 

Wasn't Arthur supposed to be a prentice maker? 

"Just my suggestion about singing to them," said Arthur. 

Alvin grinned. "So you changed your mind about the third thing." 

"For now," said Arthur Stuart. "I already used up all my brains thinking up how you ought to talk to Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel. 

But there wasn't a chance to talk to Moose and Squirrel about it, because next morning five of the children were sick, screaming with pain, shaking with chills, burning up with fever. By nightfall there were six more, and the first ones had yellow eyes. 


Part 5
Healing
There wasn't any school now. The schoolroom became the sick ward, the benches all stacked up against the wall. None of the other children were allowed into the room. Instead they were sent outside to play among the skeeters. They could still hear the screaming out there. They could hear it in their minds even when nobody was making a sound. 

Meanwhile, Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel were up and down two flights of stairs with water, poultices, salves, and teas. A couple of the herbs in the tea seemed to be a little help, and of course the water helped keep the fever down. But Alvin knew that even with the ones that had a rash, the salves and poultices did no good at all. 

Of course he and Arthur Stuart helped -- chasing up and down stairs with things so Papa Moose didn't have too, running errands in town, keeping food in the house, tending the fire, hauling the chamber pots to and from the sickroom. Moose and Squirrel didn't allow them to come inside, though, for fear of contagion. 

That didn't stop Alvin from spending most of his concentration on the sick children. Having seen the disease at the end of its course in Dead Mary's mother, he knew what to look for, and kept repairing the damage the disease was doing, including keeping the fever down enough that it didn't harm them. 

He also studied the sick children, trying to find out what caused the disease. He could see the tiny disease-fighting creatures in their blood, but he couldn't see what they were hunting down the way he could with gangrene or some other sicknesses. So he couldn't find any way to help them get rid of the cause of the disease. Still, he could see that it helped to keep the fever down and the seepage of blood under control. With Alvin tending to their bodies, the disease ran its course, but quickly, and never became dangerous. 

And in the healthy children, whom he examined one by one, he found that most of them were already producing the disease-fighters, and he took such preventive action as he could. 

What interested him, though, was the handful of children who did not get sick. Were they stronger? Luckier? What did they have in common? 

Over the days of sickness in the house, Alvin checked on each of the ones who wasn't ill. They were of different races, and both sexes. Some were older, some younger. They did tend to be the ones who read the most -- he always found them curled up in some corner of the house, always indoors with a book in their hands, now that Papa Moose wasn't patrolling to make sure none of them could be caught reading. But how could reading keep them from getting sick? Bookish people died all the time. In fact, they tended to be more frail, more easily carried off by disease. 

Meanwhile, it was Arthur Stuart who kept his eyes open outside the house. The yellow fever was beginning to spread through the town, but the early cases all showed up in the area around the fountain. It was inevitable that people began to say that the "miracle water" had brought the fever back to Barcy. Many who still had any of it threw it out. But others were just as convinced it was the only cure, which God had sent in advance, knowing that the yellow fever was coming to smite the wicked. 

Arthur Stuart was glad, for the first time he could remember, that white folks around here didn't pay all that much attention to a half-black young man carrying water with his master. So far nobody had linked him or Alvin to the miracle water. But that didn't mean somebody might not remember how he sat there in the plaza, waiting for his master to come back from some Swamptown shack where Dead Mary had said her mother might have yellow fever. No, said she did have it. The first victim of this epidemic. 

And it occurred to Arthur that however much danger the house of Moose and Squirrel might be in, Dead Mary would face much worse, and much quicker, now that the yellow fever was back. 

When this thought came to him he was in the market down in the old town, choosing whatever was cheap but still edible. He debated with himself for a moment -- what was more urgent, to get food back to Alvin, or go check on the girl? 

What would Alvin choose? 

Well, that made it easy. He always went for the dramatic over the sensible -- or rather, he chose whatever would cause him the most inconvenience and danger. 

He'd already bought a sack of yams, and not a light one. It not only got heavier as he walked, but it made it so he couldn't run -- nothing was more sure to get him stopped than to be a half-black boy running with a sack of something on his back. Everybody knew that slaves on their masters' business always moved about as slow as they could get away with, without somebody pronouncing them dead. So when a boy of color was running, it was sure to be a crime in progress. 

So he walked, but quickly, and followed, as best he could find it, the path he'd seen Alvin's and Dead Mary's heartfires trace through the swamps. He knew he didn't see heartfires anywhere near as well as Alvin did, and once they got a few hundred yards off, or mixed in with a lot of other folks, it was hopeless. But Alvin's heartfire he could follow, it was so bright and strong, and not only that, when he followed Alvin he could see, like a sort of backwash, something of where he was, the terrain he was moving through. And he had traced along with Alvin and Dead Mary all the way to her mother's house. He had seen her heartfire flicker and grow strong, even if he didn't understand what Alvin had done. 

Now it took a bit of splashing around and slapping at skeeters before he finally got to the plank bridge leading to Dead Mary's house. He stood this side of the plank and clapped his hands. "Hello the house!" he called. "Company!" Which was wrong, of course -- he was supposed to call out, "Alvin Smith's servant here!" Or, if the world had not been so ugly, "Alvin Smith's brother-in-law!" Then again, he didn't know if Alvin had ever so much as told Dead Mary his name. Maybe names wouldn't mean a thing here. 

And they didn't. Because no one was home. 

Or if they were, they weren't answering. 

He walked swiftly across the bridge and pushed open the door, half fearing that he might find them dead, murdered by fearful people. But he knew that couldn't be so -- iffen some mob blamed Dead Mary for the plague and wanted to kill her for it, they'd have burned down the house around them. 

The house was empty. Cleaned out, too -- or else they didn't own a blame thing. Most likely they had realized their peril and fled. He didn't need to tell them how Dead Mary was regarded in this town. 

He shouldered his sack of yams and retraced his route back into the city. Staying away from crowded streets and especially from the plaza with the public fountain, he made his way back to the house of Moose and Squirrel, scratching at skeeter bites the whole way. 

He emptied the sack of yams into the bin in the kitchen, an action which Alvin, who was stirring the soup, greeted with a raised eyebrow. Which made Arthur Stuart feel guilty about how few of his errands he had finished. 

"What?" asked Arthur Stuart. "It's not like I had a lot of money, and besides, I got worried about Dead Mary and her mother, and so I went out to check on them." 

"I expect they were gone," said Alvin. 

"You expect right," said Arthur Stuart. 

"But that's not why I raised my eyebrow at you." 

"Too lazy to wave?" 

"You don't just dump out a sack of yams. They need washing. Or peeling." 

"Why should I, when you can just talk the dirt right off the skins, or the skins right off the yams?" 

"Because knacks weren't given to us for frivolous purposes." 

"Oh, like the time you made me work half a summer making a dugout canoe when you could have made a canoe out of it in five minutes." 

"It was good for you." 

"It was a waste of my time," said Arthur Stuart. "And it nearly got you shot by that bear hunter." 

"Old Davy Crockett? I ended up kind of liking that fellow." 

"Peeling the yams wouldn't stop you from healing those kids upstairs the way you been doing." 

Alvin turned slowly. "How do you know that?" said Alvin. "How do you know what it costs me to do that work?" 

"Cause it's easy for you. You do it like breathing." 

"And when you run up a hill, how easy is it to breathe?" 

"Maybe I'd know what healing was like if you ever tried to teach me." 

"You only just started hotting up metal." 

"So I'm ready for the next step. You're working so hard on healing those children, I know you are. So tell me, show me what to do." 

Alvin closed his eyes. "You don't think I wish you could?" he said. "But you can't help if you can't see what's going on inside their bodies. And Arthur Stuart, I tell you, you got to be able to see pretty small." 

"How small?" 

"Look at the thinnest, smallest hair on your arm," said Alvin. 

Arthur Stuart looked. 

"That hair is like a feather." 

Arthur Stuart tried to get his rudimentary doodlebug inside that hair, to get the feel of it like he got the feel of iron. He could almost do it. He couldn't see the featherness of it, but he could sense that it wasn't smooth. That was something. 

"And each strand of that feather is made of lots of tiny bits. Your whole body is made of tiny pieces, and each one of them is alive, and there's stuff going on inside those pieces. Stuff I don't understand yet. But I get a sense of how those pieces are supposed to work, and I kind of ... you know ..." 

"I know," said Arthur Stuart. "You tell them how you want them to be." 

"Or ... sort of show them." 

"I can't see that small," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Bones are easier," said Alvin. "Bones are more like metal. Or wood, anyway. Broken bones, I bet you could fix those." 

Immediately Arthur Stuart thought of Papa Moose's foot. Was that a problem with bones? Was Alvin maybe hinting something to him? 

"But the yellow fever," said Alvin. "I barely know what I'm doing with that, and I think it's out of your reach so far." 

Arthur Stuart grinned. "So what about yams? Think I could get the dirt off yams?" 

"Sure. By scrubbing." 

"What about taking off the skins?" 

"By peeling only, my friend." 

"Because it's good for me," said Arthur Stuart, and not happily. 

"Because if you do it any other way, I'll just put the skins and dirt right back on them." 

Arthur Stuart had no answer to that. He sat down and held a yam in his hand. "All right, which is it? Peel or wash? Cause I ain't doing both." 

"You asking me?" said Alvin. "You know what a bad cook I am. And I don't think Squirrel wants me to toss these yams into the permanent soup. I think they'd kind of take over the flavor for the next couple of years." 

"So we'll roast them," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Suits me," said Alvin. 

And it occurred to Arthur Stuart that Alvin hadn't grown up watching Old Peg Guester wash and peel taters and yams for twenty or thirty people at a time. All this was new to Alvin. Of course, if Arthur Stuart had his druthers, he'd rather be an expert on healing people with fevers or club feet. 

"So I'll wash them," he said. 

"And meanwhile," said Alvin, "I'll keep snapping beans from the back garden, while my doodlebug works on the body of the most recent person to get the fever." 

"Who's that?" 

"You," said Alvin. 

"I'm not sick," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Yes you are," said Alvin. "Your body's already fighting it." 

Arthur Stuart thought about that for a minute. He even tried to see inside his own body but it was all just a confused mass of strange textures to him. "Is my body going to win?" 

"Who do you think I am, Dead Mary?" 

So it was on to snapping beans and scrubbing yams, while Arthur Stuart wondered what had made him sick. Somebody cursed him? He walked into a house that had fever in it a week ago? Dead Mary touched him? Yams? 

Where was Dead Mary? Hiding in the swamp? Traveling to some safe, familiar place? Or skulking somewhere, hoping not to get killed by those who thought her knack caused the diseases that she warned about? 

Or was she already dead? Her body burnt somewhere? Her mother too? Caught by superstitious fools who blamed them for something they had no part in causing? 

Every terrible thing in the world was caused by a whole combination of things. But everybody wanted to narrow it down to one cause -- and not even the real one. Much better to have one cause -- one person to punish. Then the unbearable could be borne. 

So why is it, Arthur Stuart wondered, that Alvin and Margaret and I and so many other decent people manage to bear the unbearable without having to punish anyone at all? 

Though come to think of it, Alvin did kill the slavecatcher who killed Arthur's and Peggy's mother. In a fit of rage he slew the man -- and regretted the killing ever since. Alvin hadn't flailed around at any old victim; he got the right man, for sure. But Alvin, too, had needed someone to blame for the unbearable. 

What about me, then? I talk big, I have a mouth like no half-black boy ought to have, my birth being so shameful, the rape of a slave woman by her master. Haven't I had unbearable things happen? My mother died after carrying me to freedom, my adopted mother was murdered by the catchers who came to take me back to my owner. People tried to bar me from school even in the north. Being nothing but a third-rate prentice maker in the shadow of the greatest maker seen in this world in many lifetimes. So much that I've lost, including any hope of a normal life. Who'll marry me? How will I live when I'm not Alvin's shadow? 

Yet I never want to lash out and punish anybody, except with words, and even then I always pretend that it's a joke so nobody gets mad. 

Maybe that's how God will get out of it, when he gathers us at his judgment seat and tries to explain why he let so many awful things go on. Maybe he'll say, "Can't you take a joke?" 

More likely, though, he'll just tell the truth. "I didn't do it," he'll say. "I'm just the one who has to clean up your mess." Like a servant. Nobody ever says, How can we make things easier on God? No. We just make messes and expect he'll come around later and clean it all up. 

That night in bed, Arthur Stuart sent out his doodlebug. He searched for Papa Moose's heartfire and found him easily enough, sleeping lightly while Mama Squirrel kept watch over the children. 

Arthur Stuart wasn't used to examining people's bodies, and he had trouble keeping his doodlebug inside the boundaries. But he began to get the knack of it, and soon found the club foot. The bone was clearly different from the other tissues -- and the bones were a mess, broken into dozens of pieces. No wonder his foot was so crippled. 

He might have begun to try to put the pieces back together, but it wasn't like looking at them with his eyes. He couldn't grasp the whole shape of each bone fragment. Besides, he didn't know what the bones in a normal foot were supposed to look like. 

He found Papa Moose's other foot and almost groaned aloud at his own stupidity. The good foot had just as many bones as the bad one. The club foot wasn't the way it was because the bones were broken. And when Arthur went back and forth between them, comparing the bones, he realized that because Papa Moose's foot had been twisted up his whole life, none of the bones were the right shape any more to fit together like a normal foot. 

So it wouldn't be a matter of just getting the bones back into place. Each one would have to be reshaped. And no doubt the muscles and ligaments and tendons would all be out of place, too, and the wrong size. And those tissues were very hard to tell apart. It was exhausting work just trying to make sense of them. He fell asleep before he understood much of anything. 


Part 6
Bowie
The rumor mill went on. The yellow fever only added to it -- who's sick, who's dead, who fled the city to live on some friend's plantation until the plague passed. 

The most important story, though, was no rumor. The army that the King had been assembling was suddenly ordered back home. Apparently the King's generals feared the yellow fever more than they feared the military might of Spain. 

Which might have been a mistake. The moment the threat of invasion disappeared, the Spanish authorities in Nueva Barcelona began arresting Cavalier agents. Apparently the Spanish had been aware of the plots all along -- they heard the same rumors as everyone else -- and had only been biding their time before striking. 

So it wasn't just the yellow fever that was decimating the English-speaking population of Nueva Barcelona. Plenty of Americans and Yankees and Englishmen were taking ship out of the city -- Americans in steamboats up the river, Yankees and Englishmen in clippers and coastal traders heading out to sea, bound for New England or Jamaica or some other British destination. 

Cavaliers weren't finding it any easier than the French. The Pontchartrain ferry and all the other passages out of the city were being watched, and those who carried royal passports from the Crown Colonies were forbidden to leave. Since the Cavaliers were the largest single English-speaking group, this left a lot of frightened people trapped in Nueva Barcelona as the yellow fever made its insidious way through the population. 

Wealthy Spanish citizens headed for Florida. As for the French, they had nowhere to go. The borders had been closed to them from the time Napoleon first invaded Spain. 

The result was a city full of fear and anger. 

Alvin was shopping in the city, which was getting harder these days, with the fever making farmers more reluctant to bring in their produce. He was looking through as ratty-looking a bunch of melons as he'd ever seen when he became aware of a familiar heartfire making toward him in the crowd. He spoke before turning around. "Jim Bowie," he said. 

Bowie smiled at him -- a big, warm smile, which made Alvin check to see if the man's hand was on his knife. Nowhere near, but that didn't mean much, as Alvin well knew, having seen the man in action. 

"Still here in Barcy," said Bowie. 

"I thought you and your expedition would be long gone." 

"We almost made it before they closed the ports," said Bowie. "Cuss the King for making such a mess of things." 

Cuss the King? As if Bowie weren't part of an expedition committed to spreading the power of the King into Mexican lands. 

"Well, the fever will pass," said Alvin. "Always does." 

"We don't have to wait for that," said Bowie. "Word's just come down from the Governor-General of Nueva Barcelona. Steve Austin's expedition can go ahead. Any Cavaliers who are with us can get passage out on a ship bound for the Mexican coast." 

"I reckon that gave recruitment a big boost." 

"You bet," said Bowie. "The Spanish hate the Mexica worse than they hate Cavaliers. I reckon it has something to do with the fact that King Arthur never tore the beating hearts out of ten thousand Spanish citizens to offer as a sacrifice to some heathen god." 

"Well, good luck to you." 

"Seeing you in the market here, I got to say, I'd feel a lot better about this expedition iffen you were along." 

So you can find a chance to stab me in the back and get even for my humiliating you? "I'm no soldier," said Alvin. 

"I been thinking about you," said Bowie. 

Oh, I'm sure of that. 

"I think an army as had you on their side would have victory in the bag." 

"There's an awful lot of bloodthirsty Mexica, and only one of me. And keep in mind I'm not much of a shot." 

"You know what I'm talking about. What if all the Mexica weapons went soft or flat-out disappeared, as once happened with my lucky knife?" 

"I'd say that was a miracle, caused by an evil god who wanted to see slavery expanded into Mexican lands." 

Bowie stood there blankly for a moment, "So that's how it is. You're an abolitionist." 

"You knew that." 

"Well, there's folks who are just agin slavery and then there's abolitionists. Sometimes you can offer a man a good bit of gold and he don't mind so much how many slaves another fellow owns." 

"That would be someone else," said Alvin. "I don't have much use for gold. Or expeditions against the Mexica." 

"They're a terrible people," said Bowie. "Bloody-handed and murderous." 

"And that's supposed to make me want to go fight them?" 

"A man don't shrink from a fight." 

"This man does," said Alvin. "And you would too, if you had a brain." 

"The Mexica won't stand up to men as knows how to shoot. On top of that, we're bound to have thousands of Reds from other tribes join with us to overthrow the Mexica. They're tired of having their men sacrificed." 

"But you'd restore slavery. They didn't like that either." 

"No, we wouldn't enslave the reds." 

"There's lots of black former slaves in Mexico." 

"But they're slaves by nature." 

Alvin turned away and picked a half-dozen melons to put in his poke. 

Bowie poked him hard in the arm. "Don't you turn your back on me." 

Alvin said nothing, just offered a couple of dimes to the melon seller, who shook his head. 

"Come on now, this is for kids in an orphanage," said Alvin. 

"I know who it's for," said the farmer, "and the price of melons today is ten cents each." 

"What, it took so much more work to raise these? They plated with gold inside?" 

"Take it or leave it." 

Alvin pulled some more money from his pocket. "I hope you're proud of profiting from the neediness of helpless children." 

"Nobody helpless in that house," murmured the farmer. 

Alvin turned away to find Bowie standing in his way. 

"I said don't turn your back on me," Bowie murmured. 

"I'm facing you now," said Alvin. "And if you don't take your hand off your knife, you'll lose something dear to you -- and it ain't made of steel, no matter how you brag to the ladies." 

"You don't want me as your enemy," said Bowie. 

"That's true," said Alvin. "I want you as a complete stranger." 

"Too late for that," said Bowie. "It's friend or foe." 

Alvin walked away with his poke full of melons, but as he went, he hotted up the man's knife blade. Also the buttons on the front of his pants. In a few moments, the threads around the buttons burned away and Bowie's pants came open. And when he reached for his knife, the sheath burst into flame. Behind him Alvin could hear the other shoppers laughing and hooting. 

That was probably a mistake, he thought. But then, it was a mistake for Bowie to show his face near Alvin again. Why did men like that refuse to accept defeat and keep challenging someone they knew had the better of them? 


*
Arthur Stuart woke up in the middle of the night with his bowels in a state. It was sloshy in there, and so it wasn't something that could be relieved by the soundless passing of gas and then pretending to be asleep if Alvin noticed. So, resigned to his fate, he got up and carried his boots downstairs and put them on by the back door and then slogged on out into the sultry night to the privy. 

It was about a miserable half-hour in there, but each time he thought he was done, he'd start to get up and his bowels would slosh again and he'd be back down on the seat, groaning his way through another session. Each time of course, thinking he was through, he'd wipe himself, so by the end he felt like his backside was as raw as pounded flank steak. At least the cows are lucky enough to be dead before they get turned into raw meat, he thought. 

Finally he was able to get up without hearing more sloshing or feeling more pressure, though that was no guarantee he wouldn't reach the top of the three flights of stairs and have to go clomping back down. He worried, of course, that maybe this had something to do with yellow fever, that Alvin might not have made him healthy enough, that it was coming back. 

Though when he thought about it, he reckoned it probably had more to do with the street vendor who sold him a rolled pie this afternoon that might not have been cooked as much as it ought. 

He flung open the privy door and stepped outside. 

Someone tugged at his nightshirt. He yelped and jumped away. 

"Don't be afraid!" said Dead Mary. "I'm not a ghost! I know Africans are afraid of ghosts." 

"I'm afraid of people grabbing at my nightshirt when I come out of the privy in the middle of the night," said Arthur Stuart. "What are you doing here?" 

"You're sick," she said. 

"No joke," he agreed. 

"But you will not die this time," she said. 

"And just when I was beginning to wish I could." 

"So many people are going to die. And so many of them blame me." 

"I know," said Arthur Stuart. "I went out to warn you, but you and your ma were gone." 

"I saw you go there and I thought, this boy is coming to give warning. So tonight I think, maybe you're the one who can give us some food. We're very hungry." 

"Sure, come on in the house," said Arthur Stuart. 

"No no," she said. "It's a strange house. Very dangerous." 

Arthur Stuart made a disgusted face at her. "Yeah, so the stories they tell about you are lies, but the stories they tell about this house are all true, is that it?" 

"The stories they tell about me are half true," said Dead Mary. "And if the stories about this house are half true, I won't go in, no." 

"This house has no danger for you, at least not from the folks that live there," said Arthur Stuart. "And now I've been standing outside the privy this long, I'm beginning to notice how bad it stinks here. So get your ma and come on inside where the air is breathable. And make it quick or I'll be out here in the privy again and then who's going to feed you?" 

Dead Mary considered for a moment, then picked up her skirts and scampered off into the wooded darkness near the back of the property. Arthur Stuart took the opportunity to move farther away from the privy and closer to the kitchen. 

A few minutes later, he had a candle lighted and Dead Mary and her mother were gobbling slightly stale bread and bland cheese and washing it down with tepid water. Didn't matter how it tasted, though. They were swallowing it down so fast they probably couldn't tell bread from cheese. 

"How long has it been since you last ate?" said Arthur Stuart. 

"Since we hid," said Dead Mary. "Didn't have no food in the house though, or we would have took it." 

"All the time flies bite me," said her mother. "I got no blood now." 

She did have a few welts from skeeter bites, now that Arthur Stuart looked at her. "How you feeling?" he asked her. 

"Very hungry," she said. "But not sick, me. That all done. Your master, he make me well." 

"He's not my master, he's my brother-in-law." 

Dead Mary looked at him sideways. "So Alvin married an Africaine? Or you have married his sister?" 

"I'm adopted," said Arthur Stuart. 

"So you're free?" 

"I'm no man's slave," said Arthur Stuart. "But it's not exactly the same as being free, not when everybody says, You're too young to do this and you're too young to do that and you're too black to go here and you're too inexperienced to go there." 

"I'm not black," said Dead Mary, "but I rather be a slave than what I am." 

"Being French ain't so bad," said Arthur Stuart. 

"I mean one who sees who is sick." 

"I know," said Arthur Stuart. "I was joking. Course, like Alvin says, if you have to tell folks you was joking, it wasn't much of a joke, was it?" 

"This Alvin," said Dead Mary. "What is he?" 

"My brother-in-law," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Non, non," said the mother. "How he make me so better?" 

Suddenly Arthur was suspicious. They come in the middle of the night and ask questions about Alvin. Perfectly good explanations for all of it -- why not be curious about Alvin! -- but it could also be somebody had set out to trap Arthur Stuart into telling more than he should. 

"I expect you can ask him yourself in the morning." 

"Got to be gone by morning," said Dead Mary. "Before light. People watch this house. They see us, they follow us, they kill us. Burn us for witches, like in New England." 

"They haven't done that in New England in years," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Your Alvin," said the mother. "Did he touch this bread?" 

Alvin had, in fact, bought the baguettes. So Arthur hesitated a moment before saying, "How should I know?" He knew that the hesitation was more of an answer than his words. And without knowing why, he wanted to snatch the bread back and send them on their way. 

As if she had read his desire, or perhaps because she thought her mother had been too obvious, Dead Mary said, "We go now." 

"Inmediatement," echoed her mother. 

"Thank you for the food," said Dead Mary. 

Even as she was thanking him, her mother was putting a couple more baguettes into her apron. Arthur would have stopped her -- that was supposed to be part of breakfast in the morning -- but he thought of them out in the swamps for days with nothing to eat and little to drink and he held his tongue. He'd go fetch more baguettes in the morning. 

He followed them out the door. 

"Non," said the mother. 

"You shouldn't go with us," said Dead Mary. 

"I'm not," said Arthur Stuart. "I got to go sit in the privy again. So you best move fast, cause I don't want the ensuing odor to offend your delicate sensibilities." 

"What?" said Dead Mary. 

"I'm gonna let fly in the privy right quick, ma'am, so hightail it if you value your nose." 

They hightailed it, and Arthur Stuart went back to groaning over the privy pot. 


Part 7
Come-Hither
It began with a few stones thrown against the house late the next night, and a muffled shout that no one inside understood. 

Next morning, a group of men marched back and forth in front of the house carrying a coffin, calling out, "Why ain't nobody sick in there!" 

Since Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel were still nursing three children who had been seized by the fever despite Alvin's preventive healing, it was tempting to invite the men inside to see that their claim was a lie. But everyone knew that showing three sick children wouldn't be much of an answer, when in this neighborhood more children were dying than anywhere else in Barcy, while not one child in the house of Moose and Squirrel had been carried out in a box. 

It wasn't because Alvin had confined his ministrations to the children of the orphanage. He had searched out other heartfires in other houses, and had saved many. But it took time, working one by one, and while he saved many, far more died beyond his reach, ones he had not even looked at. There were limits to what he could do. 

No longer did he pretend to run errands or do chores. The baguettes Arthur Stuart had shared with Dead Mary and her mother were the last he bought; and when he slept it was because he could stay awake no longer. He dozed fitfully, waking from nightmares in which children died under his hands. And the worst nightmare of all, a vision of Dead Mary's mother filled with invisible disease, walking about giving people the yellow fever just by bumping into them or speaking to them or whispering in their ear. Tousling the head of a child, she'd move on and the child would drop dead behind her. And each dead person would turn to Alvin and say, "Why did you save her and let her walk around to kill us all?" 

Then he'd wake up and search out more heartfires dimmed by disease and try to repair their ravaged bodies. 

It never occurred to him not to reach first for those nearest to where he was at the moment. But the result was that deaths from the fever increased in direct relationship to one's distance from the orphanage. It was as if God had put a blessing on the place that spilled over to neighboring houses. 

Or, as the marchers outside the house were broadly hinting, it was as if the devil was protecting his own. 

That night there were more stones, and marchers with torches, and drunks who threw bottles that crashed. Children woke up and cried, and Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel led them into the back rooms of the house. 

Still Alvin lay on his bed, reaching out with his doodlebug to heal and heal, concentrating now on children, saving all that he could. 

Arthur Stuart dared not interrupt his work -- or wake him, if by chance he was asleep. He knew that somehow Alvin blamed himself for the plague -- he understood the grim relentlessness of Alvin's labors. This was personal; Alvin was trying to undo some terrible mistake. That much he had hinted at before he went completely silent. And now Alvin was silent, and Arthur Stuart was on his own. 

Arthur had no power to heal anyone. But he had learned some makering, and thought now to use it to protect the house. It was something Squirrel said that triggered his action: "What I'm a-feared of are the torches. What if they try to burn us out?" 

So he reached out to the torch-bearing men and tried to get a sense of the fire. He had worked in metal before, but little else. Wood and cloth were organic and hard to get into, hard for him to feel and know. But soon he found that what was burning was the oil the torches had been soaked in, and that was a fluid that made more sense to his half-blind groping doodlebug. 

He didn't know how fire worked, so he couldn't stop the burning. But he could dissipate the fluid, turn it into gas the way he had turned metal into liquid. And when he had vaporized it, the torch would soon go out. 

One by one, the torches nearest the house began to go dark. 

It wasn't until Papa Moose said, "What's happening? God help us, why are the torches going out?" that Arthur Stuart realized that he might be doing something wrong. 

There was fear in Papa Moose's voice. "The nearest torches are going out," 

Arthur Stuart opened his eyes and looked. He had blacked out about a dozen of the torches. But now he saw that the remaining torchbearers had backed away from the house, and the street was now littered with the discarded sticks, scattered about like the bones of some long-dead creature. 

"If they ever wanted proof that this house was a cursy place, this was it," said Mama Squirrel. "Whoever came near, his torch went out." 

Arthur Stuart was sick at heart. He was about to confess what he had done when the crowd began to move away. 

"Safe for tonight," said Papa Moose. "But they'll be back, and more of them, what with one more miracle to report." 

"Arthur Stuart," said Mama Squirrel. "You don't think Alvin would be so foolish as to douse their torches like that, do you?" 

"No ma'am," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Let's get the children back to bed, Mama Squirrelel," said Papa Moose. "They'll be glad to know the mob is gone." 

Only after they left the room did Arthur Stuart see through the window the dark shape of one man lingering in the street, not particularly watching the house, but not leaving it, either. From the way the man moved, shambling like a bear, with pent-up energy, he thought he recognized him. Someone he had met recently. Someone on the riverboat. Abe Lincoln? Coz? 

Tentatively he reached out to the heartfire. Not being deft, like Alvin, he didn't know how to merely graze the man, glance at him. One moment he was seeing him as a distant spark, and the next moment he was filled with the man's self-awareness, his body-sense, what he saw and felt and heard, what he hungered for. Filled with hate he was, and rage, and shame. But no words, no names -- that wasn't a thing that was easy to find. Peggy could see such things, but not Arthur Stuart, and not, or so he believed, Alvin. 

It was hard to pull himself back out of the fiery heart of the man, but he knew now who it was, for in the midst of all the turmoil, one thing stood out -- a constant awareness of the knife at his hip, as if it were the man's best and truest hand, the tool that he relied on before all others. Jim Bowie, without doubt. 

With all that malice in him, there was no doubt Jim Bowie was there for mischief. Arthur Stuart couldn't help but wonder if he still harbored his old grudge from the river. But then, why didn't he remember his fear, as well? 

Maybe he needed a reminder. Arthur Stuart couldn't make the knife disappear as Alvin had, but he could do something. In moments he had the thing het up enough that Bowie was bound to feel it. Yes, there it was -- Bowie whirled around and ran full-tilt away from the orphanage. 

What Arthur Stuart couldn't figure out was why, as he ran, Bowie kept a tight hold on the front of his pants, as if he was afraid they'd fall down. 


*
Alvin was asleep, not knowing where dreams left off and the living nightmare of his failure to save more lives began. But in the midst of his restless slumber he heard a voice calling to him. 

"Healer man!" 

It was a commanding voice, and a strange one. Whoever called him in his sleep, it was not a voice that he had heard before. But it seemed to know him, to speak out of the center of his own heartfire. 

"Wake up, sleeping man!" 

Alvin's eyes opened as if against his will. There was the faintest light of dawn outside the attic, visible only through the window at the end of the long room. 

"Wake up, man who keeps a golden plow in the chimney!" 

In a moment he was out of bed, across the long room, standing with his hand pressed against the brick. The golden plow was still there. But someone knew about it. 

Or no. That must have been a dream. He had fallen asleep after healing a child four streets over. The mother had also been dying, and he meant to heal her afterward. Had he done it, before sleep took him? 

He cast about wildly, then with more focus, searching. There was the child, a boy of perhaps five years. But where the mother should have been, nothing. His body had failed him. The child was alive, but an orphan now. Sick guilt stabbed at him. 

"Take your gold out of the chimney, healer man, and come down to talk to me!" 

This time it could not be a dream. So strong was the voice that he obeyed almost as if it had been his own idea. In a moment, though, he knew that it was not. 

Yet there was no reason not to obey. Someone knew about the golden plow, and so it was not hidden anymore. Time to get it out of the chimney and carry it with him again in his poke. 

It took time and most of his concentration, tired as he was, grieved and guilty as he felt, to get the bricks apart and soften the golden plow to let it fall into his hand. It quivered there, vibrant as always, alert, yet seeming to want nothing. It made his hand tremble as he pulled it through the gap in the bricks and brought it close to him. His heart warmed when the plow came near. Whether it was the plow that caused it, or the emotion of greeting a friend and traveling companion, he didn't know. 

"Come down to me, healer man." 

Who are you? he asked silently. But there was no answer. Whoever called him out of his own heartfire either could not hear his thoughts or did not wish to answer him. 

"Come down and break bread with me." 

Bread. Something about bread. It meant more than mere eating. She wanted more from him than to share a meal. 

She. Whoever called him was a woman. How did he know? 

With his plow in its poke, along with his few other belongings, Alvin went down the stairs. Papa Moose saw him as he passed the third floor, Mama Squirrel as he passed the second, and when he got to the bottom floor they were right behind him. 

"Alvin," said Squirrel. "What are you doing?" 

"Where are you going?" asked Papa Moose. 

"Someone's calling me," he said. "Look after Arthur Stuart till I come back." 

"Whoever's calling you," said Squirrel, "are you sure it's not a trap? Last night they came with torches. Some strange power put the torches out as they came near the house, and now you can be sure the house is watched. They'd love to lure us out." 

"She's calling me as a healer," said Alvin. "To break bread with her." 

Arthur Stuart appeared in the kitchen door. "It's the woman you healed in the swamp," he said. "She came two nights ago, with Dead Mary. I gave them bread, and they asked if you had bought it." 

"There it is," said Squirrel. "Terrible power, what Dead Mary has." 

"Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren't afraid of truth. And it's not Dead Mary calling me." 

"What about her mother?" asked Arthur Stuart. 

"I don't think so," said Alvin. 

"Do you think it couldn't be no come-hither, then?" asked Squirrel. "Do you think that you're so powerful such things have no hold on you?" 

"A come-hither," said Alvin. "Yes, I think that's likely." 

"So you mustn't go," said Arthur Stuart. "Good people don't use such spells to draw a man. Or to make the awful sacrifices such a spell must take." 

"I suspect that all it took was the burning of some bread," said Alvin. "And I go or not, as I choose." 

"Isn't that how everyone feels, when they've had a come-hither set on them?" asked Papa Moose. "Don't they all think up good reasons for obeying the summons?" 

"Maybe so," said Alvin, "but I'm going." 

He was out the door. 


Part 8
La Tia
Arthur Stuart dogged Alvin's heels. 

"Go back inside, Arthur Stuart." 

"No sir," said Arthur. "If you're going to walk into a trap, I'm going to see it, so I can tell the story to folks later, about how even the most powerful man on earth can be dumb as a brick sometimes." 

"She needs me," said Alvin. 

"Like the devil needs the souls of sinners," said Arthur Stuart. 

"She's not commanding me," said Alvin. "She's begging." 

"Don't you see, that's how a compulsion would feel to a good man? When people need you, you come, so when someone wants you to come, they make you think you're needed." 

Alvin stopped and turned to face Arthur Stuart. "I left a child orphaned last night because I couldn't stay awake," he said. "If I'm so weak I can't resist my own body, what makes you think you can talk me into being strong enough to resist this spell?" 

"So you know it isn't safe." 

"I know that I'm going," said Alvin. "And you're not strong enough to stop me." 

He strode on, out into the deserted early-morning street, as Arthur Stuart trotted at his side. 

"I was the one put them torches out," said Arthur Stuart. 

"No doubt," said Alvin. "It was a blame fool thing to do." 

"I was a-feared they meant to burn down the house." 

"They mean to, no doubt of it, but it'll take them a while to work up the courage," said Alvin. "Or to work up the fear. Either one, if it gets strong enough, will make them put the house to the torch. You probably did no more than tip them to the side of fear. Put it out of your mind." 

"You have to sleep," said Arthur Stuart, "so put your own troubles out of your mind, too." 

"Don't talk to me like you understand my sins." 

"Don't talk to me like you know what I do and do not understand." 

Alvin chuckled grimly. "Oh, that mouth you've got." 

"You can't answer what I said, so you're going to talk about my saying it." 

"I ain't talking about nothing. I told you not to come with me." 

"It was Jim Bowie last night," said Arthur Stuart. "Last man who stayed behind when the mob run off." 

"He invited me to join their expedition. Told me if I wasn't their friend, I was their foe." 

"So he's maybe goading on the mob, to try to force you into joining?" 

"A man like that thinks that fear can win loyalty." 

"Plenty of masters with a lash who can testify it works." 

"Don't win loyalty, just obedience, and only while the lash is in the room." 

They were moving out of the city of painted buildings and into a different New Orleans, the faded houses and shacks of the persecuted French, and then beyond them into the huts of the free blacks and masterless slaves -- a world of cheap and desperate whores, of men who could be hired to kill for a piece of eight, and of practitioners of dark African magics that put bits of living bodies into flames in order to command nature to break her own laws. 

The black folks' way was as different from the knacks of white folks as was the greensong of the reds. Alvin could feel it around him in the heartfires, a kind of desperate courage that if worst came to worst, a person could sacrifice something to the fire and save what was most dear to him. 

"Do you feel it?" he asked Arthur Stuart. "The power around you?" 

"I smell the stink," said the boy. "Like folks here just spill their privy pots onto the ground." 

"The soil wagons don't come here," said Alvin. "What choice they got?" 

"Don't feel no power, me," said Arthur Stuart. 

"And yet you're talking like the French of this place. 'Don't feel no power ... me?'" 

"That don't mean nothing, you know I pick up what I hear." 

"You're hearing them, then. All around you." 

"This be blacktown, massa," said Arthur Stuart, affecting the voice of a slave. "This be no Veel Francezz." 

"French slaves run away as sure as Spanish ones, or slaves of Cavaliers." 

Now black children were coming out of the houses, their mothers after them, tired women with sad eyes. And men who looked dangerous, they began to follow like a parade. Until they came to a woman sitting by a cookfire. Not a fat woman, but not a thin one, either. Voluptuous as the earth, that's what she was, but when she looked up from the fire she smiled at Alvin like the sun. How old was she? Could have been twenty from the smooth bronze skin. Could have been a hundred from the wise and twinkling eyes. 

"You come to see La Tia," she said. 

A smaller woman, French by the look of her, came forward from behind the fire. "This be the Queen," she said. "You bow now." 

Alvin did not bow. Nothing in La Tia's face suggested that she wanted him to. 

"On your knees, white man, you want to live," said the French woman sharply. 

"Hush now, Michele," said La Tia. "I don't want no kneeling from this man. I want him to do us a miracle, he don't have to kneel to me. He come when I call him." 

"Everybody have to come, you call them," said Michele. 

"Not this one," said La Tia. "He come, but I don't make him. All I do is make him hear me. This one choose to come." 

"What do you want?" asked Alvin. 

"They gonna be burning here in Barcy," said the woman. 

"You know that for sure?" asked Alvin. 

"I hear that. Slaves listen, slaves talk. You know. Like in Camelot." 

Alvin remembered the capital city of the Crown Colonies, and how rumors traveled through the slave community faster than a boy could run. But how could she know that he had been there? 

"I had your skin on that bread," she said. "Most gals like me, they don't see it, so small that skin. But I see it. I got you then. While the fire burn, I got whatever you have in there. I see your treasure." 

She could see more in his heartfire than Alvin could see in hers. All he could see was the health of her body, and some strong fears, but also an intense sense of purpose. But what the purpose was, he couldn't know. Once again, his knack was not as much as he needed it to be, and it stung. 

"Don't you fret, mi hijo," she said. "I ain't gonna tell. And no, I don't mean that thing you got in your poke. That ain't your treasure. That belongs to its own self. Your treasure is in a woman's womb, far away and safe." 

To hear it in words like that, from a stranger, stabbed him in the heart. It brought tears to his eyes, and a weakness, almost a giddiness to his head. Without thinking, he sank to his knees. That was his treasure. All the lives he had failed to save in Barcy, they were that one life, the child who had died those years ago. And his redemption, his only hope, his -- yes, his treasure -- it was the new child that was so far away, and beyond his reach, in someone else's charge. 

"Get up," whispered Arthur Stuart. "Don't kneel to her." 

"He don't kneel to me," said La Tia. "He kneel to his love, to the saint of love. Not Lord Valentine, no, not him. The saint of a father's love, St. Joseph, the husband of the Holy Mother. To him he kneeling. That be so, no?" 

Alvin shook his head. "I'm kneeling because I'm broke inside," he whispered. "And you want this broke man to do something for you, and there's nothing I can do. The world is sicker every day and I got no power to heal the world." 

"You got the power I need," said La Tia. "Maria de los Muertos, she tell me. You make her mother whole, she." 

"You're not sick," said Alvin. 

"The whole of Barcy, she be sick," said La Tia. "You live in a house about to die from that sick. This blacktown, she about to die. The French people of Barcy, they be about to die. The sick of angry people, the sick of stupid people all afraid. Gotta have somebody to blame. That be you and that crazy Moose and Squirrel. That be me and all us who keep Africa alive, we. That be all them French folk like Maria de los Muertos and her Mama. What they gonna do when the mob decides to blame the fever on somebody and burn it out? Where they gonna go?" 

"What do you think I can do? I got no control over the mob." 

"You know what I want, you." 

"I don't." 

"You maybe don't know you know, but you got them words burnt in your heart by your mama all them years ago, when you little, you. 'Let my people go.'" 

"I'm not Pharaoh and this ain't Egypt." 

"Is too Egypt and I reckon you ain't Pharaoh, you Moses." 

"What do you want, a plague of cockroaches? Barcy already got that, and nobody cares." 

"I want you to part the sea and let us across on dry land in the dark of night." 

Alvin shook his head. "Moses did that by the power of God, which I ain't got. And he had someplace to go, a wilderness to be lost in. Where can you go? All these people. Too many." 

"Where you send them slaves you set free from the riverboat?" 

That flat out stunned Alvin. There was no way that story could be known here in the south. Was there? 

Alvin turned and looked at Arthur Stuart. 

"I didn't tell nobody," said Arthur. "You think I'm crazy?" 

"You think I need somebody tell me?" said La Tia. "I saw it inside you, all on fire, you. Take us across the river." 

"But you ain't talking about no two score slaves here, you talking about blacktown and the orphanage and -- French town? You know how many that is?" 

"And all the slaves as want to go," said La Tia. "In the fog of night. You make the fog come into Barcy from off the river. You let us all gather in the fog, you take us across the river. You got red friends, you take us safe to the other side." 

"I can't do it. You think I can hold back the whole Mizzippy? What do you think I am?" 

"I think you a man, he want to know why he alive," said La Tia. "He want to know what his power be for. Now La Tia tell you, and you don't want to know after all!" 

"I'm not Moses," said Alvin. "And you ain't the Lord." 

"You want to see a burning bush?" asked La Tia. 

"No!" said Alvin. She might be able to conjure up some kind of fireworks, but he didn't want to see it. 

"And it wouldn't work to cross the river anyway," said Alvin. "How would we feed the people on the far bank? It's swamp there, mud and snakes and gators and skeeters, just like here. Ain't no manna in the wilderness there. My friends among the reds are far to the north. It can't be done. Least of all by me." 

"Most of all by you," said La Tia. 

They stood there in silence for a moment. 

Arthur Stuart spoke up. "Usted es tia de quien?" 

"I don't speak no Spanish, boy," said La Tia. "They call me La Tia cause them Spanish people can't say my Ibo name." 

"We don't say her name neither," said the smaller woman. "She be our Queen, and she say, Let my people go, so you do it, you." 

"Hush, child," said La Tia. "You don't tell a man like this what to do. He already want to do it. So we help him find his courage. We tell him, go to the dock and there he find him hope this morning. There he find a brother like Moses did, make him brave, give him trouble." 

"Oh good," said Alvin. "More trouble." But he knew that he would do her bidding -- go to the dock, at least, and see what her prophecy might mean. 

"Tonight at first dark, there be fog," said La Tia. "You make fog, everybody know to come." 

"Come where?" said Alvin. "Don't do it. We can't cross the river." 

"We leave this place one way," said La Tia, "or we leave it another, we." 

As they hurried away, with blacks watching them on either hand, Arthur Stuart asked, "She mean what I thought she meant?" 

"They're going to leave or they're going to die trying," said Alvin. "And I can't say they're wrong. Something ugly's building up in this city. They were itching for war before this yellow fever. Steve Austin's been gathering men who like to fight. And there's no shortage of others who'll fight when they're afraid. They all mean to have some killing, and La Tia's right. There's no staying here, not for any of the people they might turn on. If I find a way to get Papa Moose and his family out of Barcy, they'll turn on the free blacks or the French." 

"How about a hurricane? You done a flood to stop the slave revolt in Camelot, but I think this time you could do it with wind and rain," said Arthur Stuart. 

"You don't know what you're asking," said Alvin. "A bad blow in this place, and we'd kill the very folks we ought to save." 

Arthur Stuart looked around him. "Oh," he said. "I guess they're all pretty much on low ground." 

"Reckon so." 

White faces watched them from the windows of poor shacks in Frenchtown, too. La Tia's words had gone out already. They were all looking to Alvin to save them, and he didn't know how. 

Story of my life, thought Alvin. Expectations built up all around me, but I got neither the power nor the wisdom to fulfil any of them. I can make a man's knife disappear and I can melt the chains off a bunch of slaves but it's a drop of blood in a bucket of water, you can't even find it, let alone draw it out again. 

Drop of blood in a bucket of water. 

He remembered how Tenskwa-Tawa made a whirlwind on a lake, put his blood into the waterspout, and saw the future in the walls of it as he and Alvin rose up in the air inside. 

He remembered that it was in the visions inside that column of swirling water that he saw the Crystal City for the first time. Was it something in the distant past, or something in the future? What mattered was not that dream of what might have been. It was the process by which Tenskwa-Tawa shaped the water to the form he wanted, and held it there, seeming to whirl at great speed, but really holding absolutely still. 

Blood in the water, and a whirlwind, and walls as clear and smooth as glass. 


Part 9
Calvin
Long before he reached the dock, Alvin began to scan the heartfires of the throngs of people ahead of him. He could not see into them the way Margaret could, knowing things about them, their past, their future. But he could see whose heartfire burned bright, and whose merely smoldered hot and dark; who was strong and who was weak, who fearful and who courageous. 

There were many that he recognized, having been in town for so many weeks. He easily found Steve Austin and Jim Bowie, not together at the moment, and not really much alike. He knew Austin was a dreamer, Bowie a killer. The dreamers always seem to think their dream is worth the price that others will pay. They also delude themselves that they will control whatever evil they use to try to bring about their dream. 

But soon his reflections on Austin and Bowie were stopped cold by a bright familiar heartfire that was just about the last one he expected -- or wanted -- to find here in Barcy. 

His younger brother Calvin. 

Calvin had been the closest companion of Alvin's childhood. They had been inseparable, and whatever Alvin did, Calvin had to try. Alvin, for his part, rarely succumbed to the temptation to tease his brother, but instead included him and watched over him. 

What neither had counted on was Calvin's jealousy. He, too, was a seventh son of a seventh son -- though Calvin was seventh only because the firstborn, Vigor, had died in crossing the river Hatrack on the very day, in the very hour that Alvin was born. So whatever gifts were conferred by that powerful position of birth, Calvin's were never as great as Alvin's. 

But to have a knack that was less than Alvin's was no great disappointment, surely -- most human beings suffered from the same deficiency. And Calvin's were remarkable enough. 

The problem was that Calvin had never worked at his knack. He had expected to be able to do whatever Alvin did, and when he couldn't, he grew sullen and angry. Angry at Alvin, which was ridiculous and unfair, Alvin thought. And said. 

Calvin didn't have much of an ear for argument or criticism. He couldn't bear it, and avoided it, and so the brothers who once had been close had spent the last few years with little contact. It didn't help that Margaret disliked Calvin. Or perhaps not that -- perhaps she merely feared him, and didn't want him to be near Alvin. 

And yet here Calvin was. The coincidence was too pointed. Calvin had been sent here. And the only person who could have done such a sending was Margaret. Somehow she had decided that Calvin's presence was actually good for Alvin right now. Or perhaps merely necessary to accomplish whatever her purpose was. 

As he drew nearer to the dock, Alvin felt the moment when Calvin noticed his heartfire. There was a quickening in his heart. The old love still burned there. Calvin might be annoying, disappointing, and sometimes even a bit frightening. He might have done some dark deeds that made his heartfire seem hooded and flickery sometimes. But he was still that young boy that Alvin delighted in through the best hours of his childhood, before he understood the dark enemy that sought his life. 

Before Calvin began to be seduced by that same enemy. 

So Alvin's pace quickened through the crowded streets, and he jostled people now and then, though none thought to challenge him, once they saw his height, and the size of his blacksmith's shoulders. 

Behind him Arthur Stuart trotted to keep up. "What is it? What's happening?" 

And then they emerged from the street and saw the endless row of ships and riverboats tied up along the dock, the stevedores loading and unloading, the cranes lifting and lowering, the passengers milling about -- few arriving, many leaving -- the vendors shouting and pushing, the thieves and whores skulking and strutting, and in the midst of them all, standing alone and gnawing on a baguette, was Calvin. 

He had finally reached his adult height. Not as tall as Alvin, but lankier, so he looked more like a tall man, while Alvin looked like a big one. His hair was light in the sunshine. And his eyes twinkled when he saw Alvin approaching. 

"What are you doing here, you great oaf!" cried Alvin, reaching out to embrace his brother. 

Calvin laughed and hugged him back. "Came to save you from some dire peril, I gather, though your wife wasn't more specific than that." 

"It's good to have you here," said Alvin. "Even if neither of us has any idea why we're here." 

"Oh, I know why we're here," said Calvin. "I just don't know why Peggy sent us." 

"So ... are you going to tell me?" 

"We're here because it's time for us to get over petty jealousies and work together to really change the world." 

They hadn't been talking for a whole minute, and already Alvin was grinding his teeth a little. Petty jealousies? Calvin was the only one who had ever been jealous, and Calvin was the one who decided to leave Vigor Church and head off for wherever he'd been -- France and England, Alvin knew, and Camelot, and Philadelphia once, and a lot of other places that he didn't have any idea of. Calvin was the one who decided to stop working on trying to train his knack, who had to learn everything on his own. 

Apparently he'd learned it all and was ready to take his place as Alvin's equal. But Alvin had no delusion that they'd be working together. Calvin would cooperate if he felt like it, and not, if he felt like not. 

And when he really bollixed it up, Alvin would step in to try to undo whatever madness Calvin had gotten into. 

No, no, that's not fair. Give the kid a chance. 

The man, I mean. 

Or maybe that's what I mean. 

"All right," said Calvin. "Maybe we aren't over our petty jealousies." 

Alvin realized that he'd left Calvin's declaration unanswered. "What jealousies?" he said. "I was just trying to think how best to divide our labors." 

"Why not think out loud?" asked Calvin. "Then maybe I'll have a chance to think of an idea, instead of just waiting for yours." 

He said it with a smile, but Alvin almost laughed in reply. So much for petty jealousies being put behind them. 

"Where's that French fellow you were traveling with a few years back?" 

"Balzac?" said Calvin. "Back in France, writing subversive novels that make Napoleon look like an ass." 

"And Napoleon permits it?" 

"We don't know yet. Balzac hasn't actually published any of it." 

"Is it any good?" 

"You'd have to decide that for yourself," said Calvin. 

"I don't read French," said Alvin. 

"Too bad," said Calvin. "That's where all the interesting writing is going on right now." 

Go ahead, thought Alvin. Assert your superiority. You are my superior when it comes to speaking French, and I don't mind. Good manners would suggest you not rub my nose in it. But then, you think I always rub my skill at makery in your face, so ... fair is fair. 

"Hungry?" asked Alvin. 

"I ate on the boat," said Calvin. "In fact there wasn't much else to do but eat. Nothing but fog on the river." 

"Didn't it stay to the western shore?" 

Calvin laughed. "Every now and then I'd play around with it a little. Whip up a little extra fog using the river water. Surround the boat in fog. I suppose we looked strange to anybody on shore. A little cloud floating down the river with the sound of a steam engine coming from it." 

Alvin felt the familiar contempt rise in him. Calvin persisted in using his knack for foolishness and showing off. 

Not that Alvin didn't know a little bit about the impulse. But at least he tried to control it. At least Alvin was ashamed when he caught himself showing off. Calvin reveled in it. He seemed oblivious to Alvin's scorn. Or maybe it was Alvin's scorn that he wanted to provoke. Maybe he wanted a quarrel. 

And maybe he'd get one. But not over this, and not right now. "Sounds fun," he said. 

Calvin looked at him with amusement. "I guess you've never whipped up a little fog?" 

"From time to time," said Alvin. "And cleared some away, when I found the need." 

"Some noble cause, I'm sure," said Calvin. "So, what dire problem are you working on saving, and what part do you think I'll play in it?" 

Alvin explained things as best he could -- the yellow fever, how Alvin had been healing as many people as he could. The rumors about the orphanage. Jim Bowie's little mob. La Tia and the desire of the oppressed people of Barcy to get out before the bloodshed began. 

"So, what'll it be? Take all these boats?" 

"We don't have a lot of sailors among the French and the slaves and the free blacks and the orphans," said Alvin. 

"We could persuade the crews to stay with them." 

"La Tia has some idea of my parting the river. Like Moses and the Red Sea. Only I guess it would be more like Joshua and the crossing of the Jordan. How the water piled up on the righthand side as the Israelites crossed over to the western shore." 

"And you don't want to do that." 

"Makes no sense," said Alvin. "First, that's a lot of water, and it would have to go somehow. No doubt it would end up flooding the whole city, which wouldn't exactly make things better. And when we got to the other side, what's there? Fog and swamp. And some mighty suspicious reds who won't be glad to see us. And let's not forget, several thousand people to feed." 

Calvin nodded. "I ain't too surprised, Al. I mean, everybody else has a plan, but you can see how they're all fools and their plans are no damn good." 

Alvin knew that if he called Calvin on trying to pick a fight, the boy would look at him with big innocent eyes and say, Whatever do you mean, Al? They are all fools and their plans are no damn good. 

"They ain't fools," said Alvin. "Especially considering I didn't have no plan at all. Until I was on the way here, and I remembered something I saw Tenskwa-Tawa do." 

"Oh, yeah, Lolla-Wossiky, that old one-eyed likkered-up red." 

To speak of the great Prophet that way made Alvin's blood boil, but he said nothing. 

"Of course I suppose he doesn't drink much now," said Calvin. "And didn't you fix his eye? Course, we don't know what all he's doing on the other side of the fog. Maybe they're brewing good old corn mash and getting drunk every Thursday." He laughed at his own humor. 

Alvin didn't. 

"Oh, you old stick-in-the-mud," said Calvin. "Everything's serious with you." 

Just the people that I love, thought Alvin. But he didn't say anything more about that. 

"What I saw Tenskwa-Tawa do," said Alvin, "was mix his blood with water and turn it into something solid." 

Calvin nodded. "I don't know about red knacks." 

"They don't have knacks," said Alvin. "They sort of draw their powers from nature." 

"Now, that's plain dumb," said Calvin. "We're all human, aren't we? Reds can marry whites, can't they? So what would their children have, half a knack? What would half a knack look like? And they could half draw their power from nature?" 

"Here I thought you didn't know about red knacks," said Alvin, "and you turn around and insist that their knacks are just like ours." 

"Well, if you're going to be quarrelsome," said Calvin, "I'm gonna be sorry I came." 

That would make two of us, Alvin refrained from saying. 

"So you think you can do this thing old Lolla-Wossiky did," said Calvin. "And then what? You make the river solid? Like a bridge, and the rest of the water flows under it?" 

"All the other problems are still there," said Alvin. "No, I was thinking something about Lake Pontchartrain." 

"Where's that?" 

"Just north of the city. A huge briny lake, but it's shallow. Good for catching shrimp and crawfish, and there's a ferry across it, but it doesn't get used much, because there's nothing worth going to on the other side. Most folks either take a boat upriver or a ship downriver. But at least on the other side of Pontchartrain there's farms and food and shelter and no angry reds wondering what we're doing coming across into their land." 

"But there's a whole passel of angry farmers wondering why you're bringing three thousand people, including free blacks and runaway slaves, right through their cotton plantations," said Calvin. 

Now this was an argument worth having, thought Alvin. Not just fight-picking, but something that actually mattered. 

"Well," said Alvin, "I reckon if we had thirty runaways folks might get angry with us. But we come across with three thousand, and I reckon they might decide against fighting us and just feed us and hurry us on our way." 

"They might," said Calvin. "Or they might send for the King's soldiers to come and teach you proper discipline." 

"And the King's soldiers might find us in a fog somewhere," said Alvin. 

"Aha," said Calvin. "I knew that fog would turn up as your idea." 

"I thought you wanted me to include your ideas in this plan," said Alvin, grinning because it was either that or punch the boy's nose. 

"As long as you remember they're mine," said Calvin. 

"Cal," said Alvin, "ideas aren't like land or poems or babies or something. If you tell me an idea, and I like it, then it's my idea too, and still yours, and it also belongs to everybody else on God's green earth who thinks it's a good one." 

"But I thought of it first," said Calvin. 

"Well, Cal, if we're getting sticky about it, when it comes to fog, I reckon God thought of it long before you and me was born." 

"And I guess you're gonna make me whip up all this fog while you get to do the glamorous stuff with the water." 

"I don't know," said Alvin. "I've never made fog. And you've never mixed blood and water and turned it into glass. So if we both just do the thing we already know how ..." 

Calvin laughed and shook his head. "So you've got my part all figured out." 

"Tell you what," said Alvin. "I'll do the fog and the water, and you can get back on the boat and go live your own life as you've been doing for the past six years." 


Part 10
Moose's Foot
"So you don't need me," said Calvin. "I guess Peggy was wrong again." 

"There's parts of you I need, all right," said Alvin. "The part that wants to use his knack to help get a bunch of innocent or at least mostly innocent people out of Barcy before the killing starts, I need that. But the part of you that wants to pick fights with me and distract me from what I've got to do, that part can go stick its head up a horse's butt." 

Calvin just laughed. "I bet the horse would like that even less than me." 

"You're right," said Alvin. "I was forgetting that horses got rights, too." 

"Ease up, old Al," said Calvin. "Don't you know when a body's teasing you?" 

"I reckon I do," said Alvin. "You think you're a quick dog teasing a slow bull. But what you don't seem to realize is, sometimes the dog ain't that quick and the bull ain't that slow." 

"Threatening me?" said Calvin. 

"Reminding you that I don't got all the patience in the world." 

"Don't even have patience enough for me? Your beloved little brother?" 

"A man could have eight barrels full of patience for you, Cal, and you'd just have to keep goading him till you saw what happened when it turned out he needed nine." 

"Sometimes I rile people, I admit it," said Calvin. "But so do you." 

"I reckon I do," said Alvin, thinking of Jim Bowie. 

"So you'll make a bridge over this Paunchy Train?" 

"I thought you spoke French." 

"Paunchy Train is supposed to be French?" Calvin laughed. "Oh ... oh, now I get it. Pont Chartrain." 

He said it with an exaggerated French accent so his mouth looked all pursed up like he'd just et a persimmon. 

Alvin couldn't help himself. He put on his dumb American act. "Pone Shot Train? I just can't ever hold my mouth right to speak them hard French words." 

It was like the best of the old times, tossing words back and forth. "That was the best French accent I ever heard from a journeyman blacksmith." 

"Aw shucks, Cal," said Alvin. "I reckon you done made me want to haul my poke over to Paree." 

"Iffen you wash yourself proper, I'll take you to meet Bonaparte himself," said Calvin. 

"No thanks," said Alvin. "I met him once and I'm done with him." 

All at once the playfulness fled from Calvin's face and Alvin could see his heartfire flare with anger. "Oh, excuse me, I forgot you already did everything long before little Calvin come along." 

"Oh, don't be a ..." 

"Don't be a what? What were you going to call me, big brother?" 

"I met him when I was a kid, and I didn't like him. You met him, and apparently you did. What of it? He was here in America. It was before he overthrew the monarchy. What am I supposed to do, pretend that I didn't meet him, just so you don't get provoked? Are you the only one entitled to have met famous people?" 

"Oh, just shut up," said Calvin, and he stalked off in another direction. 

Since Calvin was perfectly capable of finding Alvin's heartfire whenever he wanted, Alvin didn't fret about it. He just headed home, wishing that Margaret had decided that he needed a different helper. Like, say, Verily Cooper -- there was a good man, and he didn't pick foolish fights. Or Measure. Alvin could have used any of his brothers better than Calvin. 

But the truth was, Alvin had no idea whether he could sustain a good fog and do the thing with the water, not at the same time -- not reliably. Promising as Arthur Stuart was, he was still flailing about with makery, and Alvin would be lucky if he could teach Arthur to raise steam from a teapot, let alone a full-fledged fog. So he needed Calvin. A good thick fog wouldn't be just to hide them on the other side. It would cover the whole city tonight. It would keep people from finding them till they were all across the lake and safely gone. 

Margaret was right to send him, and Alvin would just have to swallow hard and not let Calvin make him mad. 


*
Arthur Stuart's big accomplishment of the day was coming up with fifteen cloth bags that the older children could use to carry food for the journey. Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel were supervising the loading of the bags, arguing back and forth about what they'd need. Papa Moose was determined that they should carry spare clothing, while Mama Squirrel wanted nothing but food. 

"They'll get hungry before they get nekkid," she said. 

"But no matter how much we carry with us, we'll run out of food soon, and if we're going to have to forage or buy food anyway, we might as well carry spare clothing so the children don't have to travel in rags." 

"If we can afford to buy food we can afford to buy clothes, and we'll need the food first." 

"We can pick food off trees and glean it out of fields." 

"Well, if you're talking about stealing, Papa Moose, we can take clothes off clotheslines." 

"If we're lucky enough to find clothes that fit." 

"There's not a child in this house who fits the same clothes for six months in a row." 

And on and on it went. Meanwhile, to Arthur Stuart's amusement, they were unloading each other's bags almost as fast as they were loading their own. The children seemed to be used to seeing this sort of thing and most of the bags were in another room, where the children were carefully loading them with food they were carrying out of the kitchen. Apparently they were voting with Mama Squirrel. 

"Don't like none of our clothes nohow," said one of the children to Arthur Stuart. "Druther travel nekkid." 

At that moment a cry from the kitchen sent them all running to see. 

Papa Moose lay on the floor, doubled up, holding his crippled foot and crying out with great groans of pain. 

"What happened?" said Arthur, amid the clamor of the children. 

"I don't know, I don't know," said Mama Squirrel. 

Arthur Stuart knelt down by Papa Moose, moving some of the children out of the way as he did. He took the man's ankle and foot in his hands and began unwinding and unfastening the straps that bound it in place and held on the pad at the heel. Almost at once the groaning stopped -- but not because the pain had eased, Arthur Stuart soon realized. Papa Moose had fainted. 

No one even heard the knock at the door -- if there was one. The first they knew that they had a visitor was when he spoke. 

"This is what comes of having a kitchen built right onto the house." 

Arthur Stuart looked up. It was Alvin's younger brother Calvin. 

Calvin shook his head. "Burn himself on the stove?" 

"Don't know," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Hasn't Alvin taught you anything?" 

Arthur Stuart seethed, but stuck to the subject. "It's something with his foot." 

Calvin knelt down across from Arthur and began to examine Papa Moose. "This looks like a club foot," said Calvin. 

Arthur Stuart looked up at Mama Squirrel, raising his eyebrows to say, Isn't it wonderful to have a real doctor here to tell us what we already knew. 

Mama Squirrel was not, however, in the mood for sarcasm. "Who are you, sir? And get your hands off my husband's foot." 

Calvin looked up at her and grinned. "I'm Calvin Maker, the brother of a certain journeyman blacksmith who's been living in your house, I think." 

Now that really did make Arthur Stuart mad. Calling himself a maker, as if that was his profession, when Alvin didn't make no such claim, and him ten times the maker Calvin would ever be! 

But Arthur held his tongue, since there's be nothing gained by going to war with Calvin. 

"I'm getting the lie of the bones in his foot. The muscles have grown up all wrong around the bones." Calvin palpated the foot some more, then pulled off the thick stockings. 

"What are you doing?" demanded Mama Squirrel. 

"I can't believe Alvin's been in this house so long and didn't do a blamed thing about your husband's foot." 

"My husband gets along just fine on his foot the way it is." 

"Well, he'll get along better now," said Calvin. "Got everything back in place." He stood up and offered his hand to her. "It'll take him some getting used to, but in a few weeks he'll be walking better than he ever has in his whole life." 

"A few weeks?" said Mama Squirrel, ignoring his hand. "Maybe you're all proud of your miracle working, but you might have thought to ask if this was a convenient day to go fixing up his foot. We've got miles to walk tonight! And for weeks to come." 

"And he was going to do that with a club foot?" said Calvin. 

Arthur Stuart knew, from the slight snideness now creeping into Calvin's tone, that he was irked by Mama Squirrel's lack of gratitude. 

"Some folks," said Mama Squirrel, "is so proud of their knacks that it just don't occur to them that other folks might not want them to do their public demonstrations on them." 

"Well, then," said Calvin, "I'm pretty sure I remember how the club foot was. I think I can put it back." 

"No you can't," said Arthur Stuart. 

Calvin looked at him with cool, amused hostility. "Oh?" 

"Because his foot had already been changed before you got here," said Arthur Stuart. "That's what made him cry out with pain and fall down. Something moved all the bones around while the foot was still all strapped up. And that was a good five minutes ago." 

"How interesting," said Calvin. 

"So you see," said Arthur Stuart, "the bones the way you found them when you knelt down here, that ain't how they was." 

Calvin shook his head sadly. "Arthur Stuart, does Alvin know you've been trying to heal this poor man without him even asking?" 

"I've done no such thing!" 

"If you knew how his foot was before, and how it was different when I got here, that says you been doodling around in there," said Calvin. "Don't deny it, you've always been a bad liar." 

"How do you know what I've always been." 

"Oh, then I suppose you're a good liar," said Calvin. "Not a thing I'd have expected a body to be proud of, but there you go." Calvin went to the door and looked out into the back yard. "Mind if I use your privy? It's a long time since I left the riverboat as brought me here, and I could use a pissoir." 

Mama Squirrel gestured for him to go ahead. As soon as he was gone, she knelt again beside Papa Moose. "He did it, didn't he?" she said. "Before he even walked in the door." 

"He likes to make grand entrances," said Arthur Stuart. "And he loves to show Alvin up, if he can." 

"Daring to cause my husband so much pain. Do you think we don't know what Alvin is? Do you think we couldn't have asked him to fix that foot iffen we'd wanted it done?" 

"Calvin's never going to admit he done it," said Arthur Stuart. "So you might as well work on helping him learn to walk with his foot this way. Have you got the other shoe to this pair?" 

"Other shoe? Pair?" Mama Squirrel snorted. "He's never bought a pair of shoes in his life." 

"Well, is this the only shoe he's got?" 

"He has another, for Sundays." 

"Let's get it on his other foot." 

"They don't match." 

"One shoe on and one foot bare match a good bit worse," said Arthur Stuart. 

Mama Squirrel sent a couple of children to go look for Papa Moose's Sunday shoe. Then she turned back to Arthur Stuart. "I don't reckon you'd know how to wake my husband up." 

"I don't mess around inside people's heads or feet," said Arthur Stuart. "Besides, Calvin didn't do all that good a job. It's still a mess inside his foot, even if it is shaped mostly right on the outside. I think when Papa Moose wakes up, there's gonna be a lot of pain." 

"Best let him sleep then," said Mama Squirrel. "I just. I ... ever since I knowed him, I never seen Papa Moose laid out like that. In all these things that've been happening, I never been scared till this moment." 

"When Alvin gets himself back here, he'll make it OK," said Arthur Stuart. 

"Oh, I hope so, I sure do," said Mama Squirrel. 

"We might as well get back to loading up the pokes," said Arthur. 

And in moments, the children were back to loading up with food. The extra clothing, all unloaded now, was left in a pile in the parlor. "For the poor," said Mama Squirrel. 

Arthur wondered if she had some definition of the word poor that didn't include her and her huge hungry family. 


Part 11
Crystal Ball
Alvin sat on the damp bank near Dead Mary's house, his bare feet in the water, watching a gator glide by. The gator had given him a passing thought -- Alvin saw it in his heartfire, that flash of hunger. But Alvin asked him to search somewhere else, and the gator obligingly moved along. 

Well, to put it precisely, Alvin put the idea of the gator getting its guts ripped out into its mind, and associated it with the sight of Alvin, and the gator flat-out skedaddled. 

It's a good thing to be able to scare away gators, thought Alvin. I could go into it fulltime and make a profession of it. They could call me Gator Al, and they'd always ask me how come I never wore gator-skin boots or a gator-skin belt, and I'd say, How can I get me a gator skin, iffen the gators won't come close to me? 

Sounded to him like a better job than his current employment, which right now looked like having the responsibility for saving the lives of hundreds of people without a clue of how to actually do it. 

He'd poked himself a couple of times with his knife to draw blood, which was a kind of embarrassing thing to do in the first place. It made him feel like he was just a couple of steps away from a Mexica sacrifice. He let the blood drip into the murky water and then felt it dissipate and vanish. 

He had done this once, on the Yazoo Queen, but not with river water. It was with drinking water, already pure. The blood had nowhere to go, it mixed with the water immediately and Alvin had been able to shape it as he wanted. But how to make something out of an almost infinite body of water, filled with impurities? 

More blood? Open a vein? An artery? 

How about opening a gator's artery, how about that? 

No, he knew that wouldn't do at all. The maker is the one who is part of what he makes. If there was one thing he knew, it was that. 

But he'd spent his childhood getting nearly killed by water over and over again, till his Pa was plumb scared to let Alvin have a cool drink from a stream for fear he'd drown or choke. 

Stop thinking, he told himself. This ain't science, like feeling head bumps or bleeding a patient. This is serious, and you gotta keep your mind open in case an idea comes along -- you want there to be some room for it to fit in. 

So he occupied himself with clearing the water around him. It wasn't hard -- he was good with fluids and solids, at purifying them, asking whatever belonged there to stay, and whatever didn't to go. The skeeter eggs, the tiny animals, the floating silt, all the creatures large and small, and above all the salt of this briny tidewater -- he bid them find somewhere else to go, and they went, till he could look down into the water and under the reflection of the trees spreading overhead he could see his bare feet and the muddy bottom. 

It was an interesting thing, looking into water, seeing two levels at once -- the reflection on the surface and what was underneath it. 

He remembered being there in the midst of the whirlwind with Tenskwa-Tawa, and in the walls of solid water he saw not just some reflection or whatever was in the water, but also things deep in time, hidden knowledge. He was too young to make much sense of it at the time, and he wasn't sure anymore what he actually remembered or merely remembered that he remembered, if you know what I mean. 

He could hear a kind of wordless song, he sat so still. It wasn't in his own mind, either. It was another song, a familiar one, the song that he had heard so many times in his life as he ran like wind through the woods. The greensong of the life around him, of the trees and moss, the birds and gators and fish and snakes, and the tiny lives and the momentary lives, all of them making a kind of deep harmony together that became a part of him so that he could hear himself as nothing more than a small part of that song. 

And as he listened to the greensong and as he looked down into the water, another drop of blood fell from his hand and began to spread. 

Only this time he let his doodlebug spread out with his blood, following that familiar liquid, keeping it warm, letting it bind with the water as if it was all part of the same music. There were no boundaries to contain it, but he held on to the blood, kept it as a part of himself instead of something lost, as if his heart were still pushing it through his veins. 

Instead of having outside boundaries imposed on the blood, he set his own limits to its flow. This far, he told his blood, and no farther. And because it was still a part of himself, it obeyed. 

At the limits the blood began to form a wall, become solid, become like a very thin sheet of glass. Then, working inward, the blood formed itself into a latticework that drew the water around it into complicated whorls that never ceased moving, but also never left their orbit around the impossibly thin strands of blood. 

The water moved faster and faster, a thousand million tiny whirlwinds around the calm threads, and Alvin reached down with his hands on both sides of the sphere of solidified water and lifted it out of the clear water of Lake Pontchartrain. 

It was heavy -- it took all his strength to lift it, and he wished he hadn't made it so large. It was far heavier than the plowshare he carried in his poke. But it was also strangely inert. Even though he knew the motion of water inside the sphere was incessant, to his hands it felt as still as stone. And as he looked into it, he saw everything at once. 

He saw his own labor to be born, straining to emerge into the world, his mother's wombwalls pressing against him as he pushed back; he heard her cries and saw her surrounded by the canvas walls of a covered wagon that rocked and slid and rocked in the current of a river gone to flood. And now he was outside that wagon and he saw a great fallen tree floating like a battering ram straight at the wagon, straight at him, this passionate angry hopeful unborn infant, and then heard a great loud cry and saw a man leap onto the tree and roll it over, over, so it struck only a glancing blow against the wagon and careened off into the rainstorm ... 

And now he saw a young girl reach out to the face of a just-born infant who had not yet drawn breath because a caul of flesh covered his whole face like a terrible mask. She pulled the caul back and air rushed into the baby's mouth and he began to cry. The girl put the caul away as tenderly as if it were the heart of a Mexica sacrifice, and he felt how the baby and the caul remained connected, and he knew that this was Little Peggy, the child five years old when he was born, who was now his wife, with almost nothing of that ancient, dried-up caul left in her keeping, because she had rubbed bits of it between her fingers and turned each bit to dust in order to draw the power of Alvin's own knack out of it, to use it to save his life. 

But now, he thought. What about now? 

Whether the heavy sphere responded to his question or simply showed him the desire of his heart, he saw himself kneeling in the water at the shore of Pontchartrain, dripping blood heavily into the inland sea, and watching as a crystal path hurtled forward across the lake, six feet wide, as thin as the skiff of ice on a basin left in the window on the night of the first freeze of autumn. And in ones and twos the people began to step out onto this crystal bridge and walk along with the surface of the water holding them up, a dozen, scores, hundreds of them, a great long chain of people. But then he realized that the line was slowing down, stopping, jostling, as more and more of them looked down into the crystal at their feet and began to see the way Alvin was seeing now. 

They would not go forward, so captured were they by the crystal visions in the water. They took too long, too many minutes, as the blood continued to flow out of him. 

And then all of a sudden in the glass he saw himself faint and fall onto the bridge and at once it began to break up and crumble and all the people fell into the water and screamed and splashed and ... 

Alvin dropped the crystal sphere and it fell into the water with a splash. 

He thought at first that it had dissolved instantly upon breaking the surface, but when he reached down into the water at his feet, there it was. 

He picked it back up again. 

I thought the things the crystal water showed me would be true, he thought. But that can't be true. Margaret wouldn't have sent me here to them if I didn't have the strength in me to make this bridge hold until the last soul had crossed over. 

He looked at the ball of crystal he held in his hands. I can't leave this thing here, he thought. But I can't take it with me, either. It's too heavy, not with the plow, not with all I've got to do. 

"I will carry it, me," said a soft voice behind him. 

He saw her reflection in the face of the crystal, and to his surprise the round surface did not distort her image. 

He wasn't seeing her on the crystal, he was seeing her in it, and all at once he knew far more about her than he had ever thought he could know about a person. "You're not French," he said. "You and your mother are Portugee. She has a knack with sharks. They took her on voyage after voyage because of it, to keep the sea monsters at bay, only one of them used her for something else and she got pregnant with you and so she threw herself from the ship and rode the back of a shark to shore and gave birth to you at the very mouth of the river." 

"She never told me, her," said Dead Mary. "Might be so, might not." 

Alvin rose to his feet, still standing in the water, and turned to hold the sphere out to her. "It's heavy," he said. 

"I can bear any burden," she said, "if I take it freely." And it was true. Though she staggered a little from the weight, she held the ball to her and didn't let it fall. 

"Don't look in it," said Alvin. 

"It's in front of my face," she said. "How can I not look?" And yet she didn't look. She closed her eyes tightly. "Bad enough to know what I already know about people," she said. "I don't want to know all this else." 

Alvin peeled off his shirt and draped it over the sphere. "I'll take it now," he said. 

"No," said Dead Mary. "You need all the strength you have for tonight's work." 


Part 12
Fog
All the children were sitting on the floor in every room on the main floor. The older ones all had a poke to carry, stuffed with every scrap of food in the house. Arthur Stuart admired how they all obeyed Mama Squirrel, without all that much fussing from her or from them. 

What he didn't know was what they were going to do about Papa Moose. He lay on the kitchen floor, wide awake now, but with his eyes tight shut, saying nothing, making no groan, showing no wince, but still a streak of tears ran from both eyes down into his hair and ears. Arthur Stuart longed to help him, knew that all the little bones were shaped wrong and didn't fit, pinching here and there, the ligaments and tendons sometimes too short, sometimes too long for the place they were supposed to be. What he didn't know was how to get them to change into something closer to what was right. 

The kitchen door opened and Alvin stepped in. Alvin wore no shirt, and Arthur Stuart noticed how much slacker he looked than he did in the days when he actually did a blacksmith's work every day. But slack as he was, compared to his own self, he was still massive, breasting the air like a great ship with full-bellied sails. 

Before Arthur Stuart could wonder what he'd done with his shirt, Dead Mary came in behind him carrying something with Alvin's shirt draped over it. 

Calvin hadn't bothered them a bit after causing Papa Moose all this pain. But now that Alvin was here, he appeared on the instant, striding through the front rooms of the house, calling out to his brother. "Alvin, you come in good time! You should see the mess your step-brother-in-law done caused here, meddling in this good man's foot." 

Arthur Stuart didn't bother to answer, knowing that Alvin knew Calvin too well to believe his account. 

Alvin walked up and stood over Papa Moose. He closed his eyes; Arthur Stuart thought for a moment he could feel Alvin's doodlebug warm his own inside the remade foot. Looking at no one, Alvin spoke softly. "On this night of all nights I need all my strength, and now you make me spend it on something that could have waited another week or another year." 

"Then wait," said Mama Squirrel hotly. "You think he ain't man enough to bear it? Oh, he can. I'll carry him if I have to, me and some of the bigger boys. My Moose, he don't want to cost us what we can't afford to pay. He'd die for these children, Alvin, you know he would." 

They all knew he would. 

"But I need him walking," said Alvin. "I need his strength. I'll spend some of mine on him, and later he can spend some of his on me." 

Arthur Stuart tried so hard to keep up with what Alvin was doing. But it was too quick. Alvin was too skilled at this. Bones that weren't shaped right suddenly were. Tendons that wrapped themselves all wrong slid like snakes into place. In no more than a minute it was done, and Papa Moose cried out. 

No, it wasn't a cry. It was a great sigh of relief, so sharp and sudden that it sounded like a shout. 

"God bless you sir," said Mama Squirrel. 

Papa Moose stood up and promptly fell back down the moment he tried to take a step. 

"I don't know how it's done," he said. "I can't walk on these two feet. My right leg feels too long." 

"Lean on me," said Mama Squirrel. He did, and managed to stand. 

"Go to Frenchman's Dock," said Alvin. "You and all the children. I'll be there afore you." 

"Me too?" asked Dead Mary. 

"Go to your mother and arrange a wheelbarrow from among the French, to tote that thing. I got another shirt." 

"Me?" asked Arthur Stuart. 

"To La Tia, and tell her to get all them as is going down to Frenchman's dock at nightfall." 

When all were gone, it left only Alvin and Calvin there in the house of Moose and Squirrel, which was, after all, just a big old empty house when it didn't have all them children in it. 

"I suppose I've done a dozen things wrong," said Calvin with a crooked grin. 

"I need a fog from you," said Alvin. "To cover the whole city. Except right at Frenchman's Dock." 

"I don't know where that is," said Calvin. 

"Don't matter," said Alvin. "You make the fog everywhere else, and I'll push it away from where I don't want it to go. Just don't push back at me." 

He didn't say: For once. 

"I can do that," said Calvin. 

"I'm glad Margaret sent you," said Alvin. "And I'm glad you came." 

Arthur Stuart stood outside the kitchen door until he heard those words. He could hardly believe that Alvin acted like Calvin hadn't meddled and fussed and picked quarrels, not to mention the mess he made with Papa Moose. 

There was only one meaning Arthur Stuart could get from it. Alvin didn't believe Calvin had caused the problem with Papa Moose. And that meant Alvin believed Calvin's lie and thought Arthur Stuart had caused the problem with Papa Moose's foot. 

Burning with resentment at Calvin, at the way a real brother could instantly supplant a half-black oughta-be-a-slave step-brother-in-law in Alvin's heart, Arthur Stuart took off at a run to find La Tia and get the show on the road. 


*
Calvin stood on the levee that kept the Mizzippy from pouring over its banks to flood the city of Nueva Barcelona. A couple of hundred masts stuck up from the water like a curiously bare forest, as the seagoing vessels were towed up and down the river by steam-powered tugboats. Dozens of columns of smoke and steam joined to cast a pall over the city as the sun sank toward the horizon. 

It had been a sultry, hazy day. Already everything got blurry only a mile off. The air was so wet that sweat could hardly evaporate. It ran down Calvin's neck and back and legs, and when he mopped his brow with a handkerchief, it came away dripping wet. 

Nobody'd mind if he cooled things off a little. 

Around him the air suddenly gave up some of its heat, sending it upward. The moment the air cooled just a couple of degrees, the water vapor began to condense a little, just enough to form a cloud, not enough to make rain or dew. It wasn't easy to maintain the temperature at just that point, and Calvin had to jostle the temperature up and down a little till he got it right. 

But once the fog was nicely formed, he began to reach out farther and farther, cooling the air, condensing the invisible humidity into visible fog. 

He turned a slow circle, watching as his fog spread out over the city. This was power -- to change the look of the world, to blind the eyes of men and women, to block the light and heat of the sun, to allow slaves and oppressed people to sneak to freedom. Poor Alvin, always fencing his power about with rules -- he never felt the sheer joy of it like Calvin did. 

It was like being rich, but spending money like a poor man. That was Alvin, wasn't it? A miser, hoarding his enormous power, using it only when he was forced to, and for trivial purposes, and according to rules that were devised to allow weaker men to control strong ones. I have no use for such rules, thought Calvin. I don't choose to wear chains, still less to forge my own. 

So I'll help you, Alvin, because I can and because I love you and because I don't mind being part of your noble causes when it suits me. But I make up my own mind on all things. Collect your disciples and try to teach them some clumsy imitation of makery, like that sad boy Arthur Stuart, whose true knack you stole from him. But don't ever count me as one of your disciples. I spent too many years of my life worshiping you and tagging along behind you and begging for your attention and your love and your respect. Those were my childhood days. I'm a man now, and I've held my own with a great emperor and I've slain an evil man that you hadn't the courage to kill, Alvin. 

It's not enough to have power, Alvin. You have to have the will to use it. 

Street after street, the fog crept through the city, dimming the light of the setting sun and hiding passersby. 

Slaves felt the cool clammy fog pass around them, or looked out windows and watched as buildings across the street disappeared, and they thought, Today we cross over Jordan to the promised land. 

In Frenchtown the children and grandchildren of the founders of this place, whose city had been stolen from them, looked out of their shanties and thought, You can't keep us here no more, Conquistadores. You can take our city, but that's only land. You can't hold onto us when we've a mind to go. 

In Swamptown, the poorest of the poor -- free blacks and down-and-out whites -- saw the fog and gathered up their few possessions for the journey ahead. La Tia, Dead Mary, some sorcerer from up north, they didn't care whom they were following. It couldn't help but be better than here. 

But in the rest of the city, in fine houses and the humbler homes of the working class, in hotels and whorehouses and along the dock, where people already cowered in fear of the yellow fever, afraid to go out into the streets -- they saw the fog roll through and it looked like a biblical plague to them. I'm not going out in that weather, they thought. I'll send a slave out on my errands. I'll leave the streets to the poor and those whose business is so pressing they'd risk death to carry on with it. 

Only in the taverns, where drink brought a few hours of courage and uncontained passion, did the fear burn into hatred. Someone brought this yellow fever on us. It was them French witches, that Dead Mary and her mother, didn't Dead Mary claim the plague for her mother first? 

It was those wicked race-mixing abolitionists Moose and Squirrel, they're the ones brought this down on us, cursing the city because they hate us for keeping black folk in the place where God meant them to be. You want proof? All around that house folks is dying of the fever, but not a soul in that crowded house is sick, not a body has been brought out. 

"Not Moose and Squirrel, no sir," said a powerful-looking man who carried a knife at his hip the way other men might carry a pistol. "Their house, but it's a traveling man staying there, him and his half-black catamite he uses like a witch does a cat. His name is Alvin and he has a sack full of gold he stole from the smith he was prenticed to. I tell you he brought this fever here. He and his catamite was seen at the public fountain where that magical water was drawn." 

They listened spellbound to the man. They itched for action, these men. They had come to Barcy to take part in a war, but the dread of fever had sent the King's army back into their holes, and here they were with nothing to do. Their fingers flexed into fists. The drink burned in them. They could do with a good hanging. Take a man and his slave boy and drag them to a tree or lamppost and hoist them up and watch them clutch and twitch and pee themselves while they strangled on the end of a rope. That was a good use of this foggy night. There'd be no witnesses, and maybe it would stop the fever, and even if it didn't, a hanging was still a good idea now and then, just to get your blood up, and none of this nonsense about an innocent man. Wasn't nobody in this world hadn't earned hanging five times over, if their hearts were only known. 

Out of the tavern and into the street they staggered and lurched, shouting threats and brags. A few carried torches against the fog and night as darkness fell over the city, and as they moved near the waterfront, they were joined by the drunk, the angry, the fearful, and the merely curious from other taverns. Where are you going? Off to hang us a traveling wizard and his boy. 

The slaves skulking through the streets dodged into alleys or into the shadows of doorways as the mob passed. But they weren't looking to hang the first black man they found. They had a specific man in mind tonight, thanks to that man with the big knife at his belt. They'd find him at the house of Moose and Squirrel -- who probably needed hanging too, there being no shortage of rope in Barcy. 


Part 13
Exodus
Arthur Stuart saw at once that the name "Frenchman's Dock" was meant as a cruel irony. Compared to the miles-long dock along the Mizzippy, this shabby jetty on Lake Pontchartrain was pathetic. Several dozen shrimpboats were tied up to it, and more were coming in, the shrimpers shouting and answering to help each other find their way in the fog. All of them spoke in French, a language in which Arthur was becoming quite fluent, though he suspected the French he was learning here in Nouveau Orleans was not quite the same French that Calvin would have heard in Paris. 

There was no room on that busy wharf for fifty children, so Moose and Squirrel kept their family loitering back around the fish houses, trying to stay out of the way. Many of the shrimpers had already heard what was happening tonight. Either they'd come along or not, but there was no debating or discussing it. Everyone stepped around the children and made no comment about their presence there. Even if they wouldn't follow Dead Mary out of the city, they wouldn't dare stand in her way, either. 

Blacks began arriving, too, staying even farther out of the way. Like the children, they carried bags and sacks, but it was a sad thing to see how little they had, considering that most of them were carrying all they owned in the world. The blacks who did get in some shrimper's path were met with a growl or a bark to get out of the way; it was clear that even among the oppressed French, blacks had a lower status still. 

Flies hovered and swarmed everywhere, there being plenty to feast on for them amid the shrimp offal discarded all along the shore. Skeeters, too, and Arthur Stuart could imagine that with all the people gathering here those little bloodsuckers would probably drink their fill till they bloated up and exploded. He could imagine the sound of it, like distant gunfire, the pop pop pop of busted skeeters. 

Only he didn't want them sucking blood out of these children. 

He tried to get his doodlebug inside a skeeter, but it wouldn't hold still. And besides, he wasn't looking to perform surgery on it, he wanted to talk to it the way Alvin would, telling it to go away. But he couldn't find the heartfire. It was just too small and faint. Even the heartfires of the big fat lazy flies were almost invisible to him. All the same, he tried talking to the skeeters inside his own mind. "Go away," he said silently. "Nothing to eat here." But if they heard him, they didn't pay him no mind. 

A couple of boats ran into each other in the fog, and there was much shouting and cursing. It was silly, Arthur Stuart thought, to put up with fog here, where it wasn't needed. And fog was more like metal or water, he could get inside it and work with it. Arthur Stuart stirred up a little air, drawing a little breeze in from the lake, blowing the fog back toward the city where it was needed. 

Arthur was pleased that it didn't take long for the air to clear. The sunset now blazed red in the west, while the fog hung thickly only a street or two back from the water. The shrimpers quickly got their boats tied up and their catch loaded off and dragged into the fish houses. Then they disappeared into the streets, some of them with shrimp carts to sell the catch, the others probably heading for their families, to bring them to Frenchman's Dock for the escape. 

There being no more need for clear vision now, Arthur Stuart let the breeze die down, and the fog drifted back out over the water a little. Stillness came with it, a heavy silence in which footfalls were muffled and voices became whispers. 

As it became fully dark, Arthur began to worry about folk losing their way, or somebody stumbling into the water, so he woke up the breeze again to clear the air near the shore. In the distance, he could hear shouting, and after a while, he realized that it was probably the noise of a mob moving through the streets of Barcy. He worried about folk who was trying to make their way through the streets, but the fog was the best help they could get, and there wasn't nothing Arthur Stuart could think of to add to it. 

As the fog cleared and the faint light of the stars and a sliver of moon illuminated the shore, Arthur Stuart realized that the man sitting crosslegged in the shallow water was Alvin. 

At once Arthur strode forward, but said nothing, because Alvin seemed to be concentrating. Arthur came up beside him and saw that Alvin held a knife in his hand, with the tip of the blade under the water. He was slicing into the soft skin on the side of his left heel, under the place where the leg bone joined on. 

Blood began to flow out in a slow trickle into the water. 

Almost by habit now, Arthur Stuart tracked the blood in the water, feeling its dissipation. But then it stopped dissolving, and instead began to form a rigid structure, gathering water around a delicate latticework, thickening and hardening the water into something not at all like ice, and very much like thin, delicate glass. 

The area of hardened water extended to about six feet on either side of Alvin, then narrowed gradually as it extended out over the lake. When it narrowed to about as wide as Alvin's arms could reach on both sides, it stopped narrowing and went on and on, straight north. Arthur could sense it moving forward. But he could also see that it was all connected to Alvin's living blood, still flowing out into the water and thrusting the lacy inner structure of this crystal road farther and farther out. The bridge was growing from the base, not the tip. 

"Can you see it, Arthur Stuart?" whispered Alvin. 

"Yes." 

"And on the other end, do you think you can anchor it there and hold it firm?" 

"I can try." 

"It's taking more blood than I hoped," said Alvin, "but less than I feared. I'm not sure I'll know when it's long enough. I have to concentrate on what I'm doing here. So I need you to lead the way across, because you can see it. And when you get to the end, anchor it and stop it from growing. I'll feel it at this end. I'll know that you're doing it, and I'll know when it's done." 

"Now?" said Arthur Stuart. 

"If we're going to get all these people to walk across in one night, I think now's a good time to start." 

Arthur Stuart turned around and beckoned to Moose and Squirrel. They didn't see him. So he called out, but not loudly. "Papa Moose! Mama Squirrel! Can you bring the children?" 

With Papa Moose leaning on Mama Squirrel and one of the older boys, they came down to the water's edge. When they arrived, Arthur Stuart stepped out onto the crystal. 

To the others it seemed that he stood on water. They gasped, and one of the children began to cry. 

"Come closer," said Arthur Stuart. "See? It's smooth where it's safe to walk. It's not water any more. It's crystal, and you can walk on it. But stay to the middle. Hold hands, stay together. If someone falls in, pull him back up. It's strong enough to hold you, see?" 

Arthur looked straight down into the crystal as he stomped his foot a couple of times. 

What he saw there made him freeze. 

It was his mother, flying, a newborn baby strapped in front of her. Flying over the trees, heading north, to freedom. 

And suddenly she could fly no farther. Exhausted, she tumbled to the earth and lay there weeping. She would kill the baby now, Arthur Stuart realized. Rather than let it be taken back into slavery, she'd kill the baby and herself. 

"No," he murmured. 

"Arthur Stuart," said Alvin sharply. "Don't look down into the crystal." 

Arthur tore himself away and was surprised to find Moose and Squirrel and their family all watching him, wide-eyed. 

"Nobody look down into the bridge," said Arthur Stuart. "You'll think you're seeing things, but they're not really there. It's not a thing to look at, it's a thing to walk on." 

"I can't see the edges," said Mama Squirrel. "The children can't swim." 

"They won't have to," said Arthur Stuart. "Let's get the little ones in between the older ones. Everybody hold hands." 

"The youngest can't walk so far," said Papa Moose. 

Someone pushed her way through the family to the water's edge. La Tia. "Don't you fret about that. Got plenty of strong arms here to carry them as can't walk." She called out several names, and strong young men and women stepped forward, most of them black, but some French or of other European nations. "It's all right, babies," La Tia said to the children. "You let these big folk carry you, you be all right. You tell them be happy," she said to Mama Squirrel. 

"It's all right," said Squirrel. "These are our friends now, they're going to take us out across this bridge Alvin's done made for us." 

Some of the children whimpered and a few cried outright, but they hung on all the same, doing their best to obey despite their fear. Arthur Stuart walked farther out onto the bridge, taking care to stay right in the middle. The worst thing he could do would be to stumble off the edge. They'd all be terrified then. "Come to me," he said. "We have to move quick, once we get started." 

"I stay right here," said La Tia, "I keep it all moving, I make everybody help each other. You go, you. We follow." 

Arthur turned around and walked a good twenty paces out onto the bridge. Then he stopped and turned around. Several of the older children were following him tentatively. He strode back to them and took the leading child by the hand. "All hold hands," he said. "Stay right in line. It's a long walk, but you can do it." 

"Listen to the music," said Alvin. "Listen to the music of the water and the sky, all the life around you. The greensong will carry you forward." 

Arthur Stuart knew the greensong well, though he could never find it on his own. As soon as Alvin spoke of it, though, he became aware of it, as if it had always been there, and he'd just not bothered to notice it before. He stepped on out, holding the hand of the child behind him, and set a pace that he thought everyone would be able to keep to. 

In the darkness, he couldn't see the bridge stretching out before him -- his eyes told him only that he was walking out into the middle of a trackless lake. But his doodlebug felt the bridge as clear as day, reaching on and on, out and out, and he walked with confidence. 

At first he couldn't stop his mind from fretting about all that could go wrong. Somebody falling off. Losing the way somehow. Getting to the end of the bridge and finding that it didn't quite reach the other shore. Or having the bridge get softer and wetter the farther it got from Alvin. Or the bridge bending in on itself, making a spiral that led nowhere. All kinds of imaginable disasters. 

But the rhythm of the step, step, step and the sound of the lapping water and the calls of birds began to still that relentless fretting. It was the familiar rhythm of the greensong. He let it come over him like a trance. His legs began to move, it seemed, of themselves, so he no longer thought about walking or even moving, he simply flowed forward as if he were a part of the bridge, as if he himself were a breeze on the night air. The bridge was alive under him. The bridge was part of Alvin, he understood now. It was as if Alvin's hands bore him up, as if the water and wind drew him along. 

He only sometimes noticed that he himself was singing. Not just humming, but singing aloud, a strange song that he had always known but had never noticed before. The child behind him picked up the melody and murmured it along with him, and the child behind her, until Arthur Stuart could hear that many voices carried the song. No one was crying or whimpering now. He could hear adult voices farther back. But all of them were faint, only threads amid the fabric of the great wide song that Arthur heard from the wind and the waves and the fish under the water and the birds in the sky and from animals waiting for them on the other side and from all the people on the bridge, a half mile of them, a mile of them. 

Faster and faster Arthur Stuart walked without realizing he was speeding up, but the children did not complain. Their legs carried them as fast as they needed to go. And the adults carrying children found that the little ones did not grow heavy. The babies fell asleep clinging to their bearers, their breath whispering in rhythm with the song. On and on they strode, the far shore coming no nearer, it seemed. 

And as they were all caught up in the greensong, it seemed that the bridge turned into light. They could all see the edges of it now, and could feel how the greensong throbbed within it. Each footfall on the crystal bridge caused the song to surge a little stronger for a moment and made the bridge glow a little more clearly in the night. And Arthur Stuart realized that they were becoming part of the bridge, their steps strengthening it, thickening it, making it stronger for those coming after. And since the bridge was part of Alvin himself, they also strengthened him, or at least made it so the creation of the bridge drained him less than it might have. 

Arthur could feel Alvin's heartbeat in the crystal bridge. And he realized that the light they all saw rising from the crystal was a pale reflection of Alvin's own heartfire. 

It seemed to be forever, that crossing. And then, suddenly, there was land ahead of him, and it felt as if it had taken no time at all. 

He reached forward with his doodlebug and saw that the bridge did not reach the land yet. So, without slowing down his stride, Arthur Stuart sent his doodlebug leaping beyond the end of the bridge to find where the rim of the water lapped the mud and he said to the bridge -- to Alvin: Here it is. Here's the edge. Come to this spot and no farther. 

The bridge leapt forward. It was what Alvin had been waiting for, for Arthur's doodlebug to show the way, and in moments the bridge was anchored into the land. 

Arthur Stuart did not speed up, though he wanted to run the last few hundred yards. There were people behind him, hands linked. So he kept the same pace, right to the end, and then drew the child behind him up onto the shore. 

He continued to lead her into the trees, talking to her as he went. "We'll go up into the trees," he said to her. "The others will follow. Keep moving, move in and off to the right, so there's room for everyone else. Keep holding hands, all of you!" 

Then he let go of her. 

As he did, the greensong let go of him. 

He staggered, almost fell. 

He stood there gasping for a moment in the unwelcome silence. 

The line of people on the bridge stretched out for miles, he could see, and all of them moving swiftly, faster than he would have thought possible. Even Papa Moose now strode easily, boldly, no one helping him. 

He saw how Moose and Squirrel, too, stumbled when they let go of the line. But they immediately took charge of the children, not forgetting their responsibility. 

Nor will I forget mine, thought Arthur Stuart. He scanned the nearby area for the heartfires of small creatures. Unlike the skeeters, he easily found the snakes and, not so easily, awoke them and sent them slithering away. Danger here, he told them silently. Go away, be safe. Sluggishly they obeyed him. It exhilarated him. He suspected that some part of Alvin's power still rested on him, enabling him to do more than he had ever found possible before. Or perhaps traveling on Alvin's bridge, surrounded by the greensong, had woken senses inside Arthur Stuart that had always slept. 

Will we all be makers, having crossed this bridge? 

Here and there he caused water to drain away from a bog, so that the land where the people would have to stand was all firm. And from time to time he reached back out across the water, following the bridge with his doodlebug, trying to see how Alvin was doing. The bridge remained strong, and that meant Alvin's heartfire blazed brightly. But his body was too far away for Arthur Stuart to find him, so he could not tell whether he was becoming weak. Nor could he find the far shore to count the people there, so he could not even guess how many more would come. 

It was his job to make sure there was room for them all, enough firm, safe ground that they could gather. 

Many of them sat down, then lay down, and with the echoes of the greensong still singing in their hearts, they dozed in the faint moonlight, their dreams infused with the music of life. 


Part 14
House Afire
Calvin couldn't help being curious. And it's not as if he had to stay on the levee to keep the fog in place. 

In fact, the fog could pretty much look after itself, at this point. And with all the angry, frightened heartfires flowing through the streets of Barcy, Calvin couldn't see any particular reason to stay by himself. Who knew what mischief these mobs might be up to? And since he was a maker, wasn't it his job to keep such mischief from happening? 

One mob was moving through Frenchtown, getting more and more furious as they found house after house empty. Another mob, consisting mostly of dockside drunks, was looking for slaves to throw into the water. Finding none, they started throwing in whatever passersby spoke English with a foreign accent or not at all. Which wasn't too logical, seeing how this wasn't even an American city. 

All Calvin could see of this was the anger in the heartfires and, of course, the panic in those being tossed into the river. 

The angriest mob, and the one moving with the most sense of purpose, was moving directly toward the orphanage where Alvin had been unable to resist showing off by one-upping Calvin's fixing of the man's foot. What was the big deal, Calvin wanted to know. When was he supposed to have learned anatomy? Of course, Alvin knew everything -- everything except how the world actually worked. 

So let him sit there by that briny lake and flow his heartfire out as a bridge for the scum of the earth to walk on. Wasn't that just like Alvin? Making a show of being humble and the servant of all. But since Jesus said that the person who wanted most to be ruler was the one who was servant of all, didn't that tell something about Alvin, after all? Who was the ambitious one? Calvin was perfectly willing to stay in the background -- which was the attitude a maker ought to have, as Alvin always said. But with Alvin it was do as I say, not as I do. 

Calvin jogged easily along the foggy streets -- sober, decent folk were all indoors, fearful of the sudden fog and the sound of distant shouting. There were soldiers marching, too. The Spanish were ostensibly looking for a riot to quell, but the officers carefully found the quietest streets, since there was neither honor nor safety in confronting a mob. If you shoot, it's a massacre; if you don't shoot, you're likely to get a brick in the head. 

So it wasn't hard to avoid the soldiers, and soon Calvin found himself on the fringes of the mob just when it reached the house of Moose and Squirrel. He wasn't that interested in most of the people -- a mob was a mob, and all the faces were as ugly and stupid as always when people turn their decision-making over to someone else. Brutal puppets, that's all they were. What Calvin wanted was the hot, dark heartfire that was leading them and goading them on. 

Glass was shattering as bricks and stones went through the windows of the house. Several men with torches were trying to set the house on fire, but the air was so moist and heavy that it wasn't working. 

The leader, who carried a big heavy knife at his hip, was taunting the would-be firestarters. "Y'all never set a fire before? Babies burn theirselves up all the time, but you can't even get a dry wooden house to burn!" 

Calvin sidled up. "Reckon sometimes you gotta do a thing yourself." 

The man turned to him and sneered. "And have the Spanish find some informant to testify against me? No thanks." 

"I didn't mean you," said Calvin. He reached out and pointed toward the roof. While he was pointing, he hotted up the wood just under the peak of the gable, so sudden and hot that it burst into flames. 

A cheer went up from the crowd, everyone being too drunk, apparently, to notice that the fire had started about as far as possible from where the torchwielders were doing such a pathetic job. But the mob's leader wasn't drunk, and that's the only person Calvin was looking to impress. 

"You know something?" said the man with the big knife. "I think you look a powerful lot like a certain thief and fraud name of Alvin Smith as was living in that boardinghouse only this morning." 

"You're speaking of my beloved brother, sir," said Calvin. "Nobody gets to call him names but me." 

"Beg your pardon, sir," said the man. "I'm Jim Bowie, at your service. And if I'm not wrong, you just proved to me that Alvin ain't the only dangerous man in his family." 

"Don't get no ideas about siccing this mob on me," said Calvin. "My brother plain hates to kill folks, but I got no such compunction. You turn the mob on me, and they'll all blow to bits as if they'd swallowed a keg of gunpowder. You first." 

"What's to stop me from killing you right here?" said the man. And then, suddenly, he got a panicked look on his face. "No, I was just joking, don't do nothing to my knife." 

Calvin laughed in his face. "Want to see the house go up real spectacular?" 

"You're the artist," said the man. 

Calvin found his way into the structure of the house, the thick heavy beams and posts that formed its skeleton. He hotted them up all at once -- and so hot did he make them that they didn't so much burn as melt. The outer layer of each piece of wood burnt so fast that as the ashes peeled away it looked as if somebody had just flumped a busted pillow on the ground and released a hundred thousand feathers all at once. 

The house collapsed, sending up such a cloud of smoke and ash and hot, searing air that it burned the hair and eyebrows and eyelashes right off the men in the front row. Their skin was also burned, and some were blinded, but Calvin didn't feel any particular pity. They deserved it, didn't they? They were a murderous, house-burning mob, weren't they? The ones who was blind now, they'd never join a mob again, so Calvin had flat cured them of their violence. 

"You look to be a useful man to have as a friend," said the man with the knife. 

"How would you know?" said Calvin. "You haven't seen me with any of my friends." 

The man stuck out his hand. "Jim Bowie, sir, and I'd like to be your friend." 

"Sir, I don't reckon you have many friends in this world, and neither do I. So let's not pretend to love each other. You have something you want to use me for, and I'm perfectly willing to consider being used if you can let me see what's to gain from it, and why it's a good and noble undertaking." 

"They ain't no good and noble undertakings. Everybody I know of gets undertaken has to be dead first and doesn't seem to enjoy it." 

Bowie was grinning. 

"What do you want from me, Mr. Bowie?" 

"Your company," said Bowie. "On an expedition. A job your brother turned down on account of I think he was scared." 

"Al ain't afraid of anything," said Calvin. 

"Anybody isn't scared of the Mexica might as well shoot out his own brains, cause they ain't worth keeping." 

"The Mexica?" 

"Some of us think it's time civilization came back to Mexico." 

Civilization ... like this? Calvin watched the remaining mobbers cavorting and gamboling in front ot the hot glowing embers and laughed. 

"A mob's a mob," said Bowie. "But the Mexica are evil and need destroying." 

"No doubt they do," said Calvin. "But why is it your job?" 

"I got tired of waiting on God." 

Calvin grinned at him. "Maybe we got something to talk about. I never been to Mexico." 


*
Alvin felt someone nudge him, shake his shoulder. 

"Sun coming," said a woman's voice. 

La Tia, that's who it was. 

"Everybody already pass over," said another woman. Dead Mary's mother. 

"What's your name?" Alvin murmured. "I don't know your name." 

"Rien," she said. 

Dead Mary reached out and took his bleeding hands in hers. "Get up, you wizard you. Get up and cross over the bridge of your blood." 

He tried to rise, with her helping, but at once he felt faint and his legs gave way under him. He fell face forward onto his hands and even his elbows buckled, and his face struck the surface of the crystal bridge. The heavy weight of the plow made the poke slide off his shoulder. It made the whole bridge shimmer with life, and Alvin felt himself suffused with warmth. With peace. It was all done. He could sleep now. 

At once the bridge began to give way under him. 

"No!" cried La Tia. "Hold up that bridge! You can't sleep now!" She reached down and lifted the poke from the surface of the bridge. At once the shimmering stopped, and Alvin could concentrate again. No, it wasn't time to rest, was it? 

"The army coming, boy!" La Tia said. "They know they slaves gone now, morning coming and nobody doing they chores. This ain't no drunken mob today, no. This be soldiers, and we got to cross over!" 

It wasn't just her words filling him with strength, though. He could feel the power of charms she bore. He always saw the small magics of spells and hexes and could stop them if he wanted, so he had gotten used to the idea that they had no effect on him. 

But now he was grateful for the strength that flowed into him as she draped a charm around his neck. 

"I have to stay here," he said softly, "or the bridge won't hold." 

"You had to stay here to make the bridge," said La Tia. "But don't you feel your brother put in his blood from the other side?" 

Alvin cast his awareness through the whole length of the bridge and now realized that his own heartfire was not alone in it. His was the overwhelming light within the crystal, but there was another heartfire there, too, and not a weak one, either. Arthur Stuart had taken hold of the bridge and had put his own blood into the water to join him. 

La Tia and Dead Mary's mother -- Rien, was it? -- supported him on either side, while Dead Mary pushed her wheelbarrow out onto the bridge to lead the way. Already the last of the people was out of sight in the fog. But the fog was thinning, and the first rays of dawn were lighting the eastern sky. Arthur Stuart might still be on the job, but Calvin wasn't. 

Behind them Michele, La Tia's friend and doorkeeper, was laying down charms on the bridge. They did not cause the shimmer that the plow had brought. Rather they felt like salt dropped on ice. 

"That burns," said Alvin. "I can't have that." 

"Got to keep them enemies back," said La Tia. "They my fear and fire charms she laying down." 

"This bridge was made to welcome people. The crystal is meant to open their eyes. You can't put darkness and fear onto it and hope to have it stay." 

"You know what you know," said La Tia. "You do a thing I never see, so while I stand on your blood, I do what you say." She called back over her shoulder. "Michele, you pick up all this stuff, you, you make it a ring on the shore, hold them back a little!" 

Michele ran back to land and laid the charms in a great semicircle to keep the soldiers at bay as long as possible. 

"To them it be like a fire," said La Tia. "Hate and fear, they make it into a fire." 

Blood still dripped from Alvin's hands as he walked. Dead Mary set down the barrow and tried to take one hand and bind it up to stop the bleeding, but Alvin pulled away. "Got to keep my blood going into the bridge," he said. "Arthur can't hold it up alone." 

"So this thing you make, it don't stay made?" said Dead Mary. 

"First time I done it," said Alvin, "and I don't think I done it right. But maybe it can never stay. Maybe you can't build nothing out of this that lasts." 

"Stop making him talk," said Rien. "You keep pushing, Marie, you keep showing us the way." 

"I know the way," said Alvin. 

"But what happen to us when you faint, yes? What?" 

Alvin had no answer, and Dead Mary continued to push her barrow on ahead. 

They weren't all that far when they heard Michele run up from behind. "Soldiers come, and a lot of other men, very angry. The fire hold them back for now, but they got their own peeps and slinks and they get through soon. We got to run." 

"I can't," said Alvin. 

But even as he said it, he heard the greensong that had helped the others cross so quickly, and now that he wasn't concentrating on holding the bridge alone, he could let it into him, let it strengthen and heal him a little. He hushed them. "Hear that?" he said. "Can you hear?" 

And after a while, yes, they could. They stopped talking then, and Alvin stopped leaning on them, and soon he and the four women were walking swiftly, faster than they thought they could, with longer strides than any of these women had ever taken. Long before they reached the other side of Pontchartrain they overtook the last of the people, and when Alvin got there, the song grew stronger in their hearts as well, and they stopped straggling and picked up their pace. 

It was good that they did, because Alvin felt it like a blow when the first of the soldiers charged onto the bridge. It was his heartfire they were treading on, and where the people's feet had been light, the soldiers' boots were heavy, and as they ran along the narrow bridge Alvin heard them fighting the greensong like the cacophony of two marching bands playing wildly different tunes. 

It weakened him and slowed him down, just a little at first, but more and more as they drew nearer. Hundreds of them, carrying muskets. At the far end of the bridge, someone was trying to get a horse out onto the crystal -- a horse pulling a light piece of field artillery. 

"I can't hold that up," gasped Alvin. 

"Almost there," called Dead Mary. "I can see the shore!" She started to run. 

But there was no fog on this side of Pontchartrain, so seeing the campfires on the far shore did not mean they were truly almost there. Alvin slowed, staggered. Again he had to lean on the women until they were almost dragging him along. Again he felt alone, abandoned by -- or perhaps merely oblivious to -- the greensong. But with each weakening of his own strength under the burden of the approaching army, he could feel another strength move in under his blood in the skeleton of the bridge. Arthur Stuart was already reaching far beyond his strength, but Alvin had no choice but to rely on his strength until all were safe. 

Just when it seemed that the bridge was lengthening infinitely before them, they closed the last hundred, the last fifty, the last dozen steps and staggered onto the shore. Dead Mary had set down her barrow on the bank and now hovered around, eager to help. 

There lay Arthur Stuart, prostrate in the sand, Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel kneeling beside him, their hands on him, Papa Moose praying, Mama Squirrel singing the first words Alvin had ever heard anyone put to the greensong, words about sap and leaves, flowers and insects, fish and birds and, yes, squirrels all climbing along in the nets of God. 

Arthur Stuart's hands were extended, his wrists bleeding onto the bridge, and his fingers digging down into the face of the crystal. He shouldn't have been able to do that, to push his skin and bone into Alvin's crystal bridge, but here it was partly Arthur Stuart's, and right around his bleeding fingers it was almost entirely his bridge, so it followed his need. 

Alvin sank down beside him and rested his hands and head on Arthur's back. "Arthur, you got to let go now, you got to let go first. When I let go of it the whole weight of it will fall on you, and you can't bear it, you got to let go first." 

Arthur seemed not to hear him, so deep was he in his trance of concentration. 

"Pull his hands out of the bridge," Alvin said to the others. 

But Moose and Squirrel couldn't do it, and La Tia and Dead Mary couldn't do it, and Alvin whispered into his ear, "They're coming and we can't bear them up, the bridge can't hold such a harsh load, you got to let go, Arthur Stuart, I can't hold it any longer and if you try to hold alone it'll kill you." 

Arthur Stuart finally managed to make an answer, barely audible. "They'll die." 

"I reckon so," said Alvin. "Them as can't swim. They'll die trying to bring slaves back into slavery. It ain't your job to keep alive such men as would do that." 

"They're just soldiers," said Arthur Stuart. 

"And sometimes good men die in a bad cause, when it comes to war." 

Arthur Stuart wept. "If I let go I'm killing them." 

"They chose to come up on a bridge that was built for freedom, with slavery and killing in their hearts." 

"Bear them up, Alvin, or I can't let go." 

"I'll do my best," said Alvin. "I'll do my best." 

With a final cry of anguish Arthur Stuart tore his bloodcovered hands out of the crystal. Alvin felt his heartfire vanish from the substance of the bridge, and in that moment he withdrew his own. 

It lingered for a long moment, held by the blood alone. 

And then the bridge was gone. 

"Bear them up in the water!" cried Arthur Stuart. And then he fell into something between a faint and a deep sleep. 

Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel drew him back from the water's edge and bandaged his wounds, while Dead Mary and her mother did the same for Alvin's hands and feet. 

Alvin barely noticed, though, because he was trying to find the heartfires of the soldiers. He could not save them all. But those with brains enough to let go of their weapons, to pry off their boots, to try to swim, them he could keep afloat. But those who didn't try, and those that wouldn't let go of the things that made them soldiers, he hadn't the strength to help them. 

La Tia grasped what he was doing and stepped to the water's edge, where the bridge had once been. She reared her head back and pinched a powder into her open mouth. Then she looked out over the water and cried out in a voice that could be heard for miles across the lake, a voice as loud as thunder, a voice that made wide ripples race forward across the water. 

"Drop your guns, you! Try to swim! Take off your boots! Swim back!" 

All heard, and most heeded, and they lived. Three hundred soldiers went out onto that bridge that morning, along with one horse hitched to a fieldpiece. The horse had no way to save itself, but it took Alvin only a moment to sever the harness that held it to that murderous load. The horse came out alive; the fieldpiece stayed behind under the water. All but two score men finally swam to shore, gasping and half drowned but alive. But not one gun and not one boot made it back. 

Only then, with the last of their enemies safe who was willing to be saved, Alvin let go of consciousness. 

The north shore teemed with thousands of people, of every age and color and several languages. They desperately needed someone to tell them what to do, and where to go if they were to find drinkable water and food to eat. But not one of them proposed awakening Alvin or Arthur Stuart. The man and boy who made a crystal bridge out of blood and water -- such power struck them all with awe, and they would not dare. 


*
Back in Barcy, Calvin saw what was happening with Alvin's heartfire, how deeply he slept, how weak he was. 

I could kill him right now. Just open up a hole in his heart and fill his lungs with blood and he'd be dead before anyone else realized what was happening and no one would know it was me, or if they did, they'd never prove it. 

But I won't kill him today, thought Calvin. I'll never kill him. Even though he kills me all the time, with his judgments and condemnations, his condescensions and his lessons and his utter ignorance of who I am. Because I'm not like Alvin. 

He refrains from purposely killing people because he thinks it's wrong, under some arbitrary law. While I refrain from killing people, not out of obedience, but of my own free will, because I'm merciful to those who hurt me and despitefully use me. 

Who's the Pharisee here? And who's the one like Jesus? Even though nobody else will ever see it that way, that's the truth, as God is my witness. 


"Walking on Water" is Copyright © 2003 by Orson Scott Card. All rights reserved.