Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V (16 page)

For a moment, Honoré was frightened. “Please don’t turn me into a frog, Monsieur le Maker.”

“If you don’t like me, why are you always tagging along?”

“I write novels, Calvin. I study people.”

“You’re studying me?”

“No, of course not, I already have you in my mind, ready to write. What I study is the people you meet. How they respond to you. You seem to wake up something inside them.”

“What?”

“Different things. That is what I study.”

“So you’re using me.”

“But of course. Were you under some delusion that I stayed with you for love? Do you think we are Damon and Pythias? Jonathan and David? I would be a fool to love you like such a friend.”

Calvin’s expression grew darker yet. “Why would you be a fool?”

“Because there is no room for a man like me in your life. You are already locked in a dance with your brother.
Cain and Abel had no friends—but then, they were the only two men alive. Perhaps the better comparison is Romulus and Remus.”

“Which one am I?” asked Calvin.

“The younger brother,” said Honoré.

“So you think he’ll try to kill me?”

“I spoke of the closeness of the brothers, not the end of the story.”

“You’re playing with me.”

“I always play with everybody,” said Honoré. “It is my vocation. God put me on the earth to do with people what cats do to mice. Play with them, chew the last bit of life out of them, then pick them up in my mouth and drop them on people’s doorsteps. That is the business of literature.”

“You take a lot of airs for a writer who ain’t had a book printed up yet.”

“There is no book big enough to contain the stories that fill me up. But I will soon be ready to write. I will go back to France, I will write my books, I will be arrested from time to time, I will be in debt, I will make huge amounts of money but never enough, and in the end my books will last far longer than Napoleon’s empire.”

“Or maybe it’ll just seem that way to the folks who read them.”

“You will never know. You are illiterate in French.”

“I’m illiterate in most every language,” said Calvin. “So are you.”

“Yes, but in the illiteracy competition, I will concede to you the laurels.”

“Here’s the house,” said Calvin.

Honoré sized it up. “Your sister-in-law is not rich, but she spends the money to stay in a place that is respectable.”

“Who says she ain’t rich? I mean, think of it. She knows what folks are thinking. She knows everything they’ve ever done and everything they’re going to do.
She can see the future! You can bet she’s invested a few dollars here and there. I bet she’s got plenty of money by now.”

“What a foolish use of such a power,” said Honoré. “The mere making of money. If I could see into another person’s heart, I would be able to write the truest of novels.”

“I thought you already could.”

“I can, but it is only the imagined soul of the other person. I cannot be
sure
that I am right. I have not been wrong yet about anyone, but I am never
sure
.”

“People ain’t that hard to figure out,” said Calvin. “You treat it like some mystery and you’re the high priest who has the word straight from God, but people are just people. They want the same things.”

“Tell me this list as we go inside out of the sun.”

Calvin pulled the string to ring the doorbell. “Water. Food. Leaking and dumping. Getting a woman or a man, depending. Getting rich. Having people respect you and like you. Making other people do what you want.”

The door opened. A Black woman stood before them, her eyes downcast.

“Miz Larner or Miz Smith or whatever name she’s using, Margaret anyway, she’s expecting to meet us downstairs,” said Calvin.

Wordlessly the Black woman backed away to let them come in. Honoré stopped in the doorway, took the woman by the chin, and lifted her head till their eyes met. “What do
you
want? In the whole world, what do you want most?”

For a moment the woman looked at him in terror. Her eyes darted left, right. Honoré knew she wanted to look down again, to get back to the safe and orderly world, but she did not dare to turn her face away from him as long as he held her chin, for fear he would denounce her as insolent. And then she stopped trying to look away, but rather locked her gaze on his eyes, as if she could
see into him and recognized that he meant her no harm, but only wanted to understand her.

“What do you want?” he asked again.

Her lips moved.

“You can tell me,” he said.

“A name,” she whispered.

Then she tore herself away and fled the room.

Honoré looked after her, bemused. “What do you suppose she meant by that?” he asked. “Surely she has a name—how else would her master call her when he wanted her?”

“You’ll have to ask Margaret,” said Calvin. “She’s the one who sees what’s going on inside everybody’s head.”

They sat on the porch, watching bees and hummingbirds raid the flowers in the garden. Soon Calvin began to amuse himself by making the bees’ wings stop flapping. He’d point to a bee and then it would drop like a stone. A moment later, dazed and annoyed, it would start to buzz again and rise into the air. By then Calvin would be pointing to another bee and making it fall. Honoré laughed because it
was
funny to see them fall, to imagine their confusion. “Please don’t do it to the hummingbirds,” Honoré said.

He regretted at once that he had said such a foolish thing. For of course that was exactly what Calvin had to do. He pointed. The hummingbird’s wings stopped. It plummeted to the ground. But it did not buzz and rise back into the sky. Instead it struggled there, flapping one wing while the other lay useless in the dirt.

“Why would you break such a beautiful creature?” said Honoré.

“Who makes the rules?” said Calvin. “Why is it funny to do it to bees but not to birds?”

“Because it doesn’t hurt the bee,” said Honoré. “Because hummingbirds don’t sting. Because there are millions of bees but hummingbirds are as rare as angels.”

“Not around here,” said Calvin.

“You mean there are many angels in Camelot?”

“I meant there are thousands of hummingbirds. They’re like squirrels they’re so common.”

“So it is all right to break this one’s wing and let it die?”

“What is it, God watches the sparrows and you’re in charge of hummingbirds?”

“If you can’t fix it,” said Honoré, “you shouldn’t break it.”

Calvin glowered, then pushed himself out of his chair, vaulted the railing, and knelt down by the hummingbird. He fiddled with the wing, trying to straighten it. The bird kept struggling in his grasp.

“Hold still, dammit.”

Calvin held the broken wing straight, closed his eyes, concentrated. But the fluttering of the bird kept annoying him. He made an exasperated gesture, as if he were shaking a child, and the bones of the wing crumbled in his fingers. He took his hands away and looked at the ruined wing, a sick expression on his face.

“Is this a game?” asked Honoré. “See how many times can you break the same hummingbird wing?”

Calvin looked at him in fury. “Shut your damn mouth.”

“The bird is in pain, Monsieur le Maker.”

Calvin leapt to his feet and stomped down hard on the bird. “Now it’s not.”

“Calvin the healer,” said Honoré. Despite the jesting tone he was sick at heart. It was his goading that had killed the bird. Not that there was any hope for it. It was doomed to die as soon as Calvin made it fall from the air. But even that had been partly Honoré’s fault for having asked Calvin
not
to do it. He knew, or should have known, that would be a goad to him.

“You made me do it,” said Calvin. He couldn’t meet Honoré’s gaze. This worried Honoré more than a defiant glare would have. Calvin felt shamed in front of his friend. That did not bode well for that friend’s future.

“Nonsense,” said Honoré cheerfully. “It was your own wise choice. Do not kill bees, for they make honey! But what does a humming bird make? A splash of color in the air, and then it dies, and voilà! A splash of color on the ground. And where is color more needed? The air is full of bright color. The ground never has enough of it. You have made the world more beautiful.”

“Someday I’ll be sick of you and your sick jokes,” said Calvin.

“What’s taking you so long? I’m already sick of me.”

“But you like your jokes,” said Calvin.

“I never know whether I will like them until I hear myself say them,” said Honoré.

He heard footsteps inside the house, coming to the door. He turned. Margaret Smith was a stern-looking woman, but not unattractive. Au contraire, she was noticeably attractive. Perhaps some might think her too tall for Honoré’s comfort, but like most short men, Honoré had long since had to settle for the idea of admiring taller women; any other choice would curtail too sharply the pool of available ladies.

Not that this one was available. She raised one eyebrow very slightly, as if to let Honoré know that she recognized his admiration of her and thought it sweet but stupid of him. Then she turned her attention to Calvin.

“I remember once,” she said, “I saw Alvin heal a broken animal.”

Honoré winced and stole a glance at Calvin. To his surprise, instead of exploding with wrath, Calvin only smiled at the lady. “Nice to meet you, Margaret,” he said.

“Let’s get one thing straight from the start,” said Margaret. “I know every nasty little thing you’ve ever done. I know how much you hate and envy my husband. I know the rage you feel for me at this moment and how you long to humiliate me. Let’s have no pretenses between us.”

“All right,” said Calvin, smiling. “I want to make love to you. I want to make you pregnant with my baby instead of Alvin’s.”

“The only thing you want is to make me angry and afraid,” said Margaret. “You want me to wonder if you’ll use your powers to harm the baby inside my womb and then to seduce me the way you did with another poor woman. So let me put your mind at rest. The hexes that protect my baby were made by Alvin himself, and you don’t have the skill to penetrate them.”

“Do you think not?” said Calvin.

“I know you don’t,” said Margaret, “because you’ve already tried and failed and you don’t even begin to understand why. As for wanting to seduce me—save those efforts for someone who doesn’t see through your pretenses. Now, are we going to dinner or not?”

“I’m hungry,” said Honoré, desperate to turn the conversation away from the dangerous hostility with which it had begun. Didn’t this woman know what kind of madman Calvin was? “Where shall we eat?”

“Since I’m expected to pay,” said Margaret, “it will have to be in a restaurant I can afford.”

“Excellent,” said Honoré. “I am ill at the thought of eating at the kind of restaurant
I
can afford.”

That earned him a tiny hint of a smile from the stern Mrs. Smith. “Give me your arm, Monsieur de Balzac. Let’s not tell my brother-in-law where we’re going.”

“Very funny,” said Calvin, climbing over the railing and back onto the porch. The edge of fury was out of his voice. Honoré was relieved. This woman, this torch, she must truly understand Calvin better than Honoré did, for Calvin seemed to be calming down even though she had goaded him so dangerously. Of course, if she was protected by hexes that might give her more confidence.

Or was it hexes she was counting on? She was married to the Maker that Calvin longed to be—maybe she simply counted on Calvin’s knowledge that if he harmed her or her baby, he would have to face the wrath of his
brother at long last, and he knew he was no match for Alvin Maker. Someday he would have it out with him, but he wasn’t ready, and so Calvin would not harm Alvin’s wife or unborn baby.

Certainly that was the way a rational man would see it.

Calvin tried to keep himself from getting angry during the meal. What good would it do him? She could see everything he felt; yet she would also see that he was suppressing his anger, so even that would do no good. He hated the whole idea of her existence—someone who thought she knew the truth of his soul just because she could see into his secret desires. Well, everyone had secret desires, didn’t they? They couldn’t be condemned for the fancies that passed through their mind, could they? It was only what they acted on that counted.

Then he remembered the dead hummingbird. Lady Ashworth naked in bed. He stopped himself before he remembered every act that others had criticized—no reason to list the catalogue of them for Margaret’s watchful eye. For her to report to Alvin with, no doubt, the worst possible interpretation. Alvin’s
spy
—

No, keep the anger under control. She couldn’t help what her knack was, any more than Calvin could, or anybody else. She wasn’t a spy.

A judge, though. She was clearly judging him, she had said as much. She judged everybody. That’s why she was here in the Crown Colonies—because she had judged and condemned them for practicing slavery, even though the whole world had always practiced slavery until just lately, and it was hardly fair to condemn these people when the idea of emancipation was really just some fancy new trend from Puritan England and a few French philosophers.