Keeper of Dreams (84 page)

“Tell you what,” said Alvin. “You keep your hands off my poke, and we’ll never have to find out.”

Bowie laughed again—but his grin looked more like a wildcat snarling at its prey than like an actual smile. “I like you, Alvin Smith.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Alvin.

“I know a man who’s looking for fellows like you.”

So this Bowie was part of Austin’s company. “If you’re talking about
Mr. Austin, he and I already agreed that he’ll go his way and I’ll go mine.”

“Ah,” said Bowie.

“Did you just join up with him in Thebes?”

“I’ll tell you about my knife,” said Bowie, “but I won’t tell you about my business.”

“I’ll tell you mine,” said Alvin. “My business right now is to get back to sleep and see if I can find the dream I was in before you decided to stop me snoring.”

“Well, that’s a good idea,” said Bowie. “And since I haven’t been to sleep at all yet tonight, on account of your snoring, I reckon I’ll give it a go before the sun comes up.”

Alvin lay back down and curled himself around his poke. His back was to Bowie, but of course he kept his doodlebug in him and knew every move he made. The man stood there watching Alvin for a long time, and from the way his heart was beating and the blood rushed around in him, Alvin could tell he was upset. Angry? Afraid? Hard to tell when you couldn’t look at a man’s face, and not so easy even then. But his heartfire blazed and Alvin figured the fellow was making some kind of decision about him.

Won’t get to sleep very soon if he keeps himself all agitated like that, thought Alvin. So he reached inside the fellow and gradually calmed him down, got his heart beating slower, steadied his breathing. Most folks thought that their emotions caused their bodies to get all agitated, but it was the other way around, Alvin knew. The body leads, and the emotions follow.

In a couple of minutes Bowie was relaxed enough to yawn. And soon after, he was fast asleep. With his knife still strapped on, and his hand never far from it.

This Austin fellow had him some interesting friends.

Arthur Stuart was feeling way too cocky. But if you
know
you feel too cocky, and you compensate for it by being extra careful, then being cocky does you no harm, right? Except maybe it’s your cockiness makes you feel like you’re safer than you really are.

That’s what Miz Peggy called “circular reasoning” and it wouldn’t get him nowhere. Anywhere. One of them words. Whatever the rule was.
Thinking about Miz Peggy always got him listening to the way he talked and finding fault with himself. Only what good would it do him to talk right? All he’d be is a half-Black man who somehow learned to talk like a gentleman—a kind of trained monkey, that’s how they’d see him. A dog walking on its hind legs. Not an
actual
gentleman.

Which was why he got so cocky, probably. Always wanting to prove something. Not to Alvin, really.

No,
expecially
to Alvin. Cause it was Alvin still treated him like a boy when he was a man now. Treated him like a son, but he was no man’s son.

All this thinking was, of course, doing him no good at all, when his job was to pick up the foul-smelling slop bucket and make a slow and lazy job of it so’s he’d have time to find out which of them spoke English or Spanish.

“Quién me comprénde?” he whispered. “Who understands me?”

“Todos te compréndemos, pero calle la boca,” whispered the third man. We all understand you, but shut your mouth. “Los blancos piensan que hay solo uno que hable un poco de inglés.”

Boy howdy, he talked fast, with nothing like the accent the Cuban had. But still, when Arthur got the feel of a language in his mind, it wasn’t that hard to sort it out. They all spoke Spanish, but they were pretending that only one of them spoke a bit of English.

“Quieren fugir de ser esclavos?” Do you want to escape from slavery?

“La única puerta es la muerta.” The only door is death.

“Al otro lado del rio,” said Arthur, “hay rojos que son amigos nuestros.” On the other side of the river there are Reds who are friends of ours.

“Sus amigos no son nuestros,” answered the man. Your friends aren’t ours.

Another man near enough to hear nodded in agreement. “Y ya no puedo nadar.” And I can’t swim anyway.

“Los Blancos, que van a hacer?” What are the Whites going to do?

“Piensan en ser conquistadores.” Clearly these men didn’t think much of their masters’ plans. “Los Mexicos van comer sus corazones.” The Mexica will eat their hearts.

Another man chimed in. “Tú hablas como cubano.” You talk like a Cuban.

“Soy americano,” said Arthur Stuart. “Soy libre. Soy . . .” He hadn’t learned the Spanish for “citizen.” “Soy igual.” I’m equal. But not really, he thought. Still, I’m more equal than you.

Several of the Mexica Blacks sniffed at that. “Ya hay visto, tu dueño.” All Arthur understood was “dueño,” owner.

“Es amigo, no dueño.” He’s my friend, not my master.

Oh, they thought that was hilarious. But of course their laughter was silent, and a few of them glanced at the guard, who was dozing as he leaned against the wall.

“Me de promesa.” Promise me. “Cuando el ferro quiebra, no se maten. No salguen sin ayuda.” When the iron breaks, don’t kill yourselves. Or maybe it meant don’t get killed. Anyway, don’t leave without help. Or that’s what Arthur thought he was saying. They looked at him with total incomprehension.

“Voy quebrar el ferro,” Arthur repeated.

One of them mockingly held out his hands. The chains made a noise. Several looked again at the guard.

“No con la mano,” said Arthur. “Con la cabeza.”

They looked at each other with obvious disappointment. Arthur knew what they were thinking: This boy is crazy. Thinks he can break iron with his head. But he didn’t know how to explain it any better.

“Mañana,” he said.

They nodded wisely. Not a one of them believed him.

So much for the hours he’d spent learning Spanish. Though maybe the problem was that they just didn’t know about makery and couldn’t think of a man breaking iron with his mind.

Arthur Stuart knew he could do it. It was one of Alvin’s earliest lessons, but it was only on this trip that Arthur had finally understood what Alvin meant. About getting inside the metal. All this time, Arthur had thought it was something he could do by straining real hard with his mind. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was easy. Just a sort of turn of his mind. Kind of the way language worked for him. Getting the taste of the language on his tongue, and then trusting how it felt. Like knowing somehow that even though
mano
ended in
o
, it still needed
la
in front of it instead of
el
. He just knew how it ought to be.

Back in Carthage City, he gave two bits to a man selling sweet bread,
and the man was trying to get away with not giving him change. Instead of yelling at him—what good would that do, there on the levee, a half-Black boy yelling at a White man?—Arthur just thought about the coin he’d been holding in his hand all morning, how
warm
it was, how right it felt in his own hand. It was like he understood the metal of it, the way he understood the music of language. And thinking of it warm like that, he could see in his mind that it was getting warmer.

He encouraged it, thought of it getting warmer and warmer, and all of a sudden the man cried out and started slapping at the pocket into which he’d dropped the quarter.

It was burning him.

He tried to get it out of his pocket, but it burned his fingers and finally he flung off his coat, flipped down his suspenders, and dropped his trousers, right in front of everybody. Tipped the coin out of his pocket onto the sidewalk, where it sizzled and made the wood start smoking.

Then all the man could think about was the sore place on his leg where the coin had burned him. Arthur Stuart walked up to him, all the time thinking the coin cool again. He reached down and picked it up off the sidewalk. “Reckon you oughta give me my change,” he said.

“You get away from me, you Black devil,” said the man. “You’re a wizard, that’s what you are. Cursing a man’s coin, that’s the same as thievin’!”

“That’s awful funny, coming from a man who charged me two bits for a five-cent hunk of bread.”

Several passersby chimed in.

“Trying to keep the boy’s quarter, was you?”

“There’s laws against that, even if the boy is Black.”

“Stealin’ from them as can’t fight back.”

“Pull up your trousers, fool.”

A little later, Arthur Stuart got change for his quarter and tried to give the man his nickel, but he wouldn’t let Arthur get near him.

Well, I tried, thought Arthur. I’m not a thief.

What I am is, I’m a maker.

No great shakes at it like Alvin, but dadgummit, I thought a quarter hot and it dang near burned its way out of the man’s pocket.

If I can do that, then I can learn to do it all, that’s what he thought,
and that’s why he was feeling cocky tonight. Because he’d been practicing every day on anything metal he could get his hands on. Wouldn’t do no good to turn the iron hot enough to melt, of course—these slaves wouldn’t thank him if he burned their wrists and ankles up in the process of getting their chains off.

No, his project was to make the metal soft without getting it hot. That was a lot harder than hetting it up. Lots of times he’d caught himself straining again, trying to
push
softness onto the metal. But when he relaxed into it again and got the feel of the metal into his head like a song, he gradually began to get the knack of it again. Turned his own belt buckle so soft he could bend it into any shape he wanted. Though after a few minutes he realized the shape he wanted it in was like a belt buckle, since he still needed it to hold his pants up.

Brass was easier than iron, since it was softer in the first place. And it’s not like Arthur Stuart was fast. He’d seen Alvin turn a gun barrel soft while a man was in the process of shooting it at him, that’s how quick
he
was. But Arthur Stuart had to ponder on it first. Twenty-five slaves, each with an iron band at his ankle and another at his wrist. He had to make sure they all waited till the last one was free. If any of them bolted early, they’d all be caught.

Course, he could ask Alvin to help him. But he already had Alvin’s answer. Leave ’em slaves, that’s what Alvin had decided. But Arthur wouldn’t do it. These men were in his hands. He was a maker now, after his own fashion, and it was up to him to decide for himself when it was right to act and right to let be. He couldn’t do what Alvin did, healing folks and getting animals to do his bidding and turning water into glass. But he could soften iron, by damn, and so he’d set these men free.

Tomorrow night.

Next morning they passed from the Hio into the Mizzippy, and for the first time in years Alvin got a look at Tenskwa-Tawa’s fog on the river.

It was like moving into a wall. Sunny sky, not a cloud, and when you looked ahead it really didn’t look like much, just a little mist on the river. But all of a sudden you couldn’t see more than a hundred yards ahead of you—and that was only if you were headed up or down the river. If you
kept going straight across to the right bank, it was like you went blind, you couldn’t even see the front of your own boat.

It was the fence that Tenskwa-Tawa had built to protect the Reds who moved west after the failure of Ta-Kumsaw’s war. All the Reds who didn’t want to live under White man’s law, all the Reds who were done with war, they crossed over the water into the west, and then Tenskwa-Tawa . . . closed the door behind them.

Alvin had heard tales of the west from trappers who used to go there. They talked of mountains so sharp with stone, so rugged and high that they had snow on them clear into June. Places where the ground itself spat hot water fifty feet into the sky, or higher. Herds of buffalo so big they could pass by you all day and night, and next morning it still looked like there was just as many as yesterday. Grassland and desert, pine forest and lakes like jewels nestled among mountains so high that if you climbed to the top you ran out of air.

And all that was now Red land, where Whites would never go again. That’s what this fog was all about.

Except for Alvin. He knew that if he wanted to, he could dispel that fog and cross over. Not only that, but he wouldn’t be killed, neither. Tenskwa-Tawa had said so, and there’d be no Red man who’d go against the Prophet’s law.

A part of him wanted to put to shore, wait for the riverboat to move on, and then get him a canoe and paddle across the river and look for his old friend and teacher. It would be good to talk to him about all that was going on in the world. About the rumors of war coming, between the United States and the Crown Colonies—or maybe between the free states and slave states within the U.S.A. About rumors of war with Spain to get control of the mouth of the Mizzippy, or war between the Crown Colonies and England.

And now this rumor of war with the Mexica. What would Tenskwa-Tawa make of that? Maybe he had troubles of his own—maybe he was working even now to make an alliance of Reds to head south and defend their lands against men who dragged their captives to the tops of their ziggurats and tore their hearts out to satisfy their god.