Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II (34 page)

Alvin went to his heart first. It was still pumping, but there wasn’t much blood left in the veins; it was all lost in Measure’s chest and belly. That was the first thing Alvin had to mend, heal up the blood vessels and get the blood back where it belonged, flowing in its channels.

Time, it all took time. All the broken ribs, the cut-up organs. All the bones, joining them without so much as a hand to help move something into the right place—some of the bones were so out of line that he couldn’t heal them at all. He’d have to wait until Measure woke up enough to help him.

So Alvin got inside Measure’s brain, the nerves running
down his spine, and healed it all, put it back the way it had to be.

Measure woke with one long, terrible scream of agony. He was alive and the pain was back, sharper and clearer than it ever was before. I’m sorry, Measure. I can’t heal you up without letting the pain come back. And I got to heal you, or too many innocent folks are dead.

Alvin didn’t even notice that it was already night, and half his work still lay ahead of him.

14

In Prophetstown, no one but the children slept that night. The adults all felt the circling White army; the hidings and hexes cast by the White troops were like trumpets and banners to the land-sense of the Reds.

Not all of them found they had the courage to keep their oath, now that iron-and-fire death was hours away. But they kept the oath this far: They gathered their families and slipped out of Prophetstown, passing silently between companies of White soldiers, who neither heard nor saw them. Knowing they could not die without defending themselves, they left, so that not one Red would mar the perfection of the Prophet’s refusal to fight.

Tenskwa-Tawa was not surprised that some left; he was surprised that so many stayed. Almost all. So many who believed in him, so many who would prove that trust in blood. He dreaded the morning; the pain of a single murder close at hand had cursed him with the black noise for many years. True, it was his father who was killed, so the pain was more; but did he love the people of Prophetstown any less than he had loved his father?

Yet he had to fend off the black noise, keep his wits about him, or all their deaths would be in vain. If their dying accomplished nothing, he wouldn’t have them do it. So many times he had searched the crystal tower, trying to find some way to approach this day, some path that would lead to something good. The best that he could find was
the land divided, Red west of the Mizzipy, White to the east. Even that, though, could be found only through the narrowest of paths. So much depended on the White boys, so much on Tenskwa-Tawa, so much on White Murderer Harrison himself. For in all the paths in which Harrison showed any mercy, the massacre of Tippy-Canoe did nothing to stop the destruction of the Reds, and, with them, the land. In all those paths, the Red men dwindled, confined to tiny preserves of desolate land, until the whole land was White, and therefore brutalized into submission, stripped and cut and ravished, giving vast amounts of food that was only an imitation of the true harvest, poisoned into life by alchemical trickery. Even the White man suffered in those visions of the future, but it would be many generations before he realized what he had done. Yet here—Prophetstown—there was a day—tomorrow—when the future could be turned onto an unlikely path, but a better one. One that would lead to a living land after all, even if it was truncated; one that would lead someday to a crystal city catching sunlight and turning it into visions of truth for all who lived within it.

That was Tenskwa-Tawa’s hope, that he could cling to the bright vision through all of tomorrow’s pain, and so turn that pain, that blood, that black noise of murder, to an event that would change the world.

Even before the first detectable rays of light rose above the horizon, Tenskwa-Tawa felt the coming dawn. He felt it partly in the stirring of life to the east. He could feel it from farther off than any other Red. He felt it also, though, from the movements among the Whites as they prepared to light the matches for their cannon. Four fires, hidden and therefore revealed by spells and witchery. Four cannon, poised to rake the city, end to end.

Tenskwa-Tawa walked through the city, humming softly. They heard him, and awakened their children. The White men thought to kill them in their sleep, faceless within their wigwams and lodges. Instead, they emerged in the darkness, walking surefooted to the broad meadow of the meeting ground. There wasn’t room enough for all of them even to sit. They stood, families together, father
and mother with their children in the circle of their embrace, waiting for the White man to spill their blood.

“The earth will not soak up your blood,” Tenskwa-Tawa had promised them. “It will flow into the river, and I will hold it there, all the power of all your lives and all your deaths, and I will use it to keep the land alive, and bind the White man to the lands he has already captured and begun to kill.”

So now Tenskwa-Tawa made his way to the bank of the Tippy-Canoe, watching the meadow fill up with his people, of whom so many would die before him because they believed in his words.

“Stand with me today, Mr. Miller,” said General Harrison. “It’s your kin whose blood we’ll avenge today. I want you to have the honor of firing the first bullet in this war.”

Mike Fink watched as the hot-eyed miller carefully rammed wad and shot down his musket barrel. Mike knew the thirst for murder in his eyes. It was a kind of madness that came on a man, and it made him dangerous, made him able to do things beyond his normal reach. Mike was just as glad that miller didn’t know just when and how his boy had died. Oh, Governor Bill hadn’t never told him right out who that young man was, but Mike Fink wasn’t a boy in short pants, and he knew all right. Harrison played a deep game, but one thing was sure. He’d do anything to raise himself higher and put more land and people under his control. And Mike Fink knew that Harrison would only keep him around as long as he was useful.

The funny thing was, you see, that Mike Fink didn’t think of himself as a murderer. He thought of life as a contest, and dying was what happened to those who came out second best, but it wasn’t the same as murder, it was a fair fight. Like how he killed Hooch—Hooch didn’t have to be so careless. Hooch could have noticed Mike wasn’t on the shore with the other poleboys, Hooch could have been watchful and wary, and if he had been, why, Mike Fink might well have died. So Hooch lost his life because
he lost the contest—the contest he and Mike were both playing for.

But that boy yesterday, he wasn’t a player. He wasn’t in the contest at all. He just wanted to go home. Mike Fink never wrassled a man who didn’t want a fight, and he never killed a man who wasn’t set to kill him first if he got a chance. Yesterday was the first time he had ever killed somebody just cause he was told to, and he didn’t like it, didn’t like it one bit. Mike could see now that Governor Bill
thought
he had killed Hooch that same way, just because he was told to. But it wasn’t so. And today Mike Fink looked at the young man’s father, with all that rage in his eyes, and he said to that man—but silently, so nobody could hear—he said, I’m with you, I agree with you that the man who killed your boy should die.

Trouble was, Mike Fink was that man. And he was plain ashamed.

Same thing with them Red men in Prophetstown. What kind of contest was it, to wake them up with grape-shot whistling through their own houses, setting them afire, cutting into their bodies, the bodies of children and women and old men?

Not my kind of fight, thought Mike Fink.

The first light of dawn came into the sky. Prophetstown was still nothing but shadows, but it was time. Alvin Miller aimed his musket right into the thick of the houses, and then he fired.

A few seconds later, the cannons banged out their answer. Maybe a few more seconds, and the first flame appeared in the town.

The cannons fired again. Yet not a soul ran screaming out of the wigwams. Not even the ones that were afire.

Didn’t anybody else notice it? Didn’t they realize that the Reds were all gone out of Prophetstown? And if they were gone, that meant they knew all about this morning’s attack. And if they knew, that meant they might be ready, lying in ambush. Or maybe they all escaped, or maybe—

Mike Fink’s lucky amulet was nearly burning him, it felt so hot. He knew what that meant. Time to go. Something real bad was going to happen to him if he stayed.

So he slid off down the line of soldiers—or what
passed for soldiers, since there hadn’t been more than a day or two for training some of these raw farmers. Nobody paid no heed to Mike Fink. They were too busy watching the wigwams burn. Some of them had finally noticed that nobody seemed to be in the Red city, and they were talking about it, worried. Mike said nothing, kept moving along the line, down toward the creek.

The cannon were all on the high ground; they sounded farther away. Mike emerged from the trees into the cleared ground that ran down to the river. There he stopped short and stared. The dawn was still just a grey streak in the distance, but there was no mistaking what he saw. Thousands and thousands of Reds, standing shoulder to shoulder in the meadow. Some were crying softly—no doubt stray shrapnel and musket balls had come this far, since two of the cannons were on the opposite side of the city from here, firing this direction. But they weren’t making a move to defend themselves. It wasn’t an ambush. They had no weapons. These Red folks were all lined up to die.

There was maybe a dozen canoes up and down the bank of the river. Mike Fink pushed one out into the water and rolled himself aboard. Downstream, that’s where he’d go, all the way down the Wobbish to the Hio. It wasn’t war today, it was massacre, and that just wasn’t Mike Fink’s kind of fight. Nearly everybody’s got a thing so bad he just won’t do it.

In the darkness of the root cellar, Measure couldn’t see if Alvin was really there or not. But he could hear his voice, soft but urgent, riding in over the crest of the pain. “I’m trying to fix you, Measure, but I need your help.”

Measure couldn’t answer. Speech wasn’t one of the things he could manage right at the moment.

“I’ve fixed your neck, and some of your ribs, and the guts that got tore up,” said Alvin. “And your left arm bones were pretty much in a line, so they’re all right, can you feel that?”

It was true that there wasn’t no pain coming from Measure’s left arm. He moved it. It jostled the whole rest of his body, but it could move, it had some strength in it.

“Your ribs,” said Alvin. “Poking out. You got to push them back in place.”

Measure pushed on one and nearly fainted from the pain. “I can’t.”

“You got to.”

“Make it not hurt.”

“Measure, I don’t know how. Not without making it so you can’t
move
. You just got to stand it. Everything you get back in place, I can fix it, and then it won’t hurt no more, but first you got to straighten it, you got to.”

“You do it.”

“I can’t.”

“Just reach out and do it, Alvin, you’re big for ten, you can do it.”

“I can’t.”

“I once cut your bone for you to save your life, I once did that.”

“Measure, I can’t do it cause I ain’t
there
.”

This made no sense to Measure. So he knew he was dreaming. Well, if he was dreaming, why didn’t he come up with some dream where things didn’t hurt so bad?

“Push on the bone, Measure.”

Alvin just wouldn’t go away. So Measure pushed, and it hurt him. But Alvin was as good as his word. Soon after, the place where he straightened out the bone didn’t hurt no more.

It took so long. He was so tore up that it seemed there just wasn’t no end to the pain. But in between times, while Alvin was making things heal up where he just fixed the bones, Measure explained to Alvin what had happened to him, and Alvin told him what
he
knew, and pretty soon Measure understood that there was a lot more to this than saving the life of one young man in a root cellar.

Finally, finally it was over. Measure couldn’t hardly believe it. He had hurt so much for so many hours that it felt downright strange not to hurt anywhere.