The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (25 page)

“And why would they care?”

“Because if them runaways is heading for the river, it might be they got it in their heads to cross it, like they crossed Lake Pontchartrain. They got some wizards with them, I hear. Queen La Tia, I hear. So maybe they can squelch that fog and get across. And them reds don’t fancy a bunch of free blacks and scum-of-the-earth Frenchmen trying to set up on their side of the river.”

“So you are, what…a messenger?”

Alvin shrugged. “I had my say. Who you tell now is none of my howdy do.”

The officer reached out and seized Alvin by the arm. The man had a strong grip. Of course, Alvin could have thrown him off without hardly even thinking about it, but he didn’t want a fight right here.

“I think you need to come outside and tell me a little more,” said the officer.

“And while you’re out there, you can bet these men will all get two
more
cups and then they’ll be pissing and puking the whole way upriver.”

“Come with me.”

Alvin went along peaceful enough. The officer had two other soldiers in that saloon, and they came outside, too. At once the noise level inside increased—those forbidden drinks getting ordered, no doubt. The price of rum and whiskey was bound to soar in Red Stick, on account of the scarcity they’d have by nightfall.

Outside the saloon, the officer had the soldiers hold Alvin. “I think you better come tell your story to Colonel Adan yourself.”

“I told you before, that’s what I
don’t
want to do.”

“If you do not lie, then he must know this.”

“I ain’t lying, and I can’t think why them reds would lie, but I’ll tell you where they said. You go around this first big bight in the river, and then take the second big curve, and where it comes east again, that’s the place.”

“Telling me is a waste of time,” said the officer.

“But you’re the only one that’s gonna get told,” said Alvin. Whereupon he pulled his arms free and elbowed both soldiers in the chin, knocking their heads back against the wooden wall of the saloon. One dropped like a rock, the other staggered away, and Alvin reached out and took the officer’s side-arm away from him.

The officer stepped back and drew his sword.

“No no,” said Alvin. “If you kill me,
then
what will you tell the colonel?”

In answer, the officer slashed with his sword.

Alvin sidestepped, then took the sword out of the officer’s hand and broke the blade across his knee. It pained him to do it with a blade as fine as that—Spanish steel was still a thing to be proud of—and he didn’t like smacking those soldiers, either. But he had to get away as a regular fellow might, and not with any obvious makery, or the colonel might realize he was getting set up or maybe just think he was being sent on a wild goose chase.

The officer cried out as if it had been his arm, not his sword, that was broke in two. Alvin jogged away while the officer bawled, “Siga lo! Siga lo!” But his men were in no shape to follow, and in a couple of minutes Alvin was out of sight behind buildings and heading for woodland as fast as he could go.

Arthur Stuart woke up from someone shaking him. “Who’s—”

“Shh, don’t wake the others yet.”

It was Alvin. Arthur Stuart sat up. “Boy am I glad to—”

“What part of shhhh didn’t you get?”

“There’s nobody nearby,” said Arthur. But he talked softer, all the same.

“You think,” said Alvin. “But Dead Mary, she’s only just over there.”

“She wasn’t when
I
went to sleep,” said Arthur Stuart.

But by now they were both up and walking away into the fog surrounding the camp.

“I just come from Colonel Adan’s army,” said Alvin. “We got us an appointment at the river tomorrow afternoon.”

“We crossing over?”

“Tenskwa-Tawa is granting us right to pass through, and they’ll help us get food and shelter without having to take over any more plantations.”

“Good,” said Arthur Stuart. “I’m sick of it already, folks being so scared of us.”

“Guess you’re not a natural bully,” said Alvin. “And after I tried so hard to teach you.”

“Well, it’s worked out pretty good so far. Dead Mary’s a natural liar, and I’m good at fogging folks and bending musket barrels.”

“And La Tia has made some charms,” said Alvin.

“They seemed to help. Not like having you march with us.”

“Well, I’m here to march with you now. I don’t want another stop. I want to get there first. And that means we need to wake everybody now and get moving.”

“In the dark?”

“We’ll see if it’s still dark by the time you get them going.”

It took less than an hour to get under way, but that was mostly ’cause Alvin wouldn’t let anybody fix any kind of meal. Nursing mothers could nurse, of course, and they could eat whatever bread and cheese and fruit they might have as they walked, but nothing that required cooking or washing or waiting.

Oh, there was plenty of grumbling and some out-and-out surliness, but the past couple of days’ marching, with La Tia’s charms giving them some good help, had left them feeling hale and ready even with only half a night’s sleep.

And now, with Alvin leading the way, the charms worked way better. It really was the greensong now, not just a dim echo of it. Since Arthur Stuart didn’t have to mind the fog now, he could join in with it, let it sweep over him.

Before dawn everybody was running along—the adults jogging, the children running full tilt, but everyone keeping up and nobody tired. In the dark they’d run without a soul tripping over a root or straying from the group. Because in the greensong, you always know exactly where you are and where everything else is because it’s all part of you and you’re part of it.

They ran all morning. They ran all afternoon. They did not stop to eat or drink. They splashed through streams, barely pausing to lift the children who weren’t tall enough to ford them. Six thousand people now, with all the slaves at each plantation who had shucked off their bondage to join them. Moving through the woods without need for trail or trace.

The last red of the sunset was just fading from the sky when they came to a low bluff overlooking an eastward curve of the Mizzippy and saw it, more than a mile wide, streaked with red from the sunset.

“We cross in the morning?” asked Arthur Stuart.

“We cross as soon as every last soul is up here on this bluff,” said Alvin.

They had spread out a bit during the long day’s run, so it was full dark and then some when the colonels reported that everyone was accounted for.

Once again Alvin had Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel and their children at the front, but this time La Tia would be leading them across instead of waiting till last. “Won’t be no bridge this time,” said Alvin to the council. “We’re gonna dam up the river and it’s going to look mighty strange, piled up on your right side. Nobody ought to look into it—we got no time for that.”

Then Alvin walked to the point of the bluff nearest the water, Arthur Stuart beside him, and raised up a torch.

On the far side of the river, the fog cleared and another torch could be seen, just a wink of light.

“Who’s on the other side?” asked Arthur Stuart.

“Tenskwa-Tawa,” said Alvin. “He’s gonna help me dam the Mizzippy.”

“Well,” said Arthur Stuart, “I say, dam the Mizzippy all to hell!”

Alvin laughed and then cut open his hand with his own fingernail and
flung
the blood out over the water.

It looked as if the water leaped right back up into his hand, but it wasn’t water, no sir, it was the crystal again, and as Alvin held one end of it, it grew, stretching out like a thin sheet of glass right through the river and across it. Halfway there it was met by crystal from the other side and by then the water on the left side of the dam was flowing away, sinking down, gone.

On the upstream side of the dam, though, the water had risen, and Arthur expected it would start to flow over the top any second. But it didn’t. Because, he realized, upstream of the bluff it had spilled over the banks and was flooding the land on the white man’s side of the river.

Now Arthur Stuart knew why this spot had been chosen. The bluffs on the other side were higher and extended farther upstream. There’d be no flood on the red side of the river.

“I got a job for you,” said Alvin.

“I’m game, if it’s something I can handle.”

“Colonel Adan is coming up the river with a couple of his boats. He’s also sent another bunch of soldiers around by land. Well, those boys are gonna be scrambling to climb trees and find high ground for the next while, but what I worry about is the men on them boats.”

“Won’t they be left high and dry with the river dammed like this?” said Arthur Stuart.

“They will. But they’ll be mighty tempted to get out of them boats and come upstream on foot. And when we let go of this dam, they’ll all be drowned.”

“Like Pharaoh’s chariots.”

“I don’t want any more dead men on account of this trek,” said Alvin. “There’s just no call for it, if we give proper warning.”

“I’ll keep ’em in the boats,” said Arthur Stuart.

“I was just asking you to give them advice.”

“I’ll give them such strong advice everybody takes it.”

“Well, on your way to showing off for a bunch of men armed with muskets and artillery,” said Alvin, “you might want to dry off that bottom mud so nobody gets stuck crossing over.”

And indeed it was sloppy going for the first few people to try going down the bank into the empty river bottom. But Arthur Stuart had learned enough these past days that it wasn’t hard for him to evaporate the water in the top layer of mud, making a hard-surfaced dirt road about fifty feet wide—broad enough for a lot of people to cross at once. This would go a lot faster than crossing Pontchartrain.

When La Tia saw what Arthur had done, she let out a whoop of delight and called out, “Everybody move quick! Quick as frogs!” And she began to jog over the new road.

Arthur took only a moment to look at the dam itself. Being such pure crystal, however, it didn’t look like any kind of dam. It just looked as if the water simply stopped. Even in the dark, he could see shapes moving in the water. At first he thought it was fish, but then he realized that it was too dark to see anything like that in the water. No, what he was seeing was in the
crystal
. The same kind of visions that had been so disturbing and hypnotic as people crossed over the bridge at Pontchartrain.

“Don’t look at the dam!” shouted Alvin. “Nobody look at the dam!”

Which made everybody look, of course. Look once, and then look away, because there was La Tia and Moose and Squirrel and Dead Mary and Rien, urging them on, hurrying them, hundreds and hundreds of them crossing the river bottom on Arthur’s road.

Arthur took off at a jog downriver, not running too fast because he had to dry a path before him or he’d sink. All it took was rounding one bend in the river, and there were the two big riverboats, looking pretty forlorn as they rested right on the bottom.

Already dozens of men were out of the boats, slogging along in thick mud.

“Get back in the boats!” Arthur Stuart shouted.

The men heard him, and some of them stopped and looked around to try to find which bank the voice was coming from.

“Vuelvan-se en los návios!” he shouted again, jogging nearer.

Arthur Stuart wasn’t careless. He was just starting to scan the boat for weaponry when he heard a shout of “Atiren!” and saw the flashes of a half dozen muskets on board the first boat. Wasn’t he out of range?

Well, he was and he wasn’t. The musket balls went far enough, but they had slowed considerably, and the one that hit him didn’t go into him all that terribly far. But the spot did happen to be right in the belly, just above his navel, and it hurt worse than the worst stomach ache of his life.

He doubled over and fell to the ground. Careless, foolish…he cursed himself even as he cried from the pain of it.

But pain or not, he had a mission to perform. Trouble was, with his stomach muscles torn like that, he couldn’t work up the strength to shout. Well, he had known persuasion wasn’t going to do it, and he already had a plan. When they’d been running with the greensong toward the river, Arthur Stuart had heard and felt and finally seen the heartfires of hundreds and hundreds of gators that lived in the river and its tributaries in this region.

It wasn’t hard to call to them. Come to the boats, he told them. Plenty to eat in the boats.

And they came. Whatever they might have thought in their tiny gator brains about the river suddenly disappearing like it did, they understood a supper call.

Trouble was, they had no idea what a “boat” was. They just knew they were getting called and had a vague notion of where the call was coming from and pretty soon they were all headed right for Arthur Stuart. And since he was giving off the smell of blood and looking for all the world like a wounded animal—not unnatural, considering he
was
wounded—he couldn’t blame the gators for thinking he was the meal they’d been promised.

This is about as dumb a way to die as I ever heard of, thought Arthur Stuart. I called the gators down on my own self. Good thing I died before I ever fathered children, because this much stupidity should not survive into the next generation.

And then the gators suddenly turned, all of them at once, and headed downstream toward the boats. They walked right past Arthur Stuart, ignoring him like he was a stump. And while they padded by on their vicious-looking gator feet, he felt something going on inside his stomach. He opened his shirt and looked down at his wound, just in time to see the lead ball nose out like a gopher and plop onto the dirt at his feet.

And as he watched, the blood stopped flowing out of his wound and the skin closed up and it didn’t hurt anymore and he thought, Good thing Alvin’s still watching out for me, because he gives me one dumb little assignment and I find a way to get myself killed twice over.

The gators were rushing toward the boat, but in the darkness it was plain some of the men hadn’t realized what was headed their way. “Gators!” he shouted. “Get back in the boats!”