The Crystal City

10

Mizzippy

Alvin found it hard to hear the greensong in this place. It wasn't just the disharmony of field after field of cotton tended by slaves, which droned a bitter, complaining monotone under the songs of life. It was also his own fears and worries, distracting him so he couldn't listen to the life around him as he needed to.

Leaving Arthur in charge of all the makery that this exodus required was dangerous, not because there was any ill will in the young man, but because there was simply so much he didn't know. Not just about makery, either, but about life, about what the consequences of each action were likely to be. Not that Alvin was any expert himself-nor was Margaret, for even she saw many paths and wasn't sure which ones led to good places in the end. But he knew more than Arthur Stuart did simply by virtue of having lived years longer, with a watchful eye.

Worse, the actual authority in the camp was held by La Tia, and-to a lesser extent-by Dead Mary and her mother. La Tia he had only met the day before the crossing of the lake. She was a woman who was used to being more powerful than anyone around her-how would she deal with Arthur Stuart when Alvin wasn't there to look after him? If only Alvin could see into people's hearts. La Tia was fearless, but that could mean either that she had no guile or that she had no conscience.

And Dead Mary. It was obvious she was enamored of Arthur Stuart-the way she watched him, enjoyed his company, laughed at his wit. Of course the boy would never see that, he wasn't used to the company of women, and since Dead Mary wasn't a flirt or a tart, the signs would be hard for him to recognize, being so inexperienced. But what if, in Alvin's absence, she did something to make it obvious after all? What would Arthur Stuart do, unsupervised, in the company of a woman who might be a great deal more experienced than he was?

He also had misgivings about bringing along the slaves from the plantations where they stopped along the way. But as La Tia said, when he suggested they might not want to swell their numbers: "This a march of freedom, man! Who you gonna leave behind? These folk need less freedom? Why we the chosen ones? They as much Israelites as us!"

Israelites. Of course everybody was comparing this to the exodus from Egypt, complete with the drowning of some of "Pharaoh's" army when the bridge collapsed. The fog was the pillar of smoke. And what did that make Alvin? Moses? Not likely. But that's how a lot of the people felt.

But not all. There was a lot of anger in this group. A lot of people who had come to hate all authority, and not just that of the Spanish or the slaveowners. The anger in Old Bart, the butler in the Cottoner house-there was so much fury in his heart, Alvin wondered how he had managed to contain it all these years. Old Bart was still in control of himself, and had calmed down considerable since he'd had a chance to see how big a job it was, getting all these folks safely through slave country. Didn't hurt that he'd seen Arthur Stuart and La Tia use powers he'd never seen black folks using-and that there was plenty of white folks in the company who was doing what Arthur Stuart and La Tia told them. It was already a new world.

But then they'd come to a new plantation where slaves had suffered worse than they did on the Cottoner place, and Old Bart's anger would rekindle, and the others from his old plantation would see the fire in him and it would stir it up in them, too. That was just human nature, and it made the situation dangerous.

How many others were there, with bits of authority like Old Bart's? Not to mention the ones that would like to make trouble just because they liked stirring things up. It's not like they'd get to say, at each plantation, We're gonna free all of you what's nice and forgiving, anybody who's got any nastiness in them, or is too angry to act peaceful, you're gonna stay here under the lash.

Like Moses, they'd take everybody that had been in bondage. And like Moses, they couldn't guess if some of them might find some way of making a golden calf that would destroy the exodus before they got to the promised land.

Promised land. That was the biggest worry. Where in the world was he going to take them? Where was the land of milk and honey? It's not as if the Lord had appeared to Alvin in a burning bush. The closest he'd ever come to seeing an angel was the dark night when Tenskwa-Tawa-then a perpetually drunken red named Lolla-Wossiky-appeared in his room and Alvin had healed his blind eye. But Lolla-Wossiky wasn't God or even an angel like the one that wrestled with Jacob. He was a man who groaned with the pain of his people.

And yet he was the only angel Alvin had ever seen, or even heard about, unless you counted whatever it was that his sister's husband, Armor-of-God Weaver, had seen in Reverend Thrower's church back when Alvin was a child. Something shimmering and racing around inside the walls of the church, and it like to made Thrower crazy to see whatever it was he saw, but Armor-of-God could never make it out. And that was as close to seeing a supernatural creature as anyone of Alvin's acquaintance had ever come.

Oh, there had been miracles enough in Alvin's life, plenty of strange doings, and some of them wonderful. Peggy watching out for him throughout his childhood without his even knowing it. The powers he had found inside himself, the ability to see into the heart of the world and persuade it to change and become better. But not one of them had given him the knowledge of what he ought to be doing from one moment to the next. He was left to muddle through as best he could, taking what advice he could get. But nobody, not even Margaret, had the truth-truth so true that you knew it was true, and knew that what you knew was bound to be right. Alvin always had a shadow of doubt because nobody truly knew anything, not even their own heart.

With all this running through his mind, over and over again, reaching no conclusion, he soon found that his legs were tired and his feet were sore-something that hadn't happened to him while running since Ta-Kumsaw had first taught him to hear the greensong and let it fill him with the strength of all the life around him.

This won't do, he realized. If I run like a normal man, I'll cover ground so slowly it will be more than one night before I reach the river. I have to shut all this out of my mind and let the song have me.

So he did the only thing he could think of that would shut all else out of his mind.

He reached out, searching for Margaret's heartfire, which he always knew as well as a man might know his own self. There she was . .. and there, just under her own heartfire, was that glowing spark of the baby that they had made together. Alvin concentrated on the baby, on finding his way through its small body, feeling the heartbeat, the flow of blood, the strength coming into the baby from Margaret's body, the way his little muscles flexed and extended as he tested them.

Exploring this new life, this manling-to-be, all other worries left Alvin and then the greensong came to him, and his son was part of it, that beating heart was part of the rhythm of the trees and small animals and grass and, yes, even the slave-grown cotton, all of it alive. The birds overhead, the insects crawling in and on the earth, the flies and skeeters, they were all part of the music. The gators in the banks of languid rivers and stagnant pools, the deer that still browsed in the stands of wood that had not yet made way for the cotton fields, the small herbs with healing and poison in them, the fish in the water, and the hum, hum, hum of sleeping people who, in the nighttime, became part of the world again instead of fighting against it the way most folks did the livelong day.

So it was that he was not tired, not sore, but alert and filled with vigor and well-being when he reached the shores of the Mizzippy. He had crossed many a wagon track but nothing so fine as to be called a road, for in these parts the best road was the water, and the greatest highway of all was the Mizzippy.

Though it was night, there were stars enough, and a sliver of moon. Alvin could see the broad river stretching away to the left and right, each ripple in the water catching a bit of light. Halfway across, though, there was the perpetual fog that guarded the west bank from the endless restless ambition of the Europeans.

There was no doubt that Tenskwa-Tawa knew Alvin was coming. His sister-in-law, Becca, was a weaver of the threads of life. She would have noticed Alvin's thread and how it moved over to be at the boundary between white men and red. Tenskwa-Tawa would have been told. He would know that if Alvin came here, straight toward the river, and not traveling north or south along it, it meant he wanted to cross the water. It meant he wanted to talk.

It wasn't something Alvin did often. He didn't want to be a bother. It had to matter, before he'd come. And so Tenskwa-Tawa would trust his judgment and come to meet him.

Or not. After all, it's not as if Tenskwa-Tawa came and went at Alvin's bidding. If he was busy, then Alvin would have to wait. It hadn't happened yet, or not much of a wait, anyway. But Alvin knew that it could happen, and was prepared to wait if he needed to. For a while.

But if Tenskwa-Tawa didn't come at all, what would that mean? That his answer was no? That he would not let these five thousand children of Israel-or at least children of God, or maybe Tenskwa-Tawa saw them as nothing more than the children of their powerless parents, but human beings all the same-was it possible he would not let them pass? What would Alvin do then?

He looked toward his left, not with his eyes, but searching for the heartfires of the northbound expedition that had left Barcy that afternoon to bring these runaway slaves back home. Good-they hadn't made much progress on the first day, and were still far off. There was a lot of anger and discomfort in the group, too, as drunks vomited and former drunks suffered from headaches and men who wished they were drunk grumbled at the tedium of the journey and the poor quality of the pleasures aboard a military boat.

Even farther was the ship that carried Calvin. Plenty of anger on that ship, too-but of a different kind, a sort of bitter sense of entitlements long delayed. Calvin had found a like-minded bunch, people who felt the world owed them something and was slow to pay up. Were they really going to Mexico? Was Calvin so foolish as to put in with that mad expedition? Wherever they went, he knew they'd cause trouble when they got there.

Mostly, though, Alvin wondered how he was going to cross the river.

Building a bridge for just himself didn't seem to have much point to it. But it was a long swim, and a hard one to do wearing all his clothes and carrying a golden plow-which would make a pretty good anchor but a mighty poor raft.

So he began to make his way up the river. The trouble was that close to the water, all was a tangle of trees and brush, while farther back, he couldn't see whether there was any boat tied up. This wasn't hospitable country for farming or fishing, and it was doubtful anybody lived too close. And there were gators-he could see their heartfires, dimmed a bit by sleep, except the hungry ones. Wouldn't they just like a piece of manflesh to digest as they lay on the riverbank through the heat of the day tomorrow.

Don't wake up for me, he murmured to a nearby wakeful gator. Keep your place, I'm not for you today.

Finally he realized there was going to be no boat unless he made one.

So he found a dead, half-fallen tree-no shortage of those in this untended land-and got it to let go of its roots' last hold in the earth. With a great splash it fell into the water, and after a short while, Alvin had shorn it of all the branches he didn't want it to have. The tree had been propped up there, mostly dead, for long enough that it was dry wood, and floated well. He gave it a bit more shaping, and then picked his way between bushes and stepping on roots until he was near enough to the log that he didn't have to splash far in the water to reach it.

Mounting it was a bit of a trouble, since it was inclined to roll, and it occurred to Alvin that it probably wasn't much different in appearance from the great tree that had been swept downstream on the Hatrack River flood the day that he was born. What killed my brother Vigor is now my vehicle to cross.

But thinking about the past reminded him of all those years of childhood, when it seemed that every bad accident that befell him was related somehow to water. His father had remarked upon it, and not as some kind of superstition about coincidence, either. Water was out to get him, that's what Alvin Senior said.

And it wasn't altogether false. No, the water itself had no will or wish to harm him or anything. But water naturally tore and rusted and eroded and melted and mudded up everything it passed over or under or through. It was a natural tool of the Unmaker.

At the thought of his ancient enemy, who had so often brought him to the edge of death, he got that old feeling from his childhood. The sense that something was watching him from just out of sight, just on the edge of vision. But when he turned his head, the watcher seemed to flee to where the new edge of his vision was. Nothing was ever there. But that was the problem-the Unmaker was nothing, or at least was a lover of nothing, and wished to make everything into nothing, and would not rest until it all was broken down and swept away and gone.

Alvin stood against him. A futile, pathetic weakling, that's what I am, thought Alvin. I can't build up faster than the Unmaker tears down. Yet he still hates me for trying.

Or maybe he doesn't hate me. Maybe he's a wild creature, hungry all the time, and I simply smell like his prey. No malice in it. Wasn't tearing down just a part of building up? All part of the same great flow of nature. Why should he be the enemy of the Unmaker, when really they worked together, the maker and unmaker, the maker making things out of the rubble of whatever the unmaker tore down.

Alvin shuddered. What had he been about to do? What had he been thinking about?

There was a heartfire near him. A hungry one indeed. That gator that he had told to stay away. Apparently it changed its mind, what with Alvin standing there thigh-deep in the Mizzippy, resting his hands on a floating log and burdened with a heavy poke slung over his shoulder.

Alvin felt the jaws snap shut on his leg and immediately drag him downward, a sharp tug that jerked his feet out from under him and put him under the water.

He fought to keep his body's reflexes from taking over- flailing arms all panicking to try to swim up for air wouldn't do him much good with a gator holding onto one leg.

The gator jerked its head this way and that, and Alvin felt his thigh bone pull hard away from the hip socket. Next try and the gator would have him disjointed.

Alvin reached into the mind of the gator to persuade it to let go. A simple thing, to tell some feeble-brained animal how to see the world. Not food, not prey, danger, go away.

Only the gator had no interest in his story. What Alvin felt there in its heartfire was something old and malicious. It wasn't hungry. It just wanted Alvin dead. He could feel it hungering to tear him apart, a frenzy building inside it.

And he could feel other heartfires coming. More gators, drawn by the thrashing in the water.

Why wouldn't this gator respond?

Because you're in the water, fool.

No, I've been in water a thousand times with no danger, and-

No time to settle this now. If I can't do it by persuasion, I'll do it another way.

Alvin reached down with his doodlebug and stopped up the gator's nostrils and told it that it needed air and couldn't breathe.

Didn't matter. The gator didn't care.

And now Alvin knew that he was fighting something a good deal more dangerous than a gator. Animals wanted to live, and they never forgot that. So when this gator didn't care that it couldn't breathe...

Another jerk. Alvin felt his hip joint come apart inside. Now it was just some ligaments and muscles and his skin holding his leg onto his body. The gator would have those torn apart in no time.

The pain was terrible, but Alvin shut his mind to that. He hadn't come all this way, through all the dangers that he'd faced, to die in a river the way the Unmaker had tried to kill him so many times before.

Alvin pulled the poke down from his shoulder and jammed the heavy end of it into the gator's mouth.

With one end of the living plow between its teeth, the gator tried to snap at it. That meant releasing its grip on Alvin's leg. He couldn't just pull the leg free, though-with the bones disconnected his muscles didn't work right and the leg wouldn't obey him. Nor could he reach down and pull his leg free, because he needed to use both hands to hold the plow. For all he knew it was the Unmaker's plan to get the plow away from him and lose it at the bottom of the river, and Alvin wasn't going to do that. He'd put a good part of himself into that plow, and he was blamed if he was going to let go of it without more of a fight than this.

The other gators were getting close. Alvin got inside the nearest one and tried to lead it to attack the gator who was holding onto him. But while this second animal wasn't tilled with malice, it also wasn't responding to him. It was afraid to obey him. The Unmaker could cry fear into the animal's heart louder than Alvin could speak hunger to it. It retreated. All the other gators waited in a semicircle, all about fifteen feet away, watching the struggle in the water.

The gator was still trying to gnaw at the plow, and each time it bit down, Alvin worked the plow deeper and deeper between its jaws. The plow was thicker than Alvin's leg. And finally, with the teeth no longer gripping him, he was able to twist his body and his injured leg came free.

In that moment the gator made its move, to try to get away with the plow in its mouth. But Alvin was ready. He flopped onto the gator's back and embraced its whole head in a great bear hug, clamping the jaws tightly around the plow.

That did bother the gator. The plow was too big for its jaws to close with the plow between them, and with Alvin holding on so tightly it could neither swallow nor open its mouth enough to let go of the thing. On top of that, its nostrils were still closed, and even though Alvin had caught plenty of breaths during the struggle, the gator had been going some minutes without taking in any air. How long could a gator's lungs hold out?

A long time, Alvin learned, as he held on, squeezing tighter and tighter.

After a while, he realized that the gator was no longer thrashing.

Still he held on.

Yes, there it was. One last twitch, one feeble attempt to rise to the surface and breathe.

And in that moment, Alvin unstopped its nostrils. Because he was blamed if he was going to let the Unmaker force him to kill a perfectly innocent gator who wouldn't have done nobody any harm except the Unmaker forced it to.

Alvin rose up, balancing on his one good leg, lifting the gator's head above water. At once it began to thrash weakly, sucking air into its partly open mouth and its nostrils. Then Alvin flung it across the log. Its mouth hung open for one long moment and Alvin snatched the poke, with the plow in it, back out of the gator's mouth. Then he shoved the gator back into the water and this time when he told it to go away, it heard him, and feebly began to swim away.

The other gators leapt upon the weakened one and dragged it under the water.

No! shouted Alvin into their minds. Let it go. Go away. Let it go.

They obeyed.

And as they swam away, Alvin thought, for just a moment, that swimming alongside them was a reptilian creature that was not a gator at all, but rather a fiery salamander, its glow damped by the murky water of the Mizzippy.

Was that what Thrower saw in his church, when Armor-of-God saw him cower in terror at whatever was circling the walls? Or was it just a trick of my eyes because the pain is ... so ... bad.

Alvin dragged his bad leg and the poke with the plow up onto the shore and lay there, panting.

And then he realized that even this would be a victory for the Unmaker. He didn't want me to cross that river. Therefore I must cross, and without delay, or he still wins.

With the water to help bear the agonizing weight of his disjointed leg, Alvin half hopped, half swam to the log and put the plow on top of it and dragged his own body on. It took more than his physical strength-he had to use his power to keep the thing from rolling with him on it. But finally he was fully atop the log, and he paddled it out into the current of the river.

Ahead of him the wall of fog waited. It was safety. If Alvin made it there, he'd be under the influence of Tenskwa-Tawa, and he had all the power of the red people behind the making of that fog. The Unmaker surely couldn't go there.

Alvin kept going, despite the fog of pain that threatened to plunge him into unconsciousness. He couldn't concentrate well enough to make the paddling go faster or easier. Nor could he spare the attention to tend to his disjointed hip. He just kept paddling and paddling, knowing that the current was sweeping him ever leftward, farther downstream than he wanted to go.

The fog closed around him. And with the wave of relief that swept over him, he finally slipped into unconsciousness.

He woke to find a black man bending over him.

The man spoke in a language that Alvin didn't understand. But he had heard it before. He just couldn't remember where.

Alvin was lying on his back. On dry land. He must have made it across.

Or maybe somebody on the river found him and brought him to the other shore.

It was hard to care.

The man's voice became more urgent. And then his meaning became very clear as large, strong hands pulled on his injured leg and another pair of hands shoved at his upper thigh, scraping bone on bone in a blinding flash of agony. It didn't work, the bone wouldn't go back into the socket, and as they let his leg slide back into its out-of-joint position the pain became too great and Alvin fainted.

He woke again, perhaps only moments later, and again the man spoke and gestured and Alvin raised one feeble hand. "Wait," he said. "Wait for just a moment."

But if they understood his words or his gesture, they gave no sign. He saw now that there were several of them, and they were determined to get his hip back together, and nothing he said was going to stop him.

So, with desperate hurry, he scanned through his own body, finding the ligaments that were blocking the way, and this time when they pulled and pushed, Alvin was able to arrange things so the top of the thigh bone slid past the obstructions. For a moment it balanced on the lip of the socket, and then with a jolt slipped back where it belonged.

Alvin fainted again.

When he awoke he was in a different place, indoors, and no one was with him, though he heard voices in a strange language-not the same language-outside.

Outside what?

Open your eyes, fool, and see where you are.

A cabin. An old one, in need of fresh mud to chink the holes in the walls. Long out of use, apparently.

The door opened. A different black man entered. And now Alvin saw that he looked familiar. He was dressed in a costume that consisted of feathers and animal skins arranged to give the impression, but not the reality, of decorated nakedness. Not like a red man. But perhaps like an African. Perhaps dressed as he would have dressed in his homeland, before he was carried away into slavery.

But Alvin had seen him before, on the deck of a boat.

"I am learn English," said the man.

That's right, the slaves on the boat spoke little English. Some spoke Spanish, and most spoke the language of the Mexica, but both those languages were a mystery to him.

"You were on the Yazoo Queen," said Alvin.

The man looked baffled.

"Riverboat," said Alvin. "You."

The man nodded happily. "You on boat! You put I... we... off boat!"

"Yes," said Alvin. "We set you free."

The man threw himself to his knees beside Alvin's mat and then bent over to embrace him. Alvin hugged him back. "How long have I been here?" he asked.

The man again looked baffled. Apparently Alvin had taken him beyond the limits of his English.

Alvin tried to sit up, but the man pushed him back down.

"Sleep sleep," said the man.

"No, I've had enough sleep," said Alvin.

"Sleep sleep!" insisted the man.

How could Alvin explain to him that while they'd been talking and hugging, Alvin had checked over his leg, found all the injuries-the sore spots in the joint, the places where the gator's teeth had torn the skin-and fixed them?

All he could do was raise the leg that had been dislocated and show that it could be moved freely. The man looked at him in surprise, and tried to get him to lay his leg down, but Alvin instead showed him that where the gator had bitten him, there were no scars.

The man suddenly laughed and tugged at the blanket still covering Alvin's other leg. Apparently he thought Alvin was joking by showing him the leg that had never been injured. But when this one, too, turned out to be unharmed, the man stood up and slowly backed away.

"Where are my clothes?" Alvin asked.

In reply the man darted for the door and pushed on out into daylight.

Alvin got up and looked around in the semi-darkness of the cabin, but it wasn't his clothes he was looking for. The poke was gone, and with it the plow. Had it slipped off the log into the Mizzippy? Or had it stayed with him until he reached whatever shore he was on, and now these men had it?

He cast about him with his doodlebug, looking for the warm glow of it. But it wasn't like a heartfire, a bright spark in a twinkling sea. The plow was living gold, yes, but gold all the same, with no one place in it that held the fire of life. If Alvin knew where to look for it, he always found it easily. But he had never searched for it without knowing where it was already.

Finally he pulled up the blanket and wrapped it as a skirt around his waist. They may not believe he could heal so fast, but he wasn't going to let their caution or his modesty keep him from finding what was lost.

He stepped out into bright daylight-morning light, so maybe he hadn't slept all that long. If it was morning of the same day. Why should he have slept longer? He'd been perfectly refreshed by the greensong just prior to his fight with the gator. And the fight hadn't lasted all that long. A few thrashes and it was done. Why had it worn him out so bad in the first place? Apart from the pain and loss of blood and the energy it took to help them put his hip back in place, it shouldn't have taken that much out of him. No, this had to be the same morning. He hadn't lost a day.

He was noticed very quickly, and black men came rushing to him. These had to be the men that he and Arthur Stuart had freed from slavery aboard the Yazoo Queen-the men that Steve Austin had been planning to use as interpreters and guides in Mexico, since they had once been slaves there. So they had no reason to do him harm.

"My poke," he said. "A homespun sack, I wore it slung over my shoulder, it was heavy." He pantomimed putting it on and taking it off.

At once they understood him. "Gold spirit!" cried the one who had talked to him just moments before in the house. "Gold she fly!" He ran a few steps, then beckoned for Alvin to follow.

He found the plow, out of the poke, floating in the air about a yard above the ground. Three black men sat forming a perfect triangle, looking up at the plow, each with one hand extended toward it.

Alvin's guide called to them as they approached, and slowly the three rose up, but without ever letting their hands stop reaching for the plow. It remained equidistant between them and three feet off the ground. Carefully they turned and began to walk toward Alvin.

"No take," said the guide. "She no let."

Alvin realized that the plow simply wouldn't let itself be taken by another hand. It kept its distance from reaching hands.

Except Alvin's. He approached it, reached out, and it didn't retreat. Instead it almost leapt into his hands. Of course, that involved letting go of the blanket, but seeing how these folks was as near naked as could be Alvin just said, "You got my clothes anywhere, please? And what about the poke I carry this plow in?"

With lots of smiles and bobbing heads, he found himself being dressed-they actually tried to lift up both his legs at the same time to put them into his trouser legs.

"No!" he said firmly. "I been dressing myself since I was little." He carefully set the plow down in the damp grass. Must have been a heavy dew. Or it rained in the night. Anyway, the moment he set it down, they rushed forward, reaching for the plow, causing it to rise into the air.

"Gold she fly!" the guide admonished him.

"It's a plow," said Alvin. "It's meant to set on the dirt." In fact, it was meant to bite into the earth and churn it up, breaking up clods and baring the soil to the heat of the sun. And in that moment Alvin understood the nature of the plow. All this time he'd been thinking of what it was made of, the living gold, but it was a plow first, before it turned to gold, and it was long overdue to be put to its proper use. Just because a thing was made of metal which, if you melted it down, would be worth a lot of money, didn't mean it wasn't still the kind of thing it was made to be.

Dressed, holding the poke in his hand, Alvin simply drew the mouth of it over the plow there in the air, then slung the poke over his shoulder. It went docilely into place, just like always.

The men sighed to see it.

And then another black man approached, carefully holding something on a mat of leaves. It shimmered in the bright sun like crystal, and Alvin recognized it at once. If he had had any doubt that these were the same men he and Arthur Stuart had freed from the Yazoo Queen, it was gone now, because the crystal cube he held was made with a drop of his own blood in water on the Yazoo Queen. He had given them two such cubes, to use as tokens to show to the reds on the other side of the river. They would know that such things could only be made by Tenskwa-Tawa himself or one that he had taught, and it would win them safe passage. Apparently it had worked.

"Now," said Alvin. "Where am I, and where's Tenskwa-Tawa?"

"Profeta Roja," said one of the men. "Ten-si-ki-wa Ta-wa." The way he pronounced it sounded more like the way reds said the Prophet's name. Well, speaking other languages wasn't Alvin's knack, that was already settled and he wasn't going to be embarrassed about calling his friend by the wrong name all these years.

"Ten-sa-ka-wa Ta-wa," he muttered.

One of the men tried to correct him, but Alvin gave up right away. Tenskwa-Tawa had been answering to that name for years and if he minded, he'd've mentioned it by now.

"We stay," said the guide. "Wait-for."

So Tenskwa-Tawa was coming. Well, Alvin could wait as well as the next man-especially now he was dressed and had the plow back. It also reassured him to find out that the plow could take care of itself, somewhat. A plow that flies from your hand when you reach to take it would be hard to put over a fire and melt down. Though that wasn't to say some powerful hexery might not do the trick. Still, it wasn't a thing a thief could easily do. Alvin might fret a little less about the plow, knowing.

Alvin spent what was left of the morning trying to learn the names of some of these men, but it turned into a game of laughing at his bad pronunciation. For all he knew they weren't telling him names at all, but making him say ugly cuss words in their language.

There was food at noon, but this, too, was strange and unfamiliar. A thin flat bread like a flapjack, only thinner, smeared with a spicy paste that might have contained mashed beans but then might not. It was good, though. Burned a little, and drinking water didn't help, but they had some pawpaw fruit sliced up in a basket and a bite of that took away the sting. And after a while he got used to the burning and kind of liked it.

After the meal, Alvin went walking to try to orient himself. He found that the whole troop followed him along like children in a small town, following a stranger. He wasn't sure whether they were protecting him or keeping watch to make sure he didn't run away or were simply curious what he'd do next.

He found that they were on a wide, flat island near the right bank of the Mizzippy. The fog, which was on their side of the river, ended at the shoreline, sharp as butter cut with a knife. And canoes were drawn up on the shore of the river channel that separated the island from the main shore. So these men weren't prisoners here. Alvin was relieved at that. He imagined, though, that choosing this big island as their dwelling place might have been some kind of compromise that Tenskwa-Tawa reached between those reds who didn't want to make any exceptions to the law that only reds could live west of the river, and those that believed runaway slaves were in a different category from white men with guns and axes.

Tenskwa-Tawa arrived that afternoon with a great deal of to-do. All of a sudden a whole passel of reds started hooting and hollering like they was going to war-Alvin had heard that sound before, when he was taken captive by warriors, before the Mizzippy was set as a dividing line. It was a terrible sound, and for a moment he wondered whether the reds on this shore had been using their years of peace to prepare for bloody war. But then he realized that the hooting and ululating was the red equivalent of yee-haw, hosanna, huzzah, hallelujah, and hip-hip-hooray.

Tenskwa-Tawa emerged from the woods on the far shore of the channel, and the reds surrounded him and led him down to a large canoe. They carried him so he wouldn't even get his feet wet and set him in the canoe, then leapt in and paddled furiously so he shot across the water like a skipped stone. Then he was lifted up again and carried to shore and set down right in front of Alvin.

So there was Alvin, with twenty-five black men forming a semi-circle behind him, and Tenskwa-Tawa, with about as many red men forming a semi-circle behind him.

"Is this what it looks like," said Alvin, "when the King of England meets the King of France?"

"No," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "Not enough guns, not enough clothes."

Which was true. Though compared to the black men, the reds looked like they was pretty bundled up, since there were whole stretches of their bodies here and there covered with deerskin or cloth. If I dressed like that, thought Alvin, I'd be roasted with sunburn and ready to serve.

"I'm glad you came," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "I also wanted to talk to you."

"About these fellows?" asked Alvin.

"Them? They're no bother. As long as they sleep on this island, they move freely on the shore. That's where their farms are. We'll be sorry to see them go, when you take them."

"I didn't have no plans to take them," said Alvin.

"But they're determined to become soldiers to fight for you and kill all your enemies. That's why they have to sleep on this island. Because they refuse to give up war."

Alvin was baffled. "I got no enemies."

Tenskwa-Tawa barked out a laugh.

"I mean, none that warriors can fight."

"It's so strange," said Tenskwa-Tawa, "hearing black men speak a red language like they were born to it. The language they speak is not all that different from Navaho, which I had to learn because that tribe was less inclined to give up war than most. It seemed they hadn't quite finished exterminating the Hopi and didn't want to give up killing till the job was done."

"So it hasn't been easy, getting all the reds to take the oath against war."

"No," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "Nor to get the young men to join the oath when they come of age. There's still a lot of playing at war among the young, and if you try to stop it, they just sneak off and do it. I think we've been breeding our boys for war for too many generations for it to disappear from our hearts overnight. Right now the peace holds, because there are enough adults who remember all the killing-and how badly we were defeated, time after time. But there are always those who want to go across the river and fight to take our lands back and drive all the white devils into the sea."

"There are plenty of white folks as dream of getting through the fog and taking possession of these lands, too," said Alvin.

"Including your brother," said Tenskwa-Tawa.

Alvin tried to think which of his brothers had ever said any such fool thing. "They're all farmers or millers or whatnot in Vigor Church," said Alvin. "Except Calvin."

"That's the one," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "It's what I wanted to talk to you about."

He turned to the reds who were with him and spoke a few words, then spoke in a different language to the blacks. Alvin was stunned but delighted when the two groups immediately intermingled and started up two games of cards and some dice-throwing.

"Don't tell me them cards is printed on your side of the river," said Alvin.

"Those black fellows you sent me had them," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "They play betting games, but their money is pebbles. Whoever wins the most struts for an hour, but the next time they play, they all start even again."

"Sounds civilized."

"On the contrary," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "It sounds like childish savages."

His grin had a bit of old pain in it, but Alvin understood. "Well, we white devils would simply regard it as a golden opportunity, and we'd play them with tokens representing all their property and then cheat till we had it all."

"Whereupon we red devils would kill most of you and torture the rest to death because of the power that we could draw from the pain." He held up a hand. "This is what I wanted to talk to you about. Until your brother sailed for Mexico it was not your business, but now it is."

"So he really has joined up with them fools," said Alvin.

"The Mexica have been a problem for us. There's a wide desert between our lands and theirs, but it's not as clear a wall as this river. There are plenty of tribes that live in those dry lands, and plenty of trade and travel back and forth, and stories about how the Mexica rose up against the Spanish and drove them out, except the five thousand they kept for sacrifice, one a day, his heart ripped out of his living body."

"Doesn't sound like your kind of people," said Alvin.

"They live a different way. We remember well when their ancestors came down from the north, a fierce people who spoke a language different from all others. The Navaho were the last wave, the Mexica the first, but they did not trust in the greensong. They took their powers from the pain and blood of their enemies. It's a way of power that was practiced among our peoples, too. The Irrakwa league was notorious for it, and you had a run-in, I think, with others who loved bloodshed and torture. But always we could set it aside and get back into the music of the living land. These reds can't, or don't try, which amounts to the same. And they scoff at my teaching of peace and send threatening embassies demanding that we supply them with white men to sacrifice or they'll come and take captives from our people."

"Have they done it yet?"

"All threats, but we hear from other tribes farther south that once that threat is given, it's only a matter of time before it's carried out."

"So what are you going to do?"

"Not a fog," said Tenskwa-Tawa wryly. "Not enough moisture in that high desert air, and besides, they'd just torture somebody and draw power from his pain, enough to dispel whatever I put in their way."

"So ... if that ain't your plan..."

"We live in harmony with the earth," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "They soak their earth in blood. We believe that with a little encouragement, we can waken the giant that sleeps under their great city of Mexico."

Alvin was baffled. "There's real giants? I never knowed that."

Tenskwa-Tawa looked pained. "Their city is built right on top of an upwelling of hot flowing rock. It hasn't broken through in many years, but it's growing restless, with all the killing."

"You're talking about a volcano."

"I am," said the prophet.

"You're going to do to them what was done to Pompeii."

"The earth is going to do it."

"Ain't that kind of like war?" asked Alvin.

Tenskwa-Tawa sighed. "None of us will raise a weapon and strike down a man. And we've sent them due warning that their city will be covered with fire if they don't stop their evil sacrificing of human beings and set free all the tribes they rule over by fear and force."

"So this is how you wage war now," said Alvin.

"Yes," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "We'd be at peace with every people on earth, if they'd let us. As long as we don't come to love war, or to use it in order to rule over others, then we are still a peaceful people."

"So I take it the Navaho weren't just persuaded to take the oath of peace."

"They had a long period of drought, where the only rain that fell was on Hopi fields."

"I reckon that got the message to them."

"Alvin," said Tenskwa-Tawa, "I don't have to justify our actions to you, do I?"

"No sir," said Alvin. "It just sounds like your brother's way, to fight like that. I just thought of you as being-more patient, I guess."

"Because we bore the slaughter of our friends and loved ones at Tippy-Canoe."

"Yes. You let them slaughter you till they grew sick of murder."

"But what should we do with people who never grow sick of it?" asked Tenskwa-Tawa.

"So white folks ain't all bad, is what you're saying."

"The gods of the Mexica are thirsty for blood and hungry for pain. White folks generally want to get rich and be left alone. While they're killing you, the motive doesn't make that much difference. But most white people don't think of war and slaughter as the goal-just the means."

"Well, don't that just put us in a special place in hell."

"Alvin, we're going to do what we're going to do. In fact, it's already under way, and we can't control it or stop it now. The forces beneath the earth are vast and terrible and it has taken all our wise men and women of every tribe many months to teach the earth what we need it to do in the city of Mexico."

"And you needed to tell me because Calvin is headed right into it."

"It would grieve me to cause the death of your own brother."

"Trouble is," said Alvin, "there's no time in recorded history when Calvin has actually done what I wanted when I wanted him to."

"I didn't think it would be easy. I only knew that you would not forgive me if I didn't warn you and give you a chance to try."

Alvin sighed and sat down. "I wish I were a boy again."

"With the Unmaker dropping roof beams on your head and sending preachers to bleed you to death under the guise of surgery?"

"At least then it was only me I was trying to save. I can't go follow Calvin to Mexico and try to bring him back, because I got me five thousand or so runaway slaves and refugee Frenchmen from Barcy that I got to find a place for."

Tenskwa-Tawa motioned with his arm to indicate the island where they were sitting. "If you think you can fit five thousand here, you're welcome to it. But only the runaway slaves. My people wouldn't bear it to have these white Frenchmen you speak of living on our land."

"No," said Alvin. "I reckon not."

"Canada is not such a lovely place that we trust the French to be kinder and less bloody than the English or the Spanish."

"We got some of them, too," said Alvin. "Poor folks who threw in their lot with us. But we don't want to live here."

"Good," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "Because it would be beyond my power to persuade the nations to let you."

"What we need," said Alvin, "is safe passage."

"To where?"

"North. Along the edge of the river. North till we're across the river from the United States. Or, more particularly, the free state of Noisy River. Won't do to cross back into slave territory."

"Five thousand people," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "Eating what?"

Alvin grinned. "Whatever the land and the kindness of your hearts will provide them."

"Five thousand people leave a scar on the land when they pass through."

"It's harvest season," said Alvin. "Fields coming ripe, fruit on the trees. Are times so hard this side of the river that you can't spare enough for folks escaping from bondage and oppression?"

"It would take a great amount of effort," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "We aren't like you. We don't grow the food here and then carry it on wagons or trains or barges to sell it there.

Each village grows its own food, and only when famine strikes in one place is food brought from another."

"Well, wouldn't you say that five thousand people with no land or food is kind of a walking famine?"

Tenskwa-Tawa shook his head. "You're asking something very hard. And not just for those reasons. What does it tell all the whites of the United States and the Crown Colonies when five thousand runaway slaves cross over the river despite the fog and then emerge again five hundred miles north?"

"I didn't think of that."

"We'll have them trying to cross into our land by the boatload."

"But they won't make it."

"The fog is fog," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "We instill it with fear, yes, but those with enough greed or rage can overcome that fear. A few try every year, and of those few, now and then a man makes it over."

"What do you do with them?" asked Alvin.

"They wear hobbles and work with the women until they find it in their hearts to take the oath of peace and live among us."

"Or what, you send them back?"

"We never let anyone go back."

"Except me."

"And these twenty-five black men. You can take them with you whenever you want. Because they won't tell tales of this paradise just waiting for the right army to come and drive out the heathen, unarmed savages."

"So maybe we got to make the crossing so spectacular that nobody thinks they could do it in a boat."

Tenskwa-Tawa laughed. "Oh, Alvin, you have a showman's heart."

"You've put on a couple of spectacles in your day, old friend."

"I suppose if it looks like a miracle, the United States Army and the Royal Army won't think they can do the same. The only flaw in your idea, Alvin, is that your crossing of Lake Pontchartrain was pretty much a miracle, and that didn't stop them from sending an army in pursuit of you."

"Once I took down the bridge," said Alvin, "they didn't try to cross the lake."

Tenskwa-Tawa shook his head. "I have a war on my hands with the Mexica, and now I have to help you pull off a miraculous crossing of the Mizzippy, putting the great peaceful nation at risk."

"Hey, that goes both ways," said Alvin. "Here I am trying to save five thousand runaways and you up and tell me my brother is heading into the mouth of a volcano that you can't stop."

"Isn't it good we like each other so much," said Tenskwa-Tawa.

"You taught me everything I know," said Alvin.

"But not everything I know."

"And I gave you back your eye."

"And healed my heart," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "But you're a lot of bother all the same."