The Crystal City

4

La Tia

The rumor mill went on. The yellow fever only added to it-who's sick, who's dead, who fled the city to live on some friend's plantation until the plague passed.

The most important story, though, was no rumor. The army that the King had been assembling was suddenly ordered back home. Apparently the King's generals feared the yellow fever more than they feared the military might of Spain.

Which might have been a mistake. The moment the threat of invasion disappeared, the Spanish authorities in Nueva Barcelona began arresting Cavalier agents. Apparently the Spanish had been aware of the plots all along-they heard the same rumors as everyone else-and had only been biding their time before striking.

So it wasn't just the yellow fever that was decimating the English-speaking population of Nueva Barcelona. Plenty of Americans and Yankees and Englishmen were taking ship out of the city-Americans in steamboats up the river. Yankees and Englishmen in clippers and coastal traders heading out to sea, bound for New England or Jamaica or some other British destination.

Cavaliers weren't finding it any easier than the French. The Pontchartrain ferry and all the other passages out of the city were being watched, and those who carried royal passports from the Crown Colonies were forbidden to leave. Since the Cavaliers were the largest single English-speaking group, this left a lot of frightened people trapped in Nueva Barcelona as the yellow fever made its insidious way through the population.

Wealthy Spanish citizens headed for Florida. As for the French, they had nowhere to go. The borders had been closed to them from the time Napoleon first invaded Spain.

The result was a city full of fear and anger.

Alvin was shopping in the city, which was getting harder these days, with the fever making farmers more reluctant to bring in their produce. He was looking through as ratty-looking a bunch of melons as he'd ever seen when he became aware of a familiar heartfire making toward him in the crowd. He spoke before turning around. "Jim Bowie," he said.

Bowie smiled at him-a big, warm smile, which made Alvin check to see if the man's hand was on his knife. Nowhere near, but that didn't mean much, as Alvin well knew, having seen the man in action.

"Still here in Barcy," said Bowie.

"I thought you and your expedition would be long gone."

"We almost made it before they closed the ports," said Bowie. "Cuss the King for making such a mess of things."

Cuss the King? As if Bowie weren't part of an expedition committed to spreading the power of the King into Mexican lands.

"Well, the fever will pass," said Alvin. "Always does."

"We don't have to wait for that," said Bowie. "Word's just come down from the Governor-General of Nueva Barcelona. Steve Austin's expedition can go ahead. Any Cavaliers who are with us can get passage out on a ship bound for the Mexican coast."

"I reckon that gave recruitment a big boost."

"You bet," said Bowie. "The Spanish hate the Mexica worse than they hate Cavaliers. I reckon it has something to do with the fact that King Arthur never tore the beating hearts out of ten thousand Spanish citizens to offer as a sacrifice to some heathen god."

"Well, good luck to you."

"Seeing you in the market here, I got to say, I'd feel a lot better about this expedition iffen you were along."

So you can find a chance to stab me in the back and get even for my humiliating you? "I'm no soldier," said Alvin.

"I been thinking about you," said Bowie.

Oh, I'm sure of that.

"I think an army as had you on their side would have victory in the bag."

"There's an awful lot of bloodthirsty Mexica, and only one of me. And keep in mind I'm not much of a shot."

"You know what I'm talking about. What if all the Mexica weapons went soft or flat-out disappeared, as once happened with my lucky knife?"

"I'd say that was a miracle, caused by an evil god who wanted to see slavery expanded into Mexican lands."

Bowie stood there blankly for a moment. "So that's how it is. You're an abolitionist."

"You knew that."

"Well, there's folks who are just agin slavery and then there's abolitionists. Sometimes you can offer a man a good bit of gold and he don't mind so much how many slaves another fellow owns."

"That would be someone else," said Alvin. "I don't have much use for gold. Or expeditions against the Mexica."

"They're a terrible people," said Bowie. "Bloody-handed and murderous."

"And that's supposed to make me want to go fight them?"

"A man don't shrink from a fight."

"This man does," said Alvin. "And you would too, if you had a brain."

"The Mexica won't stand up to men as knows how to shoot. On top of that, we're bound to have thousands of reds from other tribes join with us to overthrow the Mexica. They're tired of having their men sacrificed."

"But you'd restore slavery. They didn't like that either."

"No, we wouldn't enslave the reds."

"There's lots of black former slaves in Mexico."

"But they're slaves by nature."

Alvin turned away and picked a half-dozen melons to put in his poke.

Bowie poked him hard in the arm. "Don't you turn your back on me."

Alvin said nothing, just offered a couple of dimes to the melon seller, who shook his head.

"Come on now, this is for kids in an orphanage," said Alvin.

"I know who it's for," said the farmer, "and the price of melons today is ten cents each."

"What, it took so much more work to raise these? They plated with gold inside?"

"Take it or leave it."

Alvin pulled some more money from his pocket. "I hope you're proud of profiting from the neediness of helpless children."

"Nobody helpless in that house," murmured the farmer.

Alvin turned away to find Bowie standing in his way.

"I said don't turn your back on me," Bowie murmured.

"I'm facing you now," said Alvin. "And if you don't take your hand off your knife, you'll lose something dear to you- and it ain't made of steel, no matter how you brag to the ladies."

"You don't want me as your enemy," said Bowie.

"That's true," said Alvin. "I want you as a complete stranger."

"Too late for that," said Bowie. "It's friend or foe."

Alvin walked away with his poke full of melons, but as he went, he hotted up the man's knife blade. Also the buttons on the front of his pants. In a few moments, the threads around the buttons burned away and Bowie's pants came open. And when he reached for his knife, the sheath burst into flame. Behind him Alvin could hear the other shoppers laughing and hooting.

That was probably a mistake, he thought. But then, it was a mistake for Bowie to show his face near Alvin again. Why did men like that refuse to accept defeat and keep challenging someone they knew had the better of them?

Arthur Stuart woke up in the middle of the night with his bowels in a state. It felt sloshy, so it wasn't something that could be relieved by the soundless passing of gas and then pretending to be asleep if Alvin noticed. So, resigned to his fate, he got up and carried his boots downstairs and put them on by the back door and then slogged on out into the sultry night to the privy.

It was about a miserable half-hour in there, but each time he thought he was done, he'd start to get up and his bowels would slosh again and he'd be back down on the seat, groaning his way through another session. Each time of course, thinking he was through, he'd wipe himself, so by the end he felt like his backside was as raw as pounded flank steak. At least the cows are lucky enough to be dead before they get turned into raw meat, he thought.

Finally he was able to get up without hearing more sloshing or feeling more pressure, though that was no guarantee he wouldn't reach the top of the three flights of stairs and have to go clomping back down. He worried, of course, that maybe this had something to do with yellow fever, that Alvin might not have made him healthy enough, that it was coming back.

Though when he thought about it, he reckoned it probably had more to do with the street vendor who sold him a rolled pie this afternoon that might not have been cooked as much as it ought.

He flung open the privy door and stepped outside.

Someone tugged at his nightshirt. He yelped and jumped away.

"Don't be afraid!" said Dead Mary. "I'm not a ghost! I know Africans are afraid of ghosts."

"I'm afraid of people grabbing at my nightshirt when I come out of the privy in the middle of the night," said Arthur Stuart. "What are you doing here?"

"You're sick," she said.

"No joke," he agreed.

"But you will not die this time," she said.

"And just when I was beginning to wish I could."

"So many people are going to die. And so many of them blame me."

"I know," said Arthur Stuart. "I went out to warn you, but you and your ma were gone."

"I saw you go there and I thought, this boy is coming to give warning. So tonight I think, maybe you're the one who can give us some food. We're very hungry."

"Sure, come on in the house," said Arthur Stuart.

"No no," she said. "It's a strange house. Very dangerous."

Arthur Stuart made a disgusted face at her. "Yeah, so the stories they tell about you are lies, but the stories they tell about this house are all true, is that it?"

"The stories they tell about me are half true," said Dead Mary. "And if the stories about this house are half true, I won't go in, no."

"This house has no danger for you, at least not from the folks that live there," said Arthur Stuart. "And now I've been standing outside the privy this long, I'm beginning to notice how bad it stinks here. So get your ma and come on inside where the air is breathable. And make it quick or I'll be out here in the privy again and then who's going to feed you?"

Dead Mary considered for a moment, then picked up her skirts and scampered off into the wooded darkness near the back of the property. Arthur Stuart took the opportunity to move farther away from the privy and closer to the kitchen.

A few minutes later, he had a candle lighted and Dead Mary and her mother were gobbling slightly stale bread and bland cheese and washing it down with tepid water. Didn't matter how it tasted, though. They were swallowing it down so fast they probably couldn't tell bread from cheese.

"How long has it been since you last ate?" said Arthur Stuart.

"Since we hid," said Dead Mary. "Didn't have no food in the house though, or we would have took it."

"All the time flies bite me," said her mother. "I got no blood now."

She did have a few welts from skeeter bites, now that Arthur Stuart looked at her. "How you feeling?" he asked her.

"Very hungry," she said. "But not sick, me. That all done. Your master, he make me well."

"He's not my master, he's my brother-in-law."

Dead Mary looked at him sideways. "So Alvin married an Africaine? Or you have married his sister?"

"I'm adopted," said Arthur Stuart.

"So you're free?"

"I'm no man's slave," said Arthur Stuart. "But it's not exactly the same as being free, not when everybody says, You're too young to do this and you're too young to do that and you're too black to go here and you're too inexperienced to go there."

"I'm not black," said Dead Mary, "but I rather be a slave than what I am."

"Being French ain't so bad," said Arthur Stuart.

"I mean one who sees who is sick."

"I know," said Arthur Stuart. "I was joking. Course, like Alvin says, if you have to tell folks you was joking, it wasn't much of a joke, was it?"

"This Alvin," said Dead Mary. "What is he?"

"My brother-in-law," said Arthur Stuart.

"Non, non," said the mother. "How he make me so better?"

Suddenly Arthur was suspicious. They come in the middle of the night and ask questions about Alvin. Perfectly good explanations for all of it-why not be curious about Alvin!- but it could also be somebody had set out to trap Arthur Stuart into telling more than he should.

"I expect you can ask him yourself in the morning."

"Got to be gone by morning," said Dead Mary. "Before light. People watch this house. They see us, they follow us, they kill us. Hang us for witches, like in New England."

"They haven't done that in New England in years," said Arthur Stuart.

"Your Alvin," said the mother. "Did he touch this bread?"

Alvin had, in fact, bought the baguettes. So Arthur hesitated a moment before saying, "How should I know?" He knew that the hesitation was more of an answer than his words. And without knowing why, he wanted to snatch the bread back and send them on their way.

As if she had read his desire, or perhaps because she thought her mother had been too obvious, Dead Mary said, "We go now."

"Inmediatement," echoed her mother.

"Thank you for the food," said Dead Mary.

Even as she was thanking him, her mother was putting a couple more baguettes into her apron. Arthur would have stopped her-that was supposed to be part of breakfast in the morning-but he thought of them out in the swamps for days with nothing to eat and little to drink and he held his tongue. He'd go fetch more baguettes in the morning.

He followed them out the door.

"Non," said the mother.

"You shouldn't go with us," said Dead Mary.

"I'm not," said Arthur Stuart. "I got to go sit in the privy again. So you best move fast, cause I don't want the ensuing odor to offend your delicate sensibilities."

"What?" said Dead Mary.

"I'm gonna let fly in the privy right quick, ma'am, so hightail it if you value your nose."

They hightailed it, and Arthur Stuart went back to groaning over the privy pot.

It began with a few stones thrown against the house late the next night, and a muffled shout that no one inside understood.

Next morning, a group of men marched back and forth in front of the house carrying a coffin, calling out, "Why ain't nobody sick in there!"

Since Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel were still nursing three children who had been seized by the fever despite Alvin's preventive healing, it was tempting to invite the men inside to see that their claim was a lie. But everyone knew that showing three sick children wouldn't be much of an answer, when in this neighborhood more children were dying than anywhere else in Barcy, while not one child in the house of Moose and Squirrel had been carried out in a box.

It wasn't because Alvin had confined his ministrations to the children of the orphanage. He had searched out other heartfires in other houses, and had saved many. But it took time, working one by one, and while he saved many, far more died beyond his reach, ones he had not even looked at. There were limits to what he could do.

No longer did he pretend to run errands or do chores. The baguettes Arthur Stuart had shared with Dead Mary and her mother were the last he bought; and when he slept it was because he could stay awake no longer. He dozed fitfully, waking from nightmares in which children died under his hands. And the worst nightmare of all, a vision of Dead Mary's mother filled with invisible disease, walking about giving people the yellow fever just by bumping into them or speaking to them or whispering in their ear. Tousling the head of a child, she'd move on and the child would drop dead behind her. And each dead person would turn to Alvin and say, "Why did you save her and let her walk around to kill us all?"

Then he'd wake up and search out more heartfires dimmed by disease and try to repair their ravaged bodies.

It never occurred to him not to reach first for those nearest to where he was at the moment. But the result was that deaths from the fever increased in direct relationship to one's distance from the orphanage. It was as if God had put a blessing on the place that spilled over to neighboring houses.

Or, as the marchers outside the house were broadly hinting, it was as if the devil was protecting his own.

That night there were more stones, and marchers with torches, and drunks who threw bottles that crashed. Children woke up and cried, and Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel led them into the back rooms of the house.

Still Alvin lay on his bed, reaching out with his doodlebug to heal and heal, concentrating now on children, saving all that he could.

Arthur Stuart dared not interrupt his work-or wake him, if by chance he was asleep. He knew that somehow Alvin blamed himself for the plague-he understood the grim relentlessness of Alvin's labors. This was personal; Alvin was trying to undo some terrible mistake. That much he had hinted at before he went completely silent. And now Alvin was silent, and Arthur Stuart was on his own.

Arthur had no power to heal anyone. But he had learned some makering, and thought now to use it to protect the house. It was something Squirrel said that triggered his action: "What I'm a-feared of are the torches. What if they try to burn us out?"

So he reached out to the torch-bearing men and tried to get a sense of the fire. He had worked in metal before, but little else. Wood and cloth were organic and hard to get into, hard for him to feel and know. But soon he found that what was burning was the oil the torches had been soaked in, and that was a fluid that made more sense to his half-blind groping doodlebug.

He didn't know how fire worked, so he couldn't stop the burning. But he could dissipate the fluid, turn it into gas the way he had turned metal into liquid. And when he had vaporized it, the torch would soon go out.

One by one, the torches nearest the house began to go dark.

It wasn't until Papa Moose said, "What's happening? God help us, why are the torches going out?" that Arthur Stuart realized that he might be doing something wrong.

There was fear in Papa Moose's voice. "The nearest torches are going out."

Arthur Stuart opened his eyes and looked. Me had blacked out about a dozen of the torches. But now he saw that the remaining torchbearers had backed away from the house, and the street was now littered with the discarded sticks, scattered about like the bones of some long-dead creature.

"If they ever wanted proof that this house was a cursy place, this was it," said Mama Squirrel. "Whoever came near, his torch went out."

Arthur Stuart was sick at heart. He was about to confess what he had done when the crowd began to move away.

"Safe for tonight," said Papa Moose. "But they'll be back, and more of them, what with one more miracle to report."

"Arthur Stuart," said Mama Squirrel. "You don't think Alvin would be so foolish as to douse their torches like that, do you?"

"No ma'am," said Arthur Stuart.

"Let's get the children back to bed, Mama Squirrel," said Papa Moose. "They'll be glad to know the mob is gone."

Only after they left the room did Arthur Stuart see through the window the dark shape of one man lingering in the street, not particularly watching the house, but not leaving it, either. From the way the man moved, shambling like a bear, with pent-up energy, he thought he recognized him. Someone he had met recently. Someone on the riverboat. Abe Lincoln? Coz?

Tentatively he reached out to the heartfire. Not being deft, like Alvin, he didn't know how to merely graze the man, glance at him. One moment he was seeing him as a distant spark, and the next moment he was filled with the man's self-awareness, his body-sense, what he saw and felt and heard, what he hungered for. Filled with hate he was, and rage, and shame. But no words, no names-that wasn't a thing that was easy to find. Peggy could see such things, but not Arthur Stuart, and not Alvin, so far as Arthur knew.

It was hard to pull himself back out of the fiery heart of the man, but he knew now who it was, for in the midst of all the turmoil, one thing stood out-a constant awareness of the knife at his hip, as if it were the man's best and truest hand, the tool that he relied on before all others. Jim Bowie, without doubt.

With all that malice in him, there was no doubt Jim Bowie was there for mischief. Arthur Stuart couldn't help but wonder if he still harbored his old grudge from the river. But then, why didn't he remember his fear, as well?

Maybe he needed a reminder. Arthur Stuart couldn't make the knife disappear as Alvin had, but he could do something. In moments he had the thing het up enough that Bowie was bound to feel it. Yes, there it was-Bowie whirled around and ran full-tilt away from the orphanage.

What Arthur Stuart couldn't figure out was why, as he ran, Bowie kept a tight hold on the front of his pants, as if he was afraid they'd fall down.

Alvin was asleep, not knowing where dreams left off and the living nightmare of his failure to save more lives began. But in the midst of his restless slumber he heard a voice calling to him.

"Healer man!"

It was a commanding voice, and a strange one. Whoever called him in his sleep, it was not a voice that he had heard before. But it seemed to know him, to speak out of the center of his own heartfire.

"Wake up, sleeping man!"

Alvin's eyes opened as if against his will. There was the faintest light of dawn outside the attic, visible only through the window at the end of the long room.

"Wake up, man who keeps a golden plow in the chimney!"

In a moment he was out of bed, across the long room, standing with his hand pressed against the brick. The golden plow was still there. But someone knew about it.

Or no. That must have been a dream. He had fallen asleep after healing a child four streets over. The mother had also been dying, and he meant to heal her afterward. Had he done it, before sleep took him?

He cast about wildly, then with more focus, searching. There was the child, a boy of perhaps five years. But where the mother should have been, nothing. His body had failed him. The child was alive, but an orphan now. Sick guilt stabbed at him.

"Take your gold out of the chimney, healer man, and come down to talk to me!"

This time it could not be a dream. So strong was the voice that he obeyed almost as if it had been his own idea. In a moment, though, he knew that it was not.

Yet there was no reason not to obey. Someone knew about the golden plow, and so it was not hidden anymore. Time to get it out of the chimney and carry it with him again in his poke.

It took time and most of his concentration, tired as he was, grieved and guilty as he felt, to get the bricks apart and soften the golden plow to let it fall into his hand. It quivered there, vibrant as always, alert, yet seeming to want nothing. It made his hand tremble as he pulled it through the gap in the bricks and brought it close to him. His heart warmed when the plow came near. Whether it was the plow that caused it, or the emotion of greeting a friend and traveling companion, he didn't know.

"Come down to me, healer man."

Who are you? he asked silently. But there was no answer. Whoever called him out of his own heartfire either could not hear his thoughts or did not wish to answer him.

"Come down and break bread with me."

Bread. Something about bread. It meant more than mere eating. She wanted more from him than to share a meal.

She. Whoever called him was a woman. How did he know?

With his plow in its poke, along with his few other belongings, Alvin went down the stairs. Papa Moose saw him as he passed the third floor, Mama Squirrel as he passed the second, and when he got to the bottom floor they were right behind him.

"Alvin," said Squirrel. "What are you doing?"

"Where are you going?" asked Papa Moose.

"Someone's calling me," he said. "Look after Arthur Stuart till I come back."

"Whoever's calling you," said Squirrel, "are you sure it's not a trap? Last night they came with torches. Some strange power put the torches out as they came near the house, and now you can be sure the house is watched. They'd love to lure us out."

"She's calling me as a healer," said Alvin. "To break bread with her."

Arthur Stuart appeared in the kitchen door. "It's the woman you healed in the swamp," he said. "She came two nights ago, with Dead Mary. I gave them bread, and they asked if you had bought it."

"There it is," said Squirrel. "Terrible power, what Dead Mary has."

"Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren't afraid of truth. And it's not Dead Mary calling me."

"What about her mother?" asked Arthur Stuart.

"I don't think so," said Alvin.

"Do you think it couldn't be no come-hither, then?" asked Squirrel. "Do you think that you're so powerful such things have no hold on you?"

"A come-hither," said Alvin. "Yes, I think that's likely."

"So you mustn't go," said Arthur Stuart. "Good people don't use such spells to draw a man. Or to make the awful sacrifices such a spell must take."

"I suspect that all it took was the burning of some bread," said Alvin. "And I go or not, as I choose."

"Isn't that how everyone feels, when they've had a come-hither set on them?" asked Papa Moose. "Don't they all think up good reasons for obeying the summons?"

"Maybe so," said Alvin, "but I'm going."

He was out the door.

Arthur Stuart dogged his heels.

"Go back inside, Arthur Stuart."

"No sir," said Arthur. "If you're going to walk into a trap, I'm going to see it, so I can tell the story to folks later, about how even the most powerful man on earth can be dumb as a brick sometimes."

"She needs me," said Alvin.

"Like the devil needs the souls of sinners," said Arthur Stuart.

"She's not commanding me," said Alvin. "She's begging."

"Don't you see, that's how a compulsion would feel to a good man? When people need you, you come, so when someone wants you to come, they make you think you're needed."

Alvin stopped and turned to face Arthur Stuart. "I left a child orphaned last night because I couldn't stay awake," he said. "If I'm so weak I can't resist my own body, what makes you think you can talk me into being strong enough to resist this spell?"

"So you know it isn't safe."

"I know that I'm going," said Alvin. "And you're not strong enough to stop me."

He strode on, out into the deserted early-morning street, as Arthur Stuart trotted at his side.

"I was the one put them torches out," said Arthur Stuart. "No doubt," said Alvin. "It was a blame fool thing to do." "I was a-feared they meant to burn down the house." "They mean to, no doubt of it, but it'll take them a while to work up the courage," said Alvin. "Or to work up the fear.

Either one, if it gets strong enough, will make them put the house to the torch. You probably did no more than tip them to the side of fear. Put it out of your mind."

"You have to sleep," said Arthur Stuart, "so put your own troubles out of your mind, too."

"Don't talk to me like you understand my sins."

"Don't talk to me like you know what I do and do not understand."

Alvin chuckled grimly. "Oh, that mouth you've got." "You can't answer what I said, so you're going to talk about my saying it."

"I ain't talking about nothing. I told you not to come with me."

"It was Jim Bowie last night," said Arthur Stuart. "Last man who stayed behind when the mob run off."

"He invited me to join their expedition. Told me if I wasn't their friend, I was their foe."

"So he's maybe goading on the mob, to try to force you into joining?"

"A man like that thinks that fear can win loyalty." "Plenty of masters with a lash who can testify it works." "Don't win loyalty, just obedience, and only while the lash is in the room."

They were moving out of the city of painted buildings and into a different New Orleans, the faded houses and shacks of the persecuted French, and then beyond them into the huts of the free blacks and masterless slaves-a world of cheap and desperate whores, of men who could be hired to kill for a piece of eight, and of practitioners of dark African magics that put bits of living bodies into flames in order to command nature to break her own laws.

The black folks' way was as different from the knacks of white folks as was the greensong of the reds. Alvin could feel it around him in the heartfires, a kind of desperate courage that if worst came to worst, a person could sacrifice something to the fire and save what was most dear to him.

"Do you feel it?" he asked Arthur Stuart. "The power around you?"

"I smell the stink," said the boy. "Like folks here just spill their privy pots onto the ground."

"The soil wagons don't come here," said Alvin. "What choice they got?"

"Don't feel no power, me," said Arthur Stuart.

"And yet you're talking like the French of this place. 'Don't feel no power ... me?' "

"That don't mean nothing, you know I pick up what I hear."

"You're hearing them, then. All around you."

"This be blacktown, massa," said Arthur Stuart, affecting the voice of a slave. "This be no Veel Francezz."

"French slaves run away as sure as Spanish ones, or slaves of Cavaliers."

Now black children were coming out of the houses, their mothers after them, tired women with sad eyes. And men who looked dangerous, they began to follow like a parade. Until they came to a woman sitting by a cookfire. Not a fat woman, but not a thin one, either. Voluptuous as the earth, that's what she was, but when she looked up from the fire she smiled at Alvin like the sun. How old was she? Could have been twenty from the smooth bronze skin. Could have been a hundred from the wise and twinkling eyes.

"You come to see La Tia," she said.

A smaller woman, French by the look of her, came forward from behind the fire. "This be the Queen," she said. "You bow now."

Alvin did not bow. Nothing in La Tia's face suggested that she wanted him to.

"On your knees, white man, you want to live," said the French woman sharply.

"Hush now, Michele," said La Tia. "I don't want no kneeling from this man. I want him to do us a miracle, he don't have to kneel to me. He come when I call him."

"Everybody have to come, you call them," said Michele.

"Not this one," said La Tia. "He come, but I don't make him. All I do is make him hear me. This one choose to come."

"What do you want?" asked Alvin.

"They gonna be burning here in Barcy," said the woman.

"You know that for sure?" asked Alvin.

"I hear that. Slaves listen, slaves talk. You know. Like in Camelot."

Alvin remembered the capital city of the Crown Colonies, and how rumors traveled through the slave community faster than a boy could run. But how could she know that he had been there?

"I had your skin on that bread," she said. "Most gals like me, they don't see it, so small that skin. But I see it. I got you then. While the fire burn, I got whatever you have in there. I see your treasure."

She could see more in his heartfire than Alvin could see in hers. All he could see was the health of her body, and some strong fears, but also an intense sense of purpose. But what the purpose was, he couldn't know. Once again, his knack was not as much as he needed it to be, and it stung.

"Don't you fret, mi hijo," she said. "I ain't gonna tell. And no, I don't mean that thing you got in your poke. That ain't your treasure. That belongs to its own self. Your treasure is in a woman's womb, far away and safe."

To hear it in words like that, from a stranger, stabbed him in the heart. It brought tears to his eyes, and a weakness, almost a giddiness to his head. Without thinking, he sank to his knees. That was his treasure. Alt the lives he had failed to save in Barcy, they were that one life, the child who had died those years ago. And his redemption, his only hope, his-yes, his treasure-it was the new child that was so far away, and beyond his reach, in someone else's charge.

"Get up," whispered Arthur Stuart. "Don't kneel to her."

"He don't kneel to me," said La Tia. "He kneel to his love, to the saint of love. Not Lord Valentine, no, not him. The saint of a father's love, St. Joseph, the husband of the Holy Mother. To him he kneeling. That be so, no?"

Alvin shook his head. "I'm kneeling because I'm broke inside," he whispered. "And you want this broke man to do something for you, and there's nothing I can do. The world is sicker every day and I got no power to heal the world."

"You got the power I need," said La Tia. "Maria de los Muertos, she tell me. You make her mother whole, she."

"You're not sick," said Alvin.

"The whole of Barcy, she be sick," said La Tia. "You live in a house about to die from that sick. This blacktown, she about to die. The French people of Barcy, they be about to die. The sick of angry people, the sick of stupid people all afraid. Gotta have somebody to blame. That be you and that crazy Moose and Squirrel. That be me and all us who keep Africa alive, we. That be all them French folk like Maria de los Muertos and her mama. What they gonna do when the mob decides to blame the fever on somebody and burn it out? Where they gonna go?"

"What do you think I can do? I got no control over the mob."

"You know what I want, you."

"I don't."

"You maybe don't know you know, but you got them words burnt in your heart by your mama all them years ago, when you little, you. 'Let my people go.' "

"I'm not Pharaoh and this ain't Egypt."

"Is too Egypt and I reckon you ain't Pharaoh, you Moses."

"What do you want, a plague of cockroaches? Barcy already got that, and nobody cares."

"I want you to part the sea and let us across on dry land in the dark of night."

Alvin shook his head. "Moses did that by the power of God, which I ain't got. And he had someplace to go, a wilderness to be lost in. Where can you go? All these people. Too many."

"Where you send them slaves you set free from the riverboat?"

That flat out stunned Alvin. There was no way that story could be known here in the south. Was there?

Alvin turned and looked at Arthur Stuart.

"I didn't tell nobody," said Arthur. "You think I'm crazy?"

"You think I need somebody tell me?" said La Tia. "I saw it inside you, all on fire, you. Take us across the river."

"But you ain't talking about no two score slaves here, you talking about blacktown and the orphanage and-French-town? You know how many that is?"

"And all the slaves as want to go," said La Tia. "In the fog of night. You make the fog come into Barcy from off the river. You let us all gather in the fog, you take us across the river. You got red friends, you take us safe to the other side."

"I can't do it. You think I can hold back the whole Mizzippy? What do you think I am?"

"I think you a man, he want to know why he alive," said La Tia. "He want to know what his power be for. Now La Tia tell you, and you don't want to know after all!"

"I'm not Moses," said Alvin. "And you ain't the Lord."

"You want to sec a burning bush?" asked La Tia.

"No!" said Alvin. She might be able to conjure up some kind of fireworks, but he didn't want to see it. "And it wouldn't work to cross the river anyway. How would we feed the people on the far bank? It's swamp there, mud and snakes and gators and skeeters, just like here. Ain't no manna in the wilderness there. My friends among the reds are far to the north. It can't be done. Least of all by me."

"Most of all by you," said La Tia.

They stood there in silence for a moment.

Arthur Stuart spoke up. "Usted es tia de quien?"

"I don't speak no Spanish, boy," said La Tia. "They call me La Tia cause them Spanish people can't say my Ibo name."

"We don't say her name neither," said the smaller woman. "She be our Queen, and she say, Let my people go, so you do it, you."

"Hush, child," said La Tia. "You don't tell a man like this what to do. He already want to do it. So we help him find his courage. We tell him, go to the dock and there he find him hope this morning. There he find a brother like Moses did, make him brave, give him trouble."

"Oh good," said Alvin. "More trouble." But he knew that he would do her bidding-go to the dock, at least, and see what her prophecy might mean.

"Tonight at first dark, there be fog," said La Tia. "You make fog, everybody know to come."

"Come where?" said Alvin. "Don't do it. We can't cross the river."

"We leave this place one way," said La Tia, "or we leave it another, we."

As they hurried away, with blacks watching them on either hand, Arthur Stuart asked, "She mean what I thought she meant?"

"They're going to leave or they're going to die trying," said Alvin. "And I can't say they're wrong. Something ugly's building up in this city. They were itching for war before this yellow fever. Steve Austin's been gathering men who like to fight. And there's no shortage of others who'll fight when they're afraid. They all mean to have some killing, and La Tia's right. There's no staying here, not for any of the people they might turn on. If I find a way to get Papa Moose and his family out of Barcy, they'll turn on the free blacks or the French."

"How about a hurricane? You done a flood to stop the slave revolt in Camelot, but I think this time you could do it with wind and rain," said Arthur Stuart.

"You don't know what you're asking," said Alvin. "A bad blow in this place, and we'd kill the very folks we ought to save."

Arthur Stuart looked around him. "Oh," he said. "I guess they're all pretty much on low ground."

"Reckon so."

White faces watched them from the windows of poor shacks in Frenchtown, too. La Tia's words had gone out already. They were all looking to Alvin to save them, and he didn't know how.

Story of my life, thought Alvin. Expectations built up all around me, but I got neither the power nor the wisdom to fulfil any of them. I can make a man's knife disappear and I can melt the chains off a bunch of slaves but it's a drop of blood in a bucket of water, you can't even find it, let alone draw it out again.

Drop of blood in a bucket of water.

He remembered how Tenskwa-Tawa made a whirlwind on a lake, put his blood into the waterspout, and saw the future in the walls of it as he and Alvin rose up in the air inside.

He remembered that it was in the visions inside that column of swilling water that he saw the Crystal City for the first time. Was it something in the distant past, or something in the future? What mattered was not that dream of what might have been. It was the process by which Tenskwa-Tawa shaped the water to the form he wanted, and held it there, seeming to whirl at great speed, but really holding absolutely still.

Blood in the water, and a whirlwind, and walls as clear and smooth as glass.