The Crystal City

6

Exodus

Calvin stood on the levee that kept the Mizzippy from pouring over its banks to flood the city of Nueva Barcelona. A couple of hundred masts stuck up from the water like a curiously bare forest, as the seagoing vessels were towed up and down the river by steam-powered tugboats. Dozens of columns of smoke and steam joined to cast a pall over the city as the sun sank toward the horizon.

It had been a sultry, hazy day. Already everything got blurry only a mile off. The air was so wet that sweat could hardly evaporate. It ran down Calvin's neck and back and legs, and when he mopped his brow with a handkerchief, it came away dripping wet.

Nobody'd mind if he cooled things off a little.

Around him the air suddenly gave up some of its heat, sending it upward. The moment the air cooled just a couple of degrees, the water vapor began to condense a little, just enough to form a cloud, not enough to make rain or dew. It wasn't easy to maintain the temperature at just that point, and Calvin had to jostle the temperature up and down a little till he got it right.

But once the fog was nicely formed, he began to reach out farther and farther, cooling the air, condensing the invisible humidity into visible fog.

He turned a slow circle, watching as his fog spread out over the city. This was power-to change the look of the world, to blind the eyes of men and women, to block the light and heat of the sun, to allow slaves and oppressed people to sneak to freedom. Poor Alvin, always fencing his power about with rules-he never felt the sheer joy of it like Calvin did.

It was like being rich, but spending money like a poor man. That was Alvin, wasn't it? A miser, hoarding his enormous power, using it only when he was forced to, and for trivial purposes, and according to rules that were devised to allow weaker men to control strong ones. I have no use for such rules, thought Calvin. I don't choose to wear chains, still less to forge my own.

So I'll help you, Alvin, because I can and because I love you and because I don't mind being part of your noble causes when it suits me. But I make up my own mind on all things. Collect your disciples and try to teach them some clumsy imitation of makery, like that sad boy Arthur Stuart, whose true knack you stole from him. But don't ever count me as one of your disciples. I spent too many years of my life worshiping you and tagging along behind you and begging for your attention and your love and your respect. Those were my childhood days. I'm a man now, and I've held my own with a great emperor and I've slain an evil man that you hadn't the courage to kill, Alvin.

It's not enough to have power, Alvin. You have to have the will to use it.

Street after street, the fog crept through the city, dimming the light of the setting sun and hiding passersby.

Slaves felt the cool clammy fog pass around them, or looked out windows and watched as buildings across the street disappeared, and they thought, Today we cross over Jordan to the promised land.

In Frenchtown the children and grandchildren of the founders of this place, whose city had been stolen from them, looked out of their shanties and thought, You can't keep us here no more, Conquistadores. You can take our city, but that's only land. You can't hold onto us when we've a mind to go.

In Swamptown, the poorest of the poor-free blacks and down-and-out whites-saw the fog and gathered up their few possessions for the journey ahead. La Tia, Dead Mary, some sorcerer from up north, they didn't care whom they were following. It couldn't help but be better than here.

But in the rest of the city, in fine houses and the humbler homes of the working class, in hotels and whorehouses and along the dock, where people already cowered in fear of the yellow fever, afraid to go out into the streets-they saw the fog roll through and it looked like a biblical plague to them. I'm not going out in that weather, they thought. I'll send a slave out on my errands. I'll leave the streets to the poor and those whose business is so pressing they'd risk death to carry on with it.

Only in the taverns, where drink brought a few hours of courage and uncontained passion, did the fear burn into hatred. Someone brought this yellow fever on us. It was them French witches, that Dead Mary and her mother, didn't Dead Mary claim the plague for her mother first?

It was those wicked race-mixing abolitionists Moose and Squirrel, they're the ones brought this down on us, cursing the city because they hate us for keeping black folk in the place where God meant them to be. You want proof? All around that house folks is dying of the fever, but not a soul in that crowded house is sick, not a body has been brought out.

"Not Moose and Squirrel, no sir," said a powerful-looking man who carried a knife at his hip the way other men might carry a pistol. "Their house, but it's a traveling man staying there, him and his half-black catamite he uses like a witch does a cat. His name is Alvin and he has a sack full of gold he stole from the smith he was prenticed to. I tell you he brought this fever here. He and his catamite was seen at the public fountain where that magical water was drawn."

They listened spellbound to the man. They itched for action, these men. They had come to Barcy to take part in a war, but the dread of fever had sent the King's army back into their holes, and here they were with nothing to do. Their fingers flexed into fists. The drink burned in them. They could do with a good hanging. Take a man and his slave boy and drag them to a tree or lamppost and hoist them up and watch them clutch and twitch and pee themselves while they strangled on the end of a rope. That was a good use of this foggy night. There'd be no witnesses, and maybe it would stop the fever, and even if it didn't, a hanging was still a good idea now and then, just to get your blood up, and none of this nonsense about an innocent man. Wasn't nobody in this world hadn't earned hanging five times over, if their hearts were only known.

Out of the tavern and into the street they staggered and lurched, shouting threats and brags. A few carried torches against the fog and night as darkness fell over the city, and as they moved near the waterfront, they were joined by the drunk, the angry, the fearful, and the merely curious from other taverns. Where are you going? Off to hang us a traveling wizard and his boy.

The slaves skulking through the streets dodged into alleys or into the shadows of doorways as the mob passed. But they weren't looking to hang the first black man they found. They had a specific man in mind tonight, thanks to that man with the big knife at his belt. They'd find him at the house of Moose and Squirrel-who probably needed hanging too, there being no shortage of rope in Barcy.

Arthur Stuart saw at once that the name "Frenchman's Dock" was meant as a cruel irony. Compared to the miles-long dock along the Mizzippy, this shabby jetty on Lake Pontchartrain was pathetic. Several dozen shrimpboats were tied up to it, and more were coming in, the shrimpers shouting and answering to help each other find their way in the fog. All of them spoke in French, a language in which Arthur was becoming quite fluent, though he suspected the French he was learning here in Nouveau Orleans was not quite the same French that Calvin would have heard in Paris.

There was no room on that busy wharf for fifty children, so Moose and Squirrel kept their family loitering back around the fish houses, trying to stay out of the way. Many of the shrimpers had already heard what was happening tonight. Either they'd come along or not, but there was no debating or discussing it. Everyone stepped around the children and made no comment about their presence there. Even if they wouldn't follow Dead Mary out of the city, they wouldn't dare stand in her way, either.

Blacks began arriving, too, staying even farther out of the way. Like the children, they carried bags and sacks, but it was a sad thing to see how little they had, considering that most of them were carrying all they owned in the world. The blacks who did get in some shrimper's path were met with a growl or a bark to get out of the way; it was clear that even among the oppressed French, blacks had a lower status still.

Flies hovered and swarmed everywhere, there being plenty to feast on for them amid the shrimp offal discarded all along the shore. Skeeters, too, and Arthur Stuart could imagine that with all the people gathering here those little bloodsuckers would probably drink their fill till they bloated up and exploded. He could imagine the sound of it, like distant gunfire, the pop pop pop of busted skeeters.

Only he didn't want them sucking blood out of these children.

He tried to get his doodlebug inside a skeeter, but it wouldn't hold still. And besides, he wasn't looking to perform surgery on it, he wanted to talk to it the way Alvin would, telling it to go away. But he couldn't find the heartfire. It was just too small and faint. Even the heartfires of the big fat lazy flies were almost invisible to him. All the same, he tried talking to the skeeters inside his own mind. "Go away," he said silently. "Nothing to eat here." But if they heard him, they didn't pay him no mind.

A couple of boats ran into each other in the fog, and there was much shouting and cursing. It was silly, Arthur Stuart thought, to put up with fog here, where it wasn't needed. And fog was more like metal or water, he could get inside it and work with it. Arthur Stuart stirred up a little air, drawing a little breeze in from the lake, blowing the fog back toward the city where it was needed.

Arthur was pleased that it didn't take long for the air to clear. The sunset now blazed red in the west, while the fog hung thickly only a street or two back from the water. The shrimpers quickly got their boats tied up and their catch loaded off and dragged into the fish houses. Then they disappeared into the streets, some of them with shrimp carts to sell the catch, the others probably heading for their families, to bring them to Frenchman's Dock for the escape.

There being no more need for clear vision now, Arthur Stuart let the breeze die down, and the fog drifted back out over the water a little. Stillness came with it, a heavy silence in which footfalls were muffled and voices became whispers.

As it became fully dark, Arthur began to worry about folk losing their way, or somebody stumbling into the water, so he woke up the breeze again to clear the air near the shore. In the distance, he could hear shouting, and after a while, he realized that it was probably the noise of a mob moving through the streets of Barcy. He worried about folks who was trying to make their way through the streets, but the fog was the best help they could get, and there wasn't nothing Arthur Stuart could think of to add to it.

As the fog cleared and the faint light of the stars and a sliver of moon illuminated the shore, Arthur Stuart realized that the man sitting crosslegged in the shallow water was Alvin.

At once Arthur strode forward, but said nothing, because Alvin seemed to be concentrating. Arthur came up beside him and saw that Alvin held a knife in his hand, with the tip of the blade under the water. He was slicing into the soft skin on the side of his left heel, under the place where the leg bone joined on.

Blood began to flow out in a slow trickle into the water.

Almost by habit now, Arthur Stuart tracked the blood in the water, feeling its dissipation. But then it stopped dissolving, and instead began to form a rigid structure, gathering water around a delicate latticework, thickening and hardening the water into something not at all like ice, and very much like thin, delicate glass.

The area of hardened water extended to about six feet on either side of Alvin, then narrowed gradually as it extended out over the lake. When it narrowed to about as wide as Alvin's arms could reach on both sides, it stopped narrowing and went on and on, straight north. Arthur could sense it moving forward. But he could also sec that it was all connected to Alvin's living blood, still flowing out into the water and thrusting the lacy inner structure of this crystal road farther and farther out. The bridge was growing from the base, not the tip.

"Can you see it, Arthur Stuart?" whispered Alvin.

"Yes."

"And on the other end, do you think you can anchor it there and hold it firm?"

"I can try."

"It's taking more blood than I hoped," said Alvin, "but less than I feared. I'm not sure I'll know when it's long enough. I have to concentrate on what I'm doing here. So I need you to lead the way across, because you can see it. And when you get to the end, anchor it and stop it from growing. I'll feel it at this end. I'll know that you're doing it, and I'll know when it's done."

"Now?" said Arthur Stuart.

"If we're going to get all these people to walk across in one night, I think now's a good time to start."

Arthur Stuart turned around and beckoned to Moose and Squirrel. They didn't see him. So he called out, but not loudly. "Papa Moose! Mama Squirrel! Can you bring the children?"

With Papa Moose leaning on Mama Squirrel and one of the older boys, they came down to the water's edge. When they arrived, Arthur Stuart stepped out onto the crystal.

To the others it seemed that he stood on water. They gasped, and one of the children began to cry.

"Come closer," said Arthur Stuart. "See? It's smooth where it's safe to walk. It's not water any more. It's crystal, and you can walk on it. But stay to the middle. Hold hands, stay together. If someone falls in, pull him back up. It's strong enough to hold you, see?"

Arthur looked straight down into the crystal as he stomped his foot a couple of times.

What he saw there made him freeze.

It was his mother, flying, a newborn baby strapped in front of her. Flying over the trees, heading north, to freedom.

And suddenly she could fly no farther. Exhausted, she tumbled to the earth and lay there weeping. She would kill the baby now, Arthur Stuart realized. Rather than let it be taken back into slavery, she'd kill the baby and herself.

"No," he murmured.

"Arthur Stuart," said Alvin sharply. "Don't look down into the crystal."

Arthur tore himself away and was surprised to find Moose and Squirrel and their family all watching him, wide-eyed.

"Nobody look down into the bridge," said Arthur Stuart. "You'll think you're seeing things, but they're not really there. It's not a thing to look at, it's a thing to walk on."

"I can't see the edges," said Mama Squirrel. "The children can't swim."

"They won't have to," said Arthur Stuart. "Let's get the little ones in between the older ones. Everybody hold hands."

"The youngest can't walk so far," said Papa Moose.

Someone pushed her way through the family to the water's edge. La Tia. "Don't you fret about that. Got plenty of strong arms here to carry them as can't walk." She called out several names, and strong young men and women stepped forward, most of them black, but some French or of other European nations. "It's all right, babies," La Tia said to the children. "You let these big folk carry you, you be all right. You tell them be happy," she said to Mama Squirrel.

"It's all right," said Squirrel. "These are our friends now, they're going to take us out across this bridge Alvin's done made for us."

Some of the children whimpered and a few cried outright, but they hung on all the same, doing their best to obey despite their fear. Arthur Stuart walked farther out onto the bridge, taking care to stay right in the middle. The worst thing he could do would be to stumble off the edge. They'd all be terrified then. "Come to me," he said. "We have to move quick, once we get started."

"I stay right here," said La Tia, "I keep it all moving, I make everybody help each other. You go, you. We follow."

Arthur turned around and walked a good twenty paces out onto the bridge. Then he stopped and turned around. Several of the older children were following him tentatively. He strode back to them and took the leading child by the hand. "All hold hands," he said. "Stay right in line. It's a long walk, but you can do it."

"Listen to the music," said Alvin. "Listen to the music of the water and the sky, all the life around you. The greensong will carry you forward."

Arthur Stuart knew the greensong well, though he could never find it on his own. As soon as Alvin spoke of it, though, he became aware of it, as if it had always been there, and he'd just not bothered to notice it before. He stepped on out, holding the hand of the child behind him, and set a pace that he thought everyone would be able to keep to.

In the darkness, he couldn't see the bridge stretching out before him-his eyes told him only that he was walking out into the middle of a trackless lake. But his doodlebug felt the bridge as clear as day, reaching on and on, out and out, and he walked with confidence.

At first he couldn't stop his mind from fretting about all that could go wrong. Somebody falling off. Losing the way somehow. Getting to the end of the bridge and finding that it didn't quite reach the other shore. Or having the bridge get softer and wetter the farther it got from Alvin. Or the bridge bending in on itself, making a spiral that led nowhere. All kinds of imaginable disasters.

But the rhythm of the step, step, step and the sound of the lapping water and the calls of birds began to still that relentless fretting. It was the familiar rhythm of the greensong. He let it come over him like a trance. His legs began to move, it seemed, of themselves, so he no longer thought about walking or even moving, he simply flowed forward as if he were a part of the bridge, as if he himself were a breeze on the night air. The bridge was alive under him. The bridge was part of Alvin, he understood now. It was as if Alvin's hands bore him up, as if the water and wind drew him along.

He only sometimes noticed that he himself was singing. Not just humming, but singing aloud, a strange song that he had always known but had never noticed before. The child behind him picked up the melody and murmured it along with him, and the child behind her, until Arthur Stuart could hear that many voices carried the song. No one was crying or whimpering now. He could hear adult voices farther back. But all of them were faint, only threads amid the fabric of the great wide song that Arthur heard from the wind and the waves and the fish under the water and the birds in the sky and from animals waiting for them on the other side and from all the people on the bridge, a half mile of them, a mile of them.

Faster and faster Arthur Stuart walked without realizing he was speeding up, but the children did not complain. Their legs carried them as fast as they needed to go. And the adults carrying children found that the little ones did not grow heavy. The babies fell asleep clinging to their bearers, their breath whispering in rhythm with the song. On and on they strode, the far shore coming no nearer, it seemed.

And as they were all caught up in the greensong, it seemed that the bridge turned into light. They could all see the edges of it now, and could feel how the greensong throbbed within it. Each footfall on the crystal bridge caused the song to surge a little stronger for a moment and made the bridge glow a little more clearly in the night. And Arthur Stuart realized that they were becoming part of the bridge, their steps strengthening it, thickening it, making it stronger for those coming after. And since the bridge was part of Alvin himself, they also strengthened him, or at least made it so the creation of the bridge drained him less than it might have.

Arthur could feel Alvin's heartbeat in the crystal bridge. And he realized that the light they all saw rising from the crystal was a pale reflection of Alvin's own heartfire.

It seemed to be forever, that crossing. And then, suddenly, there was land ahead of him, and it felt as if it had taken no time at all.

He reached forward with his doodlebug and saw that the bridge did not reach the land yet. So, without slowing down his stride, Arthur Stuart sent his doodlebug leaping beyond the end of the bridge to find where the rim of the water lapped the mud and he said to the bridge-to Alvin: Here it is. Here's the edge. Come to this spot and no farther.

The bridge leapt forward. It was what Alvin had been waiting for, for Arthur's doodlebug to show the way, and in moments the bridge was anchored into the land.

Arthur Stuart did not speed up, though he wanted to run the last few hundred yards. There were people behind him, hands linked. So he kept the same pace, right to the end, and then drew the child behind him up onto the shore.

He continued to lead her into the trees, talking to her as he went. "We'll go up into the trees," he said to her. "The others will follow. Keep moving, move in and off to the right, so there's room for everyone else. Keep holding hands, all of you!"

Then he let go of her.

As he did, the greensong let go of him.

He staggered, almost fell.

He stood there gasping for a moment in the unwelcome silence.

The line of people on the bridge stretched out for miles, he could see, and all of them moving swiftly, faster than he would have thought possible. Even Papa Moose now strode easily, boldly, no one helping him.

He saw how Moose and Squirrel, too, stumbled when they let go of the line. But they immediately took charge of the children, not forgetting their responsibility.

Nor will I forget mine, thought Arthur Stuart. He scanned the nearby area for the heartfires of small creatures. Unlike the skeeters, he easily found the snakes and, not so easily, awoke them and sent them slithering away. Danger here, he told them silently. Go away, be safe. Sluggishly they obeyed him. It exhilarated him. He suspected that some part of Alvin's power still rested on him, enabling him to do more than he had ever found possible before. Or perhaps traveling on Alvin's bridge, surrounded by the greensong, had woken senses inside Arthur Stuart that had always slept.

Will we all be makers, having crossed this bridge?

Here and there he caused water to drain away from a bog, so that the land where the people would have to stand was all firm. And from time to time he reached back out across the water, following the bridge with his doodlebug, trying to see how Alvin was doing. The bridge remained strong, and that meant Alvin's heartfire blazed brightly. But his body was too far away for Arthur Stuart to find him, so he could not tell whether he was becoming weak. Nor could he find the far shore to count the people there, so he could not even guess how many more would come.

It was his job to make sure there was room for them all, enough firm, safe ground that they could gather.

Many of them sat down, then lay down, and with the echoes of the greensong still singing in their hearts, they dozed in the faint moonlight, their dreams infused with the music of life.

Calvin couldn't help being curious. And it's not as if he had to stay on the levee to keep the fog in place.

In fact, the fog could pretty much look after itself, at this point. And with all the angry, frightened heartfires flowing through the streets of Barcy, Calvin couldn't see any particular reason to stay by himself. Who knew what mischief these mobs might be up to? And since he was a maker, wasn't it his job to keep such mischief from happening?

One mob was moving through Frenchtown, getting more and more furious as they found house after house empty. Another mob, consisting mostly of dockside drunks, was looking for slaves to throw into the water. Finding none, they started throwing in whatever passersby spoke English with a foreign accent or not at all. Which wasn't too logical, seeing how this wasn't even an American city.

All Calvin could see of this was the anger in the heartfires and, of course, the panic in those being tossed into the river.

The angriest mob, and the one moving with the most sense of purpose, was moving directly toward the orphanage where Alvin had been unable to resist showing off by one-upping Calvin's fixing of the man's foot. What was the big deal, Calvin wanted to know. When was he supposed to have learned anatomy? Of course, Alvin knew everything-everything except how the world actually worked.

So let him sit there by that briny lake and flow his heartfire out as a bridge for the scum of the earth to walk on. Wasn't that just like Alvin? Making a show of being humble and the servant of all. But since Jesus said that the person who wanted most to be ruler was the one who was servant of all, didn't that tell something about Alvin, after all? Who was the ambitious one? Calvin was perfectly willing to stay in the background-which was the attitude a maker ought to have, as Alvin always said. But with Alvin it was do as I say, not as I do.

Calvin jogged easily along the foggy streets-sober, decent folk were all indoors, fearful of the sudden fog and the sound of distant shouting. There were soldiers marching, too. The Spanish were ostensibly looking for a riot to quell, but the officers carefully found the quietest streets, since there was neither honor nor safety in confronting a mob. If you shoot, it's a massacre; if you don't shoot, you're likely to get a brick in the head.

So it wasn't hard to avoid the soldiers, and soon Calvin found himself on the fringes of the mob just when it reached the house of Moose and Squirrel. He wasn't that interested in most of the people-a mob was a mob, and all the faces were as ugly and stupid as always when people turn their decision-making over to someone else. Brutal puppets, that's all they were. What Calvin wanted was the hot, dark heartfire that was leading them and goading them on.

Glass was shattering as bricks and stones went through the windows of the house. Several men with torches were trying to set the house on fire, but the air was so moist and heavy that it wasn't working.

The leader, who carried a big heavy knife at his hip, was taunting the would-be firestarters. "Y'all never set a fire before? Babies burn theirselves up all the time, but you can't even get a dry wooden house to burn!"

Calvin sidled up. "Reckon sometimes you gotta do a thing yourself."

The man turned to him and sneered. "And have the Spanish find some informant to testify against me? No thanks."

"I didn't mean you." said Calvin. He reached out and pointed toward the roof. While he was pointing, he hotted up the wood just under the peak of the gable, so sudden and hot that it burst into flames.

A cheer went up from the crowd, everyone being too drunk, apparently, to notice that the fire had started about as far as possible from where the torchwielders were doing such a pathetic job. But the mob's leader wasn't drunk, and that's the only person Calvin was looking to impress.

"You know something?" said the man with the big knife. "I think you look a powerful lot like a certain thief and fraud name of Alvin Smith as was living in that boardinghouse only this morning."

"You're speaking of my beloved brother, sir," said Calvin. "Nobody gets to call him names but me."

"Beg your pardon, sir," said the man. "I'm Jim Bowie, at your service. And if I'm not wrong, you just proved to me that Alvin ain't the only dangerous man in his family."

"Don't get no ideas about siccing this mob on me," said Calvin. "My brother plain hates to kill folks, but I got no such compunction. You turn the mob on me, and they'll all blow to bits as if they'd swallowed a keg of gunpowder. You first."

"What's to stop me from killing you right here?" said the man. And then, suddenly, he got a panicked look on his face. "No, I was just joking, don't do nothing to my knife."

Calvin laughed in his face. "Want to see the house go up real spectacular?"

"You're the artist," said the man.

Calvin found his way into the structure of the house, the thick heavy beams and posts that formed its skeleton. He hotted them up all at once-and so hot did he make them that they didn't so much burn as melt. The outer layer of each piece of wood burnt so fast that as the ashes peeled away it looked as if somebody had just flumped a busted pillow on the ground and released a hundred thousand feathers all at once.

The house collapsed, sending up such a cloud of smoke and ash and hot, searing air that it burned the hair and eyebrows and eyelashes right off the men in the front row. Their skin was also burned, and some were blinded, but Calvin didn't feel any particular pity. They deserved it, didn't they? They were a murderous, house-burning mob, weren't they? The ones who was blind now, they'd never join a mob again, so Calvin had flat cured them of their violence.

"You look to be a useful man to have as a friend," said the man with the knife.

"How would you know?" said Calvin. "You haven't seen me with any of my friends."

The man stuck out his hand. "Jim Bowie, sir, and I'd like to be your friend."

"Sir, I don't reckon you have many friends in this world, and neither do I. So let's not pretend to love each other. You have something you want to use me for, and I'm perfectly willing to consider being used if you can let me see what's to gain from it, and why it's a good and noble undertaking."

"They ain't no good and noble undertakings. Everybody I know of gets undertaken has to be dead first and doesn't seem to enjoy it."

Bowie was grinning.

"What do you want from me, Mr. Bowie?"

"Your company," said Bowie. "On an expedition. A job your brother turned down on account of I think he was scared."

"Al ain't afraid of anything," said Calvin.

"Anybody isn't scared of the Mexica might as well shoot out his own brains, cause they ain't worth keeping."

"The Mexica?"

"Some of us think it's time civilization came back to Mexico."

Civilization ... like this? Calvin watched the remaining mobbers cavorting and gamboling in front of the hot glowing embers and laughed.

"A mob's a mob," said Bowie. "But the Mexica are evil and need destroying."

"No doubt they do," said Calvin. "But why is it your job?"

"I got tired of waiting on God."

Calvin grinned at him. "Maybe we got something to talk about. I never been to Mexico."

Alvin felt someone nudge him, shake his shoulder.

"Sun coming," said a woman's voice.

La Tia, that's who it was.

"Everybody already pass over," said another woman. Dead Mary's mother.

"What's your name?" Alvin murmured. "I don't know your name."

"Rien," she said.

Dead Mary reached out and took his bleeding hands in hers. "Get up, you wizard you. Get up and cross over the bridge of your blood."

He tried to rise, with her helping, but at once he felt faint and his legs gave way under him. He fell face forward onto his hands and even his elbows buckled, and his face struck the surface of the crystal bridge. The heavy weight of the plow made the poke slide off his shoulder. It made the whole bridge shimmer with life, and Alvin felt himself suffused with warmth. With peace. It was all done. He could sleep now.

At once the bridge began to give way under him.

"No!" cried La Tia. "Hold up that bridge! You can't sleep now!" She reached down and lifted the poke from the surface of the bridge. At once the shimmering stopped, and Alvin could concentrate again. No, it wasn't time to rest, was it?

"The army coming, boy!" La Tia said. "They know they slaves gone now, morning coming and nobody doing they chores. This ain't no drunken mob today, no. This be soldiers, and we got to cross over!"

It wasn't just her words filling him with strength, though. He could feel the power of charms she bore. He always saw the small magics of spells and hexes and could stop them if he wanted, so he had gotten used to the idea that they had no effect on him.

But now he was grateful for the strength that flowed into him as she draped a charm around his neck.

"I have to stay here," he said softly, "or the bridge won't hold."

"You had to stay here to make the bridge," said La Tia. "But don't you feel your brother put in his blood from the other side?"

Alvin cast his awareness through the whole length of the bridge and now realized that his own heartfire was not alone in it. His was the overwhelming light within the crystal, but there was another heartfire there, too, and not a weak one, either. Arthur Stuart had taken hold of the bridge and had put his own blood into the water to join him.

La Tia and Dead Mary's mother-Rien, was it?-supported him on either side, while Dead Mary pushed her wheelbarrow out onto the bridge to lead the way. Already the last of the people was out of sight in the fog. But the fog was thinning, and the first rays of dawn were lighting the eastern sky. Arthur Stuart might still be on the job, but Calvin wasn't.

Behind them Michele, La Tia's friend and doorkeeper, was laying down charms on the bridge. They did not cause the shimmer that the plow had brought. Rather they felt like salt dropped on ice.

"That burns," said Alvin. "I can't have that."

"Got to keep them enemies back," said La Tia. "They my fear and fire charms she laying down."

"This bridge was made to welcome people. The crystal is meant to open their eyes. You can't put darkness and fear onto it and hope to have it stay."

"You know what you know," said La Tia. "You do a thing I never see, so while I stand on your blood, I do what you say." She called back over her shoulder. "Michele, you pick up all this stuff, you, you make it a ring on the shore, hold them back a little!"

Michele ran back to land and laid the charms in a great semicircle to keep the soldiers at bay as long as possible.

"To them it be like a fire," said La Tia. "Hate and fear, they make it into a fire."

Blood still dripped from Alvin's hands as he walked. Dead Mary set down the barrow and tried to take one hand and bind it up to stop the bleeding, but Alvin pulled away. "Got to keep my blood going into the bridge," he said. "Arthur can't hold it up alone."

"So this thing you make, it don't stay made?" said Dead Mary.

"First time I done it," said Alvin, "and I don't think I done it right. But maybe it can never stay. Maybe you can't build nothing out of this that lasts."

"Stop making him talk," said Rien. "You keep pushing, Marie, you keep showing us the way."

"I know the way," said Alvin.

"But what happen to us when you faint, yes? What?"

Alvin had no answer, and Dead Mary continued to push her barrow on ahead.

They weren't all that far when they heard Michele run up from behind. "Soldiers come, and a lot of other men, very angry. The fire hold them back for now, but they got their own peeps and slinks and they get through soon. We got to run."

"I can't," said Alvin.

But even as he said it, he heard the greensong that had helped the others cross so quickly, and now that he wasn't concentrating on holding the bridge alone, he could let it into him, let it strengthen and heal him a little. He hushed them. "Hear that?" he said. "Can you hear?"

And after a while, yes, they could. They stopped talking then, and Alvin stopped leaning on them, and soon he and the four women were walking swiftly, faster than they thought they could, with longer strides than any of these women had ever taken. Long before they reached the other side of Pontchartrain they overtook the last of the people, and when Alvin got there, the song grew stronger in their hearts as well, and they stopped straggling and picked up their pace.

It was good that they did, because Alvin felt it like a blow when the first of the soldiers charged onto the bridge. It was his heartfire they were treading on, and where the people's feet had been light, the soldiers' boots were heavy, and as they ran along the narrow bridge Alvin heard them fighting the greensong like the cacophony of two marching bands playing wildly different tunes.

It weakened him and slowed him down, just a little at first, but more and more as they drew nearer. Hundreds of them, carrying muskets. At the far end of the bridge, someone was trying to get a horse out onto the crystal-a horse pulling a light piece of field artillery.

"I can't hold that up," gasped Alvin.

"Almost there," called Dead Mary. "I can see the shore!" She started to run.

But there was no fog on this side of Pontchartrain, so seeing the campfires on the far shore did not mean they were truly almost there. Alvin slowed, staggered. Again he had to lean on the women until they were almost dragging him along. Again he felt alone, abandoned by-or perhaps merely oblivious to-the greensong. But with each weakening of his own strength under the burden of the approaching army, he could feel another strength move in under his blood in the skeleton of the bridge. Arthur Stuart was already reaching far beyond his strength, but Alvin had no choice but to rely on his strength until all were safe.

Just when it seemed that the bridge was lengthening infinitely before them, they closed the last hundred, the last fifty, the last dozen steps and staggered onto the shore. Dead Mary had set down her barrow on the bank and now hovered around, eager to help.

There lay Arthur Stuart, prostrate in the sand, Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel kneeling beside him, their hands on him, Papa Moose praying, Mama Squirrel singing the first words Alvin had ever heard anyone put to the greensong, words about sap and leaves, flowers and insects, fish and birds and, yes, squirrels all climbing along in the nets of God.

Arthur Stuart's hands were extended, his wrists bleeding onto the bridge, and his fingers digging down into the face of the crystal. He shouldn't have been able to do that, to push his skin and bone into Alvin's crystal bridge, but here it was partly Arthur Stuart's, and right around his bleeding fingers it was almost entirely his bridge, so it followed his need.

Alvin sank down beside him and rested his hands and head on Arthur's back. "Arthur, you got to let go now, you got to let go first. When I let go of it the whole weight of it will fall on you, and you can't bear it, you got to let go first."

Arthur seemed not to hear him, so deep was he in his trance of concentration.

"Pull his hands out of the bridge," Alvin said to the others.

But Moose and Squirrel couldn't do it, and La Tia and Dead Mary couldn't do it, and Alvin whispered into his ear, "They're coming and we can't bear them up, the bridge can't hold such a harsh load, you got to let go, Arthur Stuart, I can't hold it any longer and if you try to hold alone it'll kill you."

Arthur Stuart finally managed to make an answer, barely audible. "They'll die."

"I reckon so," said Alvin. "Them as can't swim. They'll die trying to bring slaves back into slavery. It ain't your job to keep alive such men as would do that."

"They're just soldiers," said Arthur Stuart.

"And sometimes good men die in a bad cause, when it comes to war."

Arthur Stuart wept. "If I let go I'm killing them."

"They chose to come up on a bridge that was built for freedom, with slavery and killing in their hearts."

"Bear them up, Alvin, or I can't let go."

"I'll do my best," said Alvin. "I'll do my best."

With a final cry of anguish Arthur Stuart tore his blood-covered hands out of the crystal. Alvin felt his heartfire vanish from the substance of the bridge, and in that moment he withdrew his own.

It lingered for a long moment, held by the blood alone.

And then the bridge was gone.

"Bear them up in the water!" cried Arthur Stuart. And then he fell into something between a faint and a deep sleep.

Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel drew him back from the water's edge and bandaged his wounds, while Dead Mary and her mother did the same for Alvin's hands and feet.

Alvin barely noticed, though, because he was trying to find the heartfires of the soldiers. He could not save them all. But those with brains enough to let go of their weapons, to pry off their boots, to try to swim, them he could keep afloat. But those who didn't try, and those that wouldn't let go of the things that made them soldiers, he hadn't the strength to help them.

La Tia grasped what he was doing and stepped to the water's edge, where the bridge had once been. She reared her head back and pinched a powder into her open mouth. Then she looked out over the water and cried out in a voice that could be heard for miles across the lake, a voice as loud as thunder, a voice that made wide ripples race forward across the water.

"Drop your guns, you! Try to swim! Take off your boots! Swim back!"

All heard, and most heeded, and they lived. Three hundred soldiers went out onto that bridge that morning, along with one horse hitched to a fieldpiece. The horse had no way to save itself, but it took Alvin only a moment to sever the harness that held it to that murderous load. The horse came out alive; the fieldpiece stayed behind under the water. All but two score men finally swam to shore, gasping and half drowned but alive. But not one gun and not one boot made it back.

Only then, with the last of their enemies safe who was willing to be saved, Alvin let go of consciousness.

The north shore teemed with thousands of people, of every age and color and several languages. They desperately needed someone to tell them what to do, and where to go if they were to find drinkable water and food to eat. But not one of them proposed awakening Alvin or Arthur Stuart. The man and boy who made a crystal bridge out of blood and water-such power struck them all with awe, and they would not dare.

Back in Barcy, Calvin saw what was happening with Alvin's heartfire, how deeply he slept, how weak he was.

I could kill him right now. Just open up a hole in his heart and till his lungs with blood and he'd be dead before anyone else realized what was happening and no one would know it was me, or if they did, they'd never prove it.

But I won't kill him today, thought Calvin. I'll never kill him. Even though he kills me all the time, with his judgments and condemnations, his condescensions and his lessons and his utter ignorance of who I am. Because I'm not like Alvin.

He refrains from purposely killing people because he thinks it's wrong, under some arbitrary law. While I refrain from killing people, not out of obedience, but of my own free will, because I'm merciful to those who hurt me and despitefully use me.

Who's the Pharisee here? And who's the one like Jesus? Even though nobody else will ever see it that way, that's the truth, as God is my witness.