THE CRYSTAL CITY

by Orson Scott Card

  I can't know that, thought Arthur Stuart. I'm not Peggy, I'm no torch to see inside folks' heartfires.

  And anyway, Peggy wouldn't send Alvin into a place where some other woman was going to fall in love with him.

  Then again, for all Arthur Stuart knew, women were always falling in love with Alvin and he had always been too young and dumb to notice. He remembered a few times, sure. Never amounted to much. It's not like Alvin ever flirted back.

  But this time Alvin didn't seem to see how she looked at him. Because maybe she was more subtle. After all, Arthur hadn't seen it himself until just now, just tonight. So maybe Alvin didn't notice how her gaze was always attached to him, how she listened to every word, how she worshiped him. But notice it or not, it had its effect on him. He kept turning to her. He'd be speaking to somebody else, but he kept glancing at her, as if checking to make sure she'd heard him. As if he expected her to get some joke that only the two of them knew.

  Only there was no joke between them, there was nothing, there hadn't been time for anything, Arthur Stuart had been there, hadn't he? Almost always, except that very first time they met, when she led him to that cabin in the swamp to heal her mother.

  This Dead Mary, all she ever sees in every man she meets is whether he's sick or not, and if he's gonna die of it. But in Alvin, what does she see? The man who can make her nightmares not come true.

  No, she sees power. To change the world, change the future.

  Or maybe it's just them strong blacksmith's arms and shoulders.

  And what do I care, anyway? It's not like Alvin's going to fall for her. He doesn't even look at other women than Peggy-if he ever did I'd know it. So what difference does it make to me?

  It's not like Alvin's the only man around here who can do things. I may not be able to heal folks, but I held up the other end of Alvin's bridge, and that ain't nothing. I kept Ruth Cottoner's musket from firing. I made the fog.

  What am I thinking? She must be five years older than me. And white, and French. Though I can speak French now pretty good. And I'm half white, and what difference should it make, anyway, once we get out of slave country?

  No. I'm a child in her eyes, and a half-black one at that, and most of all, I'm Alvin's prentice maker, and he's the real thing, so why should she ever look at me?

  Good thing Alvin's going, though. Good thing he's got errands to run. Wouldn't want to have a lot of distraction, when they had so much to do.

  Alvin didn't make a big deal about going. He'd done all he said he'd do. La Tia and Arthur and Dead Mary and Rien knew their jobs-Dead Mary and Rien to distract the folks in the big house until Arthur Stuart and La Tia could get the slaves free and learn what all they had to know. It wouldn't always be like this, of course, with the man of the house gone and the slaves all locked down in their cabins and the overseer drunk and easy to keep asleep. And there'd be no healings of sick women, with Alvin gone. But they'd manage.

  And the last thing Alvin wanted was for all the thousands of refugees from Barcy to see a lot of fuss about him going. Especially not if anybody was going to get emotional and plead with him to stay. That would fill the camp with uncertainty. As it was, the people who had actually done all the important work today were still with them. And when folks started asking where Alvin was, they could say, He's scouting on ahead, he'll be back soon.

  So when it came time for Alvin to step away, most people didn't even notice that he'd done it.

  Only Arthur Stuart, and he didn't run up to Alvin and say any last words, just gave him a grin and watched him shoulder his poke, slip into the trees, and move on into the fog.

  When he looked away from where Alvin had faded from view, nobody else even seemed to have noticed.

  Except Dead Mary. She was ostensibly talking with her mother and a couple of Frenchmen about something, but her gaze was fixed on the place where Alvin had last been visible.

  It's love, thought Arthur Stuart. Girl is crazy with love. Or something.

  It took a while for folks to settle down. They hadn't got much sleep, so you'd think they'd all be tired, and the children had fallen asleep about as soon as their stomachs were full. But there was conversation and wonderment and worry, plenty to keep things humming for an hour or so after the meal and the cleanup were over.

  Arthur knew he needed sleep as much as anyone, maybe more. But first he checked to make sure the fog was in place. That was his first job, and if he failed at that, what would he be worth? So he walked the perimeter of the camp one last time. A couple of the blacks just released from slavery on the Cottoner plantation saw him and came and gave him thanks, but he refused, and just said he didn't give them anything God didn't give them first, and then excused himself to finish checking on things.

  When he got back to the big house, most everyone was asleep. And it occurred to him that he hadn't arranged so much as a blanket for himself.

  No matter. The grass was dry and the air was warm and he didn't mind the insects. He found an empty patch of ground not far from the edge of the fog, where nobody else was sleeping, and he sat down and started rubbing the bottoms of his feet with grass, which he found was soothing after a day's walking. His shoes were somewhere near the house, he remembered now. He'd get them in the morning, or do without. Shoes were good to have in winter, but they were a bother to have to carry around all summer, when mostly you wanted to feel the ground under your feet.

  "So he's gone," said Dead Mary.

  Arthur hadn't even noticed her approach. He cursed himself. Alvin always knew who was nearby. And Arthur Stuart could see the heartfires, the near ones anyway. He just wasn't used to looking. There were hundreds around him now, all sleeping. He hadn't been paying attention.

  "And you are the maker now," said Dead Mary.

  "Prentice maker," said Arthur Stuart. "If that. My real knack is learning languages."

  She said something to him in a language that sounded partly like Spanish and partly like French.

  "I got to learn them first," said Arthur. "It's not like I already got all possible languages inside my head."

  She laughed lightly. "What is it like, traveling with him all the time?"

  "Like being with your brother-in-law who sometimes treats you like a kid and sometimes treats you like a person."

  She smiled and shook her head. "It must be wonderful, to see him do these noble things."

  "He usually does no more than one noble deed afore dinner, and then he's done for the day."

  "You're teasing me," she said.

  "You want to know what it's like?" said Arthur Stuart. "Just ask your ma how thrilling it is every time she sees you find out whether somebody's sick, and whether they'll die of it."

  "How could you ever get used to something like this?"

  "I'm not trying to get used to it," said Arthur. "I'm trying to learn to do it."

  "Why? Why do you need to know, when he can do it so much better?"

  Didn't she have any idea how hurtful it was to say such a thing? "Well, it's a good thing I did learn something, don't you think?" he said. "Or we'd have to have a bunch of watchmen out tonight, and in this group, how many reliable guards do you think we'd find?"

  "So you really made the fog? He didn't do it?"

  "He started it, to show me how. I made the rest."

  "And you can do it tomorrow?"

  "I hope so," said Arthur Stuart, " 'cause we got to leave this fog behind. If we stayed a second night here, this plantation wouldn't have anything left to eat and the Cottoners would starve."

  "They won't starve-they don't have all those slaves to feed now, remember?" She lay back on the grass. "If I could travel with him, I would be happy every minute of every day."

  "Don't work that way for me," said Arthur Stuart. "About every other day, I stub my toe or eat something that makes me queasy. Otherwise, though, it's pretty much ecstasy."

  "Why do you tease me? All I'm doing is telling you what's in my heart."

  "He's a married
man," said Arthur Stuart. "And his wife is my sister."

  "Don't be jealous for your sister," said Dead Mary. "I don't love him that way."

  Yes you do, thought Arthur Stuart. "Glad to hear it," he said.

  "Can you help me?" she said.

  "Help you what?"

  "This globe of crystal water he made, that I've been carrying with me-"

  "As I recall, you had a couple of boys who were sweet on you pushing that wheelbarrow most of the day."

  She waved his tease away. "I look in it and what I see frightens me."

  "What do you see?"

  "All the deaths in the world," she said. "So many I can't even tell who is doing the dying."

  Arthur Stuart shuddered. "I don't know how the thing works. Maybe you only see what you've been trained to see. You already know how to see death, so that's what you see."

  She nodded. "That makes sense. I was going to ask you what you see."

  "My mother," said Arthur Stuart. "Flying. Carrying me to freedom."

  "So you were born in slavery."

  "My mother spent all her strength and died of it, getting me away."

  "How brave of her. How sad for you."

  "I had family. A couple of families. A black one, the Berrys, they pretended they were my real parents for awhile, so folks wouldn't tag me as a runaway. And the Guesters, the white family that actually raised me. Alvin's mother-in-law, Old Peg, she adopted me. She meant it, too. Though I reckon Alvin's been more my father than Peggy's father was. He's an innkeeper, and a good man. Helped a lot of slaves get to freedom. And he always made me feel welcome, but it was Alvin took me everywhere and showed me everything."

  "And all before you were twenty."

  "I don't reckon we're done yet," said Arthur Stuart.

  "So you can tease me, but I can't tease you?"

  "I didn't know you were teasing."

  "So you don't speak all the languages." She laughed at him.

  "If you don't mind, maybe it's time for sleep."

  "Don't be mad at me, Prentice Maker. We have a lot of work to do together. We should be friends."

  "We are," said Arthur Stuart. "If you want to be."

  "I do."

  He thought, but did not say: Just so you can use me to stay close to Alvin, I reckon.

  "Do you?" she said.

  Does it matter what I want? "Of course," he said. "This is all going to work better if we're friends."

  "And someday you'll help me understand what I see in Alvin's globe?"

  "I don't even understand what I see in my soup," said Arthur Stuart. "But I'll try."

  She rolled onto one arm and leaned toward him and kissed his forehead. "I will sleep better knowing you're my friend and I can learn from you."

  Then she got up and left.

  You might sleep better, thought Arthur Stuart, but I won't.

  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.