Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V

by Orson Scott Card

  “Can you find it?” asked Balzac.

  Margaret didn’t answer. Instead she looked doubtfully at Calvin. “Do you suppose he’s incontinent?”

  “Pardon?” asked Balzac.

  “I’m speculating on the best place to take him. I think he should stay with you.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “If he has trouble dealing with urination and defecation, I believe it will cause less scandal for you to help him.”

  “I admire your prudence,” said Balzac. “I suppose I must also provide him with food and drink.”

  Margaret opened the purse tucked into her sleeve and handed a guinea to Balzac. “While you tend to his physical needs, I will find his doodlebug.”

  Balzac tossed the guinea into the air and caught it. “Finding it is one thing. Will you bring it back?”

  “That is beyond my power,” said Margaret. “I carry well-made hexes, but I don’t know how to make them. No, what I will do is find where he is and discover who is detaining him. I suspect that in the process I will find the souls of the slaves of Camelot. I will learn how the thing is done. And when I am armed with information...”

  Balzac grimaced. “You will write a treatise on it?”

  “Nothing so useless as that,” said Margaret. “I’ll tell Alvin and see what he can do.”

  “Alvin! Calvin’s life depends upon the brother he hates above all other persons on earth?”

  “The hate flows in only one direction, I fear,” said Margaret. “Despite my warnings, Alvin seems unable to realize that the playmate of his childhood has been murdered by the man who usually dwells in this body. So Alvin insists on loving Calvin.”

  “Doesn’t it make you weary? Being married to such a lunatic?”

  Margaret smiled. “Alvin has made me weary all my life,” she said.

  “‘But’... no, let me say it for you ... ‘But the weariness is a joy, because I have worn myself out in his service.’”

  “You mock me.”

  “I mock myself,” said Balzac. “I play the clown: the man who pretends to be so sophisticated that he finds kindly sentiment amusing, when the reality is that he would trade all his dreams for the knowledge that a woman of extraordinary intelligence felt such sentiments for him.”

  “You create yourself like a character in a novel,” said Margaret.

  “I have bared my soul to you and you call me false.”

  “Not false. Truer than mere reality.”

  Balzac bowed. “Ah, madame, may I never have to face critics of such piercing wisdom as yourself.”

  “You are a deeply sentimental man,” said Margaret. “You pretend to be hard, but you are soft. You pretend to be distant, but your heart is captured over and over again. You pretend to be self-mockingly pretentious, when in fact you know that you really are the genius that you pretend to be pretending to be.”

  “Am I?” asked Balzac.

  “What, haven’t I flattered you enough?”

  “My English is not yet perfect. Can the word ‘flattery’ be used with the word ‘enough’?”

  “I haven’t flattered you at all,” said Margaret. “On every path of your future in which you actually begin to write, there comes from your pen such a flood of lives and passions that your name will be known for centuries and on every continent.”

  Tears filled Balzac’s eyes. “Ah, God, you have given me the sign from an angel.”

  “This is not the road to Emmaus,” said Margaret.

  “It was the road to Damascus I had in mind,” said Balzac.

  She laughed. “No one could ever strike you blind. You see with your heart as truly as I do.”

  Balzac moved closer to her, and whispered. No, he formed the words with his lips, counting on her to understand his heart without hearing the sound. “What I cannot see is the future and the past. Can I have my freedom from Calvin? I fear him as I fear no other living man.”

  “You have nothing to fear from him,” said Margaret. “He loves you and wants your admiration more than that of any man but one.”

  “Your husband.”

  “His hatred for Alvin is so intense he has no real hate left over for you. If he lost your admiration, it would be a mere fleabite compared to losing hope of Alvin’s respect.”

  “And what is that compared to my fleabite? A bee sting? A snakebite? An amputation?”

  Margaret shook her head. “Now you are reaching for flattery. Take him home, Monsieur Balzac. I will try to find his heartfire somewhere in a house in Blacktown.”

  9

  Witch Hunt

  Hezekiah Study could not concentrate on the book he was trying to read, or the sermon he needed to write, or even on the pear he knew he ought to eat. There were several bites taken out of it, and he knew he must be the one who had taken them, but all he remembered was fretful, wandering thoughts about everything. Purity, you young fool. He’ll come now, don’t you know? He’ll come, because he always comes, and because your name is on it, and he knows who you are, oh yes, he knows you, he wants your life, he wants to finish the job he started before you were born.

  This is how he spent the afternoon, until at last a breeze arose, rattling the papers pinned under the paperweight on his writing desk. A breeze, and a shadow of cloud that dimmed the light in the room, and then the sound he had been waiting for: the trot-trot-trot of a horse drawing a little shay behind it. Micah Quill. Micah the Witcher.

  Hezekiah rose and walked to the window. The shay was only just passing on the street below; Hezekiah caught but a glimpse of the face in profile, from above. So sweet and open, so trustworthy—Hezekiah had once trusted it, believed the words that came out of the shyly smiling mouth. “God will not permit the innocent to be punished,” said that mouth. “Only the Lord Savior was foreordained to suffer innocently.” The first of a thousand lies. Truth flowed to Micah Quill, was sucked in and disappeared, and emerged again looking ever so much like it used to, but changed subtly, at the edges, where none would notice, so that simple truth became a complicated fabric indeed, one that could wrap you up so tightly and close you off from the air until you suffocated in it.

  Micah Quill, my best pupil. He has not come to Cambridge to visit his old schoolmaster, or hear the sermons he now preached on Sundays.

  Leaning out his window, Hezekiah saw the shay stop at the main entrance of the orphanage. How like Micah. He does not stop for refreshment after his journey, or even to void his bladder, but goes instead directly to work. Purity, I cannot help you now. You didn’t heed my warning.

  Purity came into the room, relieved to see that the witcher was not some fearsome creature, some destroying angel, but rather was a man who must have been in his forties but still had the freshness of youth about him. He smiled at her, and she was at once relaxed and comfortable. She was much relieved, for she had feared the torment of conscience it would cost her, to have Alvin Smith, who seemed such a nice man, examined and tried by some monster. Instead the proceeding would be fair, the trial just, for this man had no malice in him.

  “You are Purity,” said the witcher. “My name is Micah Quill.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” said Purity.

  “And I to meet you,” said Quill. “I came the moment your deposition was sent to me. I admire your courage, speaking up so boldly against a witch so dire.”

  “He made no threat to me,” said Purity.

  “His very existence is a menace to all godly souls,” said Quill. “You could feel that, even if he uttered no threat, because the spirit of Christ dwells in you.”

  “Do you think so, sir?” asked Purity.

  Quill was writing in his book.

  “What do you write, sir?”

  “I keep notes of all interviews,” said Quill. “You never know what might turn out to be evidence. Don’t mind me.”

  “It’s just that... I wasn’t giving my evidence yet.”

  “Isn’t that silly of me?” said Quill. “Please, sit down, and tell me
about this devil-worshiping slave of hell.”

  He spoke so cheerfully that Purity almost missed the dark significance of the words. When she realized what he had said, she corrected him at once. “I know nothing of what or how the man worships,” said Purity. “Only that he claims to have a witchy knack.”

  “But you see, Miss Purity, such witchy knacks are given to people only because they serve the devil.”

  “What I’m saying is I never saw him worship the devil, nor speak of the devil, nor show a sign of wishing to serve him.”

  “Except for his knack, which of course does serve the devil.”

  “I never actually saw the knack, either, with my own eyes,” said Purity. “I just heard tales of it from the boy who traveled with him.”

  “Name the boy,” said Quill, his pen poised.

  “Arthur Stuart.”

  Quill looked up at her, not writing.

  “It is a joke, sir, to name him so, but the joke was made years ago by those who named him, I do not jest with you now.”

  He wrote the name.

  “He’s a half-Black boy,” she began, “and—”

  “Singed in the fires of hell,” said Quill.

  “No, I think he’s merely the son of a White slave owner who forced himself on a Black slave girl, or that’s the implication of the story I was told.”

  Quill smiled. “But why do you resist me?” he said. “You say he’s half-Black. I say this shows he was singed by the fires of hell. And you say, no, not at all—and then proceed to tell me he is the product of a rape of a Black woman by a White man. How could one better describe such a dreadful conception than by saying the child was singed in the fires of hell? You see?”

  Purity nodded. “I thought you were speaking literally.”

  “I am,” said Quill.

  “I mean, that you literally meant that the boy had been to hell and burned there a little.”

  “So I say,” Quill said, smiling. “I don’t understand this constant insistence on correcting me when we already agree.”

  “But I’m not correcting you, sir.”

  “And is that statement not itself a correction? Or am I to take it some other way? I fear you’re too subtle for me, Miss Purity. You dazzle me with argument. My head spins.”

  “Oh, I can’t imagine you ever being confused by anybody,” said Purity, laughing nervously.

  “And again you feel the need to correct me. Is something troubling you? Is there some reason that you find it impossible to feel comfortable agreeing with me?”

  “I’m perfectly comfortable to agree with you.”

  “A statement which, while sweet of sentiment, does constitute yet another disagreement with my own prior statement. But let us set aside the fact that you are unable to accept a single word I utter at face value. What puzzles me, what I must have your help to clarify, is the matter of some missing information, and some extra information. For instance, your deposition includes several extraneous persons whom no one else has seen. To wit: a lawyer named Verily Cooper, a riverman named Mike Fink, and a half-Black boy named Arthur Stuart.”

  “But I’m not the only one who saw them,” said Purity.

  “So the deposition is wrong?”

  “I never said in the deposition that I was the only one who saw them.”

  “Excellent! Who else was there at this witches’ sabbath?”

  “What witches’ sabbath?” Purity was confused now.

  “Did you say you stumbled upon this coven of witches as they frolicked naked on the banks of the river?”

  “Two of them were bathing, but I saw no sign of anything more dire than that.”

  “So to you, when witches cavort naked before your eyes, it is innocent bathing?”

  “No, I just... I never thought of it as a... it wasn’t a worship of any kind.”

  “But the tossing of the child toward heaven—a Black child, no less—and the way the naked man laughed at you, unashamed of his nakedness ...”

  Purity was sure she had neither spoken of nor written down any such description. “How could you know of that?”

  “So you admit that you did not include this vital evidence in your deposition?”

  “I didn’t know it was evidence.”

  “Everything is evidence,” said Quill. “Beings who frolic naked, laugh at Christians, and then disappear without a trace—which part of this experience would not be evidence? You must leave nothing out.”

  “I see that now,” said Purity. “I reckon I didn’t know what a witches’ sabbath might look like, so I didn’t know when I saw it.”

  “But if you didn’t know, why would you denounce them?” asked Quill. “You haven’t brought a false accusation, have you?”

  “No, sir! Every word I said was true.”

  “Oh, and what about the words you did not say?”

  Purity was even more confused. “But if I didn’t say them, how can I know which words they are?”

  “But you know them. We just discovered them. The fact that it was a pagan bacchanal, with a naked man molesting a naked boy before your eyes—”

  “Molest! He only tossed him in the air as a father might toss his own child, or an older brother might toss a younger.”

  “So you think this might be incest as well?” asked Quill.

  “All I ever thought was to report what they said of themselves, that Alvin Smith is the seventh son of a seventh son, with all the knacks that such men are prone to have.”

  “So you believe the words of the devil concerning this?” asked Quill.

  “The words of what devil?”

  “The devil who spoke to you and told you that knacks just happen to come to seventh sons of seventh sons, when in fact witchcraft can only be practiced by those who have given themselves over to the service of Satan.”

  “I didn’t understand that,” said Purity. “I thought it was the use of hidden powers that was the crime, all by itself.”

  “Evil is never all by itself,” said Quill. “Remember that when you testify you will take an oath with your hand on the sacred scripture, the very word of God under your hand, which is the same as holding Christ by the hand, for he is the very Word. You will give oath to tell the truth, the whole truth. So you must not attempt to withhold any more information as you have been doing.”

  “But I’ve withheld nothing! I’ve answered every question!”

  “Again she must contradict the servant of God even when he speaks the plain truth. You withheld the information about pederasty, about the witches’ sabbath, about incest—and you attempted to pretend that this Alvin’s hidden powers came naturally from the order in which he was born within his family, even though it is impossible for any such devilish power to come from nature, for nature was born in the mind of God, while witchy powers come from the anti-Christ. Don’t you know that it is a terrible sin to bear false witness?”

  “I do know it, and I told the truth as I understood it.”

  “But you understand it better now, don’t you?” said Quill. “So when you testify, you will speak truly, won’t you, and name things as they truly were? Or do you intend to lie to protect your witch friends?”

  “My—my witch friends?”

  “Did you not swear that they were witches? Are you recanting that testimony?”

  “I deny that they were friends of mine, not that they were witches.”

  “But your deposition,” said Quill. “You seem to be retreating from that document as fast as you can.”

  “I stand by every word in it.”

  “And yet you claim these men were not your friends? You say that they pleaded with you to go with them as they continued their wicked journey through New England. Is this something they would ask of a stranger?”

  “It must be so, since I was a stranger to them, and they asked me.”

  “Beware of a defiant tone,” said Quill. “That will not help your cause in court.”

  “Am I in court? Have I a cause there?”
/>
  “Haven’t you?” said Quill. “The only thing standing between you and the gallows is this deposition, your first feeble attempt to turn away from evil. But you must understand that the love of Christ cannot protect you when you half-repent.”

  “Turn away from evil? I have done no evil!”

  “All men are evil,” said Quill. “The natural man is the enemy of God, that’s what Paul said. Are you therefore better than other people?”

  “No, I’m a sinner like anyone else.”

  “So I thought,” said Quill. “But your deposition shows that these men called you by name and begged you to go with them. Why would they do that, if they did not count you among their number, as a fellow witch?”

  Purity was stunned. How could this have happened? She was the accuser, wasn’t she? And yet here she sat denounced by a witcher. “Sir, is it not as likely to be a sign that I was not among their number, and that they wished to persuade me?”

  “But you do not describe a scene of seduction,” said Quill. “You do not tell us how the devil stood before you, his book open, waiting to write your name in it the moment you say that you consent.”

  “Because he did not do that,” said Purity.

  “So it was not a seduction, and the devil did not entice you to love and serve him.”

  Purity remembered how she felt in the presence of Verily Cooper, the desires that washed over her when she saw how handsome he was, when she heard the clear intelligence of his speech.

  “You are blushing,” said Quill. “I see that the spirit of God is touching you with shame at what you have withheld. Speak, and clear your conscience.”

  “I didn’t think it was anything,” said Purity. “But yes, I did for a moment feel enticed by one of Alvin’s companions, the lawyer named Verily Cooper. I thought of it only as the feelings a girl my age might easily have toward a handsome man of good profession.”

  “But you did not have those feelings toward a man of good profession,” said Quill. “You had them toward a man that you yourself have called a witch. So now the picture is almost complete: You came upon a witches’ sabbath, unspeakable incestuous debauchery taking place between a naked man and a naked boy on the riverbank, and another witch caused you to feel sexual desire for him, and then they invite you to join them on their evil passage through New England, and at the end of this you dare to tell me they had no reason to think you might go along with them?”