Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V

by Orson Scott Card

  “How can I know what reasons they had?”

  Quill leaned across the table, his face full of love and sympathy toward her. “Oh, Miss Purity, you don’t have to hide it any longer. You have kept the secret for so long, but I know that long before you were brought to that witches’ sabbath, you were keeping your powers, hidden, the powers the devil gave you, concealing them from everyone around you, but secretly using them to gain advantage over your neighbor.”

  Tears started flowing down Purity’s cheeks. She couldn’t help it.

  “Doesn’t it feel better to tell the truth? Don’t you understand that telling the truth is how you say no to Satan?”

  “Yes, I have a knack,” said Purity. “I have always been able to sense what a person feels, what they’re about to do.”

  “Can you tell what I am about to do?”

  Purity searched his face, searched her own heart. “Sir, I truly do not know you.”

  “Thus the devil leaves you to fend for yourself in the hour of your need. Oh, Miss Purity, the devil is a false friend. Reject him! Turn away from him! Cease this pretense!”

  “What pretense? I have confessed all!”

  “Again she contradicts me. Don’t you understand that as long as you are contradicting me, the spirit of the devil is in you, forcing you to contend against those who serve God?”

  “But I don’t know what more to confess.”

  “Who told you the witches’ sabbath was to be held there on the riverbank that day?”

  “No one told me,” said Purity. “I told you, I was walking along the path.”

  “But is it your custom to walk along the river at that time of day?”

  “No. No, I just read something in the library that made me think.”

  “What was it you read?”

  “Something about... witchcraft.”

  Quill nodded, smiling. “Now, didn’t that feel better?”

  Purity did not know what it was that should have felt better.

  “You were thinking of your evil pact with Satan, and suddenly you found yourself walking along the river. Perhaps you flew, perhaps you walked—I hardly think that matters, though it is possible you flew without knowing that you flew—most people fly to the witches’ sabbath, often upon a broom, but I will not deny that some might walk. However it happened, you suddenly found yourself in the midst of a debauch so foul it shocked even a hardened witch such as yourself, and you longed to be cleansed of your deep wickedness, for having met souls even more lost than you, you remembered to fear God and so you came back with a story. It was still full of lies and you still left out much, but the key was there: You said the word witch, and you named a name. That is the beginning of redemption, to name the sin and repudiate the seducer.”

  Though many of his statements were not at all the way she remembered it happening, nevertheless, the end of his statement was true. How could she not have seen it before? She was led there, and probably by the devil. And hadn’t she be filled with such terrible emotions that they had to warn her to be careful or she’d get herself denounced as a witch? Yes, she was one of them, they recognized her as one of them, and instead of accusing them, she should have accused herself. The beginning of redemption. “Oh, I want to have the love of God again. Will you help me, Mr. Quill?”

  He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “Miss Purity, I come to you with the kiss of fellowship, as the Saints greeted each other in days of old. Deep inside you is a Christian soul. I will help you waken the Christian within you, and get shut of the devil.”

  Weeping now, she clutched his hands within hers. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Let us begin in earnest, then,” said Quill. “In your fear you first named only strangers, people passing through. But you have been a witch for many years, and it is time for you to name the witches of Cambridge.”

  She echoed him stupidly. “Witches of Cambridge?”

  “It’s been many, many years since this part of Massachusetts has had a witch trial. Witchery and witchism are thick here, and with your repentance we have a chance to root them out.”

  “Witchism?”

  “The belief system surrounding witchery, which protects it and allows it to flourish. I’m sure you’ve heard these lies. The claim that knacks are natural or even a gift from God—this clearly is a satanic lie designed to keep people from getting rid of witchcraft. The claim that knacks don’t exist—absurdly, that is what many supposedly wise men claim!—that also provides a shelter under which the covens can remain safe to work their evil. It is well known that while many witchists are simply echoing the beliefs of strong-willed people around them, others are secret witches, pretending to disbelieve in witchery even as they practice it. These are terrible hypocrites who must be exposed; and yet often they are the most attractive or interesting of the witchists, keeping you from recognizing their true nature. Can you think of any who speak this way?”

  “But I can’t imagine any of them are witches,” said Purity.

  “That’s not for you to decide, is it?” said Quill. “Name the names, and let me examine them. If they’re witches, I’ll have it out of them eventually. If they’re innocent, God will preserve them and they’ll go free.”

  “Then let God show them to you.”

  “But I am not the one being tested,” said Quill. “You are. This is your chance to prove that your repentance is real. You have denounced the stranger. Now denounce the snake in our own garden.”

  She imagined herself naming names. Whom would she denounce? Emerson? Reverend Study? These were men she loved and admired. There was not witchery in them, nor witchism either.

  “All I know of witchcraft is my own knack,” she said. “That and the men I already denounced.”

  Suddenly tears appeared in Quill’s eyes. “Now Satan fears that his whole kingdom in this land is in jeopardy, and he terrifies you and forbids you to speak.”

  “No sir,” said Purity. “Honor forbids me to name those who are not witches and who to my knowledge have done only good in the world.”

  “So you are the judge?” whispered Quill. “You dare to speak of honor? Let God judge them; you have only to name them.”

  Now she remembered Reverend Study’s admonition. Why did I ever speak at all? Is this where it always leads? I cannot be considered pure unless I falsely accuse others?

  “There are no other witches but myself, as far as I know,” she said.

  “I ask for witchists, too, remember,” said Quill. “Come now, child, don’t fall back into the cruel embrace of Satan out of a misplaced sense of loyalty. If they are Christians, Christ will keep them safe. And if they are not Christians, then do you not better serve them and the world at large by exposing them for what they are?”

  “You twist everything I say,” she said. “You’ll do the same to them.”

  “I twist things?” said Quill. “Are you now denying your confession of witchcraft?”

  For a moment she wanted to say yes, but then remembered: The only people ever hanged as witches were those who confessed and then either did more witchcraft—or recanted their confession.

  “No sir, I don’t deny that I’m a witch. I just deny that I ever saw anyone from Cambridge do anything that I might call witchery or even... witchism.”

  “It’s not a good sign when you lie to me,” said Quill. “I believe you attend a class taught by one Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

  “Yes,” she said, hesitantly.

  “Why are you so reluctant to tell the truth? Is Satan stopping your mouth? Or is that how these other witches punish you for your honesty, by stopping up your mouth when you try to speak? Tell me!”

  “Satan isn’t stopping my mouth, nor any witch.”

  “No, I can see the fear in your eyes. Satan forbids you to confess the names, and even frightens you into denying that he is threatening you. But I know how to get you free of his clutches.”

  “Can you drive out the devil?” she asked.

  “Onl
y you can drive out the devil within you,” said Quill, “by denouncing Satan and those who follow him. But I will help you shake off the fear of Satan and replace it with the fear of God by mortifying the flesh.”

  Now she understood. “Oh, please sir, in the name of God, I beg you, do not torture me.”

  “Oh really,” he said impatiently. “We’re not the Spanish Inquisition, now, are we? No, the flesh can be mortified better through exhaustion than through pain.” He smiled. “Oh, when you’re free of this, when you can stand before this community of Saints and declare that you have named all of Satan’s followers here, how happy you will be, filled with the love of Christ!”

  She bowed her head over the table. “Oh God,” she prayed, “what have I done? Help me. Help me. Help me.”

  Waldo Emerson saw the men at the back of the classroom. “We have visitors,” he said. “Is there something in the teachings of Thomas Aquinas that I can explain to you, goodmen?”

  “We’re tithingmen of the witch court of Cambridge,” they said.

  Waldo’s heart stopped beating, or so it seemed. “There is no witch court in Cambridge,” he said. “Not for a hundred years.”

  “There’s a witch girl naming other witches,” said the tithingman. “The witcher, Micah Quill, he sent us to fetch you for examination, if you be Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

  The students sat like stones. All but one, who rose to his feet and addressed the tithingmen. “If Professor Emerson is accused of witchery then the accuser is a liar,” he said. “This man is the opposite of a witch, for he serves God and speaks truth.”

  It was a brave thing the boy had done, but it also forced Emerson’s hand. If he did not immediately surrender himself, the tithingmen would be taking along two, not just one. “Have done,” Waldo told his students. “Sit down, sir.” Then, walking from his rostrum to the tithingmen, he said, “I’m happy to go with you and help you dispel any misconception that might have arisen.”

  “Oh, it’s no misconception,” said the tithingman. “Everyone knows you’re a witchist. It’s just a matter of whether you do so as a fool or as a follower of Satan.”

  “How can everyone know that I’m a thing which I never heard of until this moment?”

  “That’s proof of it right there,” said the tithingman. “Witchists are always claiming there’s no such thing as witchism.”

  Waldo faced his students, who had either turned in their seats to face him, or were standing beside their chairs. “This is today’s puzzle,” he said. “If the act of denial can be taken as proof of the crime, how can an innocent man defend himself?”

  The tithingmen caught him by the arms. “Come along now, Mr. Emerson, and don’t go trying any philosophy on us.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Waldo. “Philosophy would be wasted against such sturdy-headed men as you.”

  “Glad you know it,” said the tithingman proudly. “Wouldn’t want you thinking we weren’t true Christians.”

  They had Alvin in irons, which he thought was excessive. Not that it was uncomfortable—it was a simple matter for Alvin to reshape the iron to conform with his wrists and ankles, and to cause the skin there to form calluses as if they had worn the iron for years. Such work was so long-practiced that he did it almost by reflex. But the necessity to be inactive during the hours when he could be observed made him weary. He had done this before—and without the irons—for long weeks in the jail in Hatrack River. Life was too short for him to waste more hours, let alone days or weeks, growing mold in a prison cell and weighed down by chains, not when he could so easily free himself and get on about his business.

  At sundown, he sat on the floor, leaned back against the wooden side wall of the cell, and closed his eyes. He sent out his doodlebug along a familiar path, until he found the dual heartfire of his wife and the unborn daughter that dwelt within her. She was already heading for her writing table, aware through long custom that because Alvin was farther east, sundown came earlier to him. She was always as impatient as he was.

  This time there was no interruption from visitors. She commiserated with him about the chains and the cell, but soon got to the matter that concerned her most.

  “Calvin’s doodlebug has been stolen,” she said. “He had sent it forth to follow the man who collects the names and some part of the souls of Blacks arriving at the dock.” She told him of Calvin’s last words to Balzac before all his will seemed to depart from his body. “First, I must know how much of his soul remains with his body. It is different from the slaves, for he seems to hear nothing and has to be led. His bodily functions also are like an infant’s, and Balzac and their landlord are equally disgusted at the result, though the slaves clean him without complaint. Is this reversible? Can we communicate with him to learn his whereabouts? I have searched this city all the way up the peninsula, and find no collection of heartfires and no sign of Calvin’s. It has been hidden from me; I pray it is not hidden from you.”

  Alvin had no need to write or even formulate his answers. He knew that she could find all his ideas in his heartfire moments after he thought of them and they fell into his memory. The kidnapped doodlebug—Alvin had never worried about that. His fears had always been that something awful might happen to his body while he wandered. But in his experience, his body remained alive and alert, and whenever anything in his environment changed—his eyes detecting movement, his ears hearing some unexpected sound—his attention would be drawn back into his body.

  His attention, and therefore his doodlebug. That’s what the doodlebug was, really—his full attention. That’s what was missing from Calvin. Even when things happened around his body, happened to his body, he could not bring his attention back to it. His body was no doubt sending him frantic signals demanding his attention.

  The slaves, on the other hand, couldn’t possibly have surrendered their attention to the man named Denmark.

  What they gave up was their passion, their resentment, their will to freedom. And their names.

  That was an important conclusion: There was no reason to think that this Denmark fellow had Calvin’s name. In fact, what he probably had was a net of hexwork that contained the free portion of separated souls. He might not even be aware that Calvin’s doodlebug had got inside. The hexes caught him automatically, like the workings of an engine. The hexwork also served to hide the soulstuff that it contained. Calvin could not see out, and could not be seen inside.

  But the hexes could be seen. Margaret could not possibly find them, since she saw only heartfires, and if a man knew how to hide heartfires from her, he could certainly hide his own heartfire so she could not discover the man who knew the secret.

  “Is he hiding from me?” she wrote.

  He doesn’t know you exist. He’s hiding from everybody.

  “How could Calvin be captured, when he didn’t make the little knotted things the slaves made?”

  I don’t know the workings of Black powers, but my guess is that each slave put his own name and all his fears and hatred into the knotwork. They needed the knots in order to lift this part of their souls out of their bodies. Calvin needed no such tool.

  “They had to do a Making?” she wrote.

  Yes, he thought, that’s what it was. A Making. Whether it was the power of Whites or Reds or Blacks, that’s what it came down to: connecting yourself to the world around you by Making. Reds made the connection directly—that connection was their Making, the link they forged between man and animal, man and plant, man and stone. Blacks made artifacts whose only purpose was power—poppets and knotted strings. Whites, however, spent their lives making tools that hammered, cut, tore at nature directly, and only in the one area that they called their knack did they truly make that link. Yet they did make that connection. They were not utterly divorced from the natural world. Though Alvin could imagine such men and women, never feeling that deep, innate connection, never seeing the world change by the sheer action of their will in harmony with that part of nature. Ho
w lonely they must be, to be able to shape iron no other way than with hammer and anvil, fire and tongs. To make fire only by striking flint on steel. To see the future only by living day to day and watching it unfold one path at a time. To see the past only by reading what others wrote of it, or hearing their tales, and imagining the rest. Would such people even know that nature was as alive and responsive as it is? That hidden powers move in the world—no, not just in the world, they move the world, they are the world at its foundation? How terrible it would be, to know and yet not touch these powers at any point. Only the bravest and wisest would be able to bear it. The rest would have to deny the hidden powers entirely, pretend they did not exist.

  And then he realized: That’s what the witchcraft laws are. An attempt to shut off the hidden powers and drive them away from the lives of men.

  “At least the witchcraft laws admit that hidden powers exist,” wrote Margaret.

  With that, Alvin realized the full import of what Verily was attempting. It would be good to strike down the witchery laws, but only if it led to an open acknowledgment that knacks were good or evil only according to the use made of them.

  “Verily’s strategy is to make the whole idea of witchcraft look foolish.”

  Well, it is foolish, thought Alvin. All the images of the devil that he had heard of were childish. What God had created was a great Making that lived of itself and contained lesser beings whom he tried to turn into friends and fellow Makers. The enemy of that was not some pathetic creature giving a few lonely, isolated people the power to curse and cause misery. The enemy of Making was Unmaking, and the Unmaker wore a thousand different masks, depending on the needs of the person he was attempting to deceive.

  I wonder what form the Unmaker takes to bring this witcher fellow along?

  “Some men need no deception to serve him,” wrote Margaret. “They already love his destructive work and engage in it freely of their own accord.”