Heartfire: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume V

by Orson Scott Card

  Hezekiah laughed, but there was affection in it. “I would love nothing better than to visit there. But I’m afraid I’d be tempted to loot the place, and carry it all away with me.”

  To John’s surprise, Hezekiah’s words brought tears to his eyes. “Would you, Hezekiah?” He blinked rapidly and his eyes cleared. “You see, now, you’ve moved this old man with your kindness. You found the one bribe I’m susceptible to.”

  “It wasn’t flattery, sir.”

  “I know,” said John. “It was honor. May God forgive me, but I’ve never been able to purge my heart of the desire for it.”

  “There’s no sin in it, John. The honor of good men is won only by goodness. It’s how the children of God recognize each other. It’s the feast of love.”

  “Maybe God did bring me here,” said John. “In answer to my own prayers.”

  “Maybe that’s how God works,” said Hezekiah. “We pray for a messenger from God—who knows but what the messenger also prayed for a place to take his message?”

  “What does that make me, an angel?”

  “Wrestle with Jacob. Smite his thigh. Leave him limping.”

  “Once your allusions were all to Homer and the Greek playwrights.”

  “It’s the Bible now,” said Hezekiah. “I have more to fear from death than you do.”

  “But longer to wait before it comes,” said John ruefully.

  Hezekiah laughed, shook John’s hand, and left the table. John sat back down, tucked in, and finished. The meeting had been more emotional than John had expected, or than he cared for, truth be known. Emotions had a way of filling you up and then what did you do with them? You still had to go on about your life.

  Except for Hezekiah Study. He had not gone about his life. His life had ended, all those years ago, back in Netticut, on the end of a couple of ropes.

  And my life? When did it end? Because it has ended, I see that now. I’m like Hezekiah. I took a turn, or didn’t take a turn; I stopped, or failed to stop. I should have been something else. I should have been president of a fledgling nation of free men. Not a judge at a witch trial. Not a stout little man eating the dregs of his breakfast alone at table in a boardinghouse in Cambridge, waiting for Tom Jefferson, damn him, to die, so I can have the feeble satisfaction of outliving that bastard son of Liberty.

  Oh, Tom. If only we could have been friends, I could have changed you, you could have changed me, we could have become in reality the statesmen you pretend to be and I wish I were.

  Purity could hardly sleep all night. It was unbearable, yesterday, the running, running, running. And yet she bore it. That’s what surprised her. She sweated and panted but she kept on and on and on, and all the while she ran there was a kind of music in the back of her mind. As soon as she tried to listen to it, to find the melody of it, the sound retreated and all she could hear then was the throbbing of her pulse in her head, her own panting, her feet thudding on the grassy ground. But then she’d stagger a few steps and the music would come back and it would sustain her and...

  She knew what it was. Hadn’t Arthur Stuart talked about how Alvin could run and run with the greensong he learned from that Red prophet? Or was it Ta-Kumsaw himself? It didn’t matter. Alvin was using his witchery to sustain her and she wanted to scream at him to stop.

  But she had learned a little between yesterday and today. Quill had taught her. Everything she said got twisted. She had never mentioned Satan, had never even thought of him, but somehow her meeting with Alvin and his friends on the banks of the river had turned into a witches’ sabbath, and Alvin swimming in the river with Arthur Stuart had been turned into incestuous sodomy. And she finally realized what should have been obvious all along—what Reverend Study had tried to warn her about—that whatever fault there might be in Alvin Smith, it was nothing compared to the terrible evil that resulted from denouncing him as a witch. What would happen if she cried out what was in her heart? “Stop it! Stop witching me to keep running!” It would only make things worse.

  Is this what happened to my parents?

  Gradually, as the day wore on, she had begun to notice something else. It was Quill who was filled with fear and rage, his mind alert to take anything that happened and turn it into proof of the evil he was looking for. Quill looked at Purity with fascination and loathing, a combination she found fearful and disturbing. But Alvin Smith, he was as cheerful toward her today as he ever was on the riverbank. Not a complaint toward her for getting him locked up. And yes, he used his witchery, or so it seemed to her, but he did it out of genuine kindness toward her. That was the truth—by her own knack she knew it. He was a little impatient with her, but he bore her no ill will.

  Now, as the day of her testimony loomed, she did not know what to do. If she bore witness against Alvin now, telling the simple truth, Quill would make it seem as though she was holding back. She could imagine the questioning. “Why are you refusing to mention the witches’ sabbath?” “There was no witches’ sabbath.” “What about the naked debauchery between this man and this half-White boy who is said to be as it were his own son?” “They played in the river, that’s all.” “Ah, they played in the river, a naked man, a naked boy, they sported in the river, is that your testimony?” Oh, it would be awful, every word twisted.

  Simpler by far to confess to a lesser crime: I made it up, Your Honor, because they frightened me by the riverbank and I wished them to see what it felt like. I made it up because I had just learned my parents were hanged for witchcraft and I wanted to show how false accusations are too readily believed.

  She had almost resolved on this course of action when the key turned in the lock and the door opened and there stood Quill, his face warm and smiling, filled with love. To her it looked like hate, and now she could see what somehow had eluded her before: Quill wanted her to die.

  How could she have missed it? It was her knack, to see what people intended, what they were about to do. Yet she saw no further than his smile the first time they met, saw nothing but his genuine love and sympathy and concern for her. How could her knack have failed her?

  Was it what Quill had said to her, in one of his many rambling discourses on Satan? That Satan was not loyal and did not uphold his disciples?

  Why, then, would she see the truth now?

  Or was it the truth? Was Satan now deceiving her into thinking she saw hatred where love truly existed?

  There was no way out of this circle of doubt. There was no firm ground to hold to. Alvin Smith, who admitted to witchery, was kind and forgiving to her though she did him great harm. Quill, who was the servant of God in opposing witchery, twisted every word she said to make her bear false witness against Smith and his friends. And now he seemed to want her to hang. That was how it seemed. Could the truth be so simple? Was it possible that things were exactly as they seemed?

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Quill softly.

  “Do you?” she murmured.

  “You’re thinking that you want to recant your testimony against Alvin Smith and make the whole trial go away. I know you’re thinking that because everybody does, just before the trial.”

  She said nothing. For she could sense the malice coming from him like stink from an untended baby.

  “It wouldn’t go away,” said Quill. “I already have your testimony under oath. All that would happen is that perjury would be added to your crimes. And worse—having repented, you would be seen to have returned to Satan, trying to conceal his acts. Indeed, you already seemed to be concealing the other witches in Cambridge. You could not have expected to protect your friends and incriminate only the strangers, could you? Were you that naive? Were you so caught up in the snares and nets of Satan that you believed you could hide from God?”

  “I’ve hidden nothing.” Even as she said it, she knew the futility of denial.

  “I have here a list of the professors and lecturers at Cambridge who are known to create an atmosphere of hostility toward faith and piety in their clas
srooms. You are not alone in denouncing them—my colleagues and I have compiled this list over a period of years. Emerson, for instance, scoffs at the very idea of the existence of witches and witchery. You like Emerson, don’t you? I’ve heard that you were especially attentive in spying outside his classroom.”

  “It wasn’t spying, I was given the right to listen,” said Purity.

  “You heard him,” said Quill. “But my question is, did you see him? At a witches’ sabbath?”

  “I never saw a witches’ sabbath, so how could I have seen him at one?”

  “Don’t chop logic with me,” whispered Quill. “The syllogism is false because your testimony has been false. You told me about one witches’ sabbath yourself.”

  “I never did.”

  “The debauchery,” he whispered. “The crimes against nature.”

  She looked him boldly in the face, seeing his lust for her blood so strongly depicted in the fire of his face, the tension of his body that she would not have needed a knack to detect it. “You are the one who hates nature,” she said. “You are the enemy of God.”

  “Feeble. I advise against your using that line in court. It will only make you look stupid and I answer it so easily.”

  “You are the enemy of goodness and decency,” she said, speaking more boldly now, “and insofar as God is good, you hate God.”

  “Insofar as? The professors have taught you well. I think your answer, despite your attempts to deceive, has to be ‘yes’ to the question of whether you saw Emerson at a witches’ sabbath.”

  “I say no such thing.”

  “I say that by using professorial language in the midst of a satanic denunciation of my role in God’s service, your true spirit, held a helpless prisoner by Satan, was trying to send me a coded message denouncing Emerson.”

  “Who would believe such nonsense?”

  “I’ll say it in a way the court can understand,” said Quill. He checked off Emerson’s name. “Emerson, yes. One of Satan’s spies, caught. Now look at the other names.”

  “Coded message,” she said contemptuously.

  “What you don’t understand is that your very sneer shows your contempt for holiness. You hate all things good and decent, and your scornfulness proves it.”

  “Go away.”

  “For now,” said Quill. “Your arraignment is this morning. The judge wants to hear you when Alvin Smith makes his plea.”

  But she was not fooled. Her knack was too trustworthy for her to doubt what she saw now.

  “You’re such a bad liar, Quill,” she said. “The judge never needs to have a witness at the arraignment. I’ll be there because I’m to be arraigned as well.”

  Quill was face-to-face with her again at once. “Satan whispered that lie to you, didn’t he.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “I saw it,” he said. “I saw him whisper to you.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “I saw you looking at me, and in a sudden moment you were told something that you hadn’t known before. Satan whispered.”

  Had he seen it? Was it his knack to see other knacks working?

  No. It was his knack to find the useful lie hidden inside every useless truth. He had simply seen the transformation in her facial expression when she understood the truth about his intentions.

  “Satan has never told me anything,” she said.

  “But you already told me about your knack,” he answered with a smile. “Don’t recant—it will go hard with you.”

  “Maybe I have a talent for seeing other people’s intentions,” she said defiantly. “That doesn’t mean it comes from Satan!”

  “Yes,” he said. “Use that line in court. Confess your sin and then deny that it’s a sin. See what happens to you under the law.” He reached out and touched her hand, gently, caressingly. “God loves you, child. Don’t reject him. Turn away from Satan. Admit all the evil you have done so you can prove you have left it behind you. Live to let your womb bear children, as God intended. It’s Satan, not God, who wants you twitching at the end of a rope.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That much is true. Satan your master wants me dead.”

  He winked at her, got up, and went to the door. “That’s good. Keep that up. That’ll get you hanged.” And he was gone, the door locked behind him.

  She shook with cold as if it weren’t summer with the heat already oppressive this early in the morning. Everything was clear to her now. Quill came here ready to do exactly what he had done—take a simple accusation of the use of a knack, and turn it into a story about Satan and gross perversions. He knew he had to do this because honest people never told stories about Satan. He knew that she would not name others she saw at witches’ sabbaths because there were never any such conclaves, and all such denunciations had to be extracted through whatever torture the law would allow. Witchers did what Quill did because if they did not do it, no one would ever be convicted of trafficking with Satan.

  This was how her parents died. Not because they really did have knacks that came from Satan, but because they would not play along with the witchers and join them in persecuting others. They would not confess to falsehood. They died because the City of God tried so hard to be pure that it created its own impurity. The evil the witchers did was worse than any evil they might prevent. And yet the people of New England were so afraid that they might not live up to the ideals of Puritanism that they dared not speak against a law that purported to protect them from Satan.

  I believed them. They killed my parents, raised me as an orphan, tainted with the rumor of evil, and instead of denouncing them for what they had done to me, I believed them and tried to do the same thing to someone else. To Alvin Smith, who did me no harm.

  Purity threw herself to her knees and prayed. O Father in heaven, what have I done, what have I done.

  Alvin finished the piss-poor breakfast they served to prisoners in the jail, then lay back on his cot to survey the people that he cared about. Far away in Camelot, his wife and their unborn daughter thrived. In Vigor Church, his mother and father, his brothers and sisters, all were doing well, none sick, none injured. Nearby, Verily was being let out of his cell. Alvin tracked him for a while, to be sure that he was being released. Yes, at the door of the courthouse they turned him loose to go find his own breakfast.

  Out on the riverbank, Arthur Stuart and Mike Fink were fishing while Audubon was painting a kingfisher in the early-morning light. All was well.

  It was only by chance that Alvin noticed the other heartfires converging on the river. He might not even have noticed them, in his reverie about eating fish just caught from the river, roasted over a smoky fire, except that something was wrong, some indefinable change in the world his doodlebug passed through. A sort of shimmering in the air, a feeling of something that loomed just out of sight, trembling on the verge of visibility.

  Alvin knew what he was seeing. The Unmaker was abroad in the world.

  Why was the Unmaker coming out in the open with the tithingmen? There had been no sign of the Unmaker lingering around Quill, who was clearly a lover of destruction.

  Of course the very question contained its own answer. The Unmaker didn’t have to emerge where people served its cause willingly, knowingly. Eagerly. Quill wasn’t like Reverend Thrower. He didn’t have to be lied to. He loved being the serpent in the garden. He would have been disappointed if he couldn’t get the part. But the tithingmen were decent human beings and the Unmaker had to herd them.

  Which was, quite literally, what it was doing. Quill had asked them to go searching for a witches’ sabbath. They set out with no particular destination, except a vague idea that since Purity had spoken of encountering Alvin’s party on the riverbank, that might be a good area to explore. Now, whenever they turned away from Arthur and Mike and Jean-Jacques, they stepped into the Unmaker’s influence and they became uneasy, vaguely frightened. It made them turn around and walk quite briskly the other way. Closer to Alvin’s friends
.

  Well, thought Alvin, this looks like a much better game if played by two.

  His first thought was to bring up a fog from the river, to make it impossible for them to find their way. But he rejected this at once. The Unmaker could herd them whether they could see their way or not. The fog would only make it look more suspicious-sounding, more like witchery, when they recounted their story later. Besides, fog was made of water, and water was the element the Unmaker used the most. Alvin wasn’t altogether certain that his control was so strong, especially at a distance, that he could count on keeping the Unmaker from subverting the fog. Someone might slip and die, and it would be blamed on witchery.

  What did the tithingmen care about? They were good men who served their community, to keep it safe from harm and to keep the peace among neighbors and within family. When a couple quarreled, it was a tithingman who went to them to help them iron it out, or to separate them for a time if that was needed. When someone was breaking the sumptuary laws, or using coarse language, or otherwise offending against the standards that helped them all stay pure, it was a tithingman who tried, peacefully, to persuade them to mend their ways without the need of dire remedies. It was the tithingmen who kept the work of the courts to a minimum.

  And a man didn’t last long as a tithingman in a New England town if he fancied himself to be possessed of some sort of personal authority. He had none. Rather he was the voice and hands of the community as a whole, and a soft voice and gentle hands were preferred by all. Anyone who seemed to like to boss others about would simply be overlooked when the next round of tithingmen were chosen. Sometimes they realized that they hadn’t been called on for many years, and wondered why; some even humbly asked, and tried to mend their ways. If they never asked, they were never told. What mattered was that the work be done, and done kindly.

  So these were not cudgel-wielding thugs who were being herded toward the riverbank. Not like the Finders who came after Arthur Stuart back in Hatrack River, and were perfectly happy to kill anyone who stood violently against them. Not even like Reverend Thrower, who was somewhat deceived by the Unmaker but nevertheless had a zeal to pursue “evil” and root it out.