The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI Read online

  Margaret nodded and took a bite of soup. “This is very good, Papa.”

  “Forgive me for thinking like a lawyer,” said Verily Cooper, “but why didn’t you foresee this before you sent him down?”

  She was chewing, so Old Horace answered. “She can’t see that clear when it comes to Alvin. Can’t see what all he’s going to choose to do. She can see some things, but not most things, when it comes to him. Which I think is a plain mercy. A man who has a wife can see everything he does and thinks and wants and wishes, well, I think he might as well kill himself.”

  Horace was joking, and so he laughed, but Margaret didn’t take it as a joke. Verily saw her tears drop into the stew.

  “Ho, now,” he said, “that’s already salted well enough, I can swear to that, I had some for supper.”

  “Father is right,” she said. “Oh, poor Alvin. I should never have married him.”

  Verily had actually had that thought occur to him several times in the past, and since he knew she could see into his heartfire, he didn’t bother trying to lie and reassure her. “Maybe so,” he said, “but as you already know, Alvin’s a free chooser. He chose you the way most folks choose a mate, not seeing the end, but wanting to find his way to it with his hand in yours.”

  She placed her hand on his and gave him a weak smile. “You have a lawyer’s way with words,” she said.

  “What I said is true,” said Verily. “Alvin chose you because of who you are and how he feels about you, not because he thought you’d always make right choices.”

  “How he feels about me,” she said, and shuddered. “What if he finds out that I sent him to Nueva Barcelona knowing that by going there, he’d cause the deaths of hundreds of souls?”

  “Why does he have to find out?” said Verily. But he knew the answer already.

  “He’ll ask me,” said Margaret. “And I’ll tell him.”

  “He caused the plague of yellow fever, is that it?”

  “Not on purpose, but yes.”

  “And you knew he would.”

  “It was the only thing that would stop the war that the King already planned. His invasion of Nueva Barcelona would have forced the United States to invade the Crown Colonies in order to keep the King from sealing off their access to the sea. But the yellow fever prevented the King’s army from approaching the city. By the time the fever is gone, so will be all the King’s agents inside the city. That road to war is closed.”

  “So at the cost of those who die of the fever,” said Verily, “you saved the lives of all who would have died in the war.”

  She shook her head. “I thought it would. But Alvin reopened the door without realizing it, and the war that will come now is every bit as bloody.”

  “But you delayed it a few more years,” said Verily.

  “What good is that?”

  “It’s two or three more years of life. Of loving and marrying and having babies. Of buying and selling, of plowing and planting and harvesting, of moving and settling. It will be a different world in two or three years, and those who die in the war will have had that much more life. It’s not a small thing, those years.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Margaret. “But that won’t keep Alvin from hating me for sending him down there to cause hundreds of deaths in order to postpone hundreds of thousands of others.”

  “Hush now,” said Horace. “He’s not going to hate you.”

  But Verily wasn’t sure. Alvin wasn’t one to appreciate being manipulated into committing what he would see, no doubt, as a terrible sin. “Why couldn’t you just tell the man and let him decide for himself?”

  She shook her head. “Because every path that included me telling him led to him doing something else to prevent the war—and all those things would have failed, and most of those paths ended with him dead.”

  She burst into tears. “I know too much! Oh! God help me, I’m so tired of knowing so much!”

  Horace was sitting beside her in a moment, his arm around her shoulder. He looked at Verily, who was about to try to offer comfort. “She’s tired, and you were wakened out of your sleep,” said Horace. “Go to bed, as she will too. Tomorrow is time enough for talk.”

  As usual, Horace knew just the right thing for everyone to do to be content. Verily got up from the table. “I’ll go and do what you asked,” he said to Margaret. “You can count on me to help find a place for Alvin’s people.”

  She nodded slightly, her face still hidden in her hands.

  That was all the good-night he was going to get, and so he headed back along the hall toward his room. At first he was filled with irritation at having to set aside his plan to free Alvin from the smith’s litigious heirs. But by the time he got to his room he had already let go of that. It wasn’t his case any more. He had other work now, but it hadn’t yet begun. And so, when he lay back down in his bed, it took him little time to sleep, for at the moment he had no worries.

  In the morning, he didn’t see Margaret after all. There was a note waiting for him on the floor of his room, giving the name of Abraham Lincoln’s town and how to get there.

  At breakfast the old innkeeper looked grave. “I’m worried about the baby,” said Horace. “She started throwing up last night. She’s worn herself out and she’s sick as a dog. She’s asleep now, but if she loses this baby too, I swear I don’t know but what she’ll lose her mind.”

  “So I should go on without talking to her?”

  “Everything you need to know is on that paper.”

  “I doubt that,” said Verily.

  “All right then,” said Horace with a wan smile. “Everything she thinks you need to know.”

  Verily Cooper matched his smile, then went back to his room to get his things together for the long westward ride. If he’d only stayed in Vigor Church instead of coming here to Hatrack River, he’d have only one-third the journey now. Sometimes it felt to him as though he’d spent most of his life traveling, and never quite got to anywhere that mattered.

  Then again, that might be as good a description of what life was supposed to be as anyone ever thought of. The only real destination was death, and our lives consisted of finding the most circuitous and pleasant path to get there.

  He was on horseback and on his way hours before noon, so the sun was still at his back. It would be nice when they finally got the railroad through clear to the Mizzippy. If they laid enough tracks, a man wouldn’t even need to keep a horse. But for now it was either ride the horse or struggle to keep the horse from going crazy on a flatboat or a steamboat and he wasn’t inclined to try either.

  He thought, as he rode, about how Alvin and Margaret were the two most powerful, gifted, blessed people on this continent, without question, and yet Margaret was desperately sad and frightened all the time, and Alvin wandered about half-lost and melancholy, and not for the first time Verily thought it was a good thing to be a man of relatively ordinary gifts.

  8

  Plans

  Nueva Barcelona finally had something to take the people’s minds off the yellow fever. Folks were still dying from it, and you can bet their families weren’t losing track of the fever’s vicious progress through the city, but a whole bunch of men who had felt completely helpless in the face of the epidemic were now given a task that would cover them with honor for doing what they’d been longing to do since the first outbreak of the plague:

  Get out of town.

  It was the first move that the rich made, whenever the fever struck—they packed up their families and went to the plantation in the country. But regular folks didn’t have that option, and rather despised the rich because they did. No, real men stuck around. They couldn’t afford to get their families out of the city, so they had to stay with them and risk watching their wives and children get sick and die. Not to mention the risk of dying themselves. Not much of a way to die, moaning with fever till you became one of those corpses the body wagons picked up on their sad passage through the streets.

&nbs
p; So when word spread that Gobernador Anselmo Arellano was calling for volunteers to go upriver and bring home all the runaway slaves—and kill the white renegades who had helped them—well, there was no shortage of volunteers. Especially among that element of the city that was commonly known as “drunk and disorderly.”

  Not everybody thought them particularly brave or honorable. Few whores, for instance, gave them their fifteen minutes free just because “I’m a soldier and I might die.” Nobody knew better than prostitutes just how few men were more than talk. This wasn’t an army that was likely to stand up long if they got any resistance. Hanging helpless, unarmed French folk, that was all they’d be good for, and then only if the French didn’t do anything dangerous, like slapping them or throwing rocks.

  That’s what Calvin was hearing in the taverns along the dock as the “soldiers” assembled for shipment upriver. The commander was the governor’s son, Colonel Adan, who, as longtime head of the Nueva Barcelona garrison, was grudgingly appreciated for being less brutal than he could have been. But Calvin could easily imagine the despair the poor colonel must have felt upon seeing this sorry lot that had assembled to take ship.

  Yet maybe they weren’t so sorry. Most of them were drunk—but tomorrow they wouldn’t be, and they might look like better soldiers by then. And it wasn’t as if the enemy would be hard to find. Five thousand slaves and French people, moving at the pace of the slowest child—it wasn’t going to be hard to locate them, was it? And what kind of fight could they put up? Oh, Colonel Adan probably felt just fine about things.

  He might feel differently if he actually believed those ludicrous reports about a bridge made out of clear water that disappeared when his soldiers were out on it, causing a score of deaths and a lot of splashing and spluttering. Perhaps he was so used to pathetic excuses from his men for their failures that it never occurred to him that this one might be true.

  What will Alvin do, Calvin wondered. Probably not fight. He puts far too high a value on human life, poor fellow. It’s not as if half these oafs won’t get themselves killed in some meaningless fight or just by falling into the river one drunken night.

  Well, whatever he does, I won’t be there to help.

  Though Calvin was not against helping if it didn’t put him out of his way. That’s why he had searched out Jim Bowie this morning and arranged with him to lead Calvin to Steve Austin. They met in a saloon two streets back from the water, which meant it was relatively quiet, with no jostling. There were a few other men there, though none that Calvin cared much about. Either he’d get to know them later or he wouldn’t. Right now all that mattered was Austin and his Mexican adventure.

  Austin was going on about how he owed it to help the governor return the slaves to their place before going on his expedition. “It won’t take long,” said Austin. “How far can a bunch of runaways get? We’ll probably find them crying on the north shore of Pontchartrain. Hang a few, whip a lot, and drag ’em on home. Then it’s on to Mexico.”

  Calvin only shook his head.

  Austin looked from him to Bowie. “I need fighters,” he said, “not advisers.”

  “I’d give him a listen, Steve,” said Bowie.

  “Colonel Adan’s little slave-catching venture is doomed,” said Calvin. “Don’t be with them when they go down in flames.”

  “Doomed? By what army?”

  In answer, Calvin simply softened the metal in their mugs until they collapsed, covering the table with ale and cold soft metal. With not a little of it flowing onto their laps.

  All the men sprang up from the table and began brushing ale off their laps. Calvin avoided smiling, even though they all looked like they’d peed in their trousers. He waited while Austin realized that the metal pools on the table were the former mugs.

  “What did you do?”

  “Not much,” said Calvin. “For a maker, anyway.”

  Austin squinted at him. “You telling me you’re a maker?”

  Another man muttered, “Ain’t no makers.”

  “And your ale is still in your cup,” said Calvin cheerfully. “I ain’t much of a maker. But my brother Alvin, he’s a first-rater.”

  “And he’s with them,” said Jim Bowie. “Tried to get him to join up with us, but he wouldn’t do it.”

  “When Colonel Adan’s army finds those runaways,” said Calvin, “if he finds them, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if all their weapons turn into pools of metal on the ground.”

  “Or plumb disappear,” said Bowie. “I seen him do it. Hard and heavy steel, and it was gone, like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  Austin moved to a dry table and called for more ale. Then paused a moment to inquire, “I trust we’ll be allowed to finish these drinks?”

  Calvin grinned.

  Soon they were all seated at the new table—except for a couple of Austin’s men who found urgent business to attend to in some place where somebody wasn’t melting metal cups just by thinking about it.

  “Mr. Austin, do you think I could be useful on your expedition to Mexico?” asked Calvin.

  “I do,” said Austin. “Boy, howdy.”

  “And I’ve got me a hankering to see what that tribe is like. My brother, see, he thinks he knows all about reds. But his reds is all peaceful like. I want to meet some of them Mexica, the ones who tear the beating heart out of their sacrifices.”

  “Will it satisfy you if you see some of them dead? ’Cause we ain’t going there to meet them, we’re going there to kill them.”

  “All of them?” said Calvin. “Oh my.”

  “Well, no,” said Austin. “But I reckon the common folk’ll be glad enough to be shut of these human-sacrificing heathens.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Calvin. “I’ll go with you to the end of your expedition, and help you all I can. Provided that you leave for Mexico by tomorrow morning.”

  Austin leaned back and laughed. “So you think you can come here and start dictating when we’ll leave.”

  “Not dictating a thing,” said Calvin. “Just telling you that any expedition to Mexico that sets out tomorrow, with all its men, I’ll join. And any that doesn’t, I won’t. You didn’t make your plans with me in mind, and you’re free to go on and carry them out without me.”

  “Why are you so all-fired eager to keep us from helping catch them runaways?”

  “Well, first, my brother’s with them, like I said. Since your men are probably the most dangerous in Barcy right now, I’m making my brother a little bit safer by keeping you all out of it.”

  “That’s what I figured,” said Austin. “So what’s to say that as soon as Colonel Adan is gone upriver, you won’t just disappear?”

  “Second reason is more important,” said Calvin. “If you go upriver with Colonel Adan, your men will get just as messed up as anybody else. My guess is that once Alvin’s through with them, you’ll never get them to invade their grandma’s privy, let alone Mexico.”

  “I don’t know if your brother’s all that dangerous.”

  Calvin got up, leaned over to their first table, and brought back a congealed swatch of metal that had once been a mug. “Can you just keep this in mind for a little while, so I don’t have to melt any more of them?”

  “All right,” said Austin, “of course he’s dangerous, and I’m obliged to you for warning us.”

  “And the third reason is, I don’t like sitting around waiting. If the expedition starts tomorrow, I’ll be with it. If it doesn’t, I’ll get bored and go off and find something entertaining to do.”

  Austin nodded. “Well, I’ll think about it.”

  “Good,” said Calvin.

  “But you still didn’t answer my question about how do we know you’ll actually be there tomorrow.”

  “I gave you my word,” said Calvin. “You can’t make me go if I don’t want to, but I tell you that I want to, and so I will. You get no better guarantee than that. You don’t have to trust me. You can do what you want.”

  �
��How do I know I won’t have nothing but trouble from you along the way, trying to run everything? The way you’re bossing me around now?”

  Calvin rose from his chair. “I can see, gentlemen, that some of you are more interested in being the big boss than in overcoming whatever powers these Mexica get from all the blood they spill. I apologize for wasting your time. I hear that the Mexica castrate the big boss before they cut out his heart. It’s an honor you’re welcome to.”

  He started for the door.

  Austin didn’t call him back. No one ran after him.

  Calvin didn’t hesitate. He just kept on walking. Out into the street. And still no one ran after him. Well, doggone it.

  No, there was somebody. Jim Bowie—Calvin recognized his heartfire. And he was stopping and throwing a—

  Calvin ducked down and to the left.

  A big heavy knife quivered from the wooden wall right where Calvin’s head used to be.

  Calvin leapt up, furious. In a moment, Jim Bowie was there, grinning. Calvin ripped out a long string of French profanities—eloquent enough that a couple of people nearby, who spoke French, looked at him with candid admiration.

  “What’s got your dander up, Mr. Maker?” said Jim Bowie. “Of course I aimed right at your head. Your brother would have made my knife vanish in midair.”

  “I have more respect for cutlery,” said Calvin. Though truth to tell, he could no more make a knife disappear in mid flight than he could stop the world from spinning. He could work with mugs because they mostly sat on the table, very very still.

  “The way I see it,” said Bowie, “you ain’t half the maker your brother is, but you want us to think that whatever he can do, you can do. And if that makes you mad to hear me say it, as it seems to be doing—”

  “I’m not mad,” said Calvin.

  “Glad to hear it,” said Bowie. “I’m laying it out the way I laid it out to Steve Austin. I wanted your brother because he would have guaranteed our success. He wouldn’t do it, and instead he got himself five thousand runaways to feed and no place to take them. Fine with me. But you, you want to come with us, and I think it’s because you want a chance to show off you’re just as good as your brother, only you’re not, and when that fact becomes plain and evident, I think a lot of good boys from this expedition are gonna be dead because they counted on you.”