THE CRYSTAL CITY Read online

  "You get mighty hungry, maybe, you," said La Tia.

  It took longer than Alvin expected. It seemed such a simple task, but the sun was well past noon when La Tia and Dead Mary reported that everyone was organized. They had their groups of ten, and then out of each five leaders, one was chosen to head a group of fifty, and out of every two leaders of fifty, one was designated the leader of a hundred.

  The way things worked out, that gave them ten leaders of a hundred households that sat down on the shore of Pontchartrain as the Council, to plan the trek with Alvin, La Tia, Dead Mary, and Arthur Stuart, who was finally awake. Rien, Mary's mother, was one of the leaders of a hundred-chosen by the people, to her surprise-and Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel weren't counted in anybody's group, since their household was so extravagantly large.

  People fancied titles, Alvin knew, so he designated the leaders of hundred as "colonels," the leaders of fifty as "majors," and the leaders of ten as "captains."

  "Reckon that makes you 'general,' " said Arthur Stuart.

  "It makes me 'Alvin,' " said Alvin. "You can be general."

  "I be general," said La Tia. "Not this boy. Who gonna follow this boy, him?"

  "You will," said Alvin, "when I leave."

  La Tia wanted to answer him sharply, but she held her tongue and listened while Alvin explained to the Council.

  "We got no place to go," said Alvin. "I can get us north into farm country, and we'll work out a way to get food without leaving any farmers' families to starve. But the longer we keep marching around the countryside, the bigger the armies they can raise up to destroy us. We've got to get out of slave-owning country, and there's only one way to do that."

  "By sea," said Dead Mary. "We need boats."

  "Boats do us no good without willing crews," said Alvin. "Anybody here know how to navigate?" No one did. "But that was a good idea, all the same," said Alvin. "And I appreciate you making suggestions. That goes for everybody. No such thing as an idea that shouldn't be suggested, at the right time and place."

  "Where we go, then?" asked La Tia.

  "Well, General La Tia," said Alvin-not smiling at the title, which made her preen just a little, "only one place we can go, where white men won't follow."

  "Don't take us to red land!" said Rien.

  "We can't stay there," said Alvin, "but maybe Tenskwa-Tawa will let us pass through. Maybe them red folks'll help us with food and shelter. But my point is, I know Tenskwa-Tawa, and so I'm the one that's got to go and talk to him and see whether we can use his land as our road north. Can't send nobody else. So you folks is gonna have to follow General La Tia."

  "But I don't know the way."

  "Go north for a while, and then find a road that leads west to the Mizzippy," said Alvin. "Be resourceful. What white folks along the way won't tell you, black folks will."

  "But what if an army comes?" said Dead Mary. "We got no fighters here, except maybe a few of the French men. We got no guns."

  "That's why General La Tia has to consult with Arthur Stuart here."

  "I don't got any guns," said Arthur.

  "But you know what to do with any guns that are raised against us," said Alvin. "Every plantation you come to, you got to be there, Arthur, to make sure no guns get fired. At night, you got to make sure there's fog keeping bad folks from finding us. You got to follow the heartfires to make sure no one strays."

  "No," said La Tia. "I can do that. I know how to do that, you can't lay so much on that boy, him."

  Arthur nodded gratefully. "Watching heartfires ain't as easy for me as for you, Alvin. And making fog-that's what Calvin done, not me."

  "But it's not hard," said Alvin. "I'll teach you today. And there's another thing. You're the only one speaks all the languages, Arthur. You got to make sure everybody's understanding everybody else."

  "Heck, Alvin, half the time I don't even understand you."

  Everybody laughed at that, but in truth they were all frightened-of the dangers on the road, but, even more, of their own inexperience. It wasn't the blind leading the blind, really. More like the clumsy leading the clumsy.

  "And one more thing," said Alvin. "There's gonna be lots of complaining. That's fine, you just keep your patience, you leaders-all of you, make sure they know. Listen to everything, don't get angry. But if somebody raises a hand of violence against a leader-you can't stand for that. You understand me? Person raises a hand against a leader, he's out of the company. He's not one of us any more. Because we can't be afraid of our own people. We have to know we can trust everybody to be gentle with each other."

  "How we gonna throw out this angry hitting man?" said La Tia. "Who gonna do that?"

  "The general will ask some strong men to put the offender out of the camp," said Alvin. "And then Arthur will see to it he doesn't find his way back."

  "What if he got family, him?"

  Alvin sighed. "General La Tia, you'll always find a good reason not to punish a man. But sometimes you got to punish a man to save a dozen other men from needing punishment. And sometimes you have to have a hard heart to do what needs doing."

  Arthur snorted softly.

  "Arthur knows," said Alvin. "But when I'm not here, it's not my job. The decisions are yours. You make them, you make them stick, or you don't, and then you live with the consequences. Either way, you live with them."

  "That why you going?" asked La Tia.

  "That's right," said Alvin. "Just when things get hard, I leave."

  He stared her down. When she looked away, it occurred to him that maybe that didn't happen to her very often. Giving way like that.

  "When you leaving?" asked one of the colonels.

  "Not till we've had our first meal," said Alvin. "Not till we're all bedded down for the night. Inland. Dry and away from these skeeters."

  Margaret walked up the stairs into the attic room where she had slept as a child. It was a storeroom now. Father kept a room on the main floor for her, when she visited. She had tried to get him to rent it out like any other room in the roadhouse, but he wouldn't do it. "If other people pay to sleep in it," he said, "it ain't your room."

  It was the room where Alvin had been born twenty-five years ago. Father probably didn't remember that. But every time she walked into that room on the main floor, she saw that scene. Alvin's mother lying on the bed, in desperate pain but even more desperate grief, for her firstborn son, Vigor, had been swept away by the Hatrack River scarcely an hour before.

  Peggy-"Little Peggy" then, since her mother was alive, and doing the midwifery-had a job to do. She rushed to the woman lying on the bed and laid hands on her womb. She saw so many things in that moment. How the child was lying in the womb. How the mother was clamped down and couldn't open up to let the child out. Her mother had done a spell with a ring of keys then, and the womb opened, and out came the baby.

  She had never seen a baby whose heartfire told such a dire story. The brightest heartfire she had ever seen-but when she cast her eyes into the paths of his future, there were none at all. No paths. No future. This child was going to die, and before he ever made a single choice.

  Except... there was one thing she could do. One tiny dim pathway leading out of all the dark futures, but that one opened out into hundreds, into thousands of glorious futures. And in that one narrow gate, the one that led to everything for this child, she saw herself, Little Peggy Guester, five years old, reach out and take a caul of flesh from the baby's face. So she did it, and all the deaths fell away, and all the lives became possible.

  I gave him life. In that room.

  But just the once. She took the caul and saved it, and later brought it up here into the attic, to her room, and hid it in a box. And as the baby grew up into a little boy, and then a bigger boy, she used tiny pinches of the caul to access his own knack, which he was too young and inexperienced to understand.

  Not that Peggy knew much better. She learned as she went. Learned to do her work of saving his life. For when she removed the caul
from his face, thousands of bright futures opened up for him. But on every one of those paths, he died young. And each time she saved him from one of those deaths, another death opened up for him farther down the road.

  Alvin the miller's son had an enemy.

  But he also had a friend who watched over him. And gradually, as more and more paths showed him reaching adulthood, she began to see something else. A prim and austere woman, a schoolteacher, who loved him and married him and kept him safe.

  There in that attic room, holding one of the last shreds of the caul in her hand, she realized that the prim, austere schoolteacher was herself.

  I do love him, she thought. And I'm his wife. I have his baby inside me.

  But I can't keep him safe.

  In fact, I harm him as much as anyone now. I have no more of his caul. And it wouldn't matter if I did. He deeply understands his knack. He knows more about the way the whole universe works than I ever will; even when I look inside him, I can't understand what and how he sees.

  So instead of watching over him, I use him. I found my own purpose in life, to fight slavery but also prevent the terrible war that I see in everyone's heartfire. I have gone everywhere and done everything, while he floundered, unsure of what he ought to do.

  And why was he unsure?

  Because I have never told him.

  I know the great work he is supposed to do. But I can't tell him, because once he sets his foot on that road, there is no saving him. He will die, and die brutally, at the hands of men who hate him, betrayed by some that he loved. A bitter, sad death, with his great work unfinished. And without her even there beside him. In some paths he is alone; in others, he has friends with him. Some of those friends die, some live. But none can save him. In fact, it's his death that saves them.

  But why? Why should he die? This is a man who could stop bullets by melting them in the air. He could simply walk through a wall and leave the room where they corner him. He could drop them all through the floor. He could blind them all, or fill them with unreasoning panic to make them run away.

  And yet on every path, he does none of those things. He accepts the death they bring him. And I can't bear it. How could Alvin, so full of life and joy, ever choose to embrace death when he always has it in his power to live?

  She knelt in the little attic window where, as a five-year old, she had stood to watch Alvin's family ride away into the west, to the place where they built a mill that became the foundation of the town of Vigor Church. And she realized: If Alvin wishes he could die, I can't pretend that it has nothing to do with me.

  A man with a wife and children doesn't want to die. Not if he loves them, and they love him. Not if he has hope for the future. If I just love him enough, I could save him. I've always known that.

  Yet what have I done? I sent him to Nueva Barcelona. Knowing that if he went, he would indirectly cause the deaths of hundreds of people. Save thousands, yes, but hundreds would still be felled, and it won't help that it was my responsibility. In fact, it will hurt. Because he'll cease to trust me. He'll think I love something else more than him. That I will expend his trust in a greater cause.

  But it isn't true, Alvin. I love you more than anything.

  I just didn't love you the way you wanted to be loved. I loved you like that little five-year-old girl, keeping you safe. Helping turn you away from terrible futures. Giving you the freedom to make all the good choices you've made as a grown man.

  And then taking away your freedom by not telling you all that I knew about the consequences of your actions. She could hear him telling her: A man isn't free if he doesn't know all that could be known about his choice.

  But if I told you, Alvin, you wouldn't have done the things that had to be done. You would have tried to intervene and save everybody. And I saw those paths. It wouldn't have worked. You would have failed, and quite probably would have died right then, with your great work undone.

  Instead you've turned it into something wonderful. I didn't see these paths. When you use your power you always open doors into the future that didn't exist before. So I didn't see that bridge you made across the water, I didn't see these five thousand heartfires you brought with you out of the city and into the wilderness. So it worked out well, don't you see?

  Except that he'll say, "If my power opens doors to paths you didn't see, why didn't you trust me to find my own way in Barcy?"

  Or maybe he won't say it. There are paths where he doesn't say that.

  She reached down and laid her hands on her own belly, above the womb where her baby's heart was beating. A healthy baby, with a heartfire as bright and strong as she could have reasonably hoped for.

  But nothing like Alvin's heartfire had been. An ordinary child.

  Which is all she could have hoped for. An ordinary child- talented in this, having a knack with that, but all within the realms of the expected. This little boy will have no enemy pursuing him every day of his life. And instead of watching him every waking minute as I watched Alvin for so many years, I can be a natural mother to him. And to his brothers and sisters, God willing.

  God and Alvin willing, that is. Because he may never come to me again. When he knows how I used him, how I deceived him, what I caused him, unknowingly, to do. How I did not trust him to make his own choices.

  She sat down with her back to the window and cried softly into her apron.

  And as she wept, she wondered: Did my mother weep like this, when my two older sisters died, each one just a baby? No, I know what those tears are like. Even though my first baby didn't live long enough for me to get to know him, I laid that little body in the ground and I know at least something of what she went through, laying her babies in their graves.

  Nor do I weep the way my mother would have wept, if she had known about my father and his love for Mistress Modesty. I kept that secret from her because I saw the terrible consequences of her learning the truth, how it would destroy them both.

  No, the way I weep now is the way my father would have wept, if he had known that his betrayal of my mother was sure to be discovered, and he could do nothing to prevent it. My sin was not adultery, to be sure. I've been faithful to Alvin that way. But it was a betrayal nonetheless, a violation of the deep trust between a man and the woman he has taken to be half his soul, and to be half of hers.

  Bitter tears of anticipated shame.

  And with that thought, the tears dried up. I weep for myself. It's myself I'm pitying here.

  Well, I won't do it. I'll bear the consequences of what I did. And I'll try to make the best of what is left between us. And maybe this baby will heal us.

  Maybe.

  She hated all the maybes. For on this matter, as so many others, the fog that blocked so many of Alvin's futures from her view obscured what would happen. She could know exactly what would happen in the whole life of some shepherd she passed in her carriage, but her husband, the person whose future mattered most to her, remained so dangerously exposed and yet tantalizingly hidden.

  All her hopes were in the hidden parts of his heartfire. Because the paths that were not hidden gave her no cause for hope. There'd be no happiness for her on any of those roads. Because a life without Alvin in it held no hope of joy for her.

  Calvin stood on the dock and watched the riverboats pull out, one by one. Colonel Adan had done his planning well. The steamboats pulled out on schedule, and there was no danger of collision.

  Unfortunately, there were also men determined to get out of this city whether they were part of the official expedition or not. So in the midst of the attempt to order the steamboats into a convoy for the passage upstream, two big rowboats swung out into the river, with six men pulling at the oars of each and another dozen or so under arms, many of them foolishly standing up and huzzahing their own bravado.

  Calvin laughed aloud to see them. What fools. So eager for death, and so sure to find it.

  Sooner, in fact, than Calvin himself anticipated. Though in retrospect, it se
emed almost inevitable. Too much order always seemed to bore God or Fate or Providence or whoever decided such things. There was always a little chaos just to liven things up.

  Sure enough, one of the rowboats, with its pilot yelling for a steamboat to get out of the way, tried to insert itself between the big riverboats. But steamboats don't stop quickly, and half-drunken rowers don't maneuver well when they try to cross the wake of a steamboat. The captain of the steamboat saw the danger, and some of the Spanish soldiers on board fired at the rowers.

  That provoked the armed men in the other rowboat to stand up and fire a volley at the Spanish soldiers. Not a shot hit home, for the obvious reason that so many muskets firing in the same direction at once had such a recoil that the boat rocked over and capsized. Some of the men came up sputtering. Some came up screaming. Some didn't come up-apparently unable to remove their boots in the water or get rid of all the lead balls they carried in their ammunition pouches.

  How short life is for fools, thought Calvin. They go out on the water with no thought about how to get ashore if the boat should fail them.

  Meanwhile, panicked at the warning shots the Spanish had fired, and some of them thinking that a Spanish cannonball had sunk the other rowboat, the rowers on the first boat tried to change direction. Trouble was, they hadn't agreed on which direction to change to, and so the oars interfered with each other and the rowboat was swept by the current right back into the bows of the big riverboat.

  The collision broke half the oars and turned some of them into spears that pierced the bodies of their erstwhile masters. Some of the men jumped into the water; those that didn't were borne under when the steamboat pushed the rowboat over.

  It was bedlam on the docks, with some people trying to help the swimmers ashore, and a couple even diving in to help save some of the drowning men. Smaller rowboats quickly put out to help with the rescue. But most of the people were laughing and hooting and catcalling, having a grand old time at the expense of those fools. And while he didn't do any of the catcalling, Calvin had to admit he was one of the laughers.