Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II Page 15

  It took a few seconds even at that for them to be afraid. There was a lot of Reds in Prophetstown, and they came pretty regular to trade at Armor-of-God’s store. So Alvin spoke before he even hardly looked at them. “Howdy,” said Alvin.

  They didn’t howdy him back. They had paint all over their faces.

  “These ain’t no howdy Reds,” said Measure softly. “They got muskets.”

  That made it sure these weren’t no Prophetsotwn Reds. The Prophet taught his followers never to use White man’s weapons. A true Red didn’t need to hunt with a gun, because the land knew his need, and the game would come near enough to kill with a bow. Only reason for a Red to have a gun, said the Prophet, was to be a murderer, and murdering was for White men. That’s what he said. So it was plain these weren’t Reds that put much store in the Prophet.

  Alvin was looking one right in the face. Al must’ve showed his fear, cause the Red got a glint in his eye and smiled a little. The Red reached out his hand.

  “Give him the rope,” said Measure.

  “It’s our rope,” said Al. As soon as he said it he knew it didn’t make no sense. Al handed both ropes to him.

  The Red took the coils, gentle as you please. Then he tossed one over the White boys’ heads, to another Red, and the whole bunch of them set to work, stripping off the boys’ outer clothes and then tying their arms behind them so tight it was pulling on their shoulder joints something painful.

  “Why do they want our clothes?” Al asked.

  In answer, one of the Reds slapped him hard across the face. He must’ve liked the sound it made, because he slapped him again. The sting of it brought tears to Al’s eyes, but he didn’t cry out, partly cause he was so surprised, partly cause it made him mad and he didn’t want to give them no satisfaction. Slapping was an idea that caught on real good with the other Reds, cause they started in slapping Measure, too, both of the boys, again and again, till they were half-dazed and their cheeks were bleeding inside and out.

  One Red babbled something, and they gave him Al’s shirt. He slashed at it with his knife, and then rubbed it on Al’s bleeding face. Must not have got enough blood on it, because he took his knife and slashed right across Al’s forehead. The blood just gushed out, and a second later the pain hit Al and for the first time ht did cry out. It felt like he’d been laid open right to the bone, and the blood was running down in his eyes so he couldn’t see. Measure yelled for them to leave Al alone, but there wasn’t no chance of that. Everybody knew that once a Red started in to cutting on you, you were bound to end up dead.

  Minute, Al cried out and the blood started coming, them Reds started laughing and making little hooting sounds. This bunch was out for real trouble, and Al thought back to all the stories he heard. Most famous one was probably about Dan Boone, a Pennsylvania man who tried to settle in the Crown Colonies for a while. That was back when the Cherriky were against the White man, and one day Dan Boone’s boy got kidnapped. Boone wasn’t a half hour behind them Reds. It was like they were playing with him. They’d stop and cut off parts of the boy’s skin, or poke out an eye, something to cause bad pain and make him scream. Boone heard his boy screaming, and followed, him and his neighbors, armed with their muskets and half-mad with rage. They’d reach the place where the boy’d been tortured, and the Reds were gone, not a trace of a track in the wood, and then there’d come another scream. Twenty miles they went that day, and finally at nightfall they found the boy hanging from three different trees. They say Boone never forgot that, he could never look a Red in the eye after that without thinking on that twenty-mile day.

  Al had that twenty-mile day on his mind now, too, hearing them Reds laugh, feeling the pain, just the start of the pain, knowing that whatever these Reds were after, they wanted it to start with two dead White boys, and they wouldn’t mind a little noise along the way. Keep still, he told himself. Keep still.

  They rubbed his slashed-up shirt on his face, and Measure’s hacked up clothes, too. While they were doing that, Al kept his mind on other things. Only time he ever tried to heal himself was that busted leg of his, and then he was lying down, resting, plenty of time to study it out, to find his way to all those small places where there was broken veins and heal them up, knit together the skin and bone. This time he was a-scared and getting pushed this way and that, not calm, not resting. But he still managed to find the biggest veins and arteries, make them close up. Last time they wiped his face on a shirt, his forehead didn’t gush blood down to cover his eyes again. It was still bleeding, but just a trickle now, and Al tipped his head up so the blood would ooze on down his temples, and leave his eyes clear to see.

  They hadn’t cut Measure yet. He was looking at Al, and there was a sick look on Measure’s face. Al knew his brother well enough to guess what he was thinking, about how Ma and Pa trusted Al into Measure’s keeping, and now look how he let them down. That was crazy, to blame himself. They could’ve done what they were doing now at any cabin or house in the whole countryside, and weren’t nobody could stop them. If Al and Measure hadn’t been going off on a long trip, they might still have been on this very road at this very time anyhow. But Al couldn’t say nothing like that to Measure, couldn’t do much except to smile.

  Smile and, as best he could, work on healing up his own wound. Making everything in his forehead go back to the way it was supposed to be. He kept at it, finding it easier and easier to do, while he watched what the Reds were doing.

  They didn’t talk much. They pretty much knew what to do. They got the blood-smeared clothes and tied them to the saddles. Then with a knife one of them carved the English letters for “Ta-Kumsaw” in one of the saddle seats, and “Prophet” in the other. For a second Al was surprised that he could write English, but then he saw him checking how he made the letters, comparing them to a paper he had folded up in the waistband of his loincloth. A paper.

  Then, while two of them held each horse by the bridle, another Red jabbed the horse’s flanks with a knife, little cuts, not all that deep, but enough to make them crazy with pain, kicking out, bucking, rearing up. The horses knocked down the Reds holding them and took off, ran away, heading—as the Reds knowed they would—on up the road toward home.

  A message, that’s what it was. These Reds wanted to be followed. They wanted a whole bunch of White folks to get their muskets and horses and follow. Like Daniel Boone in the story. Follow the sound of screaming. Go crazy from the sound of their children dying.

  Well Alvin decided then and there that, live or die, he and Measure wouldn’t let Reds make his parents hear what Daniel Boone heard. There wasn’t a chance in the world of them getting away. Even if Al made the rope come apart—which he could do easy enough—there wasn’t no way two White boys could outrun Reds in the forest. No, these Reds had them as long as they wanted. But Al knew ways to keep them from doing things to them. And it would be all right to do it, too, to use his knack, because it wouldn’t just be for himself. It would be for his brother, and for his family, and in a funny way he knew it would be for the Reds, too, because if there was something real, if some White boys really did get tortured to death, then there’d be a war, there’d be a real knockdown-drag-out fight between Reds and Whites, and a lot of people on both sides would die. As long as he didn’t kill anybody, then, it would be all right for Al to use his knack.

  With the horses gone, the Reds tied thongs around Al’s and Measure’s necks. Then they pulled on the thongs to drag them along. Measure was a big man, taller than any of the Reds, so as they led him they made him bend over. It was hard for him to run, and the thong was real tight on him. Al was getting pulled along behind him, so he could see how Measure was being treated, could hear him choking a little. It was a simple thing for Al, though, to get inside that thong and stretch it out, stretch it and stretch it, so it was loose around Measure’s neck, and long enough that Measure could run pretty much upright. It happened slow enough that the Reds didn’t really notice it. But Al knew that they’d
notice what he was doing soon enough.

  Everybody knew that Reds didn’t leave footprints. And when Reds took White captives, they usually carried them, slung by their arms and legs like dressed-out deer, so the clumsy White folks wouldn’t leave no tracks. These Reds meant to be followed, then, cause they were letting Al and Measure leave tracks and traces every step they took.

  But they didn’t mean it to be too easy to find them. After they’d gone forever, it felt like—a couple of hours at least—they came to a brook and walked on upstream a ways, and then ran on another half mile or maybe a mile before they finally stopped in a clearing and built a fire.

  No farms close by, but that didn’t mean much. By now the horses were home with the bloody clothing and the wounds in the horses’ flanks and those names carved into the saddles. By now every White man in the whole area was bringing his family in to Vigor Church, where a few men could protect them while the rest went out searching for the missing boys. By now Ma was pale with terror, Pa raging for the other men to hurry, hurry, not a minute to waste, got to find the boys, if you don’t come now I’ll go on alone! And the others saying, Calm down, calm down, can’t do no good by yourself, we’ll catch them, you bet. Nobody admitting what they all knew—that Al and Measure were as good as dead.

  But Al didn’t plan to be dead. No sir. He planned to be absolutely alive, him and Measure both.

  The Reds built up the fire good and hot, and it sure wasn’t no cook fire. Since the sun was shining bright and hard already, it made Al and Measure sweat something awful, even in their short summer underwear. They sweated even more when the Reds cut even that much off them, popping off the buttons down the front and slicing it right down the back, so they were naked right down to the ground they sat on.

  It was about then that one of the Reds noticed Al’s forehead. He took a big hank of underwear cloth and wiped at Al’s face, rubbing pretty hard to get the dried blood off. Then he started jabbering at the others. They all gathered around to see. Then they checked Measure’s forehead, too. Well, Al knew what they were looking for. And he knew they wouldn’t find it. Cause he had healed up his own forehead without a scar, not a mark on his own face. And of course no mark on Measure, either, since he wasn’t cut. That’d make them think a little.

  But it wasn’t healing that Al was depending on to save them. It was too hard, too slow—they could sure cut faster than Al could heal, and that was the truth. It was a lot faster for him to use that knack he had on things like stone and metal, which was all the same straight through; living flesh, on the other hand, was complicated with all kinds of little stuff that he had to get right in his head before he could change it and make it whole.

  So when one of the Reds sat down in front of Measure, brandishing a knife, Al didn’t wait for him to start cutting. He got that knife into his head, the steel of the blade—White man’s knife, just like they were carrying White man’s muskets. He found the edge of it, the point, and flattened it out, smoothed it, rounded it.

  The Red laid that knife up against Measure’s bare chest and tried to cut. Measure braced himself for the pain to start. But that knife made no more mark on Measure than if it was a spoon.

  Al almost laughed to see that Red pull his knife away and look at it, try to see what was wrong. He ran the edge against his own finger, to test it; Al thought of making the blade razor sharp right then, but no, no, the rule was to use his knack to make things right, not to cause injury. The others gathered round to look at the knife. Some of them mocked the knife’s owner, probably thinking he hadn’t kept the edge sharp. But Al spent that time finding all the other steel edges that those Red men had and making them round and smooth. They couldn’t’ve cut a pea pod in half with them knives when Al was through.

  Sure enough, all the others pulled out their knives to try them, running the edges against Al or Measure first, and finally yelling and shouting and accusing each other, quarreling over whose fault it was, probably.

  But they had a job to do, didn’t they? They were supposed to torture these White boys and make them scream, or at least hack them up bad enough that when their folks found the bodies they’d thirst for revenge.

  So one of the Reds took his old-fashioned stone-edged tommy-hawk and brandished it in front of Al’s face, waving it around so he’d get good and scared. Al used the time to soften up the stone, weaken the wood, loosen the thongs that held it all together. By the time the Red got to lifting it up ready to do some real business, like smashing Al in the face with it, it crumbled apart in his hand. The wood was rotted clear through, the stone fell to the ground as gravel, and even the thong was split and frayed through. That Red man shouted and jumped back like as if he had a rattler a-biting at him.

  Another one had a steel-blade hatchet, and he didn’t waste no time waving it around, he just laid out Measure’s hand on a rock and whacked it down, meaning to cut Measure’s fingers off. This was easy stuff to Al, though. Hadn’t he cut whole millstones, when the need was? So the hatchet struck and rang on the stone, and Measure gasped at the sight of it, sure it’d take his fingers clean off; but when the Red picked up the hatchet, there was Measure’s hand just like before, not marked a bit, while the hatchet had finger-shaped depressions in the blade, like it was made of cool butter or wet cake-soap.

  Them Reds, they howled, they looked at each other with fear in their eyes, fear and anger at the strange things going on. Alvin couldn’t know it, being White, but the thing that made this worst of all for them was they couldn’t feel it like they felt a White man’s spells or charms or doodles. A White man put a hex, they felt it like a bump in their land-sense; a beseeching was a nasty stink; a warding was a buzz when they came close. But this that Alvin did, it didn’t interrupt the land at all, their sense of how things ought to be didn’t show them nothing different going on. It was like all the natural laws had changed on them, and suddenly steel was soft and flesh was hard, rock was brittle and leather weak as grass. They didn’t look to Al or Measure as the cause of what was going on. It was some natural force doing it, as best they could figure.

  All that Alvin saw was their fear and anger and confusion, which pleased him well enough. He wasn’t cocky, though. He knew there was some things he didn’t know how to handle. Water was the main one; if they took it in their heads to drown the boys, Al wouldn’t know how to stop them, or save himself or Measure. He was only ten, and being bound by rules he didn’t understand, he hadn’t figured out what-all his knack was good for, or how it worked. Maybe there was things within his power that could be right spetackler, if he only knowed how, but the point was he didn’t know, and so he only did the things that were within his reach.

  This much was on his side—they didn’t think of drowning. But they thought of fire. Most likely they were planning that from the start—folks told tales of finding torture victims in the Red wars back in New England, their blackened feet in the cooling ashes of a fire, where they had to watch their own toes char until the pain and bleeding and madness of it killed them. Alvin saw them stoking up the fire, putting hot-burning branches on it to make it flare. He didn’t know how to take the heat out of a fire, he’d never tried. So he thought as fast as he could, and while they were picking Measure up by his armpits and dragging him to the fire, Al got inside the firewood and broke it up, made it crumble into dust, so it burnt up fast, all at once, in a fire so fast it made a loud clap and a puff of bright hot light shot upward. It rose so fast that it made a wind blow in from all directions onto the place where the fire had been, and it made a whirlwind for a second or two, whipping around, sucking up the ashes and then puffing them out to drift down like dust.

  Just like that, nothing left of the fire at all except dust settling fine as mist all over the clearing.

  Oh, they howled, they jumped and danced and beat on their own shoulders and chests. And while they were carrying on like an Irish funeral, Al loosened the ropes on him and Measure, hoping against hope that they might even get away
after all before their folks and neighbors found them and started in with shooting and killing and dying.

  Measure felt the ropes loosening, of course, and looked sharp at Alvin; up to then he’d been almost as crazy with what was happening as the Reds. Of course, he knew right off that it was Alvin doing it, but it wasn’t as if Alvin could explain what he was planning—it took Measure by surprise same as the others. Now, though, he looked at Alvin and nodded, starting to twist his arms out of the ropes. None of the Reds had noticed so far, and maybe they could get a running start, or maybe—just maybe—the Reds were so upset they wouldn’t even try to follow.

  Right then, though, everything changed. There was a hooting sound from the forest, and then it got picked up by what sounded like three hundred owls, all in a circle. Measure must have thought for a second that Al was causing that to happen, too, the way he looked at his little brother—but the Reds knew what it was, and stopped their carrying on right away. From the fear on their faces, though, Al figured it must be something good, maybe even something like rescue.

  From the forest all around the clearing there stepped out dozens, then a hundred Reds. These were all carrying bows—not a musket among them—and the way they dressed and had their hair, Al reckoned them to be Shaw-Nee, and followers of the Prophet. It was about the last thing Al expected, truth to tell. It was White faces he wanted to see, not more Red ones.

  One Red stepped out of the mass of the newcomers, a tall strong man with a face as hard and sharp as stone, it looked like. He fired off a couple of harsh-sounding words, and immediately their captors began babbling, jabbering, pleading. It was like a bunch of children, Al thought, doing something they knew they shouldn’t ought to, and then their pa comes along and catches them at it. Having been caught in such mischief himself sometimes, he almost felt a little sympathy, till he remembered that what his captors had had in mind was cruel death for him and his brother. Just because they ended up without a scratch didn’t mean them Reds weren’t guilty of the bad intent.