Alvin Jorneyman ttoam-4 Read online

  When Little Napoleon was gone, Bonaparte resumed dictating, but now his delivery was not rapid and biting. Rather he halted, corrected himself now and then, and sometimes lapsed into silence for a time, as the secretary sat with pen poised. At such moments Calvin would cause the ink on the quill to flow to the tip and drop off suddenly onto the paper– ah, the flurry of bloitting! And of course this only served to distract the Emperor all the more.

  There remained, however, the matter of legs. Calvin explored each secretary in turn, finding other nerves to pinch, ever so slightly. He left the nerves of movement alone now; it was the nerves of pain that he was finding now, charting his progress by the widened eyes, flushed faces, and occasional gasps of the unfortunate secretaries. Bonaparte was not unaware of their discomfort– it distracted him all the more. Finally, when a man gasped at a particularly sharp pinch– Calvin's touch was not always precise with such slender things as nerves– Bonaparte turned himself in his chair, wincing at the pain in his own leg, and said, as best Calvin could understand his French, “Do you mock me with these pains and moans? I sit here in agony, making no sound, while you, with no more pain than that of sitting too long to take letters, moan and gasp and wince and sigh until I can only imagine I am trapped with a choir of hyenas!”

  At that moment Calvin finally got it right, giving just the right amount of pressure to a secretary's pain nerve that all feeling vanished, and instead of the man wincing, his face relaxed in relief. That's it, thought Calvin. That's how it's done.

  He almost sent his bug right into Bonaparte's leg to do that same little twist and make the Emperor's pain go away. Fortunately he was distracted by the opening of the door. It was a scullery maid with a bucket and rags to clean up the ink from the marble floor. Bonaparte glared at her, and she almost dropped her things and fled, except that he at once softened his expression, “My rage is at my pain, girl,” he said to her. “Come in and do your work, no one minds.”

  With that she gathered her courage, scurried to the drying ink, set down the bucket with a clank and a slosh, and set to work scrubbing.

  By now Calvin had come to his senses. What good would it do to take away Bonaparte's pain if the Emperor didn't know that it was Calvin doing it? Instead he practiced the soothing twist of the nerves on all the secretaries, to their undoubted relief, and as he did he began to sense a sort of current, a humming, a vibration on the nerves that were actually carrying pain at the instant he twisted them, so that he could get even more precise, taking away not all the feeling in a leg, but just the pain itself. Finally he got to the scullery maid, to the pain she always felt in her knees as she knelt on hard cold floors to do her, work. So sudden was the relief, and so sharp and constant had been the pain, that she cried aloud, and again Bonaparte glared at the interruption.

  “Oh sir,” she said, “forgive me, but I suddenly felt no pain in my knees.”

  “Lucky you,” said Bonaparte. “Along with this miracle, do you also find that you see no ink on the floor?”

  She looked down. “Sir, with all my scrubbing, I can't get up the whole stain. I'm afraid it's gone down into the stone, sir.”

  Calvin at once sent his doodling bug into the surface of the marble and discovered that the ink had, indeed, penetrated beyond the reach of her scrubbing. Now was the chance to have Bonaparte notice him, not as a prisoner– even his guards were gone– but as a man of power. “Perhaps I can help,” he said.

  Bonaparte looked at him as if seeing him for the first time, though Calvin was quite aware that the Emperor had sized him up several times over the past half-hour. Bonaparte spoke to him in accented English. “Was it for scullery work you came to Paris, my dear American friend?”

  “I came to serve you, sir,” said Calvin. “Whether with a stained floor or a pained leg, I care not.”

  “Let's see you with floors first,” said Bonaparte. “Give him the rags and bucket, girl.”

  “I don't need them,” said Calvin. “I've already done it. Have her scrub again, and this time the stain will come right up.”

  Bonaparte glowered at the idea of serving as interpreter for an American prisoner and a scullery maid, but his curiosity got the better of his dignity and he gave the girl the order to scrub again. This time the ink came right up, and the stone was clean again. It had been child's play for Calvin, but the awe in the girl's face was the best possible advertisement for his wondrous power. “Sir,” she said, “I had only to pass the rag over the stain and it was gone!”

  The secretaries were eyeing Calvin carefully now– they weren't fools, and they clearly suspected him of causing both their discomfort and their relief, though some of them were pinching the legs to try to restore feeling after Calvin's first, clumsier attempts at numbing pain. Now Calvin went back into their legs, restored feeling, and then gave the more delicate twist that removed pain. They watched him warily, as Bonaparte looked back and forth between his clerks and his prisoner.

  “I see you have been busy playing little jokes on my secretaries.”

  Without an answer, Calvin reached into the Emperor's leg and, for just a moment, removed all pain. But only for a moment; he soon let it come back.

  Bonaparte's face darkened. “What kind of man are you, to take away my pain for a moment and then send it back to me?”

  “Forgive me, sir,” said Calvin. “It's easy to cure the pain I caused myself, in your men. Or even the pain from hours of kneeling, scrubbing floors. But the gout– that's hard, sir, and I know of no cure, nor of any relief that lasts more than a little while.”

  “Longer than five seconds, though– I'll wager you know how to do that.”

  “I can try.”

  “You're the clever one,” said Bonaparte. “But I know a lie. You can take away the pain and yet you choose not to. How dare you hold me hostage to my pain?”

  Calvin answered in mild tones, though he knew he took his life in his hands to say such a bold thing in any tone: “Sir, you have held my whole body prisoner this whole time, when I was free before. I come here and find you already a prisoner of pain, and you complain to me that I do not set you free?”

  The secretaries gasped again, but not in pain this time. Even the scullery maid was shocked– so much so that she knocked her bucket over, spilling soapy, inky water over half the floor.

  Calvin quickly made the water evaporate from the floor, then made the residue of ink turn to fine, invisible dust.

  The scullery maid went screaming from the room.

  The secretaries, too, were on their feet. Bonaparte turned to them. “If I hear any rumor of this, you will all go to the Bastille. Find the girl and silence her– by persuasion or imprisonment, she deserves no torture. Now leave me alone with this extortionist, while I find out what he wants to get from me.”

  They left the room. As they were going, Little Napoleon and the guards returned, but Bonaparte sent them away as well, to his nephew's ill-concealed fury.

  “All right, we're alone,” said Bonaparte. “What do you want?”

  “I want to heal your pain.”

  “Then heal it and have done.”

  Calvin took the challenge, twisted the nerves just right, and saw Bonaparte's face soften, losing the perpetual wince. “Such a gift as that,” murmured the Emperor, “and you spend it cleaning floors and taking stones from prison walls.”

  “It won't last,” said Calvin.

  “You mean you choose not to make it last,” said Bonaparte.

  Calvin took the unusual step of telling the plain truth, sensing that Bonaparte would know if anything he said was a lie. “It's not a cure. The gout is still there. I don't understand the gout and I can't cure it. I can take away the pain.”

  “But not for long.”

  Truthfully, Calvin answered, “I don't know how long.”

  “And for what payment?” asked Bonaparte. “Come on, boy, I know you want something. Everyone does.”

  “But you're Napoleon Bonaparte,” said Calvin. “I thought
you knew what every man wanted.”

  “God doesn't whisper it in my ear, if that's what you think. And yes, I know what you want but I have no idea why you've come to me for it. You're hungry to be the greatestman on Earth. I've met men with ambition like yours before– and women, too. Unfortunately I can't easily bend such ambition into subservience to my interests. Generally I have to kill them, because they're a danger to me.”

  Those words went like a knife through Calvin's heart.

  “But you're different,” said Bonaparte. “You mean me no harm. In fact, I'm just a tool to you. A means of gaining advantage. You don't want my kingdom. I rule all of Europe, northern Africa, and much of the ancient East, and yet you want me only to tutor you in preparation for a much greater game. What game, on God's green Earth, might that be?”

  Calvin never meant to tell him, but the words came blurting out. “I have a brother, an older brother, who has a thousand times my power.” The words galled him, burned his throat as he said them.

  “And a thousand times your virtue, too, I think,” said Bonaparte. But those words had no sting for Calvin. Virtue, as Alvin defined it, was waste and weakness. Calvin was proud to have little of it.

  “Why hasn't your brother challenged me?” asked Bonaparte. “Why hasn't he shown his face to me in all these years?”

  “He's not ambitious,” said Calvin.

  “That is a lie,” said Bonaparte, “even though in your ignorance you believe it. There is no such thing as a living human being without ambition. St. Paul said it best: Faith, ambition, and love, the three driving forces of human life.”

  “I believe it was hope,” said Calvin. “Hope and charity.”

  “Hope is the sweet weak sister of ambition. Hope is ambition wishing to be liked.”

  Calvin smiled. “That's what I've come for,” he said.

  “Not to heal my gout.”

  “To ease your pain, as you ease my ignorance.”

  “With powers like yours, what do you need with my small world-conquering gifts?” Bonaparte's irony was plain and painful.

  “My powers are nothing compared to my brother's, and he is the only teacher I can learn them from. So I need other powers that he doesn't have.”

  “Mine.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how do I know that you won't turn on me and try to take my empire?”

  “If I wanted it I could have it now,” said Calvin.

  “It's one thing to terrify people with displays of power,” said Bonaparte. “But terror only gets you obedience when you're there. I have the power to hold men obedient to me even when my back is turned, even when there's no chance I'd ever catch them in wrongdoing. They love me, they serve me with their whole hearts. Even if you sent every building in Paris crashing to the street, it wouldn't win the people's loyalty.”

  “That's why I'm here, because I know that.”

  “Because you want to win the loyalty of your brother's friends,” said Bonaparte. “You want them to spurn your brother and put you in his place.”

  “Call me Cain if you want, but yes,” said Calvin. “Yes.”

  “I can teach you that,” said Bonaparte. “But no pain. And no little games with the pain, either. If the pain comes back, I'll have you killed.”

  “You can't even hold me in a prison if I don't want to stay there.”

  “When I decide to kill you, boy, you won't even see it coming.”

  Calvin believed him.

  “Tell me, boy–”

  “Calvin.”

  “Boy, don't interrupt me, don't correct me.” Bonaparte smiled sweetly. “Tell me, Calvin, weren't you afraid that I would win your loyalty and put your gifts to use in my service?”

  “As you said,” Calvin answered, “your powers have scant effect on people with ambition as great as your own. It's only really the goodness in people that you turn against them to control them. Their generosity. Isn't that right?”

  “In a sense, though it's much more complicated than that. But yes.”

  Calvin smiled broadly. “Well, then, you see? I knew I was immune.”

  Bonaparte frowned. “Are you so sure of that? So proud to be a man utterly devoid of generosity?”

  Calvin's smile faded just a little. “Old Boney, the terror of Europe, the toppler of empires– Old Boney is shocked at my lack of compassion?”

  “Yes,” said Bonaparte. “I never thought I'd see the like. A man I'll never have power over… and yet I will let you stay with me, for the sake of my leg, and I'll teach you all that can be taught. For the sake of my leg.”

  Calvin laughed and nodded. “Then you've got a deal.”

  Only later, as he was being shown to a luxurious apartment in the palace did it occur to Calvin to wonder if, perhaps, Bonaparte's admission that Calvin could not be controlled might not be just a ploy; if, perhaps, Bonaparte already had control over Calvin but, like all the Emperor's other tools, Calvin continued to think that he was free.

  No, he told himself. Even if it's true, what good will it do me to think about it? The deed's done or it's not done, and either way I'm still myself and still have Alvin to deal with. A thousand times more powerful than me! A thousand times more virtuous! We'll see about that when the time comes, when I take your friends away from you, Alvin, the way you stole my birthright from me, you thieving Esau, you pit-digging Reuben, you jealous taunting Ishmael. God will give me my birthright, and has given me Bonaparte to teach me how to accomplish something with it.

  * * *

  Alvin didn't realize he was doing it. Daytimes he thought he was bearing his imprisonment right well, putting on a cheerful face for his visitors, singing now and then– harmonizing with the jailors when they knew the song and joined in. It was a jaunty sort of imprisonment, and everyone was saying that it was a shame for Alvin to be all cooped up, but wasn't he taking it like a soldier?

  In his sleep, though, his hatred for the jail walls, for the sameness and lifelessness of the place, it came out in another kind of song, an inward music that harmonized with the greensong that once had tilled this part of the world. It was the music of the trees and the lesser plants, of the insects and spiders, of the furred and finny creatures that dwelt in the leaves, on the ground, in the earth, or in the cold streams and unstoppable rivers. And Alvin's inner voice was tuned to it, knew all the melodies, and instead of harmonizing with jailors his heart sang with free creatures.

  And they heard his song that went unheard by human ears. In the tattered remnants of the ancient woods, in the new growth where a few abandoned fields were four or ten years fallow, they heard him, the last few bison, the still deer, the hunting cats and the sociable coyotes and the timber wolves. The birds above all heard him, and they came first, in twos, in tens, in flocks of hundreds, visiting the town and singing with his music for a while, daybirds coming in the nighttime, until the town was wakened by the din of so many songs all at once. They came and sang an hour and left again, but the memory of their song lingered.

  First the birds, and then the song of coyotes, the howl of wolves, not so near as to be terrifying, but near enough to fill the untuned hearts of most folks with a kind of dread, and they woke with nightsweats. Raccoon prints were all over, and yet there was no tearing or thievery, and no more than the usual number of chickens were taken, though foxfeet had trodden on every henhouse roof. Squirrels a-gathering their nuts ran fearlessly through the town to leave small offerings outside the courthouse. Fish leapt in the Hatrack and in other nearby streams, a silver dance in the sparkling moonlit water, the drops like stars falling back into the stream.

  Through it Alvin slept, and most folks also slept, so only gradually did the word spread that the natural world was all a-flutter, and then only a few began to link it with Alvin being in jail. Logical folks said there couldn't be no connection. Dr. Whitley Physicker boldly said, when asked (and sometimes when no one asked at all), “I'm the first to say it's wrong to have that boy locked up. But that doesn't imply that the
swarming of harmless unstinging bees through the town last night meant anything at all except that perhaps this will be a hardish winter. Or perhaps a mild one. I'm not a great reader of bees. But it's nothing to do with Alvin in jail because nature hardly concerns itself with the legal disputes of human beings!”

  True enough, but, as a lawyer might say, irrelevant. It wasn't Alvin in jail that disturbed nature, it was Alvin singing in his dreams that drew them. And those few in town who could hear some faint echo of his song– ones like John Binder, for instance, and Captain Harriman, who had heard such silent stirrings all their lives– why, they didn't wake up to the birdsong and the coyotes yipping and the wolves howling and the patter of squirrel feet on shingles. Those things just fit into their own dreams, for to them it all belonged, it all fit, and Alvin's song and the natural greensong of the world spoke peace to them deep in their hearts. They heard the rumors but didn't understand the fuss. And if Drunken Freda drank a little less and slept a little better, who would notice it besides herself?

  * * *

  Verily Cooper came to Vigor Church the hard way, but then everybody did. What with the town's reputation for making travelers listen to a hard dark story, it's no wonder nobody put a stagecoach route there. The railroad wasn't out that far west yet, but even if it was, it wasn't likely there'd be a Vigor Station or even a spur. The town that Armor-of-God Weaver once expected to be the gateway to the west was now a permanent backwater.

  So it was railroad– shaky and stinky, but fast and cheap– to Dekane, and stagecoach from there. By sheerest chance, Verily's route took him right through the town of Hatrack River, where the man he was coming to meet, Calvin's brother Alvin, was locked up. But this was the express coach and it didn't stop in Hatrack for a leisurely meal at Horace Guester's roadhouse, where no doubt Verily would have heard talk that stopped his journey right there. Instead he rode on to Carthage City, changed to a slow coach heading northwest into Wobbish, and then got out at a sleepy little ferry town and bought him a horse and a saddle and a pack mule for his luggage, which wasn't all that much but more than he wanted to have on the horse he was riding. From there it was a simple matter of riding north all day, stopping at a farmhouse at night, and riding another day until, late in the afternoon, just as the sun was setting, he came to Armor's general store, where lamps were lit and Verily hoped he might find a night's lodging.