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

  Alvin stood against him. A futile, pathetic weakling, that’s what I am, thought Alvin. I can’t build up faster than the Unmaker tears down. Yet he still hates me for trying.

  Or maybe he doesn’t hate me. Maybe he’s a wild creature, hungry all the time, and I simply smell like his prey. No malice in it. Wasn’t tearing down just a part of building up? All part of the same great flow of nature. Why should he be the enemy of the Unmaker, when really they worked together, the maker and unmaker, the maker making things out of the rubble of whatever the unmaker tore down.

  Alvin shuddered. What had he been about to do? What had he been thinking about?

  There was a heartfire near him. A hungry one indeed. That gator that he had told to stay away. Apparently it changed its mind, what with Alvin standing there thigh-deep in the Mizzippy, resting his hands on a floating log and burdened with a heavy poke slung over his shoulder.

  Alvin felt the jaws snap shut on his leg and immediately drag him downward, a sharp tug that jerked his feet out from under him and put him under the water.

  He fought to keep his body’s reflexes from taking over—flailing arms all panicking to try to swim up for air wouldn’t do him much good with a gator holding onto one leg.

  The gator jerked its head this way and that, and Alvin felt his thigh bone pull hard away from the hip socket. Next try and the gator would have him disjointed.

  Alvin reached into the mind of the gator to persuade it to let go. A simple thing, to tell some feeble-brained animal how to see the world. Not food, not prey, danger, go away.

  Only the gator had no interest in his story. What Alvin felt there in its heartfire was something old and malicious. It wasn’t hungry. It just wanted Alvin dead. He could feel it hungering to tear him apart, a frenzy building inside it.

  And he could feel other heartfires coming. More gators, drawn by the thrashing in the water.

  Why wouldn’t this gator respond?

  Because you’re in the water, fool.

  No, I’ve been in water a thousand times with no danger, and—

  No time to settle this now. If I can’t do it by persuasion, I’ll do it another way.

  Alvin reached down with his doodlebug and stopped up the gator’s nostrils and told it that it needed air and couldn’t breathe.

  Didn’t matter. The gator didn’t care.

  And now Alvin knew that he was fighting something a good deal more dangerous than a gator. Animals wanted to live, and they never forgot that. So when this gator didn’t care that it couldn’t breathe…

  Another jerk. Alvin felt his hip joint come apart inside. Now it was just some ligaments and muscles and his skin holding his leg onto his body. The gator would have those torn apart in no time.

  The pain was terrible, but Alvin shut his mind to that. He hadn’t come all this way, through all the dangers that he’d faced, to die in a river the way the Unmaker had tried to kill him so many times before.

  Alvin pulled the poke down from his shoulder and jammed the heavy end of it into the gator’s mouth.

  With one end of the living plow between its teeth, the gator tried to snap at it. That meant releasing its grip on Alvin’s leg. He couldn’t just pull the leg free, though—with the bones disconnected his muscles didn’t work right and the leg wouldn’t obey him. Nor could he reach down and pull his leg free, because he needed to use both hands to hold the plow. For all he knew it was the Unmaker’s plan to get the plow away from him and lose it at the bottom of the river, and Alvin wasn’t going to do that. He’d put a good part of himself into that plow, and he was blamed if he was going to let go of it without more of a fight than this.

  The other gators were getting close. Alvin got inside the nearest one and tried to lead it to attack the gator who was holding onto him. But while this second animal wasn’t filled with malice, it also wasn’t responding to him. It was afraid to obey him. The Unmaker could cry fear into the animal’s heart louder than Alvin could speak hunger to it. It retreated. All the other gators waited in a semicircle, all about fifteen feet away, watching the struggle in the water.

  The gator was still trying to gnaw at the plow, and each time it bit down, Alvin worked the plow deeper and deeper between its jaws. The plow was thicker than Alvin’s leg. And finally, with the teeth no longer gripping him, he was able to twist his body and his injured leg came free.

  In that moment the gator made its move, to try to get away with the plow in its mouth. But Alvin was ready. He flopped onto the gator’s back and embraced its whole head in a great bear hug, clamping the jaws tightly around the plow.

  That did bother the gator. The plow was too big for its jaws to close with the plow between them, and with Alvin holding on so tightly it could neither swallow nor open its mouth enough to let go of the thing. On top of that, its nostrils were still closed, and even though Alvin had caught plenty of breaths during the struggle, the gator had been going some minutes without taking in any air. How long could a gator’s lungs hold out?

  A long time, Alvin learned, as he held on, squeezing tighter and tighter.

  After a while, he realized that the gator was no longer thrashing.

  Still he held on.

  Yes, there it was. One last twitch, one feeble attempt to rise to the surface and breathe.

  And in that moment, Alvin unstopped its nostrils. Because he was blamed if he was going to let the Unmaker force him to kill a perfectly innocent gator who wouldn’t have done nobody any harm except the Unmaker forced it to.

  Alvin rose up, balancing on his one good leg, lifting the gator’s head above water. At once it began to thrash weakly, sucking air into its partly open mouth and its nostrils. Then Alvin flung it across the log. Its mouth hung open for one long moment and Alvin snatched the poke, with the plow in it, back out of the gator’s mouth. Then he shoved the gator back into the water and this time when he told it to go away, it heard him, and feebly began to swim away.

  The other gators leapt upon the weakened one and dragged it under the water.

  No! shouted Alvin into their minds. Let it go. Go away. Let it go.

  They obeyed.

  And as they swam away, Alvin thought, for just a moment, that swimming alongside them was a reptilian creature that was not a gator at all, but rather a fiery salamander, its glow damped by the murky water of the Mizzippy.

  Was that what Thrower saw in his church, when Armor-of-God saw him cower in terror at whatever was circling the walls? Or was it just a trick of my eyes because the pain is…so…bad.

  Alvin dragged his bad leg and the poke with the plow up onto the shore and lay there, panting.

  And then he realized that even this would be a victory for the Unmaker. He didn’t want me to cross that river. Therefore I must cross, and without delay, or he still wins.

  With the water to help bear the agonizing weight of his disjointed leg, Alvin half hopped, half swam to the log and put the plow on top of it and dragged his own body on. It took more than his physical strength—he had to use his power to keep the thing from rolling with him on it. But finally he was fully atop the log, and he paddled it out into the current of the river.

  Ahead of him the wall of fog waited. It was safety. If Alvin made it there, he’d be under the influence of Tenskwa-Tawa, and he had all the power of the red people behind the making of that fog. The Unmaker surely couldn’t go there.

  Alvin kept going, despite the fog of pain that threatened to plunge him into unconsciousness. He couldn’t concentrate well enough to make the paddling go faster or easier. Nor could he spare the attention to tend to his disjointed hip. He just kept paddling and paddling, knowing that the current was sweeping him ever leftward, farther downstream than he wanted to go.

  The fog closed around him. And with the wave of relief that swept over him, he finally slipped into unconsciousness.

  He woke to find a black man bending over him.

  The man spoke in a language that Alvin didn’t understand. But he had heard it befor
e. He just couldn’t remember where.

  Alvin was lying on his back. On dry land. He must have made it across.

  Or maybe somebody on the river found him and brought him to the other shore.

  It was hard to care.

  The man’s voice became more urgent. And then his meaning became very clear as large, strong hands pulled on his injured leg and another pair of hands shoved at his upper thigh, scraping bone on bone in a blinding flash of agony. It didn’t work, the bone wouldn’t go back into the socket, and as they let his leg slide back into its out-of-joint position the pain became too great and Alvin fainted.

  He woke again, perhaps only moments later, and again the man spoke and gestured and Alvin raised one feeble hand. “Wait,” he said. “Wait for just a moment.”

  But if they understood his words or his gesture, they gave no sign. He saw now that there were several of them, and they were determined to get his hip back together, and nothing he said was going to stop him.

  So, with desperate hurry, he scanned through his own body, finding the ligaments that were blocking the way, and this time when they pulled and pushed, Alvin was able to arrange things so the top of the thigh bone slid past the obstructions. For a moment it balanced on the lip of the socket, and then with a jolt slipped back where it belonged.

  Alvin fainted again.

  When he awoke he was in a different place, indoors, and no one was with him, though he heard voices in a strange language—not the same language—outside.

  Outside what?

  Open your eyes, fool, and see where you are.

  A cabin. An old one, in need of fresh mud to chink the holes in the walls. Long out of use, apparently.

  The door opened. A different black man entered. And now Alvin saw that he looked familiar. He was dressed in a costume that consisted of feathers and animal skins arranged to give the impression, but not the reality, of decorated nakedness. Not like a red man. But perhaps like an African. Perhaps dressed as he would have dressed in his homeland, before he was carried away into slavery.

  But Alvin had seen him before, on the deck of a boat.

  “I am learn English,” said the man.

  That’s right, the slaves on the boat spoke little English. Some spoke Spanish, and most spoke the language of the Mexica, but both those languages were a mystery to him.

  “You were on the Yazoo Queen,” said Alvin.

  The man looked baffled.

  “Riverboat,” said Alvin. “You.”

  The man nodded happily. “You on boat! You put I…we…off boat!”

  “Yes,” said Alvin. “We set you free.”

  The man threw himself to his knees beside Alvin’s mat and then bent over to embrace him. Alvin hugged him back. “How long have I been here?” he asked.

  The man again looked baffled. Apparently Alvin had taken him beyond the limits of his English.

  Alvin tried to sit up, but the man pushed him back down.

  “Sleep sleep,” said the man.

  “No, I’ve had enough sleep,” said Alvin.

  “Sleep sleep!” insisted the man.

  How could Alvin explain to him that while they’d been talking and hugging, Alvin had checked over his leg, found all the injuries—the sore spots in the joint, the places where the gator’s teeth had torn the skin—and fixed them?

  All he could do was raise the leg that had been dislocated and show that it could be moved freely. The man looked at him in surprise, and tried to get him to lay his leg down, but Alvin instead showed him that where the gator had bitten him, there were no scars.

  The man suddenly laughed and tugged at the blanket still covering Alvin’s other leg. Apparently he thought Alvin was joking by showing him the leg that had never been injured. But when this one, too, turned out to be unharmed, the man stood up and slowly backed away.

  “Where are my clothes?” Alvin asked.

  In reply the man darted for the door and pushed on out into daylight.

  Alvin got up and looked around in the semi-darkness of the cabin, but it wasn’t his clothes he was looking for. The poke was gone, and with it the plow. Had it slipped off the log into the Mizzippy? Or had it stayed with him until he reached whatever shore he was on, and now these men had it?

  He cast about him with his doodlebug, looking for the warm glow of it. But it wasn’t like a heartfire, a bright spark in a twinkling sea. The plow was living gold, yes, but gold all the same, with no one place in it that held the fire of life. If Alvin knew where to look for it, he always found it easily. But he had never searched for it without knowing where it was already.

  Finally he pulled up the blanket and wrapped it as a skirt around his waist. They may not believe he could heal so fast, but he wasn’t going to let their caution or his modesty keep him from finding what was lost.

  He stepped out into bright daylight—morning light, so maybe he hadn’t slept all that long. If it was morning of the same day. Why should he have slept longer? He’d been perfectly refreshed by the greensong just prior to his fight with the gator. And the fight hadn’t lasted all that long. A few thrashes and it was done. Why had it worn him out so bad in the first place? Apart from the pain and loss of blood and the energy it took to help them put his hip back in place, it shouldn’t have taken that much out of him. No, this had to be the same morning. He hadn’t lost a day.

  He was noticed very quickly, and black men came rushing to him. These had to be the men that he and Arthur Stuart had freed from slavery aboard the Yazoo Queen—the men that Steve Austin had been planning to use as interpreters and guides in Mexico, since they had once been slaves there. So they had no reason to do him harm.

  “My poke,” he said. “A homespun sack, I wore it slung over my shoulder, it was heavy.” He pantomimed putting it on and taking it off.

  At once they understood him. “Gold spirit!” cried the one who had talked to him just moments before in the house. “Gold she fly!” He ran a few steps, then beckoned for Alvin to follow.

  He found the plow, out of the poke, floating in the air about a yard above the ground. Three black men sat forming a perfect triangle, looking up at the plow, each with one hand extended toward it.

  Alvin’s guide called to them as they approached, and slowly the three rose up, but without ever letting their hands stop reaching for the plow. It remained equidistant between them and three feet off the ground. Carefully they turned and began to walk toward Alvin.

  “No take,” said the guide. “She no let.”

  Alvin realized that the plow simply wouldn’t let itself be taken by another hand. It kept its distance from reaching hands.

  Except Alvin’s. He approached it, reached out, and it didn’t retreat. Instead it almost leapt into his hands. Of course, that involved letting go of the blanket, but seeing how these folks was as near naked as could be Alvin just said, “You got my clothes anywhere, please? And what about the poke I carry this plow in?”

  With lots of smiles and bobbing heads, he found himself being dressed—they actually tried to lift up both his legs at the same time to put them into his trouser legs.

  “No!” he said firmly. “I been dressing myself since I was little.” He carefully set the plow down in the damp grass. Must have been a heavy dew. Or it rained in the night. Anyway, the moment he set it down, they rushed forward, reaching for the plow, causing it to rise into the air.

  “Gold she fly!” the guide admonished him.

  “It’s a plow,” said Alvin. “It’s meant to set on the dirt.” In fact, it was meant to bite into the earth and churn it up, breaking up clods and baring the soil to the heat of the sun. And in that moment Alvin understood the nature of the plow. All this time he’d been thinking of what it was made of, the living gold, but it was a plow first, before it turned to gold, and it was long overdue to be put to its proper use. Just because a thing was made of metal which, if you melted it down, would be worth a lot of money, didn’t mean it wasn’t still the kind of thing it was made to be.


  Dressed, holding the poke in his hand, Alvin simply drew the mouth of it over the plow there in the air, then slung the poke over his shoulder. It went docilely into place, just like always.

  The men sighed to see it.

  And then another black man approached, carefully holding something on a mat of leaves. It shimmered in the bright sun like crystal, and Alvin recognized it at once. If he had had any doubt that these were the same men he and Arthur Stuart had freed from the Yazoo Queen, it was gone now, because the crystal cube he held was made with a drop of his own blood in water on the Yazoo Queen. He had given them two such cubes, to use as tokens to show to the reds on the other side of the river. They would know that such things could only be made by Tenskwa-Tawa himself or one that he had taught, and it would win them safe passage. Apparently it had worked.

  “Now,” said Alvin. “Where am I, and where’s Tenskwa-Tawa?”

  “Profeta Roja,” said one of the men. “Ten-si-ki-wa Ta-wa.” The way he pronounced it sounded more like the way reds said the Prophet’s name. Well, speaking other languages wasn’t Alvin’s knack, that was already settled and he wasn’t going to be embarrassed about calling his friend by the wrong name all these years.

  “Ten-sa-ka-wa Ta-wa,” he muttered.

  One of the men tried to correct him, but Alvin gave up right away. Tenskwa-Tawa had been answering to that name for years and if he minded, he’d’ve mentioned it by now.

  “We stay,” said the guide. “Wait-for.”

  So Tenskwa-Tawa was coming. Well, Alvin could wait as well as the next man—especially now he was dressed and had the plow back. It also reassured him to find out that the plow could take care of itself, somewhat. A plow that flies from your hand when you reach to take it would be hard to put over a fire and melt down. Though that wasn’t to say some powerful hexery might not do the trick. Still, it wasn’t a thing a thief could easily do. Alvin might fret a little less about the plow, knowing.

  Alvin spent what was left of the morning trying to learn the names of some of these men, but it turned into a game of laughing at his bad pronunciation. For all he knew they weren’t telling him names at all, but making him say ugly cuss words in their language.