The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI Page 5

  “Parties?”

  “Them as favor being part of an independent Canada, and them as want to conquer Haiti, and them as want to be an independent city-state on the Mizzippy, and them as wish to restore the royal family to the throne of France, and two different Bonapartist factions that hate each other worst of all.”

  “And that don’t even touch the split between Catholics and Huguenots,” said Squirrel. “And between Bretons and Normans and Provençals and Parisians and a weird little group of Poitevin fanatics.”

  “That’s the French,” said Moose. “They may not know what’s right, but they know everybody else is wrong.”

  “What about the Americans?” asked Alvin. “I hear English on the street more than French or Spanish.”

  “That depends on the street,” said Moose. “But you’re right, this city has more English-speakers than any other language. Most of them know they’re just visitors here. The Americans and Yankees and English care about money, mostly. Make their fortune and head back home.”

  “The dangerous plotters are the Cavaliers,” said Squirrel. “They’re hungry for more land to put into cotton.”

  “To be worked by more and more slaves,” said Alvin.

  “And to restore some glory to a king who can’t get his country back,” said Squirrel.

  “The Cavaliers are the ones who want to start a fight,” said Papa Moose. “They’re the ones who hope that a revolution here would make the King step in to bail them out—or maybe they’re already sponsored by the king so he’d just use them as an excuse to send in an army. There’s rumors of an army gathering in the Crown Colonies, supposedly to guard the border with the United States but maybe it’s bound for Barcy. It’s one and the same—if the King came in here, in control of the mouth of the Mizzippy…”

  Alvin understood. “The United States would have to fight, just to keep the river open.”

  “And any war between the U.S. and the Crown Colonies would turn into a war over slavery,” said Papa Moose. “Even though parts of the United States allow slavery, too. Freestate Americans may not care enough to go to war to free the blacks, but if they won the war, I doubt they’d be so stone-hearted as to leave the slaves in chains.”

  “Does all this have anything to do with Steve Austin’s expedition to Mexico?” asked Alvin.

  They both hooted with laughter. “Austin the Conqueror!” said Papa Moose. “Thinks he can take over Mexico with a couple of hundred Cavaliers and Americans.”

  “He thinks dark-skinned people are no match for white,” said Squirrel. “It’s the kind of thing slaveowners can fool themselves into believing, what with black folks cowering to them all day.”

  “So you don’t think Austin and his friends amount to anything.”

  “I think,” said Papa Moose, “that if they try to invade Mexico, they’ll be killed to the last man.”

  Alvin thought back to his encounter with Austin, and, more memorably, with Jim Bowie, one of Austin’s men. A killer, he was. And the world wouldn’t be impoverished if the Mexica killed him, though Alvin couldn’t wish such a cruel death on anyone. Still, given what Alvin knew about Bowie, he wondered if the man would ever let himself be taken by such enemies. For all Alvin knew, Bowie would emerge from the encounter with half the Mexica worshiping him as a particularly bloodthirsty new god.

  “Doesn’t sound like there’s much useful for me to do,” said Alvin. “Margaret don’t need me to gather information—she always knows more than I do about what other folks aim to do.”

  “It kind of reassures me to have you here,” said Squirrel. “Iffen your Peggy sent you here, stands to reason this is the safest place to be.”

  Alvin bowed his head. He would have been angry if he didn’t fear that what she said was so. Hadn’t Margaret watched over him from her childhood on? Back when she was Horace Guester’s daughter Little Peggy, didn’t she use his birth caul to use his own powers to save him from the dealings of the Unmaker? But it galled him to think that she might be sheltering him, and shamed him to think that other folks assumed that it was so.

  Arthur Stuart spoke up sharp. “You don’t know Peggy iffen you think that,” he said. “She don’t send Alvin, not nowhere. Now and then she asks him to go, and when she does, it’s because it’s a place where his knack is needed. She sends him into danger as often as not, and them as think otherwise don’t know Peggy and they don’t know Al.”

  Al, thought Alvin. First time the boy ever called him by that nickname. But he couldn’t be mad at him for disrespect in the midst of the boy defending him so hot.

  Papa Moose chuckled. “I sort of stopped listening at ‘not nowhere.’ I thought Margaret Larner would’ve done a better job of learning you good grammar.”

  “Did you understand me or not?” said Arthur Stuart.

  “Oh, I understood, all right.”

  “Then my grammar was sufficient to the task.”

  At that echo of Margaret’s teaching they all laughed—including, after a moment, Arthur Stuart himself.

  During the day Alvin busied himself with repairs around the house. With his mind he convinced the termites and borers to leave, and shucked off the mildew on the walls. He found the weak spots in the foundation and with his mind reshaped them till they were strong. When he was done with his doodlebug examining the roof, there wasn’t a leak or a spot where light shone through, and all around the house every window was tight, with not a draft coming in or out. Even the privy was spic and span, though the privy pot itself could still be found with your eyes closed.

  All the while he used his makery to heal the house, he used his arms to chop and stack wood and do other outward tasks—turning the cow out to eat such grass as there was, milking it, skimming the milk, cheesing some of it, churning the cream into butter. He had learned to be a useful man, not just a man of one trade. And if, when he was done milking her, the cow was remarkably healthy with udders that gave far more milk than normal from eating the same amount of hay, who was to say it was Alvin did anything to cause it?

  Only one part of the household did Alvin leave unhealed: Papa Moose’s foot. You don’t go meddling with a man’s body, not unless he asks. And besides, this man was well known in Barcy. If he suddenly walked like a normal man, what would people think?

  Meanwhile, Arthur Stuart ran such errands for the house as a sharp-witted, trusted slave boy might be sent on. And as he went he kept his ears open. People said things in front of slaves. English-speakers especially said things in front of slaves who seemed to speak only Spanish, and Spanish-speakers in front of English-speaking slaves. The French talked in front of anybody.

  Barcy was an easy town for a young half-black bilingual spy. Being far more educated and experienced in great affairs than the children of the house of Moose and Squirrel, Arthur Stuart was able to recognize the significance of things that would have sailed right past them.

  The tidbits he brought home about this party or that, rebellions and plots and quarrels and reconciliations, they added but little to what Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel already knew about the goings-on in Barcy.

  The only information they might not have had was of a different nature: rumors and gossip about them and their house. And this was hardly of a nature that he would be happy to bring home to them.

  All their elaborate efforts to abide by the strict letter of the law had paid off well enough. Nobody wasted any breath wondering whether their house was an orphanage or a school for bastard children of mixed races, nor did anyone do more than scoff at the idea that Mama Squirrel was the natural mother of any of the children, let alone all of them. Nobody was much exercised about it one way or another. The law might be filled with provisions to keep black folks ignorant and chained, but it was only enforced when somebody cared enough to complain, and nobody did.

  Not because anybody approved, but because they had much darker worries about the house of Moose and Squirrel. The fact that the miracle water a few days ago had appeared in the publ
ic fountain nearest that house had been duly noted. So had the traffic in strangers, and nobody was fooled by the fact that it was a boardinghouse—too many of the visitors came and went in only an hour. “How fast can a body sleep, anyway?” said one of the skeptics. “They’re spies, that’s what they are.”

  But spies for whom? Some were close to the target, guessing that they were abolitionists or Quakers or New England Puritans, here to subvert the Proper Order of Man, as slavery was euphemistically called in pulpits throughout the slave lands. Others had them as spies for the King or for the Lord Protector or even, in the most fanciful version, for the evil Reds of Lolla-Wossiky across the fog-covered river. It didn’t help that Papa Moose was crippled. His strange dipping-and-rolling walk made him all the more suspicious in their eyes.

  There were more than a few who believed like gospel the story that Moose and Squirrel trained their houseful of children as pickpockets and cutpurses, sneakthieves and nightburglars. They were full of talk about how there was coin and silverware and jewelry and strange golden artifacts hidden all in the walls and crawlspaces of the house, or under the privy, or even buried in the ground, though it would take six kinds of fool to try to bury anything in Barcy, the land being so low and wet that anything buried in it was likely to drift away in underground currents or bob to the surface like the corpse of a drowned man.

  Most of the stories, though, were darker still—tales of children being taken into the house for dark rites that required the eyes or tongues or hearts or private parts of little children, the younger the better, and black only when white wasn’t available. With such vile sacrifices they conjured up the devil, or the gods of the Mexica, or African gods, or ancient hobgoblins of European myth. They sent succubi and incubi abroad in Barcy—as if it took magic to make folks in Barcy get humpty thoughts. They cursed any citizens of Barcy as interfered with anyone from that house, so those wandering children was best left alone—lessen you wanted your soup to always boil over, or a plague of flies or skeeters, or some sickness to fall upon you, or your cow to die, or your house to sink into the ground as happened from time to time.

  Most folks didn’t quite believe these tales, Arthur Stuart guessed, and them as did believe was too scared to do anything about it, not by themselves, not in a way that their identity might be discovered and vengeance taken. Still, it was a dangerous situation, and even though Mama Squirrel joked about some of the rumors, Arthur Stuart reckoned they didn’t have any idea of how important their house was in the dark mythology of Nueva Barcelona.

  It was a sure thing they never heard such talk directly. While he was still introducing himself as being the servant of a man staying at the house of Moose and Squirrel, people would be real cooperative but say nothing in his presence about that house. That was no help, so he soon started telling folks the equally true story that he was the servant of an American trader who came down the Mizzippy last week, and then it didn’t take much to get folks talking about strange things in Barcy, or dangers to avoid. And it wasn’t just slave chat. White folks told all the same stories of Moose and Squirrel.

  “Don’t you think it’s dangerous?” Arthur Stuart asked Alvin one night, as they were both in bed and going to sleep. “I mean, anything bad goes wrong, and folks are gonna blame these good people for it. Do they know what folks think of them?”

  “I expect they do, but as with many warnings and ill portents, they get used to them and stop taking them serious till all of a sudden it’s too late,” said Alvin. “It’s how cats stalk their prey, if you’ve noticed. They don’t hide. They move up so slow and hold still so long that their prey gets used to them and thinks, well, it hasn’t harmed me so far. And then all at once they pounce, no warning at all. Except there’s been plenty of warning, iffen that poor bird or mouse had had the brains to just get up and move.”

  “So you see it my way. They gotta get out of here,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “Oh, sure,” said Alvin. “They think so, too. The only difference of opinion is about when this great migration ought to occur. And how they’re supposed to get some fifty children of every race out of town without nobody taking notice of just how far they’ve flouted the race laws. And what about money? Think they’ve got the passage for a riverboat north? Think they can swim Lake Pontchartrain and fetch up in some friendly plantation that’ll be oh so happy to let a whole passel of free black children stay the night in their barn?”

  Arthur was annoyed that Alvin made it sound like he was dumb to have wanted them to git. “I didn’t say it’d be easy.”

  “I know,” said Alvin. “I was exasperated at my own self. Because you know what I think? I think Peggy sent me here for exactly that purpose. To get them out of here. Only I didn’t guess it till you thought of it.”

  “Three things,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “I’m listening.”

  “First. It’s about time you realized what a brilliant asset I am on this trip.”

  “Shiny as a gallstone,” said Alvin.

  “Second. There’s no chance this is what Peggy sent you for. Because if that was what she had in mind, she would’ve told you. And then you could have told them that she’d given warning, and they’d do whatever it took. As it is, they’re just gonna fight you every step of the way, since they don’t think you and me is so almighty smart that we can see how things are in Barcy better than they can.”

  Alvin grinned. “Hey, you’re getting to be almost worth how much it costs to feed you.”

  “Good thing, ’cause I got no plan to eat less.”

  “Well, it’ll still take you ten years to make up for how much I’ve wasted on you up to now when you wasn’t worth a hair on a pig’s butt.”

  “So this ain’t what Peggy wants us to do,” said Arthur Stuart, “and we can be pretty sure Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel don’t want us to do it. So the way I see it, that makes it just about our number one priority.”

  “I’ll talk to them.”

  “That always works.”

  “It’s a start.”

  “And then you’ll sing to them? ’Cause that might do more toward getting them to move out.”

  “So what’s the third thing?” asked Alvin. “You said three things.”

  Arthur had to think for a second. Oh, yes. He wanted to ask Alvin why he hadn’t done anything about Papa Moose’s foot. But now it seemed pretty silly to ask. Because it wasn’t as if Alvin hadn’t noticed Moose’s club foot. He’d have to be blind not to notice it. And it’s not as if Alvin didn’t know what he could or couldn’t heal.

  And besides, there was something else.

  Wasn’t Arthur supposed to be a prentice maker?

  “Just my suggestion about singing to them,” said Arthur.

  Alvin grinned. “So you changed your mind about the third thing.”

  “For now,” said Arthur Stuart. “I already used up all my brains thinking up how you ought to talk to Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel.”

  But there wasn’t a chance to talk to Moose and Squirrel about it, because next morning five of the children were sick, screaming with pain, shaking with chills, burning up with fever. By nightfall there were six more, and the first ones had yellow eyes.

  There wasn’t any school now. The schoolroom became the sick ward, the benches all stacked up against the wall. None of the other children were allowed into the room. Instead they were sent outside to play among the skeeters. They could still hear the screaming out there. They could hear it in their minds even when nobody was making a sound.

  Meanwhile, Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel were up and down two flights of stairs with water, poultices, salves, and teas. A couple of the herbs in the tea seemed to be a little help, and of course the water helped keep the fever down. But Alvin knew that even with the ones that had a rash, the salves and poultices did no good at all.

  Of course he and Arthur Stuart helped—chasing up and down stairs with things so Papa Moose didn’t have to, running errands in town, keeping food in
the house, tending the fire, hauling the chamber pots to and from the sickroom. Moose and Squirrel didn’t allow them to come inside, though, for fear of contagion.

  That didn’t stop Alvin from spending most of his concentration on the sick children. Having seen the disease at the end of its course in Dead Mary’s mother, he knew what to look for, and kept repairing the damage the disease was doing, including keeping the fever down enough that it didn’t harm them.

  He also studied the sick children, trying to find out what caused the disease. He could see the tiny disease-fighting creatures in their blood, but he couldn’t see what they were hunting down the way he could with gangrene or some other sicknesses. So he couldn’t find any way to help them get rid of the cause of the disease. Still, he could see that it helped to keep the fever down and the seepage of blood under control. With Alvin tending to their bodies, the disease ran its course, but quickly, and never became dangerous.

  And in the healthy children, whom he examined one by one, he found that most of them were already producing the disease-fighters, and he took such preventive action as he could.

  What interested him, though, was the handful of children who did not get sick. Were they stronger? Luckier? What did they have in common?

  Over the days of sickness in the house, Alvin checked on each of the ones who wasn’t ill. They were of different races, and both sexes. Some were older, some younger. They did tend to be the ones who read the most—he always found them curled up in some corner of the house, always indoors with a book in their hands, now that Papa Moose wasn’t patrolling to make sure none of them could be caught reading. But how could reading keep them from getting sick? Bookish people died all the time. In fact, they tended to be more frail, more easily carried off by disease.