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It's 1825, in a version of America's past that doesn't look like the history
books. The folk magic of the American people really works, though whites,
blacks, and reds go about their acts of power in different ways.
The land we call America isn't just one nation. New England is still a colony
of an England ruled over by the Lord Protector. The slave states of the south
are the Crown Colonies, ruled over by the King in exile. In the middle is the
United States, struggling to exist half slave and half free. This story,
however, takes place in Nueva Barcelona -- once called New Orleans, when the
French founded it.
To this city comes Alvin Smith, the seventh son of a seventh son, who makes
his living as a journeyman blacksmith; and beside him is Arthur Stuart, a free
young man, half white and half black, pretending to be Alvin's servant while
they're in slave country. They're on a mission here, and they're determined to
accomplish it ... if they can figure out what it is.
"Walking on Water" is the first third of The Crystal City, the
penultimate novel in the Tales of Alvin Maker. It will be serialized on the
Hatrack River site in 14 parts, a new one appearing every five days or so. (The
first two parts of this serialization appeared previously in The Rhinoceros
Times.)
Alvin sat on the damp bank near Dead Mary's house, his bare feet in the
water, watching a gator glide by. The gator had given him a passing thought --
Alvin saw it in his heartfire, that flash of hunger. But Alvin asked him to
search somewhere else, and the gator obligingly moved along.
Well, to put it precisely, Alvin put the idea of the gator getting its guts
ripped out into its mind, and associated it with the sight of Alvin, and the
gator flat-out skedaddled.
It's a good thing to be able to scare away gators, thought Alvin. I could go
into it fulltime and make a profession of it. They could call me Gator Al, and
they'd always ask me how come I never wore gator-skin boots or a gator-skin
belt, and I'd say, How can I get me a gator skin, iffen the gators won't come
close to me?
Sounded to him like a better job than his current employment, which right now
looked like having the responsibility for saving the lives of hundreds of people
without a clue of how to actually do it.
He'd poked himself a couple of times with his knife to draw blood, which was
a kind of embarrassing thing to do in the first place. It made him feel like he
was just a couple of steps away from a Mexica sacrifice. He let the blood drip
into the murky water and then felt it dissipate and vanish.
He had done this once, on the Yazoo Queen, but not with river water. It was
with drinking water, already pure. The blood had nowhere to go, it mixed with
the water immediately and Alvin had been able to shape it as he wanted. But how
to make something out of an almost infinite body of water, filled with
impurities?
More blood? Open a vein? An artery?
How about opening a gator's artery, how about that?
No, he knew that wouldn't do at all. The maker is the one who is part of what
he makes. If there was one thing he knew, it was that.
But he'd spent his childhood getting nearly killed by water over and over
again, till his Pa was plumb scared to let Alvin have a cool drink from a stream
for fear he'd drown or choke.
Stop thinking, he told himself. This ain't science, like feeling head bumps
or bleeding a patient. This is serious, and you gotta keep your mind open in
case an idea comes along -- you want there to be some room for it to fit in.
So he occupied himself with clearing the water around him. It wasn't hard --
he was good with fluids and solids, at purifying them, asking whatever belonged
there to stay, and whatever didn't to go. The skeeter eggs, the tiny animals,
the floating silt, all the creatures large and small, and above all the salt of
this briny tidewater -- he bid them find somewhere else to go, and they went,
till he could look down into the water and under the reflection of the trees
spreading overhead he could see his bare feet and the muddy bottom.
It was an interesting thing, looking into water, seeing two levels at once --
the reflection on the surface and what was underneath it.
He remembered being there in the midst of the whirlwind with Tenskwa-Tawa,
and in the walls of solid water he saw not just some reflection or whatever was
in the water, but also things deep in time, hidden knowledge. He was too young
to make much sense of it at the time, and he wasn't sure anymore what he
actually remembered or merely remembered that he remembered, if you know what I
mean.
He could hear a kind of wordless song, he sat so still. It wasn't in his own
mind, either. It was another song, a familiar one, the song that he had heard so
many times in his life as he ran like wind through the woods. The greensong of
the life around him, of the trees and moss, the birds and gators and fish and
snakes, and the tiny lives and the momentary lives, all of them making a kind of
deep harmony together that became a part of him so that he could hear himself as
nothing more than a small part of that song.
And as he listened to the greensong and as he looked down into the water,
another drop of blood fell from his hand and began to spread.
Only this time he let his doodlebug spread out with his blood, following that
familiar liquid, keeping it warm, letting it bind with the water as if it was
all part of the same music. There were no boundaries to contain it, but he held
on to the blood, kept it as a part of himself instead of something lost, as if
his heart were still pushing it through his veins.
Instead of having outside boundaries imposed on the blood, he set his own
limits to its flow. This far, he told his blood, and no farther. And because it
was still a part of himself, it obeyed.
At the limits the blood began to form a wall, become solid, become like a
very thin sheet of glass. Then, working inward, the blood formed itself into a
latticework that drew the water around it into complicated whorls that never
ceased moving, but also never left their orbit around the impossibly thin
strands of blood.
The water moved faster and faster, a thousand million tiny whirlwinds around
the calm threads, and Alvin reached down with his hands on both sides of the
sphere of solidified water and lifted it out of the clear water of Lake
Pontchartrain.
It was heavy -- it took all his strength to lift it, and he wished he hadn't
made it so large. It was far heavier than the plowshare he carried in his poke.
But it was also strangely inert. Even though he knew the motion of water inside
the sphere was incessant, to his hands it felt as still as stone. And as he
looked into it, he saw everything at once.
He saw his own labor to be born, straining to emerge into the world, his
mother's wombwalls pressing against him as he pushed back; he heard her cries
and saw her surrounded by the canvas walls of a covered wagon that rocked and
slid and rocked in the current of a river gone to flood. And now he was outside
that wagon and he saw a great fallen tree floating like a battering ram straight
at the wagon, straight at him, this passionate angry hopeful unborn infant, and
then heard a great loud cry and saw a man leap onto the tree and roll it over,
over, so it struck only a glancing blow against the wagon and careened off into
the rainstorm ...
And now he saw a young girl reach out to the face of a just-born infant who
had not yet drawn breath because a caul of flesh covered his whole face like a
terrible mask. She pulled the caul back and air rushed into the baby's mouth and
he began to cry. The girl put the caul away as tenderly as if it were the heart
of a Mexica sacrifice, and he felt how the baby and the caul remained connected,
and he knew that this was Little Peggy, the child five years old when he was
born, who was now his wife, with almost nothing of that ancient, dried-up caul
left in her keeping, because she had rubbed bits of it between her fingers and
turned each bit to dust in order to draw the power of Alvin's own knack out of
it, to use it to save his life.
But now, he thought. What about now?
Whether the heavy sphere responded to his question or simply showed him the
desire of his heart, he saw himself kneeling in the water at the shore of
Pontchartrain, dripping blood heavily into the inland sea, and watching as a
crystal path hurtled forward across the lake, six feet wide, as thin as the
skiff of ice on a basin left in the window on the night of the first freeze of
autumn. And in ones and twos the people began to step out onto this crystal
bridge and walk along with the surface of the water holding them up, a dozen,
scores, hundreds of them, a great long chain of people. But then he realized
that the line was slowing down, stopping, jostling, as more and more of them
looked down into the crystal at their feet and began to see the way Alvin was seeing now.
They would not go forward, so captured were they by the crystal visions in
the water. They took too long, too many minutes, as the blood continued to flow
out of him.
And then all of a sudden in the glass he saw himself faint and fall onto the
bridge and at once it began to break up and crumble and all the people fell into
the water and screamed and splashed and ...
Alvin dropped the crystal sphere and it fell into the water with a splash.
He thought at first that it had dissolved instantly upon breaking the
surface, but when he reached down into the water at his feet, there it was.
He picked it back up again.
I thought the things the crystal water showed me would be true, he thought.
But that can't be true. Margaret wouldn't have sent me here to them if I didn't
have the strength in me to make this bridge hold until the last soul had crossed
over.
He looked at the ball of crystal he held in his hands. I can't leave this
thing here, he thought. But I can't take it with me, either. It's too heavy, not
with the plow, not with all I've got to do.
"I will carry it, me," said a soft voice behind him.
He saw her reflection in the face of the crystal, and to his surprise the
round surface did not distort her image.
He wasn't seeing her on the
crystal, he was seeing her in
it, and all at once he knew far more about her than he had ever thought he could
know about a person. "You're not French," he said. "You and your mother are
Portugee. She has a knack with sharks. They took her on voyage after voyage
because of it, to keep the sea monsters at bay, only one of them used her for
something else and she got pregnant with you and so she threw herself from the
ship and rode the back of a shark to shore and gave birth to you at the very
mouth of the river."
"She never told me, her," said Dead Mary. "Might be so, might not."
Alvin rose to his feet, still standing in the water, and turned to hold the
sphere out to her. "It's heavy," he said.
"I can bear any burden," she said, "if I take it freely." And it was true.
Though she staggered a little from the weight, she held the ball to her and
didn't let it fall.
"Don't look in it," said Alvin.
"It's in front of my face," she said. "How can I not look?" And yet she
didn't look. She closed her eyes tightly. "Bad enough to know what I already
know about people," she said. "I don't want to know all this else."
Alvin peeled off his shirt and draped it over the sphere. "I'll take it now,"
he said.
"No," said Dead Mary. "You need all the strength you have for tonight's
work."
"Walking on Water" is Copyright © 2003 by Orson Scott Card. All rights
reserved.