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Walking on Water


Introduction

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.)

Part 12
Fog

All the children were sitting on the floor in every room on the main floor. The older ones all had a poke to carry, stuffed with every scrap of food in the house. Arthur Stuart admired how they all obeyed Mama Squirrel, without all that much fussing from her or from them.

What he didn't know was what they were going to do about Papa Moose. He lay on the kitchen floor, wide awake now, but with his eyes tight shut, saying nothing, making no groan, showing no wince, but still a streak of tears ran from both eyes down into his hair and ears. Arthur Stuart longed to help him, knew that all the little bones were shaped wrong and didn't fit, pinching here and there, the ligaments and tendons sometimes too short, sometimes too long for the place they were supposed to be. What he didn't know was how to get them to change into something closer to what was right.

The kitchen door opened and Alvin stepped in. Alvin wore no shirt, and Arthur Stuart noticed how much slacker he looked than he did in the days when he actually did a blacksmith's work every day. But slack as he was, compared to his own self, he was still massive, breasting the air like a great ship with full-bellied sails.

Before Arthur Stuart could wonder what he'd done with his shirt, Dead Mary came in behind him carrying something with Alvin's shirt draped over it.

Calvin hadn't bothered them a bit after causing Papa Moose all this pain. But now that Alvin was here, he appeared on the instant, striding through the front rooms of the house, calling out to his brother. "Alvin, you come in good time! You should see the mess your step-brother-in-law done caused here, meddling in this good man's foot."

Arthur Stuart didn't bother to answer, knowing that Alvin knew Calvin too well to believe his account.

Alvin walked up and stood over Papa Moose. He closed his eyes; Arthur Stuart thought for a moment he could feel Alvin's doodlebug warm his own inside the remade foot. Looking at no one, Alvin spoke softly. "On this night of all nights I need all my strength, and now you make me spend it on something that could have waited another week or another year."

"Then wait," said Mama Squirrel hotly. "You think he ain't man enough to bear it? Oh, he can. I'll carry him if I have to, me and some of the bigger boys. My Moose, he don't want to cost us what we can't afford to pay. He'd die for these children, Alvin, you know he would."

They all knew he would.

"But I need him walking," said Alvin. "I need his strength. I'll spend some of mine on him, and later he can spend some of his on me."

Arthur Stuart tried so hard to keep up with what Alvin was doing. But it was too quick. Alvin was too skilled at this. Bones that weren't shaped right suddenly were. Tendons that wrapped themselves all wrong slid like snakes into place. In no more than a minute it was done, and Papa Moose cried out.

No, it wasn't a cry. It was a great sigh of relief, so sharp and sudden that it sounded like a shout.

"God bless you sir," said Mama Squirrel.

Papa Moose stood up and promptly fell back down the moment he tried to take a step.

"I don't know how it's done," he said. "I can't walk on these two feet. My right leg feels too long."

"Lean on me," said Mama Squirrel. He did, and managed to stand.

"Go to Frenchman's Dock," said Alvin. "You and all the children. I'll be there afore you."

"Me too?" asked Dead Mary.

"Go to your mother and arrange a wheelbarrow from among the French, to tote that thing. I got another shirt."

"Me?" asked Arthur Stuart.

"To La Tia, and tell her to get all them as is going down to Frenchman's dock at nightfall."

When all were gone, it left only Alvin and Calvin there in the house of Moose and Squirrel, which was, after all, just a big old empty house when it didn't have all them children in it.

"I suppose I've done a dozen things wrong," said Calvin with a crooked grin.

"I need a fog from you," said Alvin. "To cover the whole city. Except right at Frenchman's Dock."

"I don't know where that is," said Calvin.

"Don't matter," said Alvin. "You make the fog everywhere else, and I'll push it away from where I don't want it to go. Just don't push back at me."

He didn't say: For once.

"I can do that," said Calvin.

"I'm glad Margaret sent you," said Alvin. "And I'm glad you came."

Arthur Stuart stood outside the kitchen door until he heard those words. He could hardly believe that Alvin acted like Calvin hadn't meddled and fussed and picked quarrels, not to mention the mess he made with Papa Moose.

There was only one meaning Arthur Stuart could get from it. Alvin didn't believe Calvin had caused the problem with Papa Moose. And that meant Alvin believed Calvin's lie and thought Arthur Stuart had caused the problem with Papa Moose's foot.

Burning with resentment at Calvin, at the way a real brother could instantly supplant a half-black oughta-be-a-slave step-brother-in-law in Alvin's heart, Arthur Stuart took off at a run to find La Tia and get the show on the road.

*

Calvin stood on the levee that kept the Mizzippy from pouring over its banks to flood the city of Nueva Barcelona. A couple of hundred masts stuck up from the water like a curiously bare forest, as the seagoing vessels were towed up and down the river by steam-powered tugboats. Dozens of columns of smoke and steam joined to cast a pall over the city as the sun sank toward the horizon.

It had been a sultry, hazy day. Already everything got blurry only a mile off. The air was so wet that sweat could hardly evaporate. It ran down Calvin's neck and back and legs, and when he mopped his brow with a handkerchief, it came away dripping wet.

Nobody'd mind if he cooled things off a little.

Around him the air suddenly gave up some of its heat, sending it upward. The moment the air cooled just a couple of degrees, the water vapor began to condense a little, just enough to form a cloud, not enough to make rain or dew. It wasn't easy to maintain the temperature at just that point, and Calvin had to jostle the temperature up and down a little till he got it right.

But once the fog was nicely formed, he began to reach out farther and farther, cooling the air, condensing the invisible humidity into visible fog.

He turned a slow circle, watching as his fog spread out over the city. This was power -- to change the look of the world, to blind the eyes of men and women, to block the light and heat of the sun, to allow slaves and oppressed people to sneak to freedom. Poor Alvin, always fencing his power about with rules -- he never felt the sheer joy of it like Calvin did.

It was like being rich, but spending money like a poor man. That was Alvin, wasn't it? A miser, hoarding his enormous power, using it only when he was forced to, and for trivial purposes, and according to rules that were devised to allow weaker men to control strong ones. I have no use for such rules, thought Calvin. I don't choose to wear chains, still less to forge my own.

So I'll help you, Alvin, because I can and because I love you and because I don't mind being part of your noble causes when it suits me. But I make up my own mind on all things. Collect your disciples and try to teach them some clumsy imitation of makery, like that sad boy Arthur Stuart, whose true knack you stole from him. But don't ever count me as one of your disciples. I spent too many years of my life worshiping you and tagging along behind you and begging for your attention and your love and your respect. Those were my childhood days. I'm a man now, and I've held my own with a great emperor and I've slain an evil man that you hadn't the courage to kill, Alvin.

It's not enough to have power, Alvin. You have to have the will to use it.

Street after street, the fog crept through the city, dimming the light of the setting sun and hiding passersby.

Slaves felt the cool clammy fog pass around them, or looked out windows and watched as buildings across the street disappeared, and they thought, Today we cross over Jordan to the promised land.

In Frenchtown the children and grandchildren of the founders of this place, whose city had been stolen from them, looked out of their shanties and thought, You can't keep us here no more, Conquistadores. You can take our city, but that's only land. You can't hold onto us when we've a mind to go.

In Swamptown, the poorest of the poor -- free blacks and down-and-out whites -- saw the fog and gathered up their few possessions for the journey ahead. La Tia, Dead Mary, some sorcerer from up north, they didn't care whom they were following. It couldn't help but be better than here.

But in the rest of the city, in fine houses and the humbler homes of the working class, in hotels and whorehouses and along the dock, where people already cowered in fear of the yellow fever, afraid to go out into the streets -- they saw the fog roll through and it looked like a biblical plague to them. I'm not going out in that weather, they thought. I'll send a slave out on my errands. I'll leave the streets to the poor and those whose business is so pressing they'd risk death to carry on with it.

Only in the taverns, where drink brought a few hours of courage and uncontained passion, did the fear burn into hatred. Someone brought this yellow fever on us. It was them French witches, that Dead Mary and her mother, didn't Dead Mary claim the plague for her mother first?

It was those wicked race-mixing abolitionists Moose and Squirrel, they're the ones brought this down on us, cursing the city because they hate us for keeping black folk in the place where God meant them to be. You want proof? All around that house folks is dying of the fever, but not a soul in that crowded house is sick, not a body has been brought out.

"Not Moose and Squirrel, no sir," said a powerful-looking man who carried a knife at his hip the way other men might carry a pistol. "Their house, but it's a traveling man staying there, him and his half-black catamite he uses like a witch does a cat. His name is Alvin and he has a sack full of gold he stole from the smith he was prenticed to. I tell you he brought this fever here. He and his catamite was seen at the public fountain where that magical water was drawn."

They listened spellbound to the man. They itched for action, these men. They had come to Barcy to take part in a war, but the dread of fever had sent the King's army back into their holes, and here they were with nothing to do. Their fingers flexed into fists. The drink burned in them. They could do with a good hanging. Take a man and his slave boy and drag them to a tree or lamppost and hoist them up and watch them clutch and twitch and pee themselves while they strangled on the end of a rope. That was a good use of this foggy night. There'd be no witnesses, and maybe it would stop the fever, and even if it didn't, a hanging was still a good idea now and then, just to get your blood up, and none of this nonsense about an innocent man. Wasn't nobody in this world hadn't earned hanging five times over, if their hearts were only known.

Out of the tavern and into the street they staggered and lurched, shouting threats and brags. A few carried torches against the fog and night as darkness fell over the city, and as they moved near the waterfront, they were joined by the drunk, the angry, the fearful, and the merely curious from other taverns. Where are you going? Off to hang us a traveling wizard and his boy.

The slaves skulking through the streets dodged into alleys or into the shadows of doorways as the mob passed. But they weren't looking to hang the first black man they found. They had a specific man in mind tonight, thanks to that man with the big knife at his belt. They'd find him at the house of Moose and Squirrel -- who probably needed hanging too, there being no shortage of rope in Barcy.

"Walking on Water" is Copyright © 2003 by Orson Scott Card. All rights reserved.

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