Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III (13 page)

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Authors: Orson Scott Card

BOOK: Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III
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“No, I’m not even fainting. Will you forgive me? I had a thought, that’s all. One that I must think about.”
He looked at her strangely. Any time a woman needed to part with a man, she always claimed to be near fainting. But not Mistress Margaret—Peggy knew that he was puzzled, uncertain. The etiquette of fainting was clear. But what was a gentleman’s proper manner toward a woman who “had a thought”?
She laid her hand on his arm. “I assure you, my friend—I’m quite well, and I delighted in dancing with you. I hope we’ll dance again. But for now, for the moment, I need to be alone.”
She could see how her words eased his concern. Calling him “my friend” was a promise to remember him; her hope to dance with him again was so sincere that he could not help but believe her. He took her words at face value, and bowed with a smile. After that she didn’t even see him leave.
Her attention was far away, in Hatrack River, where Prentice Alvin was calling to the Unmaker, not guessing what he was doing. Peggy searched and searched in his heartfire, trying to find something she might do to keep him safe. But there was nothing. Now that Alvin was being driven by anger, all paths led to one place, and that place terrified her, for she couldn’t see what was there, couldn’t see what would happen. And there were no paths out.
What was I doing at this foolish ball, when Alvin needed me? If I had been paying proper attention, I would have seen this coming, would have found some way to help him. Instead I was dancing with these men who mean less than nothing to the future of this world. Yes, they delight in me. But what is that worth, if Alvin falls, if Prentice Alvin is destroyed, if the Crystal City is unmade before its Maker begins to build it?
Wells
ALVIN DIDN’T NEED to look up when the dowser left. He could feel where the man was as he moved along, his anger like a black noise in the midst of the sweet green music of the wood. That was the curse of being the only White, man or boy, who could feel the life of the greenwood—it meant that he was also the only White who knew how the land was dying.
Not that the soil wasn’t rich—years of forest growth had made the earth so fertile that they said the
shadow
of a seed could take root and grow. There was life in the fields, life in the towns even. But it wasn’t part of the land’s own song. It was just noise, whispering noise, and the green of the wood, the life of the Red man, the animal, the plant, the soil all living together in harmony, that song was quiet now, intermittent, sad. Alvin heard it dying and he mourned.
Vain little dowser. Why was he so mad? Alvin couldn’t figure. But he didn’t press it, didn’t argue, because almost as soon as the dowser came along, Al could see the Unmaker shadowing the edges of his vision, as if Hank Dowser’d brought him along.
Alvin first saw the Unmaker in his nightmares as a child, a vast nothingness that rolled invisibly toward him, trying to crush him, to get inside him, to grind him into pieces. It was old Taleswapper who first helped Alvin give his empty enemy a name. The Unmaker, which longs to undo the universe, break it all down until everything is flat and cold and smooth and dead.
As soon as he had a name for it and some notion what it
was,
he started seeing the Unmaker in daylight, wide awake. Not right out in the open, of course. Look
at
the Unmaker and most times you can’t see him. He goes all invisible behind all the life and growth and up-building in the world. But at the edges of your sight, as if he was sneaking up behind, that’s where the sly old snake awaited, that’s where Alvin saw him.
When Alvin was a boy he learned a way to make that Unmaker step back a ways and leave him be. All he had to do was use his hands to build something. It could be as simple as weaving grass into a basket, and he’d have some peace. So when the Unmaker showed up around the blacksmith’s shop not long after Alvin got there, he wasn’t too worried. There was plenty of chance for making things in the smithy. Besides, the smithy was full of fire—fire and iron, the hardest earth. Alvin knew from childhood on that the Unmaker hankered after water. Water was its servant, did most of its work, tearing things down. So it was no wonder that when a water man like Hank Dowser came along, the Unmaker freshened up and got lively.
Now, though, Hank Dowser was on his way, taking his anger and his unfairness with him, but the Unmaker was still there, hiding out in the meadow and the bushes, lurking in the long shadows of the evening.
Dig with the shovel, lever up the earth, hoist it to the lip of the well, dump it aside. A steady rhythm, a careful building of the pile, shaping the sides of the hole. Square the first three feet of the hole, to set the shape of the well house. Then round and gently tapered inward for the stonework of the finished well. Even though you know this well will never draw water, do it careful, dig as if you
thought that it would last. Build smooth, as near to perfect as you can, and it’ll be enough to hold that sly old spy at bay.
So why didn’t Alvin feel a speck more brave about it?
Alvin knew it was getting on toward evening, sure as if he had him a watch in his pocket, cause here came Arthur Stuart, his face just scrubbed after supper, sucking on a horehound and saying not a word. Alvin was used to him by now. Almost ever since the boy could walk, he’d been like Alvin’s little shadow, coming every day it didn’t rain. Never had much to say, and when he did it wasn’t too easy to understand his baby talk—he had trouble with his
R
s and
S
s. Didn’t matter. Arthur never wanted nothing and never did no harm, and Alvin usually half-forgot the boy was around.
Digging there with the evening flies out, buzzing in his face, Alvin had nothing to do with his brain but think. Three years he been in Hatrack, and all that time he hadn’t got him one inch closer to knowing what his knack was for. He hardly used it, except for the bit he done with the horses, and that was cause he couldn’t bear to know how bad they suffered when it was so easy a thing for him to make the shoeing go right. That was a good thing to do, but it didn’t amount to much up-building, compared to the ruination of the land all around him.
The White man was the Unmaker’s tool in this forest land, Alvin knew that, better even than water at tearing things down. Every tree that fell, every badger, coon, deer, and beaver that got used up without consent, each death was part of the killing of the land. Used to be the Reds kept the balance of things, but now they were gone, either dead or moved west of the Mizzipy—or, like the Irrakwa and the Cherriky, turned White at heart, sleeves rolled up and working hard to unmake the land even faster than the White. No one left to try to keep things whole.
Sometimes Alvin thought he was the only one left who hated the Unmaker and wanted to build against him. And he didn’t know how to do it, didn’t have any idea what the next step ought to be. The torch who touched him at his birthing, she was the only one who might’ve taught him how to be a true Maker, but she was
gone, run off the very morning that he came. Couldn’t be no accident. She just didn’t want to teach him aught. He had a destiny, he knew it, and not a soul to help him find the way.
I’m willing, thought Alvin. I got the power in me, when I can figure how to use it straight, and I got the desire to be whatever it is I’m meant to be, but somebody’s got to teach me.
Not the blacksmith, that was sure. Profiteering old coot. Alvin knew that Makepeace Smith tried to teach him as little as he could. Even now Alvin reckoned Makepeace didn’t know half how much Alvin had learned himself just by watching when his master didn’t guess that he was alert. Old Makepeace never meant to let him go if he could help it. Here I got a destiny, a real honest-to-goodness Work to do in my life, just like the old boys in the Bible or Ulysses or Hector, and the only teacher I got is a smith so greedy I have to
steal
learning from him, even though it’s mine by right.
Sometimes it burned Alvin up inside, and he got a hankering to do something spetackler to show Makepeace Smith that his prentice wasn’t just a boy who didn’t know he was being cheated. What would Makepeace Smith do if he saw Alvin split iron with his fingers? What if he saw that Al could straighten a bent nail as strong as before, or heal up brittle iron that shattered under the hammer? What if he saw that Al could beat iron so thin you could see sunlight through it, and yet so strong you couldn’t break it?
But that was plain dumb when Alvin thought that way, and he knowed it. Makepeace Smith might gasp the first time, he might even faint dead away, but inside ten minutes he’d be figuring an angle how to make money from it, and Alvin’d be less likely than ever to get free ahead of time. And his fame would spread, yes sir, so that by the time he turned nineteen and Makepeace Smith had to let him go, Alvin would already have too much notice. Folks’d keep him busy healing and doodlebugging and fixing and stone shaping, work that wasn’t even halfway toward what he was born for. If they brought him the sick and lame to heal, how would he ever have time to be aught but a Physicker? Time enough for healing when he learned the whole way to be a Maker.
The Prophet Lolla-Wossiky showed him a vision of the Crystal City only a week before the massacre at Tippy-Canoe. Alvin knew that someday in the future it was up to him to build them towers of ice and light. That was his destiny, not to be a country fixit man. As long as he was bound to Makepeace Smith’s service, he had to keep his real knack secret.
That’s why he never ran off, even though he was big enough now that nobody’d take him for a runaway prentice. What good would freedom do? He had to learn first how to be a Maker, or it wouldn’t make no difference if he went or stayed.
So he never spoke of what he could do, and scarce used his gifts more than to shoe horses and feel the death of the land around him. But all the time in the back of his brain he recollected what he really was. A Maker. Whatever that is, I’m it, which is why the Unmaker tried to kill me before I was born and in a hundred accidents and almost-murders in my childhood back in Vigor Church. That’s why he lurks around now, watching me, waiting for a chance to get me, waiting maybe for a time like tonight, all alone out here in the darkness, just me and the spade and my anger at having to do work that won’t amount to nothing.
Hank Dowser. What kind of man won’t listen to a good idea from somebody else? Sure the wand went down hard—the water was like to bust up through the earth at that place. But the reason it
hadn’t
busted through was on account of a shelf of rock along there, not four feet under the soil. Why else did they think this was a natural meadow here? The big trees couldn’t root, because the water that fell here flowed right off the stone, while the roots couldn’t punch through the shelf of rock to get to the water underneath it. Hank Dowser could find water, but he sure couldn’t find what lay
between
the water and the surface. It wasn’t Hank’s fault he couldn’t see it, but it sure was his fault he wouldn’t entertain no notion it might be there.
So here was Alvin, digging as neat a well as you please, and sure enough, no sooner did he have the round side wall of the well defined than
clink, clank, clunk,
the spade rang against stone.
At the new sound, Arthur Stuart ran right up to the edge of the hole and looked in. “Donk donk,” he said. Then he clapped his hands.
“Donk donk is right,” said Alvin. “I’ll be donking on solid rock the whole width of this hole. And I ain’t going in to tell Makepeace Smith about it, neither, you can bet on that, Arthur Stuart. He told me I couldn’t eat nor drink till I got water, and I ain’t about to go in afore dark and start pleading for supper just cause I hit rock, no sir.”
“Donk,” said the little boy.
“I’m digging every scrap of dirt out of this hole till the rock is bare.”
He carefully dug out all the dirt he could, scraping the spade along the bumpy face of the rock. Even so, it was still brown and earthy, and Alvin wasn’t satisfied. He wanted that stone to shine white. Nobody was watching but Arthur Stuart, and he was just a baby anyhow. So Alvin used his knack in a way he hadn’t done since leaving Vigor Church. He made all the soil flow away from the bare rock, slide right across the stone and fetch up tight against the smooth-edge earthen walls of the hole.
It took almost no time till the stone was so shiny and white you could think it was a pool reflecting the last sunlight of the day. The evening birds sang in the trees. Sweat dripped off Alvin so fast it left little black spots when it fell on the rock.
Arthur stood at the edge of the hole. “Water,” he said.
“Now you stand back, Arthur Stuart. Even if this ain’t all that deep, you just stand back from holes like this. You can get killed falling in, you know.”
A bird flew by, its wings rattling loud as could be. Somewhere another bird gave a frantic cry.
“Snow,” said Arthur Stuart.
“It ain’t snow, it’s rock,” said Alvin. Then he clambered up out of the hole and stood there, laughing to himself. “There’s your well, Hank Dowser,” Alvin said. “You ride on back here and see where your stick drove into the dirt.”
He’d be sorry he got Al a blow from his master’s hand. It wasn’t
no joke when a blacksmith hit you, specially one like his master, who didn’t go easy even on a little boy, and sure not on a mansize prentice like Alvin.
Now he could go on up to the house and tell Makepeace Smith the well was dug. Then he’d lead his master back down here and show him this hole, with the stone looking up from the bottom, as solid as the heart of the world. Alvin heard himself saying to his master, “You show me how to drink that and I’ll drink it.” It’d be pure pleasure to hear how Makepeace’d cuss himself blue at the sight of it.
Except now that he could show them how wrong they were to treat him like they did, Alvin knew it didn’t matter in the long run whether he taught them a lesson or not. What mattered was Makepeace Smith really did need this well. Needed it bad enough to pay out a dowser’s cost in free ironwork. Whether it was dug where Hank Dowser said or somewhere else, Alvin knew he had to dig it.
That would suit Alvin’s pride even better, now he thought of it. He’d come in with a bucket, just like Makepeace ordered him to —but from a well of his own choosing.
He looked around in the ruddy evening light, thinking where to start looking for a diggable spot. He heard Arthur Stuart pulling at the meadow grass, and the sound of birds having a church choir practice, they were so loud tonight.
Or maybe they were plain scared. Cause now he was looking around, Alvin could see that the Unmaker was lively tonight. By rights digging the first hole should’ve been enough to send it headlong, keep it off for days. Instead it followed him just out of sight, ever step he took as he hunted for the place to dig the true well. It was getting more and more like one of his nightmares, where nothing he did could make the Unmaker go away. It was enough to send a thrill of fear right through him, make him shiver in the warm spring air.
Alvin just shrugged off that scare. He knew the Unmaker wasn’t going to touch him. For all the years of his life till now, the Unmaker’ d tried to kill him by setting up accidents, like water icing up where he was bound to step, or eating away at a riverbank so
he slipped in. Now and then the Unmaker even got some man or other to take a few swipes at Alvin, like Reverend Thrower or them Choc-Taw Reds. In all his life, outside his dreams, that Unmaker never did anything direct.

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