The Crystal City: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume VI (30 page)

Whatever else this plow might want, it had no respect for the idea that the best furrow is a straight one. It twisted and turned all around the meadow, as if it were a dowser’s stick searching for water.

Which, when Alvin thought about it, it very well might be. Not searching for water, but a dowser’s wand all the same. Hadn’t Verily shaped it into a single piece of living wood? Wasn’t it shaped like a dowser’s wand, with the two handles joined at the base?

“I can’t hold on any longer!” cried Verily, and he fell to the ground as the plow lurched forward another yard and then…stopped.

The plow just stood there in the ground, unmoving.

Alvin ran over as Verily got up off the ground.

Gingerly, Verily reached a hand out to it. The moment his skin touched it, the plow bucked again and moved forward.

“I have an idea,” said Alvin. “You take the right handle, I’ll take the left.”

“Both at once,” said Verily.

“One,” said Alvin. And Verily joined in on “two” and “three.”

“Wait a minute,” said Verily. “How high are we counting?”

“I was thinking of three, but looks like that won’t be it after all.”

“When we
say
three, or when we would have said four?”

“When we say three, we should be grabbing right then,” said Alvin.

One.

Two.

And away they went.

Only this time there was no bucking. The plow moved, all right, cutting deep into the ground and turning up the soil just like a plow should do. But its path was no longer so crooked.

And its purpose seemed to be to get out of the meadow, move through the trees, and climb back up onto the bluff.

It was steep going—this wasn’t all that gentle a slope—and there were low branches that looked like they were designed to take the head right off anyone foolish enough to be hanging on behind a living plow.

But the greensong in the music of the plow was powerful, and the branches seemed to rise up or bend back, and neither Alvin nor Verily suffered so much as a scrape or scratch or bump. Nor did they get weary as they ran up the hill behind the plow.

When it reached the top, the plow turned a little and ran across the face of the bluff. That was when Alvin became vaguely aware of the voices of Mike and Abe and Coz, somewhere in the distance, whooping and hollering like little boys. But there was no waiting for them to catch up. For the plow was zeroing in on its destination and speeding up as it grew closer.

Closer to a stony outcropping some twenty yards back from the front of the bluff, a spot where no trees grew because the stone continued under the meadow, leaving too little soil for any tree to root deep enough to withstand a storm.

They headed straight for the bare rock in the middle of the clearing, and Alvin was not altogether surprised when the plow cut right through the stone without so much as a stutter. It cut a furrow into the rock just as it had with the soil, only where the soil behind the plow had been loose and warm, the upturned stone hardened in place, like a sculpture of a furrow.

And when the plow got to a spot where a puddle of water had formed in a depression in the stone, it went straight to the middle of the puddle and stopped.

The water drained down the furrow the plow had made. A thin stream of pure water being guided by the stone furrow, and then the furrow in the soil, to the edge of the bluff and along it down to the meadow where Verily had made the handles.

The plow did not move.

Alvin and Verily took their hands from the handles.

The music faded.

“I think we’re done here,” said Alvin.

“What is it we did?” said Verily.

“We found the spot for the Crystal City,” said Alvin.

“Is that what we’ve been looking for?” asked Verily.

“I think it’s what this plow has been looking for since it was first made.”

Alvin knelt beside the plow that he had carried for so long. All these years of toting it, and now its work was done, and wild and joyful as the trip up the hill was, it hadn’t taken long. Just a few minutes. But when Alvin reached out and touched a finger to the golden face of the plow, the thing quivered, and the handle came loose and fell away. Fell to the ground.

Verily picked it up. “Still alive,” he said.

“But no longer part of the plow.”

The music was gone, too. The greensong still lingered, as it always did in Alvin’s mind. But the music of machinery was completely still.

Alvin tugged on the plow and it slid easily out of the stone. He put it back in the poke. It still quivered with life, no more nor less than it always had. As if it had no memory of what it had just done.

They all drank from the spring that now welled up from the end of the furrow. The water was sweet and clean. “We could keg this up and sell it for wine,” said Abe, “and nobody’d say we cheated them.”

“But we won’t,” said Verily.

Abe gave him an I’m-not-an-idiot look. “So you reckon this plow of yours has picked this spot for your city.”

“Might be,” said Alvin. “If we can figure out who owns the land and figure out a way to buy it.”

“Well, you’re in luck,” said Abe. “It’s why I brought you here. This is part of what the Noisy River government calls River County. It’s the wild land along the Mizzippy between Moline and Cairo. There’s an old law from territory days that offers to make a county out of any part of River County that can prove it has two thousand settlers and at least one town of three hundred people.”

“A county?” asked Verily.

“A county,” said Abe.

“But a county has the right to elect its own judges,” said Verily.

“And its own sheriff,” said Abe.

“So when somebody comes into Furrowspring County with a warrant from some court in Hio,” said Verily, “the Furrowspring County court can vacate the warrant.”

“That’s how I figured it,” said Abe.

“You were really listening when I explained about the law.”

“And I remember my old dad trying to farm boggy land along the Hio, and somebody come along and told him all about River County, and how the land was there for the taking if just two thousand folks would join up and go, and Dad said he had a hard enough time farming a swamp, the last thing he needed was fog on top of it.”

“If we have our own county,” said Alvin, “then we can build a city here, and populate it with black people and French people and anybody else we want to invite, and nobody can stop us.”

“Well,” said Abe, “it’s not that simple.”

“You mean there’s some law against folks moving in here?”

“There is against runaway slaves,” said Abe, “but I think we got that solved, since the same judge can vacate a lot of other orders, and the same sheriff can run any slave-catchers out of town or at least make it real hard to find any former slaves. But what I was getting at was,
anybody
can move in. Not just folks that you invite.”

“Well, we invite everybody,” said Alvin.

Abe laughed. “Well, shoot, word gets out about this golden plow that cut right through stone and brought water out of the rock like Moses, and your six thousand won’t be but a drop in the bucket for all the thousands of gold hunters and miracle seekers who’ll be tramping all up and down this country. And I reckon
they’ll
be the ones electing the sheriff and the judge and maybe somebody’ll get that reward after all.”

“I see,” said Alvin. “It ain’t all that easy after all.”

“If I kill you all,” said Mike, “won’t be nobody to tell about this place.”

“Except you,” said Alvin.

“Well, I didn’t say it was a perfect plan.”

“What we need,” said Verily, “is a charter from the state. Granting us the boundaries that we want for our county, and then we got to make sure we control all the land so it only gets sold to people we choose. People who are with us and won’t cause trouble.”

“People who are willing to help build this place as a city of makers,” said Alvin.

“I know how to write such a charter,” said Verily. “But I don’t know that I’ll be able to find my way around the state government.”

“Well don’t look at me,” said Abe. “I’m no politician.”

“But you’re from around here,” said Verily. “You don’t talk like a highfalutin Englishman. And you have a way of making people like you.”

“So do you,” said Abe.

“You know everybody hates him,” said Coz.

“Well, yes,” said Abe, “but only because they know Englishmen are smarter than other folks and they resent it.”

“Will you help me get that charter for Furrowspring County?” said Verily.

“I notice you took it upon yourself to name the place,” said Abe.

“Do you have a better one?” said Verily.

“I was partial to Lincoln County,” said Abe.

“How about Lincoln-Fink County?” suggested Mike.

“Now that’s pure vanity,” said Abe. “Naming the county after yourself.”

“What were
you
doing?”

“Naming it for the county in England, of course,” said Abe.

“Furrowspring it is, then,” said Alvin. “The voting is unanimous.” He turned to Abe. “But in the meantime, settlers can come freely into River County lands, right? And farm and build wherever they want?”

“That’s the law,” said Abe. “Don’t need permission. As long as you don’t step on somebody else’s farm, and I don’t see any around here.”

“You know,” said Alvin, “I was wondering why there wasn’t at least one or two farmsteads, belonging to the kind of folks who think six houses make a city too big to enjoy living in.”

“Maybe because this is land meant for something better than a stumpy little farm,” said Verily.

“And who’s doing the meaning?” asked Alvin.

“Maybe the stone itself was ambitious,” said Verily. “Or maybe it was the water, begging to be let out from under the rock.”

“Or the sun that wanted this patch to have no trees to make shade,” said Alvin. “Or the wind, needing a little meadow to blow across. Gentlemen, I don’t think any of the elements have a
plan
.”

“The plow did,” said Verily.

Alvin had to concede the point.

They put the plow handles on the back of one of Verily’s steeds and instead of anyone riding they led the three horses back to Springfield together. They moved with the greensong, all of them, and got there in only an hour of steady running, and the horses weren’t lathered or winded, and the men weren’t hungry or tired, and as for thirsty, they had all drunk from that clear spring, and they were loath to taste any other water, because they knew it would taste like tin or mud or nothing at all, instead of sweet, the way they knew now water ought to be.

It was such a lovely ride from the coast to Mexico City. Everything went just as Steve Austin had predicted—which was not at all how Calvin expected it to go. Their ship put into the free port of True Cross, where whites could come and trade without fear of being taken for sacrifice. They took three days finding interpreters and buying supplies and pack mules, and then they went to the inland gate of the city.

“You are not safe to go outside,” said the door warden.

“We’re going,” said Steve Austin. “Out of the way.”

“I will not let you go. White people die out there, give bad name to port of True Cross.”

Austin raised a pistol to shoot the man in the head.

“No, no,” said Calvin impatiently. “What did you bring me for, anyway, if you’re just going to go shooting people. What if we need to get back here and thanks to you they shoot us on sight?”

“When we come back we’ll be the rulers of Mexico.”

“Fine,” said Calvin. “But let me do this.”

Austin put his pistol away. Calvin studied the gates for a few moments, trying to decide whether it was worth the effort to make this a truly spectacular event or merely a practical one. He decided that something showy, like making the gates burst into flame and burn down to ash, would be wasted here. It was the reds outside this city that they’d need to impress.

So he dissolved the linchpins in the hinges and then, with a gentle nudge, made sure the gates fell outward instead of inward.

The door warden—with no more door to ward—shrugged and turned away. And out they rode, a hundred heavily armed white men, to take on the Mexica.

Almost at once they were confronted by Mexica soldiers. These were not the club-wielding warriors that Cortez had faced three centuries before. They were mounted and carried new-model muskets that had probably been bought from the United States, where Philadelphia—the city of brotherly love—had quite a munitions business going. Immediately they surrounded Austin’s army, which bristled with weapons at the ready.

“Patience,” said Calvin to Austin. It wasn’t hard to make fire, but it was tricky to make a ring of it, and he singed quite a few of the Mexica horses when the flames didn’t go quite where he’d planned. But that only made the demonstration more effective. The Mexica backed off, the horses shying and neighing, but then dismounted and prepared to fire through the flames.

Calvin was ready. He knew how Alvin handled this sort of thing, bending the end of the gunbarrels so the enemy wouldn’t bother firing. But Calvin wanted them to fire. So he pinched off each gunbarrel inside, not tightly, but enough to keep the ball from coming out. It was quite a scramble to find all the muskets and close them off before the firing started, but it helped that the Mexica commander kept shouting for them to surrender, while the panicky horses kept the Mexica in an uproar long enough for Calvin to finish the job.

“Don’t shoot,” said Calvin.

“But they’re about to lay a volley into us,” said Austin.

“They only think they are,” said Calvin.

The Mexica captain gave the command, and the soldiers pulled the triggers of their muskets.

Whereupon every single one of them exploded, killing or blinding almost all of them, and blowing the heads right off more than a few.

The Mexica captain was left standing there with his ceremonial obsidian-edged sword and only a few of his men still alive enough to writhe on the ground moaning or screaming in agony.

“Shoot him!” cried Austin.

“No!” cried Calvin. “Let him go! You want somebody to tell the story of this, don’t you?”

Austin didn’t like being contradicted, but it was plain that Calvin was right. What good was it to put on a show like this, if there wasn’t somebody left to go tell the rest of the Mexica about these white men who came with irresistible power. So if it bothered Austin that Calvin had countermanded his order, well wasn’t that too bad. If he didn’t want that to happen, he shouldn’t give stupid orders. And besides, it wasn’t a bad thing for Austin to remember who actually had the power here. Austin might plan to be the emperor of Mexico, but if he achieved it, it would be because he had Calvin Maker with him.

Calvin had thought he’d have to do several more demonstrations, but it all went better than he’d hoped. The first city they came to, the alcalde came out to them and insisted that the people of this place were not Mexica and begged the mighty priest they had with them not to harm them.

Austin gave a speech about how they had come to restore good government to these lands and free them from the rule of the bloodthirsty, murderous, savage Mexica. Whereupon the people cheered and the alcalde insisted on sending five hundred men along with them to Mexico City. Since these were not real soldiers, but only ordinary men, many of them old, and armed only with ceremonial clubs and swords, Austin agreed to let them come. But he insisted that they provide their own food and promise to obey his orders.

So when they came to the next city, they weren’t just a hundred white men, they had a brightly costumed troupe of reds with them, singing and chanting. Again the alcalde came out and begged them to pass on through, giving them food and water and another five hundred men to accompany them. Calvin was getting a little frustrated, so this time he crumbled part of the stone wall of the city so there’d be more to the story. The alcalde fell to his knees and offered them anything they wanted, but Austin only glared at Calvin and told him that there would be no more city walls when he ruled in Mexico City, because all the land would be at peace.

“What did you do that for when they’d already surrendered?” said Austin afterward.

“They’ve got to
see
that we come with power,” said Calvin.

“Well, what you showed them was that we come to tear stuff down.”

“I’ll find something better to do next time,” said Calvin. “Nondestructive.”

“Thank you kindly,” said Austin, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

So it went all the way up to the high Mexican plateau and through villages and cities, and by the time they got within sight of the great volcanic mountains that ringed Mexico City, they had at least fifteen thousand reds with them, a mighty army indeed, marching ahead of them and behind them and singing and chanting and dancing at every opportunity.

It was a glorious entrance they made into the valley of Mexico. But Calvin was getting more and more uneasy. “Where are the Mexica soldiers?” he asked Austin.

“All run away, if they’ve got any brains,” said Austin.

Jim Bowie was riding close by, and he seconded Calvin. “This is all too easy,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

“We raised up the conquered people against the oppressor. The Mexica soldiers aren’t going to waste their lives resisting the irresistible.”

“There’s a trap waiting for us here,” said Bowie.

So while Austin beamed and waved now and then, as if he was in a parade, Calvin and Bowie and a handful of others kept their eyes open, looking for some lurking army in hiding. Calvin sent his doodlebug ranging ahead as far as he could, but all he found were civilians, and most of them were in plain sight, standing outside to watch this army pass along the wide avenue that led to the lake in the middle of the valley.

Not until they actually reached the long causeway that led to the ceremonial city in the middle of the lake did they finally see any kind of Mexica opposition. And while there was plenty of pomp and color, lots of flags and feathers, there weren’t many that looked like soldiers. In fact, there weren’t many of anything—maybe three hundred men in the whole group that came down the causeway to meet them.

“Do they think this is going to be a picnic?” asked Bowie.

“How many men do you think it takes to surrender to us?” said Austin. “Calvin Maker, you are worth your weight in gold. We didn’t have to fire a shot, and here we are, victorious!” Austin kicked his horse and moved forward through the throng, the other white men following. Soon they were lined up near the front of the vast army, within earshot of the dignitaries coming from the city.

“We demand that you surrender!” shouted Austin. “If you surrender your lives will be spared!”

He turned to look for an interpreter, but apparently they hadn’t kept up when the white men had ridden forward. No, there was one, and Austin beckoned him over. “Tell him to surrender,” said Austin. “Tell him what I said.”

But before the interpreter could go forward with the message, a befeathered Mexica standing on a huge litter borne by a dozen men began to speak.

“What’s he saying?” asked Austin.

The interpreter listened. “He is the high priest and he thanks the people of…all these tribes…for bringing so many fine sacrifices for the god.”

Austin laughed. “Does he really believe these people came to offer sacrifice?”

“Yes,” said the interpreter.

“What a fool,” said Austin.

“There’s a fool all right,” said Bowie, “but it ain’t him.”

All at once, the reds who were surrounding them gave a great shout and dragged the white men off their horses. Bowie managed to get knives into a couple of them before they got him down. And Calvin was trying to work up some flames, but he couldn’t get anything going before they had him down on the ground and hit him in the head with a club.

Calvin woke up in pain, and not just from his head, which was throbbing. He was also tightly trussed, and lying on a stone floor. He was also blindfolded.

He could make his bonds break apart, but he figured he ought to find out first where he was and what was going on. So with his doodlebug he worked on the threads of the blind-fold and soon he had an opening he could see through. He was lying on the floor of a large dimly lighted room—a Catholic church of some kind, from the look of it, but not one that was used much. A couple of statues of saints stood against one wall, and there was an altar near the front, but everything looked shabby and dusty.

All the white men were sitting or lying on the floor, and at the doors stood heavily armed Mexica soldiers.

Calvin sent his doodlebug to see behind him, and sure enough, there were four soldiers standing over him. He was the only one of the white men with a special guard. Which meant the Mexica knew he was the powerful one. He was surprised they hadn’t just killed him outright—but no, he was the prize, he was the one they’d be proudest to sacrifice.

Ain’t gonna happen, he told himself.

He continued to lie still, checking the condition of the other men. It might still be possible to bring this thing off and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Then a door opened, putting a wedge of light into the room, and four women came in, carrying golden cups. They began offering drinks to the men, who took them eagerly, some of them even thanking the women. Calvin almost called out to warn them that the drink was drugged, but decided it was better to deal with it himself. One by one he went into the cups and separated the water from the drug, making it sink to the bottom of the cups and stay there, under the pure water. Except for the first few who had drunk, none of the others were getting any of the drug at all.

So when they got to him, Calvin offered no resistance. He pretended to be groggy—which wasn’t hard, with his head hurting so bad. Pain shot through his head when he sat up, and he wished he’d paid more attention when Alvin tried to teach him how to heal injuries like this. But after the mess he had made of Papa Moose’s foot, he wasn’t about to start fiddling with his own head.

They put the cup to his lip and he drank eagerly.

No doubt they’d become complacent soon, thinking that even the great white wizard was under control.

Except, of course, only the first few men were
acting
drugged. The women were beginning to be confused, talking to each other, probably wondering why most of the men were still awake.

So Calvin put them to sleep, one by one, until they all lay unconscious on the floor. That was what the women wanted, and out they went. Out, too, went the Mexica soldiers, even the ones guarding Calvin.

As soon as they were gone, Calvin woke all the ones he had put to sleep. The drugged ones, though, were another matter. It was simple to separate the drug from the water in the cups, but impossible to do anything of the kind when the drug was already in somebody’s blood. So they slept on while the others sat up and looked around.

“Talk softly,” said Calvin. “There are still guards outside the door, and we don’t want them to hear us.”

“You bastard,” said a man.

“Don’t tell us what to do.”

But they talked softly.

“Are you so stupid you blame
me
for this?” said Calvin. “I never claimed to be a mind reader. How should I know we were prisoners the whole way here? Did any of
you
guess it?”

No one had an answer to that.

“But I’m the reason the poison didn’t work on you, once I realized the water was drugged. So don’t get pissed at me, let’s plan how to get out of here.”

“Better plan fast,” said Bowie. “Since you’re the one they plan to sacrifice this afternoon.”

“I’m hurt,” said Calvin. “I would have thought they’d save me for last.”

“They’re not stupid,” said Bowie. “And just so you know, they also told us—using our own interpreters—that if you didn’t go willingly to be sacrificed, they’d kill all of us without even sending us to the god.”

“Won’t happen,” said Calvin.

“The way we figure it,” said Bowie, “we’ll make our break for it while they’re cutting your heart out.”

“Good plan,” said Calvin. “Of course, without me you won’t know where your weapons are stored. You won’t know how to get out of this room without getting caught. I think a few of you might make it as much as a hundred yards from this place.”

They were thinking about this when suddenly the ground shook under them. At once, from the city outside this building, they could hear screaming and shouting.

Calvin broke open his bonds and stood up. None of the others were tied, so they also stood. But the windows were too high in the walls to see through.