“Cottonwood. Not good for much, not even cotton,” said Tenskwa-Tawa.

  “The way folks name things,” said Alvin.

  “You want to know the name of that lake?”

  Alvin could see the Prophet’s delight in what he was going to say.

  “In every Red language, it’s called the Great Salt Lake.”

  “Sounds like the name goes with the thing.”

  “You want to know the name of that valley where your people will live?”

  Alvin didn’t need to answer, since Tenskwa-Tawa was going to tell him no matter what.

  “Great Salt Lake Valley.”

  Alvin gave a little hoot of laughter.

  “But you will build the Crystal City there?” asked the Prophet.

  “Already built it here.”

  “Going to leave it behind. Can’t carry it across the plains and the mountains.”

  “Think I can’t make a wagon big enough?” asked Alvin.

  “I think you can’t find tall enough trees to let you make that wagon.”

  “Not in that treeless valley.”

  Red Prophet silently moved their viewpoint to the middle of the valley, facing east. These were high, rugged mountains, and between them, heavily wooded canyons.

  “Look at the trees in those canyons.”

  Alvin looked.

  Tenskwa-Tawa said, “Try not to cut them all down at once.”

  “We’ll cut what we need and no more.”

  “Whites need so much more of everything than Reds.”

  “We live a different way.”

  “You clear land where a thousand things grow, and you plant only one thing.”

  “Easier to harvest that way.”

  “White boy Maker has an answer for everything.”

  “Not answers. I got none of those. But ideas? Guesses? I think of those all the time. Most of them worthless, but my mind keeps trying to deliver the goods.”

  “We speak truth to each other?”

  “Always,” said Alvin. “So far, anyway. You planning to lie to me?”

  “I do not tell you all that I know. But you would be angry if I don’t tell you this.”

  “Go ahead. I wouldn’t want to be angry.”

  “A plot to kill you carried you across the river, to find a place for you and the people who trust you.”

  Alvin waited.

  “Finding you gone, their assassination plan has given way to a plan many argued for in the first place. Kill all the witches. They have almost a thousand men gathering in three places around Crystal City.”

  “Is this going to be a massacre, like Tippy-Canoe?”

  “My people bore the slaughter. Yours will not. They will use their knacks to defend themselves.”

  Alvin thought about some of the knacks. Many would be utterly useless against an enemy. But there were firestarters among them, some who could start fires a ways off. He himself had trained a couple of earthshakers. One of them had opened a crack in the Earth—a deep one. Alvin had made him close it back up, but he couldn’t. It took the other earthshaker to help him get it closed.

  If I were there, I could melt all their weapons unfired so the knackles wouldn’t have to expose how terrifyingly powerful they could be. A couple of soldier-swallowing clefts in the Earth, and he didn’t think many of the thousand-man army would stay anywhere near Crystal City. Fires popping up in all their ammunition, so their powderhorns blew up on their hips? Everybody would throw away their ammunition as they fled.

  Then the word would get out. We went to drive the witches into the river or into the ground, but they had such terrible powers. They did this and this, and that and that. Some of the stories would be true. All of them would be believed. How could an elected government ignore such a general panic? There would be no refuge of freedom left—except across the river, with the Reds.

  They want us to leave. I want us to leave. So just let us sell our farms, buy or build wagons and rafts to cross the river, and you’ll never see us more.

  Tenskwa-Tawa said, “Think of your Bible. Moses finally frightens Pharaoh into letting the Israelites go. But how soon does he change his mind and send his chariot soldiers after them?”

  “It was too dangerous to let all those Israelites go into the lands of Pharaoh’s enemies,” said Alvin. “He was afraid he would face them in battle, when they were armed and trained. Better to kill them all now.”

  “The only Reds left in the East are the Irrakwa and Cherriky. The ones who chose to live White. They are doing very well. But Whites remember when there was war between our peoples. When you have gathered all your knacky people in the West, far from the river. Your enemies don’t know where you are. You could be building an army with knacks and cannons, ready to cross the Mizzippy with a million bitter and angry Reds beside your knacky Whites.”

  “So withdrawing all my people across the Mizzippy won’t work for long.”

  “Long enough, maybe. As long as you and I are both alive, nobody can cross the river to harm us.”

  “You’re getting old.”

  “And you’re in constant peril. How long will we both live?”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “I am not leader of my people after I am dead. You are not Alvin Maker after you are dead. There will be leaders after us.”

  “But we’re so good and wise.” Alvin didn’t know if Tenskwa-Tawa would hear his ironic tone.

  “There will be good and wise people after us. The future is in their hands.”

  “Suppose that your protections on the river fail, and New England, the Crown Colonies, and the United States all combine in one vast invasion.”

  “They all despise each other.”

  “Not as much as they despise Reds,” said Alvin. “And not as much as they fear and hate knackles.”

  “So you try to build your knackles into a trained army, able to withstand assaults. You bring your army to the water’s edge, and when they attack across the river, you will sink all their boats and suffocate all their officers, before any sets foot on the shore.”

  “What will you Reds do?”

  “We will kneel and bear it. We have taken an oath to live in peace.”

  “Then let us protect you.”

  “A noble thought. Do you know the best thing you can do to protect us?”

  “What?”

  “Stay on your own side of the river and don’t take refuge among us.”

  “Then we will all die.”

  “But we won’t. Why should my people shoulder the burden of your people’s safety.”

  “You’re right. It’s wrong of us to take refuge among you. But that’s our only alternative to destruction, isn’t it? What do you see in this wall of water?”

  “What do you see.”

  “Weeping. Everybody I love, weeping.”

  Tenskwa-Tawa nodded. “I have seen that, too. But what do they weep for?”

  “Their defeat at the hands of these thousand men you spoke of. The hundreds of Crystal City men who died in defense of their families.”

  “There are so many reasons for people to weep,” said the Prophet. “Gratitude for a prayer answered. Honoring the victories of great men.”

  “Standing beside your baby’s grave,” said Alvin. Then, breaking down a little, he said, “I’m not like you Reds. My emotions spill out too easy.”

  “We feel everything that you feel,” said Tenskwa-Tawa. “Maybe more. But we choose to show our feelings with hands, feet, bows, arrows, hatchets. Or our tender feelings we show in the privacy of tepee or hogan or wickiup or counselhouse. Or alone, where only the Great Spirit can see. But in our silence, we feel everything all the more sharply for not being able to show it.”

  “I have not forgotten the battle at Tippy-Canoe,” said Alvin.

  “Those were my people,” said Tenskwa-Tawa. “I knew every one of them by name, even the children. I knew them and I loved them all.” Then, to Alvin’s surprise, Tenskwa-Tawa broke down in tears, in sobs, gripping Alvin’s shoulders and almost hanging from them. The waterspout was slowing, there were fewer visions, then none, as they sank down toward the river. Just before they touched the water, Alvin said, “Walk with me, my friend,” and he made the water solid beneath their feet as they supported each other to the shore.

  * * *

  The reports came in all night. Alvin had only just left, and the angry mobs were already forming. Oh, some of them pretended to be under military discipline, but by all reports there was no difference between the mobs in their brutality and hatred and fear. There were three credible reports of murders by the mobs, and one report of an old man who shot the leader of one mob and then saw them club his old wife to death, a senile old lady who didn’t even remember her husband’s name. Clubbed her to death before they set him on fire.

  Fighting back only makes things worse, the message was.

  The leaders of Crystal City came together in counsel all that long night of raids and killings and terror and grief. At one point, Calvin Miller even showed up. Eliza went to him and remonstrated loudly enough that it was disrupting the meeting.

  So Margaret went to them, calmed and quieted Eliza, then led Calvin out of the building. “Calvin, only a few of us know of the part you played in the conspiracy to kill Alvin—”

  “I would never—”

  “Yet you did,” said Margaret. “And the men behind these mob attacks are the same ones you broke bread with.”

  “That’s right, I know them, I should be in there to advise—”

  “Hush Calvin. Listen to yourself. Who would listen to advice from you, even if it was wise? Some of those men inside are already thinking about kidnapping you—”

  “And I’ll be declared not guilty in the trial, because I never laid a hand on Alvin, and their little plot evaporated when he crossed the river.”

  “Calvin, you poor naive child, there’s not a man of them who is thinking of putting you on trial.”

  Calvin covered his face with his hands. “You warned me, Margaret.”

  “I don’t think I did. You stopped listening to my advice years ago, so I stopped giving it.”

  “You cut way back on the advice, but you didn’t stop.”

  “Alvin loves you. He has already forgiven you for the foolishness of that plot. Here’s the message he told me to give you: ‘I can be killed, brother, if I receive so many wounds so quickly that I can’t heal myself fast enough.’”

  “That’s like Samson telling the secret of his strength to Delilah.”

  “Except Delilah played him false,” said Margaret. “Nothing requires you to do the same.”

  The door opened and Measure leaned out. “Margaret, we need your counsel right now.”

  Calvin clung to her for just a moment. Then he let her go into the house, while he stayed outside and kept explaining to himself that none of this was his fault.

  30

  ALVIN WOKE FROM a very comfortable sleep on a buffalo robe. Another had been spread over him by Becca, Tenskwa-Tawa’s sister-in-law. The great Ta-Kumsaw’s wife. Who had just poked him with her toe.

  Alvin knew her at once—she had been the keeper of the American Loom. “How can you be here?” Alvin asked.

  “I retired. I’ve woven enough in my life. You’ve met the boy who took my place. And my daughter Wieza weaves for everybody west of the Mizzippy, and north of the Great Lakes. Maybe a fifth as many threads as I had to weave.”

  Alvin chuckled as he got out from under the buffalo robe, fully clothed, of course, with his knives where they belonged. By appearance he could be a Red of Tenskwa-Tawa’s tribe. Except the part about being White. Under a tan, under the normal amount of grime from having swum the river and not bathed yet. So, not all that white.

  “Well, Becca, I’m right glad to see you. And now I don’t have to fear what you’ll discover in your weaving.”

  “Never anything to fear. Life is life. Yours has been a good one. Crossed the ocean and back. Ireland. The boy hardly knew what to do with your thread, until you assembled those people and brought them across the ocean.”

  “Now he’s fit me back in?”

  “He fit you with the Irishmen, and then fit the Irish into the small riverside location of Crystal City. Then Wieza insisted that that one had to be woven into the west, not the east.”

  “I’m … I really am happy to hear that. It might mean that maybe I’m making a right decision.”

  “Just remember, Alvin. When you’re faced with important choices, there are many wrong choices but there might be many right choices as well.”

  “And you won’t advise me.”

  “I don’t have any advice. When someone learns something believable about their future, something they don’t want to have to face, they go out of their way to get as far as possible from that terrible future—only to find out that everything they did to avoid it is exactly what caused it to come to pass.”

  “I’ve read Oedipus Rex. Not in the original Greek, of course.”

  “Oh, I enjoy talking with you, Alvin. I’ve missed you. So has my husband. But I was sent to waken you because you have visitors coming.”

  “And they are?”

  “Well, first, there’s your brother.”

  Alvin lay back down on the buffalo robe and pulled the other over him.

  “Not that brother,” said Becca. “The one who’s a little taller than you. Oh, yes. Measure.”

  Alvin got out of bed again. “Who’s with him?”

  “You’ll know them when you see them. I’m too old to memorize lists of names of people I’ve never met.”

  Barely saying a goodbye, Alvin jogged away from his tepee and headed for a patch of undergrowth where the local Red men directed their urine. Any plants that urine was going to kill were dead already.

  Then he ran on, feeling the Greensong, which was welcome this groggy morning. He reached Tenskwa-Tawa, and to his surprise, Ta-Kumsaw, the great military leader of the Reds, was with him. They greeted with a tight embrace. They had been in battle together. Alvin had healed him, or he would have died that day. And he was the brother of the Prophet, so he was Red royalty twice over.

  “Some other people are here, you oblivious scoundrel.” It was Measure speaking.

  “I saw you two days ago,” said Alvin.

  “A month’s worth of trouble has come since then.”

  Alvin looked at Arthur Stuart. Definitely a man now. I shouldn’t treat him at all like a boy anymore. It sets a bad example for others.

  John Binder spoke up. “Alvin, the army of those assassins, about a thousand men, they’re harrying inside the boundaries of Crystal City.”

  “Just on the edges, so far,” said Verily Cooper. “But three people are already killed, and orchards chopped down, barns burnt, fields burned over. And the hatred from their mouths. Everyone is terrified, because the mobbers taunt them about how it’s too bad Alvin Smith isn’t here to save them.”

  “It’s the one thing the mobbers and knackles agree on,” said Measure.

  Arthur Stuart spoke up. “Obviously, they want you to come back and lead them and, of course, save them.”

  “Among all their knacks,” said Alvin, “and common sense, they’ve got all they need to fight off a thousand.”

  Verily, John, Measure, Arthur, Ta-Kumsaw, and Tenskwa-Tawa looked at each other, saying nothing.

  “People cannot fight,” said Ta-Kumsaw, “if they do not know that they are well led.”

  “I’ve never led anybody in battle,” said Alvin.

  “You were with me and saw me lead,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “Warriors from many tribes, some of them enemies forever until then.”

  “As I remember it, we lost that battle,” said Alvin, “and you were killed.”

  “I had a friend who bandaged me up,” said Ta-Kumsaw.

  “They don’t understand why you left,” said John Binder. “They know you can’t be killed, bullets don’t touch you, you can stick your enemies’ feet to the ground—”

  “I can be killed,” said Alvin. “I hope you all know that.”

  “When you left and these troubles started,” said Verily, “they still trusted that you were working for their good. What can we tell them?”

  Alvin looked at Tenskwa-Tawa and Ta-Kumsaw.

  Ta-Kumsaw said, “Because he would do anything for a friend, my brother Tenskwa-Tawa has granted permission for all the citizens of Crystal City to cross over the Mizzippy and live in the West.”

  “Far in the West,” said Tenskwa-Tawa. “A good land with no regular residents. Reds and Whites should not collide, as long as we respect each other’s boundaries.”

  Measure laughed.

  “It’s White people who have broken all the treaties,” said the Prophet, “settling in lands they promised would belong forever to the Reds.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’re right,” said Measure. “But on the other hand, I haven’t met any tribe of Reds who act like they know what a boundary is.”

  Ta-Kumsaw spoke up. “Every tribe has young men who have no way of gaining honor and fame except in battle, counting coups, slaying, bringing home women and children to serve the tribe, grow up to be part of the tribe. That is how young men have always earned the honor of the tribe.”

  “They would raid an isolated settlement,” said Tenskwa-Tawa, “but instead of counting coups like honorable men, the White settlers fired muskets and rifles at these young raiders. When some of the warriors were killed or wounded, the young men were outraged. They began to kill for revenge, and then in later raids, they started out killing, to put all the musketmen out of action.”

  “And your leaders couldn’t rein them in?” asked Verily.

  “And your leaders couldn’t keep White families from settling in our lands?” asked Tenskwa-Tawa.

  “This is the kind of thing that drove us to war in the first place,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “We couldn’t even punish those young raiders, because we needed their skill and experience in our wars with the Crown Colonies and the United States.”

  “But now the Mizzippy stands between them and you,” said Alvin.

  “I will not live forever,” said Tenskwa-Tawa. “It is my responsibility—our responsibility—to prepare our people for war, when the fog dispels, when the White soldiers cross the river to take revenge on us.”