As she ran, she felt herself grow lighter, felt her body melting under the flesh, felt her heaps and mounds erode away in an inward storm, sculpting her into a woman’s shape again. The vast skin that had contained her belly began to slap awkwardly, loosely against her thighs as she ran. The servants caught up with her, reached out to support her, and plunged their hands into a body that was melting away. They said nothing; it was not for them to say. They only took hold of the loosening folds and held and ran.

  And suddenly through her fear the Queen saw a pattern of furniture, a lintel, a carpet, a window, and she knew where she was. She had accidently stumbled upon a familiar wing of the palace, and now she had purpose, she had direction, she would go where help and strength were waiting. To the throne room, to her husband, where the king was surely holding his Invocation. The servants caught up with her at last; now they bore her up. “To my husband,” she said, and they assured her and petted her and carried her. The thing within her leapt for joy: its time was coming quickly.

  Amasa could not watch the ceremonies. From the moment he entered the Hall of Heaven all he could see were the butterflies. They hovered in the dome that was painted like the midsummernight sky, blotting out the tiny stars with their wings; they rested high on painted pillars, camouflaged except when they fanned their graceful wings. He saw them where to others they were far too peripheral to be seen, for in the base of his brain the gates opened and closed, the poles reversed, always in the same rhythm that drove the butterflies’ flight and rest. Save the Queen, they said. We brought you here to save the Queen. It throbbed behind his eyes, and he could hardly see.

  Could hardly see, until the Queen came into the room, and then he could see all too clearly. There was a hush, the ceremonies stopped, and all gazes were drawn to the door where she stood, an undulant mass of flesh with a woman’s face, her eyes vulnerable and wide with fright and trust. The servants’ arms reached far into the folds of skin, finding God-knew-what grip there: Amasa only knew that her face was exquisite. Hers was the face of all women, the hope in her eyes the answer to the hope of all men. “My husband!” she cried out, but at the moment she called she was not looking at the King. She was looking at Amasa.

  She is looking at me, he thought in horror. She is all the beauty of Besara, she is the power of Kafr Katnei, she is the abyss of Ekdippa, she is all that I have loved and left behind. I do not want to desire them again.

  The King cried out impatiently, “Good God, woman!”

  And the Queen reached out her arms toward the man on the throne, gurgled in agony and surprise, and then shuddered like a wood fence in a wind.

  What is it, asked a thousand whispers. What’s wrong with the Queen?

  She stepped backward.

  There on the floor lay a baby, a little gray baby, naked and wrinkled and spotted with blood. Her eyes were open. She sat up and looked around, reached down and took the placenta in her hands and bit the cord, severing it.

  The butterflies swarmed around her, and Amasa knew what he was meant to do. As you snapped the butterfly, they said to him, you must break this child. We are Hierusalem, and we were built for this epiphany, to greet this child and slay her at her birth. For this we found the man most holy in the world, for this we brought him here, for you alone have power over her.

  I cannot kill a child, Amasa thought. Or did not think, for it was not said in words but in a shudder of revulsion in him, a resistance at the core of what in him was most himself.

  This is no child, the city said. Do you think the dragons have surrendered just because we stole their trees? The dragons have simply changed to fit a new mate; they mean to rule the world again. And the gates and poles of the city impelled him, and Amasa decided a thousand times to obey, to step a dozen paces forward and take the child in his arms and break it. And as many times he heard himself cry out, I cannot kill a child! And the cry was echoed by his voice as he whispered, “No.”

  Why am I standing in the middle of the Hall of Heaven, he asked himself. Why is the Queen staring at me with horror in her eyes? Does she recognize me? Yes, she does, and she is afraid of me. Because I mean to kill her child. Because I cannot kill her child.

  As Amasa hesitated, tearing himself, the gray infant looked at the King. “Daddy,” she said, and then she stood and walked with gathering certainty toward the throne. With such dextrous fingers the child picked at her ear. Now. Now, said the butterflies.

  Yes, said Amasa. No.

  “My daughter!” the King cried out. “At last an heir! The answer to my Invocation before the prayer was done—and such a brilliant child!”

  The King stepped down from his throne, reached to the child and tossed her high into the air. The girl laughed and tumbled down again. Once more the King tossed her in delight. This time, however, she did not come down.

  She hovered in the air over the King’s head, and everyone gasped. The child fixed her gaze on her mother, the mountainous body from which she had been disgorged, and she spat. The spittle shone in the air like a diamond, then sailed across the room and struck the Queen on her breast, where it sizzled. The butterflies suddenly turned black in midair, shriveled, dropped to the ground with infinitesimal thumps that only Amasa could hear. The gates all closed within his mind, and he was all himself again; but too late, the moment was passed, the child had come into her power, and the Queen could not be saved.

  The King shouted, “Kill the monster!” But the words still hung in the air when the child urinated on the King from above. He erupted in flame, and there was no doubt now who ruled in the palace. The gray shadow had come in from the walls.

  She looked at Amasa, and smiled. “Because you were the holiest,” she said, “I brought you here.”

  Amasa tried to flee the city. He did not know the way. He passed a palmer who knelt at a fountain that flowed from virgin stone, and asked, “How can I leave Hierusalem?”

  “No one leaves,” the palmer said in surprise. As Amasa went on, he saw the palmer bend to continue scrubbing at a baby’s hands. Amasa tried to steer by the patterns of the stars, but no matter which direction he ran, the roads all bent toward one road, and that road led to a single gate. And in the gate the child waited for him. Only she was no longer a child. Her slate-gray body was heavy-breasted now, and she smiled at Amasa and took him in her arms, refused to be denied. “I am Dalmanutha,” she whispered, “and you are following my road. I am Acrasia, and I will teach you joy.”

  She took him to a bower on the palace grounds, and taught him the agony of bliss. Every time she mated with him, she conceived, and in hours a child was born. He watched each one come to adulthood in hours, watched them go out into the city and afix themselves each to a human, some man, some woman, or some child. “Where one forest is gone,” Dalmanutha whispered to him, “another will rise to take its place.”

  In vain he looked for butterflies.

  “Gone, all gone, Amasa,” Acrasia said. “They were all the wisdom that you learned from my ancestors, but they were not enough, for you hadn’t the heart to kill a dragon that was as beautiful as man.” And she was beautiful, and every day and every night she came to him and conceived again and again, telling him of the day not long from now when she would unlock the seals of the gates of Hierusalem and send her bright angels out into the forest of man to dwell in the trees and mate with them again.

  More than once he tried to kill himself. But she only laughed at him as he lay with bloodless gashes in his neck, with lungs collapsed, with poison foul-tasting in his mouth. “You can’t die, my Saint Amasa,” she said, “Father of Angels, you can’t die. For you broke a wise, a cruel, a kind and gentle butterfly.”

  Alvin and the Apple Tree

  A TALE OF ALVIN MAKER

  The State of Hio, 1820

  It’s not certain now whether Alvin Smith was on his way to Hatrack River for a visit to his own birthplace and his wife’s people, or on his way west from such a visit, but the hamlet of Piperbury isn’t more than two days’ walk for a man with shoes, three days barefoot, and half a day for Alvin when he ran through the woods with the greensong in his heart.

  Coming or going, when Alvin came to a covered bridge spanning a brook so narrow a lazy man could step over it, he knew he was on the road his father and brothers had traveled not long after Alvin himself was born. They left no stream unbridged in those days, as a kind of vengeance on the Hatrack, which had served the Unmaker by taking the life of the family’s oldest boy, Vigor.

  “You seem to be touching that bridge like a half-forgotten friend,” said a man’s voice.

  Alvin turned and saw him then, resting his back against the trunk of a tree with his feet in the cold water of the stream.

  It wasn’t often a body could sneak up on Alvin. But since he was sitting still I suppose he wasn’t sneaking. He was as still as if he had grown like moss on that tree. Alvin could ordinarily sense folks, especially White folks, who didn’t often blend in proper with the living things around them. But this man did. Or rather, it’s more like he didn’t exist at all, for all Alvin had noticed of him till he spoke.

  “You seem to belong here,” said Alvin, “yet your worn-out pack and the calluses on your feet say that you’re a traveler who walked long today.”

  “And you’re not even out of breath,” said the traveler, “and yet you ran out of those woods so fast I thought you to be a hare in a hurry.”

  “That’s because my shoes are so fine,” said Alvin, “I have to run.”

  “But you ain’t wearing any shoes,” said the traveler.

  “My shoes are so fine,” said Alvin, “that only I can see them.”

  The traveler lifted one dripping, naked foot out of the water and rubbed the rough and horny sole. “You can see I’m wearing shoes, too, but coarse and homey ones. I never asked the Lord for any better, though.”

  “I think we have a cobbler in common, sir,” said Alvin.

  “Your clothes are homespun and your feet are bare,” said the traveler. “May I ask if you’re primitive Christian, sir?”

  “I’ve been called primitive,” said Alvin, “and I try to live as a Christian, but I think when you put those words together they took on a new meaning and I don’t know it.”

  “We’re the Christians who try to live the simple life the Master led. Shoeless, in coarse raiment, living from handfuls of corn in the field and the wind-harvested fruit of the tree.”

  Alvin thought about that for a moment. “I’m not sure if it says in the gospels, sir, that Jesus chose his simple clothing, but rather wore the best he could afford.”

  “He also said to sell all you have, give it to the poor, and come follow him.”

  “Did you sell all you had? Did it fetch a good price?”

  “I gave it to my brother and left it all behind. Now I travel from place to place with my bag of apple seeds and the word of the Lord.”

  “Then I have a name to put to you, sir, if I’m not mistaken. Are you John Chapman, the one they call Appleseed, who has established apple nurseries in towns from east to west and north to south?”

  “Not much east and even less south, but north and west of here, I’m sometimes called John Appleseed, or Johnny when they drink a toast to me with the cider made from the sour fruit of my seed-grown trees.”

  “Seed-grown always?” Alvin asked, for he had heard some faint emphasis in the way John Chapman said those words.

  “The gentle fruit for a rich man’s table is made from a grafted tree, delicate sweet-bearing trunk sprouting from a hardy sour root. But here in this country, I plant the seed-grown tree that’s honest from root to leaf, the kind of apple tree that a working man can keep, because he doesn’t have to climb up to pick the fruit when it’s unblemished and pretty. A working man comes to my tree and gathers the fruit from the ground, too ripe and tart to go into the mouth, but just right for the cider barrel. I plant drinking apples, my friend.”

  Alvin laughed, because he liked a brag and a tale as much as any man. So he stayed and jawed and bathed his feet with the man and they traded stories, some of them nigh on to true.

  But the best stories, Alvin reckoned, were the ones about the apples John Chapman planted. That’s because Alvin, being a Maker, had a way of seeing into most folks’ knacks, puzzling out exactly what it was they did, and when John Appleseed got to talking about how he put the pollen from one tree into the blossoms of another and found the best mix, Alvin understood his treeknackery better than any other soul was likely to.

  For John Appleseed didn’t just blow the pollen into the blossoms. John Appleseed breathed the pollen into his lungs and there he came to know the grains, the deep inner secrets of them, in the few moments of a held breath. Then he puffed out onto the blossoms only the pollen grains that he wanted them to know, and so the apples that came forth were like the animals from Noah’s Ark, ready to go and propagate the world, each after its own kind.

  “You’re a man with a marvelous knack,” said Alvin, “for talking and for growing things. But I don’t see a jug of cider in your kit.”

  “A man who’s had the pure pollen in his nostrils has no need of the fermented cider,” said John Chapman.

  And because Alvin was an honest man, and didn’t expect to hear any more lies than he would tell himself, he took him at his word. And, as far as it went, that word was true. John Appleseed was no cider drinker. He ate the tart apples as they came, sharp to the bite, and otherwise he ate cornbread like other folks.

  The sun was at midafternoon when they parted, Appleseed for a place he’d camped before, the time he came to plant his nursery here. “And you go on into Piperbury, my young smith. It’s a godly town.”

  “The whole town?” asked Alvin. “That will be a sight. Every other town I seen has its good and bad people all mixed up together.”

  “In Piperbury, they have a keen awareness of the goodness of God and the low poor condition of the human soul,” said John Appleseed. “Every living soul of them. It’s why I love it more than any other place where I’ve set up a nursery of my trees. It’s why I keep on coming back.”

  From this, Alvin wasn’t quite sure what to expect as he crossed through the bridge and walked on into Piperbury. Would they be a pious group, proud of their humility, critical of any who weren’t as humble as they? Or would they be genuine Christians, their hearts filled with compassion and generosity? From what he found, Alvin figured, he’d know a good deal more about John Chapman.

  What he found was a mournful procession in the hamlet. It’s hard to put on a good funeral show when there’s no more than twenty families altogether, but this was the most ragged bunch of grievers Alvin had ever seen. It’s not that they weren’t sad enough—he couldn’t remember seeing a group more downcast. It’s that they also seemed so very tired, plodding along as if at the end of a long day’s work.

  Well, of course they were. It was late in the afternoon, and Alvin doubted that anyone except the immediate family had taken the day off work.

  Alvin doffed his cap, as he knew would show respect, and then fell in at the back of the procession. Up ahead, the plain box rested on the shoulders of six men, and Alvin wondered if they were the dead one’s family or if the hamlet was so small that the same six men carried everyone who died.

  But before he could ask anyone that question, he had to establish himself. So he spoke quietly to the prentice-age boy nearly at the back. “You mind a stranger asking whose burial we’re headed for?”

  The boy didn’t even glance up. “Why? You didn’t know her.”

  “Well right there that’s something I didn’t know. A woman. Or a girl?”

  “A woman as should have knowed better,” said the boy, and then he sped up his walk and left Alvin behind.

  “Move on through this hamlet, mister,” said a middle-aged woman. “We got nothing for you here.”

  “Not even a bite of supper? I can work for it or pay, if need be.”

  “You don’t want to spend even a night here,” said the woman. “It’s the wickedest place in all the world.” Tears streamed down her face.

  “This little place?” asked Alvin. “It’s too small to be wickedest. You don’t even have all the equipment.”

  “We are burdened with our sins,” said the woman, “and we don’t have time to take you on.”

  “Maybe I can help with your burden,” said Alvin. He was beginning to get an idea of the kind of Christianity that John Chapman loved.

  “There’s no helping us,” said the woman. “Jesus only hung for a day on the cross. That wasn’t time enough to atone for me.” And then she burst into tears and, like the teenage boy, she sped up her pace and left Alvin behind.

  Well, Alvin knew that a funeral wasn’t a place to discuss theology. And for all he knew they might be right. A town was bound to know itself better than any stranger could, especially one who just walked in and meant to walk right out again next day. What was he going to tell them, that they’d listen to?

  And yet they did all seem burdened, and not just by bearing a box on their shoulders, or grieving for the dead. It became clearer when he got to the hilltop cemetery. For they took turns speaking over the grave before throwing a handful of dirt onto the coffin, and they all said just about the same thing.

  “Nedra died convinced of her damnation, but I’m more damned than she could ever be. There was the day she had a new bonnet, and I said, ‘Would Jesus think that money was well spent? Remember the widow’s mite.’”