IGMS Issue 2 Read online

  When the talk was over, and before Arthur and Alvin separated to their sleeping places, they had a moment together at the rail overlooking the flatboat. "How can anybody hear that talk," said Arthur Stuart, "and go home to their slaves, and not set them free?"

  "Well, for one thing," said Alvin, "I'm not setting you free."

  "Because you're only pretending I'm a slave," whispered Arthur.

  "Then I could pretend to set you free, and be a good example for the others."

  "No you can't," said Arthur Stuart, "because then what would you do with me?"

  Alvin just smiled a little and nodded, and Arthur Stuart got his point. "I didn't say it would be easy. But if everybody would do it --"

  "But everybody won't do it," said Alvin. "So them as free their slaves, they're suddenly poor, while them as don't free them, they stay rich. So now who has all the power in slavery country? Them as keep their slaves."

  "So there's no hope."

  "It has to be all at once, by law, not bit by bit. As long as it's permitted to keep slaves anywhere, then bad men will own them and get advantage from it. You have to ban it outright. That's what I can't get Peggy to understand. All her persuasion in the end will come to nothing, because the moment somebody stops being a slaveowner, he loses all his influence among those who have kept their slaves."

  "Congress can't ban slavery in the Crown Colonies, and the King can't ban it in the States. So no matter what you do, you're gonna have one place that's got slaves and the other that doesn't."

  "It's going to be war," said Alvin. "Sooner or later, as the free states get sick of slavery and the slave states get more dependent on it, there'll be a revolution on one side of the line or the other. I think there won't be freedom until the King falls and his Crown Colonies become states in the union."

  "That'll never happen."

  "I think it will," said Alvin. "But the bloodshed will be terrible. Because people fight most fiercely when they dare not admit even to themselves that their cause is unjust." He spat into the water. "Go to bed, Arthur Stuart."

  But Arthur couldn't sleep. Having Cassius Clay speaking on the riverboat had got the belowdecks folk into a state, and some of them were quite angry at Clay for making White folks feel guilty. "Mark my words," said a fellow from Kenituck. "When they get feelin' guilty, then the only way to feel better is to talk theirself into believing we deserve to be slaves, and if we deserve to be slaves, we must be very bad and need to be punished all the time."

  It sounded pretty convoluted to Arthur Stuart, but then he was only a baby when his mother carried him to freedom, so it's not like he knew what he was talking about in an argument about what slavery was really like.

  Even when things finally quieted down, though, Arthur couldn't sleep, until finally he got up and crept up the ladderway to the deck.

  It was a moonlit night, here on the east bank, where the fog was only a low mist and you could look up and see stars.

  The twenty-five Mexica slaves were asleep on the stern deck, some of them mumbling softly in their sleep. The guard was asleep, too.

  I meant to free you tonight, though Arthur. But it would take too long now. I'd never be done by morning.

  And then it occurred to him that maybe it wasn't so. Maybe he could do it faster than he thought.

  So he sat down in a shadow and after a couple of false starts, he got the nearest slave's ankle iron into his mind and began to sense the metal the way he had that coin. Began to soften it as he had softened his belt buckle.

  Trouble was, the iron ring was thicker and had more metal in it than either the coin or the buckle had had. By the time he got one part softened up, another part was hard again, and so it went. It began to feel like the story Peggy read them about Sisyphus, whose time in Hades was spent pushing a stone up a mountain, but for every step up, he slid two steps back, so after working all day he was farther from the top than he was when he began.

  And then he almost cussed out loud at how stupid he had been.

  He didn't have to soften the whole ring. What were they going to do, slide it off like a sleeve? All he had to do was soften it at the hinge, where the metal was thinnest and weakest.

  He gave it a try and it was getting all nice and soft when he realized something.

  The hinges weren't connected. The one side wasn't joined to the other. The pin was gone.

  He took one fetter after another into his mind and discovered they were all the same. Every single hinge pin was missing. Every single slave was already free.

  He got up from the shadows and walked out to stand among the slaves.

  They weren't asleep. They made tiny hand gestures to tell Arthur to go away, to get out of sight.

  So he went back into the shadows.

  As if at a signal, they all opened their fetters and set the chains gently on the deck. It made a bit of racket, of course, but the guard didn't stir. Nor did anyone else in the silent boat.

  Then the Black men arose and swung themselves over the side away from shore.

  They're going to drown. Nobody taught slaves to swim, or let them learn it on their own. They were choosing death.

  Except that, come to think of it, Arthur didn't hear a single splash.

  He stood up when all the slaves were gone from the deck and walked to another part of the rail. Sure enough, they were overboard all right -- all gathered on the raft. And now they were carefully loading Abe Lincoln's cargo into the dinghy. It wasn't much of a dinghy, but it wasn't much of a cargo, either, and it didn't take long.

  What difference did it make, not to steal Abe's stuff? They were all thieves, anyway, since they were stealing themselves by running away. Or that was the theory, anyway. As if a man, by being free, thereby stole something from someone else.

  They laid themselves down on the raft, all twenty-five, making a veritable pile of humanity, and with those at the edges using their hands as paddles, they began to pull away out into the current. Heading out into the fog, toward the Red man's shore.

  Someone laid a hand on his shoulder and he near jumped out of his skin.

  It was Alvin, of course.

  "Let's not be seen here," Alvin said softly. "Let's go below."

  So Arthur Stuart led the way down into the slave quarters, and soon they were in whispered conversation in the kitchen, which was dark but for a single lantern that Alvin kept trimmed low.

  "I figured you'd have some blame fool plan like that," said Alvin.

  "And I thought you was going to let them go on as slaves like you didn't care, but I should've knowed better," said Arthur Stuart.

  "I thought so, too," said Alvin. "But I don't know if it was having Jim Bowie guess too much, or him trying to kill me with that knife -- and no, Arthur Stuart, he did not stop in time, if there'd been a blade in that knife it would have cut right through my throat. Could have been the fear of death made me think that I didn't want to face God knowing I could have freed twenty-five men, but chose to leave them slaves. Then again, it might have been Mr. Clay's sermon tonight. Converted me as neat as you please."

  "Converted Mr. Lincoln," said Arthur Stuart.

  "Might be," said Alvin. "Though he doesn't look like the sort who ever sought to own another man."

  "I know why you had to do it," said Arthur Stuart.

  "Why is that?"

  "Because you knew that if you didn't, I would."

  Alvin shrugged. "Well, I knew you'd made up your mind to try."

  "I could have done it."

  "Very slowly."

  "It was working, once I realized I only had to go after the hinge."

  "I reckon so," said Alvin. "But the real reason I chose tonight was that the raft was here. A gift to us, don't you think? Would have been a shame not to use it."

  "So what happens when they get to the Red man's shore?"

  "Tenskwa Tawa will see to them. I gave them a token to show to the first Red they meet. When they see it, they'll get escorted straight to the Prophet, wherev
er he might be. And when he sees it, he'll give them safe passage. Or maybe let them dwell there."

  "Or maybe he'll need them, to help him fight the Mexica. If they're moving north."

  "Maybe."

  "What was the token?" asked Arthur Stuart.

  "A couple of these," said Alvin. He held up a tiny shimmering cube that looked like the clearest ice that had ever been, or maybe glass, but no glass had ever shimmered.

  Arthur Stuart took it in his hand and realized what it was. "This is water. A box of water."

  "More like a block of water. I decided to make it today out on the river, when I came so close to having my blood spill into the water. That's partly how they're made. A bit of my own self has to go into the water to make it strong as steel. You know the law. 'The maker is the one ...'"

  "The maker is the one who is part of what he makes," said Arthur Stuart.

  "Get to sleep," said Alvin. "We can't let nobody know we was up tonight. I can't keep them all asleep forever."

  "Can I keep this?" said Arthur Stuart. "I think I see something in it."

  "You can see everything in it, if you look long enough," said Alvin. "But no, you can't keep it. If you think what I got in my poke is valuable, think what folks would do to have a solid block of water that showed them true visions of things far and near, past and present."

  Arthur reached out and offered the cube to Alvin.

  But instead of taking it, Alvin only smiled, and the cube went liquid all at once and dribbled through Arthur Stuart's fingers. Arthur looked at the puddle on the table, feeling as forlorn as he ever had.

  "It's just water," said Alvin.

  "And a little bit of blood."

  "Naw," said Alvin. "I took that back."

  "Good night," said Arthur Stuart. "And ... thank you for setting them free."

  "Once you set your heart on it, Arthur, what else could I do? I looked at them and thought, somebody loved them once as much as your mama loved you. She died to set you free. I didn't have to do that. Just inconvenience myself a little. Put myself at risk, but not by much."

  "But you saw what I did, didn't you? I made it soft without getting it hot."

  "You done good, Arthur Stuart. There's no denying it. You're a maker now."

  "Not much of one."

  "Whenever you got two makers, one's going to be more of a maker than the other. But lessen that one starts gettin' uppity, it's good to remember that there's always a third one who's better than both of them."

  "Who's better than you?" asked Arthur Stuart.

  "You," said Alvin. "Because I'll take an ounce of compassion over a pound of tricks any day. Now go to sleep."

  Only then did Arthur let himself feel how very, very tired he was. Whatever had kept him awake before, it was gone now. He barely made it to his cot before he fell asleep.

  Oh, there was a hullabaloo in the morning. Suspicions flew every which way. Some folks thought it was the boys from the raft, because why else would the slaves have left their cargo behind? Until somebody pointed out that with the cargo still on the raft, there wouldn't have been room for all the runaways.

  Then suspicion fell on the guard who had slept, but most folks knew that was wrong, because if he had done it then why didn't he run off, instead of lying there asleep on the deck till a crewman noticed the slaves was gone and raised the alarm.

  Only now, when they were gone, did the ownership of the slaves become clear. Alvin had figured Mr. Austin to have a hand in it, but the man most livid at their loss was Captain Howard hisself. That was a surprise. But it explained why the men bound for Mexico had chosen this boat to make their journey downriver.

  To Alvin's surprise, though, Austin and Howard both kept glancing at him and young Arthur Stuart as if they suspected the truth. Well, he shouldn't have been surprised, he realized. If Bowie told them what had happened to his knife out on the water, they'd naturally wonder if a man with such power over iron might have been the one to slip the hinge pins out of all the fetters.

  Slowly the crowd dispersed. But not Captain Howard, not Austin. And when Alvin and Arthur made as if to go, Howard headed straight for them. "I want to talk to you," he said, and he didn't sound friendly.

  "What about?" said Alvin.

  "That boy of yours," said Howard. "I saw how he was doing their slops on the morning watch. I saw him talking to them. That made me suspicious, all right, since not one of them spoke English."

  "Pero todos hablaban espanol," said Arthur Stuart.

  Austin apparently understood him, and looked chagrined. "They all of them spoke Spanish? Lying skunks."

  Oh, right, as if slaves owed you some kind of honesty.

  "That's as good as a confession," said Captain Howard. "He just admitted he speaks their language and learned things from them that even their master didn't know."

  Arthur was going to protest, but Alvin put a hand on his shoulder. He did not, however, stop his mouth. "My boy here," said Alvin, "only just learned to speak Spanish, so naturally he seized on an opportunity to practice. Unless you got some evidence that those fetters was opened by use of a slop bucket, then I think you can safely leave this boy out of it."

  "No, I expect he wasn't the one who popped them hingepins," said Captain Howard. "I expect he was somebody's spy to tell them Blacks about the plan."

  "I didn't tell nobody no plan," said Arthur Stuart hotly.

  Alvin clamped his grip tighter. No slave would talk to a white man like that, least of all a boat captain.

  Then from behind Austin and Howard came another voice. "It's all right, boy," said Bowie. "You can tell them. No need to keep it secret any more."

  And with a sinking feeling, Alvin wondered what kind of pyrotechnics he'd have to go through to distract everybody long enough for him and Arthur Stuart to get away.

  But Bowie didn't say at all what Alvin expected. "I got the boy to tell me what he learned from them. They were cooking up some evil Mexica ritual. Something about tearing out somebody's heart one night when they were pretending to be our guides. A treacherous bunch, and so I decided we'd be better of without them."

  "You decided!" Captain Howard growled. "What right did you have to decide."

  "Safety," said Bowie. "You put me in charge of the scouts, and that's what these were supposed to be. But it was a blame fool idea from the start. Why do you think them Mexica left those boys alive instead of taking their beating heart out of their chests? It was a trap. All along, it was a trap. Well, we didn't fall into it."

  "Do you know how much they cost?" demanded Captain Howard.

  "They didn't cost you anything," said Austin.

  That reminder took a bit of the dudgeon out of Captain Howard. "It's the principle of the thing. Just setting them free."

  "But I didn't," said Bowie. "I sent them across river. What do you think will happen to them there -- if they make it through the fog?"

  There was a bit more grumbling, but some laughter, too, and the matter was closed.

  Back in his room, Alvin waited for Bowie to return.

  "Why?" he demanded.

  "I told you I could keep a secret," said Bowie. "I watched you and the boy do it, and I have to say, it was worth it to see how you broke their irons without ever laying a hand on them. To think I'd ever see a knack like that. Oh, you're a maker all right."

  "Then come with me," said Alvin. "Leave these men behind. Don't you know the doom that lies over their heads? The Mexica aren't fools. These are dead men you're traveling with."

  "Might be so," said Bowie, "but they need what I can do, and you don't."

  "I do so," said Alvin. "Because I don't know many men in this world can hide their heartfire from me. It's your knack, isn't it? To disappear from all men's sight, when you want to. Because I never saw you watching us."

  "And yet I woke you up just reaching for your poke the other night," said Bowie with a grin.

  "Reaching for it?" said Alvin. "Or putting it back?"

  Bowie shrugged.


  "I thank you for protecting us and taking the blame on yourself."

  Bowie chuckled. "Not much blame there. Truth is, Austin was getting sick of all the trouble of taking care of them Blacks. It was only Howard who was so dead set on having them, and he ain't even going with us, once he drops us off on the Mexica coast."

  "I could teach you. The way Arthur Stuart's been learning."

  "I don't think so," said Bowie. "It's like you said. We're different kind of men."

  "Not so different but what you can't change iffen you've a mind to."

  Bowie only shook his head.

  "Well, then, I'll thank you the only way that's useful to you," said Alvin.

  Bowie waited. "Well?"

  "I just did it," said Alvin. "I just put it back."

  Bowie reached down to the sheath at his waist. It wasn't empty. He drew out the knife. There was the blade, plain as day, not a whit changed.

  You'd've thought Bowie was handling his long-lost baby.

  "How'd you get the blade back on it?" he asked. "You never touched it."

  "It was there all along," said Alvin. "I just kind of spread it out a little."

  "So I couldn't see it?"

  "And so it wouldn't cut nothing."

  "But now it will?"

  "I think you're bound to die, when you take on them Mexica, Mr. Bowie. But I want you to take some human sacrificers with you on the way."

  "I'll do that," said Bowie. "Except for the part about me dying."

  "I hope I'm wrong and you're right, Mr. Bowie," said Alvin.

  "And I hope you live forever, Alvin Maker," said the knife-wielding killer.

  That morning Alvin and Arthur Stuart left the boat, as did Abe Lincoln and Cuz, and they made their journey down to Nueva Barcelona together, all four of them, swapping impossible stories all the way. But that's another tale, not this one.