Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV (27 page)

The scullery maid went screaming from the room.

The secretaries, too, were on their feet. Bonaparte turned to them. “If I hear any rumor of this, you will all go to the Bastille. Find the girl and silence her—by persuasion or imprisonment, she deserves no torture. Now leave me alone with this extortionist, while I find out what he wants to get from me.”

They left the room. As they were going, Little Napoleon and the guards returned, but Bonaparte sent them away as well, to his nephew’s ill-concealed fury.

“All right, we’re alone,” said Bonaparte. “What do you want?”

“I want to heal your pain.”

“Then heal it and have done.”

Calvin took the challenge, twisted the nerves just right, and saw Bonaparte’s face soften, losing the perpetual wince. “Such a gift as that,” murmured the Emperor, “and you spend it cleaning floors and taking stones from prison walls.”

“It won’t last,” said Calvin.

“You mean you choose not to make it last,” said Bonaparte.

Calvin took the unusual step of telling the plain truth, sensing
that Bonaparte would know if anything he said was a lie. “It’s not a cure. The gout is still there. I don’t understand the gout and I can’t cure it. I can take away the pain.”

“But not for long.”

Truthfully, Calvin answered, “I don’t know how long.”

“And for what payment?” asked Bonaparte. “Come on, boy, I know you want something. Everyone does.”

“But you’re Napoleon Bonaparte,” said Calvin. “I thought you knew what every man wanted.”

“God doesn’t whisper it in my ear, if that’s what you think. And yes, I know what you want but I have no idea why you’ve come to me for it. You’re hungry to be the greatest man on Earth. I’ve met men with ambition like yours before—and women, too. Unfortunately I can’t easily bend such ambition into subservience to my interests. Generally I have to kill them, because they’re a danger to me.”

Those words went like a knife through Calvin’s heart.

“But you’re different,” said Bonaparte. “You mean me no harm. In fact, I’m just a tool to you. A means of gaining advantage. You don’t want my kingdom. I rule all of Europe, northern Africa, and much of the ancient East, and yet you want me only to tutor you in preparation for a much greater game. What game, on God’s green Earth, might that be?”

Calvin never meant to tell him, but the words came blurting out. “I have a brother, an older brother, who has a thousand times my power.” The words galled him, burned his throat as he said them.

“And a thousand times your virtue, too, I think,” said Bonaparte. But those words had no sting for Calvin. Virtue, as Alvin defined it, was waste and weakness. Calvin was proud to have little of it.

“Why hasn’t your brother challenged me?” asked Bonaparte. “Why hasn’t he shown his face to me in all these years?”

“He’s not ambitious,” said Calvin.

“That is a lie,” said Bonaparte, “even though in your ignorance you believe it. There is no such thing as a living human
being without ambition. St. Paul said it best: Faith, ambition, and love, the three driving forces of human life.”

“I believe it was hope,” said Calvin. “Hope and charity.”

“Hope is the sweet weak sister of ambition. Hope is ambition wishing to be liked.”

Calvin smiled. “That’s what I’ve come for,” he said.

“Not to heal my gout.”

“To ease your pain, as you ease my ignorance.”

“With powers like yours, what do you need with my small world-conquering gifts?” Bonaparte’s irony was plain and painful.

“My powers are nothing compared to my brother’s, and he is the only teacher I can learn them from. So I need other powers that he doesn’t have.”

“Mine.”

“Yes.”

“Then how do I know that you won’t turn on me and try to take my empire?”

“If I wanted it I could have it now,” said Calvin.

“It’s one thing to terrify people with displays of power,” said Bonaparte. “But terror only gets you obedience when you’re there. I have the power to hold men obedient to me even when my back is turned, even when there’s no chance I’d ever catch them in wrongdoing. They love me, they serve me with their whole hearts. Even if you sent every building in Paris crashing to the street, it wouldn’t win the people’s loyalty.”

“That’s why I’m here, because I know that.”

“Because you want to win the loyalty of your brother’s friends,” said Bonaparte. “You want them to spurn your brother and put you in his place.”

“Call me Cain if you want, but yes,” said Calvin. “Yes.”

“I can teach you that,” said Bonaparte. “But no pain. And no little games with the pain, either. If the pain comes back, I’ll have you killed.”

“You can’t even hold me in a prison if I don’t want to stay there.”

“When I decide to kill you, boy, you won’t even see it coming.”

Calvin believed him.

“Tell me, boy—”

“Calvin.”

“Boy, don’t interrupt me, don’t correct me.” Bonaparte smiled sweetly. “Tell me, Calvin, weren’t you afraid that I would win
your
loyalty and put your gifts to use in my service?”

“As you said,” Calvin answered, “your powers have scant effect on people with ambition as great as your own. It’s only really the goodness in people that you turn against them to control them. Their generosity. Isn’t that right?”

“In a sense, though it’s much more complicated than that. But yes.”

Calvin smiled broadly. “Well, then, you see? I knew I was immune.”

Bonaparte frowned. “Are you so sure of that? So proud to be a man utterly devoid of generosity?”

Calvin’s smile faded just a little. “Old Boney, the terror of Europe, the toppler of empires—Old Boney is shocked at
my
lack of compassion?”

“Yes,” said Bonaparte. “I never thought I’d see the like. A man I’ll never have power over . . . and yet I will let you stay with me, for the sake of my leg, and I’ll teach you all that can be taught. For the sake of my leg.”

Calvin laughed and nodded. “Then you’ve got a deal.”

Only later, as he was being shown to a luxurious apartment in the palace, did it occur to Calvin to wonder if, perhaps, Bonaparte’s admission that Calvin could not be controlled might not be just a ploy; if, perhaps, Bonaparte already had control over Calvin but, like all the Emperor’s other tools, Calvin continued to think that he was free.

No, he told himself. Even if it’s true, what good will it do me to think about it? The deed’s done or it’s not done, and either way I’m still myself and still have Alvin to deal with. A thousand times more powerful than me! A thousand times
more virtuous! We’ll see about that when the time comes, when I take your friends away from you, Alvin, the way you stole my birthright from
me,
you thieving Esau, you pit-digging Reuben, you jealous taunting Ishmael. God will give me my birthright, and has given me Bonaparte to teach me how to accomplish something with it.

Alvin didn’t realize he was doing it. Daytimes he thought he was bearing his imprisonment right well, putting on a cheerful face for his visitors, singing now and then—harmonizing with the jailors when they knew the song and joined in. It was a jaunty sort of imprisonment, and everyone was saying that it was a shame for Alvin to be all cooped up, but wasn’t he taking it like a soldier?

In his sleep, though, his hatred for the jail walls, for the sameness and lifelessness of the place, it came out in another kind of song, an inward music that harmonized with the greensong that once had filled this part of the world. It was the music of the trees and the lesser plants, of the insects and spiders, of the furred and finny creatures that dwelt in the leaves, on the ground, in the earth, or in the cold streams and unstoppable rivers. And Alvin’s inner voice was tuned to it, knew all the melodies, and instead of harmonizing with jailors his heart sang with free creatures.

And they heard his song that went unheard by human ears. In the tattered remnants of the ancient woods, in the new growth where a few abandoned fields were four or ten years fallow, they heard him, the last few bison, the still deer, the hunting cats and the sociable coyotes and the timber wolves. The birds above all heard him, and they came first, in twos, in tens, in flocks of hundreds, visiting the town and singing with his music for a while, daybirds coming in the nighttime, until the town was wakened by the din of so many songs all at once. They came and sang an hour and left again, but the memory of their song lingered.

First the birds, and then the song of coyotes, the howl of
wolves, not so near as to be terrifying, but near enough to fill the untuned hearts of most folks with a kind of dread, and they woke with nightsweats. Raccoon prints were all over, and yet there was no tearing or thievery, and no more than the usual number of chickens were taken, though foxfeet had trodden on every henhouse roof. Squirrels a-gathering their nuts ran fearlessly through the town to leave small offerings outside the courthouse. Fish leapt in the Hatrack and in other nearby streams, a silver dance in the sparkling moonlit water, the drops like stars falling back into the stream.

Through it Alvin slept, and most folks also slept, so only gradually did the word spread that the natural world was all a-flutter, and then only a few began to link it with Alvin being in jail. Logical folks said there couldn’t be no connection. Dr. Whitley Physicker boldly said, when asked (and sometimes when no one asked at all), “I’m the first to say it’s wrong to have that boy locked up. But that doesn’t imply that the swarming of harmless unstinging bees through the town last night meant anything at all except that perhaps this will be a hardish winter. Or perhaps a mild one. I’m not a great reader of bees. But it’s
nothing
to do with Alvin in jail because nature hardly concerns itself with the legal disputes of human beings!”

True enough, but, as a lawyer might say, irrelevant. It wasn’t Alvin in jail that disturbed nature, it was Alvin singing in his dreams that drew them. And those few in town who could hear some faint echo of his song—ones like John Binder, for instance, and Captain Harriman, who had heard such silent stirrings all their lives—why, they didn’t wake up to the bird-song and the coyotes yipping and the wolves howling and the patter of squirrel feet on shingles. Those things just fit into their own dreams, for to them it all belonged, it all fit, and Alvin’s song and the natural greensong of the world spoke peace to them deep in their hearts. They heard the rumors but didn’t understand the fuss. And if Drunken Freda drank a little less and slept a little better, who would notice it besides herself?

Verily Cooper came to Vigor Church the hard way, but then everybody did. What with the town’s reputation for making travelers listen to a hard dark story, it’s no wonder nobody put a stagecoach route there. The railroad wasn’t out that far west yet, but even if it was, it wasn’t likely there’d be a Vigor Station or even a spur. The town that Armor-of-God Weaver once expected to be the gateway to the west was now a permanent backwater.

So it was railroad—shaky and stinky, but fast and cheap—to Dekane, and stagecoach from there. By sheerest chance, Verily’s route took him right through the town of Hatrack River, where the man he was coming to meet, Calvin’s brother Alvin, was locked up. But this was the express coach and it didn’t stop in Hatrack for a leisurely meal at Horace Guester’s roadhouse, where no doubt Verily would have heard talk that stopped his journey right there. Instead he rode on to Carthage City, changed to a slow coach heading northwest into Wobbish, and then got out at a sleepy little ferry town and bought him a horse and a saddle and a pack mule for his luggage, which wasn’t all that much but more than he wanted to have on the horse he was riding. From there it was a simple matter of riding north all day, stopping at a farmhouse at night, and riding another day until, late in the afternoon, just as the sun was setting, he came to Armor’s general store, where lamps were lit and Verily hoped he might find a night’s lodging.

“I’m sorry,” said the man at the door. “We don’t take in lodgers—not much call for them in this town. The miller’s family up the road takes in such lodgers as we get, but . . . well, friend, you might as well come in. Because most of the miller’s family is right here in my store, and besides, there’s a tale they have to tell you before you or they can go to bed tonight.”

“I’ve been told of it,” said Verily Cooper, “and I’m not afraid to hear it.”

“So you came here on purpose?”

“With those signs on the road, warning travelers away?” Verily stepped through the doorway. “I have a horse and a mule to attend to—”

His words were heard by the people gathered on stools and chairs and leaning on the store counter. Immediately two young men with identical faces swung themselves over the counter. “I’ve got the horse,” said one.

“Which gives me the mule—and his baggage, no doubt.”

“And I’ve got the saddle,” said the first. “I think it comes out even.”

Verily Cooper stuck out his hand in the forthright American manner he had already learned. “I’m Verily Cooper,” he said.

“Wastenot Miller,” said one of the boys.

“And I’m Wantnot,” said the other.