Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II (37 page)

The words leapt from Taleswapper before he could stop them: “Then it’s a terrible work you’ve chosen, if the death of so many good folk helps it along!”

Ta-Kumsaw answered with a roar, springing on Taleswapper all at once, knocking him back, flat on the grass of the meadow. Ta-Kumsaw’s right hand clutched Taleswapper’s hair; his left pressed against Taleswapper’s throat. “All White men will die, all who don’t escape across the sea!”

Yet it was not murder he intended. Even in his rage, Ta-Kumsaw did not press so hard as to strangle Taleswapper. After a moment the Red man pushed off and rolled away, burying his face in the grass, his arms and legs spread out to touch the earth with as much of his body as he could.

“I’m sorry,” Taleswapper whispered. “I was wrong to say that.”

“Lolla-Wossiky!” cried Ta-Kumsaw. “I did not want to be right, my brother!”

“Is he alive?” asked Taleswapper.

“I don’t know,” said Ta-Kumsaw. He turned his head to press his cheek against the grass; his eyes, though, bored at Taleswapper as if to kill him with a look. “Taleswapper, the words you were saying. What did they mean? What did you see?”

“I saw nothing,” said Taleswapper. And then, though he only learned the truth as the words came out, he said, “It was Alvin’s vision I was speaking. It’s what
he
saw. My brothers and father march before. The heavens drop with human gore. His vision, my poem.”

“And where is the boy?” asked Ta-Kumsaw. “All night on that Mound, and where is he now?” Ta-Kumsaw jumped to his feet, orienting himself toward Eight-Face Mound, toward the very center of it. “No one stays there through the whole night, and now the sun is rising and he hasn’t come.” Ta-Kumsaw abruptly turned to face Taleswapper. “He can’t come down.”

“What do you mean?”

“He needs me,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “I can feel it. A terrible wound is in him. All his strength is bleeding into the earth.”

“What’s on that hill! What wounded him?”

“Who knows what a White boy finds inside?” said Ta-Kumsaw. Then he turned to face the Mound again, as if he had felt a new summoning. “Yes,” he said, then walked quickly toward the Mound.

Taleswapper followed, saying nothing about the incongruity—Ta-Kumsaw vowing to make war against Whites until all were dead or gone from this land, and yet hurrying back to Eight-Face Mound to save a White boy.

They stood together at the place where Alvin climbed.

“Can you see the place?” asked Taleswapper.

“There is no path,” said Ta-Kumsaw.

“But you saw it yesterday,” said Taleswapper.

“Yesterday there was a path.”

“Then some other way,” said Taleswapper. “Your own way onto the Mound.”

“Another way would not take me to the same place.”

“Come now, Ta-Kumsaw, the Mound is big, but not so big you can’t find someone up there in an hour of looking.”

Ta-Kumsaw gazed disdainfully at Taleswapper.

Abashed, Taleswapper spoke less confidently. “So you have to take the same path to reach the same place?”

“How do I know?” asked Ta-Kumsaw. “I never heard of one going up the Mound, and another following by the same path.”

“Don’t you ever go here in twos or threes?”

“This is the place where the land speaks to all creatures who live here. The speech of the land is grass and trees; the adornment is beasts and birds.”

Taleswapper noted that when he wished to, Ta-Kumsaw could speak the English language like any White man. No: like a well-educated White man. Adornment. Where in the Hio country could he learn a word like that? “So we can’t get in?”

Ta-Kumsaw’s face showed no expression.

“Well, I say we go up anyway. We know the road he took—let’s take it, whether we can see it or not.”

Ta-Kumsaw said nothing.

“Are you just going to stand here, then, and let him die up there?”

In answer, Ta-Kumsaw took a single step that brought him face to face—no, breast to breast—with Taleswapper. Ta-Kumsaw gripped his hand, threw his other arm around Taleswapper, held him close. Their legs were tangled; Taleswapper for a moment imagined how they must look, if there had been anyone to see them—whether someone would know which leg belonged to which man, they were so close together. He felt the Red man’s heart beating, its rhythm more commanding within Taleswapper’s body than
the unsensed beat of his own hot pulse. “We are not two men,” whispered Ta-Kumsaw. “Not Red and White men here, with blood between us. We are one man with two souls, a Red soul and a White soul, one man.”

“All right,” said Taleswapper. “Let it be as you say.”

Still holding Taleswapper tightly, Ta-Kumsaw turned within the embrace; their heads pressed against each other, their ears so close-joined Taleswapper could hear nothing but Ta-Kumsaw’s pulse like the pounding of ocean waves inside his ear. But now, their bodies so tightly joined that they seemed to have a single heartbeat, Taleswapper could see a clear path leading up the face of the Mound.

“Do you—” began Ta-Kumsaw.

“I see it,” said Taleswapper.

“Stay this close to me,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “Now we are like Alvin—a Red soul and a White soul in a single body.”

It was awkward, even ridiculous, to attempt to climb the Mound this way. Yet when their movement up the path jostled them apart, even the tiniest fraction, the path seemed to grow more difficult, hidden behind an errant growth of some vine, some bush, some dangling limb. So Taleswapper clung to Ta-Kumsaw as tightly as the Red man clung to him, and together they made their difficult way up the hill.

At the top Taleswapper was astonished to see that instead of a single Mound, they were at the crest of a ring of eight separate Mounds, with an octagonal valley between them. More important, Ta-Kumsaw was also surprised. He seemed uncertain; his grip on Taleswapper was not as tight; he was no longer in control.

“Where does a White man go in this place?” asked Ta-Kumsaw.

“Down, of course,” said Taleswapper. “When a White man sees a valley, he goes down into it, to find what’s there.”

“Is this how it always is for you?” asked Ta-Kumsaw. “Not knowing where you are, where anything is?”

Only then did Taleswapper realize that Ta-Kumsaw
lacked his land-sense here. He was as blind as a White man in this place.

“Let’s go down,” said Taleswapper. “And look—we don’t have to cling so tightly now. It’s a grassy hill, and we don’t need a path.”

They crossed a stream and found him in a meadow, with a mist low on the ground around them. Alvin was not injured, but he lay trembling—as if fevered, though his brow was cool—and his breathing was shallow and quick. As Ta-Kumsaw had said: dying.

Taleswapper touched him, caressed him, then shook him, trying to wake the boy. Alvin showed no sign that he was aware of them. Ta-Kumsaw was no help. He sat beside the boy, holding his hand, whining so softly that Taleswapper doubted he knew he was making a sound.

But Taleswapper was not one to give in to despair, if in fact that was what Ta-Kumsaw was feeling. He looked around. Nearby was a tree, looking like spring, its leaves so yellow-green that in the light of dawn they might have been made of thin-hammered gold. Hanging from the tree was a light-colored fruit. No, a
white
fruit. And suddenly, as soon as he saw it, Taleswapper smelled it, pungent and sweet, so that he could almost taste it.

He acted, not thinking what he would do, but doing it. He walked to the tree, plucked the fruit, carried it back to Alvin where he lay on the ground, a child so small. Taleswapper passed it under Alvin’s nose, so the odor of it might be like smelling salts, and revive him. Alvin’s breathing suddenly became great deep gasps. His eyes opened, his lips parted, and from gritted teeth came a whine almost exactly like Ta-Kumsaw’s keening; almost exactly like a kicked dog.

“Take a bite,” said Taleswapper.

Ta-Kumsaw reached out, snatched Alvin’s lower jaw in one hand and upper jaw in the other, his fingers interlaced at Alvin’s teeth, and with great effort prised Alvin’s jaws apart. Taleswapper thrust the fruit between Alvin’s teeth; Ta-Kumsaw forced the jaws closed again. The fruit broke open, spilling clear fluid into Alvin’s mouth and dribbling down his cheek into the grass. Slowly, with great effort, Alvin began to chew. Tears flowed from his
eyes. He swallowed, Suddenly he reached out his hands, caught Taleswapper by the neck and Ta-Kumsaw by the hair, and pulled himself up to a sitting position. Clinging to them both, drawing their faces so close to his that they all breathed each other’s breath, Alvin wept until their faces all were wet, and because Ta-Kumsaw and Taleswapper were also weeping, none could be sure whose tears cast a glaze across the skin of each man’s face.

Alvin said little, but enough. He told them all that happened at Tippy-Canoe Creek that day, of blood in the river, a thousand survivors crossing on the water made smooth and hard; blood on White men’s hands, and on one man’s hands in particular.

“Not enough,” said Ta-Kumsaw.

Taleswapper offered no argument. It was not for a White man to tell Ta-Kumsaw that the killers of his people had received a punishment exactly proportioned to their sin. Besides, Taleswapper wasn’t sure he believed it himself.

Alvin told them how he had spent the evening and the night before, restoring Measure from the edge of death; and how he spent the morning, taking away the immeasurable agony as nine thousand innocent deaths shouted in the Prophet’s mind—nine thousand times that one black shout that years before had maddened him. Which was harder—healing Measure or healing Lolla-Wossiky? “It was like you said,” Alvin whispered to Taleswapper. “I just can’t build that brick wall faster than it breaks down.” Then, exhausted but at peace now, Alvin slept.

Taleswapper and Ta-Kumsaw faced each other, Alvin curled between them, his breathing soft and slow.

“I know his wound now,” Ta-Kumsaw said. “His grief is for his own people, with their bloody hands.”

“His grief was for the dead and the living too,” said Taleswapper. “If I know Alvin, his deepest wound was thinking that he failed, that if he’d just tried harder, he might have got Measure there in time to stop it before the first shot was fired.”

“White men grieve for White men,” Ta-Kumsaw said.

“Lie to yourself if you like,” said Taleswapper, “but lies don’t fool me.”

“But Red men don’t grieve at all,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “Red men will put White blood into the ground for the blood spilled today.”

“I thought you served the land,” said Taleswapper. “Don’t you realize what happened today? Don’t you remember where we are? You’ve seen a part of Eight-Face Mound you never knew existed, and why? Because the land let us into this place together, because—”

Ta-Kumsaw held up one hand. “To save this boy.”

“Because Red and White can share this land if we—”

Ta-Kumsaw reached out his hand and touched his fingers to Taleswapper’s lips.

“I’m not a farmer who wants to hear stories of faraway places,” Ta-Kumsaw said. “Go tell your tales to someone who wants to hear them.”

Taleswapper slapped Ta-Kumsaw’s hand away. He had meant merely to push the Red man’s arm, but instead he struck with too much force, throwing Ta-Kumsaw off balance. Ta-Kumsaw immediately leapt to his feet; Taleswapper did the same.

“Here is where it starts!” shouted Ta-Kumsaw.

Between them, at their feet, Alvin stirred.

“A Red man angered you, and you struck him, just like a White man, no patience—”

“You told me to be silent, you said my tales were—”

“Words, that’s what I gave you, words and a soft touch, and you answered me with a blow.” Ta-Kumsaw smiled. It was a terrifying smile, like a tiger’s teeth out of the darkness of the jungle, his eyes glowing, his skin bright as flame.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“White man never means anything, just couldn’t help himself, it was all a
mistake
. That’s what you think, isn’t it, White Liar! Alvin’s people killed my people because of a
mistake
, because they thought two White boys were dead. For the sake of two White boys they lashed out, just like you did, and they killed nine thousand of my people,
babies and mothers, old men and stripling boys, their cannon—”

“I heard what Alvin said.”

“Don’t you like
my
story? Don’t you want to hear it? You are White, Taleswapper. You are like all White men, quick to ask forgiveness, slow to give it; always expecting patience, but flaring up like a spark when the wind rises—you burn down a forest because you tripped on a root!” Ta-Kumsaw turned and began to walk quickly back the way they came.

“How can you leave without me!” cried Taleswapper after him. “We have to leave here together!”

Ta-Kumsaw stopped, turned around, tipped back his head, and laughed without mirth. “I don’t need a path to get
down
, White Liar!” Then he was off again, running.

Alvin was awake, of course.

“I’m sorry, Alvin,” said Taleswapper. “I didn’t mean—”

“No,” said Alvin. “Let me guess what he did. He touched you like this.” Alvin touched Taleswapper’s lips, just as Ta-Kumsaw had.

“Yes.”

“That’s what a Shaw-Nee mama does to shut up a little boy who’s making too much noise. But I’ll bet if one Red man did that to another—he was provoking you.”

“I shouldn’t have hit him.”

“Then he would’ve done something else till you did.”

Taleswapper had nothing to answer to that. Seemed to him the boy was probably right. Certainly right. The one thing Ta-Kumsaw could not bear today was being a White man’s companion in peace.

Alvin slept again. Taleswapper explored, but found nothing strange. Just stillness and peace. He couldn’t even tell now which tree it was the fruit came from. They all looked silvery green to him now, and no matter how far he walked in any direction, he ended up no farther from Alvin than a few minutes’ walk. A strange place, not a place a man could map in his mind, not a place that a man could master. Here the land gives you what it wants to give, and no more.

It was near sunset when Alvin roused again, and Taleswapper helped him to his feet.

“I’m walking like a newborn colt,” said Alvin. “I feel so weak.”