Orson Card - THE CRYSTAL CITY

The other gators were getting close. Alvin got inside the nearest one and tried to lead it to attack the gator who was holding onto him. But while this second animal wasn't tilled with malice, it also wasn't responding to him. It was afraid to obey him. The Unmaker could cry fear into the animal's heart louder than Alvin could speak hunger to it. It retreated. All the other gators waited in a semicircle, all about fifteen feet away, watching the struggle in the water.

The gator was still trying to gnaw at the plow, and each time it bit down, Alvin worked the plow deeper and deeper between its jaws. The plow was thicker than Alvin's leg. And finally, with the teeth no longer gripping him, he was able to twist his body and his injured leg came free.

In that moment the gator made its move, to try to get away with the plow in its mouth. But Alvin was ready. He flopped onto the gator's back and embraced its whole head in a great bear hug, clamping the jaws tightly around the plow.

That did bother the gator. The plow was too big for its jaws to close with the plow between them, and with Alvin holding on so tightly it could neither swallow nor open its mouth enough to let go of the thing. On top of that, its nostrils were still closed, and even though Alvin had caught plenty of breaths during the struggle, the gator had been going some minutes without taking in any air. How long could a gator's lungs hold out?

A long time, Alvin learned, as he held on, squeezing tighter and tighter.

After a while, he realized that the gator was no longer thrashing.

Still he held on.

Yes, there it was. One last twitch, one feeble attempt to rise to the surface and breathe.

And in that moment, Alvin unstopped its nostrils. Because he was blamed if he was going to let the Unmaker force him to kill a perfectly innocent gator who wouldn't have done nobody any harm except the Unmaker forced it to.

Alvin rose up, balancing on his one good leg, lifting the gator's head above water. At once it began to thrash weakly, sucking air into its partly open mouth and its nostrils. Then Alvin flung it across the log. Its mouth hung open for one long moment and Alvin snatched the poke, with the plow in it, back out of the gator's mouth. Then he shoved the gator back into the water and this time when he told it to go away, it heard him, and feebly began to swim away.

The other gators leapt upon the weakened one and dragged it under the water.

No! shouted Alvin into their minds. Let it go. Go away. Let it go.

They obeyed.

And as they swam away, Alvin thought, for just a moment, that swimming alongside them was a reptilian creature that was not a gator at all, but rather a fiery salamander, its glow damped by the murky water of the Mizzippy.

Was that what Thrower saw in his church, when Armor-of-God saw him cower in terror at whatever was circling the walls? Or was it just a trick of my eyes because the pain is ... so ... bad.

Alvin dragged his bad leg and the poke with the plow up onto the shore and lay there, panting.

And then he realized that even this would be a victory for the Unmaker. He didn't want me to cross that river. Therefore I must cross, and without delay, or he still wins.

With the water to help bear the agonizing weight of his disjointed leg, Alvin half hopped, half swam to the log and put the plow on top of it and dragged his own body on. It took more than his physical strength-he had to use his power to keep the thing from rolling with him on it. But finally he was fully atop the log, and he paddled it out into the current of the river.

Ahead of him the wall of fog waited. It was safety. If Alvin made it there, he'd be under the influence of Tenskwa-Tawa, and he had all the power of the red people behind the making of that fog. The Unmaker surely couldn't go there.

Alvin kept going, despite the fog of pain that threatened to plunge him into unconsciousness. He couldn't concentrate well enough to make the paddling go faster or easier. Nor could he spare the attention to tend to his disjointed hip. He just kept paddling and paddling, knowing that the current was sweeping him ever leftward, farther downstream than he wanted to go.

The fog closed around him. And with the wave of relief that swept over him, he finally slipped into unconsciousness.

He woke to find a black man bending over him.

The man spoke in a language that Alvin didn't understand. But he had heard it before. He just couldn't remember where.

Alvin was lying on his back. On dry land. He must have made it across.

Or maybe somebody on the river found him and brought him to the other shore.

It was hard to care.

The man's voice became more urgent. And then his meaning became very clear as large, strong hands pulled on his injured leg and another pair of hands shoved at his upper thigh, scraping bone on bone in a blinding flash of agony. It didn't work, the bone wouldn't go back into the socket, and as they let his leg slide back into its out-of-joint position the pain became too great and Alvin fainted.

He woke again, perhaps only moments later, and again the man spoke and gestured and Alvin raised one feeble hand. "Wait," he said. "Wait for just a moment."

But if they understood his words or his gesture, they gave no sign. He saw now that there were several of them, and they were determined to get his hip back together, and nothing he said was going to stop him.

So, with desperate hurry, he scanned through his own body, finding the ligaments that were blocking the way, and this time when they pulled and pushed, Alvin was able to arrange things so the top of the thigh bone slid past the obstructions. For a moment it balanced on the lip of the socket, and then with a jolt slipped back where it belonged.

Alvin fainted again.

When he awoke he was in a different place, indoors, and no one was with him, though he heard voices in a strange language-not the same language-outside.

Outside what?

Open your eyes, fool, and see where you are.

A cabin. An old one, in need of fresh mud to chink the holes in the walls. Long out of use, apparently.

The door opened. A different black man entered. And now Alvin saw that he looked familiar. He was dressed in a costume that consisted of feathers and animal skins arranged to give the impression, but not the reality, of decorated nakedness. Not like a red man. But perhaps like an African. Perhaps dressed as he would have dressed in his homeland, before he was carried away into slavery.

But Alvin had seen him before, on the deck of a boat.

"I am learn English," said the man.

That's right, the slaves on the boat spoke little English. Some spoke Spanish, and most spoke the language of the Mexica, but both those languages were a mystery to him.

"You were on the Yazoo Queen," said Alvin.

The man looked baffled.

"Riverboat," said Alvin. "You."

The man nodded happily. "You on boat! You put I... we... off boat!"

"Yes," said Alvin. "We set you free."

The man threw himself to his knees beside Alvin's mat and then bent over to embrace him. Alvin hugged him back. "How long have I been here?" he asked.

The man again looked baffled. Apparently Alvin had taken him beyond the limits of his English.

Alvin tried to sit up, but the man pushed him back down.

"Sleep sleep," said the man.

"No, I've had enough sleep," said Alvin.

"Sleep sleep!" insisted the man.

How could Alvin explain to him that while they'd been talking and hugging, Alvin had checked over his leg, found all the injuries-the sore spots in the joint, the places where the gator's teeth had torn the skin-and fixed them?

All he could do was raise the leg that had been dislocated and show that it could be moved freely. The man looked at him in surprise, and tried to get him to lay his leg down, but Alvin instead showed him that where the gator had bitten him, there were no scars.