Orson Card - THE CRYSTAL CITY

The last red of the sunset was just fading from the sky when they came to a low bluff overlooking an eastward curve of the Mizzippy and saw it, more than a mile wide, streaked with red from the sunset.

"We cross in the morning?" asked Arthur Stuart.

"We cross as soon as every last soul is up here on this bluff," said Alvin.

They had spread out a bit during the long day's run, so it was full dark and then some when the colonels reported that everyone was accounted for.

Once again Alvin had Papa Moose and Mama Squirrel and their children at the front, but this time La Tia would be leading them across instead of waiting till last. "Won't be no bridge this time," said Alvin to the council. "We're gonna dam up the river and it's going to look mighty strange, piled up on your right side. Nobody ought to look into it-we got no time for that."

Then Alvin walked to the point of the bluff nearest the water, Arthur Stuart beside him, and raised up a torch.

On the far side of the river, the fog cleared and another torch could be seen, just a wink of light.

"Who's on the other side?" asked Arthur Stuart.

"Tenskwa-Tawa," said Alvin. "He's gonna help me dam the Mizzippy."

"Well," said Arthur Stuart, "I say, dam the Mizzippy all to hell!"

Alvin laughed and then cut open his hand with his own fingernail and flung the blood out over the water.

It looked as if the water leaped right back up into his hand, but it wasn't water, no sir, it was the crystal again, and as Alvin held one end of it, it grew, stretching out like a thin sheet of glass right through the river and across it. Halfway there it was met by crystal from the other side and by then the water on the left side of the dam was flowing away, sinking down, gone.

On the upstream side of the dam, though, the water had risen, and Arthur expected it would start to flow over the top any second. But it didn't. Because, he realized, upstream of the bluff it had spilled over the banks and was flooding the land on the white man's side of the river.

Now Arthur Stuart knew why this spot had been chosen. The bluffs on the other side were higher and extended farther upstream. There'd be no flood on the red side of the river.

"I got a job for you," said Alvin.

"I'm game, if it's something I can handle."

"Colonel Adan is coming up the river with a couple of his boats. He's also sent another bunch of soldiers around by land. Well, those boys are gonna be scrambling to climb trees and find high ground for the next while, but what I worry about is the men on them boats."

"Won't they be left high and dry with the river dammed like this?" said Arthur Stuart.

"They will. But they'll be mighty tempted to get out of them boats and come upstream on foot. And when we let go of this dam, they'll all be drowned."

"Like Pharaoh's chariots."

"I don't want any more dead men on account of this trek," said Alvin. "There's just no call for it, if we give proper warning."

"I'll keep 'em in the boats," said Arthur Stuart.

"I was just asking you to give them advice."

"I'll give them such strong advice everybody takes it."

"Well, on your way to showing off for a bunch of men armed with muskets and artillery," said Alvin, "you might want to dry off that bottom mud so nobody gets stuck crossing over."

And indeed it was sloppy going for the first few people to try going down the bank into the empty river bottom. But Arthur Stuart had learned enough these past days that it wasn't hard for him to evaporate the water in the top layer of mud, making a hard-surfaced dirt road about fifty feet wide- broad enough for a lot of people to cross at once. This would go a lot faster than crossing Pontchartrain.

When La Tia saw what Arthur had done, she let out a whoop of delight and called out, "Everybody move quick! Quick as frogs!" And she began to jog over the new road.

Arthur took only a moment to look at the dam itself. Being such pure crystal, however, it didn't look like any kind of dam. It just looked as if the water simply stopped. Even in the dark, he could see shapes moving in the water. At first he thought it was fish, but then he realized that it was too dark to see anything like that in the water. No, what he was seeing was in the crystal. The same kind of visions that had been so disturbing and hypnotic as people crossed over the bridge at Pontchartrain.

"Don't look at the dam!" shouted Alvin. "Nobody look at the dam!"

Which made everybody look, of course. Look once, and then look away, because there was La Tia and Moose and Squirrel and Dead Mary and Rien, urging them on, hurrying them, hundreds and hundreds of them crossing the river bottom on Arthur's road.

Arthur took off at a jog downriver, not running too fast because he had to dry a path before him or he'd sink. All it took was rounding one bend in the river, and there were the two big riverboats, looking pretty forlorn as they rested right on the bottom.

Already dozens of men were out of the boats, slogging along in thick mud.

"Get back in the boats!" Arthur Stuart shouted.

The men heard him, and some of them stopped and looked around to try to find which bank the voice was coming from.

"Vuelvan-se en los navios!" he shouted again, jogging nearer.

Arthur Stuart wasn't careless. He was just starting to scan the boat for weaponry when he heard a shout of "Atiren!" and saw the flashes of a half dozen muskets on board the first boat. Wasn't he out of range?

Well, he was and he wasn't. The musket balls went far enough, but they had slowed considerably, and the one that hit him didn't go into him all that terribly far. But the spot did happen to be right in the belly, just above his navel, and it hurt worse than the worst stomach ache of his life.

He doubled over and fell to the ground. Careless, foolish ... he cursed himself even as he cried from the pain of it.

But pain or not, he had a mission to perform. Trouble was, with his stomach muscles torn like that, he couldn't work up the strength to shout. Well, he had known persuasion wasn't going to do it, and he already had a plan. When they'd been running with the greensong toward the river, Arthur Stuart had heard and felt and finally seen the heartfires of hundreds and hundreds of gators that lived in the river and its tributaries in this region.

It wasn't hard to call to them. Come to the boats, he told them. Plenty to eat in the boats.

And they came. Whatever they might have thought in their tiny gator brains about the river suddenly disappearing like it did, they understood a supper call.

Trouble was, they had no idea what a "boat" was. They just knew they were getting called and had a vague notion of where the call was coming from and pretty soon they were all headed right for Arthur Stuart. And since he was giving off the smell of blood and looking for all the world like a wounded animal- not unnatural, considering he was wounded-he couldn't blame the gators for thinking he was the meal they'd been promised.

This is about as dumb a way to die as I ever heard of, thought Arthur Stuart. I called the gators down on my own self. Good thing I died before I ever fathered children, because this much stupidity should not survive into the next generation.

And then the gators suddenly turned, all of them at once, and headed downstream toward the boats. They walked right past Arthur Stuart, ignoring him like he was a stump. And while they padded by on their vicious-looking gator feet, he felt something going on inside his stomach. He opened his shirt and looked down at his wound, just in time to see the lead ball nose out like a gopher and plop onto the dirt at his feet.

And as he watched, the blood stopped flowing out of his wound and the skin closed up and it didn't hurt anymore and he thought, Good thing Alvin's still watching out for me, because he gives me one dumb little assignment and I find a way to get myself killed twice over.