Orson Card - THE CRYSTAL CITY

"Is there such a county?" asked Verily.

"Not yet," said Lincoln, and he grinned.

Mission

It was all as well planned as a church party, and Arthur Stuart plain admired how they done it. All the stories about reds that folks told these days was about savages living a natural life picking fruit off the trees and calling to deer and they'd come right up and the red man would clunk them on the head. Or else stories about savages murdering and raping and scalping and capturing white folks and keeping them as slaves till they got away or till some soldiers find them and they refuse to go home. Or about how if you give a red man likker he'll get as drunk as a skunk in five minutes flat and spend the rest of his life devoted to getting more.

Of course, Arthur Stuart knew in the back of his mind that this sort of thing couldn't be the complete story. Alvin's time with the reds had been back before Arthur Stuart was born, but he knew Alvin was friends with the mystical Red Prophet, and he knew Alvin had known and traveled with Ta-Kumsaw, and had even got himself known as a renegado because of the time he spent with the reds during the war.

And Arthur had seen plenty of red men, from time to time-but they were Irrakwa or Cherriky and they wore business suits just like everybody else and stood for Congress and supervised railroad construction and ran banks and did all kinds of other jobs so there wasn't no difference between them and white folks except the color of their skin and how fat they got when they grew up, because some of them reds could get huge.

Alvin got kind of sad sometimes, after meeting one of them. "A good man, as men go," he said to Arthur Stuart once. "Prosperous and clever. But what he gave up to get rich."

Arthur Stuart figured what Alvin was talking about was the greensong. He sort of had the idea that maybe red men were supposed to live inside the greensong all the livelong day, and that's what that Irrakwa railroad man had give up.

But when you thought about the red men living out beyond the Mizzippy, you sort of thought they'd be living the old way, hunting and fishing and living in wigwams. So it plain irritated Arthur Stuart at first to find out that they built log cabins and laid out their towns in streets, and that they planted acre after acre in maize and beans.

"This don't feel like no greensong to me," Arthur Stuart said to Dead Mary. "This just feels like a town."

Dead Mary laughed at him for that. "Why shouldn't red folk have towns? Big cities, too? You think only white people know what a city is?"

And when it came to feeding all these six thousand runaways, why, the red men was as organized as a church picnic. There was fifty tables set up, and each colonel and major would bring their fifty households and they'd pass along the tables and pile up food on baskets and carry them off to the pastures that had been designated as their campsites and it was so smooth that everybody got their breakfast before the sun even got hot. And all the while, there was red women hauling more food to the tables-corn bread and flat bread and bean mash and cider and apples and pawpaws and big bunches of grapes.

The grapes he just had to ask about. "Iffen red folks got grapes, how come they didn't invent wine?"

"They didn't have grapes," Alvin told him, "till they learned how to grow them from white folks."

"So what are they doing, making wine now?"

"Their cider and their wine have so little alcohol that you'd have to pee it all out long before you got drunk," said Alvin. "Tenskwa-Tawa sees to that. But it's the safest way to store water that got no disease in it, and besides, he wants to build up the reds' tolerance for it, so his people don't get enslaved by alcohol the way he was and so many others were."

"Hard to think of that man being slave to anything," said Arthur Stuart.

"But he was," said Alvin. "Slave to likker and slave to rage and hate. But now he's at peace with everybody that wants to, and he spends his life reading and studying and learning everything he can about everything."

"So red folks got books?"

"He gets them from our side of the Mizzippy," said Alvin. "And from Canada and Mexico. He travels widely, the way his brother used to do. That's why he speaks English so well. And French and Spanish and about thirty red languages, too. He says that someday the barrier won't hold, and white folks and red folks will have to mix, and he wants his people to be ready so they can do it without losing the greensong the way the Cherriky and Irrakwa did."

All that morning, Tenskwa-Tawa was holed up with La Tia and about a dozen old red men and women, and when Arthur asked what they were doing. Alvin told him to mind his own business.

But at noon-when they started in on yet another meal, this time with meat in it-mostly smoked turkey, which the reds seemed to herd like sheep-Alvin was invited in to the big hall where the red council and La Tia were meeting, and in a few minutes he came back out and fetched Arthur Stuart inside.

It was a cool, dark place, with a fire in the middle and a hole in the roof, even though the reds knew perfectly well how to make a chimney, as every cabin in town proved. So it must have something to do with keeping up the old ways. The reds sat right on the ground, on blankets, but they had a chair for La Tia, just like the one she sat in back in Barcy. So she was the tallest thing in the room, like one lone pine standing up in the middle of a stand of beeches.

"Sit with us, Arthur Stuart," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "We have a mission for you, if you're willing."

This was about the last thing Arthur Stuart expected. A mission for him? He'd expected to follow along with Alvin as he led the company north along the river. The days he'd spent as a second-rate maker barely keeping the fog around the camp had convinced him that he was not ready to go out makering on his own. Nothing terrible had happened, but it could have, and he had never been more than barely in control. He was proud that he'd done OK, and perfectly relieved if he never had to do it again.

"I'll do my part," said Arthur Stuart, "but you do know that I'm not a maker, I hope."

"It's not makery they need you for," said Alvin. "Or at least not mostly. It's your own knack with languages, and the fact that you're smart and dependable and ... you."

That made no sense to Arthur Stuart, but he was willing to listen-no, he was eager to hear what it was that they actually needed him for, himself.

Tenskwa-Tawa laid out for him what was going on in Mexico, about how the volcano was going to blow up, especially now that La Tia was on the case. "I already planned to send some of my own people to give warning to the Mexica, and they will still go," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "Already some of them are there. But there's a complication. A group of white men is heading for Mexico City and they will surely be killed, either by the Mexica or by the volcano."

"Or both," said La Tia. "Some men has to die two times to get the point."

"So we need you for two things," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "You have to go warn the white men and help them get out, if they're willing."

Arthur Stuart laughed. "You gonna send a half-black boy my age to warn white men to get out?"

"My brother Calvin's with them," said Alvin.

"But he don't like me."

"But he'll know you came from me," said Alvin. "And it's up to him to persuade the others."

"So this is about saving Calvin's life," said Arthur Stuart dubiously. He knew perfectly well that his sister Margaret had no high opinion of Calvin and Arthur Stuart kind of suspected that if Calvin died it might ease her mind. But Alvin wouldn't feel that way, of course. He still thought of Calvin as nothing worse than a foolish little brother who would grow up someday and became a decent man.