Orson Card - THE CRYSTAL CITY

"And all the others," said Alvin, "if they're smart enough to be saved."

"But how am I going to get there in time to warn them?"

"Two things," said Alvin. "First, you'll run with the greensong."

"But it's desert between here and there."

"The greensong doesn't depend on the color green, really," said Alvin. "It conies from life, and you'll see, the desert is packed with living things. They're just thirstier, is all."

"But I can't do the greensong alone."

La Tia spoke up. "I give you a charm like I made before, only better."

"And I'll run with you the first hour or so, to get you started. Arthur Stuart, you've passed the threshold, don't you realize it? You're the first one to do it, but you're a man who wasn't born to be a maker, but he's learned makery all the same."

"Not as good as you. Nowhere near."

"Maybe not," said Alvin, "but good enough-and the greensong's not makery anyway. I learned it as surely as you will, and you get better at feeling it the more you do it. You'll see."

"And somehow I'll find the way?"

"The closer you get to Mexico, the more folks will know how to point out the road."

"And if somebody decides my heart would make a dandy sacrifice?"

"Then you'll use the powers you've learned to get away. I don't just want you to deliver the message, I want you to come back safe and sound."

"Oh," said Arthur Stuart, realizing. "You want me to bring these white men with me."

"I want you to bring them as far as it takes to make them safe," said Alvin, "but on no account is that to be here with us. Get them to the coast and put them on a boat-as many as will come-and then you come on back."

"I don't think a soul's gonna listen to me," said Arthur Stuart. "When did Calvin ever listen to you?"

"Calvin will do what he wants," said Alvin. "But I won't let him die because he didn't know something I could have told him."

"I just hope I get there before the volcano blows," said Arthur Stuart. "What if I get lost?"

"Don't you worry," said La Tia. "You be carrying the volcano with you."

The other part of the errand? "How can I do that?"

Tenskwa-Tawa answered. "We have awakened the giant under the earth," he said. "It flows now hotter and hotter. But what we couldn't do was control the moment when it erupted. Or where. But La Tia, she knows the old African ways of calling to the earth. She's made two charms. They won't work until they're burned. But where they're burned, and what you say when you burn them, you'll have to memorize that and teach it to my people who are there."

"Why two charms?" asked Arthur.

"The one she call smoke from the ground," said La Tia. "The other one, she call the hot red blood out of the earth."

"My people," said Tenskwa-Tawa, "will tell the Mexica people what day the smoke will first appear, and when it happens, they'll believe. We want to give them plenty of time to leave. The idea isn't to kill Mexicas. The idea is to show them that a greater power rejects their lies about what God wants them to do."

"We're trying to break the power of the priests who sacrifice human beings," said Alvin.

"Three days after the first charm," said Tenskwa-Tawa, "they'll use the second one."

"And the volcano blows up."

"We don't know how bad it will be," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "We can't control what the giant does, once it's awake."

"What about the reds who work the charm?" asked Arthur Stuart.

"We hope that they'll get away in time," said Tenskwa-Tawa.

"I don't know how fast she work," said La Tia. "I never make this kind before."

"How do you know it'll work at all, then?" said Arthur Stuart.

It seemed a practical question to him, but La Tia shot him a glare. "I be La Tia, me," she said. "Other people charms, they maybe don't work."

Arthur Stuart grinned at her. "I hope I grow up to be perfect like you."

She apparently didn't detect the irony in his words. "You be so lucky," she said.

Arthur Stuart spent the next hour studying the charm to learn how it was put together-"in case she come apart on the road," La Tia said-and learning the words and the motions.

"What if I don't do it exactly right?" said Arthur Stuart. "What if I forget some bit? Will it just work a little slower, or will it not work at all?"

La Tia glared at him again. "Don't forget any. Then we never find out how much she go wrong when stupid boy forget."

So even after she was satisfied that he knew what to do, Arthur Stuart went off by himself, to a stand of trees near the river, to go through it all again.

That's where he was when Dead Mary found him. But he was asleep by then, exhausted from all that he'd been doing for days. The greensong helped him and everyone else stay vigorous all through the night and into the morning, but the need for sleep had caught up with him and there was no denying it.

Arthur Stuart felt a hand on his shoulder and sat bolt upright. He was confused to see that it was Dead Mary who was kneeling beside him, because she had also been in his dream.

"Alvin sent me to look for you," said Dead Mary. "Sorry to wake you up."

Arthur shook his head. "That's all right," he said. "I didn't mean to fall asleep."

"What's that you were lying on?"

Arthur Stuart looked down and was horrified to see that he had rolled over on the smaller charm and bent it. He said a swear word, apologized for it, and when Dead Mary said it was all right, he thanked her and said it again. "She's gonna kill me if I don't get this back together right."

"La Tia?" said Dead Mary. "Sometimes I think she might kill someone for practice. The power she has!"

"I'm just glad she's on our side," said Arthur Stuart.

"She is for now."

"Same could be said for you," said Arthur. "When we get to safety, what then? Where will everybody go?"

"Where can we go?" said Dead Mary. "All these runaway slaves, where will they be safe? And my people, the French- we don't speak the way they do in Paris, you think they'll want us in Canada? We will be strangers wherever we go. Maybe we stay in the United States. Maybe we stay with Alvin."

"Alvin wanders all the time," said Arthur Stuart. "He hardly sleeps in the same bed twice."

"Then maybe we wander."

Oh right, Alvin was bound to want her along on his journeys. "He's married, you know."

She looked at him like he was crazy. "I know that, ignorant boy."

"Is that what I am?"

"When you talk like that, yes," said Mary. "You think I want a husband? You think all women, they want a man for a husband or not at all?"

"Well, you ain't got a husband," said Arthur Stuart.

"And when I want one," she answered, "I will tell him and it will be none of your business."

So much for Arthur Stuart's dream. "It's none of my business now." He looked at the small charm from every angle. There was nothing wrong with it that he could see, and yet it still didn't feel quite right.

"Was this supposed to be part of it?" said Mary. She held up a grain of dried maize-a red one.

"Yes, yes, thank you." He inserted it into its place between two pieces of birchbark. "It's hard to remember what you're not seeing. I'm going to mess this up, I just know it. This is important, and they're crazy to send an ignorant boy to do it."

She laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "You are not really an ignorant boy," she said.

"No, you had it right."

"You are an ignorant boy when you try to guess what a woman is thinking," said Mary. "But you are not an ignorant boy when it comes to doing a man's work."

"I guess then I'm an ignorant man" he grumbled, but he liked having her touch his shoulder, even if she was sweet on a married man.

"I saw you in the crystal ball," she said. "I saw you running and running. Through desert, up a mountain. To a great valley surrounded by tall mountains, with a lake in the middle, and a city on the lake. I saw you run to the middle and light a fire and it turned all the mountains into great chimneys giving off smoke, and then the earth began to shake and the mountains began to bleed."