Orson Card - THE CRYSTAL CITY

Even then, he scarcely had time to realize what the music was before the plow started bucking and bouncing. It was clear that it no longer intended to be still, and Verily, far from controlling it, was barely able to hang on as the plow lurched forward-no ox or horse pulling it, nothing at all but its own will. It skipped a few feet and then dug into the thatch of the meadowgrass, cut through it like a hot knife through butter, then raced forward, Verily hanging on for dear life, running and twisting to keep up with it.

Whatever else this plow might want, it had no respect for the idea that the best furrow is a straight one. It twisted and turned all around the meadow, as if it were a dowser's stick searching for water.

Which, when Alvin thought about it, it very well might be. Not searching for water, but a dowser's wand all the same. Hadn't Verily shaped it into a single piece of living wood? Wasn't it shaped like a dowser's wand, with the two handles joined at the base?

"I can't hold on any longer!" cried Verily, and he fell to the ground as the plow lurched forward another yard and then ... stopped.

The plow just stood there in the ground, unmoving.

Alvin ran over as Verily got up off the ground.

Gingerly, Verily reached a hand out to it. The moment his skin touched it, the plow bucked again and moved forward.

"I have an idea," said Alvin. "You take the right handle, I'll take the left."

"Both at once," said Verily.

"One," said Alvin. And Verily joined in on "two" and "three."

"Wait a minute," said Verily. "How high are we counting?"

"I was thinking of three, but looks like that won't be it after all."

"When we say three, or when we would have said four?"

"When we say three, we should be grabbing right then," said Alvin.

One.

Two.

And away they went.

Only this time there was no bucking. The plow moved, all right, cutting deep into the ground and turning up the soil just like a plow should do. But its path was no longer so crooked.

And its purpose seemed to be to get out of the meadow, move through the trees, and climb back up onto the bluff.

It was steep going-this wasn't all that gentle a slope- and there were low branches that looked like they were designed to take the head right off anyone foolish enough to be hanging on behind a living plow.

But the greensong in the music of the plow was powerful, and the branches seemed to rise up or bend back, and neither Alvin nor Verily suffered so much as a scrape or scratch or bump. Nor did they get weary as they ran up the hill behind the plow.

When it reached the top, the plow turned a little and ran across the face of the bluff. That was when Alvin became vaguely aware of the voices of Mike and Abe and Coz, somewhere in the distance, whooping and hollering like little boys. But there was no waiting for them to catch up. For the plow was zeroing in on its destination and speeding up as it grew closer.

Closer to a stony outcropping some twenty yards back from the front of the bluff, a spot where no trees grew because the stone continued under the meadow, leaving too little soil for any tree to root deep enough to withstand a storm.

They headed straight for the bare rock in the middle of the clearing, and Alvin was not altogether surprised when the plow cut right through the stone without so much as a stutter. It cut a furrow into the rock just as it had with the soil, only where the soil behind the plow had been loose and warm, the upturned stone hardened in place, like a sculpture of a furrow.

And when the plow got to a spot where a puddle of water had formed in a depression in the stone, it went straight to the middle of the puddle and stopped.

The water drained down the furrow the plow had made. A thin stream of pure water being guided by the stone furrow, and then the furrow in the soil, to the edge of the bluff and along it down to the meadow where Verily had made the handles.

The plow did not move.

Alvin and Verily took their hands from the handles.

The music faded.

"I think we're done here," said Alvin.

"What is it we did?" said Verily.

"We found the spot for the Crystal City," said Alvin.

"Is that what we've been looking for?" asked Verily.

"I think it's what this plow has been looking for since it was first made."

Alvin knelt beside the plow that he had carried for so long. All these years of toting it, and now its work was done, and wild and joyful as the trip up the hill was, it hadn't taken long. Just a few minutes. But when Alvin reached out and touched a finger to the golden face of the plow, the thing quivered, and the handle came loose and fell away. Fell to the ground.

Verily picked it up. "Still alive," he said.

"But no longer part of the plow."

The music was gone, too. The greensong still lingered, as it always did in Alvin's mind. But the music of machinery was completely still.

Alvin tugged on the plow and it slid easily out of the stone. He put it back in the poke. It still quivered with life, no more nor less than it always had. As if it had no memory of what it had just done.

They all drank from the spring that now welled up from the end of the furrow. The water was sweet and clean. "We could keg this up and sell it for wine," said Abe, "and nobody'd say we cheated them."

"But we won't," said Verily.

Abe gave him an I'm-not-an-idiot look. "So you reckon this plow of yours has picked this spot for your city."

"Might be," said Alvin. "If we can figure out who owns the land and figure out a way to buy it."

"Well, you're in luck," said Abe. "It's why I brought you here. This is part of what the Noisy River government calls River County. It's the wild land along the Mizzippy between Moline and Cairo. There's an old law from territory days that offers to make a county out of any part of River County that can prove it has two thousand settlers and at least one town of three hundred people."

"A county?" asked Verily.

"A county," said Abe.

"But a county has the right to elect its own judges," said Verily.

"And its own sheriff," said Abe.

"So when somebody comes into Furrowspring County with a warrant from some court in Hio," said Verily, "the Furrowspring County court can vacate the warrant."

"That's how I figured it," said Abe.

"You were really listening when I explained about the law."

"And I remember my old dad trying to farm boggy land along the Hio, and somebody come along and told him all about River County, and how the land was there for the taking if just two thousand folks would join up and go, and Dad said he had a hard enough time farming a swamp, the last thing he needed was fog on top of it."

"If we have our own county," said Alvin, "then we can build a city here, and populate it with black people and French people and anybody else we want to invite, and nobody can stop us."

"Well," said Abe, "it's not that simple."

"You mean there's some law against folks moving in here?"

"There is against runaway slaves," said Abe, "but I think we got that solved, since the same judge can vacate a lot of other orders, and the same sheriff can run any slave-catchers out of town or at least make it real hard to find any former slaves. Hut what I was getting at was, anybody can move in. Not just folks that you invite."

"Well, we invite everybody," said Alvin.

Abe laughed. "Well, shoot, word gets out about this golden plow that cut right through stone and brought water out of the rock like Moses, and your six thousand won't be but a drop in the bucket for all the thousands of gold hunters and miracle seekers who'll be tramping all up and down this country. And I reckon they'll be the ones electing the sheriff and the judge and maybe somebody'll get that reward after all."