Orson Card - SEVENTH SON

"What does it say?" asked Mama. She was standing now across the table from them. She wasn't such a good reader, and the words were upside down to her.

Taleswapper read. "A Maker is born."

"There hasn't been a Maker," said Mama, "since the one who changed the water into wine."

"Maybe not, but that's what she wrote," said Taleswapper.

"Who wrote?" demanded Mama.

"A slip of a girl. About five years ago."

"What was the story that went with her sentence?" asked Alvin Junior.

Taleswapper shook his head.

"You said you never let people write unless you knew their story."

"She wrote it when I wasn't looking," said Taleswapper. "I didn't see it till the next place I stopped."

"Then how did you know it was her?" asked Alvin.

"It was her," he answered. "She was the only one there who could have opened the hex I kept on the book in those days."

"So you don't know what it means? You can't even tell me why I saw those letters burning?"

Taleswapper shook his head. "She was an innkeeper's daughter, if I remember rightly. She spoke very little, and when she did, what she said was always strictly truthful. Never a lie, even to be kind. She was considered to be something of a shrew. But as the proverb says, If you always speak your mind, the evil man will avoid you. Or something like that."

"Her name?" asked Mama. Alvin looked up in surprise. Mama hadn't seen the glowing letters, so why did she look so powerful eager to know about who wrote them?

"Sorry," said Taleswapper. "I don't remember her name right now. And if I remembered her name, I wouldn't tell it, nor will I tell whether I know the place where she lived. I don't want people seeking her out, troubling her for answers that she may not want to give. But I will say this. She was a torch, and saw with true eyes. So if she wrote that a Maker was born, I believe it, and that's why I let her words stay in the book."

"I want to know her story someday," said Alvin. "I want to know why the letters were so bright."

He looked up and saw Mama and Taleswapper looking steadily into each other's eyes.

And then, around the fringes of his own vision, where he could almost but not quite see it, he sensed the Unmaker, trembling, invisible, waiting to shiver the world apart. Without even thinking about it, Alvin pulled the front of his shirt out of his pants and knotted the corners together. The Unmaker wavered, then retreated out of sight.

Taleswapper woke up to somebody shaking him. Still full dark outside, but it was time to be moving. He sat, flexed himself a little, and took some pleasure in how few knots and pains he had these days, sleeping on a soft bed. I could get used to this, he thought. I could enjoy living here.

The bacon was so fat he could hear it sizzling clear from the kitchen. He was just about to pull his boots on when Mary knocked at the door. "I'm presentable, more or less," he said.

She came in, holding out two pair of long thick stockings. "I knotted them myself," she said.

"I couldn't buy socks this thick in Philadelphia."

"Winter gets right cold here in the Wobbish country, and—" She didn't finish. Got too shy, ducked her head, and scampered out of the room.

Taleswapper pulled on the stockings, and his boots over them, and grinned. He didn't feel bad about accepting a few things like this. He worked as hard as anybody, and he'd done a lot to help ready this farm for winter. He was a good roof man—he liked climbing and didn't get dizzy. So his own hands had made sure the house and barns and coops and sheds all were tight and dry.

And, without anybody ever deciding to do it, he had prepared the millhouse to receive a millstone. He had personally loaded all the hay from the mill floor, five wagons full. The twins, who really hadn't got their two farms going yet, since they married only that summer, did the unloading up in the big barn. It was all done without Miller himself ever touching a pitchfork. Taleswapper saw to that, without making a fuss over it, and Miller never insisted.

Other things, though, weren't going so well. Ta-Kumsaw and his Shaw-Nee Reds were driving off so many folks from down Carthage way that everybody had the jitters. It was fine for the Prophet to have his big town of thousands of Reds across the river, all talking about how they'd never again raise their hands in war for any reason. But there were a lot of Reds who felt the way Ta-Kumsaw did, that the White man ought to be forced to the shores of the Atlantic and floated back to Europe, with or without boats. There was war talk, and word was that Bill Harrison down in Carthage was only too happy to fan that particular flame, not to mention the French in Detroit, always urging the Reds to attack the American settlers in land the French claimed was part of Canada.

Folks in the town of Vigor Church talked about this all the time, but Taleswapper knew that Miller didn't take it all that seriously. He thought of Reds as country clowns that wanted nothing more than to guzzle such whisky as they could find. Taleswapper had seen that attitude before, but only in New England. Yankees never seemed to realize that New England Reds with any gumption had long since moved to the state of Irrakwa. It would surely open Yankee eyes to see that the Irrakwa were working heavily with steam engines brought straight from England, and up in the Finger Lakes country a White named Eli Whitney was helping them make a factory that could turn out guns about twenty times faster than it had ever been done before. Someday those Yankees were going to wake up and find out that the Reds weren't all likker-mad, and some White folks were going to have to scramble fast to catch up.

In the meantime, though, Miller didn't take the war talk very seriously. "Everybody knows there's Reds in the woods. Can't stop them from skulking around, but I haven't missed any chickens so it's no problem yet."

"More bacon?" asked Miller. He shoved the bacon board across the table toward Taleswapper.

"I'm not used to eating so much in the morning," said Taleswapper. "Since I've been here I've had more food at every meal than I used to eat in a whole day."

"Put some meat on your bones," said Faith. She slapped down a couple of hot scones with honey smeared on them.

"I can't eat another bite," protested Taleswapper.

The scones slid right off Taleswapper's plate. "Got em," said Al Junior.

"Don't reach across the table like that," said Miller. "And you can't eat both those scones."

Al Junior proved his father wrong in an alarmingly short time. Then they washed the honey off their hands, put on their gloves, and went out to the wagon. The first light was just showing in the east as David and Calm, who lived townward from the farm, rode up. Al Junior climbed in the back of the wagon, along with all the tools and ropes and tents and supplies—it would be a few days before they came back.

"So—do we wait for the twins and Measure?" asked Taleswapper.

Miller swung up onto the wagon seat. "Measure's on ahead, felling trees for the sledge. And Wastenot and Wantnot are staying back here, riding circuit from house to house." He grinned. "Can't leave the womenfolk unprotected, with all the talk of wild Reds prowling around, can we?"

Taleswapper grinned back. Good to know that Miller wasn't as complacent as he seemed.

It was a good long way up to the quarry. On the road they passed the ruins of a wagon with a split millstone right in the middle of it. "That was our first try," said Miller. "But an axle dried out and jammed up coming down this steep hill, and the whole wagon fell in under the weight of the stone."

They came near a good-sized stream, and Miller told about how they had tried to float two millstones down on a raft, but both times the raft just up and sank. "We've had bad luck," said Miller, but from the set of his face he seemed to take it personally, as if someone had set out to make things fail.