Red Prophet Page 0,127

house it was, a house that held the whole story of the White man's victorious war against the land in its shape.

And up walks Ta-Kumsaw to a small and shabby-looking door in the back, and he does not so much as knock, he just opens the door and goes inside.

Well, Alvin saw that, and for the first time he didn't know what to do. By habit he wanted to follow Ta-Kumsaw right into the house, the way he'd followed him into a hundred mud-daubed Red man's huts. But by even older habit he knew you don't just walk right into a house like this, with a proper door and all. You go round to the front and knock polite, and wait for folks to invite you in.

So Alvin stood at the back door, which Ta-Kumsaw of course didn't even bother to close, watching the first flies of spring wander into the hallway. He could almost hear his mother yelling about people leaving doors open so the flies would come in and drive everybody crazy all night, buzzing when folks are trying to sleep. And so Alvin, thinking that way, did what Ma always had them do: he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

But he dared go no farther into the house than that back hall, with some heavy coats on pegs and dirt-crusted boots in a jumble by the door. It felt too strange to move. He'd been hearing the greensong of the forest for so many months that it was deafening, the silence when it was near gone, near completely killed by the cacophony of the jammering life on a White man's farm in spring.

"Isaac," said a woman's voice.

One of the White noises stopped. Only then did Alvin realize that it had been an actual noise he was hearing with his ears, not the life-noises he heard with his Red senses. He tried to remember what it was. A rhythm, and banging, regular rhythm like - like a loom. It was a loom he'd been hearing. Ta-Kumsaw must've just walked hisself right into the room where some woman was weaving. Only he wasn't no stranger here, she knew him by the same name as that farmer fellow out in the fields. Isaac.

"Isaac," she said again, whoever she was.

"Becca," said Ta-Kumsaw.

A simple name, no reason for Alvin's heart to start apounding. But the way Ta-Kumsaw said it, the way he spoke - it was such a tone of voice that was meant to make hearts pound. And more: Ta-Kumsaw spoke it, not with the strange-twisted vowels of Red men talking English, but with as true an accent as if he was from England. Why, he sounded more like Reverend Thrower than Alvin would have thought possible.

No, no, it wasn't Ta-Kumsaw at all, it was another man, a White man in the same room with the White woman, that's all. And Alvin walked softly down the hall to find where the voices were, to see the White man whose presence would explain all.

Instead he stood in an open door and looked into a room where Ta-Kumsaw stood holding a White woman by her shoulders, looking down into her face, and her looking up into his. Saying not a word, just looking at each other. Not a White man in the room.

"My people are gathering at the Hio," said Ta-Kumsaw, in his strange English-sounding voice.

"I know," said the woman. "It's already in the fabric. " Then she turned to look at Alvin in the doorway. "And you didn't come alone."

Alvin never saw eyes like hers before. He was still too young to hanker after women like he remembered Wastenot and Wantnot doing when they both hit fourteen at a gallop. So it wasn't any kind of man-wishing-for-a-woman feeling that he had, looking at her eyes. He just looked into them like he sometimes looked into a fire, watching the flames dance, not asking for them to make sense, just watching the sheer randomness of it. That was what. her eyes were like, as if those eyes had seen a hundred thousand things happen, and they were all still swirling around inside those eyes, and no one had ever bothered or maybe even known how to get those visions out and make sensible stories out of them.

And Alvin feared mightily that she had some power of witchery that she used to turn Ta-Kumsaw into a White man.

"My name is Becca," said the woman.

"His name is Alvin," said Ta-Kumsaw; or