The Crystal City Page 0,23

greatest maker seen in this world in many lifetimes. So much that I've lost, including any hope of a normal life. Who'll marry me? How will I live when I'm not Alvin's shadow?

Yet I never want to lash out and punish anybody, except with words, and even then I always pretend that it's a joke so nobody gets mad.

Maybe that's how God will get out of it, when he gathers us at his judgment seat and tries to explain why he let so many awful things go on. Maybe he'll say, "Can't you take a joke?"

More likely, though, he'll just tell the truth. "I didn't do it," he'll say. "I'm just the one who has to clean up your mess." Like a servant. Nobody ever says, How can we make things easier on God? No. We just make messes and expect he'll come around later and clean it all up.

That night in bed, Arthur Stuart sent out his doodlebug. He searched for Papa Moose's heartfire and found him easily enough, sleeping lightly while Mama Squirrel kept watch over the children.

Arthur Stuart wasn't used to examining people's bodies, and he had trouble keeping his doodlebug inside the boundaries. But he began to get the knack of it, and soon found the club foot. The bone was clearly different from the other tissues-and the bones were a mess, broken into dozens of pieces. No wonder his foot was so crippled.

He might have begun to try to put the pieces back together, but it wasn't like looking at them with his eyes. He couldn't grasp the whole shape of each bone fragment. Besides, he didn't know what the bones in a normal foot were supposed to look like.

He found Papa Moose's other foot and almost groaned aloud at his own stupidity. The good foot had just as many bones as the bad one. The club foot wasn't the way it was because the bones were broken. And when Arthur went back and forth between them, comparing the bones, he realized that because Papa Moose's foot had been twisted up his whole life, none of the bones were the right shape any more to fit together like a normal foot.

So it wouldn't be a matter of just getting the bones back into place. Each one would have to be reshaped. And no doubt the muscles and ligaments and tendons would all be out of place, too, and the wrong size. And those tissues were very hard to tell apart. It was exhausting work just trying to make sense of them. He fell asleep before he understood much of anything.

Chapter 4

La Tia

The rumor mill went on. The yellow fever only added to it-who's sick, who's dead, who fled the city to live on some friend's plantation until the plague passed.

The most important story, though, was no rumor. The army that the King had been assembling was suddenly ordered back home. Apparently the King's generals feared the yellow fever more than they feared the military might of Spain.

Which might have been a mistake. The moment the threat of invasion disappeared, the Spanish authorities in Nueva Barcelona began arresting Cavalier agents. Apparently the Spanish had been aware of the plots all along-they heard the same rumors as everyone else-and had only been biding their time before striking.

So it wasn't just the yellow fever that was decimating the English-speaking population of Nueva Barcelona. Plenty of Americans and Yankees and Englishmen were taking ship out of the city-Americans in steamboats up the river. Yankees and Englishmen in clippers and coastal traders heading out to sea, bound for New England or Jamaica or some other British destination.

Cavaliers weren't finding it any easier than the French. The Pontchartrain ferry and all the other passages out of the city were being watched, and those who carried royal passports from the Crown Colonies were forbidden to leave. Since the Cavaliers were the largest single English-speaking group, this left a lot of frightened people trapped in Nueva Barcelona as the yellow fever made its insidious way through the population.

Wealthy Spanish citizens headed for Florida. As for the French, they had nowhere to go. The borders had been closed to them from the time Napoleon first invaded Spain.

The result was a city full of fear and anger.

Alvin was shopping in the city, which was getting harder these days, with the fever making farmers more reluctant to bring in their produce. He was looking through as ratty-looking a bunch of melons as he'd ever seen