The Crystal City Page 0,35

you fix his eye? Course, we don't know what all he's doing on the other side of the fog. Maybe they're brewing good old corn mash and getting drunk every Thursday." He laughed at his own humor.

Alvin didn't.

"Oh, you old stick-in-the-mud," said Calvin. "Everything's serious with you."

Just the people that I love, thought Alvin. But he didn't say anything more about that. "What I saw Tenskwa-Tawa do," said Alvin, "was mix his blood with water and turn it into something solid."

Calvin nodded. "I don't know about red knacks."

"They don't have knacks," said Alvin. "They sort of draw their powers from nature."

"Now, that's plain dumb," said Calvin. "We're all human, aren't we? Reds can marry whites, can't they? So what would their children have, half a knack? What would half a knack look like? And they could half draw their power from nature?"

"Here I thought you didn't know about red knacks," said Alvin, "and you turn around and insist that their knacks are just like ours."

"Well, if you're going to be quarrelsome," said Calvin, "I'm gonna be sorry I came."

That would make two of us, Alvin refrained from saying.

"So you think you can do this thing old Lolla-Wossiky did," said Calvin. "And then what? You make the river solid? Like a bridge, and the rest of the water flows under it?"

"All the other problems are still there," said Alvin. "No, I was thinking something about Lake Pontchartrain."

"Where's that?"

"Just north of the city. A huge briny lake, but it's shallow. Good for catching shrimp and crawfish, and there's a ferry across it, but it doesn't get used much, because there's nothing worth going to on the other side. Most folks either take a boat upriver or a ship downriver. But at least on the other side of Pontchartrain there's farms and food and shelter and no angry reds wondering what we're doing coming across into their land."

"But there's a whole passel of angry farmers wondering why you're bringing three thousand people, including free blacks and runaway slaves, right through their cotton plantations," said Calvin.

Now this was an argument worth having, thought Alvin. Not just fight-picking, but something that actually mattered.

"Well," said Alvin, "I reckon if we had thirty runaways folks might get angry with us. But we come across with three thousand, and I reckon they might decide against fighting us and just feed us and hurry us on our way."

"They might," said Calvin. "Or they might send for the King's soldiers to come and teach you proper discipline."

"And the King's soldiers might find us in a fog somewhere," said Alvin.

"Aha," said Calvin. "I knew that fog would turn up as your idea."

"I thought you wanted me to include your ideas in this plan," said Alvin, grinning because it was either that or punch the boy's nose.

"As long as you remember they're mine," said Calvin.

"Cal," said Alvin, "ideas aren't like land or poems or babies or something. If you tell me an idea, and I like it, then it's my idea too, and still yours, and it also belongs to everybody else on God's green earth who thinks it's a good one."

"But I thought of it first," said Calvin.

"Well, Cal, if we're getting sticky about it, when it comes to fog, I reckon God thought of it long before you and me was born."

"And I guess you're gonna make me whip up all this fog while you get to do the glamorous stuff with the water."

"I don't know," said Alvin. "I've never covered a city in fog. And you've never mixed blood and water and turned it into glass. So if we both just do the thing we already know how..."

Calvin laughed and shook his head. "So you've got my part all figured out."

"Tell you what," said Alvin. "I'll do the fog and the water, and you can get back on the boat and go live your own life as you've been doing for the past six years."

"So you don't need me," said Calvin. "I guess Peggy was wrong again."

"There's parts of you I need, all right," said Alvin. "The part that wants to use his knack to help get a bunch of innocent or at least mostly innocent people out of Barcy before the killing starts, I need that. But the part of you that wants to pick fights with me and distract me from what I've got to do, that part can go stick its head up a horse's butt."

Calvin just laughed. "I bet the horse would like that even