The Crystal City Page 0,43
don't ever count me as one of your disciples. I spent too many years of my life worshiping you and tagging along behind you and begging for your attention and your love and your respect. Those were my childhood days. I'm a man now, and I've held my own with a great emperor and I've slain an evil man that you hadn't the courage to kill, Alvin.
It's not enough to have power, Alvin. You have to have the will to use it.
Street after street, the fog crept through the city, dimming the light of the setting sun and hiding passersby.
Slaves felt the cool clammy fog pass around them, or looked out windows and watched as buildings across the street disappeared, and they thought, Today we cross over Jordan to the promised land.
In Frenchtown the children and grandchildren of the founders of this place, whose city had been stolen from them, looked out of their shanties and thought, You can't keep us here no more, Conquistadores. You can take our city, but that's only land. You can't hold onto us when we've a mind to go.
In Swamptown, the poorest of the poor-free blacks and down-and-out whites-saw the fog and gathered up their few possessions for the journey ahead. La Tia, Dead Mary, some sorcerer from up north, they didn't care whom they were following. It couldn't help but be better than here.
But in the rest of the city, in fine houses and the humbler homes of the working class, in hotels and whorehouses and along the dock, where people already cowered in fear of the yellow fever, afraid to go out into the streets-they saw the fog roll through and it looked like a biblical plague to them. I'm not going out in that weather, they thought. I'll send a slave out on my errands. I'll leave the streets to the poor and those whose business is so pressing they'd risk death to carry on with it.
Only in the taverns, where drink brought a few hours of courage and uncontained passion, did the fear burn into hatred. Someone brought this yellow fever on us. It was them French witches, that Dead Mary and her mother, didn't Dead Mary claim the plague for her mother first?
It was those wicked race-mixing abolitionists Moose and Squirrel, they're the ones brought this down on us, cursing the city because they hate us for keeping black folk in the place where God meant them to be. You want proof? All around that house folks is dying of the fever, but not a soul in that crowded house is sick, not a body has been brought out.
"Not Moose and Squirrel, no sir," said a powerful-looking man who carried a knife at his hip the way other men might carry a pistol. "Their house, but it's a traveling man staying there, him and his half-black catamite he uses like a witch does a cat. His name is Alvin and he has a sack full of gold he stole from the smith he was prenticed to. I tell you he brought this fever here. He and his catamite was seen at the public fountain where that magical water was drawn."
They listened spellbound to the man. They itched for action, these men. They had come to Barcy to take part in a war, but the dread of fever had sent the King's army back into their holes, and here they were with nothing to do. Their fingers flexed into fists. The drink burned in them. They could do with a good hanging. Take a man and his slave boy and drag them to a tree or lamppost and hoist them up and watch them clutch and twitch and pee themselves while they strangled on the end of a rope. That was a good use of this foggy night. There'd be no witnesses, and maybe it would stop the fever, and even if it didn't, a hanging was still a good idea now and then, just to get your blood up, and none of this nonsense about an innocent man. Wasn't nobody in this world hadn't earned hanging five times over, if their hearts were only known.
Out of the tavern and into the street they staggered and lurched, shouting threats and brags. A few carried torches against the fog and night as darkness fell over the city, and as they moved near the waterfront, they were joined by the drunk, the angry, the fearful, and the merely curious from other taverns.