The Crystal City Page 0,62

lay so much on that boy, him."

Arthur nodded gratefully. "Watching heartfires ain't as easy for me as for you, Alvin. And making fog-that's what Calvin done, not me."

"But it's not hard," said Alvin. "I'll teach you today. And there's another thing. You're the only one speaks all the languages, Arthur. You got to make sure everybody's understanding everybody else."

"Heck, Alvin, half the time I don't even understand you."

Everybody laughed at that, but in truth they were all frightened-of the dangers on the road, but, even more, of their own inexperience. It wasn't the blind leading the blind, really. More like the clumsy leading the clumsy.

"And one more thing," said Alvin. "There's gonna be lots of complaining. That's fine, you just keep your patience, you leaders-all of you, make sure they know. Listen to everything, don't get angry. But if somebody raises a hand of violence against a leader-you can't stand for that. You understand me? Person raises a hand against a leader, he's out of the company. He's not one of us any more. Because we can't be afraid of our own people. We have to know we can trust everybody to be gentle with each other."

"How we gonna throw out this angry hitting man?" said La Tia. "Who gonna do that?"

"The general will ask some strong men to put the offender out of the camp," said Alvin. "And then Arthur will see to it he doesn't find his way back."

"What if he got family, him?"

Alvin sighed. "General La Tia, you'll always find a good reason not to punish a man. But sometimes you got to punish a man to save a dozen other men from needing punishment. And sometimes you have to have a hard heart to do what needs doing."

Arthur snorted softly.

"Arthur knows," said Alvin. "But when I'm not here, it's not my job. The decisions are yours. You make them, you make them stick, or you don't, and then you live with the consequences. Either way, you live with them."

"That why you going?" asked La Tia.

"That's right," said Alvin. "Just when things get hard, I leave."

He stared her down. When she looked away, it occurred to him that maybe that didn't happen to her very often. Giving way like that.

"When you leaving?" asked one of the colonels.

"Not till we've had our first meal," said Alvin. "Not till we're all bedded down for the night. Inland. Dry and away from these skeeters."

Margaret walked up the stairs into the attic room where she had slept as a child. It was a storeroom now. Father kept a room on the main floor for her, when she visited. She had tried to get him to rent it out like any other room in the roadhouse, but he wouldn't do it. "If other people pay to sleep in it," he said, "it ain't your room."

It was the room where Alvin had been born twenty-five years ago. Father probably didn't remember that. But every time she walked into that room on the main floor, she saw that scene. Alvin's mother lying on the bed, in desperate pain but even more desperate grief, for her firstborn son, Vigor, had been swept away by the Hatrack River scarcely an hour before.

Peggy-"Little Peggy" then, since her mother was alive, and doing the midwifery-had a job to do. She rushed to the woman lying on the bed and laid hands on her womb. She saw so many things in that moment. How the child was lying in the womb. How the mother was clamped down and couldn't open up to let the child out. Her mother had done a spell with a ring of keys then, and the womb opened, and out came the baby.

She had never seen a baby whose heartfire told such a dire story. The brightest heartfire she had ever seen-but when she cast her eyes into the paths of his future, there were none at all. No paths. No future. This child was going to die, and before he ever made a single choice.

Except... there was one thing she could do. One tiny dim pathway leading out of all the dark futures, but that one opened out into hundreds, into thousands of glorious futures. And in that one narrow gate, the one that led to everything for this child, she saw herself, Little Peggy Guester, five years old, reach out and take a caul of flesh from the baby's face. So she did it, and all the deaths fell away, and all the