The Crystal City Page 0,65
without Alvin in it held no hope of joy for her.
Calvin stood on the dock and watched the riverboats pull out, one by one. Colonel Adan had done his planning well. The steamboats pulled out on schedule, and there was no danger of collision.
Unfortunately, there were also men determined to get out of this city whether they were part of the official expedition or not. So in the midst of the attempt to order the steamboats into a convoy for the passage upstream, two big rowboats swung out into the river, with six men pulling at the oars of each and another dozen or so under arms, many of them foolishly standing up and huzzahing their own bravado.
Calvin laughed aloud to see them. What fools. So eager for death, and so sure to find it.
Sooner, in fact, than Calvin himself anticipated. Though in retrospect, it seemed almost inevitable. Too much order always seemed to bore God or Fate or Providence or whoever decided such things. There was always a little chaos just to liven things up.
Sure enough, one of the rowboats, with its pilot yelling for a steamboat to get out of the way, tried to insert itself between the big riverboats. But steamboats don't stop quickly, and half-drunken rowers don't maneuver well when they try to cross the wake of a steamboat. The captain of the steamboat saw the danger, and some of the Spanish soldiers on board fired at the rowers.
That provoked the armed men in the other rowboat to stand up and fire a volley at the Spanish soldiers. Not a shot hit home, for the obvious reason that so many muskets firing in the same direction at once had such a recoil that the boat rocked over and capsized. Some of the men came up sputtering. Some came up screaming. Some didn't come up-apparently unable to remove their boots in the water or get rid of all the lead balls they carried in their ammunition pouches.
How short life is for fools, thought Calvin. They go out on the water with no thought about how to get ashore if the boat should fail them.
Meanwhile, panicked at the warning shots the Spanish had fired, and some of them thinking that a Spanish cannonball had sunk the other rowboat, the rowers on the first boat tried to change direction. Trouble was, they hadn't agreed on which direction to change to, and so the oars interfered with each other and the rowboat was swept by the current right back into the bows of the big riverboat.
The collision broke half the oars and turned some of them into spears that pierced the bodies of their erstwhile masters. Some of the men jumped into the water; those that didn't were borne under when the steamboat pushed the rowboat over.
It was bedlam on the docks, with some people trying to help the swimmers ashore, and a couple even diving in to help save some of the drowning men. Smaller rowboats quickly put out to help with the rescue. But most of the people were laughing and hooting and catcalling, having a grand old time at the expense of those fools. And while he didn't do any of the catcalling, Calvin had to admit he was one of the laughers.
Alvin would probably have tried to use his knack somehow to save the fools who couldn't swim. Maybe dissolve their boots or something. Or grow them gills-he could probably do it, just to show off.
But even if Calvin had been able to think of something like that quick enough, and even if he had enough control to do anything useful at such a distance, he wouldn't have tried. The world was no poorer for the loss of a few such fools. Indeed, it was downright generous of these "brave" drunk nitwits to improve the breeding population of Barcy by removing themselves from it.
All fools on the river today, thought Calvin. Because the ones following such careful plans were going to end up looking just as stupid as these clowns, when Alvin was done with them. They probably wouldn't be dead-it was Alvin, after all-but what they most certainly would not be was successful.
Which was probably about how the expedition to Mexico would turn out, too, Calvin cheerfully recognized. These arrogant men, thinking that because they were white they could easily defeat the Mexica. They would probably fail, too. And because it was the Mexica they were facing, and not Alvin Maker, a good number of