The Crystal City Page 0,78

going to take them? Where was the land of milk and honey? It's not as if the Lord had appeared to Alvin in a burning bush. The closest he'd ever come to seeing an angel was the dark night when Tenskwa-Tawa-then a perpetually drunken red named Lolla-Wossiky-appeared in his room and Alvin had healed his blind eye. But Lolla-Wossiky wasn't God or even an angel like the one that wrestled with Jacob. He was a man who groaned with the pain of his people.

And yet he was the only angel Alvin had ever seen, or even heard about, unless you counted whatever it was that his sister's husband, Armor-of-God Weaver, had seen in Reverend Thrower's church back when Alvin was a child. Something shimmering and racing around inside the walls of the church, and it like to made Thrower crazy to see whatever it was he saw, but Armor-of-God could never make it out. And that was as close to seeing a supernatural creature as anyone of Alvin's acquaintance had ever come.

Oh, there had been miracles enough in Alvin's life, plenty of strange doings, and some of them wonderful. Peggy watching out for him throughout his childhood without his even knowing it. The powers he had found inside himself, the ability to see into the heart of the world and persuade it to change and become better. But not one of them had given him the knowledge of what he ought to be doing from one moment to the next. He was left to muddle through as best he could, taking what advice he could get. But nobody, not even Margaret, had the truth-truth so true that you knew it was true, and knew that what you knew was bound to be right. Alvin always had a shadow of doubt because nobody truly knew anything, not even their own heart.

With all this running through his mind, over and over again, reaching no conclusion, he soon found that his legs were tired and his feet were sore-something that hadn't happened to him while running since Ta-Kumsaw had first taught him to hear the greensong and let it fill him with the strength of all the life around him.

This won't do, he realized. If I run like a normal man, I'll cover ground so slowly it will be more than one night before I reach the river. I have to shut all this out of my mind and let the song have me.

So he did the only thing he could think of that would shut all else out of his mind.

He reached out, searching for Margaret's heartfire, which he always knew as well as a man might know his own self. There she was . .. and there, just under her own heartfire, was that glowing spark of the baby that they had made together. Alvin concentrated on the baby, on finding his way through its small body, feeling the heartbeat, the flow of blood, the strength coming into the baby from Margaret's body, the way his little muscles flexed and extended as he tested them.

Exploring this new life, this manling-to-be, all other worries left Alvin and then the greensong came to him, and his son was part of it, that beating heart was part of the rhythm of the trees and small animals and grass and, yes, even the slave-grown cotton, all of it alive. The birds overhead, the insects crawling in and on the earth, the flies and skeeters, they were all part of the music. The gators in the banks of languid rivers and stagnant pools, the deer that still browsed in the stands of wood that had not yet made way for the cotton fields, the small herbs with healing and poison in them, the fish in the water, and the hum, hum, hum of sleeping people who, in the nighttime, became part of the world again instead of fighting against it the way most folks did the livelong day.

So it was that he was not tired, not sore, but alert and filled with vigor and well-being when he reached the shores of the Mizzippy. He had crossed many a wagon track but nothing so fine as to be called a road, for in these parts the best road was the water, and the greatest highway of all was the Mizzippy.

Though it was night, there were stars enough, and a sliver of moon. Alvin could see the broad river stretching away to the left and right, each ripple