But he found that he had merely passed from one peril to another. Because now he was assailed by birds, small and large, some bright of feather and some dull, a raging conflagration of birds, and these attacked him with beak and claw and insensate rage. They came at him in a dizzying whirl of wings, clawing with their taloned feet, and striking with their beaks. Nat countered at once, more rapidly than the time before, because now he was growing more adept and accustomed to the rules of the combat. He dodged the flailing beaks and clutching claws for a moment, then created a shield of shiny black obsidian. With this on his arm, he interposed its adamantine surface between himself and his winged attackers. The foremost of them dashed themselves to bloody pulp against his shield, and the rest drew back for a moment and buzzed together in a hovering black cloud of beating wings. They seemed to come to some decision, because in a moment they had returned to the attack, but this time they had changed shape, and Nat found, coming at him from all sides, snakelike creatures with the many tiny hooked claws of leeches. They came in a torrent, and Nat had to devise a perch for himself so he would not be engulfed by them entirely. He did so, and he was beginning to think again, because clearly something was needed here, some expedience, because the shaman’s attacks were mounting in ferocity and Nat had never been at his best in dealing with animal analogues.
The moment of analysis gave him the clue he needed to move to the next step. His own countermove, coming right up! And so he suddenly created a locomotive, alive with fire in its belly and steam bursting out of its joints. Its great rods moved in and out of their cylinder boxes, and the vast mechanism moved forward; laying track as it came, like a gigantic metal monster with a steel skin and copper eyes.
With this one coming at him, the shaman hesitated one fatal moment. The locomotive was new, even in the East. He was from one of the wild tribes that had never seen the white man’s ways up close. He had heard of this monstrosity that the white man possessed, but this was the first time he’d seen it. And as terrible as the locomotive was, it was even more terrible when viewed in its dream state, where all its potentialities for harm were in view.
The shaman tried to interpose a mountain. Quickly Nat countered with the dream image of the latest tunneling equipment from St. Louis. His bit of purest diamond cut through the granite of the shaman’s refuge, penetrated into the depths of the mountain, ate through the walls and sought out the shaman himself within. As the drill bit came toward him, Two Coyotes knew fear at last.
Then the locomotive came through the tunnel drilled in the rock and began to stalk the shaman across the quivering metaphoric surface of the Dream Country. Two Coyotes retreated, created a fastness of hills just behind him, a place where he could retreat and hide. But before he could do that, Nat had interposed another dream entity between the shaman and his refuge, and this dream entity was a cotton gin. Its belt-driven shafts went up and down; it rolled forward on bicycle wheels; its headlights shone with the lambent glow of commercial magic; steam oozed from its joints as it came toward him.
Then Two Coyotes saw his peril, and steadied himself for one final blow, his last forlorn hope.
* * *
Next morning, the old boatman at the Mississippi station sat up when he heard a halloo from outside. The man who greeted him was tall and thin, dressed as a Western frontiersman. He rode a tall black horse.
“Can I get a passage across the river?” Nat asked.
“That you can, stranger,” the boatman said. “But it’ll cost you a dollar.”
Nat took a silver dollar out of his pouch and flipped it to the boatman. “That’s the last of them.”
“What you gonna do for money?” the boatman asked.
“Maybe where I’m going I won’t need any.”
“Place like that sounds like Heaven,” the boatman remarked.
“You wouldn’t happen to be a religious man, would you, mister?”
“Not particularly. Why do you ask?”
“A man would need a lot of faith to be travelling alone in these parts with Two Coyotes and his tribes on the loose.”
“Haven’t you heard?” Nat asked. “Two Coyotes is dead.”
“How did that happen?”
“No one knows. He was found this morning. Seems like he died in his sleep. As soon as the bucks saw he was dead, they started to disperse, giving up the attack and returning to their various people. The news is all over Missouri by now.”
“Well, I’ll be dinged.” The boatman scratched his head. “You travelling alone, mister?”
“Looks like it.”
“You can go down to the boat any time. I push off inside of the hour whether anyone else shows up or not.”
Nat led the horse down the gentle slope toward the boat tied up to a makeshift dock on the Mississippi. He was alone. He took a sack out of his bag, untied it, and emptied broken bronze that had been an eagle into the water.
“Good luck, centurion,” he said.
Then he bowed his head and said, “Earth spirit, thanks for your help. I wish success and happiness for you. This is the prayer I promised you.”
Then he took out his pouch and took the amulet from it. “Marduk?”
“Yes, Nat?”
“I’m going on. To the West.”
“Without the widow, Nat?”
“She wouldn’t want to go where I’m going. Up into the mountains. To learn.”
“From the Indians?”
“Yes, from them. I only wish I hadn’t had to kill Two Coyotes. Least I can do is learn something about those people. But listen, I’ve done with witchcraft and now I am going to cast the amulet into the river and let you go free.”
“That’s right kind of you, Nat,” Marduk said. “But don’t bother.”
“Aren’t you going to leave?”
“You make such an excellent packhorse, Nat, I thought I’d stay around for a while. This amulet is quite comfortable, too. I’ve lived here for a couple of millennia. Why give it up now?”
“You’re staying with me?”
“Put the amulet away and get on the boat. It’s time we went to that Western country.”
Their bodies, torn by whip and shackle’s jaw,
Are sundered from their kin and hearth and name.
Our flesh, once threatened by self-righteous flame,
Is sheltered now by insulating law.
Our minds, whose arcane visions shy from sight,
Shield sanctuaries to contain our spells.
Their thoughts, thick-sown within their earth-dark shells,
Wither anticipating frost-hued blight.
Their souls, craving release from earthly strife,
Invoke eternal bliss with mortal breath.
Our spirits, reconciled with weighty Death,
Can celebrate creation, savor life.
Our fortune, wed to Lady Liberty,
Has freed us from the prison of our past.
Their future, bondage-fouled and mired fast,
Must pave a road to human dignity.
Texas
Anno Domini 1836
By the seventh generation the Crafter Family had spread across most of the Eastern states and territories. Some on their own, others accompanying husbands who shared their families’ adventuresome attitudes. One of these was the least likely to have traveled to the rough Mexican territory called Texas—where she found that even in an isolated corner of nowhere maqic could touch the lives of others.
Looking out across the flat, dry, dun-colored prairie baking in the heat, Lena longed for the sight of a tree. Any tree except the feathery, arid mesquite scrub that made the landscape look even drier. Her eyes were hungry for something green and lush.
She remembered summer in New England. Maple shade and emerald grass. Sparkling streams. It seemed like a memory of Heaven, though she knew she was
conveniently forgetting five months of winter and snow up to her shoulders and bitter cold.
During those times too she had longed for the sight of something green, but not as acutely as she did now, in this Godforsaken sod hut on the Texas prairie.
She stood in the open doorway and hugged herself consolingly with her thin arms. She did not need to look down at them to know they were desiccated, with all the moisture baked out of them. Same as the rest of her. She did not even look in her grandmother’s mirror anymore, the precious rosewood-framed oval she had brought unbroken clear across the country. She did not want to see her rabbity face, her red-rimmed eyes. They seemed as ugly to her as this sun bleached land.
Staring into the glare of the summer day made her eyes water and she stepped back into the shadows of the house. It seemed to Lena like some dreadful punishment, having been born an albino. She could not stand the sun. Yet her family thought she was so special! “Born silver, and with a caul!” Cousin Emily used to exclaim when telling others about young Lena. They had showed her off, at least among themselves. A very special Crafter.
So how did I end up here? Lena wondered bitterly for the hundredth time.
The answer, of course, was outside plowing, trying to dig fertile furrows into infertile earth with the help of one spavined mule and an endless supply of determination. Tell Joseph Peabody he could not do something, and he would set out to do it if it harelipped Hell. That was a favorite saying of his: “I’ll do that if it harelips Hell.” Against such a will Lena Crafter had been helpless. She married him because he insisted, and let him bring her to the great plains of Texas because he would have it no other way. Joseph had been determined to find a Garden of Eden where others found rattlesnakes and scorpions.
Well, he hasn’t found it yet, Lena thought to herself, sighing. He thought having me would make the difference, that I could somehow magic things for him. He listened to the talk, and I listened to those high and mighty dreams of his, and here we are. Both of us.
Us and the mule.
She went to the door again and stared out until her eyes started to water so badly she had to turn away.
Joseph was in a bad mood when he came in for his dinner—a stringy jack rabbit boiled with turnip greens. Lena had never said she was a cook.
“What is this mess?” he asked, looking down at the food on his plate. One of Grandmother Reliance Crafter’s best Spode dinner plates lovingly carried from New England. The others on their shelf were gritty with the dirt that blew constantly around and through the cabin.
“Jack rabbit,” Lena said, stating the obvious. “It’s all there is unless you go hunting.”
“Tarnation, woman! Where would I find time to go hunting? If we’re going to make a crop I have to get the field plowed.”
“They say that’s caleche, out there. Hardpan, Joseph. Even if you plow it, how do you expect anything to grow in it?”
“You’re my wife, you’ll help me.”
This was a resumption of an old argument. Lena sat down on the other chair—they had only two—and braced herself.
“I’ve told you and I’ve told you, I can’t wave my hands over the earth and make things grow.”
“You’re a Crafter, damn it. All my life I heard stories about your family.”
“Not from us, you didn’t.”
“No, but everyone else knew. Some of your kin were witches and wizards; you can’t keep a thing like that secret in a place like New England.”
With a patience that had long since worn thin, Lena told him again, “We aren’t witches and wizards, at least not the way you mean it. We have a Talent, that’s all, and it manifests itself differently in different members of the family.”
Joseph took a bite of rabbit, chewed hard, swallowed harder.
It was an old buck with meat like leather, for which he would somehow blame Lena, she knew. “Magic is magic,” he said stubbornly, glaring at her.
“There are all sorts of magic, and my Talent doesn’t qualify as magic anyway,” she tried once more to tell him. “The Natural Philosophies, that’s what I’m good at.”
He shrugged. “Fancy word for another kind of magic.”
“No it isn’t. Why won’t you understand? You aren’t stupid, Joseph, you’ve just closed up your mind.”
He took another bite, worked it around in his mouth, then spat it back onto the plate and stood up. “You’re the one who’s closed your mind. You won’t help me even though I know you could. You hate me for bringing you out here and this is your way of getting even!” He stalked from the cabin.
Lena was not sure whether he meant refusing to work magic was her way of getting even—or feeding him tough rabbit.
But she could not help either one. She had told him the truth; her share of the Crafter gift was almost entirely of a scientific bent. And no power on earth would have tenderized that rabbit.
She scraped his plate into the slop bucket to feed later to their one razorback hog in his pen behind the house. He wouldn’t be of slaughtering age until autumn, and autumn was a long time away. “If I had the Book, maybe I could hurry the seasons,” Lena said to no one in particular. On the prairie it was easy to start talking to yourself.
But she didn’t have the Book, or even any of its copies. Her share of the Crafter legacy was tailored to her particular gift; she only had the various discoveries other members of the family had made before her.
No magic at all, she thought wearily. But at least I have something.
She went to the small chest that held her personal things and took out her glasses with a pride she did not even bestow on the mirror or the Spode.
Lena had made the eyeglasses herself. From sand and heat and power, she had fashioned the lenses, pouring her creative will and her need into them until the finished product was exactly what she needed to enable her albino eyes to see as clearly as anyone else’s, even in strong sunlight. But when Joseph was around she no longer wore them, because he would begin saying, “If you can do that, why can’t you do what I need?”
She wiped the polished lenses on her apron, flinching at the gritty feeling of the cloth against glass. Scratching them undoubtedly. When they became too scratched she would have to make new ones, and it would be hard to do without Joseph catching her at it.
“I’ve certainly fallen short of my family’s expectations,” Lena said to the room at large. The dirt-floored, sod-walled, one-room cabin in a wasteland that had become her home. “Born silver with a caul, indeed!”
* * *
The seasons passed. They did not hurry, but they passed.
Joseph coaxed a grudging, parched crop from the poor soil; they slaughtered the pig; the mule died and they went into debt to buy another. Life was hard and getting harder. Lena dreamed of going home to New England, but she was too proud to admit how wrong she had been, back in the days when she was delighted to have found a man who didn’t mind her looks and insisted on marrying her. She wouldn’t go creeping back and let the family pity her. In her way, she was as stubborn as Joseph.
In time her eyeglasses became so scratched she could not see well enough to do the sewing and mending. If she did not get new eyeglasses, soon they would be wearing rags. So Lena waited until Joseph had to go into town, and then she took her small Talent and her great need out onto the prairie, to search for sand.
Her greatest gift was the wisdom handed down by Amer Crafter. Every one of his descendants had the phrase drummed into their heads from childhood: A thing is what you think it is. So Lena began by thinking that the coarse beige prairie grit was the finest silica. It had been much easier when she had white Atlantic beach sand available; then she had made fine eyeglasses for many Crafters, a family devoted to reading and studying and therefore subject to eyestrain. When Joseph learned the extent of her gift, he had been scornful. “You can make eyeglasses?” he asked incredulously, s
taring at her with his perfect, uncorrected eyes. “Is that all?” They were in the wagon coming to Texas by then, however, and it had been too late to take her back.
So now she concentrated with all her might to transmute Texas prairie into eyeglass-quality silica sand, and while she worked, she dreamed. Not of Joseph. But of maple shade and emerald grass, the things her eyes were hungry for.
To her relief, Joseph stayed in town longer than he had meant to, and she was actually doing the final polishing of the lenses when she heard the creak of the wagon outside, and his voice yelling at the mule. Lena quickly hid the new eyeglasses in her wooden chest and went to meet her husband at the door.
To her astonishment, he had someone with him. Sitting on the plank seat of the old Springfield wagon was a giant of a man, sun-bronzed, wearing the remains of what had once been a fine coat with silver buttons. His dark hair was tousled by the omnipresent prairie wind, but without her glasses Lena could not make out his features. She could only tell that he was big. He dwarfed Joseph.
The Crafters Book Two Page 31
