Prentice Alvin: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume III

by Orson Scott Card

  Easy as breaking a rat’s neck. If that was all the Unmaker could think of doing, it might as well go on home. Alvin was a match for him, just like he was a match for Makepeace Smith and Hank Dowser both. He dug on, dredged up. hoisted, flung, then bent to dredge again.

  He was pretty near deep enough now, a good six feet lower than the stone shelf. Why, if he hadn’t firmed up the earthen sides of the well, it’d be full of water over his head already. Alvin took hold of the knotted rope he left dangling and walked up the wall, pulling himself hand over hand up the rope.

  The moon was rising now, but the hole was so deep it wouldn’t shine into the well until near moon-noon. Never mind. Into the pit Alvin dumped a barrowload of the stones he’d levered out only an hour before. Then he clambered down after it.

  He’d been working rock with his knack since he was little, and he was never more sure-handed with it than tonight. With his bare hands he shaped the stone like soft clay, making it into smooth square blocks that he placed all around the walls of the well from the bottom up, braced firm against each other so that the pushing of soil and water wouldn’t cave it in. Water would seep easily through the cracks between stones, but the soil wouldn’t, so the well would be clean almost from the start.

  There wasn’t enough stone from the well itself, of course; Alvin made three trips to the stream to load the barrow with water-smoothed rocks. Even though he was using his knack to make the work easier, it was late at night and weariness was coming on him. But he refused to pay attention. Hadn’t he learned the Red man’s knack for running on long after weariness should have claimed him? A boy who followed Ta-Kumsaw, running without a rest from Detroit to Eight-Face Mound, such a boy had no need to give in to a single night of well-digging, and never mind his thirst or the pain in his back and thighs and shoulders, the ache of his elbows and his knees.

  At last, at last, it was done. The moon past zenith, his mouth tasting like a horsehair blanket, but it was done. He climbed on out of the hole, bracing himself against the stone walls he’d just finished building. As he climbed he let go of his hold on the earth around the well, unsealed it, and the water, now tame, began to trickle noisily into the deep stone basin he’d built to hold it.

  Still Alvin didn’t go inside the house, didn’t so much as walk to the stream and drink. His first taste of water would be from this well, just like Makepeace Smith had said. He’d stay here and wait until the well had reached its natural level, and then clear the water and draw up a bucket and carry it inside the house and drink a cup of it in front of his master. Afterward he’d take Makepeace Smith outside and show him the well Hank Dowser called for, the one Makepeace Smith had cuffed him for, and then point out the one where you could drop a bucket and it was splash, not clatter.

  He stood there at the lip of the well, imagining how Makepeace Smith would sputter, how he’d cuss. Then he sat down, just to ease his feet, picturing Hank Dowser’s face when he saw what Al had done. Then he lay right down to ease his aching back, and closed his eyes for just a minute, so he didn’t have to pay no heed to the fluttering shadows of unmaking that kept pestering him out the corners of his eyes.

  8

  Unmaker

  MISTRESS MODESTY WAS stirring. Peggy heard her breathing change rhythm. Then she came awake and sat up abruptly on her couch. At once Mistress Modesty looked for Peggy in the darkness of the room.

  “Here I am,” Peggy murmured.

  “What has happened, my dear? Haven’t you slept at all?”

  “I dare not,” said Peggy.

  Mistress Modesty stepped onto the portico beside her. The breeze from the southwest billowed the damask curtains behind them. The moon was flirting with a cloud; the city of Dekane was a shifting pattern of roofs down the hill below them. “Can you see him?” asked Mistress Modesty.

  “Not him,” said Peggy. “I see his heartfire; I can see through his eyes, as he sees; I can see his futures. But himself, no, I can’t see him.”

  “My poor dear. On such a marvelous night, to have to leave the Governor’s Ball and watch over this faraway child in grave danger.” It was Mistress Modesty’s way of asking what the danger was without actually asking. This way Peggy could answer or not, and neither way would any offense be given or taken.

  “I wish I could explain,” said Peggy. “It’s his enemy, the one with no face—”

  Mistress Modesty shuddered. “No face! How ghastly.”

  “Oh, he has a face for other men. There was a minister once, a man who fancied himself a scientist. He saw the Unmaker, but could not see him truly, not as Alvin does. Instead he made up a manshape for him in his mind, and a name—called him ‘the Visitor,’ and thought he was an angel.”

  “An angel!”

  “I believe that when most of us see the Unmaker, we can’t comprehend him, we haven’t the strength of intellect for that. So our minds come as close as they can. Whatever shape represents naked destructive power, terrible and irresistible force, that is what we see. Those who love such evil power, they make themselves see the Unmaker as beautiful. Others, who hate and fear it, they see the worst thing in the world.”

  “What does your Alvin see?”

  “I could never see it myself, it’s so subtle; even looking through his eyes I wouldn’t have noticed it, if he hadn’t noticed it. I saw that he was seeing something, and only then did I understand what it was he saw. Think of it as—the feeling when you think you saw some movement out of the corner of your eye, only when you turn there’s nothing there.”

  “Like someone always sneaking up behind you,” said Mistress Modesty.

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “And it’s sneaking up on Alvin?”

  “Poor boy, he doesn’t realize that he’s calling to it. He has dug a deep black pit in his heart, just the sort of place where the Unmaker flows.”

  Mistress Modesty sighed. “Ah, my child, these things are all beyond me. I never had a knack; I can barely comprehend the things you do.”

  “You? No knack?” Peggy was amazed.

  “I know—hardly anyone ever admits to not having one, but surely I’m not the only one.”

  “You misunderstand me, Mistress Modesty,” said Peggy. “I was startled, not that you had no knack, but that you thought you had no knack. Of course you have one.”

  “Oh, but I don’t mind not having one, my dear—”

  “You have the knack of seeing potential beauty as if it were already there, and by seeing, you let it come to be.”

  “What a lovely idea,” said Mistress Modesty.

  “Do you doubt me?”

  “I don’t doubt that you believe what you say.”

  There was no point in arguing. Mistress Modesty believed her, but was afraid to believe. It didn’t matter, though. What mattered was Alvin, finishing his second well. He had saved himself once; he thought the danger was over. Now he sat at the edge of the well, just to rest a moment; now he lay down. Didn’t he see the Unmaker moving close to him? Didn’t he realize that his very sleepiness opened himself wide for the Unmaker to enter him?

  “No!” whispered Peggy. “Don’t sleep!”

  “Ah,” said Mistress Modesty. “You speak to him. Can he hear you?”

  “Never,” said Peggy. “Never a word.”

  “Then what can you do?”

  “Nothing. Nothing I can think of.”

  “You told me you used his caul—”

  “It’s a part of his power, that’s what I use. But even his knack can’t send away what came at his own call. I never had the knowledge to fend off the Unmaker itself, anyway, even if I had a yard of his caulflesh, and not just a scrap of it.”

  Peggy watched in desperate silence as Alvin’s eyes closed. “He sleeps.”

  “If the Unmaker wins, will he die?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps. Perhaps he’ll disappear, eaten away to nothing. Or perhaps the Unmaker will own him—”

  “Can’t you see the future, torch girl?”

>   “All paths lead into darkness, and I see no path emerging.”

  “Then it’s over,” whispered Mistress Modesty.

  Peggy could feel something cold on her cheeks. Ah, of course: her own tears drying in the cool breeze.

  “But if Alvin were awake, he could fend off this invisible enemy?” Mistress Modesty asked. “Sorry to bother you with questions, but if I know how it works, perhaps I can help you think of something.”

  “No, no, it’s beyond us, we can only watch—” Yet even as Peggy rejected Mistress Modesty’s suggestion, her mind leapt ahead to ways of using it. I must waken him. I don’t have to fight the Unmaker, but if I waken him, then he can do his fighting for himself. Weak and weary though he is, he might still find a way to victory. At once Peggy turned and rushed back into her room, scrabbled through her top drawer until she found the carven box that held the caul.

  “Should I leave?” Mistress Modesty had followed her.

  “Stay with me,” said Peggy. “Please, for company. For comfort, if I fail.”

  “You won’t fail,” said Mistress Modesty. “He won’t fail, if he’s the man you say he is.”

  Peggy barely heard her. She sat on the edge of her bed, searching in Alvin’s heartfire for some way to waken him. Normally she could use his senses even when he slept, hearing what he heard, seeing his memory of the place around him. But now, with the Unmaker seeping in, his senses were fading. She could not trust them. Desperately she cast about for some other plan. A loud noise? Using what little was left of Alvin’s sense of the life around him, she found a tree, then rubbed a tiny bit of the caul and tried—as she had seen Alvin do it—to picture in her mind how the wood in the branch would come apart. It was painfully slow—Alvin did it so quickly!—but at last she made it fall. Too late. He barely heard it. The Unmaker had undone so much of the air around him that the trembling of sound could not pass through it. Perhaps Alvin noticed; perhaps he came a bit closer to wakefulness. Perhaps not.

  How can I waken him, when he is so insensible that nothing can disturb him? Once I held this caul as a ridgebeam tumbled toward him; I burned a childsize gap in it, so that the hair of his head wasn’t even touched. Once a millstone fell toward his leg; I split it in half. Once his own father stood in a loft, pitchfork in hand, driven by the Unmaker’s madness until he had decided to murder his own most-beloved son; I brought Taleswapper down the hill to him, distracting the father from his dark purpose and driving off the Unmaker.

  How? How did Taleswapper’s coming drive off the Destroyer? Because he would have seen the hateful beast and given the cry against it, that’s why the Unmaker left when Taleswapper arrived. Taleswapper isn’t anywhere near Alvin now, but surely there’s someone I can waken and draw down the hill; someone filled with love and goodness, so that the Unmaker must flee before him.

  With agonizing fear she withdrew from Alvin’s heartfire even as the blackness of the Unmaker threatened to drown it, and searched in the night for another heartfire, someone she could waken and send to him in time. Yet even as she searched, she could sense in Alvin’s heartfire a certain lightening, a hint of shadows within shadows, not the utter emptiness she had seen before where his future ought to be. If Alvin had any chance, it was from her searching. Even if she found someone, she had no notion how to waken them. But she would find a way, or the Crystal City would be swallowed up in the flood that came because of Alvin’s foolish, childish rage.

  9

  Redbird

  ALVIN WOKE UP hours later, the moon low in the west, the first scant light appearing in the east. He hadn’t meant to sleep. But he was tired, after all, and his work was done, so of course he couldn’t close his eyes and hope to stay awake. There was still time to take a bucketful of water and carry it inside.

  Were his eyes open even now? The sky he could see, light grey to the left, light grey to the right. But where were the trees? Shouldn’t they have been moving gently in the morning breeze, just at the fringes of his vision? For that matter, there was no breeze; and beyond the sight of his eyes, and touch on his skin, there were other things he could not feel. The green music of the living forest. It was gone; no murmur of life from the sleeping insects in the grass, no rhythm of the heartbeats of the dawn-browsing deer. No birds roosting in the trees, waiting for the sun’s heat to bring out the insects.

  Dead. Unmade. The forest was gone.

  Alvin opened his eyes.

  Hadn’t they already been open?

  Alvin opened his eyes again, and still he couldn’t see; without closing them, he opened them still again, and each time the sky seemed darker. No, not darker, simply farther away, rushing up and away from him. like as if he was falling into a pit so deep that the sky itself got lost.

  Alvin cried out in fear, and opened his already-open eyes, and saw:

  The quivering air of the Unmaker, pressing down on him, poking itself into his nostrils, between his fingers, into his ears.

  He couldn’t feel it, no sir, except that he knew what wasn’t there now; the outermost layers of his skin, wherever the Unmaker touched, his own body was breaking apart, the tiniest bits of him dying, drying, flaking away.

  “No!” he shouted. The shout didn’t make a sound. Instead, the Unmaker whipped inside his mouth, down into his lungs, and he couldn’t close his teeth hard enough, his lips tight enough to keep that slimy uncreator from slithering on inside him, eating him away from the inside out.

  He tried to heal himself the way he done with his leg that time the millstone broke it clean in half. But it was like the old story Taleswapper told him. He couldn’t build things up half so fast as the Unmaker could tear them down. For every place he healed, there was a thousand places wrecked and lost. He was a-going to die, he was half-gone already, and it wouldn’t be just death, just losing his flesh and living on in the spirit, the Unmaker meant to eat him body and spirit both alike, his mind and his flesh together.

  A splash. He heard a splashing sound. It was the most welcome thing he ever heard in his life, to hear a sound at all. It meant that there was something beyond the Unmaker that surrounded and filled him.

  Alvin heard the sound echo and ring inside his own memory, and with that to cling to, with that touch of the real world there to hang on to, Alvin opened his eyes.

  This time for real. he knew, cause he saw the sky again with its proper fringe of trees. And there was Gertie Smith, Makepeace’s missus, standing over him with a bucket in her hands.

  “I reckon this is the first water from this well,” she said.

  Alvin opened his mouth, and felt cool moist air come inside. “Reckon so,” he whispered.

  “I never would’ve thought you could dig it all out and line it proper with stones, all in one night,” she said. “That mixup boy, Arthur Stuart, he come to the kitchen where I was making breakfast biscuits, and he told me your well was done. I had to come and see.”

  “He gets up powerful early,” said Alvin.

  “And you stay up powerful late,” said Gertie. “If I was a man your size I’d give my husband a proper licking, Al, prentice or no.”

  “I just did what he asked.”

  “I’m certain you did, just like I’m certain he wanted you to excavate that there circle of stone off by the smithy, am I right?” She cackled with delight. “That’ll show the old coot. Sets such a store by that dowser, but his own prentice has a better dowsing knack than that old fraud—”

  For the first time Alvin realized that the hole he dug in anger was like a signboard telling folks he had more than a hoof-knack in him. “Please, ma’am,” he said.

  “Please what?”

  “My knack ain’t dowsing, ma’am, and if you start saying so, I’ll never get no peace.”

  She eyed him cool and steady. “If you ain’t got the dowser’s knack, boy, tell me how come there’s clear water in this well you dug.”

  Alvin calculated his lie. “The dowser’s stick dipped here, too, I saw it, and so when the first well struck
stone, I tried here.”

  Gertie had a suspicious nature. “Do you reckon you’d say the same if Jesus was standing here judging your eternal soul depending on the truth of what you say?”

  “Ma’am, I reckon if Jesus was here, I’d be asking forgiveness for my sins, and I wouldn’t care two hoots about any old well.”

  She laughed again, cuffed him lightly on the shoulder. “I like your dowsing story. You just happened to be watching old Hank Dowser. Oh, that’s a good one. I’ll tell that tale to everybody, see if I don’t.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Here. Drink. You deserve first swallow from the first bucket of clear water from this well.”

  Alvin knew that the custom was for the owner to get first drinks. But she was offering, and he was so dry he couldn’t have spit two bits’ worth even if you paid him five bucks an ounce. So he set the bucket to his lips and drank, letting it splash out onto his shirt.

  “I’d wager you’re hungry, too,” she said.

  “More tired than hungry, I think,” said Alvin.

  “Then come inside to sleep.”

  He knew he should, but he could see the Unmaker not far off, and he was afeared to sleep again, that was the truth. “Thank you kindly, Ma’am, but anyhow, I’d like to be off by myself a few minutes.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said, and went on inside.

  The morning breeze chilled him as it dried off the water he spilled on his shirt. Was his ravishment by the Unmaker only a dream? He didn’t think so. He was awake right enough, and it was real, and if Gertie Smith hadn’t come along and dunked that bucket in the well, he would’ve been unmade. The Unmaker wasn’t hiding out no more. He wasn’t sneaking in backways nor roundabout. No matter where he looked, there it was, shimmering in the greyish morning light.

  For some reason the Unmaker picked this morning for a face-to-face. Only Alvin didn’t know how he was supposed to fight. If digging a well and building it up so fine wasn’t making enough to drive off his enemy, he didn’t know what else to do. The Unmaker wasn’t like the men he wrestled with in town. The Unmaker had nothing he could take ahold of.