Your Majesty, please do not be harsh with this gifted young man. He has the arrogance of youth; there is no treason in his heart, I know it. Nevertheless, I will be guided by you, as always, for you will always know the proper balance between justice and mercy. Your humble servant, Gilbert.
King Charles would be livid, of course. Even if Napoleon was right, and Charlie was inclined to be indulgent, the courtiers would never let such an opportunity pass. There would be such a howl for Napoleon’s head that even King Charles could not resist cashiering the boy.
Another letter, the most painful one, was again in Gilbert’s own hand, this time addressed to Frederic, Comte de Maurepas. Gilbert had written it long ago, almost as soon as Napoleon arrived in Canada. Soon it would be time to send it.
On the eve of such momentous events, my dear Freddie, I think you should wear this amulet. It was given me by a holy man to fend the lies and deceptions of Satan. Wear it at all times, my friend, for I think your need for it is greater far than mine.
Freddie need not know that the “holy man” was Robespierre—de Maurepas would certainly never wear it then. Gilbert drew the amulet from the bosom of his shirt, where it dangled on a golden chain. What will de Maurepas do when Napoleon has no power over him? Why, he will act his true self again, that is what he will do.
Gilbert had sat thus for half an hour, knowing that the time of decision had arrived. The amulet would not be sent yet—only at the cusp of events would Napoleon suddenly lose his influence over Freddie. But the letter to the King must be sent now, if there was to be time for it to reach Versailles, and the inevitable response to return to Canada before the springtime battle with the Americans.
Am I a traitor, to work for the defeat of my King and country? No, I am not, most certainly I am not. For if I thought it would do my beloved France even an ounce of good, I would help Napoleon win his victory over the Americans, even if it meant crippling the cause of liberty in this new land. For though I am a Feuillant, a democrat, even a Jacobin in my darkest heart, and even though my love for America is greater than that of any man save perhaps Franklin or Washington, who are dead, or Jefferson among the living—despite all that, I am a Frenchman first, and what care I for liberty in any corner of God’s world, if there is none in France?
No, I do this because a terrible, humiliating defeat in Canada is exactly what France needs, especially if it can be seen that the defeat is caused by King Charles’s direct intervention. Such a direct intervention as removing popular and brilliant Bonaparte from command on the eve of battle, and replacing him with an ass like de Maurepas, all for the sake of Charlie’s own vanity.
For there was one last letter, this one in code, seemingly innocuous in its babbling about hunting and the tedium of life in Niagara. But hidden within it was the entire text of both Napoleon’s and Frederic’s letters, to be published to withering effect as soon as the news of French defeat reached Paris. Almost as quickly as Napoleon’s original letter reached the King, Robespierre would have this ciphered letter in his hands.
But what of my oath to the king? What sort of plotting is this? I was meant to be a general, to lead armies in battle; or a Governor, to move the machinery of state for the good of the people. Instead I am reduced to plotting, backstabbing, deception, betrayal. I am a Brutus, willing to betray all for the sake of a loyalty to the people. And yet—I pray that history will be kind to me, and let it be known that but for me King Charles would have called himself Charlemagne Second and used Napoleon to subjugate Europe in a new French Empire. Instead, with God’s help, because of me France will set an example of peacefulness and liberty to all the world.
He lit his wax candle, let it drip to fasten closed the letter to the King and the letter to his trusted neighbor, and then pressed his seal into both. He called in his aide, who put them in the mail pouch, then left to carry them to the ship—the last ship that was sure to make it down the river and on to France before winter.
Only the letter to de Maurepas remained, that and the amulet. How I regret having you, he said to the amulet. If only I, too, could have been deceived by Napoleon, and rejoiced as he made his inevitable way into history. Instead I am thwarting him, for how can a general, be he as brilliant as Caesar, possibly thrive in the democracy Robespierre and I will create in France?
All seeds are planted, all traps are set.
For another hour Gilbert de La Fayette sat trembling in his chair. Then he arose, dressed in his finest clothing, and spent the evening watching a wretched farce by a fifth-rate company, the finest that poor Niagara could get from Mother France. At the end he stood and applauded, which, because he was Governor, guaranteed the company financial success in Canada; applauded long and vigorously, as the rest of the audience was forced to keep applauding with him; clapped his hands until his arms were sore, until the amulet was slick with sweat on his chest, until he felt the heat of his exertion burning through his shoulders and back, until he could clap no more.
17
Becca’s Loom
Winter’d been going on half Alvin’s life, it seemed like. Used to be he liked snowy times, peeking out his window through the craze of frost, looking at the sun dazzling off the smooth unbroken sea of snow. But then, in those days he could always get inside where it was warm, eat Ma’s cooking, sleep in a soft bed. Not that he was suffering so much now; what with learning Red ways for doing things, Alvin wasn’t bad off.
It had just been going on for too many months. Almost a year since that spring morning when Alvin set out with Measure for the trip to Hatrack River. That had seemed such a long journey then; now, to Alvin, it was no more than a day’s jaunt by comparison with the traveling he had done. They been south so far the Reds spoke Spanish more than English when they talked White man talk. They been west to the foggy bottom lands near the Mizzipy. They talked to Cree-Ek, Chok-Taw, the “uncivilized” Cherriky folk of the bayou country. And north to the highest reaches of the Mizzipy where the lakes were so many and all hooked on that you could go everywhere by canoe.
It went the same with every village they visited. “We know about you, Ta-Kumsaw, you come to talk war. We don’t want war. But—if the White man comes here, we fight.”
And then Ta-Kumsaw explaining that by the time the White man comes to their village, it’s too late, they’ll be alone, and the Whites will be like a hailstorm, pounding them into the dirt. “We must make ourselves into one army. We still can be stronger than they are if we do.”
It was never enough. A few young men would nod, would wish to say yes, but the old men, they didn’t want war, they didn’t want glory, they wanted peace and quiet, and the White man was still far away, still a rumor.
Then Ta-Kumsaw would turn to Alvin, and say, “Tell them what happened at Tippy-Canoe.”
By the third telling, Alvin knew what would happen when he told the tale the tenth time, the hundredth time, every time. Knew it as soon as the Reds seated around the fire turned to look at him, with distaste because he was White, with interest because he was the White boy who traveled with Ta-Kumsaw. No matter how simple he made the tale, no matter how he included the fact that the Whites of Wobbish Territory thought that Ta-Kumsaw had kidnapped and tortured him and Measure, the Reds still listened to it with grief and grim fury. And at the end, the old men would be gripping handfuls of soil in their hands, tearing at the ground as if to turn loose some terrible beast inside the earth; and the young men would be drawing their flint-edged knives gently across their own thighs, drawing faint lines of blood, teaching their knives to be thirsty, teaching their own bodies to seek out pain and love it.
“When the snow is gone from the banks of the Hio,” said Ta-Kumsaw.
“We will be there,” said the young men, and the old men nodded their consent. The same in every village, every tribe. Oh, sometimes a few spoke of the Prophet and urged peace; they were scorned as “old women”; though as far as Alvin could see, the old women seemed most savage of all in their hate.
/> Yet Alvin never complained that Ta-Kumsaw was using him to heat up anger against his own race. After all, the story Alvin had to tell was true, wasn’t it? He couldn’t deny to tell it, not to anybody, not for any reason, no more than his family could deny to speak under the Prophet’s curse. Not that blood would appear on Alvin’s hands if he refused to tell. He just felt like the same burden was on him like it was on all the Whites who beheld the massacre at Tippy-Canoe. The story of Tippy-Canoe was true, and if every Red who heard that tale became filled with hate and wanted vengeance, wanted to kill every White man who didn’t sail back to Europe, why, would that be a reason for Alvin to try to keep them from knowing? Or wasn’t that their natural right, to know the truth so as to be able to let the truth lead them to do good or evil, as they chose?
Not that Alvin could talk about natural rights and such out loud. There wasn’t much chance for conversation. Sure enough, he was always with Ta-Kumsaw, never more than an arm’s length off. But Ta-Kumsaw almost never spoke to Alvin, and when he did it was things like “Catch a fish” or “Come with me now.” Ta-Kumsaw made it plain that he had no friendship for Alvin now, and in fact he didn’t much want a White along with him. Ta-Kumsaw walked fast, in his Red man’s way, and never looked back to see if Alvin was with him or not. The only time he ever seemed to care that Alvin was there was when he turned to him and said, “Tell what happened at Tippy-Canoe.”
One time, after they left a village so het up against Whites they were looking with interest at Alvin’s own scalp, Alvin got to feeling defiant and he said, “Why don’t you have me tell them about how you and I and Taleswapper all got into Eight-Face Mound?” Ta-Kumsaw’s only answer was to walk so fast that Alvin had to run all day just keeping up.
Traveling with Ta-Kumsaw was like traveling alone, when it came to company. Alvin couldn’t remember ever being so lonely in his life. So why don’t I leave, he asked himself. Why do I keep going with him? It ain’t like it’s fun, and I’m helping him start a war against my own folks, and it’s getting colder all the time, like as if the sun gave up shining and the world was supposed to be grey bare trees and blinding snow from one end to the other, and he don’t even want me here.
Why did Alvin go on? It was partly Tenskwa-Tawa’s prophecy that Ta-Kumsaw never would die if Alvin stuck close by. Alvin might not like Ta-Kumsaw’s company, but Alvin knew he was a great and good man, and if Alvin could somehow help keep him alive, then it was his duty to give it a try as best he could.
But it was also more than that, more than the duty he felt to the Prophet, to care for his brother; more than the need he felt to act out the terrible punishment of his family by telling the tale of Tippy-Canoe all over the Red man’s country. Alvin couldn’t exactly find it in words to tell himself inside his head as he ran along through the woods, lost in a halfway dream, the green of the forest guiding his footsteps and filling his head with the music of the earth. No, that wasn’t a word time. But it was a time of understanding without words, of having a sense of lightness about what he was doing, a feeling that Alvin was like the oil on the axle of a wagon wheel that was carrying great events forward. I might just get myself all used up, I might get burned away by the heat of the wheel rubbing on the axle, but the world is changing, and somehow I’m part of what’s helping it go forward. Ta-Kumsaw’s building something, bringing together Red men to make something out of them.
It was the first time Alvin understood that something could be built out of people, that when Ta-Kumsaw talked them Reds into feeling with one heart and acting with one mind, they became something bigger than just a few people; and building something like that, it was against the Unmaker, wasn’t it? Just like Alvin always used to make little baskets by weaving grass. The grass was nothing but grass by itself, but all wove together it was something more than grass.
Ta-Kumsaw’s making something new where there wasn’t nothing, but the new thing won’t come to be without me.
That filled him with fear of helping make something he didn’t understand; but it also filled him with eagerness to see the future. So he pressed on, pushed forward, wore himself down, talked to Reds who started out suspicious and ended up filled with hate, and stared most of every day at the back of Ta-Kumsaw, running ahead of him ever deeper into the forest. The green of the wood turned gold and red, then black with the rains of autumn on the bare trees, and finally grey and white and still. And all his worry, all his discouragement, all his confusion, all his grief for the terrible things he saw coming and the terrible things he’d seen in the past—all turned into a weary distaste for winter, an impatience for the season to change, for the snow to melt and spring to come, and then summer.
Summer, when he could look back and think of all this as the past. Summer, when he’d know pretty much how it all turned out, for good or ill, and not have this sickening snow-white dread in the back of his mind, masking all his other feelings the way snow masked the earth beneath it.
Until one day Alvin noticed that the air was somewhat warm, and the snow had slacked off the grass and dirt and was purely gone from the tree limbs, and there was a flash of red where a certain bird was getting itself ready to find him a wife and nestle in for egg season. And on that very day, Ta-Kumsaw turned eastward, up over a ridge of hills, and stood perched atop a rock looking down on a valley of White men’s farms in the northern part of the White man’s state of Appalachee.
It was a sight Alvin had never seen before in his life. Not like the French city of Detroit, people all packed in together, nor like the sparse settlements of the Wobbish country, with each farm carved out like a gouge in the greenwood forest. Here the trees were all disciplined, lined up in rows to mark off one farmer’s field from another. Only on the hills skirting the valley were the trees somewhat wild again. And as the ground softened today, there were farmers out cutting the earth open with their plows, just as gentle and shallow on the face of the earth as those Red warriors’ flint knives against their thighs, teaching the blade to thirst, teaching the earth to bear, so that like the blood that seeped upward under the Red men’s knives, the wheat or maize or rye or oats would seep upward, make a thin film of life across the skin of the earth, an open wound all summer until harvest blades made another kind of cut. Then the snow again, it would form like a scab, to heal the earth until the next year’s injury. This whole valley was like that, broken like an old horse.
I shouldn’t feel like this, thought Alvin. I should be glad to see White lands again. There was curls of smoke from a hundred chimneys up and down the valley. There was folks there, children getting outside to play after being penned up the whole of winter, men sweating into the chilly air of early spring as they did their tasks, hard-working animals raising a steam from their nostrils and off their hot, heaving flanks. This was like home, wasn’t it? This was what Armor and Father and every other White man wanted to turn the Wobbish country into, wasn’t it? This was civilization, one household butting up into the next one, all elbows jostling, all the land parceled out till nobody had no doubt at all who owned every inch of it, who had the right to use it and who was trespassing and better move along.
But after this year of being with Reds practically every minute and hardly seeing a White man except for Measure, for a while, and Taleswapper for a day or two, why, Alvin didn’t see that valley with White eyes. He saw it like a Red man, and so to Alvin it looked like the end of the world.
“What’re we doing here?” Alvin asked Ta-Kumsaw.
In answer, Ta-Kumsaw just walked right down from the mountain and on into the White man’s valley, just like he had a right. Alvin couldn’t figure, but he followed tight.
To Alvin’s surprise, as they traipsed right through a field half-plowed, the farmer didn’t so much as yell at them to mind the furrows, he just looked up, squinted at them, and then waved. “Howdy, Ike!” he called.
Ike?
And Ta-Kumsaw raised his hand in greeting and walked on.
Alvin like to laughed o
ut loud. Ta-Kumsaw, being known to civilized farmers in a place like this, known so well that a White man could tell who he was at such a distance! Ta-Kumsaw, the most ferocious hater of Whites in all the woodland, being called by a White man’s name?
But Alvin knew better than to ask for explanation. He just followed close behind till Ta-Kumsaw finally came to where he was going.
It looked to be a house like any other house, maybe a speck older. Big, anyway, and added onto in a jumbly way. Maybe that corner of the house was the original cabin, with a stone foundation, and then they added that wing onto it bigger than the log house, so the cabin no doubt got turned into a kitchen, and then another wing across the front of the cabin, only this time two stories high, with an attic, and then an add-on in the back of the cabin, right across the roof of it, keeping the gable shape and framing it with shaped timbers, which were whitewashed clean enough once, but now were peeling off the paint and showing grey wood through. The whole history of this valley in that house—desperately just throwing up enough of a cabin to keep rain off between battling the forest; then a measure of peace to add a room or two for comfort; then some prosperity, and more children, and a need to put a grand two-story face on things, and finally three generations in that house, and building not for pride but just for space, just for rooms to put folks into.
Such a house it was, a house that held the whole story of the White man’s victorious war against the land in its shape.
And up walks Ta-Kumsaw to a small and shabby-looking door in the back, and he doesn’t so much as knock, he just opens the door and goes inside.
Well, Alvin saw that, and for the first time he didn’t know what to do. By habit he wanted to follow Ta-Kumsaw right into the house, the way he’d followed him into a hundred mud-daubed Red man’s huts. But by even older habit he knew you don’t just walk right into a house like this, with a proper door and all. You go round to the front and knock polite, and wait for folks to invite you in.
Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II Page 29
