Seventh Son ttoam-1

by Orson Scott Card

  It put him out of sorts when he caught himself compromising with witchery. And being out of sorts, he wasn't about to let anything lie, even though he knew Elly plain didn't want to talk about it. “Why don't you think the leg will rot?”

  “It's just getting better so fast,” she said.

  “How much better?”

  “Oh, pert near fixed.”

  “How near?”

  She turned around, rolled her eyes, and turned back away from him. She started cutting up an apple to eat with the cheese.

  “I said how near, Elly? How near fixed?”

  “Fixed.”

  “Two days after a millstone rips off the front half of his leg, and it's fixed?”

  “Only two days?” she said. “Seems like a week to me.”

  “Calendar says it's two days,” said Armor. “Which means there's been witchery up there.”

  “As I read the gospels, the one that healed people wasn't no witch.”

  “Who did it? Don't tell me your pa or ma suddenly figured out something as strong as that. Did they conjure up a devil?”

  She turned around, the knife in her hands still poised for cutting. There was a flash in her eyes. “Pa may be no kind of church man, but the devil never set foot in our house.”

  That wasn't what Reverend Thrower said, but Armor knew better than to bring him into the conversation. “It's that beggar, then.”

  “He works for his room and board. Hard as anyone.”

  “They say he knew that old wizard Ben Franklin. And that atheist from Appalachee, Tom Jefferson.”

  “He tells good stories. And he didn't heal the boy neither.”

  “Well, somebody did.”

  “Maybe he just healed up himself. Anyway, the leg's still broke. So it ain't a miracle or nothing. He's just a fast healer.”

  “Well maybe he's a fast healer cause the devil takes care of his own.”

  From the look in her eye when she turned around, Armor kind of wished he hadn't said it. But dad-gum it, Reverend Thrower as much as said the boy was as bad as the Beast of the Apocalypse.

  But beast or boy, he was Elly's brother, and whereas she might be as quiet as you please most of the time, when she got her dander up she could be a terror.

  “Take that back,” she said.

  “Now, that's about as silly a thing as I ever heard. How can I take back what I said?”

  “By saying you know it ain't so.”

  “I don't know it is and I don't know it ain't. I said maybe, and if a man can't say his maybes to his wife then he might as well be dead.”

  “I reckon that's about true,” she said. “And if you don't take that back you'll wish you was dead!” And she started coming after him with two chunks of apple, one in each hand.

  Now, most times she came for him like that, even if she was really mad, if he let her chase him around the house awhile she usually ended up laughing. But not this time. She mushed one apple in his hair and threw the other one at him, and then just sat down in the upstairs bedroom, crying her eyes out.

  She wasn't one to cry, so Armor figured this had got right out of hand.

  “I take it back, Elly,” he said. “He's a good boy, I know that.”

  “Oh, I don't care what you think,” she said. “You don't know a thing about it anyway.”

  There weren't many husbands who'd let their wife say such a thing without slapping her upside the head. Armor wished sometimes that Elly'd appreciate how him being a Christian worked to her advantage.

  “I know a thing or two,” he said.

  “They're going to send him off,” she said. “Once spring comes, they're going to prentice him out. He's none too happy about it, I can tell, but he don't argue none, he just lies there in his bed, talking real quiet, but looking at me and everybody else like he was saying good-bye all the time.”

  “What are they wanting to send him off for?”

  “I told you, to prentice him.”

  “The way they baby that boy, I can't hardly believe they'd let him out of their sight.”

  “They ain't talking about nothing close by, neither. Clear back at the east end of Hio Territory, near Fort Dekane. Why, that's halfway to the ocean.”

  “You know, it just makes sense, when you think about it.”

  “It does?”

  “With Red trouble starting up, they want him plumb gone. The others can all stick around to get an arrow in their face, but not Alvin Junior.”

  She looked at him with withering contempt. “Sometimes you're so suspicious you make me want to puke, Armor-of-God.”

  “It ain't suspicion to say what's really happening.”

  “You can't tell real from a rutabaga.”

  “You going to wash this apple out of my hair, or do I have to make you lick it out?”

  “I expect I'll have to do something, or you'll rub it all over the bed linen.”

  * * *

  Taleswapper felt almost like a thief, to take so much with him as he left. Two pair of thick stockings. A new blanket. An elkhide cloak. Jerky and cheese. A good whetstone.

  And things they couldn't even know they gave him. A rested body, free of aches and bruises. A jaunty step. Kind faces fresh in his mind. And stories. Stories jotted in the sealed-up part of the book, the ones he wrote down himself. And true stories painfully inscribed by their own hands.

  Still, he gave them fair return, or tried to. Roofs patched for winter, other jobs here and there. More important, they'd seen a book with Ben Franklin's own handwriting in it, with sentences from Tom Jefferson, Ben Arnold, Pat Henry, John Adams, Alex Hamilton– even Aaron Burr, from before the duel, and Daniel Boone, from after. Before Taleswapper came they were part of their family, and part of the Wobbish country, and that's all. Now they belonged to much larger stories. The War of Appalachee Independence. The American Compact. They saw their own trek through the wilderness as one thread among many, and felt the strength of the whole tapestry woven from those threads. Not a tapestry, really. A rug. A good, thick, solid rug that generations of Americans after them could tread on. There was a poem in that; he'd work that into a poem sometime.

  He left them a few other things, too. A beloved son he pulled from under a falling millstone. A father who now had the strength to send away his son before he killed him. A name for a young man's nightmare, so he could understand that his enemy was real. A whispered encouragement for a broken child to heal himself.

  And a single drawing, burnt into a fine slab of oakwood with the tip of a hot knife. He'd rather have worked with wax and acid on metal, but there was neither to be had in this place. So he burnt lines into the wood, making of it what he could. A picture of a young man caught in a strong river, bound up in the roots of a floating tree, gasping for breath, his eyes facing death fearlessly. It would have earned nothing but scorn at the Lord Protector's Academy of Art, being so plain. But Goody Faith cried out when she saw it, and hugged it to her, dropping her tears over it like the last drips from the eaves after a rainstorm. And Father Alvin, when he saw it, nodded and said, “That's your vision, Taleswapper. You got his face perfect, and you never even saw him. That's Vigor. That's my boy.” Then he cried, too.

  They set it right up on the mantel. It might not be great art, thought Taleswapper, but it was true, and it meant more to these folks than any portrait could mean to some fat old lord or parliamentarian in London or Camelot or Paris or Vienna.

  “It's fair morning now,” said Goody Faith. “You've got long to go before dark.”

  “You can't blame me for being reluctant to leave. Though I'm glad you trusted me with this errand, and I won't fail you.” He patted his pocket, wherein lay the letter to the blacksmith of Hatrack River.

  “You can't go without you say good-bye to the boy,” said Miller.

  He'd put it off as long as it could be delayed. He nodded once, then eased himself from the comfortable chair by the fire and went on into the room where he'd slept the best nights of his life. It was good
to see Alvin Junior's eyes wide open, his face lively, no longer slack the way it was for a while, or winced up with pain. But the pain was still there, Taleswapper knew.

  “You going?” asked the boy.

  “I'm gone, except for saying good-bye to you.”

  Alvin looked a little angry. “So you ain't even going to let me write in your book?”

  “Not everybody does, you know.”

  “Pa did. And Mama.”

  “And Cally, too.”

  “I bet that looks good,” said Alvin. “He writes like a, like a–”

  “Like a seven-year-old.” It was a rebuke, but Alvin had no intention of squirming.

  “Why not me, then? Why Cally and not me?”

  “Because I only let people write the most important thing they ever did or ever saw with their own eyes. What would you write?”

  “I don't know. Maybe about the millstone.”

  Taleswapper made a face.

  “Then maybe my vision. That's important, you said so yourself.”

  “And that got written up somewhere else, Alvin.”

  “I want to write in the book,” he said. “I want my sentence in there along with Maker Ben's.”

  “Not yet,” said Taleswapper.

  “When!”

  “When you've whipped that old Unmaker, lad. That's when I'll let you write in this book.”

  “What if I don't ever whip him?”

  “Then this book won't amount to much, anyway.”

  Tears sprang to Alvin's eyes. “What if I die?”

  Taleswapper felt a thrill of fear. “How's the leg?”

  The boy shrugged. He blinked back the tears. They were gone.

  “That's no answer, lad.”

  “It won't stop hurting.”

  “It'll be that way till the bone knits.”

  Alvin Junior smiled wanly. “Bone's all knit.”

  “Then why don't you walk?”

  “It pains me, Taleswapper. It never goes away. It's got a bad place on the bone, and I ain't figured out yet how to make it right.”

  “You'll find a way.”

  “I ain't found it yet.”

  “An old trapper once said to me, 'It don't matter if you start at the bung or the breastbone, any old way you get the skin off a panther is a good way.'”

  “Is that a proverb?”

  “It's close. You'll find a way, even if it isn't what you expect.”

  “Nothing's what I expect,” said Alvin. “Nothing turns out like anything I figured.”

  “You're ten years old, lad. Weary of the world already?”

  Alvin kept rubbing folds of the blanket between his thumb and fingers. “Taleswapper, I'm dying.”

  Taleswapper studied his face, trying to see death there. It wasn't. “I don't think so.”

  “The bad place on my leg. It's growing. Slow, maybe, but it's growing. It's invisible, and it's eating away at the hard places of the bone, and after a while it'll go faster and faster and–”

  “And Unmake you.”

  Alvin started to cry for real this time, and his hands were shaking. “I'm scared to die, Taleswapper, but it got inside me and I can't get it out.”

  Taleswapper laid a hand on his, to still the trembling. “You'll find a way. You've got too much work to do in this world, to die now.”

  Alvin rolled his eyes. “That's about as dumb a thing as I've heard this year. Just because somebody's got things to do don't mean he won't die.”

  “But it does mean he won't die willingly.”

  “I ain't willing.”

  “That's why you'll find a way to live.”

  Alvin was silent for a few seconds. “I've been thinking. About if I do live, what I'll do. Like what I done to make my leg get mostly better. I can do that for other folks, I bet. I can lay hands on them and feel the way it is inside, and fix it up. Wouldn't that be good?”

  “They'd love you for it, all the folks you healed.”

  “I reckon the first time was the hardest, and I wasn't partickler strong when I done it. I bet I can do it faster on other people.”

  “Maybe so. But even if you heal a hundred sick people every day, and move on to the next place and heal a hundred more, there'll be ten thousand people die behind you, and ten thousand more ahead of you, and by the time you die, even the ones you healed will almost all be dead.”

  Alvin turned his face away. “If I know how to fix them, then I got to fix them, Taleswapper.”

  “Those you can, you must,” said Taleswapper. “But not as your life's work. Bricks in the wall, Alvin, that's all they'll ever be. You can never catch up by repairing the crumbling bricks. Heal those who chance to fall under your hand, but your life's work is deeper than that.”

  “I know how to heal people. But I don't know how to beat down the Un– the Unmaker. I don't even know what it is.”

  “As long as you're the only one that can see him, though, you're also the only one who has a hope of beating him.”

  “Maybe.”

  Another long silence. Taleswapper knew it was time to go.

  “Wait.”

  “I've got to leave now.”

  Alvin caught at his sleeve. “Not yet.”

  “Pretty soon.”

  “At least– at least let me read what the others wrote.”

  Taleswapper reached into his bag and pulled out the book pouch. “I can't promise I'll explain what they mean,” he said, sliding the book out of its waterproof cover.

  Alvin quickly found the last, newest writings.

  In his mother's hand: “Vigor he push a log and he don die til the boy is bornd.”

  In David's hand: “A mil ston splits in two then it suks bak not a crak.”

  In Cally's hand: “A sevent sunn.”

  Alvin looked up. “He ain't talking about me, you know.”

  “I know,” said Taleswapper.

  Alvin looked back at the book. In his father's hand: “He dont kil a boy cus a stranjer com in time.”

  “What's Pa talking about?” asked Alvin.

  Taleswapper took the book from his hands and closed it. “Find a way to heal your leg,” he said. “There's a lot more souls than you who need it to be strong. It's not for yourself, remember?”

  He bent over and kissed the boy on the forehead. Alvin reached up and held him with both arms, hanging on him so that he couldn't stand up without lifting the boy clear out of bed. After a while, Taleswapper had to reach up and pull the boy's arms away. His cheek was wet with Alvin's tears. He didn't wipe them away. He let the breeze dry them as he trudged along the cold dry path, with fields of half-melted snow stretching left and right.

  He paused a moment on the second covered bridge. Just long enough to wonder if he'd ever come back here, or see them again. Or get Alvin Junior's sentence for his book. If he were a prophet, he'd know. But he hadn't the faintest idea.

  He walked on, setting his feet toward morning.

  Chapter Thirteen – Surgery

  The visitor sat comfortably upon the altar, leaning casually on his left arm, so that his body had a jaunty tilt. Reverend Thrower had seen just such an informal pose taken by a dandy from Camelot, a rakehell who clearly despised everything that the Puritan churches of England and Scotland stood for. It made Thrower more than a little uncomfortable to see the Visitor in such an irreverent pose.

  “Why?” asked the Visitor. “Just because the only way you can maintain control over your bodily passions is to sit straight in your chair, knees together, hands delicately arranged in your lap, fingers tightly intertwined, does not mean that I am required to do the same.”

  Thrower was embarrassed. “It isn't fair to chastise me for my thoughts.”

  “It is, when your thoughts chastise me for my actions. Beware of hubris, my friend. Do not fancy yourself so righteous that you can judge the acts of angels.”

  It was the first time the Visitor had ever called himself an angel.

  “I did not call myself anything,” said the Vis
itor. “You must learn to control your thoughts, Thrower. You leap to conclusions far too easily.”

  “Why have you come to me?”

  “It's a matter of the maker of this altar,” said the Visitor. He patted one of the crosses Alvin Junior had burnt into the wood.

  “I've done my best, but the boy is unteachable. He doubts everything, and contests each point of theology as if it were required to meet the same tests of logic and consistency that prevail in the world of science.”

  “In other words, he expects your doctrines to make sense.”

  “He is unwilling to accept the idea that some things remain mysteries, comprehensible only to the mind of God. Ambiguity makes him saucy, and paradox causes open rebellion.”

  “An obnoxious child.”

  “The worst I have ever seen,” said Thrower.

  The Visitor's eyes flashed. Thrower felt a stab in his heart.

  “I've tried,” said Thrower. “I've tried to turn him to serve the Lord. But the influence of his father–”

  “It is a weak man who blames his failures on the strength of others,” said the Visitor.

  “I haven't failed yet!” said Thrower. “You told me I had until the boy was fourteen–”

  “No. I told you I had until the boy was fourteen. You only have him as long as he lives here.”

  “I've heard nothing about the Millers moving. They just got their millstone in place, they're going to start grinding in the spring, they wouldn't leave without–”

  The Visitor stood up from the altar. “Let me put a case to you, Reverend Thrower. Purely hypothetical. Let us suppose you were in the same room with the worst enemy of all that I stand for. Let us suppose that he were ill, and lay helpless in his bed. If he recovered, he would be removed from your reach, and would thus go on to destroy all that you and I love in this world. But if he died, our great cause would be safe. Now suppose that someone put a knife into your hand, and begged you to perform a delicate surgery upon the boy. And suppose that if you were to slip, just the tiniest bit, your knife could cut a great artery. And suppose that if you simply delayed, his lifeblood would flow out so quickly that in moments he would die. In that case, Reverend Thrower, what would be your duty?”