Still, he couldn't rid himself of frustration that the words were so plain. He reached out and turned the page, turned many pages, riffling them with his fingers. The words were all the same. Grey ink on yellowing paper.
A flash of light came from the book, blinding him for a moment.
“Don't play with the pages like that,” said Papa. “You'll tear one.”
Alvin turned around to took at Taleswapper. “What's the page with light on it?” he asked. “What does it say there?”
“Light?” asked Taleswapper.
Then Alvin knew that he alone had seen it.
“Find the page yourself,” said Taleswapper.
“He'll just tear it,” said Papa.
“He'll be careful,” said Taleswapper.
But Papa sounded angry. “I said stand away from that book, Alvin Junior.”
Alvin started to obey, but felt Taleswapper's hand on his shoulder. Taleswapper's voice was quiet, and Alvin felt the old man's fingers moving in a sign of warding. “The boy saw something in the book,” said Taleswapper, “and I want him to find it again for me.”
And, to Alvin's surprise, Papa backed down. “If you don't mind getting your book ripped up by that careless lazy boy,” he murmured, then fell silent.
Alvin turned to the book and carefully thumbed the pages, one at a time. Finally one fell into place, and from it came a light, which at first dazzled him, but gradually subsided until it came only from a single sentence, whose letters were on fire.
“Do you see them burning?” asked Alvin.
“No,” said Taleswapper, “But I smell the smoke of it. Touch the words that burn for you.”
Alvin reached out and gingerly touched the beginning of the sentence. The flame, to his surprise, was not hot, though it did warm him. It warmed him through to the bone. He shuddered as the last cold of autumn fled from his body. He smiled, he was so bright inside. But almost as soon as he touched it, the flame collapsed, cooled, was gone.
“What does it say?” asked Mama. She was standing now across the table from them. She wasn't such a good reader, and the words were upside down to her.
Taleswapper read. “A Maker is born.”
“There hasn't been a Maker,” said Mama, “since the one who changed the water into wine.”
“Maybe not, but that's what she wrote,” said Taleswapper.
“Who wrote?” demanded Mama.
“A slip of a girl. About five years ago.”
“What was the story that went with her sentence?” asked Alvin Junior.
Taleswapper shook his head.
“You said you never let people write unless you knew their story.”
“She wrote it when I wasn't looking,” said Taleswapper. “I didn't see it till the next place I stopped.”
“Then how did you know it was her?” asked Alvin.
“It was her,” he answered. “She was the only one there who could have opened the hex I kept on the book in those days.”
“So you don't know what it means? You can't even tell me why I saw those letters burning?”
Taleswapper shook his head. “She was an innkeeper's daughter, if I remember rightly. She spoke very little, and when she did, what she said was always strictly truthful. Never a lie, even to be kind. She was considered to be something of a shrew. But as the proverb says, If you always speak your mind, the evil man will avoid you. Or something like that.”
“Her name?” asked Mama. Alvin looked up in surprise. Mama hadn't seen the glowing letters, so why did she look so powerful eager to know about who wrote them?
“Sorry,” said Taleswapper. “I don't remember her name right now. And if I remembered her name, I wouldn't tell it, nor will I tell whether I know the place where she lived. I don't want people seeking her out, troubling her for answers that she may not want to give. But I will say this. She was a torch, and saw with true eyes. So if she wrote that a Maker was born, I believe it, and that's why I let her words stay in the book.”
“I want to know her story someday,” said Alvin. “I want to know why the letters were so bright.”
He looked up and saw Mama and Taleswapper looking steadily into each other's eyes.
And then, around the fringes of his own vision, where he could almost but not quite see it, he sensed the Unmaker, trembling, invisible, waiting to shiver the world apart. Without even thinking about it, Alvin pulled the front of his shirt out of his pants and knotted the corners together. The Unmaker wavered, then retreated out of sight.
Chapter Eleven – Millstone
Taleswapper woke up to somebody shaking him. Still full dark outside, but it was time to be moving. He sat, flexed himself a little, and took some pleasure in how few knots and pains he had these days, sleeping on a soft bed. I could get used to this, he thought. I could enjoy living here.
The bacon was so fat he could hear it sizzling clear from the kitchen. He was just about to pull his boots on when Mary knocked at the door. “I'm presentable, more or less,” he said.
She came in, holding out two pair of long thick stockings. “I knotted them myself,” she said.
“I couldn't buy socks this thick in Philadelphia.”
“Winter gets right cold here in the Wobbish country, and–” She didn't finish. Got too shy, ducked her head, and scampered out of the room.
Taleswapper pulled on the stockings, and his boots over them, and grinned. He didn't feel bad about accepting a few things like this. He worked as hard as anybody, and he'd done a lot to help ready this farm for winter. He was a good roof man– he liked climbing and didn't get dizzy. So his own hands had made sure the house and barns and coops and sheds all were tight and dry.
And, without anybody ever deciding to do it, he had prepared the millhouse to receive a millstone. He had personally loaded all the hay from the mill floor, five wagons full. The twins, who really hadn't got their two farms going yet, since they married only that summer, did the unloading up in the big barn. It was all done without Miller himself ever touching a pitchfork. Taleswapper saw to that, without making a fuss over it, and Miller never insisted.
Other things, though, weren't going so well. Ta-Kumsaw and his Shaw-Nee Reds were driving off so many folks from down Carthage way that everybody had the jitters. It was fine for the Prophet to have his big town of thousands of Reds across the river, all talking about how they'd never again raise their hands in war for any reason. But there were a lot of Reds who felt the way Ta-Kumsaw did, that the White man ought to be forced to the shores of the Atlantic and floated back to Europe, with or without boats. There was war talk, and word was that Bill Harrison down in Carthage was only too happy to fan that particular flame, not to mention the French in Detroit, always urging the Reds to attack the American settlers in land the French claimed was part of Canada.
Folks in the town of Vigor Church talked about this all the time, but Taleswapper knew that Miller didn't take it all that seriously. He thought of Reds as country clowns that wanted nothing more than to guzzle such whisky as they could find. Taleswapper had seen that attitude before, but only in New England. Yankees never seemed to realize that New England Reds with any gumption had long since moved to the state of Irrakwa. It would surely open Yankee eyes to see that the Irrakwa were working heavily with steam engines brought straight from England, and up in the Finger Lakes country a White named Eli Whitney was helping them make a factory that could turn out guns about twenty times faster than it had ever been done before. Someday those Yankees were going to wake up and find out that the Reds weren't all likker-mad, and some White folks were going to have to scramble fast to catch up.