"I suppose if it looks like a miracle, the United States Army and the Royal Army won't think they can do the same. The only flaw in your idea, Alvin, is that your crossing of Lake Pontchartrain was pretty much a miracle, and that didn't stop them from sending an army in pursuit of you."

"Once I took down the bridge," said Alvin, "they didn't try to cross the lake."

Tenskwa-Tawa shook his head. "I have a war on my hands with the Mexica, and now I have to help you pull off a miraculous crossing of the Mizzippy, putting the great peaceful nation at risk."

"Hey, that goes both ways," said Alvin. "Here I am trying to save five thousand runaways and you up and tell me my brother is heading into the mouth of a volcano that you can't stop."

"Isn't it good we like each other so much," said Tenskwa-Tawa.

"You taught me everything I know," said Alvin.

"But not everything I know."

"And I gave you back your eye."

"And healed my heart," said Tenskwa-Tawa. "But you're a lot of bother all the same."

11

Flood

After the second night, word went on ahead of them and it got harder. Mistress Cottoner didn't talk, La Tia said so, but her son did. And the people at the second house, Arthur Stuart had to use makery to seal the doors and windows of a room in their house so they couldn't get out, because they wouldn't calm down, they kept screaming, It's our life you're taking, you're making us poor, you have no right, these slaves are ours, until Marie wanted to fill their mouths with cotton, all the cotton that had ever been picked by their slaves, just stuff it down their mouths until they were as fat and soft as the huge pillows they slept on while their slaves slept on hard boards and straw in filthy rat-infested cabins.

As filthy and rat-infested as the cabin her mother had made her grow up in back in Swamptown. Only her mother wasn't a slave. We're finer people than these scum, her mother would say. We're Portuguese royalty, only Napoleon drove us out and forced us into exile in Nouveau Orleans and then he sold it to the Spanish so that we could never go home. Because you are the granddaughter of a duke, and he was the son of a king, and you should be married to at least a count, so you must learn fine manners and speak French and English very well and learn how to curtsey and stand straight and...

And then Marie got old enough to understand that not everybody could see into people's bodies and feel whether they were sick and whether they would die of it. And all of a sudden her mother's story changed. Your father was a great wizard, she said. A maker, they call such a man here. Facteur. Createur. He could carve a bird out of wood and breathe on it and it would fly away. And you have some of his gift, and some of mine, because my talent is love, I love people, my dear Marie, you have that love and it lets you see inside their hearts, and the power from your father lets you see their death because that is the ultimate power, to stare death in the face and be unafraid.

Her mother, such a storyteller. That was when Marie knew that her mother's stories were all lies. In Portugal her name had been Caterina, and they called her Rina for short. When she came to Nouveau Orleans they made a joke of it and called her Rien, which was French for "nothing." Or even "de rien," which was what the French said after "merci," so it was like the English "you're welcome." Because now Marie understood that her mother was a prostitute, and not an expensive one, either, and her father had probably been a customer, back in the days before she had a hex against pregnancy that worked.

But she pretended to believe her mother's stories because it made her mother happy to tell them. And Marie was actually relieved, because she had always been afraid that someday Napoleon would fall from power or die, and the Portuguese royal family would be restored to the throne and they'd come looking for them and find them and it would be fine for Mother, she could go back to being what she was raised to be, but Marie wasn't good at curtseying and her French was not elegant and fine and she was dirty and always covered in skeeter bites and they would despise her and mock her in the royal court, just like they did here on the streets of Barcy. Only it would be worse, because it would be fine ladies and gentlemen doing it. So she hated the idea of being royalty. It was better just to be the daughter of a cheap Portuguese whore in Nueva Barcelona.

But now, far from being the most despised people in Barcy, they were actually important. Because Alvin and Arthur Stuart and La Tia treated them with respect, because they were the ones who went to the doors of the houses, everyone looked up to them. They got to wear fine clothes and act like royalty, and even though it didn't really fool people because the clothes weren't fine enough, it was still fun to pretend that Mother's story had been a little bit true after all.

The third day, though, as they approached the house La Tia said, "This house is not good. Pass it by." And they would have done it, but then three men came out on the porch with muskets and aimed them and demanded that they surrender.

So Arthur Stuart-such a clever boy, bless him-made the ends of all three of their muskets go soft and droop, so they couldn't shoot anymore. The men threw them down and drew swords and began to run at them, and Arthur Stuart made the swords soft too, like willow wands, and La Tia laughed and laughed.

But there was no pretending this time. The people of this house, of the whole neighborhood, had heard of the huge army of runaway slaves who captured plantations and raped the women and killed the men and let the slaves burn everything to the ground. Of course it wasn't true, not a bit of it- except for the part about how two French women would come to the door and get themselves invited inside, and while they were in there the two slaves that traveled with them, a mammy slave and a young buck, would go provoke a rebellion among the slaves of the plantation and then it was all murder and rape and burning.

There'd be no more deception at the door. Every house would be more like a military campaign from then on.

So that third night, with all the white men tied up in the barn and all the white women locked in the upstairs of the house and not a slave to be found because they had all been sent away, La Tia and Arthur Stuart and Mother and Marie met with the council of colonels to decide what to do.

"If we could hear the greensong," said Arthur Stuart, "we could travel by night and not get hungry-like we did crossing Pontchartrain."

"I don't remember no greensong," said La Tia.

"Yes you do," said Arthur Stuart. "Only you didn't know that's what you were hearing."

"What be in this song?" said La Tia. "What make it green?"

"It's the song of the life around you. Not the human life, that's just noise, most of the time. Not machines, either. But the music of the trees and the wind and the heat of the sun, the music of fish and birds and bugs and bees. All the life of the world around you, and you let yourself be part of the song. I can't do it alone, but when I'm with Alvin, he can catch me up in the song and then I hear it and it feels like my body is running itself, you know what I mean? I can just run and run and at the end I feel like I just woke up from a good long nap. And I'm not hungry, not while I'm running. Not thirsty, either. I'm just part of the world, turning around from night to day, wind blowing over me, plants growing up out of me, animals moving through and over me."

It was lovely to hear him talk about it, his face so lighted up like it got. This young half-black man, he loved his friend, his brother-in-law Alvin, even more than Marie did. Oh, to hold Alvin's hand and run through the trees and hear that greensong and see the bushes and branches bend out of the way and the ground become smooth and soft under her feet:.