"I reckon you heard what we were doing here and had to come and add it to your book."

"I don't think so," said Taleswapper. "I filled it already." He slid a thick volume from inside his deerskin jacket. "Every page in it, full, and I even added a few scraps to make more pages than the blamed thing had. No, I think I'm here because what you're building, it'll take the place of books like mine."

"I hope not," said Arthur Stuart. "I hope never."

"Well, we'll see," said Taleswapper. "You've grown a lot taller, but not a whit smarter, as far as I can see."

"Can't see smart," said Arthur Stuart.

"I can," said Taleswapper.

"Come on, then," said Arthur Stuart. "Even I'm smart enough to know Alvin and Peggy'll want to see you forth with."

"Forthwith?" asked Taleswapper.

"Abe Lincoln is reading law with Verily Cooper, and they let me listen in."

"I'd rather you kept on speaking English like the rest of us."

"Law is the biggest mishmash of languages. Two kinds of Latin, two kinds of French, and three kinds of English all made into a soup that nobody can understand except a lawyer."

"That's what it's for," said Taleswapper. "It's how lawyers make sure they'll always have work, cause nobody can understand what they wrote down except another lawyer."

Arthur led him down off the bluff to the flatland leading to the river. The trees were mostly gone from this area, cut down and turned into cabins and fence rails. "Eight thousand people living here now," said Arthur.

"Still more than half of them runaway slaves, though, right?" said Taleswapper. "And therefore subject to being taken back south?"

"All citizens here," said Arthur Stuart. "Ain't no catcher been able to claim a soul yet."

"Word outside is that Furrowspring County is in virtual rebellion against the laws of the United States, refusing to accept the Supreme Court ruling that slaveowners can recover their escaped property."

"I reckon so," said Arthur Stuart proudly.

"There's war fever, and those as want to prevent the war, they might decide to sacrifice this town."

"As if they could," said Arthur Stuart. "With Alvin watching out for us!"

Taleswapper only shook his head.

They found Alvin down by the river, up to his knees in mud, helping with the sinking of posts to support a riverboat dock. "Howdy, Taleswapper!" cried Alvin. "About time you got here! You've missed all the best stories already, poor fellow. Too old to keep up with us boys, I reckon!"

"Reckon so," said Taleswapper. "But I got sense enough not to stand up to my neck in mud."

"This ain't just ordinary mud," said Alvin. "This is Mizzippy clay. It gets ahold of you and steals the boots right off your feet."

"Well, that's a recommendation for it. Make a cup out of such clay and it'll suck the tea right out of your mouth, is that the way of it?"

Alvin and all the men laughed. "Make a jar from it and it'll collect water from dry air."

"So you carry a bit of the Mizzippy with you even into dry land," said Taleswapper. "Why, with advertising like that, I reckon you could sell such jars for a dollar each and make fifty bucks in every town, as long as you hightailed it out before they found out the jars don't work."

"They'd work if Alvin made 'em!" shouted a man. That was enough to rouse a bit of a cheer for Alvin Maker, much to his embarrassment.

"Well, if you're gonna waste time cheering a man covered in mud, I reckon I'll leave you to your own work and go show my good friend just what a perfect baby looks like."

"Show him your son, too, while you're at it!" shouted one of the workers, which was good for another laugh and another cheer for Alvin.

Alvin clambered out of the water and up the bank, and Arthur took due note that the mud just slid off his clothes and the water dried while he was watching and thirty steps from the river you'd never guess what Alvin had been working on not two minutes before. He won't use his knack to spare these men a moment's work, but he'll use it to spare himself a bath! Or at least to spare Peggy the task of cleaning up after a muddy husband ... so that was all right.

They passed Measure, who was leading a team of men and horses doing stump removal. Arthur Stuart knew perfectly well that Measure was using as much makery as he had mastered to help free up the roots from the deep soil. But since there was still plenty of hard work for the men and teams to do, Alvin didn't say anything about it to him, and Arthur Stuart figured that as long as Measure kept his makery secret, nobody would give him the credit for how fast the clearing of the land was going.

But Measure left the work and came along. And when they got to Alvin's cabin, there inside it were a gaggle of women. La Tia seemed like the president of the women of Furrow-spring County, and what had gathered here might have been the great council: the leading women of the exodus, including Marie d'Espoir, Rien, and Mama Squirrel, and some of the women who had known Alvin and Peggy in years past, come to be part of the long-awaited city. Purity, a young preacher against Puritanism from New England, who still seemed to be in love with Verily Cooper-who hardly noticed she was there-and Fishy, a former slave from Camelot who had become something of a great woman among the abolitionists of the north in the years since her escape. And, of course, Peggy.

"I can't stay in this room," said Taleswapper. "So many glorious women, I have no choice but to be in love with all of you at once. It'll tear me apart."

"Live with it," said Peggy dryly. "I think you know them all."

"Them as I don't know, I hope I soon will," said Tale-swapper. "If I don't die in the next few minutes from pure happiness."

"That man talk some," said La Tia appreciatively.

"I didn't know there was a meeting," said Alvin.

"You wasn't invite," said La Tia. "My meeting. But you welcome a stay."

"What's the topic?" asked Alvin.

"The name of that thing what you build," said La Tia. "I don't like what Verily call it, me."

Peggy laughed. "Nobody likes what anybody calls it," she said. "But La Tia was reading in the Bible and she has a name."

"You lead us out like Moses," said La Tia. "And Arthur Stuart, he lead us like Joshua when you gone. Not like Aaron, no! We got no golden calf! But we the book of Exodus, us. So this thing you build, I find out in the Bible, she a tabernacle."

Alvin frowned. "Makes it sound like a church meeting place."

"Oui!" cried Rien. "Only instead of you go and a priest pretend to be God, we go inside and find out where he live in our heart!"

"For a building that don't exist yet, everybody's got a good idea of how it's gonna work," said Alvin.

But of course they did. Alvin had already made thirty-two of the crystal blocks-big ones, heavy, hard to haul. They were stacked up waiting to be laid down as foundation stones, but there was hardly a soul in Furrowspring County what hadn't walked the corridor between those blocks and looked into their infinite depth. You walk among them and it feels like you're in a place larger than the whole world, with all of what was and is and is yet to come beside you on either hand, and the ordinary world looks so small and narrow, when you see it at the end of that glistening corridor. But then you walk away from the stacked up blocks and they get to looking small, and quite plain. Shimmery, yes, reflecting the trees and the sky, the clouds and the river, if you're standing where the reflection of the Mizzippy could be seen. Small on the outside, huge on the inside-oh, they all knew what this building was going to be like, when it was done.

"In the Bible," said Marie d'Espoir, "the tabernacle was a place where only the priest could go. He'd come out and tell everyone what he saw. But our tabernacle, everybody's the priest, everybody can go inside, man and woman, to see what they see and hear what they hear."