Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV by Orson Scott Card Read Free Book Online

bowl.
    “My name is Peggy Larner.” The woman ignored her outstretched hand. “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have intervened, but as you can see the boy was taking some serious injury.”
    “Just my nose is bloody, is all,” said the boy. But his limp suggested other less visible pains.
    “Come inside,” said the woman.
    Peggy had no idea whether the woman was speaking just to the children, or was including her in the invitation. If it could be called an invitation, so blandly she spoke it, not looking up from the bowl she stirred. The woman turned away, disappearing inside the house. The children followed. So, finally, did Peggy.
    No one stopped her or seemed to think her action strange. It was this that first made her wonder if perhaps she had fallen asleep in the carriage and this was some strange dream, in which unaccountable unnatural things happen which nevertheless excite no comment in the land of dreams, where there is no custom to be violated. Where I am now is not real. Outside waits the carriage and the team of four horses, not to mention the driver, as real and mundane a fellow as ever belched in thecoachman’s seat. But in here, I have stepped into a place beyond nature. There are no heartfires here.
    The children disappeared, stomping somewhere through the wood-floored house, and at least one of them went up or down a flight of stairs; it had to be a child, there was so much vigor in the step. But there were no sounds that told Peggy where to go, or what purpose was being served by her coming here. Was there no order here? Nothing that her presence disrupted? Would no one but the children ever notice her at all?
    She wanted to go back outside, return to the carriage, but now, as she turned around, she couldn’t remember what door she had come through, or even which way was north. The windows were curtained, and whatever door she had come through, she couldn’t see it now.
    It was an odd place, for there was cloth everywhere, folded neatly and stacked on all the furniture, on the floors, on the stairs, as if someone had just bought enough to make a thousand dresses with and the tailors and seamstresses were yet to arrive. Then she realized that the piles were of one continuous cloth, flowing off the top of one stack into the bottom of the next. How could there be a cloth so long? Why would anyone make it, instead of cutting it and sending it out to get something made from it?
    Why indeed. How foolish of her not to realize it at once. She knew this place. She hadn’t visited it herself, but she had seen it through Alvin’s heartfire, years ago.
    He was still in Ta-Kumsaw’s thrall in those days. The Red warrior took Alvin with him and brought him into his legend, so that those who now spoke of Alvin Smith the Finder-killer, or Alvin Smith and the golden plow, had once spoken of the same boy, little knowing it, when they spoke of the evil “Boy Renegado,” the white boy who went with Ta-Kumsaw in all his travels in the last year before his defeat at Fort Detroit. It was in that guise that Alvin came here, and walked down this hall, yes, turning right here, yes, tracking the folded cloth into the oldest part of the house, the original cabin, into the slantinglight that seems to have no source, as if it merely seeped in through the chinks between the logs. And here, if I open this door, I will find the woman with the loom. This is the place of weaving.
    Aunt Becca. Of course she knew the name. Becca, the weaver who held the threads of all the lives in the White man’s lands in North America.
    The woman at the loom looked up. “I didn’t want you here,” she said softly.
    “Nor did I plan to come,” said Peggy. “The truth is, I had forgotten you. You slipped my mind.”
    “I’m supposed to slip your mind. I slip all minds.”
    “Except one or two?”
    “My husband remembers me.”
    “Ta-Kumsaw? He isn’t dead, then?”
    Becca snorted. “My husband’s name is Isaac.”
    That was