Either one, if it gets strong enough, will make them put the house to the torch. You probably did no more than tip them to the side of fear. Put it out of your mind."

"You have to sleep," said Arthur Stuart, "so put your own troubles out of your mind, too."

"Don't talk to me like you understand my sins."

"Don't talk to me like you know what I do and do not understand."

Alvin chuckled grimly. "Oh, that mouth you've got." "You can't answer what I said, so you're going to talk about my saying it."

"I ain't talking about nothing. I told you not to come with me."

"It was Jim Bowie last night," said Arthur Stuart. "Last man who stayed behind when the mob run off."

"He invited me to join their expedition. Told me if I wasn't their friend, I was their foe."

"So he's maybe goading on the mob, to try to force you into joining?"

"A man like that thinks that fear can win loyalty." "Plenty of masters with a lash who can testify it works." "Don't win loyalty, just obedience, and only while the lash is in the room."

They were moving out of the city of painted buildings and into a different New Orleans, the faded houses and shacks of the persecuted French, and then beyond them into the huts of the free blacks and masterless slaves-a world of cheap and desperate whores, of men who could be hired to kill for a piece of eight, and of practitioners of dark African magics that put bits of living bodies into flames in order to command nature to break her own laws.

The black folks' way was as different from the knacks of white folks as was the greensong of the reds. Alvin could feel it around him in the heartfires, a kind of desperate courage that if worst came to worst, a person could sacrifice something to the fire and save what was most dear to him.

"Do you feel it?" he asked Arthur Stuart. "The power around you?"

"I smell the stink," said the boy. "Like folks here just spill their privy pots onto the ground."

"The soil wagons don't come here," said Alvin. "What choice they got?"

"Don't feel no power, me," said Arthur Stuart.

"And yet you're talking like the French of this place. 'Don't feel no power ... me?' "

"That don't mean nothing, you know I pick up what I hear."

"You're hearing them, then. All around you."

"This be blacktown, massa," said Arthur Stuart, affecting the voice of a slave. "This be no Veel Francezz."

"French slaves run away as sure as Spanish ones, or slaves of Cavaliers."

Now black children were coming out of the houses, their mothers after them, tired women with sad eyes. And men who looked dangerous, they began to follow like a parade. Until they came to a woman sitting by a cookfire. Not a fat woman, but not a thin one, either. Voluptuous as the earth, that's what she was, but when she looked up from the fire she smiled at Alvin like the sun. How old was she? Could have been twenty from the smooth bronze skin. Could have been a hundred from the wise and twinkling eyes.

"You come to see La Tia," she said.

A smaller woman, French by the look of her, came forward from behind the fire. "This be the Queen," she said. "You bow now."

Alvin did not bow. Nothing in La Tia's face suggested that she wanted him to.

"On your knees, white man, you want to live," said the French woman sharply.

"Hush now, Michele," said La Tia. "I don't want no kneeling from this man. I want him to do us a miracle, he don't have to kneel to me. He come when I call him."

"Everybody have to come, you call them," said Michele.

"Not this one," said La Tia. "He come, but I don't make him. All I do is make him hear me. This one choose to come."

"What do you want?" asked Alvin.

"They gonna be burning here in Barcy," said the woman.

"You know that for sure?" asked Alvin.

"I hear that. Slaves listen, slaves talk. You know. Like in Camelot."

Alvin remembered the capital city of the Crown Colonies, and how rumors traveled through the slave community faster than a boy could run. But how could she know that he had been there?

"I had your skin on that bread," she said. "Most gals like me, they don't see it, so small that skin. But I see it. I got you then. While the fire burn, I got whatever you have in there. I see your treasure."

She could see more in his heartfire than Alvin could see in hers. All he could see was the health of her body, and some strong fears, but also an intense sense of purpose. But what the purpose was, he couldn't know. Once again, his knack was not as much as he needed it to be, and it stung.

"Don't you fret, mi hijo," she said. "I ain't gonna tell. And no, I don't mean that thing you got in your poke. That ain't your treasure. That belongs to its own self. Your treasure is in a woman's womb, far away and safe."

To hear it in words like that, from a stranger, stabbed him in the heart. It brought tears to his eyes, and a weakness, almost a giddiness to his head. Without thinking, he sank to his knees. That was his treasure. Alt the lives he had failed to save in Barcy, they were that one life, the child who had died those years ago. And his redemption, his only hope, his-yes, his treasure-it was the new child that was so far away, and beyond his reach, in someone else's charge.

"Get up," whispered Arthur Stuart. "Don't kneel to her."

"He don't kneel to me," said La Tia. "He kneel to his love, to the saint of love. Not Lord Valentine, no, not him. The saint of a father's love, St. Joseph, the husband of the Holy Mother. To him he kneeling. That be so, no?"

Alvin shook his head. "I'm kneeling because I'm broke inside," he whispered. "And you want this broke man to do something for you, and there's nothing I can do. The world is sicker every day and I got no power to heal the world."

"You got the power I need," said La Tia. "Maria de los Muertos, she tell me. You make her mother whole, she."

"You're not sick," said Alvin.

"The whole of Barcy, she be sick," said La Tia. "You live in a house about to die from that sick. This blacktown, she about to die. The French people of Barcy, they be about to die. The sick of angry people, the sick of stupid people all afraid. Gotta have somebody to blame. That be you and that crazy Moose and Squirrel. That be me and all us who keep Africa alive, we. That be all them French folk like Maria de los Muertos and her mama. What they gonna do when the mob decides to blame the fever on somebody and burn it out? Where they gonna go?"

"What do you think I can do? I got no control over the mob."

"You know what I want, you."

"I don't."

"You maybe don't know you know, but you got them words burnt in your heart by your mama all them years ago, when you little, you. 'Let my people go.' "

"I'm not Pharaoh and this ain't Egypt."

"Is too Egypt and I reckon you ain't Pharaoh, you Moses."

"What do you want, a plague of cockroaches? Barcy already got that, and nobody cares."

"I want you to part the sea and let us across on dry land in the dark of night."

Alvin shook his head. "Moses did that by the power of God, which I ain't got. And he had someplace to go, a wilderness to be lost in. Where can you go? All these people. Too many."

"Where you send them slaves you set free from the riverboat?"

That flat out stunned Alvin. There was no way that story could be known here in the south. Was there?

Alvin turned and looked at Arthur Stuart.

"I didn't tell nobody," said Arthur. "You think I'm crazy?"

"You think I need somebody tell me?" said La Tia. "I saw it inside you, all on fire, you. Take us across the river."

"But you ain't talking about no two score slaves here, you talking about blacktown and the orphanage and-French-town? You know how many that is?"

"And all the slaves as want to go," said La Tia. "In the fog of night. You make the fog come into Barcy from off the river. You let us all gather in the fog, you take us across the river. You got red friends, you take us safe to the other side."