But he'd spent his childhood getting nearly killed by water over and over again, till his Pa was plumb scared to let Alvin have a cool drink from a stream for fear he'd drown or choke.

Stop thinking, he told himself. This ain't science, like feeling head bumps or bleeding a patient. This is serious, and you gotta keep your mind open in case an idea comes along-you want there to be some room for it to fit in.

So he occupied himself with clearing the water around him. It wasn't hard-he was good with fluids and solids, at purifying them, asking whatever belonged there to stay, and whatever didn't to go. The skeeter eggs, the tiny animals, the floating silt, all the creatures large and small, and above all the salt of this briny tidewater-he bid them find somewhere else to go, and they went, till he could look down into the water and under the reflection of the trees spreading overhead he could see his bare feet and the muddy bottom.

It was an interesting thing, looking into water, seeing two levels at once-the reflection on the surface and what was underneath it.

He remembered being there in the midst of the whirlwind with Tenskwa-Tawa, and in the walls of solid water he saw not just some reflection or whatever was in the water, but also things deep in time, hidden knowledge. He was too young to make much sense of it at the time, and he wasn't sure anymore what he actually remembered or merely remembered that he remembered, if you know what I mean.

He could hear a kind of wordless song, he sat so still. It wasn't in his own mind, either. It was another song, a familiar one, the song that he had heard so many times in his life as he ran like wind through the woods. The greensong of the life around him, of the trees and moss, the birds and gators and fish and snakes, and the tiny lives and the momentary lives, all of them making a kind of deep harmony together that became a part of him so that he could hear himself as nothing more than a small part of that song.

And as he listened to the greensong and as he looked down into the water, another drop of blood fell from his hand and began to spread.

Only this time he let his doodlebug spread out with his blood, following that familiar liquid, keeping it warm, letting it bind with the water as if it was all part of the same music. There were no boundaries to contain it, but he held on to the blood, kept it as a part of himself instead of something lost, as if his heart were still pushing it through his veins.

Instead of having outside boundaries imposed on the blood, he set his own limits to its flow. This far, he told his blood, and no farther. And because it was still a part of himself, it obeyed.

At the limits the blood began to form a wall, become solid, become like a very thin sheet of glass. Then, working inward, the blood formed itself into a latticework that drew the water around it into complicated whorls that never ceased moving, but also never left their orbit around the impossibly thin strands of blood.

The water moved faster and faster, a thousand million tiny whirlwinds around the calm threads, and Alvin reached down with his hands on both sides of the sphere of solidified water and lifted it out of the clear water of Lake Pontchartrain.

It was heavy-it took all his strength to lift it, and he wished he hadn't made it so large. It was far heavier than the plowshare he carried in his poke. But it was also strangely inert. Even though he knew the motion of water inside the sphere was incessant, to his hands it felt as still as stone. And as he looked into it, he saw everything at once.

He saw his own labor to be born, straining to emerge into the world, his mother's wombwalls pressing against him as he pushed back; he heard her cries and saw her surrounded by the canvas walls of a covered wagon that rocked and slid and pitched and yawed in the current of a river gone to flood. And now he was outside that wagon and he saw a great fallen tree floating like a battering ram straight at the wagon, straight at him, this passionate angry hopeful unborn infant, and then heard a great loud cry and saw a man leap onto the tree and roll it over, over, so it struck only a glancing blow against the wagon and careened off into the rainstorm....

And now he saw a young girl reach out to the face of a just-born infant who had not yet drawn breath because a caul of flesh covered his whole face like a terrible mask. She pulled the caul back and air rushed into the baby's mouth and he began to cry. The girl put the caul away as tenderly as if it were the heart of a Mexica sacrifice, and he felt how the baby and the caul remained connected, and he knew that this was Little Peggy, the child five years old when he was born, who was now his wife, with almost nothing of that ancient, dried-up caul left in her keeping, because she had rubbed bits of it between her fingers and turned each bit to dust in order to draw the power of Alvin's own knack out of it, to use it to save his life.

But now, he thought. What about now?

Whether the heavy sphere responded to his question or simply showed him the desire of his heart, he saw himself kneeling in the water at the shore of Pontchartrain, dripping blood heavily into the inland sea, and watching as a crystal path hurtled forward across the lake, six feet wide, as thin as the skiff of ice on a basin left in the window on the night of the first freeze of autumn. And in ones and twos the people began to step out onto this crystal bridge and walk along with the surface of the water holding them up, a dozen, scores, hundreds of them, a great long chain of people. But then he realized that the line was slowing down, stopping, jostling, as more and more of them looked down into the crystal at their feet and began to see the way Alvin was seeing now.

They would not go forward, so captured were they by the crystal visions in the water. They took too long, too many minutes, as the blood continued to flow out of him.

And then all of a sudden in the glass he saw himself faint and fall onto the bridge and at once it began to break up and crumble and all the people fell into the water and screamed and splashed and...

Alvin dropped the crystal sphere and it fell into the water with a splash.

He thought at first that it had dissolved instantly upon breaking the surface, but when he reached down into the water at his feet, there it was.

He picked it back up again.

I thought the things the crystal water showed me would be true, he thought. But that can't be true. Margaret wouldn't have sent me here to them if I didn't have the strength in me to make this bridge hold until the last soul had crossed over.

He looked at the ball of crystal he held in his hands. I can't leave this thing here, he thought. But I can't take it with me, either. It's too heavy, not with the plow, not with all I've got to do.

"I will carry it, me," said a soft voice behind him.

He saw her reflection in the face of the crystal, and to his surprise the round surface did not distort her image.

He wasn't seeing her on the crystal, he was seeing her in it, and all at once he knew far more about her than he had ever thought he could know about a person. "You're not French," he said. "You and your mother are Portugee. She has a knack with sharks. They took her on voyage after voyage because of it, to keep the sea monsters at bay, only one of them used her for something else and she got pregnant with you and so she threw herself from the ship and rode the back of a shark to shore and gave birth to you at the very mouth of the river."

"She never told me, her," said Dead Mary. "Might be so, might not."

Alvin rose to his feet, still standing in the water, and turned to hold the sphere out to her. "It's heavy," he said.

"I can bear any burden," she said, "if I take it freely." And it was true. Though she staggered a little from the weight, she held the ball to her and didn't let it fall.