Alvin Journeyman: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume IV (26 page)

Calvin had no idea what he was supposed to do upon meeting the Emperor. The man’s title was a throwback to ancient Rome, to Persia, to Babylon. But there he sat in a straight-back chair instead of a throne, his leg up on a cushioned bench; and instead of courtiers there were only secretaries, each scribbling away on a writing desk until an order or letter or edict was finished, then leaping to his feet and rushing from the room as the next secretary began to scribble furiously as Bonaparte dictated in a continuous stream of biting, lilting, almost Italian-sounding French.

As the dictation proceeded, Calvin, with guards on either side of him (as if that could stop him from making the floor collapse under the Emperor if he felt like it), watched silently. Of course they did not invite him to sit down; even Little Napoleon, the Emperor’s nephew, remained standing. Only the secretaries could sit, it seemed, for it was hard to imagine how they could write without a lap.

At first Calvin simply took in the surroundings; then he studied the face of the Emperor, as if that slightly pained expression contained some secret which, if only examined long enough, would yield the secrets of the sphinx. But soon Calvin’s attention drifted to the leg. It was the gout that he had to cure, if he was to make any headway. And Calvin had no idea what caused the gout or even how to figure it out. That was Alvin’s province.

For a moment it occurred to Calvin that maybe he ought to
beg permission to write to his brother so he could get Alvin over here to cure the Emperor and win Calvin’s freedom. But he immediately despised himself for the cowardly thought. Am I a Maker or not? And if a Maker, then Alvin’s equal. And if Alvin’s equal, why should I summon him to bail me out of a situation which, for all I know right now, might need no bailing?

He sent his doodling bug into Napoleon’s leg.

It wasn’t the sort of swelling that Calvin was used to in the festering sores of beggars. He didn’t understand what the fluids were—not pus, that was certain—and he dared not simply make them flow back into the blood, for fear that they might be poisons that would kill the very man he came to learn from.

Besides, was it really in Calvin’s best interests to cure this man? Not that he knew how to do it—but he wasn’t sure he really ought to try. What he needed was not the momentary gratitude of a cured man, but the continuing dependence of a sufferer who needed Calvin’s ministration for relief. Temporary relief.

And this was something Calvin
did
understand, to a point. He had learned long ago how to find the nerves in a dog or squirrel and give them a sort of tweak, an invisible pinch. Sometimes it set the animal to squealing and screeching till Calvin almost died from laughing. Other times the creature didn’t show pain, but limped along as if that pinched limb didn’t even exist. One time a perfectly healthy dog dragged around its hindquarters till its belly and legs were rubbed raw in the dirt and Father was all set to shoot the poor thing to put it out of its misery. Calvin took mercy on the beast then and unpinched the nerve so it could walk again, but after that it never did walk right, it sort of sidled, though whether that was from the pinch Calvin gave it or from the damaged caused by dragging its butt through the dirt for most of a week Calvin had no way to guess.

What mattered was that pinching of the nerve, to remove all feeling—Bonaparte might limp, but it would take away the pain. Relief, not a cure.

Which nerve? It wasn’t like Calvin had them all charted out. That sort of methodical thinking was Alvin’s game. In England, Calvin had realized that this was one of the crucial differences between him and his brother. There was a new word a fellow just coined at Cambridge for people who were ploddingly methodical like Alvin:
scientist.
While Calvin, with dash and flair and verve and, above all, the spirit of improvisation,
he
was an artist. Trouble was, when it came to getting at the nerves in Bonaparte’s leg, Calvin couldn’t very well experiment. He didn’t think a strong friendship would develop between the Emperor and him if it began with the Emperor squealing and screeching like a tortured squirrel.

He pondered that for a while until, watching a secretary rise up and rush from the room, it occurred to him that Bonaparte’s weren’t the only legs around. Now that it mattered that Calvin find out exactly which nerve did what, and that his pinch deadened pain instead of provoking it, he had to play the scientist and test many legs until he got it right.

He started with the secretary who was next in line, a shortish fellow (smaller even than the Emperor, who was a man of scant stature) who fidgeted a little in his chair. Uncomfortable? Calvin asked him silently. Then let’s see if we can find you some relief. He sent his bug into the man’s right leg, found the most obvious nerve, and pinched.

Not a wince, not a grimace. Calvin was annoyed. He pinched harder. Nothing.

Then the current secretary jumped to his feet and rushed from the room. It was now the turn of the short fellow Calvin had pinched. The man tried to shift his body in his chair, to adjust the position of the lapdesk, but to Calvin’s delight a look of astonishment came over the man’s face, followed by a blush as he had to reach down and move his right leg with his hands. So. That large nerve—or was it a bundle of very fine nerves?—had nothing to do with feeling. Instead they seemed to control movement. Interesting.

The fellow wrote in silence, but Calvin knew that all he was
really thinking about was what would happen when he had to jump up and run from the room. Sure enough, when the edict ended—it was about the granting of a special tax exemption to certain vintners in southern France because of a bad harvest—the man leapt up, spun around, and sprawled on the floor, his right leg tangled with his left like the fishing lines of children.

Every eye turned to the poor fellow, but not a word was spoken. Calvin watched with amusement as he got up on his hands and his left knee, while the right leg hung useless. The knee bent well enough, of course, and the man got it under his body so it
looked
like it might work, but twice he tried to put weight on it and twice he fell again.

Bonaparte, looking annoyed, finally spoke to him. “Are you a secretary, sir, or a clown?”

“My leg, sir,” said the miserable clerk. “My right leg seems not to work just now.”

Bonaparte turned sharply to the guards detaining Calvin. “Help him out of here. And fetch someone to clean up the spilled ink.”

The guards hauled the man to his feet and started to move him toward the door. Now it was time for Little Napoleon to assert himself. “Take his desk, fools,” said the Emperor’s nephew. “And the inkwell, and the quill, and the edict, if it isn’t spoiled.”

“And how will they do all that?” asked Bonaparte testily. “Seeing they have to hold up this one-legged beggar?” Then he looked expectantly at Little Napoleon’s face.

It took a moment for Little Napoleon to realize what the Emperor wanted of him, and an even longer moment for him to swallow his pride enough to do it. “Why, of course, Uncle,” he said, with careful mildness. “I shall gladly pick it up myself, sir.”

Calvin suppressed a smile as the proud man who had arrested him now knelt down and gathered up papers, lapdesk, quill, and inkwell, carefully avoiding getting a single drop of ink on
himself. By now the secretary Calvin had pinched was out of the room. He thought of sending out his bug to find the man and unpinch the nerve, but he wasn’t sure where he had gone and anyway, what did it matter? It was just a secretary.

When Little Napoleon was gone, Bonaparte resumed dictating, but now his delivery was not rapid and biting. Rather he halted, corrected himself now and then, and sometimes lapsed into silence for a time, as the secretary sat with pen poised. At such moments Calvin would cause the ink on the quill to flow to the tip and drop off suddenly onto the paper—ah, the flurry of blotting! And of course this only served to distract the Emperor all the more.

There remained, however, the matter of legs. Calvin explored each secretary in turn, finding other nerves to pinch, ever so slightly. He left the nerves of movement alone now; it was the nerves of pain that he was finding now, charting his progress by the widened eyes, flushed faces, and occasional gasps of the unfortunate secretaries. Bonaparte was not unaware of their discomfort—it distracted him all the more. Finally, when a man gasped at a particularly sharp pinch—Calvin’s touch was not always precise with such slender things as nerves—Bonaparte turned himself in his chair, wincing at the pain in his own leg, and said, as best Calvin could understand his French, “Do you mock me with these pains and moans? I sit here in agony, making no sound, while you, with no more pain than that of sitting too long to take letters, moan and gasp and wince and sigh until I can only imagine I am trapped with a choir of hyenas!”

At that moment Calvin finally got it right, giving just the right amount of pressure to a secretary’s pain nerve that all feeling vanished, and instead of the man wincing, his face relaxed in relief. That’s it, thought Calvin. That’s how it’s done.

He almost sent his bug right into Bonaparte’s leg to do that same little twist and make the Emperor’s pain go away. Fortunately he was distracted by the opening of the door. It was a scullery maid with a bucket and rags to clean up the ink
from the marble floor. Bonaparte glared at her, and she almost dropped her things and fled, except that he at once softened his expression. “My rage is at my pain, girl,” he said to her. “Come in and do your work, no one minds.”

With that she gathered her courage, scurried to the drying ink, set down the bucket with a clank and a slosh, and set to work scrubbing.

By now Calvin had come to his senses. What good would it do to take away Bonaparte’s pain if the Emperor didn’t
know
that it was Calvin doing it? Instead he practiced the soothing twist of the nerves on all the secretaries, to their undoubted relief, and as he did he began to sense a sort of current, a humming, a vibration on the nerves that were actually carrying pain at the instant he twisted them, so that he could get even more precise, taking away not all the feeling in a leg, but just the pain itself. Finally he got to the scullery maid, to the pain she always felt in her knees as she knelt on hard cold floors to do her work. So sudden was the relief, and so sharp and constant had been the pain, that she cried aloud, and again Bonaparte glared at the interruption.

“Oh sir,” she said, “forgive me, but I suddenly felt no pain in my knees.”

“Lucky you,” said Bonaparte. “Along with this miracle, do you also find that you see no ink on the floor?”

She looked down. “Sir, with all my scrubbing, I can’t get up the whole stain. I’m afraid it’s gone down into the stone, sir.”

Calvin at once sent his doodling bug into the surface of the marble and discovered that the ink had, indeed, penetrated beyond the reach of her scrubbing. Now was the chance to have Bonaparte notice him, not as a prisoner—even his guards were gone—but as a man of power. “Perhaps I can help,” he said.

Bonaparte looked at him as if seeing him for the first time, though Calvin was quite aware that the Emperor had sized him up several times over the past half-hour. Bonaparte spoke to
him in accented English. “Was it for scullery work you came to Paris, my dear American friend?”

“I came to serve you, sir,” said Calvin. “Whether with a stained floor or a pained leg, I care not.”

“Let’s see you with floors first,” said Bonaparte. “Give him the rags and bucket, girl.”

“I don’t need them,” said Calvin. “I’ve already done it. Have her scrub again, and this time the stain will come right up.”

Bonaparte glowered at the idea of serving as interpreter for an American prisoner and a scullery maid, but his curiosity got the better of his dignity and he gave the girl the order to scrub again. This time the ink came right up, and the stone was clean again. It had been child’s play for Calvin, but the awe in the girl’s face was the best possible advertisement for his wondrous power. “Sir,” she said, “I had only to pass the rag over the stain and it was gone!”

The secretaries were eyeing Calvin carefully now—they weren’t fools, and they clearly suspected him of causing both their discomfort and their relief, though some of them were pinching the legs to try to restore feeling after Calvin’s first, clumsier attempts at numbing pain. Now Calvin went back into their legs, restored feeling, and then gave the more delicate twist that removed pain. They watched him warily, as Bonaparte looked back and forth between his clerks and his prisoner.

“I see you have been busy playing little jokes on my secretaries.”

Without an answer, Calvin reached into the Emperor’s leg and, for just a moment, removed all pain. But only for a moment; he soon let it come back.

Bonaparte’s face darkened. “What kind of man are you, to take away my pain for a moment and then send it back to me?”

“Forgive me, sir,” said Calvin. “It’s easy to cure the pain I caused myself, in your men. Or even the pain from hours of kneeling, scrubbing floors. But the gout—that’s hard, sir, and I know of no cure, nor of any relief that lasts more than a little while.”

“Longer than five seconds, though—I’ll wager you know how to do
that.
”

“I can try.”

“You’re the clever one,” said Bonaparte. “But I know a lie. You can take away the pain and yet you choose not to. How dare you hold me hostage to my pain?”

Calvin answered in mild tones, though he knew he took his life in his hands to say such a bold thing in
any
tone: “Sir, you have held my whole body prisoner this whole time, when I was free before. I come here and find you already a prisoner of pain, and you complain to
me
that I do not set
you
free?”

The secretaries gasped again, but not in pain this time. Even the scullery maid was shocked—so much so that she knocked her bucket over, spilling soapy, inky water over half the floor.

Calvin quickly made the water evaporate from the floor, then made the residue of ink turn to fine, invisible dust.