47

25.

When I came to I was on my back, looking up at the sky. I got up on one shoulder to see if Mr. Stewart was still where he had fallen. He was gone but a little way beyond I saw the prone body of my brother in light Tall John from beyond Africa.

I tried to make it to my feet but I was too groggy from the explosion. After trying to get up and falling five or six times I settled on crawling to my friend's side.

He was in a bad way. Both his arms and both of his legs were broken. There were a dozen cuts on his face and one deep gash in his chest.

His glassy eyes stared up at nothing. I was sure that he was dead, but I couldn't believe it.

"Where's yo yellah bag, John?" were the first words I said.

Then I put my face on the ground, suddenly made even weaker at the loss of my friend.

"There's no healing this body again, Forty-seven," he said.

I looked up to see him turn slightly in order that he might see me.

"John!" I shouted. "You're alive!"

"Would you please hold up a hand to block the sun from my eyes," he said weakly, and then added, "my friend."

I held my hand to shield his eyes and asked, "What can I do, John?"

"Listen," he said. "I am going to the Upper Level now."

"Where that?"

"It is the river of dreams where we all flow together."

"Like heaven?"

John nodded and coughed and then he said, "I will come to you many times over your life, Forty-seven. I'll come and help you when I can… with your fight against Wall."

"Ain't he dead?" I asked, feeling a prickling along my spine as if the evil one-eyed monster were staring at me at that moment.

"No," John said. "He survived the explosion but he's very weak and will not appear to you again for seventeen years at least. But when you see his evil plans imprinted on the world you must stand against him, even though you will feel small and weak compared to his power."

"How do you know what he'll do if you dyin'?" I asked, even though the question hurt my heart.

"I will come to you," he whispered. "You will be a great hero and I will be the hero's friend."

"You gonna be a ghost?" I asked, fearful of being haunted but even sadder over the loss of my friend.

"No," he hissed. "Do you remember the crystal machine that I told you about?"

"Queziastril," I said, remembering the word through the light in my mind.

"Through her I have spoken to you many times."

"I don't remember those talks, John."

"That's because you haven't had them yet…," he said, and then he took a deep and painful breath. He coughed and moved his head and neck like he was going to get up but instead he fell back, and I knew that Tall John was dead.

When I could stand I dragged John's body down to the pit where Wall and his ghoul had dug up the Sun Ship. I lowered my friend into the grave and used the spade Stewart had used to cover him.

My right foot hurt me some. I guess I must have sprained it running away from Stewart's blasts. So I used the green stem as a walking stick and made my way back toward my friends.

Near the ledge, where we first spied Stewart and Pike, I found John's yellow sack.

Because of my limp the trek took me many hours.

That was the saddest journey of my young life. I was free but my friend was dead. And his passing left a void in my heart where I never knew I had something to lose. At times along the way I'd fall down on my knees and yowl some incomprehensible words to try and express the loss of my pal Tall John from beyond Africa.

I reached the flat rock at just about sunset.

I was sad about the death of John and Mud Albert, about the slaves running in the wilderness and being hunted down by dogs. I even felt sorry for poor Eloise and the death of her father, my one-time master. But the hardest thing would be to tell Eighty-four, Tweenie, that the man she loved was dead.

She cried and caterwauled like a deep forest creature, and her grief called mine forward and I fell to the ground and wept bitterly with her. My friend was dead. He died, I knew, saving all the peoples of Earth.

When night came we moved north into a wood that I knew was uninhabited.

I could tell that the wood was safe because when I gazed hard at the valley of pines a soft gray light washed the images in my mind. I knew somehow that the gift of light that John had given me was telling me that no one would molest us in that pleasant vale.

There we found a cave that we used as a shelter. We stayed for a fortnight, until we were all healed and rested.

There was a rill not far from the mouth of our shelter. In the early morning and late at night Champ and I would steal down there and catch fish with a net I found in John's yellow bag. We had to eat the fish raw because none of us knew if John's little disk machine would keep the slave hunters from smelling smoke.

One afternoon I stole away from the cave and climbed way up into a willow tree. There I sat and thought about my friend.

"Hello, boy," a small, squeaky voice called.

Hearing those words I was so startled that I almost lost my balance and fell from the branch where I was sitting.

"Who?" I said, looking all around.

"Up here," the little voice said.

I looked up and there, standing on nothing but air, was a tiny little person who had orange and purple skin and a fire, like a candle's flame, hovering above his head.

"John!" I cried. "It's you!"

"I'm sorry," the true form of my friend said, "but you are mistaking me for someone else. My name is N'clect. Have you met someone else of my race?"

"No," I said. "You are looking into the future through Queziastril. You sail across the universe using suns as your propellers to come and find me."

"How do you know about Queziastril?" Little John asked. "It is the most closely guarded secret of my people."

"I know you think so," I said. "But someday soon the Calash are going to break into your hive an' break that crystal ball to pieces."

"You know about the Calash and the Talam?" Little John was amazed.

I was surprising him as much as he did me when we first met (was that only a week before?) on the path between the slave graveyard and the slaves' quarters.

"I know a lot about you, Neglect," I said, mispronouncing his Talamish name. "You are my best friend and my brother. You came to Earth to find me and to tell me that I, Forty-seven, will fight a war against a creature of the Calash called Wall."

"Wall is their greatest warrior," John said. "Surely you must be what you say. Tell me more of the future, my friend."

And so I began the long story of the past week or so that I had shared with the little being who didn't remember any of it because for him none of it had happened yet. It started much as this book did. I had to explain the concept of slavery very carefully because he had never heard of such a thing. When I told him that white people owned everything, even the ground and the trees, and saw all other colors of people as inferior, he was doubly amazed.

"But that seems so silly," N'clect, who was destined to become Tall John, said.

We talked for hours. Sometimes I would say things that he didn't seem to hear. For instance, when I tried to explain why we were thrown into the Tomb the words came out all garbled so neither one of us understood. After I tried to explain two or three times John seemed to think that he knew why the words got confused.

"Queziastril must be interfering with the transmission," he said. "Tell me something else."

He became very somber when I told him about his death. I was about to explain the particulars on how he died when he interrupted me.

"I don't think I want to know how I die," he said. "It might sadden me too much."

I understood how he felt and resolved never again to tell the story of Tall John's death. I have been true to that resolution until writing this story.

"You must never tell anyone on your planet about these amazing experiences or about your mission," John said to me at one point in our talk.

"Why?" I asked. "Maybe somebody like Champ could help me."

"If people were to learn about your powers before they're ready, they might hurt themselves or you in the attempt to steal them."

I promised that I wouldn't tell, but that reminded me of something else.

"There's a lot I don't understand myself," I said to the floating elf.

"What?"

"I have this yellah bag," I said, holding up John's treasure.

"Oh that's grand!" the tiny elf shouted. "All you have to do is reach in and close your hand and you will, most likely, grab onto something that will help you in your mission. And over the days that come if you keep the object in your hand or pocket it will speak through the light I gave you, and you will come to know how to use it."

We talked through the night. Me sitting on that high branch and John standing on air thousands of years before and a universe away.

Toward dawn I asked, "You know, John, sometimes all you have to do is walk from the house out to the fields and you find people who speak the same tongue as you but they talk so different that you can't hardly understand a word they say."

"Yes," he said.

"So how do I know what you're saying when you're so far away an' you haven't even heard about me yet?"

"Queziastril," John said simply, and I understood everything.

The crystal translated our thoughts and so we understood each other.

When the sun peaked over the mountains John began to fade.

"Don't go!" I cried.

"Queziastril is turning to some other concern, my friend, Forty-seven. But don't fear, I'll come back and look for you again."

With those words my little friend faded into the air. And even though I was sad at his death I knew that we would be comrades for many years to come.

Something I have learned over the years since those times is that nothing is ever truly gone from the world. No atom or electron ceases to exist, they only change from one thing into another. And no life ever ends but itself transmutes into other forms and places.

John was alive in my heart and so I was able to glean a lesson that he meant to teach me.

And what I needed to do was to consider his words and make sure that I and my friends could survive long enough to do battle with Wall and his ghoul, Mr. Stewart.

Every day we saw white men in the distance searching with hounds and muskets.

One evening Champ came running into our cave, dragging Bitter Lee, slave Number Seventeen from the Corinthian Plantation. Lee had been shot in the back but still he managed to throw off the hounds and escape. Champ had found him near the stream, barely conscious and burning with fever.

"Why'd they shoot you, Bitter Lee?" Mama Flore asked him.

"They blames the slaves fo' burnin' down Corinthian," he said. "They say it was niggers killed all them white men and women."

"But didn't nobody tell'em 'bout Mr. Stewart and his band'a thieves?" Champ asked.

"None'a the white peoples from Corinthian lived," Bitter Lee said. "They's all dead 'cept for Miss Eloise, who showed up outta nowhere. She said that you niggers gone west but she didn't remember the fire or the attack."

Somehow I knew that Tall John had helped Eloise to forget the events of that terrible night. Maybe if he knew that the slaves would have been blamed for the murders he would have done differently.

"How you know all this?" Nola asked, "if you been runnin'?"

"They caught me," Number Seventeen said. "Caught me and told me that they was gonna hang me for all them murders. They th'owed me in chains but in the night Miss Eloise come to me an' unlocked my chains. She said that she had a dream that Forty-seven here had saved her, and in the dream he told her that there was no nigger or master and she thought that that meant she should let me free."

We all looked at each other, wondering what spell John had put on Eloise to make her act like that. And while we were looking at each other Bitter Lee began coughing. It was a deep, wet, rolling cough that went on for well over a minute. And when he stopped coughing he was dead.

We buried Bitter Lee at midnight. When Mama Flore was saying a few holy words over his shallow grave we heard dogs braying and even saw lantern light not twenty-five feet from where we were praying.

Later on I picked up the little disk that we used to hide us from the search parties. Physical contact with the device gave me information about its use. Somehow, the light that John gave me allowed me to understand his technology in this way. I saw that the machine's power was running low,

and soon the white men would find us. So I reached into John's yellow sack and came out with a small glass plate that had blue and red threads running through it.

I studied that plate for three days without eating or sleeping.

Mama Flore and Champ and Nola and even sad Tweenie tried to get me to rest and sup but I told them that this was the only way for me to save their lives. I told them that but for all my fasting and staring in three days I hadn't learned a thing about the little glass dish.

But then, at the end of the third day, when I was feeling dizzy and weak, something strange happened.

It was as if the world stopped but I kept on going. I rose up out of my body and looked at the plate held by my body's hands. The blue and red threads wound together and waved toward one side of the rim. When I looked toward that rim I saw mountains and deep forests with trees older than countries and bears that stood twice as tall as tall men stand.

Canada. The word sounded in my mind. Freedom. This word rung true.

I snapped out of the trance and said out loud, "Follow the blue and red threads and they will lead us to freedom in Canada."

When the morning broke I told my friends that we were going to take a journey through the wild woods of America and go all the way to Canada, where they might let a colored man or woman be free.

"How do you know what way's the right way?" Champ Noland asked.

"Because," Tweenie said, "he an' John shared the light and now Forty-seven is the one to lead us."

There were tears in her eyes and a deep sadness in her voice. Everyone listening believed her, even me. And so that night we set out through the woods. We had over fifteen hundred miles to travel on bare feet. There were wild animals and evil white men we passed along the way. We had many adventures and each of us nearly died more than once. But we made it to Canada and freedom. Mama Flore was able to settle down on a farm that Champ started. He married Tweenie and they adopted Nola and me. And for some time we all lived together safe from chains and whips.

Maybe some other time I will tell the story of our escape or of the times years later when I came up against Mr. Stewart and other ghouls of the evil Calash Wall.

But for the time being this story is over. Some of us lived, others did not. But at least for some of us there was happiness and freedom at the end of the trail.