The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

  The two men headed away down the passage again, leaving Calvin and Taber alone. “So what does that mean?” Calvin asked. “Who would have chalked the passage?”

  A tunnel opened on the right, and Taber headed down it, going steeply downhill now. “Could be a Knight,” Taber said. “Could be a skunk. One mark’s not enough to go on, though. It’d take hours to search the tunnels, and we don’t have hours.”

  “How about the cameras?”

  “That’s our best bet, although aside from in the catacombs and the mint, we don’t have much surveillance. Some places it’s taboo.”

  Taber stopped now, and within the silence of the dead air, Calvin could hear what sounded like rushing water, although it might as easily have been the sound of blood in his own veins. In front of them stood a door built of rough-hewn cypress beams, which began to be hauled upward now, although Calvin hadn’t seen Taber do anything to make it happen. The door was counterweighted with solid globes of what must have been silver, and as it rose out of sight above it revealed a dim cavern, apparently sizable, although the ceiling was only a couple of feet overhead. There was the smell of river water and wet stone now, and a metallic smell, like old coins in a sack. The sound of water was more pronounced, and he realized that they must be very near the river itself, perhaps in the upper reaches of New Cyprus or beyond, where the river swept deep and fast along the cliffs of the Dead Mountains.

  Nearly lost in the twilight, in the downward-sloping end of the room, lay a pool of water that appeared to have leaked beneath three other wooden doors, their heavy, water-darkened planks cleated with silver bands and fitted into square-cut holes in the stone wall, as if the doors shut out the river itself. Lamplight glinted on flecks of quartzite and on jagged veins of silver that appeared and disappeared in the hewn granite walls of the cavern. On the stone floor, and stacked on stone tables cut into the walls, stood wooden casks and crates, some fixed with lids, some open, revealing thousands of silver coins of varying sizes. Broken casks on the floor had spilled coins into silver deltas that flowed out around pyramids of ingots the size of decks of playing cards. Other pyramids were built out of what might have been globular, two-pound fishing weights if the metal had been lead rather than silver. Farther back in the recesses of the cavern, bar silver lay in piles four or five feet high, stacked back and forth like bricks on a pallet, the stacks making a wall that partially screened further casks of coin and heaps of ingots and silver bricks that would have been almost too heavy to lift.

  Bob Postum suddenly made perfect sense to Calvin. Simple greed explained him—it was the only sort of “belief that he needed. That hadn’t been clear when Calvin was talking to Mifflin that morning, but it was clear as a bell now that he saw the silver lying before him like moonlit dunes.

  “The coin is stamped with the Knight’s crest,” Taber said, stepping into the cavern and motioning Calvin in after him. “You’ll see it advertised in coin collectors’ catalogues now and then. A coin fetches a pretty good price, too, although if all of this were dumped onto the market it wouldn’t be worth more than the weight of the silver. How much weight do we have here? I have no earthly idea. We move some pallets of these bricks to a man out in Vegas now and then, which keeps us in chips, but in my years here I can’t tell that the pile has gone down much at all. And there’s more silver in the mines. Who knows how much? Bob Postum’s got no idea what he’s going to find. It’ll be a hell of a memorable moment for him when he walks in through this door.”

  Calvin followed him back out into the passage again, glancing upward toward the high ceiling, where he saw a pinpoint of light glowing off a small circle of glass—another camera lens. “So we’re just leaving the door open like this?” Calvin asked.

  “Like a dare,” Taber said.

  ALONG THE RIVER

  Calvin stood in the shade at the foot of Taber’s dock, where he looked out over the river through a pair of binoculars. The camera boat was securely anchored from all four corners now, and aside from what looked like legitimate film-shoot activity, the day was quiet and waiting. On the water they had put out a line of fat red buoys, routing pleasure boats along the Arizona side and cordoning off New Cyprus from the rest of the world, and there was a man in uniform on the ferry dock, evidently a sheriff, now and then shouting things and gesturing. When the trouble started, according to what Taber had told him earlier, they’d shut the river down entirely, opening it back up now and then to let boats through and then closing it again. That is, if the battle lasted long enough to make that necessary.

  Lasted long enough. Calvin wondered what it meant, exactly. There was a cold-blooded quality to this whole thing that Calvin couldn’t quite get his mind around. And what about himself? Was he willing to kill people over a cache of religious relics and a heap of silver? Maybe more to the point—was he willing to kill people who were willing to kill his friends in order to take the loot? That was another story, way more complicated, but with a more evident answer.

  He watched the ferry take off from the dock with Betty Jessup at the helm, running a load of children and their mothers out through the buoys and up to the Colorado Belle in Laughlin where they would wait out the battle. Anyone could leave who wanted to leave, although from the Knights’ point of view, mothers with children didn’t have a choice.

  A sheriff’s boat had come in alongside the camera boat a few minutes ago, and had chatted with the uniformed man on the dock, and then had gone away again after the crew in the water had shifted buoys and signed paperwork. Through his binoculars Calvin could see the crew eating box lunches. He wondered how many of them were innocent—actual union slobs or film student interns making a few extra dollars at a weekend shoot. Across the river there were more cameras on scaffolding, all of it thrown up in the past couple of hours.

  The Boston Whaler, Calvin noticed, was hauled up onto the beach, but the fireboat was moored to the end of Taber’s dock. It had taken him a moment to recognize it, since it was decked out on the starboard side like some kind of Moorish galley, with a fake mast and square-rigged sail and a dozen oars thrusting out through a plywood gunwale. There were little curlicue cutouts fore and aft like fancy bowsprits. The water cannons weren’t in any way hindered, however, and they had a clear aim out over the river and the town both. Another water cannon had been towed in on a raft built of railroad ties, and two men were busy mooring it to the ferry dock. There was a fourth set up below the footbridge.

  Calvin could see men milling around up on the hill, where there were pieces of dismantled wooden equipment, what Mifflin had referred to as Postum’s “siege engines.” Even with the binoculars it was hard to make sense of it, although almost certainly they were built of wood in some authentic, old-fashioned manner. The assembly was already under way—two skeletal-looking frameworks, one set up on the turnout itself, and one back up behind it on higher ground. The Dead Mountains were full of projectiles; there was no doubt about that.

  “What do you think?” someone said to Calvin, and he turned around to find Taber standing there, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, although only the collar was showing. The rest of it was hidden by the Knights’ tunic with the embroidered red cross. He had on a straw hat that looked new, with a garish silk band patterned with red hibiscus on a gold background.

  “Nice hat,” Calvin said.

  “I knew you’d be jealous of it. I bought this in one of those upscale shops at Caesar’s Palace, must have been fifteen years ago. I’ve been waiting for an occasion to wear it. A man might as well go out in style.”

  “I hope you mean out on the town.”

  “Sure. Why not? The last ditch, if it comes down to it”

  “Is that a sheriff out on the ferry dock?” Calvin asked. “I keep hearing about how we’re keeping the authorities out of this.”

  “That’s George Fowler,” Taber said. “I’ll introduce the two of you later on. He’s our liaison. That’s one of the ways we’re keeping the authorities out of this. What d
o you think of those devices up on the hill?”

  Calvin turned his attention from the doings on the river and looked up into the Dead Mountains again through the binoculars. “I’ve never seen a real catapult before,” he said.

  “Technically it’s called a trebuchet, widely in use during the Crusades,” Taber told him. “They brought them out of China, out along the Silk Road. It was a heck of an engineering feat, with a big old ballast box pulling down on a lever as long as the mast of a ship. There’s a sling at the end of the lever, and it’s got a mean whip when it comes over the top. It takes a lot of men to raise the ballast box, but Postum’s probably figured out some mechanical means to get the job done. He used to be an engineer—apparently a good one. It’s a shame he went crooked, but he’s bent so far out of shape now that they’re going to have to dig his grave with a corkscrew.”

  “How accurate are those machines?”

  “Not very. I saw one of those two there in action once. They had a pumpkin-throwing contest out in Oatman. Haifa dozen teams built catapults, but most of them were designed on the Roman model, big enough to toss a pumpkin the size of your head a couple of hundred yards. The Beamon’s crew set up a trebuchet and threw a three-hundred-pound blue-ribbon pumpkin half a mile. They can find the range if they work at it, but they can’t aim it at anything, which actually makes it a little more worrisome.”

  “Yeah, I should say it does. What about those camera people, out on the raft? Aren’t they in trouble when Postum’s finding his range?”

  “God knows what he told them, but human expendability is part of his way of doing business. You can bet he promised them a big payday.” They watched the hills for another moment in silence, and then Taber said, “Do you mind a little chitchat? I’m worried about something.”

  “Sure,” Calvin said.

  “I talked to Doc Hoyle about the Lymons, and he says he never saw anything like it. Al simply took the cancer away from Nettie.”

  “I guess it doesn’t surprise me that he’d do that,” Calvin said.

  “Well, it does and it doesn’t. But maybe Lymon should have asked Nettie before he went ahead and hijacked her illness. The thing is, I’m pretty sure Nettie got her hands on the veil some time after you finished the sketch, but I’m not sure what she’s up to with it. She won’t talk to me. That veil doesn’t belong to Al Lymon or to Nettie or to the Knights, either. Lymon’s using the veil to take on Nettie’s cancer looks like what we’d call a selfless act, but it wasn’t. If Lymon had been in a selfless mood, he’d have left the veil where it belonged.”

  “Nettie doesn’t see it as selfish, though?”

  “She sees a man who’s killed himself to save a life that was already forfeit. Now she’s alive and her husband’s on his deathbed instead of being out here with us where he’s supposed to be, and on top of that she’s got to watch him die and then be left alone. Seems to her that it’s sort of a mixed blessing.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Calvin asked. “Tell her that two wrongs don’t make a right?”

  “Well … do what you can do. Make her see reason.”

  “Sure,” Calvin said. “Okay. I’ll reason with her.”

  “Good. And bring back the veil. It’s not a means to an end. It can’t be left in private hands, and I don’t care whose.”

  PHARAOH’S ARMY

  Calvin ran into a nervous little man in the driveway of the Lymons’ house. He wore a straw fedora and a white linen shirt and slacks, and he carried a medical bag. “You must be the nephew from out on the coast,” the man said to him.

  “That’s right. I’m Calvin Bryson. You’re Doc Hoyle, I guess. How’s Lymon?”

  “Not good, son. He was conscious enough to refuse the offer of a morphine drip. I could have done that much for him, but I let him make the call. If it were me, I’d take the morphine.”

  “So he’s got cancer? There’s no doubt about it?”

  “Not in my mind,” Hoyle said. “This … transference, or whatever we want to call it, would qualify as some kind of miracle, except a man’s going to die because of it. That’s not the standard result of a miracle. And then there’s Nettie. She could go to work up in the quarry tomorrow, if she had a mind to.” He shook his head, then shut his eyes and rubbed his temples. “I’m in a small hurry,” he said. “I’ve got to look in on a couple more folks.”

  Calvin watched the man go away down the drive. The door of the cellar shelter in the carport wall was standing partway open, so he looked in. His aunt sat next to the bed where his uncle lay on his back, apparently asleep. A wheelchair stood nearby, and he could see a bathroom beyond, and a little kitchenette and shelf full of books and puzzles to while away the time. Nettie saw Calvin standing in the doorway and nodded, and he came down the steps into the cool of the interior, pulling the door shut behind him.

  “Take a seat,” she told him, and he sat down on the edge of his uncle’s bed.

  Lymon opened his eyes, nodded faintly, and then closed them again. He fumbled his hand on top of Calvin’s. His breathing was labored, and after every third or fourth breath it caught in his throat.

  “Sorry I dumped you into the sand pile this morning,” Calvin said to him.

  His uncle squeezed his hand, but that was his entire response, and after a moment Calvin realized that he was asleep again or else had slipped out of consciousness. His mouth was open, and from time to time his aunt mopped it with a tiny sponge on a stick that she dipped into a jar of clear liquid. The two of them sat silently in the dim light. Calvin looked around the big room, at the stone ceiling and cypress posts that supported it. Beyond a set of downward-sloping stone stairs ending against the far wall there was another wooden door, double-barred with heavy six-inch planks about three inches thick, set into flatiron hooks. There must be a room on the other side, Calvin thought. Or more likely another passage of some sort, given that it was barred on this side. This whole side of the river was a warren of passages. One well-placed rock from that trebuchet and the whole place would probably collapse in a cloud of dust.

  “We’ll let him rest,” his aunt whispered. Calvin got up and followed her outside, where they sat down in the lawn chairs, looking out on the river and all the activity, just as they had on the evening he arrived, although the view was different now. He remembered how awkward he had felt trying to talk to her. Now she understood everything too well. And clearly she was deeply unhappy, and that didn’t help.

  “I’ve been over talking to Miles,” he said finally.

  “I know you have,” she said. “I saw you two out there on the dock. I know why he sent you over. He wants you to talk sense into me about that veil. But I don’t know that there’s any such thing as sense in this case, so I might as well make my own sense out of it, and you can tell him I said so. Anyway, he already had Doc Hoyle try to weasel it out of me, but I didn’t budge.”

  “Doc Hoyle told you that Miles sent him down here after the veil?”

  “He promised Miles that he’d fetch it back to him, but I sent him off empty-handed.”

  “Good for you. Did you tell him you had it, though?”

  “I didn’t see much reason to tell him anything, but I didn’t lie to him. I didn’t tell him I didn’t have it.”

  “So you’ve made up your mind about it?”

  “My mind is pretty much settled, but you might as well have your say. I don’t suppose I can stop you anyway.”

  “Okay. What I want to say is that I don’t pretend to understand what went through Uncle Lymon’s head when he took the cancer on himself, but I know what was in his heart.”

  “Any fool can figure out what was in his heart,” she said, suddenly getting angry. “But that’s where he should have kept it. Why in God’s good name did he have to carry through with it? I take that back. I don’t think he did it in God’s good name. I think he did it in Al Lymon’s good name, because he’s so bullheaded. Once Al gets an idea into his mind, he can’t let go of it. He can’t see it a
ny way but his own. There’s something too self-righteous in what he did.”

  “I don’t think that’s fair,” Calvin said. “And when it comes down to it, most of us like our own ideas pretty well.”

  “Lord knows that’s true, but it doesn’t make it right. We can be sure of the truth and not be so ever-loving sure of ourselves. What on earth possessed him to think I’d want to be alone like this? And he did it to me when I didn’t know what was being done. That’s just not right. I made my peace with Al and I made my peace with the world and with God. God dealt me a hand and I played it out the best I knew how. Whatever regrets I had left over were long gone out of my mind. And now I don’t have any peace at all to speak of, but instead I’ve got a parcel of new regrets and I’ve got to bury my husband. If he weren’t so sick, I’d tell him just what I think. But now I can’t. He got in the last word.”

  “But you know he did it out of love,” Calvin said, his words sounding lame and inadequate even though he meant what he said. “He couldn’t talk it through with you first. You know that. He saw his chance and he took it, come what may.”

  “He should have thought it out more than halfway. He thought through his half, but he didn’t think through mine.”

  “It’s not the kind of thing you can reason out. I’ve only known Donna for about three days, but I think I’d jump into the river to save her if she fell in. I hope I would.”

  “That isn’t the same thing,” she said. “Not at all. This isn’t that kind of river. He knew he wasn’t going to make it back to shore. He knew he couldn’t swim, and I’d have to go on alone. I don’t want to be alone—not under these circumstances. Why couldn’t he see that?”

  “He didn’t want to be alone, either.”

  “And he took good care to see that he wouldn’t be. That’s just my point.”

  “You shouldn’t look at it that way. That’s not why he did it.”

  Her anger had apparently carried her about as far as it was going to, and she began to cry. Calvin felt like a complete creep, shoving his oar in where it wasn’t appreciated, stirring up the water without making any headway. “I don’t mean to sound like I’m sure about anything,” he said. “Especially not about what I would or wouldn’t do. I just—”