by Tim Powers
Mavranos scowled around at the kneeling clay people in the guttering torchlight. “Are you people volunteers?” Mavranos roared at them, and Cochran thought there was a note of desperate hope in the man’s voice. “Do you mean to put yourselves in the way of what’s happening here?”
“We’re here of our own will, which is the god’s will,” called one of the figures.
Mavranos nodded, though he was still frowning and squinting as if against the glare of the vanished lightning. “If this cup may pass away,” he muttered. Then, more loudly, he said, “Let’s get to the cave.”
Plumtree took Cochran’s right hand, and the two of them set off across the marshy plain, with the others following; the mud-people did appear to be allies, but when Cochran glanced back he saw that Angelica with her bundle of soaked fabric, and Mavranos with his hand in the pocket of his raincoat, were hanging back a few paces to watch the roofless building and the landward slopes and the path behind.
Cochran was suddenly, viscerally sure that not all of the king’s company would survive this night; and he was still dizzy from his mouthful of the forgiveness wine, and wondering what memories and loves it had taken from him … and if it might soon take more.
“This is like in a chess game,” he said to Plumtree through clenched teeth, “when all the castles and bishops and knights are focused on one square, and there’s like a pause, before they all start charging in and knocking each other off the board.” He walked faster, pulling her along the slope up toward the cave mouth, so that several yards of thrashing rain separated them from Pete and Kootie.
“I don’t care what—” he said to her, “well, I do, I care a lot—but whatever you think, whatever your feelings are, I’ve got to tell you—” He shook his head bewilderedly. “I love you, Cody.”
She would have stopped, but he pulled her on.
“Me?” she said, hurrying along now. “I’m not worth it, Sid! Even if I love you—”
He glanced at her sharply. “Do you?” he asked, leaning his head toward hers to be heard, for his heart was thudding in his chest and he couldn’t make himself speak loudly. “Do you love me?”
She laughed, but it was a warm, anxious laugh. “How do I love thee?” she said. With her free hand she pulled her soggy waitress pad out of her jeans pocket. “Let me read the minutes.”
From far away behind them, somewhere on the overgrown terrace paths above this plain but below the highway, came two hard pops that were louder than the drumming; and Cochran was still wondering if they had been gunshots when several more echoing knocks shivered the rain, and then the dark basin behind them was a hammering din of gunfire.
He looked back, crouching and stepping in front of Plumtree. Mavranos had his revolver out as he backed fast across the mud, and Angelica had thrown away the bundle of cloth and was holding the pistol-grip .45 carbine in both hands. Cochran could see winking flashes now on the distant ruined buildings and along the sea-wall; most of the shooters seemed to be firing into the air, and perhaps this whole barrage was just a live-ammunition variation on the Chinatown firecrackers.
But Cochran drew his own revolver again, hollowly reflecting that he now had only two rounds left in the cylinder.
“I’m still here,” said Cody wonderingly as the two of them scrambled on up the muddy slope. “Gunfire, a lot of it, and I haven’t passed the hand.”
CHAPTER 32
False eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck upon them, and their hideous countenances were all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of sleep.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
DR. ARMENTROUT AND LONG John Beach had jumped off the muddy path to the left after his first reflexively answering shot had provoked so much return fire, and the two of them had tumbled over an old ivy-covered stone wall, with the two-manikin appliance flailing wildly on Armentrout’s shoulders, and then they tumbled and spun down a mud slope in darkness, away from the torches up on the path. He believed at least one of the Lever Blank men had been shot.
When they had still been in the car, the pomegranate had been pulling hard enough to jump away from his hands when he had let go of it, and so he had made sure to grip it tightly as they had climbed out of the Saturn in the parking lot up the hill—he could imagine the thing getting away from him and rolling off into the night to find the king by itself. He had ordered Long John Beach to strap the heavy two-man appliance onto him, and he had held the pomegranate tightly in each hand while sliding the other through the arm loops—even when the left-hand-side Styrofoam head had nuzzled his cheek in an eerie similitude of affection or attack.
With the manikins flanking him, the leisure-suited aluminum-pole arms around his shoulders, there had seemed to be six people who ran across the drag-strip highway and started down the path toward the Sutro Baths ruins, and they must have been conspicuous; before Armentrout and Long John Beach and the two Lever Blank men had walked ten yards, their way had been blocked by torch-bearing figures of a sort Armentrout had seen before, on the Leucadia beach.
And tonight again he had stared at the human eyes in the clay faces, and again he had used his most authoritative doctor’s voice as he’d said, “What, precisely, is your business here? Get out of our way, please.”
An earthen hand pointed at the pomegranate he held, and a red mouth opened on teeth that glittered in the close orange torchlight: “That’s what you took,” said an adolescent voice, “from up the stairs at the Leucadia Camelot.”
With his free hand Armentrout pulled the little derringer out of his inside jacket pocket. He levered the hammer back, and then confidently raised the gun and pointed it at the center of the breastless, clay-smeared chest. “Get out of our way, please,” he said again.
And then a ringing explosion flared in the ivy to the right, and Armentrout was tugged around in that direction by a punch to his right-side manikin.
His instant twitch of astonishment clenched his fists—the hollow pomegranate crumpled in his left hand, and his right hand clutched the little gun—
—and then his wrist was hammered by the impact of the wooden ball-grip being slammed into his palm, and the muzzle-flash burned his retinas—but not so dazzlingly that he wasn’t able to see the clay-smeared figure step back and then sit down abruptly in the mud, with a ragged golf-ball-sized hole in its chest.
The shrubbery had seemed to erupt in glaring flashes and deafening bangs then, and Armentrout and Long John Beach had vaulted over the ivy on the downhill side of the path. In the ensuing tumbling slide, Armentrout just tried to let the aluminum bodies and the grunting manikin heads take the abrasions and knocks, while he kept his hands clamped on the gun and the broken pomegranate.
When they had rolled to a halt in a rainy pool down on the plain, Armentrout sat up in the water and squinted sideways at the Styrofoam head on his right shoulder. A great red flare of afterimage hung in the center of Armentrout’s vision, but he could see that the Styrofoam man had been shot squarely through the forehead—and then he looked away again quickly, because for just an instant the blank white features had been the face of Philip Muir, pop-eyed and gaping as it had been after Armentrout had put a point-blank load of .410 shot between Muir’s eyes.
All he could hear down here, through the ringing in his ears, was a rapid drumming—and then he became aware of a whole siege of popping, spattering gunfire, none of it very close. Peering out through the curtains of cold rain, he saw blinks and flashes of light all along the walls and paths on the plain.
The Maruts, he thought almost in awe; the militant youths described in the Rig-Veda, springing up spontaneously on this western American shore, armed with guns now instead of swords and spears, and wearing earthen rather than golden armor. And they’re embodying the Cretan Kouretes, too, protecting the new king by making a distracting racket with their weapons.
The pomegranate was still pulling in his hand,
though it was cracked now and bright little seeds were popping out of it and flying away toward the dark cliffs of Point Lobos on the far side of the lagoons and the low stone buildings. “We have to find the king,” he gasped to Long John Beach as he struggled painfully to his feet and thrust the leaking pomegranate into his pocket. “Come on!”
Long John Beach pushed himself up with his one arm—and then, without falling back, impossibly lifted the arm from the water to push his sopping white hair back out of his face while he was still propped up at an angle out of the pool.
Then he had got his feet under himself and stood up, and the tiny miracle was over. “I do stand engaged to many Greeks,” the old man said in the dead Valerie-voice, “even in the faith of Valerie, to appear this morning to them.” Then he blinked at the three heads on Armentrout’s shoulders as if all of them were alive; and after staring attentively at the one beside Armentrout’s left shoulder, he looked the doctor in the eye and said, “Your mother, in most great affliction of spirit, hath sent me to you.”
In the moment it took Armentrout to remember that he now had only one .410 shell left unfired in the magical gun, he was ready to shoot Long John Beach; then he tried to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was a hoarse stuttering wail like a goat’s. Frightened and angry, and desperate to be once again free of all the demanding dead people, Armentrout just tucked the gun too into his pocket and shoved Long John Beach forward toward the cliffs.
Cochran and Plumtree had scrambled up to the ledge road, and the cave was only a dozen feet to their left.
Cochran wasn’t aware that he had been hearing idling engines until the headlights came on, up the slope to the right—single headlights, motorcycles—and at the same moment he heard the whirring clatter of Harley-Davidson engines throttling up. Cochran clutched the wine bottle to his ribs with his left hand and cocked the hammer of his revolver with his right. Because he had been half thinking in French all evening, he was able to recognize the chorus of yells from the riders: Vive le Roi! Vive le Roi!
The flashes of the first cracking gunshots were aimed toward Pete and Kootie, in the middle of the group; Cochran raised his revolver and saw, in razory tunnel-vision over the gun sights, a bearded and wild-haired rider swinging a pistol left-handed toward Angelica and Mavranos.
And Cochran touched the trigger. Blue flames jetted out in an X from the gap where the cylinder met the barrel, and the hammer-blow of sound rocked him as much as the recoil did, but he glimpsed the rider rolling over backward as a booted leg kicked out and the motorcycle’s wheels came up and the bike went down in a plowing slide.
A second motorcycle rode down into the fallen one and then stood up on end and somersaulted forward, tossing its rider tumbling across the mud to within a yard of Cochran’s feet as the heavy bike clanged away downhill through the curtains of rain; Cochran was aiming now at two more riders who had banked down toward Pete and Kootie.
But Angelica’s carbine and Mavranos’s .38 were a sudden jack-hammer barrage, flaring like a cluster of chain-lightning, and then the motorcycles wobbled past as Kootie dived one way and Angelica leaped in the other direction—one of the machines crashed over sideways, throwing its rag-doll rider to the ground, while the other bounded straight over a low wall into the big rectangular lagoon with an explosive hissing splash.
Cochran spun to the man who had fallen at his feet—and saw Plumtree straightening up from the man’s bloody, sightless face and tossing away a wet rock; raindrops splashed on a stainless-steel automatic that lay in the man’s limp hand. Plumtree’s eyes were bright, and she cried, “It’s still me, Sid!”
And not Salvoy, he thought, remembering the story of the would-be rapist in Oakland in ’89. Cochran’s right hand was twitching, re-experiencing the hard recoil of the gun, as if his very nerves wished the action could still be cancelled; and he cringed for Cody’s sake, at the thought that she had now been permitted to commit homicide for herself.
A fresh volley of gunfire erupted from down the slope, and stone splinters whistled through the air as bullets hammered into the cliff face to his left and behind him and ricochets twanged through the rain. Then someone had grabbed Cochran’s arm and yelled into his ear, “Back—Arky’s been shot, and there’s bikers in the cave.”
Cochran threw his arm around Plumtree’s shoulders and pulled her away from the dust-spitting cliff face, back down the mud slope toward the fires. He realized that it was Pete who had seized him, and he glimpsed more moving headlights up the slope on the right. The cold rainy air was fouled now with the smells of motor oil and cordite.
“This isn’t aimed at us!” yelled Pete over the banging din.
“Gooood!” wailed Cochran, gritting his teeth and trying to block Plumtree from at least one quarter of the banging, flashing night. The two of them stumbled and slid back down the slope after Pete; squinting against the battering rain, Cochran could see Mavranos being half-carried back toward the roofless stone building by one of the naked-looking clay-people, with Angelica and Kootie hunching along after. The flames that boiled up from within the stone walls were huge now, throwing shadows across the mud-flats and clawing the night sky, seeming even to redly light the undersides of the clouds.
“The men on m-motorcycles,” said Pete, speaking loudly to be heard, “think-kuh Kootie is the khing, but they want him to be-be their king. They’ll—kill—everyone else, if they cannn.”
Sound was becoming jerky and segmented again, and Cochran again felt that he was experiencing time in fast but discrete frames—the unceasing rattle and pop of gunfire near and far began to be paced, in a fast, complicated counterpoint tempo like the hand-clapping of the clay people—
—Cochran was stumbling, suddenly feeling very drunk, with the taste of the pagadebiti wine blooming back into his throat and expanding his head—
—Clumsily he pushed the revolver back into the holster at the back of his belt so that he could hold the bottle with the black-stained hand too—
—And then in an instant all the noise stopped, with one last distant rebounding echo to deprive him of the consolation of believing that he had gone deaf; and as if the stunning racket had been a headwind he’d been leaning against, the abrupt cessation of it pitched him forward onto his knees in the mud.
The cork popped out of the bottle’s neck, and Cochran thought he could hear the smack of it hitting the mud a moment later.
Even the rain had stopped—the air was clear and cold, with no slightest breeze, and the fire in the stone building convulsed overhead for another moment and then stood up straight, a towering yards-wide brushstroke of golden glare against the black night.
Cody Plumtree was on her hands and knees beside him, panting. “When the shooting started,” she whispered, “the other girls fell back, and I was on the bus alone, in the driver’s seat, driving away from them.” Her voice was faint, but in the silence Cochran could hear every sound her teeth and lips and breath made. “But the man standing beside me in the vision wasn’t the broken lunatic anymore—it was Scott Crane, all strong and excellent and wise, guiding me; and we sped up and leaped the bus right over the gap in the freeway, and landed whole on the other side.”
From Dirty Harry to Speed, thought Cochran. That’s good, I guess. “Kootie did say,” he whispered cautiously, “when we were here two or three weeks ago, that you’re probably carrying Crane’s ghost on you.”
“Tonight he gets washed off.”
Cochran remembered the motorcyclist she had killed, and the automatic in the man’s limp hand. “Cody,” he said, “you saved my life.”
“Old Chinese proverb,” said Plumtree hoarsely. “ ‘Whoever saves another person’s life should dig two graves.’ ”
Kootie came plodding up to where Cochran and Plumtree knelt. And the boy’s splashing footsteps in the mud awoke a wind from over the eastern slopes—the gusty breeze swept down the bowl of the vast amphitheater, bending trees and rippling the ponds, and twitched at Cochran’s wet hai
r as it stepped over him and his companions and moved out over the dark ocean. The air smelled of dry wine and fresh tree sap.
“Give me the wine,” said Kootie, his raincoat flapping in the breeze. He had lost Cochran’s hat at some point.
Cochran looked past Kootie. The tall flame was curling and snapping again, and by its yellow glow he could see Angelica standing close behind Kootie, and next to her Mavranos with his left arm around Pete’s shoulders and his right hand pressed to his side. Cochran lifted the bottle over his head with both hands and the boy took it.
“Now I think Dionysus … set me up to kill that woman, meant me to do it, in his boarding house,” the boy said quietly. The firelight made deep shadows of his cheeks and his eye sockets. “But I did kill her—I do still have to offer my neck to the Green Knight’s blade.” Angelica would have said something, but Kootie raised his hand. “We won’t be able to get into the cave, until I do—and I know the god will kill us all here tonight if I don’t. Remember the end of that play Arky told us about, the one where the people refused to drink the god’s wine.”
“The Bacchae,” said Mavranos through clenched teeth.
A deep, hollow drumbeat rolled down the strengthening breeze; then after a few seconds came another. Like two very slow steps.
“Get up,” Kootie told Cochran and Plumtree. “Let’s go over by the water—”
Cochran struggled to his feet and helped Plumtree up, and with Angelica and Pete and Mavranos they followed the boy down the slope toward the black water beside the stone building. The heat from the flames was a sting on the right side of Cochran’s face.
They passed half a dozen of the mud-smeared youths, all of them kneeling; several of them, and many others on the plain, were facing away, toward the Point Lobos cliff, and holding pistols and even rifles at the ready. Bikers in the cave, Cochran remembered. Four ragged figures were trudging at a labored pace down from the highway-side slope into the light; one was limping, evidently supported by two of his companions.
