by Tim Powers
“They’ve killed him!” Cochran yelled, struggling to get up.
Behind and above him he heard Angelica say, “Is that a bad thing, Sid?”
Out in the water the old woman and the young man with the holed face seemed to merge, and then become a shape superimposed on the seascape instead of in it: the stylized black silhouette of a fat man with stubby limbs and a warty round head. And as it shrank, or receded in some non-spatial sense so that it didn’t disappear into the water, it flickeringly seemed to be a very fat naked white man with tattoos all over him, and a middle-aged Mexican man, and a pretty Asian woman, and others …
Then it had faded to nothing like a retinal glare-spot, and the sea was an unfeatured expanse of rippled silver all the way across to the Marina.
“No,” Cochran said. A death was still owed in the math, he thought. A physical heart had to literally stop. “No,” he said again.
Cochran was lying on his back. He twisted his head to look up at Angelica, and then he focused past her. Two transparent old women stood above and behind her, and their milk-in-water eyes were fixed on the puddle of blood on the dirt below Cochran’s tourniquetted wrist. Their hands were reaching toward the blood, and their fingers were stretching like old cobwebs disturbed by a solid person’s passage.
Up the slope by the stairs, Scott Crane had at some point got to his feet. His beard had dried enough to be lustrous and full, so that seen from below this way he looked like a schoolbook picture of Solomon or Charlemagne; and in a voice so deep and resonant that it cut through the shrilling in Cochran’s impacted eardrums, Crane said, “Hot blood is what you’re leaving behind forever now, ladies. Get aboard the boat now; the tide is about to ebb, and you have to go.”
The ghosts of Mrs. Winchester and Mammy Pleasant swirled away to the steps and down toward the insubstantial boat, and then the first rays of the rising sun touched the iron lamp-post at the end of the peninsula. Cochran thought he could hear distant voices singing.
He was sagging with fatigue, and he wondered that he was able to hold his head up; and then he realized that Cody Plumtree was sitting on the sand behind him and cradling his head in her lap. Kootie was kneeling white-faced behind Plumtree, with his arms around the black dog’s neck. Blood was trickling down Kootie’s own neck from a long, shallow cut below his ear, where a stray shot-pellet had evidently nicked him.
Cochran rolled his eyes to look back out at the water of the bay, but it was still empty—the blobby black figure had certainly gone.
The Green Knight gave the boy just a token cut, Cochran thought; and he settled his head more firmly against Cody’s warm, solid legs. The retribution-aspect of Dionysus was merciful, this morning.
Pete was behind the wheel of the truck, and now started up the rackety old engine; and just because of the new noise Cochran became aware that at some point violin-pure voices had begun singing out of the pipes that stood up from the masonry, a high solemn wordless chorus that now coaxed Cochran’s sluggish pulse to meet the vibrant cadences implicit in the new dawn.
“Get up, Sid,” said Plumtree, and Angelica added, “On this morning you can go to a hospital, with no fear of ghosts.”
Cochran got dizzily to his feet, leaning heavily on the two women as he shambled up the slope toward the shaking truck.
White seagulls, luminous in the new daylight, were circling high overhead against the blue of the clean sky, whistling and piping in the open, unechoing air as if calling out the news of the soon-returning spring.
EPILOGUE: “IN THE MIDSUMMER OF THIS YEAR …”
All, all is yours,
The love I owed my father, who is dead,
The love I might have given to my mother,
And my poor sister, cruelly doomed to die.
All yours now, only yours.
—Aeschylus,
The Libation Bearers
CUPPED AT THE VERY top of the steep green hill, above the lake that encircled the island and above the fenced-in reservoir that fed the waterfall, was a little lake surrounded by cherry laurel trees and standing green and orange stones. The lake water was so still that every tree branch against the blue sky was reflected motionless in the water.
Cody Plumtree had run up the steps of half-buried railway ties ahead of the others, and now she carefully lifted the hem of her white linen skirt and stepped up onto the altar-like rock at the east end of the little lake. This rock looked as if it were once a source for a waterfall into this lake, and it also looked as if it had been the site of fires in remote times. She remembered Sid saying that these moss-green stones were druid stones, magically counter-weighted by the monastery stones around the lake below. Sid might not remember that now, but he would know it if she told him about it and then made sure to tell him about it again a few times.
It was a topic that was connected to his memories of his dead wife, and all those memories really had disappeared. He knew these days that he had been married, and he could even recognize photographs of the Nina woman, but he was like an amnesia victim—except that an amnesia victim would probably want to learn about the lost past. Along with the memories, Sid had lost any interest in what they had been of.
Cody didn’t mind, and she would probably not remind him of the history of the stones.
The two of them had been living in Sid’s South Daly City house for five months now, but somehow—like, she thought helplessly, the Solville piece of string that couldn’t ever quite be cut—it had consistently been a celibate relationship. That would change after this ceremony today, she was certain.
Cody had not lost any memories at all, and she still dreamed of the other girls that had occupied her head with her. On some nights she even dreamed of the day the sun fell on her, the day—twenty-six years ago now to the day, perhaps to the hour—when her father was thrown off the building in Soma; it was a harrowing dream, but she was glad to experience it, especially since she saw it in color—it indicated that she had absorbed, taken as her own, those earliest memories that had been in the sole custody of dead Valorie.
And last night she had dreamed of driving the bus, speeding up and jumping across the wide empty gap in the freeway to land safe on the other side, and the man standing beside her had been Sid Cochran.
Two miles away to the southeast she could see the tall X-shaped TV tower on Mount Sutro; and when she shifted around, she could see the two distant piers of the Golden Gate Bridge, appearing in foreshortening to be standing next to each other on the horizon.
The other people were scuffing up the steps now—and she saw Scott Crane come striding lightly across the grass first, tall and brown and smiling through his lustrous coppery beard; he was fifty-two years old now, but hardly looked thirty-five, and on this midsummer’s day his wound didn’t make him limp at all. He wasn’t dressed as any kind of priest, though that was the function he would be serving here today; he wore a navy blue suit with a white shirt, and his long hair was tied back in a ponytail secured, she had noticed on the walk over the bridge, with a gold Merovingian bee.
The others from the Leucadia compound were right behind him, led by lithe Nardie Dinh and Diana with her three-inch thatch of radiant blond hair. Arky’s widow, Wendy, was leading their two teenage daughters; Plumtree had been afraid to meet them at first, and then had been surprised by their unaffected friendliness and their eagerness to hear stories about Arky’s last month. Diana’s boys Scat and Oliver appeared next, herding the children up into the clearing. Behind them she could hear a barking dog, which meant that the Solville contingent was coming right up.
With the Valorie-memories which were now her own, Cody called across the hilltop glade to Crane, “Standing in happy sunlight on the hill in the lake!”
Crane laughed quietly, and the sound seemed to shake the green leaves and send ripples across the little lake.
Through the green branches overhead, the sky was a cloudless, deep blue. It was a good day for a wedding.
Sid Cochran was glad now th
at he hadn’t acceded to the advice of the other sales representatives at Pace and worn some kind of tuxedo. His suit was formal enough, and in these wooded sunlit groves the affected pretension of a tuxedo would have been ludicrous. In the same spirit, he had left his prosthetic hand in the car’s glove compartment, and was just wearing a white sock over the stump of his right wrist.
Behind him Fred was bounding along the cinder path on a leash, for Angelica hadn’t wanted him jumping up on people’s nice clothes, and Kootie was kept as busy as a fishing boat trying to stay over a powerful marlin, with the dog wanting to sniff at the mossy stones along the path and go loping and barking across the grass. Kootie had left his sport coat in the Solville van, and Cochran could see that there was no bandage anymore under the boy’s white shirt. Angelica had told him that Kootie’s two-year-old wound had finally healed up within a week of their return to Long Beach.
“And the cement Eleggua figure was back in its cabinet, when we got back home,” said Angelica now, striding along between Cochran and Pete Sullivan.
“With a bunch of snapshots in the cabinet with him,” added Pete. “Pictures of the Eleggua statue in front of Stonehenge, and at the Great Pyramid, and at Notre Dame cathedral …”
Cochran glanced sharply at him, but Pete’s face was resolutely deadpan and Cochran couldn’t quite decide if he was kidding or not.
Cody had kept in touch with Angelica during these five months, and the two of them had cautiously agreed that there appeared to have been, so far, no legal or psychic or underworld repercussions from their arduous January. Cochran and Plumtree had heard nothing from Rosecrans Medical—possibly because, according to the newspapers, Dr. Armentrout had run off with a number of patient files before allegedly murdering intern Philip Muir at the borrowed house of an absent neurologist, and then disappearing for parts unknown—and Cody had anonymously, and grumblingly, sent money to the people whose purse and car she had stolen, as well as twenty dollars to the Frost Giant ice-cream shop and a hundred to Strubie the Clown; and Angelica was still safely doing underground-occult consulting work among the Long Beach poor, though she no longer corralled ghosts for clients, and nobody had come looking for Spider Joe, who would ideally rest in peace forever beneath the Solville back parking lot.
The newspapers had reported that Richard Paul Armentrout had apparently been a victim of childhood incest at the hands of his alcoholic single mother, and that he had been committed to a men’s psychiatric hospital and had undergone electroconvulsive therapy at the age of seventeen, after killing her.
That bit of news had obscurely upset Cody, and she had spent a good part of the afternoon sitting in the bone-strewn ruins of the backyard greenhouse, uncommunicatively drinking vodka; Cochran had eventually got her to come inside, and they had got stoically drunk together.
With the loss of his hand, Cochran had become unfitted for his cellar-and-vineyard work, and now was working out of the office as a sales representative; the change had been disorienting at first, but he had really had no choice, for along with his hand he had lost too his instinctive understanding of the soil and the vines and the slow pulse of the wines maturing in the casks.
Above him the path leveled out between the descending green slopes, and the trees were farther apart.
They had reached the clearing at the top of the hill, and Cochran could see his bride-to-be standing with Scott and Diana Crane on the far side of the little lake, talking with them and the Nardie Dinh woman and Mavranos’s widow, while a gang of children climbed around on the rocks. Cochran had seen Cody’s white skirted suit when she had got into the blue truck from Leucadia, but when he looked at her now, standing over there straight and slim and softly laughing, her blond hair in a long pageboy cut, he thought she looked even more beautiful than Diana Crane.
Scott Crane had seen the newcomers step up onto the level grass, and he held up one hand—and then walked down the shallow slope and waded several steps out into the lake, until the water was above his ankles. Fred barked at the spectacle, until Kootie shushed him.
With his beard and broad shoulders, Crane still seemed taller than everyone else. “This is a balanced place,” he said in his deep, rolling voice, “and we want to maintain that and not be showing up as a spike in anyone’s charts.” Diana and Mavranos’s widow seemed to be the only ones who knew what he was doing—Diana was looking away, down the grassy slope toward the surrounding lake, and Wendy was staring thoughtfully at Crane.
Crane went on, slowly, “When I came back, five months ago—through the self-sacrifice of my best friend—I accepted certain terms, the terms stated in that palindrome. I expect now to spend the January of every year in Erebus, as I did this winter—but with my lifeless body in Leucadia, and not requiring strenuous help to come back to life, each time. Three representatives of Death, two ghosts and one murderer who was shortly to die, brought me the requisite sacrament.”
He held up a lumpy little brown ball that seemed from this distance to be cracked. “A pomegranate,” he said, “which Nardie tells me was brought all the way from my own back garden … appropriately.” He broke it and let most of it fall into the water, but held up something tiny between a thumb and forefinger. “One seed,” he said. “Like what Persephone ate.” And he put it into his mouth, and swallowed.
The children had paid attention when he had walked out into the water, but had lost interest when he had paused to talk; Kootie had dropped Fred’s leash, and now the children and the dog were happily climbing around on the rocks in the dappled sunlight.
Scott Crane had seemed to go pale for a moment, but he inhaled deeply in the flower-scented air, and smiled toward the oblivious children. “This is a happy day,” he said, “all of us obedient to our proper places in the seasons. And,” he went on, looking into Cochran’s eyes for a moment, “summer is the season for weddings.”
He turned and walked back out of the lake, the cuffs of his pants flinging bright drops of water out onto the grass.
“Cody Plumtree,” said the king, holding out his left hand to her, “who wide unclasped the table of your thoughts, so that intercessors of one sort and another could help me through all the houses of the year.”
Cody stepped up to where he stood and took his hand with her right hand.
“And,” called the king, now holding out his right hand and looking across the lake, “Sid Cochran, who reached out your hand twice to save the old king, and selflessly held the god’s favor to give to me.”
Everyone, even the children and the dog, was looking at Cochran; and he was sweating and awkward and he wanted to put the stump of his right wrist into his pocket. This hilltop clearing and lake, with the ring of leaning old laurels and redwoods around the perimeter, looked oddly familiar to him. He thought he might have been here once before, a very long time ago … happily …?
“Go to your bride,” muttered Pete Sullivan, nudging him in the back.
And Cochran met Cody’s blue eyes across the lake, and she was smiling at him—and he smiled back at her, and walked straight toward her, down the bank and into the lake and striding through the clear, cleansing water all the way across while the children laughed delightedly and the dog barked, though the water rose to his waist in the middle of the lake and was cold down around his toes and ankles, striding finally up the far bank and stepping up onto the sunlit grass beside her and the king to take his vows, profoundly glad.
About the Author
Tim Powers is the author of fourteen novels, including The Anubis Gates, Declare, Hide Me Among the Graves, and On Stranger Tides, which was adapted for the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie of the same title. His novels have twice won the Philip K. Dick Award and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and three times won Locus Awards. Powers lives with his wife, Serena, in San Bernardino, California.
Serena Powers
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