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 ANDPlumtree 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 nn_ 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 mudflats 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.