But Plumtree grabbed his chin in her cold hand and yelled, “Look!”—and she stared past him, toward Pete and Angelica and Kootie.
Feeling as though he were turning himself inside-out, Cochran tore his eyes from the close darkness of the stone tunnel and twisted his head around to look toward the open sea.
A man was climbing up out of the waves onto the shaking ledge, clutching each new, bucking handhold with bunched muscles and straining tendons. He was shirtless, and a thick dark beard, sopping wet, was matted across his broad chest. When he had hauled himself up and got one knee onto the shelf, Cochran saw that he was naked, and that a wound in his right side was bleeding; Kootie pushed himself away from Angelica and began unbuttoning his raincoat.
A big black dog, wet as a seal, was scrambling up the rocks on the side of the ledge closer to the George Washington boulder, and Kootie paused to scream “Fred!” over the howling of the storm.
The dog clawed the stone and got its legs under itself and then bounded to the boy, water flying from its weakly wagging tail.
Cochran met the dark eyes of the bearded man—
And with a sudden hollowness in his chest he recognized Scott Crane, alive in a living body at last.
Blood was streaming away in the rain from the man’s nose and mouth and ears, but he smiled through evident pain; and then he braced himself and straightened his legs and stood up. Blood ran down his right leg from the gash below his ribs.
Cochran was sure the man would just be blown right back off the ledge and broken to pieces on the rocks—but the wind rocked to a halt as if Scott Crane had put his aching shoulders under it, and the cliffs stopped shaking under the weight of his bloody bare feet.
In spite of the glad leaping of the dog, Kootie had managed to shrug out of the raincoat, and he knelt forward to hold it up toward Crane. The bearded man took it and slowly pulled it on and belted the yellow sash, and at once he no longer appeared to Cochran to be some sea god risen from the waves just a robed king, barefoot and wounded.
The rain was falling vertically out of the sky onto the surfaces of stone now, and the arching streams of water had stopped gushing from the cliff. Scott Crane’s gaze travelled from Pete and Angelica and Kootie and the dog to Cochran and, finally, to Plumtree. Cochran wasn’t touching her, but could feel her flexted tension, and he thought he heard a high, keening wail.
Crane smiled at her, and nodded in recognition.
Then Crane’s great bearded head turned as he looked around at the surrounding boulders and the tunnel opening. “Where is Arky?” he said, and his low voice cut effortlessly through the hiss and spatter of the rain. “He called me, all the way from Persephone’s shore, beyond India.”
Plumtree was on her hands and knees, but now she cautiously stood up, bracing herself with one hand against the rock wall. “The gunshot wound in your side,” she wailed, “is all that’s left of him. He gave you his body—and you’ve transformed it into your own.” She was shaking against the stone, and Cochran realized that she was sobbing. “He restored you to life.”
The bearded king was visibly shaken by this. “Is this true?” he asked hollowly.
Cochran realized that it must be, and he nodded even as Kootie said, “Yes.”
Crane raised his bearded head and stretched his arms out to the sides—as Mavranos had when he had fallen into the sea—and he roared a wordless yell that echoed back from the cliffs, and fell to his knees.
“How can I take this?” he said loudly. “Is this how Dionysus gives his favors?”
“Yes,” said Cochran, and he was aware that he and Plumtree had spoken the word in unison.
“Yes,” echoed Kootie.
“Medere pede,” said Crane, quietly but clearly; “ede, perede, melos. I heard that and assented to it—I came back, on those terms. And there’s more blood owed on the account, shamefully proxy blood, still. But after this dawn I can make sure it’s only me that pays, every winter.” He exhaled a long, harsh aah. “But what can my kingdom be, without … loyal, old, Archimedes Mavranos?” Still kneeling, Scott Crane looked across the ledge at Kootie. “You’re the…young man who held the crown.”
“Fumbled it,” called Kootie miserably over the rain. He was hugging the big black dog. “I ran away, on the morning of Dionysus’s day. And I…can’t remember what I did then, but …”
“My family,” said Crane. “My son Benjamin, my wife—do you know if they’re all right?”
“They’re fine,” said Plumtree. Cochran believed that she needed to talk to Crane now, in spite of her guilt—that she needed to keep on establishing that the man really had returned to life. “According to a woman called Nardie Dinh,” Plumtree went on, “who’s taking care of your place.”
“Nardie,” said Crane hoarsely. “That’s good.”
Again Crane got to his feet, smoothly but with pain evident in the stiffening and sudden pallor of his face. “Stand up,” he said. “You five constitute my army and my field marshals.” Bloody teeth showed through the soaked curls of his beard as he gave them a clenched but resolute smile. “Have you got a car?”
“A Torino.” said Koorip planning at Cochran and Plumtree.
“Which is stolen,” said Plumtree. “We’ve got Arky’s truck.”
Crane winced, either at the evident pains of his transfiguration or at the mention of Mavranos’s old Suburban. “Take me to it, and one of you drive,” he said. He stared into Plumtree’s eyes then, making her flinch. “We’ve got two poor bankrupt old women to see off at the cemetery dock.”
“Im—immediately?” asked Cochran, trying to make his voice neutral. All of them had been soaked with cold rain in cold wind for hours, and he had been passionately looking forward to a car heater and a hot shower and then enough to drink so that he could drive out of his mind the image of a severed head in his hands.
Then he glanced at Crane, naked under the raincoat and drenched in sea water and wounded, too, and he was ashamed of having asked. “Not that I—”
“I reckon it’ll be immediate by the time we get there,” said Crane, “yep. We’ve got to go to the cemetery marble temple, out at the end of the peninsula. I think you’ve been there before.”
And been shot at, thought Cochran. “Yes,” he said.
There appeared to be nothing more to say. Plumtree and Cochran led the way-back down the tunnel to the slope that descended to the amphitheater plain. The lull moon had disappeared behind the clouds, and the fire in the roofless stone structure had died down to a height hardly above the ragged walltops, and the dancers were moving in rings now, waving their torches in unison to the quieter drumming.
It was just a Bacchanalian revel now, no longer a Dionysian hunt. The gods were no longer present.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
Ghosts all! The ghost of beauty, the ghost of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes that were changed by the death they had died in coming here.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
LIKE a bruise all over,” said Plumtree intently as Scott Crane labored up the steep driveway toward the Sutro Heights parking lot, “isn’t it? Like you’ve been hammered with a meat tenderizer, especially on the insides.”