"Pretty good," Ransom commented. He pointed at the shouting figure of Lomax. "It looks as if your father is frying the same technique. I'm afraid Mr. Lomax isn't as clever as you." He pulled a tin from his pocket and took off the lid. Inside were two pieces of dried meat. First wiping his fingers, he gave one to the child. Holding it tightly, he toddled away among the ruins.
Ransom leaned back against the column. He was debating when to leave the oasis and take his chances with the lions when a stinging blow struck his left arm above the elbow.
He looked up into the grimacing, powdered mask of Richard Lomax, silvertopped cane in one hand.
"Ransom…!" he hissed. "Get out…!" His suit was puffed up, the lapels flaring like the gills of an angry fish. "Stealing my water! Get _out!_"
"Richard, for God's sake-" Ransom stood up. There was a soft clatter among the stones, and the child reappeared. In his hands he carried a small white gull, apparently dead, its wings neatly furled.
Lomax gazed down at the child, a demented Prospero examining the offspring of his violated daughter. He looked around at the dusty garbage-strewn oasis, as if stunned by the horror of this island infested by nightmares. He raised his cane to strike the child. It stepped back, eyes suddenly still, and opened its hands. With a squawk the bird rose into the air and flashed past Lomax's face.
There was a shout across the dunes. The stilted figure of Quilter came striding over the rubble a hundred yards away, furs lifting in the hot sunlight. Beside him with the dogs was Whitman, pushing along the broken figure of Jonas, the dogs tearing at the rags of his trousers.
Ignoring Ransom, Lomax spun on his white shoes and raced off across the sand. The dogs broke leash and ran after him, Quilter at their heels, the stilts carrying him in sixfoot strides. Whitman fumbled with the leash, and the bending figure of Jonas straightened up and swung a fist at the back of his neck, felling him to the ground. Whitman scrambled to his feet, and Jonas unfurled a net from his waist and with a twist of his hands rolled Whitman into the dust again. Retrieving the net, he leapt away on his long legs.
Halfway to the pavilion, Lomax turned to face the dogs. From his pockets he pulled out handfuls of firecrackers, and hurled them down at their feet. The thunderfiashes burst and flared, and the dogs broke off as Quilter charged through them.
He reached one hand toward Lomax. There was a gleam of silver in the air and a long blade appeared from the shaft of Lomax's cane. He darted forwards on one foot and pierced Quilter's shoulder. Before Quilter could recover, he danced off behind the safety of the doors.
Gazing at the blood on his hand, Quilter walked slowly back to the swimming pool, the gongs beating from the pavilion behind him. Glancing at Ransom, who was holding his child, he shouted to Whitman. The two men called the dogs together, and set off along the river in pursuit of Jonas.
An hour later, when they had not returned, Ransom carried the child down into the pool.
"Doctor, do come in," Miranda greeted him, as he pushed back the flaps of the inner courtyard. "Have I missed another of Richard's firework displays?"
"Probably the last," Ransom said. "It wasn't meant to amuse."
Miranda gestured him into a chair. In a cubicle beyond the curtain the old woman was crooning herself to sleep over the children. Miranda sat up on one elbow. Her sleek face and giant body covered by its black negligee made her look like a large seal reclining on the floor of its pool. Each day her features seemed to get smaller, the minute mouth with its cupid's lips subsiding into the overlaying flesh in the same way that the objects in the drained river had become submerged and smoothed by the enveloping sand.
"Your brother is obsessed by the water in the reservoir," Ransom said. "Have you any influence with Quilter? If Richard goes on provoking him there may be a bloodbath."
"Don't worry." Miranda fanned herself with a plump hand. "Quilter is still a child. He wouldn't hurt a thing."
"Miranda, I've seen him crush a sea gull to death in one hand."
Miranda waved this aside. "That's just to show he understands it. In a way, it's a sign he loves the bird."
"That's a fierce love," Ransom commented.
"What love isn't?"
Ransom looked up, noticing the barely concealed question in her voice. Miranda lay on the divan, watching him with her bland eyes, her face composed. She seemed unaware of the dunes and dust around her. Ransom stood up and went over to her. Taking her hands, he sat down on the divan. "Miranda…" he began. Looking at her great seal-like waist, he thought of the dead fishermen whose bodies had helped to swell its girth, drowned here in its warm seas, unnamed Jonahs reborn in the strange idiot-children. He remembered Quilter and the long knives in the crossed shoulder-straps under his furs, but the danger seemed to recede. The blurring of everything during his journey from the coast carried with it the equation of all emotions and relationships. Simultaneously he would become the children's father and Quilter's brother, Mrs. Quilter's son, and Miranda's husband. Only Lomax, the androgyne, remained isolated.
As he watched Miranda's smile form itself, the image of a river flowed through his mind, a clear stream that broke and illuminated the sunlight.
"Doctor!" He looked up to see Mrs. Quilter's frightened face through the tenting. "There's water leaking!"
Ransom pulled back the canopy. Spilling on to the floor of the pool was a steady stream of water, pouring off the concrete verge above. The water swilled along the floor, soaking the piles of bedding, and then ran to the fireplace in the center where the tiles had been removed.
"Mrs. Quilter, take the children!" Ransom turned to Miranda, who was sitting upright on the divan. "There's water running past the house, it must come from the reservoir! I'll see if I can head Lomax off."
As he climbed the stairway out of the pool the figures of Quilter and Whitman raced past, the dogs at their heels.
Winding between the dunes were a dozen arms of silver water, pouring across the bleached earth from the direction of the reservoir. Ransom splashed across the streams, feeling the pressure of the water as it broke and spurted. Beyond the next line of dunes there was a deeper channel. Three feet deep, the water slid away among the ruined walls, spilling into the cracks and mine-holes, sucked down by the porous earth.
Quilter flung himself along on his stilts. Whitman was pulled by the dogs, hunting bayonet clasped in his teeth. They splashed through the water, barely pausing to watch its progress, and then reached the embankment. Quilter shouted as the long-legged figure of Jonas, kneeling by the water with his net, took off like a startled hare around the verges of the reservoir. The dogs bounded after him, kicking the wet sand into a damp spray.
Ransom leaned against a chimney stump. The reservoir was almost drained, the shallow pool in the center leaking out in a last quiet glide. At four or five points around the reservoir large breaches had been cut in the bank, and the water had poured out through these. The edges of the damp basin were already drying in the sunlight.
Quilter stopped by the bank and gazed down blankly at the vanishing mirror of blue light. His swan's hat hung over one ear. Absentmindedly he pulled it off and let it fall onto the wet sand.
Ransom watched the chase around the opposite bank. Jonas was halfway around the reservoir, arms held out at his sides as he raced up and down the dunes. The dogs gained on him, and began to leap up at his back. Once he stumbled, and a dog tore the black shirt from his shoulders. Knocking the animal away, he ran on, the dogs all around him.
Then two more figures appeared, running out of the dunes across the dog's path, and Ransom heard the roaring of the white lions.
"Catherine!" As he shouted, she was running beside the lions, driving them on with her whip. Behind her was Philip Jordan, a canteen strapped to his back, spear in one hand. He feinted with it at Whitman as the dogs veered and scuttled away from the lions, scrambling frantically across the empty basin of the reservoir. Catherine and the lions ran on, disappearing across the dunes as suddenly as they had come. Still running, Philip Jordan took Jonas' arm, but the older man broke free and darted left and right between the dunes.