The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

  “Give me a second,” she said, wiping her eyes. “You’re as bad as Al.” She shook her head. “Maybe I haven’t played out my hand yet, like I thought. If Al couldn’t stand to see me go on to the next place alone, then I’m willing to play it the same way.”

  For a few minutes neither of them spoke, but sat watching the river. He wondered what she meant by what she’d said, that she’d “play it the same way.” But he couldn’t ask her. She would go her own way whether he wanted her to or not. It was enough that she thought she had a part in things again. The veil would have to look out for itself.

  No sooner had the thought come into his head than he saw what looked like a small speck in the sky overhead, a bird, maybe. It grew, though, as it fell to earth, metamorphosing into a huge stone, turning end over end and smashing down silently beyond a gap in the willows out beyond the river. A dust cloud rose in the air, blowing away on the Arizona wind, and the bells began to ring in the church belfry down by the old riverbed.

  “I guess I’d better get on back over to talk to Miles,” he said, standing up. “Why don’t you head down into the shelter with Uncle Lymon, just in case they get lucky with one of these stones.”

  “I will. And you tell Miles to settle down. I’ll be all right. I’ll take good care of Al just like I always have. And I’ll take care of that veil, too. That’s what this is about, you know. It’s not about the silver, and it’s not about the real estate. It never has been. There’re some things, like a person’s soul, you might say, that just shouldn’t reside on earth.”

  Another stone thumped down into the field while he was cutting back through town toward Taber’s place. He turned up between two houses and onto Main Street near the Cozy Diner, listening to the tolling of the church bells. What had Nettie meant by saying she would “take care of the veil? He wondered whether he should relay the cryptic remark to Taber out of loyalty to the Knights or keep it to himself out of loyalty to his aunt.

  There were a dozen crusaders milling in the street, wearing white tunics over chain mail and the familiar red cross over the heart. They were looking out across the old riverbed, up toward the hills, where a dust cloud rose out of the shadows and into the sunlight. He saw Downriver Du Pont and his wife in the group, along with Whitey Stern-bottom, who waved him over.

  “It’s those camel riders,” Whitey said. “They started down out of the hills just about the time they let loose with that first rock. One of them’s a distraction from the other, or both of them from some third thing. It’s hard to say what they’re up to. Watch along that cut—up top in the hillside there.”

  Calvin watched, and within moments saw a line of a few dozen men on camels ride out of the rocks along the edge of the steep precipice, the sun beaming on their white burnooses. The bells abruptly stopped tolling, and he heard a wild yipping and howling that carried down toward New Cyprus on the now-still air as the men worked their camels downward, looking like toy figures from this distance, skidding and sliding and hopping along, switchbacking their way slowly. In a moment they disappeared again, and all Calvin could see was dust.

  He wondered what this meant. Bloodshed? Rifles and artillery? The Knights apparently carried no weapons at all. Calvin half expected to see pikes and halberds, or at least a shield or two, but they were empty-handed. Perhaps it was just as well, because it made it that much less likely that the riders would find any need to shoot the place up. Certainly that was a relief, at least for the moment. Either that or he was hopelessly naive.

  “What do we intend to do?” Calvin asked. “Throw rocks? Make ugly faces?”

  “Something like that,” Whitey said. “We wait till they’re coming down into the riverbed. Then we fall back and take shelter behind the old levee there to see what happens. Could be they don’t try anything at all here, but head on down the riverbed and try to get through the park to the bridge. In that case we’re strictly the rear guard. We’ll follow them down and tackle them in the park, because by then the bridge will be history.”

  “We’re going to blow up the bridge?”

  “Just the middle span, or so we hope, and only if we have to. If we’re lucky, though, we’ll get a little help from the river itself before all of that comes to pass. This section’s been dry a long time.”

  Calvin blinked at him. “It doesn’t look much like rain.”

  “You never know. Water does some funny things out here in the desert. I’ve seen a flash flood cut a gorge in a hillside twenty feet deep, and a half hour earlier it was picnic weather.” He winked at Calvin, as if they were both in on a joke, and then nodded up toward town. “Here comes Donna,” he said. “She’s been up in the belfry sounding the alarm. Everybody’s underground now, unless they’ve got something better to do.”

  Calvin watched her coming down between the Cozy Diner and the church. She smiled at him and waved. A third stone passed silently overhead now, flung out of the now-invisible trebuchet, and a dozen heads turned to watch it drop down toward the river.

  “Postum hasn’t gotten serious yet,” Donna said to him.

  “Maybe it’s an effort to promote a negotiated settlement.”

  “It’ll fail,” she said. “And then we’ll see.”

  Whitey motioned them forward along a low stone wall that edged the churchyard and out into the full sunlight on a sort of levee of piled boulders that ran along the old riverbank. The men and women spread out along the top as if they meant to hold their ground. There were still some muddy areas above the opposite shore in the shadows against the hillside where water had run down in the storm a couple of nights back, but the riverbed itself was baked white, scattered with bare-looking greasewood and sagebrush.

  “Have you been to the Lymons’?” Donna asked him.

  “Just came from there. Nettie’s got something on her mind, but I don’t know what. Where’s Shirley?”

  “At the Temple, which is where I’m supposed to go when this is through. I’ll look in on the Lymons on the way, though.”

  “Thanks.”

  They stood silently for a moment, and then Donna looked at him and smiled. It occurred to him that in a few minutes she’d be gone again. …

  “I want to say thank you for picking up that oilcan,” he said, getting off to a vague and metaphoric start. “I mean …”

  “I know what you mean. Don’t just stand there looking all moony,” she said. “Show me.”

  “Okay, I will.” He kissed her then, smiled at her, and kissed her a second time. Someone clapped nearby, and someone else said something that was probably witty, but he didn’t catch the words. He traced the scar on her face with his finger and said, “Sorry I pushed you into that picnic table. Obviously I was out of my mind.”

  “Obviously,” she said. “But how do I know you’re sane now?”

  He reached behind his neck and pulled his tiki off over his head. Donna bowed slightly, and he slipped it over her head, pulling her ponytail up through the cord. “Being of sound mind,” he said, “I bequeath you this tiki as a token of my undying love.”

  “Nobody’s ever said anything nearly that romantic to me,” she told him, tucking it inside her shirt.

  “The Order of the Tiki is an exclusive club. Now there’re two of us in it.”

  “Good,” she said. “We’ll keep it that way.”

  She kissed him and started to say something more, but just then Whitey shouted, “Here they come!” as the first of the camel riders edged out into the sunlight, reining up his camel, the others following, one by one out of the narrow gorge, massing in the open river bottom. It was the strangest thing Calvin had ever witnessed—robed men on camels fresh from the Arabian Desert or Barnum & Bailey. The riders had rifles slung across their saddle pommels, although so far no one was making any move to use them. Calvin could smell the camels now, a heavy, musky odor, and could hear them snorting. Many of the riders were awkward, clearly novices, and they fought simply to maneuver the edgy camels.

  The ground shook
then, a quick side-to-side, sliding tremor and a noise that might have been a distant muffled explosion or might have been the sound of the earth moving beneath them. Calvin braced himself, waiting for it to worsen. “Earthquake?” he said needlessly to Donna.

  The camels were still coming down out of the gorge, and there were fifteen or sixteen in the riverbed, turning and bumping into each other nervously, as if trying to knock their riders off.

  “Listen,” Donna said, and pointed up the river. There was a rumbling noise now, which grew steadily in volume. Several of the camels bolted helter-skelter down the river, their riders futilely trying to rein them in, two or three falling off into the sand and rock as the camels galloped up onto higher ground. Several others turned back toward the hillside, jostling each other. More riders fell off, their weapons clattering on the stones, the other riders trying to control the camels, which cantered back and forth and sideways.

  “Back up!” Whitey yelled, shading his eyes from the sun with one hand and pointing up the river with the other. “Here she comes!”

  Donna tugged on Calvin’s arm, scrambling up onto higher ground. The air was full of an immense roaring sound now, generated by a head-high wall of green water surging around the nearby bend in what had been the dry riverbed, moving like an express train, sweeping up boulders and dead brush, foaming and roiling. There was a pontoon houseboat, apparently empty, careening madly along on top of the rushing water, followed by a wooden shed tilted over onto its side.

  The tide bore down on what was left of the camels and riders, the camels snorting and shrieking in a mad panic as the wall of water surged through, running swift and deep, tumbling boulders and flattening brush, and for the space of a long minute the Colorado flowed deep and green through its old bed. Then it began to diminish, the high side emptying, until it became a rivulet. Within a few minutes there were simply a few pools of water shining in the sunlight and draining away into the earth. The air was perfectly silent, as if the raging water had deadened it.

  “Moses couldn’t have worked it better,” someone said in a low voice.

  Calvin heard a weird ringing noise now. What the hell? he wondered, and then realized that it was his cell phone. He hauled it out of his pocket and flipped it open.

  “What do you have for me?” a voice said.

  “Have for you?”

  “Miles tells me you approached Nettie about the veil.”

  It was Cousin Hosmer. Calvin nearly burst into laughter. “I was a complete failure,” he said. “I think maybe she doesn’t have it.”

  “You’ve got the IQ of a snipe. Of course she has it”

  “She told me not to worry about it.”

  “Why should you worry about it? Your worries are beside the point. Give her another try. Don’t take no for an answer. Where the hell are you now?”

  “I’m down by the old riverbed. Postum’s men tried to launch an attack on camelback. They rode down out of the hills, and when they were in the middle of the old dry bed, the river turned out of her banks and drowned them, or maybe they drowned. I don’t know. Most of them got washed away.”

  There was dead silence on the other end of the phone—the first time Calvin could remember having said anything that took the wind out of Hosmer’s sails. “You’re telling me you saw this?” the old man asked.

  “With my own eyes. I wouldn’t have believed it otherwise. There was an earthquake, and then a wall of water came down the river in a flood. Swept the pharaoh’s army clean away. The timing was perfect.”

  “I’ll be damned,” the old man said. “I wish to hell I’d seen it. That kind of thing can make a believer out of you.”

  “You’ve got that right Anyway, I’m not going to bother Aunt Nettie anymore. If you want to argue with her about the veil you should give her a ring. Be ready, though. She’s in a mood to say what she thinks.”

  Calvin flipped his phone shut. “I’m running late,” he said to Donna.

  “Take care of yourself,” she said, kissing him one last time. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

  FINDING THE RANGE

  From the vantage point of Taber’s dock Calvin could see the two catapults set up. They appeared to be spindly things—long levers bent across a fulcrum, with a heavy weight attached to the shorter, lower end. As he watched, the weighted end raised slowly skyward. The ballast, whatever it was—iron, probably—looked to be the size of a man, maybe larger. What would such a thing weigh? Half a ton? It hung there suspended for a time while they loaded the missile into the sling at the other end, and then with a movement that was nearly too quick to follow, the ballast fell and the sling shot forward, and the missile was airborne. It flew upward until it was miniaturized, like a high fly ball over a baseball diamond, and then it plummeted downward, spiraling lazily, growing in size. Calvin watched it with a sense of wonder until he realized that it would fall on this side of the river—way too close for comfort, and he moved back up the dock, watching it land in the middle of the bay, sending a geyser of water into the air. If they were looking for the range, they had found it.

  Taber approached, wearing a pocket watch with a big chain, contrary to usual New Cyprus policy. “Railroad chronometer,” he said to Calvin. “Swedish model. We’ve got a two-piece set of them. We take them out when we need to, like right now. I’ll give you a little display of its accuracy in a moment. You’ll get a kick out of it. We’ve got about two and a half minutes, which should do it, since it takes them about that long to launch those damned stones.”

  “Two and a half minutes till what?” Calvin asked.

  “Till the display, like I was telling you. What did you make of the river turning out of its bed like that?”

  “You saw it?”

  “Oh, yes. Might have been the earthquake that did it. The camera crew bottomed out. The river ran dry. Then just like that it was flowing again. Washed right over the damned camera boat. Cleared the deck. She’s still moored out there, but there’s no one left on board, although they’ve still got the cameras rolling on those towers they built on the far shore.” He laughed out loud, and then looked at his watch. “One minute, thirty seconds now,” he said. “Bob Postum is wowing them with those two trebuchets, so we want to have our turn. Now if you look hard down toward the base of that lower machine,” he said, “you can see that they’ve got a Humvee parked there on the turnout. That’s what they’re using to winch that ballast box up. Look there! They’re connecting her to the winch.”

  Calvin watched through the binoculars, spotting the small figure of Bob Postum standing behind the trebuchet with his arms crossed. Calvin wondered whether a marksman with a high-powered rifle couldn’t simply shoot the man dead right there on the mountainside and end this whole thing before someone else was hurt—someone besides Postum.

  “There’s some power in those Humvees,” Taber said appreciatively. “Fifteen seconds! Here we go! Ten, nine, eight—watch it now! Don’t look away! Two, one!”

  For a moment nothing changed. The ballast box rose a couple of more feet, nearly to the top, while the slingend dipped. But then the ground shook, as if from another small earthquake, and the hillside twenty feet below the trebuchet blew outward in a silent cloud of rock and dust. A second later there was the muffled sound of the explosion, and then the roar of the avalanche.

  Calvin could see men falling to the ground and others scrambling up the hill to safer ground. The Humvee lurched forward, still winched to the trebuchet, the driver evidently trying to put some distance between him and the hillside. The rocking ballast jerked the trebuchet sideways, though, and the entire machine slammed down onto the top of the Humvee, burying it in a tangle of wooden spars.

  The edge of the cliff appeared to be crawling now, collapsing in on itself, the Humvee and the trebuchet sliding with it, picking up speed until what looked to be several acres of hillside avalanched downward in a second cloud of rock and dust. When the wind whirled the dust away, it was evident that t
he turnout was gone, the road destroyed. The second trebuchet still stood in place, although it was canted forward and had slipped around sideways. Calvin watched it, willing it to fall, but very quickly a couple of men were tying lines to it, setting up to drag it away from the brink.

  “There’s the driver,” Taber said, pointing, and Calvin saw a man crawling up the hillside, moving like a big, slow lizard. Somehow he had jumped or fallen out of the Humvee. A tire-size rock suddenly let loose above his head and bounded downward, right over him, starting another small avalanche. He held on for a moment and then started crawling again.

  “Hell,” Taber muttered.

  “What?” Calvin asked. “Did we want him dead?”

  “No, we want that second trebuchet.”

  “Leastways they can’t drive down into town now,” Calvin said.

  “And we can’t drive out. But you can bet they’ll quit playing around now. They made their point and now we’ve made ours, although it fell a little short. They’ll try harder with that second machine.”

  The remaining trebuchet lurched sideways, seeming to square itself with the hillside as they dragged it upward and away from the precipice, towing it with a vehicle that was hidden from view. And in a moment it was apparently on solid ground again, and they were pounding away at the corners of the base with sledgehammers—knocking in wedges, probably, to steady and level it.

  “This is it,” Taber said. “Let’s go inside.”

  Calvin and Taber went back up the dock and in through a big wooden sliding door. Taber’s house was the same vintage as the Lymons’ house, although it had a better view downriver, and it looked down on the Temple Bar, so that they could see over the ramparts now at the men still working, going in and out across the bridge. There were heavy steel shutters over the Temple windows, and the wooden door had been barricaded with a steel panel.