The Knights of the Cornerstone (28 page)

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.”

A
nother 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.”

F
rom 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?”