“I’ve got the wine,” he whispered. “Let’s esplitavo.”
“God,” said Angelica, “back up that chimney?”
The dirt floor shook then, and Cochran was so careful not to drop the bottle that he fell to his knees cradling it. Plumtree had let the lighter snap off, and when she flicked it on again there were vertical streaks of dust sifting in the air below the stone ceiling. And through the arch behind them came the echoing rattle of bricks and iron clattering down in the old chimney shaft.
“No,” said a new, deep voice.
Again Plumtree let the lighter go out—and when the flint-wheel had stutteringly lit the flame again, Cochran jumped in surprise to see a tall, broad-shouldered black man standing in the open arch. Even in the frail lighter glow, this newcomer seemed solider than Cochran and his companions—glossier because of reflecting the light more strongly, his feet more of a weight on the dirt floor, the very air seeming to rebound more helplessly from his unyielding surfaces.
The man, if it was a man and not some sort of elemental spirit, was wearing a spotted animal skin like a toga, and leafy vines were tangled in his long braids; in his hand was a staff wrapped with vines and capped with a pinecone.
“I am the guardian of the god’s blood,” the figure said. The voice shook the streaks of dust that hung in the air, and his breath seemed to carry the faint music and the forest smells. “Did you think there would be no guard? Nobody takes the god’s blood out of the tabernade past me. He shifted the staff to his right hand, and it gleamed in the frail light now, for it had become a long, curving sword, and muscles flexed in the strong black arm to hold the weapon’s evident new weight.
“Well I say goddamn!“ burst out Plumtree. The lighter was jiggling wildly in her hand, and Angelica took it from her and re-lit it.
“The,” said Pete Sullivan quickly, “the god wants us to take the wine. He led us here, to get it!”
“So these others claimed” said the black man, rolling his obsidian head around at the bones without looking away from the four intruders. “Did you think there would be no guard? Nobody takes the god’s blood out of the tabernacle past me” When he inhaled, Cochran yawned nervously, expecting his eardrums to pop.
Cochran held up the back of his right hand. “This is the god’s mark, given to me when I put out my hand to save the god’s vine from being cut back!” He made a fist. “The god led me into this room, by this hand, half a minute ago!”
“So these others claimed,” repeated the tall black man, again rocking his head.
Cochran realized that the figure was not listening to what they said; perhaps didn’t even have the capacity to understand objections. It was some kind of idiot genius loci, an apparently unalterable part of the gods math, as implacable and unreasoning as an electrified fence. With his free hand Cochran reached around under the back of his windbreaker and, though hollowly aware that the “antique revolver” had apparently been of no use to one long-ago intruder, nevertheless unsnapped his holster.
Beside him, Plumtree shivered.
“If I—put the wine back—” Cochran began hoarsely.
All at once the supernatural guard stamped far forward into the room, sweeping the sword in a fast horizontal arc—the blade whistled as it split the quivering air—
—Hopping back, Cochran snatched the Pachmayr grip and yanked the gun out of the holster, and despairingly pointed the muzzle into the center of the broad chest—
And in the same instant Plumtree stepped forward so that a backswing from the sword or a shot from the gun would hit her; and Mammy Pleasant’s imperious voice said, “Bacchus!”
The curved sword blade paused behind the black man’s left shoulder like the rising crescent moon behind a mountain, and Cochran tipped the gun barrel upward.
“Don’t you recognize me, Bacchus?” spoke the old woman’s voice from Plumtree’s mouth. ‘I’m Mary Ellen Pleasant, the poor old woman you took custody of, in ’99! You were there when I died, five years later—and you were there too when the god came breaking down Yerba Buena for my ghost, three Easters after that.”
“I—do recognize you,” said the solid black figure.
“Am I, like you, a totally surrendered servant of the god?”
“You are.”
“I am,” said Pleasant as Plumtree’s blond head nodded. “And I tell you that the god has sent me to fetch out this wine, and bring it to the king.” Without looking away from the creature’s eyes, she held out one hand toward Cochran. He carefully laid the bottle in her palm.
For several long seconds the tall black figure stood motionless. Cochran kept the gun pointed at the ceiling but didn’t take his finger out of the trigger guard.
Then the apparition tossed the sword through the eddying air to its left hand, and the sword again became a vine-wrapped staff with a pinecone on it.
The figure waved it and said, “Pass.”
Again the ground shook, and this time the bottles on the walls clinked and clicked like castanets and temple bells, and didn’t stop rattling; and Cochran didn’t fall to his knees this time, but just crouched like a surfer to keep his balance on the gyrating floor.
While the floor was still shifting, Plumtree turned and began dancing like a tightrope-walker into the darkness at the far end of the cellar, away from the arch and the supernatural guard. Angelica let the lighter go out as she went hopping, and skipping after her, and Pete and Cochran were bounding along at her heels.
And, over the bass drumming of the earth, Cochran thought as he ran that he could hear distant pipes playing, unless that was just some whistling overtone of his panicky panting breath as he followed the sounds of Pete and Angelica through the rocking pitch blackness.
SOON THEY were able to see slanting gray light ahead of them and hear the crackle of rain, and when they had hurried to the muddy end of the tunnel, and climbed up over tumbled masonry out onto wet grass in a battering showery wind, they could see that they were in some kind of park. Cochran hastily shoved his revolver back into its holster, and pulled the back of his windbreaker down over it.
The rain quickly made runny black mud of the soot that smeared their backs and knees, and by unspoken agreement they didn’t run for the shelter of the corrugated metal roof over some nearby picnic tables, but plodded through the cleansing shower straight across the grass toward the nearest visible road.
When Plumtree glanced at him, Cochran saw that she was Cody again. “I guess I look as shitty as you do,” she said through chattering teeth.
“I guess you do,” he said stolidly.
She touched the angular bulge at the bottom of the zipped leather jacket, right over her belt, and Cochran realized that it must be the gold box from the chimney. “I swear I can feel her kicking in there,” she said.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Hades and Dionysus, for whom they go mad and rage, are one and the same.
—Heraclitus
THE road proved to be called Tisch Way, and they trudged a quarter of a mile west along its gravel shoulder through the downpour to the intersection of Winchester Boulevard, with the rushing lanes of the 280 visible now just past a chain-link fence on the other side of the road.