The Drowned World Part 7

In a wild scramble the party dissolved, with the exception of Beatrice and Kerans everyone raced off across the square. Shotguns slammed left and right, and Bodkin paused uncertainly, the fuse wire sparking about his legs. Then he turned and began to edge back along the barrage.

Kerans jumped to his feet and ran after the others. As he reached the perimeter wall star-sh.e.l.ls were bursting into the air, spitting magnesium fragments across the roadway. Strangman and the Admiral were leaping up a fire escape, Big Caesar's shotgun slamming out over their heads. Bodkin had left the bomb in the centre of the dam and was racing away over the rooftops.

Straddling the final ledge, Strangman leapt up on to the barrage, in a dozen strides reached the bomb and kicked it out into the centre of the creek. As the splash died away a cheer of approval went up from those below. Catching his breath, Strangman b.u.t.toned his jacket, then slipped a short-barreled.38 from his shoulder holster. A thin smile glittered on his face. Whipping on the cries of his followers, he set out after Bodkin as he scaled his way painfully up the pontoon of the testing station.

Kerans listened numbly to the final shots, remembering Bodkin's warning and the necessity, for which he bore him no grudge as he had chosen to ignore it, of being swept away himself with Strangman and his crew. He walked slowly back to the square, where Beatrice still sat on the heap of cushions, the alligator head on the ground in front of her. As he reached her he heard the footsteps behind him slowing menacingly, a strange silence fall over the pack.

He swung around to see Strangman saunter forward, a smirk twisting his lips. Big Caesar and the Admiral were at his shoulder, their shotguns exchanged for machetes. The rest of the crew fanned out in a loose semi-circle, watching expectantly, obviously pleased to see Kerans, the aloof medicine-man of a rival juju, get his just deserts.

"That was rather stupid of Bodkin, don't you think, Doctor? Dangerous too, as a matter of fact. We could d.a.m.n nearly have all been drowned." Strangman paused a few feet from Kerans, eyeing him moodily. "You knew Bodkin pretty well, I'm surprised you didn't antic.i.p.ate that. I don't know whether I should take any more chances with mad biologists."

He was about to gesture to Big Caesar when Beatrice jumped to her feet and rushed over to Strangman.

"Strangman! For heaven's sake, one's enough. Stop it, we won't hurt you! Look, you can have all these!"

With a wrench she unclasped the ma.s.s of necklaces, tore the tiaras from her hair and flung them at Strangman. Snarling with anger, Strangman kicked them into the gutter, and Big Caesar stepped past her, the machete swinging upward.

"Strangman!" Beatrice threw herself at Strangman, stumbled and almost dragged him to the ground by his lapels. "You white devil, can't you leave us alone?"

Strangman twisted her away, breath seething through his clenched teeth. He gazed wildly at the disheveled woman down on her knees among the jewels, and was about to wave Big Caesar on when a sudden intention tremor flickered across his right cheek. He slapped at it with his open hand, trying to brush it away like a fly, then flexed his facial muscles in an ugly grimace, unable to master the spasm. For a moment his face was twisted in a grotesque gape, like a man struggling in lock-jaw. Aware of his master's indecision, Big Caesar hesitated, and Kerans moved backwards into the shadows under the depot ship.

"All right! G.o.d, what a...!" Strangman muttered something thickly to himself and straightened his jacket, the point grudgingly conceded. The tic had faded. He nodded slowly at Beatrice, as if warning her that any future intercessions would be ignored, then barked sharply at Big Caesar. The machetes were tossed aside, but before Beatrice could protest again the entire pack threw itself on Kerans with a series of whoops and yells, hands flailing and clapping.

Kerans tried to sidestep them, uncertain from the circle of grinning faces whether this was merely some elaborate form of horseplay intended to discharge the tension that Bodkin's murder had generated, and at the same time administer a salutary reproof. He skipped around Strangman's divan as the pack closed in, found his escape blocked by the Admiral, who was feinting from side to side in his white tennis shoes like a dancer. Suddenly he sprang forwards and kicked Kerans' feet from under him. Kerans sat down heavily on the divan, and a dozen, oily brown-skinned arms seized him around the neck and shoulders and somersaulted him backwards onto the cobbled ground. He struggled helplessly to free himself, had a glimpse through the panting bodies of Strangman and Beatrice watching from the distance. Taking her arm, Strangman drew her firmly towards the gangway.

Then a large silk cushion was stuffed into Kerans' face, and hard palms began to pound a drum-beat across the back of his neck.

12 - The Feast of Skulls

"The Feast of Skulls!"

Goblet raised in the flare-light, its amber contents spilling over his suit, Strangman let out an exultant shout, with a flourish leapt down from the fountain as the tumbrel cart swerved across the cobbled square. Propelled by six sweating, bare-chested sailors bent double between its shafts, it rattled and jolted through the quickening embers of the charcoal fires, a dozen hands helping it on its way, and to a final accelerating crescendo on the drums struck the edge of the dais and tipped its white gleaming cargo across the boards at Kerans' feet. Immediately a chanting circle formed around him, hands beat out an excited rantando, white teeth flashed and snapped at the air like demoniac dice, hips swiveled and heels stamped. The Admiral dived forward and cleared a way through the whirling torsos, and Big Caesar, a steel trident held in front of him with a huge bale of red kelp and fucus transfixed on its barbs, lurched onto the dais and with a grunting heave tossed the dripping fronds into the air over the throne.

Kerans swayed forward helplessly as the sweet, acrid weeds cascaded around his head and shoulders, the lights of the dancing flares reflected in the gilt arm-rests of the throne. As the rhythm of the drums beat around him, almost exorcising the deeper pulse booming faintly in the base of his mind, he let his weight hang against the bloodied thongs around his wrists, indifferent to the pain as he sank in and out of consciousness. At his feet, at the base of the throne, the broken white harvest of bones gleamed with their ivory whiteness: slender tibias and femurs, scapulas like worn trowels, a mesh of ribs and vertebrae, even two lolling skulls. The light flickered across their bald pates and winked in the empty eye sockets, leaping from the bowls of kerosene borne by the corridor of statues which led towards the throne across the square. The dancers had formed themselves into a long undulating line, and with Strangman prancing at their head began to weave in and out of the marble nymphs, the drummers around the fires pivoting in their seats to follow their progress.

Given a momentary respite as they circled the square, Kerans lolled against the velvet back-rest, pulling automatically at his clamped wrists. The kelp trailed around his neck and shoulders, falling over his eyes from the tin crown Strangman had clamped to his brow. Almost dry, the kelp exuded its sweaty stench, and covered his arms so that only a few ragged strips of his dinner jacket were visible. At the edge of the dais, beyond the litter of bones and rum bottles, were more drifts of the weed, and a debris of conches and dismembered star-fish with which they had pelted him before finding the mausoleum.

Twenty feet behind him towered the dark bulk of the depot ship, a few lights still burning on its decks. For two nights the parties had continued, the tempo mounting hour by hour, Strangman apparently determined to exhaust his crew. Kerans drifted helplessly in a half-conscious reverie, his pain dulled by the rum forced down his throat (evidently the final indignity, drowning Neptune in an even more magical and potent sea), mild concussion cloaking the scene before him in a mist of blood and scotomata. Dimly he was aware of his torn wrists and lacerated body, but he sat patiently, stoically acting out the role of Neptune into which he had been cast, accepting the refuse and abuse heaped upon him as the crew discharged their fear and hatred of the sea. In that role, too, or its caricature which he performed, lay his only safety. Whatever hi motives, Strangman still seemed reluctant to kill him, and the crew reflected this hesitation, always disguising their insults and tortures res in the form of grotesque and hilarious jokes, protecting themselves when they pelted him with sea-weed by half-pretending to make an offering to an idol.

The snake of dancers reappeared and formed itself into a chanting circle around him. Strangman detached himself from its centre-he was obviously reluctant to come too close to Kerans, perhaps afraid that the bleeding wrists and forehead would make him realise the crudity of the j.a.pe-and Big Caesar came forward, his huge k.n.o.bbed face like an inflamed hippo's. Lumbering about to the rhythm of the bongos, he selected a skull and femur from the pile of bones around the throne, began to beat out a tattoo for Kerans, tapping the varying thicknesses of the temporal and occipital lobes to pick out a crude cranial octave. Several others joined in, and with a rattle of femur and tibia, radius and ulna, a mad dance of the bones ensued. Weakly, only half aware of the grinning, insulting faces pressed to within a foot or two of his own, Kerans waited for this to subside, then leaned back and tried to shield his eyes as a salvo of star-sh.e.l.ls burst overhead and for a moment illuminated the depot ship and the surrounding buildings. This signaled the end of the festivity and the start of another night's work. With a shout, Strangman and the Admiral pulled apart the dancing group. The cart was hauled away, metal rims ringing over the cobbles, and the kerosene flares were extinguished. Within a minute the square was dark and empty, a few gutted fires sputtering among the cushions and drums, intermittently reflected in the gilt limbs of the throne and the white bones encircling it.

Now and then, at intervals through the night, a small group of looters would reappear, wheeling their booty in front of them, a bronze statue or a section of portico, hoist them into the ship and then vanish again, ignoring the motionless figure hunched on the throne among the shadows. By now Kerans was asleep, unaware of his fatigue and hunger, waking for a few minutes before dawn at the coolest ebb of the night to shout for Beatrice. He had not seen her since his capture after Bodkin's death, and a.s.sumed that Strangman had locked her away within the depot ship.

At last, after the exploding night with its bravura of drums and star-sh.e.l.ls, the dawn lifted over the shadow-filled square, drawing behind it the immense golden canopy of the sun. Within an hour the square and the drained streets around it were silent, only & distant whir of an air-conditioner in the depot ship reminding Kerans that he was not alone. Somehow, by a manifest miracle, had survived the previous day, sitting out unprotected in the full noon heat, shaded by only the cloak of weeds trailing from his crown. Like a stranded Neptune, he looked out from this make shift pavilion of sea weed at the carpet of brilliant light covering the bones and garbage. Once he had been aware of a hatchway opening onto a deck above, and sensed that Strangman had come from his cabin to observe him-a few minutes later several buckets of icy water were tossed down onto him. He sipped feverishly the cold drops falling from the weeds into his mouth like frozen pearls. Immediately afterwards he sank off into a profound torpor, waking after dusk just before the night's festivities were to begin.

Then Strangman had come down in his pressed white suit and examined him critically, in a strange access of pity suddenly murmured: "Kerans, you're still alive, how do you do it?"

It was this remark which sustained him through the second day, when the white carpet at noon lay over the square in incandescent layers a few inches apart, like the planes of parallel universes crystallised Out of the continuum by the immense heat. Across his skin the air burned like a flame. He stared listlessly at the marble statues, and thought of Hardman, moving through the pillars of light on his way towards the mouth of the sun, disappearing over the dunes of luminous ash. The same power which saved Hardman seemed to have revealed itself within Kerans, in some way adjusting his metabolism so that he could survive the unbroken heat. Still he was watched from the deck above. Once a large salamander three feet long had darted among the bones towards him, its insane teeth like flints of obsidian flexing slowly as it scented Kerans, and a single shot had roared out from the deck, smashing the lizard into a writhing bloodied mess at his feet.

Like the reptiles which sat motionlessly in the sunlight, he waited patiently for the day to end.

Again Strangman seemed baffled to find him, swaying in an exhausted delirium but still alive. A flicker of nervousness creased his mouth, and he glanced irritably at Big Caesar and the crew waiting around the dais in the torchlight, apparently as surprised as himself. When Strangman began to whoop and shout for drums the response was markedly less prompt.

Determined to break Kerans' power for once and for all, Strangman ordered two additional casks of rum lowered from the depot ship, hoping to drive from his men's minds their unconscious fear of Kerans and the paternal guardian of the sea he now symbolised. Soon the square was filled with noisy stumbling figures, tipping their jugs and bottles to their lips, tap dancing on the drum skins. Accompanied by the Admiral, Strangman moved swiftly from one Party to another, inciting them to further acts of extravagance. Big Caesar donned the alligator head and tottered about the square on his knees, a whooping troupe of drummers behind him.

Wearily Kerans waited for the climax. At Strangman's instructions the throne was lifted from the dais and lashed to the cart Kerans lay back limply against the head-rest, looking up at the dark flanks of the buildings as Big Caesar heaped the bones and sea-weed around his feet. With a shout from Strangman the drunken procession set off, a dozen men fighting to get between the shafts of the tumbrel, throwing it from left to right across the square and knocking down two of the statues. Amid a chorus of excited orders from Strangman and the Admiral, who raced along beside the wheels, trying helplessly to restrain it, the cart rapidly gathered speed and veered away into a side-street, careened along the pavement before demolishing a rusty lamp-standard. Bludgeoning the curly pates of the men around him with his ma.s.sive fists, Big Caesar fought his way to the front of the shafts, seized one in each hand and enforced a more leisurely progress.

High above their heads, Kerans sat in the rocking throne, the cool air slowly reviving him. He watched the ceremony below with semi-conscious detachment, aware that they were moving systematically down every street in the drained lagoon, almost as if he were an abducted Neptune forced against his will to sanctify those sections of the drowned city which had been stolen from him by Strangman and reclaimed.

But gradually, as the exertion of pulling the cart cleared their heads and made them move in step, the men between the shafts began to sing what sounded like the lay of an old Haitian cargo cult, a deep crooning melody that again underlined their ambivalent att.i.tude towards Kerans. In an effort to re-establish the real purpose of the outing, Strangman began to shout and brandish his flare pistol, after a short scrimmage made them reverse the direction of the cart so that they pushed it instead of pulled. As they pa.s.sed the planetarium Big Caesar leapt up on to the cart, clinging to the throne like an immense ape, picked up the alligator's head and clamped it down over Kerans' shoulders.

Blinded and almost suffocated by the foetid stench of the crudely skinned hide, Kerans felt himself flung helplessly from side to side as the tumbrel gained speed again. The men between the shafts, unaware of their direction, raced along the street, panting after Strangman and the Admiral, Big Caesar pursuing them with a rain of blows and kicks. Almost out of control, the cart swerved and lurched, narrowly missed wrecking itself on a traffic island, then straightened up and accelerated down an open stretch of roadway. As they neared a corner Strangman suddenly shouted to Big Caesar, without looking the huge mulatto flung his weight on the righthand shaft and the cart pivoted and bounded up on to the sidewalk For fifty yards it raced along helplessly, several of the men tripping over each other's legs and falling to the ground, then in a scream of axle iron and timber collided with the wall and pitched onto its side.

Torn from its mooring, the throne was flung half-way across the street into a low mud bank. Kerans lay face downwards, his impact with the ground softened by the damp silt, freed of the alligator head but still trapped in his seat. Two or three of the crew were spreadeagled around him and picked themselves up, and an upended wheel of the cart rumbled slowly in the air.

Staggering helplessly with laughter, Strangman slapped Big Caesar and the Admiral on the back, soon had the rest of the crew jabbering excitedly to each other. They gathered around the wrecked cart, then went over to look at the upturned throne. Strangman rested one foot upon it majestically, rocking the shattered headrest. Holding the pose long enough to convince his followers that Kerans' power was now truly spent, he bolstered his flare pistol and ran away down the street, beckoning the others after him. With a chorus of jeers and shouts, the pack made off.

Pinioned below the inverted throne, Kerans stirred painfully. His head and right shoulder were half buried in the bank of caking silt. He flexed his wrists against the loosened thongs, but they were still too tight for him to free his hands.

Shifting his weight on to his shoulders, he tried to pull the throne over by his arms, then noticed that the left-hand arm-rest had snapped from its vertical support. Slowly he pressed his blunted fingers under the arm-rest and began to work the thongs loop by loop over the ragged stump of the support protruding from the mortise joint.

When his hand freed itself, he let it fall limply to the ground, then ma.s.saged his bruised lips and cheeks, and kneaded the stiffened muscles of his chest and stomach. He twisted himself onto his side and picked at the knot clamping his right wrist to the other rest, in the brief flares of light from the star-sh.e.l.ls loosened the thongs and freed himself.

For five minutes he lay inertly under the dark hulk of the throne, listening to the distant voices recede into the alleys beyond the depot ship. Gradually the flares faded, and the street became a silent canyon, the rooftops faintly illuminated by the fading phosph.o.r.escent glow of the dying animalcula, which cast a web-like silver veil over the drained buildings and turned them into the expiring corner of an ancient spectral city.

Crawling from below the throne, he rose uncertainly to his feet, stumbled across the sidewalk and leaned against the wall, his head pounding from the exertion. He pressed his face against the cool still-damp stone, staring down the street into which Strangman and his men had disappeared.

Abruptly, before his eyes closed involuntarily, he saw two figures approaching, one familiarly white-suited, the other tall and bowshouldered, walking swiftly down the street towards him.

"Strangman...!" Kerans whispered. His fingers gripped the loose mortar, and he stiffened into the shadows which covered the wall. The two men were a hundred yards away, but he could see Strangman's brisk, purposive stride, Big Caesar's loping step behind him. Something gleamed as it caught a ray of light shining down an intersection, a stab of silver that swung from Big Caesar's hand.

Searching the darkness, Kerans edged along the wall, almost cut his hands on a ragged angle of plate gla.s.s in a store window. A few yards away was the entrance to a large arcade, running through the block until it joined a parallel street fifty yards to the west. Black silt a foot deep covered its floor, and Kerans crouched down as he climbed the shallow steps, then ran slowly through the dark tunnel to the far end of the arcade, the soft silt m.u.f.fling his limping footsteps.

He waited behind a pillar at the rear entrance, steadying himself as Strangman and Big Caesar reached the throne. The machete in the mulatto's giant hand seemed little more than a razor. Strang man raised one hand warningly before touching the throne. Carefully he scanned the streets and walls of windows, his lean white jaw illuminated in the moonlight. Then he gestured sharply at Big Caesar and kicked the throne over with his foot.

As their oaths rang out into the air, Kerans drew himself back behind the pillar, then tiptoed quickly across the street towards a narrow alleyway that ran off into the labyrinthine nexus of the university quarter.

Half an hour later he took up his position on the top floor of a fifteen-storey office block that formed part of the perimeter wall of the lagoon. A narrow balcony ringed the suite of offices, at its rear leading to a fire escape that trailed off across the lower roofs into the jungle beyond, finally swallowed by the giant retaining banks of silt. Thin pools of water which had condensed from the afternoon heat mists lay across the plastic floors, and after climbing the central stairwell Kerans lay down and bathed his face and mouth in the cool liquid, slowly soothing his wounded wrists.

No search party came after him. Rather than concede complete defeat-the only interpretation most of the crew would put upon Kerans' disappearance, Strangman had evidently decided to accept his escape as a fait accompli and forget him, a.s.suming that Kerans would set sail for the lagoons in the south. Through the night the looting parties continued to rove the streets, each succeeding find signallised by a display of rockets and pyrotechnics.

Kerans rested until dawn, lying in a pool of water, letting it soak through the ragged strips of the silk dinner jacket that still clung to him, washing away the stench of the sea-weed and silt. An hour before dawn he pulled himself to his feet, tore off his jacket and shirt and stuffed them down a crack in the wall. He unscrewed a gla.s.s light bracket that was intact, carefully scooped up the water from one of the clean pools on the floor below. He had collected about a quart by the time the sun was lifting over the eastern perimeter of the lagoon. Two corridors down he trapped a small lizard in the washroom, killed it with a loose brick. He lit a fire of tinder with a lens of chipped gla.s.s, roasted the filets of dark stringy meat until they were tender. The small steaks melted in his cracked mouth with the exquisite tenderness of warm fat. Recovering his strength, he climbed back to the top floor and retired to a service cubicle behind the elevator shaft. After wedging the door with a few lengths of rusty banister rail, he settled down in the corner and waited for the evening.

The last sunlight was fading over the water as Kerans paddled the raft below the fronds of the fern trees dipping into the water around the lagoon, the blood and copper bronzes of the afternoon sun giving way to deep violets and indigo. Overhead the sky was an immense funnel of sapphire and purple, fantasticated whorls of coral cloud marking the descent of the sun like baroque vapour trails. A slack oily swell disturbed the surface of the lagoon, the water clinging to the leaves of the ferns like translucent wax. A hundred yards away it slapped lazily against the shattered remains of the jetty below the Ritz, throwing up a few broken spars of timber. Still restrained by the loose net of mooring lines, the fifty-gallon drums floated together like a group of hump-backed alligators. Luckily the alligators Strangman had posted around the lagoon were still in their nests among the buildings, or had dispersed into the neighbouring creeks in search of food as the iguanas retreated before them.

Kerans paused before paddling out across the exposed face of the derelict bank adjacent to the Ritz, scanning the sh.o.r.eline and the exit creek for any of Strangman's sentries. The concentration needed to build the raft from two galvanised iron water tanks had almost drained his brain, and he waited carefully before pushing on. As he neared the jetty he saw that the mooring lines had been slashed deliberately, the wooden box frame crushed by some heavy water-craft, probably the hydroplane, which Strangman had berthed in the central lagoon.

Wedging the raft between two of the floating drums, where it floated un.o.btrusively among the shifting debris, Kerans pulled himself up on to the balcony and stepped over the window ledge into the hotel. Quickly he made his way up the staircase, following the trail of huge blurred footprints on the blue carpet mould which led down from the roof.

The penthouse had been wrecked. As he opened the outer wooden door into the suite a ragged gla.s.s panel of the interior air-seal fell to the floor at his feet. Someone had moved through the rooms in a berserk frenzy of violence, systematically smashing everything within sight. The Louis Quinze furniture had been hacked to pieces, dismembered legs and arms hurled through the internal gla.s.s walls. The carpeting over the floor lay in a tangle of long torn strips, even the cord underlay ripped apart so that the floor seals could be hacked and breached. Its legs lopped, the cabinet of the desk lay in two divided sections, the crocodile skin pared from its edges. Books were scattered underfoot, many of them slashed cleanly into two. A rain of blows had fallen upon the mantelpiece, huge gouges cut into its gilt lip, and enormous stars of frosted gla.s.s and silverscreen burst across the mirror like frozen explosions.

Stepping over the litter, Kerans ventured briefly onto the terrace, where the wire mesh of the mosquito screen had been ballooned outwards until it burst. The beach chairs where he had lain for so many months were chopped to matchwood.

As he expected, the decoy safe behind the desk had been sprung, its door open on the empty vault. Kerans went into the bedroom, a faint smile crossing his face when he realised that Strangman's housebreakers had failed to find the deep safe behind the bedroom mirror over the escritoire. The dented cylinder of the bra.s.s compa.s.s he had idly stolen from the base, still pointing to its talismanic south, lay on the floor below the small circular mirror, which it had shattered into a pattern like a magnified snow-flake. Kerans carefully rotated the rococo frame, released the hinge and drew it back to reveal the unbreached dial of the safe.

Darkness fell from the air, throwing long shadows into the suite as Kerans' fingers raced through the tumblers. With a relieved intake of breath he pulled back the door, quickly slipped out the heavy Colt.45 and its carton of slugs. He sat down on the wrecked bed and tore the seals off the carton, then loaded the chamber, weighing the ma.s.sive black weapon in his hand. He emptied the carton and filled his pockets with the slugs, then tightened his belt and went back into the lounge.

As he surveyed the room, he realised that by a curious paradox he bore Strangman little malice for wrecking the suite. In a sense its destruction, and with it all his memories of the lagoon, merely underlined something he had been tacitly ignoring for some time, and which Strangman's arrival, and all it implied, should have made him accept-the need to abandon the lagoon and move southwards. His time there had outlived itself, and the air-sealed suite with its constant temperature and humidity, its supplies of fuel and food, were nothing more than an encapsulated form of his previous environment, to which he had clung like a reluctant embryo to its yoke sac. The shattering of this sh.e.l.l, like the piercing doubts about his true unconscious motives set off by his near drowning in the planetarium, was the necessary spur to action, to his emergence into the brighter day of the interior, archaeopsychic sun. Now he would have to go forward. Both the past, represented by Riggs, and the present contained within the demolished penthouse, no longer offered a viable existence. His commitment to the future, so far one of choice and plagued by so many doubts and hesitations, was now absolute.

In the darkness the sleek curved hull of the depot ship rose into the air like the velvet belly of a stranded whale. Kerans crouched down in the shadow of the stern paddle, his lean bronzed body merging him into the background. He hid in the narrow interval between two of the blades, each a riveted metal slab fifteen feet wide and four feet deep, peering through the coconut-sized links of the drive chain. It was shortly before midnight, and the last of the foraging parties was leaving the gangway, the sailors, bottle in one hand and machete in the other, lurching off across the square. The cobbles were littered with burst cushions and bongo drums, bones and burnt-out embers, all kicked about in a careless melee.

Kerans waited until the last of the group made their way off among the streets, then stood up and secured the Colt in his belt. Far away, on the opposite side of the lagoon, was Beatrice's apartment, its windows in darkness, the light on the pylon extinguished. Kerans had considered climbing the stairs to the top floor, but safely a.s.sumed that Beatrice would be aboard the depot ship, an unwilling house-guest of Strangman.

Overhead a figure appeared at the rail, then withdrew. Distantly a voice shouted something, another replied from the bridge. A hatchway from the galley opened and a pail-full of filthy slops were tossed down into the square. Already a substantial pool of abyssal fluid had gathered under the ship, soon it would fill the lagoon and the ship would float away again on a sea of its own excrement.

Ducking under the band of the drive chain, Kerans stepped up onto the lowest blade, quickly pulled himself hand over hand up this curved radial ladder. The paddle creaked slightly, rotating a few inches under his weight as the slack in the drive chain was taken in. At the top he transferred to the steel boom which carried the paddle axle. Steadying himself on the overhead guy-rope controlling the blade sc.r.a.per, he crawled slowly along the foot-wide boom, then stood up and climbed over the pa.s.senger rail into the small well of the flag-deck. A narrow companionway led up diagonally to the observation deck. Kerans scaled it soundlessly, pausing as he pa.s.sed the two intervening decks in case any sailor with a hangover was moon-gazing at the rail.

Hiding in the lee of a white-painted gig berthed on the deck, Kerans moved forward, ducking from one ventilator to the next, reached a rusty winch which stood a few feet from the dining table where Strangman had entertained them. The table had been stripped, the divans and chesterfield drawn up in a row below the giant painting still propped against the funnels.

Voices sounded below again, and the gangway creaked as a last departure stepped down into the square. In the distance, over the rooftops, a signal flare glowed briefly against the chimney stacks. As it faded Kerans stood up and walked past the painting towards the hatchway hidden behind it.

Suddenly he stopped, hand reaching for the b.u.t.t of the Colt. Little more than fifteen feet away from him, on the berthing wing of the bridge, the red end of a cheroot glowed in the darkness, apparently detached from any corporeal form. Poised on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet, and unable to either move forward or withdraw, Kerans searched the darkness around the glow, then picked out the white brim of the Admiral's peaked cap. A moment later, as he inhaled contentedly on the cheroot, the gleam of his eyes reflected the glowing tip.

While the men below crossed the square, the Admiral turned and surveyed the observation deck. Over the edge of the wooden rail Kerans could see the b.u.t.t of a shotgun cradled loosely in his elbow. The cheroot swiveled to one side of his mouth and a cone of white smoke dispersed in the air like silver dust. For a full two or three seconds he looked straight at Kerans, silhouetted in the darkness against the ma.s.s of figures on the canvas, but he gave no hint of recognition, apparently a.s.suming that Kerans was part of the composition. Then he strolled slowly into the bridge-house.

Picking each footstep carefully, Kerans advanced to the edge of the painting, then ducked into the shadows behind it. A fan of light from the hatchway lay across the deck. Crouching down, the Colt steady in his hand, he slowly descended the steps onto the empty gaming deck, watching the doorways for any sign of movement, for a leveled gun barrel among the curtains. Strangman's suite was directly below the bridge, entered by a panel door in an alcove behind the bar.

He waited by the door until a metal tray slammed in the galley, then leaned on the handle and eased the door off its latch, stepped silently into the darkness. For a few seconds he paused inside the door, adjusting his eyes to the dim light cast into the ante-room through a bead curtain hidden behind a chart cabinet on his right. In the centre of the room was a large map table, roll-maps under the gla.s.s top. His bare feet sank into the soft carpeting, and he stepped past the cabinet and peered through the beads.

The room, twice the length, was Strangman's princ.i.p.al saloon, an oaklined chamber with leather couches facing each other down the side walls, a large antique globe on its bronze pedestal below the forward row of portholes. Three chandeliers hung from the ceiling, but only one was lit, over a high-backed Byzantine chair with stained gla.s.s inlays at the far end of the room, shining on the jewels which spilled from the metal gunboxes drawn up on a semi-circle of low tables.

Head back against the chair, one hand touching the slender stem of a gold-lipped gla.s.s on a mahogany table at her elbow, was Beatrice Dahl. Her blue brocade dress was spread out like a peac.o.c.k's tail, a few pearls and sapphires which had spilled from her left hand gleaming among the folds like electric eyes. Kerans hesitated, watching the door opposite which led into Strangman's cabin, then parted the curtain slightly so that the beads tinkled gently.

Beatrice ignored this, obviously too-familiar with the sound of rustling gla.s.s. The chests at her feet were loaded with a ma.s.s of jeweled trash-diamante anklets, gilt clasps, tiaras and chains of zircon, rhinestone necklaces and pendants, huge earrings of cultured pearl, overflowing from one chest to another and spilling onto the salvers placed on the floor like vessels to catch a quicksilver rainfall.

For a moment Kerans thought that Beatrice had been drugged- her expression was vacant and blank, like the mask of a wax dummy, her eyes on some distant focus. Then her hand moved, and she raised the wine gla.s.s perfunctorily to her lips.

"Beatrice!"

With a start she tipped the wine across her lap, looked up in surprise. Pushing back the beads, Kerans stepped quickly across the room, caught her elbow as she began to rise from the chair.

"Beatrice, wait! Don't move yet!" He tried the door behind the chair, found it locked. "Strangman and his men are looting the streets, I think there's only the Admiral up on the bridge."

Beatrice pressed her face to his shoulders, with her cool fingers traced the black bruises showing through his ebony tan. "Robert, be careful! What happened to you, Strangman wouldn't let me watch?" Her relief and pleasure at seeing Kerans gave way to alarm. She glanced anxiously around the room. "Darling, leave me here and get away. I don't think Strangman will harm me."

Kerans shook his head, then helped her to her feet. He gazed at Beatrice's elegant profile, at her sleek carmine mouth and lacquered nails, almost bemused by the heady scent of perfume and the brocaded rustle of her gown. After the violence and filth of the past days he felt like one of the dust-begrimed discoverers of the tomb of Nefert.i.ti stumbling upon her exquisite painted mask in the depths of the necropolis.

"Strangman's capable of anything, Beatrice. He's insane, they were playing a sort of mad game with me, d.a.m.n nearly killed me."

Beatrice gathered the train of her skirt, brushing away the jewels that clung to its fabric. Despite the lavish a.s.sortment before her, her wrists and breast were bare, one of her own small gold clasps in a contoured twist around her neck. "But Robert, even if we get out-"

"Quiet!" Kerans stopped a few feet from the curtain, watching the strands balloon faintly and then subside, trying to remember whether there was a porthole open in the ante-room. "I've built a small raft, it should carry us far enough. Later we'll rest and build a better one."

He started to walk towards the curtain when two of the strands parted fractionally, something moved with snake-like speed and a whirling silver blade three feet long cleft the air and spun towards his head like an immense scythe. Wincing with pain, Kerans ducked and felt the blade skim past his right shoulder, tearing a shallow three-inch weal, then impale itself with a steely shudder in the oak paneling behind him. Voice frozen in her throat, Beatrice backed wild-eyed into one of the occasional tables, knocking a chest of jewels across the floor.

Before Kerans could reach her the curtain was thrashed back by an enormous arm and a huge hunch-backed figure filled the doorway, his one-eyed head lowered like a bull's below the transom. Sweat poured from his huge muscled chest, staining his green shorts. In his right hand was a twelve-inch barb of gleaming steel, about to thrust upwards at Kerans' stomach.

Sidestepping down the room, Kerans steadied the revolver in his hands, the huge negro's single cyclopean eye following him. Then he stepped on the open teeth of a necklace clasp, involuntarily stumbled back against a sofa.

As he steadied himself against the wall Big Caesar launched himself through the air at Kerans, the knife driving through the air in a short arc like the tip of a propeller. Beatrice screamed, her voice abruptly drowned in the tremendous roar of the Colt. Jolted by the recoil, Kerans sat down in the sofa, watched the mulatto crash crookedly against the doorway, the knife spilling from his hand. A strangled bubbling grunt erupted from his throat, and with a cataclysmic wrench which summed up all his pain and frustration he tore at the bead curtain and ripped it from the transom. The bunching muscles of his torso contracted for the last time. Draped in the curtain, he fell forwards onto the floor, his vast limbs like a bloated giant's, the thousands of beads spilling around him.

"Beatrice! Come on!" Kerans seized her arm, steered her past the prostrate body into the ante-room, his right hand and forearm numb from the jarring discharge of the Colt. They crossed the alcove, and raced past the deserted bar. Overhead a voice shouted from the bridge, and footsteps hurried across the deck to the rail.

Kerans stopped, looking down at the voluminous folds of Beatrice's gown, then abandoned his plan to retrace his entry over the stern paddle.

"We'll have to try the gangway." He pointed to the unguarded entrance by the starboard rail, the beckoning night-club cupids with flutes to their ruby lips dancing on either side of the steps. "It may look a little obvious, but it's just about the only way left now."

Half-way down, the gangway began to rock in its davits, and they heard the Admiral bark down at them from the bridge. A moment later the shotgun roared out, the pellets slashing through the clapboard roof over their heads. Kerans ducked, at the mouth of the gangway craned up at the bridge, now directly overhead, saw the long barrel of the shotgun sticking into the air as the Admiral maneuvered about.

Kerans jumped down into the square, took Beatrice by the waist and swung her down. Together they crouched under the hull of the depot ship, then darted across the square to the nearest street.

Half-way there Kerans looked over his shoulder as a group of Strangman's men appeared on the far side of the square. They shouted to and fro with the Admiral, then spotted Kerans and Beatrice a hundred yards away.

Kerans started to run on, the revolver still clasped in his hand, but Beatrice held him back.

"No, Robert! Look!"

In front of them, stretched arm to arm across the full width of the street, another group approached, a white-suited man at its centre. He strolled along, one thumb hooked casually into his belt, the other signaling his men on, his fingers almost touching the tip of the machete brandished by the man next to him.

Changing direction, Kerans pulled Beatrice diagonally across the square, but the first group had fanned out and cut them off. A starsh.e.l.l went up from the deck of the ship and illuminated the square in its roseate light.

Beatrice stopped, out of breath, helplessly holding the broken heel of her gold slipper. She looked uncertainly at the men closing in on them. "Darling... Robert-what about the ship? Try to get back there yourself."

Kerans took her arm and they backed into the shadows below the forward paddle, hidden by the blades from the shotgun on the bridge. The exertion of climbing aboard the ship and then running about the square had exhausted Kerans, and his lungs pumped in painful spasms, so that he could barely steady the revolver.

"Kerans..." Strangman's cool, ironic voice drifted across the square. He advanced at a relaxed amble, just within range of the Colt but well screened by the men on either side of him. All carried machetes and pangas, their faces amiable and unhurried.

"Finis, Kerans... finis." Strangman stopped twenty feet from Kerans, his sardonic lips wreathed in a soft smile, surveying him with almost kindly pity. "Sorry, Kerans, but you're being a bit of a nuisance. Throw away the gun or we'll kill the Dahl girl too." He waited for a few seconds. "I mean it."

Kerans found his voice. "Strangman-"

"Kerans, this is no time for a metaphysical discussion." A note of annoyance crept into his voice, as if he were dealing with a fractious child. "Believe me, no time for prayers, no time for anything. I told you to drop the gun. Then walk forward. My men think you abducted Miss Dahl, they won't touch her." He added, with a touch of menace: "Come on, Kerans, we don't want anything to happen to Beatrice, do we? Think what a beautiful mask her face will make." He t.i.ttered insanely. "Better than that old alligator you wore."

Phlegm choking his throat, Kerans swung around and handed the revolver to Beatrice, pressing her small hands around the b.u.t.t. Before their eyes could meet he looked away, inhaling for the last time the musky perfume on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, then began to walk out into the square as Strangman had ordered. The latter watched him with an evil smirk, then suddenly leapt forward with a snarl, whipping the others on.