The Stress of Her Regard (54 page)

Byron shook his head. "I'm not sure. That's why I needed you to be here, to help me. It'll be . . . whatever so drew the attention of the Graiae to Shelley, in Venice four years ago—and drew the attention of some kind of wild lamia on Lake Leman, two years before that."

Seeing Crawford's baffled look, he added, "Whatever made him different from people—different from
everybody
, even people like you and I."

"Ah." Crawford nodded. "Right, he was a member of the family—and by
birth
, by
blood
, rather than just by marriage, as I was." He remembered Shelley's complaints about bladder stones and the stiffening of his skin and the hardness of his fingernails. "He was mostly human, but part . . . nephelim, part stone."

"His bones, then, perhaps," said Byron hoarsely. He raised his hand uncertainly, almost as if in farewell or apology to Shelley, then looked over to where Trelawny stood, sweat and tears running down the tanned face into the black beard. "Trelawny!" Byron called. "I'd like his skull, if it can be salvaged!"

Trelawny hadn't caught his words, and made him repeat them—and then visibly comprehended them, and stared at Byron wrathfully. "Why?" Trelawny demanded. "So that you can make another drinking cup?"

Byron's voice was level when he answered. "No," he said, limping toward the others, "I will treat it as . . . as Shelley would have wanted."

Crawford followed Byron across the sand as Trelawny reluctantly picked up a long-handled boathook and approached the fire. The bearded giant leaned toward the blazing oven and reached in with the hook toward Shelley's head, but at the first touch of the iron the skull fell to pieces, throwing burning bits of flesh spinning up into the sky. Trelawny reeled back, tossing the hook aside and rubbing singed hair off his forearm.

Crawford caught Byron's eye and shook his head slightly. It's not the skull, he thought.

The flames billowed in a breeze from the sea, and Crawford turned away to cool his sweating face. In the last few minutes he had become intensely aware of the charring figure on the iron bed behind him—not as a human figure, much less as something evocative of the man it had been, but as a kink in the fabric of the world, something that violated natural laws, like a stone impossibly hovering in midair. It was as if the heat had crystallized something, quantified something that had only been implicit before.

He looked back at the body, trying to determine the source of the impression, but the body looked like nothing more than dead flesh and bone in a fire.

Crawford looked toward Byron, curious to see if he showed any signs of feeling a wrongness about Shelley's body, but for the moment Byron seemed to have forgotten that Shelley had not been entirely human—he was just clenching and unclenching his fists as he stared at the pyre of his friend.

Hunt had walked up with the wooden box he'd brought to Williams's pyre the day before, and now he and Trelawny opened it and began throwing frankincense and salt onto the fire, intensifying the yellow-gold glow of the flames. Trelawny again plodded up close to the oven, this time to pour wine and oil over Shelley's body.

"We restore to nature through fire," intoned Trelawny, "the elements of which this man was composed: earth, air, and water. Everything is changed, but not annihilated; he is now a portion of that which he worshipped."

For a while no one spoke, and the roaring of the fire was the only sound under the empty sky; at last Byron forced a frail smile. "I knew you were a pagan," he said to Trelawny, "but not that you were a pagan
priest
." Tears glistened in Byron's eyes, and his voice was unsteady as he added, "You do it . . . very well."

Hunt walked back through the hot sand to the carriage, and Trelawny walked around to the other side of the fire. Byron, clearly embarrassed at having shown emotion, was blinking around as if someone had said something he chose to interpret as an insult. Crawford was watching the burning body.

"I think it's the heart," he said.

"What is?" asked Byron belligerently. "Oh." He took a deep breath and expelled it and rubbed his eyes. "Very well—why?"

Crawford nodded toward the fire. "It's turned black but it's not burning—though the ribs have collapsed around it." And only when I stare at
it
, he thought, do I get that feeling of cosmic wrongness.

Byron followed his gaze, and after a few moments he nodded. "You might be right." He was breathing hard. "Damn all this. We need to talk—I need to tell you about this thing he and I tried to do in Venice, unsuccessfully, and how I think it
can
be done
successfully
." Byron looked up and down the shore, then down at the sand under his boots. "We can't talk here—let's go out to the
Bolivar
. I'll swim, and you can go in the boat. I'll get Tita to go with you and work the oars."

Crawford looked at the sand too, and remembered that when Shelley had first talked to him about the lamia, on that summer night six years ago in Switzerland, he had insisted that they talk in a boat out on the take; and before Shelley had told Josephine and Crawford about his plan to run the
Don Juan
into a storm and drown, he had told them to walk a few yards out into the surf first—and he even told Josephine to leave her glass eye on the sand.

So Crawford just nodded, and followed the limping figure of Byron down across the white sand toward the waves.

Tita wordlessly rowed Crawford out toward the
Bolivar
as Byron and one of his Genoese boatmen swam alongside, a few yards out from the boat's starboard gunwale. Crawford assumed Tita and the Italian sailor were keeping track of their master's progress, but Crawford did too, remembering that Byron had had trouble while swimming yesterday.

But Byron was swimming strongly today, his muscular arms metronomically knifing ahead of him to pull him forward through the glassy water—though Crawford noticed that his shoulders were red with sunburn. He should call for a shirt when he gets to the
Bolivar
, he thought.

The three bare masts of the
Bolivar
grew taller and clearer and farther apart with each powerful pull on the oars, and soon Crawford could recognize the men on her deck. He waved to them, but though they waved back they clearly didn't recognize him as the man who had helped them search the shoreline for signs of the
Don Juan
a month earlier.

He looked back at the shore. The smoke was a tower in the nearly windless sky, and the men standing around on the distant beach looked like the dazed survivors of some disaster.

The
Bolivar
was close enough now to blot out a third of the sky. At a call from Byron, Tita pushed strongly on the oars, and a few moments later the boat had stopped and was rocking in the water under the arch of the
Bolivar's
hull.

The rope boarding-ladder hung to the water from the rail above, but Byron stayed a yard or so out away from it, treading water. He looked skeptically up at Crawford. "Can you handle the oars well enough to keep the boat from bumping the hull? Or drifting away?"

Crawford flexed his bony shoulders. "I have no idea."

"Oh hell, in a pinch I can swim over and give the boat a push or a tug. Tita, up on deck with you—and lower us a cold bottle of
sciacchetra
and a couple of glasses."

The sailor had come paddling and gasping up to the ladder, and after catching his breath he pulled himself up the rungs to the rail, followed closely by Tita, who had paused to maneuver the boat in to within a yard of the hull.

The creaking of the timbers and the slap of low waves against the hull were the only sounds now, and in spite of his broad-brimmed hat Crawford felt the hot sun as a weight on his head.

Through the clear water he could see Byron's legs kicking at a relaxed pace, and there was no sign of strain when he raised one hand to carefully push his wet hair back away from his forehead.

Byron looked up at him. "Trelawny or Hunt might want the heart," he said quietly. "Or Mary—she might already have asked for it."

Crawford nodded. "People get sentimental about such things. Hunt tells me that Jane Williams already has Ed's ashes in an urn on the mantel of the house in Pisa."

Byron spat. "She'll forget and make tea in it one of these days." He tilted his head back to peer toward shore. "Well, they can have the bones or something—we've got to make sure we get the heart."

A basket was being lowered on a rope, and Crawford leaned out and caught it and took from it a bottle and two napkin-wrapped wine glasses. The cork had been pulled out of the bottle and stuck loosely back in, but it took all of Crawford's strength to tug it out again, and his hands were shaking as he poured the wine into one of the glasses and held it out over the gunwale to Byron.

"Thank you," Byron said, taking a sip and then effortlessly holding the glass steady above the water as his legs continued to pump below the surface. "You seem to be a moderately educated man, Aickman—have you heard of the Graiae?"

"Graiae as in the Greek myth?" asked Crawford, "They were the three sisters Perseus consulted, before going to kill the Medusa." He carefully filled his own glass and tasted the wine.

"They had only one eye among them—didn't they?—and they had to keep handing it back and forth."

Byron confirmed this, and then went on to describe the attempt he and Shelley had made to awaken the blind Graiae pillars in Venice in 1818. The narration took several minutes, and twice during it Byron paddled closer to the boat and held out his glass for a refill.

Crawford had finished the wine in his own glass, and was debating the wisdom of pouring himself some more. He decided not to—he was already dizzy, and this story would clearly require all of his concentration. "So—what is it we want the heart
for
?"

"I think
it's
what drew the attention of the Graiae to him. The fresh blood that was splashed all over the pavement acted as a sort of jury-rigged eye for them, and—goddamn me, Aickman—when Shelley was wavering at a point about the same distance from each of the columns, that blood just
raced
across the paving stones from one column to the other, and back! You could
feel
the attention they were paying to him, like . . . like the pressure on your ears when you're under water."

He held up his glass, and Crawford leaned over the gunwale to refill it again.

"And then when we were fleeing in a gondola," Byron went on, "the third sister—the pillar they'd dropped in the canal centuries ago—came rearing up out of the water as we passed. I think if we hadn't very quickly got out of their . . .
field of influence
, the blood would have sprayed horizontally out over the water to that pillar. They wanted to stare at him as closely as they could, and so they were throwing their eye back and forth, to whichever of them was closest to him."

"What's so . . . astonishing . . . to them, about his heart?"

"I can only guess, Aickman. Since it's half human and half nephelim—"

"Carbonari and siliconari," commented Crawford.

Byron blinked. "If you like. In any case, since it's a mix that probably isn't logically possible, I think it's a violation of the determinism that the Graiae project with their eye, and so the eye can't leave it alone. I don't think such a creature as Shelley could have been conceived in the field of the eye . . . though I'll bet such a creature couldn't be easily killed in the field, either. The eye prevents randomness, the vagaries of chance. As I told Shelley then, it not only checks on things, it checks them."

Crawford opened his mouth to speak, but Byron was already talking again. His upthrust hand was still steady, though the moisture beading his face now was clearly sweat.

"The reason the Austrian's brought the eye to the pillars," Byron was saying, "was that they were also bringing some enormously old Austrian king or something there too, so that with specific treatment he can live forever in the deterministic focus of the wakeful, sighted Graiac." Byron raised his sunburned shoulders above the water in a shrug. "Maybe this king is a half-and-half too, like Shelley."

Crawford's stomach had gone cold, though the sun on him was as hot as ever. "Yes," he said. "He is. But unlike Shelley, who was born that way, this king was . . . surgically made into one."

For the first time that day, Byron really looked squarely at Crawford. "You know of him?"

"I—" Crawford laughed uneasily. "I used to
work
for him. Werner von Aargau, he's called these days. You and I saw him—or his vehicle, at least—when we were going through the Alps. Do you remember a wagon that was bogged down in mud? You jumped up into the bed of it to oversee the job of freeing it, and you said there was a box in it full of ice. I'm pretty sure our Austrian was in that, in the box."

"Huh. Well, he's no concern of ours. The thing is, when the Graiae are awake but
without
their eye, then everything is
very
randomized,
supremely
uncertain. And this priest I got to know there said that if you were in the focus of them while they were blind, you could shed the attention of a vampire. The vampire can't track you in the . . . the spiritual darkness, the chaos of unresolved probabilities. The creature can't hold its beam of attention on you. Of course you'd have to cross a lot of salt water directly afterward so that the vampire wouldn't eventually be drawn back to you."

"America, you once told me."

"Or Greece. Now I think Greece would be good enough."

"But even if your vampire
did
find you again, it'd need a fresh invitation, wouldn't it?"

The corners of Byron's mouth turned downward in a bitter smile. "Yes—but even though you never gave in and asked yours back, as your wife and I both did eventually, I'm sure you'll agree that it's a . . . powerful temptation. I'm sure there were moments of loneliness and fear, in which even you
just about
gave in."

Crawford lifted his eyes and looked past Byron, up the coast to the point where the shoreline seemed to dissolve in the wavering heat-mirages, and he nodded. "So," he said after a moment, "we go to Lerici, catch Josephine and tie her up, and take her to Venice, and then use Shelley's heart to draw the eye out of whichever of these sisters has got it, and catch it." He grinned and looked down at his pale, trembling hands. "And then run like hell."