by Tim Powers
All day Crawford had alternately sweated in the sun and shivered in the sea breezes as he dragged the wagon along the rutted road, and at lunch he and his passenger had each drunk an entire bottle of claret with the bread and cheese and cabbage des Loges had packed; just before they resumed their journey the old man had bitten eye-holes into the cloth bag and pulled it over his head like the hood of a bucolic executioner, and Crawford had followed his example by donning as a hat the hollowed-out shell of the cabbage head.
Having finally reached Auray, these many hours later, the cabbage was wilted but still clinging to his head, and he was noctambulistically intoning the refrain to a song des Loges had begun singing hours ago; and the melody, or perhaps the wing-flapping motions with which the wagon-bound old man had chosen to accompany it, had attracted a following procession of barking dogs. Children ran into houses and several old women blessed themselves fearfully.
Des Loges broke off his singing long enough to tell Crawford where to turn and which one of the fifteenth-century buildings to stop in front of; and when the wagon rolled to a halt and he was finally able to take off the harness, Crawford blinked around at the steep streets and old houses and wondered what he was doing here, weary, fevered and cabbage-decked.
They’d stopped at a two-story stone building with half a dozen windows upstairs but only a single narrow one at street level. The eaves projected a good yard out beyond the wall, and the building was just perceptibly wider at the bottom than at the top, and Crawford thought the place had a forbiddingly oriental look. A thin, middle-aged man in an outmoded powdered wig was staring down at them in consternation from one of the upstairs windows.
“This had better be it, François,” the man called.
“I’ll see that the widow is delivered to you in a lace dress and a veil,” answered des Loges in his archaic French, “and that Mont St. Michel stands in for her father! But Brizeux!—until my cousin here resumes his travels I can’t spare the hospitality.”
The man in the window nodded tiredly. “Everybody needs help in passing on. One moment.” He disappeared, and a few moments later the street door was pulled open. “Come in, come in,” Brizeux said, “God knows you’ve drawn enough attention already.”
The sunset glow overwhelmed the lamplight inside, and it wasn’t until the door was closed again that the ranked shelves of ledgers and journals regained their air of significance.
Brizeux led them into a private office and waved toward a couple of velvet-upholstered chairs; dimly on the faded cloth backs Crawford could see the outline of the embroidered Napoleonic B that had been cut off recently and, more faintly, the shadow of the fleur-de-lis that had preceded it. Brizeux was as erratic in his politics as the chair, addressing his guests as “citoyens” one moment and as “monsieurs” the next. His French, at least, was pure Parisian.
Crawford looked at the man curiously. He was nearly a caricature of a law clerk, fussy and shabby and ink-stained and smelling of book-bindings and sealing wax, but he seemed to hold a position of authority here—and, to Crawford’s surprise, he seemed to be willing to give Crawford a passport.
He opened a drawer in his desk and dug out a double handful of passports and then shuffled through them, squinting up at Crawford from time to time as if to judge the fit. Finally, “Would you be more at ease as a veterinarian or as an upholsterer?” he asked.
Crawford smiled. “A veterinarian.”
“Very well. Henceforth you are Michael Aickman, forty-two years old, late of Ipswich, who arrived in France on the twelfth of May. Your family is doubtless worried about you.” He handed Crawford the passport.
“What happened to the original Michael Aickman?” he asked.
Brizeux shrugged. “Waylaid by criminals, I imagine. Perhaps he was carrying a lot of money … or perhaps his assailants simply killed him for his passport, which could be sold to,” he permitted himself a sour smile, “certain unscrupulous public officials.”
“And how much would a public official charge for one of these?”
“Quite a bit,” said Brizeux cheerfully, “but in your case des Loges here has elected to … pay your bill for you.”
Crawford glanced at des Loges and began to wonder what, exactly, the ancient man expected in return; but Brizeux had now initialed the passport and was flipping through the pages to show him what his new signature looked like, and
Crawford pushed the worry away.
“You’ll want to practice it until you can do it instinctively,” said Brizeux, grinning up at him as he handed the document across.
It occurred to Crawford that Brizeux resembled young Keats—not in much, for Keats was young and burly and Brizeux was gray and frail, but very strongly in the eyes. The eyes of both of them, he realized, had the same unhealthy brightness, as if they were infected with the same rare kind of fever.
When they were outside again des Loges began hobbling back toward the wagon.
“No! We’ll take a regular coach back,” said Crawford in slow, carefully pronounced French. “I’ll pay for it.” His feet had been throbbing painfully ever since he had stopped pulling the wagon, and he could feel them swelling in the borrowed shoes.
“No doubt you could satisfy the coachman, but what I’d need to be paid isn’t yours to offer,” laughed des Loges, not looking back or pausing.
“Wait, I mean it. I would think you’d prefer it yourself, that can’t be the most comfortable position to be in all day—or all night, in this case. Why don’t we just—”
The old man had stopped, and was looking back at him. “Didn’t you look at the wheels?” he demanded in his barbaric French. “Why do you think I asked you if you wanted stone shoes?”
Crawford walked bewilderedly to the wagon, crouched beside it and spat on one of the wheels and rubbed off the caked mud. The rim of the wheel was studded with flat stone ovals—no wonder the grotesque vehicle had begun to seem ponderous during the day! He looked up at the old man blankly.
“Your wife never told you?” asked des Loges in a quieter voice. “Travel over stone doesn’t age us, you and me. A family courtesy, you might say. I wore stone-soled shoes for more years than I can count, but age crept up anyway, when I’d change them or take a stroll barefoot for a treat, and now I just don’t have the strength for it anymore. I’ve got a stone base to my walking stick, though, and I make sure to lean on it. Every little bit, right?”
“Uh … right.”
“I’ll give you a pair of stone soles before you go. And wear them, you hear me? You’ll be good for centuries more, easily, just so you don’t insulate yourself from your wife.”
“But I’m not married, certainly not to one of these … things.” His fever suddenly seemed much worse, and his breath was as hot as a desert wind in his head. “Am I? Could my wife have been one of them?”
“Assuredly—a fellow-husband can tell it just to glance at you, even without the evidence of your finger.”
Crawford shook his head uncomprehendingly. “But she’s dead … so I can hardly keep from insulating myself from her.” “I really doubt that she’s dead.”
Crawford chuckled dizzily. “You should have been there. Crushed like a press-full of grapes for wine, she was, and on our wedding night.”
Des Loges’s walnut-wrinkled face softened in what might have been pity. “Boy, that wasn’t your wife.” He shook his head, then climbed into the wagon. “I got your passport—now pull me home so that you can do your part of the bargain.”
Crawford considered just walking away, hiring a carriage to take him at top speed to the Swiss border, and leaving this old man to walk, or hire some child to pull his wagon—but, almost in spite of himself, he remembered Appleton with the horse and money, and Keats with his luggage.
He bent over stiffly and picked up the harness.
Twilight had fallen before they were five miles south of Auray, but des Loges refused to consider spending the night in an inn, even when Crawford pointed out that there was
no moon tonight to see by; and so Crawford plodded on, wondering feverishly if there would ever again be a time when he wasn’t dragging this wagon around the Brittany hills.
The moon was indeed in its dark phase, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he discovered that he could nevertheless see it as a faint ring in the sky. The ground seemed to have a dim glow too, and several times when he heard noises in the surrounding fields he glimpsed patches of phosphorescence moving behind the wild shrubbery; and when an owl sailed past he was able to follow its silent flight for several long seconds before it swooped toward some small animal.
As the miles unrolled away behind, Crawford settled into a comfortable, metronomic pace, and when a pebble worked its way into his shoe through a gap at the side of the sole, he was reluctant to break his stride and take the shoe off—but after a few seconds he realized that the pebble wasn’t at all uncomfortable. It might have been a fever-born delusion, but that foot, the whole leg, in fact, felt much less tired, springier; and so when he did pause it was to find another pebble and poke it into his other shoe. Behind him, des Loges laughed softly.
This time he wasn’t startled by the valley of the standing stones, even though at night the figures looked much more like motionless men lined up across the miles of nighted plain for some unimaginable purpose. Luminous mists played over the stones in the starlight, and Crawford, dizzy and sick, thought the mists greeted him; he nodded back and waved his maimed hand.
It was past midnight when he pulled the wagon up beside the inverted half-boat that was des Loges’s house. When they had got inside, the old man gave him a cup of brandy and showed him a corner he could sleep in.
At noon the next day Crawford was awakened by the old man calling to him from outside. He came stumbling out of the tiny house, blinking in the glaring sunlight, but it wasn’t until he walked out to the rocks and looked down into the tide pool, and saw old des Loges sitting in the water next to the angular rock, that he remembered escaping from the ship and acquiring a passport.
And now you’ve got to do him this favor, he thought as he squinted around and scratched under his unfresh shirt. I hope it’s something you can do quickly, so as to be on the road again before the sun moves too much farther west. Nothing like the sleep-late life of a fugitive! He shook the pebbles out of the battered shoes, pulled them on and then climbed down the sandstone boulders to where des Loges sat.
The old man was dressed in the same dun cassock he’d been wearing the day before, and the clear seawater was rocking and swirling around his upper chest. The roughly hewn pyramidic stone was submerged, but Crawford could see that a segmented necklace of silver and wooden beads and some kind of onionlike bulbs was draped around the base of it—the buoyant wood and vegetable sections arched upward and waved in the currents, but the silver sections held the strange jewellery down on the sand.
Crawford glanced around again, uneasily, for all at once he knew that something bad was supposed to happen here, and he didn’t know what direction it was likely to come from.
The old man was grinning up at him. “Married in the mountains, divorced by the sea!” he piped. “It’s high tide now, but after you’ve liberated me, do please break that garlic necklace, will you? I’m not selfish, and I do like to pay my debts.”
Though mystified, Crawford nodded. “Got you. Break the necklace.” He dipped a toe into the water and winced at the chill. “You’re … getting divorced?”
“That’s the ceremony I want you to perform,” des Loges told him. “It shouldn’t be any problem. I’m a frail old man, and anyway I promise not to struggle.”
“Do I have to get in the water?”
Des Loges rolled his eyes. “Of course you’ve got to get in the water! How are you going to drown me if you don’t get in the water?”
Crawford grinned. “Drown you. Indeed. Listen, I—” Glancing at the necklace-bordered stone, he realized that it had a square base—and there had been a square dent in the ground where des Loges had said his wife always sat. “How does this divorce work?” he asked unsteadily.
Des Loges was watching the tide anxiously. “You drown me. It’s just a token killing, really—suicide won’t work, you see. Accident or murder only, and with the wife,” he waved toward the stone, “incapacitated. And it has to be you—I knew it had to be you when I first heard you were on your way—because you’re married into the family. They won’t interfere with you; anybody else they could stop, or at least visit vengeance upon.”
Crawford was reeling, and had to kneel down. “That rock, there, in the water by you. Are you trying to—is that your—”
“Brizeux has no family, no children!” des Loges shouted. “There’s no one at stake but he and I, and we know what we’re doing. For God’s sake, the tide’s going out—hurry! You promised!”
As if to give Crawford a head start, the old man bent over and shoved his own face into the water; and with his four-fingered hand he beckoned furiously.
Crawford looked again at the sunken pyramid … and a voice in his head said, No. Getaway.
Crawford turned and ran, as fast as his stiff legs could propel him, east—toward Anjou, and Bourbonnais and, somewhere beyond, Switzerland.
CHAPTER 7
I said “she must be swift and white
And subtly warm and half perverse
And sweet like sharp soft fruit to bite,
And like a snake’s love lithe and fierce.”
Men have guessed worse.
—A. C. Swinburne,
Felise
And always, night and day, he was in the mountains,
and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.
—Mark 5:5
Like the fingers of a vast, invisible harpist, high-altitude winds were drawing plumes of snow from the top of distant Mont Blanc and casting them out across the whole southwest quarter of the sky; and in spite of the sunlight that raised steam from the slate roofs of the riegelhausen around him and made him carry his coat instead of wear it, Crawford shivered with something like sympathy as he watched the faraway mountain, and for a moment he could vividly imagine how these Geneva streets would look from the viewpoint of a person with a telescope on the summit.
Blue sky glittered in the puddles of rainwater between the cobblestones underfoot, and in the west a rainbow spanned the whole valley between Geneva and the Monts du Jura. Looking down from the too bright sky, Crawford saw a young woman approaching him hesitantly from across the street.
Though her fair hair and lace-trimmed red bonnet implied that she was a native, her pallid beauty seemed suited to some less sunny land, and her sick smile was jarring among these gaily painted housefronts—it seemed to Crawford to be somehow fearfully eager, like the smile of an unworldly person loitering around a foreign waterfront in the hope of selling stolen property or hiring a murderer.
“L’arc-en-ciel,” she said hoarsely, nodding over her shoulder at the rainbow but not looking at it. “The token of God’s covenant to Noah, hmm? You look, pardon me, like a man who knows the way around it.”
Crawford assumed she was a prostitute—the Hôtel d’Angleterre was just ahead, after all, and no doubt many of the English tourists who could afford to stay there would appreciate a girl who didn’t require the services of an interpreter—and he was chagrined, but not very surprised, to realize that he was not tempted to take her upstairs somewhere. He had just spent a full month in traversing France, and never during that time, even when he was working alongside very healthy young girls in the vineyards, had he felt any stirring of erotic interest. Perhaps the death of his wife was still too recent … or perhaps his intensely sexual dreams, the near nightmares that plagued him and left him drained and fevered in the mornings, were leaving him no energy for the pursuit of real women.
But before he could reply to her ambiguous remark, there was a scuffling on the side of the street she’d come from.
“It’s that damned atheist, let him lie,” a gruf
f man’s voice called, and then a girl cried, “A doctor, someone go for a doctor!”
Crawford automatically pushed the young woman aside and loped past her across the street.
“I’m a doctor, let me through,” he said loudly, shoving his weathered but newly bought portmanteau between the people who were clustered in a rough semicircle against the wall of a tavern. They backed away to let him in, and at the focus of the crowd he found a frail-looking youth lying unconscious on the stones, his wispy blond hair clinging damply to his forehead.
“He started talking crazily, wildly,” said a girl who was crouched beside him, “and then he simply fell over.” Crawford realized that she was the one who had called for a doctor. She was English, and idly he noted that he would once have found her, too, attractive, though in contrast to the Swiss girl she was dark-haired and plump.
He got down on one knee and felt the young man’s pulse. It was rapid and weak. “It looks like sunstroke,” he snapped. “Got to get the temperature back down. Get me wet cloths—anything, a sail … curtains, a cloak—and something to fan him with.”
A couple of people ran away, presumably to get the wet cloths, and Crawford pulled off the unconscious man’s jacket and began unbuttoning his shirt. A moment later he had peeled it off too, and he tossed both garments over his shoulder. “Soak up some rainwater with these,” he yelled, “and give them back to me.”
Crawford stood up then and began flapping his own coat back and forth over the thin torso. It occurred to him that this young man resembled someone he’d met recently.
