by Tim Powers
“Wasting your time, my good man,” said one foppishly dressed Englishman cheerfully. “That’s Shelley the atheist. Let him die and the world’s a better place.”
Crawford was about to say something about the Hippocratic Oath, but another man had just limped up from the direction of the hotel, and this new arrival swung around to give the tourist a frigid smile. “Shelley is a friend of mine,” he said tightly. “If you have friends, perhaps you would be so kind as to have one of them arrange a time when you and I can meet somewhere at your convenience and … reason with each other?”
“Good God,” muttered someone in the crowd, “it’s Byron.”
Crawford, still flapping his coat, glanced over at the newcomer. He did seem to resemble the author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as the drawings in the London papers had portrayed him—with a moody but classically handsome face under a wind-tossed mane of dark curls. Crawford had vaguely heard that the man had left England, but he hadn’t known he had come to Switzerland. And who was this “atheist” Shelley?
The English tourist’s face was dark and he was looking away, back toward the hotel. “I … apologize,” he muttered, then turned and stalked off.
The blond young woman who’d talked to Crawford about the rainbow came hobbling over with a blanket and a bucket of water—and before she let Crawford dunk the blanket she shook into the water a handful of what seemed to be white sand. “Salt,” she said impatiently, as if Crawford should have thought of it himself. “It makes the water a better conductor of electricity.”
Byron seemed startled by the remark, and looked more closely at her.
“Great, thank you,” Crawford said, too busy to bother with her odd remark. He balled up the blanket and plunged it into the water, and then draped the sodden fabric over Shelley’s thin frame—noting, as he tucked it around him, a wide, corrugated scar on the young man’s side, below the prominent ribs. One of the ribs, in fact, seemed to be missing.
The English girl who had called for a doctor smiled up at Crawford. “You must have been a ship’s surgeon,” she said, “to have instinctively called for a sail.”
Both Byron and Crawford looked at her uncomfortably.
“Oh, hello, Claire,” said Byron. “I didn’t see you there.”
“Yes,” Crawford put in shortly. “I was in the Navy in my youth.”
Just then another man came bustling up. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “I’m a physician, let me pass.”
“The situation’s well in hand, Pollydolly,” said Byron. “It seems Shelley has had a sunstroke.”
“According to whose diagnosis?” The man with the implausible name glared around at the crowd and then focussed on Crawford. Crawford noticed that he was young—in his twenties, probably, and trying to hide the fact behind his ostentatious moustache and blustery manner. “Yours, sir?”
“Yes,” said Crawford, “I’m a surgeon—”
“A barber, that is to say.” The newcomer smirked. “Well! While I won’t deny that Shelley could benefit from the services of—of one of your trade, I can’t applaud your—your methods of—”
“Oh, save it, Polly,” interrupted Byron. “This man seems to be doing fine—look, Shelley’s coming around now.”
The young man on the pavement had half sat up, and was hugging Claire; he hadn’t yet opened his eyes. “Her conscious tail her joy declared,” he said in a thin, high voice, obviously reciting something; “the fair round face, the snowy beard, the velvet of her paws, her coat that with the tortoise vies …”
Obviously embarrassed for his friend, Byron laughed. “That’s from Thomas Gray’s poem about the favorite cat that drowned in a tub of goldfish. Here, let’s see if we can’t get him up—”
“Mommee!” Shelley yelled suddenly. “It wasn’t Daddy, it was the tortoise-thing from the pond! You must have known, even if it did make itself look like him! It lives in the pond, in Warnham Pond….” His eyes flew open then, and he blinked around without evident recognition at the faces over him. Crawford and the thin, sick-looking young woman were standing next to each other, and Shelley’s gaze stayed on them for a moment, then darted away.
Warnham, Crawford was thinking. That’s where I lost my wedding ring.
Byron grabbed Shelley under the arm and hauled him to his feet. “Can you walk, Shelley? Here’s your coat, though some helpful soul has mopped the street with it. Sir,” he added, turning to Crawford, “we’re in your debt. I’m staying at the Villa Diodati, just north along this shore of the lake, and the Shelleys are my neighbors—do visit us, especially if … if we can be of any aid to a fellow traveller.”
Byron and Claire each took one of Shelley’s arms and led him away, and the physician with the ludicrous name followed, after shooting Crawford a baleful squint. Crawford again noticed that Byron was limping, and now he remembered reading that the young lord was lame—clubfooted.
The crowd was dispersing, and Crawford found himself walking beside the thin girl who had asked him if he knew a way around rainbows. “Sometimes they appear to be reptiles,” she remarked, as casually as if she were resuming a conversation.
Crawford was worrying about having admitted to being a surgeon and onetime Navy man. “I daresay,” he answered absently.
“I mean, I’m certain it wasn’t really a tortoise.”
“I suppose that is unlikely,” he agreed.
“My name is Lisa,” she said.
“Michael.”
She rocked her head dreamily, and Crawford noticed her high cheekbones and large, dark eyes, and he was again sourly aware of how attractive he would once have found her.
“Have you ever seen one that regal?” she asked him softly. “His mother was damned fortunate. The closest to real love I ever had was the hand of a statue…. I lived with it for years, but then I became anemic, and people noticed that I couldn’t be out in the sun anymore, and so the priests came with the salted holy water and killed it. I suppose I’m grateful—I’d certainly be dead today if they hadn’t—but I still look for rocks on the slopes of the mountains.”
“The hand of a statue,” echoed Crawford, thinking again about Warnham.
“I was luckier than most,” she said, nodding as if in agreement. She glanced at him shyly and licked her lips. “Have you brought with you any …” She blushed, then went on in a lower voice, “… any loaves of St. Stephen? We could, you and I could, be together through them—” She took his hand and drew it across her cheek, then kissed the palm; the gesture seemed forced, but for a moment he had felt the hot, wet tip of her tongue. “—we could share in their interest in us, Michael, and at least be interested in each other that way….”
Crawford realized that this was what Keats had told him about, and had something to do with what des Loges had wanted him to do; and he admitted to himself that he recognized the same ill glitter in Lisa’s eyes that he had seen in the eyes of Keats and that government clerk, Brizeux—he would have to study his own face in a mirror sometime.
“I’m sorry,” he told her gently. “I don’t have anything.”
“Oh.” She dropped his hand, though she kept walking beside him. “You have had recently, though—you shine with it like ignis fatui, will-o'-the-wisps, over a stagnant pond.”
He glanced sharply at her, but she was looking listlessly ahead and seemed to have meant no offense.
“Maybe you could come to the mountains with me sometime and look for rocks,” she said, beginning to draw away from him. “I know a couple of high places where landslides have exposed the metal, that silvery metal that’s as light as wood, and we could check all the rocks nearby, for live pieces.”
He nodded and waved as she receded into the crowd. “Sounds like fun,” he said helplessly.
Visits to a few of the nearby hotels and inns convinced him that he couldn’t afford to lodge within Geneva’s walls, so he took a coach through the villages northward along Lake Leman’s east shore; and in one of them he found a room for r
ent in a sixteenth-century log house, the windows of which looked down over narrow lanes to a beach grooved by the keels of the fishing boats that had been dragged from there down to the lake that morning.
He slept until dark, and then spent most of the night staring out across the lake at the remote, sky-banishing blackness that was the Jura; sometimes he turned to face the northeast corner of his room and, beyond the panelling, beyond the house and the hills of the Chablais and the Rhône River, he could sense the separate majesties of the Bernese Alps far away in the night—Mönch, the Eiger, and the Jungfrau.
Some time after midnight the sky began slowly to ripple and gleam in vast curtains like the Aurora Borealis, and the stars went out; the massed trees around the lake began to shine faintly, and for just a few moments, like someone who hears a distant music when the wind is right, he thought he could feel through his heels the reverberations of a long-ongoing litany from the very heart of the stony earth. He slept, and dreamed of the cold woman again.
She was in the room with him in this dream, and that was a first—when he had dreamed of her in England and France he had always seemed to meet her on an island where ruins shouldered up between ancient olive trees, and the two of them had made love on a floor of marble tiles that was streaked by alternate bands of moonlight and the shadows of broken pillars. Always her skin was cold, and after she had drained him she slithered away so rapidly into the viny shrubbery that he knew her shape could no longer be human … and it had maddened him, every time, to be unable to follow her, for in the dream he was somehow convinced that her reptilian shape would prove to be as erotically beautiful as her human one.
Tonight she seemed to come in as a mist between the casements, but she was in her human form by the time he looked fully at her. She was naked, as always before, and he was so dazzled by the sight of her that he hardly noticed her arm snake out and turn his shaving mirror to face the wall. Then her white fingers reached out and unbuttoned his shirt, and his lungs seemed to clog full with ice when her cold nipples pressed against his chest.
He fell backward onto the bed and she followed and straddled him, and he realized, with no feeling except gratitude, that it was she he had made love to in the hours before the dawn when he found Julia’s body. Now she bent down to give him a passionate kiss—her hair fell in coils around his ears, and he abandoned himself to her.
Her flesh warmed around him as the hours were achingly chiselled away, and when at last she rose from the bed she was actually glowing faintly, like the bricks lining a smithy’s stove. She leaned down and took his limp hand as if to kiss it, but when she lifted it to her lips it was only to bite the stump of his missing finger. The blood spurted rackingly into her mouth, and the strained bed joints squealed as he convulsed into unconsciousness.
He cringed when the morning sunlight touched his face, and though the effort made his legs shake and sent him gasping and sweating back to bed, he managed to drag the curtain across the torturing bright gap. The bedsheet was blotted brown with blood from his freshly torn finger stump.
Only after sunset was he able to venture outside, and at twilight he found himself on a ledgelike walkway notched across the lake-facing side of an ancient stone house, and after leaning on the iron railing for half an hour, watching silent lightning play over the mountains beyond the far shore, he noticed a boat out on the face of the water.
It was a small sailboat, its mainsail blue under the salmon sky, skating toward him on the breeze that twitched at his coat collar and made the water’s sky-reflecting skin flutter like a sheet of gold-leaf held up to a whisper. There was one solitary figure aboard.
A set of stone steps slanted down to the water at Crawford’s left, and when it became clear that the boat was headed directly toward him he found himself slowly walking to the steps and then descending them. By the time the boatman was close enough to swing broadside to the wind and loose the sail, Crawford was waiting for him on the stone dock at the water’s edge, and he caught the painter-rope the boatman tossed to him.
Crawford tugged the boat in to the dock, and as he crouched to loop the rope around a weathered wooden post, Percy Shelley stepped agilely from the rocking boat onto the unmoving stone.
The line secured, Crawford straightened up. It was the first time he’d seen Shelley’s face under normal conditions, and he flinched.
“The resemblance is not coincidental,” Shelley said with a kind of grim amusement. “She’s my half sister.”
Crawford didn’t have to ask who he meant … and he remembered some of the things Shelley had said during his heat-stroke delirium. “Half sister? Who—who was her father?”
Shelley’s face was haggard but merry. “Can I trust you?”
“I—don’t know. Yes.”
Shelley leaned against the wooden post. “I’m pretty sure I can trust you in exactly the same way I can trust a flower to turn toward the sun.” He made a slight bow. “That will suffice.”
Crawford frowned at that, and wondered why he should believe anything that Shelley might tell him. Well, he thought, he is her brother—visibly he’s her brother.
“You asked about her father,” Shelley was saying. “Well, to start with, father isn’t really the right word. These things are … can assume either sex. It was … Christ, there’s no point in trying to define it. It looked like a giant tortoise, as often as not, and if it had any more motivations than do the animalcules that you can see through a microscope in a drop of vinegar, it’s news to me. I’ve studied … his … species for years, but I still can’t see motivations behind the consistencies.”
Crawford thought of the cold woman, of her ageless beauty. “Which of you is the elder?”
Shelley’s grin widened, but looked even less cheerful. “That’s hard to say. Our mother gave birth to both of us on the same day, so you could say we’re twins. But her seed was implanted in my mother’s womb long before mine was—these things must have a longer gestation period—so it would be just as valid to say she’s older. But then again she lived as a sort of encysted stone in my abdomen for nineteen years, until 1811, when I managed to cut her out of myself—you must have noticed, the other day, the scar from my ‘caesarean'—so you could say she’s younger than I am. The only thing I can say with any assurance is that we did have the same mother.” He laughed and shook his head ruefully. “At least for you it wasn’t incest.”
Crawford was suddenly light-headed with jealousy. “You—” he choked, “when did you—”
“The stones have ears. Let’s talk out on the lake.” Shelley waved toward the boat.
Crawford turned to the knobby post around which the painter was tied, and for the first time noticed that the top of it had been crudely carved into the form of a grimacing human head, and that several long iron nails had been pounded into the face … long ago, to judge by the black rust-lines that streaked the splintered visage like tears.
“That’s a mazze,” called Shelley, from behind him. “The word’s Italian for ‘club.’ You see a lot of them in the Valais, southeast of here.”
Crawford was gingerly untying the rope from around the thing. “What’s it for?”
“Back in the fifteenth century, when the Swiss were breaking free of the
Hapsburgs, those things were a sort of roster for the rebels; if you wanted to go fight the oppressors, you indicated it by pounding a nail—an eisener breche, they called them—into one of these heads.”
Crawford touched one of the nails. It rocked in its hole, and impulsively he pulled it out of the face and put it into his pocket.
Shelley was taking in the freed rope, and Crawford stepped aboard before the vessel could drift out of reach. The wooden hoops around the mast clattered as the sail was raised, and then, even as Crawford settled himself comfortably on the thwart, Shelley was deftly working the sheet to put the bow around into the wind and begin tacking out away from shore. The sky had already darkened to the color of wet ash.
“When did,
” Crawford began, but his voice came out too shrill; he swallowed, and then in a more normal tone he said, “when did you … sleep with her?”
“Long before you married her,” Shelley assured him. “Actually it was shortly after her birth—her birth from me, that is. I met her on the street, and I made myself believe that it … that what I had cut out of myself had been nothing more than a stone—I do suffer from bladder stones.”
Shelley twitched at the mainsail sheet, and the boat leaned as it skated out across the face of the lake. “I made myself believe,” he went on, “that this woman who had sought me out couldn’t have anything to do with that bloody lump, that diseased rib, that I had flung into the street a couple of months before. But of course they were one and the same … though it was very difficult for her to maintain a human form back then. Even now she has to relapse into something else … rocky or reptilian … after any length of time.” The wind shifted, and he smoothly let the shift become a change to a fresh tack. “It was my first sexual experience.”
“And have you … had her, since?” It made Crawford’s teeth hurt to ask.
“No. It was—no offense, but it was too horrible to want to repeat. She was too nearly me, after all those years of living inside me, and it was like masturbation—having sex with the dark side of myself.”
“Too horrible?” Crawford’s hands had clenched. “Can you swim?”
“No, I can’t—and you’d harm her, very likely kill her, if you drowned me. We’re twins, remember, and very closely linked. But I didn’t seek you out this evening in order to insult her. Do you—”
“You’re the second—no, third!—person who has thought I’m married to her,” Crawford interrupted. “Why do you think that?”
Shelley glanced over at him quizzically. “Well, because she’s let me know, for one thing. And you’re missing your wedding-ring finger, which is generally a sign of being married to one of these—as a matter of fact, wedding bands were originally a symbolic protection against succubae, the idea being that that finger was thus banded with metal to the body. And you’ve got a different look from all the people who are just prey for these things—a practiced observer can always recognize a member of the family.”
