The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  Shelley remembered Byron’s report of an unbelievably old Austrian being carried toward Venice in order to have his life prolonged even further, and he wondered if this aged fellow was here for the same reason; somehow he thought not.

  Just then the old man looked up and met his gaze, and waved—Shelley noticed that his left hand was missing a finger—and called something that sounded like Percy.

  Startled, Shelley waved. “Do we know him?” he asked Byron.

  “No,” Byron replied, grabbing his arm and pulling him away, toward where their gondola waited. “But I’ve heard the song before.”

  Claire looked up the hill toward where he was standing and, though she didn’t move her head, she rolled her eyes in a way that clearly summoned him. He sighed and stood away from the olive tree’s twisted branch and started back down.

  The little box was being carried over from the boat, and Hoppner, the English Consul, had removed his hat. The hot morning sun gleamed on his bald head and on the varnished box.

  Several emotions tightened Shelley’s chest as he stared at the box; but when he noticed that the lid had been nailed shut his only feeling was one of relief.

  The Lido was a long, narrow spit of sandy, weedy hillocks, streaked with shadows in the late afternoon, and aside from a few fishermen’s net-draped huts, the wooden building that was Byron’s stable was the only structure visible along the desolate island.

  Byron’s grooms had left for the Lido at the same time that Byron and Shelley left the Palazzo Mocenigo, and had been waiting on the shore for a while when the two of them stepped out of the gondola onto the low dock.

  The day had turned chilly, and Byron quickly had the grooms saddle up two horses; minutes later the two men had ridden across the spine of the Lido and were galloping away down the eastern shore, the Adriatic on one hand and the low, thistle-furred hills on the other.

  For a while neither of them spoke; the wind was snatching the tops from the waves and flinging occasional gusts of spray across their faces, and Shelley tasted salt when he licked his lips.

  “When you wrote to me,” he called finally, “you said that in Venice a means could be found to free ourselves and our children from the attentions of the nephelim.”

  “Yes, I did,” replied Byron tiredly. He reined in, and Shelley did the same, and they walked their horses down the slope toward the water.

  “It’s … just possible,” Byron said, “that one can, here, just as in the Alps, break their hold and break their attention—lose them, the way you can lose tracking dogs by walking up a stream. You’ve got to invoke a blindness—for one thing, it can only be done at night.” He spat into the water. “Evidently you can even restore life to a freshly perished corpse, if the sun hasn’t yet shone on it; vampires’ victims never truly die, of course, but if you do this right you get the resurrection without the vampirehood—the person is still a normal, mortal human, revived from death just this once.”

  Byron laughed. “And of course then you’d be best advised to take ship immediately to the other side of the globe, so that your devil won’t be likely to stumble across you again—put a lot of salt water between yourself and her. I was thinking very seriously about South America.” He gave Shelley a defiant stare. “I no longer think I need to.”

  Byron was clearly not comfortable with the subject, so Shelley tried to approach it obliquely. “It sounded as though you asked that man about an eye,” he said. “Whether or not it had been restored.”

  “The eye of the Graiae,” Byron said. His horse had come to a halt and begun chewing up clumps of the coarse grass. “You remember the Graiae.”

  “The … what was it, three sisters that Perseus consulted before going off to kill the Medusa?” Abruptly, and irrationally, he was sure it had been Perseus, not Percy, that the very old man had shouted to him in the Piazzetta earlier.

  “Right,” said Byron. “And they only had one eye among them, and had to hand it back and forth to take turns seeing, and Perseus snatched it from the hand of one of them, and wouldn’t give it back until they answered his questions. When I first came here after leaving Switzerland, I spent a lot of time at a monastery full of Armenian priests and monks on one of the islands in the lagoon; I was … nervous about some metaphysical nonsense that doctor told me.”

  “Who, Polidori? Oh! No, you must mean the very neffy one—Aickman.”

  Byron looked annoyed that Shelley remembered the name. “That’s the one. He and I climbed the Wengern after you went back to England, and it really did exorcise us, as I told you it would—I felt the psychic infection sweated out of me, and I’m still not sure what we saw and what we only imagined we saw up on the summit.”

  He squinted out across the Adriatic. “Odd to be speaking of restoring the eye—I think I saw a woman cut out her own eye up there. In any case, this Aickman fellow, afterward, tried to convince me that the … shall we call them lamiae? … would still, even after the exorcism, keep track of us, still be able to recognize us as good prospects, as people with a weakness for their particular … infection.”

  Shelley thought of the woman he’d seen at Byron’s palace. “What are you writing these days?” he asked.

  Byron laughed again and shook his head, but Shelley thought the laugh was forced. “No, no, I haven’t relapsed. I am writing my best thing to date, a … sort of epic, called Don Juan, but the fact that it’s good is to my credit, not some … some vampire’s.” He was looking Shelley in the eye as he spoke, as if to prove his sincerity.

  “Oh, I don’t doubt you,” Shelley began, “it’s just—”

  “In any case,” Byron interrupted, “you are hardly the one to be lecturing me about all this.” He was still smiling, but his eyes were chilly.

  “You’re right, you’re right,” Shelley said hastily. “Uh, back to what I was saying. Was it word of this … exorcism possibility … that brought you to Venice in the first place?”

  “I … can’t recall.”

  Shelley nodded. “Very well. So what’s all this about the Graiae and their eye?”

  Byron nudged his horse into a slow walk. He sighed, apparently tired of this subject. “The Armenian fathers claim that the three sisters were examples of the real, Old Testament nephelim giants, and were captured in Egypt way the hell of a long time ago. They were staked out in the sun until they turned to stone, and then they were carved up for use in architecture, and shackled by having certain restricting designs cut into their bodies. They became drained of energy—unconscious, asleep. But they still had their eye—except that it wasn’t really an eye, and what they did with it wasn’t precisely see.”

  Shelley rolled one hand in an And? gesture.

  “I wish I could have Father Pasquale explain it to you. With the eye they didn’t so much see as know. They knew, down to decimal points even finer than God Himself ever bothered to figure to, every detail of their surroundings; and therefore they could predict any future event with absolute certainty—as easily as you were able to predict which corner of the room would receive one of those billiard balls you and Allegra were rolling around this afternoon.”

  He stared out at the sea for a moment before going on. “Now the world isn’t usually as knowable as this—it isn’t by nature hard and fast in its tiniest details, and that’s why we have the luxury of despising or admiring people, for if our courses really were as predestined as, say, the parabola of a dropped stone, we could hardly … make moral judgments … about the bodies that found themselves conforming to those courses, any more than we can blame a rock that falls on us. Fortune-tellers—and Calvinists—would like living around these things when they’re awake and have their eye, because the Graiae’s sight forbids all randomness, all free will. When they have their sight, the Graiae not only check on things, but also check them.”

  “But according to that fat man they don’t have it, their eye hasn’t been restored,” said Shelley. A wave surged in and swirled foam around his horse’s fetlocks. “
How did that juggling establish that?”

  “Well, Carlo’s an expert coin-tosser, so good at it that he works right up against the bounds of what’s possible; and if you take that as a given, then by having him juggle and try precision-tossing, you can monitor the bounds of the possible. If the eye had been restored, his coin would have landed a good deal closer to the spot of blood; and if they were awake and had the eye, it would have landed squarely on it.”

  “And what if they’d been awake this afternoon when he did it? Awake but still blind?”

  “That’s what you’ve come to Venice to do—wake them up while they’re still blind—that’s what I was hinting about in my letter. As to what would happen to Carlo’s coin if he was to toss it in that circumstance—I don’t know. I’ve asked him, and he’s tried to explain, but all I can gather is that the coin wouldn’t even exist between the moment of being tossed and the moment of coming to rest; and where it came to rest would have nothing to do with how he threw it; and the penny that landed wouldn’t in any valid sense be the same one that was thrown.”

  Shelley was frowning, but after a few moments he nodded slowly. “There’s a sort of insane consistency to it,” he said. “We’re trying to undo determinacy, predestination; these things, these three primordial sisters, cast a … a field, say. If they’ve got their eye, it’s a field of inviolable determinacy—but if they’re blind, it’s a field of expanded possibilities, freedom from coldly mechanical restrictions.” He grinned at Byron, his eyes bright. “You’ll remember that Perseus was careful to ask them his questions while they were casting their blind field—so that what he asked wouldn’t be impossible.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” said Byron. “And you’re right, if they’re awake but still blind, then many things ordinarily impossible are possible within their focus.”

  “And they’re in Venice, the Graiae? And your priests told you how to wake them up?”

  “I’m not too confident about waking them, certain very rare fuels have to be acquired … but yes, they’re here—you saw two of them an hour ago standing at the southern end of the Piazza. The third fell into the canal when they were trying to set them up, way back in the twelfth century.” Shelley blinked. “Those columns?”

  “Right. The doge at the time, Sebastiano Ziani, promised any favor, any onesta grazia, to whomever could stand the pillars up in safe captivity there on the pavement in front of the Ducal Palace. Some fellow named Nicolò il Barattieri did it—though he did drop one of them in the canal—but then he demanded the eye as payment. In other words he demanded that uncertainty—gambling—be legalized in the vicinity of the square, in the focus of the sisters’ attention. The doge had to stand by his promise, but to counteract it he built the prison right there, and had executions held between the pillars. Blood, fresh-spilt blood, is evidently a fair replacement for the missing eye. Of course, they haven’t had executions there for quite a while now.”

  Shelley was trying to hold on to his impression that all this made some kind of sense. “Why should blood be an effective replacement?”

  Byron turned his horse back the way they’d come, and set off at a walk. “I’m just quoting the priests now, and I know what you think of priests—but they said that blood contains the … what, the complete, unarguable plan, the design, of the person it comes from. There’s no—”

  “That has to be why they need to drink human blood,” interrupted Shelley excitedly. “In order to take human form. They couldn’t do it without the plan, the design, that’s in the blood. If they just drank animal blood, the only forms they could assume would be animals.”

  Byron shrugged a little testily. “That could be. Anyway, in blood there’s no room for change—no uncertainty, in other words. It’s a pretty powerful embodiment of predestination. Semen would be the opposite, the embodiment of undefined potentiality. In fact, if you could have sex with a woman, there in the square, that would be a perfect blinder for them.” He laughed and put the spurs to his horse. “I’ll volunteer to try, if you like.”

  Shelley was shaking his head. “How can the Austrians want to restore the eye, and make everyone in the area brute slaves to mechanical causality?”

  “Well of course they’ve supposedly got this ancient member of the ruling Hapsburg family—some old fellow named Werner who’s apparently been hibernating in the Hapsburg castle in northern Switzerland for the last eight centuries. They want to keep him alive for another few centuries, and medicines and life-prolonging magics work much better near the Graiae—assuming they’re awake and can pay their razory sort of attention to things. The Austrians have apparently been busy shipping him south through the Alps ever since 1814, when they acquired Venice. I—” He laughed uncertainly. “I believe they’ve got him packed in ice.”

  Shelley shrugged. “Very well. But back when Venice was a republic—why did the doges want the pillars to have the eye? The doges were always enemies of the Hapsburgs.”

  “The Graiae, with the eye, promote stasis, Shelley,” said Byron impatiently. “Every ruler wants to maintain the status quo. And I don’t see that that’s so pernicious, either. Your fields of expanded probability sound to me like the … unformed darkness that was on the deep before God said ‘Let there be light.'”

  “Maybe it is like that—maybe it’s God who imposes restrictions on us to keep us from becoming all that we’re capable of becoming, all we dream of. Certainly religion does that. Without the shackles of religion, mankind would be free to—”

  Byron laughed. “You haven’t changed, Shelley. I’ll admit that it was cruel of nature to allow mankind self-awareness; death is going to sever every one of us from his memories and everything that he—uselessly—sought, and we all know it, and that’s unbearable. But it’s also the way the world works—you needn’t blame it on priests and religion. Hell, religion can at least make us believe, for a while, sometimes, that our souls are grand and immortal and perfectible.”

  “You’re talking the worst kind of fatalism,” said Shelley sadly.

  “And you’re talking Utopia,” answered Byron.

  Shelley managed to get Byron to agree on a plan of action, and Shelley and Claire Clairmont left Venice three days later; Shelley was to return as soon as possible with his whole family: Mary, their two-and-a-half-year-old son William, and their one-year-old daughter Clara.

  He wrote to Mary even before leaving Venice, telling her to bring the children with all possible haste to Byron’s hilltop villa in the mainland town of Este, where Shelley would be awaiting them. He had had to be a bit evasive in the letter, for he couldn’t tell her, especially through the Austrian-controlled mail, that he intended to take the whole family northwest to Venice in the middle of some night, awaken the blind Graiae and slip free of the attention-net of the vampiric nephelim, and then flee the Western Hemisphere forever.

  Mary and both of the children arrived at Byron’s villa twelve days later, on the fifth of September, and Mary insisted on simply resting there for a week or so, relaxing in the gardens of the villa, which had been built on the site of a Capuchin monastery that had been destroyed by the French. Byron had told Shelley that consecrated ground might have certain protective properties.

  The children seemed happy to get a respite from travel, and even Shelley decided that a few days of rest could do them no harm.

  He was finding that he was able to write very well here, in fact; he began by doing translations of the Greek classics, and had now moved smoothly from translating the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus to actually trying to write the last play of that ancient, uncompleted trilogy.

  He wrote during the long, hot days in the breezy summer house, which was reached by leaving the back of the main house and walking through a shady tunnel of vine-tangled trellises, and at night he often went out there to watch the bats fly out of the battlements of the ruined medieval fortress of Este; sometimes too, at night, he would stare out across the hundred and twenty miles at the spine of the Apenn
ine Mountains to the south.

  Those mountains had dominated the southeast corner of the sky when he and Mary and the children had recently been living near Livorno on the opposite coast, and the peaks had fascinated him then too. He had written a fragment of a poem while living there, and on many nights now he recalled it while staring south at the mountains over the monastery’s fallen walls:

  The Apennine in the light of day

  Is a mighty mountain dim and gray,

  Which between the earth and sky doth lay;

  But when night comes, a chaos dread

  On the dim starlight then is spread,

  And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm,

  Shrouding …

  He had taken the poem no further; he wasn’t sure what the mountain might be shrouding.

  As it happened, they wound up spending eighteen days at the villa; then, one Monday afternoon late in the month, two things happened to convince Shelley that he’d better get the family on to Venice as fast as possible.

  Clouds had sailed darkly up the Po Valley, and the light was leaden and dim by four o’clock; storm clouds bunched and flexed vastly in the south, like gods miraculously rendered in tortured, animate marble, and Shelley, sitting over his manuscript in the summer house, glanced up at the sky from time to time. He was hoping it wouldn’t rain for a while, for he was writing a more purely powerful sort of verse than anything he’d ever written before, and he was unwilling to stop the flow of words for any reason—not for rain, nor even to reread the verses to see if they made consistent sense.

  “Ere Babylon was dust,” he found himself writing, “The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, / Met his own image walking in the garden …” And Shelley looked up and saw a figure walking in his own garden, behind a vine-choked lattice, a silhouette against the distant gray bulks of the clouds and the Apennines.