by Tim Powers
The soldier who had started toward the first pillar evidently saw this as the greater threat, for he veered toward the burning straw at the base of the second one and began trying to kick the stuff away; his trousers began flaming, but he didn’t stop.
“Feuer!” the soldiers were yelling now, and they were rushing away from Shelley and his marionette; the old man swung his heavy walking stick at the Austrian who was trying to kick the fire away from the second column, and the apparently weighted end of the stick caught the man solidly in the belly; he folded up in midair and hit the pavement and lay there, writhing and still burning.
A man who was clearly an Austrian officer sprinted up, his fire-thrown shadow dancing across the pillared wall of the Ducal Palace, and he was waving to someone back by the dark bulk of the basilica. “Das Auge!” he was yelling. “Komm hier! Schnell!”
One soldier levelled a rifle at the very old man and squinted down the barrel. Shelley grabbed Allegra’s hand. Things were getting out of control—people might very well die here tonight.
Byron had torn free of his remaining captor and flung him to the ground. Two of the soldiers had dragged their burning fellow away toward the canal, apparently hoping to throw him into the water, but his rifle still lay on the pavement. Byron limped over to it, picked it up and hurried back to where Shelley stood with the children.
In the instant before the soldier fired his rifle at the old man, Shelley saw a thing burst vividly but silently into existence in the air between the soldier and his target; it was a winged serpent as big as a large dog, and firelight glittered on scales and blurs of wings as the snaky thing curled in the air.
After the bang Shelley heard the rifle ball ricochet off of the thing and go rebounding away among the pillars as the echoes of the shot batted between the palace and the library.
Byron grabbed Shelley’s arm. “Get back—all we can do now is hope the fires get hot enough before they can restore the eye.”
The winged serpent disappeared, and the sudden chill in the air made Shelley wish irrationally that he had brought a coat for Clara.
In the red light he could see several of the Austrians hurriedly carrying a wooden box from the direction of the basilica.
“It’s the eye,” said Byron. “Hold Allegra.”
The Austrian officer was gesturing urgently to the men with the box, and yelling something to them about the fires being nearly hot enough.
And Byron swore, made the sign of the cross and then raised the captured rifle to his shoulder. It took him only a moment to aim at the advancing men, and then he fired.
The box fell to the stones as its lead carrier buckled, and Byron barked a quick, harsh laugh, which was echoed by the old man. Shelley was holding Allegra’s hand so tightly that she had started to cry.
The officer cast a desperate glance toward Byron and Shelley, and then snatched at his belt—Shelley turned his back and crouched in front of Allegra, but when he glanced fearfully over his shoulder he saw that it hadn’t been a pistol the man had been reaching for.
The man had drawn a knife and, even as Shelley watched, he slammed the edge of it against the throat of one of the soldiers Byron had struggled with. Blood sprayed across the stones as the man folded backward and down, his hands clutching uselessly at his split neck.
“Blood!” yelled Byron, throwing the rifle down, “he’s spilling blood! That will provide an eye!”
Shelley unceremoniously dropped Clara and rushed forward, intending to drag the bleeding body away, out of the focus of the Graiae, but the officer had spun around and cut the throat of another soldier—and as Shelley ran toward him, shouting in horror and still twenty feet away, the officer looked him square in the eye and lifted the blade under his own chin and dragged it deeply across his throat. He knelt down almost gently, leaning forward.
Blood was puddled across the uneven pavement now, and Shelley floundered dizzily to a halt, wondering if it was delirium that made the paving stones underfoot seem to ripple, as if thirsty for the fare they hadn’t got since executions had stopped being done here.
But the air was rippling too, like a bird in a trap, and Shelley thought the very fabric of the world here was quivering in protest—then abruptly it stopped, and though the fires were still raging and lashing bits of burning straw up to the weirdly underlit statues on top of the columns, and the soldiers were shouting and running back and forth as chaotically as ever, Shelley felt a heavy stillness settle over the square; and he knew it was too late.
The Graiae were awake, and they could see.
He backed hesitantly across the solid pavement to where Byron stood. Byron tossed Clara’s ludicrously costumed body to him and began leading Allegra back toward the gondola.
Shelley followed numbly, and their shadows were wiggling across Tita and the gondola long before they reached the steps. As Byron lifted Allegra into the gondola Shelley noticed how pale he was, and he remembered the soldier Byron had shot.
Shelley looked back—and the hair stood up on the back of his neck for, impossibly, the blood was now sliding rapidly across the square from the base of one column to the base of the other, horizontally, as though the whole pavement had been tilted up; and then as he took a sideways step to see better, it rushed back the other way, toward the column at whose base it had been spilled.
The stars seemed to be crawling in the sky, and when Shelley turned back to get into the gondola he noticed that the shadows cast by the fires were particularly hard-edged, with no blurriness.
Shelley could feel vast attention being paid to him; he had to glance up to make sure nothing had leaned down out of the sky to focus on him. There was nothing to see but the hard-gleaming stars.
“It’s the columns,” said Byron hoarsely, pushing him into the gondola. “They’re—apparently fascinated by you.”
As Shelley climbed in and sat down, Allegra edged away from him, up toward the bow, and for an anguished moment he thought she hated him for the way he had treated Clara’s body; but then she pulled one of the seat cushions over her face and, in a muffled voice, called, “Why is the eye staring so hard at you, Uncle Percy?"—and he realized that she had only wanted to get away from the object of the Graiae’s overpowering scrutiny.
And they were staring hard at him, he could feel the intense interest. His heart labored in his thin chest, as if extra work was required to push his blood along against the resistance of their attention.
Byron untied the mooring ropes and climbed in last.
The water was uncharacteristically choppy as Tita poled them away from the fondamenta, though the sky had cleared of storm clouds hours ago and the stars shone like needles. Again the stars seemed to be moving in the sky, rocking just perceptibly like toy boats on an agitated pond. Shelley leaned out of the gondola and clawed sweaty hair back from his forehead to see what was happening in the canal.
Something was splashing heavily in the water fifty yards away, out in front of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, and spray glittered dimly in the starlight—Tita was audibly and uncharacteristically praying as he wrenched at the oar—and then for a moment something big had risen partway out of the water, something made of stone but alive, and its blunt head, bearded with seaweed and crusted with barnacles, seemed to be turned toward the glaringly lit Piazza with terrible attention in the moment before it crashed back into the water and disappeared.
The oppressive sense of being cosmically stared at lifted from Shelley’s chest.
“The third pillar,” Byron said hoarsely. “The one they dropped into the canal in the twelfth century. We’ve awakened it too.” He looked almost fearfully at Shelley. “I think even it wants a look at you.”
Shelley was glad he had blocked Allegra’s view of it—she had already seen far too much tonight—and he tried to broaden his narrow shoulders to keep her from seeing anything more; but the water seemed to be settling down, and the thing didn’t rise again.
Soon the church of San Vitale bl
ocked the rearward view, and he let himself lean back. He looked anxiously at Allegra. She was apparently calm, but he wasn’t reassured.
He didn’t stay long at the Palazzo Mocenigo.
He did remember to take the armor off Clara’s abused body—and to borrow a couple of tools from the shaken Byron, who didn’t ask why or even look at him as he handed them over—before flagging a gondola in which to return to the inn where Mary and Claire waited.
Shelley walked back down the hill in the morning sunlight to where Mary and
Claire stood. The tiny coffin had already been lowered into the grave, and the priest was shaking holy water down into the hole. Too little too late, Shelley thought.
Goodbye, Clara. I hope you don’t resent the last thing I did for you—the unspeakable going-away present I gave you just before dawn, after we’d got back to the inn and everyone but you and me had gone to sleep.
Did I really delay so long in Este, he asked himself, and let this happen to my child, just because my writing was going so well? Am I guilty of the same self-imposed blindness as Byron, who is clearly ignoring the connection between his concubine Margarita Cogni and his recent poetry?
Maybe, he thought now, maybe if I had jumped out of the gondola on the trip from Fusina to Venice, when Clara was at least still alive—drowned myself then, even as late as that—my dreadful sister would have died too, and Clara wouldn’t have had to die. But no, by then she’d already been bitten.
He looked again at his abraded left hand.
The coffin had been shut last night, when he had stolen down to the spare room where the landlord had told them to put it, but Shelley had lifted the lid and taken Clara’s cooled little wrist in his hand. There had been no pulse, but he had felt a patient vitality there, and he knew what sort of “resurrection of the dead” would await her if he didn’t take the ancient precaution.
It hadn’t taken him long, even trembling as he was and blinded with tears.
When he had finished, he had closed the coffin again, and despite being an atheist he prayed, to whatever benevolent power there might be, that no one would open it—or at least no one unburdened by an awareness of the truths behind superstitions.
He threw Byron’s iron-headed hammer into the canal; the wooden stake, which had so ravaged his hands and had so much more horribly ravaged little Clara’s body, he left imbedded in her chest.
INTERLUDE
FEBRUARY 1821
…This consumption is a disease particularly fond of people who write such good verses as you have done … I do not think that young and amiable poets are at all bound to gratify its taste; they have entered into no bond with the Muses to that effect….
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, to John Keats, 27 July 1820
I fear much there is something operating on his mind—at least so it appears to me—he either feels that he is now living at the expence of some one else or something of that kind.
—Dr. James Clark,
Keats’s physician in Rome, 27 November 1820
Write to George as soon as you receive this, and tell him how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister—who walks about my imagination like a ghost—she is so like Tom. I can scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward bow.
—John Keats, to Charles Brown, 30 November 1820
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
—John Keats, epitaph for himself
Even on this chilly day there were a dozen artists, mostly English tourists, who had setup easels in the Piazza di Spagna, at the foot of the wide marble stairs that terraced the Pincian Hill below the twin bell towers of the Trinità dei Monti church. As Michael Crawford strode across the Piazza toward the tile-roofed rooming house that was Number 26, his boots scattered piles of the little yellow husks that littered the pavements wherever the lower classes of Rome gathered, and he looked with sour amusement at the loungers eating plates of the boiled beans that had shed the husks.
These weren’t precisely beggars—they stood here in hopes of being asked to model for paintings. In order to solicit such employment they liked to assume, as if by accident, poses they thought they were particularly suited for: here, leaning against the stairway coping, a hollow-cheeked, bearded young man rolled his eyes heavenward and mumbled under his breath, clearly hoping to be asked to pose as some suffering saint or perhaps even Christ; while over by the Bernini fountain a woman in a blue shawl clutched an infant to her breast and made beatifically magnanimous gestures with her free arm; the weather was evidently too chilly for any appearance by the sun-basking representatives of the dolce far niente, the “sweet to do nothing” life, but saints and madonnas and even entire Holy Families stood in shivering clusters along the shallow gray slopes of the steps.
For a moment Crawford was whimsically tempted to drop his bag and stand idly here himself, just to be able to see, when an artist finally did ask him to pose, what sort of character the artist might think he represented. A Hippocrates? A Medici poisoner?
But he quickened his pace, for even in Rome winter could be deadly to victims of consumption, and the man he was going to see was supposedly very far gone with that disease; and the man’s nurse, for whom Crawford had been given some medicine that was now in a vial in his coat pocket, was apparently suffering from a nervous disorder that made her a danger to both herself and her patient.
Though Crawford’s step was still light and he was only forty years old, his hair was almost completely gray. He had been working as a doctor again for two years now, largely on retainer for a man named Werner von Aargau, and the retainer work had, during the last twenty-six months, taken him all over Europe. He was glad to be back in Rome again.
He had met von Aargau in Venice, in the winter of 1818. Crawford, nearly destitute in those days, had been doing some late-night drinking by lamplight in a canal-side café when he’d been startled to his feet by the nearby screech and clang of swordplay, and when he had flung down his drink and rushed along the canal bank a dozen yards, he had come upon a young man sprawled on the ancient pavement beside a dropped sword, his shirt soaked with blood.
Over the diminishing drumbeat of fleeing footsteps Crawford had been able to hear the young man’s rasping breath, and so he had crouched down and used the sword to cut a bandage from the victim’s silk jacket and tie it tightly over the cut in his belly; Crawford had then run back to the café and enlisted help to drag the semiconscious body back there, and when they had got the young man stretched out on the floor beside one of the tables, he had stitched up the wound with a skewer and kitchen twine.
The young man had regained consciousness as Crawford and a couple of volunteers were boating him to the nearest hospital, and when he learned who had stitched him up he had weakly dug a purse from his pocket and insisted that Crawford accept it; and when Crawford looked into it, later in the evening, it had proven to contain a dozen gold Louis d’or.
Thinking to use up the money sparingly, Crawford had spent a little of it to hire a cheap room and buy a plate of hot pasta in unfresh oil, but the next morning a footman had knocked at his door and summoned him to the hospital. Crawford never did find out how the footman had known where to find him.
To Crawford’s astonishment the young man whom he had stitched up only the night before had been cheerfully sitting up in the hospital bed, apparently lucid and unfevered; and when Crawford had haltingly begun to express his gratitude for the money, the young man had interrupted to say that no amount of money could repay the debt he owed Crawford for having saved his life—and that he had a proposal of employment, if Crawford happened to need such.
Crawford had looked down at his own shabby clothes, then looked up with a wry smile and asked what sort of work it might be.
The young man had proved to be one Werner von Aargau, a wealthy humanitarian and patron of the arts. He explained to Crawford that he not only funded artists and politicians and religious leaders, but got the finest medica
l care for them too when they needed it, and he asked Crawford if he’d like to work for him as a surgeon, since his skills in that area were clearly so great.
Crawford had told him that he was only legally qualified to practice veterinary medicine, and hadn’t made a success of that—he’d come to Venice, in fact, only to try to borrow money from an acquaintance he hadn’t seen in a couple of years, and he’d been wasting the evening in that café only because he’d parted from the acquaintance on bad terms, and wanted to blunt his pride with drink before approaching the man.
Von Aargau had assured him that his skills were first-rate, and that he could be provided with impeccably forged medical credentials, and—since von Aargau would call on him only infrequently—that he could build and maintain a medical practice all of his own, in whatever specialty he would like to pursue.
That had made up Crawford’s mind for him.
Crawford hadn’t felt that he had the right to ask about the nature of the quarrel that had led to their meeting; but, before accepting von Aargau’s offer, he had worked up the nerve to ask him how often swordsmen tried to kill him in the middle of the night.
Von Aargau had laughed and assured him that it was infrequent—but when Crawford had stitched him up on the blood-puddled café floor, he had noticed a broad scar below the young man’s ribs, and he knew that the canal-side assassin’s blade had not been the first to violate the integrity of von Aargau’s hide.
Later he learned that von Aargau was obscurely but powerfully connected with the new Austrian government of Venice, and that he was particularly hated and feared by the Carbonari, an ancient, secret society that was currently striving to drive out Italy’s foreign masters. Von Aargau warned Crawford that he’d be regarded by these people as an agent of the Austrians himself, even though he’d only be doing medical work; he would be wise, von Aargau had said, to avoid neighborhoods where the post-mounted wooden heads called mazzes were to be found, for the mazze was virtually the Carbonari flag.
