by Tim Powers
Crawford nodded. “That’s true, I guess. They just want the dreams they get from their quartzes and bits of lightweight metal … and from the blood of the people who have been bitten. You can see through the blood.” He started forward, but again had to lean on Byron.
“And I wasn’t even infected anymore. They said my blood was still worth a connoisseur’s time, though—they said it was like a mild vinegar in which one could … still taste the grandeur of the fine wine it had once been.” He laughed weakly. “They’d love yours. If you should ever fall into penury …”
“A position always open to me, right. Thanks.”
For several moments they limped on in silence, while Crawford kept reminding himself of what was going on. “I’ll try to go up into the Alps again,” he wheezed finally, “for the sake of the child, but I’m afraid I’d die now long before reaching the peaks. I was … incalculably younger in 1816.”
“If my plan is sound we won’t have to go any farther than Venice,” Byron said. “I think I know a way to blind the Graiae.”
“Blind the … Graiae,” Crawford repeated, sadly abandoning his frail hope of being able to understand what was going on.
They shuffled around a corner, and Byron had taken off his hat and was waving it at the waiting carriage.
“You’ll stay at my place in Pisa tonight,” Byron said as the carriage got under way, “and then tomorrow we’ll take this carriage to Viareggio, where we’ll meet Trelawny, who’s sailing there aboard the Bolivar. He’s built some kind of damned oven or something to burn the bodies in. We’ll be bringing leaden boxes to hold the ashes.”
Crawford nodded. “I’m glad they’re going to be burned.”
“I am too,” Byron said. “The damned Health Office has been dragging its feet on letting us have the permits—I think someone high up in the Austrian government wants vampires hatching out of the sand—but we’ve got the permits now, and mean to use them before they can be cancelled. I just hope it’s not already too late.”
“Wait a moment,” said Crawford, “Pisa? I can’t go there—the guardia is looking for me.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, do you really imagine that you’re recognizable? You must weigh all of ninety pounds right now. Hell, look at this!”
Byron reached out and took hold of a handful of Crawford’s greasy white hair, and tugged. The clump of hair came away in his hand with almost no resistance. Byron tossed it out the open window and wiped his hand on a handkerchief and then threw the handkerchief out too. “You look like a sick, starved, hundred-year-old ape.”
Crawford smiled, though his vision was brightly blurred with tears. “I’ve always said that a man should have experienced something of life before embarking on fatherhood.”
Leigh Hunt’s children also noticed Crawford’s resemblance to an ape, and insisted that the lord’s menagerie was extensive enough already without bringing in “a mangy ourang-outang,” but Byron cursed them away and got Crawford upstairs and into a bath, then went to fetch Trelawny.
Crawford scrubbed himself with some rose-scented soap that might have belonged to Byron’s mistress Teresa—though he was sure she wouldn’t want it after this—and washed his hair with it too. When he lifted his head after dunking it in the water to rinse out the soap, most of his hair stayed in the tub, floating in curls like strands of boiled egg white; and when he got out of the tub and used one of Teresa’s hairbrushes, he realized that he had gone bald during this past month.
A full-length mirror hung on one wall, and he stared in horror at his naked body. His knees and elbows were now the widest parts of his limbs, and his ribs stood out like the fingers of a fist under tight cloth, and there were sores on his wrists from the daily chafing of the cross-ropes. And he didn’t think he would be fathering any more children.
For a few moments he wept, almost silently, for the man he had once been … and then bolstered himself with a sip of Teresa’s cologne, pulled a robe around his wasted body, and tried to tell himself that if he could somehow save Josephine and their child he would qualify for manhood in a truer sense than he ever had before.
It was a brave resolve, but he looked at his pale, trembling hands and wondered how much he would be able to do; and he considered the fragmented state of his mind and wondered how long he would even be able to remember the resolve.
Byron returned with John Trelawny to discuss the details of tomorrow’s pyre—Trelawny only gaped at Crawford twice, once when he first glimpsed him and once when he was told who Crawford was—but Crawford wasn’t able to concentrate on what was being said; Trelawny was so burly and tanned and dark-bearded and clear-eyed and healthy that Crawford felt battered and scorched by the man’s mere proximity.
Byron noticed his inattention, and led Crawford down a hall to a guest bedroom. “I’ll send up a servant with some bread and broth,” he said as Crawford carefully sat down on the bed. “I’m sure a doctor would insist that you stay in bed for a week, but this pyre tomorrow will be a sort of practice run for Shelley’s on the following day, so I want you along.”
Byron started to turn away, then added, “Oh, and I’ll have the servant bring in a cup of brandy too—and feel free to ask for more whenever you like. It’s no office of mine to restrict anyone’s drinking, and I can’t have word going round that my hospitality is such that my guests are driven to drinking cologne.”
Crawford felt his face heating up, and he didn’t meet Byron’s eye; but after Byron had left the room he relaxed gratefully back across the bed to await the food. He heard his bath water being dumped out of a window, and he hoped the plants wouldn’t be poisoned.
He fell asleep, and dreamed that he was back up on the cross in the underground bar; someone had mistaken him for a wooden crucifix, and was getting ready to hammer an iron nail into his face, but Crawford’s only fear was that the man would notice too soon that Crawford was alive, and not do it.
CHAPTER 20
The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull; but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had any one seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine.
—Edward John Trelawny,
Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, 1878
Lady Macbeth: Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!
Doctor of Physic: What a sigh is there! The heart is sorely charged.
Waiting-Gentlewoman: I would not have such a heart in my bosom for the dignity of the whole body.
—Shakespeare,
Macbeth
The Serchio River at the end of summer was low and narrow between its banks, and the glittering waves that swept in from the Ligurean Sea and crashed along this uninhabited stretch of the Tuscany coast went foaming quite a distance up the river mouth, apparently unopposed by any current. The onshore breeze hissed faintly in the branches of the aromatic pine trees that furred the slopes of the hills.
The Bolivar was moored fifty yards out from shore, near a sloop that flew the Austrian flag, and Byron’s carriage stood on the dirt road above the beach.
On the sand slope a hut had been built of pine tree trunks woven with pine branches and roofed with reeds, and Crawford and Byron and Leigh Hunt were sitting in its shade, drinking cool wine while several uniformed men stood around the little structure. Crawford was sweating profusely, and he wondered which of the officers had had the unpleasant duty of living in the hut for the past month, guarding the graves of Williams and des Loges.
“Trelawny is upset,” Byron said. “He’d like to have done this at dawn—with a Viking ship for the pyre, I don’t doubt. He’s a pagan at heart.” Byron had been nervously irritable all morning.
Trelawny stood a few hundred yards away, his arms crossed, watching the men from the Health Office digging in the soft sand. His custom-made oven, a sort o
f high-sided, four-legged iron table, sat over a lavish pile of pine logs a few yards past him.
Trelawny had told Byron that he wanted the cremation to take place at ten o’clock—but Byron had slept late, and his carriage had not come rolling up to the road above the shore until noon.
Crawford took one more sip of wine, then shrugged. “It’s a pagan business,” he said. The ride had tired him, and he wished he could sleep. He tugged the brim of his straw hat down farther over his eyes.
Hunt looked at him in puzzlement and seemed about to ask a question, but Byron swore and stood up—the men had evidently found a body, for one of them had climbed up out of the sandy hole and picked up a boathook.
“Somebody is still here, at least,” Byron muttered, starting to limp forward.
Crawford and Hunt stood up and plodded after Byron through the thick, hot sand to the hole. Crawford made himself keep up with Hunt, but in order not to faint he had to clench his fists and stare at the ground and take deep breaths. The bandages around his ankles were wet—the blood-draining incisions the nefandos had given him had started bleeding again.
Oddly, there was no noticeable odor of putrefaction on the pine-scented sea breeze.
The health officer had dragged a blackened, limbless body out onto the sand. A woven chain of garlic still adhered to the body, and several purpled silver coins tumbled off onto the sand. The Health Office didn’t cheat, Crawford thought dizzily.
Byron was squinting, and his mouth was pinched. “Is that a human body?” he asked, his voice scratchy. “It’s more like the carcass of a sheep. This is … a satire.”
Trelawny reached down and gingerly pulled a black silk handkerchief free of the remains of the jacket; he laid it out on the sand near one of the silver coins and pointed at the letters E.E.W. stitched into the fabric.
Byron shook his head in disgusted wonder. “The excrement of worms holds together better than the potter’s clay of which we’re made.” He sighed. “Let me look at his teeth.”
Both Trelawny and Hunt turned puzzled glances on Byron.
“I, uh, can recognize anyone I’ve talked to by their teeth,” he said. Glancing at Crawford, he added, “The teeth reveal what the tongue and eyes might try to conceal.”
Trelawny muttered some quick Italian to the officer, who shrugged and, with the handle of the shovel, turned the head.
Crawford looked down at the shapeless, lipless face, and nodded. Williams’s canine teeth were perceptibly longer than they had been when he’d been alive. The garlic and silver slowed him down, Crawford thought, but the Health Office really should have thought of some plausible, hygienic-sounding reason to put a wooden stake through the chest.
The officer had leaned into the hole again, and this time hooked up a leg with a boot on the end of it. Trelawny stepped forward—he had brought one of Williams’s boots for comparison, and when he held it up to the one on the dead foot, they were obviously the same size.
“Oh, it’s him, sure enough,” said Byron. “Let’s get this onto your oven, shall wer?”
The officers were careful, but as they lifted the body, the neck gave way and the head fell off and thudded into the sand. One of the officers hurriedly stepped forward with a shovel, and, in a grotesque attempt at reverence that made Crawford think of someone coaxing some hesitant animal into a trap, gingerly worked the blade of the shovel under the head, and picked it up. The head grimaced eyelessly at the ocean, rocking slightly as the officer walked.
Byron was pale. “Don’t repeat this with me,” he said. “Let my carcass rot where it falls.”
Several of the officers had continued digging in the sand; they had found another body now, and wanted to know whether it should be carried to the oven too.
“No no,” said Byron, “it’s just that poor sailor boy, I doubt that he has any family to—”
Crawford took Byron’s arm, both to steady himself and to get the lord’s attention. “Add him to the pyre,” Crawford whispered. “I think you’ll recognize him by his teeth, too.”
“Oh.” Byron swore. “Si, metti anche lui nella fornache!” Hunt and Trelawny were staring at him, and he added, “Shelley thought well enough of—whatever his name was—to hire him, didn’t he? I’m taking over Shelley’s debts, and I choose to regard this as one of them.”
Hunt and Byron and Trelawny walked onward to stand around the open-topped oven on which their dead and sundered friend lay, but Crawford reeled away through the hot air to where the other body was being dug up.
The officers had got the head and an arm out, and Crawford saw here too the garlic and the silver coins. He stared down at des Loges’s fleshless smile, noting the lengthened canine teeth, and he managed to smile back at the grisly thing, and tip his straw hat.
Goodbye at last, François, he thought. Thanks again for helping with my passport six years ago. I wonder if that clerk is still around—Brizeau? Some name like that—and if he’ll finally manage to get your wife now.
The health officers laid des Loges’s remains in a blanket, and Crawford limped along beside them as they carried the burden to where everyone else waited.
At last both bodies were laid side by side in the bed of the oven, and Trelawny crouched and held a burning glass over a particularly dry cluster of pine needles. The concentrated sunlight glowed blindingly white, and then resinous smoke was billowing up. Quickly the fire was burning so furiously that Hunt and Trelawny and the officers all stepped back, and the beach and the sea seemed to ripple through the nearly transparent flames.
Crawford forced himself to stand firm for one second longer, holding his hat onto his head against the blast of hot air that would have whirled it away, and through streaming eyes he watched the heat taking the ruined bodies; and when he finally had to spin away and stagger into the relative coolness of the sea breeze, he noticed that Byron too had hung back to look.
The two of them glanced at each other for a moment, and then looked away, Crawford toward the sea and Byron toward his carriage; and Crawford knew that Byron too had seen the pieces of the bodies moving, weakly, like embryos in prematurely broken eggs.
Hunt had fetched a wooden box from the carriage, and after the first intense heat had given way to a steadier fire, Trelawny opened the box, and then he and Hunt leaned in toward the fire to throw frankincense and salt onto the now inert bodies, and Trelawny managed to get close enough to pour a bottle of wine and a bottle of oil over them. Everyone retreated back to the hut then, for the very sand around the furnace was becoming too hot to walk on, even in boots.
Earlier in the morning Trelawny had curtly turned down the offer of a drink, but now he seized the wine bottle and drank deeply right from the neck of it. He leaned against one of the poles of the hut, but it started to give, so he sat down beside Hunt. Byron was standing just outside the hut, next to where the exhausted Crawford sat.
“A cooked salad,” Crawford heard Byron mutter. Then, louder, Byron said, “Let’s try the strength of these waters that drowned our friends! How far out do you think they were when their boat sank?”
Trelawny stared up at him in exasperation, the shadows of the woven branches striping his bearded face. “You’d better not try, unless you want to be put into the oven yourself—you’re not in condition.”
Byron ignored him and began unbuttoning his shirt, walking away down the sand slope toward the sea.
“Damn the man,” muttered Trelawny, handing the bottle to Hunt and getting to his feet.
Crawford watched the two of them stride to the surf, throwing off garments as they went, and then dive into the waves. He and Hunt passed the bottle back and forth as the heads and arms of the two swimmers receded out across the sea’s glittering face. Crawford absently brushed blood-caked sand off the bandages on his ankles.
After a few minutes one of the swimmers seemed to be having some difficulty—the other had paddled over to him, and now they had both turned around and were laboring back.
Hunt had sto
od up. “I think it was Byron that ran into trouble,” said Hunt nervously.
Crawford just nodded, knowing that most of Hunt’s concern for Byron’s welfare was based on Byron’s promised support of the magazine that was supposed to save Hunt from penury.
At last the two swimmers had reached the shallows, and were able to stand up. It had indeed been Byron who had broken down—Trelawny had practically towed him in, and Byron now angrily threw off his supporting arm.
Byron retrieved his scattered clothing, and put it all back on before walking back up to the hut. “It was an excess of black bile,” he muttered when he had got back into the shade.
Crawford recalled that in the medieval system of medicine black bile was supposed to be the humour that caused pessimism and melancholy. I imagine, he thought, that we’re all suffering an excess of it today.
Trelawny had stumped up to the hut now, and though he watched Byron solicitously, the lord avoided meeting his glance. “I hope you paid attention here today,” Byron said, perhaps to Crawford. “Tomorrow we do Shelley.”
Crawford stared toward the still raging pyre, and in spite of the day’s heat he had to clench his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering.
Trelawny sailed off in the Bolivar and spent the night at an inn in Viareggio, while the others returned to Pisa in Byron’s carriage. The next day they all met again at a section of beach fifteen miles farther north; and again Byron had made them late. No hut had been built here, and Byron and Crawford and Hunt waited in Byron’s carriage.
The sky was as cloud free as yesterday’s had been, and seemed all of a piece with the sea, so that the two islands on the southern horizon seemed to float in space.
Byron caught Crawford’s eye and nodded toward the islands. “Gorgona and Elba,” he said. “To which do you suppose our Perseus has flown? To the Gorgon, or to the isle of exile?”
