by Tim Powers
Crawford gratefully relaxed back in the tub of water in the Lerici inn and watched the black Venetian water rush past his eyes.
When Byron had thrashed Crawford’s body several yards back underwater toward the third sister, he hunched it and then kicked strongly with the legs, and Crawford was for a moment out of the water to his waist, and his hand, still holding the heart, was lashed upward hard enough to nearly sprain his shoulder.
And the music swept up in volume, and then held steady at a tooth-razoring pitch. Time seemed to have stopped—he could see drops of water suspended in the air, and he wasn’t falling back into the water.
He had caught the eye.
He forced his head up to look at it. The stars were as clear and bright as luminous diamonds just in front of the ragged bulk that was Shelley’s heart. The eye was wedged in the split, barely captured.
He forced his hand forward, closing the cloven heart around the patch of unnatural clarity, and he squeezed his hand hard to hold the eye in.
Motion crashed back in on him as the music was muffled, and then he had fallen back into the water. His legs and his free arm began pumping, propelling him back toward the Piazza.
Crawford knew his body was very close to total exhaustion, and he was horribly aware that the canal bottom was far below his feet, and that the nearest solid ground was a hundred yards away in either direction; he didn’t try to resist when Byron again took over the job of swimming.
And even Byron seemed to be finding it difficult. The current had carried them well east of the glow on the horizon that was the Piazza, and though he swam in at a slant against the current, at a fairly good speed considering that one of his hands had to grip the heart, he had to pause frequently simply to float and work his heaving lungs.
At one point his bad leg began to tighten up painfully, and Crawford thrashed Byron’s body in panic in the tub at Lerici, but Byron just gasped a curse and folded double in the water to massage the thigh muscles with his free hand. He had clearly had to do this many times before—his hand worked neither too quickly nor too hard, and within a minute the muscles were unkinked.
Byron breathed deeply when he hauled Crawford’s head back up into the cooling night air. “You did mention your leg,” he said stoically. “Onward.”
Three times they heard gunshots, followed by the soft whipping sound of lead balls snipping the wave-tops as they flew away toward the Lido, and for several minutes after each shot Byron swam with a sort of dog-paddle stroke that, though slower, was quieter. The hand holding the heart was beginning to cramp now.
Crawford’s lungs seemed to be wringing themselves empty and then filling to capacity every second, and his heart was a staccato hammer in the soft tissues of his chest. His left hand, holding the heart, was an aching claw. The lights of the Piazza were closer, but when Byron next paused to rest he gasped, “Your body’s—not going to—make it.”
Before Crawford could use his mouth himself, Byron was speaking again. “I’ll—try something.”
Suddenly Crawford was entirely in the room in the Lerici inn. Trelawny was standing in the doorway and staring at him. “You had a fit,” Trelawny said worriedly. “Let me get you out of that tub.”
“No, damn you,” said Crawford in Byron’s voice, “leave me alone.”
Had Byron decided to throw Crawford to safety and ride Crawford’s used-up body down to the canal bottom? But that wouldn’t work—after a couple of hours, at the most, the blood-induced link would dissolve. Byron’s body would simply die, and Crawford would find himself, for a few terrible minutes, in the drowned body.
All at once the body he was in sagged with stunning fatigue, and was panting violently. Sweat sprang out on Byron’s forehead as Trelawny swore in alarm and rushed to the tub, but Crawford managed to choke out a strangled laugh as Trelawny lifted the body from the tub, for he realized what Byron had done.
Just as he had, earlier, let Crawford be the one to feel the cold water of the tub, he had now let his own body take the exhaustion Crawford’s felt. He had used the blood link to send the fatigue poisons to his own body, and send whatever it was that made blood fresh to Crawford’s.
Trelawny had gently laid him down on the narrow bed. “Where’s that damned Aickman when we need him?” he muttered to himself as he flung blankets over Byron’s shivering, gasping, nearly unconscious form.
After a few minutes the panting began to subside, and Crawford opened eyes to see the gondola docks close ahead, and he felt his right hand close around the upright wooden trunk of one of the outer mooring poles.
His body was panting, but evenly. “Did I kill myself?” asked Byron bitterly through Crawford’s mouth.
“No,” said Crawford, staring gratefully at the nearby hulls rocking in the water. “Trelawny thought you’d had it, but … you’re fine now. I’ll bet it did me a world of good,” Byron added. “Does Josephine have dry clothes for you in that bag? Yes. Then let’s get out.”
He climbed up onto the little dock, noticing with respect that he was still somehow clutching the heart.
With even more respect he saw that Byron had swum to the same dock they’d arrived at earlier in the evening. Helps to have a native guide, he thought. “Byron,” he said feelingly, “thank you for … for everything.”
The gondolier who had boated them in from the Lido was standing on the shoreward end of the dock; he had been talking to some other gondoliers, but was now staring at, and clearly recognizing, Crawford.
Crawford took back control of his body and smiled at the man, and he was wondering what he could say to make this unconventional reappearance seem mundane, when he saw Josephine hurrying toward them down the fondamenta, the sword cane and their one remaining bag still blessedly clutched in her hands.
Crawford set the heart down on the dock and then stood up and began taking off his clothes, and the gondolier shouted to several saints and took a step toward him as if intending to throw him back into the water.
Josephine’s call for him to stop was so imperious, though, that he paused; and when she had come panting up and shoved a handful of lire into his hand, he actually bowed. Crawford by this time was naked.
“Take us back to the Lido,” Crawford gasped as he opened the bag Josephine handed him and began pulling on a dry pair of trousers. When he had got them on he wrapped Shelley’s heart tightly in a shirt.
The gondolier shrugged, and waved toward the boat they’d come in on. Josephine stepped into it, followed by Crawford, who was carrying the balled-up shirt.
The gondola was expertly poled out into the water, and Crawford looked back toward the Piazza. The soldiers’ boat was still crisscrossing the water well to the west, and such soldiers as he could see on the pavement of the Piazza were looking out toward it.
The gondolier turned the boat, and now the bow faced the darkness of the lagoon, away from the lights of the city. The breeze was colder now, but Crawford didn’t even bother to dig in the bag for a shirt or jacket or shoes.
“We … goddamn … did it,” he breathed wonderingly. “Great God, my body’s a wreck!” he said helplessly then. “I suppose I’ll live, though—for a while, anyway. Now what about the eighteen hundred lire you spent, and what about the horses and carriage?” Crawford laughed in plain relief. “Byron,” he said, “I will curry your horses and mop your floors for twenty years to pay you back. I—”
He paused, staring at Josephine.
She was sitting with her legs crossed. She had got mud on her shoes at the dock, and now she dragged a finger down the sole, and stared at the resulting ball of mud on her fingertip.
Then she put her finger into her mouth and licked it clean and began scraping her sole again.
Expectant mothers, he knew, often ate odd things—it was as if their bodies knew what the growing babies needed to form themselves.
Abruptly he remembered the clay he’d seen around her mouth when she’d first appeared at the Casa Magni four nights ago—and he remember
ed too the uncharacteristic pain her three-month pregnancy was giving her.
For several seconds he tried to think of some explanation besides the one he knew must be the true one, and at last he had to abandon them all.
Clearly she carried more than just a human baby.
He became aware that she was looking at him, and he tried to reassume the satisfied smile he’d been wearing moments before.
She wasn’t fooled. “What is it?” she asked.
Byron repeated aloud the thought Crawford had just had. “It’s twins,” Crawford heard his own mouth say.
The gondola surged on through the dark water for a full minute while Josephine stared at the bloodstained floorboards. At last she looked up at him from eyes exhausted of tears. “I think I knew that.”
Crawford leaned forward and took her hand. In his other hand he clutched the shirt that wrapped Shelley’s heart, and he hefted it. “Shelley had a good life,” he said, forcing each word out as if it were a stone he was pushing in through the doorway of a house, “all things considered.”
Now she was sobbing, but still without tears. “What did we accomplish tonight, then?”
“We … freed you, the child’s mother,” Crawford said. “And we bought for the child at least as human a life as Shelley had, as opposed—” He paused. The effort of speaking was almost too much. “—As opposed to a life of pure … stone. We saved Byron, and his children, and Teresa. It was … a … worthwhile endeavor … on the whole.” His own throat was closing, and he turned away so that she wouldn’t see the tears in his eyes.
For a while neither of them spoke. “And all of us,” she said finally in a desolated voice, “have to flee across oceans now, or else be constantly afraid that they’ll find us again, and that we’ll eventually one night be weak enough to invite them back. And our child will be born into their … their slavery. I asked them in, for little him or her.”
She leaned back in her seat and stared up at the stars. “I suppose if you add it all up it’s a victory—of sorts—at least—for most of us,” she whispered. “But God, I wish there was a way to free people, to cut the string between our species and theirs.”
Crawford trailed the fingers of his maimed hand in the water and watched the dim silhouettes of the church domes filing silently past on the portside, and he thought about the link between the species. He mentally re-heard conversations he’d had with Shelley and Byron and Villon.
And at last he took a deep breath and said, “I think there may be.” He turned around to face the gondolier. “Take us back to the Piazza, please.”
“No!” he shouted a moment later in Byron’s unmistakable tones. “No, onward to the Lido. Aickman, listen to me—as soon as the Austrians realize the eye is gone, they’ll just cut somebody’s head off in the Piazza, and the blood will work as an eye. If Josephine is there she’ll be seen, she’ll be back in the net.”
Crawford took back control of his throat. “I’m not going to bring Josephine along. She won’t step out of the gondola, so she shouldn’t be visible to her vampire even if they have already done the blood trick. And I wasn’t in their net even before we took the eye, so it’s no danger to me.” He turned and spoke to the gondolier. “Take us back to the Piazza, please.”
Josephine leaned out over the gunwale and cupped up some water in her clawed hand. She leaned forward and splashed it across Crawford’s forehead.
Crawford blinked at her in irritable puzzlement for a moment, then smiled. “I said in Rome that I might want that sometime, didn’t I? Thank you.”
He dipped his own hand in the water and rubbed his wet hand across her forehead too, vertically and horizontally.
Now baptized, they turned to look anxiously back toward the Piazza San Marco.
CHAPTER 26
Nothing is sure but that which is uncertain,
What’s evident to all is most obscure;
Only when snared in doubts can I be sure.
Only to enigmas, never to Logic’s lure,
Knowledge surrenders, and draws back her curtain …
—François Villon,
“Ballade for the Contest at Blois,”
the W. Ashbless translation
The gondolier sighed theatrically and waved one imploring hand to heaven, but he obediently swung the gondola into a wide curve, back the way they’d come, probably because they were closer to the Piazza than to the Lido, and he’d be rid of these mad people sooner.
Crawford’s mouth opened again. “They might just arrest both of you at the mooring stairs.” Crawford massaged his throat and wished Byron wouldn’t speak so harshly. “If we see soldiers near the stairs we’ll go on by, and let me off somewhere else.”
Josephine had been staring at him with desperate hope. “What is it you’re going to do?” she asked now.
“I’m going to undo—try to undo—the link between the species.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, precisely.” He rapped one knuckle against his head. “Byron—the Graiae are still awake, but right now they’re blind. What does that mean? It means that, unless the Austrians keep a steady flow of blood running in the Piazza, my friend Carlo has lost his livelihood as the premier coin-lagger in Venice. He’ll be unable now even to toss a penny reliably through an open window from three paces—and if he can, there’s no way anyone will be able to predict with any certainty where it will land—and it won’t even still be the same penny in any sense that makes sense. The field the Graiae are projecting right now is one of indeterminacy and imprecision. I wish Shelley had lived to see it, he did so love disorder.”
It was clear from the tone Byron put into Crawford’s voice that Byron did not love disorder.
“Did your Armenian priests tell you how quickly the whole field changed, once the radiating heart of it is altered? It changes instantaneously, Aickman—or, as the fathers insisted on putting it, at the speed of light. But they told me that it’s like St. Elmo’s Fire, or the electricity stored in a roomful of Leyden jars: it’s not a current, it’s a static field, and so there will probably be patches where the old field is still standing—leaky, but still standing—though such … high spots … will probably have faded out and conformed with the predominant field within a day or so.”
Crawford nodded. “Unless they get the eye back, or keep drenching the pavement with blood. Can you find Carlo? If he’s still alive. He won’t have moved—until tonight this was coin-lagger heaven.”
Crawford watched the lights of the Piazza drawing closer. The Graiae columns seemed slightly flexed, and the Doge’s Palace was a motionless but unpredictable beast crouching on a thousand stone legs.
He dug into Josephine’s bag and pulled out one of her blouses. “This looks nothing like the shirt I was wearing earlier,” he observed, pulling it on. He smiled at her tiredly. “I don’t suppose there are any shoes in here?”
She shook her head. “Your last pair you lost in the canal.”
“Huh.” He pulled out a blue shirt of his own and, with some effort, tore off the sleeves and drew them over his feet. The cuffs flapped loosely a few inches in front of his toes, so he unlaced a couple of ribbons from one of Teresa’s dresses and bound up the loose sleeve-ends with them, lacing the ribbons up around his insteps and ankles and then tying them off low on his shins. “There,” he said. “They may be looking for someone who has shed his shoes.”
Josephine shook her head doubtfully. The gondolier was making the sign of the cross.
“I think,” Crawford said, “that there will be one main pocket of the old, determinate field still standing; it’ll be near the Piazza and the Ducal Palace, and it’ll be where Werner is being kept. He’ll have made sure he’s living in the equivalent of a Leyden jar.”
A boat was approaching them, and belatedly he noticed the guns in the hands of the men aboard it—these were the Austrian soldiers who had shot to pieces his hijacked gondola only half an hour ago.
He tensed, ready to tell his
gondolier to angle away from the boat, then realized that there was no possibility of eluding the Austrians. Instead he gaped at them as they drew near, and nudged Josephine and said, “Look, dear—those men have guns!”
“Gracious!“ Josephine exclaimed.
The Austrians stared at them, but rowed on past to look at other gondolas.
Crawford relaxed, one muscle at a time. “I guess they’re not looking for a couple, especially two people on their way in.” He took several deep breaths.
“Anyway, Byron, if your friend Carlo can’t help us find the field, and if we can’t manage to … undo Werner, Werner will probably have his Austrians put the Graiae back to sleep before his determinacy pocket bleeds away, and then he’ll be at least no worse off than he was before he came south from Switzerland. And then he can set his people searching for the eye.”
He had paused for only a moment when Byron took his throat again. “Who cares about this Werner?”
The gondolier swung the craft’s stern out to port and then leaned on the oar to push the gondola forward into an empty space between the lean hulls of two others.
Crawford stuffed into Josephine’s bag the balled-up shirt that contained Shelley’s heart and the Graiae’s eye. “Don’t lose that,” he told her, handing it to her and standing up.
“Werner,” he said quietly as the gondolier hopped out and began looping lines around the mooring poles, “constitutes the link between the two species, human and nephelim. Eight hundred years ago he revived the nephelim, who at that time had been dormant for thousands of years, by having one of them—a little, petrified statue—surgically sewn into his abdomen. And the two of them, one being contained inside the other, now constitute the overlap between the two forms of life on Earth—the overlap that keeps the nephelim species revived, and able to prey on humans.”
He started to step out of the boat, but Josephine caught his arm. “I’m coming with you,” she said. “Look at the square—obviously they haven’t spilled a lot of blood there. They have no eye.” Her own glass eye was staring into the sky, though her human eye stared intensely at Crawford.
