The Stress of Her Regard (64 page)

It was time. He laid the heart on his knees, and then, with infinite reluctance, he opened the jar. If only this cup could pass away, he thought with forlorn irony—and he took a deep breath and raised it to his lips.

Somehow his disgust was so great that he didn't even gag at the garlic and vinegar and rust taste. When only a couple of spoonfuls remained in the jar, he surreptitiously poured the stuff out onto the floorboards and placed the sole of one shoe in the puddle; then he dropped the empty jar into the sea, feeling as though he were handing it to a friend. He recalled that, until the Austrians had taken over, the Doges had annually taken part in an ancient ritual that was supposed to marry the city to the sea. Help me tonight, he mentally asked the dark waves.

The canal scene faded, and he was lying on his back in a narrow bed under a low wooden ceiling. His eyes burned and his throat was dry.

"Good evening, my lord," he said in English. The lips were cracked and chapped.

"You're there," he felt the body say. "Am I, yet?" The head rolled to the side, and Crawford could see a tub of water on the floor.

"Not quite yet. When I step ashore you will be. I'll give you plenty of warning so you can be in the tub when I do it."

"Damn this scheme of yours," said Byron, He was quiet for a moment, then said softly, "God, she is the most beautiful city on Earth," and Crawford knew Byron was looking at Venice through his eyes while he was seeing Byron's room in Lerici.

With a slight effort of will Crawford resumed his own body. The gondolier was staring at him dubiously, and Crawford realized that he must have seemed to be talking to himself. Byron had clenched Crawford's hand on the package that contained Shelley's heart, and Crawford loosened the fingers a little.

The gondola had slanted back westward a little, and the bow now pointed just east of the Ducal Palace. Close ahead were bristling ranks of docked gondolas moored at right angles to the wide stone stairs, and Crawford's gondola had already passed between two of the outer mooring poles.

"Get in the tub," he said.

Crawford saw the docked gondolas grow nearer and then flank them as the one he was in was deftly edged into a space between two others, and he tensed for the exertions to come—but he nevertheless gave an involuntary shout, for he could suddenly feel cold water up to his waist.

Josephine jumped and stared at him, and he managed to wave reassuringly. "It's all," he said through chattering teeth, "going according to plan, yes, great God. We're . . . in the tub."

Behind him the gondolier was muttering something about
l'Inglese pazzo
, the insane Englishman.

In his head he heard Byron say, "Do you like that, Aickman? I'm letting you do the feeling for a while."

Then Crawford thrashed in the tub, for his body in Venice had stood up without his volition. He was
seeing
what his body was looking at in Venice
but feeling
what Byron's body felt in Lerici.

"The . . . blood," Crawford made his own body say, "is on the sole of . . . our left shoe. Don't rub it off or get it in the water before you step ashore."

The gondolier had stepped onto a little floating dock that projected a few yards out into the water, and he reached a hand down to Josephine and helped her up out of the gondola and then handed her the bag and the cane.

Crawford found himself waving the help away and then hopping on one foot up onto the dock and then down its thumping boards to the lowest of the stone steps. God only knew what the gondolier was making of this.

On the pavement he paused for a moment on one leg. "So this is what a sound right leg feels like," said Byron through Crawford's mouth.

"Don't try the left one," said Crawford through the same mouth. He was growing accustomed to the water in the tub, and was able to talk without chattering the teeth they shared. "A pistol ball in Rome made a mess of the thigh muscles."

Byron lowered the left foot and pressed its wet sole against the step.

Like the whisper of a loosed arrow diminishing in one ear and then being audible to the other, Crawford felt a focus of attention leave the body in the tub and arrive at the body standing on the step.

"You're here now," said Crawford tightly. "Go."

Crawford relaxed in the tub and simply rode his body passively, like a man riding a horse that knows the way.

Byron was walking across the canal-side pavement awkwardly, apparently from his lifetime habit of putting his weight on his left leg, and he was tearing the paper off of the heart.

"You do understand that I'm Byron?" he asked Josephine, who was reeling along beside him. "Even though I'm in Aickman's body?"

Josephine frowned in concentration, but finally nodded. "Right," she said. "You're going to free the eye for jumping from one sister to the other, and then you're going to try to catch it in the heart."

"Very good, Now in a moment I'll want you to walk away from me, stand clear, and watch me and the people around me; I'm going to be busy, and might well miss something. Act like a tourist who's out shopping. Hell,
do
some shopping—Aickman, how much money do you have left?—
Uh, about two hundred
lire—two hundred? Out of two thousand? And I suppose the horses and carriage are gone?—
Well, yes
—Damn me!" Crawford could feel Byron clenching Crawford's fists. "Well, if we're not killed here we'll talk about that later. Where is it?—
In our right coat pocket.
"

Byron dug out the bills and handed them to Josephine. "Here. Anyway, buy some touristy junk but keep watching for anyone, especially soldiers, watching me. Got that?"

"Yes," said Josephine. "Do you want to carry the . . . cane?"

"No—this doesn't seem to be a night for close work. And if it all goes very wrong, you can use it to defend yourself."

They had passed the darkly pillared facade of the building that had been the city's prison centuries ago, and reached the foot of the Ponte della Paglia, a stone bridge over the narrow canal that flanked the Doge's Palace.

Halfway across the bridge Byron paused, and for Josephine's sake pointed and for Crawford's sake looked, up the dark little canal to the archingly roofed Bridge of Sighs, which looked in the dim light like a jawless skull wedged between the walls of the two forbidding buildings.

"That's the bridge across which prisoners were taken from the prison, for execution between the pillars on the Piazza. Thank God we don't cross
it
—though we're crossing a bridge that parallels it.
Keep moving.
" he added involuntarily as Crawford took control of the mouth for a moment.

Byron laughed, and resumed his limping pace. "It's clear you're no longer infected, Aickman," he said. "You have no poetry in you."

He turned to Josephine and went on, "Now if any soldiers
are
watching me, and coming toward me, I want you to scream, as loud as you can. Pretend you saw a bug or something. And if they're pointing
guns
at me, scream several times, as if you've become hysterical. Have you got that?"

Josephine sighed, and Crawford thought it was a good sign that she evidently dreaded the possible necessity of making a spectacle of herself. "Yes," she said.

"Good." They had reached the lowest, widest-set pillars of the Ducal Palace. It took them a minute to limp and lurch past the building to where the Piazza opened away on their right.

The Graiae columns were only a dozen yards away. Crawford would have flinched a little if he'd been working his body—the marble pedestals of the columns alone were half as high as a man, and the wide stone shafts soared away far upward against the night sky.

At that moment bells began ringing—the bronze figures on top of the Coducci clock tower at the far end of the Piazza had moved forward on their tracks and begun swinging their hammers at the bell. "Now start slanting away from me," said Byron.

Since Byron didn't turn his head Crawford couldn't see Josephine go, but from his tub on Italy's west coast he wished her well. Crawford felt a strong sense of being watched—it seemed to partake of the echoing of the bells, and set all the stones of the buildings vibrating like plucked violin strings.

Byron was limping toward the nearest of the two columns, the one with the statue of the winged lion of St. Mark at its top. The far one was capped with a statue of St. Theodore standing on a crocodile, and Crawford thought of St. Michael killing the serpent.

The fourth shivering bell-note rang away across the water.

There was a fist-sized spot moving down the near column. Byron stared at it, and Crawford tried to figure out what it consisted of. It wasn't a patch of darkness or light . . . and then he realized that the stone of the column, the minute pocks and scratches, were particularly clear in the spot, as if a clarifying lens were moving down the shaft.

"I believe that's the eye," muttered Byron tensely as the sixth note rang from the clock tower.

He walked past the column toward the farther one, and Crawford was grateful that Byron looked back; the spot of clarity was around on this side of the lion's column now. The sense of a vast attention focussed on him was now terribly strong, like a pressure in the air. The bell in the clock tower was still ringing, though Crawford had lost count of the notes.

When Byron was nearly halfway to the far pillar he paused and crouched—like, thought Crawford, a mouse between the feet of a giant.

"Sorry, Aickman," Byron said, then stuck Crawford's maimed little finger into Crawford's mouth and bit the scarcely healed stump with Crawford's teeth.

It bled freely, and Byron shook Crawford's finger over the rippled pavement, spattering blood onto the stones.

Crawford shivered, but not at the cold of the water in the tub—for the drops hit the pavement in a symmetrical pattern, as if defining the points on a crystal. They seemed to resonate almost visibly in the vibration of the bells.

Byron looked up at the sky, gauging the clouds and the positions of the stars, and then he looked out at the water of the Canale di San Marco, apparently noting the level of the water; and Crawford for a moment sensed Byron's thoughts, and knew that he was choosing from among a number of incantations the one that would work in this particular alignment of the elements.

Then he began chanting under his breath, against the rhythm of the bells, but though Crawford listened closely to his own voice he couldn't decide whether the language he was speaking was Greek or Latin—or, conceivably, some much older tongue.

Still chanting quietly, Byron straightened and resumed walking toward the St. Theodore column.

Crawford heard a sustained musical note rush past close over his head, and then the spot of clarity was on the broad surface of the far column.

The eye was freed to be passed back and forth among the sisters.

The bells had ceased, and the last harsh echoes rolled away across the water toward the domes of the church of Santa Maria della Salute.

Byron had stripped all the paper off of the heart now, and he gripped it in Crawford's good hand so that the split open side of the thing faced outward. He held his hand up, with the palm toward the spot of definition, and began walking backward.

"Hope I can catch it," he whispered.

Josephine screamed; and then screamed again, and again.

Byron threw Crawford's body to the ground and began rolling across the wavy pavement toward the ranks of gondolas, and Crawford heard two bangs from the far end of the Piazza, and then heard the
twang
of a leaden ball darting past next to his ear.

"That's torn it," gasped Byron out of Crawford's throat as he rolled to his feet and ran in a low crouch toward the water. "We can—try it again sometime.
No, get into one of the gondolas.
Are you crazy, Aickman? Swimming's the route now.
Damn it
—"

Crawford exerted his will and forcibly took control of his body. They had reached the steps now, and he ran down them, tossed the heart onto a seat in one of the gondolas and began untying the little boat from its mooring.

When it was free he ran down the short dock it had been moored to, pushing the blade-shaped stem of it ahead of him, and then when the dock ended he jumped into the seat beside Shelley's heart.

The boat was arrowing backward out away from the stairs, and he scrambled aft and, trying to keep low, grabbed the steering oar.

He kept his jaws clenched, but he could still hear the words Byron was making his throat form;
There's nothing to be done out here—we had to be equidistant between the two pillars, so that the eye would dart back and forth between them!

Another gunshot sounded behind them, and the ball skipped away past them across the water with a sound like startled birds in tall grass.

Dive overboard!
hummed the voice in his throat.
I
can
swim us to safety! I know a hundred places I can swim to in this city where we'll be safe!

"Soon," said Crawford. He had worked the gondola around and was sculling furiously, working up speed. As his arm worked he was peering ahead, trying to judge the relative distances of the Grand Canal and the Church of San Giorgio and the Piazza behind him.

"I guess those bells," he panted, "weren't—tolling the hour. They were—an alarm."

He was just beginning to wonder desperately if he could have miscalculated the place where he'd seen the turbulence in the water earlier, when he saw it again, ahead.

The water was churning at a spot a hundred yards ahead of the prow, and then splashing violently, flinging up a cloud of spray that glittered in the multicolored lights—and then the third sister raised her head above the white water, into the warm night air.

His mouth formed the word "Jesus," and he didn't know whether it had been Byron or himself who had spoken.

Perhaps the thing had lost its shape in its long years underwater; or perhaps she had never been carved into as symmetrical a pillar as her sisters, in which case it had probably not been an accident when the workmen had dropped her into the canal in the twelfth century.