The Stress of Her Regard (30 page)

When Byron had got back into the gondola and ordered Tita to resume their journey, he began untying the sections of armor from the marionette and tossing them to Shelley. "Dress Clara in these," he said curtly. Shelley did as he was told, and when Byron handed him the visored golden helmet he tried to fit it over Clara's head.

After several minutes of wrenching, "It doesn't fit," he said desperately.

The canal was in shadow now, and darkening by the moment—the water was already streaked and stippled with the reflections of colored lights from the many-windowed palaces they were passing.

"It's got to," Byron told him harshly. He was staring ahead at the night-silhouetted domes of Santa Maria della Salute. "And quick—we've only got another minute or so."

Shelley forced the helmet on, hoping Allegra wasn't watching.

The gondola pulled in to the
fondamenta
in front of the torchlit piazza, and as Shelley stood up and stepped across from the rocking boat onto the stairs he saw that there were indeed Austrian soldiers on the pavement—ranks of them—and he saw too that charcoal and straw and bundles of wood and canvas bags had been piled around the bases of the two columns. A man was splashing some liquid onto the piles. Shelley smelled fine brandy on the breeze.

He turned to Byron, who now stood beside him with Allegra. "Intense heat wakes them up?"

"Right," Byron answered, starting forward, "with the proper fuel, and just so it isn't done in sunlight. The Austrians are ready; the eye must be in Venice now. I wish I'd thought to bring Carlo."

Tita stayed by the gondola, and the odd foursome—Byron, Allegra and Shelley carrying the ghastly marionette—strode out across the square.

Several of the Austrian soldiers stepped forward as if to stop them, but began laughing when they saw what Shelley carried, and they called to him in German.

"They want to see the puppet dance," whispered Byron tensely. "I think you'd better do it. It'll be a distraction—I'll try to ignite the fires—now, while the eye isn't here yet—while they're watching you."

Shelley stared at him in horror—and noticed a very old man standing behind Byron, leaning on a cane. There was a moment's glint of light beneath the old man's plain brown robe, and Shelley realized that he was carrying a concealed lamp. Did he, too, intend to light the fires prematurely, while the Graiae were still blind?

The old man met his gaze, and nodded, as if answering his thought—and suddenly Shelley remembered having seen him here a month ago; he had called something that had seemed then to be
Percy
, but Shelley was now surer than ever that the name called had actually been
Perseus
.

"Do it,"
snarled Byron. "Remember, if this works, it won't have been disrespect to a corpse." He shoved Allegra toward him, which added to Shelley's distress—what would
she
make of this?

With tears in his eyes, Shelley took hold of the two iron rods in one hand and the strings in the other, then let the body slide out of his arms so that it dangled above the warped pavement—and, as Byron sidled away in the shadows, Shelley began yanking at the strings and rods, making the body dance grotesquely. Torchlight glinted red on the helmet, which was lolling loosely at the level of his belt.

His teeth were clenched and he wasn't permitting himself to think, except to hope that the impossibly hard thudding of his heart might kill him instantly; and though over the rushing of blood in his ears he was vaguely aware that the soldiers had begun muttering, it wasn't until he sneaked an upward glance through his eyebrows that he realized that they were dissatisfied with the show—that they'd seen better, that they had higher standards when it came to this sort of thing.

Somehow that made the whole situation even a little bit worse. It occurred to him that he now knew something that perhaps no one else in the world did—that there was no curse more horrible than,
May your daughter die and be made into a puppet which finds disfavor before an audience of Austrian soldiers.

Then an urgent shout rang among the pillars of the Ducal Palace, and Shelley had completely lost his audience. He stopped jiggling the body and looked up.

Two of the soldiers had grabbed Byron, but the lord managed to tear one arm free and throw his firepot into the heaped straw at the base of the western column—the column, Shelley remembered, that was surmounted by a statue of Saint Theodore standing on a crocodile.

One of Byron's captors let go of him to rush to where the firepot now lay flaming.

We're committed now, thought Shelley—or at least Byron is.

At the same moment the old man in the brown robe shambled awkwardly to the other column, opened his robe and, with a full-arm swing, lashed a lamp onto the pavement at the base of it. Burning oil splashed across the straw.

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 vast eyes 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 vast 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 blocked 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?