The Stress of Her Regard (63 page)

The wind had picked up, and the boat was scudding along under only the half-reefed mainsail.

Crawford was in the bow, fingering the grip of the pistol under his jacket and watching the turbulent sky—but he was nevertheless taken by surprise when the thing struck.

A loud, musical rushing sound slashed the air like a sword across the strings of a harp, and then the deck was heavily struck and resounding hollowly—the boat was jarred sideways with a loud crack and a ripple of popping rigging, and when Crawford scrambled around and looked back toward the stern the hair stood up on the back of his neck.

A translucent human figure, a woman, was rising slowly in the dark sky above the mast, its long hair streaming out behind it like the fine tentacles of a jellyfish. The long glassy arms and legs were flailing, and Crawford realized that the creature had rebounded upward after hitting the deck, and was now about to dive into it again. The face of the thing was contorted with idiot rage.

Delia Torre and Sputo had scrambled to the stern and were cowering there, though della Torre had drawn a pistol; Josephine was standing beside the mast, staring up into the face of the woman in the air. It seemed to Crawford that Josephine's head was canted, that she was looking upward through her glass eye.

Crawford drew his pistol and aimed up at the inhumanly beautiful form, wishing the boat would stop rocking and that his hands were steadier, and that he had a few more pistols with him—and then he let out the breath he'd been holding, and squeezed the trigger.

The explosion jolted his wrist and the long yellow-blue muzzle flash blinded him, but over the ringing in his ears he heard the harsh metallic music of the thing's scream.

Crawford rolled away to the other side of the bow as the air shook with the firing of della Torre's gun.

Again the boat was struck. Crawford got to his knees on the slanting deck, blinking furiously to rid his eyes of the red dazzle-spot that stained his vision.

Dimly he could make out the inhuman woman's form; it was contorting in midair only a couple of yards over the deck, its fine hair spread out around its head like a flexing crown. One perfect leg was stretched behind the body and its clawed left hand was slowly stretching out toward Josephine's face.

Josephine was just staring at the approaching hand.

Crawford sobbed a curse and lunged aft at the thing, but even as he took the first of the two steps that would propel him uselessly into the creature he saw Sputo draw a knife from behind his collar and throw it.

The woman exploded in an icy gust that punched Crawford backward off his feet and filled his nostrils with the smell of cold clay.

Crawford wanted nothing more than to lie on the deck; but he rolled over and got up onto his knees and then, gripping the rail, he stood up.

The woman-shaped thing was gone—a wisp of fog out over the water might have been what was left of her. The boat had lost headway and was heeled around almost perpendicular to the current, and it disoriented him to look aft and dimly see the shoreline beyond the stern.

Josephine had sat down against the mast; Sputo walked up next to her, and he crouched to pick up the knife he had thrown. He grinned at Crawford and held the blade up.
"Ferrobreccia,"
he said.

Iron breach, thought Crawford.
Eisener-breche.

Delia Torre barked some harsh order at Sputo, who shrugged, tucked his knife back behind his collar, and went back to the stern.

For the next ten minutes everyone, even the subdued Josephine, was kept busy lowering the sail and splicing and repairing lines and bailing water out of the hold. At last della Torre took the helm and had Crawford raise the gaff-spar halfway, and the sail filled without snapping the rigging, and the bow began ponderously to come around into the wind.

Crawford was crouched by the broken-off leeboard, where until a moment ago he'd been ready to release the runner line if the sail or the gaff spar had looked overstrained, and della Torre now left the helm to Sputo and walked over and leaned on the rail near Crawford.

"She," he said, nodding toward Josephine, who was up at the bow, staring ahead, "summoned that thing. To kill us."

Crawford laughed weakly. "You know that's not true."

"How do I know?" Della Torre's tone was one of token anger, and when Crawford looked up at him the only expression he could see in the man's eyes was haunted bewilderment. "The thing came to her, was reaching for her."

"Not to do her any good. If Sputo's knife-cast had missed, I'm pretty sure my . . . my wife's face would have been torn off."

Della Torre shook his head. "It
came
to us—something drew it." He heaved himself away from the rail and went back to talk to Sputo.

Only Sputo slept that night; Josephine refused to go below, and della Torre worked the tiller with one hand so that he could clutch a pistol in the other, and his eyes were scanning the currents of the sky as much as the dimly visible river ahead of them, and Crawford paced ceaselessly from one side of the boat to the other, peering out at the dark lands moving past.

The creature's screams and the gunshots must have been heard by some villagers, he thought, and fishermen and other boatmen out on the Po. Would the Austrians hear of it? What would they make of it?

Several times he heard distant singing, and once when a breeze brought a few particularly clear notes he looked back at della Torre, who just shook his head.

And once there was a rushing in the sky, high in the empty vaults through which the clouds sailed, but though both men crouched tensely, pistols drawn and cocked and aimed upward, the sound was not repeated, and after several minutes they cautiously relaxed again.

Crawford allowed himself a swig of brandy and leaned against the rail. Sometime during this silent watch he had figured out what it was that must have drawn that air-creature, and he prayed again that Josephine was carrying only a human baby, and not the sort of pair Shelley's mother had carried.

The thing had been drawn by Shelley's heart, which was currently packed, still wrapped in butcher paper, in one of Crawford's bags.

Shelley had been an inadmissible mix of species, like a baby bird who has been handled by humans and now carries their smell; and like a mother bird, most of the pure examples of either species had found him repugnant—though in the case of the human species, the members had not been able to say exactly why he was so intrinsically offensive, and had had to use the excuses of his atheism and his revolutionary poetry and his morals as reasons to disown him and hound him from country to country, so that his only friends had been other outcasts.

His heart still embodied the appalling mix, and was therefore still a tangible offense against the inherent separateness of the two forms of life.

Shelley had once told him about having been attacked by one of the airy creatures in a boat on Lake Leman, and how he had been strongly tempted—since in that case the boat had very nearly been sunk—to use the incident as an excuse for the watery suicide that he had always known could free his family from the consequences of his existence.

Crawford thought now that the main reason Shelley had considered drowning must have been the awareness of rejection by both forms of life on earth. Crawford didn't want a child of his to have to face the same exile.

At dawn Crawford and Josephine went below, to two separate bunks. Della Torre stayed on deck with the refreshed and chatty Sputo.

Crawford woke up to someone shaking his shoulder.

"Good morning-which-is-evening,
Inglese
," said della Torre. "I think you will want to be leaving the boat."

Crawford struggled up in the bunk, bumping his head on the close underside of the deck. He didn't know where he was. "Leaving the boat," he said cautiously, stalling for time.

"We are only a mile short of Punta Maestra, where the Po River empties into the Adriatic Sea. Austrian military boats are blocking the river ahead of us. We're moving slowly, but you will nevertheless have to swim away—you and the woman both—soon, if you hope not to be noticed. Already it is too late for us to slant in to shore without drawing their attention." He shrugged, "Sorry."

Crawford suddenly remembered everything, and he was grateful that he'd been able to get a lot of sleep. "I understand," he said quietly, rolling out of the bunk and shaking Josephine's shoulder. "Josephine," he said. "We've got some swimming to do."

Sputo and della Torre helped them tie their luggage onto a couple of planks. "These articles are likely to get wet," della Torre advised Crawford, "when you are swimming."

"That's . . . quite a thought, della Torre," said Crawford, absentmindedly speaking in English.

The riverbanks were shrouded in fog, and the setting sun was just a red glow astern, but Crawford could see the line of boats ahead, toward which they were drifting.

For several long seconds he tried to think of some way to keep from having to swim. At last he shook his head and took Josephine's arm and walked to the stern, and the two of them sat down and took off their shoes and added them to the raft, tying them down securely.

"Thank you," he said as he swung one leg over the transom, "but I don't think we quite got our money's worth. If we come back this way, I'll want a ride back up the river."

Della Torre laughed. "You're going to Venice, you said? If you manage to come back, we'll sail you to
England
."

Crawford jumped off the back of the boat.

The water seemed icily cold after the recent warmth of the bunk, and when he had bobbed back up to the surface he could only breathe in great, whispered hoots. The makeshift little raft splashed in next to him, followed by Josephine, who, more stoic than Crawford, was breathing normally when she surfaced. Crawford caught his floating hat and set it back on his bald head.

He waved to della Torre—and softly called, "We might just take you up on that!"—and then he and Josephine each took an end of the little raft and began paddling toward the north bank.

They ferry over this Lethean sound
Both to and fro, their sorrow to augment,
And wish and struggle, as they pass, to reach
The tempting stream, with one small drop to lose
In sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe,
All in one moment, and so near the brink;
But Fate withstands, and, to oppose the attempt,
Medusa with Gorgonian terror guards
The ford, and of itself the water flies . . .

—John Milton,
Paradise Lost

It was only early evening, and the breeze that swept the lagoon from over the low sand-hills of the Lido behind the gondola was warm; but Crawford was shivering as he saw the filigreed white bulk of the Doge's Palace, and the tower of the campanile, rising on the dark horizon beyond the gondola's beak. The lagoon was calm, and the gondola's bow hardly rose and fell as the keel skated through the water.

Crawford was holding the jar of Byron's blood in one hand and Shelley's charred, paper-wrapped heart in the other. The poets return, he thought nervously.

He dreaded what he was going to have to do, and he took a frail comfort in the expanse of water, glittering with reflections of the many-colored lights of the city, that still lay ahead to be crossed. Several minutes at least you've got, he told himself.

For the first time he noticed that the upswept stem of the gondola was metal, and shaped vaguely like a trident blade. He turned around in his seat and waved at the gondolier, then pointed forward at the stem. "Why is it shaped like a blade?" he asked.

The gondolier managed to shrug without breaking the rhythm of his sculling. "Tradition," he said. "Gondolas in Venice have always had it. It's called the
ferro
."

Crawford nodded and looked forward again. From where he sat the
ferro
did make a breach across the many-eyed and toothy-looking face of the Doge's Palace.

He looked worriedly at Josephine, who was slumped on the seat across from him, beside their bag and Byron's sword cane. She was shivering too, but from fever more than fear.

The two of them had had to walk eastward last night for several hours, slogging through marshes as often as walking on roads, to get past the line of Austrian boats blocking the Po, and by the time they had found an early-morning fisherman who would agree to sail them north to the Lido, Josephine had been hot and trembling and unsure about where they were or what year it was. More often than not she had seemed to believe that they were back in Rome, fleeing south from Keats's apartment through the ruins of the Roman Forum.

And several times she'd been doubled up with cramps, though when he'd become alarmed she'd told him that she had them frequently, and that they always passed within a few minutes. He worried that something might be going wrong with her pregnancy—certainly her life recently wasn't the sort of regimen he'd have recommended for an expectant mother.

The white pillars of the Church of San Giorgio were squarely off the portside now, a hundred yards away across the low waves, and the gondola was slanting across the wide mouth of the Canale di San Marco toward the domes of the Church of San Zaccaria, a hundred yards to the east of the Ducal Palace. Crawford could now see the two columns standing on the seaward side of the brightly lighted Piazza.

Within minutes San Giorgio was astern, and away off to port was the broad, boat-spangled corridor of the Grand Canal; the facades of the tall palaces, seen end-on, were a Byzantine glory of lights and arches and ornate balconies.

Crawford stared at the spectacle until he noticed a turbulence in the water out between the gondola and the lights.

"Faster," he called to the gondolier, who sighed but increased the rhythm of the oar.

Crawford realized that they were on the fringes of the Graiae's focus—the agitation in the water had undoubtedly been the third sister, heaving blindly under the surface at the perception of the heart moving past.