The Stress of Her Regard (47 page)

"A Christ from the old gods," said Josephine softly in French. "A sort of artificial redeemer-in-reverse." Her hands lay limp in her lap, as if even the multiplication tables had failed her.

Crawford was peripherally impressed that she'd understood the old man's speech, but his attention had been caught by something else, and he turned away from the window to face des Loges again. "Surgically inserted," he said. "Where did he have that done? Switzerland, right?"

"Yes," the old man answered. "You know something about that?"

Crawford remembered the manuscript he'd described to Boyd six years ago, the description in
The Menotti Miscellany
of a procedure for inserting a statue into a man's abdomen. As he'd told Boyd, the manuscript had only survived because it had been mistakenly catalogued as a procedure for Caesarian birth. "I believe I've read the surgeon's notes." Des Loges started to say something, but Crawford waved for silence. "This Werner-from-Aargau!—what does he
look
like? Does he look . . . young? Healthy?"

Des Loges stared at him. "You
have
seen him, haven't you? No, he's not young nor healthy, though his condition is notably
stable
now that he's in Venice, near the Graiae pillars. He can't move around, but he can
project
himself, in images tangible enough to pick up wine glasses or turn the pages of books or cast solid shadows in not too bright light, and these images can be as youthful-looking as he wants them to be. He can't project them very far, though—no more than a few hundred yards from where his horrible old body is. And since 1818 that's been Venice, in the Doge's Palace by the Piazza San Marco. I believe that's the only reason he had the Austrians take Italy, so that he could own the Graiae pillars and live in their preserving aura."

"I met what must have been him—one of his projections—in a café on the Grand Canal," said Crawford thoughtfully. "He wasn't very secretive—he told me his name was Werner von Aargau."

"I guess he hasn't got a lot of need to be secretive," put in Josephine. "The only thing he kept from you was—what, the fact that you were specifically furthering the nephelim cause, rather than just the Austrian one."

"And the fact that the medicine I was supposed to give you would have killed you," said Crawford.

"Of course it would have," said des Loges, nodding so vigorously that Crawford thought his driftwoody neck would break. "The Austrians have derived their power from the alliance Werner forged with the revived nephelim, and so they do whatever they can to keep the nephelim happy—and this young gentleman's . . .
ex-wife
," he said, pointing at Crawford, "would be very happy to have you dead. These creatures genuinely do love us, but they are powerfully jealous."

There was torchlight visible down the road now, behind the trees, and Crawford wondered if he should warn Josephine; but he decided that Byron's servants could surely handle any visitors. Byron's pistol was still in his belt, and he touched it nervously.

"Who are
you
?" asked Josephine. "How do
you
know all this?"

The very old man smiled, and his face had such a look of detestable wisdom that Crawford had to force himself not to look away. "My real name is Francois des Loges, though I'm remembered under another. I was born in the year Joan of Arc was burned to death, and I was a student at the University of Paris when I fell in love."

He chuckled softly. "Near the University," he went on, "in front of the house of a certain Mademoiselle des Bruyeres, there was a large stone—you saw it, sir, when you took advantage of my hospitality. The students must have perceived something of its . . .
strangeness
, for among them it was known as
Le Pet-au-Diable
, the Devil's Fart.
I
never called it that—
I
had seen the woman it became by night, and I worshipped her. You have both experienced this."

He smiled reminiscently. "When I was thirty-two I left Paris and the attentions of men, and for many, many years I wandered with her, a happy pet of hers. I was in the bosom of my new family, and I met other in-laws like myself—including Werner himself, the man who had reintroduced the two species to each other. The fours and the twos, under the gaze of the eternal threes."

Crawford frowned and looked away from the window. "That's the riddle, isn't it? The one the sphinx asked us on the peak of the Wengern. What does it mean?"

"You don't know?" Des Loges shook his head in wonder. "What did you do, just
guess
the right answer? You can't have used the answer that legend claims was given by Oedipus—legend has it close, but not nearly close enough."

Crawford tried to remember the wording of the riddle.
What was it that walked on four limbs when the sunlight had not yet changed, and now is supported by two, but will, when the sunlight is changed again and the light is gone, be supported by three?
"I thought the riddle might be a . . . a ritualistic demand for diplomatic recognition. A citing of something the two species had in common. So, instead of 'man,' I gave an answer broad enough to include the nephelim too—I said, 'sentient life on earth.' "

The old man nodded sombrely. "That was a lucky guess. You were lucky, too, to have got by the phantom that guards the threshold, the one Goethe refers to in
Faust
—'She looks to every one like his first love,' Mephistopheles tells Faust. Actually, the phantom looks to every intruder like the person the intruder loved and has most grossly betrayed."

Josephine had reddened, but was smiling slightly too. "So what does it
refer
to?" she asked. "The riddle, I mean."

"Skeletons," des Loges told her. "Your friend Shelley knows about it. Read his
Prometheus Unbound;
'A sphere, which is as many thousand spheres . . . ' " Des Loges's English was even worse than his French, to which he now mercifully returned. "Matter, every bit of stuff that comprises the world and ourselves, is made up of what the old Greeks called atoms—they're tiny spheres, animated by the same force that makes lightning jump from the sky to the ground, or makes St. Elmo's Fire flicker on the spars of ships."

Corbie's Aunt, thought Crawford, animating the hulks.

"Each of these spheres is 'many thousand spheres,' " des Loges went on, "for the central bit is surrounded by tiny pieces of electricity that occupy distinctly divided spheres—and it's the number of these pieces of electricity in the atom's outermost sphere that defines which other atoms the atom may combine with. The pieces of electricity are the limbs by which the atom can seize other atoms, and three kinds of atoms are the bases for the three kinds of skeletons. Even the surviving legends of Oedipus describe the four-and-two-and-three as means of
support
."

Crawford nodded dubiously. "So what are these kinds of skeletons?"

"Well," said des Loges, "the nephelim, the
Siliconari
, so to speak, were the first intelligent race the earth had, Lilith's people, the giants that were in the earth in those days, and their skeletons are made of the same stuff their flesh is made of—the stuff that's the basis of glass and quartz and granite. The atoms of that stuff have four pieces of electricity in their outer sphere. Then the sunlight changed and the nephelim all petrified and sort of receded from the perspective of the picture.

"Humanity was the next form of intelligent life, and our skeletons are made of the same stuff as seashells and chalk and lime. And the basic element of those things has two pieces of electricity in its outer sphere.

"And the answer to the riddle implies that after the sunlight changes again and the sun goes out, the only intelligent things left will be the mountains themselves, the gods, and you've seen the stuff of their skeletons—it's the lightweight metal my pots and pans were made of, remember? Back in my little boat-house in Carnac? It's the most abundant metal in the earth, found most commonly in clay and alum, and of course its atoms have three of these electrical bits in the outermost sphere."

Crawford remembered seeing a silvery metal exposed in the side of the Wengern by an avalanche—a mountain guide had called it
argent de l'argite
, silver from clay.

Then his attention was distracted by the lights on the road. There were many torches approaching—more than could be carried by the group he'd seen earlier. Byron's servants would not be able to hold off this crowd.

"We've got to get out of here," he said hastily to Josephine. "Back stairs, and no time to grab anything." He was suddenly very grateful for Shelley's twenty pounds.

Josephine's eyes widened when she looked out the window, and instantly she was moving for the door, with Crawford right behind her.

On the stairs Crawford noticed that des Loges was following them. "Can you distract this gang?" Crawford hissed back at the old man. "They're your friends."

"No friends of mine, I assure you," des Loges panted. "They'd kill me, but not in the way I need. I'm coming with you."

There was no chance of escaping unseen by the front door, so Crawford led them out the back door and across the darkening field that Byron had trod only the night before, with his dead daughter's body in his arms. Crawford was glad Byron's servants hadn't seen them leave, for it seemed to him that their loyalty was dubious.

The trio moved slowly through the dry grass for fear of making any trackable noise, and eventually found themselves blundering through the churchyard that must have been Byron's goal. The sky was dimming through deep purple toward black, but Crawford spotted a small mound of fresh-turned earth under an olive tree by the fence. He led them several yards farther before sitting down.

"May as well get comfortable here," he said quietly. "There's no use blundering around in the dark with people after us who know every road, and they probably won't look for us on consecrated soil."

During the long, furtive walk he had remembered some things—such as Byron's identification of the song Crawford had been singing in the Alps, the song Crawford had learned from des Loges—and he was now sure he knew what des Loges's other name was, the one under which he'd said he was remembered.

"And so, Monsieur Villon," Crawford whispered when they had all sat down on the still warm, grassy earth, "is it your intention to travel with us?"

The old man laughed softly in the darkness. "You're a bright boy. Yes, since you have evidently overcome your reluctance to participate in drownings, I want to enlist in the . . . the terminal cruise of poets."

Crawford realized what the man was asking for, and realized too that he himself now knew enough about the situation to be unable to refuse. "Well," he said slowly, "there's no way Shelley will permit that English boy Charles Vivian to sail along—
he
certainly has no need of this kind of baptism. So yes—I see no reason why there shouldn't be a berth for you aboard."

. . . Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

—Percy Bysshc Shelley, "Ozymandias"

Processions of priests and religiosi have been for several
days past praying for rain; but the gods are either angry,
or nature is too powerful.

—Edward Williams's journal, last entry, 4 July 1822

As dawn scratched away the darkness of the sky between the trees and the old Romanesque buildings of the church, Crawford and Josephine and des Loges stole to the road and began walking north. The air had already shed the mild chill of night, and was poised for the day's heat.

At first light the three of them caught a ride northward aboard a farmer's wagon, and before the rising sun had even cleared the bulk of Mount Querciolaia they alighted in a narrow street in the southwestern waterfront section of Livorno. The docks and channels extended inland quite a distance, and were connected with a network of canals, and Crawford could almost believe he was back in Venice.

He knew that Shelley would expect to meet them at the Globe Hotel, but he knew too that Edward Williams would be there now, and he dreaded seeing the man again; so he found an
albergo
to stay at on the banks of one of the canals. The landlord crossed himself when they checked in, but an English ten-pound note for a week's lodging overcame whatever superstitious misgivings the man may have had.

Crawford and Josephine took rooms on the ground floor, overlooking the canal, but des Loges insisted on a room right up under the roof, in spite of the impediment of the narrow stairway. "Even if I
am
dying in a week," he told Crawford, "I'd just as soon keep as much stone as possible between me and the earth."

Crawford made a show of liking the place, praising the local restaurants and getting to know the neighbors, but to himself he admitted that he was simply hoping to miss Shelley and not have to follow through on the promise he'd made to him . . . and, years earlier, to des Loges.

So he was dismayed when, early on the morning of Monday the eighth of July, their fourth day in Livorno, des Loges came hobbling to the table in the outdoor trattoria where he and Josephine were having minestrone with beans, and told them, "I feel a twin, a symbiote, approaching by sea, and it's certainly not old Werner. It's time—let's go."

The
Don Juan
was in the harbor, and Shelley was at the Globe Hotel, in the sunlit lobby. He was tanned and fit-looking in a double-breasted reefer jacket and white nankeen trousers and black boots, but the face under the disordered gray-blond hair was expressionless. An iron case with a carrying handle stood on the floor by his right foot. Williams and Trelawny were with him—Williams was pale and haggard and Trelawny looked worried.

Crawford limped up to them.

"The Vivian boy and I," Shelley was saying quietly, "
can
work the
Don Juan
by ourselves. And we
will
." Very slowly, as if saying it for the hundredth time, he added, "I simply want to do the trip in as much solitude as possible."