The Stress of Her Regard (65 page)

Her head was a barnacled boulder twelve feet across, and under a single gaping socket her mouth—as wide as Crawford's gondola was long—lowered open and then crashed shut with an explosion of iridescent spray and a sound like a stone door dropped closed over the whole city. The head swung slowly, blindly, back and forth over the water.

Crawford stood up—having to grip the gunwale, for the boat was rocking in the suddenly choppy water—and, gripping the heart the way Byron had, turned away from her and faced the other two pillars. He raised the heart over his head.

Again he heard the musical note, distant at first but getting rapidly louder, and in the space of an instant a dozen stars in quick succession became momentarily brighter and steadier. As soon as he had noticed the effect they had resumed their dim twinkling.
"You missed,"
he heard himself say.
"And here come the Austrians."

He had been peripherally aware of another, bigger gondola angling out from the docks, and when he looked closely at it he could see the barrels of long guns against the lights of the distant Piazza.

He looked back toward the third sister. The socket above her mouth was no longer empty—it was darker than it had been before, but it gleamed, and every needle of light it reflected seemed aimed straight into Crawford's own blinking and ephemeral eyes. Shelley's heart flexed in his hand, with a faint crackling sound.

Hastily he tossed the heart onto the seat and sculled his gondola around, and then began heaving at the oar to get closer to the Piazza.

"A little farther," he panted, his face running with sweat, "past the equidistant point, and then I'll try it again."

He spared a glance to port, toward the Austrian boat; they were still moving in the opposite direction, as if intending to pass the third sister on the far side.

They're afraid of her, he realized, afraid to shoot toward her; they want to get to a position from which they can shoot at us with only the lagoon and the distant Lido behind us.

He looked back, toward the third sister.
"You'll have to row farther than you thought,"
said Byron, unnecessarily.
"She's following us."

Crawford leaned hard into the oar, sweeping it back and forth through the water so hard that he was afraid it would break, and he was desperately pleased to see the wake his gondola was throwing; and when he thought that he had outdistanced the advancing thing by a few more yards, he dropped the oar and picked up the heart and again held it up.

Again the music swept past him, briefly clarifying a line of stars. "Missed again," he gasped, before Byron could say it.

Then the night lit with a yellow flash in the east, and the gondola was jarred by a dozen hammer-blows; stung with flying splinters and off-balance, Crawford rolled over the gunwale as the multiple booming of the Austrian guns shook the air. Instinctively he kicked off his shoes.

He nearly lost his breath when Byron spoke in his throat underwater.
We're invisible to everyone now
, came the muffled sound from his closed throat.
Let me swim back.

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, 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 guess 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 remembered 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 guess 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 port side, 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 catch on that 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."