Crawford looked at the sand too, and remembered that when Shelley had first talked to him about the lamia, on that summer night six years ago in Switzerland, he had insisted that they talk in a boat out on the lake; and before Shelley had told Josephine and Crawford about his plan to run the Don Juan into a storm and drown, he had told them to walk a few yards out into the surf first—and he even told Josephine to leave her glass eye on the sand.
So Crawford just nodded, and followed the limping figure of Byron down across the white sand toward the waves.
Tita wordlessly rowed Crawford out toward the Bolivar as Byron and one of his Genoese boatmen swam alongside, a few yards out from the boat’s starboard gunwale. Crawford assumed Tita and the Italian sailor were keeping track of their master’s progress, but Crawford did too, remembering that Byron had had trouble while swimming yesterday.
But Byron was swimming strongly today, his muscular arms metronomically knifing ahead of him to pull him forward through the glassy water—though Crawford noticed that his shoulders were red with sunburn. He should call for a shirt when he gets to the Bolivar, he thought.
The three bare masts of the Bolivar grew taller and clearer and farther apart with each powerful pull on the oars, and soon Crawford could recognize the men on her deck. He waved to them, but though they waved back they clearly didn’t recognize him as the man who had helped them search the shoreline for signs of the Don Juan a month earlier.
He looked back at the shore. The smoke was a tower in the nearly windless sky, and the men standing around on the distant beach looked like the dazed survivors of some disaster.
The Bolivar was close enough now to blot out a third of the sky. At a call from Byron, Tita pushed strongly on the oars, and a few moments later the boat had stopped and was rocking in the water under the arch of the Bolivar’s hull.
The rope boarding-ladder hung to the water from the rail above, but Byron stayed a yard or so out away from it, treading water. He looked skeptically up at Crawford. “Can you handle the oars well enough to keep the boat from bumping the hull? Or drifting away?”
Crawford flexed his bony shoulders. “I have no idea.”
“Oh hell, in a pinch I can swim over and give the boat a push or a tug. Tita, up on deck with you—and lower us a cold bottle of sciacchetrà and a couple of glasses.”
The sailor had come paddling and gasping up to the ladder, and after catching his breath he pulled himself up the rungs to the rail, followed closely by Tita, who had paused to maneuver the boat in to within a yard of the hull.
The creaking of the timbers and the slap of low waves against the hull were the only sounds now, and in spite of his broad-brimmed hat Crawford felt the hot sun as a weight on his head.
Through the clear water he could see Byron’s legs kicking at a relaxed pace, and there was no sign of strain when he raised one hand to carefully push his wet hair back away from his forehead.
Byron looked up at him. “Trelawny or Hunt might want the heart,” he said quietly. “Or Mary—she might already have asked for it.”
Crawford nodded. “People get sentimental about such things. Hunt tells me that Jane Williams already has Ed’s ashes in an urn on the mantel of the house in Pisa.”
Byron spat. “She’ll forget and make tea in it one of these days.” He tilted his head back to peer toward shore. “Well, they can have the bones or something—we’ve got to make sure we get the heart.”
A basket was being lowered on a rope, and Crawford leaned out and caught it and took from it a bottle and two napkin-wrapped wine glasses. The cork had been pulled out of the bottle and stuck loosely back in, but it took all of Crawford’s strength to tug it out again, and his hands were shaking as he poured the wine into one of the glasses and held it out over the gunwale to Byron.
“Thank you,” Byron said, taking a sip and then effortlessly holding the glass steady above the water as his legs continued to pump below the surface. “You seem to be a moderately educated man, Aickman—have you heard of the Graiae?”
“Graiae as in the Greek myth?” asked Crawford. “They were the three sisters Perseus consulted, before going to kill the Medusa.” He carefully filled his own glass and tasted the wine. “They had only one eye among them—didn’t they?—and they had to keep handing it back and forth.”
Byron confirmed this, and then went on to describe the attempt he and Shelley had made to awaken the blind Graiae pillars in Venice in 1818. The narration took several minutes, and twice during it Byron paddled closer to the boat and held out his glass for a refill.
Crawford had finished the wine in his own glass, and was debating the wisdom of pouring himself some more. He decided not to—he was already dizzy, and this story would clearly require all of his concentration. “So—what is it we want the heart for?”
“I think it’s what drew the attention of the Graiae to him. The fresh blood that was splashed all over the pavement acted as a sort of jury-rigged eye for them, and—goddamn me, Aickman—when Shelley was wavering at a point about the same distance from each of the columns, that blood just raced across the paving stones from one column to the other, and back! You could feel the attention they were paying to him, like … like the pressure on your ears when you’re under water.”
He held up his glass, and Crawford leaned over the gunwale to refill it again.
“And then when we were fleeing in a gondola,” Byron went on, “the third sister—the pillar they’d dropped in the canal centuries ago—came rearing up out of the water as we passed. I think if we hadn’t very quickly got out of their … field of influence, the blood would have sprayed horizontally out over the water to that pillar. They wanted to stare at him as closely as they could, and so they were throwing their eye back and forth, to whichever of them was closest to him.”
“What’s so … astonishing … to them, about his heart?”
“I can only guess, Aickman. Since it’s half-human and half-nephelim—”
“Carbonari and Siliconari,” commented Crawford.
Byron blinked. “If you like. In any case, since it’s a mix that probably isn’t logically possible, I think it’s a violation of the determinism that the Graiae project with their eye, and so the eye can’t leave it alone. I don’t think such a creature as Shelley could have been conceived in the field of the eye … though I’ll bet such a creature couldn’t be easily killed in the field, either. The eye prevents randomness, the vagaries of chance. As I told Shelley then, it not only checks on things, it checks them.”
Crawford opened his mouth to speak, but Byron was already talking again. His upthrust hand was still steady, though the moisture beading his face now was clearly sweat.
“The reason the Austrians brought the eye to the pillars,” Byron was saying, “was that they were also bringing some enormously old Austrian king or something there too, so that with specific treatment he can live forever in the deterministic focus of the wakeful, sighted Graiae.” Byron raised his sunburned shoulders above the water in a shrug. “Maybe this king is a half-and-half too, like Shelley.”
Crawford’s stomach had gone cold, though the sun on him was as hot as ever. “Yes,” he said. “He is. But unlike Shelley, who was born that way, this king was … surgically made into one.”
For the first time that day, Byron really looked squarely at Crawford. “You know of him?”