“Two times five is ten,” said Byron, softer now, as if reciting a lullaby to a child, “two times six is twelve …”
She opened her mouth to answer, but was interrupted by a loud, musically resonant voice from the darkness on the hill.
“No,” it said. “You’re mine, and your child is mine. I’m the father.”
“Christ,” grated Byron, sliding his free hand into his pocket, “that sounded like Polidori.”
Josephine had stopped. Her tattered dress was fluttering in the chilly breeze.
She was staring at Crawford intently. He smiled at her—and then flipped the rope out away from his side and tossed the loop over her shoulders.
She turned and lunged for the arch and the darkness beyond it, and Crawford was pulled off balance and fell painfully onto his knees; but he pulled her strongly back, and she fell across him.
She was struggling furiously, and even though Byron knelt on her—awkwardly, for he wouldn’t drop the torch or take his hand out of his pocket—Crawford wasn’t able to get another loop of the rope around any part of her. He could hear something scrambling down the hillside, and in desperation he hauled back his maimed hand and slapped her very hard across the face.
It rocked her head and she went limp, and as Byron stood up Crawford hurriedly rolled her over and tied her wrists together tightly.
The hand he’d hit her with was gritty with clay. The stuff smeared around her mouth was clay. Had she been eating it?
When he looked up, Byron had drawn his pistol and was pointing it past Crawford, toward the trees. His free hand held the torch steadily.
Crawford looked in the direction the muzzle was pointing. A man stood on the pavement beside the house.
He was dressed in a shirt and trousers as shabby as Josephine’s dress; but, unlike Josephine, he looked well fed, with a visible paunch and the beginnings of a double chin.
He was smiling coldly at Crawford. “I,” he said, “have not ever hit a woman. I’m proud to have resigned from a race whose members would.”
Josephine was recovering from the blow, and flexing weakly under Crawford, and he ran the rope back from her wrists and looped it around her ankles and drew it tight. He began tying a knot, with trembling fingers.
“Polidori,” called Byron, his voice a little unsteady. “The ball in this pistol is Carbonari issue—silver and wood.”
Crawford drew the knot tight, and looked up.
With an explosive tearing pop that made Crawford jump, Polidori’s clothing flew away in rags in all directions—and to judge by the way the torchlight guttered and flared, Byron had been startled too—but when the light steadied, Crawford saw that a serpent with buzzing wings hung now in midair where
Polidori had been standing.
It curled heavily in the air, its metallic-looking scales glittering in the torchlight. Its long snout opened, showing a white brush of teeth, and its glassy eyes swivelled from Byron to Crawford, and then down to where Josephine lay on the stones.
“Don’t shoot now,” said Crawford hastily. “I’ve seen them in this form before—pistol balls just bounce off them.”
“My darling!” breathed Josephine, staring at the serpent.
The thing rose up into the air, buzzing loudly, and then sailed off into the darkness toward the hillside.
Crawford had wrestled the resisting Josephine halfway to her feet when the musical voice sounded again from among the trees.
“Your ball wouldn’t have killed me,” it said, and though its tone was urbane, Crawford could clearly hear anger in the precision of the syllables, “but it would have hurt me. You hurt me before, Mister Crawford, in the Alps. Do you recall?”
Crawford couldn’t hold up the struggling Josephine any longer; but he knelt under her as he let her fall, so that it was his already bleeding knees, and not her head, that cracked against the stone. “Why the hell didn’t you shoot when you had the chance?” he asked Byron, his voice an exhausted sob.
Then he took a deep breath and looked up. “No,” he shouted, answering the voice.
He was glad the thing apparently wanted to talk, for he needed time to think. Could he and Byron drag Josephine into the surf, and use the insulating qualities of seawater to keep the thing away from them until dawn? It would be, he thought hysterically, like children swimming in a pond, ducking under water when a hornet was hovering near.
Josephine was panting, staring up into the dark trees.
“With the mirror,” said the voice. “When you reflected sunlight onto me.”
Crawford did remember it. “But that wasn’t Polidori,” he panted. “Polidori only killed himself last year.”
“We’re not such divided entities as humans,” came the voice. It laughed, a harsh ringing like bronze bells. “'What you have done to the least of my brethren, you have done to me.'”
“How,” demanded Byron, “do you dare to quote Scripture?”
“How do you dare to publish poetry as your own?” returned the voice, its rage abruptly very evident. “The great Lord Byron! Secretly sucking away at the Gorgon’s teat! Presuming to despise anyone who hasn’t found their way to it! My poetry may not have been brilliant"—the voice was shrill—"but at least it was my own!”
Byron still had the pistol in his hand, and he laughed now and swept its muzzle across the hillside. “Poetry,” he said good-naturedly, “was the least of the things in which I excelled you.”
A scream sounded from the hillside, and for a moment Crawford glimpsed a naked man rushing toward them between the trees, and Byron levelled the pistol; but an instant later the buzzing curdled the air again and it was the winged serpent that flew at them.
Byron’s pistol went off just before the thing hit him, and the ball ricocheted off the serpent and the house wall as the torch spun through the air and hit the stones, scattering sparks.
The light was gone, and over the ringing in his ears Crawford could hear Byron’s panicky gasping and the slither and heavy slap of the serpent’s coils; then there was a sharp, tortured wheeze, and he knew that the thing had wrapped itself around Byron and was squeezing the breath out of him.
Crawford had taken one step toward the sea—the only thought in his mind being to swim out as far as he could—when he saw that the torch was not quite extinguished. It lay on the stones a couple of yards to his left, and the head of it was still smoldering.
Still not giving up the idea of fleeing, he snatched it up and whirled it in a circle in the air. It flared back into flame, and the first thing he could see was Josephine’s face staring anxiously toward Byron and the serpent.
Her concern, he realized, was not for Byron’s safety but for her lover’s—and Crawford’s panic hardened into a leaden, despairing rage.
He turned away from her.
The thing had Byron down, its long rippling body coiled around him, holding his arms helpless against his constricted ribs, and even as Crawford stepped forward it lowered its head to Byron’s neck and delicately lanced its narrow teeth into the man’s corded throat.
Byron’s eyes clenched shut and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl of pain and rage and humiliation—but of reluctant pleasure, too—and Crawford leaned down and thrust the torch against the serpent’s eyes.
Josephine screamed, and the flames licked Byron’s cheek and withered the gray hair at his temple, but the reptile’s eyes just rolled upward to look at Crawford incuriously as the scaled throat worked, swallowing Byron’s blood.
Still holding the torch in one hand, Crawford pulled the jar of minced garlic out of his coat pocket and lashed it down onto the stones, then scooped up a handful of glass and garlic and, shivering with revulsion, leaned down to scour it across the reptile’s eyes. Shards of glass lanced into his palm, but the chance that it might hurt Josephine’s new lover made him ignore the pain.