At Michaelmas dawn the old man burst into the stable with a priest, and as the stable owner harnessed the horses the priest shouted angry, incomprehensibly fast Italian sentences at Crawford, who just nodded miserably.
The carriage was on the road again before the sun had quite cleared the mountains ahead.
“Making friends everywhere you go, hey?” shouted Crawford from the driver’s bench to the sleeping Josephine as he snapped the reins over the horses backs. “Good policy.”
They drove north under the blue summer sky, through the Cisa Pass between the vertically remote and snow-fouled peaks of the Apennines—the sun was rising ahead of them, and the sunlight was hot in the moments when the mountain wind was not rasping down through the sparsely wooded pass—and by mid-morning Crawford knew, from Byron’s maps and roadside markers, that they were very near the border between Tuscany and Emilia.
The road had got narrower, and the rocky wall on his right and the abyss to his left had both grown steeper, and when he knew that they must be within a hundred yards of the border crossing, Crawford gave up on finding a place to pull over, and simply halted the carriage in the road. At least there didn’t seem to be any traffic right now. He hurriedly climbed down and opened the carriage door—and then gagged and reeled away.
He had left the windows half-open, but the sun had nevertheless made a garlic steam-room of the carriage’s interior. Josephine was only semiconscious. He checked her pulse and breathing—they were still regular, and Crawford wondered what he would have done if they had not been.
There was a strongbox under the front seat, and Crawford made sure that all of Byron’s pistols and all the knives from the cutlery set were in it, and that it was locked and the key in his pocket. He climbed back outside for a breath of fresh air, then leaned in for one more look around.
He supposed she could break one of the windows and saw open her neck on the jagged edges, or open the door and throw herself off the precipice, but he would hear her beginning either of those, and could conceivably get down in time to stop her—and she looked too weak for any strenuous suicide anyway.
He leaned out for another breath, and then quickly but gently untied the knots he’d pulled tight twelve hours ago in front of the Casa Magni.
He closed the door and climbed back up to the driver’s bench and started the carriage rolling again.
At the border crossing Josephine was so clearly ill and incoherent, and Crawford’s explanation that she needed to get to the hospital in Parma so desperately convincing, and his bribe so handsome, and the smell of garlic so appalling, that the border guards quickly let them continue on the road east, the road that would lead them down out of the mountains.
A few hundred yards farther on, Crawford halted the carriage and climbed down. He roused Josephine enough to get her to eat some bread and cheese with him, and he made her drink some water, reminding himself to plan a rest stop before too long.
She cursed him weakly as he retied her hands and ankles. After a minute he realized that he was cursing her in return, and he made himself stop.
Hand-sized wooden crucifixes stood on poles every few miles along the roadside, sheltered by tiny shingled roofs, and as the sun climbed by imperceptible degrees to the zenith, and then began to throw Crawford’s shadow out under the horses’ hooves, Crawford found himself praying to the weather-grayed little figures.
He wasn’t precisely praying to Christ, but to all the gods who had represented humanity and had suffered for it; curled around his mental image of the wooden Christ were vague ideas of Prometheus chained to the stone with the vulture tearing at his entrails—and Balder nailed to the tree, around the roots of which flowers grew where the drops of his blood fell—and Osiris torn to pieces beside the Nile.
He had his flask with him on the driver’s seat, and the brandy worked with the fatigue and the monotonous noises and motions of driving to lull him into a state that was nearly dreaming.
He wished he had the time, and the hammer and nails, to stop the carriage and go pound an eisener breche into the face of one of the little wooden Christs—it would be a gesture of respect and a declaration of solidarity, not vandalism—and, after a couple of hours of wishing it, he began to imagine that he was doing it.
The figure, in his hallucinatorily vivid daydream, lifted wooden eyelids and stared at him with tiny but unmistakably human eyes, as red blood ran down the pain-lines of the crudely chiselled face, and then it opened its wooden mouth and spoke.
“Accipite, et bibite ex eo omnes.”
It was Latin, and he translated it mentally: All of you take and drink of this.
He was pretty sure it was a line from the Catholic Mass, said when the priest changed the wine into Christ’s blood.
Crawford noticed now that a rusty iron cup hung under the crucifix, and that the blood had run down the legs into the cup. He reached for the cup, but a cloud passed over the sun then, and the figure on the eclipsed cross was himself, and while he was watching himself from someone else’s eyes he thrust an eisenerbreche into the side of the crucified figure.
Water ran out of the wound, and he didn’t have to taste it to know that it was salty—seawater. The water puddled and deepened, and filled the cellar and spilled out into the Arno, which somehow was also the Thames and the Tiber, and flowed out to sea; the little roof over the crucifix became a boat, but it was too far out at sea by now for Crawford to know which boat it was. The Don Juan? The ark? One boat to save us by sinking, Crawford thought dizzily, one to save us by surviving.
He realized that his flask was empty, and that the sun had set behind them. They were down among the wooded foothills now, and he blinked back over his shoulder at the red-lit mountain peaks, through whose stony domain this little box of warm organic life had travelled, and he shivered and thanked the hallucinated Christ, or whoever it had been, for the horses, and even for Josephine.
Somewhere ahead lay the ancient walled city of Parma—once a Gallic town, then an important Roman city, and now a possession, with the blessing of the Austrians, of the French; its royal gardens and promenades were supposed to be among the most beautiful in Italy. Crawford just hoped that whatever stable he would find for them to sleep in would have straw lying around, so that he and Josephine could sleep out of the malodorous carriage.
CHAPTER 24
Their watchmen stare, and stand aghast,
As on we hurry through the dark;
The watch-light blinks as we go past,
The watch-dog shrinks and fears to bark …
—George Crabbe
Perhaps because Parma was occupied by Austrian-sanctioned forces, no priest came to the stable to harry the vampire’s woman out of town. The stable owner slid open the heavy wooden door at dawn, and plodded inside to open one of the stalls and lead a horse out, but he didn’t even look toward where Crawford and Josephine lay on a luxuriously thick pile of straw, covered by a spare horse-blanket.
Crawford wished Byron had thought to pack blankets.
The man led the horse outside, and Crawford threw the blanket aside and stood up. He went to the carriage, but the jug of water had somehow picked up the ubiquitous garlic smell, and he cursed and took one of Byron’s crystal glasses to a horse-trough and dipped up some water. It didn’t taste bad, and he refilled the glass and took it over to Josephine.