He was just beginning to wonder desperately if he could have miscalculated the place where he’d seen the turbulence in the water earlier, when he saw it again, ahead.
The water was churning at a spot a hundred yards ahead of the prow, and then splashing violently, flinging up a cloud of spray that glittered in the multicolored lights—and then the third sister raised her head above the white water, into the warm night air.
His mouth formed the word “Jesus,” and he didn’t know whether it had been Byron or himself who had spoken.
Perhaps the thing had lost its shape in its long years underwater; or perhaps she had never been carved into as symmetrical a pillar as her sisters, in which case it had probably not been an accident when the workmen had dropped her into the canal in the twelfth century.
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 as he splashed into the water.
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, still 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.