“No,” said Josephine calmly. “You’re sure to need help, you’re sure to fail without help. I’m not going to the Lido to wait for someone who won’t be returning.”
She held up her hand. “Listen to me, and believe me—if you don’t let me come, I swear to you I’ll … fill this dress with stones and jump into the middle of the lagoon. Enough weight and a couple of fathoms of salt water should prevent any of us from ever reappearing: these two fetuses, the heart, the eye, or me.”
Crawford was shaking his head and moaning. “But what if they do cut off somebody’s head or something when you’re ashore?”
“If you succeed in this, it won’t matter. And if you fail, I’ll drown myself anyway.”
Crawford knew she meant it. He shook his head, but took her hand. “'If ‘twere done, ‘twere well done quickly,'” he said. “Macbeth again,” observed Byron as they stepped out onto the dock.
She offered the gondolier more money, but he waved her off, again making the sign of the cross.
“Fine,” she told him. “Thanks.” She linked her arm through Crawford’s, and they walked down the dock to the pavement and began strolling toward the Piazza. “So,” she said, as casually as if they were tourists deciding where to dine, “you plan to cut this statue out of him?”
“That’s it,” said Crawford. He swung Byron’s sword cane with despairing jauntiness.
“What if our human child is already infected with the nephelim stuff? Like Shelley was?” She looked at him brightly. “Wouldn’t he or she constitute another overlap?”
Crawford stopped walking. He hadn’t thought of that. “Jesus.” He ran his maimed hand over his bald scalp. “How long have you been … eating dirt?” he asked.
She shrugged. “A week? Less.”
“We’re probably all right, then. I doubt that the inhuman fetus could get around to interfering with his womb-mate until he was fairly well formed himself, and it doesn’t sound as if he is yet.”
He tried to put more conviction into his voice than he felt, and he mentally cursed any God that there might be, for having made this coming ordeal not only tremendously difficult and dangerous, but possibly pointless too. “Take the legs, Byron,” he said hoarsely.
Byron did, without comment; Crawford relaxed in the Lerici bed and watched the pillars of the square-facing side of the Ducal Palace sweep past on the right side of his vision. The palace’s white pillars were so near that he could clearly see the rust stains on the undersides of the Corinthian capitals, and he realized that Byron was skirting the Graiae columns as widely as possible.
Crawford assumed just enough of his body’s sensations so that he could feel Josephine’s arm in his. A frailer overlap, he thought—but just possibly the one that will prevail tonight.
A hundred yards ahead, torchlight outlined the Byzantine arches and spires of the Basilica of St. Mark in luminous orange dry-brush strokes against the starry blackness of the night, and Crawford tried not to see the main entry arch as a gaping stone mouth. Dozens of people were strolling across the broad mosaic pavement, and several of them wore the uniforms of the Austrian military, but at least none of the soldiers was escorting a prisoner and carrying an axe.
The faces of many of the people he passed were blurred slightly, and seemed to shimmer with multiple, contradictory expressions, and it was difficult to be sure in which direction they were looking.
All potential, Crawford thought, and minimal actuality; it would be interesting to live in an indeterminacy field. Imagine cooking, trying to get a three-minute egg just right.
Byron walked Crawford’s body quickly past the palace and then past the high arches of the basilica’s west face, hurrying Josephine along whenever she slowed, and under the broad face of the clock tower he turned left, toward the narrower north end of the Piazzetta.
Crawford’s face was for a moment lifted toward the ornamental architecture above the clock face, and he wondered if Byron was as uneasy as he was to see the winged stone lion staring down at them, and above it the two bronze giants poised with hammers beside the great bell.
With scarcely a glance around at the smaller, darker square, Byron hustled the two weary bodies toward a narrow alley-mouth on the north side.
The alley itself, Crawford saw when they were in it, was more brightly lit than the square behind them; lamplight spilled from shops tucked in under the arches on either side, casting onto the worn brick walls the shadows of hanging sausages and cheeses, and lights behind opened windows overhead illuminated flowerpots and balconies and frail curtains flapping in the night breeze.
“Give me a coin,” rasped Byron with Crawford’s voice.
Josephine dug one out of her bag and put it in Crawford’s hand, which lifted and tossed the coin against the wall, deftly catching it again when it bounced back and tossing it again.
The alley was noisy with conversation and laughter and the strains of a man singing drunkenly somewhere nearby, but the clink … clink … clink of the coin seemed to undercut and dominate all the other sounds. Before his body had taken six more steps Crawford had become sure that the other sounds were now coordinated with, their pace dictated by, the rhythm of the ringing coin.
Then there were two clinks for each impact of the coin against the wall. Crawford’s hand caught the coin and his face looked upward.
On a balcony above, a fat man was tossing coins against the far wall. The coins rang against the bricks, but none of them fell down into the alley, or were even visible after hitting the wall.
The man looked down, apparently with recognition. “They’re awake now,” he said in Italian, fear putting a quaver into the careful nonchalance of his voice. “And blind.”
“We need your help, Carlo,” Byron said. “I’m Byron, the—”
“I know,” the man interrupted. “Byron’s face is visible behind the face you’re wearing, like one patterned veil behind another. This is an evil night.” He threw one more coin into ringing oblivion, then gripped the balcony railing firmly with both hands, as if to stop it from vibrating. “What help?”
“We believe that somewhere nearby is a pocket of the old way—in this pocket you would still judge that they can see. We need you to help us find it.”
“What will you do there?”
“If we succeed we’ll kill the columns, and the vampires—all the unnatural stony life—or at least reduce them to a dormant state they haven’t been in for eight hundred years.”
“I’ve got a wife,” Carlo said thoughtfully. “And children.”
“You rent, don’t you? I’ll buy you an estate anywhere in Italy.”
After a long pause—during which Crawford, in the room in Lerici, whimpered with impatience as he imagined soldiers leading a prisoner out onto the square and drawing a knife—Carlo nodded. “But you don’t speak to me or in any way indicate that I am with you.”
“Fine.”
The fat man turned and entered the building.
With some of the lire Josephine still had they bought a bag of coins and gave it to Carlo, who took it and walked out of the alley into the Piazzetta; Crawford and Josephine followed him at a distance of a dozen feet.
Carlo walked halfway across the pavement toward the basilica, then flipped a coin into the air. It glittered for a moment in the torchlight and then Crawford lost sight of it; a few seconds later he heard a metallic clink-and-roll far out to the right, toward the tall brick tower of the campanile.
Carlo walked in that direction for a few steps, then flipped his thumb up again. This time Crawford never saw the coin, and heard nothing but the voices and laughter from the alley behind them.