Then he met her furious gaze, and he sprang for the pistols.
The boat rocked as the cloud figure collided with it, and Shelley and the boatmen yelled; when Byron rolled up into a crouch with a pistol in his hand he saw Shelley swing the bared sword at the woman-shaped cloud, which hung now just above the rail, and though the blade stopped so abruptly that the top half of it snapped right off, the cloud seemed to recoil and lose some of its shape. There was blood on Shelley’s cheek and in his hair, and Byron aimed the pistol into the center of the cloud and pulled the trigger.
The sharp explosion of the charge set his ears ringing, but he could hear Shelley shout, “Good—lead conducts electricity well enough—silver or gold’s better!”
Shelley braced his tall, narrow frame against the rail, and with the broken sword aimed a real tree-felling stroke at the thing. The now turbulent cloud recoiled again, no longer resembling a woman at all. Shelley swung again, and the blade struck the wooden rail a glancing blow; Byron thought his friend had missed his target, but when a moment later Shelley hit the rail again, straight down this time, he realized that he had intended to chop free a wooden splinter.
Shelley let go of the broken sword—it tumbled over the side—and with his thin hands pried up the splinter. “Give me your other pistol!”
Byron dug it out of the fallen sack and tossed it to him. Shelley jammed the wooden splinter into the barrel and as Byron shouted at him to stop, aimed the weirdly bayonetted gun into the cloud and fired.
The cloud burst apart, with an acid smell like fresh-broken stone. Shelley slumped back onto the seat. After a moment he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and began blotting his bleeding forehead.
“You’re damned lucky,” was all Byron could think of to say. His heart was pounding, and he shoved his hands into his pockets so Shelley wouldn’t see them trembling. “Jam a gun barrel like that again and it’ll blow your hand off.”
“Necessary risk—wood’s about the worst conductor.” Shelley pushed himself back up and stared anxiously at the sky. “Have the boatmen get us in, fast.”
“What, you think we’re likely to see another?” Byron turned back to the ashen boatmen. “Get us in to shore—bougez nous dans le rivage plus près! Vite, very goddamn vite!”
Facing Shelley again, he forced himself to speak levelly. “What was that thing? And what … did … it … goddamn … want?”
Shelley had wiped the blood off, and now folded his handkerchief carefully and put it back in his pocket. He apparently had no scruples about being seen to tremble, but his eyes were steady as he met Byron’s glare. “It wanted the same thing the tourists in Geneva want, when they point me out to each other. A look at something perverse.” He waved to keep Byron silent. “As to what it was—you could call it a lamia. Where better to meet one than on Lake Leman?”
Byron stepped back, dispelling the mood of challenge. “I never thought about the name of this lake. A leman, a mistress.” He laughed unsteadily. “You’ve got her in a temper.”
Shelley relaxed too, and leaned on the rail. “It’s not the lake—the lake’s just named after her kind. Hell, the lake’s more an ally.”
The man at the tiller had tacked them more squarely into the offshore breeze, and the castle of Chillon swung around to the portside. The wine glasses had fallen and shattered when the cloud-thing impacted with the boat, so Byron picked up the bottle, pulled the cork with his teeth, and took a deep gulp. He passed it to Shelley and then asked, “So if wood’s the worst conductor, why did it work? You said—”
Shelley took a drink and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I think it has to be …an extreme, electrically. I think they’re like pond fish—equally vulnerable to either rapids or stagnation.” He grinned crookedly and had another pull at the wine. “Silver bullets and wooden stakes, right?”
“Good Christ, what are we talking about here? It sounds like vampires and werewolves.”
Shelley shrugged. “Not a … coincidence. Anyway, silver’s the best electrical conductor, and wood’s about the worst. Silver’s generally been too expensive for the kind of people who are credulous of the old stories, so they’ve traditionally had to make do with iron stakes. Eisener brechen, the stakes are called—it’s a very old term that means ‘iron gap,’ sort of, or ‘iron breach’ or ‘iron violation,’ though brechen can also refer to the refraction of light, or even to adultery. Evidently in some archaic context those things were all somewhat synonymous—odd thought, hm? In fact, it was an eisener breche that I was calling for at your house four nights ago. Polidori, the idiot, thought I had said ‘eyes in her breasts.'” Shelley laughed. “When I came to myself again, I had no choice but to go along with his foolish misunderstanding. Mary thought I had gone mad, but it was better than letting her know what I’d really said.”
“Why were you calling for one that night? Was this creature we saw today outside my window that night?”
“It, or one very like it.”
Byron started to say something, but paused, staring back north across the water. A sheenless wave of agitation was sweeping toward them. “The sail, desserrez la voile!” he yelled at the sailors; then, “Hang on to something,” he added tensely to Shelley.
The wind struck the boat like an avalanche, tearing the sail and heeling the boat over to starboard until the mast was almost horizontal, and water poured solidly in over the gunwales, splashing up explosively at the thwarts and the tiller. For several seconds it seemed that the boat would roll right over—while the shrill wind tore at their rail-clutching hands and lashed spray across their faces—but then, as reluctantly as a tree root tears up out of the soil when the tree is forced over, the mast came back up, and the half-foundered boat swung ponderously around on the choppy water. One of the boatmen yanked the tiller back and forth, but it just knocked loosely in its bracket; the rudder was broken. The winds were still chorusing through the rent sail and the shrouds, and had raised a surf that was crashing on the rocks of the shore a hundred yards away.
Byron took off his coat and began pulling at his boots. “Looks like we swim for it,” he yelled over the noise.
Shelley, gripping the port rail, shook his head. “I’ve never learned how.” His face was pale, but he looked determined and oddly happy.
“Christ! And you say the lake’s your ally? Never mind, get out of your coat—I’ll get us an oar to cling to, and if you don’t struggle, I think I can maneuver us around those rocks. Get—”
Shelley had to speak loudly to be heard, but his voice was calm—"I have no intention of being saved. You’ll have enough to do to save yourself.” He looked over the far rail at the humped rocks withstanding the battering of the surf, then looked back at Byron and smiled nervously through his tangled blond hair. “I don’t fear drowning—and if you give me an oar to cling to I promise you I’ll let go of it.”
Byron stared at him for a couple of seconds, then shrugged and waded aft, bracing himself on the rail, to where his servant and one of the sailors were frantically filling buckets from the pool sloshing around their thighs, and heaving the water over the side; the other boatman was pulling at the shrouds in an effort to get what was left of the sail usefully opposed to the wind. Byron grabbed two more of the emergency buckets and tossed one toward Shelley. “In that case bail as fast as you can, if you ever want to see Mary again.”