They spent that night at Clarens, on the east shore of the lake, and on the next day they hired pack mules and started into the mountains.
Breakfast was a stop under the pine trees on the slopes of Mont Davant. One of the servants started a fire and made a pot of coffee, and paper-wrapped pieces of last night’s chicken were passed around by Byron’s valet, and Byron himself circulated among the crouching company with a magnum bottle of cold white wine, filling up any cups that had been emptied of coffee.
Byron eventually sat down on a sunlit heap of brown pine needles near where Crawford was trying, for the first time in at least a week, to shave. Even though he had nothing but cold water, Crawford had managed to work up some lather from the cake of soap he’d borrowed from Hobhouse, and now he was carefully drawing a straight razor down his lean cheek. He had propped a small mirror on a fallen black branch that lay against a trunk, and after every slow razor-stroke he peered curiously at his reflection. Because of the altitude, or perhaps the early morning wine, his own face looked less familiar, and more like the face of some imbecile, every time he glanced at it.
When he was done he wiped his face on his coattail and took one last look in the mirror. By now he couldn’t recognize himself at all, and the visage in the mirror seemed to be nothing more than a bumpy blob of flesh with eyes and holes and dots of blood arranged randomly on it. He pondered it thoughtfully for several minutes.
“Did you ever notice,” he asked Byron finally, “how foolish your face looks?”
Byron glanced sharply up from his wine, obviously startled and angry. “No, Mister Aickman,” he said, “how foolish does my face look?”
“No no, I mean if you stare at your own face for long enough it stops looking familiar—or even like any face at all. It’s the same effect you get if you repeat your name over and over again; pretty soon the name sounds like nothing but frog croaks.” Crawford waved, a bit drunkenly, at the mirror. “I’ve been shaving, here, and now I can’t recognize myself at all.”
He was glad he had had several glasses of wine, for he found the bestial face in the mirror obscurely frightening.
Still frowning, Byron took the mirror and stared into it for nearly a full minute; finally he shook his head and handed it back. “It doesn’t work for me—though sometimes I wish I could fail to recognize myself.” He sipped his wine. “And it would certainly be a relief to be able to hear the syllables ‘By-ron’ without …” He made a fist.
“Without having to take it personally,” Crawford suggested. “Without it being a … call to the battlements.”
Byron grinned, and it occurred to Crawford for the first time that the poet was younger than himself. Crawford dropped the mirror into his jacket pocket and got up to return Hobhouse’s soap and razor.
They were attacked an hour later, when the road had become so steep that everybody had had to get out of the carriage and ride or walk, and even the baggage had been taken out of the boot and strapped onto the backs of the mules. Crawford was riding one of the saddle horses, alternately warmed and chilled as the horse climbed through slanting bars of sunlight and tree-shadow; ahead of him swayed one of the baggage-laden mules, and beyond it rode Byron, leading the plodding procession.
The horses moved slowly, audibly sniffing the cold air from time to time, though Crawford could smell only morning-damp earth and pine needles.
Crawford, still a little drunk, was singing a song that old des Loges had sung interminably on that day, nearly two months ago now, when Crawford had pulled him in a wagon from Carnac to Auray and back. The song, which of course Crawford knew only in des Loges’s debased dialect, recounted how badly the songwriter had been treated by the woman he loved.
After the first stanza had gone ringing away through the pine trees that towered up from the slopes above and below them, Byron reined in his horse to listen; and when Crawford came to a stanza in which the singer compared himself to laundry beaten on rocks in a stream, Byron let the mule pass him and then edged his own horse between Crawford’s and the road’s edge, so that he could comfortably talk to Crawford as they rode.
“Who set Villon to music?” Byron asked.
Crawford had heard of the fifteenth-century poet François Villon, but he’d never read him. “I didn’t even know that’s who wrote it,” he said. “I learned the song from an old madman in France.”
“It’s the ‘Double Ballade’ from The Testament,” said Byron thoughtfully. “I’m not sure I ever really paid attention to it before. Do you remember the rest?”
“I think so.”
Crawford began the next verse—which lamented the fact that even the penalties for practicing witchcraft wouldn’t deter young men from pursuing women like the one that ruined the singer—but suddenly and for no apparent reason his heart was pounding, and a dew of sweat had sprung out on his temples.
The wine, he thought—or the disquieting lyrics of the song.
Then the path shook to a heavy, splintering crash on the uphill slope at their right, and Crawford heard branches snapping and drifts of pine needles hissing like fire as something big came sliding down toward him.
Byron had just grabbed the reins of Crawford’s horse and tried to pull both of them back, out of the path of whatever was tumbling down the slope, when the thing roared like an earthquake and sprang at them.
Dazzled by the blue sky, Crawford wasn’t able to see the thing until, in midair, it erupted from the shadows—then he got an instant’s glimpse of a mad-faced, eyeless giant before the thing collided with him and punched him right out of the saddle.
The downhill slope was steep, and Crawford fell through four yards of chilly air before he hit the muddy slope; but he landed feetfirst and slid, and so it was his feet and legs and rump that took the worst of the beating against the low branches and upward-projecting rocks; and when he finally jolted to a stop against a tree trunk dozens of yards down the slope, flayed and wrenched and whooping with the effort of getting air into his abused lungs, he was at least still conscious and not badly broken physically.
They were in the mountain’s shadow, and even after he had brushed the leaves and dirt and blood out of his face, it took several seconds for Crawford’s eyes to adjust to the cathedral dimness; he heard, more than watched, as the roped-together bundle of luggage rolled noisily down the slope, finally stopping with an expensive-sounding internal crash against a tree trunk. After that, all he could hear was the diminishing rattle of dislodged dirt-clods tumbling away far below.
His breathing was a confusion of hiccups and frightened sobs. He was trying hard to believe that the rushing bulk had been a boulder, and wishing passionately that he had stayed back down in the lowlands.