For several taut seconds it continued to stare eyelessly at him while he held the light on its neck.
And at last it tipped, slowly at first and then with a massive rush, and its shoulders jarred the earth several yards downslope and then it was just a tumbling statue breaking up as it receded away, more audibly than visibly, below them.
When the crashing racket had diminished to silence, Crawford could hear someone clambering down the slope above them, and soon he heard Hobhouse shouting angrily.
“Here we are, Hobby,” called Byron, his voice quavering only slightly. “And the luggage is wedged against a tree down here. Did the horses fall too?”
“Damn you for not answering before,” yelled Hobhouse, grudging relief evident in his tone. “Yes, one horse fell, but not far and he’s not hurt. What was that roaring? And what did you shoot at?”
Crawford had climbed, much more slowly and carefully now, halfway to Byron’s perch, and when he looked up he saw the young lord wink at him. “Some species of mountain lion, I believe!” A frown crossed his haggard face for a moment, and he called, “Don’t tell them about it back in England, there’s a good lad! Hey? No sense worrying poor Augusta.”
Soon Crawford had joined Byron on his rock, and from there he could see men hopping down the mountainside on a rope.
Byron held out his hand, which Crawford now noticed was torn and bloody. “Earn your keep, Doctor.”
Crawford took his hand and looked at the ragged wound. “What did you catch it on?” he asked, proud that he could speak levelly.
“Our … assailant,” Byron said. “Before you managed to get your reflector working, that thing got up here. I pushed him back, and he slid down a little, but … he got his teeth into me.” His smile was brightly bitter. “Redundant, in my case, of course … but this confirms my resolve to divest myself entirely of the connection, in the"—he swept his bloody hand in a gesture that encompassed the entirety of the Alps—"in the high places.”
Crawford looked down at the stump of his own wedding ring finger, on which the bite scar was still visible, and he tried, with at least some success, to be glad that he was going along.
Byron developed a fever as they continued up the mountain and the sun burned its slow arc across the empty vault of the sky, and when they reached snow he took delight in showing Crawford how the sweat from his forehead, falling on a snowbank, made “the same dints as in a sieve.” Several times he slipped and fell on the ice, and Hobhouse, clearly alarmed, kept throwing glances of suspicion at Crawford—who, doubtless because of the thinner air, was beginning to feel a little dizzy and disoriented himself.
Byron, though, was full of hectic cheer; at one point he gaily called Hobhouse’s attention to a shepherd playing upon a pipe in a sky-bordering meadow across the valley—"just like the ones we saw in Arcadia fifteen years ago … though, now I recollect it, they all carried muskets instead of crooks, and had their belts full of pistols"—and later, when their guide asked them to cross one mountain ledge in a hurry because of the danger of falling rocks, Byron just laughed and asked Hobhouse if he remembered the crowd of Greek workmen he had seen in 1810, who wouldn’t carry an ancient statue to Lord Elgin’s ship because they swore they’d heard the statue sobbing at the prospect of being sent across the water.
He seemed to recover himself for a little while at the peak of Mont Davant, from which vantage point they could see most of Lake Leman far below them to the west, Lake Neufchatel to the north and, ahead of them in the east, the remote, towering, patriarchal peaks of the canton of Bern.
He and Crawford had wandered away from the rest of the group, and were standing on a wind-scoured rock outcrop above the plateau of powder snow. Both men were sweating and shivering.
“You lied, I think,” remarked Byron in the echoless silence of the sky, “when you told Hobhouse that you don’t write poetry—hmm?”
Crawford, nervous about the abyss overhead, sat down and gripped the rock with damp hands. “Not precisely,” he managed to answer. “I haven’t written any—but I do find myself building … verses, images, metaphors, in my head, when I’m half asleep.”
Byron nodded. “These creatures aren’t especially good visually, but they are purely matches in a powder keg when it comes to language. I wonder how many of the world’s great writers have owed their gift to the … ultimately disastrous attentions of the nephelim.” His laughter was light and sarcastic. “And I wonder how many of them would have freed themselves, if they could have.”
Crawford was sick, and he wasn’t letting himself think about all the narrow ledges and steep climbs that lay between him and normal ground—and he was still trembling from their encounter with one of Byron’s precious nephelim that morning, and didn’t relish hearing anything even remotely good about the creatures. “I wonder if that was mistletoe,” he snapped.
Byron blinked at him. “If what was?”
“The twig you shot at that beast this morning. Isn’t that what Balder the Beautiful was killed with, in the Norse myths? A dart made of mistletoe? I guess that makes you Loki, Odin’s evil brother.”
Byron frowned, and Crawford wondered if he could actually be feeling bad about having shot at that monstrosity this morning.
“Balder,” Byron said softly. “You’re right, a wooden stake killed him. Christ! Do all of our most affecting legends, as well as our literature, derive from these devils?” He shook his head and looked down the west side of the mountain, and Crawford knew he was thinking of the hideous statue that lay shattered in the bottom of a ravine far below them.
Finally Byron looked up and met Crawford’s gaze. “Loki came to a bad end, didn’t he?” Byron said. “But I’m afraid his is the only example we can follow with any self-respect.” He shivered and started back toward the others.
When the innkeeper handed her back her passport, Julia Carmody hoped that she could now let her phantom sister lie dormant in her head until … until the day when the sister would emerge, do what she had to do, and then disappear forever.
Julia had had to be Josephine two days ago in order to pick up the bank draft from her father at the Poste Restante in Geneva, and tonight, here in Clarens, getting a room had required that she show her passport; but she didn’t want to touch the passport again until she was crossing international boundaries on the way home to Bexhill-on-Sea. And she didn’t ever want to think about the anguished note that had accompanied the bank draft.
With luck she’d be home comfortably before Christmas, and her father would accept the way things were, or had turned out to be, and then she would be Julia for the rest of her life, and she could expunge the name and identity of Josephine from her memory.
A boy carried her bags upstairs, and when he had opened the door to her room she took only the hastiest glance inside, for she knew in advance what she would see—the same disgraceful thing she had seen in every rented room she’d been in since the twenty-first of July, her wedding day—and she had her sentence of French prepared.
“Oh!” she exclaimed after her first glimpse of the bed. “Mon Dieu! Voulez-vous changer les draps!” The sheets, as she had known they would be, were grossly blotted with dried blood.
The boy, of course, pretended to see nothing wrong with the sheets, but she gave him a handful of francs to have them changed anyway. A harassed-looking chambermaid was summoned, and when she had changed the offending bedclothes and departed, Julia opened the lake-facing window and lay down on the bed.