Crawford thought the remark was a little too affected and theatrical, a little too Byronic, to be genuine, and he wondered if Byron himself could always distinguish between his own emotions and his poses.
The road grew steeper, and at one point they had to angle across the path of a recent avalanche; no trees still stood in the wide, swept-looking track of it and, blinking up the slope at the inaccessible steepnesses from which it had come, Crawford was surprised to see a broad silvery vein glittering in a freshly exposed stone face. He asked the guide about it, and the man answered, uncomfortably, that it was the argent de l’argile, or silver from clay, and that in a day or two it would have withdrawn back into the body of the mountain.
After a thoughtful pause, Crawford asked if it was a particularly lightweight metal, but the guide just turned away and began pointing out peaks ahead of them.
Soon they were moving in single file along narrow switchback ledges up the face of the Wengern, and Crawford discovered that his mule behaved as though it were carrying its usual width-tripling bales of cargo—the beast plodded along the very precipice edges of the paths to avoid snagging its nonexistent baggage against the mountain wall. No amount of yanking or swearing could make the beast move in closer to the wall and, after an hour or so of the almost tightrope-walking pace, Crawford had got used to it, and only turned pale when his mount would knock loose a section of the edge with its hoof and have to scramble to right itself.
Josephine was on foot, but her new friend had given her a splinter of stone to press deeply into the flesh of her palm, and for hours she had been able to jog along after Byron’s party without fatigue; and on the ledgy paths up the mountain she was able to keep pace with her quarry effortlessly. Her transfixed palm had stopped bleeding hours ago, and her hand only hurt when she accidentally touched the rock wall with it.
“I can’t accompany you,” her friend had told her at dawn when he had had to leave. “But take this piece of me"—he had handed her the little stone claw then—"and keep it, me, enclosed in your flesh, and I will be with you in spirit, and guide you.”
And he certainly had. Several times she had encountered a choice of ways, but each time the stone spike pulled her decisively, if painfully, one way or the other—it had always kept her on Crawford’s trail, even when her eyes were watering so badly in the glare of the sunlit snow, in spite of her goggles, that she couldn’t see where she was going; and her only concern now was not to follow so closely that someone in Byron’s party might look back along some straight traverse and see this solitary female figure following after them.
She had seen only one party of tourists—a dozen men standing around a tent that seemed to conceal a big wagon—and they seemed to have pitched camp for the day. Clearly they wouldn’t be interfering with her plans.
Her pistol was loaded and tucked into the waistband of her skirt; her friend had told her of another way to get Crawford, but the mere description of the procedure had made her sick—with a weak, horrified attempt at humor she had told him that she didn’t have eyes for it—and she was resolved to make the gun serve.
Scuff marks in the snow told her that her quarry was still ahead of her, but all at once the stone imbedded in her hand began pulling upward. Startled, she glanced up.
The face of the mountain directly above her was somewhat sloping and bumpy, but surely not enough so that she could climb it, she thought—especially with a gored hand! Her arm was stretched out above her head now, and she tried to pull it down. The stone only grated between the bones of her palm, making her nearly faint with the pain, and then it pulled upward harder.
The only way she could lessen the agony was to fit her free hand and the toes of her boots into irregularities in the rock wall and pull herself up; she did, and was permitted several seconds of relief, but the stone soon resumed its tugging, and she had to do it again.
The stone seemed to want her to get above Crawford quickly. And though she was in such pain that the world had gone dim, and terrified that she might slip and find all her weight hanging on her maimed hand, it never occurred to her to pull the guiding, torturing stone out of her palm.
By noon Byron’s party had reached a valley only a few hundred feet short of the Wengern’s summit, and they dismounted to tie up the horses and mules and proceed on foot to the top.
Crawford’s legs were uncomfortably quivery after the hours in the saddle, and he kept shaking them and stamping around to get rid of the feeling … and he noticed that the odd tingling went away when he was walking downhill. Just for the relief of it he took several long strides back down the road, and then it occurred to him that Byron had done the same thing only moments before.
He looked across at Byron, and found himself intercepting his stare. Byron walked across the slanting, snow-dusted rock surface to him, and when he was standing beside Crawford he spread his hand in a gesture that took in Hobhouse and the guides and the servants, none of whom seemed a bit impelled to walk downhill.
“They’re not sweating the way you and I are, either,” he told Crawford quietly, his breath wisping away as visibly as smoke. “It’s not an effect of riding, or scanty air. I believe that, like hydrophobia, it’s a consequence of having been
bitten.” He smiled tightly and waved up at the snowy summit. “There’s a cure up there, but the venom in us doesn’t want us to get it.”
They heard the rolling thunder of an avalanche, but there wasn’t even a mist of powder snow to be seen over the mountain when they looked up—it must have been on the south side.
Crawford wanted nothing so much as to be off this mountain—to be at sea level or, better, below sea level, living in the Dutch low countries, no, living in a deep, sunless cave … that would be best of all. Even with the blue-tinted goggles on, the sun glare on the steep snow slopes was blinding, and he kept having to push them up to wipe the stinging sweat from his eyes. “The venom,” he told Byron hoarsely, “is persuasive.”
Byron took off his coat as they walked back toward Hobhouse and the assembled servants and beasts. “Only a few hundred feet left to go,” he said. “We can be back here within the hour, and back at the curate’s house before dark.”
Josephine had heard the avalanche too, and her flinty guide seemed to take it as an excuse to let her rest for a little while on the foot-wide diagonal ledge she’d been hobbling along for the last quarter of an hour. She was a hundred yards west of Byron’s party and a bit above it, and she had missed the sunlit valley and was shivering in a wind that spun across the shadowed face of the mountain like the bow-wave cast up by a ship; but the momentary cessation of the agony in her hand made her mid-cliff crouching place seem luxurious.
For several minutes she basked in the rest, and then the bone-grating tug started up again, and with a whispered sob she straightened her knees and looked up at the nearly vertical slope that still loomed above her—and then she realized that the stone was pulling downward.
What is it, she thought wildly, suddenly terrified at the notion of climbing backward—has Crawford started down again already?
No, came a voice in her head, but we can’t go any farther up. Wait for him below—get him when he descends.