Then an urgent shout rang among the pillars of the Ducal Palace, and Shelley had completely lost his audience. He stopped jiggling the body and looked up.
Two of the soldiers had grabbed Byron, but the lord managed to tear one arm free and throw his firepot into the heaped straw at the base of the western column—the column, Shelley remembered, that was surmounted by a statue of St. Theodore standing on a crocodile.
One of Byron’s captors let go of him to rush to where the firepot now lay flaming.
We’re committed now, thought Shelley—or at least Byron is.
At the same moment the old man in the brown robe shambled awkwardly to the other column, opened his robe and, with a full-arm swing, lashed a lamp onto the pavement at the base of it. Burning oil splashed across the straw.
The soldier who had started toward the first pillar evidently saw this as the greater threat, for he veered toward the burning straw at the base of the second one and began trying to kick the stuff away; his trousers began flaming, but he didn’t stop.
“Feuer!” the soldiers were yelling now, and they were rushing away from Shelley and his marionette; the old man swung his heavy walking stick at the Austrian who was trying to kick the fire away from the second column, and the apparently weighted end of the stick caught the man solidly in the belly; he folded up in midair and hit the pavement and lay there, writhing and still burning.
A man who was clearly an Austrian officer sprinted up, his fire-thrown shadow dancing across the pillared wall of the Ducal Palace, and he was waving to someone back by the dark bulk of the basilica. “Das Auge!” he was yelling. “Komm hier! Schnell!”
One soldier levelled a rifle at the very old man and squinted down the barrel. Shelley grabbed Allegra’s hand. Things were getting out of control—people might very well die here tonight.
Byron had torn free of his remaining captor and flung him to the ground. Two of the soldiers had dragged their burning fellow away toward the canal, apparently hoping to throw him into the water, but his rifle still lay on the pavement. Byron limped over to it, picked it up and hurried back to where Shelley stood with the children.
In the instant before the soldier fired his rifle at the old man, Shelley saw a thing burst vividly but silently into existence in the air between the soldier and his target; it was a winged serpent as big as a large dog, and firelight glittered on scales and blurs of wings as the snaky thing curled in the air.
After the bang Shelley heard the rifle ball ricochet off of the thing and go rebounding away among the pillars as the echoes of the shot batted between the palace and the library.
Byron grabbed Shelley’s arm. “Get back—all we can do now is hope the fires get hot enough before they can restore the eye.”
The winged serpent disappeared, and the sudden chill in the air made Shelley wish irrationally that he had brought a coat for Clara.
In the red light he could see several of the Austrians hurriedly carrying a wooden box from the direction of the basilica.
“It’s the eye,” said Byron. “Hold Allegra.”
The Austrian officer was gesturing urgently to the men with the box, and yelling something to them about the fires being nearly hot enough.
And Byron swore, made the sign of the cross and then raised the captured rifle to his shoulder. It took him only a moment to aim at the advancing men, and then he fired.
The box fell to the stones as its lead carrier buckled, and Byron barked a quick, harsh laugh, which was echoed by the old man. Shelley was holding Allegra’s hand so tightly that she had started to cry.
The officer cast a desperate glance toward Byron and Shelley, and then snatched at his belt—Shelley turned his back and crouched in front of Allegra, but when he glanced fearfully over his shoulder he saw that it hadn’t been a pistol the man had been reaching for.
The man had drawn a knife and, even as Shelley watched, he slammed the edge of it against the throat of one of the soldiers Byron had struggled with. Blood sprayed across the stones as the man folded backward and down, his hands clutching uselessly at his split neck.
“Blood!” yelled Byron, throwing the rifle down, “he’s spilling blood! That will provide an eye!”
Shelley unceremoniously dropped Clara and rushed forward, intending to drag the bleeding body away, out of the focus of the Graiae, but the officer had spun around and cut the throat of another soldier—and as Shelley ran toward him, shouting in horror and still twenty feet away, the officer looked him square in the eye and lifted the blade under his own chin and dragged it deeply across his throat. He knelt down almost gently, leaning forward.
Blood was puddled across the uneven pavement now, and Shelley floundered dizzily to a halt, wondering if it was delirium that made the paving stones underfoot seem to ripple, as if thirsty for the fare they hadn’t got since executions had stopped being done here.
But the air was rippling too, like a bird in a trap, and Shelley thought the very fabric of the world here was quivering in protest—then abruptly it stopped, and though the fires were still raging and lashing bits of burning straw up to the weirdly underlit statues on top of the columns, and the soldiers were shouting and running back and forth as chaotically as ever, Shelley felt a heavy stillness settle over the square; and he knew it was too late.
The Graiae were awake, and they could see.
He backed hesitantly across the solid pavement to where Byron stood. Byron tossed Clara’s ludicrously costumed body to him and began leading Allegra back toward the gondola.
Shelley followed numbly, and their shadows were wiggling across Tita and the gondola long before they reached the steps. As Byron lifted Allegra into the gondola Shelley noticed how pale he was, and he remembered the soldier Byron had shot.
Shelley looked back—and the hair stood up on the back of his neck for, impossibly, the blood was now sliding rapidly across the square from the base of one column to the base of the other, horizontally, as though the whole pavement had been tilted up; and then as he took a sideways step to see better, it rushed back the other way, toward the column at whose base it had been spilled.
The stars seemed to be crawling in the sky, and when Shelley turned back to get into the gondola he noticed that the shadows cast by the fires were particularly hard-edged, with no blurriness.
Shelley could feel vast attention being paid to him; he had to glance up to make sure nothing had leaned down out of the sky to focus on him. There was nothing to see but the hard-gleaming stars.
“It’s the columns,” said Byron hoarsely, pushing him into the gondola. “They’re—apparently fascinated by you.”
As Shelley climbed in and sat down, Allegra edged away from him, up toward the bow, and for an anguished moment he thought she hated him for the way he had treated Clara’s body; but then she pulled one of the seat cushions over her face and, in a muffled voice, called, “Why is the eye staring so hard at you, Uncle Percy?"—and he realized that she had only wanted to get away from the object of the Graiae’s overpowering scrutiny.
And they were staring hard at him, he could feel the intense interest. His heart labored in his thin chest, as if extra work was required to push his blood along against the resistance of their attention.
Byron untied the mooring ropes and climbed in last.
The water was uncharacteristically choppy as Tita poled them away from the fondamenta, though the sky had cleared of storm clouds hours ago and the stars shone like needles. Again the stars seemed to be moving in the sky, rocking just perceptibly like toy boats on an agitated pond. Shelley leaned out of the gondola and clawed sweaty hair back from his forehead to see what was happening in the canal.