“Some problem about the fee, I expect,” muttered Byron as the two of them hung up their wet cloaks and followed the old man up the stairs; but Crawford had seen the look of distaste and sorrow on the lean, wrinkled face, and he wondered if they were all simply going to be thrown out, as he had been from the rooming house near Geneva eight days ago.
The old clergyman’s room was right up under the steeply slanted roof, with a very low wall on one side and a high one on the other, and the windows that ran at ankle height along the low side were so small that Crawford guessed a lamp was necessary here even on the sunniest day. Rows of old leather book spines along shelves on the high wall seemed to blot up the light from the old man’s lamp as he set it down on a low table and then lowered himself onto the narrow bed and waved toward two chairs at the other end of the room.
“I … did not know who you were,” said the old clergyman, speaking English with a heavy German accent, “when you came here. I would not have let you stay.” Byron had just sat down, and now pushed his chair back to stand up again, but the old man raised his hand. “You may stay now, I will not turn you out. But I have heard from the people about you—you, besonders,” he added, looking at Crawford.
“Means ‘especially,'” put in Byron helpfully. “What did they tell you about us? That old incest story again? Those girls weren’t sisters, you know—Mary Godwin had entirely different parents than the Clairmont girl, even if they do both have the same stepfather. And in any case, is it really worth the effort of your disapproval? These are things that every day occur.”
“This is nothing to do with … plain carnal congresses,” the old curate said. “Worse stories are about. The people tell me that you have dealings with … unheavenly spirits, the things which walk the valley of the shade of death.”
“A nice phrase,” said Byron, grinning. “I like it. So we’ve sinned against your … ordinances? Prove it and punish us, if you can.”
The old man shook his head wearily. “The mountains, the high places, are not the path to redemption now, not anymore. That was long ago—and dangerous even then. Salvation, redemption, are now to be found through the sacraments.” He turned to Crawford, and his lined old face was rigid, as if with the effort of concealing his loathing. “Even such as you might be able, through them, to escape damnation.”
Byron laughed uneasily. “Don’t be so hard on the lad, Father, he’s not nearly as bad as all that. My God, you’re eyeing him as if you think he’ll steal the gold chalices off your altar.”
“Or turn the wine in them to vinegar,” said Crawford, his voice quiet with anger, “just with a look. Is this Christian charity as it’s practiced in Bern?” He stood up, rapping his head against the low ceiling. “The Church has become a more … exclusive club since the founder’s day, it’s clear. No doubt the Devil is more hospitable.”
“Wait,” said the curate, “sit. I want to see you in Paradise, but I also want to see all my parishioners there. If you go to the mountains now, in the state you’re in, things will be roused that will do none of my people any good.” He nodded to Crawford. “Another like you is already in the Alps, but I can do nothing about him, and in any case he’s keeping to the low passes and travelling only at night….”
He had slowly lifted the stopper from a decanter of brandy on a shelf by the bed, and he turned toward a row of glasses beside it. “Will you stay down here, away from the mountains? I can promise you redemption, if you truly want it—and I can promise you death, if you persist in your course. You have not ever had better counsel than what I am saying.”
Crawford sat down, a little mollified, but he shook his head. “No. I’m going up there.”
Byron nodded agreement. “I don’t get dissuaded from my courses by this kind of counsel.”
The curate closed his eyes for a moment, then shrugged and poured the brandy into three of the glasses. He stood up to hand one to each of his guests, and then hobbled back to the bed and sat down.
Behind him a human shadow appeared on the wooden panelling of the wall, though there was no form casting it. The dim silhouette shook its head slowly, and then faded.
Crawford’s heart was thumping, and he looked at Byron; Byron’s eyes were wide—clearly he’d seen it too. Both of them put their glasses down on the floor.
“None for me, thanks,” said Crawford, standing up.
“Me either,” said Byron, who had already got to the door and opened it.
The old man was quietly sobbing on his bed as they drew the door closed behind them, and Crawford wondered if he was repenting having tried to poison his guests, or sorry that the attempt had failed.
On the way back to where Hobhouse waited they passed a big, six-wheeled wagon that had got bogged down in the sudden mud. Byron, still in his wild, contentious mood, insisted that they get out and push, even though the wagon seemed to have at least a dozen torch-carrying attendants who were already laboring at it, and so he and Crawford and the servant got off their horses and dug their heels into the mud and helped shove at the thing.
The attendants didn’t seem grateful for the help, especially when Byron got up into the bed of the wagon to direct the work, but they put up with it until the wagon was rolling again, then made Byron get down and whipped up the horses and resumed their southward progress.
“Coals to Newcastle,” laughed Byron as he got back onto his horse.
“How’s that?” asked Crawford wearily, wishing his boots weren’t now full of cold mud.
“The big box they’ve got in the back of that is full of ice—it leaked on my hands when I leaned against it—and they’re heading into the Alps.”
At seven o’clock the next morning they set out toward the mountains again, fortified with coffee and brandy—their own—against the eternal chill that made fragile cloud-plumes of human speech and then snatched them away into the cobalt sky. Crawford and the guide were on mules, while Byron and Hobhouse rode horses.
The waterfall was now glowing in sunlight; Byron called attention to the rainbow that hovered around it like a halo, but Hobhouse sniffed and said he wasn’t impressed with a rainbow that had only two distinct colors in it.
“At least they’re regal colors, Hobby,” said Byron, and only Crawford heard the tremor in his voice. “Purple and gold, after all.”
The mountains themselves were too big—too high and distant and vastly jagged—for Crawford to comprehend; looking at them was like looking through a telescope at the alien features of the moon. It was only the unnaturally clear air of this high country that let these sights be visible in such awful totality—back down there behind the travellers, in the zones where mankind flourished, hazes and mists and smokes mercifully limited the extents of human sight. As the hooves clopped along the uphill stone path toward the feet of the sky-spanning peaks, Crawford kept catching himself thinking of the mountains as ancient, living entities, and he was nervously reminded of the story of Semele, the human mother of Dionysus, who was struck dead by the sight of Zeus in his undisguised, inhuman glory.
The sun blazed on the expanses of snow and ice, and by midmorning they had all donned blue-tinted goggles to protect themselves from snow-blindness.
The oily scent of the pines was diminishing as the travellers got higher, like the taste of juniper in a glass of gin that’s being refilled with icy vodka, and Crawford thought that all smells, and even the ability of the air to carry them, would soon be among the things he and the others had left behind. The pines they were passing now were all withered and stripped of bark, and Byron stared at them sombrely and said that they reminded him of himself and his family.
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.
With a wave of despair colder than the wind, Josephine realized that she might not be able to survive the descent even with the spiritual strengthening she’d get from having killed Crawford … but that she certainly wouldn’t survive without it.
I can’t, she thought; I can’t make it down without having spilled his blood on the rocks and snow.
The stone spur in her hand pulled at her insistently.
It’s you, she thought at it; you can’t go any higher. Well, I can.
The effort leached the color from her face and outlined her teeth starkly against her bloodless lips, but she managed to brace herself, flex her arm until she thought her sleeve would burst, and then actually pull her hand up off the stone claw.
Blood sprayed brightly in all directions as if she’d been shot, and for a moment the redly glistening stone hung suspended in the air—and then, with a scream that she heard only in her mind, it sprang away downward in the shadow of the mountain.
Her strength was going with the blood that was now jetting out of her and steaming in spatters on the ledge. Josephine clutched her ruined hand to herself and pressed her face against the rock wall, and her sobs w
ere as grating and patient as the natural noises of the mountain.
Then she pulled the ribbons from her hair and knotted them tightly around her wrist—and, much more slowly now that she was unassisted, she resumed creeping up the side of the mountain.
Byron had glanced sharply across the sunlit rock face at Crawford, who now nodded to let him know that he had heard the psychic scream too—though Hobhouse and the guide, on a ledge below them, didn’t seem to have sensed anything.
“A lot of people hereabouts seem to find high altitudes uncongenial,” Byron remarked tightly, shaking sweaty hair out of his face.
Crawford was aware, with a sense that was neither quite hearing nor touch, of the minds of Hobhouse and the others below; and he would have given in to the increasing reluctance and depression if he had not constantly been reminded of his dead wife Julia; it almost seemed that he sensed her mind, too, on the mountain.
At last he pulled himself up over the last rock outcrop onto the rounded summit, even though every atom of his body seemed to be screaming at him to go back down—and then suddenly he was standing up on the wind-scoured irregular plateau, and the discomfort was gone, and the breeze was invigoratingly cold in his open, sweat-drenched shirt. He was tempted to scratch a line into the rock to mark the level at which the venom could finally be left behind.
The air seemed to be vibrating, at a frequency so high that it was scarcely discernible. He felt safe for now in ignoring it.
The summit was about a quarter the size of a cricket field, looking particularly tiny under the dominating, empty sky; he took several wobbly strides across it to look at the valleys and peaks spread out vastly distant below him—and at the Jungfrau that, miles away, still towered above. It seemed to him that he felt lighter for all the immense volume of air that he was now on top of, and he thought he must be able to jump much higher here than he could on the ground.