III
June 11, 1825
“…it is our will
That thus enchains us to permitted ill –
We might be otherwise –”
– Percy Shelley, “
Julian and Maddalo”
In the month since he and Tersitza had been turned back in their attempted midnight flight from the mountain, she had several times asked Edward Trelawny about the vrykolakas that had barred their escape. It seemed to him that she was morbidly fascinated by it, though she wouldn’t elaborate on her claim, that night, to have seen it herself.
On this Saturday noon, though, Trelawny made his hopping and shuffling way down from his house in the high inner reaches of the cave to find her sitting at a table in the sunlight on the broad stone floor at the front of the cave and talking to Fenton about it.
And another young English Philhellene, a newly arrived friend of Fenton’s named Whitcombe, was leaning on the parapet close enough to hear. He had only been staying at the cave for four days now, and Trelawny hadn’t yet talked to him at any length.
A cannon barrel gleamed fiercely in the sunlight just beyond their table, and even up here, hundreds of feet above the treetops in the Velitza Gorge, the air was stiflingly hot. Fenton was bareheaded, but Tersitza was wearing a white turban with the loose ends tucked across her face.
Reluctant to venture out into the direct rays of the sun, Trelawny had hung back in the shadows, and though he could hardly focus his eyes on the figures out in the glaring light, he had heard Fenton laugh.
“In ten days your teeth will be fine,” said the Scotsman now in his cacophonous Greek. “You’ll be able to bite through stone.”
Trelawny recalled that Tersitza had been complaining of a toothache for the last several days.
“And throats,” Tersitza said lightly. “I wish I had had the courage to approach her, on those nights I glimpsed her on the mountain. She wasn’t threatening, I now believe – just – bigger than me, in all ways. Bigger than flesh.”
Whitcombe turned to look toward Tersitza and Fenton, but Fenton shifted his head to glance at him; Trelawny couldn’t see Fenton’s expression, but Whitcombe looked away and resumed staring out over the gorge.
Fenton turned back to face Tersitza. “It’s good you didn’t,” he said. “You’re not family quite yet.”
Tersitza shifted on her chair and held up her arm so that her shawl fell back. Trelawny noticed a narrow band of white cloth above her elbow, and he thought he saw a spot of blood on it.
“Almost I am, now.” She let the shawl fall forward, covering the band. “But I wish I had been awake, last month, when she stopped Edward and me from leaving her. For a while, he says, she took the form of a beautiful woman.”
“No more beautiful than yourself, I’m sure,” purred Fenton, “and no more immortal than you’ll be, in ten days.”
Whitcombe moved away to the right along the parapet, toward one of the cannons that was aimed out at the hillside of the gorge. Two rifles leaned against the low wall near him.
She’ll be their prey, and change to one of them, Byron had said a year ago; supposing that you care about the child.
At the time, Trelawny had not cared about Tersitza. The troubles of humans was not a concern of mine. Now his belly was cold with the certainty that her arm had been ritually cut in the same way that his had, by the lightweight gray-metal knife. Odysseus was imprisoned in Athens – could Fenton have presided over the ceremony?
Trelawny stepped soundlessly back into the deeper shadows. Ten days from now would be Midsummer’s Eve, when Trelawny was expected to undergo the consecration to the mountain. He was supposed to have had the fired-clay statue inserted into his abdomen weeks ago, and the surgeon here was increasingly suspicious of Trelawny’s excuses and postponements.
Where the hell was Bacon? It was almost four months now since he had gone off to retrieve the talisman from Captain Hamilton of the frigate Cambrian. Hamilton was the senior British Navy officer in the Aegean Sea, and his father-in-law had reportedly acquired the talisman when Percy Shelley’s ashes were buried at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome two years ago.
Trelawny recalled his meeting in February with Major Francis D’Arcy Bacon, on indefinite leave from the 19th Light Dragoons.
It had been the last time Trelawny had seen Odysseus; they had ridden with a dozen of Odysseus’s palikars to the abandoned ruins of Talanta, ten miles east of Parnassus, to meet with the Turk captain Omer Pasha and arrange a private three-month truce. “It is the only way in which I can save my people from being massacred,” Odysseus had told Trelawny; “if Ghouras will send me no supplies for my army, I can’t defend the Athenian passes, and I must find what allies I can.”
Trelawny had been uneasy about making a secret peace with the Turkish enemy, and he had remembered Byron’s posthumous warnings about Odysseus’s purpose. But he had just nodded, as if Odysseus’s explanation of the meeting with Omer Pasha was entirely satisfactory.
Rain had been thrashing down outside the ruined Greek church on the night of the meeting, and an attack from Ghouras’s troops in the area seemed likely, so the horses had been brought into the church still saddled, and the mutually mistrustful Turks and Greeks kept their rifles and swords close by them as they crouched against the walls or sat around the fire on the cracked marble floor.
After Odysseus and Omer Pasha had concluded their pact, and a dinner of roasted goat had been followed by coffee and the lighting of pipes, several of Odysseus’s palikars had stepped in from the rainy night escorting a couple of disheveled strangers and announced that they had captured two Franks.
One of the captives, a tall sandy-haired man of perhaps forty, looked around at the scowling crowd of Greek and Turkish soldiers in the firelight and said in English to his companion, “What a set of cut-throats! Are they Greeks or Turks?”
Trelawny sat against the cracked plaster wall not far from the fire, puffing at a clay pipe, but he knew he was indistinguishable from the rest of Odysseus’s men.
“Mind what you say,” the other man said quietly.
“Oh, they only want our money,” the first man went on. He took off his wet hat and shook rainwater onto the floor. “I hope they’ll give us something to eat before they cut our throats – I’m famished.”
In halting but comprehensible Greek, the man explained to Odysseus that he and his companion were neutral travelers simply out to see the country, and though neither Odysseus nor Omer Pasha appeared to believe him, Odysseus invited him to sit down and have some of the no-longer-hot goat meat.
The tall man, who introduced himself as Major Bacon, sat down beside Trelawny; and as he gnawed at a rib he stared at Trelawny.
After a while he muttered quietly, “You’ve got the Neffy brand, then, haven’t you?”
“‘Neffy,’” repeated Trelawny, also speaking quietly. “As in Nephelim? The ‘giants that were in the earth in those days,’ in the sixth chapter of Genesis?”
Bacon had dropped the goat bone he’d been holding, and now asked Odysseus for raki, the local brandy. Odysseus spoke to one of his palikars, and the man stood up and handed Bacon a cup of wine.
“If they’re robbers,” Bacon called to his unhappy companion on the other side of the fire, “they’re good fellows, and I drink success to their next foray.”
Lowering his voice, he said to Trelawny, “You’re English? You certainly don’t look it. No, I said you’re a … hefty man.” He forced a laugh. “But hardly a giant.”
“It’s all right,” Trelawny told him, staring into the pile of burning logs on the ruined marble floor. “I do have the, the ‘Neffy’ brand, I know.” He touched his forearm, but he knew that the mark showed in his face too, in his eyes.
Ah.” The major retrieved his goat bone and stared at it thoughtfully. “Not … altogether happy about it, are we?”
Trelawny glanced at Bacon, wondering what this stranger might know about the ancient race that slept unquietly in Mount Parnassus, and their imminent awakening.
“Not altogether,” he ventured.
“Would you … get away, if you could?”
Trelawny thought of young Tersitza, asleep in his bed back in the cave on the mountain, and sighed. “Yes.”
Bacon pursed his lips and seemed to come to a decision. “Think of an excuse for you and I to talk away from these men.”
After a pause, Trelawny nodded, then got up and crossed to where Odysseus sat, and whispered to him that Bacon was willing to carry a letter to the British Navy asking for Odysseus’s safe passage to Corfu or Cephalonia in the Ionian Sea. With Ghouras in charge of Athens now and already trying to arrest Odysseus, it would in fact be a valuable option to have.
But ever since the day he had talked to Byron’s ghost, Trelawny had been trying to figure out a way to get a message to Captain Hamilton of the HMS Cambrian.
“Good,” said the klepht. “Have him write it.”
Trelawny straightened, nodded to Bacon, and then led the way to a doorless confessional in the shadows away from the fire.
When Major Bacon had joined him, carrying his cup of wine, Trelawny told him about the proposed letter.
“Very good,” said Bacon, settling onto the priest’s bench in the confessional’s center booth. “I can write such a letter, in fact.”
“I do want you to write to this Captain Hamilton,” said Trelawny. There was only a leather-covered kneeler in his booth, in which parishioners had once knelt to confess their sins, so he leaned against the plaster wall. “I have another purpose.”
“You can tell me what to write. But – you’re marked with the metal from fossile alum! And I gather you have some idea of what sort of … antediluvian creature you’re a vassal to.”
“Not just any vassal.” Trelawny smiled unhappily and quoted Louis XV. “Après moi le déluge.” Who are you? How do you know about these things?”
The older man grinned, though not happily.
“I was a vassal to them myself, boy, until two and a half years ago, when the link between the two species was broken in Venice. Before it was broken, I watched my wife and my infant son die, and – and met them again later, when they had crawled back up out of their graves.” His voice was flat, not inviting comment on events that he had clearly come to some sort of costly terms with. “None of it troubled me at the time. I was … married, to one of the Nephelim, and the troubles of humans was not a concern of mine.”
“But it – is, now,” Trelawny hazarded cautiously.
“There are other wives and sons,” Bacon said, “besides mine. I make what amends I can, for the sake of my soul. When I learned that some fugitive members of the Hapsburg royalty were in Moscow, hoping to interest Czar Alexander in reviving the Nephelim connection, I went there, and – prevented it. Then I learned that a Greek warlord had taken possession of the Muses’ very mountain and had lately performed human sacrifices in the villages of Euboaea, so I came here.” He looked at Trelawny curiously. “The warlord had a partner in those sacrifices, a foreigner.”
Trelawny looked back toward the fire. “Already,” he said hoarsely, “the troubles of humans was not a concern of mine.”
“But it is now?”
“I didn’t know – quite how jealous these things are – until an old friend told me. I have two daughters back in England, and, lately, a wife.”
“Stay in touch with your old friend,” advised Bacon. “We tend to need reminding.”
“He’s dead. He was dead when he told me.”
Bacon laughed. “I’m dead myself, in every important respect.” He nodded toward the men around the fire. “My traveling companion is one of the Philhellene rabble, whom I hired as a guide in Smyrna. He still fears death.”
Trelawny wasn’t sure if he himself did or not. “Listen,” he said, “you’ve got to convince Captain Hamilton of the facts you and I know, and then have him get from his father-in-law a … piece of bone that he once stole as a souvenir.”
“Ah?”
“When I got to Rome in April of ‘23, I supervised the re-burying of Percy Shelley’s ashes. You’ve heard of Shelley?” “Atheist poet?”
Trelawny frowned. “Among other things. He … apparently!… killed himself to save his own wife and son from these things. He was born into the family of these creatures, and even before his death he had begun to petrify. I was at his cremation in Viareggio in August 1825 of ‘22, and when we scraped his ashes into a wooden box, I noticed that his jawbone had not burned. But when I arrived in Rome I found that his ashes had been buried in an anonymous corner of the cemetery, and I insisted that the box be dug up again and re-buried in a more prominent spot – and I looked in the box before I buried it.”
“The jawbone was gone?”
Trelawny nodded. “I questioned everyone, and eventually learned that Captain Hamilton’s father-in-law had been present, and had been seen to take something out of the box, as a, a souvenir. My dead friend said that if I could break one of Shelley’s bones right in Mount Parnassus itself, and sever the Nephelim element from the human element, that might, I don’t know, constitute a rupture or defilement of the arrangement I’ve made with them.”
Bacon shook his head. “I know the Cambrian is in the Aegean Sea somewhere,” he said, “but it’d be God’s own chore to find him and then try to get this bone, just – I’m sorry! – to save one man’s family.”
“I’m not ‘just one man,’” said Trelawny, and to his alarm he felt the old pride welling up in him; “I’m to be the bridge,” he went on quickly, “they’re going to implant a fired-clay statue into my ribs, and then at this Midsummer’s Eve I’ll be consecrated as the overlap, the gate between the species! I’ll be – don’t you see? – the restoration of the link.”
For several seconds Bacon was silent in his booth. “No,” he said finally with a smile that made his gleaming face look haggard in the firelight, “I won’t gain anything by killing you, will I? You klepht will only find another racial traitor to do it with. No lack of candidates, I imagine.” He stared toward the fire. “I wonder if killing your bandit-chief would effectively prevent it.”
“His one-time ally and now chief rival, Ghouras of Athens, would step in. Already he’s trying to.”
“And others behind him, I suppose. The Greeks can’t forget Deucalion and Pyrrha or the Muses in Parnassus.” He sighed and stood up. “Write your letter, I’ll take it – and I’ll return with this atheist’s jawbone as quickly as I’m able.”
Trelawny stepped away from the wall. “Before Midsummer’s Eve,” he said, suppressing a shiver that might have been fear or shameful hope, “or you may as well give it back to Hamilton’s father-in-law to use as a paperweight.”
Behind him, the newcomer Whitcombe was staring in evident alarm at the three people by the table. The wind from below tossed his blond hair.
“Do it today,” said Tersitza. “You need time to heal from it. You don’t want to be carried down the mountain to Delphi on a stretcher, on Midsummer’s Eve!”
“I’ll have the surgery tomorrow, or the day after,” said Trelawny, wishing he didn’t have to blink tears out of his eyes in the glare. “Today you and I ride to Tithorea.”
“But Ghouras’s men have blockaded the gorge,” said Tersitza patiently. “Wait, and we’ll be able to ride right over them.” She laughed. “Fly right over them.”
“You’re not getting cold feet, are you, old man?” said Fenton. “Not the pirate prince of the Indian Ocean?”
“I keep my word,” said Trelawny stiffly. I did vow at our wedding to protect her, he told himself. That takes precedence, even if she doesn’t want protection.
“But – are you serious?”
“Completely.”
“Ghouras will just arrest you both and lock you up with her brother.”
“Ghouras wants this cave, he wants the mountain, not us – and he knows he can’t take it by force. He’ll negotiate.” This is good, he thought – it almost makes sense.
“And you think it will help to take Tersitza with you.”
Trelawny could think of no plausible reason for that condition, so he only said, “Yes.”
Fenton frowned and shrugged. “Odysseus told us that you’re in command here while he’s away. If you’re confident you can come back, and if you want to be carried to Delphi with a bleeding incision …”
“I heal fast,” said Trelawny. He turned to Tersitza and said, “We can meet with Ghouras at Tithorea, I’m certain. We’ll be back here in two days at most.”
And I hope I’m wrong, he thought. I hope Ghouras’s men do simply arrest us, and forcibly take us to Athens, away from this monstrous mountain.
Tersitza’s eyes were shadowed by her turban, and Trelawny couldn’t tell whether she was looking at him or at Fenton.
But after a pause her shoulders slumped and she sighed, fluttering the cloth over her face. “Very well, my husband.”
“I would advise keeping your pistols handy,” Fenton said.
“Yes of course,” said Trelawny.
“Why not at least get in a bit of target practice, then?” Fenton said. “Just while the palikars climb down to get your horses saddled? Whitcombe here can join us.” He peered with apparent sympathy at Trelawny. “Though I must say you look a little shaky to compete this afternoon.”
“Even with a pistol I’m a better shot than you two with your carbines,” Trelawny muttered, “any day.”
Relieved that they had given in to his proposal so easily, Trelawny quickly called for the Italian servant he always addressed as Everett, and told him to set up a plank for a target at the far left side of the terrace.
Both Fenton and Whitcombe had rifles ready and leaning against the parapet, and now they picked them up and checked the flints and the powder in the pans.
Trelawny drew a pistol from his sash and stepped between them and the target to shoot first. When Everett had set up the board and hurried back into the shadows, Trelawny swung his arm up and fired, and though the smoke stung his already watering eyes and the boom of the shot set his ears ringing, he heard the plank clatter forward onto the stone.
He stepped forward to prop the board up again, but paused when he heard Tersitza shout urgently to one of the Greeks, “Fire the cannons!”
Trelawny knew the cannons were aimed out over the gorge, loaded with the fired-clay pellets that were to come alive at the next full moon – but it wouldn’t work now, the statue hadn’t been implanted in him yet.
He opened his mouth to ask her why –
And a sudden hard blow to his back and jaw sent him staggering forward as a rifle-shot cracked behind him; he caught his balance and straightened, dizzy and stunned and choking on hot blood, and then he coughed and spat blood down the front of his shirt and cried hoarsely, “I’ve been shot!”
Dimly he was aware that Fenton had rushed up and was supporting him now, shouting something, but Trelawny turned to Tersitza, who was waving at someone behind him; and a moment later the stone floor shook under Trelawny’s feet as the unmistakable boom of a cannon shot jarred the terrace.
Fenton was shouting, “He’s good on his own for another minute, at least! It’ll take! He’s –” The man’s voice choked off then in a gasp, and Trelawny blinked tears out of his eyes to see Tersitza.
She was pointing a pistol of her own at him, or at Fenton.
“Not me, not yet!” Fenton screamed, and then he wrenched Trelawny around by the shoulder and spoke directly into his face: “She’s pregnant, she’s carrying your still-human –”
Tersitza’s shot struck Fenton squarely in the chest, and he pitched over backward and rolled onto his face, his head against the base of the parapet.
Trelawny abruptly sat down on the stone floor and bent forward to let the blood run out of his mouth, and two teeth and an object like half of a big pearl tumbled out past his lips to clink in the widening red puddle on the stone. But his sight was dimming and he remotely realized that he wasn’t breathing, and his ribs and skull seemed to be shattered and held together only by the confinement of his skin.
As if from far away in a ringing distance, he heard the other three cannons being fired in rapid succession.
The clay pellets flew tumbling through the hot air, still moving out away from the cave terrace but already beginning to fall toward the treetops and the Kakoreme riverbed. Trelawny was leaping with them out over the world, though at the same time he was still sitting hunched forward on the stone floor of the cave terrace on the mountain.
His right arm was numb and useless, but with his left hand he picked up the half-pearl and rubbed away its coating of bright red blood. Now he could see that it was half of a ceramic ball, with half of a tiny grimacing face imprinted on it.
He laid it back down in the puddle and moved his hand away.
Someone was kneeling beside him, and when he squinted he saw that it was Zela, the Arab princess whose marriage to him had been cut short by her youthful death – in his stories.
“Swallow it,” Zela said. “I – can’t force you!” Trelawny thought blurrily that she seemed surprised to realize that she couldn’t.
Trelawny’s consciousness had expanded as far as the mouth of the gorge to the east, and north to the three standing pillars on the round stone dais at the Oracle of Delphi, but he bent his attention downward over Mount Parnassus to look at the figures on the terrace of Odysseus’s cave.
He saw the sitting figure that was himself; two holes in the back of his white shirt, to the right of his spine, showed where the rifle balls had struck him.
A figure that must have been young Whitcombe had snatched off its turban and tied one end of it to the crane boom at the edge, and was rapidly climbing down it toward the highest of the moored ladders on the cliff-face below.
The woman who was either Tersitza or Zela was speaking, and the hovering spirit of Trelawny discovered that he could hear what she said:
“Swallow it.” There was urgency in her voice. “You’ve only got half of the statue inside you now. Swallow it and it will reform itself, and reform you. I can’t force you! You’re dying, Edward, my love – you’ll die here, now, if you don’t do what I say. Or you can be healed, and live forever with us.”
He was able, too, to look in another, entirely unsuspected direction, and there he saw the Trelawny figure step toward the fallen target-plank, as behind him Fenton aimed a rifle at his back and pulled the trigger – but the gun didn’t fire; Fenton gestured at Whitcombe, who raised his own rifle and fired it at Trelawny’s back, and two balls flew from the muzzle in slow motion across the terrace and struck Trelawny just to the right of his spine. From this vantage point, the hovering Trelawny spirit could even see the balls – one silver, one ceramic – punch through his flesh; the ceramic one split as it glanced off his shoulder-blade and broke his collar bone, one half of the ball tearing up through his neck muscles to break his jaw and lodge in his mouth.
This was the recent past. Trelawny looked in the other new direction, but could see nothing in the future. Did that mean he would very shortly die?
You’ll die here, now, if you don’t do what I say. Or you can be healed, and live forever with us.
The direction which was the future must be blank because he had not yet chosen.
The Trelawny figure’s shocked lungs were at last able to take a spluttering breath.
The air smelled of tobacco, sweat, and the Indian rum known as arrack.
Trelawny was sitting at a table in a lamp-lit Bombay tavern he remembered well, and it was an effort of his unbodied will to remember too that the place had never actually existed. In a few seconds he was able to hear noises, and then he either noticed or it became the case that the low-ceilinged room was crowded. Slaves carrying trays threaded their way between tables full of young British midshipmen in blue jackets, but Trelawny stared at the man sitting across the table from him – he was perhaps thirty years old, with black hair pulled back from his high tanned forehead, and he puffed tobacco smoke from the hose of a hookah. Unlike anyone else in the place, he had a cup of steaming coffee in front of him.
The man pressed his lips together in a way Trelawny remembered well – it used to indicate impatience at an unexpected obstacle.
“You died,” Trelawny said to him carefully, “off the Barbary Coast, in a fight with an English frigate.” He realized that he could speak, and that his wounds were gone, and that he could flex both arms. He took a deep effortless breath, wondering if it might be his last, but forced himself to go on: “And in fact you never existed at all outside my imagination.” For this man at the table with him was the privateer de Ruyters, who in Trelawny’s stories had taken him in as a raw, wild sixteen-year-old deserter and taught him discipline and self-control.
“If you like,” said de Ruyters with a tight smile. “At that rate, of course, you’re about to bleed to death on Mount Parnassus, and your Tersitza will be a widow. And you and I will never have – oh, where do I start? We’ll never have stormed St. Sebastian, and saved your bride Zela from the Madagascar pirates. Zela, in fact, will never have existed.” His smile was gone. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten her already.”
Trelawny had not. He remembered, as if it had actually occurred, his first meeting with Zela: when de Ruyters’s French and Arab crew had routed the slave traders of St. Sebastian before dawn and burst into the slave-huts, where Trelawny had been only moments too late to save Zela’s bound father from being stabbed by one of the pirate women.
Trelawny had killed the woman and freed the dying old Arab, who as he took his last breaths had drawn a ring from his own finger and put it on Trelawny’s, and had joined Trelawny’s hand with his young daughter’s, and had then spoken a blessing and died. The Arab’s daughter had been Zela.
Later Trelawny had learned that this had constituted a betrothal, and he had devoted the next several weeks to the strictly chaperoned courtship that Arab tradition required; when at last he had been permitted to hold Zela’s hand and meet her unveiled eyes, he had known that this was, as he had put it to himself, the first link of a diamond chain that would bind him to her forever.
“She,” said Trelawny, “died too. After not having ever existed either.”
After? he thought, impatient with himself.
“We can exist,” said de Ruyters irritably. “We do, in some branches of reality. Would you not rather have the adventurous life you had with us, than what – if you insist! – you actually had? – an undistinguished Naval career and a shabby marriage and divorce?”
De Ruyters reached across the table and gripped Trelawny’s shoulder, and a confident comradely smile deepened the lines in his cheeks.
“Look, man,” he said softly, waving around at the crowded tavern – which abruptly faded away, revealing a landscape that was deeper and clearer than anything Earth could provide: a remote horizon of green-sloped mountains lit by slanting amber light, crowned with castles whose towers cleaved the coral clouds; wide bays glittering in the sunset glow, stippled with the painted sails of splendid ships; parrots like flaming pinwheels shouting among the leafy boughs closer at hand. Faintly on the cool sea breeze Trelawny caught the lilt of festive music.
He couldn’t see de Ruyters, but a girl stood beside him now on this grassy meadow, her slim brown body visible under her blowing yellow veils, and he knew that she would be young forever. “All these things will I give you,” she told him, “if you will worship me.”
Trelawny knew that it was the spirit of the mountain that was speaking to him and had been speaking to him.
“You need not surely die,” the girl said earnestly. “When you swallow the stone, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be a god among gods, knowing neither good nor evil.”
And Trelawny remembered what this same creature had said to him a month ago, when he had tried to escape with Tersitza from Parnassus:
And I will purge thy mortal grossness so
That thou shalt like an airy spirit go …
For a moment he glimpsed again the pale, sweating, tortured figure sitting on the terrace-edge of the Parnassus cave, a string of blood dangling from its mouth to the spreading puddle of blood in which lay several teeth … and the half-sphere stone.
One image or the other would have to be erased – the bright sensual immortality or the suffering organic thing in the cave. The one was imaginary and the other was real, but what hold had real things ever had on him?
A god among gods, Trelawny thought dizzily, “king of kings,” as Shelley had written – “look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”
But the thought of Shelley’s poetry brought back Byron’s words about him: he drowned deliberately, foundered his boat and sank, to save his wife and last child.
Trelawny had been proud to call Shelley his friend.
The young girl still stood beside him on the green slope, near enough to touch, but Trelawny made himself look away from her. “Tersitza,” he said, bracing himself and almost apologetic, “is pregnant with my child.”
Then, abruptly, he was in the reeking Bombay tavern again, and in the dim lamplight de Ruyters was staring at him across the table. “Zela was pregnant too. Is.”
Somewhere beyond this hallucination, Trelawny felt the cannon-propelled clay pellets clatter down onto the dirt and pebbles of the Velitza Gorge, bounding and skittering until they came to rest. They would germinate if the link between humanity and the Nephelim was established – if he swallowed the broken-off half of the little stone statue so that it could be whole inside him.
If I do it, he thought, Tersitza, with the wound of the gray metal knife in her arm, will change to one of them … and so will my child … supposing that I care about them.
Hating himself for his cowardice, Trelawny closed his eyes and reached out again with his left hand, brushed at the puddled stone surface that it encountered until his fingers closed around the split stone sphere, and again picked it up.
Torn nerves made a bright razory pain in his ribs, his neck, his jaw. He opened his eyes and saw Tersitza staring anxiously at him.
“Be healed,” she said.
And he flung the stone out sideways, into the abyss. “No,” he grated to Tersitza and the mountain.
IV
August 1825
“For the first twenty days after being wounded, I remained in the same place and posture, sitting and leaning against the rock, determined to leave everything to nature. I did not change or remove any portion of my dress, nor use any extra covering. I would not be bandaged, plastered, poulticed, or even washed; nor would I move or allow anyone to look at my wound. I was kept alive by yolks of eggs and water for twenty days. It was forty days before there was any sensible diminution of pain; I then submitted to have my body sponged with spirit and water, and my dress partly changed. I was reduced in weight from thirteen stone to less than ten, and looked like a galvanized mummy.”
– Edward John Trelawny,
Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author
It was nearly two months later that Major Bacon came at last to the cave, climbing barefoot up the ladders in the noonday sun because the height was too unnerving for him to attempt the ascent in boots. At the top of the second ladder, hanging over a drop of more than seven hundred feet, he had to shout several times to the suspicious faces that peered down at him from the parapet twenty feet above.
“Trelawny!” he yelled up at them. “I’m looking for Edward Trelawny, you ignorant brigands!”
You clods, you stones, you worse than senseless things, he thought worriedly. Midsummer’s Eve was more than a month past, and though Shelley’s charred jawbone was wrapped in an altar cloth in Bacon’s haversack, it would be of no use if Trelawny had already been transformed into the new link between humanity and the Nephelim. He hoped poor idiot Whitcombe had been able to accomplish something.
Bacon allowed himself a moment to stare at the pitted limestone directly in front of his rung-clutching hands – looking up was even more terrifying than looking down past his feet at the distant rocky gorge, and he felt as if his bowels had turned to ice water. But at a scuffling sound from above he looked up again.
A girl’s face had appeared now at the cave’s rim, scowling down at him. “Bacon?” she called.
His stomach was too fluttery on this windy, vertiginous perch for him to do more than scream back the Greek word for assent, “Neh!”
The girl disappeared, and after sixty fast, shallow breaths Bacon had begun considering the ordeal of feeling for the next rung down with his bare right foot, and then putting his full weight on that rung and doing it again, back down forty feet of rickety ladders to the narrow ledge that was still seven hundred vertical feet above the roofs of the barracks and stables at the foot of the mountain … but then he heard a clattering from above and saw that several men were angling another ladder out from the cave and lashing its top end to a boom that projected out over the low wall at the edge.
Bacon had to duck when the ladder swung free, and the bottom end of it swished through the air a foot over his head.
He stayed crouched at the top of the second ladder until the third one had largely stopped swinging. It stood out at right angles from the cliff-face, and the high-altitude breeze chilled Bacon’s sweating face as he reached up with one hand and gripped the bottom rung. A moment later his other hand had clutched it too, and he climbed up it rapidly, before it could swing away from the fixed ladder and leave his feet flailing free.
No more than a minute later he was sitting on the cave floor several yards back from the edge, panting and pressing his palms against the solid stone.
Five or six disreputable Greeks with rifles stood around him in the shade of the cave’s roof, but their scowls might have been habitual, for the rifles were pointed at the floor.
“Trelawny?” said the girl who had peered at him over the edge. She was standing beside Bacon, dressed in a loose white chiton that left her arms bare to the shoulders, and she seemed very young. The big dark eyes in her thin face stared intently at him.
Bacon stared back, and did not see the feverish hunger he remembered seeing in the eyes of his unnaturally resurrected wife and son.
After a pause, “Neh,” Bacon said again. “Here?”
She nodded, perhaps just at the affirmative, and rocked her head toward the back of the cave, and then began walking up the shelved layers of stone into the deeper shadows.
Bacon sighed mightily and got to his feet.
Several little houses had been built of wood and stone on the higher levels, and the girl led him to one of them and pulled open the flimsy door.
The room within, lit by a lantern on the table, smelled like an ill-kept dog kennel, and at first the frail figure on the bed did seem to show the sick, predatory alertness of those favored by the Nephelim – but a second glance convinced Bacon that it was only extreme physical illness that gave the sunken eyes their glittering semblance of eagerness.
A dirty cloth was visible under the bearded jaw, bound over the top of the head, and the figure apparently couldn’t speak; but when its eyes lit in recognition and a skeletal hand wobbled toward him, Bacon recognized the man.
“My God,” he said. “Trelawny?”
The man on the bed looked toward Tersitza and touched his jaw. The girl crossed to him and worked with both hands at the knotted cloth, and when it fell away, Trelawny opened his mouth and said, clearly, “Yes.”
Bacon leaned against the wall and ventured to smile. Clearly Trelawny had somehow not been granted the near-godhood that had been planned for him.
“Here I am,” Bacon said, “come to redeem my pledge of rendering you a service –” He paused to look around the room. “ – and to enable you to quit Greece.”
“You,” said Trelawny hoarsely, “are a friend indeed.”
Bacon unslung the haversack from his shoulder and crouched to unstrap it. He lifted out the altar-cloth and unfolded it, exposing the arch of dark bone with its row of knobby teeth.
Tersitza was looking on anxiously, and a couple of bearded faces were peering in through the door, but there was no comprehension in their expressions.
Half of the jawbone-section was gray stone, and the hinge-end was blackened yellow bone. “Shall I break it?” Bacon asked. “No,” said Trelawny. “It’s for me to do.”
He held out his skeletal arm again, and Bacon straightened up and crossed to the bed and laid the bone in Trelawny’s withered palm.
Trelawny’s right arm seemed to be useless, but he gripped the bone between the fingertips and the heel of his left hand, and then the tendons stood out like cords on his trembling forearm as he squeezed the thing.
Tersitza opened her mouth and took a half-step forward, then hesitated.
The bone snapped.
The floor shook, as if the whole mountain had been massively struck.
Bacon flinched, then with hollow flippancy quoted the Book of Judges: “With the jawbone of an ass you have slain your thousands.”
He noticed tears glittering on the girl’s cheeks, though she made no sound.
Trelawny opened his shaking hand and two pieces fell onto the floor, the stone half separate from the organic half.
“Give me the bit that was Shelley,” said Trelawny, “the human half of him.”
Bacon bent down and retrieved it, and handed it to Trelawny. By the dim lantern-light Bacon looked around at their audience, and decided he could talk safely if he spoke in rapid English.
“You aren’t the link between the species,” he said. “It didn’t happen, obviously. Why not?”
“A young man shot me,” said Trelawny, “in the back, before the appointed day. He fled directly after. My people here,” he added with a nod toward the girl and the men in the doorway, “caught him and wanted to kill him, but I let him go two weeks ago.”
“Ah,” said Bacon. After a moment he asked, “Why’d you let him go?”
“He was – trying to save me, actually. When he shot me. Well, save Tersitza and my unborn child, at any rate.” Trelawny clutched the fragment of Shelley’s jaw. “Odysseus and his agents –” He looked toward the wall, and Bacon guessed that he was deliberately not looking at the girl, “ – had arranged to insert the fired-clay statue into me by a more direct sort of surgery, since I was reluctant to have it done with a scalpel; they loaded a rifle with it.”
Bacon raised his eyebrows and looked at the wasted figure on the bed – clearly Trelawny’s jaw and right arm had been injured. It seemed unlikely that a shot in the back could have done all this damage. “But Whitcombe shot you first?” he hazarded.
The girl and the men in the doorway shifted at the mention of the name.
And Trelawny was staring at him. “You – know him?”
“I sent him, man.”
“Sent him to shoot me in the back?”
“If that was what the situation called for.” Seeing Trelawny’s sunken eyes fixed on him, he grinned and added, “The troubles of humans is still not a big concern of mine. But his shot obviously didn’t kill you, quite – didn’t they then shoot the statue into you?”
Trelawny was shaking, and he seemed to spit. “Did I call you a friend, a moment ago?”
“Yes, and I am your friend. I don’t indulge my friends when hard measures are needed to save them – save their souls, if not their lives.” He smiled. “I have very few friends.”
“God help them.”
“Rather than another, yes.”
Trelawny scowled at him. “Whitcombe didn’t shoot me first – it was him that shot the bloody statue into me.”
“He did?” Bacon shook his head. “I don’t understand. Why are you – as you are, then?”
“Your man Whitcombe loaded their rifle with a second ball, too – one made of silver. And he made sure that he was the one who fired it, so the addition wouldn’t be noticed.”
Bacon laughed softly. “Ah, clever boy! Silver repels vampires, certainly. And that … cancelled the stone one?”
“No, damn you. The stone ball, the statue, broke, as it broke my bones; half of it broke my jaw and came out through my mouth. ‘Jawbone of an ass’ there, if you like. All the silver ball accomplished was to restrain them –” Now he did glance at the girl, “ – from forcibly feeding it to me, shoving it back in.” He exhaled harshly. “I had to choose to throw away the mountain’s offer of salvation – and accept,” he added, waving his frail hand at his diminished body, “this, instead.”
Bacon nodded and crossed his arms. “I learned some things about your chum Shelley,” he said, “while I was off fetching that there bit of bone. It seems he made a costly choice too, finally, at the end – and he didn’t get the privilege of complaining about it, after.”
Trelawny managed to draw himself up in the bed, and Bacon was more able to recognize the man he had met on that rainy night in the ruined chapel at Talanta six months ago. “I’m not complaining,” said Trelawny. “Just giving you honesty.” He closed his eyes and sighed deeply. “I only give it to a very few.”
Four days later at noon they left the cave – Trelawny and his Italian servant, Bacon, Tersitza and her younger brother. Odysseus’s mother and his palikars chose to stay behind in the Muses’ mountain. A rope had to be tied under Trelawny’s arms and run through the pulley on the boom, for he couldn’t negotiate the ladders.
At the foot of the mountain at last, Trelawny was lifted into a saddle, and it was all he could do to keep from falling off the horse as their party wound slowly down the dry Kakoreme riverbed. Trelawny was squinting in the sun-glare, but now only because of his long stay in the dimness of the cave.
Tersitza sat cross-legged on a mule, and she replied only in curt monosyllables to the remarks Trelawny was able to articulate. They passed the stones marking Fenton’s grave without comment.
The bone fragment of Shelley’s jaw was tucked into Trelawny’s sash beside his pistols and his sword, and he touched the angular lump of it and wished he believed in God so he could pray.
From behind them a deep boom rolled down the gorge, followed a moment later by another, and Trelawny knew that the palikars in the cave were firing the guns as a parting salute, with no projectiles loaded. The ready tears of long convalescence blurred his vision.
In the dirt and pebbles and fallen leaves all around them, he knew, were the kilned clay pellets that had been fired from those same cannons two months ago – and he wondered now if they had quivered with newborn alertness, in the moment between their landing and his rejection of Parnassus’s offered gift.
Another cannon shot boomed away between the ridges of the gorge.
For a moment as the echoes faded he was sure he caught, faintly, the high female voices he had heard singing on the night four months ago when he had tried to take Tersitza and himself away from the mountain – but they were very faint now, and he was bleakly sure that they no longer sang to him.
He thought of Odysseus, the real Odysseus of Homer, tied to the mast and intolerably hearing the song of the sirens fading away astern.
And in a vision that he knew was only for himself, he saw the great stone spirit of the mountain rise beyond the trees to his right; its vast sunlit shoulders eclipsed the southern ridges, and its dazzling face, though it was an expanse of featureless gleaming rock, somehow expressed immortal grief.
And I do love thee, it had said to him on that night. Therefore stay with me.
As he shifted his head the thing stayed in the center of his vision as if it were a lingering spot of sun-glare, or else his gaze helplessly followed it as it moved with voluntary power, and he found that he had painfully hitched around in the saddle to keep it in sight, until it overlapped and merged with the giant that was Mount Parnassus, receding away forever behind him.
AFTERWORD
Trelawny was certainly a liar who eventually came to believe his own melodramatic fabulations – though his last words were, “Lies, lies, lies” – but his adventures on Mount Parnassus did happen. He really was the barbaric right-hand man of the mountain warlord Odysseus Androutses, really did marry the thirteen-year-old Tersitza, and he really was shot by William Whitcombe in the high Parnassus cave, and with no medical aid simply waited out his recovery. His injuries were exactly as I describe them, and he really did spit out, along with several teeth, half of one of the two balls Whitcombe’s rifle was loaded with.
He survived, and in later years asked Mary Shelley to marry him (she declined the offer), swam the Niagara River just above the falls, and in his old age was lionized in Victorian London society as the piratical friend of the legendary Byron and Shelley – and even of Keats, though in spite of the many colorful stories he would tell about his acquaintance with that poet, Trelawny had never actually met him. Trelawny died in 1881, at the age of eighty-eight, and the romantic autobiography he had constructed for himself, partly extravagant truth and partly extravagant lies, endured whole for a good eighty years after his death.
–T. P.