Wall, Stone, Craft by Walter Jon Williams

Author:Walter Jon Williams [Williams, Walter Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction & Fantasy, science fiction, alternate history, Two Hours or More (65-100 Pages), Literature & Fiction, Alternative History
Amazon: B00MOSUNTO
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TWO

Mary was pregnant again. She folded her hands over her belly, stood on the end of the dock, and gazed up at the Alps.

Clouds sat low on the mountains, growling. The passes were closed with avalanche and unseasonal snow, the vaudaire storm wind tore white from the steep waves of the gray lake, and Ariel pitched madly at its buoy by the waterfront, its mast-tip tracing wild figures against the sky.

The vaudaire had caused a “seiche”— the whole mass of the lake had shifted toward Montreux, and water levels had gone up six feet.

The strange freshwater tide had cast up a line of dead fish and dead birds along the stony waterfront, all staring at Mary with brittle glass eyes.

“It doesn’t look as if we’ll be leaving tomorrow,” Bysshe said. He and Mary stood by the waterfront, cloaked and sheltered by an umbrella. Water broke on the shore, leaped through the air, reaching for her, for Bysshe... It spattered at her feet.

She thought of Harriet, Bysshe’s wife, hair drifting, clothes floating like seaweed. Staring eyes like dark glass. Her hands reaching for her husband from the water.

She had been missing for weeks before her drowned body was finally found.

The vaudaire was supposed to be a warm wind from Italy, but its warmth was lost on Mary. It felt like the burning touch of a glacier.

“Let’s go back to the hotel,” Mary said. “I’m feeling a little weak.”

She would deliver around the New Year unless the baby was again premature.

A distant boom reached her, was echoed, again and again, by mountains. Another avalanche. She hoped it hadn’t fallen on any of the brave Swiss who were trying to clear the roads.

She and Bysshe returned to the hotel through darkening streets. It was a fine place, rather expensive, though they could afford it now.

Their circumstances had improved in the last year, though at cost.

Old Sir Bysshe had died, and left Bysshe a thousand pounds per year. Harriet Shelley had drowned, bricks in her pockets. Mary had given birth to a premature daughter who had lived only two weeks. She wondered about the child she carried— she had an intuition all was not well. Death, perhaps, was stalking her baby, was stalking them all.

In payment for what? Mary wondered. What sin had they committed?

She walked through Montreux’s wet streets and thought of dead glass eyes, and grasping hands, and hair streaming like seaweed.

Her daughter dying alone in her cradle at night, convulsing, twitching, eyes open and her tiny red face torn with mortal terror.

When Mary had come to the cradle later to nurse the baby, she had thought it in an unusually deep sleep. She hadn’t realized that death had come until after dawn, when the little corpse turned cold.

Death. She and Bysshe had kissed and coupled on her mother’s grave, had shivered together at the gothic delights of Vathek, had whispered ghost stories to one another in the dead of night till Claire screamed with hysteria. Somehow death had not really touched her before.

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