A Time to Cast Away Stones by Tim Powers

Author:Tim Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: tor.com

II

June 1824

“...and fortunate is he

For whom the Muses have regard! His song

Falls from his lips contented. Though he be

Harried by grief and guilt his whole life long,

Let him but hear the Muses’ servant sing

Of older beings and the gods, and then

His memory is cleared of everything

That troubled him within the world of men.”

– Hesiod’s Theogony,

the Ceniza-Bendiga translation,

lines 96-102

After encountering the fleeing palikars just east of Missolonghi a year ago, and learning from them that Byron had died only a few days earlier, Edward Trelawny had pressed on with his own party of palikars and reached the marshy seacoast town the next day.

Down at the end of a row of shabby wooden houses under a gray sky, the house Byron had worked and died in stood on the shore of a wide, shallow lagoon. Trelawny had been escorted upstairs by Byron’s old servant Fletcher, and had found the lord’s coffin laid out across two trestles in the leaden glow of narrow uncurtained windows.

Fletcher had pulled back the black pall and the white shroud, and Trelawny had scowled and pursed his lips at the evidences of an autopsy – the aristocratic face bore an expression of stoic calm, though thinned by the fever that had killed him, but the disordered gray-streaked brown hair half-concealed a crude ring cut in his scalp where physicians had removed part of his brain, and the body’s torso was divided by a long incision.

When Fletcher left the room, Trelawny drew his Suliote dagger and forced himself to cut off the small toe of Byron’s twisted left foot. Byron was gone, but even a relic of the man might have some value as a rafiq.

Byron had been a co-representative in Greece of the London Greek Committee, which had put together a Stock Exchange loan to fund the war for Greek independence, and though a big sum of cash was daily expected, all that had been provided so far in Missolonghi were several cannons. By claiming to be Byron’s secretary, Trelawny prevailed on the remaining representative – an idealistic but naïve British colonel called Stanhope – to let him take away a howitzer and three three-pounders and ammunition, for the defense of eastern Attica by Odysseus Androutses. Trelawny even managed to commandeer fiftyfive horses and twenty artillerymen to haul the guns across the seventyfive miles back to the Velitza Gorge and the foot of Mount Parnassus, where Odysseus’s soldiers built a crane to hoist the guns and crates up to the fortified cave.

Mavre Troupa, the Black Hole, was what the Greeks called the cave, but Trelawny had been relieved to get back to its lofty security.

The climb up to its broad lip was exhilarating – the last sixty feet of the eight hundred were a sheer vertical face, negotiated by clambering up ladders made of larch branches bolted to the crumbling sandstone, and the last twenty-foot ladder had a tendency to swing like a pendulum in the wind, for it was attached only at the top so that it could be pulled up in case of a siege.

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