Читать онлайн «The Stress of Her Regard»
Автор Тим Пауэрс
DEDICATION
For Dean and Gerda Koontz,
for thirty years of
cheerful, hospitable and tolerant friendship
And with thanks to
Gregory Santo Arena and Gloria Batsford and
Gregory Benford and Will Griffin and
Dana Holm Howard and Meri Howard and
K. W. Jeter and Jeff Levin and Monique Logan and
Kate Powers and Serena Powers and
Joe Stefko and Brian M. Thomsen and Tom Whitmore
And to Paul Mohney,
for that conversation, many years ago
over beers at the Tinder Box, about Percy Shelley.
EPIGRAPH
…yet thought must see
That eve of time when man no longer yearns,
Grown deaf before Life’s Sphinx, whose lips are barred;
When from the spaces of Eternity,
Silence, a rigorous Medusa, turns
On the lost world the stress of her regard.
—Clark Ashton Smith,
PROLOGUE: 1816
—Bring with you also … a new
(my last tumbled into this lake—)
—Lord Byron,
to John Cam Hobhouse, 23 June 1816
Until the squall struck, Lake Leman was so still that the two men talking in the bow of the open sailboat could safely set their wine glasses on the thwarts.
The boat’s wake stood like a ripple in glass on either side; it stretched to port far out across the lake, and on the starboard side slowly swept along the shore, and seemed in the late afternoon glare to extend right up the green foothills to move like a mirage across the craggy, snow-fretted face of the Dent d’Oche.
A servant was slumped on one of the seats reading a book, and the sailors had not had to correct their course for several minutes and appeared to be dozing, and when the two travellers’ conversation flagged, the breeze from shore brought the faint wind-chime melody of distant cowbells.
The man in the crook of the bow was staring ahead toward the east shore of the lake. Though he was only twenty-eight, his curly dark red hair was already shot with gray, and the pale skin around his eyes and mouth was scored with creases of ironic humor.
“That castle over there is Chillon,” he remarked to his younger companion, “where the Dukes of Savoy kept political prisoners in dungeons below the water level.
Imagine climbing up to peer out of some barred window at allHis friend pushed the fingers of one skinny hand through his thatch of fine blond hair and peered ahead. “It’s on a sort of peninsula, isn’t it? Mostly out in the lake? I imagine they’d be glad of all the surrounding water. ”
Lord Byron stared at Percy Shelley, once again not sure what the young man meant. He had met him here in Switzerland less than a month ago and, though they had much in common, he didn’t feel that he knew him.
Both of them were voluntarily in exile from England. Byron had recently fled bankruptcy and a failed marriage and, though it was less well known, the scandal of having fathered a child by his half sister; four years earlier, with the publication of the long, largely autobiographical poem
