Taltos

by Anne Rice

  Other chairs, along the windowed walls of the cabin, were empty, big upturned gloved hands waiting to hold you firm and tight, One of them was larger than the others. For Ash, no doubt.

  The colors were caramel, gold. Everything streamlined and near perfect. The young American woman who had served the drinks, perfect. The music, for the little while it had played, Vivaldi, perfect.

  Samuel, the astonishing little man, slept in a rear cabin, curled up in bed, holding tight to the bottle he'd brought from the flat in Belgravia, and demanding a bulldog which Ash's servants had not procured for him. "You said, Ash, that I was to have anything I wanted. I heard you tell them. Well, I wanted a bulldog! And I want a bulldog now."

  Rowan lay back in the chair, holding the backs of her arms.

  She didn't know how long it had been since she'd slept. Sometime before they reached New York, she'd have to sleep. Right now she was curiously electrified, staring at the two men opposite her--at Michael, who smoked his little stub of a cigarette, holding it in two fingers, the red brand of the lighted end facing inwards.

  And Ash, in another one of those long, full-cut, double-breasted silk coats, all the rage, with sleeves turned up carelessly, white shirt cuffs adorned with gold and stone cuff links that made her think of opals, though she realized she was not much of an expert on precious or semiprecious stones or anything of that sort. Opals. His eyes had a rather opalescent quality, or so she had thought several times. His pants were loose, rather like pajamas, but that too was fashionable. He had brought up his foot, disrespectfully, on the edge of the leather, his leather, and on his right wrist he wore a thin gold bracelet without any obvious use, a thin band of metal, glittering and looking maddeningly sexual to her, though why she couldn't explain.

  He lifted his hand, ran it back through his dark hair, running the little finger through the white streak as if he didn't want to forget it, leave it out, but collect it with all the other dark waves. It made his face come alive for her again, just this little movement, and the way his eyes scanned the room and then stopped on her.

  She herself hardly noticed what she'd taken hastily from her suitcase. Something red, something soft, something loose and short that barely touched her knees. Michael had put the pearls around her neck, a small, neat necklace. It had surprised her. She'd been so dazed then.

  Ash's servants had packed up everything else.

  "I didn't know whether or not you wanted us to get Samuel a bulldog," the young one, Leslie, had said several times, very distressed that she'd displeased the boss.

  "It doesn't matter," Ash had said finally, hearing her, perhaps for the first time. "In New York we will get Samuel bulldogs. He can keep his bulldogs in the garden on the roof. Do you know, Leslie, there are dogs who live on the rooftops of New York who have never, never been to the street below?"

  What must she think he is? Rowan had wondered. What do they all think he is? Is it to his advantage that he is blindingly rich? Or blindingly handsome?

  "But I wanted a bulldog tonight," the little man had fussed until he'd passed out again, "and I want it now."

  The little man had on first sight terrified Rowan. What was that, witch genes? Witch knowledge? Or was it the physician in her, horrified by the folds of flesh slowly covering his entire face? He was like a great variegated and living piece of stone. What if a surgeon's scalpel removed those folds, revealing eyes, a full, correctly shaped mouth, the bones under the cheeks, the chin? What would his life become?

  "Mayfair witches," he'd said when he saw them, Rowan and Michael.

  "Does everyone in this part of the world know us?" Michael had asked testily. "And does our reputation always go before us? When I get home, I mean to read up on witchcraft, to study it in earnest."

  "Very good idea," Ash had said. "With your powers, you can do many things."

  Michael had laughed. They liked each other, these two. She could see it. They shared certain attitudes. Yuri had been so frenzied, shattered, so young.

  All the way back from the grim confrontation at Stuart Gordon's tower, Michael had told them the long story related to him by Lasher, of a life lived in the 1500s, and of Lasher's strange account of earlier memories, of his sense that he had lived even before that. There had been nothing clinical in the telling--rather a ragged outpouring of the tale which he and Aaron alone had known. He had told it once before to Rowan, yes, and she remembered it more as a series of images and catastrophes than words.

  To have heard it again in the black limousine, flying over the miles towards London, was to see it again and in greater detail. Lasher the priest, Lasher the saint, Lasher the martyr, and then, a hundred years later, the beginning of Lasher the witch's familiar, the invisible voice in the dark, a force of wind lashing the fields of wheat, and the leaves from the trees.

  "Voice from the glen," the little man had said in London, jabbing his thumb to point at Michael.

  Was it? She wondered. She knew the glen, she would never forget it, forget being Lasher's prisoner, being dragged up through the ruins of the castle, never forget the moments when Lasher had "recalled" everything, when the new flesh had reclaimed his mind and severed it from whatever true knowledge a ghost can possess.

  Michael had never been there. Maybe someday they would, together, visit that place.

  Ash had told Samuel to go to sleep as they drove for the airport. The little man had drunk another pint of whiskey, with a lot of grunting and groaning and occasional belching, and had been comatose when carried onto the plane.

  Now they were flying over the Arctic.

  She closed and opened her eyes. The cabin shimmered.

  "I would never hurt this child Mona," said Ash suddenly, startling her, waking her more fully. He was watching Michael with quiet eyes.

  Michael took a final drag off the stubby little cigarette, and crushed it out in the big glass tray so that it became a hideous little worm. His fingers looked large, powerful, dusted with dark hair.

  "I know you wouldn't," said Michael. "But I don't understand it all. How can I? Yuri was so frightened."

  "That was my fault. Stupidity. This is why we have to talk to each other, we three. There are other reasons as well."

  "But why trust us?" asked Michael. "Why befriend us at all? You're a busy man, some sort of billionaire, obviously."

  "Ah, well, we have that in common then, too, don't we?" said Ash, earnestly. Rowan smiled.

  It was a fascinating study in contrasts, the deep-voiced man with the flashing blue eyes and the dark, almost bushy eyebrows; and the tall one, so beguilingly slender, with graceful movements of the wrist that made you almost dizzy. Two exquisite brands of masculinity, both bound up with perfect proportions and fierce personality, and both men--as big men often do--seemed to luxuriate in a great self-confidence and inner calm.

  She looked at the ceiling. In her exhaustion, things were distorted. Her eyes were dry and she would have to sleep soon, simply have to, but she couldn't now. Not now.

  Ash spoke again.

  "You have a tale to tell which no one can hear but me," said Ash. "And I want to hear it. And I have a tale to tell that I will tell only to you. Is it that you don't want my confidence? That you don't want my friendship or ever, possibly, my love?"

  Michael considered this. "I think I want all that, since you ask," said Michael, with a little shrug and laugh. "Since you ask."

  "Gotcha," said Ash softly.

  Michael laughed again, just a low little rumble. "But you know, don't you, that I killed Lasher? Yuri told you this. You hold this against me, that I killed one of you?"

  "He was not one of me," said Ash, smiling kindly. The light glinted on the white streak coming from his left temple. A man of thirty, perhaps, with elegant gray streaks, a sort of boy genius of the corporate world, he must have seemed, prematurely rich, prematurely gray. Centuries old, infinitely patient.

  It gave her a small warm burst of pride, suddenly, that she had killed Gordon. Not him.
/>   She had done it. It was the first time in all her sad life that she had enjoyed using the power, condemning a man to death with her will, destroying the tissues inside him, and she had confirmed what she had always suspected, that if she really wanted to do it, if she really cooperated with it, rather than fighting this power, it could work awfully fast.

  "I want to tell you things," Ash said. "I want you to know them, the story of what happened and how we came to the glen. Not now, we're all too tired, surely. But I want to tell you."

  "Yeah," said Michael, "and I want to know." He was reaching into his pocket, pulling the pack halfway up and then shaking loose the cigarette. "I want to know all about you, of course. I want to study the book, if you still mean to let us do that, see the book."

  "All that is possible," said Ash, with an easy gesture, one hand resting on his knee. "You are a veritable tribe of witches. We are close, you and I. Oh, it isn't terribly complicated, really. I have learned to live with a profound loneliness. I forget about it for years and years. Then it surfaces, the desire to be placed in context by somebody else. The desire to be known, understood, evaluated morally by a sophisticated mind. That was always the lure of the Talamasca, from the beginning, that I could go there and confide in my scholars, that we would talk late into the night. It's lured many another secretive nonhuman. I'm not the only one."

  "Well, that's what all of us need, isn't it?" asked Michael, glancing at Rowan. There passed another one of those silent, secret moments, rather like an invisible kiss.

  She nodded.

  "Yes," Ash agreed. "Human beings very seldom survive without that kind of exchange, communication. Love. And our breed was such a loving breed. It took so long for us to come to understand aggression. We always seem like children when humans first meet us, but we're not children. It's a different kind of mildness. There's a stubbornness in it, a desire to be gratified at once, and for things to remain simple."

  He fell silent. Then he asked, very sincerely, "What really troubles you? Why did you both hesitate when I asked you to come with me to New York? What went through your minds?"

  "Killing Lasher," said Michael. "It was a matter of survival with me, no more, no less. There was one witness, one man present who could understand and forgive, if a forgiving witness is required. And that man's dead."

  "Aaron."

  "Yeah, he wanted to take Lasher, but he understood why I didn't let him. And those other two men, well, that, we could say, was self-defense...."

  "And you suffer over these deaths," said Ash gently.

  "Lasher, that was the deliberate murder," said Michael, as if he were speaking to himself. "The thing had hurt my wife; it had taken my child somehow, taken my child. Though what that child would have been, who can say? There are so many questions, so many possibilities. And it had preyed upon the women. Killed them, in its drive to propagate. It could no more live with us than could some plague or insect. Coexistence was unthinkable, and then there was--to use your word--the context, the way it had presented itself from the beginning, in ghostly form, the way it had ... used me from the start."

  "Of course I understand you," Ash said. "Were I you, I would have killed him too."

  "Would you?" asked Michael. "Or would you have spared him because he was one of the very few of your kind left on the earth? You would have had to feel that, a species loyalty."

  "No," said Ashlar. "I don't think you understand me, I mean in a very basic way. I have spent my life proving to myself that I am as good as human. Remember. To Pope Gregory himself I once made the case that we had souls. I am no friend to a migrant soul with a thirst for power, an aged soul that had usurped a new body. This arouses no such loyalty in me."

  Michael nodded as if to say I see.

  "To have spoken with Lasher," said Ash, "to have talked about his remembrances, that might have given me considerable pause. But no, I would have felt no loyalty to him. The one thing that the Christians and the Romans never believed was that murder is murder, whether it is a human murder or a murder of one of us. But I believe it. I have lived too long to hold foolish beliefs that humans aren't worthy of compassion, that they are 'other.' We are all connected; everything is connected. How and why, I couldn't tell you. But it's true. And Lasher had murdered to reach his ends, and if this one evil could be stamped out forever, only this one ..." He shrugged and his smile came back, a little bitter perhaps, or only sweet and sad. "I always thought, imagined, dreamed, perhaps, that if we did come back, if we had again our chance on the face of the earth, we could stamp out that one crime."

  Michael smiled. "You don't think that now."

  "No," said Ash, "but there are reasons for not thinking about such possibilities. You'll understand when we can sit down and talk together in my rooms in New York."

  "I hated Lasher," said Michael. "He was vicious and he had vicious habits. He laughed at us. Fatal error, perhaps. I'm not entirely certain. I also believed that others wanted me to kill him, others both alive and dead. Do you believe in destiny?"

  "I don't know."

  "What do you mean, you don't know?"

  "I was told centuries ago that to be the lone survivor of my people was my destiny. It's happened. But does that mean it was really destiny? I was cunning; I had survived winters and battles and unspeakable tribulations. So I continued to survive. Destiny, or survival? I don't know. But whatever the case, this creature was your enemy. Why do you need my forgiveness now for what you did?"

  "That isn't really the worry," said Rowan. She spoke before Michael could answer. She remained curled in the chair, head to one side against the leather. She could see both of them comfortably, and they were both looking at her. "At least I don't think it's Michael's worry."

  He didn't interrupt her.

  "His worry," she said, "is something that I've done, which he himself could not do."

  Ash waited, just as Michael waited.

  "I killed another Taltos, a female," Rowan said.

  "A female?" Ash asked softly. "A true female Taltos?"

  "Yes, a true female, my own daughter by Lasher. I killed her. I shot her. I killed her as soon as I realized what she was and who she was, and that she was there, with me. I killed her. I feared her as much as I'd feared him."

  Ash appeared fascinated, but in no way disturbed.

  "I feared a match of male and female," said Rowan. "I feared the cruel predictions he'd made and the dark future he'd described, and I feared that somewhere out there, among the other Mayfairs, he'd fathered a male, and the male would find her and they would breed. That would have been his victory. In spite of all I suffered and what Michael had suffered, and all the Mayfair witches, from the beginning, for this ... this coupling, this triumph of the Taltos."

  Ash nodded.

  "My daughter had come to me in love," said Rowan.

  "Yes," Ash whispered, obviously eager for her to go on.

  "I shot my own daughter," she said. "I shot my own lonely and unprotected girl. And she'd cured me, she'd come to me with her milk and given me this and healed me of the trauma of her birth.

  "That's what worries me and what worries Michael, that you should know this, that you'll discover it, that you, who want to be close to us, will be horrified when you discover that a female might have been within your grasp if I hadn't snuffed out her life."

  Ash had leant forward in the chair, his elbows resting on his knee, one finger curled beneath his soft lower lip, pressing into it. His eyebrows were raised, coming together in a frown only slightly, as he peered into her face.

  "What would you have done?" Rowan asked. "If you had discovered her, my Emaleth?"

  "This was her name!" he whispered, amazed.

  "The name her father gave her. Her father had forced me and forced me, though the miscarriages were killing me. And finally, for some reason, this one, Emaleth, was strong enough to be born."

  Ash sighed. He sat back again, putting his arm on the edge of the leather arm of the chair, and he
studied her, but he seemed neither devastated nor angry. But then, how could one know?

  For one split second, it seemed madness to have told him, to have told him here, of all places, on his own plane, flying silently through the sky. But then it seemed simply inevitable, something that had to be done, if anything was to progress, if anything was to come of their knowing each other, if love was in fact already growing between them out of what they'd already witnessed and heard.

  "Would you have wanted her?" Rowan asked. "Would you have, perhaps, moved heaven and earth to get to her, to save her, to take her away safely, and father the tribe again?"

  Michael was afraid for her, she could see it in his eyes. And she realized as she looked at both of them that she wasn't really saying all this just for them. She was talking for her own sake, the mother who had shot the daughter, pulled the trigger. She flinched suddenly, eyes shut tight, shuddering, her shoulders rising, and then sitting back in the chair, head to one side. She'd heard the body drop on the floor, she'd seen the face collapse before that, she'd tasted the milk, the thick sweet milk, almost like a white syrup, so good to her.

  "Rowan," said Ash gently, "Rowan, Rowan, don't suffer these things again on my account."

  "But you would have moved heaven and earth to get to her," Rowan said. "It's why you came to England when Samuel called you, when he told you Yuri's story. You came because a Taltos had been seen in Donnelaith."

  Slowly Ash nodded. "I can't answer your question. I don't know the answer. Yes, I would have come, yes. But tried to take her away? I don't know."

  "Oh, come now, how could you not want it?"

  "You mean how could I not want to make the tribe again?"

  "Yes."

  He shook his head and looked down, thoughtfully, the finger curled beneath his lip again, elbow on the arm of the chair.

  "What strange witches you are, both of you," he whispered.

  "How so?" asked Michael.

  Ash rose to his feet suddenly, his head almost touching the top of the cabin. He stretched and then turned his back, walking a few steps, head bowed, before he turned around.