Taltos (10 page)

“But I … ah … care about what’s happening to everybody, well, almost everybody. I know things. I know more than anybody except Michael or Aaron. Do you remember Aaron?”

That was a dumb question. Of course Rowan remembered Aaron, if she remembered anything at all.

“Well, what I meant to say was, there’s this man, Yuri. I told you about him. I don’t think you ever saw him. In fact, I’m sure you didn’t. Well, he’s gone, very gone, as it stands now, and I’m worried, and Aaron’s worried, too. It’s like things are at a standstill now, with you here in the garden like this, and the truth is, things never stand still—”

She broke off. This was worse than the other approach. There was no way to tell if this woman was suffering. Mona sighed, trying to be quiet about it. She put her elbows on the table. Slowly she looked up. She could have sworn that Rowan had been looking at her, and had only just looked away.

“Rowan, it’s not over,” she whispered again. Then she looked off, through the iron gates, and beyond the pool and down the middle of the front lawn. The crape myrtle was coming into bloom. It had been mere sticks when Yuri left.

She and he had stood out there whispering together, and he had said, “Look, whatever happens in Europe, Mona, I am coming back here to you.”

Rowan
was
looking at her. Rowan was staring into her eyes.

She was too amazed to speak or move. And she was frightened to do either, frightened that Rowan would look away. She wanted to believe this was good, this was ratification and redemption. She had caught Rowan’s attention, even if she had been a hopeless brat.

Gradually Rowan’s preoccupied expression seemed to fade as Mona stared at her. And Rowan’s face became eloquent and unmistakably sad.

“What’s the matter, Rowan?” Mona whispered.

Rowan made a little sound, as if she were clearing her throat.

“It’s not Yuri,” Rowan whispered. And then her frown tightened, and her eyes darkened, but she didn’t drift away.

“What is it, Rowan?” Mona asked her. “Rowan, what did you say about Yuri?”

It appeared for all the world as if Rowan thought she was still speaking to Mona, and didn’t know that nothing was coming out.

“Rowan,” Mona whispered. “Tell me. Rowan—” Mona’s words stopped. She’d lost the nerve, suddenly, to speak her heart.

Rowan’s eyes were still fixed on her. Rowan lifted her right hand and ran her fingers back through her pale ashen hair. Natural, normal, but the eyes were not normal. They were struggling….

A sound distracted Mona—men talking, Michael and someone else. And then the sudden, alarming sound of a woman crying or laughing. For one second, Mona couldn’t tell which.

She turned and stared through the gates, across the glaring pool. Her Aunt Beatrice was coming towards her, almost running along the flagstone edge of the water, one hand to her mouth and the other groping as if she were going to fall on her face. She was the one who was crying, and it was most certainly crying. Bea’s hair was falling loose from her invariably neat twist on the back of her head. Her silk dress was blotched and wet.

Michael and a man in ominous plain dark clothes followed quickly, talking together as they did.

Great choked sobs were coming from Beatrice. Her heels sank into the soft lawn, but on she came.

“Bea, what is it?” Mona rose to her feet. So did Rowan. Rowan stared at the approaching figure, and as Beatrice rushed across the grass, turning her ankle and righting herself immediately, it was to Rowan that she reached out.

“They did it, Rowan,” said Bea, gasping for breath. “They killed him. The car came up over the curb. They killed him. I saw it with my own eyes!”

Mona reached out to support Beatrice, and suddenly her aunt had put her left arm around Mona and was near crushing her with kisses while the other hand still groped for Rowan, and Rowan reached to take it and clasp it in both of hers.

“Bea, who did they kill, who?” Mona cried. “You don’t mean Aaron.”

“Yes,” Bea answered, nodding frantically, her voice now dry and barely audible. She continued to nod, as Mona and Rowan closed against her. “Aaron,” she said. “They killed him. I saw it. The car jumped the curb on St. Charles Avenue. I told him I’d drive him over here. He said no, he wanted to walk. The car deliberately hit him, I saw it. It ran over him three times!”

As Michael, too, put his arms around her, Bea slumped as if she would faint, and let herself fall to the ground. Michael collected her and held her and she sank, crying, against his chest. Her hair fell in her eyes, and her hands were still reaching, trembling, like birds that couldn’t light.

The man in the ominous clothes was a policeman—Mona saw the gun and the shoulder holster—a Chinese American, with a tender and emotional face.

“I’m so sorry,” he said with a distinct New Orleans accent. Mona had never heard such an accent from such a Chinese face.

“They killed him?” Mona asked in a whisper, looking from the policeman to Michael, who was slowly soothing Bea with kisses and a gentle hand that straightened her hair. In all her life Mona had never seen Bea cry like this, and for one moment two thoughts collided in her: Yuri must be dead already; and Aaron had been murdered, and this meant perhaps that they were all in danger. And this was terrible, unspeakably terrible above all for Bea.

Rowan spoke calmly to the policeman, though her voice was hoarse and small in the confusion, in the clattering of emotion.

“I want to see the body,” said Rowan. “Can you take me
to it? I’m a doctor. I have to see it. It will take me only a moment to dress.”

Was there time for Michael to be amazed, for Mona to be flabbergasted? Oh, but it made sense, didn’t it? Horrible Mary Jane had said, “She’s listening. She’ll talk when she’s ready.”

And thank God she had not sat still and silent through this moment! Thank God that she couldn’t or didn’t have to, and was with them now.

Never mind how fragile she looked, and how hoarse and unnatural her voice sounded. Her eyes were clear as she looked at Mona, ignoring the policeman’s solicitous answer that perhaps it was better she did not see the body, the accident having been what it was.

“Bea needs Michael,” said Rowan. She reached out and clasped Mona’s wrist. Her hand was cool and firm. “I need you now. Will you go with me?”

“Yes,” said Mona. “Oh yes.”

H
E HAD PROMISED
the little man he would enter the hotel moments after. “You come with me,” Samuel had said, “and everyone will see you. Now keep the sunglasses on your face.”

Yuri had nodded. He didn’t mind sitting in the car for the moment, watching people walk past the elegant front doors of Claridge’s. Nothing had comforted him so much since he’d left the glen of Donnelaith as the city of London.

Even the long drive south with Samuel, tunneling through the night on freeways that might have been anywhere in the world, had unnerved him.

As for the glen, it was vivid in his memory and thoroughly gruesome. What had made him think it was wise to go there alone—to seek at the very roots for some knowledge of the Little People and the Taltos? Of course he had found exactly what he wanted. And been shot in the shoulder by a .38-caliber bullet in the process.

The bullet had been an appalling shock. He’d never been wounded before in such a fashion. But the truly unnerving revelation had been the Little People.

Slumped in the back of the Rolls, he suffered again a vivid memory of that sight—the night with its heavy rolling clouds and haunting moon, the mountain path wildly overgrown, and the eerie sound of the drums and the horns rising against the cliffs.

Only when he had seen the little men in their circle had he realized they were singing. Only then had he heard their
baritone chants, their words thoroughly unrecognizable to him.

He wasn’t sure he had believed in them until then—

Round in the circle they went, stunted, humpbacked, lifting their short knees, rocking back and forth, giving forth rhythmic bursts in the chants, some drinking from mugs, others from bottles. They wore their gunbelts over their shoulders. They fired their pistols into the great windy night with the riotous hilarity of savages. The guns did not roar. Rather they went off in tight bursts, like firecrackers. Worse, by far, were the drums, the awful pounding drums, and the few pipes whining and struggling with their gloomy melody.

When the bullet struck him, he thought it had come from one of them—a sentry perhaps. He had been wrong.

Three weeks had passed before he’d left the glen.

Now Claridge’s. Now the chance to call New Orleans, to speak to Aaron, to speak with Mona, to explain why for so long he’d been silent.

As for the risk of London, as for the proximity of the Talamasca Motherhouse and those who were trying to kill him, he felt infinitely safer here than he had in the glen only moments before the bullet had knocked him on his face.

Time to go upstairs. To see this mysterious friend of Samuel’s, who had already arrived, and who had not been described or explained to Yuri. Time to do what the little man wanted because the little man had saved Yuri’s life, nursed him back to health, and wanted him to meet this friend who had, in this great drama, some mammoth significance.

Yuri climbed out of the car, the genial British doorman quickly coming to his assistance.

His shoulder ached; there was a sharp pain. When would he learn not to use his right arm! Maddening.

The cold air was fierce but momentary. He went directly into the lobby of the hotel—so vast, yet warm. He took the great curving staircase to his right.

The soft strains of a string quartet came from the nearby bar. The air was still all around him. The hotel calmed him and made him feel safe. It also made him feel happy.

What a wonder it was that all of these polite Englishmen—the doorman, the bellhops, the kindly gentleman coming down the stairs past him—took no visible notice of his dirty sweater or his soiled black pants. Too polite, he mused.

He walked along the second floor until he came to the door of the corner suite, which the little man had described to him, and finding the door open, he entered a small, inviting alcove rather like that of a gracious home, and which looked into a large parlor, dowdy yet luxurious as the little man had said it would be.

The little man was on his knees, piling wood into the fireplace. He had taken off his tweed jacket, and the white shirt pulled painfully over his stunted arms and hump.

“There, there, come in here, Yuri,” he said, without so much as looking up.

Yuri stepped into the doorway. The other man was there.

And this man was as strange to behold as the little man, but in an entirely different fashion. He was outrageously tall, though not impossibly so. He had pale white skin and dark, rather natural-looking hair. The hair was long and free and out of keeping with the man’s fine black wool suit and the dull sheen of the expensive white shirt that he wore, and his dark red tie. He looked decidedly romantic. But what did this mean? Yuri wasn’t sure. Yet it was the word that came to his mind. The man did not look decisively athletic—he was not one of those freakish sports giants who excel in televised Olympic games or on noisy basketball courts—rather he looked romantic.

Yuri met the man’s gaze with no trouble. There was nothing menacing in this extraordinary and rather formal figure. Indeed, his face was smooth and young, almost pretty for a man, with its long, thick eyelashes and full, gently shaped androgynous lips—and not intimidating. Only the white in his hair gave him an air of authority, which he clearly did not regularly enforce. His eyes were hazel and rather large, and they looked at Yuri wonderingly. It was altogether an impressive figure, except for the hands. The hands were a little too big, and there was an abnormality about the fingers,
though Yuri wasn’t sure what it was. Spidery thin they were, maybe that was the sum of it.

“You’re the gypsy,” said the man in a low, pleasing voice that was almost a little sensual and very unlike the caustic baritone of the dwarf.

“Come inside, sit down,” said the dwarf impatiently. He had now lighted the fire and was fanning it with the bellows. “I sent for something to eat, but I want you to go into the bedroom when they bring it, I don’t want you seen.”

“Thank you,” said Yuri quietly. He realized suddenly that he’d failed to remove his dark glasses. How bright the room was suddenly, even with its deep green velvet furniture and old-fashioned flowered curtains. An agreeable room, with the imprint of people upon it.

Claridge’s. He knew the hotels of the world, but he had never known Claridge’s. He had never lodged in London except at the Motherhouse, to which he could not go now.

“You’re wounded, my friend told me,” said the tall man, approaching him and looking down at him in such a kindly way that the man’s height aroused no instinctive fear. The spidery hands were raised and extended as if, in order to see Yuri’s face, the man had to frame it.

“I’m all right. It was a bullet, but your friend removed it. I would be dead if it wasn’t for your friend.”

“So he’s told me. Do you know who I am?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you know what a Taltos is? That is what I am.”

Yuri said nothing. He had no more suspected this than he had suspected that the Little People really existed. Taltos has meant Lasher—killer, monster, menace. He was too shocked to speak. He merely stared at the man’s face, thinking that the man looked to be no more and no less, except for the hands, than a giant human.

“For the love of God, Ash,” said the dwarf, “have some guile for once.” He brushed off his pants. The fire was vigorous and splendid. He seated himself in a soft, rather shapeless chair that looked extremely comfortable. His feet didn’t touch the ground.

It was impossible to read his deeply wrinkled face. Was he really so cross? The folds of flesh destroyed all expression.
Indeed, the voice alone carried everything with the little man, who only occasionally made bright wide eyes as he spoke. His red hair was the appropriate cliché for his impatience and his temper. He drummed his short fingers on the cloth arms of the chair.