Taltos (15 page)

Part of her wanted to return to the graves and the garden, to the iron table beneath the tree, to the
danse macabre
of the winged creatures high above, making the bold purple night throb with incidental and gorgeous song. Part of her didn’t dare. If she walked out of here and went back to that table, she might open her eyes to discover that a night had passed away, perhaps more…. Something as wretched and
ugly as the death of Aaron would catch her again unawares and say to her, “Wake, they need you. You know what you must do.” Had Aaron been there himself for a split second, disembodied and merciful, whispering it in her ear? No, it had been nothing so clear or personal.

She looked at her husband. The man slouching in the chair, crushing the hapless beer can into something round and almost flat, his eyes still settled on the windows.

He was both wondrous and dreadful—indescribably attractive to her. And the awful, shameful truth was that his bitterness and suffering had made him more attractive; it had tarnished him rather marvelously. He didn’t look so innocent now, so unlike the man he really was inside. No, the inside had seeped through the handsome skin and changed the texture of him all over. It had lent a slight ferocity to his face, as well as many soft and ever-shifting shadows.

Saddened colors. He had told her something once about saddened colors, in the bright newlywed time before they knew their child was a goblin. He had said that when they painted houses in the Victorian times they used “saddened” colors. This meant darkening the colors somewhat; this meant somber, muted, complex. Victorian houses all over America had been painted in that way. That’s what he’d said. And he had loved all that, those brownish reds and olive greens and steel grays, but here one had to think of another word for the ashen twilight and the deep green gloom, the shades of darkness that hovered about the violet house with its bright painted shutters.

She was thinking now. Was he “saddened”? Was that what had happened to him? Or did she have to find another word for the darker yet bolder look in his eye, for the manner in which his face yielded so little now, at first glance, yet was not for a moment mean or ugly.

He looked at her, eyes shifting and striking her like lights. Snap. Blue and the smile almost there. Do it again, she thought as he looked away. Make those eyes at me. Make them large and blue and really dazzling for a moment. Was it a handicap to have such eyes?

She reached out and touched the shadowy beard on his face, on his chin. She felt it all over his neck, and then she
felt his fine black hair, and all the new coarser gray hair, and she sank her fingers into the curls.

He stared forward as if he were shocked, and then very cautiously he turned his eyes, without much turning his head, and looked at her.

She withdrew her hand, rising at the same time, and he stood up with her.

There was almost a throb in his hand as he held her arm. As he moved the chair back and out of her way, she let herself brush fully against him.

Up the stairs they went quietly.

The bedroom was as it had been all this time, very serene and overly warm, perhaps, with the bed never made but only neatly turned down so that she could at any moment sink back into it.

She shut the door and bolted it. He was already taking off his coat. She opened her blouse, pulling it out of the skirt with one hand and peeling it off and dropping it to the floor.

“The operation they did,” he said. “I thought perhaps …”

“No, I’m healed. I want to do it.”

He came forward and kissed her on the cheek, turning her head as he did it. She felt the blazing roughness of the beard, the coarseness of his hands, pulling a little hard on her hair as he bent her head back. She reached out and pulled at his shirt.

“Take it off,” she said.

When she unzipped the skirt, it dropped to her feet. How thin she was. But she didn’t care about herself or want to see herself. She wanted to see him. He was stripped now, and hard. She reached out and caught the black curling hair on his chest, and pinched his nipples.

“Ah, that’s too hard,” he whispered. He drew her against him, pushing her breasts right into the hair. Her hand came up, between his legs, finding him hard and ready.

She tugged on him as she climbed up on the bed, moving across it on her knees and then falling down on the cool cotton sheet and feeling his weight come down clumsily on top of her. God, these big bones crushing her again, this
swarm of hair against us, this scent of sweet flesh and vintage perfume, this scratching, pushing, divine roughness.

“Do it, do it fast,” she said. “We’ll go slowly the second time. Do it, fill me up,” she said.

But he needed no goading words.

“Do it hard!” she whispered between her teeth.

The cock entered her, its size shocking her, hurting her, bruising her. The pain was gorgeous, exquisite, perfect. She clenched the cock as best she could, the muscles weak and aching and not under her command—her wounded body betraying her.

Didn’t matter. He battered her hard, and she came, giving no cue of cries or sighs. She was thoughtless, red-faced, hands flung out, and then tightening on him with all her might, on the very pain itself, as he drove into her repeatedly and then spent in great jerking motions that seemed to lift him off her and then abandon him to fall into her arms, wet and familiar and loved, desperately loved. Michael.

He rolled off. He wouldn’t be able to do it so soon again. That was to be expected. His face was wet, the hair stuck to his forehead. She lay still in the cooling air of the room, uncovered and watching the slow movement of the fan blades near the ceiling.

The movement was so slow. Perhaps it was hypnotizing her. Be quiet, she said to her body, her loins, her inner self. She half dreamed, in fear, revisiting the moments in Lasher’s arms and, mercifully, found them wanting. The savage, lustful god, yes, he might have seemed that; but this had been a man, and a brutal man with an immense and loving heart. It was so divinely rough, so divinely crude, so utterly blinding and bruising and simple.

He climbed out of the bed. She was certain he would sleep, and she herself knew she couldn’t do it.

But he was up and dressing himself again, dragging clean clothes from the rods in the bathroom closet. He had his back to her, and when he turned around, the light from the bathroom shone on his face.

“Why did you do it!” he said. “Why did you leave with him!” It came like a roar.

“Shhhhh!” She sat up and put her finger to her lips.
“Don’t bring them all. Don’t make them come. Hate me if you will …”

“Hate you? God, how can you say that to me? Day in and day out, I’ve told you that I love you!” He came towards the bed, and put his hands firmly on the footboard. He glowered over her, horrifically beautiful in his rage. “How could you leave me like that!” He whispered the cry. “How!”

He came round the side, and suddenly grabbed her by her naked arms, fingers hurting her skin unbearably.

“Don’t do it!” she screamed back, struggling to keep her voice low, knowing how ugly it was, how filled with panic. “Don’t hit me, I warn you. That’s what he did, that’s what he did over and over and over again. I’ll kill you if you hit me!”

She pulled loose and rolled to the side, tumbling off the bed and pushing into the bathroom, where the cold marble tile burned her naked feet.

Kill him! Goddamn it, if you don’t stop yourself you will, you will, with your power you’ll kill Michael!

How many times had she tried it with Lasher, spitting it at him, the puny hatred, kill him, kill him, kill him, and he had only laughed. Well, this man would die if she struck with her invisible rage. He would die as surely as the others she had killed—the filthy, appalling murders that had shaped her life, brought her to this very house, this moment.

Terror. The stillness, the quietness of the room. She turned slowly and looked through the door and she saw him standing beside the bed, merely watching her.

“I ought to be afraid of you,” he said. “But I’m not. I’m only afraid of one thing. That you don’t love me.”

“Oh, but I do,” she said. “And I always did. Always.”

His shoulders sagged for a minute, just a minute, and then he turned away from her. He was so hurt, but he would never again have the vulnerable look he had had before. He would never again have the pure gentleness.

There was a chair by the window to the porch, and he appeared to find it blindly and choose it indifferently as he sat down, still turned away from her.

And I’m about to hurt you again, she thought.

She wanted to go to him, to talk to him, to hold him again. To talk the way they had that first day after she’d come to herself, and buried her only daughter—the only daughter she’d ever have—beneath the oak. She wanted to open now with the kindling excitement she’d felt then, the utter love, thoughtless and rushed and without the slightest caution.

But it seemed as beyond reach now as words had been so soon after that.

She lifted her hands and ran them back hard through her hair. Then, rather mechanically, she reached for the taps in the shower.

With the water flooding down, she could think, perhaps clearly, for the first time. The noise was sweet and the hot water was luscious.

There seemed an impossible wealth of dresses to choose from. Absolutely confounding that there were so many in the closets. Finally she found a pair of soft wool pants, old pants she’d had eons ago in San Francisco, and she put those on, and on top a loose and deceptively heavy cotton sweater.

It was plenty cool enough now for the spring night. And it felt good to be dressed again in the clothes she herself had loved. Who, she wondered, could have bought all these pretty dresses?

She brushed her hair, and closed her eyes, and thought, “You are going to lose him, and with reason, if you do not talk to him now, if you do not once again explain, if you do not struggle against your own instinctive fear of words, and go to him.”

She laid down the brush. He was standing in the doorway. She’d never shut the door all this while, and when she looked up at him, the peaceful, accepting look on his face was a great relief to her. She almost cried. But that would have been ludicrously selfish.

“I love you, Michael,” she said. “I could shout it from the rooftops. I never stopped loving you. It was vanity and it was hubris; and the silence, the silence was the failure of a soul to heal and strengthen itself, or maybe just the necessary
retreat that the soul sought as if it were some selfish organism.”

He listened intently, frowning slightly, face calm but never innocent the way it had been before. The eyes were huge and glistening but hard and shadowed with sadness.

“I don’t know how I could have hurt you just now, Rowan,” he said. “I really don’t. I just don’t.”

“Michael, no …”

“No, let me say it. I know what happened to you. I know what he did. I know. And I don’t know how I could have blamed you, been angry with you, hurt you like that, I don’t know!”

“Michael, I know,” she said. “Don’t. Don’t, or you’ll make me cry.”

“Rowan, I destroyed him,” he said. He had dropped his voice to a whisper the way so many people did when they spoke of death. “I destroyed him and it’s not enough! I … I …”

“No, don’t speak anymore. Forgive me, Michael, forgive me for your sake and my sake. Forgive me.” She leant forward and kissed him, took the breath out of him deliberately so it would remain wordless. And this time when he folded her into his arms, it was full of the old kindness, the old cherishing warmth, the great protective sweetness that made her feel safe, safe as it had when they’d first made love.

There must have been something more lovely than falling in his arms like this, more lovely than merely being close to him. But she couldn’t think what it was now—certainly not the violence of passion. That was there, obviously, to be enjoyed again and again, but this was the thing she’d never known with any other being on earth, this!

Finally he drew back, taking her two hands together and kissing them, and then flashing her that bright boyish smile again, precisely the one she thought sure she’d never receive again, ever. And then he winked and he said, his voice breaking:

“You really do still love me, baby.”

“Yes,” she said. “I learned how once, apparently, and it will have to be forever. Come with me, come outside, come
out under the oak. I want to be near them for a while. I don’t know why. You and I, we are the only ones who know that they’re there together.”

They slipped down the back stairs, through the kitchen. The guard by the pool merely nodded to them. The yard was dark as they found the iron table. She flung herself at him, and he steadied her. Yes, for this little while and then you’ll hate me again, she thought.

Yes, you’ll despise me. She kissed his hair, his cheek, she rubbed her forehead back and forth across his sharp beard. She felt his soft responsive sighs, thick and heavy and from the chest.

You’ll despise me, she thought. But who else can go after the men who killed Aaron?

T
HE PLANE LANDED
in Edinburgh’s airport at 11:00 p.m. Ash was dozing with his face against the window. He saw the headlamps of the cars moving steadily towards him, both black, both German—sedans that would take him and his little entourage over the narrow roads to Donnelaith. It was no longer a trek one had to make on horseback. Ash was glad of it, not because he had not loved those journeys through the dangerous mountains, but because he wanted to reach the glen itself with no delay.

Modern life has made all impatient, he thought quietly. How many times in his long life had he set out for Donnelaith, determined to visit the place of his most tragic losses and reexamine his destiny again? Sometimes it had taken him years to make his way to England and then north to the Highlands. Other times it had been a matter of months.

Now it was something accomplished in a matter of hours. And he was glad of it. For the going there had never been the difficult or the cathartic part. Rather it was the visit itself.