Taltos (36 page)

Ash’s face did not change. And then, very gently, as if breaking a terrible secret to a tender heart, one for which he had compassion, he said:

“There can be no union, there can be no offspring.” He took his time with the words. “She is old, your beautiful treasure. She is barren. Her fount is dried.”

“Old!” Stuart was baffled, disbelieving. “Old!” he whispered. “Why, you’re mad, how can you say this?” He turned helplessly to Tessa, who watched him without pain or disappointment.

“You’re mad,” said Stuart again, his voice rising. “Look at her!” he cried out. “Look at her face, her form. She’s magnificent. I’ve brought you together with a spouse of such beauty that you should fall to your knees and give me
your thanks!” Suddenly he was stricken, disbelieving and yet slowly being crushed.

“Her face will be that way, perhaps, the day she dies,” Ash said with his characteristic mildness. “I have never seen the face of a Taltos that was different. But her hair is white, completely white, not a single live strand remains in it. No scent comes from her. Ask her. Humans have used her again and again. Or perhaps she has wandered longer even than I. Her womb is dead within her. Her fount is dried.”

Gordon gave no further protest. He had clapped his hands over his lips, the little steeple of his fingers collapsed to shut in his pain.

The woman looked a little puzzled, but only vaguely disturbed. She stepped forward and put her long, slender arm lightly around the shivering Gordon, and addressed her words very distinctly to Ash.

“You judge me for what men have done to me, that they used me in every village and every town I entered, that over the years they made the blood flow again and again, until there was no more?”

“No, I don’t judge you,” Ash said earnestly and with great concern. “I don’t judge you, Tessa. Truly I do not.”

“Ah!” Once again she smiled, brightly, almost brilliantly, as if this was a reason to be supremely happy.

She looked at Michael suddenly, and then at the shadowy figure of Rowan near the stairway. Her expression was eager and loving.

“I’m saved from these horrors here,” she said. “I’m loved in chastity by Stuart. This is my refuge.” She stretched out her hands to Ash. “Won’t you stay with me, talk to me?” She tugged him towards the center of the room. “Won’t you dance with me? I hear music when I look into your eyes.”

She drew Ash closer. She said with deep, true feeling, “I’m so glad you’ve come.”

Only now did she look at Gordon, who had slipped away, forehead furrowed, fingers still pressed to his lips, stepping backwards and finding a heavy old wooden chair. He sank down on it, and rested his head against the hard
planks that made up the back of it, and turned wearily to the side. The spirit had gone out of him. It seemed his very life was leaving him.

“Dance with me,” said Tessa. “All of you, don’t you want to dance?” She flung out her arms and threw back her head and shook out her hair, which did indeed look like the lifeless white hair of the very very old.

She turned round and round until her long, full, violet skirts swung out around her, making a bell, and she was dancing on tiptoe with small slippered feet.

Michael couldn’t take his eyes off her, off the subtle swaying movements with which she made a great circle, leading with her right foot, and then bringing the other closer to it, as though it were a ritual dance.

As for Gordon, it was too painful even to look at him, and this disappointment seemed far more important to him than his life. Indeed, it was as if the fatal blow had already been struck.

Ash, too, stared rapt at Tessa—touched perhaps, worried certainly, and maybe even miserable.

“You lie,” Stuart said. But it was a desperate, broken murmur. “You’re telling a terrible and abominable lie.”

Ash didn’t bother to answer him. He smiled and nodded at Tessa.

“Stuart, my music. Please play my music. Play my music for … for Ash!” She gave Ash a great bow and another smile, and he too bowed and reached out to take her hands.

The figure in the chair was incapable of movement, and, once again in a murmur, he said, “It’s not true,” but he didn’t believe his own denial.

Tessa had begun to hum a song, turning again in a circle.

“Play the music, Stuart, play it.”

“I’ll play it for you,” said Michael in a low voice. He turned, looking for some possible source, hoping against hope it wasn’t an instrument, a harp, a fiddle, something that required a player, because if it was, then he could not rise to the moment.

He felt heartbroken himself, impossibly sad, unable to enjoy the great relief he ought to have been feeling. And for one moment his eyes moved over Rowan, and she too
seemed lost in sadness, veiled in it, her hands clasped, her body very upright against the stair railing, her eyes following the dancing figure who had begun to hum a distinct melody, something that Michael knew and loved.

Michael discovered the machines—modern stereo components, designed to look almost mystically technical, with hundreds of tiny digital screens, and buttons, and wires snaking in all directions to speakers hung at random intervals along the wall.

He bent down, tried to read the name of the tape inside the player.

“It’s what she wants,” said Stuart, staring still at the woman. “Just start it. She plays it all the time. It is her music.”

“Dance with us,” said Tessa. “Don’t you want to dance with us?” She moved towards Ash, and this time he could not resist. He caught her hands, and then embraced her as a man might embrace a woman for a waltz, in the modern intimate position.

Michael pressed the button.

The music began low, the throb of bass strings plucked slowly—flowing out of the many speakers; then came trumpets, smooth and lustrous, over the shimmering tones of a harpsichord, descending in the same melodic line of notes and now taking the lead, so that the strings followed.

At once Ash guided his partner into wide graceful steps, and a gentle circle.

This was Pachelbel’s Canon, Michael knew it at once, played as he’d never heard it, in a masterly rendition, with the full brass perhaps intended by the composer.

Had there ever been a more plaintive piece of music, anything more frankly abandoned to romance? The music swelled, transcending the constraints of the baroque, trumpets, strings, harpsichord now singing their overlapping melodies with a heartrending richness so that the music seemed both timeless and utterly from the heart.

It swept the couple along, their heads bending gently, their wide steps graceful and slow and in perfect time with the instruments. Ash was smiling now, as fully and completely as Tessa. And as the pace quickened, as the trumpets
began to delicately trill the notes, with perfect control, as all voices blended magnificently in the most jubilant moments of the composition, faster and faster they danced, Ash swinging Tessa along almost playfully, into bolder and bolder circles. Her skirts flared freely, her small feet turned with perfect grace, heels clicking faintly on the wood, her smile ever more radiant.

Another sound was not blended into the dance—for the canon, when played like this, was surely a dance—and slowly Michael realized it was the sound of Ash singing. There were no words, only a lovely openmouthed humming, to which Tessa quickly added her own, and their faultless voices rose above the dark lustrous trumpets, effortlessly traveling the crescendos, and now, as they turned faster, their backs very straight, they almost laughed in what seemed pure bliss.

Rowan’s eyes had filled with tears as she watched them—the tall, regal man and the lithesome, graceful fairyqueen, and so had the eyes of the old man, who clung to the arm of his chair as if he were very close to the limit of his resources.

Yuri seemed torn inside, as if he would lose control finally. But he remained motionless, leaning against the wall, merely watching.

Ash’s eyes were now playful, yet adoring, as he rocked his head and swayed more freely, and moved even more quickly.

On and on they danced, spinning along the edge of the pool of light, into shadow and out of it, serenading one another. Tessa’s face was ecstatic as that of a little girl whose greatest wish has been granted her.

It seemed to Michael that they should withdraw—Rowan, Yuri, and he—and leave them to their poignant and gentle union. Perhaps it was the only embrace they’d ever really know with each other. And they seemed now to have forgotten their watchers, and whatever lay ahead of them.

But he couldn’t go. No one moved to go, and on and on the dance went until the rhythm slowed, until the instruments played more softly, warning that they would soon take their leave, and the overlapping lines of the canon
blending in one last full-throated voice and then slacking, drawing away, the trumpet giving forth a final mournful note, and then silence.

The couple stopped in the very center of the floor, the light spilling down over their faces and their shimmering hair.

Michael rested against the stones, unable to move, only watching them.

Music like that could hurt you. It gave you back your disappointment, and your emptiness. It said,
Life can be this. Remember this
.

Silence.

Ash lifted the hands of the fairyqueen, looking at them carefully as he did so. Then he kissed her upturned palms and he let her go. And she stood staring at him, as if in love, perhaps not with him, perhaps with the music and the dance and the light, with everything.

He led her back to her loom, gently urging her to sit again on her stool, and then he turned her head so that her eyes fell on her old task, and as she peered at the tapestry, she seemed to forget that he was there. Her fingers reached for the threads, and began immediately to work.

Ash drew back, careful not to make a sound, and then he turned and looked at Stuart Gordon.

No plea or protest came from the old man, fallen to one side in the chair, his eyes moving without urgency from Ash to Tessa and then to Ash again.

The awful moment had come, perhaps. Michael didn’t know. But surely some story, some long explanation, some desperate narrative would forestall it. Gordon had to try. Somebody had to try. Something had to happen to save this miserable human being; simply because he was that, something had to prevent this imminent execution.

“I want the names of the others,” said Ash in the usual mild fashion. “I want to know who your cohorts were, both within and outside the Order.”

Stuart took his time in answering. He didn’t move, or look away from Ash. “No,” he said finally. “Those names I will never give you.”

It sounded as final as anything Michael had ever heard.
And the man, in his pain, seemed beyond any form of persuasion.

Ash began to walk calmly towards Gordon.

“Wait,” said Michael “Please, Ash, wait.”

Ash stopped, politely looking to Michael.

“What is it, Michael?” he asked, as if he could not possibly presume to know.

“Ash, let him tell us what he knows,” Michael said. “Let him give us his story!”

E
VERYTHING WAS CHANGED
. Everything was easier. She lay in Morrigan’s arms and Morrigan lay in hers and—

It was evening when she opened her eyes.

What a great dream that had been. It was as if Gifford and Alicia and Ancient Evelyn had been with her, and there was no death and no suffering, and they had been together, dancing even, yes, dancing, in a circle.

She felt so good! Let it fade; the feeling remained with her. The sky was Michael’s violet.

And there was Mary Jane standing over her, looking so goddamned cute with her flaxen yellow hair.

“You’re Alice in Wonderland,” said Mona, “that’s who you are. I should nickname you Alice.”

Going to be perfect, I promise you
.

“I cooked the supper,” said Mary Jane. “I told Eugenia to take the night off, hope you don’t mind, when I saw that pantry I went crazy.”

“ ’Course I don’t mind,” said Mona. “Help me up, you’re a real cousin.”

She jumped up refreshed, feeling so light and free, like the baby tumbling inside, the baby with its long red hair swishing in the fluid, like a teeny rubbery doll with the teensiest little knobby knees….

“I cooked yams, rice, and baked oysters in cheese, and broiled chicken with butter and tarragon.”

“Wherever did you learn to cook like that?” asked Mona. Then she stopped and threw her arms around Mary Jane.
“There’s nobody like us, is there? I mean, you know your blood, don’t you?”

Mary Jane beamed at her. “Yeah, it’s just wonderful. I love you, Mona Mayfair.”

“Oh, I’m so glad to hear it,” said Mona.

They had reached the kitchen doors, and Mona peered inside.

“God, you did cook a big supper.”

“You better believe it,” said Mary Jane proudly, again displaying her perfect white teeth. “I could cook when I was six years old. My mama was living with this chef then?? You know?? And then later on, I worked in a fancy restaurant in Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson’s the capital, remember? This was a place where the senators ate. And I told them, ‘You want me to work here, then you let me watch when the cook’s doing things, you let me learn what I can.’ What do you want to drink?”

“Milk, I’m starving for it,” said Mona. “Don’t run inside yet. Look, it’s the magic time of twilight. This is Michael’s favorite time.”

If only she could remember in the dream who had been with her. Only the feeling of love lingered, utterly comforting love.

For a moment she worried fiercely for Rowan and Michael. How would they ever solve the mystery of who killed Aaron? But together they could probably defeat anybody, that is, if they really cooperated, and Yuri, well, Yuri’s destiny had never been meant to involve itself with hers.

Everybody would understand when the time came.

The flowers had begun to glow. It was as if the garden were singing. She slumped against the door frame, humming with the flowers, humming as if the song were being made known to her by some remote part of her memory where beautiful and delicate things were never forgotten, but only securely stored. She could smell some perfume in the air—ah, it was the sweet olive trees!