Taltos (40 page)

Patience. Aaron would want it thus. Aaron would want the story known, and recorded for others to know. And Michael and Rowan, were they not entitled to the facts? And then there was Ash, the mysterious Ash. Ash had uncovered Gordon’s treachery. If Ash had not appeared in Spelling Street, Yuri would have accepted Gordon’s pretense of innocence, and the few foolish lies Gordon had told while they sat in the café.

What went on in Ash’s mind? He was overwhelming, just as Yuri had told them. Now they knew. They saw for themselves his remarkable face, the calm, loving eyes. But they mustn’t forget that he was a menace to Mona, to any of the Mayfair family—

Yuri forced himself to stop thinking about this. They needed Ash too much just now. Ash had somehow become the commander of this operation. What would happen if Ash withdrew and left them with Gordon? They couldn’t kill Gordon. They couldn’t even scare him, at least Yuri didn’t think so. It was impossible to gauge how much Rowan and Michael hated Gordon. Unreadable. Witches. He could see that now.

Ash sat on the other side of the circle, his monstrous hands clasped on the edge of the old, unfinished wood, watching Gordon, who sat to his right. He did hate Gordon, and Yuri saw it by the absence of something in Ash’s face, the absence of compassion, perhaps? The absence of the tenderness which Ash showed to everyone, absolutely everyone else.

Rowan Mayfair and Michael Curry sat on either side of Yuri, thank God. He could not have endured to be close to Gordon. Michael was the wrathful one, the suspicious one. Rowan was taken with Ash. Yuri had known she would be. But Michael was taken with no one just yet.

Yuri could not touch this cup. It might as well have been filled with the man’s urine.

“Out of the jungles of India,” said Stuart, sipping his own tea, in which he had poured a large slug of whiskey. “I don’t know where. I don’t know India. I know only that the natives said she’d been there forever, wandering from village to village, and that she’d come to them before the war, and that she spoke English and that she didn’t grow
old, and the women of the village had become frightened of her.”

The whiskey bottle stood in the middle of the table. Michael Curry wanted it, but perhaps he could not touch the refreshments offered by Gordon either. Rowan Mayfair sat with her arms folded. Michael Curry had his elbows on the table. He was closer to Stuart, obviously trying to figure him out.

“I think it was a photograph, her undoing. Someone had taken a picture of the entire village, together. Some intrepid soul with a tripod and a wind-up camera. And she had been in that picture. It was one of the young men who uncovered it among his grandmother’s possessions when the grandmother died. An educated man. A man I’d taught at Oxford.”

“And he knew about the Talamasca.”

“Yes, I didn’t talk much to my students about the Order, except for those who seemed as if they might want to …”

“Like those boys,” said Yuri.

He watched the light jump in Stuart’s eye, as if the lamp nearby had jumped, and not Stuart.

“Yes, well, those boys.”

“What boys?” asked Rowan.

“Marklin George and Tommy Monohan,” said Yuri.

Stuart’s face was rigid. He lifted the mug of tea with both hands and drank deeply.

The whiskey smelled medicinal and sickening.

“Were they the ones who helped you with this?” asked Yuri. “The computer genius and the Latin scholar?”

“It was my doing,” said Stuart, without looking at Yuri. He was not looking at any of them. “Do you want to hear what I have to say, or not?”

“They helped you,” said Yuri.

“I have nothing to say on the subject of my accomplices,” Gordon said, looking coldly at Yuri now, and then back again into empty space, or the shadows along the walls.

“It was the two young ones,” said Yuri, though Michael was gesturing to him to hold back. “What about Joan Cross, or Elvera Fleming, or Timothy Hollingshed?”

Stuart made an impatient and disgusted gesture at the mention of these names, hardly realizing how this might be interpreted in relation to the boys.

“Joan Cross doesn’t have a romantic bone in her body,” Stuart said suddenly, “and Timothy Hollingshed has always been overrated due simply to his aristocratic background. Elvera Fleming is an old fool! Don’t ask me these questions anymore. I won’t be made to speak of my accomplices. I won’t be made to betray them. I’ll die with that secret, be assured.”

“So this friend,” said Ash, his expression patient but surprisingly cold, “this young man in India, he wrote to you, Mr. Gordon.”

“Called me, as a matter of fact, told me he had a mystery for me. He said he could get her to England, if I’d take over once she arrived. He said that she couldn’t really fend for herself. She seemed mad, and then not mad. No one could quite analyze her. She spoke of times unknown to the people around her. And when he’d made inquiries, with a view to sending her home, he found she was a legend in that part of India. I have a record of it all. I have our letters. They are all here. There are copies in the Motherhouse as well. But the originals are here. Everything I value is in this tower.”

“You knew what she was when you saw her?”

“No. It was extraordinary. I found myself enchanted by her. Some selfish instinct dominated my actions. I brought her here. I didn’t want to take her to the Motherhouse. It was most peculiar. I couldn’t have told anyone what I was doing or why, except for the obvious fact that I was so charmed by her. I had only lately inherited this tower from my mother’s brother, an antiquarian who had been my family mentor. It seemed the perfect place.

“The first week, I scarcely left at all. I had never been in the company of such a person as Tessa. There was a gaiety and simplicity in her which gave me inexpressible happiness.”

“Yes, I’m sure,” said Ash softly, with a trace of a smile. “Please go on with your story.”

“I fell in love with her.” He paused, eyebrows raised, as
if amazed by his own words. He seemed excited by the revelation. “I fell completely in love with her.”

“And you kept her here?” asked Yuri.

“Yes, she’s been here ever since. She never goes out. She’s afraid of people. It’s only when I’ve been here a long while that she’ll talk, and then she tells her amazing tales.

“She’s seldom coherent, or I should say chronological. The little stories always make sense. I have hundreds of recordings of her talking, lists of Old English words and Latin words which she has used.

“You see, what became clear to me almost immediately was that she was speaking of two different lives, a very long one which she was living now, and a life she’d lived before.”

“Two lives? Then you mean, simply, reincarnation.”

“After a long while, she explained,” said Gordon. He was now so passionately involved in his tale, he seemed to have forgotten the danger to him. “She said that all her kind had two lives, sometimes more,” he went on. “That you were born knowing all you needed to know to survive, but then gradually an earlier life came back to you, and bits and pieces of others. And it was the memory of this earlier life that kept you from going mad among human beings.”

“You had realized,” asked Rowan, “by this time, that she wasn’t human. She would have fooled me.”

“No. Not at all. I thought she was human. Of course, there were strange characteristics to her—her translucent skin, her tremendous height, and her unusual hands. But I didn’t think, ‘No, this being isn’t human.’

“It was she who said that she wasn’t human. She said it more than once. Her people lived before humans. They had lived thousands of years in peace on islands in the northern seas. These islands were warmed by volcanic springs from the depths, by geysers of steam, and pleasant lakes.

“And this she knew, not because she herself had lived at that time, but because others she had known in her first lifetime could remember a former life in this paradise, and that was how her people knew their history, through the inevitable and always singular remembrance of earlier lives.

“Don’t you see? It was incredible, the idea that everyone
would come into this world with some distinct and valuable historical memories! It meant that the race knew more of itself than humans could possibly know. It knew of earlier ages from, so to speak, firsthand experience!”

“And if you bred Tessa to another of her race,” said Rowan, “you would have a child who could remember an earlier life—and then perhaps another child and another life remembered.”

“Exactly! The chain of memory would be established, and who knows how far back it would go, for each one, remembering some earlier existence, remembering the tales of those he had known and loved in that time who remembered having lived before!”

Ash listened to all this without comment, or any perceptible change of emotion. None of it seemed to surprise him or offend him. Yuri almost smiled. It was the same simplicity he’d observed in Ash at Claridge’s, when they had first spoken.

“Someone else might have dismissed Tessa’s claims,” said Gordon, “but I recognized the Gaelic words she used, the bits of Old English, the Latin, and when she wrote down the runic script, I could read it! I knew she told the truth.”

“And this you kept to yourself,” said Rowan, neutrally, as if merely trying to quell Gordon’s annoying emotion and get back on track.

“Yes! I did. I almost told Aaron about it. The more Tessa talked, the more she spoke of the Highlands, of early Celtic rituals and customs, of Celtic saints even, and the Celtic church.

“You do know that our church in England then was Celtic or Briton or whatever you want to call it, founded by the Apostles themselves, who had come from Jerusalem to Glastonbury. We had no connection with Rome. It was Pope Gregory and his henchman, St. Augustine, who thrust the Roman church on Britain.”

“Yes, but then you did not tell Aaron Lightner?” asked Ash, raising his voice just slightly. “You were saying …?”

“Aaron had already gone to America. He had gone there to make contact once more with the Mayfair witches, and
to pursue other paths in psychic investigation. It was no time to question Aaron about his early research. And then, of course, I had done something wrong. I had taken a woman entrusted to me as a member of the Order, and I had kept her for myself, almost a prisoner. Of course, there has never been anything stopping Tessa from leaving, nothing but her own fear. But I had closeted this woman away. I had told the Order nothing about it.”

“But how did you make the connection?” asked Ash. “Between Tessa and the Mayfair witches?”

“Oh, it wasn’t that difficult at all. One thing followed upon another. As I said, Tessa’s speech was full of references to archaic Highland customs. She spoke over and over of the circles of stones built by her people and later used by the Christians for bizarre rituals to which their priests could never put a stop.

“You know our mythology, surely all of you, some of you. The ancient myths of Britain are full of mythic giants. Our stories say the giants built the circles, and so did Tessa. Our giants lingered long after their time in the dark and remote places, in the caves by the sea, in the caves of the Highlands. Well, Tessa’s giants, hunted from the earth, almost annihilated, also survived in secret places! And when they did dare to appear among human beings, they incited both worship and fear. It was the same, she said, with the Little Folk, whose origins had been forgotten. They were revered on the one hand, and feared on the other. And often the early Christians of Scotland would dance and sing within the circle of stones, knowing that the giants had once done this—indeed, had built the circles for that purpose—and they would, by their music, lure the giants from hiding, so that the giants came down to join the dance, at which point these Christians would slaughter them to satisfy the priests, but not before using them to satisfy old gods.”

“How do you mean, ‘using them’?” asked Rowan.

Gordon’s eyes glazed slightly, and his voice dropped to a soft, nearly pleasant tone, as if the mere mention of these things could not but evoke a sense of wonder.

“Witchcraft, that is what we are talking about—early,
blood-drenched witchcraft, in which superstition, under the yoke of Christianity, reached back into a pagan past for magic, to do
maleficia
, or to gain power, or only to witness a dark secret rite which thrilled them as criminal acts have always thrilled humankind. I longed to corroborate Tessa’s stories.

“Without confiding in anyone, I went to the very cellars of the Motherhouse, the places where the oldest unexamined material on British folklore had been stored. These were manuscripts that had been deemed ‘fanciful’ and ‘irrelevant’ by the scholars, like Aaron, who had spent years translating old documents. This material did not exist in our modern inventory or our modern computer banks. One had to touch the crumbling pages with one’s own hand.

“Oh, what I found! Crumbling quartos and books of beautifully illustrated parchment, the works of Irish monks and the Benedictines and the Cistercians, complaining of the mad superstition of the common people, and filled with tales of these giants and these Little Folk, and how the common people persisted in believing in them, in luring them out, in using them in various ways.

“And right there, mixed in with these ranting condemnations, were tales of giant saints! Giant knights and kings!

“Here, at Glastonbury, only a little way from where we sit now, a giant of seven feet was unearthed in former times, and declared to be King Arthur. What was this but one of Tessa’s giants, I ask you? Such creatures have been found all over Britain.

“Oh, a thousand times I was tempted to call Aaron. How Aaron would have loved these stories, especially those which had come directly from the Highlands and its haunted lochs and glens.

“But there was only one person in this world in whom I could confide. And that was Tessa.

“And as I brought home my carefully excavated stories, Tessa recognized these rituals, these patterns—indeed, the names of saints and kings. Of course, Tessa didn’t speak with sophisticated words. It came in fragments from her, how her people had become a sacred quarry, and could save themselves from torture and death only by rising to power
and gaining sway over the Christians, or by fleeing deeper and deeper into the great forests which still covered the mountains in those years, and into the caves and the secret valleys where they struggled to live in peace.”