Taltos (41 page)

“And this you never told Aaron,” said Yuri.

Gordon ignored the words. He continued:

“Then, in a painful voice, Tessa confessed to me that she had once suffered horribly at the hands of Christian peasants, who had imprisoned her and forced her to receive man after man from all the villages round. The hope was that she would give birth to another giant like herself, a giant who would spring from the womb, speaking, knowing, and growing to maturity within hours—a creature which the villagers might then have killed before her eyes!

“It had become a religion to them, don’t you see? Catch the Taltos, breed it, sacrifice the offspring. And Christmas, that time of ancient pagan rituals, had become their favorite period for the sacred game. From this hideous captivity Tessa had finally escaped, having never given birth to the sacrificial creature, and only suffering a flow of blood from the seed of each human man.”

He stopped, his brows knit. His face became sad, and he looked at Ash.

“This is what hurt my Tessa? This is what dried the fount?” It wasn’t so much a question as a confirmation of what had been revealed earlier, only Ash, feeling no need, apparently, to confirm it, did not speak.

Gordon shuddered.

“She spoke of horrible things!” he said. “She talked of the males lured down into the circles, and of the village maidens offered to them; but if the giant was not born to such a maiden, death would surely result. And when enough maidens had died that the people doubted the power of this male giant, he was then burnt as the sacrifice. Indeed, he was always burnt, whatever the outcome, or whether or not he had fathered a sacrificial offspring, because the males were so greatly feared.”

“So they didn’t fear the women,” said Rowan. “Because the women didn’t bring death to the human men who lay with them.”

“Exactly,” said Gordon. “However!” He held up his finger with a little delighted smile. “However! It did now and then happen, yes! That the male giant or the female giant did parent, as it were, the magical child of its own race. And there would be this newborn giant for all to behold.

“No time was more propitious for such a union than Christmas, December Twenty-fifth, the feast of the old solar god! And it was said then—when a giant was born—that the heavens had once again copulated with the earth, and out of the union had come a great magic, as had happened at the First Creation; and only after great feasting, and singing of the Christmas songs, was the sacrifice carried out in Christ’s name. Now and then a giant fathered or mothered many such off-spring, and Taltos mated with Taltos, and the fires of sacrifice filled the glens, the smoke rising to heaven, bringing an early spring and warm winds and good rains, and making the crops grow.”

Gordon broke off, turning enthusiastically to Ash. “You must know all of this. You yourself could give us links in the chain of memory. Surely you too have lived an earlier life. You could tell us things which no human can ever discover in any other way. You can tell them with clarity and power, for you’re strong, and not addled, like my poor Tessa! You can give us this gift.”

Ash said nothing. But his face had darkened, and Gordon seemed not at all aware of it.

He’s a fool, thought Yuri. Perhaps that is what great schemes of violence always require—a romantic fool.

Gordon turned to the others, even to Yuri, to whom he appealed now. “Don’t you understand? Surely you understand now what such possibilities meant to me?”

“What I know,” said Yuri, “is that you didn’t tell Aaron. And you didn’t tell the Elders, either, did you? The Elders never knew. Your brothers and sisters never knew!”

“I told you. I could trust no one with my discoveries, and frankly, I would not. They were mine. Besides, what would our beloved Elders have said, if ‘said’ is even appropriate for their endless silent communications! A fax would have come through directing me to bring Tessa to the Motherhouse
at once, and to—No, this discovery was mine by right. I had found Tessa.”

“No, you lie to yourself and everyone else,” said Yuri. “Everything that you are is because of the Talamasca.”

“That’s a contemptible thought! Have I given the Talamasca nothing? Besides, it was never my idea to hurt our own members! The doctors involved, yes, I agreed to this, though again I would never have proposed it.”

“You did kill Dr. Samuel Larkin?” asked Rowan in her low, expressionless voice, probing but not meaning to alarm him.

“Larkin, Larkin … Oh, I don’t know. I get confused. You see, my helpers had some very different notions from mine, about what was required to keep the whole thing secret. You might say I went along with the more daring aspects of the plan. In truth, I can’t imagine simply killing another human being.”

He glared at Ash, accusingly.

“And your helpers, their names?” asked Michael. His tone was not unlike Rowan’s, low-key, entirely pragmatic. “The men in New Orleans, Norgan and Stolov, you invited those men to share these secrets?”

“No, of course not,” declared Gordon. “They weren’t really members, any more than Yuri here was a member. They were merely investigators for us, couriers, that kind of thing. But by that time it had … it had gotten out of hand, perhaps. I can’t say. I only know my friends, my confidants, they felt they could control those men with secrets and money. That’s what it’s always about, corruption—secrets and money. But let’s get away from all that. What matters here is the discovery itself. That is what is pure and what redeems everything.”

“It redeems nothing!” said Yuri. “For gain you took your knowledge! A common traitor, looting the archives for personal gain.”

“Nothing could be farther from the truth,” declared Gordon.

“Yuri, let him go on,” said Michael quietly. Gordon calmed himself with remarkable will, appealing to Yuri again in a manner that infuriated Yuri.

“How can you think that my goals were other than spiritual?” asked Gordon. “I, who have grown up in the shadow of Glastonbury Tor, who all his life has been devoted to esoteric knowledge, only for the light it brings into our souls?”

“It was spiritual gain, perhaps,” said Yuri, “but it was gain, personal gain. And that is your crime.”

“You try my patience,” said Gordon. “Perhaps you should be sent from this room. Perhaps I should say nothing more….”

“Tell your story,” said Ash calmly. “I’m growing impatient.”

Gordon stopped, gazed at the table, one eyebrow raised, as if to say he need not settle for this ultimatum. He looked at Ash coldly.

“How did you make the connection?” asked Rowan. “Between all of this and the Mayfair witches?”

“I saw a connection at once. It had to do with the circle of stones. I had always known the original tale of Suzanne, the first Mayfair, the witch of the Highlands who had called up a devil in the circle of stones. And I had read Peter van Abel’s description of that ghost and how it pursued him, and taunted him, and evinced a will far stronger than any human haunt.

“The account of Peter van Abel was the first record of the Mayfair witches which Aaron translated, and it was to me, naturally, that he came with many questions about the old Latin. Aaron was always coming to me in those days for assistance.”

“How unfortunate for him,” said Yuri.

“Naturally it occurred to me, what if this Lasher were the soul of another species of being seeking to reincarnate? How well it fitted the whole mystery! And Aaron had only lately written from America that the Mayfair family faced its darkest hour when the ghost who would be made flesh was threatening to come through.

“Was this the soul of a giant wanting its second life? At last my discoveries had become too momentous. I had to share them. I had to bring into this those I trusted.”

“But not Stolov and Norgan.”

“No! My friends … my friends were of an entirely different ilk. But you’re confusing me. Stolov and Norgan weren’t involved then. No. Let me continue.”

“But they were in the Talamasca, these friends,” said Rowan.

“I will tell you nothing of them except that they were … they were young men in whom I believed.”

“You brought these friends here, to the tower?”

“Indeed not,” said Stuart. “I’m not that much of a fool. Tessa I revealed to them, but in a spot chosen by me for the purpose, in the ruin of Glastonbury Abbey, on the very spot where the skeleton of the seven-foot giant had been unearthed, only to be later reinterred.

“It was a sentimental thing, my taking her there, to stand over the grave of one of her own. And there I allowed her to be worshiped by those whom I trusted to help with my work. They had no idea that her permanent abode was less than a mile away. They were never to know.

“But they were dedicated and enterprising. They suggested the very first scientific tests. They helped me obtain with a syringe the first blood from Tessa, which was sent to various laboratories for anonymous analysis. And then we had the first firm proof that Tessa was not human! Enzymes, chromosomes, it was all quite beyond me. But they understood it.”

“They were doctors?” Rowan asked.

“No. Only very brilliant young men.” A shadow passed over his face, and he glanced viciously at Yuri.

Yes, your acolytes, Yuri thought. But he said nothing. If he interrupted again, it would be to kill Gordon.

“Everything was so different at that point! There were no plots to have people killed. But then, so much more was to happen.”

“Go on,” said Michael.

“My next step was obvious! To return to the cellars, to all the abandoned folklore, and research only those saints of exceedingly great size. And what should I come upon but a pile of hagiography—manuscripts saved from destruction at the time of Henry VIII’s ghastly suppression of the monasteries,
and dumped in our archives along with thousands of other such texts.

“And … And among these treasures was a carton marked by some long-dead secretary or clerk: ‘Lives of the Scottish Saints.’ And the hastily scribbled subtitle: ‘Giants’!

“At once I happened upon a later copy of an early work by a monk at Lindisfarne, writing in the 700s, who told the tale of St. Ashlar, a saint of such magic and power that he had appeared among the Highlanders in two different and separate eras, having been returned by God to earth, as was the Prophet Isaiah, and who was destined, according to legend, to return again and again.”

Yuri looked at Ash, but Ash said nothing. Yuri couldn’t even remember whether Gordon had ever understood Ash’s name. But Gordon was already staring at Ash, and then said quickly:

“Could this be the very personage for whom you were named? Could it be that you know of this saint yourself, through your remembrances or those you heard from others, assuming you have known others like yourself?” Gordon’s eyes blazed.

Ash didn’t answer. The silence this time was stony. Something changed again in Ash’s face. Was it pure hatred that he felt for Gordon?

Gordon at once resumed his account, his shoulders hunched and his hands working now in his excitement.

“I was overcome with enthusiasm when I read that St. Ashlar had been a giant of a being, standing perhaps seven feet tall, that St. Ashlar had come from a pagan race whom he himself had helped to exterminate—”

“Get on with it,” said Ash softly. “How did you connect this with the Mayfair witches? How did men come to die as the result?”

“All right,” said Gordon patiently, “but you will perhaps grant this dying man one request.”

“Perhaps not,” said Ash. “But what is it?”

“You will tell me whether or not these tales are actually known to you, whether you yourself have remembrances of these early times?”

Ash made a gesture that Gordon should continue.

“Ah, you are cruel, my friend,” said Gordon.

Ash was becoming deeply angry. It was plain to see. His full black hair and smooth, almost innocent mouth rendered his expression all the more menacing. He was like an angel gathering its anger. He did not respond to Gordon’s words.

“You brought home these tales to Tessa?” asked Rowan.

“Yes,” said Gordon, ripping his eyes off Ash finally and looking to her. A little false smile came over his mouth as he continued—as if to say, Now we will answer the question of the pretty lady in the first row.

“I did bring the tale home to Tessa; over supper, as always, I told her of my reading. And the history of this very saint, she knew! Ashlar, one of her own people, and a great leader, a king among them, who had converted to Christianity, betraying his own kind. I was triumphant. Now I had this name to track through history.

“And the following morning I was back at the archives and hard at work. And then, and then … came my momentous discovery, that for which other scholars of the Talamasca would give their eyeteeth, if only they knew.”

He paused, glancing from one face to another, and even to Yuri finally, his smile full of pride.

“This was a book, a codex of vellum, such as I had never seen in my long life of scholarship! And never dreamed that I would see ‘St. Ashlar,’ that was the name carved on the cover of the wood box which contained it. ‘St. Ashlar.’ That was the name of the saint that leapt from the dust and the shadows as I went along the shelves with my electric torch.”

Another pause.

“And beneath that name,” said Gordon, again looking from one to the other to enlarge the drama. “Beneath, in runic script, were the words, ‘History of the Taltos of Britain!’ and in Latin: ‘Giants in the Earth!’ As Tessa was to confirm for me that very night with a simple nod of her head, I had hit upon the crucial word itself.

“Taltos. ‘That is what we are,’ she said.

“At once I left the tower. I drove back to the Mother-house. I went down into the cellar. Other records I had always examined within the house, in the libraries or
wherever I chose. When has such scholarship ever attracted anyone’s notice? But
this
I had to possess.”

He rose, resting his knuckles on the table. He looked at Ash, as if Ash would move to stop him. Ash’s face was dark, and some imperceptible change had rendered it utterly cold.

Gordon drew back, turned, and then went directly to a big carved cabinet against the wall, and took out of it a large rectangular box.