Taltos (69 page)

What did he think? That she’d come to seek him out?

She felt shattered inside, weak. Unable to reason what to do, needing perhaps to walk across the floor, to stand beside him and look down on the smoky gloom of early roofs and towers, on lights twinkling along hazy streets, and smoke rising and curling from a hundred stacks and chimneys.

She did this. She stood beside him. “We love each other now,” he said. “Don’t we?” His face was so sad. It hurt her. It was a fresh hurt, touching her right in the midst of the old pain, something
immediate that could bring the tears where before there had only been something as black and empty as horror.

“Yes, we do, we love each other,” she said. “With our whole hearts.”

“And we will have that,” he said. “Won’t we?”

“Yes, always. For as long as we live. We are friends and we will always be, and nothing, nothing will ever break the promises between us.”

“And I’ll know you’re there, it’s as simple as that.”

“And when you don’t want to be alone anymore, come. Come and be with us.”

He turned for the first time, as if he had not really wanted to look at her. The sky was paling so fast, the room just filling up and opening wide, and his face was weary and only slightly less than perfect.

One kiss, one chaste and silent kiss, and no more, just a tight clasp of fingers.

And then she was gone, drowsy, aching, glad of the day spilling down over the soft bed. Now I can sleep, daylight at last, now I can sleep, tumbling under the soft covers, next to Michael again.

I
T WAS TOO
cold to be out, but winter would not let go its hold upon New York. And if the little man wanted to meet at the Trattoria, so be it.

Ash didn’t mind the walk. He did not want to be alone in his lonely tower rooms, and he was fairly certain that Samuel was on his way, and could not be persuaded to return.

He enjoyed the crowds on Seventh Avenue rushing in the early dusk, bright shop windows full of lavishly colored Oriental porcelains, ornate clocks, bronze statues, and rugs of wool and silk—all the gift merchandise sold in this part of midtown. Couples were hurrying to dinner so that they might make the curtain at Carnegie Hall for a young violinist who was causing a worldwide sensation. Lines at the ticket office were long. The fancy boutiques had not yet closed; and though the snow fell in tiny little flakes, it could not possibly cover either asphalt or sidewalks due to the continuous thunder of human feet.

No, this is not a bad time to be walking. This is a bad time for trying to forget that you have just embraced your friends, Michael and Rowan, for the last time until you hear from them.

Of course they don’t know that that is the rule of the game, the gesture his heart and his pride would require, but more than likely, they would not have been surprised. They had spent four days, all told, with him. And he was as unsure
of their love now as he had been the very first moment in London when he had laid eyes on them.

No, he did not want to be alone. Only problem was, he should have dressed for anonymity and the freezing wind, but he had dressed for neither. People stared at a seven-foot-tall man with dark wavy hair who wore a violet silk blazer in such weather. And the scarf was yellow. How mad of him to have thrown on these decidedly private-realm clothes and then rushed out into the street wearing them.

But he had changed before Remmick gave him the news: Samuel had packed and gone; Samuel would meet him at the Trattoria. Samuel had left behind the bulldog, that it might be his New York dog, if Ash didn’t mind. (Why would Ash mind a dog that both drooled and snored, but then Remmick and the young Leslie undoubtedly would be the ones to endure the brunt of this. The young Leslie was now a permanent fixture in the tower offices and rooms, much to her glee.) Samuel would get another dog in and for England.

The Trattoria was already packed, he could see this through the glass, patrons shoulder to shoulder along its winding bar and at its innumerable little tables.

But there was Samuel, as promised, puffing on a small damp cigarette (he murdered them the way Michael did), and drinking whiskey from a heavy little glass, and watching for him.

Ash tapped on the window.

The little man took him in, head to toe, and shook his head. The little man himself was spruce in his new style, tweed with waistcoat, brand-new shirt, shoes shined like mirrors. There was even a pair of brown leather gloves lying like two ghost hands, all collapsed and mashed, on the table.

It was impossible to know what feelings were concealed behind the folds and wrinkles of Samuel’s flesh, but the neatness and style of the overall figure argued for something other than the bleary, drunken, grumbling melodrama of the last forty-eight hours.

That Michael had found Samuel so amusing was a blessing. Indeed, one night they had drunk each other under the
table, telling jokes, while Rowan and Ash had only smiled indulgently, to be left at last with the awful tension of knowing that if they went to bed more would be lost than gained—unless Ash thought of himself, and only himself entirely.

Not in Ash’s nature.

“Not in my nature to be alone, either,” he thought. There was a leather portmanteau beside Samuel’s glass. Leaving.

Ash pushed very gently past those entering and exiting, giving a little nod and a point of the finger to Samuel to let the harried doorman know he was expected.

The cold died away at once, and with the loud crash of voices and pots and pans, dishes and shuffling feet, there came the warm air like a fluid oozing around him. Inevitably heads turned, but the marvelous thing about any restaurant crowd in New York was that table partners were twice as animated as anywhere else, and always so seriously focused on each other. All meetings seemed crucial; courses devoured in a rush; faces evincing infatuation, if not with one’s partner, then certainly with the evening’s ever-quickening momentum.

Surely they saw the tall man in the outrageous violet silk take the chair opposite the smallest man in the place, a chunky little fellow in heavy clothes, but they saw it out of the corner of the eye, or with a movement of the neck swift enough to injure the spinal cord, and they did not miss a beat of their own conversations. The table was right before the front glass, but then people on the streets were even more skilled at secret observation than the people in the warm safety zone of the restaurant.

“Go ahead and say it,” said Ash under his breath. “You are leaving, you are going back to England.”

“You knew I would, I don’t want to be over here. I always think it’s going to be wonderful and then I get tired, and I have, to go home. I have to go back to the glen, before those fools from the Talamasca start invading it.”

“They won’t do that,” Ash said. “I hoped you’d stay for a little while.” He marveled at the control he managed to maintain over his own voice. “That we’d talk about things …”

“You cried when you said goodbye to your human friends, didn’t you?”

“Now, why do you ask me that?” said Ash. “You are determined that we part with cross words?”

“Why did you trust them, the two witches? Here, the waiter’s talking to you. Eat something.”

Ash pointed to something on the menu, the standard pasta he always ordered in such places, and waited for the man to disappear before resuming.

“If you hadn’t been drunk, Samuel, if you hadn’t seen everything through a tiresome haze, you would know the answer to that question.”

“Mayfair witches. I know what they are. Yuri told me all about them. Yuri talked in a fever a lot of the time. Ash, don’t be stupid again. Don’t expect these people to love you.”

“Your words don’t make sense,” said Ash. “They never did. They’re just a sort of noise I’ve grown used to hearing when I’m in your presence.”

The waiter set down the mineral water, the milk, the glasses.

“You’re out of sorts, Ash,” said Samuel, gesturing for another glass of whiskey, and it was pure whiskey, Ash could tell by the smell. “And it’s not my fault.” Samuel slumped back in the chair. “Look, my friend, I’m only trying to warn you. Let me put it this way, if you prefer. Don’t love those two.”

“You know, if you insist upon this lecture, I just may lose my temper.”

The little man laughed outright. It was a low, nimbly laugh, but the folds over his eyes even showed his sudden bemusement.

“Now that might keep me in New York another hour or two,” he said, “if I thought I was really going to see that.”

Ash didn’t respond. It was too terribly important not to say anything he didn’t mean, not now, not to Samuel, not to anyone. He had believed that all his long life, but periodically he was brutally reminded of it.

After a moment, he said:

“And who should I love?” It was said with only the softest
note of reproach. “I’ll be glad when you’re gone. I mean … I mean I’ll be glad when this unpleasant conversation is over.”

“Ash, you should never have drawn so close to them, never told them all you did. And then the gypsy, letting him just go back to the Talamasca.”

“Yuri? And what did you want me to do? How could I stop Yuri from going back to the Talamasca?”

“You could have lured him to New York, put him to work for you some way. He was a man with a broken life; but you sent him home to write volumes on what happened. Hell, he could have been your companion.”

“That was not right for him. He had to go home.”

“Of course it was right. And he was right for you—an outcast, a gypsy, the son of a whore.”

“Please don’t make your speech as offensive and vulgar as you possibly can. You frighten me. Look, it was Yuri’s choice. If he had not wanted to go back, he would have said so. His life was the Order. He had to go back, at least to heal all the wounds. And after that? He wouldn’t have been happy here in my world. Dolls are pure magic to those who love them and understand them. To others they are less than toys. Yuri is a man of coarse spiritual distinctions, not subtle ones.”

“That sounds good,” said Samuel, “but it’s stupid.” He watched the waiter set the fresh drink before him. “Your world is full of things that Yuri might have done. You could have turned him loose to build more parks, plant more trees, all these grandiose schemes of yours. What were you telling your witches, that you were going to build parks in the sky so that everyone could see what you see from your marble chambers? You could have kept that kid busy all his life, and you would have had his companionship—”

“I wish you would stop. This didn’t happen. It simply did not happen.”

“But what happened is that you want the friendship of those witches, a man and woman married to each other with a great clan around them, people who are
a priori
committed to a family way of living that is intensely human—”

“What can I do to make you stop?”

“Nothing. Drink the milk. I know you want it. You’re ashamed to drink it in front of me, afraid I might say something like ‘Ashlar, drink your milk!’ ”

“Which you now have, even though I have not touched the milk, you realize.”

“Ahh, this is the point. You love those two, the witches. And it is incumbent upon those two—as I see it—to forget all this, this nightmare of Taltos, and the glen, and murdering little fools who infiltrated the Talamasca. It is essential to the sanity of that man and woman that they go home and build the life the Mayfair family expects them to build. And I hate it when you love those who will only turn their backs on you, and those two have to do it.”

Ash didn’t answer.

“They are surrounded by hundreds of people for whom they must make this part of their lives a lie,” Samuel continued to expostulate. “They will want to forget you exist; they will not want the great realm of their day-to-day life lost in the glare of your presence.”

“I see.”

“I don’t like it when you suffer.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes! I like to open magazines and newspapers and read about your little corporate triumphs, and see your smiling face above flippant little lists of the world’s ten most eccentric billionaires, or New York’s most eligible bachelors. And now I know you will break your heart wondering if these witches are your true friends, if you can call them when your heart aches, if you can depend on them for the knowledge of yourself that every being requires—”

“Stay, please, Samuel.”

This put a silence to the lecture. The little man sighed. He drank some of the fresh drink, about half, and licked his heavy crooked lower lip with an amazingly pink tongue.

“Hell, Ash, I don’t want to.”

“I came when you called me, Samuel.”

“You regret that now?”

“I don’t think in that way. Besides, how could I regret it?”

“Forget it all, Ash. Seriously, forget it. Forget a Taltos came to the glen. Forget you know these witches. Forget you need anyone to love you for what you are. That’s impossible. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of what you will do now. The pattern’s all too familiar.”

“What pattern is that?” asked Ash quietly.

“You’ll destroy all this, the company, the corporation, the Toys Without Limit or Dolls for the Millions, whatever it’s called. You’ll sink into apathy. You’ll just let it go. You’ll walk out and far away, and the things you’ve built and the things you’ve made will just slowly fall apart without you. You’ve done it before. And then you’ll be lost, just the way I’m lost, and some cold winter evening, and why you always choose the dead of winter I don’t know, you’ll come to the glen again looking for me.”

“This is more important to me, Samuel,” he said. “It’s important for many reasons.”

“Parks, trees, gardens, children,” sang the little man.

Ash didn’t reply.

“Think about all those who depend on you, Ash,” said Samuel, continuing the same sermon for the same congregation. “Think of all these people who make and sell and buy and love the things you manufacture. That can substitute for sanity, I think, having other warm beings of intellect and feeling dependent upon us. You think I’m right?”

“It doesn’t substitute for sanity, Samuel,” said Ash. “It substitutes for happiness.”