Taltos

Sixteen

THEY’D BEEN ON the road over an hour, and it was almost dark, the sky clabbering with silvery clouds, and a drowsy look coming over the great expanses of rolling hills and bright green farmland, neatly cut into patterns as if the landscape were covered with a great patchwork quilt.

They made a pit stop in a little one-street village with several black and white half-timbered houses and a small, overgrown cemetery. The pub was more than inviting. It even had the proverbial dart board and a couple of men playing darts, and the smell of the beer was wonderful.

But this was hardly the time to stop for a drink, thought Michael.

He stepped outside, lit a fresh cigarette, and watched with quiet fascination the formal gentleness with which Ash guided his prisoner into the pub and inevitably towards the bathroom.

Across the street, Yuri stood at a phone booth, talking rapidly, having made his connection to the Motherhouse, apparently, and Rowan stood beside him, arms folded, watching the sky or something in it, Michael couldn’t be sure which. Yuri was upset again, wringing his right hand as he held the receiver with the left, nodding over and over again. It was plain that Rowan was listening to his words.

Michael leaned back against the plaster wall, and drew in on the smoke. It always amazed him how tiring it was to simply ride in a car.

Even this journey, with its agonizing suspense, was no different ultimately, and now that darkness had closed off the lovely countryside, he would grow more sleepy, he figured, no matter what was yet to come.

When Ash and his prisoner emerged from the pub, Gordon looked resentful and desperate. But obviously he’d been unable to solicit help, or had not dared to try.

Yuri hung up the phone. It was his turn to disappear into the pub now; he was still anxious, if not crazed. Rowan had been watching him attentively during the drive, that is, when she was not riveted to Ash.

Michael watched Ash as he returned Gordon to the backseat. He didn’t try to disguise the fact that he was staring. That seemed unnecessarily cumbersome. The thing about the tall man was this: he did not in any way appear hideous, as Yuri had averred. The beauty was there, and rather spectacular, but the hideousness? Michael couldn’t see it. He saw only a graceful frame, and easy, efficient movements that indicated both alertness and strength. The man’s reflexes were amazing. He’d proved that when Stuart Gordon had reached again for the lock of the door when they were stopped at a crossroads about a half hour back.

The man’s soft black hair reminded him all too much of Lasher; too silky, too fine, too much body to it, he didn’t know for certain. The white streaks added a kind of high luster to the whole figure. The face was far too big-boned to be feminine in any conventional sense, but it was delicate, the long nose redeemed perhaps by the fact that the eyes were so large and set so wide apart. The skin was mature skin and not baby-fine. But the real allure of the man was mixed up with his voice and his eyes. His voice could have talked you into anything, Michael thought, and the eyes were highly persuasive as well.

Both bordered on a childlike simplicity, but were not ultimately simple. The effect? The man seemed some sort of angelic being, infinitely wise and patient and yet resolved, without question, to murder Stuart Gordon exactly as he had said that he would.

Of course, Michael wasn’t assuming anything about the age of this creature. It was pretty hard not to think he was human, just different, unaccountably strange. Of course, Michael knew he wasn’t. He knew it by a hundred little details-the size of Ash’s knuckles, the curious way he widened his eyes now and then so that he looked awestruck, and above all perhaps by the absolute perfection of his mouth and teeth. The mouth was baby-soft, impossible for a man with that skin, really, or at least highly improbable, and the teeth were as white as some sort of flashing advertisement that had been shamelessly retouched.

Michael didn’t for a moment believe this creature was ancient, or that he was the great Saint Ashlar of the Donnelaith legends, the ancient king who had converted to Christianity in the last days of the Roman Empire in Britain, and allowed his pagan spouse, Janet, to be burnt at the stake.

But the grim tale he had believed when Julien had told it to him. And this was one of the many Ashlars, no doubt-one of the mighty Taltos from the glen-a being of the very same ilk as the one that Michael had slaughtered.

These things were not disputed by any part of his mind.

He had experienced too much for him to doubt, It was only that he couldn’t believe the tall, beautiful man was that old St. Ashlar himself. Perhaps he just didn’t want it to be so, for very good reasons that made sense within these elaborate frameworks which he’d now totally accepted.

Yes, you are living now with a whole series of completely new realities, he thought. Maybe this is why you’re taking it all calmly. You’ve seen a ghost; you’ve listened to him; you know he was there. He told you things you could have never manufactured or imagined. And you’ve seen Lasher and you’ve heard his long plea for sympathy, and that was also something completely unimaginable for you, something filled with new information and strange details that you can still remember with puzzlement, now that the misery you were feeling when Lasher told it is over, and Lasher lies buried under the tree.

Oh yeah, don’t forget, the burying of the body, dropping the head down in the hole beside it, and then finding the emerald, picking it up, and holding it in the dark while the decapitated body lay down there in the wet earth, ready to be covered up.

Perhaps you can become accustomed to anything, he figured. And he wondered if that was what had happened to Stuart Gordon. He had no doubt that Stuart Gordon was guilty, dreadfully and inexcusably guilty of everything. Yuri had no doubt. But how had the man managed to betray his values?

Michael had to admit he himself had always had a susceptibility to this very kind of Celtic darkness and mystery. His very love of Christmas had its roots in some irrational longing for rituals born in these isles, perhaps. And the tiny Christmas ornaments he had so lovingly collected over the years were all in some way emblematic of old Celtic gods, and a worship overlaid on pagan secrets.

His love of the houses he’d restored had brought him at times as close to this atmosphere of old secrets, old designs, and a dormant knowledge to be revealed as one could ever get in America.

He realized he understood Stuart Gordon in a way. And very soon the figure of Tessa would explain Gordon’s sacrifices and terrible mistakes, very clearly.

Whatever, Michael had been through so much that his calm now was only inevitable.

Yes, you’ve been through these things, and you’ve been used by them and battered by them, and now you stand here, by the village pub in this small, picture-postcard village, with its gently sloping stone street, and you think about all this without emotion-that you are with something that is not human, but is as intelligent as any human, and is soon to meet a female of its kind, an event of such enormous significance that no one really wants to touch upon it, perhaps only out of respect for the man who is supposed to die.

It’s hard to ride in a car for an hour with a man who is supposed to die.

He’d finished the cigarette. Yuri had just come out of the pub. They were ready to push off.

“You did reach the Motherhouse?” Michael asked quickly.

“Yes, and I reached more than one person. I made four different calls and reached four different individuals. If these four, my oldest and closest friends, are part of it, then I despair.”

Michael gave Yuri’s thin shoulder a squeeze. He followed Yuri to the car.

Another thought came to him, that he wasn’t going to think about Rowan and her reactions to the Taltos any more now than he had all the way down here, when a deep, instinctive possessiveness had almost caused him to demand that they stop the car, that Yuri climb in the front, so that he could sit by his wife.

No, he wasn’t going to give in to this. He couldn’t any way in the world know what Rowan was thinking or feeling as she looked at this strange creature. A witch he might be, by genetic profile, and perhaps by some peculiar heritage of which he knew nothing. But he wasn’t a mind reader. And he had been aware from the very first moments of their encounter with Ashlar that Rowan would probably not be harmed by making love to this strange creature, because now that she could not have children, she could not suffer the sort of terrible hemorrhage which had brought down Lasher’s Mayfair victims one by one.

As for Ash, if he was lusting after Rowan, he was keeping it a gentlemanly secret, but then the creature was driving towards a female of his species, who was perhaps one of the last female Taltos in the world.

And then there’s the immediate consideration, isn’t there, he thought as he slipped into the passenger seat and firmly shut the door. Are you going to stand by and let this giant of a man murder Stuart Gordon? You know perfectly well you can’t do that. You can’t watch somebody be murdered. That’s impossible. The only time you’ve ever done it, it happened so quick, with the crack of the gun, that you scarcely had time to breathe.

Of course, you have killed three people yourself. And this misguided bastard, this crazed man who claims to have a goddess under lock and key, has killed Aaron.

They were leaving the little village, which had all but disappeared into the gathering shadows. How tender, how manageable, how tame this landscape. At any other time he would have asked them to stop so that they could walk for a while along the road.

When he turned to the side, he was surprised to discover that Rowan had been watching him. That she was sitting to the side herself and had brought her leg up on the seat right behind him, apparently so that she could look at him. Of course her half-naked legs looked glorious, but so what? She had pulled her skirt down properly. It was no more than a fashionable flash of nylon-covered thigh.

He stretched out his arm along the old leather upholstery, and he laid his left hand on her shoulder, which she allowed, quietly looking at him with her immense and secretive gray eyes, and giving him something far more intimate than a smile.

He had avoided her the entire time they were in the village, and now he wondered why he had done that. Why? On impulse, he decided to do something rude and vulgar.

He leaned over, reaching out to cup the back of her head with his hand, and he kissed her quickly, and then settled back. She could have avoided it, but she didn’t. And when her lips had touched him, he had felt a sharp little pain inside, that now began to glow and to increase in intensity. Love you! Dear God, give it a chance again!

And no sooner had that reprimand come into his mind than he realized he wasn’t talking to her at all; he was talking to himself about her.

He settled back, looking out the windshield, watching the dark sky thicken and lose the last of its porcelain luster, and leaning his head to the side, he closed his eyes.

There was nothing stopping Rowan from falling madly in love with this being who could not wring monstrous babies from her, nothing but her marriage vows and her will.

And Michael realized he was not sure of either one. Perhaps he would never be sure again.

Within twenty minutes the light was gone. Their headlights forged through the darkness, and this might have been any highway, anywhere in the world.

Finally Gordon spoke up. The next road right, and left on the one immediately following.

The car turned off into the weald, into the high dark trees, a mixture of beech and oak it seemed, with even some light flowering fruit trees that he could not clearly see. The blossoms looked pink here and there in the headlights.

The second side road was unpaved. The woods grew thicker. Maybe this was the remnant of an ancient forest, the kind of grand, Druid-infested woods that had once covered all of England and Scotland, possibly all of Europe, the kind of forest that Julius Caesar had cleared away with ruthless conviction so that the gods of his enemies would either flee or die.

The moon was fairly bright. He could see a little bridge now as they drew closer, and then came another turn, and they were driving along the borders of a small and peaceful lake. Far across the water stood a tower, perhaps a Norman keep. It was a sight so romantic that surely the poets of the last century had gone mad for the place, he thought. Perhaps they had even built it, and it was one of those beautiful shams which were thrown up everywhere as the recent love for the Gothic transformed architecture and style worldwide.

But as they drew closer, as they swung round and came near to the tower, Michael saw it more clearly. And realized that it was a rounded Norman tower, rather large, with perhaps three stories rising to its battlements. The windows were lighted. The lower portion of the building was shrouded by trees.

Yes, that was exactly what it was, a Norman tower-he had seen many in his student years, wandering the tourists’ roads over all England. Perhaps on some summer sabbatical which he could no longer remember he had even seen this one.

It didn’t seem so. The lake, the giant tree to the left, all of this was too nearly perfect. Now he could see the foundations of a larger structure, wandering away in crumbling lumps and pieces, worn down by rain and wind, no doubt, and further blurred by mounds of wild ivy.

They drove through a thick copse of young oaks, losing track of the building altogether, and then emerged, surprisingly close to it, and Michael could see a couple of cars parked in front of it, and two tiny electric lights flanking a very large door.

All very civilized, it seemed, livable. But how marvelously preserved it was, unmarred by any visible modern addition. Ivy crawled over the rounded and mortared stone, up above the simple arch of the doorway.

No one spoke.

The driver stopped the car finally, in a small graveled clearing.

Michael at once got out and looked around. He could see a lush and wild English garden spreading towards the lake and towards the forest, banks of flowers just coming into bloom. He knew their dim shapes, but they had closed up in the darkness, and who knew what glory would be all around when the sun rose?

Were they going to be here when the sun rose?

An enormous larch tree stood between them and the tower, a tree that was surely one of the oldest Michael had ever seen.

He walked towards its venerable trunk, realizing that he was walking away from his wife. But he couldn’t do otherwise.

And when he finally stood under the tree’s great spreading branches, he looked up at the façade of the tower, and saw a lone figure in the third window. Small head and shoulders. A woman, her hair loose or covered with a veil, he couldn’t be certain.

For one moment the entire scene overwhelmed him-the dreamy white clouds, the high light of the moon, the tower itself in all its rough grandeur.

Though he could hear the crunch of the others coming, he didn’t step out of the way, or move at all. He wanted to stand here, to see this-this serene lake, to his right, water interrupted and framed now by the delicate fruit trees with their pale, fluttering flowers. Japanese plum, most likely, the very kind of tree that bloomed all over Berkeley, California, in the springtime, sometimes making the very light in the small streets a rosy pink.

He wanted to remember all this. He wanted never to forget it. Perhaps he was still weakened by jet lag, maybe even going predictably crazy like Yuri. He didn’t know. But this, this was some image that spoke of the entire venture, of its horrors and revelations-the high tower and the promise of a princess within it.

The driver had switched off the headlamps. The others were walking past him. Rowan stood at his side. He looked one more time across the lake and then at the enormous figure of Ash walking in front of him, Ash’s hand still clamped to Stuart Gordon, and Stuart Gordon walking as if he would soon collapse-an elderly gray-haired man, the tendons of his thin neck looking woefully vulnerable as he moved into the light of the doorway.

Yes, this was the quintessential moment, he thought, and it hit him rather like somebody slamming him with a boxing glove, that a female Taltos lived in this tower, like Rapunzel, and that Ash was going to kill the man he was guiding towards the door.

Maybe the memory of this moment-these images, this soft chilly night-maybe this was all he would salvage from this experience. It was a very real possibility.

Ash wrested the key with a firm but slow gesture from Stuart Gordon, and slipped the key into a large iron lock. The door opened with modern efficiency and they entered a lower hall, electrically heated and filled with large, comfortable furnishings, massive Renaissance Revival pieces with bulbous but beautifully carved legs, claws for feet, and tapestried fabrics, worn but still very pretty, and genuinely old.

Medieval paintings hung on the walls, many with the high imperishable gloss of true egg tempera. A suit of armor stood, covered with dust. And other treasures were heaped here and there in careless luxury. This was the den of a poetic man, a man in love with England’s past, and perhaps fatally alienated from the present.

A staircase came down into the room, on their left, following the curve of the wall as it descended. Light shone down from the room above and, for all Michael knew, from the room above that.

Ash let go of Stuart Gordon. He went to the foot of the stairs. He laid his right hand on the crude newel post and began to go up.

Rowan followed him immediately.

Stuart Gordon seemed not to realize that he was free.

“Don’t hurt her,” he cried suddenly, viciously, as though it was the only thing he could think of to say. “Don’t touch her without her permission!” he pleaded. The voice, issuing from the skeletal old face, seemed the last reservoir of his masculine power. “You hurt my treasure!” he said.

Ash stopped, looking at Gordon thoughtfully, and then again he started to climb.

They all followed, finally even Gordon, who pushed past Michael rudely, and then shoved Yuri out of his way. He caught up with Ash at the head of the stairway and disappeared out of Michael’s sight.

When they finally reached the top, they found themselves in another large room as simple as the one below it, its walls the walls of the tower, except for two small rooms, skillfully built of old wood, and roofed over-bathrooms perhaps, closets, Michael couldn’t tell. They seemed to melt back into the stone behind them. The great room had its share of soft couches and sagging old chairs, scattered standup lamps with parchment shades making distinct islands in the darkness, but the center was wonderfully bare. And a single real iron chandelier, a circle of melting candles, revealing a great pool of polished floor beneath it.

It took a moment for Michael to realize the room held another partially concealed figure. Yuri was already looking at this figure.

Across the circle from them, at the far end of the diameter, so to speak, sat a very tall woman at a stool, apparently working on a loom. One small gooseneck lamp illuminated her hands, but not her face. A small bit of her tapestry was revealed, and Michael could see that it was very intricate and full of muted color.

Ash stood stock-still, staring at her. The woman stared back. It was the long-haired woman Michael had seen at the window.

The others made no move. Gordon rushed towards her. “Tessa,” he said, “Tessa, I’m here, my darling.” The voice was speaking in a realm of its own, the others forgotten.

The woman rose, towering over the frail figure of Gordon as he embraced her. She yielded with a sweet, delicate sigh, her hands rising to gently touch Gordon’s thin shoulders. In spite of her height, she was so slight of build that she seemed the weaker one. With his arms around her, he brought her forward into the brighter light, into the circle.

There was something grim in Rowan’s expression. Yuri was enthralled. Ash’s face was unreadable. He merely watched as the woman came closer and closer and now stood beneath the chandelier, the light gleaming on the top of her head and on her forehead.

Perhaps on account of her sex, the woman’s height seemed truly monstrous.

Her face was perfectly round, flawless, rather like that of Ash, but not so long or deeply defined. Her mouth was tender and tiny, and her eyes, though big, were timid and without unusual color. Blue eyes, however, kind, and fringed, like those of Ash, with long, luxuriant lashes. A great mane of white hair grew back from her forehead, falling about her almost magically. It seemed motionless and soft, more a cloud than a mane, perhaps, and so fine that the light made the mass of it appear faintly transparent.

She wore a violet dress, beautifully smocked just beneath her breasts. The sleeves were gorgeously old-fashioned, gathered around the small of her upper arms and then ballooning to the cuffs that fitted tightly at the wrists.

Dim thoughts of Rapunzel came to Michael-or more truly of every speck of romance that he had ever read-a realm of fairy queens and princes of unambiguous power. As the woman drew near to Ash, Michael couldn’t help but see that her skin was so pale it was almost white. A swan of a princess she seemed, her cheeks firm and her mouth glistening slightly, and her lashes very vivid around her glowing blue eyes.

She frowned, which made a single pucker in her forehead, and seemed like a baby about to bawl.

“Taltos,” she whispered. But this was said without the slightest alarm. Indeed, she looked almost sad.

Yuri let out a tiny, faint gasp.

Gordon was transformed with astonishment, as if nothing had actually prepared him for this meeting to take place. He seemed for a moment almost young, eyes fired with love and with rapture.

“This is your female?” asked Ash softly. He was gazing at her, even smiling slightly, but he had not moved to greet her or touch her outstretched hand. He spoke slowly.

“This is the female for whom you murdered Aaron Lightner, for whom you tried to kill Yuri, the female to whom you would have brought the male Taltos at any cost?”

“What are you saying!” said Gordon in a timorous voice. “You dare to hurt her, either with words or actions, I’ll kill you.”

“I don’t think so,” said Ash. “My dearest,” he said to the woman, “can you understand me?”

“Yes,” she said softly, in a tiny bell of a voice. She shrugged and threw up her hands, almost in the manner of an ecstatic saint. “Taltos,” she said, and gave a small sad shake of her head, and frowned again with almost dreamy distress.

Had the doomed Emaleth been so fair and feminine?

With a shock, Michael saw Emaleth’s face collapse as the bullets struck it, saw the body fall over backwards! Was this why Rowan was crying, or was she merely tired and wondering, eyes watering slightly as she watched Ash looking down at the woman and the woman looking up. What must this be for her?

“Beautiful Tessa,” Ash said with a slight rise of his eyebrows.

“What’s wrong?” asked Gordon. “Something is wrong-for both of you. Tell me what’s wrong.” He moved closer, but stopped, obviously not willing to step between them. His voice was rich and sorrowful now. It had the quality of an orator, or of someone who knew how to affect his listeners. “Oh, God in heaven, this is not what I imagined-to meet here in this place, surrounded by those who can’t truly grasp the meaning.”

But he was too full of emotion for there to be any artifice in what he was saying or doing at all. His gestures were no longer hysterical. They were tragic.

Ash stood as still as ever, smiling at Tessa very deliberately, and then nodding with pleasure as her little mouth opened and expanded, and her cheeks grew small and plump with her own smile.

“You’re very beautiful,” Ash whispered, and then he raised his hand to his lips, and kissed his fingers and gently placed this kiss on her cheek.

She sighed, stretching her long neck and letting her hair tumble down her back, and then she reached out for him, and he took her in his arms. He kissed her, but there was no passion in it. Michael could see it.

Gordon came between them, circling Tessa’s waist with his left hand and gently drawing her back.

“Not here, I beg you. Oh, please, not as if it were in a common brothel.”

He let go of Tessa and approached Ash, hands clasped as if praying, peering up without fear now, caught in something more crucial to him even than his own survival.

“What is the place for the wedding of the Taltos?” he said reverently, voice rich and imploring. “What is the holiest place in England, where St. Michael’s line runs over the crest of the hill, and the ruined tower of the ancient Church of St. Michael is a sentinel still?”

Ash regarded him almost sadly, composed, merely listening, as the impassioned voice continued.

“Let me take you there, both of you, let me see the wedding of the Taltos on Glastonbury Tor!” His voice dropped low and the words came evenly, almost slowly. “If I see this, if I see the miracle of the birth there on the sacred mountain, in the place where Christ himself came to England-where old gods have fallen and new gods risen, where blood was shed in the defense of the sacred-if I see this, the birth of the offspring, full-grown and reaching out to embrace its parents, the very symbol of life itself, then it doesn’t matter whether I go on living, or whether I die.”

His hands had risen as if he held the sacred concept in them, and his voice had lost all its hysteria, and his eyes even were clear and almost soft.

Yuri watched with obvious suspicion.

Ash was the picture of patience, but for the first time Michael saw a deeper and darker emotion behind Ash’s eyes and even his smile.

“Then,” said Gordon, “I will have seen the thing that I was born to see. I will have witnessed the miracle of which poets sing and old men dream. A miracle as great as any ever made known to me from the time my eyes could see to read, and my ears could hear the tales told to me, and my tongue could form words that would express the strongest inclinations of my heart.

“Grant me these last precious moments, the time to travel there. It’s not far. Scarcely a quarter of an hour from here-a mere few minutes for us all. And on Glastonbury Tor, I will give her over to you, as a father would a daughter, my treasure, my beloved Tessa, to do what you both desire.”

He stopped, looking to Ash desperately still, and deeply saddened, as if behind these words were some complete acceptance of his own death.

He took no notice of Yuri’s plain though silent contempt.

Michael was marveling at the transformation in the old man, the sheer conviction.

“Glastonbury,” Stuart whispered. “I beg you. Not here.” And finally, he shook his head. “Not here,” he whispered, and then fell silent.

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!”