Taltos

Thirty

WHAT WAS IT like in the cave, I wondered. The voices of hell I had no desire to hear, but what about the singing of heaven?

I thought it over, and then decided to pass by. I had a long journey ahead of me. It was too early for rest. I wanted to be away from here.

I was about to set off and go around this part of the slope, when a voice called to me.

It was a woman’s voice, very soft and seemingly without a source, and I heard it say:

“Ashlar, I’ve been waiting for you.” I turned, looking this way and that. The darkness was unnerving. The Little People, I thought, one of their women, determined to seduce me. Again I determined to be on my way, but the call came again, soft as a kiss:

“Ashlar, King of Donnelaith, I am waiting for you.”

I looked at the little hovel, with its lights flickering in the dimness, and there I saw a woman standing. Her hair was red, and her skin very pale. She was human, and a witch, and she carried the very faint scent of a witch, which could mean, but might not, that she had the blood of the Taltos in her.

I should have gone on. I knew it. Witches were always trouble. But this woman was very beautiful and in the shadows my eyes played tricks on me, so that she looked somewhat like our lost Janet.

As she came towards me, I saw that she had Janet’s severe green eyes and straight nose, and a mouth that might have been carved from marble. She had the same small and very round breasts, and a long graceful neck. Add to this her beautiful red hair, which has ever been a lure and a delight to the Taltos.

“What do you want of me?” I said.

“Come lie with me,” she said. “Come into my house. I invite you.”

“You’re a fool,” I said. “You know what I am. I lie with you and you’ll die.”

“No,” she said. “Not I.” And she laughed, as so many witches had before her. “I shall bear the giant by you.”

I shook my head. “Go your way, and be thankful I’m not easily tempted. You’re beautiful. Another Taltos might help himself. Who is there to protect you?”

“Come,” she said. “Come into my house.” She drew closer, and in the few feeble rays of light that broke through the branches, the long, very golden light of the last of the day, I saw her beautiful white teeth, and how her breasts looked beneath her fine lace blouse, and above her painfully tight leather girdle.

Well, it wouldn’t hurt just to lie with her, just to put my lips on her breasts, I thought. But then. She is a witch. Why do I allow myself to even think of this?

“Ashlar,” she said, “we all know your tale. We know you are the king who betrayed your kind. Don’t you want to ask the spirits of the cave how you might be forgiven?”

“Forgiven? Only Christ can forgive me my sins, child,” I said. “I’m going.”

“What power has Christ to change the curse that Janet has laid upon you?”

“Don’t taunt me anymore,” I said. I wanted her. And the angrier I became, the Jess I cared about her.

“Come with me,” she said. “Drink the brew that I have by the fire, and then go into the cave, and you will see the spirits who know all things, King Ashlar.”

She came up to the horse, and laid her hand on mine, and I felt the desire rising in me. She had a witch’s penetrating eyes; and the soul of Janet seemed to look out of them.

I had not even made up my mind when she’d helped me from my horse, and we were walking together through the thick bracken and elderberry.

The little hut was a rank and frightening place! It had no windows. Above the fire, a kettle hung on a long skewer. But the bed was clean, and laid with skillfully embroidered linen.

“Fit for a king,” she said.

I looked about, and I saw a dark open doorway opposite that by which we’d come in.

“That is the secret way to the cave,” she said. She kissed my hand suddenly, and pulling me down onto the bed, she went to the kettle and filled a crude earthen cup with the broth inside it.

“Drink it, Your Majesty,” she said. “And the spirits of the cave will see you and hear you.”

Or I will see them and hear them, I thought, for God only knows what she had put in it-the herbs and oils which made witches mad, and likely to dance like Taltos under the moon. I knew their tricks.

“Drink, it’s sweet,” she said.

“Yes,” I replied. “I can smell the honey.”

And while I was looking into the cup and resolving not to take a drop, I saw her smile, and as I smiled back, I realized I was lifting the cup, and suddenly I drank a deep swallow of it. I closed my eyes.

“What if?” I whispered. “What if there is magic in it?” I was faintly amused and already dreaming.

“Now lie with me,” she said.

“For your sake, no,” I replied, but she was taking off my sword and I let her do it. Getting up long enough only to bolt her door, I fell back on the bed and pushed her down beneath me. I dragged her blouse loose from her breasts, and thought I would weep at the mere sight of them. Ah, the Taltos milk, how I wanted it. She was not a mother, this witch, she would have no milk, Taltos or human. But the breasts, the sweet breasts, how I wanted to suckle them, to bite the nipples and pull at them, and lick at them with my tongue.

Well, that won’t do her any harm, I thought, and when she is moist and hot with desire, I’ll place my fingers between her hidden hairy lips and make her shiver.

At once I began to suckle her. I began to kiss her and nuzzle against her. Her skin was firm and young and smelled young. And I loved the sound of her soft sighs, and the way her white belly felt to my cheek, and the way her nether hair looked, when I pulled down her skirt, and found it red, like the hair of her head, flaming and softly curly.

“Beautiful, beautiful witch,” I whispered.

“Take me, King Ashlar,” she said.

I sucked hard on her breast, letting my cock suffer, thinking, no, I will not kill her. She is a fool, but she does not deserve to die for it. But she pulled my cock between her legs, she pressed its tip against her hair, and quite suddenly, as many a male has done, I decided that if she really wanted it so, I would do as she asked of me.

I came in her hard, with as little care as I would have had for a Taltos, riding her, and loving it. She flushed and wept and cried out to spirits whose names I didn’t know.

Immediately it was over. Sleepily she looked at me from the pillow, a triumphant smile on her lips. “Drink,” she said, “and go into the cave.” And she closed her eyes to sleep.

I downed the rest of the cup. Why not? I had gone this far. What if there was something in that remote darkness, one last secret my own land of Donnelaith had to give me? God knew the future held trials, pain, and probably disillusionment.

I climbed off the bed, put my sword back on, buckling everything properly so that I was ready should I meet with trouble, and then, taking a crude lump of wax with a wick, which she kept at hand, I lighted the wick, and I entered the cave by this secret doorway.

I went up and up in the darkness, feeling my way along the earthen wall, and finally I came to a cool and open place, and from there, very far off, I could see a bit of light stealing in from the outside world. I was above the cave’s main entrance.

I went on up. The light went before me. With a start, I came to a halt. I saw skulls gazing back at me. Rows and rows of skulls! Some of them so old they were no more than powder.

This had been a burial place, I reasoned, of those people that save only the heads of the dead, and believe that the spirits will talk through those heads, if properly addressed.

I told myself not to be foolishly frightened. At the same time I felt curiously weakened.

“It is the broth you drank,” I whispered. “Sit down and rest.”

And I did, leaning against the wall to my left, and looking into the big chamber, with its many masks of death grinning back at me.

The crude candle rolled out of my hand, but did not go out. It came to rest in the mud, and when I tried to reach for it, I couldn’t.

Then slowly I looked up and I saw my lost Janet.

She was coming towards me through the chamber of the skulls, moving slowly, as if she were not real, but a figure in a dream.

“But I am awake,” I said aloud.

I saw her nod, and smile. She stepped before the feeble little candle.

She wore the same rose-colored robe that she had the day they had burnt her, and then I saw to my horror that the silk had been eaten away by fire, and that her white skin showed through the jagged tears in it. And her long blond hair, it was burnt off and blackened on the ends, and ashes smudged her cheeks and her bare feet and her hands. Yet she was there, alive, and near to me.

“What is it, Janet?” I said. “What would you say to me now?”

“Ah, but what do you say to me, my beloved King? I followed you from the great circle in the southland up to Donnelaith and you destroyed me.”

“Don’t curse me, fair spirit,” I said. I climbed to my knees. “Give me that which will help all of us! I sought the path of love. It was the path to ruin.”

A change came over her face, a look of puzzlement and then awareness.

She lost her simple smile, and taking my hand, she spoke these words as if they were our secret.

“Would you find another paradise, my lord?” she asked. “Would you build another monument such as you left on the plain for all time? Or would you rather find a dance so simple and full of grace that all the peoples of the world could do it?”

“The dance, Janet, I would. And ours would be one great living circle.”

“And would you make a song so sweet that no man or woman of any breed could ever resist it?”

“Yes,” I said. “And sing we would, forever.”

Her face brightened and her lips parted. And with a look of faint amazement, she spoke again.

“Then take the curse I give you.”

I began to cry.

She gestured for me to be still, but with patience. Then she spoke this poem or song in the soft, rapid voice of the Taltos:

Your quest is doomed, your path is long,

Your winter just beginning.

These bitter times shall fade to myth

And memory lose its meaning

But when at last her arms you see,

Outstretched in bold forgiveness,

Shrink not from what the earth would do

When rain and winds do till it.

The seed shall sprout, the leaves unfurl,

The boughs shall give forth blossoms,

That once the nettles tried to kill, and

Strong men sought to trample.

The dance, the circle, and the song,

Shall be the key to heaven,

As ways that once the mighty scorned

Shall be their final blessing.

The cave grew dim, the little candle was dying, and with a subtle farewell gesture of her hand, she smiled again, and disappeared completely.

It seemed the words she’d spoken were carved in my mind as if engraved on the flat stones of the circle. And I saw them, and fixed them for all time, even as the last reverberation of her voice left me.

The cave was dark. I cried out, and groped in vain for the candle. But quickly climbing to my feet, I saw that my beacon was the fire burning in the little hut far back down the tunnel by which I’d entered.

Wiping at my eyes, overcome with love for Janet and a terrible confusion of sweetness and pain, I hurried into the small warm room and saw the red-haired witch there, on her pillow.

For one moment it was Janet! And not this gentle spirit who had just looked at me with loving eyes, and spoken verses that promised some remission.

It was the burnt one, the suffering and dying woman, her hair full of small flames, her bones smoldering. In agony she arched her back and tried to reach for me. And as I cried out and reached to snatch her from her own flames, it was the witch again, the red-haired one who had brought me into her bed and given me the potion.

Dead, white, quiet forever in death, the blood staining her gathered skirts, her little hut a tomb, her fire a vigil light.

I made the Sign of the Cross. I ran out of the place.

But nowhere in the dark wood could I find my horse, and within moments I heard the laughter of the Little People.

I was at my wits’ end, frightened by the vision, uttering prayers and curses. Fiercely I turned on them, challenging them to come out, to fight, and was in a moment surrounded. With my sword I struck down two and put the others to flight, but not before they had torn and dragged from me my green tunic, ripped away my leather girdle, and stolen my few belongings. My horse, too, they had taken.

A vagabond with nothing left to me but a sword, I did not go after them.

I made for the high road by instinct, and by the stars, which a Taltos can always do, and as the moon rose, I was walking south away from my homeland.

I didn’t look back on Donnelaith.

I did go on to the summerland, as it was called, to Glastonbury, and I did stand on the sacred hill where Joseph had planted the hawthorn. I washed my hands in Chalice Well. I drank from it. I crossed Europe to find Pope Gregory in the ruins of Rome, I did go on to Byzantium, and finally to the Holy Land.

But long before my journey took me even to Pope Gregory’s palace amid the squalid ruins of Rome’s great pagan monuments, my quest had changed, really. I was not a priest anymore. I was a wanderer, a seeker, a scholar.

I could tell you a thousand stories of those times, including the tale of how I finally came to know the Fathers of the Talamasca. But I cannot claim to know their history. I know of them what you know, and what has been confirmed now that Gordon and his cohorts have been discovered.

In Europe I saw Taltos now and then, both women and men. I thought that I always would. That it would always be a simple thing, sooner or later, to find one of my own kind and to talk for the night by a friendly fire of the lost land, of the plain, of the things we all remembered.

There is one last bit of intelligence I wish to communicate to you.

In the year 1228, I finally returned to Donnelaith. It had been too long since I had laid eyes on a single Taltos. I was beginning to feel a fear on this account, and Janet’s curse and her poetry were ever in my mind.

I came as a lone Scotsman wandering through the land, eager to talk to the bards of the Highlands about their old stories and legends.

My heart broke when I saw that the old Saxon church was gone and a great cathedral now stood upon the very spot, at the entrance of a great market town.

I had hoped to see the old church. But who could not be impressed by this mighty structure, and the great glowering castle of the Earls of Donnelaith that guarded the whole valley?

Bending my back, and pulling my hood up high to disguise my height, I leaned on my cane as I went down to give thanks that my tower still stood in the glen, along with many of the stone towers built by my people.

I cried tears of gratitude again when I discovered the circle of stones, far from the ramparts, standing as it always had in the high grass, imperishable emblems of the dancers who had once gathered there.

The great shock came, however, when I entered the cathedral and, dipping my hand into the water fount, looked up to see the stained-glass window of St. Ashlar.

There was the very image of myself in the glass, clothed in a priest’s robes, with long flowing hair such as I had worn in those days, and peering down at my own true self with dark eyes so like my own they frightened me. Stunned, I read the prayer inscribed in Latin.

St. Ashlar Beloved of Christ

And the Holy Virgin Mary

Who will come again

Heal the sick

Comfort the afflicted

Ease the pangs

Of those who must die

Save us

From everlasting darkness

Drive out the demons from the valley.

Be our guide

Into the Light.

For a long time I was overcome with tears. I could not understand how this could have happened. Remembering to play the cripple still, I went to the high altar to say my prayers, and then to the tavern.

There I paid the bard to play all the old songs he knew, and none of them were familiar to me. The Pict language had died out. No one knew the writing on the crosses in the churchyard.

But this saint, what could the man tell me about him, I asked.

Was I truly Scots, the bard asked.

Had I never heard of the great pagan King Ashlar of the Picts, who had converted this entire valley to Christianity?

Had I never heard of the magic spring through which he worked his miracles? I had only to go down the hill to see it.

Ashlar the Great had built the first Christian church on this spot, in the year 586, and then set out for Rome on his first pilgrimage, being murdered by brigands before he had even left the valley.

Within the shrine his holy relics lay, the remnants of his bloody cloak, his leather belt, his crucifix, and a letter to the saint himself from none other than St. Columba. In the scriptorium I might see a psalter which Ashlar himself had written in the style of the great monastery at Iona.

“Ah, I understand it all,” I said. “But what is the meaning of this strange prayer, and the words ‘who will come again’?”

“Ah, that, well now, that’s a story. Go to Mass tomorrow morning and look well at the priest who celebrates. You will see a young man of immense height, almost as tall as yourself, and such men are not so uncommon here. But this one is Ashlar come again, they say, and they tell the most fantastic story of his birth, how he came from his mother speaking and singing, and ready to serve God, seeing visions of the Great Saint and the Holy Battle of Donnelaith and the pagan witch Janet burnt up in the fire as the town converted in spite of her.”

“This is true?” I asked, in quiet awe.

How could it be? A wild Taltos, born to humans who had no idea they carried the seed in their blood? No. It could not have been. What humans could make the Taltos together? It must have been a hybrid, sired by some mysterious giant who had come in the night and coupled with a woman cursed with the witches’ gifts, leaving her with his monster offspring.

“It has happened three times before in our history,” said the bard. “Sometimes the mother does not even know she’s with child, other times she is in her third or her fourth month. No one knows when the creature inside her shall start to grow and become the image of the saint, come again to his people.”

“And who were the fathers of these children?”

“Upstanding men of the Clan of Donnelaith, that’s who they were, for St. Ashlar was the founder of their family. But you know there are so many strange tales in these woods. Each clan has its secrets. We’re not to speak of it here, but now and then such a giant child is born who knows nothing of the Saint. I have seen one of these with my own eyes, standing a head taller than his father moments after he left his mother to die at the hearthside. A frantic thing, crying in fear, and possessed of no visions from God, but wailing for the pagan circle of stones! Poor soul. They called it a witch, a monster. And do you know what they do with such creatures?”

“They burn them.”

“Yes,” came his answer. “It’s a terrible thing to see. Especially if the poor creature is a woman. For then she is judged to be the devil’s child, without trial, for she cannot possibly be Ashlar. But these are the Highlands, and our ways have always been very mysterious.”

“Have you yourself ever laid eyes on the female thing?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Never. But there are some who say they have known those who have seen it. There is talk among the sorcerers, and those who cling to the pagan ways. People dream that they will bring the female and the male together. But we should not speak of these things. We suffer those witches to live because now and then they can cure. But no one believes their stories, or thinks them proper for the ears of Christian people.”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “I can well imagine.” I thanked him.

I did not wait for morning Mass to see the strange, tall priest.

I caught his scent as soon as I approached the rectory, and when he came to the door, having caught mine, we stood staring at one another. I rose to my full height, and of course he had done nothing to disguise his own. We merely stood there, facing one another.

In him I saw the old gentleness, the eyes almost timid, and the lips soft, and the skin as fresh and free of blemish as that of a baby. Had he really been born of two human beings, two powerful witches perhaps? Did he believe his destiny?

Born remembering, yes, born knowing, yes, and thank God for him it had been the right time that he remembered-and the right battle, and the right place. And now he followed the old profession they had marked for us hundreds of years ago.

He came towards me. He wanted to speak. Perhaps he could not believe his eyes, that he was looking upon one exactly like him.

“Father,” I asked in Latin, so that he was most likely to answer, “was it really from a human mother and father you came?”

“How else?” he asked, quite clearly terrified. “Go if you will to my parents themselves. Ask them.” He grew pale, and was trembling.

“Father,” I said, “where is your like among women?”

“There is no such thing!” he declared. But now he could scarcely keep himself from running away from me. “Brother, where have you come from?” he asked. “Here, seek God’s forgiveness for your sins, whatever they are.”

“You have never seen a woman of our kind?”

He shook his head. “Brother, I am the chosen of God,” he explained. “The chosen of St. Ashlar.” He bowed his head, humbly, and I saw a blush come to his cheeks, for obviously he’d committed a sin of pride in announcing this.

“Farewell, then,” I said. And I left him.

I left the town and I went again to the stones; I sang an old song, letting myself rock back and forth in the wind, and then I made for the forest.

Dawn was just rising behind me when I climbed the wooded hills to find the old cave. It was a desolate spot, dark as it had been five hundred years before, with no sign now of the witch’s hovel.

In the early light, cold and bitter as that of a winter’s eve, I heard a voice call me.

“Ashlar!”

I turned around and I looked at the dark woods. “Ashlar the cursed, I see you!”

“It’s you, Aiken Drumm,” I cried. And then I heard his mean laughter. Ah, the Little People were there, garbed in green so that they would blend with the leaves and the bracken. I saw their cruel little faces.

“There’s no tall woman here for you, Ashlar,” cried Aiken Drumm. “Nor will there ever be. No men of your ilk but a mewling priest born of witches, who falls to his knees when he hears our pipes. Here! Come. Take a little bride, a sweet morsel of wrinkled flesh, and see what you beget! And be grateful for what God gives you.”

They had begun to beat their drums. I heard the whining of their song, discordant, ghastly, yet strangely familiar. Then came the pipes. It was the old songs we had sung, the songs we taught them!

“Who knows, Ashlar the cursed?” he cried out. “But your daughter by one of us this morn might be a female! Come with us; we have wee women aplenty to amuse you. Think, a daughter, Your Royal Majesty! And once again the tall people would rule the hills!”

I turned and ran through the trees, not stopping till I had cleared the pass and come once more to the high road.

Of course Aiken Drumm spoke the truth. I had found no female of my kind in all of Scotland. And that was what I’d come to seek.

And what I would seek for another millennium.

I did not believe then, on that cold morning, that I would never lay eyes again upon a young or fertile female Taltos. Oh, how many times in the early centuries had I seen my female counterparts and turned away from them. Cautious, withdrawn, I would not have fathered a young Taltos to suffer the confusion of this strange world for all the sweet embraces of the lost land.

And now where were they, these fragrant darlings?

The old, the white of hair, the sweet of breath, the scentless, these I had seen many a time and would see again-creatures wild and lost, or wrapped in a sorceress’s dreams, they had given me only chaste kisses.

In dark city streets once I caught the powerful scent, only to be maddened, unable ever to find the soft folds of hot and secret flesh from which it emanated.

Many a human witch I’ve lured to bed, sometimes warning her of the dangers of my embrace, and sometimes not, when I believed her strong, and able to bear my offspring.

Across the world I’ve gone, by every means, to track the mysterious ageless woman of remarkable height, with memories of long ago, who greets men who come to her with sweet smiles and never bears their children.

She is human or she is not there at all.

I had come too late, or to the wrong place, or plague took the beauty many years ago. War laid waste that town. Or no one knows the story.

Would it always be so?

Tales abound of giants in the earth, of the tall, the fair, the gifted.

Surely they are not all gone! What became of those who fled the glen? Are no wild female Taltos born into the world of human parents?

Surely somewhere, in the deep forest of Scotland or the jungles of Peru, or the snowy wastes of Russia, there lives a family of Taltos, a clan, in its warm and well-defended tower. The woman and the man have their books, their memories to share, their games to play, their bed in which to kiss and play, though the act of coitus must, as always, be approached with reverence.

My people can’t be gone.

The world is huge. The world is endless. Surely I am not the last. Surely that has not been the meaning of Janet’s terrible words, that I should wander through time, mateless forever.

Now you know my story.

I could tell many tales. I could tell of my journeys through many lands, my years in various occupations; I could tell of the few male Taltos I met over the years, of the stories I heard of our lost people who had once lived in this or that fabled village.

The story you tell is the story you choose to tell.

And this is the story we share, Rowan and Michael.

You know now how the clan of Donnelaith came into being. You know how the blood of the Taltos came to be in the blood of humans. You know the tale of the first woman ever burnt in the beautiful valley. And the sad account of the place to which the Taltos brought such misery, not once, but again and again, if all our stories are history.

Janet, Lasher, Suzanne, her descendants, even to Emaleth.

And you see now that when you raised your gun, when you lifted it, Rowan, and you fired the shots that brought down this child, the girl who had given you her milk, it was no small act of which you need ever be ashamed, but destiny.

You have saved us both. You have saved us all perhaps. You have saved me from the most terrible dilemma I could ever know, and one which I may be not meant to know.

Whatever the case, don’t weep for Emaleth. Don’t weep for a race of strange, soft-eyed people, long ago driven from the earth by a stronger species. This is the way of the earth, and we are both of it.

What other strange, unnamed creatures live within the cities and jungles of our planet? I have glimpsed many things. I have heard many stories. The rain and wind till the earth, to use Janet’s words. What next shall spring from some hidden garden?

Could we now live together, the Taltos, the human, in the same world? How would such be possible? This is a world where human races battle endlessly, where people of one faith still slaughter people of another. Religious wars rage from Sri Lanka to Bosnia, from Jerusalem to American cities and towns where Christians still, in the name of Jesus Christ, bring death in his name to their enemies, to their own, even to little children.

Tribe, race, clan, family.

Deep within us all are the seeds of hate for what is different. We do not have to be taught these things. We have to be taught not to give in to them! They are in our blood; but in our minds is the charity and the love to overcome them.

And how would my gentle people fare today, if they did come back, as foolish now as they were then, unable to meet the ferocity of men, yet frightening even the most innocent humans with their bold eroticism? Would we choose tropical islands on which to play our sensuous games, to do our dances and fall into our spells of dancing and singing?

Or would ours be a realm of electronic pastimes, of computers, films, games of virtual reality, or sublime mathematical puzzles-studies suited to our minds, with their love of detail and their inability to sustain irrational states such as wrath or hatred? Would we fall in love with quantum physics the way we once fell in love with weaving? I can see our kind, up night and day, tracing the paths of particles through magnetic fields on computer screens! Who knows what advances we might make, given those toys to preoccupy us?

My brain is twice the size of the human brain. I do not age by any known clock. My capacity to learn modern science and modern medicine cannot be imagined.

And what if there rose among us but one ambitious male or female, one Lasher, if you will, who would the supremacy of the race restore, what then might happen? Within the space of one night, a pair of Taltos could breed a battalion of adults, ready to invade the citadels of human power, ready to destroy the weapons which humans know how to use so much better, ready to take the food, the drink, the resources of this brimming world, and deny it to those less gentle, less kind, less patient, in retribution for their eons of bloody dominance.

Of course, I do not wish to learn these things.

I have not spent my centuries studying the physical world. Or the uses of power. But when I choose to score some victory for myself-this company you see around you-the world falls back from me as if its obstacles were made of paper. My empire, my world-it is made of toys and money. But how much more easily it could be made of medicines to quiet the human male, to dilute the testosterone in his veins, and silence his battle cries forever.

And imagine, if you will, a Taltos with true zeal. Not a dreamer who has spent his brief years in misted lands nourished on pagan poetry, but a visionary who, true to the very principles of Christ, decided that violence should be annihilated, that peace on earth was worth any sacrifice.

Imagine the legions of newborns who could be committed to this cause, the armies bred to preach love in every hamlet and vale and stamp out those, quite literally, who spoke against it.

What am I finally? A repository for genes that could make the world crumble? And what are you, my Mayfair witches-have you carried those same genes down through the centuries so that we may finally end the Kingdom of Christ with our sons and our daughters?

The Bible names this one, does it not? The beast, the demon, the Antichrist.

Who has the courage for such glory? Foolish old poets who live in towers still, and dream of rituals on Glastonbury Tor to make the world new again.

And even for that mad old man, that doddering fool, was murder not the first requisite of his vision?

I have shed blood. It is on my hands now for vengeance’s sake, a pathetic way to heal a wound, but one to which we turn again and again in our wretchedness. The Talamasca is whole again. Not worth the price, but done. And our secrets are safe for the present.

We are friends, you and I, I pray, and we will never hurt each other. I can reach for your hands in the dark. You can call out to me, and I’ll answer.

But what if something new could happen? Something wholly new? I think I see it, I think I imagine…. But then it escapes me.

I don’t have the answer.

I know I shall never trouble your red-haired witch, Mona. I shall never trouble any of your powerful women. Many centuries have passed since lust or hope has tricked me into that adventure.

I am alone, and if I am cursed, I’ve forgotten it.

I like my empire of small, beautiful things. I like the playthings that I offer to the world. The dolls of a thousand faces are my children.

In a small way they are my dance, my circle, my song. Emblems of eternal play, the work perhaps of heaven.

Thirty-one

AND THE DREAM repeats itself. She climbs out of bed, runs down the stairs. “Emaleth!” The shovel is under the tree. Who would ever bother to move it?

She digs and digs, and there is her girl, with the long slack hair and the big blue eyes. “Mother!”

“Come on, my darling.”

They’re down in the hole together. Rowan holds her, rocking her. “Oh, I’m so sorry I killed you.”

“It’s all right, Mother dear,” she says.

“It was a war,” Michael says. “And in a war, people are killed, and then afterwards …”

She woke, gasping.

The room was quiet beneath a faint drone of heat from the small vents along the floor. Michael slept beside her, his knuckles touching her hip as she sat there, hands clasped to her mouth, looking down at him.

No, don’t wake him. Don’t put him through the misery again. But she knew.

When all the talk was over and done with, when they’d had their dinner and their long walk through the snowy streets, when they’d talked till dawn and breakfasted and talked some more and vowed their eternal friendship, she knew. She should never never have killed her girl. There was no reason for it.

How could that doe-eyed creature, who had comforted her so, in that kindly voice, milk spilling from her breasts, hhhmmm, the taste of the milk, how could that trembling creature have hurt anyone?

What logic had made her lift the gun, what logic had made her pull the trigger? Child of rape, child of aberration, child of nightmare. But child still….

She climbed out of the bed, finding her slippers in the dark, and reaching for a long white negligee on the chair, another one of these strange garments which filled her suitcase, full of the perfume of another woman.

Killed her, killed her, killed her, this tender and trusting thing, full of knowledge of long-ago lands, of valley and glen and plains and who knew what mysteries? Her comfort in the dark, when she’d been tied to the bed. My Emaleth.

A pale white window was hung in the darkness at the far end of the hallway, a great rectangle of glowing night sky, light spilling on the long path of colored marble.

To that light she moved, the negligee ballooning out, her feet making a soft skittering tap on the floor, her hand out for the button of the elevator.

Take me down, down, down to the dolls. Take me out of here. If I look from that window, I’ll jump. I’ll open the glass, and I’ll look out over the endless lights of the largest city in the world, and I’ll climb up and put my arms out, and then I’ll drop down into the ice-cold darkness.

Down, down, down with you, my daughter.

All the images of his tale went through her mind, the sonorous timbre of his voice, his gentle eyes as he spoke. And she is now debris beneath the roots of the oak, something erased from the world without a jot of ink upon a piece of paper, without a hymn sung.

The doors closed. The wind sounded in the shaft, that faint whistling, like wind in mountains perhaps, and as the cab descended, a howling as if she were in a giant chimney. She wanted to crumple and fall on the floor, to go limp without will or purpose or fight anymore, just to sink into the darkness.

No more words to say, no more thoughts. No more to know or to learn. I should have taken her hand, I should have held her. So easy it would have been to keep her, tender, against my breasts, my darling, my Emaleth.

And all those dreams that sent you out the door with him-of cells within cells the like of which no human had ever seen, of secrets gleaned from every layer and fiber gently plied from willing hands, willing arms, willing lips pressed to sterile glass, and droplets of blood given with the smallest frown, of fluids and maps and schemes and X rays made without a pinch of hurt, all to tell a new tale, a new miracle, a new beginning-all that, with her, would have been possible! A drowsy feminine thing that would not have hurt any mortal being, so easy to control, so easy to care for.

The doors opened. The dolls have been waiting. The gold light of the city comes through a hundred high windows, caught and suspended in squares and rectangles of gleaming glass, and the dolls, the dolls wait and watch with hands uplifted. Tiny mouths ever on the verge of greeting. Little fingers hovering in the stillness.

Silently she walked through the dolls, corridor after corridor of dolls, eyes like pitch-black holes in space, or gleaming buttons in a glint of light. Dolls are quiet; dolls are patient; dolls are attentive.

We’ve come back to the Bru, the queen of the dolls, the big cold bisque princess with her almond eyes and her cheeks so rosy and round, her eyebrows caught forever in that quizzical look, trying vainly to understand what? The endless parade of all these moving beings who look at her?

Come to life. Just for a moment come to life. Be mine. Be warm. Be alive.

Out from under the tree in the dark, walk again as if death were a part of the tale you could have erased, as if those fatal moments could be omitted forever. No stumbling in this wilderness. No false steps.

Hold you in my arms.

Her hands were splayed out on the cold glass of the case. Her forehead pressed against it. The light made two crescent moons in her eyes. The long mohair tresses lay flat and heavy against the silk of her dress, as if they were moist with the dampness of the earth, the dampness of the grave perhaps.

Where was the key? Had he worn it on a chain around his neck? She couldn’t remember. She longed to open the door, to take the doll in her arms. To hold it tight for one moment against her breast.

What happens when grief is this mad, when grief has blotted out all other thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams, wonder?

Finally exhaustion comes. The body says return to sleep, lie down now to rest, not torment. Nothing’s changed. The dolls stare as the dolls will always stare. And the earth eats at what is buried inside of it as it always has. But a kind weariness overtakes the soul, and it seems possible, just possible, to wait to weep, to wait to suffer, to wait to die and lie down with them, to have it finished, because only then is all guilt gone, washed away, when you are as dead as they are.

He was there. He was standing before the glass. You couldn’t mistake him for anyone else. There is no one else that tall, and even if it weren’t for that, she knew his face too well now, the line of his profile.

He’d heard her in the dark, walking back down the corridor. But he didn’t move. He was just leaning there against the window frame and watching the light gather outside, watching the blackness fade and turn to milk and the stars dissolve as though melted in it.

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.