Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 3)

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 pr

essed 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.