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 thei
r 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....