Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 3)

Marklin had often thought that he must have seemed to Tommy to be one of the characters in those fantastic novels--Marklin himself hated fiction--and that Tommy had gone from an outsider to a featured player in a science fiction drama upon meeting Marklin. Tommy's loyalty had never, for even one moment, been in question. Indeed, during the years when Marklin had wanted his freedom, Tommy had been too close, always on hand, always at Marklin's service. Marklin had invented tasks for his friend, simply to give himself space to breathe. Tommy had never been unhappy.

Marklin was getting cold, but he didn't mind it.

Glastonbury would never be anything for him but a sacred place, though he believed almost nothing, literally, that was connected with it.

He would, each time he came to Wearyall Hill, with the private devotion of a monk, envision the noble Joseph of Arimathea planting his staff upon this spot. It did not matter to him that the present Holy Thorn had been grown from a scion of the ancient tree, now gone, any more than other specific detail mattered. He could in these places feel an excitement appropriate to his purpose, a religious renewal as it were, which strengthened him and sent him back into the world more ruthless than ever.

Ruthlessness. That was what was needed now, and Stuart had failed to see it.

Yes, things had gone dreadfully wrong, no doubt of it. Men had been sacrificed whose innocence and substance surely demanded a greater justice. But this was not entirely Marklin's fault. And the lesson to learn was that ultimately none of it mattered.

The time has come for me to instruct my teacher, Marklin thought.

Miles from the Motherhouse, in this open place, our meeting safely explained by our own customs of so many years, we will come together again as one. Nothing has been lost. Stuart must be given moral permission to profit by what has happened.

Tommy had arrived.

Tommy was always the second. Marklin watched Tommy's antique roadster slowing as it came down High Street. He watched as it found a parking place, and as Tommy shut the door, failing to lock it as always, and started his climb up the hill.

What if Stuart failed to show? What if he was nowhere near? What if he had truly abandoned his followers? Impossible.

Stuart was at the well. He drank from it when he came, he would drink from it before he left. His pilgrimages here were as rigid as those of an ancient Druid or Christian monk. From shrine to shrine to shrine traveled Stuart.

Such habits of his teacher had always aroused a tenderness in Marklin, as had Stuart's words. Stuart had "consecrated" them to a dark life of penetrating "the mystique and the myth, in order to lay hands upon the horror and the beauty at the core."

It seemed tolerable poetry both then and now. Only Stuart had to be reminded of it, Stuart had to be convinced in metaphors and lofty sentiments.

Tommy had almost reached the tree. He took his last steps carefully, for it was easy to lose one's footing in the slippery mud, and fall. Marklin had done it once, years ago, when they'd first begun their pilgrimages. This had meant a night at the George and Pilgrims Hotel while his clothes were thoroughly cleaned.

Not bad that it had happened; it had been a marvelous evening. Stuart had stayed down with him. They'd spent the night talking together, even though Marklin had been confined to a borrowed robe and slippers and a small, charming bedchamber, and both had longed in vain to climb the tor in the midnight, and commune with the spirit of the sleeping king.

Of course, Marklin had never for a moment in his life believed that King Arthur slept beneath Glastonbury Tor. If he had believed it, he would have taken a shovel and started digging.

Stuart had come late in life to his conviction that myth was only interesting when a truth lay behind it, and that one could find that truth, and even the physical evidence of it.

Scholars, thought Marklin, theirs is an inevitable flaw; words and deeds become the same to them. That was at the very basis of the confusion now. Stuart, at eighty-seven years of age, had had perhaps his first excursion into reality.

Reality and blood were intermingled.

Tommy at last took his place at Marklin's side. He blew on his cold fingers and then reached into his pockets for his gloves--a classic Tommy routine, to have walked up the hill without them, to have forgotten his gloves were even there until he saw Marklin's leather gloves, the very ones he'd long ago given Marklin.

"Where is Stuart?" Tommy asked. "Yes, gloves." He stared at Marklin, eyes enormous through his round, thick, rimless glasses, red hair clipped neatly short so that he might have been a lawyer or a banker. "Gloves, yes. Where is he?"

Marklin had been about to say that Stuart had not come, when in fact he saw Stuart beginning the very last leg of the ascent from his car, which he had brought as close as permissible up Wearyall Hill. Unlike Stuart to have done this.

But Stuart seemed otherwise unchanged--tall, narrow in his familiar greatcoat, with the cashmere scarf around his neck and streaming out behind him in the wind, his gaunt face looking as if it were carved out of wood. His gray hair resembled, as always, a jay's crest. It seemed in this last decade he had scarcely changed at all.

He looked right at Marklin as he drew near. And Marklin realized that he himself was trembling. Tommy stepped aside. Stuart stopped some six feet from both of them, his hands clenched, his thin face anguished as he confronted the two young men.

"You killed Aaron!" Stuart cried. "You, both of you. You killed Aaron. How in the name of God could you have done such a thing?"

Marklin was speechless, all his confidence and plans deserting him suddenly. He tried to stop the tremor in his hands. He knew if he spoke his voice would be frail and without any authority. He could not bear for Stuart to be angry, or disappointed in any way.

"Dear God, what have you done, both of you!" Stuart ranted. "And what have I done that I set this scheme into motion? Dear God, the blame is mine!"

Marklin swallowed, but kept his silence.

"You, Tommy, how could you have been a party to this!" Stuart continued. "And Mark. Mark, you, the very author of all of it."

"Stuart, you must hear me out!" Marklin declared before he could stop himself.

"Hear you out?" Stuart drew closer, his hands shoved into his coat pockets. "Hear you out, should I? Let me ask you a question, my brilliant young friend, my finest, my bravest hope! What's to stop you now from killing me, as you've done with Aaron and Yuri Stefano?"

"Stuart, it was for you that I did it," Marklin insisted. "If you would only listen, you'll understand. These are but flowers of the seeds you planted when we began this together. Aaron had to be silenced. That he had not reported back, that he had not come home to the Motherhouse itself, was pure luck, Stuart! He might have any day, and Yuri Stefano would also have come. His visit to Donnelaith was a fluke. He might have come straight home from the airport."

"You speak of circumstance, you speak of detail!" Stuart said, taking yet another step towards them.

Tommy stood quiet, seemingly emotionless, his red hair tousled by the wind, eyes squinting behind his glasses. He watched Stuart steadily, his shoulder very close to Marklin's arm.

Stuart was beside himself.

"You speak of expediency, but you don't speak of life and death, my pupil," he insisted. "How could you do it! How could you bring an end to Aaron's life!"

And here Stuart's voice failed him, and the grief displayed itself, monstrous as the rage. "I would destroy you, Mark, if I could," said Stuart. "But I cannot do such things, and that is perhaps why I did not think that you could! But you've amazed me, Mark."

"Stuart, it was worth any sacrifice. What is sacrifice if it is not moral sacrifice!"

This horrified Stuart, but what else could Marklin do, other than take the plunge? Tommy really ought to say something, he thought, but he knew that when Tommy spoke, he would stand firm.

"I put an end to those who could have stopped us," said Mark. "That is all there is to it, Stuart. You grieve for Aaron because you knew him."

"Don't be a fool," said Stuart bitterly. "I grieve for innocent blood shed, I grieve for monstrous stupidity! Oh yes, that is what it was. Do you think the death of such a man will go unavenged within the Order? You think you know the Talamasca, you think with your shrewd young mind you could size it up in a matter of a few years. But all you've done is to learn its organizational weaknesses. You could live all your life in the Talamasca and not know the Talamasca. Aaron was my brother! It was my brother you killed! You have failed me, Mark. You have failed Tommy. You have failed yourself! You have failed Tessa."

"No," Mark said, "you don't speak the truth, and you know it. Look at me, Stuart, look into my eyes. You left it to me to bring Lasher here, you left it to me to step out of the library and plot everything. And to Tommy as well. Do you think this could have been orchestrated without us?"

"You miss a crucial point, don't you, Mark?" Stuart asked. "You failed. You did not rescue the Taltos and bring him here! Your soldiers were fools, and so it must be said of the general."

"Stuart, have patience with us," said Tommy. It was his usual matter-of-fact tone. "I knew the first day we spoke that this couldn't be accomplished without someone paying for it with his life."

"You never spoke such words to me, Tommy."

"Let me remind you," Tommy said in the same monotone manner, "you said that we were to render Yuri and Aaron powerless to interfere, and erase all evidence that the Taltos itself had been born into the Mayfair family. Now, how was this to be done except in the ways that we did it? Stuart, we have nothing to be ashamed of in our actions. What we seek makes these things utterly insignificant."

Marklin tried desperately to conceal his sigh of relief.

Stuart looked from Tommy to Marklin and then back again, and then out over the pale landscape of gently rolling green hills, and then up to the peak of Glastonbury Tor. He turned his back on them to face the tor, and he hung his head as if communing with some personal deity.

Marklin drew close, and he placed his hands very tentatively on Stuart's shoulders. He was far taller now than Stuart, and Stuart in old age had lost some of his earlier height. Marklin drew close to his ear.