Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(33)
Author: Anne Rice

“Lost knowledge …” Those words had been given to him so often; he could not remember a time when he didn’t know them.

This was an agony, really, this return, this refusal to move forward without a bitter consultation with his full soul.

Soul. You have no soul, or so they’ve told you.

Through the dim glass he watched young Leslie slip into the passenger seat in front of him. He was relieved that he had the rear compartment entirely to himself—that two cars had been found to carry him and his little entourage northward. It would have been unendurable now to sit close to a human, to hear human chatter, to smell a robust female human, so sweet and so young.

Scotland. Smell the forests; smell the sea in the wind.

The car moved away smoothly. An experienced driver. He was thankful. He could not have been tossed and pushed from side to side clear to Donnelaith. For a moment he saw the glaring reflection of the lights behind him, the bodyguards following as they always did.

A terrible premonition gripped him. Why put himself through this ordeal? Why go to Donnelaith? Why climb the mountain and visit these shrines of his past again? He closed his eyes and saw for a second the brilliant red hair of the little witch whom Yuri loved as foolishly as a boy. He saw her hard green eyes looking back at him out of the picture, mocking her little-girl hair with its bright colored ribbon. Yuri, you are a fool.

The car gained speed.

He could not see anything through the darkly tinted glass. Lamentable. Downright maddening. In the States, his own cars had untinted windows. Privacy had never been a concern to him. But to see the world in its natural colors, that was something he needed the way he needed air and water.

Ah, but maybe he would sleep a little, and without dreams.

A voice startled him—the young woman’s, coming from the overhead speaker.

“Mr. Ash, I’ve called the Inn; they’re prepared for our arrival. Do you want to stop for anything now?”

“No, I want only to get there, Leslie. Snuggle with the blanket and the pillow. It is a long way.”

He closed his eyes. But sleep didn’t come to him. This was one of those journeys when he would feel every minute, and every bump in the road.

So why not think of the gypsy again—his thin, dark face, the flash of his teeth against his lip, so white and perfect, the teeth of modern men. Rich gypsy, perhaps. Rich witch, that had come plain to him in the conversation. In his mind’s eye he reached for the button of her white blouse in the photograph. He pulled it open to see her br**sts. He gave them pink ni**les, and he touched the blue veins beneath the skin which had to be there. He sighed and let a low whistle come from his teeth and turned his head to the side.

The desire was so painful that he forced it back, let it go. Then he saw the gypsy again. He saw his long dark arm thrown up over the pillow. He smelled again the woods and the vale clinging to the gypsy. “Yuri,” he whispered in his fantasy, and he turned the young man over and bent to kiss his mouth.

This too was a fiery furnace. He sat up and forward and put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.

“Music, Ash,” he said quietly, and then, settling back once more, his head against the window, his eyes large and struggling to see through the horrid dark glass, he began to sing to himself in a wee voice, a tiny falsetto, a song no one might understand but Samuel, and even Samuel might not know for sure.

It was 2:00 a.m. when he told the driver to stop. He could not continue. Beyond the dark glass lurked all the world that he had come here to see. He could wait no longer.

“We’re almost there, sir.”

“I know we are. You’ll find the town only a few miles ahead. You’re to go there directly. Settle into the Inn and wait for me. Now call the guards in the car behind us. Tell them to follow you in. I must be alone now here.”

He didn’t wait for the inevitable arguments or protests.

He stepped out of the car, slamming the door before the driver could come to his assistance, and with a little goodwill wave of his hand, he walked fast over the edge of the road and into the deep, cold forest.

The wind was not strong now. The moon, snared in clouds, gave an intermittent and filmy light. He found himself enveloped by the scents of the Scotch pines, the dark cold earth beneath his feet, the brave blades of early spring grass crushed beneath his shoe, the faint scent of new flowers.

The barks of the trees felt good beneath his fingers.

For a long time he moved on and on, in the dark, sometimes stumbling, sometimes catching hold of a thick tree trunk to steady himself. He didn’t stop to catch his breath. He knew this slope. He knew the stars above, even though the clouds tried to obscure them.

Indeed, the starry heavens brought him a strange, painful emotion. When at last he stopped, it was upon a high crest. His long legs ached a little, as legs should perhaps. But being in this sacred place, this place which meant more to him than any other bit of land in the world, he could remember a time when his limbs would not have ached, when he could have hurried up the hill in big, loping steps.

No matter. What was a little pain? It gave him an insight into the pain of others. And humans suffered such terrible pain. Think of the gypsy asleep in his warm bed, dreaming of his witch. And pain was pain, whether physical or mental. Not the wisest of men or women or Taltos would ever know which was worse—the pain of the heart or the pain of the flesh.

At last he turned and sought even higher ground, climbing steadily up the slope even when it seemed impossibly steep, often reaching for a grip upon branches and firm rock to help himself.

The wind came up, but not strongly. His hands and feet were cold, but it was not a coldness he couldn’t endure. Indeed, coldness had always refreshed him.

And indeed, thanks to Remmick he had his fur-collared coat; thanks to himself he had his warm wool clothes; thanks to heaven, perhaps, the pain in his legs grew no worse, only a little more annoying.

The ground crumbled a little. He could have fallen here, but the trees were like tall balusters keeping him safe, letting him go on and on rapidly.

At last he turned and found the path he had known would be here, winding up between two gently rising slopes where the trees were old, untouched, perhaps spared by all intruders for centuries.

The path descended into a small vale covered with sharp stones that hurt his feet, and made him more than once lose his balance. Then up again he went, thinking the slope quite impossible except for the fact that he’d climbed it before and he knew that his will would overcome the evidence of his senses.