Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(43)
Author: Anne Rice

“You stand on the sacred ground of Glastonbury,” Stuart had told them that day, when it all began. “Who is buried within this tor? Arthur himself, or only the nameless Celts who left us their coins, their weapons, the boats with which they traveled the seas that once made of this the isle of Avalon? We’ll never know. But there are secrets which we can know, and the implications of these secrets are so vast, so revolutionary, and so unprecedented that they are worth our allegiance to the Order, they are worth any sacrifice we must make. If this is not so, then we are liars.”

That Stuart now threatened to abandon Marklin and Tommy, that he had turned against them in his anger and revulsion, was something Marklin could have avoided. It had not been necessary to reveal every part of their plan to Stuart. And Marklin realized this now, that his refusal to assume full leadership himself had caused the rift. Stuart had Tessa…. Stuart had made his wishes clear. But Stuart should never have been told what had really happened. That had been the error, and Marklin had only his own immaturity to blame, that he had loved Stuart so much he had felt compelled to tell Stuart everything.

He would get Stuart back. Stuart had agreed to come today. He was no doubt already here, visiting Chalice Well as he always did before coming to Wearyall Hill and leading them up on the tor itself. Marklin knew how much Stuart loved him. This breach would be repaired with an appeal from the soul, with poetry and with honest fervor.

That his own life would be long, that this was only the first of his dark adventures, Marklin had no doubt. His would be the keys to the tabernacle, the map to the treasure, the formula for the magic potion. He was utterly certain of it. But for this first plan to end in defeat would be a moral disaster. He would go on, of course, but his youth had been a chain of unbroken successes, and this too must succeed so that his ascent would lose no momentum.

I must win, I must always win. I must never attempt anything that I cannot do with utter success. This had always been Marklin’s personal vow. He had never failed to keep it.

As for Tommy, Tommy was faithful to the vows the three had taken, faithful to the concept and the person of Tessa. There was no worry with Tommy. Deeply involved in his computer research, his precise chronologies and charts, Tommy was in no danger of disaffection for the very reasons that made him valuable; he was not the one to see the whole scheme, or to question the validity of it.

In a very basic sense, Tommy never changed.

Tommy was the same now as the boy whom Marklin had come to love in childhood—collector, collator, an archive unto himself, an appreciator and an investigator. Tommy without Marklin had never existed, as far as Marklin knew. They had first laid eyes, upon each other at the age of twelve, in boarding school in America. Tommy’s room had been filled with fossils, maps, animal bones, computer equipment of the most esoteric sort, and a vast collection of paperback science fiction.

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.