Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(7)
Author: Anne Rice

They crossed Fifth Avenue and sped towards the river. The storm was a soundless torrent of lovely tiny flakes. They melted as they struck the dark windows and the wet sidewalks. They came down through the dark faceless buildings as if into a deep mountain pass.

Taltos.

For a moment the joy went out of his world—the joy of his accomplishments, and his dreams. In his mind’s eye he saw the pretty young woman, the dollmaker from California, in her crushed violet silk dress. He saw her in his mind dead on a bed, with blood all around her, making her dress dark.

Of course it wouldn’t happen. He never let it happen anymore, hadn’t in so long he could scarce remember what it was like to wrap his arms around a soft female body, scarce remember the taste of the milk from a mother’s breast.

But he thought of the bed, and the blood, and the girl dead and cold, and her eyelids turning blue, as well as the flesh beneath her fingernails, and finally even her face. He pictured this because if he didn’t, he would picture too many other things. The sting of this kept him chastened, kept him within bounds.

“Oh, what does it matter? Male. And dead.”

Only now did he realize that he would see Samuel! He and Samuel would be together. Now that was something that flooded him with happiness, or would if he let it. And he had become a master of letting the floods of happiness come when they would.

He hadn’t seen Samuel in five years, or was it more? He had to think. Of course they had talked on the phone. As the wires and phones themselves improved, they had talked often. But he hadn’t actually seen Samuel.

In those days there had only been a little white in his hair. God, was it growing so fast? But of course Samuel had seen the few white hairs and remarked on it. And Ash had said, “It will go away.”

For one moment the veil lifted, the great protective shield which so often saved him from unendurable pain.

He saw the glen, the smoke rising; he heard the awful ring and clatter of swords, saw the figures rushing towards the forest. Smoke rising from the brochs and from the wheel houses … Impossible that it could have happened!

The weapons changed; the rules changed. But massacres were otherwise the same. He had lived on this continent now some seventy-five years, returning to it always within a month or two of leaving, for many reasons, and no small part of it was that he did not want to be near the flames, the smoke, the agony and terrible rain of war.

The memory of the glen wasn’t leaving him. Other memories were connected—of green fields, wildflowers, hundreds upon hundreds of tiny blue wildflowers. On the river he rode in a small wooden craft, and the soldiers stood on the high battlements; ah, what these creatures did, piling one rock upon another to make great mountains of their own! But what were his own monuments, the great sarsens which hundreds dragged across the plain to make the circle?

The cave, he saw that too again, as if a dozen vivid photographs were shuffled suddenly before him, and one moment he was running down the cliff, slipping, nearly falling, and at another Samuel stood there, saying,

“Let’s leave here, Ash. Why do you come here? What is there to see or to learn?”

He saw the Taltos with the white hair.

“The wise ones, the good ones, the knowing ones,” they had called them. They had not said “old.” It would never have been a word they would have used in those times, when the springs of the island were warm, and the fruit fell from the trees. Even when they’d come to the glen, they had never said the word “old,” but everyone knew they had lived the longest. Those with the white hair knew the longest stories….

“Go up now and listen to the story.”

On the island, you could pick which of the white-haired ones you wanted, because they themselves would not choose, and you sat there listening to the chosen one sing, or talk, or say the verses, telling the deepest things that he could remember There had been a white-haired woman who sang in a high, sweet voice, her eyes always fixed on the sea. And he had loved to listen to her.

And how long, he thought, how many decades would it be before his own hair was completely white?

Why, it might be very soon, for all he knew. Time itself had meant nothing then. And the white-haired females were so few, because the birthing made them wither young. No one talked about that either, but everybody knew it.

The white-haired males had been vigorous, amorous, prodigious eaters, and ready makers of predictions. But the white-haired woman had been frail. That is what birth had done to her.

Awful to remember these things, so suddenly, so clearly. Was there perhaps another magic secret to the white hair? That it made you remember from the beginning? No, it wasn’t that, it was only that in all the years of never knowing how long, he had imagined that he would greet death with both arms, and now he did not feel that way.

His car had crossed the river, and was speeding towards the airport. It was big and heavy and hugged the slippery asphalt. It held steady against the beating wind.

On the memories tumbled. He’d been old when the horsemen had ridden down upon the plain. He’d been old when he saw the Romans on the battlements of the Antonine Wall, when he’d looked down from Columba’s door on the high cliffs of Iona.

Wars. Why did they never go out of his memory, but wait there in all their full glory, right along with the sweet recollections of those he’d loved, of the dancing in the glen, of the music? The riders coming down upon the grassland, a dark mass spreading out as if it were ink upon a peaceful painting, and then the low roar just reaching their ears, and the sight of the smoke rising in endless clouds from their horses. He awoke with a start.

The little phone was ringing for him. He grasped it hard and pulled it from its black hook.

“Mr. Ash?”

“Yes, Remmick?’’

“I thought you’d like to know, sir. At Claridge’s, they are familiar with your friend Samuel. They have arranged his usual suite for him, second floor, corner, with the fireplace. They are waiting for you. And, Mr. Ash, they don’t know his surname either. Seems he doesn’t use it.”

“Thank you, Remmick. Say a little prayer. The weather’s very volatile and dangerous, I think.”

He hung up before Remmick could begin the conventional warnings. Should never have said such a thing, he thought.

But that was really amazing—their knowing Samuel at Claridge’s. Imagine their having gotten used to Samuel. The last time Ash had seen Samuel, Samuel’s red hair had been matted and shaggy, and his face so deeply wrinkled that his eyes were no longer fully visible, but flashed now and then in random light, like broken amber in the soft, mottled flesh. In those days Samuel had dressed in rags and carried his pistol in his belt, rather like a little pirate, and people had veered out of his path on the street.