Taltos Read online

  Ah, but she loved its tiny fingers. She loved its lace stockings and its silk petticoats, very old, very faded, apt to tear at her touch.

  Ash stood very still, looking down at her, face rested, almost annoyingly handsome, streaked hair brushed to a luster, hands a little steeple beneath his lips. His suit was white silk today, very baggy, fashionable, probably Italian, she honestly didn't know. The shirt was black silk, and the tie white. Rather like a decorative rendition of a gangster, a tall, willowy man of mystery, with enormous gold cuff links, and preposterously beautiful black-and-white wing-tip shoes.

  "What does the doll make you feel?" he asked innocently, as if he really wanted to know.

  "It has virtue to it," she whispered, frightened of her voice being louder than his. She placed it in his hands.

  "Virtue," he repeated. He turned the doll and looked at her, and made a few very quick and natural gestures of grooming her, moving her hair, adjusting the ruffles of her dress. And then he lifted her and tenderly kissed her and lowered her slowly, gazing down at her again. "Virtue," he said. He looked at Rowan. "But what does it make you feel?"

  "Sad," she said, and turned away, placing her hand on the case beside her, looking at the German doll, infinitely more natural, sitting inside in a small wooden chair. MEIN LEIBLING, said the card. She was far less decorative and overdone. She was not the coquette of anyone's imagination, yet she was radiant, and as perfect as the Bru in her own way.

  "Sad?" he asked.

  "Sad for a kind of femininity that I've lost or never had. I don't regret it, but the feeling is sadness, sadness for something perhaps I dreamed about when I was young. I don't know."

  And then, looking at him again, she said, "I can have no more children. And my children were monsters to me. And my children are buried together beneath a tree."

  He nodded. His face was very eloquent of sympathy, so he said not a word.

  There were other things she wanted to say--that she had not guessed there was such craft or beauty in the realm of dolls, that she had not guessed they could be so interesting to look at, or that they were so different, one from the other, that they had such a frank and simple charm.

  But beneath these thoughts, running deep in the coldest place in her heart, she was thinking, Their beauty is sad beauty, and I don't know why, and so is yours.

  She felt suddenly that if he were to kiss her now, if he were so inclined, she would yield very easily, that her love for Michael wouldn't stop her from yielding, and she hoped and prayed that there was no such thought in his mind.

  Indeed, she wasn't going to allow time for it. She folded her arms and walked past him into a new and unexplored area, where the German dolls ruled. Here were laughing and pouting children, homely little girls in cotton frocks. But she didn't see the exhibits now. She couldn't stop thinking that he was just behind her, watching her. She could feel his observation, hear the faint sound of his breath.

  Finally, she looked back. His eyes surprised her. They were too charged with emotion, too full of obvious conflict, and very little if any struggle to hide it from her.

  If you do this, Rowan, she thought, you will lose Michael forever. And slowly she lowered her gaze and walked softly, slowly away.

  "It's a magical place," she said over her shoulder. "But I'm so eager to talk to you, to hear your story, I could savor it more truly at another time."

  "Yes, of course, and Michael's awake now, and Michael should be almost finished with breakfast. Why don't we go up? I am ready for the agony. I am ready for the strange pleasure of recounting it all."

  She watched as he set the big French doll back in her glass cabinet. And once again his thin fingers made quick, busy gestures to groom her hair and her skirts. Then he pressed a kiss to his fingers and gave this to the doll. And he shut the glass and turned the small golden key, which he then put away.

  "You are my friends," he said, turning to face Rowan. He reached past her and pressed the button for the tower. "I think I am coming to love you. A dangerous thing."

  "I don't want it to be dangerous," she said. "I'm too deep under your spell to want our knowledge of each other to wound or disappoint. But tell me, as to the present state of things, do you love us both?"

  "Oh yes," he said, "or I would beg you on bended knee to let me make love to you." His voice fell to a whisper. "I would follow you to the ends of the earth."

  She turned away, stepping into the elevator, her face hot and her mind swimming for the moment. She saw one grand flash of the dolls in their finery before the doors slid shut.

  "I'm sorry that I told you this," he whispered timidly. "It was a dishonest thing to do, to tell you and to deny it, it was wrong."

  She nodded. "I forgive you," she whispered. "I'm too ... too flattered. Isn't that the right word?"

  "No, 'intrigued' is the word you want," he said. "Or 'tantalized,' but you're not really flattered. And you love him so wholeheartedly that I feel the fire of it when I'm with you. I want it. I want your light to shine on me. I should never have said those words."

  She didn't answer. If she'd thought of an answer, she might have said it, but nothing really came to her mind. Except that she couldn't imagine being severed from Ash right now, and she didn't think that Michael could, either. In a way, it seemed that Michael needed Ash more than she did, though Michael and she had not had a moment, really, to talk of these things.

  When the doors opened, she found herself in a large living room, with the floor tiled in rose-and cream-colored marbles, with the same kind of large, snug leather furnishings that had been on the plane. These chairs were softer, larger, yet remarkably similar, as if designed for comfort.

  And once again, they gathered around a table, only this time it was very low, and set out with a dozen or more little offerings of cheeses and nuts and fruits and breads that they might eat as the hours passed.

  A tall, cold glass of water was all she required just now.

  Michael, his horn-rimmed glasses on, and wearing a battered tweed Norfolk jacket, sat bent over the day's New York Times.

  Only when they were both seated did he tear himself away, fold the paper neatly, and put it to the side.

  She didn't want him to take off the glasses. They were too appealing to her. And it struck her, suddenly, making her smile, that she rather liked having these two men with her, one on either side.

  Vague fantasies of a menage a trois flitted through her mind, but such things, as far as she knew, never really worked, and she could not imagine Michael either tolerating it or participating in it in any way. Sweeter, really, to think of things precisely the way they were.

  You have another chance with Michael, she thought. You know you do, no matter what he may think. Don't throw away the only love that's ever really mattered to you. Be old enough and patient enough for kinds of love, seasons of it, be quiet in your soul so that when happiness comes again, if it ever does, you will know.

  Michael had put away his glasses. He'd sat back, his ankle on his knee.

  Ash had also relaxed into his chair.

  We are the triangle, she thought, and I am the only one with bare knees, and feet tucked to the side as if I have something to conceal.

  That made her laugh. The smell of the coffee distracted her. She realized the pot and cup were right in front of her, easy to reach.

  But Ash reached to pour for her before she could do it, and he put the cup in her hand. He sat at her right, closer to her than he'd been in the plane. They were all closer. And it was the equilateral triangle again.

  "Let me just talk to you," Ash said suddenly. He'd made his fingers into the little steeple again and was pushing at his lower lip. There came the tiny scowl to the very inside tips of his eyebrows, and then it melted, and the voice went on, a bit sad. "This is hard for me, very hard, but I want to do it."

  "I realized that," said Michael. "But why do you want to do it? Oh, I'm dying to hear your story, but why is it worth the pain?"

  H
e thought for a moment, and Rowan could hardly bear to see the tiny signs of stress in his hands and his face.

  "Because I want you to love me," Ash said softly.

  Once again, she was speechless, and faintly miserable.

  But Michael just smiled in his usual frank fashion and said, "Then tell us everything, Ash. Just ... shoot."

  Ash laughed at once. And then they all fell silent, but it was an easy silence.

  And he began.

  Twenty-five

  ALL TALTOS ARE born knowing things--facts of history, whole legends, certain songs--the necessity for certain rituals, the language of the mother, and the languages spoken around her, the basic knowledge of the mother, and probably the mother's finer knowledge as well.

  Indeed, these basic endowments are rather like an uncharted vein of gold in a mountain. No Taltos knows how much can be drawn from this residual memory. With effort, amazing things can be discovered within one's own mind. Some Taltos even know how to find their way home to Donnelaith, though why no one knows. Some are drawn to the far northern coast of Unst, the northernmost island of Britain, to look out over Burrafirth at the lighthouse of Muckle Flugga, searching for the lost land of our birth.

  The explanation for this lies in the chemistry of the brain. It's bound to be disappointingly simple, but we won't understand it until we know precisely why salmon return to the river of their birth to spawn, or why a certain species of butterfly finds its way to one tiny area of forest when it comes time to breed.

  We have superior hearing; loud noises hurt us. Music can actually paralyze us. We must be very, very careful of music. We know other Taltos instantly by scent or sight; we know witches when we see them, and the presence of witches is always overwhelming. A witch is that human which cannot--by the Taltos--be ignored. But I'll come to more of these things as the story goes on. I want to say now, however, that we do not, as far as I know, have two lives, as Stuart Gordon thought, though this might have been a mistaken and oft-repeated belief about us among humans for some time. When we explore our deepest racial memories, when we go bravely into the past, we soon come to realize these cannot be the memories of one particular soul.

  Your Lasher was a soul who had lived before, yes. A restless soul refusing to accept death, and making a tragic, blundering reentry into life, for which others paid the price.

  By the time of King Henry and Queen Anne, the Taltos was a mere legend in the Highlands. Lasher did not know how to probe the memories with which he was born; his mother had been merely human, and he set his mind upon becoming a human, as many a Taltos has done.

  I want to say that, for me, actual life began when we were still a people of the lost land, and Britain was the land of winter. And we knew about the land of winter, but we never went there, because our island was always warm. My constitutional memories were all of that land. They were filled with sunlight, and without consequence, and they have faded under the weight of events since, under the sheer weight of my long life and my reflections.

  The lost land was in the northern sea, within very dim sight of the coast of Unst, as I've indicated, in a place where the Gulf Stream of that time apparently made the seas fairly temperate as they struck our shores.

  But the sheltered land in which we actually developed was, I believe now when I remember it, nothing less than the giant crater of an immense volcano, miles and miles in width, presenting itself as a great fertile valley surrounded by ominous yet beautiful cliffs, a tropical valley with innumerable geysers and warm springs rising bubbling from the earth, to make small streams and finally great clear and beautiful pools. The air was moist always, the trees that grew about our little lakes and riverets immense, the ferns also of gigantic size, and the fruit of all kinds and colors--mangos, pears, melons of all sizes--always abundant, and the cliffs hung with vines of wild berry and grape, and the grass forever thick and green.

  The best fruit was pears, which are nearly white. The best food from the sea was the oyster, the mussel, the limpet, and these were white too. There was a breadfruit that was white once you peeled it. There was milk from the goats, if you could catch them, but it wasn't as good as milk from your mother or the other women who would let those they loved have their milk.

  Scarcely ever did the winds come into the valley, sealed off as it was, except for two or three passes, from the coasts. The coasts were dangerous, for though the water was warmer than on the coast of Britain, it was nevertheless cold, and the winds violent, and one could be swept away. Indeed, if a Taltos wanted to die, which I was told did happen, that Taltos would go out and walk into the sea.

  I think, though I'll never know, that ours was an island, very large, yet an island. It was the custom of some very white-haired ones to walk completely around it, along the beaches, and I was told that this trek took many many days.

  Fire we had always known, because there were places up in the mountains where fire breathed right out of the earth. Hot earth itself, molten lava, came in a tiny trickle from some of these places, running down to the sea.

  We had always known how to get fire, keep it alive, feed it, and make it last. We used fire to light up the longer nights of winter, though we had no name for it, and it wasn't cold. We used fire occasionally to cook big feasts, but most of the time this wasn't necessary. We used fire in the circle sometimes when the birth was happening. We danced around fire, and sometimes played with it. I never beheld a hurtful incident in which any of us was injured by fire.

  How far the winds of the earth can carry seeds, birds, twigs, branches, uprooted trees, I have no idea, but that which loved heat thrived in this land, and this is where we began.

  Now and then, someone among us told of visiting the islands of Britain--known now as the Shetlands or the Orkneys--or even the coast of Scotland. The islands of winter, that's what we called them, or, more literally, the islands of the bitter cold. This was always an exciting tale. Sometimes a Taltos was washed out, and somehow managed to swim to the land of winter, and make a raft there for the return home.

  There were Taltos who went to sea deliberately to seek adventure, in hollow log boats, and if they did not drown, they would often come home, half dead from the cold, and never travel to the land of winter again.

  Everybody knew there were beasts in that land, covered with fur, that would kill you if they could. And so we had a thousand legends and ideas and wrong notions and songs about the snows of winter, and the bears of the forests, and ice that floated in great masses in the lochs.

  Once in a very great while, a Taltos would commit a crime. He or she would couple without permission and make a new Taltos that was not, for one reason or another, welcome. Or someone would willfully injure another, and that one would die. It was very rare. I only heard of it. I never saw it. But those outcasts were taken to Britain in the large boats, and left there to die.

  We did not know the actual cycle of the seasons, by the way, for to us even the summer in Scotland felt fatally cold. We reckoned time in moons only, and we did not have a concept, as I recall, of a year.

  Of course there was a legend you will hear all over the planet, of a time before the moon.

  And that was the legendary time before time, or so we thought, but no one actually remembered it.

  I can't tell you how long I lived in this land before it was destroyed. I knew the powerful scent of the Taltos in that land, but it was as natural as air. Only later did it become distinct, to mark the difference between Taltos and human.

  I remember the First Day, as do all Taltos. I was born, my mother loved me, I stayed for hours with my mother and father, talking, and then I went up to the high cliffs just below the lip of the crater, where the white-haired ones sat, who talked and talked. I nursed from my mother for years and years. It was known that the milk would dry if a woman didn't let others drink from her breasts, and not come again till she gave birth. Women didn't want ever for the milk to dry, and they loved having the men nurse from them; it gave them divin
e pleasure, the sucking, the stimulation, and it was a common custom to lie with a woman and let the suckling, in one form or another, be the extent of the love. The semen of the Taltos was white, of course, like the semen of human beings.

  Women, of course, nursed from women, and teased men that their nipples had no milk. But then our semen was thought to be like milk, not as tasty but in its own way just as nourishing and good.

  One game was for the males to find a female alone, pounce upon her, and drink her milk, until others heard her protests and came and drove us away. But no one would have thought of making another Taltos with that woman! And if she really didn't want us sucking her milk, well, within a reasonable amount of time we stopped.

  The women would every now and then gang up on other women also. And beauty had much to do with the allure of those who were sought for this kind of pleasure; personality was always mixed with it; we had distinct personalities, though everyone was pretty much always in a good mood.

  There were customs. But I don't remember laws.

  Death came to Taltos through accidents. And as Taltos are playful by nature, indeed physically rough and reckless, many Taltos were always dying of accidents, of having slipped from a cliff or choked on a peach pit, or being attacked by a wild rodent, which attack then caused bleeding which could not be stopped. Taltos rarely if ever broke their bones when they were young. But once a Taltos's skin had lost its baby softness and there were perhaps a few white hairs in his head, well, then he could be killed by falling from the cliffs. And it was during those years, I think, that most Taltos died. We were a people of the white-haired, and the blond, the red, and the black-haired. We didn't have many people of the mixed hair, and of course the young greatly outnumbered the old.

  Sometimes a pestilence came over the valley that greatly diminished our numbers, and the stories of the pestilence were the saddest that we were ever told.

  But I still don't know what the pestilence was. Those which kill humans do not apparently kill us.