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“If I am wrong, may Christ lead me back to his fold. May he forgive me. Or … may I go to hell,” I said with a shrug. “I’m leaving.”

  I went to prepare for my journey….

  Before these parting words to my flock, I had taken all of my personal possessions out of my tower, including all my books, my writings, my letters from Father Columba, and everything of any importance to me, and I had hidden these in two of the souterrains I had built centuries ago. Then I took the last of my fine clothes, having given up all else for vestments and for the church, and I dressed in a green wool tunic, long and thick and trimmed in black fur, and put around it my only remaining girdle of fine leather and gold, strapped on my broadsword with its jeweled scabbard, placed on my head an old hood of fur, and a bronze helmet of venerable age. And thus garbed as a nobleman, a poor one perhaps, I rode out, with my possessions in a small sack, to leave the glen.

  This was nothing as ornate and heavy as my kingly raiment had been, and nothing as humble as a priest’s robes. Merely good clothing for travel.

  I rode for perhaps an hour through the forest, following old trails known only to those who had hunted here.

  Up and up I went along the heavily wooded slopes towards a secret pass that led to the high road.

  It was late afternoon, but I knew I would reach the road before nightfall. There would be a full moon, and I meant to travel until I was too tired to go further.

  It was dark in these dense woods, so dark, I think, that people of this day and age cannot quite imagine it. This was a time before the great forests of Britain had been destroyed, and the trees here were thick and ancient.

  It was our belief that these trees were the only living things that were older than us in the whole world-for nothing we had ever beheld lived as long as trees or Taltos. We loved the forest and we had never feared it.

  But I had not been in the darkest forest for very long when I heard the voices of the Little People.

  I heard their hisses and whispers and laughter.

  Samuel had not been born in that time, so he was not there, but Aiken Drumm and others alive today were among these that called, “Ashlar, the fool of the Christians, you’ve betrayed your people.” Or, “Ashlar, come with us, make a new race of giants and we shall rule the world,” and other such things. Aiken Drumm I have always hated. He was very young then, and his face was not so gnarled that one couldn’t see his eyes. And as he rushed through the undergrowth, shaking his fist at me, his face was full of malevolence.

  “Ashlar, you leave the glen now after destroying everything! May Janet’s curse be upon you!”

  Finally they all fell back and away for a simple reason. I was coming close to a cave on the mountainside, about which I had-for simple reasons-entirely forgotten.

  Without even thinking, I’d chosen the path that ancient tribes had taken to worship there. In the time when the Taltos lived on the Salisbury Plain, these tribes had filled this cave with skulls, and later peoples revered it as a place of dark worship.

  In recent centuries the peasants had sworn that a door was open inside this cave by which one might hear the voices of hell, or the singing of heaven.

  Spirits had been seen in the nearby wood, and witches sometimes braved our wrath to come here. Though there had been times when we rode up the hills in fearsome bands to drive them out, we had not in the last two hundred years much bothered with them.

  I myself had only been up this way a couple of times in all my life, but I had no fear of the cave at all. And when I saw that the Little People were afraid, I was relieved to be rid of them.

  However, as my horse followed the old trail closer and closer to the cave, I saw flickering lights playing in the thick darkness. I came to see there was a crude dwelling in the mountainside, made out of a cave itself perhaps, and covered over with stones, leaving only a small door and a window, and a hole higher up through which the smoke passed.

  The light flickered through the cracks and crevices of the crude wall.

  And there, many feet above, was the path to the great cave, a yawning mouth altogether hidden now by pine and oak and yew trees.

  I wanted to keep clear of the little house as soon as I saw it. Anyone who would live in the vicinity of this cave had to be trouble.

  The cave itself vaguely intrigued me. Believing in Christ, though I had disobeyed my abbot, I did not fear pagan gods. I did not believe in them. But I was leaving my home. I might not ever come back. And I wondered if I should not visit the cave, perhaps even rest there a while, hidden, and safe from the Little People.

  Twenty-nine

  “NOW LISTEN TO me, both of you,” she said without taking her eyes off the road. “This is the point where I am going to take over. I’ve thought this over since I was born, and I know exactly what we need to do. Is Granny asleep back there?”

  “Sound asleep,” said Mary Jane from the jump seat, where she was stretched out sideways, so she could see Morrigan behind the wheel.

  “What do you mean,” asked Mona, “that you are going to take over?”

  “Just exactly this,” said Morrigan, both her hands together at the top of the wheel, gripping it easily on account of the fact that they had been going ninety miles an hour for quite some time now, and no cop, obviously, was going to stop them. “I’ve been listening to you argue and argue, and you’re stuck on things that are utterly beside the point, sort of moral technicalities.”

  Morrigan’s hair was tangled and falling all over her shoulders and her arms, a brighter red, as far as Mona could tell, but in the same family as her own hair. And the uncanny resemblance between their faces was enough to completely unnerve Mona if she let herself stare too long at Morrigan. As for the voice, well, the big danger was obvious. Morrigan could pretend to be Mona on the phone. She had done it with ease when Uncle Ryan had finally called Fontevrault. What a hilarious conversation that had been! Ryan had asked “Mona” very tactfully if she was taking amphetamines, and reminded her gently that anything ingested might hurt the baby. But the point was, Uncle Ryan had never guessed that the fast-talking and inquisitive female on the other end of the line was not Mona.

  They were all dressed in their Easter Sunday best, as Mary Jane had called it earlier, including Morrigan, whom they had outfitted in the fashionable shops of Napoleonville. The white cotton shirtwaist dress would have been ankle length on Mona or even Mary Jane. On Morrigan it came to the knee; the waste was cinched really tight, and the plain V neck, the symbol of matronly good sense, became against her fairly well-developed breasts a plunging neckline. It was the old story; put a plain, simple dress on a flamboyantly beautiful girl, and it becomes more eye-catching than gold foil or sable. Shoes had been no problem, once they had faced that she was a size ten. One size larger and they would have had to put her in men’s lace-ups. As it was, she had stiletto heels and had danced around the car in them for fifteen minutes, before Mona and Mary Jane had laid firm hands on her, told her to shut up, don’t move, and get in. Then she had demanded to drive. Well, it wasn’t the first time …

  Granny, in Wal-Mart’s best cotton knit pantsuit, slept beneath her baby-blue thermal blanket. The sky was blue, the clouds magnificently white. Mona wasn’t sick anymore at all, thank God, just weak. Dismally weak. They were now one half hour from New Orleans. “Like what moral technicality?” asked Mary Jane. “This is a question of safety, you know, and what do you mean, ‘take over’?”

  “Well, I’m talking about something inevitable,” said Morrigan, “but let me break it to you in stages.” Mona laughed.

  “Ah, you see, Mother is smart enough to know, of course, to see the future as a witch might, I suppose, but you, Mary Jane, persist in being a cross between a disapproving aunt and the devil’s advocate.”

  “You sure you know the meaning of all those words?”

  “My dear, I have imbibed the entire contents of two dictionaries. I know all the words my mother knew before I was born, and a great many my father knew. How else would
I know what a socket wrench is, and why the trunk of this car contains an entire set of them?

  “Now back to the crisis of the moment: Where do we go, which house? And all of that nonsense?”

  Immediately she answered her own questions.

  “Well, my thinking is that whose house we go to is not all that fired important. Amelia Street would be a bad idea, simply because it is loaded with other people, as you have thrice described, and though it may be Mother’s house in a sense, it truly belongs to Ancient Evelyn. Fontevrault is too far away. We are not going back, I don’t care what happens! An apartment is a hideout which I cannot, in my anticipatory anxiety, abide! I will not choose some small impersonal lodgings obtained under false pretenses. I cannot live in boxes. First Street does belong to Michael and Rowan, that’s true, but Michael is my father! What we need is at First Street. I need Mona’s computer, her records, the papers Lasher scribbled out, any notes my father has made in his copy of his famous Talamasca file, everything which is presently in that house, and to which Mona has acknowledged access. Well, not Lasher’s scribblings, but again, that is a technicality. I claim the rights of breed to take those notes. And I do not have a single scruple about reading Michael’s diary if I do find it. Now don’t start screaming, both of you!”

  “Well, just slow down for one thing!” shouted Mary Jane. “And I get a creepy feeling in my bones from the way you say those words, ‘take over.’ ”

  “And let’s think this out a little further,” said Mona.

  “You have reminded each other enough in my presence that the name of the game is survival,” Morrigan replied. “I need this knowledge-diaries, files, records-for survival. And First Street is empty now, we know that, and we can make our preparations in peace for Michael and Rowan’s homecoming. So I will make the decision here and now that that is where we go, at least until Michael and Rowan have returned and we have apprised them of the situation. If my father then wishes to banish me from the house, we seek an appropriate dwelling, or put into operation Mother’s plan to obtain funds for the complete restoration of Fontevrault. Now, do you have all this in your memories?”

  “There are guns in that house,” said Mary Jane, “she has told you that. Guns upstairs, downstairs. These people are going to be scared of you. This is their house. They’re going to start screaming! Don’t you understand? They think that Taltos are evil beings, evil! Trying to take over the world!”

  “I am a Mayfair!” declared Morrigan. “I am the daughter of my father and my mother. And the hell with guns. They are not going to aim a gun at me. That’s perfectly absurd, and you are forgetting that they are not expecting me to be there at all, and will be utterly unprepared when you search them for guns, as if they would be carrying guns at all, and furthermore you will be there, both of you, to protect me, and speak for me, and to issue dire warnings that they are not to harm me, and please remember for more than five consecutive minutes at a stretch that I have a tongue in my mouth with which to protect myself, that nothing in this situation is analogous to any that existed before, and that it is best to settle in there, where I can examine everything I should examine, including this famous Victrola, and the backyard-there you go, stop screaming, both of you!”

  “Just don’t dig up the bodies!” Mona cried.

  “Right, leave those bodies under the tree!” declared Mary Jane.

  “Absolutely, I will. I shall. I told you. No digging up bodies. Bad, bad idea. Morrigan is sorry. Morrigan won’t do it. Morrigan has promised Mona and Mary Jane. No time for bodies! Besides, what are these bodies to me?” Morrigan shook her head, making her red hair tumble and tangle and then giving it a vigorous and determined toss. “I am the child of Michael Curry and Mona Mayfair. And that is what matters, isn’t it?”

  “We’re scared, that’s all!” Mary Jane declared. “Now, if we turn around right now, and we go back to Fontevrault-”

  “No. Not without the appropriate pumps, scaffolding, jacks, and lumber to straighten out that house. I shall have a sentimental attachment to it all of my life, of course, but at this time I simply cannot remain there! I am dying to see the world, don’t both of you understand, the world is not Wal-Mart and Napoleonville and the latest issues of Time, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. I cannot remain waiting any longer. Besides, for all you know, they are home now, Rowan and Michael, and I am for an immediate confrontation. No doubt they will make the records available to me, even if in their secret hearts they have opted for extermination.”

  “They’re not home,” said Mona. “Ryan said two more days.”

  “Well, then, what are you all so afraid about?”

  “I don’t know,” cried Mona.

  “Then First Street it is, and I don’t want to hear another word about it. There is a guest room, is there not? I’ll stay in there. And I want all this squabbling to stop. We can then obtain a secure home base of our own at our leisure. Besides, I want to see this house, I want to see the house the witches built. Do not either of you understand the degree to which my being and my fate are connected to this house, this house designed to perpetuate the line with the giant helix? Why, if we strip away most of the clouding sentiment, it is perfectly obvious that Stella, Antha, and Deirdre died so that I might have life, and the bumbling literalist dreams of this evil spirit, Lasher, have resulted in an incarnation he could never foresee, but which is now my destiny. I am tenacious of life, I am tenacious of position!”

  “Okay,” Mona said, “but you have to be quiet, and you have to not speak to the guards, and you cannot answer the phone again!”

  “Yeah, the way you grab for a phone when it rings,” said Mary Jane, “any phone at all, is just downright loco.”

  Morrigan gave a shrug. “What you fail to realize is that each day achieves for me an enormous series of developments. I am not the girl I was two days ago!” She flinched suddenly, and gave a little groan.

  “What’s the matter, what’s wrong?” asked Mona.

  “The memories, the way they come. Mother, turn on the tape recorder, will you? You know, it’s the strangest thing, the way some of them fade, and some of them don’t and it’s as if they are memories from lots and lots of people, people like me, I mean. I see Ashlar through everybody’s eyes…. The glen is the same glen in the Talamasca file, I know it. Donnelaith. I can hear Ashlar say it.”

  “Speak loud,” said Mary Jane, “so I can hear you.”

  “This is about the stones again, we’re not in the glen yet, we’re near the river, and the men are dragging the stones out onto the rolling logs. I tell you that there are no accidents in this world, nature is sufficiently random and lush for things to happen almost inevitably. This may not make sense at first, but what I am saying is this-that out of all the chaos and pain of resistant and defiant witches has come the moment when this family must become a family of humans and Taltos. The strangest feelings come over me. I have to go there, to see that place. And the glen. The circle is smaller, but it’s ours too, Ashlar has consecrated both circles, and the stars overhead are in the winter configuration. Ashlar wants the dark woods to shelter us, to lie between us and the hostile world. I am tired. Sleepy.”

  “Don’t let go of the wheel,” said Mary Jane. “Describe this man, Ashlar, again. Is he always the same, I mean, in both circles and both times?”

  “I think I’m going to cry. I keep hearing the music. We have to dance when we get there.”

  “Where?”

  “First Street, anywhere. The glen. The plain. We have to dance in a circle. I’ll show you, I’ll sing the songs. You know? Something terrible has happened more than once, to my people! Death and suffering, they have become the norm. Only the very skilled avoid them; the very skilled see human beings for what they are. The rest of us are blinded.”

  “Is he the only one with a name?”

  “No, just the one whose name everyone knows, everyone. Like a magnet drawing everyone’s emotions. I don’t want to …”

  “Tak
e it easy,” said Mona. “When we get there you can write it all out again, you can have peace and quiet, two whole days before they come.”

  “And who will I be by that time?”

  “I know who you are,” said Mona. “I knew who you were when you were in me. You’re me and Michael, and something else, something powerful and wondrous, and part of all the other witches, too.”

  “Talk, honey,” said Mary Jane. “Tell us, tell us about him and everybody making the little chalk dolls. I want to hear about that, burying the dolls at the foot of the stones. You remember what you said?”

  “I think I do. They were dolls with breasts and penises.”

  “Well, you never mentioned that before.”

  “They were sacred dolls. But there must be a purpose to this, a redemption for this pain, I … I want the memories to let go, but not before I take everything of value from them. Mary Jane, would you please, honeybunch, grab a Kleenex there and wipe my eyes? I am saying this for the record, pay attention. This is stream of consciousness. We are taking the long stone to the plain. Everybody is going to dance and sing around it for a long time, before they begin to make the scaffolding out of logs by which we’ll make it stand upright. Everyone has been carving their dolls. You can’t tell the difference, each doll looks somehow like every one of them. I am sleepy. I’m hungry too. I want to dance. Ashlar is calling everyone to attention.”

  “Fifteen more minutes and we pull in the back gate,” said Mary Jane. “So just keep your teary little peepers open.”

  “Don’t say a word to the guards,” said Mona. “I’ll handle them. What else do you remember? They’re bringing the stone to the plain. What’s the name of the plain? Say it in their language.”

  “Ashlar calls it simply ‘the flat land’ and ‘the safe land’ or ‘the grass land.’ To say it right I have to speak it very, very fast, to you it will sound like whistling. But everyone knows those stones. I know everyone does. My father knows them, has seen them. God, do you suppose there is another of me anywhere in this whole world? Don’t you think there has to be? Another me besides those buried under the tree? I can’t be the only one alive!”