Taltos Read online

  These brave few walked amid the ruins of the old brochs; the human Christians of Donnelaith looked on them with cold eyes and fear, and sighed with relief when they took their final leave of the valley.

  Over the months that followed, some Taltos came who had accepted Christ and wanted to become priests. We welcomed them.

  All over northern Britain, the quiet time for my people had ended.

  The race of the Picts was fast disappearing. Those who knew the Ogham script wrote terrible curses on me, or they carved into walls and stones their newfound Christian beliefs with fervor.

  An exposed Taltos might save himself by becoming a priest or a monk, a transformation which not only appeased the populace but greatly exhilarated it. Villages wanted a Taltos priest; Christians of other tribes begged for a celibate Taltos to come and say the special Mass for them. But any Taltos who did not play this game, who did not renounce his pagan ways, who did not claim the protection of God, was fair game for anyone.

  Meantime, in a great ceremony, some five of us, and four who had come later, accepted Holy Orders. Two female Taltos who had come into the glen became nuns in our community, and dedicated themselves to caring for the weak and the sick. I was made Father Abbot of the monks of Donnelaith, with authority over the glen and even the surrounding communities.

  Our fame grew.

  There were times when we had to barricade ourselves in our new monastery to escape the pilgrims who came "to see what a Taltos was" and to lay hands on us. Word got around that we could "cure" and "work miracles."

  Day after day, I was urged by my flock to go to the sacred spring, and bless the pilgrims there who had come to drink the holy water.

  Janet's broch had been torn down. The stones from her home, and what metal could be melted down from her plate and few bracelets and rings, were put into the building of the new church. And a cross was erected at the holy stream, inscribed with Latin words to celebrate the burning of Janet and the subsequent miracle.

  I could barely look at this. Is this charity? Is this love? But it was more than plain that for the enemies of Christ, justice could be as bitter as God chose to make it.

  But was all this God's plan?

  My people destroyed, our remnants turned into sacred animals? I pleaded with our monks from Iona to discourage all those beliefs! "We are not a magical priesthood!" I declared. "These people are on the verge of declaring that we have magical powers!"

  But to my utter horror the monks said that it was God's will.

  "Don't you see, Ashlar?" said Ninian. "This is why God preserved your people, for this special priesthood."

  But all that I had envisioned had been laid waste. The Taltos had not been redeemed, they had not discovered a way to live on the earth at peace with men.

  The church began to grow in fame, the Christian community became enormous. And I feared the whims of those who worshiped us.

  At last I set aside each day an hour or two when my door was locked and no one might speak to me. And in the privacy of my cell, I began a great illustrated book, using all the skill I had acquired from my teacher on Iona.

  Done in the style of the Four Gospels, it was to be, complete with golden letters on every page, and tiny pictures to illustrate it, the story of my people.

  My book.

  It was the book which Stuart Gordon found in the crypts of the Talamasca.

  For Father Columba, I wrote every word, lavishing on it my greatest gift for verse, for song, for prayer, as I described the lost land, our wanderings to the southern plain, the building of our great Stonehenge. In Latin, I told all I knew of our struggles in the world of men, of how we'd suffered and learned to survive, and how at last my tribe and clan had come to this--five priests amid a sea of humans, worshiped for powers we did not possess, exiles without a name, a nation, or a god of our own, struggling to beg salvation from the god of a people who feared us.

  "Read my words here, Father," I wrote, "you who would not listen to them when I tried to speak them. See them here inscribed in the language of Jerome, of Augustine, of Pope Gregory. And know that I tell the truth and long to enter God's church as what I truly am. For how else will I ever enter the Kingdom of Heaven?"

  Finally my task was complete.

  I sat back, staring at the cover to which I myself had affixed the jewels, at the binding which I myself had fashioned from silk, at letters which I myself had written.

  At once I sent for Father Ninian, and laid the book before him. I sat very still as Ninian examined the work.

  I was too proud of what I'd done, too certain now that somehow our history would find some redeeming context in the vast libraries of church doctrine and history. "Whatever else happens," I thought, "I have told the truth. I have told how it was, and what Janet chose to die for."

  Nothing could have prepared me for the expression on Ninian's face when he closed the volume.

  For a long moment he said nothing, and then he began to laugh and laugh.

  "Ashlar," he said, "have you lost your mind, that you would expect me to take this to Father Columba!"

  I was stunned. In a small voice I said, "I've given it all my effort."

  "Ashlar," he said, "this is the finest book of its kind I've ever beheld; the illustrations are perfectly executed, the text written in flawless Latin, replete with a hundred touching phrases. It is inconceivable that a man could have created this thing in less than three to four years, in the solitude of the scriptorium at Iona, and to think that you have done it here within the space of a year is nothing short of miraculous."

  "Yes?"

  "But the contents, Ashlar! This is blasphemy. In the Latin of Scripture, and in the style of an Altar Book, you have written mad pagan verses and tales full of lust and monstrousness! Ashlar, this is the proper form for Gospels of the Lord, and psalters! Whatever possessed you to write your frivolous stories of magic in this manner?"

  "So that Father Columba would see these words and realize they were true!" I declared.

  But I had already seen his point. My defense meant nothing.

  Then, seeing me so crushed, he sat back and folded his hands and looked at me.

  "From the first day I came into your house," he said, "I knew your simplicity and your goodness. Only you could have made such a foolish blunder. Put it aside; put your entire history aside once and for all! Devote your extraordinary talent to the proper subjects."

  For a day and a night I thought on it.

  Wrapping my book carefully, I gave it again to Ninian.

  "I am your abbot here at Donnelaith," I said, "by solemn appointment. Well, this is the last order I shall ever give you. Take this book to Father Columba as I've told you. And tell him for me that I have chosen to go away on a pilgrimage. I don't know how long I will be gone, or where. As you can see from this book, my life has already spanned many lifetimes. I may never lay eyes on him again, or on you, but I must go. I must see the world. And whether I shall ever return to this place or to Our Lord, only He knows."

  Ninian tried to protest. But I was adamant. He knew that he had to make a journey home to Iona soon anyway, and so he gave in to me, warning me that I did not have Columba's permission to go away, but realizing that I did not care about this.

  At last he set out with the book, and a strong guard of some five human beings.

  I never saw that book again until Stuart Gordon laid it out on the table in his tower at Somerset.

  Whether it ever reached Iona I don't know.

  My suspicion is that it did, and it may have remained at Iona for many years, until all those who knew what it was, or knew who'd written it or why it was there, were long gone.

  I was never to know whether Father Columba read it or not. The very night after Ninian went on his way, I resolved to leave Donnelaith forever.

  I called the Taltos priests together into the church and bade them lock the doors. The humans could think what they liked, and indeed this did make them naturally restless and suspi
cious.

  I told my priests that I was leaving.

  I told them that I was afraid.

  "I do not know if I have done right. I believe, but I do not know," I said. "And I fear the human beings around us. I fear that any moment they might turn on us. Should a storm come, should a plague sweep through the land, should a terrible illness strike the children of the more powerful families--any of these disasters could provoke a rebellion against us.

  "These are not our people! And I have been a fool to believe that we could ever live in peace with them.

  "Each of you, do what you will, but my advice to you as Ashlar, your leader since the time we left the lost land, is go away from here. Seek absolution at some distant monastery, where your nature is not known, and ask permission to practice your vows in peace there. But leave this valley.

  "I myself shall go on a pilgrimage. First to Glastonbury, to the well there where Joseph of Arimathea poured the blood of Christ into the water. I will pray there for guidance. Then I will go to Rome, and then perhaps, I do not know, to Constantinople to see the holy icons there which are said to contain the very face of our Christ by magic. And then to Jerusalem to see the mountain where Christ died for us. I herewith renounce my vow of obedience to Father Columba."

  There was a great outcry, and much weeping, but I stood firm. It was a very characteristic Taltos way of ending things.

  "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 mo
re 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!"