Taltos (61 page)

Can you see how it might happen?

Can you see how vulnerable we were, we, who in the solitude of our stone towers would play at weaving and writing like little children, who would hum or sing all day long for the love of it? We, who believed in love and in the Good God, and refused to hold death sacrosanct?

What was the pure message of the early Christians? Of both the Roman monks and the Celtic monks who came to our shores to preach the new religion? What is the pure message, even today, of those cults which would consecrate themselves anew to Christ and his teachings?

Love, the very thing we believed in!

Forgiveness, the very thing we thought practical. Humility, the virtue we believed, even in our pride, to be far more noble than the raging hubris of those who warred endlessly upon others. Goodness of heart, kindness, the joy of the just—our old values. And what did the Christians condemn? The flesh, the very thing that had always been our downfall! The sins of the flesh, which had caused us to become monsters in the eyes of humans, copulating in great ceremonial circles and bringing forth full-grown offspring.

Oh, we were ripe for it. Oh, it was made for us!

And the trick, the sublime trick, was that at its core Christianity not only embraced all this, but managed somehow to sacralize death and at the same time redeem that sacralization.

Follow my logic. Christ’s death had not come in battle, the death of the warrior with the sword in his hand; it had been a humble sacrifice, an execution which could not be avenged, a total surrender on the part of the Godman to save his human children! But it was death, and it was everything!

Oh, it was magnificent! No other religion could have had a chance with us. We detested pantheons of barbarian gods. We laughed at the gods of the Greeks and Romans. The gods of Sumer or India we would have found just as alien and distasteful. But this Christ, why, my God, he was the ideal of every Taltos!

And though he had not sprung full-grown from his mother’s womb, he had nevertheless been born of a virgin, which was just as miraculous! Indeed, the birth of Christ was just as important as his submissive crucifixion! It was our way, it was the triumph of our way! It was the God to whom we could give ourselves without reservation!

Lastly, let me add the
pièce de résistance
. These Christians, too, had been once hunted and persecuted and threatened with annihilation. Diocletian, the Roman emperor, had subjected them to these things. And refugees came seeking shelter in our glen. We gave it to them.

And the Christians won our hearts. When we spoke to them, we came to believe that possibly the world was changing. We believed that a new age had dawned and that our elevation and restoration were now at least conceivable.

The final seduction was simple.

A lone monk came into the glen for refuge. He had been chased thither by ragged wandering pagans and begged shelter. Of course we would never refuse such a person, and I brought him into my own broch and into my own chambers, to pick his brains about the outside world, as I hadn’t ventured out in a while.

This was the mid-sixth century after Christ, though I didn’t know it. If you would picture us then, see men and women in long, rather simple robes trimmed in fur, embroidered with gold and jewels; see the men with their hair trimmed above the shoulders. Their belts are thick, and their swords are always near at hand. The women cover
their hair with silk veils beneath simple gold tiaras. See our towers very bare, yet warm and snug, and filled with skins and comfortable chairs, and raging fires to keep us warm. See us as tall, of course, all of us tall.

And see me in my broch alone with this little yellow-haired monk in brown robes, eagerly accepting the good wine I offered him.

He carried with him a great bundle which he was eager to preserve, he said, and first off, he begged me that I give him a guard to escort him home to the island of Iona in safety.

There had been three in his party originally, but brigands had murdered the other two, and now he was wretchedly alone, dependent upon the goodwill of others, and must get his precious bundle to Iona, or lose something more valuable than his own life.

I promised to see that he reached Iona safely. Then he introduced himself as Brother Ninian, named for the earlier saint, Bishop Ninian, who had converted many pagans at his chapel or monastery, or whatever it was, at Whittern. This bishop had already converted a few wild Taltos.

Young Ninian, a very personable and beautiful Irish Celt, then laid out his invaluable bundle and revealed its contents.

Now, I had seen many books in my time, Roman scrolls and the codex, which was now the popular form. I knew Latin. I knew Greek. I had even seen some very small books called
cathachs
which Christians wore as talismans when they rode into battle. I had been intrigued by the few fragments of Christian writing I had beheld, but I was in no way prepared for the treasure which Ninian revealed to me.

It was a magnificent altar book that he carried with him, a great illustrated and decorated account of the Four Gospels. Its front cover was decorated with gold and jewels, it was bound in silk, and its pages were painted with spectacular little pictures.

At once I fell on this book and virtually devoured it. I began to read the Latin aloud, and though there were some irregularities in it, in the main I understood it, and began to
run with the story like someone possessed—nothing very extraordinary, of course, for a Taltos. It felt like singing.

But as I turned the vellum pages, I marveled not only at the tale which was being told to me, but also at the incredible drawings of fanciful beasts and of little figures. It was an art which I loved truly, from having done my own similar form of it.

Indeed, it was very like much art of that time in the islands. Later ages would say it was crude, but then come to love the complexity and ingenuity of it.

Now, to understand the effect of the gospels themselves, you have to remind yourself of how very different they were from any literature which had come before them. I didn’t include the Torah of the Hebrews, because I didn’t know it, but the gospels are even different from that.

They were different from everything! First off, they concerned this one man, Jesus, and how he had taught love and peace and been hounded, persecuted, tormented, and then crucified. A confounding story! I couldn’t help but wonder what the Greeks and the Romans thought of it. And the man had been a humble person, with only the most tenuous of connections to ancient kings, that was obvious. Unlike any god of whom I’d ever heard, this Jesus had told his followers all sorts of things which they had been charged to write down and teach to all nations.

To be born again in spirit was the essence of the religion. To become simple, humble, meek, loving, that was the gist of it.

Now step back a moment and see the whole picture. Not only was this god amazing and this story amazing; the whole question of the relationship of the tale to writing was amazing.

As you can tell from this narrative, the one thing we had once shared with our barbarian neighbors was that we distrusted writing. Memory was sacred to us, and we thought that writing was not good for it. We knew how to read and write. But we still distrusted it. And here was this humble god who quoted from the sacred book of the Hebrews, connected himself with its innumerable prophecies concerning
a messiah, and then charged his followers to
write about him
.

But long before I’d finished the last gospel, pacing, reading aloud, holding the big altar book in two arms, with fingers curled over the tops of the pages, I came to love this Jesus for the strange things that he said, the way he contradicted himself, and his patience with those who killed him. As for his resurrection, my first conclusion was that he was as long-lived as were we—the Taltos. And that he had put one over on his followers because they were mere humans.

We had to do such tricks all the time, to assume different identities when speaking to human neighbors, so that they would become confused and fail to realize that we were living for centuries.

But I soon realized through Ninian’s zealous instructions—and he was a joyful and ecstatic monk—that Christ had in fact risen from the dead. And truly ascended into heaven.

I saw in something of a mystical flash the whole picture—this god of love, martyred for love, and the radical nature of his message. In a mad way, the thing gripped me because it was so utterly unbelievable. Indeed, the entire combination of elements was cumbersome and preposterous.

And another fact—all Christians believed the world would end soon. And apparently—this emerged slowly from my conversations with Ninian—they always had! But preparing for this end of the world was also the essence of the religion. And the fact that the world hadn’t ended yet discouraged nobody.

Ninian spoke feverishly of the growth of the church since Christ’s time, some five hundred years before, of how Joseph of Arimathea, his dear friend, and Mary Magdalene, who had bathed his feet and dried them with her own hair, had come to England in the southern part, and founded a church on a sacred hill in Somerset. The chalice from Christ’s last supper had been brought to that spot, and indeed a great spring flowed bloodred year-round from the magic presence of Christ’s blood having been poured into it. And the staff of Joseph, having been put into the ground
of Wearyall Hill, had grown into a hawthorn which had never ceased to flower.

I wanted to go there at once, to see the sacred place where Our Lord’s own disciples had set foot on our own island.

“Oh, but please,” cried Ninian, “my good-hearted Ashlar, you’ve promised to take me home to my monastery on Iona.”

There the abbot, Father Columba, was expecting him. Many books such as this were being made in monasteries all over the world, and this copy was most important for study at Iona.

I had to meet this Columba. He sounded as strange as Jesus Christ! Perhaps you know the story. Michael, probably you know it.

This is how Ninian described Columba. Columba was born of a rich family, and might have in the scheme of things become King of Tara. Instead he became a priest and founded many Christian monasteries. But then he got into a battle with Finnian, another holy man, over whether or not he, Columba, had had a right to make a copy of the Psalter of St. Jerome, another holy book, which Finnian had brought to Ireland. A quarrel over the possession of the book? The right to copy?

It had led to blows. Three thousand men had died as a result of this dispute, and Columba had been blamed for it. He had accepted this judgment, and off he had gone to Iona, very near our coast, in order to convert
us
, the Picts, to Christianity. It was his plan to save three thousand pagan souls to exactly make up for the three thousand men who had died as the result of his quarrel.

I forget who got the copy of the Psalter.

But Columba was now at Iona and, from there, was sending missionaries everywhere. Beautiful books such as this were being made in these Christian compounds, and all were invited into this new faith. Indeed, Christ’s church was for the salvation of everyone!

And it soon became clear that though Columba and many missionary priests and monks like him had been kings or persons of royal blood, the rule of the monasteries
was extraordinarily severe, demanding constant mortification of the flesh and self-sacrifice.

For example, if a monk spilled milk while helping to serve at community meals, he must go into the chapel during the singing of Psalms and lie on his face, prostrate, until twelve of them had been completely finished. Monks were beaten when they broke their vows of silence. Yet nothing could restrain the rich and powerful of the earth from flocking into these monasteries.

I was dumbfounded. How could a priest who believed in Christ get into a war in which three thousand died! Why would the sons of kings submit to being lashed for common offenses? But, ah, it had a simple potency to it, a captivating logic.

I set out with Ninian and two of my recent sons to go to Iona. Of course we kept up our masquerade as human beings. Ninian thought we were human beings.

But as soon as I arrived at Iona, I became further spellbound by the monastery itself and the personality of Columba.

It was a magnificent island, forested and green, with splendid views from its cliffs, where the openness and cleanness of the sea brought peace to the soul immediately.

In fact, a wondrous calm descended upon me. It was as if I had found again the lost land, only now the dominant themes were penance and austerity. But the harmony was there, the faith in the sheer goodness of existence.

Now the monastery was Celtic, and not at all like the Benedictine monasteries which later covered Europe. It was made of a great circular enclosure—the vallum, as it was called—which suggested a fort, and the monks lived in small, simple huts, some no more than ten feet wide inside. The church itself was not grand, but a humble wooden structure.

But never was a complex of buildings more in keeping with its natural setting. It was a place to listen quietly to the birds, to walk, to think, to pray, to talk with the enchanting and friendly and truly gracious Columba. This man had royal blood; I had long been a king. Ours was the north country of Ireland and Scotland; we knew each other; and
something in me touched the saint as well—the sincerity of the Taltos, the foolish way of coming directly to the point, an easy outpouring of enthusiasm.

Columba soon convinced me that the harsh monastic life and the mortification of the flesh were the keys to the love which Christianity demanded of a man. This love was not a sensual thing. This love was spiritually elevated beyond expression through the body.

He longed to convert my entire tribe, or my clan. He longed to see me an ordained priest among my people.

“But you don’t know what you’re saying,” I said. And then, binding him under the seal of the confessional—that is, to eternal confidentiality—I told him the tale of my long life, of our secret and miraculous way of giving birth, of how it seemed that many of us seemed capable of living an endless life of eternal youth, unless accident or disaster or some specific pestilence destroyed us.