Taltos (62 page)

Some things I did not tell. I did not tell that I had once been the leader of the great circle dances at Stonehenge.

But all the rest I told, even of the lost land, and how we had lived in our glen for so many hundreds of years, passing from secrecy to a masquerade as human beings.

All this he listened to with great fascination. Then he said an amazing thing. “Can you prove these things to me?”

I realized that I could not. The only way any Taltos can prove he is a Taltos is by coupling with another and producing the offspring.

“No,” I said, “but look well at us. Look at our height.”

This he dismissed; there were tall men in the world. “People have for years known of your clan; you are King Ashlar of Donnelaith, and they know you are a good ruler. If you believe these things about yourself, it is because the devil has put them into your imagination. Forget them. Proceed to do what God wants you to do.”

“Ask Ninian, the whole tribe is of this height.”

But he’d heard of that, very tall Picts in the Highlands. It seems my own ruse was working!

“Ashlar,” he said, “I’ve no doubt of your goodness. Once
again, I counsel you to disregard these illusions as coming from the devil.”

Finally I agreed, for one reason. I felt that it made no difference whether he believed me or not about my past. What mattered was that he had recognized a soul in me.

Michael, you know that this was a great point in Lasher’s tale—that, alive in the time of Henry, he wanted to believe that he had a soul, that he would not accept that he could not be a priest of God the same as a human.

I know this awful dilemma. All who are outsiders in their own way know it. Whether we talk of legitimacy, of a soul, of citizenship, or of brotherhood or sisterhood, it is all the same, we long to be seen as true individuals, as inherently valuable inside as any other.

This I longed for too, and I made the terrible error of accepting Columba’s advice. I forgot what I knew to be true.

There on Iona, I was received into the Christian faith. I was baptized, and so were my sons. Another baptism was to follow, but for me and my sons it was only ceremonial. On that island, removed from the mists of the Highlands, we became Christian Taltos.

I spent many days at the monastery. I read all the books that were in it; I was charmed by the pictures, and very soon took to making copies of them. With official permission, of course. I copied a psalter, then a gospel, amazing the monks with my typical Taltos obsessive behavior. I drew strange beasts in brilliant colors by the hour. I made the priests laugh sometimes with bits of poetry I copied out. I pleased them with my good Greek and Latin.

What community had ever been more like the Taltos? Monk children is what they seemed, surrendering the entire concept of sophisticated adulthood to serve the abbot as their lord, and thereby serve their Lord Himself, the Crucified Christ who had died for them.

These were happy, happy days.

Gradually I began to see what many a heathen prince had come to see in Christianity: absolute redemption of everything! All my suffering made sense in light of the woes of the world and Christ’s mission to save us from sin. All the disasters I’d witnessed had done nothing but improve my
soul and school it for this moment. My monstrousness, indeed the monstrousness of all the Taltos, would be accepted by this church, surely, for all were welcome into it, regardless of race, it was an utterly open faith, and we could submit as well as any human being to the baptism of water and the spirit, to the vows of poverty, chastity, obedience.

The stringent rules, which bound even laymen to purity and restraint, would help us to control our terrible urge to procreate, our terrible weaknesses for dance and for music. And the music we would not lose; we would, within the constraints of the monastic life—which for me at this point was synonymous with the Christian life—sing our greatest and most joyful songs ever!

In sum, if this church accepted us, if it embraced us, all our past and future sufferings would have meaning. Our true loving nature would be allowed to flower. No subterfuge would be required any longer. The church would not let the old rituals be forced upon us. And those who dreaded the birthing now, as I did, out of age and experience and seeing so many young die, could consecrate themselves to God in chastity.

It was perfect!

At once, with a small escort of monks, I returned to the glen of Donnelaith and drew all my people together. We must pledge our allegiance to Christ, I told them, and I told them why, in long rippling speeches, not too fast for my human companions to understand, talking passionately of the peace and harmony that would be restored to us.

I also spoke of the Christian belief in the end of the world. Very soon all this horror would be over! And then I spoke of heaven, which I imagined to be like the lost land, except that no one would want to make love, everyone would be singing with the choirs of angels.

We must all now confess our sins and prepare to be baptized. For a thousand years I had been the leader, and all must follow me. What greater guidance could I give my people?

I stood back at the end of this speech. The monks were overcome with emotion. So were the hundreds of Taltos gathered in the glen around me.

At once began the heated discussions for which we were known—all in the human Art of the Tongue—the endless debates and telling of little tales and relating of this to that, and drawing memories into it where they seemed to pertain, and beneath it all the great theme: we could embrace Christ. He was the Good God! He was our God. The souls of the others were as open to Christ as was my soul.

A great many at once declared their faith. Others spent the afternoon, the evening, and the night examining the books I’d brought back, arguing somewhat about the things they’d heard, and there were some very fretful whispers about its being contrary to our nature to be chaste, absolutely contrary, and that we could never live with marriage.

Meantime I went out to the human beings of Donnelaith and preached this great conversion to them as well, and the monks followed me. We called all the clans of the valley together.

And in our great gathering ground, amid the stones, hundreds declared their desire to come to Christ, and indeed, some of the humans confessed they had already converted, maintaining it as a secret for their own protection.

I was very struck by this, particularly when I found that some human families had been Christian for three generations. “How very like us you are,” I thought, “but you don’t know it.”

It seemed then that all were on the verge of conversion. En masse, we begged the priests to begin the baptisms and the blessings.

But one of the great women of our tribe, Janet, as we had come to call her, a name very current then, raised her voice to speak out against me.

Janet too had been born in the lost land, which she mentioned now quite openly before the human beings. Of course they didn’t know what she meant. But we did. And she reminded me that she had no white streaks in her hair, either. In other words, we were wise and young, both of us, the perfect combination.

I had had one son by Janet, and truly loved her. I had spent many, many nights at play in her bed, not daring to have coitus, of course, but nursing from her rounded little
breasts, and exchanging all kinds of other clever embraces that gave us exquisite pleasure.

I loved Janet. But there had never been any doubt in my mind that Janet was fierce in her own beliefs.

Now she stepped forth and condemned the new religion as a pack of lies. She pointed out all its weaknesses in terms of logic and consistency. She laughed at it. She told many stories which made Christians look like braggarts and idiots. The story of the gospel she declared unintelligible.

The tribe was immediately split. So loud was the talk that I could not even tell how many were for Janet’s point of view or against it. Violent verbal quarrels ensued. Once again we undertook our marathon debates, which no human being could watch without realizing our differences.

The monks withdrew to our sacred circle. There they consecrated the earth to Christ, and prayed for us. They did not fully understand yet how different we were, but they knew we were not like other people.

At last a great schism occurred. One third of the Taltos refused utterly to be converted, and threatened battle with the others if we tried to make the glen a haven of Christianity. Some evinced a great fear of Christianity and the strife it would cause among others. Others simply did not like it, and wanted to keep to our own ways and not live in austerity and penance.

The majority wanted to convert, and we did not wish to give up our homes—that is, to leave the glen and go elsewhere. To me, such a possibility was unthinkable. I was the ruler here.

And like many a pagan king, I expected my people to follow me absolutely in my conversion.

The verbal battles progressed to physical pushing and shoving and threats, and I saw within an hour that the entire future of the valley was threatened.

But the end of the world was coming. Christ had known this and come to prepare us. The enemies of Christ’s church were the enemies of Christ!

Bloody skirmishes were being fought in the grasslands of the glen. Fires broke out.

Accusations were flung out. Humans who had always
seemed loyal suddenly turned on Taltos and accused them of wretched perversity, of having no lawful marriage, no visible children, and of being wicked magicians.

Others declared that they had long suspected the Taltos of evil things, and now was the time to have it out, Where did we keep our young? Why did no one ever see any children among us?

A few crazed individuals, for reasons of their own, shouted the truth. A human who had mothered two Taltos pointed at her Taltos husband and told all the world what he was, and that if we were to sleep with human women we would soon annihilate them.

The frenzied zealots, of whom I was the most outspoken one, declared that these things no longer mattered. We, the Taltos, had been welcomed into the church by Christ and Father Columba. We would give up the old licentious habits, we would live as Christ would have us live.

There followed more confusion. Blows were struck. Screams rang out.

Now I saw how three thousand people could die in an argument over the right to copy a book! Now I perceived everything.

But too late. The battle had already commenced. All rushed to their brochs to take up arms and to defend their positions. Armed men poured out of doors, attacking their neighbors.

The horror of war, the horror I had sought to hide from all these years in Donnelaith, was now upon us. It had come through my conversion.

I stood confounded, my sword in my hand, hardly knowing what to make of it. But the monks came to me. “Ashlar, lead them to Christ,” they said, and I became as many a zealot king before me. I led my converts against their brothers and sisters.

But the real horror was yet to come.

When the battle was over, the Christians still stood in the majority, and I saw, though it did not register very clearly yet, that most of them were human. The majority of the Taltos elite, never very numerous anyway, thanks to our rigid control, had been slaughtered. And only a band of
some
fifty of us
remained, the oldest, the wisest, in some ways the most dedicated, and we were all still convinced of our conversion.

But what were we to do with the few humans and Taltos who had not come over to us, who had not been killed only because the killing had stopped before everyone was dead? Now gathered from the battlefield, wounded, limping, these rebels, with Janet as their leader, cursed us. They would not be driven from the glen, they declared, they would die where they stood in opposition to us.

“You, Ashlar, look at what you’ve done,” Janet declared. “Look, everywhere on the bodies of your brothers and sisters, men and women who have lived since the time before the circles! You have brought about their death!”

But no sooner had she laid on me this terrible judgment than the zealous human converts began to demand: “How could you have lived since the time before the circles? What were you, if you were not human beings?”

At last one of the boldest of these men, one who had been a secret Christian for years, came up and slit open my robe with his sword, and I, baffled as Taltos often are by violence, found myself standing naked in the circle.

I saw the reason. They would see what we were, if our tall bodies were the bodies of men. Well, let them see, I announced. I stepped out of the fallen robe. I laid my hand upon my testicles in the ancient fashion, to swear an oath—that is, testify—and I swore that I would serve Christ as well as any human.

But the tide had turned. The other Christian Taltos were losing their nerve. The sight of the slaughter had been appalling to them. They had begun to weep, and to forget the Art of the Tongue, and to talk in the high, rapid speech of our kind, which quickly terrified the humans.

I raised my voice, demanding silence, and demanding allegiance. I had put back on my slashed robe, for all that it mattered. And I walked back and forth in the circle, angry, using the Art of the Tongue as well as I’d ever used it.

What would Christ say to us on account of what we had done? What was the crime here, that we were a strange tribe? Or that we had murdered our own in this dispute?
I wept with great gestures and tore my hair, and the others wept with me.

But the monks were now filled with fear, and the human Christians were filled with fear. What they had suspected all their lives in the glen was almost revealed to them. Once again the questions flew. Our children, where were they?

At last another Taltos male, whom I greatly loved, stepped forward and declared that from this moment forth he was, in the name of Christ and Virgin, celibate. Other Taltos made the same pledge, women and men both.

“Whatever we were,” the Taltos women declared, “does not matter now, for we will become the Brides of Christ and make our own monastery here in the spirit of Iona.”