Taltos lotmw-3

by Anne Rice

  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 divine 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.

  I could “remember” pestilence, and nursing sick ones. I was born knowing how to get fire and carry it safely back to the valley. I knew how to make fire so that I did not have to go to get it, though getting it from someone else was the easiest way. I was born knowing how to cook mussels and limpets with fire. I knew how to make black paste for painting from ashes of fire.

  But to return to the subject of death, there was no murder. The idea that one Taltos had the power to kill another was not generally believed. Indeed, if you did quarrel and push someone off a cliff, and that person fell and died, it was still an “accident.” You hadn’t really done it, though others might condemn you for your appalling carelessness and even send you away.

  The white-haired ones who liked to tell tales had been alive the longest, certainly, but no one thought of them as old. And if they lay down one night and failed to wake in the morning, it was assumed they had died of a blow from an accident that had not been observed. The white-haired ones often had very thin skin, so thin you could almost see the blood running under it; and often they had lost their scent. But other than that, we didn’t know age in any particular.

  To be old was just to know the longest and the best stories, to have stories to relate from Taltos who were gone.

  Tales were told in loose verses, or were sung as songs, or sometimes merely poured forth in a rush, with lavish images and rhythms and little bits and pieces of melody and much laughter. Telling, telling was joyful; telling was glorious; telling was the spiritual side of life.

  The material side of life? I’m not sure there was one, in the strict sense. There was no ownership, except perhaps of musical instruments or pigments for painting, but even these were fairly liberally shared. Everything was easy.

  Now and then a whale would be washed ashore, and when the meat had rotted, we would take the bones and make things of them, but to us, these were toys. Digging in the sand was fun, digging loose rocks to make them tumble downhill was fun. Even carving little shapes and circles into the bone with a sharp stone or another bone-this was fun.

  But telling, ah, that took respectable talent, and true remembering, and remembering not only in one’s own head, but remembering what oth
er people had remembered and told as well.

  You see what I am driving at. Our assumptions about life and death were founded upon these special conditions and notions. Obedience was natural to Taltos. To be agreeable was apparently natural. Seldom was there a rebel or a visionary, until the human blood became mixed with ours.

  There were very few white-haired women, perhaps one to every twenty men. And these women were much sought after, for their fount was dried, like that of Tessa, and they wouldn’t birth when they gave themselves to the men.

  But in the main, childbirth killed the women, though we never said so at the time. It weakened women, and if a woman did not die by the fourth or fifth birth, she would almost always fall asleep later and die. Many women did not care to give birth at all, or would do it only once.

  Birth always followed the true coupling of a pair of true Taltos. It was only later, when we mingled with humans, that women were worn out, like Tessa, by having bled again and again. But the Taltos descended from human origins have many traits entirely peculiar to them which I will recount in time. And who knows but that Tessa didn’t have offspring? It is entirely possible, as you know.

  Generally, birth was something that a woman did want to do. But not for a long time after she was born. Men wanted to do it all the time, because they enjoyed it. But no one who thought of coupling did not know that a child would be born from it, as tall as his own mother, or taller, and so no one thought to do it just for fun.

  Just for fun was woman making love to woman in many ways, and man making love to man; or man finding a white-haired beauty who was free now for pleasure. Or one male being approached by several young virgins, all eager to bear his child. Fun was occasionally finding the woman who could bear six and seven children without injury. Or the young woman who, for reasons no one knew, could not bear at all. Nursing from the breasts of women was exquisite pleasure; to gather in groups to do this was splendid, the woman who gave her breasts often going into a sensuous trance. Indeed, women could derive complete pleasure in this way, reaching satisfaction with scarcely any other contact at all.

  I don’t remember rape; I don’t remember execution; I don’t remember grudges that lasted very long.

  I remember pleading and arguments and much talk, and even some quarreling over mates, but always it was in the realm of songs or words.

  I do not remember bad tempers or cruelty. I do not remember uneducated souls. That is, all were born knowing some concept of gentleness, goodness, the value of happiness, and a strong love of pleasure and a desire for others to share that pleasure, for the pleasure of the tribe to be assured.

  Men would fall deeply in love with women, and vice versa. They would talk for days and nights; then finally the decision would be made to couple. Or argument would prevent this from ever taking place.

  More women were born than men. Or so it was said. But no one really counted. I think more women were born, and that they died much more easily; and I think this is one reason the men felt so utterly tender to the women, because they knew the women were likely to die. The women passed on the strength of their bodies; simple women were cherished because they were gay all the time, and glad to be living and not afraid of giving birth. In sum, the women were more childlike, but the men were simple too.

  Deaths by accident were invariably followed by a ceremonial coupling and a replacement of the dead one; and times of pestilence gave way to times of rampant and orgiastic mating, as the tribe sought to repopulate the land.

  There was no want. The land never became crowded. Never did people quarrel over fruit or eggs or milk animals. There was too much of everything. It was too warm and lovely, and there were too many pleasant things to do.

  It was paradise, it was Eden, it was the golden time that all peoples speak of, a time before the gods became angry, a time before Adam ate the fatal apple, a time of bliss and plenty. The only point is, I remember it. I was there.

  I do not remember any concept of laws.

  I remember rituals-dances, songs, forming the circles, and each circle moving in the opposite direction from the one inside it, and I remember the men and the women who could play pipes and drums, and even stringed harps that were small and sometimes made of shells. I remember a band of us carrying torches along the most treacherous cliffs, just to see if we could do it and not fall.

  I remember painting, that those who liked to do it did it on the cliffs, and in the caves that surrounded the valley, and that sometimes we would go on a day’s journey to visit all the caves.

  It was unseemly to paint too much at any one given time; each artist mixed his or her own colors from earth, or from her blood, or from the blood of a poor fallen mountain goat or sheep, and from other natural things.

  At several intervals I remember the whole tribe coming together to make circle after circle after circle. It is conceivable the whole population was then gathered. Nobody knew.

  At other times we gathered in small, single circles and made the chain of memory as we knew it-not what Stuart Gordon has described to you.

  One would call out, “Who remembers from long, long ago?” And someone would venture, telling a tale of white-haired ones long gone, whom he had heard tell when he was newborn. Those tales he would relate now, offering them as the oldest, until someone raised his voice and told tales that he could place before those.

  Others would then volunteer their earliest recollections; people would argue with or add to or expand the stories of others. Many sequences of events would be put together and fully described.

  That was a fascinating thing-a sequence, a long period of events linked by one man’s vision or attitude. That was special. That was our finest mental achievement, perhaps, other than pure music and dance.

  These sequences were never terribly eventful. What interested us was humor or a small departure from the norm, and of course beautiful things. We loved to talk of beautiful things. If a woman was born with red hair, we thought it a magnificent thing.

  If a man stood taller than the others, this was a magnificent thing. If a woman was gifted with the harp, this was a magnificent thing. Terrible accidents were very, very briefly remembered. There were some stories of visionaries-those who claimed to hear voices and to know the future-but that was very infrequent. There were tales of the whole life of a musician or an artist, or of a red-haired woman, or of a boatbuilder who had risked his life to sail to Britain and had come home to tell the tale. There were tales of beautiful men and women who had never coupled, and they were much celebrated and sought after, though as soon as they did couple, they lost this charm.

  The memory games were most often played in the long days-that is, those days on which there was scarcely three hours of darkness. Now, we had some sense of seasons based on light and dark, but it had never become terribly important because nothing much changed in our lives from the long days of summer to the shorter days of winter. So we didn’t think in terms of seasons. We didn’t keep track of light and dark. We frolicked more on the longer days, but other than that, we didn’t much notice. The darkest days were as warm as the longest for us; things grew in profusion. Our geysers never ceased to be warm.

  But this chain of memory, this ritual telling and recounting, it is important to me now for what it later became. After we migrated to the land of bitter cold, this was our way of knowing ourselves and who we had been. This was crucial when we struggled to survive in the Highlands. We, who had no writing of any kind, held all our knowledge in this way.

  But then? In the lost land? It seemed like a pastime. A great game.

  The most serious thing that happened was birth. Not death-which was frequent, haphazard, and generally deemed to be sad but meaningless-but the birth of a new person.

  Anyone who did not take this seriously was considered to be a fool.

  For the coupling to happen, the guardians of the woman had to consent that she could do it, and the men had to agree that they would give permission to the particular ma
n.

  It was known always that the children resembled the parents, that they grew up at once, possessing characters of one or the other, or both. And so the men would argue vehemently against a male of poor physique seeking to couple, though everyone was entitled by custom to do it at least once.

  As for the woman, the question was, did she understand how hard it might be to bear the child? She would have pain, her body would be greatly weakened, she might even bleed afterwards, she might even die when the child came out of her, or die later on.

  It was also deemed that some physical combinations were better than others. In fact, this was the cause of what we might have called our disputes. They were never bloody, but they could be very noisy, with Taltos shouting finally, and some foot-stomping, and so forth and so on. Taltos loved to outshout each other, or to rail at one another in a great, speedy buzz of language until the other was exhausted and couldn’t think.

  And very, very seldom, there was one prime male or female considered to be so perfect of limb and fair of face, so tall, so well proportioned, that coupling with him or her to produce a beautiful offspring was a great honor; and this did lead to contests and games. Indeed, there was a whole realm of these.

  But those are the only painful or difficult things I remember, and I won’t tell of them now. Maybe because the only time I knew desperation was in these games. Also, we lost those rituals when we traveled to the land of bitter winter. We had too many real sorrows to contend with from then on.

  When the couple had finally obtained permission-I remember once having to beg permission of twenty different people, and having to argue and wait for days on end-the tribe would gather, forming the circle, and then another and another, quite far back, until people felt it was no fun anymore because it was too far away to see.

  The drums and the dancing would begin. If it was night, the torches would appear. And the couple would embrace and play lovingly with each other for as long as they could before the final moment had to come. This was a slow feast. To go on for an hour, that was lovely, to go on for two hours was sublime. Many could not go on more than half an hour. Whatever, when the consummation came, it too held the couple for an amazing period of time. How long? I don’t know. More, I think, than humans or Taltos born of humans could endure. Perhaps an hour, perhaps more.