Taltos lotmw-3

by Anne Rice

  The great shock came, however, when I entered the cathedral and, dipping my hand into the water fount, looked up to see the stained-glass window of St. Ashlar.

  There was the very image of myself in the glass, clothed in a priest’s robes, with long flowing hair such as I had worn in those days, and peering down at my own true self with dark eyes so like my own they frightened me. Stunned, I read the prayer inscribed in Latin.

  St. Ashlar Beloved of Christ

  And the Holy Virgin Mary

  Who will come again

  Heal the sick

  Comfort the afflicted

  Ease the pangs

  Of those who must die

  Save us

  From everlasting darkness

  Drive out the demons from the valley.

  Be our guide

  Into the Light.

  For a long time I was overcome with tears. I could not understand how this could have happened. Remembering to play the cripple still, I went to the high altar to say my prayers, and then to the tavern.

  There I paid the bard to play all the old songs he knew, and none of them were familiar to me. The Pict language had died out. No one knew the writing on the crosses in the churchyard.

  But this saint, what could the man tell me about him, I asked.

  Was I truly Scots, the bard asked.

  Had I never heard of the great pagan King Ashlar of the Picts, who had converted this entire valley to Christianity?

  Had I never heard of the magic spring through which he worked his miracles? I had only to go down the hill to see it.

  Ashlar the Great had built the first Christian church on this spot, in the year 586, and then set out for Rome on his first pilgrimage, being murdered by brigands before he had even left the valley.

  Within the shrine his holy relics lay, the remnants of his bloody cloak, his leather belt, his crucifix, and a letter to the saint himself from none other than St. Columba. In the scriptorium I might see a psalter which Ashlar himself had written in the style of the great monastery at Iona.

  “Ah, I understand it all,” I said. “But what is the meaning of this strange prayer, and the words ‘who will come again’?”

  “Ah, that, well now, that’s a story. Go to Mass tomorrow morning and look well at the priest who celebrates. You will see a young man of immense height, almost as tall as yourself, and such men are not so uncommon here. But this one is Ashlar come again, they say, and they tell the most fantastic story of his birth, how he came from his mother speaking and singing, and ready to serve God, seeing visions of the Great Saint and the Holy Battle of Donnelaith and the pagan witch Janet burnt up in the fire as the town converted in spite of her.”

  “This is true?” I asked, in quiet awe.

  How could it be? A wild Taltos, born to humans who had no idea they carried the seed in their blood? No. It could not have been. What humans could make the Taltos together? It must have been a hybrid, sired by some mysterious giant who had come in the night and coupled with a woman cursed with the witches’ gifts, leaving her with his monster offspring.

  “It has happened three times before in our history,” said the bard. “Sometimes the mother does not even know she’s with child, other times she is in her third or her fourth month. No one knows when the creature inside her shall start to grow and become the image of the saint, come again to his people.”

  “And who were the fathers of these children?”

  “Upstanding men of the Clan of Donnelaith, that’s who they were, for St. Ashlar was the founder of their family. But you know there are so many strange tales in these woods. Each clan has its secrets. We’re not to speak of it here, but now and then such a giant child is born who knows nothing of the Saint. I have seen one of these with my own eyes, standing a head taller than his father moments after he left his mother to die at the hearthside. A frantic thing, crying in fear, and possessed of no visions from God, but wailing for the pagan circle of stones! Poor soul. They called it a witch, a monster. And do you know what they do with such creatures?”

  “They burn them.”

  “Yes,” came his answer. “It’s a terrible thing to see. Especially if the poor creature is a woman. For then she is judged to be the devil’s child, without trial, for she cannot possibly be Ashlar. But these are the Highlands, and our ways have always been very mysterious.”

  “Have you yourself ever laid eyes on the female thing?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “Never. But there are some who say they have known those who have seen it. There is talk among the sorcerers, and those who cling to the pagan ways. People dream that they will bring the female and the male together. But we should not speak of these things. We suffer those witches to live because now and then they can cure. But no one believes their stories, or thinks them proper for the ears of Christian people.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “I can well imagine.” I thanked him.

  I did not wait for morning Mass to see the strange, tall priest.

  I caught his scent as soon as I approached the rectory, and when he came to the door, having caught mine, we stood staring at one another. I rose to my full height, and of course he had done nothing to disguise his own. We merely stood there, facing one another.

  In him I saw the old gentleness, the eyes almost timid, and the lips soft, and the skin as fresh and free of blemish as that of a baby. Had he really been born of two human beings, two powerful witches perhaps? Did he believe his destiny?

  Born remembering, yes, born knowing, yes, and thank God for him it had been the right time that he remembered-and the right battle, and the right place. And now he followed the old profession they had marked for us hundreds of years ago.

  He came towards me. He wanted to speak. Perhaps he could not believe his eyes, that he was looking upon one exactly like him.

  “Father,” I asked in Latin, so that he was most likely to answer, “was it really from a human mother and father you came?”

  “How else?” he asked, quite clearly terrified. “Go if you will to my parents themselves. Ask them.” He grew pale, and was trembling.

  “Father,” I said, “where is your like among women?”

  “There is no such thing!” he declared. But now he could scarcely keep himself from running away from me. “Brother, where have you come from?” he asked. “Here, seek God’s forgiveness for your sins, whatever they are.”

  “You have never seen a woman of our kind?”

  He shook his head. “Brother, I am the chosen of God,” he explained. “The chosen of St. Ashlar.” He bowed his head, humbly, and I saw a blush come to his cheeks, for obviously he’d committed a sin of pride in announcing this.

  “Farewell, then,” I said. And I left him.

  I left the town and I went again to the stones; I sang an old song, letting myself rock back and forth in the wind, and then I made for the forest.

  Dawn was just rising behind me when I climbed the wooded hills to find the old cave. It was a desolate spot, dark as it had been five hundred years before, with no sign now of the witch’s hovel.

  In the early light, cold and bitter as that of a winter’s eve, I heard a voice call me.

  “Ashlar!”

  I turned around and I looked at the dark woods. “Ashlar the cursed, I see you!”

  “It’s you, Aiken Drumm,” I cried. And then I heard his mean laughter. Ah, the Little People were there, garbed in green so that they would blend with the leaves and the bracken. I saw their cruel little faces.

  “There’s no tall woman here for you, Ashlar,” cried Aiken Drumm. “Nor will there ever be. No men of your ilk but a mewling priest born of witches, who falls to his knees when he hears our pipes. Here! Come. Take a little bride, a sweet morsel of wrinkled flesh, and see what you beget! And be grateful for what God gives you.”

  They had begun to beat their drums. I heard the whining of their song, discordant, ghastly, yet strangely familiar. Then came the pipes. It was the old songs we had sung, t
he songs we taught them!

  “Who knows, Ashlar the cursed?” he cried out. “But your daughter by one of us this morn might be a female! Come with us; we have wee women aplenty to amuse you. Think, a daughter, Your Royal Majesty! And once again the tall people would rule the hills!”

  I turned and ran through the trees, not stopping till I had cleared the pass and come once more to the high road.

  Of course Aiken Drumm spoke the truth. I had found no female of my kind in all of Scotland. And that was what I’d come to seek.

  And what I would seek for another millennium.

  I did not believe then, on that cold morning, that I would never lay eyes again upon a young or fertile female Taltos. Oh, how many times in the early centuries had I seen my female counterparts and turned away from them. Cautious, withdrawn, I would not have fathered a young Taltos to suffer the confusion of this strange world for all the sweet embraces of the lost land.

  And now where were they, these fragrant darlings?

  The old, the white of hair, the sweet of breath, the scentless, these I had seen many a time and would see again-creatures wild and lost, or wrapped in a sorceress’s dreams, they had given me only chaste kisses.

  In dark city streets once I caught the powerful scent, only to be maddened, unable ever to find the soft folds of hot and secret flesh from which it emanated.

  Many a human witch I’ve lured to bed, sometimes warning her of the dangers of my embrace, and sometimes not, when I believed her strong, and able to bear my offspring.

  Across the world I’ve gone, by every means, to track the mysterious ageless woman of remarkable height, with memories of long ago, who greets men who come to her with sweet smiles and never bears their children.

  She is human or she is not there at all.

  I had come too late, or to the wrong place, or plague took the beauty many years ago. War laid waste that town. Or no one knows the story.

  Would it always be so?

  Tales abound of giants in the earth, of the tall, the fair, the gifted.

  Surely they are not all gone! What became of those who fled the glen? Are no wild female Taltos born into the world of human parents?

  Surely somewhere, in the deep forest of Scotland or the jungles of Peru, or the snowy wastes of Russia, there lives a family of Taltos, a clan, in its warm and well-defended tower. The woman and the man have their books, their memories to share, their games to play, their bed in which to kiss and play, though the act of coitus must, as always, be approached with reverence.

  My people can’t be gone.

  The world is huge. The world is endless. Surely I am not the last. Surely that has not been the meaning of Janet’s terrible words, that I should wander through time, mateless forever.

  Now you know my story.

  I could tell many tales. I could tell of my journeys through many lands, my years in various occupations; I could tell of the few male Taltos I met over the years, of the stories I heard of our lost people who had once lived in this or that fabled village.

  The story you tell is the story you choose to tell.

  And this is the story we share, Rowan and Michael.

  You know now how the clan of Donnelaith came into being. You know how the blood of the Taltos came to be in the blood of humans. You know the tale of the first woman ever burnt in the beautiful valley. And the sad account of the place to which the Taltos brought such misery, not once, but again and again, if all our stories are history.

  Janet, Lasher, Suzanne, her descendants, even to Emaleth.

  And you see now that when you raised your gun, when you lifted it, Rowan, and you fired the shots that brought down this child, the girl who had given you her milk, it was no small act of which you need ever be ashamed, but destiny.

  You have saved us both. You have saved us all perhaps. You have saved me from the most terrible dilemma I could ever know, and one which I may be not meant to know.

  Whatever the case, don’t weep for Emaleth. Don’t weep for a race of strange, soft-eyed people, long ago driven from the earth by a stronger species. This is the way of the earth, and we are both of it.

  What other strange, unnamed creatures live within the cities and jungles of our planet? I have glimpsed many things. I have heard many stories. The rain and wind till the earth, to use Janet’s words. What next shall spring from some hidden garden?

  Could we now live together, the Taltos, the human, in the same world? How would such be possible? This is a world where human races battle endlessly, where people of one faith still slaughter people of another. Religious wars rage from Sri Lanka to Bosnia, from Jerusalem to American cities and towns where Christians still, in the name of Jesus Christ, bring death in his name to their enemies, to their own, even to little children.

  Tribe, race, clan, family.

  Deep within us all are the seeds of hate for what is different. We do not have to be taught these things. We have to be taught not to give in to them! They are in our blood; but in our minds is the charity and the love to overcome them.

  And how would my gentle people fare today, if they did come back, as foolish now as they were then, unable to meet the ferocity of men, yet frightening even the most innocent humans with their bold eroticism? Would we choose tropical islands on which to play our sensuous games, to do our dances and fall into our spells of dancing and singing?

  Or would ours be a realm of electronic pastimes, of computers, films, games of virtual reality, or sublime mathematical puzzles-studies suited to our minds, with their love of detail and their inability to sustain irrational states such as wrath or hatred? Would we fall in love with quantum physics the way we once fell in love with weaving? I can see our kind, up night and day, tracing the paths of particles through magnetic fields on computer screens! Who knows what advances we might make, given those toys to preoccupy us?

  My brain is twice the size of the human brain. I do not age by any known clock. My capacity to learn modern science and modern medicine cannot be imagined.

  And what if there rose among us but one ambitious male or female, one Lasher, if you will, who would the supremacy of the race restore, what then might happen? Within the space of one night, a pair of Taltos could breed a battalion of adults, ready to invade the citadels of human power, ready to destroy the weapons which humans know how to use so much better, ready to take the food, the drink, the resources of this brimming world, and deny it to those less gentle, less kind, less patient, in retribution for their eons of bloody dominance.

  Of course, I do not wish to learn these things.

  I have not spent my centuries studying the physical world. Or the uses of power. But when I choose to score some victory for myself-this company you see around you-the world falls back from me as if its obstacles were made of paper. My empire, my world-it is made of toys and money. But how much more easily it could be made of medicines to quiet the human male, to dilute the testosterone in his veins, and silence his battle cries forever.

  And imagine, if you will, a Taltos with true zeal. Not a dreamer who has spent his brief years in misted lands nourished on pagan poetry, but a visionary who, true to the very principles of Christ, decided that violence should be annihilated, that peace on earth was worth any sacrifice.

  Imagine the legions of newborns who could be committed to this cause, the armies bred to preach love in every hamlet and vale and stamp out those, quite literally, who spoke against it.

  What am I finally? A repository for genes that could make the world crumble? And what are you, my Mayfair witches-have you carried those same genes down through the centuries so that we may finally end the Kingdom of Christ with our sons and our daughters?

  The Bible names this one, does it not? The beast, the demon, the Antichrist.

  Who has the courage for such glory? Foolish old poets who live in towers still, and dream of rituals on Glastonbury Tor to make the world new again.

  And even for that mad old man, that doddering fool, was murder not the
first requisite of his vision?

  I have shed blood. It is on my hands now for vengeance’s sake, a pathetic way to heal a wound, but one to which we turn again and again in our wretchedness. The Talamasca is whole again. Not worth the price, but done. And our secrets are safe for the present.

  We are friends, you and I, I pray, and we will never hurt each other. I can reach for your hands in the dark. You can call out to me, and I’ll answer.

  But what if something new could happen? Something wholly new? I think I see it, I think I imagine…. But then it escapes me.

  I don’t have the answer.

  I know I shall never trouble your red-haired witch, Mona. I shall never trouble any of your powerful women. Many centuries have passed since lust or hope has tricked me into that adventure.

  I am alone, and if I am cursed, I’ve forgotten it.

  I like my empire of small, beautiful things. I like the playthings that I offer to the world. The dolls of a thousand faces are my children.

  In a small way they are my dance, my circle, my song. Emblems of eternal play, the work perhaps of heaven.

  Thirty-one

  AND THE DREAM repeats itself. She climbs out of bed, runs down the stairs. “Emaleth!” The shovel is under the tree. Who would ever bother to move it?

  She digs and digs, and there is her girl, with the long slack hair and the big blue eyes. “Mother!”

  “Come on, my darling.”

  They’re down in the hole together. Rowan holds her, rocking her. “Oh, I’m so sorry I killed you.”

  “It’s all right, Mother dear,” she says.

  “It was a war,” Michael says. “And in a war, people are killed, and then afterwards …”

  She woke, gasping.

  The room was quiet beneath a faint drone of heat from the small vents along the floor. Michael slept beside her, his knuckles touching her hip as she sat there, hands clasped to her mouth, looking down at him.