Taltos

Twenty-eight

WE INVENTED A human identity for ourselves.

We “became” an ancient tribe called the Picts, tall because we came from the northern countries where men grow tall, and we were eager to live in peace with those who would not disturb us.

Of course, we had to go about this very gradually. Word went out before we did. There was a waiting period at first, during which no strangers were admitted to the glen; then occasional travelers were let through, and from these we gleaned valuable knowledge. Then we ventured out, declaring ourselves to be the Picts and offering enlightened friendship to those whom we encountered.

Over time, in spite of the legend of the Taltos, which was always around, and gained some new impetus every time some poor Taltos was captured, we succeeded with this ruse. And our security improved not through battlements, but through our slow integration with human beings.

We were the proud and reclusive Clan of Donnelaith, but others would receive hospitality at our brochs. We did not speak of our gods much. We did not encourage questions about our private ways or our children.

But we lived as noblemen; we held the concepts of honor, and pride in our homeland.

It began to work rather beautifully. And with the doors of the glen open finally, new learning came to us for the first time directly from outside elements. We quickly learned to sew, to weave, and weaving proved a trap for the obsessive Taltos. Men, women, all of us would weave. We would weave for days and nights on end. We could not stop ourselves.

The only remedy was to pull away and turn to some other new craft and master it. Working with metals. We learned this. And though we never did more than forge a few coins and make arrowheads, we nevertheless went mad for a while with it.

Writing also had come to us. Other peoples had come to the shores of Britain, and unlike the uncouth warriors who had destroyed our world of the plain, these people wrote things on stone, on tablets, and on sheepskin especially worked by them to be permanent and beautiful to see and touch.

The writing on these stones, tablets, and scrolls of vellum was Greek and Latin! And we learnt it from our slaves as soon as the first marvelous connection between symbol and word was made. And then later from the traveling scholars who came into the valley.

Indeed, it became an obsession to many of us, myself in particular, and we read and wrote incessantly, translating our own tongue, which is far older than any in Britain, into written words. We made a script called Ogham, and it formed our secret writings. You can see this script on many a stone in the north of Scotland, but no one today can decipher it.

Our culture, the name we took, that of the Pictish people, and our art and our writing continue in modern times to be a complete mystery. You’ll see the reason for that soon-for the loss of the Pict culture.

As a practical point, I wonder sometimes what became of those dictionaries which I so laboriously completed, working months on end without stopping except to collapse for a few hours of sleep or to send out for food.

They were hidden away in the souterrains or earth houses which we built beneath the floor of the glen, the ultimate hiding place in case humans ever swept down on us again. Also hidden were many of the manuscripts in Greek and Latin from which I studied in those early days.

Another great trap for us, something which could entrance us, was mathematics, and some of the books that came into our possession were concerned with theorems of geometry which set us talking for days and days, and drawing triangles in the mud.

The point is that these were exciting times for us. The subterfuge gave us a perfect access to new developments. And though we had all the time to watch and chastise the foolish young Taltos that they weren’t to confide in the newcomers or fall in love with their men and women, we generally came to know much of the Romans who had come into Britain, and to realize that these Romans had punished the Celtic barbarians who had inflicted such atrocities on us.

Indeed, these Romans put no faith in the local superstitions about the Taltos. They spoke of a civilized world, vast and full of great cities.

But we feared the Romans as well. For though they built magnificent buildings, the likes of which we’d never seen, they were more skilled at war than the others. We heard lots of stories of their victories. Indeed, they had refined the art of war and made it even more successful at destroying lives. We kept to the remote glen. We never wanted to meet them in battle.

More and more traders brought their books to us, their scrolls of vellum, and I read avidly their philosophers, their playwrights, their poets, their satirists, and their rhetoricians.

Of course, no one of us could grasp the actual quality of their lives, the ambience, to use the modern word, their national soul, their character. But we were learning. We knew now that all men were not barbarians. Indeed, this was the very word the Romans used for the tribes that were filling Britain from all sides, tribes which they had come here to subdue in the name of a mighty empire.

The Romans, by the way, never did reach our glen, though for two hundred years they campaigned in Britain. The Roman Tacitus wrote the story of Agricola’s early campaign which reached Scotland. In the next century the Antonine Wall was built, a marvel to the barbarian tribes who resisted Rome, and very near it for forty-five miles the Military Way, a great road on which not only the soldiers passed, but traders bringing all manner of goods from the sea, and tantalizing evidence of other civilizations.

Finally the Roman Emperor himself, Septimus Severus, came to Britain to subdue the Scottish tribes, but even he never penetrated our strongholds.

For many years after that the Romans remained, providing much strange booty for our little nation.

By the time they withdrew from those lands, and gave them up to the barbarians at last, we were no longer really a hidden people. Hundreds of human beings had settled in our valley, paying homage to us as the lords, building their smaller brochs around our larger ones, and seeing us as a great, mysterious, but altogether human family of rulers.

It was not easy always to maintain this ruse. But nowhere was the life of the times more suited to it. Other clans were springing up in their remote strongholds. We were not a country of cities, but of small feudal holdings. Though our height and our refusal to intermarry were deemed unusual, we were in every other way completely acceptable.

Of course the key was never, never to let the outsiders see the birth ritual. And in this the Little People, needing our protection from time to time, became our sentries.

When we chose to make the circle amid the stones, all lesser clans of Donnelaith were told that our priests could only preside over our family rites in the strictest privacy.

And as we grew bolder, we let the others come, but only in far-reaching outer circles. Never could they see what the priests did in the very heart of the assembly. Never did they see the birth. They imagined it was only some vague worship of sky and sun and wind and moon and stars. And so they called us a family of magicians.

Of course, all this depended upon considerable peaceful cooperation with those who lived in the glen, and this remained stable for centuries.

In sum, we passed for people, in the midst of people. And other Taltos partook of our subterfuge, declaring themselves Picts, learning our writing and taking it, with our styles of building and ornament, to their strongholds. All Taltos who truly wanted to survive lived in this way, fooling human beings.

Only the wild Taltos continued to flash about in the forests, risking everything. But even they knew the Ogham script and our many symbols.

For example, if a lone Taltos lived in the forest, he might carve a symbol on a tree to let other Taltos know that he was there, a symbol without meaning for human beings. One Taltos seeing another in an inn might approach and offer him some gift, which was in fact a brooch or pin with our emblems.

A fine example of this is the bronze pin with a human face, discovered many centuries later by modern peoples in Sutherland. Humans do not realize, when they write about this pin, that it is a picture of an infant Taltos emerging from the womb, its head huge, its small arms still folded, though ready to unfold and grow, rather like the wings of a new butterfly.

Other symbols we carved into rock, at the mouths of caves or upon our sacred stones, represented fanciful conceptions of the animals of the lost land of tropical abundance. Others had purely personal meanings. Pictures of us as fierce warriors were deceptive, and skillfully made to actually show people meeting in peace, or so we imagined.

The art of the Picts is the common name given to all of this. And that tribe has become the great mystery of Britain.

What was our worst fear? The worst threat, so to speak? Enough time had passed that we did not fear human beings who really knew anything about us. But the Little People knew and the Little People longed to breed with us, and though they needed us, to protect them, they still occasionally caused us trouble.

But the true threats to our peace came from witches. Witches-those singular humans who caught our scents, and could somehow breed with us, or were the descendants of those who had bred with us. For the witches-who were always very rare, of course-passed on, from mother to daughter and father to son, the legends of our kind, and the lovely, mad notion that if they could ever couple with us, they could make monsters of size and beauty who might never die. And other fanciful propositions inevitably grew up around this idea-that if they drank the blood of the Taltos, the witches could become immortal. That if they killed us, with the proper words and the proper curses, they could take our power.

And the most awful aspect of all this, the only real, true part of it, was that the witches could often tell on sight we were not mere tall humans, but real Taltos.

We kept them out of the glen. And when traveling abroad, we took great pains to avoid the village witch, or the sorcerer who lived in the wood. But they of course had reason to fear us too, for we too knew them infallibly on sight and, being very clever and very rich, we could make plenty of trouble for them.

But when a witch was about, it was a dangerous game. And all that was required to make it worse was one clever or ambitious witch determined to find the true Taltos of the Highlands among the tall clans that dwelt there.

And now and then there was the worst challenge, a powerful spellbinding witch capable of luring Taltos out of their dwellings, of wrapping them up in charms and music, and drawing them to her rituals.

Occasionally there would be talk of a Taltos found elsewhere. There would be talk of hybrid births; there would be whispers of witches and Little People and magic.

By and large, we were safe in our strongholds.

The glen of Donnelaith was now known to the world. And as the other tribes squabbled with one another, our valley was left in peace, not because people feared that monsters dwelt there, but only because it was the stronghold of respectable noblemen.

It was in those years a grand life, but a life with a lie at its core. And many a young Taltos could not endure it. Off he would go into the world, and never return. And sometimes hybrid Taltos came to us who knew nothing of who or what had made them.

Very gradually, over time, a rather foolish thing happened. Some of us even intermarried with human beings.

It would happen in this way. One of our men would go on a long pilgrimage, perhaps, and come upon a lone witch in a dark wood with whom he fell in love, a witch who could bear his offspring without difficulty. He would love this witch; she would love him; and being a ragged poor creature, she would throw herself upon his mercy. He would bring her home; she might at some point in the distant future bear him another child before she died. And some of these hybrids married other hybrids.

Sometimes, too, a beautiful female Taltos would fall in love with a human man, and forsake everything for him. They might be together for years before she would bear, but then a hybrid would be born, and this would unite the little family even more closely, for the father saw his likeness in the child, and laid claim to its loyalty, and it of course was a Taltos.

So that is how the human blood in us was increased. And how our blood came into the human Clan of Donnelaith that eventually survived us.

Let me pass over in silence the sadness we often felt, the emotions we evinced at our secret rituals. Let me not try to describe our long conversations, pondering the meaning of this world, and why we had to live among humans. You are both outcasts now. You know it. And if God is merciful and you really don’t, well, then, you can still imagine it.

What is left of the glen today?

Where are the countless brochs and wheelhouses which we built? Where are our stones with their curious writing and strange serpentine figures? What became of the Pictish rulers of that time, who sat so tall on their horses, and impressed the Romans so much with their gentle manner?

As you know, what is left at Donnelaith is this: a quaint inn, a ruined castle, an immense excavation that is slowly revealing a giant cathedral, tales of witchcraft and woe, of earls who died untimely deaths, and of a strange family, gone through Europe to America, carrying with them an evil strain in the blood, a potential to give birth to babies or monsters, an evil strain evidenced by the glow of witches’ gifts, a family wooed for that blood and those gifts by Lasher-a wily and unforgiving ghost of one of our people.

How were the Picts of Donnelaith destroyed? Why did they fall as surely as the people of the lost land and the people of the plain? What happened to them?

It was not the Britons, the Angles, or the Scots who conquered us. It was not the Saxons or the Irish, or the German tribes who invaded the island. They were far too busy destroying each other.

On the contrary, we were destroyed by men as gentle as ourselves, with rules as strict as our own, and dreams as lovely as our dreams. The leader they followed, the god they worshiped, the savior in whom they believed was the Lord Jesus Christ. He was our undoing.

It was Christ himself who brought an end to five hundred years of prosperity. It was his gentle Irish monks who brought about our downfall.

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.

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.”

Great cries rang out, of joy and agreement, and those humans who had always loved us, who loved me as their king, rallied quickly around us.

But the danger hung in the air. At any moment the bloody swords might clash again, and I knew it.

“Quickly, all of you, pledge yourself to Christ,” I declared, seeing in this Taltos vow of celibacy our only chance for survival.

Janet cried out for me to cease with this unnatural and evil plan. And then, in a great volley of words, rushing sometimes too fast and sometimes too slow, she spoke of our ways, of our offspring, our sensuous rites, our long history, everything that I was now prepared to sacrifice.

It was the fatal mistake.

At once the human converts descended upon her and bound her hand and foot, as those who sought to defend her were cut down. Some of the converted Taltos tried to flee, and they were immediately cut down, and another vicious battle broke out, in which cottages and huts were set aflame and people ran hither and thither in panic, screaming for God to help us. “Kill all the monsters,” was the cry.

One of the monks declared it was the end of the world. Several of the Taltos did also. They dropped to their knees. Humans, seeing those Taltos in that submissive posture, at once killed those whom they did not know, or feared or disliked, sparing only those few who were beloved of everyone.

Only I and a handful were left-those who had been most active in the leadership of the tribe, and had magnetic personalities. We fought off the few who had the stamina to attack us, subduing others with mere ferocious looks or vociferous condemnations.

And at last-when the frenzy had peaked, and men fell under the burden of their swords, and others screamed and wept over the slain, only five of us remained-Taltos dedicated to Christ-and all those who would not accept Christ, except for Janet, had been annihilated.

The monks called for order.

“Speak to your people. Ashlar. Speak or all is lost. There will be no Donnelaith, and you know it.”

“Yes, speak,” said the other Taltos, “and say nothing that will frighten anyone. Be clever, Ashlar.”

I was weeping so hard this task seemed utterly beyond me. Everywhere I looked I saw the dead, hundreds born since the circle of the plain, dead and gone now, into eternity, and perhaps into the flames of hell without Christ’s mercy.

I fell to my knees. I wept until I had no more tears, and when I stopped, the valley was still.

“You are our king,” said the human beings. “Tell us that you are no devil, Ashlar, and we will believe you.”

The other Taltos with me were desperately afraid. Their fate hung now with mine. But they were those most known to the human population and most revered. We did have a chance, that is, if I did not despair and seal the fate of all of us.

But what was left of my people? What? And what had I brought into my valley?

The monks came close. “Ashlar, God tries those whom He loves,” they said. And they meant it. Their eyes were filled with sadness too. “God tests those whom he would make saints,” they said, and heedless of what others might think of our monstrousness, our sinfulness, they threw their arms around me, and stood firm against the rest, risking their own safety.

Now Janet, held tight by her captors, spoke:

“Ashlar, you are the betrayer of your people. You have brought death to your own in the name of a foreign god. You have destroyed the Clan of Donnelaith, which has lived in this glen since time immemorial.”

“Stop the witch!” someone cried.

“Burn her,” said another. And another and another.

And even as she continued to speak, there was whispering, and those going to prepare a stake in the stone circle.

All this I saw from the corner of my eye, and so did she, and still she kept her courage.

“I curse you, Ashlar. I curse you in the eyes of the Good God.”

I couldn’t speak, and yet I knew that I had to. I had to speak to save myself, the monks, my followers. I had to speak if I was to stop the death of Janet.

Wood had been dragged to the stake. Coal was being thrown down. Humans, some of whom had always feared Janet and every female Taltos whom they could not have, had brought torches.

“Speak,” whispered Ninian beside me. “For Christ, Ashlar.”

I closed my eyes, I prayed, I made the Sign of the Cross, and then I made my plea to all to listen.

“I see before me a chalice,” I declared, speaking softly but loud enough for all to hear. “I see the Chalice of Christ’s blood which Joseph of Arimathea brought to England. I see the blood of Christ emptied into the Well; I see the water run red, and I know its meaning.

“The blood of Christ is our sacrament and our nourishment. It shall forever replace the cursed milk we sought from our women in lust; it shall be our new sustenance and our portion.

“And in this awful slaughter today, may Christ receive our first great act of self-sacrifice. For we loathe this killing. We loathe it and we always have. And we do it only to the enemies of Christ, that His kingdom may come on earth, that he may rule forever.”

It was the Art of the Tongue as best I knew it, and it was said with eloquence and tears, and it left the entire mob of human and Taltos alike cheering and praising Christ and throwing their swords to the ground and tearing off their finery, their bracelets, their rings, and declaring themselves to be born again.

And at that moment, as they had come from my lips, I knew these words were lies. This religion was a deceiving thing, and the body and blood of Christ could kill as surely as poison.

But we were saved, we who stood there exposed as monsters. The crowd no longer wanted our death. We were safe-all except for Janet.

They dragged her now to the stake, and though I protested, weeping and begging, the priests said no, that Janet must die, that she might die as a lesson to all those who would refuse Christ.

The fire was lighted.

I threw myself to the ground. I couldn’t bear it. Then, leaping up, I ran at the slowly gathering blaze, only to be pulled back and held against my will.

“Ashlar, your people need you!”

“Ashlar, set an example!”

Janet fixed her eyes on me. The fire licked at her rose-colored gown, at her long yellow hair. She blinked to clear her eyes of the rising smoke, and then she cried out to me:

“Cursed, Ashlar, cursed for all time. May death elude you forever. May you wander-loveless, childless-your people gone, until our miraculous birth is your only dream in your isolation. I curse you, Ashlar. May the world around you crumble before your suffering is ended.”

The flames leapt up, obscuring her fair face, and a low roar came from the rapidly burning timbers. And then came her voice again, louder, full of agony and full of courage.

“A curse on Donnelaith, a curse on its people forever! A curse on the Clan of Donnelaith. A curse on Ashlar’s people.”

Something writhed within the flames. I did not know if it was Janet in her final pain, or some trick of light and shadow and flickering.

I had fallen to my knees. I couldn’t stop the tears and I couldn’t look away. It was as if I had to go as far as I could with her into her pain, and I prayed to Christ, “She knows not what she says, take her to heaven. For her kindnesses to others, for her goodness to her people, take her to heaven.”

The flames leapt heavenward, and then at once began to die away, revealing the stake, the smoldering heap of wood and burnt flesh and bone that had been this gracious creature, older and wiser than I was.

The glen was still. Nothing remained of my people now but five males who vowed to be celibate Christians.

Lives that had existed for centuries had been snuffed out. Torn limbs, severed heads, and mutilated bodies lay everywhere.

The human Christians wept. We wept. A curse on Donnelaith, she had said. A curse. But, Janet, my darling Janet, I prayed, what more can happen to us! I collapsed on the ground.

At that moment I wanted no more of life. I wanted no more of suffering or death, or of the best of intentions resulting in abominable ruin.

But the monks came to me, lifting me to my feet. My followers called to me. I was to come, they said, to behold a miracle that had happened before the ruined and burnt-out tower that had once been the home of Janet and those closest to her.

Dragged there, dazed, unable to speak, I was gradually made to understand that an old spring, long dried, had come to life, clear water bubbling up from the earth once again, and cutting its path through the old dried bed, between hillocks and the roots of the trees and into a great drift of wildflowers.

A miracle!

A miracle. I pondered. Should I point out that that stream had come and gone a number of times in the century? That the flowers were blooming yesterday and the day before because the earth there was already damp, presaging the little fount which had now at last broken through the surface again?

Or should I say:

“A miracle.”

I said, “A sign from God.”

“Kneel, all,” cried Ninian. “Bathe in this holy water. Bathe away the blood of those who wouldn’t accept God’s grace and have gone now to eternal perdition.”

Janet burning in hell forever, the pyre that will never go out, the voice that will curse me still crying …

I shuddered and all but fainted again, but I fell on my knees.

In my soul, I knew that this new faith must sweep me up, it must consume my whole life, or I was lost forever!

I had no more hope, no more dreams; I had no more words, and no more thirst for anything! This had to save me, or I should die in this very spot now, by sheer will, never speaking or moving or taking nourishment again until death stole over me.

I felt the cold water slapped against my face. I felt it running down into my robes. The others had gathered. They too were bathing. The monks had begun to sing the ethereal psalms which I had heard on Iona. My people, the humans of Donnelaith crying and sad, and eager for the same grand redemption, took up the song, in the old-fashioned way, singing the lines right after the monks, until voices everywhere were raised in praise of God.

We were all baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.

The Clan of Donnelaith was Christian thereafter. All human save for five Taltos.

Before the following morning a few more Taltos were discovered, mostly very young women who had been shielding two almost newborn males in their house, from which they had seen the whole tragedy, including Janet’s execution. They were six altogether.

The Christian humans brought them to me. They would not speak, either to accept or deny Christ, but looked at me in terror. What should we do?

“Let them go, if they will,” I said. “Let them flee the valley.”

No one had the stomach for any more blood or death. And their youth and their simplicity and their innocence made a shield around them. As soon as the new converts stepped back, these Taltos fled, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, right into the forest.

In the days that followed, we five males who were left did win the entire goodwill of the people. In the fervor of their new religion, they praised us that we had brought Christ to them, and honored us for our vows of celibacy. The monks prepared us with instructions day and night to accept Holy Orders. We pored over our holy books. We prayed constantly.

Work was begun upon the church, a mighty Roman-style building of dry stone, with rounded arch windows and a long nave.

And I myself led a procession through the old circle, at which we effaced any symbols from olden times, and carved into the rocks new emblems, from the Altar Book of the Gospels.

These were the fish, which stood for Christ, the dove, which stood for the Apostle John, the lion for Mark, the ox for Luke, and the man for Matthew. And in a little Taltos fury we carved other biblical scenes into the flatter stones, and moved into the cemetery, putting crosses upon the old graves, in the style of the crosses of the book, very ornate and ornamented.

It was a brief interlude in which something returned of the old fervor that had once taken hold of all of us on the Salisbury Plain. But we were only five now, and not an entire tribe, five who had renounced their own nature to please God and the human Christians, five who had been cast in the role of saints in order not to be massacred.

But a dark terror lurked inside me and in the others. How long would this uneasy truce last? Would not the slightest sin topple us from our pedestals?

Even as I prayed to God to help me, to forgive me for all my errors, to bind me to him as a good priest, I knew that we five could not remain in Donnelaith much longer.

And I could not endure it myself! Even at my prayers, and during the singing of psalms with the monks, I heard Janet’s curse in my ears, I saw my people covered in blood. Christ, give me faith, I prayed, yet in my secret heart I did not believe that the only path for my kind was one of such renunciation and chastity. How could it be? Did God mean for us to die out?

This was not self-sacrifice, it was a form of utter denial. For Christ, we had become no one!

Yet the love of Christ burned hot in me. It burned desperately. And a very strong personal sense of my Savior developed in me as it has in Christians always. Night after night in my meditations I envisioned the Chalice of Christ, the holy hill on which Joseph’s hawthorn bloomed, the blood in the water of Chalice Well. I made a vow to go in pilgrimage to Glastonbury.

There were rumblings from outside the glen. Men had heard of the Holy Battle of Donnelaith, as it had come to be called. They had heard of the tall celibate priests with strange powers. Monks had written to other monks, passing on the story.

The legends of the Taltos came alive. Others who had lived as Picts in small communities had now to flee their homes as their pagan neighbors taunted and threatened them, and as Christians came to plead with them to renounce their wicked ways and become “holy fathers.”

Wild Taltos were found in the forest; there were rumors of the magic birth having been witnessed in this or that town. And the witches were on the prowl, boasting that they could make us reveal ourselves, and render us powerless.

Other Taltos, richly dressed and armed to the teeth, and now exposed for what they were, came in heavily defended groups to the glen and cursed me for what I had done.

Their women, beautifully clothed, and guarded on all sides, spoke of Janet’s curse, having heard whispers of this, no doubt from the Taltos who had fled Donnelaith, and demanded that I repeat the curse to all, and hear their judgments.

I refused. I said nothing.

Then, to my horror, these Taltos repeated the entire curse to me, for indeed they already knew it.

“Cursed, Ashlar, cursed for all time. May death elude you forever. May you wander-loveless, childless-your people gone, until our miraculous birth is your only dream in your isolation…. May the world around you crumble before your suffering is ended.”

It had become a poem to them which they could recite, and they spat at my feet when they were finished.

“Ashlar, how could you forget the lost land?” the women demanded. “How could you forget the circle of Salisbury Plain?”

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 suspicious.

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.