Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 3)

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 other 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.