Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 3)

Before we move on to the cataclysm and the land of winter, let me add one thing.

I do believe there were bad ones among us, those who did violence. I think there were. There were those who killed perhaps, and those who were killed. I'm sure it must have been that way. It had to be. But no one wanted to talk about it! They would leave such things out of the tales! So we had no history of bloody incidents, rapes, conquests of one group of men by another. And a great horror of violence prevailed.

How justice was meted out, I don't know. We didn't have leaders in the strict sense, so much as we had collections of wise ones, people who drew together out of presence and formed a loose elite, so to speak, to whom one might appeal.

Another reason I believe that violence must have happened was that we had definite concepts of the Good God and the Evil One. Of course the Good God was he or she (this divinity was not divided) who had given us the land and our sustenance and our pleasures; and the Evil One had made the terrible land of bitter cold. The Evil One delighted in accidents which killed Taltos; and now and then the Evil One got into a Taltos, but that was really rare!

If there were myths and tales to this vague religion, I never heard them told. Our worship was never one of blood sacrifice or appeasement. We celebrated the Good God in songs and verses, and in the circle dances always. When we danced, when we made the child, we were close to the Good God.

Many of these old songs come back to me all the time. Now and then I go down in the early evening, and I walk through the streets of New York, solitary, amid the crowds, and I sing all of these songs that I can then remember, and the feeling of the lost land returns to me, the sound of the drums and the pipes, and the vision of men and women dancing in the circle. You can do that in New York, no one pays any attention to you. It's really amusing to me.

Sometimes others in New York who are singing to themselves, or mumbling loudly, or chattering, will come near to me, chatter at me, or sing towards me, and then drift off. In other words, I am accepted by the crazies of New York. And though we are all alone, we have each other for those few moments. The twilight world of the city.

Afterwards, I go out in my car and give coats and wool scarves to those who don't have them. Sometimes I send Remmick, my servant, to do this. Sometimes we bring in the street people to sleep in the lobby, to feed them and bed them down. But then one will fight with another, perhaps even knife another, and out they all must go, into the snow again.

Ah, but that brings me to one other pitfall of our life in the lost land. How could I have forgotten? There were always those Taltos who were caught in music and couldn't get out. They could be caught by the music of others, so that others had to be made to stop the music in order to release them. They could be caught in their own song, and truly sing until they fell dead. They could dance until they fell dead.

I often fell into great spells of singing and dancing and rhyming, but I always woke out of it, or the music came to a ceremonial finish, or I grew weary perhaps, or lost the rhythm. Whatever, I was never in any danger of death. Many did as I did. But there were always deaths in this manner.

Everyone felt that the Taltos who died dancing or singing had gone to the Good God.

But nobody talked much about it. Death just wasn't a fit subject for Taltos. All unpleasant things were forgotten. That was one of our basic ideals.

I'd been alive a long time by the time of the cataclysm. But I don't know how to measure. Let me estimate twenty or thirty years.

The cataclysm was entirely a thing of nature. Later, men told tales of Roman soldiers or the Picts driving us from our island. No such thing happened at all. In the lost land, we never laid eyes on human beings. We knew no other people. We knew only ourselves.

A great upheaval of the earth caused our land to tremble and begin to break apart. It started with vague rumblings, and clouds of smoke covering the sky. The geysers began to scald our people. The pools were so hot we couldn't drink from them. The land moved and groaned both day and night.

Many Taltos were dying. The fish in the pools were dead, and the birds had fled the cliffs. Men and women went in all directions seeking a place that was not turbulent, but they did not find it, and some came running back.

At last, after countless deaths, all the tribe built rafts, boats, dugouts, whatever they could, to make the journey to the land of bitter cold. There was no choice for us. Our land grew more tumultuous and treacherous with every day.

I don't know how many remained. I don't know how many got away. All day and all night, people built boats and went into the sea. The wise ones helped the foolish ones--that was really the way we divided old from young--and on about the tenth day, as I would calculate it now, I sailed with two of my daughters, two men whom I loved, and one woman.

And it is really in the land of winter, on the afternoon that I saw my homeland sink into the sea, on that afternoon, that the history of my people really began.

Then began their trials and their tribulations, their real suffering, and their first concept of valor and sacrifice. There began all the things human beings hold sacred, which can only come from difficulty, struggle, and the growing idealization of bliss and perfection, which can only flourish in the mind when paradise is utterly lost.

It was from a high cliff that I saw the great cataclysm reach its conclusion; it was from that height that I saw the land break into pieces and sink into the sea. It was from there that I saw the tiny figures of Taltos drowning in that sea. It was from there that I saw the giant waves wash the foot of the cliffs and the hills, and crash into the hidden valleys, and flood the forests.

The Evil One has triumphed, said those who were with me. And for the first time the songs we sang and the tales we recited became a true lament.

It must have been late summer when we fled to the land of bitter cold. It was truly cold. The water striking the shores was cold enough to knock a Taltos unconscious. We learned immediately that it would never be warm.

But the full breath of winter was something of which we had not truly dreamed. Most of the Taltos who escaped the lost land died the first winter. Some who remained bred furiously to reestablish the tribe. And as we had no real idea that winter was going to come again, many more died the following winter, too.

Probably we caught on to the cycle of the seasons by the third or fourth year.

But those first years were times of rampant superstition, endless chattering and reasoning as to why we had been cast out of the lost land, and why the snow and wind came to kill us, and whether or not the Good God had turned against us.

My penchant for observation and making things elevated me to the undisputed leader. But the entire tribe was learning rapidly about such things as the warm carcasses of dead bears and other large animals, and then the good warmth from their furry skins. Holes were warmer obviously than caves, and with the horns of a dead antelope we could dig deep underground homes for ourselves, and roof them over with tree trunks and stones.

We knew how to make fire, and very soon got good at it, because we didn't find any fire to be had for nothing, simply breathing out of the rock. Different Taltos at different times developed similar kinds of wheels, and crude wagons were soon fashioned to carry our food, and those who were sick.

Gradually, those of us who had survived all the winters of the land of bitter cold began to learn very valuable things which had to be taught to the young. Paying attention mattered for the first time. Nursing had become a means of survival. All women gave birth at least once, to make up for the appalling rate of death.

If life had not been so hard, this would have been seen perhaps as a time of great creative pleasure. I could list the various discoveries that were made.

Suffice it to say we were hunter-gatherers of a very primitive sort, though we did not eat the meat of animals unless we were really starving, and that we progressed erratically in a completely different fashion from human beings.

Our large brains, our enhan

ced verbal capacity, the strange marriage in each of us of instinct and intelligence--all this made us both more clever and more clumsy, more insightful and more foolish in many respects.

Of course, quarrels broke out among us, as the result of scarcity or questions of judgment--whether to go this way or that to seek game. Groups broke off from the main group and went their own way.

I had by this time become accustomed to being the leader, and did not frankly trust anybody else to do it. I was known simply by name, Ashlar, as no titles were required among us, and I exerted tremendous influence over the others, and lived in terror of their getting lost, being eaten by wild animals, or fighting each other in harmful ways. Battles, quarrels, they were now daily occurrences.

But with each passing winter we had greater and greater skills. And as we followed the game south, or moved in that direction simply by instinct or by accident, I don't know, we came into warmer lands of fairly extended summer, and our true reverence for, and reliance upon, the seasons began.

We began to ride the wild horses for fun. It was great sport to us. But we didn't think that horses could really be tamed. We did all right with the oxen to pull our carts, which, in the beginning, of course, we had pulled ourselves.

Out of this came our most intense religious period. I invoked the name of the Good God every time chaos came upon us, striving to put our lives back in order. Executions took place sometimes twice a year.