Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(115)
Author: Anne Rice

The mother lay as dead after, sleeping the mother’s thin sleep. But the offspring lay with her, talking to her, and the mother sometimes never really slipped into dreams, but talked and sang to the young one, though she was always groggy and often humorous, and she would draw from the young one the first memories, so that the young one wouldn’t forget.

We do forget.

We are very capable of forgetting. And to tell is to memorize, or to imprint. To tell is to strike out against the awful loneliness of forgetting, the awful ignorance of it, the sadness. Or so we thought.

This offspring, whether male or female, and most often it was female, caused great joy. It meant more to us than the birth of a single being. It meant the life of the tribe was good; the life of the tribe would go on.

Of course, we never doubted it would, but there were always some legends that at times it had not, that at times women had coupled and runtish offspring had been born to them, or nothing, and that the tribe had dwindled to a very few. Pestilence now and then sterilized the women, and sometimes the men too.

The offspring was much loved and cared for by both parents, though if it was a daughter, it might be taken away after a while to a place where only women lived. In general, the offspring was the bond of love between the man and the woman. They did not seek to love each other in any other or private way. Childbearing being what it was, we had no concept of marriage or monogamy, or of remaining with one woman. On the contrary, it seemed a frustrating, dangerous, and foolish thing to do.

It did sometimes happen. I’m sure it did. A man and a woman loved each other so much that they would not be parted. But I don’t remember it happening myself. Nothing stood between one seeing any woman or any man, and love and friendship were not romantic; they were pure.

There are many things more about this life I could describe—the various kinds of songs we sang, the nature of arguments, for there were structures to them, the types of logic that held currency with us, which you would probably find preposterous, and the types of awful errors and blunders young Taltos inevitably made. There were small mammalian animals—very like monkeys—on the island, but we never thought of hunting them or cooking them or eating them. Such an idea would have been vulgar beyond tolerance.

I could describe also the kinds of dwellings we built, for they were many, and the scant ornaments we wore—we did not like clothing or need it or want to keep something so dirty next to our skin—I could describe our boats and how bad they were, and a thousand such things.

There were times when some of us crept to the place where the women lived, just to see them in each other’s arms, making love. Then the women would discover us and insist that we go away. There were places in the cliffs, grottoes, caves, small alcoves near bubbling springs, which had become veritable shrines for making love, for both men and men, and women and women.

There was never boredom in this paradise. There were too many things to do. One could romp for hours on the seashore, swim even, if one dared. One could gather eggs, fruit, dance, sing. The painters and the musicians were the most industrious, I imagine, and then there were the boat-builders and the hut builders too.

There was great room for cleverness. I was thought to be very clever. I discerned patterns in things which others did not notice, that certain mussels in the warm pools grew faster when the sun shone on the pools, and that some mushrooms thrived best in the dark days, and I liked to invent systems—such as simple lifts of vines and twig baskets, by which fruit could be sent down from the tops of trees.

But as much as people admired me for this, they also laughed at it. It really wasn’t necessary to do things like this, it was supposed.

Drudgery was unheard of. Each day dawned with its myriad possibilities. No one doubted the perfect goodness of pleasure.

Pain was bad.

That is why the birth aroused such reverence and such caution in all of us, for it involved pain for the woman. And understand, the woman Taltos was no slave of the man. She was often as strong as the male, arms just as long, and just as limber. The hormones in her formed a totally different chemistry.

And the birth, involving both pleasure and pain, was the most significant mystery of our lives. Actually, it was the only significant mystery of our lives.

You have now what I wanted you to know. Ours was a world of harmony and true happiness, it was a world of one great mystery and many small, wondrous things.

It was paradise, and there was never a Taltos born, no matter how much human blood ran in his veins from whatever corrupt lineage, who did not remember the lost land, and the time of harmony. Not a single one.

Lasher most surely remembered it. Emaleth most surely remembered it.

The story of paradise is in our blood. We see it, we hear the songs of its birds, and we feel the warmth of the volcanic spring. We taste the fruit; we hear the singing; we can raise our voices and make the singing. And so we know, we know what humans only believe, that paradise can come again.

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.