Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(117)
Author: Anne Rice

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.

There’s so much I could write or say about those centuries. But in a very real sense they constitute a unique time—between the lost land and the coming of human beings—and much of what was deduced, surmised, learned, memorized, was shattered, so to speak, when the humans came.

It is enough to say that we became a highly developed people, worshiping the Good God largely through banquets and dances as we had always done. We still played the game of memory, and still kept to our strict rules of conduct, though now men “remembered” at birth how to be violent, to fight, to excel, and to compete, and women were born remembering fear.

And certain strange events had had an incredible impact upon us, far greater than anyone realized at the time.

Other men and women were afoot in Britain. We heard of them from other Taltos—and that they were loathsome and as mean as animals. The Taltos had slaughtered them in self-defense. But the strange people, who were not Taltos, had left behind pots made of brittle earth, painted with pretty pictures, and weapons made of magical stone. They had also left behind curious little creatures like monkeys, though hairless and very helpless, who might be their young.

This settled the question that they were bestial, for in our minds only the beasts had helpless little young. And even the young of the beasts weren’t as helpless as these little creatures.

But Taltos took mercy on them; they nourished them on milk and kept them, and finally, having heard so much about them, we bought about five of these little creatures, who by that time were no longer crying all the time, and actually knew how to walk.

These creatures didn’t live long. What, thirty-five years, perhaps, but during that time they changed dramatically; they went from little wriggling pink things to tall, strong beings, only to become wizened, withered old things. Purely animal, that was our conjecture, and I don’t think we treated these primitive primates any better than they might have treated dogs.

They were not quick-witted, they didn’t understand our very rapid speech; indeed, it was quite a discovery that they could understand if we spoke slowly, but they had no words, apparently, of their own.

Indeed, they were born stupid, we thought, with less innate knowledge than the bird or the fox; and though they gained greater reasoning power, they always remained fairly weak, small, and covered with hideous hair.

When a male of our kind mated with a female of them, the female bled and died. The men made our women bleed. They were crude and clumsy, besides.

Over the centuries we came upon such creatures more than once, or bought them from other Taltos, but we never saw them in any organized force of their own. We supposed them to be harmless. We had no name for them, really. They taught us nothing, and they made us cry with frustration when they couldn’t learn anything from us.

How sad this is, we thought, that these big animals look so much like Taltos, even walking upright and having no tails, but they have no minds.

Meanwhile, our laws had become very strict. Execution was the ultimate punishment for disobedience. It had become a ritual, though never a celebrated one, in which the offending Taltos was quickly dispatched with deliberate and severe blows to the skull.

Now, the skull of a Taltos stays resilient long after other bones in his body have become hard. But the skull can be crushed easily, if one knows how to do it, and we had—unfortunately—learned.

But death still horrified us. Murder was a very infrequent crime. The death penalty was for those who threatened the entire community. Birth was still our central sacred ceremony, and when we found good places to settle, which argued for permanence, we frequently selected places for our religious circle dancing, and we laid out stones to mark these places, sometimes very, very large stones, in which we took pride.

Ah, the circles of stones! We became, though we never thought of it that way, the people of the stone circles all over the land.

When we were forced to a new territory—either by starvation or because another band of Taltos was coming towards us whom none of us liked, and with whom no one wanted to live in close quarters—we got in the custom of making a new circle at once. Indeed, the diameter of our circle and the weight of its stones became a claim upon a certain area, and the sight of a very large circle built by others was a sign to us that this was their land and we should move on.

Anybody foolish enough to disregard a sacred circle? Well, they would be given no peace and quiet till they decamped. Of course, it was scarcity that imposed these rules often. A great plain could support very few hunters, really. Good spots on lakes and rivers and on the coast were better, but no place was paradise, no place was the endless fountain of warmth and plenty that had been the lost land.

Claims of sacred protection were asserted against invaders or squatters. And I remember myself carving a figure of the Good God, as I perceived God—with both br**sts and a penis—upon an immense stone in one of these circles, a plea to other Taltos that they must respect our holy circle and therefore our land.

When there was a true battle, born of personality and misunderstanding, and rank greed for a particular portion of the earth, the invaders would knock down the stones of those who lived there, and make a new circle entirely of their own.

To be driven out was exhausting, but in a new home the desire to build a larger, more imposing circle burnt hot. We would find stones, we vowed, so large that no one could ever dislodge them, or would ever try.

Our circles spoke of our ambition and our simplicity—of the joy of the dance and our willingness to fight and die for the territory of the tribe.

Our basic values, though unchanged since the days of the lost land, had hardened somewhat around certain rituals. It was mandatory for all to attend the birth of a new Taltos. It was the law that no woman could give birth more than twice. It was the law that reverence and sensuality attend these births; indeed, a great sexual euphoria was often sustained.