Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(129)
Author: Anne Rice

Clickety, clickety, clickety.

The rain had slacked up a bit, praise God. And a little bit of sun was even breaking through the heavy gray clouds just enough to shine on the drops!

“Now, here, Doctor, you take this,” said Mary Jane, as he climbed into the car. It was a fat envelope just full of bills, and, he saw by the way she ruffled them with her thumb, all new twenties. He eyeballed that to be a thousand. She slammed the door and ran around to the other side.

“Now that’s just too much money, Mary Jane,” he said, but he was thinking Weed Eater, lawn mower, brand-new electric shrub clippers, and Sony color TV, and there wasn’t a reason in the world to declare this on his taxes.

“Oh, shut up, you keep it!” she said. “Coming out on a day like this, you earned it.” There went her skirt, back down to her thighs. But she couldn’t hold a candle to that flaming darling upstairs, and what would it be like to get his hands on something like that, just for five minutes, something that young and that sleek and fresh and that beautiful, with those long long legs! Hush now, you old fool, you’re going to give yourself a heart attack.

Mary Jane threw the car into reverse, wheels whirring in the wet shells of the road, and then made a dangerous one-hundred-eighty-degree turn and headed off over the familiar potholes.

He looked back at the house one more time, the big hulk of rotting columns and wood towering over the cypresses, with the duckweed muck lapping at its half-sunk windows, and then at the road ahead. Boy, he was glad to get out of here.

And when he got home and his little wife Eileen said, “What all did you see out there at Fontevrault, Jack?” what was he going to tell her? Not about the three prettiest young women he’d ever seen under one roof, that’s for sure. And not about this wad of twenty-dollar bills in his pocket, either.

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.