Taltos (Lives of the Mayfair Witches #3)(118)
Author: Anne Rice

The new Taltos was seen as an omen; if not perfect of limb and form, beautiful to behold, and full sized, a terrible fear came over the land. The perfect newborn was the blessing of the Good God as before, but you see, our beliefs had darkened; and as they darkened, as we drew all the wrong conclusions from purely natural events, so did our obsession with the great circles darken, our belief in them as pleasing to the Good God, and as morally essential for the tribe.

At last came the year when we settled on the plain.

This was in the south of Britain, now known as Salisbury, where the climate was beautiful to us, and the best we had ever been able to find. The time? Before the coming of human beings.

We knew by then that the winter would always be with us; we did not think it possible to escape the winter anywhere in the world. If you think about this, it’s a perfectly logical assumption. Alas! The summers were longest and sweetest in this part of Britain, I knew this firsthand now, and the forests were thick and full of deer, and the sea was not far away.

Herds of wild antelope wandered the plain.

Here we decided that we would build our permanent home.

The idea of moving all the time, to avoid arguments or to chase the food supply, had long since lost its appeal. We had become, to some extent, a people of settlements. The search was on among all our peoples for permanent refuge and a permanent place to perform the sacred singing, the sacred memory game, and the sacred dance, and of course the ritual of the birth.

We had deeply resented our last invasion, and had only left after endless argument (Taltos always try words first), some pushing and shoving, and finally a lot of ultimatums, such as “All right, if you are determined to crowd these woods, then we shall leave them!”

We held ourselves to be vastly superior to the other tribes for any number of reasons, and certainly because we had so many who had lived in the lost land, and many, many still with white hair. We were in many respects the most clearly organized group, and we had the most customs. Some of us had horses now, and could manage to ride them. Our caravan was comprised of many wagons. And we had good-sized herds and flocks of sheep, goats, and a form of wild cattle that no longer exists.

Others poked fun at us, especially for riding horses, off which we fell repeatedly, but in general other Taltos held us in awe, and came running to us for help in bad times.

Now, upon the Salisbury Plain, determining that it would be ours forever, we chose to make the greatest circle of stones ever seen in the world.

By this time, too, we knew that the very making of the circle united the tribe, organized it, kept it from mischief, and made the dances all the more joyous, as stone after stone was added, and the circle grew ever more impressive to behold.

This great undertaking, the building of the biggest circle in the world, shaped several centuries of our existence, and pushed us forward rapidly in terms of inventiveness and organization. The search for the sarsens, or the sandstone, as it is now called, the means of bringing the boulders back, of dressing them and erecting them, and finally laying in place the lintels—this consumed us; it became a justification for life itself.

The concept of fun and play was almost gone from us now. We were survivors of the bitter cold. The dance had been sanctified. Everything had been sanctified. Yet this was a great and thrilling time.

Those who would share our life joined us, and we grew to such a number that we could resist invasion; indeed, the very first monstrous stone of our great plan inspired such inspiration that other Taltos came to worship, to join our circle or to watch it, rather than to steal part of the plain.

The building of the circle became the backdrop against which our development took place.

During these centuries our life reached its highest peak. We built our encampments all over the plain, in easy walking distance of our great circle, and gathered our animals into small stockades. We planted the elderberry and the blackthorn around our encampments, and these encampments became forts.

We arranged for the orderly burial of the dead; indeed, we built some graves beneath the ground during this time. Indeed, all the consequences of permanent settlement played themselves out. We did not begin to make pottery, but we bought a great deal of it from other Taltos who claimed to have bought it from the short-lived hairy people who came to the coast in boats made of animal skin.

Soon tribes came from all over Britain to make the living circle of the dance within our standing stones.

The circles became great winding processions. It was deemed to be good luck to give birth within our circle. And much trade and prosperity came our way.

Meanwhile, other large circles were being erected in our land. Vast, marvelous circles, but none, absolutely none, to rival our own. Indeed, sometime during this productive and wondrous era, it became known that ours was indeed the circle of circles; people did not seek to rival it, but rather only to see it, to dance in it, to join the procession weaving in and out of the various doorways formed by the lintels and the standing stones.

To travel to another circle, to dance with the tribe there, became a regular event. At such gatherings we learnt much from each other, and celebrated great chains of memory, swapping tales and reinforcing the details of the most cherished stories, and correcting the legends of the lost land.

We would go in bands to see the circle which is now called Avebury, or to see other circles farther south, near Stuart Gordon’s beloved Glastonbury Tor. We went north to worship at others.

But all the while, ours was the most magnificent, and when Ashlar and his people came to visit the circle of another tribe, it was considered to be a great honor, and we were asked for advice, and begged to remain, and given fine gifts.

Of course, you know that our circle became Stonehenge. Because it and many others of our sacred rings are standing even today. But let me explain what may be obvious only to scholars of Stonehenge. We did not build the whole thing that is there now, or is believed to have been there at one time.

We built only two circles of sarsens, quarried in other areas, including the distant Marlborough Downs, but mainly at Amesbury, which is very near to Stonehenge. The inner circle had ten standing stones, and the outer thirty. And the placing of the lintels atop these stones was a matter of great debate. From the beginning, we opted for the lintels. But I never much appreciated them. I had dreamed of a circle of stones to imitate a circle of men and women. Each stone was to be roughly twice the size of a Taltos, and as wide as a Taltos is tall. That was my vision.

But to others of the tribe, the lintels gave the impression of shelter, reminding them of the great volcanic cone which had once protected the tropical valley of the lost land.