Where are the countless brochs and wheelhouses which we built? Where are our stones with their curious writing and strange serpentine figures? What became of the Pictish rulers of that time, who sat so tall on their horses, and impressed the Romans so much with their gentle manner?
As you know, what is left at Donnelaith is this: a quaint inn, a ruined castle, an immense excavation that is slowly revealing a giant cathedral, tales of witchcraft and woe, of earls who died untimely deaths, and of a strange family, gone through Europe to America, carrying with them an evil strain in the blood, a potential to give birth to babies or monsters, an evil strain evidenced by the glow of witches’ gifts, a family wooed for that blood and those gifts by Lasher—a wily and unforgiving ghost of one of our people.
How were the Picts of Donnelaith destroyed? Why did they fall as surely as the people of the lost land and the people of the plain? What happened to them?
It was not the Britons, the Angles, or the Scots who conquered us. It was not the Saxons or the Irish, or the German tribes who invaded the island. They were far too busy destroying each other.
On the contrary, we were destroyed by men as gentle as ourselves, with rules as strict as our own, and dreams as lovely as our dreams. The leader they followed, the god they worshiped, the savior in whom they believed was the Lord Jesus Christ. He was our undoing.
It was Christ himself who brought an end to five hundred years of prosperity. It was his gentle Irish monks who brought about our downfall.
Can you see how it might happen?
Can you see how vulnerable we were, we, who in the solitude of our stone towers would play at weaving and writing like little children, who would hum or sing all day long for the love of it? We, who believed in love and in the Good God, and refused to hold death sacrosanct?
What was the pure message of the early Christians? Of both the Roman monks and the Celtic monks who came to our shores to preach the new religion? What is the pure message, even today, of those cults which would consecrate themselves anew to Christ and his teachings?
Love, the very thing we believed in!
Forgiveness, the very thing we thought practical. Humility, the virtue we believed, even in our pride, to be far more noble than the raging hubris of those who warred endlessly upon others. Goodness of heart, kindness, the joy of the just—our old values. And what did the Christians condemn? The flesh, the very thing that had always been our downfall! The sins of the flesh, which had caused us to become monsters in the eyes of humans, copulating in great ceremonial circles and bringing forth full-grown offspring.
Oh, we were ripe for it. Oh, it was made for us!
And the trick, the sublime trick, was that at its core Christianity not only embraced all this, but managed somehow to sacralize death and at the same time redeem that sacralization.
Follow my logic. Christ’s death had not come in battle, the death of the warrior with the sword in his hand; it had been a humble sacrifice, an execution which could not be avenged, a total surrender on the part of the Godman to save his human children! But it was death, and it was everything!
Oh, it was magnificent! No other religion could have had a chance with us. We detested pantheons of barbarian gods. We laughed at the gods of the Greeks and Romans. The gods of Sumer or India we would have found just as alien and distasteful. But this Christ, why, my God, he was the ideal of every Taltos!
And though he had not sprung full-grown from his mother’s womb, he had nevertheless been born of a virgin, which was just as miraculous! Indeed, the birth of Christ was just as important as his submissive crucifixion! It was our way, it was the triumph of our way! It was the God to whom we could give ourselves without reservation!
Lastly, let me add the pièce de résistance. These Christians, too, had been once hunted and persecuted and threatened with annihilation. Diocletian, the Roman emperor, had subjected them to these things. And refugees came seeking shelter in our glen. We gave it to them.
And the Christians won our hearts. When we spoke to them, we came to believe that possibly the