of other tribes begged for a celibate Taltos to come and say the special Mass for them. But any Taltos who did not play this game, who did not renounce his pagan ways, who did not claim the protection of God, was fair game for anyone.
Meantime, in a great ceremony, some five of us, and four who had come later, accepted Holy Orders. Two female Taltos who had come into the glen became nuns in our community, and dedicated themselves to caring for the weak and the sick. I was made Father Abbot of the monks of Donnelaith, with authority over the glen and even the surrounding communities.
Our fame grew.
There were times when we had to barricade ourselves in our new monastery to escape the pilgrims who came “to see what a Taltos was” and to lay hands on us. Word got around that we could “cure” and “work miracles.”
Day after day, I was urged by my flock to go to the sacred spring, and bless the pilgrims there who had come to drink the holy water.
Janet’s broch had been torn down. The stones from her home, and what metal could be melted down from her plate and few bracelets and rings, were put into the building of the new church. And a cross was erected at the holy stream, inscribed with Latin words to celebrate the burning of Janet and the subsequent miracle.
I could barely look at this. Is this charity? Is this love? But it was more than plain that for the enemies of Christ, justice could be as bitter as God chose to make it.
But was all this God’s plan?
My people destroyed, our remnants turned into sacred animals? I pleaded with our monks from Iona to discourage all those beliefs! “We are not a magical priesthood!” I declared. “These people are on the verge of declaring that we have magical powers!”
But to my utter horror the monks said that it was God’s will.
“Don’t you see, Ashlar?” said Ninian. “This is why God preserved your people, for this special priesthood.”
But all that I had envisioned had been laid waste. The Taltos had not been redeemed, they had not discovered a way to live on the earth at peace with men.
The church began to grow in fame, the Christian community became enormous. And I feared the whims of those who worshiped us.
At last I set aside each day an hour or two when my door was locked and no one might speak to me. And in the privacy of my cell, I began a great illustrated book, using all the skill I had acquired from my teacher on Iona.
Done in the style of the Four Gospels, it was to be, complete with golden letters on every page, and tiny pictures to illustrate it, the story of my people.
My book.
It was the book which Stuart Gordon found in the crypts of the Talamasca.
For Father Columba, I wrote every word, lavishing on it my greatest gift for verse, for song, for prayer, as I described the lost land, our wanderings to the southern plain, the building of our great Stonehenge. In Latin, I told all I knew of our struggles in the world of men, of how we’d suffered and learned to survive, and how at last my tribe and clan had come to this—five priests amid a sea of humans, worshiped for powers we did not possess, exiles without a name, a nation, or a god of our own, struggling to beg salvation from the god of a people who feared us.
“Read my words here, Father,” I wrote, “you who would not listen to them when I tried to speak them. See them here inscribed in the language of Jerome, of Augustine, of Pope Gregory. And know that I tell the truth and long to enter God’s church as what I truly am. For how else will I ever enter the Kingdom of Heaven?”
Finally my task was complete.
I sat back, staring at the cover to which I myself had affixed the jewels, at the binding which I myself had fashioned from silk, at letters which I myself had written.
At once I sent for Father Ninian, and laid the book before him. I sat very still as Ninian examined the work.
I was too proud of what I’d done, too certain now that somehow our history would find some redeeming context in the vast libraries of church doctrine and history. “Whatever else happens,” I thought, “I have told the truth. I have