rennie walker

Talitha, old and of birdbone body, great healer and the wisest of all, teaches the Weaver Women of Alba the Sacred Dances. She waits for two of her group to join her in Inverness and has sent out the Call to them. One a man and one a woman – who have been lovers before. In a previous life. But they are late, and the time available for their sacred service to Alba grows shorter with each turn of the Moon.

Talitha dances upon the Great Loom itself and sees all Threads that point to the growing dangers. It is the year 839, as the Nazarenes name and tally time, and a handful of years before Scotland emerges into history. The Kingdom of Alba the Beautiful stands at a crossroads. The Tribe of Alba the Beautiful - King Eoghann, Ard-Rigd of Alba and his Queen Caisseaid, Talitha, the Weaver Women of Inverness, Mora and Duancan, Soay, daughter of Caisseaid, and the mysterious and magnificent Golden Boar of Alba, and all the others of Eoghann's kingdom - face threats, from both the Scots kingdom of Dal Riada and the Norse berserkirs. Alba is the last kingdom in all the Brit Islands not heartful in its praise of the Nazarene Church, but which still follows the ancient ways. And there are those, as yet unknown to Eoghann and Talitha, weaving plots to change this. Finally and forever.

Talitha teaches all that she knows of the Sacred Dances to the Weaver Women of Alba the Beautiful - Eo and Enya, Lorna and Lahleain, Deardreaith, Moireaichd, and Mora. And they in turn give Service to King Eoghann, the people of Alba and Mother EAerth Herself. And through the unfolding towards the Last Battle of the Tribe of Alba the Beautiful the Weaver Women feel joy and sorrows, the touch of Love and fire, intuitions and premonitions, and are coursed by dreams from the Golden Boar of Alba and by the touch of the Sacred Dances themselves, particularly the Dance of Showing the Memory, which presses itself upon them so that they might remember ... their past together ... and their Purpose.

In the kingdom of Dal Riada Kenneath, son of King Alpin, feels in his heart that he will become King of a new kingdom, Scotland. He remembers fragments of teachings told him by Moireaichd of Alba and he uses those fragments to try and see clearly into the near future and discern right action from wrong action.

Meanwhile the Norse reivers, led by the shaman Night Raven are being drawn into a plot to play a part in destroying Alba.

And so the heartland and the shores of Alba the Beautiful become the backdrop and the foreground, both, to this sweeping story. A story that is mystic, shamanic, romantic, and heroic. A story that is all about Love of Mother EAerth and all upon Her Breast, endings (of lives and kingdoms), how to live a life of honor while all the time becoming more and more aware that each of us is just one Thread of Life Woven upon the Great Loom of All Things.

For as Mora declaims to those who would destroy Alba the Beautiful "I fight against all rape of Mother EAerth. The Dances that take me are Woven of Love itself, and were upon the Breast of Mother EAerth before the Time of women and men." In this manner the Weaver Women Serve Alba the Beautiful, the magnificent Golden Boar of Alba and Mother EAerth Herself.

War seems inevitable and Talitha, and her great boon companion the Golden Boar of Alba, prepare the Weaver Women to march by Eoghann’s side in the coming last battle of Alba the Beautiful. But there is much to teach and time may be too short.