Talitha, old and of birdbone body, great healer and the wisest of all, teaches the Weaver Women of Alba the Beautiful the Sacred Dances. It is the year 839, as the Nazarenes name and tally time, and the Kingdom of Alba the Beautiful stands at a crossroads. King Eoghann rules from Inverness and faces threats, from both the Scots kingdom of Dal Riada and the Norse berserkirs. Alba is the last kingdom in all the Brit Islands which is 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.

War seems inevitable and Talitha, and her great boon companion the Golden Boar of Alba – a mysterious and magnificent being whose depthless eyes carry “stars, and shoals of stars, swimming deep in the backlight of its depthless eyes” – prepare the Weaver Women to march by Eoghann’s side in the coming last battle. But there is much to teach and time may be too short.

Talitha teaches all that she knows to Eo and Enya, Lorna and Lahleain, Deardreaith, Moireaichd and Mora, and they in turn give Service to King Eoghann, all the people of Alba and Mother EAerth Herself. Throughout all the unfolding towards this last battle 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.

This is how the Epilogue to Alba begins – “The ways of the people of Alba – whom historians have called the Picts for many generations of writing history, even though they did not, themselves, call their own name as “Picts” – quickly disappeared. No texts in any language of these people of Alba have ever been found. There remain in the archeological record some marvelous artifacts, carvings and glyphs, but not so many of these at all.”

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.

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