Taltos

Twenty-five

ALL TALTOS ARE born knowing things-facts of history, whole legends, certain songs-the necessity for certain rituals, the language of the mother, and the languages spoken around her, the basic knowledge of the mother, and probably the mother’s finer knowledge as well.

Indeed, these basic endowments are rather like an uncharted vein of gold in a mountain. No Taltos knows how much can be drawn from this residual memory. With effort, amazing things can be discovered within one’s own mind. Some Taltos even know how to find their way home to Donnelaith, though why no one knows. Some are drawn to the far northern coast of Unst, the northernmost island of Britain, to look out over Burrafirth at the lighthouse of Muckle Flugga, searching for the lost land of our birth.

The explanation for this lies in the chemistry of the brain. It’s bound to be disappointingly simple, but we won’t understand it until we know precisely why salmon return to the river of their birth to spawn, or why a certain species of butterfly finds its way to one tiny area of forest when it comes time to breed.

We have superior hearing; loud noises hurt us. Music can actually paralyze us. We must be very, very careful of music. We know other Taltos instantly by scent or sight; we know witches when we see them, and the presence of witches is always overwhelming. A witch is that human which cannot-by the Taltos-be ignored. But I’ll come to more of these things as the story goes on. I want to say now, however, that we do not, as far as I know, have two lives, as Stuart Gordon thought, though this might have been a mistaken and oft-repeated belief about us among humans for some time. When we explore our deepest racial memories, when we go bravely into the past, we soon come to realize these cannot be the memories of one particular soul.

Your Lasher was a soul who had lived before, yes. A restless soul refusing to accept death, and making a tragic, blundering reentry into life, for which others paid the price.

By the time of King Henry and Queen Anne, the Taltos was a mere legend in the Highlands. Lasher did not know how to probe the memories with which he was born; his mother had been merely human, and he set his mind upon becoming a human, as many a Taltos has done.

I want to say that, for me, actual life began when we were still a people of the lost land, and Britain was the land of winter. And we knew about the land of winter, but we never went there, because our island was always warm. My constitutional memories were all of that land. They were filled with sunlight, and without consequence, and they have faded under the weight of events since, under the sheer weight of my long life and my reflections.

The lost land was in the northern sea, within very dim sight of the coast of Unst, as I’ve indicated, in a place where the Gulf Stream of that time apparently made the seas fairly temperate as they struck our shores.

But the sheltered land in which we actually developed was, I believe now when I remember it, nothing less than the giant crater of an immense volcano, miles and miles in width, presenting itself as a great fertile valley surrounded by ominous yet beautiful cliffs, a tropical valley with innumerable geysers and warm springs rising bubbling from the earth, to make small streams and finally great clear and beautiful pools. The air was moist always, the trees that grew about our little lakes and riverets immense, the ferns also of gigantic size, and the fruit of all kinds and colors-mangos, pears, melons of all sizes-always abundant, and the cliffs hung with vines of wild berry and grape, and the grass forever thick and green.

The best fruit was pears, which are nearly white. The best food from the sea was the oyster, the mussel, the limpet, and these were white too. There was a breadfruit that was white once you peeled it. There was milk from the goats, if you could catch them, but it wasn’t as good as milk from your mother or the other women who would let those they loved have their milk.

Scarcely ever did the winds come into the valley, sealed off as it was, except for two or three passes, from the coasts. The coasts were dangerous, for though the water was warmer than on the coast of Britain, it was nevertheless cold, and the winds violent, and one could be swept away. Indeed, if a Taltos wanted to die, which I was told did happen, that Taltos would go out and walk into the sea.

I think, though I’ll never know, that ours was an island, very large, yet an island. It was the custom of some very white-haired ones to walk completely around it, along the beaches, and I was told that this trek took many many days.

Fire we had always known, because there were places up in the mountains where fire breathed right out of the earth. Hot earth itself, molten lava, came in a tiny trickle from some of these places, running down to the sea.

We had always known how to get fire, keep it alive, feed it, and make it last. We used fire to light up the longer nights of winter, though we had no name for it, and it wasn’t cold. We used fire occasionally to cook big feasts, but most of the time this wasn’t necessary. We used fire in the circle sometimes when the birth was happening. We danced around fire, and sometimes played with it. I never beheld a hurtful incident in which any of us was injured by fire.

How far the winds of the earth can carry seeds, birds, twigs, branches, uprooted trees, I have no idea, but that which loved heat thrived in this land, and this is where we began.

Now and then, someone among us told of visiting the islands of Britain-known now as the Shetlands or the Orkneys-or even the coast of Scotland. The islands of winter, that’s what we called them, or, more literally, the islands of the bitter cold. This was always an exciting tale. Sometimes a Taltos was washed out, and somehow managed to swim to the land of winter, and make a raft there for the return home.

There were Taltos who went to sea deliberately to seek adventure, in hollow log boats, and if they did not drown, they would often come home, half dead from the cold, and never travel to the land of winter again.

Everybody knew there were beasts in that land, covered with fur, that would kill you if they could. And so we had a thousand legends and ideas and wrong notions and songs about the snows of winter, and the bears of the forests, and ice that floated in great masses in the lochs.

Once in a very great while, a Taltos would commit a crime. He or she would couple without permission and make a new Taltos that was not, for one reason or another, welcome. Or someone would willfully injure another, and that one would die. It was very rare. I only heard of it. I never saw it. But those outcasts were taken to Britain in the large boats, and left there to die.

We did not know the actual cycle of the seasons, by the way, for to us even the summer in Scotland felt fatally cold. We reckoned time in moons only, and we did not have a concept, as I recall, of a year.

Of course there was a legend you will hear all over the planet, of a time before the moon.

And that was the legendary time before time, or so we thought, but no one actually remembered it.

I can’t tell you how long I lived in this land before it was destroyed. I knew the powerful scent of the Taltos in that land, but it was as natural as air. Only later did it become distinct, to mark the difference between Taltos and human.

I remember the First Day, as do all Taltos. I was born, my mother loved me, I stayed for hours with my mother and father, talking, and then I went up to the high cliffs just below the lip of the crater, where the white-haired ones sat, who talked and talked. I nursed from my mother for years and years. It was known that the milk would dry if a woman didn’t let others drink from her breasts, and not come again till she gave birth. Women didn’t want ever for the milk to dry, and they loved having the men nurse from them; it gave them divine pleasure, the sucking, the stimulation, and it was a common custom to lie with a woman and let the suckling, in one form or another, be the extent of the love. The semen of the Taltos was white, of course, like the semen of human beings.

Women, of course, nursed from women, and teased men that their nipples had no milk. But then our semen was thought to be like milk, not as tasty but in its own way just as nourishing and good.

One game was for the males to find a female alone, pounce upon her, and drink her milk, until others heard her protests and came and drove us away. But no one would have thought of making another Taltos with that woman! And if she really didn’t want us sucking her milk, well, within a reasonable amount of time we stopped.

The women would every now and then gang up on other women also. And beauty had much to do with the allure of those who were sought for this kind of pleasure; personality was always mixed with it; we had distinct personalities, though everyone was pretty much always in a good mood.

There were customs. But I don’t remember laws.

Death came to Taltos through accidents. And as Taltos are playful by nature, indeed physically rough and reckless, many Taltos were always dying of accidents, of having slipped from a cliff or choked on a peach pit, or being attacked by a wild rodent, which attack then caused bleeding which could not be stopped. Taltos rarely if ever broke their bones when they were young. But once a Taltos’s skin had lost its baby softness and there were perhaps a few white hairs in his head, well, then he could be killed by falling from the cliffs. And it was during those years, I think, that most Taltos died. We were a people of the white-haired, and the blond, the red, and the black-haired. We didn’t have many people of the mixed hair, and of course the young greatly outnumbered the old.

Sometimes a pestilence came over the valley that greatly diminished our numbers, and the stories of the pestilence were the saddest that we were ever told.

But I still don’t know what the pestilence was. Those which kill humans do not apparently kill us.

I could “remember” pestilence, and nursing sick ones. I was born knowing how to get fire and carry it safely back to the valley. I knew how to make fire so that I did not have to go to get it, though getting it from someone else was the easiest way. I was born knowing how to cook mussels and limpets with fire. I knew how to make black paste for painting from ashes of fire.

But to return to the subject of death, there was no murder. The idea that one Taltos had the power to kill another was not generally believed. Indeed, if you did quarrel and push someone off a cliff, and that person fell and died, it was still an “accident.” You hadn’t really done it, though others might condemn you for your appalling carelessness and even send you away.

The white-haired ones who liked to tell tales had been alive the longest, certainly, but no one thought of them as old. And if they lay down one night and failed to wake in the morning, it was assumed they had died of a blow from an accident that had not been observed. The white-haired ones often had very thin skin, so thin you could almost see the blood running under it; and often they had lost their scent. But other than that, we didn’t know age in any particular.

To be old was just to know the longest and the best stories, to have stories to relate from Taltos who were gone.

Tales were told in loose verses, or were sung as songs, or sometimes merely poured forth in a rush, with lavish images and rhythms and little bits and pieces of melody and much laughter. Telling, telling was joyful; telling was glorious; telling was the spiritual side of life.

The material side of life? I’m not sure there was one, in the strict sense. There was no ownership, except perhaps of musical instruments or pigments for painting, but even these were fairly liberally shared. Everything was easy.

Now and then a whale would be washed ashore, and when the meat had rotted, we would take the bones and make things of them, but to us, these were toys. Digging in the sand was fun, digging loose rocks to make them tumble downhill was fun. Even carving little shapes and circles into the bone with a sharp stone or another bone-this was fun.

But telling, ah, that took respectable talent, and true remembering, and remembering not only in one’s own head, but remembering what other people had remembered and told as well.

You see what I am driving at. Our assumptions about life and death were founded upon these special conditions and notions. Obedience was natural to Taltos. To be agreeable was apparently natural. Seldom was there a rebel or a visionary, until the human blood became mixed with ours.

There were very few white-haired women, perhaps one to every twenty men. And these women were much sought after, for their fount was dried, like that of Tessa, and they wouldn’t birth when they gave themselves to the men.

But in the main, childbirth killed the women, though we never said so at the time. It weakened women, and if a woman did not die by the fourth or fifth birth, she would almost always fall asleep later and die. Many women did not care to give birth at all, or would do it only once.

Birth always followed the true coupling of a pair of true Taltos. It was only later, when we mingled with humans, that women were worn out, like Tessa, by having bled again and again. But the Taltos descended from human origins have many traits entirely peculiar to them which I will recount in time. And who knows but that Tessa didn’t have offspring? It is entirely possible, as you know.

Generally, birth was something that a woman did want to do. But not for a long time after she was born. Men wanted to do it all the time, because they enjoyed it. But no one who thought of coupling did not know that a child would be born from it, as tall as his own mother, or taller, and so no one thought to do it just for fun.

Just for fun was woman making love to woman in many ways, and man making love to man; or man finding a white-haired beauty who was free now for pleasure. Or one male being approached by several young virgins, all eager to bear his child. Fun was occasionally finding the woman who could bear six and seven children without injury. Or the young woman who, for reasons no one knew, could not bear at all. Nursing from the breasts of women was exquisite pleasure; to gather in groups to do this was splendid, the woman who gave her breasts often going into a sensuous trance. Indeed, women could derive complete pleasure in this way, reaching satisfaction with scarcely any other contact at all.

I don’t remember rape; I don’t remember execution; I don’t remember grudges that lasted very long.

I remember pleading and arguments and much talk, and even some quarreling over mates, but always it was in the realm of songs or words.

I do not remember bad tempers or cruelty. I do not remember uneducated souls. That is, all were born knowing some concept of gentleness, goodness, the value of happiness, and a strong love of pleasure and a desire for others to share that pleasure, for the pleasure of the tribe to be assured.

Men would fall deeply in love with women, and vice versa. They would talk for days and nights; then finally the decision would be made to couple. Or argument would prevent this from ever taking place.

More women were born than men. Or so it was said. But no one really counted. I think more women were born, and that they died much more easily; and I think this is one reason the men felt so utterly tender to the women, because they knew the women were likely to die. The women passed on the strength of their bodies; simple women were cherished because they were gay all the time, and glad to be living and not afraid of giving birth. In sum, the women were more childlike, but the men were simple too.

Deaths by accident were invariably followed by a ceremonial coupling and a replacement of the dead one; and times of pestilence gave way to times of rampant and orgiastic mating, as the tribe sought to repopulate the land.

There was no want. The land never became crowded. Never did people quarrel over fruit or eggs or milk animals. There was too much of everything. It was too warm and lovely, and there were too many pleasant things to do.

It was paradise, it was Eden, it was the golden time that all peoples speak of, a time before the gods became angry, a time before Adam ate the fatal apple, a time of bliss and plenty. The only point is, I remember it. I was there.

I do not remember any concept of laws.

I remember rituals-dances, songs, forming the circles, and each circle moving in the opposite direction from the one inside it, and I remember the men and the women who could play pipes and drums, and even stringed harps that were small and sometimes made of shells. I remember a band of us carrying torches along the most treacherous cliffs, just to see if we could do it and not fall.

I remember painting, that those who liked to do it did it on the cliffs, and in the caves that surrounded the valley, and that sometimes we would go on a day’s journey to visit all the caves.

It was unseemly to paint too much at any one given time; each artist mixed his or her own colors from earth, or from her blood, or from the blood of a poor fallen mountain goat or sheep, and from other natural things.

At several intervals I remember the whole tribe coming together to make circle after circle after circle. It is conceivable the whole population was then gathered. Nobody knew.

At other times we gathered in small, single circles and made the chain of memory as we knew it-not what Stuart Gordon has described to you.

One would call out, “Who remembers from long, long ago?” And someone would venture, telling a tale of white-haired ones long gone, whom he had heard tell when he was newborn. Those tales he would relate now, offering them as the oldest, until someone raised his voice and told tales that he could place before those.

Others would then volunteer their earliest recollections; people would argue with or add to or expand the stories of others. Many sequences of events would be put together and fully described.

That was a fascinating thing-a sequence, a long period of events linked by one man’s vision or attitude. That was special. That was our finest mental achievement, perhaps, other than pure music and dance.

These sequences were never terribly eventful. What interested us was humor or a small departure from the norm, and of course beautiful things. We loved to talk of beautiful things. If a woman was born with red hair, we thought it a magnificent thing.

If a man stood taller than the others, this was a magnificent thing. If a woman was gifted with the harp, this was a magnificent thing. Terrible accidents were very, very briefly remembered. There were some stories of visionaries-those who claimed to hear voices and to know the future-but that was very infrequent. There were tales of the whole life of a musician or an artist, or of a red-haired woman, or of a boatbuilder who had risked his life to sail to Britain and had come home to tell the tale. There were tales of beautiful men and women who had never coupled, and they were much celebrated and sought after, though as soon as they did couple, they lost this charm.

The memory games were most often played in the long days-that is, those days on which there was scarcely three hours of darkness. Now, we had some sense of seasons based on light and dark, but it had never become terribly important because nothing much changed in our lives from the long days of summer to the shorter days of winter. So we didn’t think in terms of seasons. We didn’t keep track of light and dark. We frolicked more on the longer days, but other than that, we didn’t much notice. The darkest days were as warm as the longest for us; things grew in profusion. Our geysers never ceased to be warm.

But this chain of memory, this ritual telling and recounting, it is important to me now for what it later became. After we migrated to the land of bitter cold, this was our way of knowing ourselves and who we had been. This was crucial when we struggled to survive in the Highlands. We, who had no writing of any kind, held all our knowledge in this way.

But then? In the lost land? It seemed like a pastime. A great game.

The most serious thing that happened was birth. Not death-which was frequent, haphazard, and generally deemed to be sad but meaningless-but the birth of a new person.

Anyone who did not take this seriously was considered to be a fool.

For the coupling to happen, the guardians of the woman had to consent that she could do it, and the men had to agree that they would give permission to the particular man.

It was known always that the children resembled the parents, that they grew up at once, possessing characters of one or the other, or both. And so the men would argue vehemently against a male of poor physique seeking to couple, though everyone was entitled by custom to do it at least once.

As for the woman, the question was, did she understand how hard it might be to bear the child? She would have pain, her body would be greatly weakened, she might even bleed afterwards, she might even die when the child came out of her, or die later on.

It was also deemed that some physical combinations were better than others. In fact, this was the cause of what we might have called our disputes. They were never bloody, but they could be very noisy, with Taltos shouting finally, and some foot-stomping, and so forth and so on. Taltos loved to outshout each other, or to rail at one another in a great, speedy buzz of language until the other was exhausted and couldn’t think.

And very, very seldom, there was one prime male or female considered to be so perfect of limb and fair of face, so tall, so well proportioned, that coupling with him or her to produce a beautiful offspring was a great honor; and this did lead to contests and games. Indeed, there was a whole realm of these.

But those are the only painful or difficult things I remember, and I won’t tell of them now. Maybe because the only time I knew desperation was in these games. Also, we lost those rituals when we traveled to the land of bitter winter. We had too many real sorrows to contend with from then on.

When the couple had finally obtained permission-I remember once having to beg permission of twenty different people, and having to argue and wait for days on end-the tribe would gather, forming the circle, and then another and another, quite far back, until people felt it was no fun anymore because it was too far away to see.

The drums and the dancing would begin. If it was night, the torches would appear. And the couple would embrace and play lovingly with each other for as long as they could before the final moment had to come. This was a slow feast. To go on for an hour, that was lovely, to go on for two hours was sublime. Many could not go on more than half an hour. Whatever, when the consummation came, it too held the couple for an amazing period of time. How long? I don’t know. More, I think, than humans or Taltos born of humans could endure. Perhaps an hour, perhaps more.

When at last the couple fell back away from each other, it was because the new Taltos was about to be born. The mother would swell painfully. The father would then help to take the long, ungainly child out of the mother and to warm it with his hands, and to give it to its mother’s breasts.

All drew in to watch this miracle, for the child, commencing as a being of perhaps twenty-four to thirty-six inches, very slender and delicate, and apt to be damaged if not carefully handled, began to elongate and enlarge at once. And over the next fifteen minutes or less, it would often grow to full and majestic height. Its hair would pour down, and its fingers stretch, and the tender bones of its body, so flexible and strong, would make the big frame. The head would grow to three times its birth size.

The mother lay as dead after, sleeping the mother’s thin sleep. But the offspring lay with her, talking to her, and the mother sometimes never really slipped into dreams, but talked and sang to the young one, though she was always groggy and often humorous, and she would draw from the young one the first memories, so that the young one wouldn’t forget.

We do forget.

We are very capable of forgetting. And to tell is to memorize, or to imprint. To tell is to strike out against the awful loneliness of forgetting, the awful ignorance of it, the sadness. Or so we thought.

This offspring, whether male or female, and most often it was female, caused great joy. It meant more to us than the birth of a single being. It meant the life of the tribe was good; the life of the tribe would go on.

Of course, we never doubted it would, but there were always some legends that at times it had not, that at times women had coupled and runtish offspring had been born to them, or nothing, and that the tribe had dwindled to a very few. Pestilence now and then sterilized the women, and sometimes the men too.

The offspring was much loved and cared for by both parents, though if it was a daughter, it might be taken away after a while to a place where only women lived. In general, the offspring was the bond of love between the man and the woman. They did not seek to love each other in any other or private way. Childbearing being what it was, we had no concept of marriage or monogamy, or of remaining with one woman. On the contrary, it seemed a frustrating, dangerous, and foolish thing to do.

It did sometimes happen. I’m sure it did. A man and a woman loved each other so much that they would not be parted. But I don’t remember it happening myself. Nothing stood between one seeing any woman or any man, and love and friendship were not romantic; they were pure.

There are many things more about this life I could describe-the various kinds of songs we sang, the nature of arguments, for there were structures to them, the types of logic that held currency with us, which you would probably find preposterous, and the types of awful errors and blunders young Taltos inevitably made. There were small mammalian animals-very like monkeys-on the island, but we never thought of hunting them or cooking them or eating them. Such an idea would have been vulgar beyond tolerance.

I could describe also the kinds of dwellings we built, for they were many, and the scant ornaments we wore-we did not like clothing or need it or want to keep something so dirty next to our skin-I could describe our boats and how bad they were, and a thousand such things.

There were times when some of us crept to the place where the women lived, just to see them in each other’s arms, making love. Then the women would discover us and insist that we go away. There were places in the cliffs, grottoes, caves, small alcoves near bubbling springs, which had become veritable shrines for making love, for both men and men, and women and women.

There was never boredom in this paradise. There were too many things to do. One could romp for hours on the seashore, swim even, if one dared. One could gather eggs, fruit, dance, sing. The painters and the musicians were the most industrious, I imagine, and then there were the boatbuilders and the hut builders too.

There was great room for cleverness. I was thought to be very clever. I discerned patterns in things which others did not notice, that certain mussels in the warm pools grew faster when the sun shone on the pools, and that some mushrooms thrived best in the dark days, and I liked to invent systems-such as simple lifts of vines and twig baskets, by which fruit could be sent down from the tops of trees.

But as much as people admired me for this, they also laughed at it. It really wasn’t necessary to do things like this, it was supposed.

Drudgery was unheard of. Each day dawned with its myriad possibilities. No one doubted the perfect goodness of pleasure.

Pain was bad.

That is why the birth aroused such reverence and such caution in all of us, for it involved pain for the woman. And understand, the woman Taltos was no slave of the man. She was often as strong as the male, arms just as long, and just as limber. The hormones in her formed a totally different chemistry.

And the birth, involving both pleasure and pain, was the most significant mystery of our lives. Actually, it was the only significant mystery of our lives.

You have now what I wanted you to know. Ours was a world of harmony and true happiness, it was a world of one great mystery and many small, wondrous things.

It was paradise, and there was never a Taltos born, no matter how much human blood ran in his veins from whatever corrupt lineage, who did not remember the lost land, and the time of harmony. Not a single one.

Lasher most surely remembered it. Emaleth most surely remembered it.

The story of paradise is in our blood. We see it, we hear the songs of its birds, and we feel the warmth of the volcanic spring. We taste the fruit; we hear the singing; we can raise our voices and make the singing. And so we know, we know what humans only believe, that paradise can come again.

Before we move on to the cataclysm and the land of winter, let me add one thing.

I do believe there were bad ones among us, those who did violence. I think there were. There were those who killed perhaps, and those who were killed. I’m sure it must have been that way. It had to be. But no one wanted to talk about it! They would leave such things out of the tales! So we had no history of bloody incidents, rapes, conquests of one group of men by another. And a great horror of violence prevailed.

How justice was meted out, I don’t know. We didn’t have leaders in the strict sense, so much as we had collections of wise ones, people who drew together out of presence and formed a loose elite, so to speak, to whom one might appeal.

Another reason I believe that violence must have happened was that we had definite concepts of the Good God and the Evil One. Of course the Good God was he or she (this divinity was not divided) who had given us the land and our sustenance and our pleasures; and the Evil One had made the terrible land of bitter cold. The Evil One delighted in accidents which killed Taltos; and now and then the Evil One got into a Taltos, but that was really rare!

If there were myths and tales to this vague religion, I never heard them told. Our worship was never one of blood sacrifice or appeasement. We celebrated the Good God in songs and verses, and in the circle dances always. When we danced, when we made the child, we were close to the Good God.

Many of these old songs come back to me all the time. Now and then I go down in the early evening, and I walk through the streets of New York, solitary, amid the crowds, and I sing all of these songs that I can then remember, and the feeling of the lost land returns to me, the sound of the drums and the pipes, and the vision of men and women dancing in the circle. You can do that in New York, no one pays any attention to you. It’s really amusing to me.

Sometimes others in New York who are singing to themselves, or mumbling loudly, or chattering, will come near to me, chatter at me, or sing towards me, and then drift off. In other words, I am accepted by the crazies of New York. And though we are all alone, we have each other for those few moments. The twilight world of the city.

Afterwards, I go out in my car and give coats and wool scarves to those who don’t have them. Sometimes I send Remmick, my servant, to do this. Sometimes we bring in the street people to sleep in the lobby, to feed them and bed them down. But then one will fight with another, perhaps even knife another, and out they all must go, into the snow again.

Ah, but that brings me to one other pitfall of our life in the lost land. How could I have forgotten? There were always those Taltos who were caught in music and couldn’t get out. They could be caught by the music of others, so that others had to be made to stop the music in order to release them. They could be caught in their own song, and truly sing until they fell dead. They could dance until they fell dead.

I often fell into great spells of singing and dancing and rhyming, but I always woke out of it, or the music came to a ceremonial finish, or I grew weary perhaps, or lost the rhythm. Whatever, I was never in any danger of death. Many did as I did. But there were always deaths in this manner.

Everyone felt that the Taltos who died dancing or singing had gone to the Good God.

But nobody talked much about it. Death just wasn’t a fit subject for Taltos. All unpleasant things were forgotten. That was one of our basic ideals.

I’d been alive a long time by the time of the cataclysm. But I don’t know how to measure. Let me estimate twenty or thirty years.

The cataclysm was entirely a thing of nature. Later, men told tales of Roman soldiers or the Picts driving us from our island. No such thing happened at all. In the lost land, we never laid eyes on human beings. We knew no other people. We knew only ourselves.

A great upheaval of the earth caused our land to tremble and begin to break apart. It started with vague rumblings, and clouds of smoke covering the sky. The geysers began to scald our people. The pools were so hot we couldn’t drink from them. The land moved and groaned both day and night.

Many Taltos were dying. The fish in the pools were dead, and the birds had fled the cliffs. Men and women went in all directions seeking a place that was not turbulent, but they did not find it, and some came running back.

At last, after countless deaths, all the tribe built rafts, boats, dugouts, whatever they could, to make the journey to the land of bitter cold. There was no choice for us. Our land grew more tumultuous and treacherous with every day.

I don’t know how many remained. I don’t know how many got away. All day and all night, people built boats and went into the sea. The wise ones helped the foolish ones-that was really the way we divided old from young-and on about the tenth day, as I would calculate it now, I sailed with two of my daughters, two men whom I loved, and one woman.

And it is really in the land of winter, on the afternoon that I saw my homeland sink into the sea, on that afternoon, that the history of my people really began.

Then began their trials and their tribulations, their real suffering, and their first concept of valor and sacrifice. There began all the things human beings hold sacred, which can only come from difficulty, struggle, and the growing idealization of bliss and perfection, which can only flourish in the mind when paradise is utterly lost.

It was from a high cliff that I saw the great cataclysm reach its conclusion; it was from that height that I saw the land break into pieces and sink into the sea. It was from there that I saw the tiny figures of Taltos drowning in that sea. It was from there that I saw the giant waves wash the foot of the cliffs and the hills, and crash into the hidden valleys, and flood the forests.

The Evil One has triumphed, said those who were with me. And for the first time the songs we sang and the tales we recited became a true lament.

It must have been late summer when we fled to the land of bitter cold. It was truly cold. The water striking the shores was cold enough to knock a Taltos unconscious. We learned immediately that it would never be warm.

But the full breath of winter was something of which we had not truly dreamed. Most of the Taltos who escaped the lost land died the first winter. Some who remained bred furiously to reestablish the tribe. And as we had no real idea that winter was going to come again, many more died the following winter, too.

Probably we caught on to the cycle of the seasons by the third or fourth year.

But those first years were times of rampant superstition, endless chattering and reasoning as to why we had been cast out of the lost land, and why the snow and wind came to kill us, and whether or not the Good God had turned against us.

My penchant for observation and making things elevated me to the undisputed leader. But the entire tribe was learning rapidly about such things as the warm carcasses of dead bears and other large animals, and then the good warmth from their furry skins. Holes were warmer obviously than caves, and with the horns of a dead antelope we could dig deep underground homes for ourselves, and roof them over with tree trunks and stones.

We knew how to make fire, and very soon got good at it, because we didn’t find any fire to be had for nothing, simply breathing out of the rock. Different Taltos at different times developed similar kinds of wheels, and crude wagons were soon fashioned to carry our food, and those who were sick.

Gradually, those of us who had survived all the winters of the land of bitter cold began to learn very valuable things which had to be taught to the young. Paying attention mattered for the first time. Nursing had become a means of survival. All women gave birth at least once, to make up for the appalling rate of death.

If life had not been so hard, this would have been seen perhaps as a time of great creative pleasure. I could list the various discoveries that were made.

Suffice it to say we were hunter-gatherers of a very primitive sort, though we did not eat the meat of animals unless we were really starving, and that we progressed erratically in a completely different fashion from human beings.

Our large brains, our enhanced verbal capacity, the strange marriage in each of us of instinct and intelligence-all this made us both more clever and more clumsy, more insightful and more foolish in many respects.

Of course, quarrels broke out among us, as the result of scarcity or questions of judgment-whether to go this way or that to seek game. Groups broke off from the main group and went their own way.

I had by this time become accustomed to being the leader, and did not frankly trust anybody else to do it. I was known simply by name, Ashlar, as no titles were required among us, and I exerted tremendous influence over the others, and lived in terror of their getting lost, being eaten by wild animals, or fighting each other in harmful ways. Battles, quarrels, they were now daily occurrences.

But with each passing winter we had greater and greater skills. And as we followed the game south, or moved in that direction simply by instinct or by accident, I don’t know, we came into warmer lands of fairly extended summer, and our true reverence for, and reliance upon, the seasons began.

We began to ride the wild horses for fun. It was great sport to us. But we didn’t think that horses could really be tamed. We did all right with the oxen to pull our carts, which, in the beginning, of course, we had pulled ourselves.

Out of this came our most intense religious period. I invoked the name of the Good God every time chaos came upon us, striving to put our lives back in order. Executions took place sometimes twice a year.

There’s so much I could write or say about those centuries. But in a very real sense they constitute a unique time-between the lost land and the coming of human beings-and much of what was deduced, surmised, learned, memorized, was shattered, so to speak, when the humans came.

It is enough to say that we became a highly developed people, worshiping the Good God largely through banquets and dances as we had always done. We still played the game of memory, and still kept to our strict rules of conduct, though now men “remembered” at birth how to be violent, to fight, to excel, and to compete, and women were born remembering fear.

And certain strange events had had an incredible impact upon us, far greater than anyone realized at the time.

Other men and women were afoot in Britain. We heard of them from other Taltos-and that they were loathsome and as mean as animals. The Taltos had slaughtered them in self-defense. But the strange people, who were not Taltos, had left behind pots made of brittle earth, painted with pretty pictures, and weapons made of magical stone. They had also left behind curious little creatures like monkeys, though hairless and very helpless, who might be their young.

This settled the question that they were bestial, for in our minds only the beasts had helpless little young. And even the young of the beasts weren’t as helpless as these little creatures.

But Taltos took mercy on them; they nourished them on milk and kept them, and finally, having heard so much about them, we bought about five of these little creatures, who by that time were no longer crying all the time, and actually knew how to walk.

These creatures didn’t live long. What, thirty-five years, perhaps, but during that time they changed dramatically; they went from little wriggling pink things to tall, strong beings, only to become wizened, withered old things. Purely animal, that was our conjecture, and I don’t think we treated these primitive primates any better than they might have treated dogs.

They were not quick-witted, they didn’t understand our very rapid speech; indeed, it was quite a discovery that they could understand if we spoke slowly, but they had no words, apparently, of their own.

Indeed, they were born stupid, we thought, with less innate knowledge than the bird or the fox; and though they gained greater reasoning power, they always remained fairly weak, small, and covered with hideous hair.

When a male of our kind mated with a female of them, the female bled and died. The men made our women bleed. They were crude and clumsy, besides.

Over the centuries we came upon such creatures more than once, or bought them from other Taltos, but we never saw them in any organized force of their own. We supposed them to be harmless. We had no name for them, really. They taught us nothing, and they made us cry with frustration when they couldn’t learn anything from us.

How sad this is, we thought, that these big animals look so much like Taltos, even walking upright and having no tails, but they have no minds.

Meanwhile, our laws had become very strict. Execution was the ultimate punishment for disobedience. It had become a ritual, though never a celebrated one, in which the offending Taltos was quickly dispatched with deliberate and severe blows to the skull.

Now, the skull of a Taltos stays resilient long after other bones in his body have become hard. But the skull can be crushed easily, if one knows how to do it, and we had-unfortunately-learned.

But death still horrified us. Murder was a very infrequent crime. The death penalty was for those who threatened the entire community. Birth was still our central sacred ceremony, and when we found good places to settle, which argued for permanence, we frequently selected places for our religious circle dancing, and we laid out stones to mark these places, sometimes very, very large stones, in which we took pride.

Ah, the circles of stones! We became, though we never thought of it that way, the people of the stone circles all over the land.

When we were forced to a new territory-either by starvation or because another band of Taltos was coming towards us whom none of us liked, and with whom no one wanted to live in close quarters-we got in the custom of making a new circle at once. Indeed, the diameter of our circle and the weight of its stones became a claim upon a certain area, and the sight of a very large circle built by others was a sign to us that this was their land and we should move on.

Anybody foolish enough to disregard a sacred circle? Well, they would be given no peace and quiet till they decamped. Of course, it was scarcity that imposed these rules often. A great plain could support very few hunters, really. Good spots on lakes and rivers and on the coast were better, but no place was paradise, no place was the endless fountain of warmth and plenty that had been the lost land.

Claims of sacred protection were asserted against invaders or squatters. And I remember myself carving a figure of the Good God, as I perceived God-with both breasts and a penis-upon an immense stone in one of these circles, a plea to other Taltos that they must respect our holy circle and therefore our land.

When there was a true battle, born of personality and misunderstanding, and rank greed for a particular portion of the earth, the invaders would knock down the stones of those who lived there, and make a new circle entirely of their own.

To be driven out was exhausting, but in a new home the desire to build a larger, more imposing circle burnt hot. We would find stones, we vowed, so large that no one could ever dislodge them, or would ever try.

Our circles spoke of our ambition and our simplicity-of the joy of the dance and our willingness to fight and die for the territory of the tribe.

Our basic values, though unchanged since the days of the lost land, had hardened somewhat around certain rituals. It was mandatory for all to attend the birth of a new Taltos. It was the law that no woman could give birth more than twice. It was the law that reverence and sensuality attend these births; indeed, a great sexual euphoria was often sustained.

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.

It was later peoples who built the circle of blue stones, and many other formations at Stonehenge. At one time, all of our beloved open-air temple was enclosed into some sort of wooden edifice by savage human tribes. And I do not care to think of the bloody rites practiced there. But this was not our doing.

As to the emblems carved upon the sarsens, we used only one, upon a central stone which is long gone. It was a symbol of the Good God with breasts and phallus, and it was deeply etched within reach of a Taltos, so that he or she might trace it in the dark by touch.

Later, human beings put other carvings upon the sarsens, just as they put Stonehenge to other use.

But I can tell you that no one-Taltos, human, or other species-has ever happened upon our great circle who did not to some extent respect it or come to feel the presence of the sacred when within it. Long before it was ever completed, it became a place of inspiration, and it has been one ever since.

In this monument you have the essence of our people. It is the only great monument we were ever to build.

But to fully appreciate what we were, remember, we retained our values. We deplored death and did not celebrate it. We made no blood sacrifice. We did not see war as glorious so much as chaotic and unpleasant. And the high expression of our art was the singing and dancing circles assembled in and around Stonehenge.

At their greatest height, our birth festivals and festivals of memory or music would include thousands of Taltos, come from far and wide. It was impossible to count the circles formed, or to measure the widest of them. It is impossible to say how many hours and days these rituals went on.

Imagine it, if you will, the vast snowy plain, the clear blue sky, smoke rising from the encampments and the huts built near to the stone circle, for warmth and food and drink. See the Taltos, men and women all, and of my height, with hair long, often to the waist or even to the ankles, wearing carefully sewn skins and furs and high boots of leather, and linking hands to form these beautiful, simple configurations as the voices rose in song.

Ivy leaves, mistletoe, holly, whatever was green in winter, we wore in our hair, and brought with us, and laid upon the ground. The branches of the pine or whatever tree did not lose their leaves.

And in summer we brought flowers aplenty; and indeed, deputations were kept going all day and night into the woodlands to find flowers and fresh green boughs.

The singing and the music alone were magnificent. One did not tear oneself from the circles easily. Indeed, some people never left of their own accord, and small fires were made within the margins between moving lines of dancers, for warmth. Some danced and sang and embraced others until they fell down in a faint or dead.

In the beginning we had no one presiding, but that changed. I was called upon to go into the center, to strike the strings of the harp, to begin the dance. And after I had spent many hours there, another came to stand in my place, and later another and another, each new singer or musician making a music which the others imitated, taking the new song out from small circle to big circle, like the ripples in a pond from a falling stone.

At times, many great fires were constructed beforehand, one in the center and others at various points, so that the dancers would pass near to them often as they followed the circular path.

The birth of the Taltos in our circle was for the newborn an event unrivaled even in the lost land. For there the circles had been voluntary and spontaneous and small. But here the new creature opened its eyes upon an enormous tribe of its own kind, and heard a chorus like that of angels, and dwelt within that circle, being suckled and stroked and comforted for the first days and nights of life.

Of course, we were changing. As our innate knowledge changed, we changed. That is, what we learned changed the genetic makeup of the newborn.

Those born in the time of the circles had a stronger sense of the sacred than we old ones did, and were frankly not so given to rampant humor or irony or suspicion as we were. Those born in the time of the circles were more aggressive, and could murder when they had to, without giving way to tears.

Had you asked me then, I would have said our kind would rule forever. Had you said, “Ah, but men will come who will slaughter people for fun, who will rape and burn and lay waste simply because it is what they do for a living,” I would not have believed it. I would have said, “Oh, but we’ll talk to them, we’ll tell all our stories and memories and ask them to tell theirs, and they’ll start dancing and singing, and they’ll stop fighting or wanting things they shouldn’t have.”

When human beings did come down on us, we assumed, of course, that they would be simple little hairy people, of the gentle ilk of the amiable, grunting little traders who sometimes came to the coast in boats of skin to sell us goods and then went away.

We heard tales of raids and massacres but we could not believe these. After all, why would anyone do such things?

And then we were amazed to discover that the human beings coming into Britain had smooth skin like ours, and that their magic stone had been hammered into shields and helmets and swords, that they had brought their own trained horses with them by the hundreds, and on horseback they rode us down, burning our camps, piercing our bodies with spears, or chopping off our heads.

They stole our women and raped them until they died of the bleeding. They stole our men and sought to enslave them, and laughed at them and ridiculed them, and in some instances drove them mad.

At first their raids were very infrequent. The warriors came by sea, and descended upon us by night from the forests. We thought each raid was the last.

Often we fought them off. We were not by nature as fierce as they, by any means, but we could defend ourselves, and great circles were convened to discuss their metal weapons and how we might make our own. Indeed, we imprisoned a number of human beings, invaders all, to try to pry the knowledge from them. We discovered that when we slept with their women, whether willing or unwilling, they died. And the men had a deep, inveterate hatred of our softness. They called us “the fools of the circle,” or “the simple people of the stones.”

The illusion that we could hold out against these people crumbled almost in the space of one season. We only learned later that we’d been saved from earlier annihilation by one simple fact: we didn’t have much that these people wanted. Principally, they wanted our women for pleasure, and some of the finer gifts which pilgrims had brought to the circle shrine.

But other tribes of Taltos were flocking onto the plain. They’d been driven from their homes along the coast by the human invaders, who inspired in them only deathly fear. Their mounts gave these human beings a fanatical sense of power. Humans enjoyed these invasions. Massacre was sport to them.

We fortified our camps for the winter. Those who had come to join us replaced many of the fighting men we had lost.

Then the snow came; we had plenty to eat, and we had peace. Maybe the invaders didn’t like the snow. We didn’t know. There were so many of us gathered together, and we had lifted from the dead so many spears and swords, that we felt safe.

It was time for the winter birth circle to be convened, and it was most important, as so many had been killed in the last year. Not only must we make new Taltos for our villages; we had to make them to send to other villages where the inhabitants had been burnt out.

Many had come from far and wide for the winter birth circle, and we heard more and more tales of slaughter and woe.

However, we were many. And it was our sacred time.

We formed the circles, we lit the sacred fires; it was time to declare to the Good God that we believed the summer would come again, to make birth happen now as an affirmation of that faith, and an affirmation that the Good God wanted us to survive.

We had had perhaps two days of singing and dancing and birthing, of feasting and drinking, when the tribes of human beings descended on the plain.

We heard the enormous rumble of the horses before we saw them; it was a roar like the sound of the crumbling of the lost land. Horsemen came from all sides to attack us; the great sarsens of the circles were splashed with our blood.

Many Taltos, drunk on music and erotic play, never put up any resistance at all. Those of us who ran to the camps put up a great fight.

But when the smoke had cleared, when the horsemen were gone, when our women had been taken by the hundreds in our own wagons, when every encampment had been burnt to the ground, we were only a handful, and we had had enough of war.

Indeed, the horrors we’d seen we never wanted to witness again. The newborns of our tribe had all been slain, to the last one. They had blundered into death in the first days of their lives. Few women remained to us, and some had given birth too many times in the past.

By the second nightfall after the massacre, our scouts came back to tell us what we had feared was true: the warriors had set up their camps in the forest. They were building permanent dwellings; indeed, there was talk of their villages dotting the southern landscape.

We had to go north.

We had to return to the hidden valleys of the Highlands, or places too inaccessible for these cruel invaders. Our journey was a long one, lasting the rest of the winter, in which birth and death became daily occurrences, and more than once we were attacked by small bands of humans, and more than once we spied upon their settlements and learned of their lives.

We massacred more than one band of the enemy. Twice we raided lowland forts to rescue our men and women, whose singing we could hear from great distances.

And by the time we discovered the high valley of Donnelaith, it was spring, the snow was melting, the rich forest was green again, the loch was no longer frozen, and we soon found ourselves in a hideaway accessible to the outside world only by a winding river whose route was so circuitous that the loch itself could not be seen from the sea. Indeed, the great cove through which a seafarer enters it appears to all eyes as a cave.

Understand, the loch in later times became a port. Men did much by that time to open it to the sea.

But in those times we found ourselves hidden and safe at last.

We had many rescued Taltos with us. And the stories they told! The human beings had discovered the miracle of birth with us! They were spellbound by the magic of it; they had tortured the Taltos women and men mercilessly, trying to force them to do it, and then had screamed in delight and thrilling fear when the new Taltos appeared. They had worried some of these women to death. But many of our kind had resisted, refusing to be so violated; some women had found ways to take their own lives. Many had been killed for struggling, for attacking every human who came near them, and finally for trying repeatedly to escape.

When humans discovered that the newborns could breed immediately, they forced them to do it, and the newborns, muddled and frightened, did not know what to do but comply. The humans knew the power of music over the Taltos, and how to use it. The humans thought the Taltos sentimental and cowardly, though what the words were for it then, I don’t now know.

In sum, a deep hatred grew between us and the warriors. We thought them animals, of course, animals that could talk and make things, perfect horrors, actually, aberrations that might destroy all beautiful life. And they thought us amusing and relatively harmless monsters! For it soon became apparent that the wide world was filled with people of their height or even smaller, who bred and lived as they did, and not with people like us.

From our raids we had gathered many objects which these people had brought from far and wide. The slaves repeated tales of great kingdoms with walls about them, of palaces in lands of desert sand and jungle, of waning tribes and of great congregations of people in encampments of such size that one could not imagine it. And these encampments had names.

All of these people, as far as we knew, bred in the human way. All had tiny, helpless babies. All brought them up half-savage and half-intelligent. All were aggressive, liked to war, liked to kill. Indeed, it was perfectly obvious to me that the most aggressive among them were the survivors, and they had weeded out over the centuries anyone who was not aggressive. So they had had a hand in making themselves what they were.

Our early days in the glen of Donnelaith-and let me say here that we gave it that name-were days of intense pondering and discussion, of building the finest circle that we could, and of consecration and prayer.

We celebrated the birth of numerous new Taltos, and these we schooled vigorously for the ordeals that lay ahead. We buried many who died of old wounds, and some women who died from childbearing, as always happens, and we buried others who, having been driven from the plain of Salisbury, simply did not want to live.

It was the worst time of suffering for my people, even worse than the massacre itself had been. I saw strong Taltos, white-haired ones, great singers, abandon themselves completely to their music, and fall at last without breath into the high grass.

Finally, when a new council had been appointed, of newborns and wiser Taltos, of the white-haired and of those who wanted to do something about all this, we came to the one very logical position.

Can you guess what it was?

We realized that humans had to be annihilated. If they weren’t, their warring ways would destroy all that had been given us by the Good God. They were burning up life with their cavalry and their torches and swords. We had to stamp them out.

As for the prospect that they existed all over distant lands in great numbers, well, we bred much faster than they did-was that not so? We could replace our slain very quickly. They took years to replace a fallen warrior. Surely we could outnumber them as we fought against them, if only … if only we had the stomach for the fight.

Within a week, after endless argument, it was decided that we did not have the stomach for the fight. Some of us could do it; we were so angry and full of hate and irony now that we could ride down upon them and hack them to pieces. But in the main, Taltos simply could not kill in this way; they could not match the malicious lust of humans for killing. And we knew it. Humans would win by sheer meanness and cruelty in the end.

Of course, since that time, and possibly a thousand times before it, a people has been annihilated because it lacked aggression; it could not match the cruelty of another tribe or clan or nation or race.

The one real difference in our case was that we knew it. Whereas the Incas were slaughtered in ignorance by the Spanish, we understood much more of what was involved.

Of course, we were certain of our superiority to humans; we were baffled that they didn’t appreciate our singing and stories; we did not believe that they knew what they were doing when they struck us down.

And realizing that we really couldn’t match them in combat, we assumed that we could reason with them, we could teach them, we could show them how much more pleasant and agreeable life was if one did not kill.

Of course, we had only just begun to understand them.

By the end of that year, we had ventured out of the glen to take a few human prisoners, and from these we learned that things were far more hopeless than we thought. Killing lay at the very basis of their religion; it was their sacred act!

For their gods they killed, sacrificing hundreds of their own kind at their rituals. Indeed, death was the very focus of their lives!

We were overcome with horror.

We determined that life would exist for us within the glen. As for other Taltos tribes, we feared the worst for them. In our little forays to find human slaves, we had seen more than one village burnt out, more than one field of wasting, sinewy Taltos bones being scattered by the winter wind.

As the years passed, we remained secure in the glen, venturing out only with the greatest care. Our bravest scouts traveled as far as they dared.

By the end of the decade, we knew that no Taltos settlements remained in our part of Britain. All the old circles were now abandoned! And we also came to find out from the few prisoners we took-which was not easy-that we were hunted now, and very much in demand to be sacrificed to the humans’ gods.

Indeed, massacres had become a thing of the past. Taltos were hunted strictly for capture, and only killed if they refused to breed.

It had been discovered that their seed brought death to human women, and on that account the males were kept in unbearable bondage, laden with metal chains.

Within the next century the invaders conquered the earth!

Many of the scouts who went out to seek other Taltos, and bring them into the glen, simply never came back. But there were always young ones who wanted to go, who had to see life beyond the mountains, who had to go down to the loch and travel to the sea.

As the memories were passed on in our blood, our young Taltos became even more warlike. They wanted to slaughter a human! Or so they thought.

Those wanderers who did return, and frequently with at least a couple of human prisoners, confirmed our most terrible fears. From one end of Britain to the other, the Taltos was dying out. Indeed, in most places it was no more than legend, and certain towns, for the new settlements were nothing less than that, would pay a fortune for a Taltos, but men no longer hunted for them, and some did not believe anymore that there had ever been such strange beasts.

Those who were caught were wild.

Wild? we asked. What in the name of God is a wild Taltos?

Well, we were soon told.

In numerous encampments, when it came time for sacrifice to the gods, the chosen women, often fanatically eager for it, were brought to embrace a prisoner Taltos, to arouse his passion, and then to die by his seed. Dozens of women met their deaths in this fashion, precisely as human men were being drowned in cauldrons, or decapitated, or burnt in horrid wicker cages for the gods of the human tribes.

But over the years some of these women had not died. Some of them had left the sacred altar alive. And a few of these, within a matter of weeks, had given birth!

A Taltos came out of their bodies, a wild seed of our kind. This Taltos invariably killed its human mother, not meaning to, of course, but because she could not survive the birth of such a creature. But this didn’t always happen. And if the mother lived long enough to give her offspring milk, which she had aplenty, this Taltos would grow, within the customary time of three hours, to full size.

In some villages this was counted as a great omen of good fortune. In others it was disaster. Human beings could not agree. But the name of the game had become to get a pair of such human-mothered Taltos and to make them breed more Taltos, and to keep a stock of these prisoners, to make them dance, to make them sing, to make them give birth.

Wild Taltos.

There was another way that wild Taltos could be born. A human man now and then made one grow in the body of a Taltos woman! This poor prisoner, being kept for pleasure, did not suspect at first that she had conceived. Within weeks her child was born to her, growing to full height as she knew it would, only to be taken from her and imprisoned, or put to some grisly use.

And who were the mortals who could breed with Taltos in this way? What characterized them? In the very beginning we did not know; we could not perceive any visible signs. But later, as more and more mixture occurred, it became clear to us that a certain kind of human was more prone than any other, either to conceive or to father the Taltos, and that was a human of great spiritual gifts, a human who could see into people’s hearts, or tell the future, or lay healing hands upon others. These humans to our eyes became quite detectable and finally unmistakable.

But this took centuries to develop. Blood was passed back and forth.

Wild Taltos escaped their captors. Human women swelling monstrous with Taltos fled to the glen in hope of shelter. Of course we took them in.

We learned from these human mothers.

Whereas our young were born within hours, their young took a fortnight to a month, depending upon whether or not the mother knew of the child’s existence. Indeed, if the mother knew and was to address the child, quiet its fears, and sing to it, the growth was greatly accelerated. Hybrid Taltos were born knowing things their human ancestors had known! In other words, our laws of genetic inheritance embraced the acquired knowledge of the human species.

Of course, we had no such language then to discuss these things. We only knew that a hybrid might know how to sing human songs in human tongues, or to make boots such as we had never seen, very skillfully, from leather.

In this way, all manner of human knowledge passed into our people.

But those wild ones, born in captivity, were always full of the Taltos memories too, and conceived a hatred for their human tyrants. They broke for freedom as soon as they could. To the woods they fled, and to the north, possibly to the lost land. Some unfortunates, we learned later, went home to the great plain and, finding no refuge, survived hand-to-mouth in the nearby forest, or were captured and killed.

Some of these wild Taltos inevitably bred with each other. As fugitives they found one another; or within captivity they were bred. They could always breed with the pure Taltos prisoner, giving birth in the pure way, immediately; and so a fragile race of Taltos was hanging on in the wilderness of Britain, a desperate minority of outcasts, incessantly searching for their ancestors and for the paradise of their memories, and carrying in their veins human blood.

Much, much human blood came into the wild Taltos during these centuries. And the wild Taltos developed beliefs and habits of their own. They lived in the green treetops, often painting themselves entirely green for camouflage, making the paint of several natural pigments, and clothing themselves when they could in ivy and leaves.

And it was these, or so it was claimed, who somehow created the Little People.

Indeed, the Little People may have always lived in the shadows and hidden places. We had glimpsed them surely in our early years, and during the time of our rule of Britain, they had kept themselves entirely away from us. They were but a kind of monster in our legends. We scarcely noticed them any more than hairy human beings.

But now tales came to our ears that they had begun with the spawning of Taltos and human-that when the conception occurred but the development failed, a hunchbacked dwarf was born, rather than the wiry and graceful Taltos.

Was this so? Or did they spring from the same root as we did? Were we cousins of each other in some time before the lost land, when perhaps we had mingled in some earlier paradise? The time before the moon? Was that the time of our branching off, one tribe from the other?

We didn’t know. But at the times of hybrids, and experiments of this sort, of wild Taltos seeking to discover what they could or could not do, or who could breed with whom, we did learn that these horrid little monsters, these malicious, mischievous, and strange Little People, could breed with us. Indeed, if they could seduce one of us into coupling with them, man or woman, the offspring was more often than not a Taltos.

A compatible race? An evolutionary experiment closely related to us?

Again, we were never to know.

But the legend spread, and the Little People preyed upon us as viciously as human beings. They set traps for us; they tried to lure us with music; they did not come in warrior bands; they were sneaks, and they tried to entrance us with spells which they could cast by the powers of their minds. They wanted to make the Taltos. They dreamed of becoming a race of giants, as they called us. And when they caught our women, they coupled with them until they died; and when they caught our men, they were as cruel to them to make them breed as humans.

Over the centuries the mythology grew; the Little People had once been as we were, tall and fair. They had once had our advantages. But demons had made them what they were, cast them out, made them suffer. They were as long-lived as we were. Their monstrous little offspring were born as quickly and as fully developed proportionately as ours were.

But we feared them, we hated them, we did not want to be used by them, and we came to believe the stories that our children could be like them if not given milk, if not loved.

And the truth, whatever it was, if anyone ever knew, was buried in folklore.

In the glen the Little People still hang on; there are few natives of Britain who do not know of them. They go by countless names, lumped with other creatures of myth-the fairies, the Sluagh, the Ganfers, the leprechauns, the elves.

They are dying out now in Donnelaith, for a great many reasons. But they live in other dark, secret places still. They steal human women now and then to breed, but they are no more successful with humans than we are. They long for a witch-a mortal with the extra sense, the type that, with one of them, often conceives or fathers the Taltos. And when they find such creatures, they can be ruthless.

Never believe that they won’t hurt you in the glen, or in other glens and remote woods and valleys. They would do it. And they would kill you and burn the fat of your bodies on their torches for the sheer joy of it. But this is not their story.

Another tale can be told of them, by Samuel, perhaps, should he ever be moved to tell it. But then Samuel has a tale all his own of his wanderings away from the Little People, and that would make a better adventure, I think, than their history.

Let me return to the wild Taltos now, the hybrids who carried the human genes. Banding together outside the glen, whenever possible, they exchanged the memories, the tales, and formed their own tiny settlements.

And periodically we went in search of them and brought them home. They bred with us; they gave us offspring; we gave them counsel and knowledge.

And surprisingly enough, they never stayed! They would come to the glen from time to time to rest, but they had to return to the wild world, where they shot arrows at humans, and fled through the forests laughing afterwards, believing themselves to be the very magical creatures, sought for sacrifice, which humans believed them to be.

And the great tragedy, of course, of their desire to wander is that inevitably they carried the secret of the glen to the human world.

Simpletons, that is what we are in a true sense. Simpletons, that we did not see that such a thing would have to happen, that these wild ones, when finally captured, would tell tales of our glen, sometimes to threaten their enemies with the prospect of vengeance from a secret nation, or out of sheer naiveté, or, that the tale having been told to other wild Taltos who had never seen us, would be passed on by them.

Can you see what happened? The legend of the glen, of the tall people who gave birth to children who could walk and speak at birth, began to spread. Knowledge of us was general throughout Britain. We fell into legend with the Little People. And with other strange creatures whom humans seldom saw, but would have given anything to capture.

And so the life we’d built in Donnelaith, a life of great stone towers or brochs, from which we hoped someday to successfully defend ourselves against invasions, of the old rituals carefully preserved and carried out, of the memories treasured, and of our values, our belief in love and birth above all things held sacred-that life was in mortal danger from those who would hunt for monsters for any reason, from those who only wanted to “see with their own eyes.”

Another development took place. As I said earlier, there were always those born in the glen who wanted to leave. It was deeply impressed upon them that they must remember the way home. They must look at the stars and never forget the various patterns that could guide them home. And this became a part of innate knowledge very rapidly because we deliberately cultivated it, and this cultivation worked. In fact, it worked amazingly well, opening up to us all kinds of new possibilities. We could program into the innate knowledge all manner of practical things. We put it to the test by questioning the offspring. It was quite astonishing. They knew the map of Britain as we knew it and preserved it (highly inaccurate), they knew how to make weapons, they knew the importance of secrecy, they knew the fear and hatred of human beings and how best to avoid them or triumph over them. They knew the Art of the Tongue.

Now, the Art of the Tongue, as we called it, was something we never thought of until the humans came. But it was essentially talking and reasoning with people, which we did with each other all the time. Now, basically we speak among ourselves much, much faster than humans, sometimes. Not always. Just sometimes. It sounds to humans like a whistling or a humming, or even a buzzing. But we can talk more in human rhythm, and we had learned how to speak to humans on their level, that is, to confuse them and entangle them in logic, to fascinate them and to influence them somewhat.

Obviously this Art of the Tongue wasn’t saving us from extinction.

But it could save a lone Taltos discovered by a pair of humans in the forest, or a Taltos man taken prisoner by a small human clan with no ties to the warrior people who had invaded the land.

Anyone venturing out must know the Art of the Tongue, of speaking slowly to humans, on their level, and doing it in a convincing way. And inevitably some of those who left decided to settle outside.

They built their brochs, that is, our style of tower, of dry stone without mortar, and lived in wild and isolated places, passing for humans to those new peoples who happened to pass their home.

It was a sort of clan existence that developed defensively, and in scattered locales.

But inevitably these Taltos would reveal their nature to humans, or humans would war on them, or someone would learn of the magical Taltos birth, and again talk of us, talk of the glen, would circulate among hostile men.

I myself, having ever been inventive and forward-looking and refusing to give up, ever-even when the whole lost land was exploding, I did not give up-more or less thought ours was a lost cause. We could, for the present, defend the glen, that was true, when outsiders did occasionally break in on us, but we were essentially trapped!

But the question of those who passed for human, those who lived among human beings, pretending to be an old tribe or clan-that fascinated me. That got me to thinking…. What if we were to do this? What if, instead of shutting human beings out, we slowly let them in, leading them to believe that we were a human tribe too, and we lived in their midst, keeping our birth rituals secret from them?

Meantime great changes in the outside world held a great fascination for us. We wanted to speak to travelers, to learn. And so, finally, we devised a dangerous subterfuge….