Taltos Page 43

  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 naivete, 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....

  Twenty-si
x

  "YURI STEFANO HERE. Can I help you?"

  "Can you help me! God, it's good to hear your voice," said Michael. "We've been separated less than forty-eight hours, but the Atlantic Ocean is between us!"

  "Michael. Thank God you called me. I didn't know where to reach you. You're still with Ash, aren't you?"

  "Yes, and we will be for another two days, I think. I'll tell you all about it, but how are things with you?"

  "It's over, Michael. It's over. All the evil is gone, and the Talamasca is itself again. This morning I received my first communication from the Elders. We're taking serious measures to see that this sort of interception can never happen again. I have my work cut out for me, writing my reports. The new Superior General has recommended that I rest, but that's impossible."

  "But you have to rest some of the time, Yuri. You know you do. We all do."

  "I sleep for four hours. Then I get up. I think about what happened. I write. I write for maybe four, five hours. Then I sleep again. At mealtimes they come and get me. They make me go downstairs. It's nice. It's nice to be back with them. But what about you, Michael?"

  "Yuri, I love this man. I love Ash the way I loved Aaron. I've been listening to him talk for hours. It's no secret, what he's telling us, of course, but he won't let us record any of it. He says that we should take away only what we naturally remember. Yuri, I don't think this man will ever hurt us or anyone connected with us. I'm sure of it. You know, it's one of those situations. I've put my trust in him. And if he does come to hurt us, for any reason, well, that's going to be what happens."

  "I understand. And Rowan? How is she?"

  "I think she loves him too. I know she does. But how much and in what way, well, that's her story. I never could speak for Rowan. We're going to stay here, as I said, for another two days, maybe more, then we have to go back down south. We're a little worried about Mona."

  "Why?"

  "It's nothing terrible. She's run off with her cousin Mary Jane Mayfair--this is a young woman you've not had the pleasure of meeting--and they're a bit too young to be running around without any parental supervision."