In him I saw the old gentleness, the eyes almost timid, and the lips soft, and the skin as fresh and free of blemish as that of a baby. Had he really been born of two human beings, two powerful witches perhaps? Did he believe his destiny?
Born remembering, yes, born knowing, yes, and thank God for him it had been the right time that he remembered-and the right battle, and the right place. And now he followed the old profession they had marked for us hundreds of years ago.
He came towards me. He wanted to speak. Perhaps he could not believe his eyes, that he was looking upon one exactly like him.
“Father,” I asked in Latin, so that he was most likely to answer, “was it really from a human mother and father you came?”
“How else?” he asked, quite clearly terrified. “Go if you will to my parents themselves. Ask them.” He grew pale, and was trembling.
“Father,” I said, “where is your like among women?”
“There is no such thing!” he declared. But now he could scarcely keep himself from running away from me. “Brother, where have you come from?” he asked. “Here, seek God’s forgiveness for your sins, whatever they are.”
“You have never seen a woman of our kind?”
He shook his head. “Brother, I am the chosen of God,” he explained. “The chosen of St. Ashlar.” He bowed his head, humbly, and I saw a blush come to his cheeks, for obviously he’d committed a sin of pride in announcing this.
“Farewell, then,” I said. And I left him.
I left the town and I went again to the stones; I sang an old song, letting myself rock back and forth in the wind, and then I made for the forest.
Dawn was just rising behind me when I climbed the wooded hills to find the old cave. It was a desolate spot, dark as it had been five hundred years before, with no sign now of the witch’s hovel.
In the early light, cold and bitter as that of a winter’s eve, I heard a voice call me.
“Ashlar!”
I turned around and I looked at the dark woods. “Ashlar the cursed, I see you!”
“It’s you, Aiken Drumm,” I cried. And then I heard his mean laughter. Ah, the Little People were there, garbed in green so that they would blend with the leaves and the bracken. I saw their cruel little faces.
“There’s no tall woman here for you, Ashlar,” cried Aiken Drumm. “Nor will there ever be. No men of your ilk but a mewling priest born of witches, who falls to his knees when he hears our pipes. Here! Come. Take a little bride, a sweet morsel of wrinkled flesh, and see what you beget! And be grateful for what God gives you.”
They had begun to beat their drums. I heard the whining of their song, discordant, ghastly, yet strangely familiar. Then came the pipes. It was the old songs we had sung, the songs we taught them!
“Who knows, Ashlar the cursed?” he cried out. “But your daughter by one of us this morn might be a female! Come with us; we have wee women aplenty to amuse you. Think, a daughter, Your Royal Majesty! And once again the tall people would rule the hills!”
I turned and ran through the trees, not stopping till I had cleared the pass and come once more to the high road.
Of course Aiken Drumm spoke the truth. I had found no female of my kind in all of Scotland. And that was what I’d come to seek.
And what I would seek for another millennium.
I did not believe then, on that cold morning, that I would never lay eyes again upon a young or fertile female Taltos. Oh, how many times in the early centuries had I seen my female counterparts and turned away from them. Cautious, withdrawn, I would not have fathered a young Taltos to suffer the confusion of this strange world for all the sweet embraces of the lost land.
And now where were they, these fragrant darlings?
The old, the white of hair, the sweet of breath, the scentless, these I had seen many a time and would see again-creatures wild and lost, or wrapped in a sorceress’s dreams, they had given me only chaste kisses.
In dark city streets once I caught the powerful scent, only to be maddened, unable ever to find the soft folds of hot and secret flesh from which it emanated.
Many a human witch I’ve lured to bed, sometimes warning her of the dangers of my embrace, and sometimes not, when I believed her strong, and able to bear my offspring.
Across the world I’ve gone, by every means, to track the mysterious ageless woman of remarkable height, with memories of long ago, who greets men who come to her with sweet smiles and never bears their children.
She is human or she is not there at all.
I had come too late, or to the wrong place, or plague took the beauty many years ago. War laid waste that town. Or no one knows the story.
Would it always be so?
Tales abound of giants in the earth, of the tall, the fair, the gifted.
Surely they are not all gone! What became of those who fled the glen? Are no wild female Taltos born into the world of human parents?
Surely somewhere, in the deep forest of Scotland or the jungles of Peru, or the snowy wastes of Russia, there lives a family of Taltos, a clan, in its warm and well-defended tower. The woman and the man have their books, their memories to share, their games to play, their bed in which to kiss and play, though the act of coitus must, as always, be approached with reverence.
My people can’t be gone.
The world is huge. The world is endless. Surely I am not the last. Surely that has not been the meaning of Janet’s terrible words, that I should wander through time, mateless forever.
Now you know my story.
I could tell many tales. I could tell of my journeys through many lands, my years in various occupations; I could tell of the few male Taltos I met over the years, of the stories I heard of our lost people who had once lived in this or that fabled village.
The story you tell is the story you choose to tell.
And this is the story we share, Rowan and Michael.
You know now how the clan of Donnelaith came into being. You know how the blood of the Taltos came to be in the blood of humans. You know the tale of the first woman ever burnt in the beautiful valley. And the sad account of the place to which the Taltos brought such misery, not once, but again and again, if all our stories are history.
Janet, Lasher, Suzanne, her descendants, even to Emaleth.
And you see now that when you raised your gun, when you lifted it, Rowan, and you fired the shots that brought down this child, the girl who had given you her milk, it was no small act of which you need ever be ashamed, but destiny.
You have saved us both. You have saved us all perhaps. You have saved me from the most terrible dilemma I could ever know, and one which I may be not meant to know.
Whatever the case, don’t weep for Emaleth. Don’t weep for a race of strange, soft-eyed people, long ago driven from the earth by a stronger species. This is the way of the earth, and we are both of it.
What other strange, unnamed creatures live within the cities and jungles of our planet? I have glimpsed many things. I have heard many stories. The rain and wind till the earth, to use Janet’s words. What next shall spring from some hidden garden?
Could we now live together, the Taltos, the human, in the same world? How would such be possible? This is a world where human races battle endlessly, where people of one faith still slaughter people of another. Religious wars rage from Sri Lanka to Bosnia, from Jerusalem to American cities and towns where Christians still, in the name of Jesus Christ, bring death in his name to their enemies, to their own, even to little children.
Tribe, race, clan, family.
Deep within us all are the seeds of hate for what is different. We do not have to be taught these things. We have to be taught
