the table and motioning for me to sit down. He had taken off his clumsy Dutch hat, and looked at me eagerly as I took the opposite chair.
The strange enticing scent came strongly from my sister, and once again it made me hunger for something, but I did not know for what. If it was an erotic hunger, I did not intend to find out.
I was fully dressed for High Mass. I seated myself carefully and folded my hands on the table.
“What is it you want?” I looked from my sister to the Dutchman. “Do you come to go to confession so that you can receive the Body and Blood of Christ tonight?”
“Save yourself,” said my sister. “Leave now.”
“And forsake these good people and this cause? You are mad.”
“Listen to me, Ashlar,” said the man from Amsterdam. “I’m offering you my protection again. I can take you from the valley tonight, secretly. Let the cowardly priests here gather their courage on their own.”
“Into a Protestant country? For what?”
It was my sister who answered: “Ashlar, in the dim days of legends before the Romans and the Picts came to this land, your breed lived on an island, naked and mad as apes of the wild—born knowing, yes, but knowing at birth all that they would ever know!
“At first the Romans sought to breed with them, as had others. For if they could father sons who grew to manhood within hours, what a powerful people they would become. But they could not breed the Taltos, save once in a thousand times. And as the women died from the seed of the Taltos males, and the Taltos females led the men to endless and fruitless licentiousness, it was decided that they must wipe the Taltos from the earth.
“But in the islands and in the Highlands, the breed survived, for it could multiply like rats. And finally when the Christian faith was brought to this country, when the Irish monks came in the name of St. Patrick, it was Ashlar the leader of the Taltos who knelt to the image of the Crucified Christ and declared that all his kind should be murdered, for they had no souls! There was a reason behind it, Ashlar! For he knew that if the Taltos really learnt the ways of civilization, in their childishness, and idiocy, and penchant to breed, they could never be stopped.
“Ashlar was no longer of his people. He was of the Christians. He had been to Rome. He had spoken to Gregory the Great.
“So he condemned his fellow Taltos! He turned on them. The people made it a ritual, an offering, as cruel a pagan slaughter as ever was known.
“But down through the years, in the blood, the seed travels, to throw up these slender giants, born knowing, these strange creatures whom God has given the cleverness of mimicry, and singing, but no true capacity to be serious or firm.”
“Oh, but that is not so,” I said. “Before God, I am the living proof.”
“No,” said my sister, “you are a good follower of St. Francis, a mendicant and a saint, because you are a simpleton, a fool. That’s all St. Francis ever was—God’s idiot, walking about barefoot preaching goodness, not knowing a word of theology really, and having his followers give away all they possessed. It was the perfect place to send you—the Italy of the Franciscans. You have the addled brain of the Taltos, who would play and sing and dance the livelong day and breed others for playing and singing and dancing…”
“I am a celibate,” I said. “I am consecrated to God. I know nothing of such things.” I was cut so deep it was a miracle the words would come from me. I was wounded. “I am not such a creature. How dare you?” I whispered, but then I bowed my head in humility. “Francis, help me now,” I prayed.
“I know this whole story,” declared the Dutchman, as my sister nodded. He went on. “We are an Order called the Talamasca. We know the Taltos. We always have. Our founder beheld with his own eyes the Taltos of his time. It was his great dream to bring the male Taltos together with the female Taltos, or with the witch whose blood was strong enough to take the male’s seed. That has been our purpose for centuries, to watch, to wait, and to rescue the Taltos!—to rescue a male and a female in one generation if such a thing does occur!