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.