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