the leader, and did not frankly trust anybody else to do it. I was known simply by name, Ashlar, as no titles were required among us, and I exerted tremendous influence over the others, and lived in terror of their getting lost, being eaten by wild animals, or fighting each other in harmful ways. Battles, quarrels, they were now daily occurrences.
But with each passing winter we had greater and greater skills. And as we followed the game south, or moved in that direction simply by instinct or by accident, I don’t know, we came into warmer lands of fairly extended summer, and our true reverence for, and reliance upon, the seasons began.
We began to ride the wild horses for fun. It was great sport to us. But we didn’t think that horses could really be tamed. We did all right with the oxen to pull our carts, which, in the beginning, of course, we had pulled ourselves.
Out of this came our most intense religious period. I invoked the name of the Good God every time chaos came upon us, striving to put our lives back in order. Executions took place sometimes twice a year.
There’s so much I could write or say about those centuries. But in a very real sense they constitute a unique time—between the lost land and the coming of human beings—and much of what was deduced, surmised, learned, memorized, was shattered, so to speak, when the humans came.
It is enough to say that we became a highly developed people, worshiping the Good God largely through banquets and dances as we had always done. We still played the game of memory, and still kept to our strict rules of conduct, though now men “remembered” at birth how to be violent, to fight, to excel, and to compete, and women were born remembering fear.
And certain strange events had had an incredible impact upon us, far greater than anyone realized at the time.
Other men and women were afoot in Britain. We heard of them from other Taltos—and that they were loathsome and as mean as animals. The Taltos had slaughtered them in self-defense. But the strange people, who were not Taltos, had left behind pots made of brittle earth, painted with pretty pictures, and weapons made of magical stone. They had also left behind curious little creatures like monkeys, though hairless and very helpless, who might be their young.
This settled the question that they were bestial, for in our minds only the beasts had helpless little young. And even the young of the beasts weren’t as helpless as these little creatures.
But Taltos took mercy on them; they nourished them on milk and kept them, and finally, having heard so much about them, we bought about five of these little creatures, who by that time were no longer crying all the time, and actually knew how to walk.
These creatures didn’t live long. What, thirty-five years, perhaps, but during that time they changed dramatically; they went from little wriggling pink things to tall, strong beings, only to become wizened, withered old things. Purely animal, that was our conjecture, and I don’t think we treated these primitive primates any better than they might have treated dogs.
They were not quick-witted, they didn’t understand our very rapid speech; indeed, it was quite a discovery that they could understand if we spoke slowly, but they had no words, apparently, of their own.
Indeed, they were born stupid, we thought, with less innate knowledge than the bird or the fox; and though they gained greater reasoning power, they always remained fairly weak, small, and covered with hideous hair.
When a male of our kind mated with a female of them, the female bled and died. The men made our women bleed. They were crude and clumsy, besides.
Over the centuries we came upon such creatures more than once, or bought them from other Taltos, but we never saw them in any organized force of their own. We supposed them to be harmless. We had no name for them, really. They taught us nothing, and they made us cry with frustration when they couldn’t learn anything from us.
How sad this is, we thought, that these big animals look so much like Taltos, even walking upright and having no tails, but they have no minds.
Meanwhile, our laws had become very strict. Execution was the ultimate punishment for disobedience. It had become a ritual, though never a celebrated one, in which the offending Taltos was quickly dispatched with deliberate and severe blows to