In the beginning we had no one presiding, but that changed. I was called upon to go into the center, to strike the strings of the harp, to begin the dance. And after I had spent many hours there, another came to stand in my place, and later another and another, each new singer or musician making a music which the others imitated, taking the new song out from small circle to big circle, like the ripples in a pond from a falling stone.
At times, many great fires were constructed beforehand, one in the center and others at various points, so that the dancers would pass near to them often as they followed the circular path.
The birth of the Taltos in our circle was for the newborn an event unrivaled even in the lost land. For there the circles had been voluntary and spontaneous and small. But here the new creature opened its eyes upon an enormous tribe of its own kind, and heard a chorus like that of angels, and dwelt within that circle, being suckled and stroked and comforted for the first days and nights of life.
Of course, we were changing. As our innate knowledge changed, we changed. That is, what we learned changed the genetic makeup of the newborn.
Those born in the time of the circles had a stronger sense of the sacred than we old ones did, and were frankly not so given to rampant humor or irony or suspicion as we were. Those born in the time of the circles were more aggressive, and could murder when they had to, without giving way to tears.
Had you asked me then, I would have said our kind would rule forever. Had you said, “Ah, but men will come who will slaughter people for fun, who will rape and burn and lay waste simply because it is what they do for a living,” I would not have believed it. I would have said, “Oh, but we’ll talk to them, we’ll tell all our stories and memories and ask them to tell theirs, and they’ll start dancing and singing, and they’ll stop fighting or wanting things they shouldn’t have.”
When human beings did come down on us, we assumed, of course, that they would be simple little hairy people, of the gentle ilk of the amiable, grunting little traders who sometimes came to the coast in boats of skin to sell us goods and then went away.
We heard tales of raids and massacres but we could not believe these. After all, why would anyone do such things?
And then we were amazed to discover that the human beings coming into Britain had smooth skin like ours, and that their magic stone had been hammered into shields and helmets and swords, that they had brought their own trained horses with them by the hundreds, and on horseback they rode us down, burning our camps, piercing our bodies with spears, or chopping off our heads.
They stole our women and raped them until they died of the bleeding. They stole our men and sought to enslave them, and laughed at them and ridiculed them, and in some instances drove them mad.
At first their raids were very infrequent. The warriors came by sea, and descended upon us by night from the forests. We thought each raid was the last.
Often we fought them off. We were not by nature as fierce as they, by any means, but we could defend ourselves, and great circles were convened to discuss their metal weapons and how we might make our own. Indeed, we imprisoned a number of human beings, invaders all, to try to pry the knowledge from them. We discovered that when we slept with their women, whether willing or unwilling, they died. And the men had a deep, inveterate hatred of our softness. They called us “the fools of the circle,” or “the simple people of the stones.”
The illusion that we could hold out against these people crumbled almost in the space of one season. We only learned later that we’d been saved from earlier annihilation by one simple fact: we didn’t have much that these people wanted. Principally, they wanted our women for pleasure, and some of the finer gifts which pilgrims had brought to the circle shrine.
But other tribes of Taltos were flocking onto the plain. They’d been driven from their homes along the coast by the human invaders, who inspired in them only deathly fear. Their