mounts gave these human beings a fanatical sense of power. Humans enjoyed these invasions. Massacre was sport to them.
We fortified our camps for the winter. Those who had come to join us replaced many of the fighting men we had lost.
Then the snow came; we had plenty to eat, and we had peace. Maybe the invaders didn’t like the snow. We didn’t know. There were so many of us gathered together, and we had lifted from the dead so many spears and swords, that we felt safe.
It was time for the winter birth circle to be convened, and it was most important, as so many had been killed in the last year. Not only must we make new Taltos for our villages; we had to make them to send to other villages where the inhabitants had been burnt out.
Many had come from far and wide for the winter birth circle, and we heard more and more tales of slaughter and woe.
However, we were many. And it was our sacred time.
We formed the circles, we lit the sacred fires; it was time to declare to the Good God that we believed the summer would come again, to make birth happen now as an affirmation of that faith, and an affirmation that the Good God wanted us to survive.
We had had perhaps two days of singing and dancing and birthing, of feasting and drinking, when the tribes of human beings descended on the plain.
We heard the enormous rumble of the horses before we saw them; it was a roar like the sound of the crumbling of the lost land. Horsemen came from all sides to attack us; the great sarsens of the circles were splashed with our blood.
Many Taltos, drunk on music and erotic play, never put up any resistance at all. Those of us who ran to the camps put up a great fight.
But when the smoke had cleared, when the horsemen were gone, when our women had been taken by the hundreds in our own wagons, when every encampment had been burnt to the ground, we were only a handful, and we had had enough of war.
Indeed, the horrors we’d seen we never wanted to witness again. The newborns of our tribe had all been slain, to the last one. They had blundered into death in the first days of their lives. Few women remained to us, and some had given birth too many times in the past.
By the second nightfall after the massacre, our scouts came back to tell us what we had feared was true: the warriors had set up their camps in the forest. They were building permanent dwellings; indeed, there was talk of their villages dotting the southern landscape.
We had to go north.
We had to return to the hidden valleys of the Highlands, or places too inaccessible for these cruel invaders. Our journey was a long one, lasting the rest of the winter, in which birth and death became daily occurrences, and more than once we were attacked by small bands of humans, and more than once we spied upon their settlements and learned of their lives.
We massacred more than one band of the enemy. Twice we raided lowland forts to rescue our men and women, whose singing we could hear from great distances.
And by the time we discovered the high valley of Donnelaith, it was spring, the snow was melting, the rich forest was green again, the loch was no longer frozen, and we soon found ourselves in a hideaway accessible to the outside world only by a winding river whose route was so circuitous that the loch itself could not be seen from the sea. Indeed, the great cove through which a seafarer enters it appears to all eyes as a cave.
Understand, the loch in later times became a port. Men did much by that time to open it to the sea.
But in those times we found ourselves hidden and safe at last.
We had many rescued Taltos with us. And the stories they told! The human beings had discovered the miracle of birth with us! They were spellbound by the magic of it; they had tortured the Taltos women and men mercilessly, trying to force them to do it, and then had screamed in delight and thrilling fear when the new Taltos appeared. They had worried some of these women to death. But many of our kind had resisted, refusing to be so violated; some women had found ways to take their own lives.