"Such killing rituals always took place at dusk. Understand, they could easily transform into wolf people in the daytime if an enemy approached; but for executions they always waited until dusk.
"And so as darkness fell, they lighted their torches and formed a great circle, forcing me into the middle of it, and they began to dance to bring about the change.
"It wasn,t easy for them. They were not all a party to it. Some stood back. I had saved the lives of many of them, healed their sick children. I could see it there and then, the great disinclination in these crude beings to harm an innocent. Indeed, I am not sure what scent they caught from me at that time, and I,ll never know.
"But I know what scent I caught from them - a hideous, acrid scent, a scent of malice threatening my very life, when they came down on me like wolves.
"Now if they,d torn me apart as they did the other enemies and lawbreakers, that would have been the end of the story. And my journey through time would have ended like that of any mortal man. But they did not. Something restrained them, some lingering respect or fascination, or distrust of themselves.
"And it is conceivable that from the playful bites I,d extracted, and from the fluids I,d imbibed, I had some great glandular immunity working in me, some powerful fount of healing that allowed me to survive their attack.
"Whatever the case, I suffered bites all over and I crawled on my belly towards the jungle to die. This was the worst torture I,d ever endured. I was angry - enraged that my life was ending in this fashion. And they were dancing back and forth all around me, on either side of me, and behind me. They were shifting back into their regular shape, and cursing me, then struggling into the wolfen form again, because I was not dead. But they could not bring themselves, obviously, to finish me off.
"And then I changed.
"Before their eyes, I changed.
"Maddened by the sounds and scents of their hatred for me, it was I who changed and attacked them."
His eyes grew wide peering into something that only he could see. They all sat silent waiting. There came over Reuben a strong sense of Morgon,s demeanor, the way that he maintained an unspoken supremacy though not a single inveterate gesture of his was imposing and his voice was, even at its most heated, rolling steadily beneath the governance of a deeply private and disciplined man.
"They were no match for me at all," he said with a shrug. "They had been like yapping puppies with milk teeth. I was a seething wolfen monster with a human being,s resolve and wounded pride. They didn,t have emotions like that! Nothing was so necessary to them, ever in all their lives, as killing them was then to me."
Reuben smiled. This so beautifully touched on the lethal edge of the human species that he marveled.
"Something far more deadly than either of us had ever beheld had now been born," said Margon. "The man wolf, the werewolf, the wolf man - what we are."
Again, he paused. He seemed to be struggling with something he wanted to express but could not.
"There,s so much about it I do not understand," he confessed. "But I know this and it,s what all people know now, that every particle of life explodes from mutation, from the accidental combining of elements on every level, that accident is the indispensable nuclear power of the universe, that nothing advances without it, without a reckless and random blundering, whether it is seeds ripped from a dying flower by the wind, or pollen carried on the tiny feet of winged insects or blind fish tunneling into caverns of the deep to consume life forms undreamt of by those on the surface of the planet above. Accident, accident, and so it was with them and with me: a blunder, a stumbling - and what you call a man wolf was born. What we called the Morphenkinder were born."
He stopped and drank some more of the coffee, and once again Reuben filled his cup.
Stuart was enthralled. But the old impatience was cooking again in him. He couldn,t help himself.
"There,s a virtue," Felix said, "to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth."
"I know this," said Stuart, struggling. "I,m sorry, I know