Blood Canticle - Anne Rice [79]
“The Taltos is telepathic, curious by nature and hardwired with a tremendous amount of basic historical and intellectual knowledge. It is born ‘knowing,’ as they say, all about the species itself, the island continent from which they came, and the places in the British Isles to which they migrated after the island was destroyed by the same volcano that created it. The glen of Donnelaith in Scotland was one of those strongholds. Maybe one of the last.
“That’s what the Taltos was . . . when it was pure, before it knew about humankind or had any mixture with it. The population was culled by accidents, occasional pestilence, the females by overbreeding.”
“What does this mean, hardwired?” I said. “I want to be sure I understand you.”
“We’re not hardwired,” she said. “We don’t come into this world knowing how to build a house or speak a language. But a bird is hardwired to build its nest, to do a mating call, or a mating dance. A cat is hardwired to hunt for food, care for its kittens—even to eat them if they are weak or deformed.”
“Yes, I see,” I said.
“The Taltos is a highly intelligent primate that is hardwired with a tremendous fund of knowledge,” she said. “That and its extraordinary reproductive advantage are what make it so dangerous. Its naivete, its simplicity and lack of aggression are its vulnerabilities. It’s also extremely sensitive to rhythm and music. You can almost paralyze a Taltos when you utter a long rhyme or sing a rhythmic song.”
“I understand,” I replied. “How did they become mixed with humans?” I asked.
She seemed at a loss. “Medically,” she said, “I don’t know the answer. I only know that it happened.”
“Humans inevitably came to the British Isles,” said Michael. “And there is a long history of “the tall people” and their fight with their more aggressive invaders. Interbreeding occurred. For human females it’s almost always fatal. The woman conceives and then miscarries and bleeds to death. You can imagine the hatred and fear this inspired. As for the other way around, a human male would bring about an insignificant hemorrhage in a female Taltos. Nothing important there, except that if it happens repeatedly over years and years, it will use up the female’s eggs.” He paused, caught his breath and went on:
“Some successful breeding occurred and the offspring gave rise both to malformed ‘little people’ and Taltos with human genes, and humans with the genes of the Taltos. And as the centuries passed, all this became a matter of superstition and legend.”
“Not so very neatly,” said Rowan. Her voice was firmer than before, though her eyes still moved feverishly. “There were terrible wars and massacres and unspeakable bloodshed. The Taltos, being far less aggressive than humans by nature, lost out to the new species. The Taltos were scattered. And they went into hiding. They pretended to be humans. They concealed their birthing rites. But as Michael said, couplings with humans did happen. And unbeknownst to the early inhabitants of the British Isles, there developed a kind of human who carried a giant helix of genes, twice the number of a normal human, and capable at any time of giving birth to the Taltos or a malformed elfin child struggling to be one. When two such humans happened to mate, a Taltos birth was even more likely.”
Rowan paused. Michael hesitated, and then, as she put her face into her hands, he continued the story.
“The secret genes were passed on by the Earls of Donnelaith, Scotland, and their kith and kin, this we know for certain, and superstitious legends grew up about any occasional Taltos child born to their household.
“Meantime, a May Day orgy gave way to a misalliance