"I left them without ever realizing that I would roam this earth for centuries to come.
"But there,s one more thing I must tell you about what happened to me on that island," he said. He looked intently at Reuben. "And someday perhaps you will share this with your brother, when he is suffering acutely from his dark night of the soul. I have seldom if ever told anyone this small thing, which I want to reveal now."
Felix and Thibault were watching him as though they were mightily intrigued and couldn,t guess what he meant to say.
"There was a holy man on the island," he said, "what we call now a shaman, a mystic of sorts who imbibed the few plants there that could intoxicate and induce madness and trance. I paid little attention to him. He didn,t hurt anybody and he spent most of his existence in a blissful stupor and scratching signs and symbols understood only by him into the dirt or the sand of the beach. He was actually quite beautiful in a ghastly sort of way. He never challenged me and I never questioned him on his supposed mystical knowledge. And of course, I believed in nothing, and held that I,d acquired the power, as I saw it, on my own.
"But when I prepared to leave the island, when I had passed on the scepter so to speak to another, and was ready to embark for the mainland, this shaman came down to the beach and called out to me before the assembled tribe.
"Now this was a time of ceremonial well-wishing and even tears. And so for this strange being to appear, crazed by his revolting potions and talking in riddles, well, it was not something any of us wanted to see.
"But he came on, and when he had the attention of everyone present, he pointed his finger at me and he said the gods would punish me for the theft of the power that had been given to ,the people,, and not to me.
"I was no god, he told the others.
"He cried out: ,Margon the Godless One, you cannot die. The gods have decided it. You cannot die. There will come a time when you,ll beg for death but it will be denied to you. And wherever you go and whatever you do, you will not die. You will be a monster among your own kind. The power will torment you. It will give you no rest. This is because you have taken into yourself the power which the gods intended for us alone.,
"The tribe was very agitated, outraged, confused. Some wanted to beat him and chase him back to his hut and his drunken stupors. Others were merely afraid.
" ,The gods have told me these things,, he said. ,They are laughing at you, Margon. And they will always be laughing at you, wherever you go or whatever you do.,
"I myself was shaken, though why I didn,t fully grasp. I bowed to him, thanked him for his oracle, firmly resolved that he ought to be pitied, and prepared to leave. For many a year after that, I never so much as thought of him.
"But then came the time when I did begin to think of him. And not a year goes by that I have not remembered him and every word that he spoke."
He paused again, and he sighed. "Well over a hundred years later I returned to that island, to see how my people, as I called them, had fared. They had been wiped out to the last one. Homo sapiens sapiens ruled the island. And only the legend of the feral people survived."
He looked at Reuben and then at Stuart and finally to Laura, letting his gaze linger on Laura.
"Now, let me put it to you," he said. "What is there to be learned from such a story, may I ask?"
No one spoke up, not even Stuart, who was merely studying Margon, with his elbow on the table and his right fingers curled under his lip.
"Well, obviously," said Laura, "that the power had evolved in them in response to their enemies, over how many thousands of years no one could say. It was a survival mechanism that was gradually enhanced."
"Yes," said Margon.
She went on.
"And catching the scent of the enemy was part of it and became the trigger mechanism for the change."
"Yes."
"But clearly," she continued, "they never used it for simple hunting or feasting, because they were more intimately connected with the animals of the jungle."
"Yes, perhaps."
"But you," she said, "a human being, Homo sapiens sapiens, you suffered the divide from the wild beasts that we all suffer, and you did want to slay them, and though they were neither innocent nor guilty, neither good nor evil, they were fair game, just what the expression means, fair game, and you hunted them in your new form."
Stuart interjected: "And so the power took a new evolutionary turn in you. Well, that means it must have taken other evolutionary turns in you, and in others since. We,re talking thousands of years, are we not? We,re talking many changes."
"I would say so," said Margon. "Understand one thing more. At the time I had no sense of these things of which you,re speaking, no sense of an evolutionary continuum. So I could not conceive of this new power, this wolfen power, as anything but depravity, a sinking, a loss of soul, a contamination with a lower and bestial drive."
"Yet you,d wanted it," said Stuart.
"Yes, always, I wanted it. I very much wanted it, and loathed myself for the wanting of it," said Margon, "and only afterwards, only as time passed, as my understanding deepened, did I come to think that something magnificent might lie in this great potential to become the unbeatable monster while still retaining my cunning, my intellect, my human soul as it were."
"So you believe in the soul?" Stuart said. "You didn,t believe in the gods, but you believed in the soul."
"I believed in the uniqueness and the superiority of humankind. I was not a man who thought animals had anything to teach. I didn,t know there was a universe - not in the way we use the word now. I thought this earth was all that there was. Think for a moment of what that truly means - that we, the people of that time, truly thought this earth was all there was. Any spirit realm above or beneath was a mere antechamber. That,s how small our imagined cosmos was. I know you know this, but think about it. Think about what it must have felt like to us.
"Whatever the case, I wanted the ability in order to possess a marvelous weapon, a powerful extension of myself. If my brother ever came after me, I wanted the ability to turn into a beast and rip him apart. Of course that was hardly the only thing I wanted. I wanted to see and feel as the wolfen beast and bring back to my human state whatever I,d learned. Yet it was a selfish and greedy thing that I sought it, and obtained it, and afterwards I was a suffering man, resorting most often to the beast in defeat, and rarely ever in joy."