Chapter 8

Boyd made short work of breakfast.

He enjoyed the pancakes with dates and honey. He also learnt that the butter was from their goats, and they made their own cheeses. He also found that traditionally, eggs were often served boiled at lunchtime, and various forms of bread were staples at every meal.

He told them what his favourite breakfast was when asked. He was told he could have fried bacon and eggs for breakfast the next day if he wished. Since they did have pigs and knew how to make bacon. They also smoked the haunches to make ham. The pig and chicken pens were behind the horses’ barn.

While drinking the hot herbal tea he was given, he turned to Mathus and said, “One thing I don’t understand. Flavia said the Ancients transported to Earth through a portal. Is there only one portal on Earth and one here?”

“No, the ancient books say there were once five portals opened to Earth,” Mathus replied as he too sat back to let the food settle.

“So, then there are probably more portals here. If so, then there is a good probability that others got here the same way as your people. Did the Ancients only travel by portals?”

Mathus shook his head, “No, one of my Aunt’s books say they also built spaceships to find new worlds. That is how they found Earth. They then put the portals in place so others could follow.”

“So, if they have to travel by spaceship to put the portals in place, then they came to this planet before your people got here.”

“Yes, I suppose they had to. Why is that significant? We found no people living on these islands when we came here.”

“Maybe not, but I bet there are portals on other islands on this planet. Have you people explored all of this planet?”

Mathus looked around the table. He got head shakes from most of the other people having breakfast with them. Boyd also noticed the head shakes. He shook his own head in disgust.

“So, you have known about this problem for more than fifty years. You must have sea-worthy ships if you travel between the islands here. So why didn’t you go looking for other people?”

Julia answered, “I guessed we thought we were alone. We haven’t had visitors from the other islands in the two thousand years we have been here. It was only luck that caused the portal to work when Grandmother was investing it in the hope we could reconnect with Earth.”

“We have not really had a need to travel beyond the islands. We brought most of our staple crops and livestock with us. There are four very large islands and quite a few smaller ones in this group.”

“Moss Island, for example, is some 2600km at its longest. Even this island, being Tye Island, is about 1500km at its longest and nearly that at its widest. Joh and Ino islands are also as big if not bigger.”

“You see, there were at most only about six hundred people that escaped Earth, and about two hundred of them were humans. While our forefathers bred more often in the beginning, we slipped back into the old ways as time went by.”

“Normally, we only have a child about every thirty years, so we don’t have an explosion of the population. Therians were feared back on Earth because of our shapeshifting abilities, so most of our people were used to hiding and keeping low populations.”

“For the first thousand years, we let the non-Therian races breed. But when their numbers more than doubled ours, and they wanted their own towns, our leaders got worried that the same thing that happened on Earth would happen here.”

“So, they ruled that the non-Therians could only breed with a Therian or be neutered. That resulted in several minor wars that spanned several centuries. They did neither population any good. We, however, prevailed, and so we bred the humans out of our lives. It is not a happy time in our history.”

“We weren’t aware that this was a problem until about two hundred and fifty years ago. That was when our people found that they had to search to find a mate that they were genetically able to mate with. We started creating genetic charts for everyone to see who could mate with who.”

Mathus then took over the tale by saying, “That is when we began to suspect there was a problem if a person was a child of two Therian parents who were also the children of two Therian parents. They could only produce a child if they found a partner who still had a human as one of those parents.”

“And by then, it was mostly only a grandparent or a mage from our great grandparents’ age. Also, that person was often the last child of a much older Therian parent. Non-magical Therians are fertile for close to a hundred years, but most people don’t have a child that late in life.”

Julius then stated, “Mages are people who gain a magical artifact and become Novices or Mages. They are fertile for all of their lives. Novices can live for about three hundred years and mages for about six hundred. However, they can still die and be killed by natural causes.”