Chapter 127

“I guess you don’t live hundreds of years either.”

“And how well you suppose. The oldest of our people that has been documented lived one hundred and eighteen years, with great luck. It’s not that we are very prolific either, because our women often have problems conceiving; but we put a lot of enthusiasm into the matter,” he commented, with a chuckle. He always explained to me whatever I wanted to know about his people very willingly; he liked to talk to me about those things. That last statement surprised me, and inadvertently answered a whole series of questions I had been asking myself for a long time, starting with the fact that Ivan only had one brother, Mikhail. “And we are definitely not a very old race, as far as I know. The Books began to be written four hundred years ago, but we estimate that we existed for only a handful of centuries before that, in small, savage clans, hidden in the most inaccessible territories. The world itself pushed us to organize and form mor