Who was it that decided that moving back and forth between time periods is consistent with the suspension of disbelief, or that a temporal spread is an adequate basis for a plot?
A reader, emerging from the swamp of Chapter Two — where an exiled ‘Keeper of the Beasts’ falls in love with the virgin daughter of a ‘Keeper of the Horses….’ believes nothing. Oh, please. The bulls of Lascaux don’t need to be stipulated by way of stipulating a primordial artist with his own cave, balls, tribe, and palette of coloured dung.