The Oldest Living
Vampire Saga
Nyal’s Story
By
Joseph Duncan
Table of Contents
Copyright Notice
Acknowledgements
Dedication
1. The mountain had always been…
2. When she was young and of childbearing age…
3. Twice a year, on the night of the solstice…
4. When Nyala was fourteen years old…
5. After Eyya’s spirit had departed…
6. The Foul Ones came in the spring…
7. She had told little Maia…
8. To his credit …
9. Nyal groaned…
10. She awoke in pain…
11. When they were satisfied…
12. Nyal dreamed…
13. The sun had passed…
14. Gon caught her…
15. They walked…
16. Nyala, in the tongue of the River People…
About the Author
Copyright Notice
Copyright 2013 by Joseph Duncan
Originally published under the pen name Rod Redux.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living, dead or undead is entirely coincidental.
Published by Cobra E-books
Metropolis, IL
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank my beta readers for taking the time out of their busy schedules to critique an early draft of this novella. Their advice was invaluable. Thanks to Amy Higginbotham, Bella Quinones, Michael Burgener, and David Traweek.
Dedication
In memory of my grandmother,
Sarah Elizabeth Johnson
1
The mountain had always been.
In that, it was like the heavens and the earth: eternal. Or near enough, reckoned against an old woman’s lifetime, to be called eternal. It had stood against the sky for as long as she could remember, a gray-blue sentry guarding the valley where her people made their home. Strange that she had never given it more than a passing thought, if any at all, it was such a familiar sight to her, but it had been there all her life and she had never been given cause to think on it. She had never journeyed to it or climbed it, nor passed within its shadow. It was like the clouds in the sky. Always there, ever beyond her reach.
Until this day.
She was so high up now she didn’t dare look down. If she did she would freeze in terror, or her head would swim and she would lose her purchase and fall, just like her brave grandson Gilad, and despite how old she was, she didn’t wish to die. Not yet. Not until she had saved the children.
She looked up instead, up along the sheer, blue-gray face of the mountain, searching for a ledge or crevice she could use to continue her ascent.
Not much further, she promised herself, her bony arms trembling, her thin white hair, fragile as spider silk, whipping around her face. The wind was strong up here, so high above the valley. It stole away the heat of her body and tried to pluck her from her perch. The sound of it, hooting in all the tiny cracks and crevices that riddled the escarpment, frightened her almost as much as the thought of falling. To her ears, they were the voices of spirits, speaking in some foreign language she couldn’t comprehend.
Look at me, Eyya! she thought, directing it toward those keening spirits. Aren’t I the adventurous one now!
Eyya had always been the adventurous one when they were young and strong and carefree. Before the Evil One came and took away their husbands, one transformed into a strange white god, the other crippled and tormented by his memories. What would her sweet Eyya say if she could see her clinging to the face of this mountain, so high up now she might reach out and pluck a cloud out of the sky, like a bit of seed pod fluff?
You’d say I was crazy, that’s what you’d say! the old woman thought, and she laughed.
I was the outspoken one. I was the one who always had to have the last word. And stubborn--! It was my way or no way, but I was never adventurous. Not like you, my dearest, always traipsing off after those men, even when there were demons on the prowl!
But for her grandchildren, she could be adventurous. For them, she could be brave.
The old woman extended her arm, curled her fingers around a narrow ledge. She tested her hold and then pulled herself up.
Her entire body trembled with the effort. Her breath came out in gasps and hitches. Her heart thumped in her chest like a drum, each percussion a little stab of pain.
When did she get so damn old?
Just a little further! she promised herself. A little further, and then you can rest!
She hauled herself up again, then paused to shout, “Gon! Come to me! The Foul Ones have taken our granddaughters!”
She tried to shout above the howling of the wind, but she knew it would be a miracle if he heard her. He might not even be there to hear!
She had sent her grandson, Gilad, to find her husband’s lair when Eyya died. He swore it was somewhere on this mountain, but she was never quite certain when he was telling her the truth. Perhaps he was just humoring his senile old grandmother, but if so, if he had been humoring her, why carry her all the way here? Why sacrifice himself trying to climb the sheer face of this mountain, which he called Old Stone Man?
I guess I’m about to find out, she thought. Or die in the trying.
2
When she was young and of childbearing age, the people of her tribe called her Nyala.
She lived in the verdant river valley of a piney mountainous region that is now named the Swabian Alps, in a country that would come to be called Germany in some thirty thousand years. In her youth she had two husbands, one named Gon and the other named Brulde. She also had a subordinate wife named Eyya. Eyya was a Neanderthal. They had lived contentedly in a dome-shaped hut called a wetus for six years, and their successful group marriage—which was a common way to live in her culture—produced an equal number of beautiful children, three of which she had delivered from her own womb.
But her childbearing days were long past. Her youth, like her womb, had wizened with the passing of the seasons, shriveling like a bunyun fruit left too long in the sun.
Nyala, in the tongue of the River People, meant “a blooming flower”, a name her father had given her when she was born, never considering that someday that flower would go to seed. As age seamed her face, as the inexorable march of the sun and moon across the sky bleached her blonde hair white and hunched her back, the People took to calling her Nyal, which meant simply “a plant”, but the connotation of the word was a little less kind. It really meant “a useless old weed”, but that suited her. That suited her just fine.
This Paleolithic crone, now named Nyal, was by our standard of measuring time only 59 years old, but that was ancient in those untamed days. She and her subordinate wife had been living in the Siede for more than twenty years, old widow women.
The Siede was the communal cave of the elders, where the River People retired to wile away their twilight years, performing menial tasks and teaching the young ones the skills they would need to survive while their parents were off hunting and gathering.
It was just the two of them now.
Brulde was dead, and Gon… Gon had vanished many years before, when they were all still young and had a hut full of babies to look after. Nyal and Eyya subsisted on the generosity of their four strapping sons now, and traded their skills at threadwork and medicine for the rest of the commodities they needed to survive.
“At least we’re comfortable,” Eyya sometimes said, sitting beside the fire.
&
nbsp; Comfortable is a matter of opinion, Nyal thought, shifting irritably on a mat of woven reeds. Either her cushion was getting thinner or her bottom was getting bonier!
Probably a little of both.
“At least our children come to see us,” Eyya sometimes said.
Well, Den was always busy, chasing after women who were far too young for him, but Hun and Gan and Gavid always brought a portion of their hunting to their mothers’ apartment in the Siede. Lethe and Breyya visited daily. Then again, they had to. Nyal and Eyya looked after their children, as was their duty as elders of the tribe, but sometimes they would linger to gossip with their mothers around the hearth, and that was nice. Not everyone’s children were so generous with their time.
Still, Eyya was an incurable optimist. It irritated Nyal to no end.
“It’s a miracle that all our children still live,” Eyya often observed, after their grandchildren had left for the evening. Life was hard. Death for the River People-- whether from accident, predation or disease-- was as certain as the passage of the moon and the sun through the heavens. Why, just two days ago, a young boy named Tiam had developed a fever and passed into the Ghost World, and he was only four years old!
“Vestra has truly blessed us, Nyala,” Eyya invariably said.
“Is that right?” Nyal always replied, always with a neutral expression on her face.
Vestra was the moon goddess of the Neanderthal people, the celestial mother who had given birth to all living things. The River People had no gods—no gods save one. Some of the younger People had taken to calling her husband a god, but Gon was no god. She didn’t really know what he was, but she knew he was no god. Nyal didn’t believe in such things.
But she loved old Eyya, as fat and ugly as she’d become, so Nyal nodded as if she agreed with her.
Nyal wasn’t inclined to feel so satisfied with her lot. She never had been. But Eyya’s feelings were easily bruised, and Nyal hated to see that look of hurt flash in her big Fat Hand eyes. It made the old woman feel terribly guilty.
“I suppose that’s true, my love,” Nyal said, adjusting a pair of breeches in her lap. She wriggled her bone needle through the tough deerskin and pulled the flaxen thread taut. One of the young men in the tribe, whose wife had no skills at sewing, had promised her a fat hare in return for a new pair of pants.
As she sewed, Nyal pretended she did not notice how thin and wrinkled the flesh of her hands had become. When did her hands become an old crone’s crinkled claws? She turned them this way and that when Eyya was not watching, scowling at the ropy veins and swollen knuckles.
Eyya often smiled-- like she was doing right this moment-- looking at the ceiling with a dreamy expression. Counting all her blessings, Nyal supposed. Nyal shook her head in exasperation. Eyya counted her blessings like a little girl counted pretty stones.
Ancestors love her!
She wished her heart could be so simple… so easily satisfied.
3
Twice a year, on the night of the solstice, the People of the River celebrated the death and rebirth of the warm season with a great ritual orgy. There were other observances in which they held orgies—weddings were a particularly festive occasion—but the orgies of the summer and winter solstices were the most highly anticipated events of the year.
Every member of the tribe who was chumsuhk was expected to attend. Chumsuhk meant “flowing water”, but it actually referred to the fluids of the body. For women, the menstrual flow. For men, the production of semen.
Nyal and Eyya always attended the orgies. As elders, they were not required to participate. Nyal had not had her “flowing waters” in many moons, and neither had Eyya, but she went to prepare the brash while Eyya looked after the children.
Brash was a very precisely measured mixture of dried herbs and roots. Steeped in boiling water, it removed the inhibitions of the People, induced an ecstatic trance state, and filled the minds of the celebrants with powerful visions. It also caused the reproductive organs to become extremely engorged with blood. The effect could last for days, though usually it began to wear off about daybreak. In rare instances, it was also know to cause temporary blindness in men, though usually only one or two men had to be led back home after the orgy.
Fueled by the brash, the celebrants coupled for hours. In fact, they coupled until the world outside began to brighten once more. Nyal ground and mixed the ingredients of the brash until she thought her arm would break off at the shoulder, while Eyya, who had drunk far too much framash, passed out with the children at the back of the cave.
Nyal kept an eye on her mate all through the night, just to make sure no addled celebrant tried to fuck her while she slept. She nearly dozed off herself, once or twice, she was so bored. Orgies, when you are not an active participant, are not half as interesting as you might expect them to be. When the orgy had finally wound down for the night, and all of the People stumbled back to their homes, she asked her grandson to carry Eyya to the Siede.
Gilad, who was a dutiful grandson (her favorite, though she would never speak it aloud), bent and scooped the Fat Hand up.
“Whew!” he said. “She’s getting big!”
“As you will, too, when you get old,” Nyal replied.
The path that led to the Siede was winding and muddy. It had warmed the previous afternoon, melting some of the snow that had fallen in recent weeks. Nyal held onto his arm to steady herself on the slippery trail.
“Now you be careful with her!” she snapped at Gilad. “She’s very old, and her bones are as fragile as dry sticks.”
“Don’t worry, Grandmother. I won’t drop her,” Gilad snorted, still glassy-eyed from the brash. His fat young cock bounced from thigh to thigh as he descended the forest path, still engorged. It also, Nyal judged, looked rather raw.
“Gently,” Nyal said in the Siede, as Gilad lay Eyya down.
“You worry too much,” Gilad laughed.
“And you worry too little, Grandson,” Nyal retorted. She arched her back with a groan, her spine crackling. “Before you leave, take some of that ointment-- no, the small shell; yes, that one—and smear some on your pecker before the thing falls off.”
Laughing, Gilad smeared the white ointment liberally on his cock. “Is that enough? I can’t really see.”
“Yes, that’s fine” Nyal said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to lie down. It’s been a long night, and this old bird needs some rest. I’m not nearly as young as I used to be, you know.”
Eyya slept until midday. She snored so loudly Nyal considered smothering her with the rolled up skin she used for a pillow, but she eventually dozed off. The old Neanderthal slept until her bladder, swollen to bursting from all the framash she had drunk the previous night, sounded the alarm.
She jumped to her feet with a cry and headed for the midden, the ditch at the edge of camp where their people went to eliminate. She had to hold herself just to keep from wetting.
Nyal woke at her cry, squawked as Eyya lumbered across her. “What is the matter?” she demanded. “Where are you going?”
“Oh! I have to pee!” Eyya whined.
“Now, you just wait,” Nyal snapped, struggling to sit up. “You’re still drunk from last night. If you’ll give me a moment, I’ll walk you to the midden.”
“Hurry!” Eyya moaned. “I can’t hold it any longer!”
“Just let me get my shoes on!”
But Eyya couldn’t hold her water – she could never hold her water anymore. As Nyal threw off her sleeping furs, Eyya screeched and raced from their quarters.
Cursing under her breath, Nyala slipped her wrinkled old crone’s feet into her boots. She pulled the laces to snug them tighter to her feet, then leaned her elbow against an outcrop of stone to lever herself up. She winced at the pain that seized her back. It felt like some devil cat had sunk its hooked claws into the meat of her and pulled in both directions. When she was sure of her balance, one hand on the wall, she pushed away and tottered after the
mate of her mates.
The Siede was divided with hanging hides, which were draped from rickety frames of wood bound together with gut string. Nyal’s apartment was near the entrance of the cave, which was good for a pee-pee bunny like Eyya, but not so good for an old arthritic like Nyal. It took her several minutes every morning just to work her swollen joints loose, and on moist days, her body howled in agony at the chore. If not for the framash, which she drank regularly, she thought she might wander off into the woods to die, the pain could get so bad.
Nyal pushed through the hide dividing her quarters from the rest of the elder commune and began to shuffle her way toward the opening of the cave. Through gaps in the other hangings, she caught little glimpses of her fellow residents: her fat brother-in-marriage Epp’ha, snoring in his bedding, tiny Herma and her blind husband, the sisters Deb and Neba, smoking merje beside the low licking flames of their hearth. She saw nasty old Ypp’ham assaulting the wrinkled remains of his manhood and averted her eyes with a disgusted snort.
Do they never tire of their little toy?
Even on the best of days, the Siede smelled of smoke and aged flesh, stale farts and urine-stained bedding.
Nyal’s lips thinned as she leaned into the frigid wind that whistled through the cave’s outer flap. The entrance of the cave was blocked off with hides like their individual quarters, but the stout winter wind had found a dozen gaps through which to pry its icy fingers. The chill currents blew through her lank hair, made her knees and shoulders throb.
She was reaching to catch the flapping entrance when she heard a cry ring out.
It seemed she already knew, even before she tottered outside, what had just transpired.
With a coldness in her heart that she could not attribute to the wind, she pushed her way out. The sun was bright, despite the cold, and glared off drifts of new fallen snow. It was a lovely sight, the sparkling white humps of snow, but the glare was still painful for rheumy old eyes adjusted to the dimness of the Siede.
Nyal's Story (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga) Page 1
