Nyal's Story (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga)

by Joseph Duncan

  Squinting, Nyal watched as several of the younger People went running toward the midden. They called to one another as they ran, making sounds of surprise and concern.

  She limped after them, her lips pressing tighter and tighter together. The wind blew spicules of ice into her face. Icicles dripped from the bare limbs of the trees. Her heart was frozen, too.

  She hoped her premonition was wrong, hoped she was just being silly, worrying about things that might never happen, but before she’d even made it halfway across the camp, several men came stumbling in her direction, Eyya cradled in their arms.

  “Oh, you foolish old Fat Hand!” Nyala cried as the men carried her mate toward her.

  Eyya was groaning, the right side of her body wet and slick with mud.

  “She fell down, Grandmother,” one of the men said, a tall, powerful looking hunter in a fur trimmed anorak. The man was not her grandson. “Grandmother” was just a title of respect. The young ones called all the elders Grandmother or Grandfather.

  “I was shitting when she came to the ditch to empty her bladder,” he explained. “I asked if she needed help, but she didn’t answer. I turned away to give her some privacy, and, well, I guess she slipped. She fell all the way in, and couldn’t get back up.”

  The ditch where the People went to eliminate their waste, near the tannery on the east side of the camp, was several feet deep, a sizeable fall for a very old woman.

  So that isn’t mud splattered all over her!

  Nyal curled her upper lip and waved at the foul smell coming from her co-wife. “Why couldn’t you wait a moment longer?” she asked Eyya querulously. “I said I was getting up!”

  “I’m sorry, Nyala,” Eyya moaned, her soft brown face contorted with pain. She gasped and clutched her hip. “Ooh, that hurts! That hurts so much!”

  Her heart aching, Nyal stepped aside and motioned the men past. “Take her to our quarters in the Siede. I will look after the foolish old thing!” She followed, daubing at her eyes with the back of her bony arm.

  That wind--!

  There was nothing that could be done for her. The other elders gathered and helped Nyal bathe the woman and make her comfortable. They gave Eyya framash to sooth her pain, and piled covers on her for warmth. Most of their children came to see her in the days that followed. Breyya and Lethe helped tend to their mother while Nyal mixed healing potions for her friend. Nyal tried every dried herb, root and decoction she could think of, but she could only dull the pain. The Neanderthal woman grew weaker by the hour.

  Those last few nights were long and terrible. Eyya could do naught but shiver. She shouted every time she moved. Nyal did not leave her side. She didn’t even sleep. And when Eyya soiled herself like a baby, she cleaned her without complaint. When Eyya apologized, crying out of shame, Nyal shushed her. “You’d do the same for me, my love,” Nyal said.

  She couldn’t bring herself to speak out loud all the things she felt in her heart. As unpleasant as it was to clean her, Nyal loved the old Neanderthal woman, and felt it was an honor to tend to her in her final hours.

  Finally, about a week after falling and breaking her pelvis, Eyya passed into the Ghost World.

  Nyal knew it was coming. Her companion was much too pale and weak. Eyya lay shivering by their fire, even though the Siede was stifling hot. It usually was. Old bones crave heat like grass craves sunshine. She had lain unconscious most of the day, and when she did wake, her eyes were filmy and rolled in their sockets as if she were lost in some dark tunnel and couldn’t find her way back out of it.

  Nyal lay beside her, spreading their sleeping furs across the two of them. She turned on her side, even though it pained her, so she could pet the fat old Neanderthal.

  “Nyala?” Eyya croaked.

  “I’m here.”

  “We’ve had a good life, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, we have.”

  “Do you remember how handsome and strong our husbands were when we were young?”

  “Yes.”

  Eyya laughed softly. “I think we got the best ones. They pursued me so insistently! My father didn’t know what to make of them, you know. The Gray Stone People did not live in group families like your people do. It was a bit of a scandal when I left home to marry two Fast Feet men, but I loved Gon so much, and Brulde was a very sweet man, too. So calm and thoughtful. Brulde was very much like my own people. It was easy to be with him.”

  Nyala shifted uncomfortably. She did not like to reflect on the past. It made her weepy and angry.

  “You need to rest, dear one. How will you ever get better if you don’t rest?”

  Eyya’s large brown eyes rolled toward Nyal. They seemed very clear all of a sudden. Their lucidity chilled Nyal to the bone.

  Eyya smiled and said, “I won’t be getting better, Nyala. I’m going tonight to dwell with Vestra. I’m ready to return to the Mother of All Things. I’m tired of living here on Doomhalde’s back. But I will miss you, Nyala! Oh, I will miss you so much! I only hope to see my family there. All my dear ones the Demon Ghost killed. And Brulde, too. I hope to see him in the spirit world. Perhaps they’re one and the same, your Ghost World and the realm of our sky goddess?”

  Nyal shushed her, bringing the woman’s feverish hand to her lips. “Perhaps,” she said solemnly. “I suspect it might be.”

  Eyya’s eyes shifted to some distant point. As she faded, she asked one last question: “Do you think our husband will come down from the mountain to claim me, Nyala?” She drew a whispery breath, more of a rattle, really. “I hope…” the Neanderthal sighed, so softly Nyal could barely hear her.

  And then she was gone.

  4

  When Nyala was fourteen years old, one of the older hunters tried his best to woo her. He followed her around the village, tempted her with gifts. Sometimes he tried to trick her into reaching inside his leggings, telling her that he had hidden a special treat for her inside. That man’s name was Lorthe. Sex for the River People was a very casual thing, but Lorthe was a singularly ugly and lecherous man, with a great flabby belly that Nyala found very unappealing. Also, he stank. She never took the gifts her offered her, and she never reached inside his leggings for her “special treat”. Whenever he was following her, she always made it into a game of hide-and-seek, one she was determined he would never win.

  One day, in the middle of the winter season, Lorthe came upon her alone. He was returning to the village after checking his snares. He had caught a couple rabbits and was feeling very proud of himself, marching through the snow with the dead hares dangling from his fist. Nyal was kneeling on a steep hill on the setting sun side of the camp, digging for tubers with a stick. Lorthe spied her, and froze there in his tracks. He recognized her, even from a distance. No other girl in the village had hair as thick and long.

  Lorthe, tired of sweet-talk and bribery, decided it was time to try a different approach.

  Nyala was one of the fastest children in the village. She had easily eluded Lorthe once he began his pursuit in earnest, but he crept up quietly behind her that day, making not a sound, not even in the snow. It was why he had always been such a successful hunter, that stealth, even in his middle years, even with a belly so big he looked like he was with child.

  His shadow fell upon her, and then the man himself.

  “Just hold still, Little One,” he laughed, pushing down his breeches. “It won’t hurt if you don’t fight. You might even like it if you give Old Lorthe a chance!”

  He squashed her face into the earth as she thrashed and cursed at him. She screamed when he shoved her skirt up over her back. She was wearing buckskin leggings, but the leggings did not cover her bottom.

  “Hold still, I said!” he cried.

  He very nearly mounted her before she managed to wriggle free. She felt the hot, blunt end of his organ part her vulva dryly, and panic gave her the burst of strength she needed to squirm loose.

  Lorthe cursed at her, standing on his knees in the snow, cock in han
d, as she scrambled away from him.

  Her father, who was old and blind in one eye, told her that night she ought to just give Lorthe what he wanted. “You’ve been to the orgies twice now,” he said. “I don’t understand why it should disturb you to mate with any man. Yes, he is ugly and fat, but once he has put his seed inside you, he will lose interest, and then he will leave you alone. Believe me, Nyala. I am a man, too. I know.”

  Furious, Nyala marched across the village and threw aside the flap of Gon and Brulde’s wetus. Gon and Brulde were young and handsome, and unlike her father, they were brave. They already had a wife, an ugly old thing named Eyya, but they had room for another in their wetus, and she’d much rather have the two of them lay upon her than that lecherous old Lorthe!

  “We are married now!” she proclaimed, standing in the opening of their hut. She was short for a Fast Feet woman, but lithe and pleasant of feature. They stared at her in shock as the winter wind tossed her curly blond locks about her face, then they both whipped back their furs so the willful girl could join them.

  Four cycles of the seasons later, a demon ghost invaded their valley.

  It stalked and killed the Gray Stone People, the tribe of Fat Hands from which her subordinate wife hailed. (Nyala always considered Eyya her subordinate wife, even though Eyya had mated with their men first. Eyya was not of their people, and she was not nearly so stubborn as Nyal, so Nyal acted as First Wife, even though Eyya technically was.) When Nyal’s people sent a war party to aid the neighboring clan only two of the warriors survived to come home.

  Nyal supposed she and Eyya were lucky. Both of their husbands had gone to aid their Fat Hand allies. One, at least, had lived to return to them. Brulde had survived, crippled and full of fearsome tales, speaking of not one but two demons, and how those demons had killed nearly the entire war party. Nyal had one husband who’d survived, and that was more than what many of the other wives could say.

  Gon, Nyala and Eyya’s other husband, did not come home.

  Gon and Brulde had escaped after killing the little demon, Brulde told them. But there was a second demon, even more powerful than the first. It killed Gon’s father and the half-breed Tavet. “And then we ran,” Brulde said. “We ran like frightened hares. We nearly made it home, too. Thought that we’d escaped. But then the demon ghost flew down from the treetops. Swooped down like an eagle, and plucked Gon from the earth.”

  Several of the People had vanished in the night while the war party was absent, their bodies never recovered. A couple of their tribesmen had seen it, though, the creature who was stalking them. They said that it was pale, with eyes like the embers of a fire, and that it flew through the trees on great black wings, moving faster than a mortal man could move.

  Mad as his tales were, Brulde was believed by all, and it was verified a day later when one more survivor straggled in, Brulde’s uncle Korte-lenthe.

  The People waited for the demon to return, debating in the Siede whether they should flee the valley like their Neanderthal neighbors had done, but when no more people were stolen in the night, they began to think that the demon ghost had moved on, and they got back to their daily lives, mourning for those that were lost, yes, but a body had to eat, and there were babies to take care of.

  A few seasons went by. Life returned to normal. No more People were snatched from their tents in the middle of the night. Brulde recovered, and grew strong enough to provide for his family once more—with the help of their eldest sons, of course. But he was never the same. He had loved Gon as powerfully as Nyala and Eyya had, and he often thrashed in his sleep, crying out to his beloved tent-mate. A few tribesmen petitioned to join their family, but Brulde always declined. He would have no other husbands.

  And then one day, many seasons later, Brulde came limping back to camp, overwrought and shouting the news that Gon still lived. Their two sons, who were hunting with him that day, were just as excited as their father. “Gon lives! Gon lives!” they shouted, though they could not possibly remember who he was.

  They explained to all who cared to hear their tale how Gon had dispatched the demon ghost who’d killed the Neanderthals. “Gon destroyed the demon ghost. He told me with his own lips. But the demon ghost cursed him,” Brulde gasped breathlessly. “That is why he could not return to us. He has been made a thing of ice and spirit. I saw him, Nyala! It is like he is trapped beneath a frozen pool. He hasn’t aged a day! And after we spoke, he melted away like smoke. He just vanished, like he was never there. But he is real! I touched him with these hands! These hands, Nyala!”

  If her sons Gan and Hun had not also sworn it were true, Nyala wouldn’t have believed him. Demons and magic were the playthings of Neanderthal imagination, not the People.

  Then, when Brulde died of a coughing sickness a couple winters later, Nyala saw her long lost husband with her own eyes.

  Brulde had spoken the truth!

  Gon drifted like a spirit from the treetops, skin white and gleaming, as young as the day he left her side to do battle with the monster that stalked the doomed Fat Hands.

  They were carrying Brulde’s body to their ancestral burial mound, but at Gon’s request, their sons placed the body of Nyala’s dead husband at the feet of the white, ageless thing. He spoke to Nyala and Eyya both then, his voice like the voice she heard in her sweetest dreams. And then he lifted Brulde reverently into his arms and flew away with him, leaving with the promise to return for them as well, when their days were done.

  Eyya had wondered aloud if Gon would indeed return for her when she died, and of course he did.

  How had he known that Eyya had passed into the Ghost World?

  That was a question for which Nyal had no answer.

  Perhaps he watched over them like the great mountains that stood guard over the valley. Some of the young ones insisted the mountains were the abode of the gods, but she could not say whether she believed that was true or not. She worshipped her ancestors, as the people of the valley had always done. Why make rituals to appease creatures you could not see when it was your mother who birthed you and your father who provided?

  Perhaps she was wrong. Perhaps there were gods, and they lived in the mountains overlooking the valley, and perhaps her husband Gon lived among them now. They called Gon “Thest-u’un-Mann”, the Ghost Who Is a Man. It was hard for her to imagine the man she remembered as a god. She had seen him shit and piss, took his seed inside her body, but the world was a mysterious place, and she couldn’t deny what she had seen with her own eyes. He had flown! He had not aged!

  Whatever he now was, Gon had come for Brulde. And now he came for Eyya.

  Just as with Brulde, they bore Eyya’s body to the burial mound. They had swathed her in soft hides. Nyala and Eyya’s sons bore her body between them, their faces hard with the effort it took to maintain their composure. If the old Neanderthal had died in the spring, Nyala would have adorned her body in flowers. She would have buried her in drifts of sweet smelling petals! But it was winter, and there were no flowers to pick for Eyya. Instead, Nyala had placed some of the old woman’s favorite things inside her burial shroud. An old chipped spear tip she kept in remembrance of her father. A small deer that Gon had carved of wood for their children to play with. A simple charm Brulde had made for Eyya by drilling holes in brightly colored stones and running a thong through them.

  Nyala walked beside her companion, one hand placed lovingly on the old Neanderthal’s breast. One of her grandsons held her other arm by the elbow to ensure she did not fall. The winds stirred, twisting and whipping like a serpent, and then He swept down through a swirl of snow. He swept down to claim his Fat Hand bride.

  Several members of the tribe fell to their knees, crying, “Thest-u’un-Mann!” in a kind of fearful ecstasy.

  But Nyal did not fall to her knees, and neither did her sons and daughters. They stood and watched as the being who had been her husband-- and their father and grandfather-- landed on the snowy slope of the hill directly below them
. He landed softly, as if he were made of cloud, and gravely approached the funerary procession.

  “Husband,” Nyal said, stepping forward to greet him.

  Gon hesitated, as if the crone had offended him.

  “Not too near, my love,” he said in a tight voice. “I would not harm you for the sake of the world, but I have been cursed. Though I ache to take you in my arms, a demon has taken possession of my soul. I will harm you if you do not stand at a distance.”

  Nyal nodded. “So it is true the things our husband spoke.”

  “What I told to Brulde,” Gon said. He nodded. “It is all true.”

  Though her eyes were poor now, she could still make out his features. Her husband still possessed the same narrow face, the same high cheekbones, the same sorrowful eyes she remembered from their youth.

  Yes, she knew that face! How many times had she stared into it as he lay between her legs, those eyes inflamed with passion, his organ deep inside her?

  A thousand times, at least!

  But he was much changed. His flesh was pale now, as white as the mound of snow he stood upon, and it had a strange luster, glinting in the sunlight much the way a stone with fine flakes of crystal in it will glimmer. And his eyes, they were different now, too. Once they had been brown, with little specks of green and amber. Now they were gold, and seemed to hold the light inside them.

  But it was Gon. She had no doubt of it, no matter how he’d changed.

  An irrational hope sprang into her mind then. A mad, wishful fantasy. But once it had come, she could not push it from her thoughts. She had to speak it, even though she felt foolish for even imagining it.

  “Brulde,” Nyal said, “does he live with you now in the mountains? Some of the people say you have become a god. Have you used your magic to restore our husband to life? Will you do it now for our beloved Eyya?”