Whatever tragedy befell the boy’s people, it had occurred more than a week or two before our arrival. I sensed no marauders lingering in the woodlands that encircled the area. I sensed no living men for miles, aside from the boy at my side. The sun gleamed on the surface of the creek that wound alongside the settlement, and carrion birds swept through the air, turning in slow circles in the sky. Yet in the village, there was only death, long grown cold and bloated.
I turned to Ilio then and took his shoulders in my hands. “Now listen to me, boy. I want you to sit right here beside this bush while I walk down to your village to investigate. I don’t want you to follow. Believe me, this is something you don’t want to see up close.”
His eyes glimmered moistly as he stared up at me. “But what happened? Why is everything burned? There are dead people down there, lying on the ground! I can see them.”
“I know. Just stay here. I promise I’ll be right back.”
Ilio obeyed, sitting abruptly.
I turned then and descended the escarpment toward the camp.
As I approached, the smell of death and violence and blood and ash grew ever stronger, until finally my lips peeled back from my teeth and I had to hold my breath to keep from inhaling any more of it. The stew of foulness made my head spin, sickened me more than just physically.
I was sickened to my soul.
I walked through the remnants of the village, just charred sticks and cold coals now. The Denghoi employed mammoth tusks as part of the construction material of their homes. The ivory was charred, but not consumed, as the wood and hides had been. It gave the impression that their dwellings were not homes so much as great dead beasts, blackened and subsiding into the earth.
There were a multitude of tracks in the bare earth: humans, dogs, the little scavengers that came down from the forest to feast on the bodies, like raccoons and opossums, and there were bird tracks too, the markings of buzzards and crows. But there was another kind of track I’d never seen before, a crescent-shaped mark racing all through the village.
I traced the crescent impressions, trying to imagine what kind of beast would leave such a marking behind, but the sign was an enigma to me. I’d encountered no creature in the valley of the River People that could make such a footprint.
Finally, I turned to examine the bodies.
A female with long, braided hair lay stiff in the dirt a few strides away from me, her belly bloated with gas. Her neck was so mangled it was a wonder her head was still attached to her body. Her belly had been torn open and her entrails dragged out and partially eaten. Insects crawled among the bits of dirt and ash that adhered to her intestines.
A little further away was a young boy. He was lying on his face, his pale body naked and deeply lacerated. His sad little body displayed the markings of blunt injuries, and there was one of the crescent-shaped markings stamped into his spine, just above his buttocks.
Here, an old man clutched a knife in his cold fist, his frizzy white beard stained black with dried blood. There, another female, plump and fetching in life, perhaps, but dead and stiff now, her eyes empty sockets, her tongue protruding from her lips. Her throat was mangled as well, though not, I noted, as violently as the first’s.
At the center of the devastation, several bodies were piled haphazardly, one atop the other. The injuries all the Denghoi people suffered were terribly familiar. Wounds to the neck.
Blood Drinkers! I thought to myself.
I was not frightened, but I was angry, and—dare I admit—mightily intrigued. In all my years, I had met no other Blood Drinkers like me, aside from the vicious pair who had plundered my own valley home so very long ago. Of course, I was thinking of the strange little vampire slave that moved like a lizard, and his master, the fiend who made me an immortal. And now, here was evidence of others like myself!
I stood, feeling a heady combination of excitement and apprehension, and I reached out with my senses again, hoping to catch some clue to the direction the Blood Drinkers had departed, hoping perhaps that I would find them at the furthest limits of my faculties, that they were not as long gone as it appeared they were.
Alas! I could detective no evidence of their presence.
But Ilio, I noticed, had chosen to disobey me. He weaved among the charred remains of his people’s camp, his face white and drawn with shock even as his eyes jerked this was and that. I turned to chastise him, but saw that he had squatted and was pushing his fingers through the ash of a burned down hut. He pulled a charred figure from the rubble—a carving of a man. It was blackened and its crudely shaped legs had been broken off at the knees. He turned it in his hands, his eyes glittering with tears, then threw it down with an angry expression and walked swiftly toward me.
“Can we leave now, Thest-un-Mann?” he asked, choking only a little on his tears. “There’s nothing left here for me. It is all gone, and everyone is dead. I’m the only Denghoi that lives now.”
“Yes,” I said sympathetically. I reached out and pulled him to my cold body. “I’m so sorry, Ilio. Let us leave this sad place.”
The Country of the Ground Scratchers
1
Before we departed the village of the Denghoi, Ilio and I gathered together what few valuables lay strewn in the ruins, items left behind by the marauders which the fires had not destroyed. The boy was anxious to leave, but I knew we would need the supplies. There were several things lying in the rubble that would be useful in the days ahead.
We recovered a few knives and a hatchet made of stone. I also found some bone needles and eating utensils in the remains of one hut, and a couple intact spears. We put the small things we collected in our clothes pouches and, carrying the larger items in our hands, moved on.
Ilio, I noticed, had retrieved the broken figure he’d unearthed earlier. He secreted it in his pocket without comment, trying to keep me from seeing him do it by turning his back to me.
Instead of continuing south, as we would be forced to cross the river, I suggested we head east, toward the wooded ridge that rose up from the destroyed village. I’d grown up in a densely forested river valley, and knew I would feel more comfortable traveling through the woodlands. I had no love for the wide open plains of the steppe, and the foliage would help shield the boy from the cold winds that swept the region.
Ilio shrugged. “It doesn’t matter which way we go,” he said. “Not anymore.”
He said this in an emotionless way that pained me, his eyes distant and mournful. I wanted to say something to comfort him, but was there anything I could possibly say that would mitigate his loss? His whole world had been stripped away from him.
And I, unbeknownst to the boy, had played no small part in this.
So I said nothing. I put my hand on his shoulder and drew him to me, and we walked east, away from his tribe’s devastated camp.
As twilight approached, I built a big campfire in a clearing on the ridge, well out of sight of the plundered settlement. I made the fire near a burbling stream and Ilio went to it and drank, then sat beside the water for a while with his back to me. I tended the fire, poking it with a stick every now and then, and pretended I did not hear the boy’s quiet tears. He’d taken the carving from his pocket and wept as he squeezed it in his hands.
We had a little meat left from the day before, and I foraged some edible shoots and roots on the slopes around us. My wives, I’m sure, could have collected a tastier assortment of plants, but I was pretty confident none of my selections would poison the boy. When Ilio finally sought my company, his cheeks scrubbed dry, I passed him some food and he ate.
“My people believe a spirit dwells within all things,” I said casually, pretending to chew. “Me, you, that tree, this stone. It is our belief that when a thing from this world dies or is destroyed, the essence within it lives on. For some things, like a stone or a tree, the spirit returns to the earth and is reborn, but the essence of living things, it is said by my people, their spirits ascend into the heavens, where t
hey reside for all time, watching down over us.” I gestured up at the sky, in which there twinkled a multitude of faint stars.
Ilio looked up at the stars thoughtfully.
“Do you think that’s true?” he asked finally.
“Why not?” I shrugged. “Even if it’s not true, it’s a soothing thought.”
Ilio’s eyes cut sharply toward me, then he smiled. “You’re not very good at consoling people,” he said.
I laughed. “It’s not one of my strengths.”
We talked for a while after that.
Ilio told me of his peoples’ spiritual beliefs, which were polytheistic and sounded quite complex, lots of gods and goddesses with complicated relationships and very human foibles. Very similar to recent Nordic beliefs—recent to me, that is; rather ancient to you modern readers. It sounded as if it was all very entertaining to listen to on long winter nights, I suppose, but I was not converted.
He talked about his uncle and the other Mammoth Hunters who’d taken care of him when his mother died and no one else in the village was willing to look after him. His uncle had been a rough-edged fellow, but had made sure Ilio was fed and clothed. The old man Elk had been his grandfather’s brother, the eldest in their tribe. He told me of them all, and I suffered for every one.
I told him about my wives and children, the peaceful valley where I was born, and the big, gentle Neanderthals who were our neighbors. He seemed very interested when I told him about my children, and laughed out loud several times when I described some of their more amusing antics.
It was growing late by then. I could see his eyes getting heavy, and he yawned several times as we conversed. I finally told him it was time for sleep, and he did not object. I watched him unfold his outer coat into a sleeping bag—wondering again at the clever way his people had made them-- and I poked at the fire while he wiggled in and settled down for the night.
He pulled his cover over his head and went to sleep quickly. When soft snores issued from the lump across the fire from me, I rose silently to my feet and slipped away from the light of the campfire.
At the edge of the clearing, I disrobed so that I did not get blood on my garments or snag them on the branches of the trees, and then I flew up into the boughs.
I flashed through the treetops, hunting for something hot and full of blood. Ilio’s constant nearness taxed my restraint. All through the evening, the smell of his blood made the dark hunger roil and snap inside me. I could feel my veins contracting, my skin shriveling. I needed to feed.
I leapt from branch to branch, enjoying my freedom. My flight through the forest was exhilarating, a thing I’d enjoyed since my days looking after the River People when it was the only joy I had left to me, my lust for blood so overpowering I dared not venture near my loved ones.
I snatched a fat raccoon from its burrow in a hollow log. An owl met its doom at my fangs. I rustled through the forest canopy like a swift, dark wind.
Further on, I spied a deer on the ground below, bedded for the night in a tangle of thorn bushes, and I dropped down on it from above to tear its neck open. It made a bleating cry and struggled beneath me as I fed on its blood, but I only held it tighter and drew its life into my mouth more forcefully. When it finally went limp in my arms and my belly was tight as a drum, I threw it over my shoulders and hiked back to our campsite.
Ilio still slept.
I hung the carcass in a tree a little distance away to keep the scavengers from it. The deer’s struggles, and the journey back to camp, had splattered me with its blood. Instead of dressing, I walked naked to the brook to bathe. Squatting down by the water, I scrubbed my face and arms and chest, washing all the dried blood off me. My cold flesh gleamed, white and steaming, in the starlight.
Ilio stirred when I approached the fire to dry myself. His eyes cracked open and he smiled faintly, then the whites showed and he began to snore again.
I dressed, then retrieved a dry hunk of kindling and one of the stone knives we’d recovered from the Denghoi rubble. I sat cross-legged by the fire. As Ilio slept, I began to whittle a shape in the timber. I worked at my carving for several hours, employing a bit of my vampiric speed to shave the surface of the log away rapidly. The knife was a blur in my white hands. Curlicues and bits of wood drifted down upon my thighs.
As I carved a plaything for the boy, I recalled the long ago nights I sat in my own home by the fire and carved trifles for my sleeping children. The memory filled me with melancholy, but when I was finished with the carving, that melancholy turned to pride and anticipation. I’d carved a very realistic likeness of a Mammoth Hunter for the young orphan, and I couldn’t wait to give it to him when he awoke.
“I found something for you,” I told him in the morning when he rose, yawning, from his bedding.
“What is it?” he asked.
I swung the wooden carving from behind me and passed it to him with a grin.
I watched his eyes light up. He looked at me with a wondrous smile and in that instant, I knew I loved him completely.
He turned the carving in his hands, smiling and wiping his eyes, then jumped into my arms and hugged me. “Thank you, Thest. Thank you!” And though he tried to hide it from me—I suppose he thought he was too old for such things—I caught him several times, playing with the wooden hunter by the brook, making low noises as the little figure battled imaginary enemies. I even overhead him speaking for the plaything in a low and murmuring voice.
I never allowed myself to forget my offenses against the child, but I pushed my guilt and shame aside so that I could love him selflessly, nurture him without reservation. In the months that followed, I cared for him as if he was my own son, and I watched him grow and mature with the pride of a father.
Oh, Ilio--! My first vampire child… How I sinned against you--!
I loved you, even as you struck me down.
I begged you to forgive me, even in the face of your hatred.
If only I could go back and change the things I did.
2
We travelled in a southeasterly direction, moving through the low forested hills as the trees budded and spring came round to the continent of Europe.
As the weather grew warmer, Ilio took to wearing just a loincloth. I could see him maturing day by day, and it filled me with a mixture of sorrow and admiration. By the end of summer, he had grown at least four inches, and was transforming into a slim and muscular young man. His body rippled powerfully when he ran through the forest. His face began to take on the contours of the man he would become. By the time autumn came around, his thick black hair had grown down past his shoulders, and he began braiding it so that it swung about his face and shoulders in coils. Soon, he would be grown, and he would leave me to start a family of his own, I knew, so I took a secret delight when I caught him playing with the little wooden men and animals that I’d added to his collection, when the mood seized me to carve them.
It seemed that winter came in the blink of an eye. We settled in a cave in a mountainous region bordering the Pannonian Plain, in the country that is now called Austria, and it was there I spent my days teaching the boy the skills he would require to survive on his own.
I taught him to flake stone so he could make his own knives and arrowheads and chopping instruments. I taught him how to construct a bow, how to tan hides, how to cut and sew clothing. Ilio was a bright boy. A quick study, you would say in these modern times. He even improved on the snares and weaving skills I imparted to him.
I no longer tried to hide from him the peculiar quality of my skin. He loved me as I loved him and had grown accustomed to my strange appearance. He even joked about it from time to time. “You’re as pale as a frog’s belly!” he teased me one afternoon, as we bathed together in the pool beside our home.
Winter had passed, a mild season of cold, and spring had returned to the Alps once again. It was the first truly warm day of the season, and we’d dashed for the falls to swim, even though it was still cold enough to
make us both yelp when we jumped in.
I twisted my hair to wring out the water. “You’d probably be a couple shades lighter if you washed more often,” I retorted, teasing him in return.
Ilio laughed. “I like being dirty. The stronger I smell, the better I like it.”
“That’s not a good thing if you ever want wives. Women don’t want a husband who smells like a skunk.”
Paddling about in the pool, Ilio said, “Tell me about your wives again, Thest.”
So I told him about Eyya and Nyala, what they’d looked like, how I’d won their favor. He listened with keen interest, then wanted to know what it felt like to mate with a woman, and more importantly, how exactly it was done.
His question caught me off guard, and I looked at him with my mouth open for a moment, too flabbergasted to answer him. I realized then, gaping at the boy, that he’d blossomed like the forest around us had blossomed. He was growing sideburns. There were wispy patches of hair on his chin and upper lip. There was no hair on his penis yet, but I noted it was bigger than it was before. My little Ilio was growing up.
Of course, you know if you read the first volume of my memoirs that I grew up in a very open society, sexually. The River People were ancestor worshippers, our culture based on group families and fertility rituals. We revered sex and celebrated it as the wellspring of our continuation. We didn’t regard it with shame, or believe that it was the root of all evil in the world, as the modern Christians aver. In my culture, community orgies, psychotropic drug use and homosexual bonding rituals were the norms. It didn’t embarrass me to explain the mechanics of sex to the boy, or admit to him how pleasurable the act was. I was only shocked by his sudden interest in it, how I’d failed to realize he was no longer a boy, and would be feeling his first stirrings of sexual desire.
The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 2) Page 9
