The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All: Revised and Expanded (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 1)

by Joseph Duncan

  He was my constant companion, my hunting partner, and yes, from time to time a lover. He protected me when I was vulnerable, when I was drugged or asleep, cared for me when I was ill, guarded me from predators when I was shitting or mating... and I did the same for him. He helped me to protect and provide for our wives and our numerous troublesome children. He groomed me and tended to my wounds. He entertained me when we were hunting far afield. When the rare fight erupted in our camp, he was there at my back, fighting with me... for me... and I him.

  It is a relationship that I think you modern men sorely miss. Look to your popular culture if you do not believe this is so. How often is the two-male dynamic depicted in your books and movies and television programs? It is a theme that is repeated with telling regularity. You have an approximation of this social convention. You call it “best friend”, I believe. Or sometimes “blood brother”. But it is much circumscribed now by your phallus-mutilating, Hell-condemning desert god. In your culture, it is taboo for men to share pleasure. You may live or die for a man you love, but the admission of affection, the intimate touch, that is a forbidden thing.

  Not so in my time.

  Brulde came to our wetus as a child. He was orphaned at an early age and slept at my side from that day forth. We were roughly the same age so we became close companions in our childhood. When puberty overtook us, we explored our blooming sexuality together. We were curious. Why should there be shame in that? We knew the older boys engaged in such behavior, and often even the grown men did as well. We knew that certain rituals were observed before battle, rituals only departing warriors participated in, and that some of the rites were sexual in nature. It was a natural thing for us.

  I was the bigger, stronger boy, and so I took the more dominant role. Yet there was nothing effeminate about my companion. He was just as masculine as I was, and we both preferred to couple with females. Our people just didn’t have any taboos about other forms of sexual expression.

  As I said before, the men of my tribe joked about that kind of behavior. They called it “Good Practice”. Well, we “practiced” a lot when we were boys. The girls our age were not so free with their affection, and boys are so curious during that stage of development. But it was not simply lust that drew us together. We shared a close bond. I respected his quiet strength. He admired my boldness.

  Brulde shared my tent, my wives, my children and my life, but so that it doesn't jar you, my modern day reader, I will simply refer to him as my companion.

  He was my Hephaestion. My Patroclus.

  When he died, I abandoned my will to live. When he descended into the earth, I descended into the eternal ice.

  Or so was my intent.

  8

  Let us not forget Nyala, my Cro-Magnon wife. She was a young thing but very forthright and willful. Though tiny of stature, she was no female to be trifled with. Endlessly generous and doting if she was pleased with you, vicious if you dared to vex her, she joined Brulde and I not long after we took Eyya as a wife.

  Our culture had no marriage rituals, per se. Our ceremony with Eyya, apart from the orgy, was mostly Fat Hand tradition. In our tribe, one person would say, “I want to be your mate,” and the other would answer, “Okay,” and you were married. By custom, we men did the wooing, but the decision was ultimately the female's concerning permanent living arrangements. A marriage was really only official after the woman had moved into the man’s tent and took over the household. We had a saying, “She’s cleaning his tent now,” and that was how we said a woman had joined with a male or a group family. Our males very rarely forced themselves upon the females. You had to sleep sometime... and our women were known to have a vindictive streak.

  And access to weapons.

  Nyala, in particular, was infamous for her stubbornness. She was also notoriously impulsive.

  One snowy night in the middle of the winter season, she threw aside the flap of our tent and declared that Brulde and I would henceforth be her husbands.

  Nyala was an attractive young woman with long wavy blonde hair, like Brulde's, and smooth unscarred skin that was milk white in complexion and smattered with freckles, and though she was slim almost to the point of being boyish, we excitedly welcomed her into our burgeoning family. I don't think either of us even paused to contemplate the matter. Brulde and I had both, on occasion, courted her, and Eyya was lonely for female company, a helpmate in her burdens.

  “I want to come live with you, Gon and Brulde. Will you take me as a wife?” she asked.

  Before the snowflakes that swirled into the tent around her ankles had even had a chance to melt, we were hers.

  I think the four of us mated for a week straight after she barged into our tent and married us. I won’t say that that’s all we did (we did take breaks to eat and sleep) but both of our wives were with child by next full moon.

  Nyala's abrupt arrival was not without ulterior motives on her part. We found out later that she was being pursued by one of the other men in the village, a fat old hog named Lorthe, and we also found at that he had been a little more insistent than was proper, so we did not feel ashamed that she was a bit too young to leave her family and take us as husbands. Her parents were happy they no longer needed to protect her from Lorthe's lecherous advances – he was known to press himself onto young, unwilling girls-- and Lorthe was leery of her two virile new husbands, who would think nothing of sticking a spear in his belly for upsetting their wife. Shortly after she took up residence in our wetus, Lorthe moved on to greener pastures and-- sadly-- younger and less willful girls.

  It was not long before Nyala was bossing all three of us around, and though she wasn't too thrilled to share her husbands with a strange Neanderthal female, she eventually warmed to Eyya.

  In time they grew very close, Nyala and Eyya. Many an evening found Nyala lying across Eyya’s lap so that the gentle Neanderthal woman could groom her hair or stroke away her cares. After a while, Brulde and I began to debate whether Nyala and Eyya made love when we were away, so we would sneak up on the wetus when we returned from hunting, hoping to catch them in the act. We would peek through the seams of the tent like horny little boys, but we never caught them doing anything else but housekeeping. It was a disappointment, but it pleased me that they were so close. It has always pleased me when those I love are happy, whether I am the source of that happiness or not.

  But we were not neglected. On the contrary! Nyala and Eyya doted on Brulde and me shamelessly. They cooked our food when we were hungry, kept us healthy with the fruits and berries and vegetables they gathered for our meals. They tended to our injuries and illnesses and gave freely of their bodies when we were desirous.

  All through those first winter months, we did our best to expand our fledgling family. Without the security of laws and technology, an extended family was a great advantage. It eased the struggle to eke out an existence in those primitive days. And in the fall our family grew by two. Eyya and Nyala delivered within days of one another. The following spring, another two children came along. And then two more. The women reared our children with a united front. Brulde and I fished and hunted and helped to care for and protect our progeny when we managed to straggle home, but Nyala and Eyya shouldered the bulk of the work of making and maintaining a family, as women have always done.

  At night, we tied the flap of the tent and gathered around the fire, feeding and entertaining ourselves and our wives and children. Eyya often sang the children to sleep in her soft, high-pitched voice. Sometimes Brulde would make up stories. Nyala and I had the most nimble fingers, so we repaired our clothes and weapons as Eyya and Brulde entertained. When we retired, we all cuddled together in our furs and made love.

  Does it sound wonderful, as it does to me as I look back with nostalgia on my last living days? Or are you shocked and revolted by our strange way of life?

  I only feel love and longing for my mortal family-- gone now for so many lonesome and night-filled millennia.

  Nyal
a, Eyya, Brulde... oh, how terribly I miss you.

  9

  But so that I do not paint too rosy a picture of that primitive era, I should tell you that our lives were hard. Death, by misadventure or disease, dogged our every footstep, clinging to our heels as tenaciously as a shadow. I think that is why we cherished our pleasures so greatly. No candle seems so bright as the one that burns in the blackest night. And it was dark in those days. Dark with death. So much death that it seems a wonder we did not go mad from the sheer hopelessness of our lot.

  My mother died when I was just a toddler. Her name was Val-Hal, and my father was madly in love with her. I do not have many memories of her. I was very young when she died, but I do remember her face and her long curling auburn hair, which I inherited from her. I remember her kind green eyes, and the way she always smiled, as if she were secretly amused by the ridiculousness of the universe.

  She died when she was struck by a snake while gathering the fiber of the flax plant to wind into string. She was struck on the heel of her foot and suffered a slow and painful death, her leg blackened and swelled to three times its normal size. She died gripping my father by his shirt, screaming through clenched teeth, her eyes crazed and bulging in her agony.

  My elder brother Grent was killed by a bear the year before I married, and my brother Vooran died when I was young, too.

  So many of my people died in those days, from accident or infection or animal attack. The children fell prey to disease and wild beasts. Winters were especially hard on the elders of the Siede. When a member of our tribe passed on to the spirit realm, we wrapped their mortal flesh in their sleeping furs and carried them to our burial mound, to be interred among our ancestors. We mourned them, bitterly sometimes, as my father mourned my mother, but we knew that death was a part of life. We had a saying: As the sun descends into the earth each day, so too do we.

  But not I.

  By the caprices of fate, I was placed beyond the reach of death. Even among my vampire brethren I am something of a freak of nature, a true immortal, immune to every common way my long-lived comrades find their ends. Burn me on a pyre and I arise like a phoenix from the cooling ashes. Separate my head from my body and the two parts will conspire to rejoin. Pound a stake into my heart and I will pluck it out like a mortal would pluck a thorn from his finger. I know this for a fact, as both man and immortal have tried to rid the world of me a thousand times over throughout the ages... and time after time, I have shrugged aside death's dark embrace to deliver retribution on my tormentors.

  I was old when Babel was new. I was ancient when Mesopotamian accountants pressed the first cuneiform symbols into clay tablets. I have fed on the blood of countless forgotten empires.

  I am the oldest living vampire.

  Of that I am quite certain.

  We vampires have always been a rare breed, a species forever teetering on the brink of extinction. Though I am not the first of our kind, I have wandered the world from stem to stern and found no other immortal who is as old as I am, not in this modern age. All those who came before me have long since quit the stage of this corporal existence, moving on to I know not what, and I myself destroyed the beast who made me what I am. Though there are no doubt a great many vampires far wiser than I, there is not a single undead creature that can boast to be as old.

  Yet, I am still a man. I miss my family. Even now, after so many endless ages, I mourn their loss as if it were fresh.

  My only wish now is that I could truly die and end this long and wearying existence.

  I curse the day the dark fiend who made me what I am snatched me from the bright-lit path of my life.

  Now let me tell you how it happened.

  The Search Party

  1

  The first hint that darkness had come to roost in our bucolic valley came the evening Brulde and I stumbled upon the search party on the Mound of Ghosts.

  The Mound of Ghosts is what our people called the evergreen forest on the southeast ridge overlooking our summer settlement. The dense pines there were ancient and tall, and when the wind blew through their swaying boughs, it seemed one could hear the hushed whispering of spirits. It was not a thing that frightened my people. We worshiped our ancestors. The thought of ghosts was comforting to us. Still, it was a place we traveled through solemnly. We treated the Mound as we treated our elders, with reverence and respect.

  Brulde and I had taken one of the paths that wound through the Mound of Ghosts as a shortcut back to the village. Our hunt that day had been successful and we were burdened with meat for our family, a large buck. We were tired but in high spirits. We sang as we walked, as our people were wont to do, but we kept our voices low so that we did not disturb any earthbound spirits. The dense pines and needle-padded earth softened all sound in the forest. It was like the hush that fell upon the world after a heavy snowfall.

  At first the only thing we heard, aside from the rustle of the trees, was our low humming voices and the crunch of our feet on the brittle forest duff. Presently, we noticed a chorus of distant cries. It was impossible to judge their distance, as the pines deadened all sound within the boundaries of the forest, but as we marched on the voices grew steadily louder, accompanied by rhythmic popping sounds.

  “Fat Hands,” Brulde said with a frown, after we had paused for a moment to listen. I agreed. The voices of the Fat Hand people were distinct from our own, higher in pitch and nasal. It sounded like a large group of our Neanderthal neighbors were moving loudly through the wilderness, yelling and beating the tree trunks with sticks.

  “Are they hunting?” Brulde asked.

  I shrugged. How could I know? The Fat Hands did not normally hunt in this area, which we considered part of our territory. It was not forbidden to them, but they were wary of the wooded ridge, thinking it haunted by evil spirits.

  “They don't come this way often,” I said. “They're afraid of ghosts.”

  Brulde chuckled.

  “It doesn't sound like they're hunting though,” I added, frowning thoughtfully.

  The Fat Hands did not hunt as we did. We employed bows, nets and long throwing spears to catch and kill our quarry. We tracked our game in pairs or trios and sometimes baited traps. The Fat Hands used crudely fashioned knives or short jabbing spears. They hunted in groups, driving their prey into an ambush by yelling and thrashing the underbrush, then throwing their powerful bodies onto the beasts when they had run them half to death. It was a brutal affair, which often left at least one member of the hunting party injured, but it was their way.

  Although they were making quite a ruckus, it did not sound like the rhythmic cries they usually made when they were driving game through the woodland, and the noise was coming from a single direction instead of spread along a cordon.

  It was strange.

  Brulde and I had killed a deer earlier that morning on the other side of the ridge, where the forest was not so densely wooded. We had bound the animal's legs together with leather strips and suspended its carcass from a branch, which we were carrying on our shoulders. It was a long trek back to Big River Camp and our backs were aching, so we debated for a moment whether to wait and see what the Fat Hands were up to or continue on our way.

  “Fodaaaarrr! Eeeeeeevv!”

  In the end, curiosity trumped our complaining backs. We set the carcass down and squatted to await the Fat Hands.

  Massaging my aching shoulder, I listened to the echoing yells with concern. “I wonder what they’re doing so deep in our territory,” I said. Although our relationship with the Neanderthals was generally a peaceful one, there had been territorial skirmishes with our neighbors in the past, during leaner seasons. Even minor clashes with the Fat Hands could be deadly. Despite our advanced weaponry, a Fat Hand was just as strong as two of our kind. It might even be a party of hunters we were unfamiliar with. Crossing the path of strangers so far from home was particularly dangerous, especially as there were only two of us.

  “I don't know,” Brulde r
eplied, cocking his ear. “It doesn't sound like they're driving a beast. It sounds like they're calling out to someone.”

  I listened for a moment.

  “Yes, you’re right,” I said.

  Normally, Fat Hands yelled “Yah!” or howled like wild dogs when they were on the hunt, using their cries to drive an animal into ambush. This group was yelling, “Fodar!” and “Evv!” If I remembered correctly, Fodar and Evv were the names of two of our neighboring tribe’s younger adult males.

  The voices drew nearer. After a few minutes, the Fat Hands came into sight, rounding the hill and tromping in our direction. They were walking single file, armed with their crude knives and short, sharp jabbing sticks.

  “Fodar! Evv!”

  They bashed the trunks of the pines with their sticks, the dull whacks resounding in the air. When a few more straggled into sight and I saw that none of them had noticed us, I thought it might be prudent to announce ourselves so that we didn't startle them.

  I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled, “Yah! Fat Hands!”

  Those nearest to us started and crouched down, weapons swinging in our direction. I grinned and showed them my open hands. Even though I recognized a few of them, there was a wildness in their eyes that made me nervous. I could tell they were spooked by our haunted hillside. Fat Hands were impressive warriors but terribly fearful of the supernatural.

  I was particularly friendly with one of the Neanderthals-- a big bear of a man named Frag. He had thick, tangled black hair that hung to his waist and a beard like a bird’s nest, interwoven with small feathers and twigs. He stood at the head of the group.

  “Frag! It is Gon!” I called. “Gon and Brulde!”

  He squinted in my direction for a moment, and then recognition dawned in his deep-set brown eyes. A toothy grin appeared in the center of his frizzy beard and he relaxed from his fighting stance, standing straight and lowering his knife. I saw him murmur to the others before he started in our direction. Weapons drooping, his tribesmen trudged after him, following his lead.