Exhausted, Brulde was snoring minutes later.
“My eyes grow heavy as well,” Poi-lot yawned. “I will sleep here by the opening. You Fast Feet keep your lodgings so hot!”
In our culture, it was customary for a guest to be offered sex before retiring. Nyala did the honors after all the children were asleep, as it was taboo for a brother to lie on top of his sister. Eyya curled up with me as Nyala slid across the tent to Poi-lot.
He seemed surprised when she wriggled under the furs beside him.
“What are you doing?” he asked, looking nervously toward me.
“I mean to help you sleep tonight, big brother,” Nyala answered.
I grinned at Poi-lot. “Don’t be afraid, brother,” I said to him. “It will not make me jealous. It is our custom.”
Poi-lot swallowed, eyes wide.
“Don’t you want me to help you sleep?” Nyala asked him, writhing subtly against his body.
He nodded. “Y-yes… all right.”
I watched as my wife slid atop the big Neanderthal. She curled forward so that her blonde hair drifted across his brow. Poi-lot hissed as she rose up under the furs, then settled down gingerly upon his manhood. The covers fell away as they mated. I tried to avert my eyes out of politeness, but it was such a fine show I couldn’t help but watch. Nyala arched her back, her small breasts thrust out, her bottom sliding to and fro with an ever-quickening pace. For all his massive bulk, Poi-lot was a surprisingly gentle lover. He changed positions with her, placing her carefully on the furs beneath him, then slid his great tool back inside of her.
Eyya never woke up.
When Poi-lot was sated, Nyala dreamily groomed his chest hair. It was clear from the expression on her face that he had pleased her. Our drowsy conversation turned one last time to the missing Neanderthals. There seemed to be something my bother-in-law wanted to confess. I could see it in his face. I was curious what it was but I didn’t press the issue. Finally, Poi-lot confided-- his eyes twitching back and forth as if there might be eavesdroppers-- that other Fat Hand children had gone missing this season, not just Evv and Fodar.
“All of them vanished in the night,” he whispered. “Some from their very hearth. It is like the darkness itself stole into the cave and plucked them from their bedding. We have looked and looked for them, but they are lost to us. We do not know what happened to them.”
Nyala glanced at the children sprawled in sleep around our tent. Little Gan on his back with his limbs splayed out. Leth curled up beside her brother, sucking on her thumb. Breyya and Hun in Papa Brulde’s arms. Her eyes glimmered with worry. If such misfortune could befall our Neanderthal neighbors, I could see her thinking, what was there to keep it from visiting us, too?
“Though none of my people will speak it aloud, I fear an evil spirit is taking them,” Poi-lot continued, his voice low. Firelight glinted in the pools of shadow beneath his brow ridge. “Perhaps it is Tat, the demon snake, who steals them away. I never believed in gods or spirits before, not really, but what if they are real? We have lost so many!”
“Our people are ancestor worshippers, but we understand the Fat Hand concept of evil spirits,” I replied. “I confess, they have the power to chill us, too. In the daylight, such fantasies are laughable. A tree is just a tree. A stone is but a stone. But at night...” I looked toward the darkness that peeked through the flap of the tent. “Night softens the surface of things, makes even the most solid things seem dream-like and untrue.”
“Perhaps we will find out tomorrow if gods and demons are real,” Poi-lot said.
“I think that is something I would rather not know,” I replied grimly.
“I agree,” he said with a nervous chuckle. “But we must seek the truth of it nonetheless.”
3
My dreams that night were wrought with terrible imaginings. In my sleep I suffered visions of a great demon snake, its scales black and shiny like obsidian stone, its eyes huge and glinting with evil intelligence. In my dream, the demon snake burst through the leather walls of our domed tent and began to feed upon my screaming children. Its vast, cylindrical body twisted and lunged violently as it snapped them up, one at a time, from their sleeping furs before tossing back its head and swallowing them whole.
Now it was my people’s belief that our dreams were as real as our waking lives, that we should face the terrors of our nightly imaginings as courageously as we faced the dangers of our waking existence, so I tried to be brave. I did my best to fight the demon snake, thinking that if I could kill it, I could cut open its body and rescue my babies from its belly before they were smothered. I threw myself upon its writhing coils, thrusting my knife into its pulsating flesh. It hissed in pain, its cold black blood spurting in my face, but try as I might I could not impede its vicious rampage. One by one the wicked creature devoured my children.
I wrapped my legs around its coiling body. Thrusting my knife into its flesh, I used the handle of the blade to pull myself closer to its head, thinking to stab it in the eyes, blind it, kill it. It bucked its body and tried to throw me off but I clung stubbornly on.
“You monster!” I roared. “You fiend! I'll kill you for what you’ve done!”
Its wedge-shaped head whipped toward me and its mouth split open in a horrid, fanged grin.
“Foolish mortal,” it spat. “I am the great god Tat! I cannot die by knife or spear!” It spoke to me in moist hisses but somehow I could understand what it was saying. “I am the darkness that devours all living flesh!” it said. “I am the hungry maw of death. I am the churning belly of eternity.”
Its huge jaws gaped, exposing row after row of needle sharp teeth, and behind the teeth, the quivering sphincter of its throat, perversely carnal, gateway of oblivion. I jerked awake as it lunged forward, engulfing my entire head in its mouth.
I opened my eyes in the dark, breathing heavily. I was afraid I might have thrashed in my sleep or cried out and disturbed my household, but no. Eyya still slept beside me, her face tucked into the pit of my arm, her hand lying on my breast. The children had not stirred. Brulde snored monotonously near the hearth, which had burnt down to shimmering coals.
I was slick with sweat. The air in the wetus felt too hot, too close. Carefully, so as not to wake my sleepmate, I removed Eyya’s hand from my chest and eased my arm from beneath her head. She sighed and curled up her legs but did not wake. I rose and stepped carefully over Nyala and Poi-lot, ducking out through the tent flap.
It was night still, though the sky to the east had begun to lighten. Day was kindling just below the rugged black horizon. Soon the sky would burst aflame and the sun would rise to warm our wooded valley. Already, dim tongues of pastel-colored fire licked the encircling mountain peaks, gleaming on the topmost shelves of the distant glacial floes.
My breath steamed the chill air. I could tell by the smell of the wind that the season was turning. The world would soon be cloaked in the icy mantle of winter, summer just a fond memory and no guarantee of its return.
I stood under the sky of my ancestors, naked and alone, and reached out with my senses. The dream was still very much with me. I was trying to see if I could sense anything supernatural nearby, the demon god of the Fat Hands perhaps. I imagined the great snake watching me from the darkness that lay just outside the light of our campfires, coiled in some dank crevice, its black scales and glittering eyes hidden in darkest moonshadow.
I felt nothing, of course, but the chill night wind. I heard nothing but the song of insects and the twitter of birds in the surrounding treetops, rousing for the coming day. One of the camp dogs trotted up and licked my palm. I crouched down and ruffled his fur and let him slather my face with his tongue, smiling at last as I released the dread engendered by my dreams.
I believed in the spirits of my ancestors. I once saw the ghost of my grandmother wave to me from the entrance of the Elder Siede just days after she died. But I did not believe in gods. I did not believe in demons.
Fat Hands ar
e a silly lot, I said to myself. Scared of the shadows in the back of their cave.
“Like little children,” I said to the dog.
There was no monster preying on the Gray Stone People, only a hungry old speartooth. Monsters prowled only in bad dreams and the imaginations of children, not in the real world, where a tree is just a tree and a stone is just a stone.
As I’m sure you already know, dear readers, I was very, very wrong.
4
We found the body of Fodar that day, not long after the sun had reached its apex in the sky and begun to roll down the blue slope of the heavens toward the craggy mountains in the west. We were not too surprised to find him dead. Death, as I have said, dogged our every step in those rough days. It was the condition in which we found his body that upset us all so greatly.
We set out at dawn, not long after voiding our bladders and bowels. I did not eat breakfast, as I was still a little hung over from the night before and my stomach was sour. Also, I wanted to be quick on my feet if we ran into any trouble that day and a full belly always made me sluggish. There were seventeen men in our search party. Nine of them were Fat Hands. The rest were Fast Feet warriors. Most of the men of our tribe stayed behind, including my older brother Epp’ha, which irritated my father to no end. Our women saw us off, pressing packets of food and extra weapons into our hands with worried expressions. Eyya gathered the children to be cuddled one last time before I left, while Nyala ordered me to be careful and come home in one piece, or at the very least alive.
“And which piece should I bring home?” I asked, leering at her roguishly.
Her reply was a pinch that stung for several minutes.
Brulde, who was not comfortable around so many Fat Hand men, stayed in camp and didn't accompany me as he normally would have done. I could see that he felt terribly guilty about this so I made a point of it to speak with him privately before we departed.
As the hunting party made its final preparations, I took him aside. We walked down the hill toward the river, stopping behind a screen of young trees. There I put my arms across his shoulders and pulled his face toward mine.
“Husband,” he said uneasily. He could not meet my gaze.
“Spit it out, Brulde.”
“I will come if you want. Just say the word.”
“There are enough already.”
He peeked up at me, his brow furrowed. “I feel ashamed.”
“Don’t be. I understand.”
He nodded, then smiled tentatively. “Then take care and do not let some mangy old speartooth sneak up behind you.”
“I will do my best to not get killed today,” I promised with a grin.
We embraced and then I held him at arm’s length and instructed him to keep a close watch on our wives and children, especially if they should forage outside the village.
“Do not let any of them wander off alone,” I said to him. “Especially the children. Not even to make water.”
He could see the fear in my eyes. He knew a speartooth had snatched my brother from our wetus when I was a boy. He had played with Vooran as a child. “I'll keep them safe,” he promised.
I had not slept since waking from my nightmare and couldn't quite shake the image of the giant reptile devouring my children. I squeezed Brulde's shoulders and stared hard into his eyes. “I mean it, husband,” I said. “No napping or chasing stray pussy. Not today. I had dark dreams and they have given me a terrible foreboding.”
Brulde laughed uneasily. “You are like a girl who sees a stick and thinks it is a snake.” But I could see that he was worried as well. “I will be vigilant,” he promised more seriously.
Before I departed, he made sure I had our best blade and spear and retied the strings of my chest armor, a vest of plated bones. I thumped him on the arm and then turned and trotted to catch up with Frag and my father.
My brother-in-law, Poi-lot, was walking a pace behind them. He looked from Brulde to me with a curious grin. Fat Hands did not share wives as we did. They sometimes took more than one wife but they rarely shared them with other men.
“Your man-wife stays behind today?” he said, trying to make a joke of it.
“He is not my wife,” I said testily.
Frag and my father frowned back at him. Poi-lot ducked his head repentantly. “Apologies. Some of your ways are strange to me.”
You didn’t make light of our customs last night, I wanted to say, but I held my tongue.
The sun was bright that day but the wind was blowing from the northwest, where glaciers gripped the dark spires of the mountains, and it carried with it the chill and desolate smell of those creaking ice floes. As our group spread out and began to yell and beat the tree trunks with spears and sticks, high clouds tinged with gray scudded swiftly overhead.
More than once that morning, I paused to watch a V-shaped flock of geese fly past overhead. Their honk-honk-honking echoed across the lowering sky. More proof that the warm season was passing. Soon we would have to move to our winter camp. Big River was too open, the winter winds too harsh by the expansive waterway. Our winter camp was sheltered between two sets of high cliffs. It was much warmer there, and not so damned blustery.
By midmorning, our group had picked up the trail of the big cat. The ground was soft so it was easy to track the beast. We were near the border we shared with the Fat Hands, at the very edge of the land we considered our territory. It was a low swampy area full of strange animal cries and buzzing insects hungry for blood, an eerie place we did not venture too often. That was when the cry went up.
“Ayyy-eeeeeeee! I see him! It is Fodar! Ayyy-eeeeee!”
I was walking alongside Poi-lot at the time, conversing with him idly. Actually, he was doing most of the talking. Poi-lot was a gregarious man. We had lost the cat's trail a little earlier and were only beating the bushes, dispirited by our lack of success. The panic stricken cry launched me into a sprint. I gripped the shaft of my spear in white-knuckled fists. Poi raced behind me, kicking up sprays of mucky water.
It was upsetting to find the man dead. Make no mistake about that. Even so long ago, we understood death. We mourned those who passed on to the afterlife. We buried them and placed tokens of love beside their inert bodies. We weren't like the Foul Ones to the north, who boiled their dead and scraped the meat from their bones to feast on. Neither were we like the beasts, who sniffed the carcasses of their dead before moving on, giving them no further thought. A great, mournful cry went up when the missing Neanderthal was discovered, but it was the strange manner of his death that inspired our horror.
My father had reached the body before me. He turned toward me as I drew near, his ruddy face crinkled with confusion. “What manner of beast does such a thing?” he demanded.
Frag and several of the other Fat Hands were crowded around the man’s body, partially obscuring it from sight. I pressed through their broad bodies and felt my jaw fall to my chest.
“No beast would do this!” Frag declared.
Fodar was dead. I expected him to be beast-savaged and partially devoured but his body had been stripped naked and hung from a tree. And he wasn't just suspended in the crook of a limb. A large cat might have done that, dragged his body into the branches of a tree to keep the scavengers from its meal. Instead, the branches of the tree had been broken into sharp spears and Fodar's body had somehow been hefted into the air and slammed onto the spikes upside-down. The narrow points of the broken tree limbs protruded from his chest and thighs in half a dozen places, but that was not the worst of it. That was not what killed him. His throat had been ripped open, and his horror-stricken face, frozen in a dying expression of agony and terror, was covered in a glittering black glaze of dried blood, making him monstrous and inhuman.
Fat Hands and Fast Feet shuffled around the body, examining it and then casting fearful glances into the surrounding wilderness.
I walked up close to the corpse. Fodar was hanging about six feet above the ground. I examined the wound in
his throat, waving away the flies, then looked the rest of his body over. There were some bruises on his chest but no other signs of violence -- no claw marks, no bites. He was slightly bloated but did not appear to have been dead for more than a day or two. His arms were hanging down to either side of his yawning face. I took the wrist of his right arm and tried to move it. The arm was stiff with death, what your modern medicine calls rigor mortis. His flesh was cold and pale. There was dried blood on both hands but no injuries, nothing to indicate that he had tried to fight off his attacker.
“What is it, Fast Foot?” Frag asked in a low voice. He had seen my thoughtful scowl and come close behind me. “What do you see?”
“I once saw a bird kill a lizard like this,” I said to the Neanderthal. “It skewered the lizard on a thorn so that it could eat it at its leisure, but Fodar has not been eaten. His only wounds are to his throat, and the flesh there is only torn. None of it is missing.”
“What great bird could lift a man so high into the air?” Frag demanded. He looked nervously to the sky.
There were giant raptors in those days, some with wingspans as wide as the length of two men lying head-to-toe, but none could lift a full-grown Fat Hand. A small child perhaps, but Fodar was no child. Even by Fat Hand standards he was a big man, bigger even than Frag or his father Herung. But that was not the point I was trying to make.
“It was an evil spirit,” one of the Fat Hands moaned.
“Look,” I said, pointing to the ground. “There is only a little blood on the ground beneath him!”
I looked back to the body. It seemed to me there was a puzzle here, a mystery that needed, for all our sakes, to be solved, and that quickly, but I did not know what to make of the evidence at hand, and my father did not give me time to turn it over in my mind. In retrospect, I doubt I could have figured it out anyway, but I was still frustrated when my father interrupted my examination of the dead Fat Hand.
The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All: Revised and Expanded (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 1) Page 6
