The rituals we performed that night were similar to the sexual ceremonies of the Tantrics. The animal fats we smeared on our bodies contained a carefully mixed recipe of plant juices and powdered herbs. The psychoactive herbs engendered a mildly euphoric state, while the merje further heightened our delirium. The stinking unguents we smeared on our bodies did another thing, too. They dilated the blood vessels. Prehistoric Viagra. After a while, the hangings blocking the entrance of the cave were swept aside and a group of the village’s unmarried women marched solemnly inside.
These unattached females, who for this ceremony were called the Stohle, had volunteered for the sacred duty. None were pressed to do it, but they took it upon themselves as a service to the departing warriors. As we were chanting and getting ourselves worked up in the war lodge, they had gathered below at the Siede of Bubbling Waters, where the elder women of the tribe prepared them for the ritual. Their naked flesh was painted and their heads were draped in woven veils so that they could see out but no man could see inside. They were given a bit of framash to calm their nerves, and then, when the echo of our chanting and drumming had reached a fevered pitch, they proceeded one by one to the place of Stohle-Eh-Strochte to perform their sacred duty.
They filed into the cave as we chanted, lithesome and beautiful, their smooth young bodies gleaming in the firelight. A collective groan reverberated through the smoky chamber as they drifted in. They seemed to glide through the haze like ghostly nymphs from some pubescent boy’s first sex dream. Each of the Stohle had been painted a different vivid color. Each was a mystery, her identity concealed beneath her veil. Stohle, in our language, meant “keeper”. They had come to preserve our seed.
The women placed upon the floor of the cave their finest sleeping furs, and then they reclined upon them, moving with seductive languor to await the first who won their indulgence. They sighed and squirmed, breasts thrust out, legs parted, offering themselves to us, baring without shame or inhibition their moist pink secret selves, the vessels which would preserve our bloodline should we fall in the coming battle.
But it was not without ceremony. The warriors formed a circle around the maidens and began to dance to the beat of the hollow logs. Arm-in-arm, we chanted. We sang to them. We sang of our gratitude, of our devotion to our people. Eyes bulging, flesh slick with sweat and animal grease, hearts pounding, veins bulging, we sang. All the while, the Stohle writhed, moaning and stroking their flesh to enflame us.
The ritual dance grew more and more urgent. Every so often, a pair of men would break from the circle and wrestle. They would grapple and roll around the floor as we shouted encouragement until one man had subjugated the other. The winner would then choose the Stohle he found most pleasing to the eye, and impart his seed to her.
We called the ritual Stohle-Eh-Strochte, the Keeping of the Essence.
As we believed that the insemination of woman by man transmitted the spark of life to the womb, we also believed that the exchange of fluid could preserve a man’s spirit within the chambers of a woman’s body. Hence, should he die in battle in some faraway country, his strength and, more importantly, his spirit would not be lost to the People.
Oh, don’t be so shocked, you prudes! You self-appointed protectors of passionless propriety! I assure you, this type of behavior has been practiced far longer than I’ve been around. We were going to war. Perchance to our deaths! For several of the young men who were marching to battle with us, this was their last chance of passing down their legacy, of preserving their bloodline. In a culture that worshipped its ancestors, to die without offspring was next of kin to damnation.
And we worshipped. We worshipped hard that night. For hours, we danced and fought and made love until in our exhaustion it seemed that time itself grew pliant and began to stretch out, like a drip of warm pine resin, and the drifting forms of our ancestors, enticed back from the spirit realm, appeared among the clouds of smoke that drifted inside the cavern, caressing our flesh, twining among ours bodies.
It was fearsome and fantastic, violent and tender, painful and ecstatic, all wrapped up in a psychedelic haze of pure sexual abandon.
At one point during the night, I rolled onto my back, momentarily spent, and saw the spirit of my grandfather gliding smoothly through the air above me, his form waxing and waning as it flowed through the currents of merje suspended near the roof of the cavern. Ghostly figures swam through the air all around us, like exotic fish. Our exertions had summoned a great host of our ancestors.
I turned to Brulde and started to say, “Look! Do you see the spirits in the smoke?” I thought it a good omen that there were so many of them, but before I could finish speaking, I was tackled, and I found myself struggling to keep my clansman Hyde from besting me.
I hadn’t lost a challenge yet and I wasn’t about to let this upstart break my winning streak. But it’s hard to fight naked and covered in animal fat. You can’t get a grip on any of your opponent's limbs. Also, Hyde was much younger. And I was trying not to get sodomized accidentally. It would have been a terrible embarrassment.
We writhed and bucked upon the earth. He almost pinned me to the ground but I wriggled out of his grip. Heart pounding, I scrambled to my feet. All the other men were shouting, watching with wide, crazed eyes, shaking their fists, stomping their feet. Hyde leapt at me with a gusty snarl. I fell back with him, planted my foot in his belly and threw him up and over me.
“Yaaaahhhh!” the circle bellowed, crying out in their appreciation of my clever move.
“I’m going to beat you, old man!” Hyde declared, grinning, nostrils flaring, coming at me again.
I tried to perform a hip toss, but he was ready for my trickery this time. He hooked an arm around my neck and we both went down in a greasy heap. He punched me a few times, grinning and wheezing. They were not serious blows. He wasn’t trying to injure me. But somehow he managed to sneak a chokehold on me and I found myself defeated.
Leaping up and pumping his fists in the air, erection bouncing, he celebrated his victory. Then, as we shouted encouragement to him—I, too, with grudging respect-- he turned and staggered to the Stohle.
Sighing and cooing, they welcomed him into their arms.
Perhaps you're hoping I'll spare you further detail. That would be the proper thing to do in this repressed modern era, wouldn't it? To “cut away” to the next scene, as they say. In these present times, it seems the tradition is to espouse one's high moral standards in public while indulging oneself anonymously on the “world wide web”. Am I not correct?
Fear not. I shan't offend your delicate sensibilities. I've done my best to “keep it clean” for you.
I think, however, that some of you understand. You grasp the underpinnings of our ritual: that we were preparing ourselves for death. The orgy before war is a timeless tradition. It was practiced by a thousand ancient and respected cultures over the millennia. We were departing for battle in the morning. Our warrior rites were a way to preserve our essence, so that should one man die-- or all men die-- their bravery would not be lost to our people. A part of them would live on, or have a chance of living on, and that helped to take the sting out of the prospect of mortality.
I was challenged three more times that night, but Hyde was the only man who beat me.
Suffice it to say, I woke the next morning with a sore head and even sorer loins.
6
The floor of the cavern was littered with fallen bodies when I awoke. It looked like we had been massacred during the night, and in a way we had. Do not the French call orgasm “la petit mort”, the little death? Well, I had died several times that night, and rousing from sleep the next morning was very much like rising from the dead. The Stohle were nowhere to be seen, having departed before dawn. The men lay where they had dropped, some atop one another, naked, filthy, still smeared in animal grease. The orgy had continued after the Keepers, sore and exhausted, took their leave of us, and the cavern stank of all the essence that had been splash
ed so liberally around.
The chamber echoed with our snores and groans and rumbling farts. It took me three attempts to get to my feet. I stumbled to the entrance, holding my thumping skull in one hand and my aching penis in the other. I pushed through the hangings, squinting into the dim light. I felt as if I were covered in sticky honey. I slipped and skidded halfway down the cliff to the springs below. I meant to bathe myself. I wasn’t going to be able to think clearly, to sober up, until I had cleansed that animal grease from my skin. Not only that, I stank. And I had a horrible taste in my mouth.
Steam rolled up from the burbling pools at the base of the ravine. The foliage and rocks were patterned with frost. With a grimace, I sat on one of the limestone slabs that projected out over the water. Bracing myself for the shock, I slid into the churning liquid. So cold! Shivering uncontrollably, I scooped some sand from the bed of the stream and scrubbed my flesh. I dipped my head and washed my hair clean. I sucked in a mouthful of water, gargled and spat it out.
Brulde and Strom staggered down the slope a few minutes later. Strom, I saw, was walking a little bowlegged. Poor kid. Last night was the young warrior's first Stohle-Et-Strochte, and he’d done very well in the challenges. He’d fared very well after the Stohle-Et-Strochte, too, when it was just the men. He was handsome and very fit.
Brulde's eyes were still swollen and red from the smoke and his blond hair was matted on one side, but he looked more relaxed than he had the past few weeks. He had gotten his “essence preserved” several times. Come next winter, there would probably be a couple of girls with blond haired, blue-eyed children on their hips.
“Strom. Brulde,” I greeted them.
Brulde hopped from foot to foot beside the pool, shivering and cupping his genitals in both hands. “Is it cold?” he asked, teeth chattering.
“No, it's actually pretty nice,” I said slyly. “Almost feels warm, once you get in.”
Lying about how cold the water is... that is also an ancient tradition.
He plunged in and howled.
7
The first fatality in our war party was chubby Bukhult. He died because he got the shits.
It's okay. You can laugh. I think “comic tragedy” might be the most apt description for what happened to him. People die in the most awful and embarrassing ways imaginable every day. They die with their pants down. They die from pratfalls, while masturbating, with foreign objects lodged in their colons. Most mortals shit themselves at the moment of death, the Final Indignity. As the greatest mass murderer in all of human history, I can assure you this is true. Sometimes you can't help but laugh at a thing, even when it's awful, but that’s what keeps us sane. It’s what keeps the steadily mounting weight of all our human tragedies from crushing us to paste.
Before I describe how poor Bukhult managed to get himself killed, however, I think I ought to tell you a little more about the people we called the Foul Ones, because they're central to our decision to send a war party to the land of the Gray Stone People. Despite Poi-lot's advice, and our own frightening experiences with the lizard man, we thought the Fat Hands were merely being plagued by a hitherto unknown clan of Foul Ones.
The Foul Ones were a tribe that lived to the north of us, some three or four days journey from our valley. Although their culture was the antithesis of our own, they were Cro-Magnon like us. Also like us, they were a semi-nomadic people, moving between several seasonal camps throughout the year. Species was about the only thing our two peoples had in common, however. They were scrawnier than us, and they filed their teeth into points, and they seemed to revere filth and depravity and death almost as much as we revered family and honor and procreation. Even their language was offensive to our ears. They had a guttural, hissing language that sounded like an asthmatic with dry heaves. They had raided our village several times when I was a boy, sneaking into our territory to harass and steal from us until we adopted a policy of killing them on sight. After a half-dozen of their warriors fell to our arrows and spears, their raids came more infrequently. I imagine they set their sights on weaker prey, for they hadn’t raided our village in years by the time we had our trouble with the “lizard men”.
As far back as I could remember there had been hostility between our peoples. In fact, my clansmen were revolted by the very thought of our distant neighbors. Just the mention of their name was enough to make the lip curl back from the teeth. Our women shuddered at the thought of them. Children would hide their faces betwixt their mothers’ breasts. Our revulsion had become an instinctive thing, almost an involuntary reflex, ingrained in our psyche from early childhood. Thump a man’s knee and his leg kicks. Mention the Foul Ones and our people retched.
They were just so, well... foul!
They seemed, as a group, to be gripped by some kind of mental derangement. They ate their own dead. By the smell of them, they wallowed in their own filth as well. They adorned themselves in the bones of their ancestors, a most disrespectful thing to our reckoning, and tried to kidnap our children and the children of neighboring clans for use as slave labor, and for sexual sport and food.
It was known that they practiced genital mutilation, slicing off the outer flesh of their organs, both male and female, as religious offerings to their deities. They also practiced blood sacrifice. One of our people, who escaped from captivity, described how the Foul Ones would cut out the hearts and brains of their captives and eat them raw, still hot and wet from the bodies, as part of their obscene religious rites.
I saw them up close just once as a boy, when a small group of them raided our camp. In fact, I came very close to being abducted by one of them.
I was young, no more than six or seven years old at the time. I had discovered a praying mantis trundling across the ground not far from my father’s wetus and was ruthlessly pestering the creature with a stick. Prodding it. Giggling as the insect swiped angrily at my tool with its strangely folded forelimbs. Engrossed with my play, I paid little attention to the clamor that had arisen at the outer fringes of the camp.
The goggle-eyed insect, bright green and fierce-looking, swatted at the twig I was poking it with. It grabbed the stick and tried to bite it, mouthparts wriggling. I twisted the twig from its grasp and poked the insect again, completely oblivious to the footfalls approaching rapidly behind me.
And why should I be alarmed? People were always racing around the village. That’s why the Neanderthals called us Fast Feet. I only turned to look when the runner’s shadow fell across me.
The sun flashed in my eyes when I craned my head to look at him. I raised a hand to shield them and froze in shock at the utter alienness of the being. To my child's eyes, he was the very definition of “monster”. Thin to the point of emaciation and dressed in bones and rotting hides, he scowled down at me. His teeth were very sharp. His eyes bulged from their blackened sockets much like the eyes of the praying mantis I was entertaining myself with. All the strength seemed to drain from my body at once. I think I might have urinated on myself, as my bladder felt very hot and heavy. The scary man-thing looked back over his shoulder, grinning in exultation, and then reached down to grab me with his filthy, long-nailed hands.
He crowed something in the weird, sibilant language of his people. Probably, “Gotcha!”
I couldn’t move. I don't think I even cried out. Fear had seized me around the throat, bearing down like a strangler. But before his fingers could catch ahold of me, the tip of an arrow burst from his mouth like a bloody, pointy tongue.
The raider's eyes swiveled toward me with an expression of fierce outrage, like I was the one who had struck him the mortal blow. Blood spilled over his chin and ran down his neck in a torrent. He reached for the blade at his hip, lips writhing around the bloody shaft protruding from his mouth-- cursing me, I’m sure-- and then he collapsed... almost on top of me.
I jumped out of the way and then stood numbly, blinking down at the arrow protruding from the back of his neck. I had never seen a man murdered before. I ha
d seen men die by sickness and accident, but never in battle. A pool of blood was expanding around the Foul One’s shaggy head, soaking into the earth. He had shit himself a little, as men were wont to do.
I examined the dead man, too shocked to feel much of anything apart from curiosity. He seemed strangely lessened by death, as if some vital force had departed his flesh. In its absence he seemed shrunken, spent, like a shed snakeskin.
“Gon!” my father bellowed, and then I felt myself seized roughly and lifted from my feet. A moment later, my uncle dashed past, bow in hand. “Oh, son! You must pay more attention!” my father moaned, squeezing me to his chest so hard I couldn't breathe.
I remember catching a fistful of his thick beard, and then the numbness faded and I began to cry, pressing my face into his fuzzy mane.
I don't like to think what my fate might have been if my father and uncle had not saved me from my would-be abductor. Would I have been enslaved, used for sport, or sacrificed to their bloodthirsty gods? What indignities would I have suffered? What terrible rituals would they have performed on me? I never forgot the look in the Foul One's eyes when he stumbled upon me and thought, for just an instant, that he was about to make away with a plump little Fast Foot child.
Such greed and wickedness!
These were the people we thought were plaguing the Fat Hands. These Foul Ones. We, in our arrogance, believed that the superstitious Neanderthals had attributed their harassment to the work of devils.
Ours was not that great a misjudgment, to be fair. The Fat Hands could have easily confused Foul One trickery with the supernatural. Even our own people threatened rebellious children with the flesh eaters, as your people sometimes threaten your youngsters with the boogeyman. “Don't wander off or the Foul Ones will get you!” we said, or, “If you don’t behave, I’m going to give you to the Foul Ones!” The Foul Ones lived far enough away, and were strange enough to us, to have achieved semi-mythic status, but we weren’t frightened of them. We had always vanquished them before. We thought we were just going to march on over there and chase the Foul Ones back to their own territory, send them running home with their tails tucked between their legs.
The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All: Revised and Expanded (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 1) Page 12
