Though I was sympathetic, I hoped this experience would ameliorate his reckless nature. He had always been a headstrong boy, and he was much too careless when he got excited. Still, I was so shaken by his brush with death that I could not bring myself to lecture him overly much. Also, I couldn’t help feeling I was partially responsible for his injuries. I was far too indulgent of his schemes.
He hobbled around our camp, moving like a mortal old man, wincing when he bent to pick something up and stroking his lower chest where the bull’s horn had run though him. I held my tongue and tried not to let my irritation show. I’ve never had much patience for self-pity. Finally, on the third night, I decided enough was enough.
I began to mock him gently, hoping to draw him out of his malaise. Even back then we had idioms like “biting off more than one could chew”, not to mention, “grabbing the bull by its horns”, and I was generous with them.
At first he acted wounded by my teasing, thinking I was making light of his injuries, but then he let slip a chuckle, and by morning he was himself again.
As night gave way to morning’s light, he confided in me how close he’d come to the spirit world. “It was like my body had become a great weight and it was dragging me down into darkness,” he whispered breathlessly. He had a very intense look in his eyes, trying to impress on me the gravity of his experience. “It hurt, but at the same time, the pain did not seem to matter. I felt like I was being propelled toward some unknown destination, yet I knew I was not moving physically. And then you were there. Your presence. You were carrying me back to the living world.”
“I used my potashu to heal you,” I explained. “I brought it up out of me and spat it onto your wounds, much in the same manner that I changed you into a blood drinker.”
Ilio nodded. “I could hear your thoughts, like the Tanti hunter I killed by accident.”
“Is that so?” I said carefully, staring into the campfire. “And what did my spirit say to you?”
Thinking of my crimes against him. The terrible things I had done when I awakened from the ice. No thoughts. No memories. Driven by the Hunger.
Ilio shook his head. “You did not speak. I only had a sense of your presence, your emotions.” He looked at me somberly. “Your spirit seemed very sad.”
We spoke of the Tanti hunter he’d killed then. Somehow Ilio had experienced the man’s memories, learnt the tongue of the Tanti people, by drinking the man’s blood.
“And you’ve never experienced this before?” he questioned me.
“No. Nothing like that,” I answered. “Sometimes there is an echo of their dying thoughts in my mind, but it is very faint. And I have never acquired knowledge or skills from the men that I have fed upon. Their thoughts are just whispers in a dark cavern. They fade away to silence even as I strain to listen.”
It pleased the boy that he possessed a talent which I did not. He grinned pridefully, said, “Perhaps, I will explore this strange skill further the next time I feed from a mortal man.”
It disturbed me to hear him speak of killing men, but I did not comment. I knew he would kill again, as would I. The call of the blood is just too strong. A vampire can resist, but our hunger for mortal blood can only be postponed, not denied. Eventually, all vampires succumb to that siren song.
I have since come to learn that the preternatural skills of vampires vary quite remarkably. While I was much more resilient physically, Ilio had mental capabilities which I did not possess—some of them quite astounding. It is no different from the talents of mortal men. Even womb brothers, I suppose. One may be an accomplished hunter, the other a fine musician. Apollonius, a vampire who became my companion many millennia later, was just as impervious to harm as I, and possessed all of Ilio’s mental abilities and more! And my beloved Zenzele… but I will come to her soon enough!
We had not moved from the dried up falls since Tapas and his people parted with the main group. The Neirie lingered in the area for several days, combing over the hills and through the forests, looking for the hunter that Ilio had killed. They did not seem suspicious of us. They appeared to have no inkling that their brother had met his demise at the fangs of my adopted child. After all, we were not the only large predators in the area. There were wolves and bears, large cats and raptors. Any one of them could have killed the missing man.
Eventually they gave up hope of finding him and broke camp. As we slept through the daylight hours in our comfortable little cleft beneath the waterfall, they gathered their sparse belongings and continued east. When evening came, we rose to find their camp abandoned, and so we gave up our own little shelter and trailed after them.
That night we took down a red deer stag. We came across the large ungulate as it was drinking from a stream. I urged Ilio to slay the animal, hoping a successful kill would bolster his confidence, which had been flagging since our disastrous aurochs hunt.
Looking anxiously at the animal’s great antlers, he hesitated, but I nudged him forward, nodding for him to go, and he flew down from the tree limbs we were perched upon, concealed by thick summer foliage.
The beast did not see him coming. Ilio threw his arms around the animal’s neck as he swooped down, and he used his vampire strength to wrestle the animal onto its side. Quick as a snake, he jerked his flint knife from its sheath and gashed open the deer’s neck, holding the animal down until it finished struggling. When we had drunk our fill of its blood, we carried the animal between us to the Neirie’s new campsite.
It did not take us long to catch up to them, not even dragging the four hundred pound stag. The distance they’d covered that day took us only an hour to traverse.
We could not take to the air, not with such a heavy load, but we jogged tirelessly, following the trail of downtrodden grass, which was as clear as any modern road to our vampire eyes.
The Neirie had encamped near a thick evergreen wood. Their temporary settlement was quiet as we approached, the travelers subdued. Though many of the former slaves were awake and gathered around their fires, they spoke in low voices and eyed the darkness nervously. I suppose they felt smaller and more vulnerable now that the mighty Tapas and his Vis’hantu associates had departed. Several men saw us swim out of the dark, like divers emerging from murky water, and leapt to their feet. They cried out to their companions, pointing.
Of course they all gathered around us excitedly. Ilio spoke to several of the men in his newfound tongue, but I could still only understand a few words here and there. They were ecstatic when Ilio explained the deer meat was for them, and they took the animal away to skin it on the far side of the camp.
I could understand the men who spoke Oombai, and I nodded to accept their gratitude. They must all have been fluent in the tongue of the ground scratchers, being slaves to them for so long, but there seemed to be an unspoken consensus against speaking the language of their oppressors, as most of the people spoke only in their native tongue, and those who did converse in Oombai were frowned at.
Once again I was struck with a strange sense of familiarity, and I looked more closely at the Tanti men. They seemed to be of the same stock as the people who had birthed me. They were muscular and robust (now that they were free of the Oombai), and very egregious in their mannerisms. The men had thick, shaggy manes and curly beards. Their women were bold-- and by that I mean they did not scurry at the commands of the men or drop their eyes when I looked in their direction.
Could these Tanti be descendants of my own people? I wondered.
It was an idle thought. It snuck into my mind without fanfare, almost as if it had been hiding there in my subconscious all along, waiting for just that moment.
The answer came almost immediately after.
Of course, they were!
The realization stunned me, yet the logic of it was unassailable. It was no coincidence they worshipped a god named Thest. Thest was the name the River People gave me when I became their guardian blood drinker. Thest-u’un-Mann, to be precise. The Ghost Who Is
a Man. By the time the River People abandoned their valley home, my name had been shortened to Thest, and its original meaning, “ghost”, had long been forgotten.
It seemed incredible that my people had survived the last great ice age, and that I had unwittingly followed in their footsteps seven thousand years later, when the retreating glaciers cast my mutilated body upon the frozen steppes. Yet I had merely sought out warmer climes, traveling the pathways of least resistance… just as my descendants must have done.
My descendants… my children…!
I was paralyzed by the implications of this discovery. As Ilio laughed and spoke easily with the Tanti, I stood stock still and examined the men and women who had gathered around us.
I inspected them in exhausting detail, opening up my vampire senses to their fullest, taking in every mote and minutiae. There--! That man’s beard was much like my father’s beard once was, wiry and gray and curled in the exact same manner my father’s beard had curled, even to the way the hair whorled underneath the line of his chin! There stood a man whose eyes bore the same somber shape and color as the eyes of my tent-mate Brulde. Was he some great-to-the-nth grandson of my long dead companion? I scanned the figures milling around me with ever more intense concentration. There was a dark-skinned woman who was full figured like my Neanderthal wife Eyya. Though she looked completely human, she had the prominent brow and receding chin of a hybrid Fat Hand woman. And there, a woman who was frustrated with her makeshift cooking utensils stood and stamped her foot, one hand on her hip, in the exact same manner that my second wife might have done.
I felt suddenly overwhelmed, as if I stood in the vortex of a stormwind. Faces from the past whirled before my mind’s eye. My brothers, my father, my mates, my tribesmen. Their voices echoed in my skull, so real and so loud I wanted to clap my hands over my ears. I could not understand what the Tanti were saying, but I could imagine that their language had evolved over time from the tongue of the River People. It shared a similarity to my people’s language, with its emphasis on plosive consonants and the abbreviated, almost careless way they made their vowel sounds. Though it was far from musical, the language of the River People could communicate a lot of information in a very efficient manner, and the Tanti had inherited this rapid way of speaking.
Ilio took notice of my distraction. “Are you all right, Thest?” he asked.
I nodded absently, waving away his concern.
I had magnified the Tanti in my awareness, taking in their sights, their sounds, even their smells, and all the evidence I collected pointed to these people being descendants of the tribe that I was born of, that I had protected for so many hundreds of years after I was made into a blood drinker.
One of the Tanti men gestured for us to sit beside him at his fire. Ilio was speaking to me again, but I could not understand what he was saying. His Denghoi tongue seemed foreign to me suddenly. I could make no sense of it.
I pushed the ancient memories from my consciousness, closed the floodgates of my vampire senses so that my thoughts were clear and quiet and solitary. The world around me seemed to leap into vivid relief. I returned to the here and now, where each man was the sum of his parts, rather than a swarm of sensory impressions.
“They want us to sit and share a meal with them,” Ilio was saying, and I turned to him and nodded, patting him on the shoulder. He eased me toward the fire, concerned by my sudden distractibility, helping me to sit like I was an elder.
“Are you certain you are all right, Father?” Ilio asked, lowering himself to the ground beside me.
“Yes,” I nodded, my eyes heavy-lidded, my mind still deep in thought, and then I smiled at him. I shrugged off my shock like a winter coat, grinned at him. “Yes! I am fine, boy. I am… very happy!”
The man whose beard curled like my father’s beard sat down across the fire from us. He took a stick that was angled into the coals and put the hot tip to the bowl of a long-stemmed smoking pipe. His cheeks puffed in and then he exhaled a plume of sweet-smelling gray smoke. He coughed a bit, his cheeks ruddy in the firelight. Handing the pipe to the man seated to his left, he smiled at us and said, “Merh.”
I recognized the burning herb by its scent, of course. Our people had once called it “merje”.
13
The man who reminded me of my father—same curly beard, same great mane of fuzzy gray hair—was named Paba. He was a stocky man, late middle-age, with a comically round belly and skinny legs. He told Ilio he had been a slave of the Oombai for more than ten cycles of the seasons. He was taken captive with his two older brothers while fighting Oombai slavers who had raided their village. Both of his brothers were dead now, Ilio translated. One had died shortly after their capture, killed while trying to escape, and the other had died during the slave uprising following my battle with the Oombai Elders. Paba was the oldest of the escaped Neirie who still lived. He had assumed the mantle of leadership when Tapas and his group departed, though he shared the burden of that responsibility with some of the younger, more robust slave men and women, some of who hailed from other nearby tribes: the Grell, the Pruss.
Paba’s pipe circled around the fire, and when it came to me, I puffed on it to be polite, though the redolent smoke could do little to enlighten my thoughts. The living black blood moves quickly to eliminate any drug-like or toxic substances I ingest.
Paba nodded in approval as I exhaled and passed the pipe on, his eyes reddening from the drug. He spoke to Ilio, gesturing with a thickly calloused finger, and Ilio translated his words to me.
“He says that he believes you are their god Thest, even though you deny it,” Ilio said.
The old man spoke some more, then nodded for Ilio to relate what he’d said. The other men gathered around the fire listened to Paba with wide solemn eyes, then turned to see what I would reply.
“Why else, he says, would you have killed the Elders,” Ilio translated. “Why protect the lowly Tanti, even feed them, if you are not one of the… tessares?” He frowned and asked the old man to explain what tessares meant.
The old man spoke for several minutes, gesturing to the ground and then to the sky and then waving his hand horizontally in the air.
Ilio listened, nodding his head, then explained, “Tessares means ‘four corners’ but it is also the word for their pantheon of gods. There are four, he says. Namames is Great Mother Earth, Tul is Great Father Sky, Vera is their goddess of water, and Thest is their god of wind.” He listened some more and said, “Vera and Thest are the children of Mother Earth and Father Sky. They are brother and sister, and their children are the little spirits that inhabit the living realm… minor gods and goddesses.”
Paba jabbered some more, then spread his arms out.
“But of all the gods and goddesses,” Ilio said, “the Tessares are the most powerful.”
The old man fell silent, waiting for my answer.
I smiled. To Ilio, I said, “Tell them that I am the one called Thest, but I do not know these other gods and goddesses he speaks of.”
The Grell and Pruss gathered around the fire were unimpressed, but several of the Tanti men gasped. They whispered to one another indignantly. The old man, however, burst out laughing. He put his hand on his bouncing belly.
He spoke to Ilio when his laughter had tapered away, and Ilio translated: “He says he has never seen the gods either. Only the one who sits before him tonight.”
The old man spoke and Ilio added, “Perhaps you forgot them when you came to the world to free your people... in the same manner the spirits of children forget their past lives when they are born.”
I smiled and shrugged.
Nuhnhe, I might have said in a bygone era, but I doubted the old man would have understood the word, or appreciated the sentiment behind it. The word meant “who knows” in the tongue of the River People, but it was more than that. It meant who can really know anything, the world is a mystery and we are nothing.
One thing I did know, however. I knew it would be u
seless to argue with the old man. He seemed as unflappable as my father. Also, I didn’t want to upset these people any more than I had to, or make us unwelcome when we arrived at their homeland. These were the descendants of the tribe that had given me birth. Their great ancestors were my great ancestors. I had lost them long ago, when the glaciers enveloped our valley home, but now we were reunited, as unlikely as that might seem. If they wanted to believe that I was some kind of guardian spirit, an incarnate deity, well… it wasn’t very different than what I intended to be to them anyway.
Once again, I become Thest-u’un-Mann, I thought. The Ghost Who is a Man. The god who watches over the River People.
Only now I intended to live among them.
As we conversed, Ilio acting as our translator, the fragrance of cooking venison drifted to our group. The women had already butchered the stag and were preparing a meal over one of the other fires.
The aroma of the sizzling meat was a pleasant one. It stirred up old memories, though it no longer stirred my appetite. I found myself wishing that I was a mortal man again, flesh and blood like the men sitting around the fire with me. I wished that my belly could ache for the flesh of the deer, instead of the blood of my tribesmen, that the smoke of the pipe that circled the fire could still turn my thoughts to dripping honey, that a woman waited for me in my hut when I tired of my brothers’ company, that she would welcome me into soft arms, into her warm womanhood, and see me off to fur-lined dreams, sated from food and talk and sex. The wishing was suddenly an ache in my soul that was much more painful than my hunger for their blood. That hunger I could control now… within reason. The ache for my lost humanity was suddenly unbearable. I wanted to leap to my feet. I wanted to flee from these people, find some dark and hidden place far away, and curl around the ache in my heart until it killed me or drove away my mind.
The Oldest Living Vampire In Love (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 3) Page 12
