“Are you all right?” Nyal asked, as her husband gathered twigs and leaves to start his fire. She tried to sit up and winced at the pain in her side. “Go, if you think you cannot endure the smell of our blood. We will find our way home somehow.”
Gon laughed gently as he squatted nearby. “I should be worried about you,” he said. He dug a shallow pit in the earth and began to place his tinder inside it. “You are not well, my love.”
“I am old,” Nyal replied. “When you are old, you are never well. But you wouldn’t know about that, I suppose.”
Gon paused in his labors. “No,” he said after a moment.
The girls returned from the stream, breathless and shambling. They dropped down in a loose circle around Nyal. Korte-Anthe and Ganni cuddled up to their grandmother’s legs, one to each side of her. Quietly, they watched their savior make fire.
Nyal was tempted to question them, ask them if the Foul Ones had abused them, and what had happened to the one missing girl, but her granddaughters had the look of sleepwalkers, their faces pale and swollen, so she held her tongue. There would be time enough later to learn all that had transpired.
When Gon had piled his sticks and branches into a teepee shape, he took two large pieces of wood and rubbed them together. He did it so quickly his arms melted into blurs. The girls gasped at the screeching sound the sticks made scraping against one another, then cried out in awe as the wood burst suddenly into flames.
“That’s a handy trick to have,” Nyal said, laughing softly. The laugh turned into coughing, and the coughing into blood. Nyal scowled, wiped the blood on her skirt.
Comforted by the fire, the girls dropped off to sleep before the sun had even slipped out of the sky. Nyal watched the bloated red orb lower behind the distant mountain peaks, then turned her regard to her husband.
Gon sat across the fire from her, his eyes gleaming like embers. He was watching his grandchildren sleep, a look of such longing on his face that Nyal felt her heart break for him just a little.
“You’ve missed so much,” Nyal said. Ganni and Korte-Anthe slept with their heads upon her lap. She patted them, one after the other, then gently combed through little Ganni’s tangled locks. All four girls moaned and whimpered intermittently. They had endured a terrible night in the captivity of the Foul Ones. “Perhaps you no longer need to live apart from us,” Nyal went on, her voice uncharacteristically wistful. “Or I can come stay with you on the mountain. I wouldn’t be a bother for long. I can feel it in my bones. They tell me my time is nearly up.”
“I can’t,” Gon said in a pained voice.
Nyal saw his throat convulse, and spoke no more of it. It was a silly fantasy.
When the children had slept for several hours, Gon rose and gently woke his wife.
“We need to continue,” he said.
“But it is still dark,” Nyal said in a scratchy voice.
“I know, but we must push on. I will not be able to stay with you much longer. My hunger has returned. Soon it will chase me from your presence, lest I surrender to it-- and that I will not do.”
“All right then. Girls? Girls, wake up. We have to walk some more.”
Carrying Nyal, Gon led the girls through the forest. The stars slowly rolled across the heavens, towing the sun up behind them. Day came with petal-tinted clouds, then a bright blue sunny sky. By midday, Nyal had begun to see some familiar landmarks… and was coughing almost constantly.
The pain in her lungs had become nigh unbearable. It hurt every time she breathed, even when she took just the tiniest sips of air. Gon told her to swallow the blood, don’t spit it out when she brought it up from her lungs, so that’s what she did. It made her nauseous, but she didn’t want to tempt him any more than was necessary.
They found the river and followed it for a while, then the old familiar path that wound its way up to the camp. They passed a pike on which the head of a Foul One had been hung, a cloud of gnats boiling around it.
Its mouth drooped, exposing pointy teeth. Its eyes were rolled back in their sockets. The girls whimpered at the sight of it, clinging to their grandfather’s legs, and Gon made a low moan of dismay, nostrils flaring.
“Just a little further,” Nyal murmured, turning his face to hers.
He nodded curtly and continued walking.
When they entered the village of the River People, a collective cry of shock rang out. Mothers and fathers rushed to their exhausted daughters, sweeping them into their arms. The rest gathered around Gon and Nyal, staring at the white figure with awe. Thest-u’un-Mann has returned! they cried. He has rescued our stolen ones! He has vanquished our enemies!
Gon nearly fled from them. Nyal felt it in his body, a jolt that worked its way through him from head to toe. “Get back!” she cawed hoarsely at her tribesmen. “Get back! You mustn’t touch him!”
But they ignored her. Gon was forced to walk through a gauntlet of grasping hands. A forest of hands! Touching his shoulders and face. Plucking at his hair and clothing. Hot, soft, blood-filled hands. He looked straight forward, face set, and paced steadily through the crowd. He walked stiffly through the village, pushed through the flap of the Siede, and bore Nyal to her bed.
“Put me down,” Nyal wheezed. “Hurry, now! Go! Before you do something you regret.”
The elders had heard the commotion. They peeked through their hanging hides into Nyal’s quarters: Epp’ha, tiny Herma and her blind husband Gault, the sisters Deb and Neba, even nasty old Ypp’ham. Ancient faces made young with surprise and curiosity. Others were pushing through the flap from outside. Breyya barged in with her daughters in her arms, screaming, “Where is my father? I want to see my father!” Gilad was among them, limping forward with a smile.
Gon crouched next to Nyal like a cornered animal.
“Go,” she said, gentler this time. She coughed, and her eyes rolled dizzily in their sockets. Her saggy flesh had gone gray, her lips smeared with blood. “But don’t wander off too far. I’ve a feeling…” She tried to catch her breath, but couldn’t. “I’ve a feeling… you’ll be coming back for me soon.”
Gon gazed down at her face for a moment, not speaking, just adoring her. His wife. The woman he had loved-- and loved still! The woman who had truly made him an immortal, by bringing his children into the world!
He made as if to rise, then hesitated, a thoughtful look upon his face. His jaw flexed subtly, and then he leaned down and put his mouth upon hers. The People of the River did not kiss. Such a practice was not known to them. But this wasn’t a kiss. Not in the traditional sense.
Nyal’s thin and crinkled eyelids fluttered. Gon drew back, licking her blood from his lips.
“What did you do to me?” Nyal breathed.
Already, the color was coming back to her cheeks. Already, her breathing had eased.
“I am not certain,” Gon whispered. “Making you better, I hope. It was how the demon ghost transformed me. But just a drop! I would not inflict this curse upon you.”
“Your blood?” Nyal asked, working her tongue.
“Yes.”
“But why take such a chance?”
Gon brushed back a strand of her spider-silk hair. “Someone must help keep an eye on the kids.”
16
Nyala, in the tongue of the River People, meant a blossoming flower. It was fitting, then, that she died at the end of the season, as spring was blossoming into summer. The strange blood her husband had given her—just a drop!—had mended her injuries. It had even helped to quiet the singing of her bones. But Nyal was an old woman, and she had an old heart.
She died in the Siede, on a lovely early summer afternoon. She would not have chosen that day to pass on, for who really says, “This would be a good day to die”? Dying is always better suited for tomorrows, or the day after that, or next season, or next year. She did not die alone, either, as she would have preferred, so that her loved ones were not unnecessarily distressed. But she did die doing something she enjoyed-- looking aft
er her young granddaughters.
She had all three of them that day: Ganni, Maia and Korte-Anthe. Ganni and Maia were busy playing with their new toy, a baby hare their father had brought home three days before, telling them they could keep it for a pet until it was big enough to eat. It was a cute little thing, with brown fur and short, stubby ears tipped with black. They had named it Gub-Gub, which was a baby word for eat. All day long, the girls ran outside to pull grass and fed it to the rabbit, which chomped happily on any green thing they thrust into its snout, its little nose spinning in circles as it chewed. Korte-Anthe, however, was training to be a medicine woman. Of all the things that she could have been, for the River People considered women equal, if not superior, to men-- a wife, a mother, a huntress, a warrior-- Korte-Anthe really only wanted to be one thing, and that was a medicine woman like her grandmother.
Nyal, of course, was happy to teach her.
She was explaining to Korte-Anthe how important it was to use the proper proportions of herbs and roots for the drink the People partook of just before their ritual orgies. If the herbs were not apportioned properly, their spirits would not soar during the ritual. They would not enter the trance, and the visions would not come.
“It will just be a lot of sweaty rutting then,” Nyal said with a scowl, watching over her granddaughter’s shoulder. “Of no good use to anyone.”
She observed Korte-Anthe until she was satisfied, then sat back, stroking her breast through her clothing. She felt dizzy all of a sudden, and she could not seem to catch her breath.
“How much of the chanthum, Grandmother?” Korte-Anthe asked, unwrapping a bundle of dried roots.
“Two,” Nyal murmured, “about the length of your thumb.”
Korte-Anthe noticed her grandmother’s breathlessness and turned to her in concern. “Grandmother, are you well?” she asked.
She really was a lovely girl, with long curly blond hair, just like Nyal once had, before she got old and her hair turned to spider silk.
Nyal tried to speak, tried to reassure the girl she was fine, but there was suddenly a great weight pressing down on her chest. She reclined against the wall of the cave, her strength deserting her, the interior of the Siede brightening, as when the sun peeks out from behind a cloud.
Korte-Anthe had risen, was shaking her by the shoulders, calling “Grandmother! Grandmother!” but Nyal did not answer her. She was looking over her shoulder, watching as Brulde and Eyya ducked through the flap at the entrance of the cave.
They were young again, strong, fit and beautiful.
Eyya put her arm around Brulde’s waist as they drew near, leaning her head against his shoulder with a blissful smile.
“Where is Gon?” Nyal asked, rising to join them. She noticed her hands then, held them up before her. They were smooth and pink.
“Our husband will be along, Nyala,” Brulde said, “but not for a very long time.”
Nyal saw that his scar was gone. The one that zigzagged down the left side of his face. She reached out to touch his unblemished cheek, fearful for a moment that her hand would pass through him, that she was only imagining him in her final moments, but he was there. Her palm settled on his flesh, warm and firm.
“That’s all right,” Nyal said, lowering her hand. “We will wait for him.”
“Yes, my love,” Eyya said. “We will.”
END
About the Author
Joseph Duncan is the author of nine novels, including the indie bestselling Oldest Living Vampire Saga. He lives in Southern Illinois with his wife, his kids, and all the voices in his head. If you’d like to contact Mr. Duncan, you may do so at [email protected]. You can also friend him on Facebook, or visit his blog Red Ramblings.
Nyal's Story (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga) Page 7