By Blood We Live

by Glen Duncan

  I thought I’d got used to the idea. Drinking blood. But when I thought of myself doing it it made me dizzy and hot. Disgusted, too, a little. I told myself not to be shocked. It was stupid to be shocked. I’d known this was what it was, what it would be. I’d always known.

  The study still smelled of bleach but there were no other signs of what had happened, what we’d done. I turned the desk lamp on and woke my laptop.

  Finder.

  Documents.

  Files.

  Encryption.

  Enter password.

  My hands didn’t move. The book title I’d noticed yesterday came back to me: You Can’t Go Home Again. It meant something different now. It made me doubt myself. I saw what Fluff had meant, that you couldn’t trust it, the feeling of things seeming to mean things. Or what he’d actually said was you had to trust it and mistrust it, to keep bouncing between the two. Be the loving servant of two masters, was the phrase he used.

  Yeah, well, physician heal thy fucking self.

  I entered the password.

  The faces came up, the information.

  30

  Remshi

  WHOEVER LOVED THAT loved not at first sight?

  I loved Vali. But you’ll have worked that out by now.

  All of it, once I was in it, felt as if it had happened before.

  Naturally. Love being indefinite déjà vu.

  The humans, in lousy furs, rattling with trinkets of teeth and bone, had been following the retreating ice north, and I’d been following the humans. Not just me. Fellow vampires Amlek, Mim, Una and Gabil were travelling more or less with me, though they were elsewhere that night. We were governed by an irregular familial gravity. We gathered for a while, lived and hunted as a group, separated, came together again. No obligations, no see you Friday or I’ll be back around seven. I’d made Amlek. Amlek had made Mim. Una and Gabil, two and three hundred years old respectively, had their own makers, but they’d have to trace back to me in the end. (The first question I asked any vampire I met was: How old are you? So far no one counted as many winters as I did.) But that particular night I’d felt like being alone, and I’d been around long enough to know when to follow my inclinations.

  As I entered the clearing a gang of Homo sapiens were just about to hack the werewolf’s head off. She was impaled on a low tree branch, stuck with at least a dozen spears, one through the throat. (Not looking where I was going, she fessed-up afterwards. My own stupid fault. If I hadn’t stuck myself on that tree they’d never have got the spears into me.) Her hands, huge and elegantly clawed, had been cut off and lay among the frozen leaves on the ground.

  Two humans with flint hatchets had climbed up (had been ordered to climb up, their wobbling faces said) into the tree above her and now stood, or rather crouched, ostensibly ready to deliver the decapitative coup de grâce, in fact wishing they were far away. The remaining fifteen ringed her, the boldest darting close—grinning and screeching and tongue-flapping and mooning—to add wounds with knives and darts, with which latter her torso was already liberally quilled. The full moon—the heavenly one—lit the forest’s slivers and gashes of stubborn snow. Lit too Vali’s wet snout and bloodied fangs, her glistening pelt, her hard bare breasts and flat, deep-naveled belly …

  I can tell you what I did next. I can tell you exactly what I did next. But I can’t tell you why. Divine whim? A determined universe? Aesthetic indignation? Desperate boredom? Sheer randomness? Take your pick. These days my preference is for Mysterious Moments of Pure Being, wherein perhaps all the above meet in paradoxical simultaneity and you find yourself doing something with both a deep sense of inevitability and absolutely no clue why you’re doing it.

  The two shivering ninnies in the tree first. She wouldn’t die from her wounds, but she would certainly die from having her head cut—or, as it would have been with these halfwits, bludgeoned—off. (These were pre-silver days, or at least, pre-worked silver; a handful of smarter-than-average primitives had found certain rocks gave the creatures trouble—argentine and chlorargyrite we now know, though at the time your grandsires simply called them “wolf rocks” or “monster rocks”—but bullets and blades were millennia away.) The forest was cold and crisp and full of dark consciousness. It had been a long time since I’d seen this sort of action, but there were my energies like loyal horses, rearing and snorting and pounding the earth. I held them for a moment (a long time since I’d felt this sort of physical self-delight, too, outside feeding) then released them, with a thirty-foot leap into the tree, where a nifty spring and flip had me hanging like a bat in front of human Tweedles Dum and Dee. There was of course the stretched moment of stunned introduction. Their faces, swiped with paint, achieved a lovely nude look of surprise that had the briefest moment to switch to one of terror and certainty of death before I despatched them with a pair of tracheal slashes. A moment later my lady’s would-be decapitators went sailing over their companions’ heads and disappeared into the darkness on the other side of the clearing.

  High human spirits dropped a little. Dropped further when the assailants found four more of their number dead, suddenly, throats ripped out or bellies opened, when they hadn’t actually seen how that was possible, when they were forced to concede that they hadn’t, actually, seen that happen.

  Mooning and tongue-flapping ceased. Celebratory gibbering petered out. One of your lot, wearing feathers in his hair and a necklace of small bird skulls, flung his spear at me. I caught it, cheerleader twirled it, then sent it back at him with such force that it went straight through his skull, splitting his forehead and cleaving his affronted brain, nicely, en route. Group shock. Perhaps because the feathers testified to chieftainship the bisection of this particular noggin produced a pivotal dip in morale. The remaining humans fled, some blubbering, some screaming, some in bug-eyed silence.

  I turned to see the werewolf forcing herself backwards off the snapped tree limb that had pierced her just beneath the ribs and come through slightly to the right of her spine. With a moan, she collapsed on her back then rolled onto her side, gasping. I went to her as if in fluid obedience to an inevitable choreography. With, I imagine, an inane or beatific smile on my face. I felt—in those rare split seconds when I wasn’t wholly dissolved into the experience—full of uncomplicated warm innocence.

  “It’s okay,” I said to her in my own language, despite knowing she wouldn’t understand me, while the ghostly collective of my vampire peers went: What the fuck are you doing? “The humans have gone. Let me help you.”

  (We didn’t stink to each other in those days. That came later, when the species war was already a thousand years old and the vampire ruler Hin Kahur implemented howler aversion therapy: Newly turned vampires were tortured for weeks and months; each time something excruciating was done to them they were gagged and hooded with gammou-jhi hide, saturated and coated with the creature’s urine, faeces and the fluids from the sex organs and scent glands. Within a hundred years the therapy was no longer necessary. Even brand-new vampires found the smell of a werewolf unbearable. Conditioned response morphed into sensory hardwiring—go figure. There’s plenty of post hoc vamp science that attempts to explain it—my friend Olek, the oldest vampire egghead, has a theory that it’s like the experiential formation of neural pathways in the brains of newborn human infants—but whatever the explanation, there the phenomenon unequivocally is: to vampires, werewolves absolutely fucking stink. And though the blood-drinkers’ gammou-jhi stereotype is a moron, it didn’t take his species long to copy the aversion method, rendering the olfactory feelings mutual. However, when I met Vali all that was still in the future. Our races didn’t socialise with each other, and there was natural competition for prey, but we managed as best we could simply to keep out of each other’s way.)

  “I know you can’t talk,” I said. “And I know your wounds will heal. But we should move in case they come back in greater numbers. Can you walk?”

  She couldn’t. She’d lost a lot of bl
ood through the big wound, and by the time I was done pulling out the spears and darts she’d lost more—along with consciousness. I wondered what language she spoke in her human form, what tribe she was from, how long she’d had the Curse. I wondered—astonished at myself, since it was risibly irrelevant—what she’d look like when the moon set. What she’d look like as a woman.

  I tore a leg off one of the humans, plucked a couple of hearts and tongues and stuffed them into one of their furs. I debated taking her own severed hands, but closer examination revealed they were decomposing already, and besides, it was common knowledge that gammou-jhi, like vampires, could regrow anything (apart, obviously, from a head) overnight. So I left the forlorn things where they were. (Later she said to me: I think there must be a place all the parts go, all the hands and feet and hearts and eyes. They’re put together to make whole creatures, who carry the confused memories of all their original owners …)

  The sky said seven hours till sunrise. Two hours less to the setting of the moon. There would be a second and possibly more awkward introduction.

  I picked her up, slung her over my shoulders and set off.

  31

  MY NEAREST EARTH was four miles away in a cave in the hills. Unburdened and going at a sprint (we’ll have to talk about flight later, though I already know I’m going to make a devil’s arse of explaining it, and in any case these were the days before I could do it) a journey of a few minutes. Going carefully with a nine-foot gammou-jhi across my shoulders it seemed to take forever. I wasn’t tired when we got there, but small muscles I’d forgotten about had woken up and were stretching and blinking, astonished they’d slept so long. When I laid her down on her side her eyes opened. They were dark, their lights still a little adrift. I knelt beside her.

  “You’re in a cave in the hills on the side of the river where the sun goes down,” I told her, this time in the tongue of the tribe who’d been chasing her. “You’ve been hurt, but as you know, you’ll live. I brought meat. It’s here if you need it.”

  The cave was dry, and smelled of icy stone and the wild sage that grew over the entrance. Now of her, too, a complicated odour: her bitter canine blood, yes, but also something that just when you thought it was sly and fruit-sour hit you with a dash of brine—then astonished the back of your throat with maddening sweetness, like too much honey, so that you could hardly breathe. I’d never smelled anything like it. It sensitised my face. My idiot face. My tranced, beguiled, undone face.

  Nonetheless the long moment of pure being was passing and the strangeness of what I was doing was beginning to assert itself. I’d never been this close to one of her kind before. The big totemic head looked bizarre lying still, blinking, jaws open. I looked down to where her hands had been lopped from her wrists. Two new nubs were sprouting already. Even with my hearing I’m sure I only imagined catching the whisper of furious cellular repair. I’d lost a hand more than once down the centuries (although never both together) and supposed regeneration to be the same for her as it was for me, a sensation as of millions of tiny insects hurrying to form a very specific complex cluster …

  “I can’t explain this,” I said to her. I felt hyperreal and precarious, repeatedly close to laughter. I’d been picturing myself trying to explain it to Amlek and the others. I don’t know what made me help her. I just found myself helping her.

  Her eyes closed again. The bleeding had slowed. Phlegm rattled in her chest when she exhaled. I realised I was looking—a flower of absurdity opened in my heart—at her breasts, which were small and hard, nipples dark as blackberries.

  I felt very rich in the body and confused in the head.

  “You have nothing to fear from me,” I said, pointlessly. For a moment her eyes focused and I saw all her dreadful power, the monthly rhythm of her need for living meat, the work it had been to find room for the beast. The souls of her dead babbled in her blood, not knowing if her dying would release them. My own dead stirred, wondered how it was for these others suddenly close by. “Something’s happening,” I said. To her, to myself, to the universe—or was it the universe saying it through me, matter-of-factly? Something’s happening.

  By accident or her own intention her giant knee relaxed and touched mine where I knelt. Then her eyes closed again.

  32

  A LONG AND unhinged night for me, walking up and down outside the cave telling myself what was happening wasn’t possible. I kept laughing out loud. The sound of which frightened me and made everything worse. Details were urgent and vivified: a bare white-branched tree; the shadows of small stones; the odour of snow. The moon sailed by slowly like a delighted intelligence, faceless yet somehow grinning, somehow in on it. My guest’s breathing sounded as if she had a slight cold. I kept going back to her—(Her! Upper case was ten thousand years in the future but she’d acquired its mental equivalent)—ostensibly to see if she was awake or to check on the progress of her budding palms and fingers. In fact to keep feeling what I was, against all reason, feeling.

  What I was feeling.

  Yes.

  I laughed again, and again it made me feel worse. I lost my balance—actually found myself falling sideways and reaching out; I would’ve fallen over—fallen over! Me!—if I hadn’t been so close to the sheer side of the hill. Instead I leaned there, imbecilic, incredulous, full of dumb certainty. The blood in my head was colossal and unruly, a giant who’d drunk too much.

  I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking the shock derived from the hilariously inappropriate object of my desire. (I could see the faces of my vampire friends going from plain surprise to crimped bafflement to wrinkled disgust. Really? A gammou-jhi? A dog? Gods, Rem, you’re sick in the blood!) But you’re wrong. It wasn’t the object of my desire. It was the fact of desire itself.

  Desire.

  After a thousand years.

  (Or two thousand. One loses count.)

  I’d passed thirty-nine summers before I became a vampire. I’d fathered several children. My equipment had, back in the human days, worked. Splendidly, on occasion, if the shrieks and teethmarks and flailing not-quite-knowing-what-to-do-with-themselves limbs of my various lady friends were to be believed. But since my Turning, nothing. Not impotence. Just a complete absence of desire. It’s common knowledge in modern times (thanks not least to peskily scribbling Jacob Marlowe) but back then we had to make the wretched discovery for ourselves: The Lash murders libido.

  But here I was … Here I was …

  Nor was it merely desire. Desire alone would have cracked the paradigm’s egg and scrambled it. But I repeat: It wasn’t merely desire. Every time I went within range of her scent reality’s tectonic plates shifted, threatened to come apart entirely. Because here, along with desire, was an unbalancing recognition. I knew her. I knew her. The ether between us shivered with dark remembered joy. Remembered joy. It wasn’t perversion. It wasn’t—I searched myself thoroughly for this—the titillation of taboo. It was … It was …

  A burst of laughter from the moon smashed the reverie and I looked up to see it was almost below the horizon.

  33

  IT’S NOT SOMETHING they want you to watch.

  So said the lore, and my roused shame as I approached the cave endorsed it. But I had to see. Had to.

  She was on her feet, leaning back against the left-hand wall of the cave, head lowered, jaws open, panting. Her tongue went back and forth with each pant. The wounds had healed. Only the claws on the regrown hands hadn’t yet arrived. The smell of her dizzied me. Its soft kernel was in her somewhere, an infinite source. I wanted to find it. Go into it. Lose myself.

  I stepped inside the cave. She knew I was there, of course, could have snarled or chased me out, made a need for privacy plain. But she didn’t. Instead she turned her magnificent head and looked at me.

  I know you. You know me.

  How?

  All my past gathered, as if it knew what was about to happen would draw a line marking the beginning of a New Age.

>   Then with a strangled sound she grabbed her belly, doubled up, and crashed forward onto her knees.

  It was compelling and ugly to watch. After that first choked gargle she didn’t utter a sound. Which made her body’s mad monologue of bone-squeak and muscle-crunch loud. A jerky series of implosions, the beast done bit by bit out of its molecular rights as the long femurs shuddered through their appalling compression and the head thrashed from side to side as if the inner skull were trying to shake off the outer. Her odour bloomed, swelled for a moment at the edge of rottenness, then in an instant atomised around her and hung, suspended, waiting to resettle in its human version. And all the while my baffled certainty grew, reached a warm fullness as all but the now resting head returned in three, four, five slow spasms (she would climax with these same pretty convulsions, I knew) to its human form. She turned her face away for the last and most intimate part of the transformation, though I watched the scalp’s short fur hurry out as thick dark human hair, one long wave curved as if by design over the breast nearest me.

  Moments. Her face turned away, her breathing slowing. Our mutual awareness naked. I thought: Was I mistaken? Am I mistaken?

  Then she turned her face to me, and I knew I wasn’t.

  34

  IN THE LANGUAGE of the upper river people, she said: “I’m freezing.” Her voice was low and soft and confident and the colour of the river at night.

  I answered her in her own tongue: “Take these. I’ll make a fire.”

  “These” were the fur, emptied of its human remains, plus my own bearskin cloak. When she wriggled into them giant desire uncoiled in me. Laughter rushed up immediately, made itself available. I only just resisted it. The vastness and simplicity of wanting her in that way—of wanting anyone in that way—was so vast and simple laughter seemed inevitable. It was as if someone had lifted the sky like a lid to reveal a completely different wonderful realm beyond, one that made everything we thought we knew redundant—and hilarious. Every drop of my blood stared at its new reflection, scared to recognise itself, convinced that to accept this gift would be to lose it.