By Blood We Live

by Glen Duncan

  “You’re sweating, in fact,” Caleb said.

  This was the tone he’d decided on with me: equals. Tangents, blunt observations, non sequiturs. Overcompensated adulthood. I didn’t mind. I still felt sorry for him.

  “Maybe you need to drink some more? Shall I get you another bag?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Believe it or not, flying’s never really agreed with me. Even flying in one of these.”

  The truth was I wasn’t feeling well. Not just the effects of the dream, which I’d had again, which I’d been having every night and understood I would go on having every night for as long as it took, but a higher than usual (or comfortable) rate of snapshots from the improbable past, memories that came like rounds of machine-gun fire or occasionally like flashbulbs exploding in slow motion. Botticelli woken by a nightmare of his own discovering me in his workshop studying by lamplight the all but finished Birth of Venus and backing away, barefoot in his nightshirt, crying out, knocking over a small wooden table and a vase of irises. I would have killed him to have a moment longer with the image (the smell of oils remains one of my favourites, along with mown grass and a brand-new packet of tea bags and the first whiff of the ocean when you get near enough to the coast) but the thought of cutting off his talent and depriving the world stayed my hand. And the young private in an Ypres ditch, close but not close enough to death, stomach wound bubbling, skin tight and damp in the moonlight, knowing what I was and saying in a voice that sounded twelve years old, Please, sir, can you kill me? I can’t stand it anymore. Please, please … These were the slow-motion flashbulbs, yes, but the rest was vertiginous, an impossible compression of thunderstorms and dark rivers and neoned cities and constellations and news reports and night-marching legionaries and one of the big moonlit stones of Djoser stained with blood where a slave had dropped from exhaustion and cracked his head and a blind singer in a torchlit Athenian courtyard that stank of vomit and piss and spilled wine draining his own cup and emptying the dregs for the gods and beginning in Greek “Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’s son, Achilles …”

  I got up and stretched my legs a little, lifted my arms above my head until the higher vertebrae cracked like a card dealer’s riffle. Caleb raised his recliner a few inches. He’d taken his shoes off. Odd socks, one blue, one black. His pale big toe poked through a hole in the right, like a button mushroom. He was at war with how much I fascinated him. I was thinking it would give me pleasure to make him and his mother materially comfortable. I’d give them the house at Big Sur, if they wanted it. It would be nice to have company there when I visited. Without warning my eyes filled with tears.

  “Who made you?” he said.

  I’d known he was going to ask, sooner or later. The young’s natural need for origins. I took the pack of Lucky Strikes from the countertop of the minibar and lit one. I remembered Justine standing here, mixing drinks for herself. She’d bought a book of cocktail recipes in Kuala Lumpur and worked her way through, getting drunker. She’d kept taking them up to the pilots and poor Veejay (who in any case didn’t drink) had had to keep politely saying no, thank you, miss, I have to fly the aircraft. I looked at the bar’s little horseshoe of bottles. Big jewels: green; gold; sapphire; diamond white. It was a sadness to me that I’d been Turned before the invention of alcohol. I’d watched the Egyptians loosened by beer. The slurred segue into familial warmth—and familial violence. I’ve many times worked the night shift in bars down the years (saloons, gin-joints, taverns) when things have got lonely. It’s always helped, the room’s wink and murmur, the conversation, the short stories blooming and fading as customers come and go. The comfort of strangers, as my darling Justine had learned.

  “It was a long time ago,” I said, turning my back to him so I could dab my idiot eyes.

  “You don’t want to talk about it?”

  “It’s a long time since I’ve told that story. Maybe I’ve forgotten it.”

  Caleb didn’t say anything. Mia came out of the bathroom, freshly cosmeticised and smelling of Justine’s coconut shower gel and Flex shampoo. I’d had Damien pick up clothes for her and her son en route to the airport. Now she was in crisp blue jeans and a white t-shirt. A new short black leather jacket and boots. Purple Converse for Caleb, who had refused a new leather jacket, kept the crash-scorched red one instead. I knew it was a friend to him, gave him a little feeling of fraternal comfort every time he shrugged it on. He’d had too much loneliness in his life already. Too much of thinking that he’d fucked things up for his mother.

  “You need to take a shower,” Mia said to him.

  Caleb lit a cigarette of his own, ignored her. There were these little battles between them. I sat on the high stool behind the bar and rested my elbows on the marble counter. There was a pretty red carnelian ashtray within reach, niftily bolted to the surface. I’d been at the lecture William Morris gave in Birmingham in 1880. “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” he’d advised the designers. He’d found the maxim written on a piece of paper in the pocket of a blue serge jacket he’d been wearing a month before. Put there by me. I’ve always had a mischievous habit of planting messages on influential humans.

  Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

  Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

  Coke is it.

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Fresh cream cakes. Naughty—but nice.

  Yes, we can.

  I ASKED HIM WHO MADE HIM.

  Caleb’s gauche mental shield might as well have been cigarette smoke. Mia looked an apology at me. The jet dipped in and out of an air pocket.

  “I was made by someone I never saw,” I said. “According to this little Oa around my neck, twenty thousand years ago.”

  Neither of them spoke, though I could feel Caleb’s young mind tumbling back towards steamships and Native Americans and then plunging with a shock to movie cavemen, fires, spears, the world alarmingly uncluttered by pop songs and litter. It came as a shock to him, rocks and streams and forests and deserts, a nude world of natural objects curiously untouched by Mad Men and Twitter.

  CAN’T BE. NO ONE’S THAT OLD.

  “I was thirty-nine when it happened,” I continued. I put the cigarette down in the ashtray and began making a Manhattan. There would be no takers for it, I knew, but there’s comfort in the small ritual actions of the hands. “I’d been out hunting with five of my kinsmen. We knew we were close to the edge of another tribe’s territory, but we could smell the boar, and it had been too long a chase to go home empty-handed. There was only an hour or so of daylight left, and we had a ten-mile walk back to our people and the fires.”

  “What were you hunting with?” Caleb asked. He’d brought his recliner all the way up, and sat now with his knees under his chin.

  “Spears,” I said. “Bows and arrows. What you’d call slingshots. The ratio of projectiles to dead meat was pretty lousy most of the time. We had a phrase: ‘nuts and berries.’ It meant the less desirable of two options. It was what we ate when there was no meat.”

  Caleb, I could tell, wanted Mia to sit down. It was spoiling the act of listening for him, to have her on her feet, implying potential interruption. It was taking a little part of his consciousness away from the story, and he wanted to be immersed. His childhood really wasn’t very long ago.

  Mia felt it. Gave me a glance of complicity. Took the seat opposite her son, reclined it, laced her fingers on her midriff and crossed her long, slender legs. I felt Caleb relax. Aside from the pleasure of being told a tale he took his emotional cues from her. If she was at quiescent ease, so was he. Which added to her weight of responsibility. It was comforting to be getting all this so quick and easy from them, via mutually lowered guards. It had been a long time since I’d been among my own kind by choice—Justine’s recent species-shift excepted.

  “We got a boar,” I said. “A
big one. Probably two hundred pounds if you weighed it today. We trussed it and strapped it to the carry-pole. I can’t tell you how the feeling of warmth and goodness used to go between us when there was meat to bring home. Imagining the faces and the kids’ bellies stuffed and the women’s fingers and lips shining with animal fat in the firelight.”

  I had to pause. Balance. The memory was the edge of a sheer drop through my time. The fall would be everything. You know, Juss, I sometimes think that if I remembered everything that’s happened to me …

  “But we were attacked,” I said. “Twenty hunters from the other tribe. My kinsmen were killed. I was wounded, but I got away. Obviously they took the boar, too.”

  “Where were you wounded?” Caleb asked.

  “Guts,” I said. “A spear went straight through my intestines, destroyed my kidneys. I broke the shaft, but when I tried to pull it out I realised the head was barbed with teeth. The pain was unbearable.”

  “So how come you got away?” Reflex modern teen scepticism: Look for cowardice, lies, trickery. Things aren’t what they seem unless they seem shit.

  “I was lucky,” I said. “We were still in the forest, and darkness gathered quickly. I slipped them and struggled on for what felt like miles. It was so tempting to lie down and close my eyes. I was very cold.”

  It was a minor, separate fascination to Caleb that I was making the drink as I spoke. Sweet vermouth. Bourbon. Angostura bitters. There were maraschino cherries in a jar on the shelf—but I doubted we had an orange for the peel rub around the glass. Shame. Caleb would’ve been tickled by that.

  “It rained,” I said. “By the time I found the cave I was crawling on my hands and knees. I knew I was dying. I was hoping there’d be a big cat inside to finish me off. There was something in there, but it wasn’t a big cat.”

  “Your maker?” Caleb said.

  I strained the bourbon, vermouth and bitters over ice into a funnel glass. I was right: we didn’t have oranges. It offended my inner bartender, a tiny aesthetic pain. A missing piece. He lied in every word.

  “It was a good place to die,” I said, sliding the cocktail to my imaginary customer (I pictured a tired midtown businesswoman with fractured blue eye-shadow and a creased pinstripe skirt, shapely, aching calves, coffee breath, the day’s migraine of corporate jabber draining away in the first sip of the drink) and leaning on the counter on the heels of my hands. “It would have been a good place to die. The mouth of the cave looked west, out over the tops of the trees. On the horizon the last flakes of sunset like blood and gold. When I heard a sound behind me I thought the gods had answered me. He came close. I felt his breath on my neck. He said: ‘Answer me something. Do you want to live?’ To this day I can’t recall whether I answered yes or no. It didn’t matter. He said: ‘I’ve seen this place in my dreams. It’s a relief to come to it.’ Then he took me in his arms and put his teeth in my throat.”

  I was remembering the darkening land, those last flakes of light and the night coming down inside me, his drinking to the rhythm of my heart, to what felt like the rhythm of the land itself. It was such a thin, light-aired place between life and death. In it you could see the universe was like a frail smile.

  “When he opened his wrist and put it to my lips, I remember I said: ‘Why?’ And he answered: ‘Because someone must bear witness. My time is over. This is the last thing I can do. Now drink.’ So of course,” I said, smiling, feeling the tears coming again, “I drank.”

  Caleb had forgotten to smoke his cigarette. It had burned all the way down, and its ash had fallen on the carpet. I could feel Mia trying to make the emotional calculation. She was barely six hundred years old. There was, I knew, a determination in her to pass the thousand-year jinx—but twenty thousand?

  “What happened to him?” Caleb asked.

  I swallowed the tears. Blinked. Blinked. There’s no fool like an old fool.

  “I never saw him,” I said. “I crawled deep into the cave and slept. When I woke the next night, there were only the remains.”

  “What remains?”

  The other youth demand—for end-points. Prime movers and final destinations.

  “Not much,” I said. “I couldn’t see. It was still dark. Something like wet ash. I left the cave and went out into the night. I had a woman. Children. There was no going back. I knew that from the very beginning.”

  “And did you have to feed straight away?” Caleb asked—but Mia shook her head.

  “That’s enough questions,” she said. She, at any rate, could see or sense the state I was in. You’re a bit fragile …

  Caleb, snapped out of it, saw what had become of his unsmoked cigarette. “Oh,” he said. “Shit. Sorry.”

  “Sir?” Damien’s voice came over the PA. I picked up the phone by the bar.

  “Yes, Damien?”

  “Sir, we’re starting our approach. We should be on the ground in twenty minutes.”

  I turned to my guests. “Okay,” I said. “Seats upright, please. Fasten your seat belts. We’re landing soon.”

  59

  IT WAS OBVIOUS before the Caminata installation came into view that whatever had happened here, we’d missed it. The air (to noses of our refinement) stank—beyond the quiet base notes of meadow grass, gorse and rain—of explosives and gunfire.

  Something very bizarre had happened to me en route.

  We’d parked the car a quarter of a mile away on a chalk track that led off a rutted lane and made our way through a thin line of woodland up towards the ridge. A stream ran through a gully some thirty metres into the trees. Mia and Caleb went over it in a single leap, but I found myself compelled to wade. Not just the threatened unsteadiness in my pins (my body had decided to experiment with various anomalies and I’d decided to keep quiet about them) but a psychological necessity. A sort of dim curiosity about what the water would feel like, although I had no earthly reason for expecting it to feel like anything other than water. Fortunately, by the time I began to cross mother and son were far enough ahead not to see what happened.

  What happened was that after three or four paces, shin-deep, I became convinced that I was treading not on what were obviously—visibly—the rounded stones of the stream bed, but on the heads and bodies of dead people.

  I made it to the opposite bank and sloshed out, shaking, wondering not only what new doolally gimmick my brain was trying out, but also why the feel of the non-existent corpses underfoot reminded me of the old geezer I’d seen that night on the drive at Las Rosas, with his crutch and his bloodshot eye and his baffling bulletin that I was “going the wrong way.” Him and that wretched horse I’d had to shoot the night I went after Justine in North Vegas. I’d forgotten both of them until just now.

  Needless to say I didn’t mention any of this to Mia and Caleb when I caught up with them at the edge of the tree line.

  Now we lay on our bellies on the ridge with night binoculars trained on what looked like the human equivalent of a smoked wasps’ nest some three hundred metres away. Part of the building’s roof had caved in. There were detonation scars everywhere. The main doors had been blown clean off. Half a dozen dazed personnel moved around, manifestly not knowing whether to abandon what was left of their post.

  “She’s not here,” Mia said. Grudging satisfaction. She’d pulled her blonde hair back and bound it in a bun as hard as an eight ball, exposing her fine Slavic cheekbones and the superb whiteness of her throat. Had I not come along, she could have had a career as a model. Night shoots only.

  “Apparently not,” I said. I could feel her weighing up whether to take a feed from the shell-shocked victims still in the facility. They looked in no state to offer resistance. She was at least thirty hours early, but her recent travails had made an opportunist of her. The thirst was lifting its head in her, the red snake waking from a light (always light) doze.

  “We need one of them alive,” I said.

  “They’re not going to know anything,” Mia said. “She’s been taken out
by force. I’d say it was her pack, except …” She didn’t need to finish. I could smell it, too: along with the odour of werewolves was the inimitable perfume of our own kind. Vampires had been here.

  “Two different snatch teams?” Mia said. “That’s an unlikely coincidence.”

  “And yet still more likely than ours and theirs joining forces.”

  “How many do you think are left?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Stay here.”

  I went fast and low between the gorse bushes. I needn’t have bothered. Militi Christi vigilance had collapsed.

  Seventy metres. Fifty. Twenty-five. There were now only two guards outside the building. Take one out, grab the other. I readied myself for the last sprint.

  I must have made some sound when I fell, but, either deaf from the explosions or past caring, neither of the grunts heard it. The world swung up and went out. I lay on my side with my left arm trapped under me. Nausea. A rush that dipped me for a second into complete blackness. A moment needed when I came back to organise the rearranged geometry. Grass tickled my face. One huge trodden daisy head beamed at me sadly. I could smell wet earth, rabbit shit, wild rosemary. I retched, thinking, as I retched, of the idiom, as weak as a kitten. I thought, Yes, I’ve never considered the weakness of kittens properly, but that’s how I feel, as weak as a kitten. Briefly, I felt sorry for weak things everywhere.