The Living Blood

by Tananarive Due

  “Uhm . . . ,” Jessica heard Fana struggling. “It’s . . . Shuh . . . Shuh . . . Oh, I dunno!”

  “Come on now, this isn’t difficult at all. You aren’t concentrating. Forget the bees.”

  “Shannon!” Fana said as if it had occurred to her suddenly. As much as Jessica had come to accept Fana’s mental abilities, it was still shocking to hear her daughter pull the archaic name out of thin air. Not for the first time, Jessica felt amazed that this child had come from her.

  “Yes. His name was Shannon.” Teferi paused for a moment, and Jessica wondered if he had forgotten the story. The bees’ drone drowned her.

  “Please go on,” Jessica prompted.

  “Yes. I hope you’ll bear with me. This part of my life, in some ways, is more painful to me than the events in Turkey.” Teferi took a deep breath. “In any case, I was settled in Ireland at the time. It isn’t proper for parents to have favorite children, I know, but Shannon may have been mine. I was with him and his mother for nearly twenty years, which was much longer than the Searchers had ever allowed me to remain in one place. So I knew him so much better! Shannon was intelligent, handsome, hardy. I watched him become a man, that rarest of gifts. His only downfall was his temper, which led him to fights. As a young man, he was severely wounded with a knife. This was the year 1795, and mortal medicine wasn’t nearly advanced enough then to treat him properly without infection. So, I opened my veins and applied my blood to his wound while he watched, much as you are doing at your clinic now. He healed, of course, but then he became inquisitive. His questions never ended. I told him as little as I could—one of our most sacred Covenants is No one must know—but I confessed my Life Gift, a foolish mistake. He begged me to make him as I am, but I told him that was impossible. Our other Covenant is No one must join, but I can admit to you that I loved Shannon so much that I would gladly have broken it if only I had known the ritual Khaldun had performed on me and my Life Brothers. But, unlike Dawit, I did not know the Ritual of Life. I did not have the choice Dawit had when he decided to prolong your life indefinitely, giving you eternal youth. I only promised Shannon I would be there for him forever, to help him with my blood when he needed it. Perhaps it is a promise I should not have made.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I could not honor it. The Searchers came in silence while we slept, not even allowing me to bid my family good-bye, and I was kept here at the colony. Twenty years passed before I saw Shannon again. And when I finally found him, he was embittered. To a mortal, as you know, twenty years is the heart of a lifetime. His mother, by then, had died. He himself had been debilitated by what I’m quite certain was syphilis. I healed him with my blood, of course, but his attitude toward me was much changed. So, what happened next broke my heart, but it did not surprise me.”

  Fana spoke up. “Teferi . . . what’s ex . . . sang . . . ?”

  “Exsanguination is a very unpleasant thing, Fana. It is the draining of one’s blood. And that is what my beloved son Shannon did to me.”

  Jessica gasped, forgetting the bees entirely. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, quite simply, that he knocked me unconscious while I slept. And as I awoke, I found that my son had hung me upside down by hooks in his barn. I protested and made pleas, and yet he cut my throat from end to end so my blood would drain into a bucket below. He did this three times, as I healed and regained consciousness. The process took two days, and I bled all the while. My own son did this to me, remember. He finally cut me free and took me to an alleyway, where he stood over me and said, ‘I’m sorry, Father.’ And he walked away from me.”

  Jessica couldn’t find the words to respond.

  “But . . . why did he hurt you?” Fana asked, intrigued.

  “For my blood, Fana. I’m sure he planned to keep the blood as long as he could to heal himself whenever he got sick. It might have retarded his aging process a bit. But I could not allow that. I hate to think of what my Life Brothers would have done to me had they known I was careless enough to allow a mortal to steal my blood. I had no choice but to slay him. When I knew he was drunk in bed, I set fire to his home and watched it burn to the ground. He—”

  “Okay, that’s enough, Teferi,” Jessica cut him off sharply. “I don’t know what in the world made you think you needed to tell a story like that in front of a child.”

  “I’m only telling her who she is.”

  “No one will hang her on hooks and slit her throat. And I don’t appreciate your trying to give her that impression,” Jessica snapped. Her jaw was trembling.

  For a moment, Teferi didn’t speak. When he did, his voice sounded more raw. “No, I pray not. It is a fate I would not wish on anyone. But please believe I did not share the story to shock you. With all my soul, I only want you to learn to understand the true nature of mortals.”

  “I do. I was one myself, remember?”

  “Yes, as we all were, but you must forget what you were. That is the first step on the Path. You are separate from mortals now.”

  Jessica was suddenly furious, and she realized it had been a long time since she had thought about the bees. She could still hear them, but they no longer mattered. “I think that’s the excuse you all make up for yourselves so you don’t have to help anyone, even though you’ve had this blood all this time. It’s just selfishness.”

  “No, Jessica, it is much more than that. It is preservation of our freedom. Remember what the gravity of death is to a mortal—this world and all they love ceases to exist for them. Their fear of death is the essence of who they are. Nothing matters to a mortal except his own existence. Shannon butchered me because he believed he had no choice. He surely thought little of his betrayal, and I have forgiven him. He was a mortal, and mortals cannot love us. How can they? Their jealousy is too strong. Those awful nights Shannon cut me open like a fattened calf, when I looked into his eyes, I did not see my son there. All I saw was desperation and loathing.”

  “I’m sorry that happened to you, Teferi, but that was just one terrible man.”

  “He was not always terrible. His fear of death made him so. Haven’t you ever witnessed mortals’ true nature?” Despite herself, Jessica couldn’t help remembering the face of the sick man at her clinic who’d threatened her with the table. “Of course you pity them, lovely child, but you can never do enough for them. And in return, they can only despise you. This is what I know.”

  The tunnel began to steepen downward sharply. Jessica’s breathing was already heavy from Fana’s weight, and she wondered how much longer she would be able to carry her before she would need Teferi’s help. Her forearm throbbed with a dull ache that sharpened with every few steps, but she didn’t want to hand her child over to this man, even for a minute.

  “You’re wrong,” Jessica said at last. “It doesn’t have to be like that.”

  “Loving mortals, Jessica, has been my own version of hell. As it will be for you.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Even as Jessica said the words, her eyes stung as if she were lying.

  “Dawit and I know this truth better than any of our other brothers,” Teferi said. “And Dawit can counsel you on this other matter, too: If you’re determined to love mortals, you must also be prepared to kill a few.”

  Kill a few! The way David had killed her friend Peter. And Kira. And how many others?

  Jessica’s body tensed, and she felt her abdomen shrink as if she’d been hit in the stomach. She must have reached the depths of an insanity all her own, winding through underground tunnels full of bees in search of a people like this, who had nothing but disdain for humanity and had long ago lost touch with their own. She’d initially been fooled by Teferi’s warm manner, but he was no better than the others, she thought. No better than David.

  How in the world could she have believed that people as soulless as these would have anything to teach Fana?

  “I don’t want to talk anymore,” Jessica said softly. “Let’s just walk, please.”

>   “You’re no longer afraid of the bees?”

  No, Jessica thought glumly. Suddenly, a cave full of swarming bees seemed like the least of her fears.

  18

  Jessica was stunned by the light. Even before Teferi announced that he would take off her blindfold, light was glowing through the fabric in a brilliant stream. And when he removed the strip of cloth, she had to press her palm against her eyes and squint hard. Was it midafternoon already? The day had suddenly turned sunny instead of overcast.

  “You tricked me. I thought we were still underground,” she said from behind her hand.

  “We are. Your eyes will adjust,” Teferi said.

  “It’s the sun!” Fana cried as her own blindfold was removed.

  As Jessica tried to venture tentative glances around her, seeing smooth, polished rock-faces, plants flowering near her feet, and that so-bright light, she was convinced Teferi must by lying. They weren’t underground anymore, they were back outside! Even the air was much fresher now than it had been in the tunnels, oxygen-rich and flowing freely.

  But, then . . .

  “Sweet almighty Jesus,” Jessica whispered as her vision began to clear.

  They stood in an arched entryway that was a dozen yards high and nearly that wide, adorned with detailed, colorful tile mosaics. Wide-leafed ferns and palms grew all around them, swaying gently in what honestly felt like a pleasant outdoor breeze. But it couldn’t be, Jessica realized. They were not outdoors. They were standing in a structure that felt like a mammoth cavern, except that its rust-brown walls were finished and smooth like marble, and beyond this entryway, where the light streamed so brightly, was a vast, bright open space she could not see from where she stood.

  “Go on. Step forward,” Teferi said. “You’ll have the best view of the colony from here.”

  Holding Fana’s hand, Jessica stepped slowly into the light. The arch led to a wide ledge with room enough for a large group of people to stand. Jessica’s heart began to pound from a sense of vertigo, because she hadn’t realized they were perched up so high. The stone railing before her was also as smooth as marble, and her hands clasped it so tightly that her knuckles cramped with pain.

  But she couldn’t help it. She needed a physical support to keep standing.

  Her high school’s honor society had taken a trip to Rome when she was a senior, an event made even more magical by the fact that the trip was chaperoned by her English teacher, Mr. Kaplan, whom she’d had a hopeless crush on since she was fifteen. There, in Rome, she’d visited the ruins of the Colosseum—and that was the only frame of reference she had to absorb the architecture spread out beneath her, which reminded her of the shape of the Colosseum. She stood at the top of an oval-shaped creation with three levels built from rock, each level lined with neat rows of thick columns and multiple arched entry-ways gilded by wildly growing plants, many of which Jessica did not recognize. Each level appeared to be at least two or three stories high.

  It was dizzyingly huge, and almost like a religious structure in itself, it was so pristine and carefully tended. And three levels below her, at the floor that was an oversize courtyard nearly the size of a football field, there was a thick tangle of rough, multicolored rock in shapes like the wild coral reefs that grew underwater off the coast of Florida, the endless spindles and arms jutting in multiple directions. It was like a jungle of trees without leaves, except that the trees were made of stone, and some of them looked as if they might be fifty feet high. Woven throughout those rock-trees like random rain puddles were springs emitting steady, wafting steam, with water so clear she could see the red-brown rock at the water’s bottom. The entire scene twinkled and winked in the bright light from above. Jessica longed for a camera, until she realized photographs could never capture the majesty of what was spread before her. And how could her memory fail to preserve a sight like this?

  Instinctively, her mouth agape, Jessica looked up. The light was nearly blinding, but she could just about make out a globe the size of a billboard—no, bigger. So big she couldn’t guess at its size. She heard herself murmuring, “My God, oh my God . . . ,” and she had no idea how long she’d been repeating the phrase.

  “Your eyes will hurt if you stare straight into it,” Teferi said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “It’s a sunlight replicator. We have some crops we grow here, and live animals for those who prefer the taste of organic meats. As a whole, most of us practice regular meditation and need very little sleep otherwise—perhaps two hours here and there—so our sun always shines, so to speak. Khaldun did not want us to forget sunlight, so he brought it to us.”

  “Wh-what is it?” Jessica heard herself ask.

  “Luminous gases. It’s our own design. That globe you see above is simply made of a form of glass, and the gases are constantly filtered in and out to maintain the brightness. We all keep miniature globes in our chambers, as a personal light source. You’ll see. The overhead globe is maintained constantly, but the smaller ones have a limited lifetime. Eight or ten years, usually. We’re always refilling them, it seems. Still, they’re a far better alternative to cruder power forms. We prefer the gases, which we manufacture in our House of Science.”

  “It’s . . . amazing,” Jessica muttered only half aloud, disoriented at how authentic the artificial sunlight was. She kept expecting to see a blue sky above her, but there was only the cave and the globe. Power companies would fall over themselves for an energy source such as this, she thought with wonder.

  “Oh, we can’t expose your world to our technologies,” Teferi said in a hush, breaking into her thoughts. “The simplest of them could change the face of it. It’s best that we live segregated as we do. Believe me, if we had any designs on the mortal world, it would be ours to take.”

  His last words, which reminded Jessica of something a sponge-faced alien would say in a sci-fi movie, pulled her out of the rapturous state that had overwhelmed her as she surveyed the impressive Life Colony. The beauty here was deceptive, she remembered. These people were aliens, she thought. And if they were so bent on protecting their privacy, there probably wasn’t much they wouldn’t be willing to do if they thought humankind was getting too close to them. That realization made Jessica wrap her arms around herself as she felt a breeze. The globe above gave plenty of light, but suddenly it didn’t seem to give much warmth.

  “It’s a whole city, Mommy,” Fana said, peering down at the colony through the railing.

  “Yes, sweetie, it sure is,” Jessica whispered, squeezing Fana’s fingers.

  “Our population is distributed almost entirely throughout what we call our six houses of learning. They aren’t literal houses, but they are chambers populated by students. Each house is led by a guide. The highest level, where we stand, is divided between the House of Music and the House of Meditation. On the second level, you’ll find the House of Mystics and the House of Science. Below, at the level just above our rock garden, we have the House of History and the House of Tongues. There is a wealth of space here for so few of us, as you can see, so some of the brothers also have very large individual chambers on one level or another, as I did before I moved to the House of Meditation to be near Khaldun. We are not bound to any particular house, but they are the center of our philosophy. Each house helps us learn the discipline we will need to complete our Rising.”

  “Where’s the people?” Fana asked, which was exactly what Jessica had been wondering. Impressive as this place was, it looked like a ghost town. Or a ghost coliseum. Except for the faint gurgling of the water so far below, the vast cave was filled with an oppressive, eerie silence.

  “Oh, you’ll meet others, I’m certain,” Teferi said. “Rarely is everyone here at once. The six Searchers are most often above, and anywhere from ten to twelve Life Brothers may be traveling at any given time, either on various sanctioned expeditions or simply to be to themselves. The rest of us are here engaged in our studies. Oh, and there are seven Higher Brothers who meditate nearly constantly,
and it’s not likely you would see them.”

  “You study all the time?” Jessica asked.

  “We have our diversions, of course,” Teferi said. “The rock garden. The hot springs. Climbing. Lucid dreaming. Intricate forms of dance, combat arts. You’ll see.” He motioned for them to follow, and he walked from the ledge back to the shadowed entryway, which branched into an open passage. “Come. We have a ceremonial hall, where I believe a meal is waiting for us. Khaldun asked the brothers to attend, but I do not know how many we can expect.”

  “But . . .” Jessica was hungry, all right, but she certainly wasn’t ready to be unveiled to the entire colony. She might never be ready for that. She felt humbled. Jessica was wearing traveling clothes—slightly grimy jeans, a University of Miami sweatshirt, and her Nikes—and she felt shabby and unworthy. She needed more than lipstick for an occasion like this. Why hadn’t she brought a regal African dress?

  “Please. This is Khaldun’s wish,” Teferi said.

  “I wanna see my daddy!” Fana whined. She gave her rag doll an exasperated shake.

  “We can hope Dawit will be there. Ritual is paramount here, however. As you are Khaldun’s guests, I will ask you to respect his wishes.”

  Meaning, Sorry, but you don’t have a choice, Jessica thought to herself. She was not simply a guest here, she reminded herself; she was, in effect, at these beings’ mercy.

  “Okay, but I’m a ve-ge-ta-ri-an,” Fana pointed out to Teferi. “No meat!”

  Teferi smiled at Fana in a way that was so endearing that it touched Jessica and made her forget her irritation and trepidation about being hustled straight to the dining hall. “Yes, and you’re a very precious vegetarian, at that,” Teferi said, brushing his hand beneath Fana’s chin. “No worries, empress. You are one of the guests of honor. You will eat only what you like.”

  • • •

  Jessica’s mother had always taught her two daughters to be conscientious about maintaining eye contact. As a product of the north-Florida “blackristocracy,” as Alex called it, Bea had been raised in a home where every table setting had two forks, two spoons, and two knives, and everyone was taught when and how to use them from the time he or she could eat. Bea had tried to re-create that upbringing with her daughters, making them society girls, even though the family was only a step away from food stamps for at least four years after Jessica’s father died unexpectedly when she was eight. Jessica remembered feeling as if she were in perpetual training for some imaginary debutante ball where she would one day be introduced to her dashing husband-to-be; it meant good posture, learning to walk with her toes touching the ground before her heels, speaking in sentences free of grammatical errors, firm handshakes, and above all, eye contact.