Though much of my past was still a mystery to me, my mind had healed enough that I remembered my powers, and I took full advantage of them. In fact, I reveled in them.
I watched, and when Korg stepped away from the fire to piss after an hour or so, I snatched him away. He only took a few steps from the safety of the group, but it was enough.
The speed at which I bolted toward him rendered me invisible to their gaze. It’s not a hard trick to pull off for a vampire like me, especially at night. The men standing guard would have seen less than a blur. To their eyes, it would have looked like had Korg simply melted into darkness.
The force that struck the man as I flew down and snatched him from his feet knocked him unconscious. I bound into the air with the unconscious Mammoth Hunter in my arms, the cold tundral wind blasting across my cheeks. I could hear his companions crying out in horror and confusion behind me, but I ignored their loud dismay. My mind was not yet whole. Because of that, I was no more compassionate than the beast who made me a vampire. I thought only of the need inside me. The Hunger, and its satiation.
I landed with a thump and threw the unconscious Mammoth Hunter on the ground. My violent abduction had bruised him. His fine beaded clothes hung from his limbs in tatters. His flesh was purpling where my fingers had sunk into him. Blood trickled from one nostril.
I leered as his eyelids fluttered, my mouth watering for him, my fangs exposed. He stirred, then opened his eyes and looked at me, confused. Seeing my sharp-toothed grin, he scrambled away with a cry.
How cruel I was with him that night! How like my maker! It shames me to recount it.
The Mammoth Hunter named Korg was a brave man. After scrambling out of my reach, the burly hunter vanquished his fear and pulled a stone blade from his breeches. He leapt to attack me, uttering a warrior’s cry, a deep-chested challenge. Laughing in mockery, I grabbed his wrist and snapped the bones in his forearm. His blade tumbled from his spasming fingers as bony shards breached his flesh, a bloody eruption. He howled in agony, clutching his broken arm, and I stepped toward him and knocked him to the ground. He shouted as I fell upon him, striking my ribs and my back with his fist. I pushed his chin up with my head. My jaws stretched wide. With one quick lunge, I bit into the flesh of his throat.
But not too deeply--!
I wanted to relish this kill. Holding his head by his hair, I fed on him. Slowly. I savored every spurt. I gulped and sighed. In his last moment, his fist flattened out on my back and it was almost like he embraced me… embraced death. The Mammoth Hunter murmured something softly. I’m not sure what it was. I was too enraptured in the feeding. He sighed, and then his heart fell still. His palm slid down my smooth white back, lifeless, and then his arm rolled into the grass.
I fed upon him a while longer, then I reluctantly withdrew my fangs from him. I rose to my feet and swayed, my body flushed and tingling, my cock engorged. I wiped the blood from my lips and chin with the back of my arm and then licked the blood from that, too.
I was tempted to return to the camp and take another. I might have done it, if not for the memories crowding in my skull.
My head throbbed with the hunter’s blood. I could feel it inside me, repairing the cells of my brain.
Flashes of my former life—Nyala, sweeping aside the flap of our wetus, young but imperious, demanding that we take her as a wife. Eyya, embracing Brulde and I in the reeds beside the river. Eyya and Nyala both, laughing so hard they had to cling to one another to stand as Brulde and I bounced around our tent, all six of our children riding on our backs. I remembered Brulde looking at me and laughing as we squatted beside a campfire. We were eating venison, the two of us out hunting in the mountains, as a light snow drifted down around us.
Overwhelmed, I staggered away in the dark.
Nyala, fighting with her sisters. Eyya, suckling our babies by the fire. Brulde, practicing with his bow.
Where are you?
I tripped and fell. Eyes squeezed shut, I crawled on my hands and knees.
Brulde and I, naked in the river, splashing with our sons in the sunshine, scrubbing them with silty mud. Our group family, tangled in our sleeping furs, making love. All the babies asleep. Slick, warm flesh under my lips, in my hands, sliding tight and wet upon my cock.
I think I knew it then, where they were, what was past and what was present… but I could not accept it. My heart cowered from the revelation. I shook my head, trying to deny it, but there it was, in all its horror. The truth. The rest of my lost memories. I fell on my face and clawed at the earth and grass beneath me. My cheeks were wet with tears.
Dead. They were all dead. A hundred years dead. A thousand years dead.
No! I thought, shaking my head. No, they’re still alive! They’re waiting for me to come home!
I rolled onto my side, still denying, still shaking my head. I brought my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them.
5
“Imagine the pain,” I said to the man duct taped to the chair in my apartment. “You wake with no memories. You don’t know where you are. You don’t even know who you are. Your body is smashed beyond all recognition. You are crippled. Monstrous. But then a miracle occurs. You are healed. One by one, your memories return, and they are good memories, memories of love and pleasure. You are excited, overjoyed. You see a path that leads back home, back to the loved ones waiting there for you, their arms open in welcome.
“And then you realize, like the fictional character Rip Van Winkle, that the world has passed you by while you slept.
“I did not return to my valley. I never have. Not in the flesh. I return to it in my memory. I return to it again and again, even now, thirty millennia later. I watch them from afar, much like I did so long ago, when I was first transformed into a vampire. I watch from afar as my beautiful wives and my quiet, enduring husband grow old and die. I wish I had gone to them then, cold and white and evil as I am, but I did not—I could not—return to their side. I had become a monster, and I did not trust myself to resist the lure of their warm, nourishing blood. I retreated to a cave like a monster in a fairy tale and watched them from a distance, undying, ageless, and now I remembered it all. Lying there in the tundra, my memories tortured me.
“I remembered how time took my lovers from me, one by one, how I flew down to the village and collected their remains. By then, the people of the river called me Thest-Un-Mann, which meant “the ghost who is a man” and I brought their bodies, one by one, to the cave to keep me company. I buried them there, and with me they remained, for decades, for hundreds of years, I do not know how long I resided there, but they were my only companions through that long epoch of self-imposed exile. I was the ultimate hermit. God of the recluses. I only left my mountain when disaster threatened my people.
“I remembered the ages that passed, as my children and my children’s children grew up and then succumbed to time. I remembered how the world grew cold and my people forsook our valley, how the glaciers spilled over the northern mountains until all that remained was ice, and when I could bear my solitude no longer, I went down to that ice and cast myself into a deep and lightless crevasse.
“There was no going home, I realized. Everything I knew was dust. The ones I’d loved the most were ancient bones in a distant and long abandoned cavern.
“I mourned them afresh, lying in that distant tundral steppe. I cried for them all through the night. The pain accompanied me even into the daylight hours that followed, as I slept in the shallow fissure in the dry creek bed. I dreamed of Eyya and Brulde and Nyala, and woke with my vile black tears crusted upon my cheeks.
“I took the young Mammoth Hunter named Hammon that night.
“I found the survivors many miles away, having abandoned their camp. They were fleeing home. They were jogging south through the starlight when I caught up to them.
“I took Hammon from their ranks without a sound and dressed myself in his clothes after draining his body of blood.
“Asha
med of my gluttony, I decided to spare the boy and the wizened old man. I had come, at last, to think as my true self, with all my mind intact.
“Yes, I would let the boy and the old man live. I was not like the monster who had made me into a vampire.
“With no home to return to, and no glacier to throw myself in, I started walking south, parallel to the two surviving Mammoth Hunters. I was not stalking them. South merely seemed as good a direction as any other, and their distant presence was comforting to me.”
6
When I woke the following evening, the sun a squashed and bloody thing in the western sky, the constant wind of the steppes carried to my sensitive ears the sound of a child’s weeping. Feeling ashamed that I had wrought such terror and deprivation on another soul, I turned my back to that distant lamentation and ordered my legs to carry me away. There was nothing I could do to atone for my crimes, not to this group of unlucky hunters-- save to spare the survivors any further harm.
But after a few steps, I faltered. Why was the boy crying so inconsolably? Why was his voice the only voice I heard riding on the wind?
Reluctantly, I turned and followed the sound of his grief.
I found the crying child sitting beside the old man. The boy’s legs were crossed, his head hanging. I crouched to look at him, watched his shoulders tremble up and down as he mourned the fallen elder.
The ancient Mammoth Hunter was lying on his back in the grass. Even from a distance, I knew the old man had passed on to the afterlife. The ancient one’s body was cold and gray. His eyes were rolled up in their sockets. No steaming breath stirred the chill night air from his blue and unmoving lips.
Yes, he was gone, and out of love, the child had folded the old man’s arms across his chest, lingering to weep at his side, one of his hands placed lightly on the old man’s belly.
Even as I felt pity for the boy-child, my appetite for his blood gnawed at me.
You should go, I counseled myself. Better to leave him to his fate than tempt your blood-lust with his company.
I knew he would not survive any attempt on my part to assist him. Eventually, my hunger would win out, and I would take him.
Yet, either way he would die, I argued with myself. Look at him! He cannot survive here in this cold and desolate waste. With no elders to look after him, he was doomed. Isn’t it better to make the attempt and fail than to slink away like a coward?
I don’t know why I went to him. I don’t know whether my motivation was pity or guilt. Perhaps I was simply lonely, having realized I had no wives and children to return to.
I try to be noble, but I am a selfish creature at heart, so perhaps I desired a companion with whom to share my pain and loneliness with. It was probably a stew of all those motives, but regardless of the reasons, I finally went to him.
But before I did, I took a handful of earth and rubbed it on my shining flesh. I did not want him to know I was the fiend who’d taken his family from him. The single time the boy laid eyes on me, I was a crushed and hissing monster, fused to stone with a tree growing out the middle, an inhuman thing, a fearsome earth spirit. I had healed, but I did not want to startle him with my twinkling white flesh. I wanted him to think I was a man who’d crossed his path by coincidence. He was young. He would accept my arrival as good fortune.
As I approached in the moonlight, I whistled a quiet tune, giving him time to hear me. I walked as a man walked, thinking cleverly to pass near the boy, not come at him directly.
I heard his weeping fall silent. I heard him listen to my whistling. He’d gone as still as a hare, fearful of the fox, waiting in terror, I’m sure, for some demon to come flying out of the dark to claim him.
I passed him at a distance and continued on. As I passed, I hummed a song I once sang for my children. It was a song about young rabbits playing in a field, seeing who could hop the highest. It was one of my kids’ favorite songs. Whenever I sang it, they would scramble to their feet and start hopping, trying to out-jump one another.
After a short distance, I stopped and gathered tinder to make a campfire. It was a quick, easy chore. I had no flint to make sparks, so I found a couple pieces of wood to rub together. I employed a bit of my superhuman speed and the wood promptly burst into flames. Not my best trick, but gratifying. I built the fire up as large as I could, using what wood I could scrounge in the immediately vicinity, and even some freeze-dried mammoth piles. They were good, if redolent, fuel.
After a while, I sensed the boy approach. I heard his cautious movements as he circled my fire.
Smiling pleasantly, I sang another song my children once favored, a song about a magic deer that jumped into fires to feed hungry children. The smell of the boy’s blood was tempting. I wanted chase him down and chew his neck open, but the blood of my last kill was still warm inside my flesh, and I was able to wrestle the blood-thirst down. It was actually a little easier than I thought it would be, now that I had made the decision to fight it.
I could hear his breathing, the rapid beating of his heart.
After a time, I curled up near the fire and feigned sleep.
It was good to lie near a fire as a man would lie. The brisk wind of the steppes tossed the flames of my campfire one direction and then another. The tongues the fire flapped and twisted. Sparks spun away into the night sky, orange embers, flaring for just an instant before dying away.
I watched the flames whip. I watched the moon creep slow as a snail from one end of the heavens to the other. Moonlit clouds drifted, restlessly changing shape, like foam in the rapids. I finally did sleep then, like a real mortal man. I dreamed I was a boy, helping the Neanderthals fish near the bank of our river in the valley. The big Fat Hand Stodd was there, my youthful hero, so strong and careful of me. I was just a little boy from a neighboring tribe, no kin of his, but he always treated me kindly, and he never let me come to harm. “Grab it quick, Little Worm, before it flaps away!” he called to me.
I snapped awake as the boy approached.
I heard the whisper of his feet in the grass. The thud of his heart. I smelled the fear in his sweat.
I didn’t move. I lay as if in slumber.
Finally, he called to me in the tongue of his people. “Utt! Ne n’ghoi? Utt!”
I sat up abruptly, as a mortal man would sit up, startled from his sleep. Though I knew exactly where the boy stood, I pretended to blink into the surrounding darkness, confused and a little frightened. I’d picked up some of his people’s language in the last few days, so I called out in his tongue: “Ne w’ae? Ne st’oh?” which roughly translated as: “Who is it? Who’s there?”
The boy crept into the circle of dancing firelight, pointing a spear at me. He was small, thin, with a round face and large, worrisome eyes. It was probably those eyes which preserved his life in the days that followed. They reminded me tremendously of the eyes of my companion Brulde. Large and slightly bulging, a blue-gray color, and full of nervousness, always looking out at the world as if something large and hungry was about to pounce.
And who knows? Maybe this boy-child was a descendant of my companion Brulde? Our people had abandoned our valley when the glaciers returned, so very, very long ago. Perhaps Brulde’s descendants had flourished, even while I slept in my tomb of ice.
It was certainly possible this boy was a great-to-the-nth-degree grandchild, that our progeny had bred with the Mammoth Hunters. I did not know what became of our descendants after they abandoned the valley.
Not then, anyway.
I put my hands up, showing him my empty palms, then nodded apprehensively toward his weapon.
Seeing my unease, the boy lowered his spear. He said something I did not understand.
I shook my head, lowered my hands. I looked him up and down sympathetically.
“What’s your name, boy?” I asked, in the tongue of the River People. “Are you cold? Come, warm yourself by the fire.”
The boy narrowed his eyes, watching me warily. He didn’t understand the language
of the River People, didn’t like my foreignness.
I smiled and gestured for him join me by the fire, which he did, but his big, careful eyes didn’t stray from me for a moment, and he sat well out of my reach, the shaft of his spear lying across his thighs. He pulled the fur-lined gloves he wore off his hands and held his palms up near the fire. His hands, I saw, were trembling from the night chill.
“Thest-Un-Mann,” I said, tapping my chest.
He stared at me fretfully, then his shoulders fell and he tapped his chest and said, “Ilio.”
I smiled again, careful not to expose my fangs. “Thest-un-Mann. Ilio.” Gesturing from me to him.
He finally smiled-- faintly, hesitantly-- back at me, then repeated my gesture. “Ilio. Thest-un-Mann.”
I chuckled and nodded. There was not much else we could say to one another. Though vampires are quick at adopting unfamiliar dialects, my mind had not been my own those first few days I was stalking the Mammoth Hunters. I was little more than an animal until the cursed blood repaired my mind. I had paid little attention to the sounds the hunters grunted at one another. For now, we were divided by ignorance, and could only sit and eye one another suspiciously.
I gestured that I was lying back down and he nodded, still warming his hands by the fire. I lay on my side and watched him across the fire. The terror that sprang to his eyes every time a sound arose in the darkness made me feel very ashamed. I was the cause of that fear. I had killed all his companions save one, the old man, and the ancient hunter Elk had probably died because of me as well, their fearful flight overtaxing his ancient heart. Now here I was, lying on the ground across the fire from the boy, a deceiver as well as a destroyer. Could I ever atone for so many offenses?
The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 2) Page 7