Every now and then I look a mighty leap to get a broader view of my surroundings. I made better speed when I stayed earthbound, but it just wasn’t as fun.
As I drew near the country of the Ground Scratchers, I slowed my advance.
I flitted past the few scarce huts sprinkled along the perimeter of the strange tribe’s territory, those peculiar dwellings made of sticks and grass and stone. I could smell the bodies of the inhabitants sleeping inside, unwashed men and women, curled up with their children for the night. Some of the homes were surrounded by patches of exposed earth with food plants growing in rows within the borders. Other huts were adjacent to enclosures imprisoning sleeping animals: reindeer and more of those great, feathered beasts we’d seen the day we first entered the country of the Ground Scratchers. The gargantuan birds hunkered in dug out depressions in the dirt with their heads tucked under their wings, an outlandish scene.
The sight of the enslaved animals disturbed me. My people were hunter-gatherers, and though my tribe had lived off the bounty of the land, we were children of nature. We had no delusions of its mastery. We did not try to enclose it or possess it… or our fellow man.
These Ground Scratchers are grasping fools, I thought. What kind of madmen think they can possess the world?
Or perhaps I was the fool, and time had moved on without me.
My passage went unobserved. My silent movements did not even rouse the dogs.
I rounded the hill and looked down upon their primitive little city, impressed again by its breadth and the multitude of dwellings therein. The moon gleamed on the surface of the winding river beyond. Torches gleamed and flickered, so many it looked like the stars had fallen into the avenues of the village.
The task of finding the elders among all these homes suddenly seemed daunting. How could I find the old degenerates in this vast settlement without roaming from hut to hut? I was fast and silent, but eventually some sentry or servant would spy my movements, and then I would have to flee once again.
Then I thought of Aioa—beautiful, fiery Aioa—and I thought of Ilio-- his innocence lost forever-- and I gathered my resolve.
Holding my anger close to my heart, I descended unto the village of the Oombai.
2
Aioa’s face floated in my mind as I slipped through the dark avenues. I kept seeing her eyes-- the way they bulged from their sockets when Bhulloch’s servant yanked her head back and cut her throat. The shock and betrayal in them. I’d asked for her freedom in return for my assistance, but the Chief Elder had misunderstood. The chieftain thought I was literally asking for her life … and bent eagerly to the task. She thought I was a willing accomplice. That I’d called for her sacrifice. Her final horror-struck expression was etched forever in my immortal memory now.
I moved through the thoroughfares, slipping from shadow to shadow—an outlandish sight, I’m sure. A tall naked savage, white skin glowing in the moonbeams, moving too fast, too lightly to be human. My eyes engulfed the eldritch light, amber coals in the black hollows beneath my brow.
I avoided the dancing glow of the torches. When sentries passed my way, I slipped silently around the corner of a hut, or ducked behind a tree or bush or low stone wall.
Most of the village’s denizens were sleeping, but here and there a lodge was lively. I peeked through a crack in the wall and watched slave women dancing for a group of swaying drunkards. I spied on revelers and love-makers and gamblers. In one large hut, naked men covered in lard were wrestling inside a ring as others cheered them on. In another, a brutal man was whipping the naked back of an emaciated servant.
The servant cowered and begged for mercy, crying out each time the lash fell. His back was striped and bloody, but his pleading won him no respite.
This culture thoroughly confused and disgusted me. I could not fathom its dynamics. Why did the slaves not rise up against their brutal masters? Why did this bloodied servant not take a weapon and put it in his master’s belly? There were plenty of them at hand.
And I still had not found the lairs of the elders.
Frustrated, I paused to gather my thoughts. Squatting beside a shrub, I asked myself: Where would such men place their dwellings? It would be in a central location—one that afforded both comfort and security. The Elders would vie for prominence, esteem. They would own grand lodges. Dwellings large enough to house their servants, to secret their ill-gotten possessions, to lord their position of power over the other inhabitants of this country.
The central plaza, of course. Somewhere near there.
I rose and scuttled toward the center of the village. The concentric stone walls of the courtyard come into view, deserted at this hour of the night. Beyond that, perched upon a low prominence were several broad and well-maintained huts.
They were too large to be called huts, actually. They were, in size, more similar to the halls of the Viking people, a true miracle of modern architecture by the standards of that primitive era. Three broad lodgings, crowded close together, built of timber and thatch and stone, and decorated with hanging plants and great mammoth tusks that were inscribed with ornate imagery.
They were guarded, of course. A quartet of grim-looking men stood watch at the perimeter of the elders’ lodges, armed with spears.
I circled around, staying in the shadows, moving in a low-to-the-ground crouch. I slipped behind a tree, then flitted behind the timber posts of another animal enclosure.
But no--! This was no animal enclosure. I smelled human blood, human sweat, the high rich stink of human excrement. Rising a little, I peered toward the far end of the pen and saw a small group of slaves, huddled together beneath a primitive lean-to, wrapped in stinking hides.
The sight of the emaciated humans fueled my anger. My mind flashed on the image of Neanderthals, lying stiff and dead in my maker’s charnel pit. My lips split back from my fangs in furious indignation.
One of the sentries had wandered a little too far into the shadows. He was leaning on the shaft of his spear, his back to me, preparing perhaps to steal a little nap.
When I saw the opportunity, I struck.
I blurred through the unlit rear grounds, coming up behind the delinquent guard and clapping my palm across his mouth. Before he could react, I curled the fingers of my other hand into his neck and pulled out his throat.
I dragged him further around the corner so that his corpse would be well out of sight and lowered his still twitching body to the ground. Taking a moment to lick my bloodied fingers– I couldn’t help myself, it smelled so good!—I slipped quietly toward an opening in the wall of one of the Elder lodges. As silent as a spirit, I peeked inside, pushing the plaited hanging to the side with my fingers.
The dwelling was impressively large, with a multitude of furs and low, simple furnishings sprawled across the oiled dirt floor. Many of the room’s occupants were sleeping, but there was an old man sitting near the fire, smoking a long and ornately carved pipe. The wizened elder named Y’vort. He was rocking slightly, humming a song under his breath.
I cast my gaze about the room and saw the ancient man’s nursemaid, his son, sleeping on a nearby mat. Elder Gant.
I knew it would be a simple thing to slip inside the lodge and dispatch the two men, but I withdrew, allowing the hanging to drop back into place. Sneaking through the dark to the next hut, I peeked through a chink in the wall and spied the elder Ungst mating with a slave girl, his fat bearded face twisted with pleasure. He was thrusting against her brutally, his fingers digging into the flesh of her hips, making her cry out in pain.
The elder Hault must reside in the next dwelling, which was the largest of the three. I wondered where Bhulloch had slept. Maybe with the other two, Y’vort and his son. They were the eldest of the five.
As I started toward Hault’s lodge, however, a cry of alarm rose in the night: a man’s exclamation of surprise. I twisted around and saw one of the sentries blinking down at his dead fellow’s corpse. Before the guard could raise his eyes and fi
nd me in the shadows, I leapt toward the bough of a nearby tree. I vanished among the foliage with hardly a rustle and watched as the other sentries came running.
A few seconds later, half a dozen armed men came stumbling from Hault’s lodge, babbling and brandishing spears and knives. Elder Hault strode from his dwelling, pulling his cloak about his shoulders. He snapped orders at the disorganized mob in an imperious tone.
The armed men fanned out and began to search for me.
So they were expecting me, I thought. Or they feared my retribution. I wasn’t surprised.
I watched as the elder Y’vort tottered out and conferred with Hault. They spoke together in low voices. I craned forward to listen. I was beginning to grasp the language of the Oombai. The sounds had begun to congeal into meaning.
“Fallehn t’horn-- Blood Drinker—e’ei hobphen—tonight!” Hault murmured, his eyes flicking this way and that as he spoke, betraying his nervousness.
Y’vort nodded. “Yes! Yes! T’horn e’ei hemm trod ei’skii! I told you as much.”
Suddenly, the Elders jerked their heads in my direction, their bodies stiffening with alarm. For a moment, I saw their eyes drink in the torchlight. Their pupils shone, a dim orange glow.
I froze a little in shock.
The blood they traded for with my vampire brethren--! They must have drunk enough of it to alter them physically! Their senses were sharper than a normal human’s senses. I wasn’t expecting that.
As they howled for their guards, their gnarled fingers waving in my direction, I launched myself from the tree at them, snarling like a sabre-tooth cat. The tall elder named Hault threw himself to the ground with surprising speed, but ancient Y’vort was not so quick.
I landed a few feet away and seized the old man’s head in my hands.
“Call upon your goddess to save you now!” I challenged him.
As he mewled in terror, I twisted his head violently to the side. The moist crunch of bone within the wattled flesh of his neck gave me a thrill of satisfaction.
I let the wrinkled body crumple to my feet.
I expected the old man to be dead when he hit the earth, but the vampire blood he had drunk through the years had fortified him. Not enough to preserve his life. He didn’t heal.
For a time he lay twitching on the ground, his head twisted round in an unnatural position, his eyes glaring up at me, filled with hatred and pain. I was momentarily distracted by the grotesque sight. I pulled my gaze away finally, turned to kill Hault, but before I could move to seize him, a spear whooshed through the air toward me, and I was forced to contort my body backwards to elude it.
“Kill it! Kill it!” Hault wailed, lying prone on the ground with his arms covering his head.
The starved men and women in the slave pen were stirring. I heard their frightened murmurs, saw a couple of them peek through the fence rails at the nearby chaos. I wondered if any of them were Aioa’s sisters, but I couldn’t tell, not by just the eyes.
A dozen warriors were running my direction, streaming from all quarters. Two more spears left their hands and whistled toward me.
I launched myself into the air to avoid them. Landing on the thatched roof of Y’vort’s lodge, I ran to the far end—stumbling as the roof sagged beneath my bare feet—and then I leapt toward the central plaza.
I landed in a crouch, looked over my shoulder to make sure there were no projectiles flying toward me from the rear, then I ran.
I’d lost the element of surprise—a minor setback, by my reckoning. Of my enemies, only three remained.
And I would return with the dark to kill them.
Tomorrow night, I promised them silently.
3
“Thest! You’re all right!” Ilio exclaimed. He was sitting cross-legged by the fire he’d made, waiting for me in the clearing outside the entrance of our warren. He flew to his feet to welcome me, relief etched in his features.
“Of course I’m all right,” I smiled at him. “Did you think otherwise?”
He shrugged, embarrassed. “Who can know the future?” he asked. “I only know I do not want to be an orphan again.”
I hugged him and promised, “I will not let that happen.”
“Come sit with me. Tell me what happened,” he said anxiously.
We sat near the crackling fire. He’d made a good one in my absence. It could probably be seen by the warriors who pursued us on the plains, blazing as it did on the side of the mountain, but I was not worried about them. They were far across the grasslands and had not moved much nearer when I’d checked from the treetops on my return. I relaxed and watched the flames. The logs popped and hissed as the blue and orange tongues lapped over them. I could feel its heat tighten the surface of my cold, white flesh. It felt good.
The boy looked ethereal in the orange glow of the leaping flames, his skin smooth and shimmering. His curiosity was plain to see in those glittering blue eyes, so plain it almost made me laugh.
“Did you find us some clothes?” Ilio asked.
I shook my head. “Unfortunately, no. I was forced to retreat from the Oombai village. The Elders have a secret which caught me by surprise.”
“What is that?”
I quickly recounted my adventure. Ilio’s eyes grew wide as I told him the effect our brethren’s blood had wrought on the old men I’d sworn vengeance against. When I finished my tale, he said, “We should leave this country, Thest. Who cares what these people do? They’re all mad!”
Thinking of Aioa’s accusing last glare, seeing the boy’s white lifeless flesh, my countenance darkened with indignation. “I care, boy. Those old men have offended me. They have offended us both. They’re wicked and they must be brought to task.”
Ilio recoiled from my angry tone. “I’m sorry, Thest. I only worry for your safety. We are strong, but I know we can die. I see it in your eyes when you look at me. Your fear for me.”
I sighed. “Don’t apologize, Ilio. Your counsel is wise.” I looked to the south, toward the country of the Ground Scratchers, then chuckled, turning back to him. “You remind me of an old companion. I rarely took his advice either. It was a habit that often got me in trouble.”
“So we will leave this country?” he asked hopefully.
“Yes,” I answered. “Tomorrow night, I will return and kill those old men, and then we will leave.”
Ilio grinned, rueful at my stubbornness. “Then come and rest, father,” he said, rising. “You need to be refreshed when you return to your war.”
I did not reproach him for calling me “father”, though it troubled me. I rose and followed him into our earthen burrow. The sky was lightening, the horizon aflame. There were thick clouds drifting in from the north, promising rain. Ilio scurried in before me, then I squatted down and slid inside too. I closed our hole to the coming light and curled up next to my adopted child to rest, and though I thought my sleep would be slow in coming, my mind drifted away quickly.
I dreamed that morning.
I dreamed of the fiend who made me a vampire. I dreamed of the charnel pit and the mounds of dead Neanderthals therein. That pit was where he held me captive, where he stole away my humanity. In my dream, I was a man, and I was clawing at the slick stone walls, trying to climb, trying to escape the cavern full of cold, stiff corpses, but every time I managed to ascend a meter or two, the slippery limestone crumbled under my fingers and I fell back onto the lifeless, savaged bodies of his victims. I railed at the moon peeking through the entrance of the pit, frustrated and afraid. My terror felt real in my dream. Although the event had transpired in the far distant past, my dream that morning had an immediacy that convinced my sleeping mind that it was real, it was all real, and it was happening right now.
I rose to try the wall again, and that’s when his shadow fell across me.
The monster, my maker, dropped silently from the entrance of the charnel pit, his fur cloak spreading out like the wings of a great carrion bird. There was no place in the gourd-shaped pit to
run or hide. I could only throw my back against the slick wall and squeeze my eyes shut. I slid down until I was sitting on the gruesome floor of the cavern. It was only when I heard no other sound from the monster that I dared to peek out.
My maker was gone. In his stead, the Elders of the Oombai glowered.
The five old men stood in a semi-circle around me, their bodies bent and leathered by time. Bhulloch, Y’Vort, Gant, Ungst and Hault—all glared down at me with furious contempt. At their feet lay the bloodless corpse of my adopted son Ilio, his flesh white as snow, his eyes empty of all but a lingering expression of pain. The faces of the old men were masks of spiteful pleasure, and in each of their eyes, drowned in pools of black shadow, was a tiny, glowing moon, moist and silvery. Those terrible eyes were angled down at the corpse of my child, but as I sat shivering just a few feet away, they twitched in my direction, and I was frozen to my soul at the terrible hunger in them.
I feared, not for what they were, but for what they might become.
4
I awoke with the thought that I should arm myself. I could not know the extent of the remaining elders’ powers, and it would be foolish to attack them and their army without weapons and armor of my own. It was unwise to venture into their village last night, so naked and unprepared. I knew the limits of my own transformed body, but what tricks might those wily old monsters possess? What if they managed to restrain me? Could they drain me of my Living Blood somehow? Steal the source of my immortality?
I’d grown overconfident of my strength.
Tonight I must be prepared.
Thinking this, I turned my body over in our little earthen burrow and realized our retreat was slick and cold with mud. It had rained while we slept and water had seeped inside. A puddle had formed at the bottom, several inches deep. My feet were lying in the pool to my ankles.
The boy lay at my side in death-like repose, his black hair curling at his pale brow, his chest unmoving. It was always disconcerting to see him sleeping so still. Even his heart was silent, beating only once every few minutes, and weakly at that. It is the Strix which preserves us, not our human organs.
The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 2) Page 18