My captor watches me fumble with myself, his expression mercurial. He seems by turns amused and disgusted, then angry and embarrassed. When I rise shakily to my feet some time later, he does not move to restrain me. “You may roam about my lair freely,” he says when I glance at him questioningly, “but do not try to escape. The mountain is steep. You will fall to your death.”
“But what are you?” I ask. “I have never seen your kind before. And what is your name?”
“I am Bujune,” he says. “I am a blood drinker.”
“A blood drinker,” I repeat, and then: “Do you mean to kill me, like you killed my sister Atswaan?”
He stares at me for a long time without speaking. I see his eyes move to my breasts, my groin. Finally, he meets my gaze. He shrugs. “I do not know,” he says. “Perhaps.”
Then he lies back, and turns on his side toward the fire.
14
Zenzele’s memories blossomed in my awareness, unfolding in my mind like the petals of some exotic flower. Every moment, every thought, every sensory experience unfurled as if it were happening to me personally, and in their revelation, yet another deeper layer of experience, her soul an infinite inwardly curling corolla.
An immortal’s life... in all its entirety.
I hung in her arms, the taste of her blood still tingling on my tongue. Only a moment had passed since I sank my fangs into her neck, but in the illusory world of the Sharing, days, seasons, years shuttered rapidly by.
I aged as she aged, growing from a child to a gangly-legged teen, and from a teenager to the woman who held me, even now, tenderly to her breast. She held me, kissing me lightly on the forehead and cheek and lips as I experienced for the first time in my existence this terrible-glorious thing we call the Sharing.
Bujune was an ancient blood drinker. A babe if you were to compare him to my lifespan, but old by the standards of most of our kind. Many hundreds of years old. Tempted by the smell of blood from the Zul circumcision rite, he had come down from the mountain where he had lived for countless years in seclusion. He had stolen Zenzele, fully intending to feast on her blood, but was moved by her innocence and beauty. He healed her of the terrible wounds inflicted on her by her Zul sisters, but it was not kindness which motivated him. She evoked in him long dormant feelings of possessiveness and desire.
He was a powerful immortal, and not just physically. He was clever and stubborn and domineering. A cunning brute with impressive powers. He was not what we vampires call an Eternal, but only just. He might have persisted, even to this modern age, if he were not destroyed later by Khronos.
A vampire king commanding a great territory in central North Africa, he decided to keep the Msanaa child named Zenzele. He cared for her in his clumsy way, feeding her, looking to her safety. He was rough, and sometimes he injured her without meaning to, but he saw to her needs, and I-- I mean, Zenzele!-- felt her fear of him turn to respect, and later, as she matured, into a kind of reluctant affection.
Bujune was the Msanaa word for a male lion, and the name was certainly appropriate. With his great mane of frizzy dark hair and insouciant disposition, he reminded Zenzele very much of some indolent father lion, and she treated him as such. When she got over her fear of him, she waited on him hand and foot, more to have something to do than out of any great love for him. She forgave him for the violence he did to her adopted sister. He had explained to her the particulars of the curse that had befallen him, how it made him lust for the blood of living creatures, how terrible it was for him, and because of his misery, she took pity on him. She spent hours at a stretch babbling on about the things that concern young women. She braided his hair and made clothing for him. Sometimes she even made a game of provoking him, and if she sometimes got her ears cuffed for catching him in a bad mood, that was just the kind of thing that father lions did. Sometimes you got the tongue and sometimes you got the claw.
In the early days, he behaved in a paternal fashion toward his gangly young captive, but as she continued to mature, her feminine beauty aroused him.
He tried to put the strange feelings out of his mind at first. He had forgotten what it was to be a mortal man. Those feelings might have even frightened him a little because they had become so alien to him. But day by day-- or perhaps I should say “night by night”-- those feelings grew. He had jealously protected her, but now he felt the stirrings of other more primitive emotions. His thoughts bubbled with carnal images, memories of conquests from his former mortal life. Finally, one night, he could take no more of it. The fantasies tormented him so!
She was lying on her back beside the fire, trying to persuade him to carry her across the savannah, to help her find her long lost family. She missed them terribly, she said. She wanted to see them again. “I do not wish to leave you,” she reassured him quickly. “I like living with you, but I want to see if my mother and father still live. I want to see my brothers and sisters. They probably have children of their own by now!” She sat up to see if he was listening to her, and that was when he lunged on top of her. He pinned her beneath his massive bulk, and then he raped her.
His cold, massive organ ripped into her virgin maidenhood, but it was his perfidy which did the greater damage. His betrayal of her trust shattered any love she might have felt for him.
The rape was brutal, painful, and protracted, and though he used the living blood to heal the injuries that his passion had inflicted on her, she could not forgive him. She never forgave him.
After that, he took her whenever the desire stirred in him. She did not fight him and cry out, as she did that first brutal time, but she hated him. And that hatred grew each and every time he assaulted her. She hated him for taking what she might have freely given, if only he had waited for her to desire it as well. She might have been his lover, but instead she became his prisoner.
And when he made her an immortal, that was an act of rape as well.
Zenzele knew that her companion was a thing called a blood drinker, and she knew that it was something more than human. She had seen him feed. She had witnessed his great powers. When they moved periodically from one cave to another, he took her into his arms and flew in great bounds across the moonlit savannah. But she never coveted his powers. She did not want to become a creature like him: cold, inhuman, given to strange moods and violent behavior. She only ever thought of one day returning to the place where she was born, to her mother and father and all her squabbling siblings, of maybe even having a husband and children of her own someday. Bujune had told her once that blood drinkers were incapable of bearing children, and so she held stubbornly onto her humanity, refusing every offer he made of changing her into an immortal. When he finally decided that he was going to give her the Blood anyway, she revolted. She fought him with all of her strength, a strength doubled by her panic and outrage, cursing him, calling down the wrath of the spirits, but it was not enough.
He pried her mouth open and the black blood erupted from his gullet like an evil curse. It wriggled down her throat as if it were a living creature. She could feel it coil inside her guts, stilling her racing heart before spreading out through her extremities. She watched in horror and despair as the flesh of her hands hardened and grew as cold and shiny as her captor’s obsidian skin. She found her fangs with the tip of her tongue, and wiped tears from her cheeks that were no longer the tears of a mortal woman.
“Why?” she sobbed, then louder: “WHY?”
Even her voice had changed! It was no longer the voice of a mortal-fleshed woman. It had become the ear-shattering wail of a woman-shaped goddess. “I offered you companionship, and you’ve taken my very soul. You’ve taken everything from me! Now what is there for me to live for?”
He had scowled at her, incapable of understanding why she was so angry and despairing. Now they could be together forever. She would never fall ill, never grow old.
“Why do you rage at me, Zenzele?” he asked. “I have delivered you from death and sickness. I have made you my
equal. I have done this out of love.”
“Love?” she shrieked. “Love? If you truly loved me, you would have released me long ago! All you’ve ever thought of were your own needs, your own selfish desires. You say you’ve done this out of love, but love could never spawn the hatred that I feel for you now. In fact, I despise you!”
They fought-- a long and terrible battle that threatened to send their mountain lair crashing in pieces to the earth below-- but he was strong, and he subdued her, and so she continued on, for untold ages, hostage to another’s desires.
Until they heard of Uroboros, the city of the blood gods.
They learned of the fabled city from a passing blood drinker.
The vampire’s name was Uruk. He was a strange creature, with skin as pale as sun-bleached bone, long straight shining hair and eyes the color of the daylit sky. Their paths crossed by chance one night while Bujune and Zenzele were out hunting for blood. After a tense standoff, the two parties made peace, and he came to live with them for many moons, learning their language, dazzling them with endless tales of the exotic wonders he’d beheld in his travels.
Uruk spoke often of Uroboros, the city of the blood gods. It was a vast settlement, he said, carved from the stone of a great smoking mountain, and populated by hundreds of blood drinkers just like them, blood drinkers who had come from the furthest corners of the earth. There, mortals worshiped their kind as deities, and willingly offered their blood to propitiate the appetites of their masters. This city, he said, was ruled by a god who called himself Khronos, an eternal being who had great knowledge and magic powers. Khronos claimed to be the father of their race, Uruk attested, and standing in his presence, one was hard pressed to doubt the powerful being’s claims.
Bujune was very curious about this land called Uroboros, and more than a little excited by the thought of being worshipped by mortals-- fed willingly from their very veins, Uruk had said! It appealed to his ego, and his lazy disposition.
It wasn’t long after Uruk tired of their company and moved on that Bujune grew restless, and they journeyed north to see this legendary place.
15
How much more tangled shall the web of this narrative grow?
I fear it is too much already, all these frayed and wagging threads. My life’s remembrances, the experiences of my soulmate, my latter day machinations... Prithee, bear with me a little longer, my dear readers, for I fully intend to weave them all together, and make of them one complete tapestry before this tale is told.
But let me return to Bujune and Zenzele for a moment before we proceed with the next-- the penultimate-- chapter in this, the third installment of my memoirs.
Bujune and Zenzele traveled to the city of Uroboros.
Now I do not wish to overshadow my own adventures there, so try not be frustrated if I gloss over the details of their experiences. I will say this: the denizens of Uroboros took them in, and being the first immortals to come from the continent now known as Africa, they were welcomed with much fanfare and curiosity. Khronos was unusually taken with the vampire Zenzele, being the beautiful proud warrior-woman she was-- and still is to this day. He was so enamored of her, in fact, that he destroyed Bujune within moments of tasting Zenzele’s blood.
He did not even Share with Bujune. When they were summoned to his court for his blessing, as all new arrivals must do in Uroboros, Khronos sipped delicately from Zenzele’s wrist. His eyelids fluttered, a soft sigh escaped his colorless lips, and then he turned and struck Bujune’s head from his shoulders, sending it smashing into the wall on the far side of the great chamber.
Bujune’s head struck the wall with enough force to shatter into a million glittering particles. All the courtiers who were gathered there that day scrambled out of the way, shocked by their ruler’s sudden violence.
If he had been a true immortal, an Eternal, even an injury as grievous as that would not have been enough to kill the ill-fated Bujune. It would have disabled him, but he would have survived. He might even had healed without much psychological trauma, if his head were returned to his shoulders and he was given enough blood to drink. But in his creation, Bujune had fallen short of true godhood, and when his head was struck from his neck, the Strix that resided within him was unable to repair the sudden and catastrophic damage.
Bujune fell to his knees, every muscle churning beneath his dark and glossy flesh. Black tendrils erupted from the shattered stump, whipping wildly in the air. The immortal courtiers gasped or cried out in horror at the sight of those madly wavering pseudopodia, or did so moments later, when the Strix withdrew and devoured Bujune from within.
Zenzele fell back in surprise when Khronos decapitated her master. She watched in stunned disbelief as Bujune’s massive form began to shrivel. She put her hand over her mouth as chinks zigzagged down his chest and shoulders and his left arm snapped off and fell away to twinkling dust.
Bujune’s torso keeled forward, separating from his pelvis with a loud crackling sound. It hit the floor with a dry crunch, bursting into granules no larger than flecks of sand.
His legs and pelvis remained upright a moment longer, still shriveling, the last bits of drying Strix wriggling upon his vertebrae, and then Khronos lashed out with one foot, sending the man’s lower half swirling across the floor.
Zenzele watched with fatalistic detachment as Khronos ground the last of Bujune beneath his heel, thinking that she would join her maker in the afterlife momentarily, or worse, be bound to the will of another jealous man.
Instead, Khronos turned to her and held out his hand.
“Rise, Zenzele,” he said. “I have freed you from bondage.”
Trembling, frightened half out of her wits, incapable of comprehending even the concept of her freedom, Zenzele took his hand.
And so she became a free woman, and master of her own house.
16
Because their god king favored her, Zenzele was courted by the most influential clans of Uroboros, but in the end, she decided to remain clanless. Her maker was gone, she was a sovereign being, and that was how she intended to remain: mistress of a clan of one, and beholden to no other creature, save the one who had freed her from her maker.
As for Khronos, he made no demands on her save one: that she do as she pleased.
Her happiness gave him great satisfaction.
17
So what is left to tell you, my readers? That she had a brief and unsatisfactory affair with the blood drinker Palifver some time before our paths chanced to cross. That she dreamt of me long before I surrendered to her that snowy night on the mount. That she had been searching for me without knowing it, driven by her inexplicable intuition, since the fall of the Oombai. That she had subtly manipulated all of us to protect me from the rancor of her companions. From my own ignorance.
My beautiful Zenzele, my soul’s mate, forgive me for the indiscretions I have and intend to set to print-- here in the pages of my memoirs!
Better yet, come to me, even if my confessions have moved you to righteous fury, and save me from this terrible course that I have set myself upon.
You must know by now what I intend to do.
Zenzele, my love!
18
Gently, I pushed away from her. I stood on my own two feet. My mind was reeling, my body weak and trembling. The taste of Zenzele’s blood lingered on my tongue. It lingered in my mouth like her memories lingered in my mind: foreign, alluring. For a moment, I felt as if I were two distinct and separate beings. I was male. I was female. I was Gon. I was Zenzele. It was a maddening sensation. I shook my head, trying to clear it of this disorienting duality.
So this is the Sharing, I thought.
It was terrible and sublime, both at the same time.
I took in my surroundings, feeling as if I’d been cast adrift in time. What strange shores have I been swept upon this time? I wondered, and then the disturbing thought: Is this another memory, and if so, whose?
“Thest?” Zenzele murmured. There
was amusement in her voice, but concern, too. “Are you all right?”
“That is not my real name,” I said.
Too loud! Why am I shouting?
She was quiet a moment, then asked, “What is your real name?”
It was hard for me to look at her suddenly, she was so beautiful. Is this why men turn their eyes from the faces of their gods?
“The name my father gave me when he delivered me from my mother’s womb... is Gon.”
I looked at her breasts, the snow drifting silently toward the ground. The trees. The sky. Anything but her face!
“Gon,” she said, as if tasting the word.
“It is my secret name... my true name. I share it with you because I love you.” She opened her mouth to protest, and I insisted, “Yes, I love you, Zenzele!”
A shadow passed before her eyes, and because I had lived her life, I knew the fear that cast that shadow.
“I love you without condition,” I said, stepping toward her. Careful! Move as if she is a hare and might bolt at any moment! “It is yours to do with as you will.”
She regarded me silently for a moment, and then she grinned, her eyeteeth very sharp and white. “I have only shared my blood with you. I have not released you from your vow, beautiful man,” she said.
Her bare feet crunched very softly in the snow as she closed the distance between us. She stood on her tiptoes, put her arms around my neck. “You are my bound servant, until I see fit to release you from the bargain we have struck.”
“Is not the master also enslaved?” I asked teasingly. “A tether must be fixed at both ends. By knot or by fist.”
The Oldest Living Vampire In Love (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 3) Page 32