“If Ilio were here, he could learn their tongue easily enough,” I said one morning as we prepared to sleep for the day. I went on to explain how the boy, my first vampire child, could absorb the memories of the mortals he fed from, including the languages they spoke.
“It is a kind of Sharing,” Zenzele nodded. “It is a rare gift, to hear the thoughts of your mortal victims. Some say it is a curse. Blood gods who possess this gift often go mad.”
“Perhaps one of us has this gift,” Eris spoke up. “I have fed from a mortal, but my tribesmen have not. One of them may have this power.”
So far, the rest of the Orda had only fed from animals. Hares. Goats. The odd predator.
“We should feed from one of the mortals tonight, see if one of us has this gift of Sharing,” Hammon said.
I was glad Hammon had suggested it. It was what I had been thinking, but I did not want to put it forward myself. Zenzele flashed a look at me as I nodded, stewing in my own shame. Her look said, You will have to rid yourself of this reluctance to kill if you ever hope to defeat the God King. And then I was ashamed of my squeamishness. She was right, of course, but it didn’t make me feel any better.
The following evening, just after moonrise, we took one of the nomads, an adult male standing the night’s watch. We dragged him away from his camp, out into the deep desert where his cries could not be heard, and then the Orda fed on him.
The Orda circled the struggling man like hyenas around a kill, tearing at his clothing, biting into his flesh. They even sounded like hyenas, laughing, giddy with his blood, their chins and teeth red and dripping. The mortal fought until the end, his eyes wide and bright with terror, but it was over quickly.
Our gambit was a success.
Neolas had the gift.
Moments after he fed, Hammon’s younger brother rocked back on his knees, eyes closed, and exclaimed, “I can feel his thoughts inside my mind! His whole life!”
He swayed there on his knees, blood still dripping down his chin and chest, eyes closed in the orgasmic pleasure of feeding on human blood. Black tears, streaked with red, coursed down his cheeks. The Sharing always engenders a powerful simpatico—even the lesser Sharing that occurs from drinking a mortal’s blood.
Neolas looked down at the dead man, and his body began to quake. “Te-Han!” he said gutturally, and then he put his forehead on the dead man’s chest and began to cry hoarsely. His tribesmen stared at him as if he had sprouted wings.
Zenzele was right again, I thought. It is a curse.
I thanked my ancestors I did not have to Share the thoughts and feelings of my victims. I did not think I could bear it.
“Do you have it?” Zenzele asked, after he had mourned for a while. “Can you speak his tongue?”
Neolas nodded shakily, struggling to maintain his composure. He gazed at the dead mortal as if the man had been his brother. He wiped the blood-streaked tears from his cheeks and licked them from the side of his hand. “I have it,” he said with a hitch in his chest. “I have all of him. Here. In my mind.” And he touched his temple with a finger.
“Then you must Share him with us,” Zenzele said. There was no pity in her voice, no compassion, but her tone was not cruel either. It had to be done and that was all.
He nodded and held out his wrist.
He passed his wrist to all who were present: Zenzele and I, Hammon and the rest of the Orda. Bhorg and Goro had not come with us. They had gone into the mountains to hunt. They would Share with him later.
When Neolas held his arm out to me, I hesitated, dreading the rush of foreign memories that came with the Sharing, the momentary loss of identity, then I gashed the delicate veins running through his inner wrist. His flesh had healed over while I wavered.
I sucked the living blood from the gash I had made in his flesh, shuddering as the Orda’s memories fell through my mind like a shower of silver raindrops. And there, mirrored in the Orda’s memories, were the life experiences of the mortal he had drunk from. They were dimmer, an image reflected on the surface of rushing water, and I had to strain to catch them, for Neolas’ memories were much brighter and more intense. But at last I had the mortal’s thoughts, and I absorbed the language and customs and unique mythology of the desert dwellers he was born of.
They called themselves the Han, which was also what they called the desert mouse here in this unforgiving land. They were a clever and resourceful people. They had no gods, but they did believe in spirits, good and bad, and a thing they called Ken, which was a sort of spiritual accounting system. If a man was kind and generous and brave, his spirit grew bright and strong, and he became a protector of the tribe after he died. If a man was wicked and petty and cowardly, his spirit shriveled and grew dark, and he become a demon, a source of bad luck and sickness. The Han knew of the blood gods, whom they called shiang-tzeh, which meant Bad Ghosts of the Night, but they had no knowledge of the God King, or anything of the world beyond their barren desert.
The Han were a family. All of the members of the tribe were related to one another in some manner, and they considered the other wandering desert dwellers a part of this extended family. In that, Han was more of a surname than a title. The tribes of the desert met from time to time for trade and for marriage, but mostly they kept to themselves.
And, of course, I lived the mortal’s life. His childhood, his adolescence. When he had his manhood rite, and the elders of the tribe sliced away his foreskin, it was my flesh that was rent, my blood that gushed upon the sand. I shared his righteous anger when he took part, at the age of thirteen, in his first real battle. This was with the Lo, a clan of thieves who had raided their camp and stolen several of their children. I shared his excitement when he took beautiful Wei-Tzau as his bride, and his horror when the fragile young woman died while giving birth. It was all there, in Neolas’s blood, the man’s overpowering love for his second wife, Be-Hui. His joy when she gave birth to their first child, a boy, and every child after that. They were strong, bright, beautiful children, all of them, and he was so proud of them, though he did not dare to show it. The Han would consider such an exhibition appallingly crass. And foolish. Such displays of unseemly pride were known to tempt the evil spirits who prowled the darkened ways, so jealous were they of the living.
The mortal’s thoughts were dimmer than what I had experienced Sharing with Zenzele, for these were secondhand memories, taken by Neolas and then passed on to me, but I was thankful for that. It was hard enough to Share these faded memories, his lifeless body lying at my feet. I felt like I had murdered my brother.
It took me several days to fully absorb all that I had Shared, but I learned his tongue, and the various dialects Te-Han spoke. Each tribe who lived in this vast desert had a slightly different vernacular, though they shared a common base language, a necessity for trade and marriage.
Through sheer good luck, we had overcome the language barrier… but we were about to encounter a second obstacle.
Human nature.
6
Humans are, at their core, an irrational species. The human mind has the capacity for rational thought, but (and I assure you of this from long and bitter experience) little inclination to exercise it. And who can blame you? There is very little joy in stark reality, and little motivation to live in full awareness of life’s bleak truths. To do so leads unerringly to despair… or madness.
You all die.
So you distract yourself with trivialities, insulate your minds from the terrible truth of your existence. I can give you a thousand examples to show you this is true. A million. You need only turn on your evening news to know that I speak the truth.
You make war when you could have peace. Pollute the world when you have the technology to make a paradise of it. You squat here on this ball of mud and rock and squander your lives bickering on internet social networks and masturbating to pornography when your race could be colonizing the heavens.
And why?
To distract yourselves from
the horrifying truth of your existence. You all die. And when you are at peace, you remember it.
Even then, over twenty thousand years ago, I knew that this was so. I knew that men were irrational creatures. I knew they reacted to even a whiff of honesty with violence and hatred. It should not have surprised me how the first desert dwellers we tried to recruit reacted to our entreaty.
But it did.
I was completely flabbergasted by it.
We did not approach the Han. They would have deduced what had happened to Te-Han the moment we walked out of the desert. They would have known that we had killed him.
Instead we approached one of the other desert tribes.
They were called the Hui.
It was my decision to approach them directly, to be truthful with them, and trust that reason would compel them to join us in our war against Khronos. Yes, they were far removed from the God King’s influence—for now, I would tell them-- but Khronos’s empire was steadily expanding, and the day would come when their children, or their children’s children, would kneel in submission to the insatiable blood god if we did not move to stop him. We must take up arms now, I would say to them, before he was too powerful to be challenged.
Zenzele was doubtful it would work.
“Men do not want truth,” she said. “They want comforting lies. They do not react well when you rob them of their conceits.”
“They will recognize the truth of my words,” I assured her. “They will see the necessity of our cause.”
Oh, how deluded I was!
I knew the heart of man. I’ve just always had trouble accepting it.
We walked in from the desert, our eyes gleaming, our flesh glowing softly in the moonlight. The Hui scrambled from their tents when the night watch cried out the alarm, brandishing their spears and knives and bows. I held up my hands for peace, and in their native tongue I pled my case. The God King of the west must be defeated, I told them. He will not be satisfied until he has conquered the world and enslaved all mortal men, including the Hui. The Hui must join us, help us to fight this God King before the whole world must bow in submission to the fiend.
The elders of the Hui conferred at a short distance, eying us with great suspicion. Then their chief, a tall, brawny man with long hair and a thick, black, curling beard, returned to address me—or so I thought. He grinned at me, his teeth as white and shining as my flesh, and then he ran me through with his spear.
“No!” Zenzele shouted.
I could have-- should have-- dodged the chieftain’s attack, but the man caught me off guard. I could not believe that he had attacked me. The spear pierced me through the chest and punched out through the back of me, skewering my heart and left lung. It would have killed me if I was a mortal man, but I was not. I didn’t need either organ to live. Still, it hurt. In truth, the pain was stunning. In such instances, our amplified senses can be a detriment, for we feel pain as finely as we can smell and see and hear and taste. For a moment all I could do was blink stupidly into the chieftain’s fiercely glaring eyes, holding the shaft of the spear between us.
Talk about killing the messenger!
“You lie, demon!” the chieftain hissed. “Die, trickster of the desert!”
He jerked the spear out and stabbed it through me again.
The Orda rushed forward as I yanked the spear from the chieftain’s hands. I stumbled back, trying to pull the weapon from my chest. Zenzele came to assist me while the Orda and the Hui engaged in battle.
“Hold still,” Zenzele said as I tried to pull the spear out. I couldn’t do it on my own. My arms were too short, and I hadn’t yet thought to pull it out by degrees. She grasped the shaft and put her foot against my hip and yanked. My flesh had already healed around the shaft, healed to it, and she had to rip it loose to get it out.
I couldn’t make speech for a moment, not with my lungs punctured. I gaped like a fish drowning in air as the living blood flowed into the injuries and began to knit me back together again.
The Orda were tearing the Hui apart. Already, half of their adult males were dead. My people fed upon them in a frenzy of blood lust. Women and children were fleeing into the desert, screaming. The younger Hui men came running and the Orda leapt upon them.
“Stop them!” I finally managed to gasp.
“It is already too late,” Zenzele said grimly, holding the spear.
I stumbled forward, shouting at the Orda, or trying to shout. My lungs had not yet healed and my words were garbled with blood. I stepped across the body of the chieftain, who was missing his head. I grabbed Hammon by the shoulders and pulled him off a Hui warrior. Hammon hissed at me, chin bloody. The Hui warrior bucked, his tattered neck spurting blood.
“Stop this, Hammon,” I choked. “Come to your senses!”
An arrow thunked into my shoulder and I blinked up at the Hui bowman who had just shot me. It was a lad barely older than Ilio had been when I met him. The bowman, hands shaking, nocked another arrow, his tilted eyes glittering with fear.
Hammon saw the arrow protruding from my shoulder and leapt at the bowman, snarling. The boy screamed once, and then the leader of the Orda knocked him down and began to pummel him. Two blows and the lad was dead, his neck broken.
Zenzele walked to me, her lips pressed thinly together. One of the Hui pelted toward her from the rear, having circled around behind. She turned and seized the man’s spear and knocked him flat to the ground with it, then continued on, barely breaking her stride.
“Will you take my counsel now?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I’m sorry this happened,” she said. “I know it was not your intent.” She pushed the arrow the rest of the way through my body, snapped off the tip, then pulled the shaft from my flesh and threw it aside.
I looked across the camp. There were dead men lying everywhere. Bloody. Dismembered. In just moments, the Orda had massacred half the tribe. Only the Hui who had fled into the desert still lived.
“What hope have mortal men?” I said despairingly to Zenzele. “What hope in the face of our savagery?”
Following my gaze with her eyes, Zenzele replied, “There has always been little hope for our cause, my love. You know that as well as I. But it is not completely hopeless. Men can be trained to battle our kind. They can be convinced to join us. But it will take time. We must be patient. And much more subtle than this.”
“Subtle? But how?” I asked,
Her eyes narrowed. “We’re going to have to trick them into saving themselves,” she said.
7
The next evening, Zenzele addressed the Orda, speaking to them as a general might address her troops. “Our intent was to convince the Hui to join our war against the God King.” She glared at the contrite Orda, who were sitting on their knees before her. “In this, we failed… miserably.”
Almost as one, the Orda dropped their heads in shame. Even Neolas had succumbed to the bloodlust, though he Shared with any mortal he fed from.
“It is not your fault,” Zenzele went on, pacing back and forth in front of the men. “You are new blood gods. You have little control of your powers, and even less control of your thirst for blood. Be not ashamed. Control comes with experience, and we have been sorely remiss in your training. The fault lies solely with us, your makers.”
She stopped and smiled fiercely down at them. “From this night forth, I shall address that failing.”
“I shall teach you to control your lust for blood,” she said.
That night, we hunted in the mountains. We hunted in a group, and took down a great old mountain goat, but Zenzele would not let the Orda feed.
“You must learn to resist the blood thirst,” she told them, and then she shot a challenging look at me. “You, as well, beautiful one.”
So I was going to starve, too.
I nodded gamely, seeing the necessity of it, though the Strix was twisting my guts into knots, though the smell of the goat’s blood made my body quiver with need.
I watched as Zenzele fed, then Bhorg and Goro.
This is not so hard, I thought, but it was harder the next night, and the night after that.
It was not so bad when we were fleeing from the God King’s minions. There was no time to think about the hunger then. We took what we could as we traveled, feeding quickly and without much thought.
This was different.
The nights were long with nothing to do and the hunger burning in our guts like hot coals. Zenzele, Bhorg and Goro drank all the blood they wanted, and I could smell it on them, on her, that rich, coppery scent. I licked her skin when we made love. I imagined she was a mortal woman and I was lapping up her blood. She would not Share with me during this training period, and pushed me away when she felt the prick of my fangs.
“You have to master your hunger!” she chastised me. “What will you do if Khronos captures you and tries to break your will by starving you? He has been known to do it. Will you bow and scrape at his feet for a bellyful of mortal blood?”
“No!” I quavered.
“It is a weakness he can use against you.”
“I know!”
I think, perhaps, only those among you who have been addicted to drugs or alcohol might know what it is like for us when we are denied our sustenance. The blood hunger is very like the withdrawal symptoms a mortal addict suffers when his drug is taken away from him. It is maddening, all-consuming. It feels as if every cell of our bodies is crying out for blood. We cannot get the thought of it out of our minds. A vampire starving for blood is a tortured creature, and dangerous, deadly dangerous. I will rip the head off a puppy and squeeze every last drop of blood from its furry little body if I am starved. I would tear Mother Theresa’s head off her shoulders and lap from the spurting fount of her sainted neck.
For days, weeks, months, we suffered. I watched as the flesh slowly collapsed upon the bones of my hands so that they looked like the hands of a desiccated mummy, white and leathery, the veins standing out like knotted cords. The Orda became shambling monsters, eyes bulging from their sockets, teeth jutting from taut lips. We fought amongst ourselves, our tempers frayed. We begged Zenzele for blood, cried, threw tantrums, but our mistress would not relent.
The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4) Page 23