“You must master your hunger!” she snarled. “All new blood gods are trained in this manner in Uroboros. Are you lesser men than them?”
We even tried to escape from the cave, but Zenzele put down each pathetic rebellion. We were too weak to overpower her, too muddled to outwit her.
“When you have divorced your thoughts from your pain, when you can turn your lips from the blood you crave so badly, then I will allow you to eat,” Zenzele said.
“I don’t know what that means!” I cried, and the Orda howled feebly in solidarity.
“Seek a peaceful place in your thoughts,” she said. “Your mind can shelter you from the pains of the flesh, if you will only think it so.”
“How?”
“You must tell yourself there is no pain. There is no hunger. You must believe it.”
I did not understand her words, but I loved her, I trusted her, and so I tried to master the pain with my mind.
There is no pain, I repeated to myself. There is no hunger.
And it worked, but only partially.
I tried to retreat into my Shared memories. Perhaps I could lose myself in the memories of those Others, hide from the pain, as the doe hides in the bush from the hunter.
I fled into the memories of Neolas, lived the past through his eyes, through his thoughts and impressions. And as I experienced his childhood, a rambunctious young boy who worshipped his older brother, the imaginative child he had once been inspired me. It happened when he fell and broke his leg. He had distracted himself from the pain as he mended in his father’s tent with long and elaborate daydreams. Hunting mammoths with his father and brother. Fighting with their mortal enemies, the Eguhl. Neolas had possessed a vivid imagination when he was a boy. But it worked. The pain went away as he drifted in these fantasies, and I realized it was not enough to tell myself there was no hunger. I had to imagine that there was no hunger!
We all have this power when we are children. The power to bend the universe to our will. To make gods out of drifting clouds and monsters out of shadows. Somewhere around the time that we begin to develop into our adult bodies, that capacity for self-delusion begins to weaken. We shed our dream-selves like a snake sheds its skin. We leave it behind to crackle and fall to dust while we chase more adult pursuits. If I could learn to use my imagination again, like a muscle weak and wasted from neglect, I could conquer the hunger!
But it was not easy. I was not just an old man. I was an impossibly old man. Seven thousand years old by then! My childhood was a hazy memory, my mind as ossified as my cold vampire flesh.
It took days to move my atrophied imagination. To begin, very weakly, to exercise it again. But pain and hunger are the best motivators. They drove me to persevere, even when I feared the task was hopeless.
I pretended that my thoughts were a cave, and the hunger was an old wolf pacing and snarling at the mouth of it. He wanted to come inside, that old wolf. He wanted to eat me. But he couldn’t. He was afraid of my fire. So I had to keep my hearth blazing. I had to feed wood constantly to the fire. I had to make sure it did not die, so that the wolf was not emboldened, so that he could not come inside and eat me.
I was easily distracted, and each time the fantasy slipped away, the hunger and pain swept back in upon me. Hungry wolf. Hungry belly. I was afraid. I was afraid I would go mad. But slowly, determinedly, I used my imagination to bend the universe to my will, as I had when I was a mortal child. To make gods out of drifting clouds. To make monsters out of shadows.
To believe.
I tell you this so that you, too, might conquer some unpleasant truth that torments you.
You cannot escape pain through the gate of rational thought, for the gatekeeper of reason is not a gullible fellow. But the gatekeeper of the imagination is a trusting fool, and easily distracted by flights of fancy.
I did not conquer the hunger. I transformed it. Or rather I transformed the world around it, and myself with it.
Zenzele tempted me with a bloody hare. She held the creature under my nose. Smeared its sticky blood upon my lips, but I did not drink. I did not even recoil from it.
(The wolf is back. The wolf is hungry. Must keep the fire burning. Must add more wood. Must have more fire.)
“Good,” she said, smiling down at me. “You have done it, my love! You have mastered the hunger.”
“No,” I said, “I have mastered the world.”
I fed that night, and then I shared my insights with the Orda so that they too might master their thoughts. Morgruss, the eldest of the Orda, had the most difficulty thinking as he had when he was a boy, but he finally came around.
“And now I shall train you to do battle as the t’sukuru do battle,” Zenzele said.
8
Again, I thought I was exempt from Zenzele’s plans to whip us into shape.
Again, I was wrong.
“You may Share my memories,” she said, “but the Sharing is not enough. If you wish to defeat your enemies, memory is not enough. The flesh must fight, and the only way it can learn to fight is through experience and repetition.”
She was speaking, of course, of muscle memory, a term that would not be coined for twenty thousand years.
Muscle memory is another way to describe motor learning, which a process that consolidates a specific motor task into memory through repetition. When a movement or series of movements is repeated over time, a long-term muscle memory is created for that task, allowing it to be performed quickly and without conscious effort, like riding a bike or typing on a keyboard… or fighting.
No matter the knowledge we absorbed through the living blood, any foe we fought, if trained, would be faster than us. She explained this to all of us as best she could with our limited vocabulary.
“The flesh must learn,” she said. “Even if the mind already knows. The flesh must act before thought, or you will all fall to your enemies. Your attacks will seem like the doddering of old men to your enemies. Their movements will be faster and more efficient, and they will strike where you are most vulnerable.”
“You fight as mortal men fight,” she said. This, after we had gone out into the desert to train. She addressed us from atop a dune, the moonlight glinting on her obsidian skin. “That would be fine if we were fighting mortal men,” she continued, “but our enemies are not mortal men. They are t’sukuru, like you. Unlike you, however, they have been trained to kill other t’sukuru, and they have had much practice at it.”
She paced in front of us like a restless panther as she spoke. I knew from our Shared memories that she had trained long and hard in Uroboros before the God King gave her leave to join his brutal raiders. And I knew that she would drive us just as ruthlessly. She would have no pity, least of all for me, but that was a good thing.
“If I wished to do it, I could defeat every one of you,” she declared, sweeping her hand scornfully in our direction. When Morgruss scoffed, she thrust out her chest. “You do not believe I can do it? Why? Because I am a woman? Attack me, and I will show you the error of your convictions.”
Morgruss was an old man when we made him an immortal, but he moved with surprising alacrity. He was on his feet and flying at her in an instant, fingers curled into claws, jaws agape so that his tusk-like fangs were fully exposed, ready to slice and tear into my beloved’s flesh. It was all I could do to restrain myself from jumping to her defense.
Rather than leap into the air, as I suspected she would do, Zenzele slumped back. She seized ahold of the old man’s tunic and threw him high into the air, using her muscular legs to propel him.
Morgruss went up and up, and then flapped his arms and legs as he returned to earth, his eyes comically wide.
Zenzele leapt as he fell and delivered a terrific kick to his head.
She struck him with such force that we all winced. Morgruss was flung away, spinning like a dervish, and smashed into a neighboring dune with a great puff of dust.
The Orda slid slowly down the side of the dune, sand crumbli
ng over his limp body. The old man’s head lolled like a flower with a broken stem.
Zenzele landed in a crouch. She rose and turned to look at her fallen opponent. Face down in the sand, Morgruss was making a low keening sound. “I have broken his neck,” Zenzele said. “Even though the living blood will heal his injury, he will be paralyzed unless someone sets his neck on right. This is what our enemies will do to you if you do not know how to fight them. They will strike at your neck and back to paralyze you. They will snap off your arms or legs so that you cannot strike back at them. And once you are incapacitated, they will destroy you, or—“ and she glanced at me—“they will quarter your body and take you to the God King as a trophy.”
“T’sukuru strength is derived from the earth,” she went on, after we had gone and restored Morgruss. We had to rebreak his neck so that it could heal properly. The living blood had fixed it in its damaged state. Even so, he moved clumsily for a day or two afterwards, as if his brain were not correctly wired to his limbs.
“When you fight the God King’s warriors, they will try to throw you into the air. Or they will strike you while you are leaping through the air. They may use a weapon we call a straith, which is a rope with a hook tied on the end of it. They will surround you and catch your limbs with their hooks and hoist you off the ground, and then they will break you apart.”
That was a tactic the Oombai had tried on me. I suppose I was lucky I had escaped it.
Zenzele looked at us solemnly.
“We do not know why a t’sukuru loses his strength when he is removed from the earth, but that is the way of it, and you must learn to take advantage of this weakness.”
That was how Zenzele and her band of raiders had defeated Ilio and I in the Tanti forest. They had ambushed us, attacked us in midair, kept us from fighting on the ground until we were exhausted.
Of course, vampires have no mystical connection to the earth. It does not matter whether our feet are touching the ground or not. Our strength is physical. What she was talking about, and did not have the language to accurately convey, was leverage. Positional advantage. The ability to place yourself against a fixed object and push.
It is a thing your modern popular fiction rarely depicts when portraying feats of superhuman strength. One can exert little force without an object to push against. Unless he were extraordinarily heavy, your Super-man could no more lift a bus by its bumper than you could, not unless he had leverage.
But we didn’t need technical language to practice the application of it.
And practice we did. All night, and for the next several months. We practiced offense and defense. We practiced on the ground and in midair. We practiced singularly and in groups.
We practiced crippling one another, though we had to be careful not to fatally injure our more vulnerable training partners. The most lethal portions of our education were practiced upon Eris, Zenzele and I—our group’s resident Eternals.
We submitted to the indignity of it with stoic resignation. Though having my head ripped off or my heart pierced could not kill me, nor could it truly harm Eris or Zenzele, it is never a pleasant thing to experience. In fact, it is excruciating, not to mention humiliating. But we could see the necessity of it. We had to be experts at killing, every single one of us, if we hoped to defeat the God King and his zealous sycophants.
I allowed them to decapitate me, again and again. I was quartered, disemboweled, my arms and legs torn from my body.
We practiced until we could kill and maim without conscious thought. Until the movements were imprinted in our very cells—as Zenzele had said they must be.
We also learned how to restore one another in the midst of battle. Zenzele taught us to fight in groups, to keep an eye on our partners so that we could form a protective circle around a crippled ally. In the event that one of us were seriously injured, a member of the squad could fall back into the protective ring and quickly put our fallen comrade back together again—or Share with them at the final moment, if the injured warrior could not be healed.
It was another form of immortality.
The idea comforted the blood drinkers who were not so resilient as we three Eternals, especially Petra, the most fragile of our cabal. Even if they fell in this war with the God King, they knew their thoughts and experiences would not be lost to death’s dark maw. A part of them would live on in the mind of the one who had Shared with them.
The term “immortal” is a disingenuous one, for very few of us are truly immortal. The Orda had already realized this. We are long-lived, yes. Hard to kill. Yet, for even the weakest blood drinkers among us, the Sharing offers hope of true immortality.
It is a great comfort, even for “gods”.
9
As we honed ourselves into instruments of death, a group of mortals sought us from out of the desert. They called themselves the Pang. There were three of them. Young. Strong. Untamed. Zenzele sensed their approach long before they arrived, and we were waiting for them when they marched out of the wasteland.
Their leader was a dark, virile young man with a scruff of beard on his chin and a wild mane of glossy black hair. He wore a short cape made of crow feathers. “I am Usus,” he said, when we met them at the edge of the dunes. “We came to see if what the Hui told us was true.”
Beside me, Eris stared at the warrior intensely. I could tell that the hermaphrodite was powerfully attracted to the cloaked man.
“And what did the Hui tell you?” I asked.
“They said that gods had appeared from the desert. Blood gods from the western lands. They said that these gods spoke of a war in the higher realms, and asked their tribe to join them in this war. They said when their warriors refused to aid them, the gods destroyed their tribe.”
“That was not quite the way of it,” I replied. “But close enough.”
Usus glanced at his companions. I could smell their fear and excitement. I knew what they desired, but I wanted them to speak it.
“Are you the gods the Hui spoke of?” the one named Usus asked.
Gods! What is it about you mortals that you must have gods to fight for?
Zenzele’s glared at me.
“We are,” I said, tasting the lie upon my tongue. It was bitter, the lie, like a poison.
“And you need men to help you fight this war in heaven?”
“The war, when it comes, shall be fought in this world, not the next one. But yes. We need men to help us fight it.”
Usus thought about it a moment, then demanded: “Do you fight for us, or do you fight for yourselves?”
He thought he was being clever.
“We fight for you,” Eris interjected, but it was the truth, and that was all that mattered. “We fight to preserve this world for your kind.”
“Then let us join you,” Usus said to me, glancing at Eris curiously. “We are strong, brave warriors! We can help! And we can convince many more to come and join your ranks!”
“Good,” I said. “We will need them.”
10
We gave them the blood, and after they had changed, we sent them out to recruit more warriors. Eris accompanied Usus. He claimed he went to be our emissary, but it was obvious the two were powerfully attracted to one another. That was fine with me. I finally had Zenzele to myself again.
We changed the men they brought back with them. Young men, eager for adventure. We robbed them of the mortal lives they might have led, the children they might have sired, the full experience of life that had, until now, been their right by birth.
My army, at last.
But I was tormented by guilt.
I have never been a violent man. Oh, I have the capacity for violence, just like any living creature. I have killed for food, killed to defend my loved ones, but this was killing on a much grander scale, and the weight of it was crushing my soul.
None of these desert men became Eternals. They would perish eventually. Many of them would fall in the war that was coming, I knew—the war that I m
yself had declared upon the God King. I sought consolation in the fact that they would die fighting for their own interests, that we were fighting to preserve the world as it was, to prevent the hell it would become if Khronos was allowed to expand his kingdom unchallenged, but it was a small comfort.
I wanted to run away. I wanted to shift the weight of it onto someone else’s shoulders, but I couldn’t.
For the Tanti, my mortal descendants, I would carry this burden of guilt and horror. For their children, and their children’s children, I would be strong. And for the living world, which I had relished when I was a mortal man. And for the noble soul of man.
11
My army grew by leaps and bounds until I began to have trouble keeping our numbers and remembering the names of our newest recruits. We made them into blood gods, those who wanted it, and some became fine, powerful vampires. Most were not so powerful, but they were no less important to our cause, for it was sheer numbers we needed if we ever hoped to challenge the God King. We trained them as Zenzele had trained us, and then we sent them out to recruit more.
Through our new associates, we made ourselves and our war known to the tribes of the Gobi. We couched our proposal in terms the mortals would find most enticing: that we were gods, and that should they fight for our side, they would have eternal life, either here in the world of living men, or after in the Ghost World. We promised them godhood, and they only had to give their lives to us, swear to us their undying allegiance. Lies. Ugly, wicked lies. But isn’t that how all religions work? Give us your loyalty, give us your soul, and we will exalt you to godhood, give you eternal life, and powers beyond imagining. Oh, yes, we vampires were mankind’s first real gods, and our war with Uroboros was the first Holy War that men would spill their blood for.
The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 4) Page 24