Chapter 71 - Tundra, 23,000 Years Ago, Earth Spirit Man part 1

I did not know how long I'd drifted in the slow ice when I first awoke. There were no thoughts in that great tomb of white, no sense of time, no sense of self. I'd floated within the cold's embrace, insensate, as the glacier fileted the flesh from my bones and then ground those bones to slivers. For all intents and purposes, I was unmade, and it was a glorious release. Sweet oblivion. I can only imagine the damage it did to my body as the white juggernaut flowed, so slow and relentless, its snowy fingers clawing further and further south across the lands of Europe. I had no sense of myself, and if I had dreams, they did not follow me from the dark when I was reborn.

For seven thousand years, I slept in that womb of ice. I lay there, an insect trapped in white amber, as the world spun on, as the Earth chilled, as all the familiar flora and fauna I shared the world with when I was a living man shivered and passed away, and new orders of life flourished and filled the vacancies left behind by all those extinct creatures. When at last the Earth began to warm, and I was delivered like a baby into this new world, cast out by the retreating glacial floe like a half-formed fetus, I was, like a premature child, helpless and without memory, a new thing myself, and savage for that newness.

The first thing I remember is the smell of blood.

Of course.

I could not see. I could not feel. I could only smell, and I smelled blood.

My mind was like a dark and echoing cave, an empty gourd. Crushed flat a million times and repaired imperfectly by the living blood which animates my kind, my mind was a blank slate, a tabula rasa, upon which the demon within me scribbled its urgent and ghastly needs.

Must feed! Need blood!

Awaken! Awaken!

Eat!

Hot salty smell of blood, coppery and red… my mouth filled with saliva.

My mouth. I discovered my mouth then, and I creaked open my jaws and ran my tongue around my teeth, feeling the tips of my fangs with it—careful! They're sharp!—feeling my dry lips stretch and crack, like cold-stiffened leather. My jaw felt strange, misshapen, and there was pain when I yawned it open. I heard the bones pop and crunch.

Feeling my lips, then, I discovered my head. It felt oddly twisted and flattened. I tried to move it, but it seemed frozen, calcified. I pressed harder and felt a searing pain in my cheek. I heard a sound like small branches snapping. Why did it hurt so much to move my head? It felt like something was ripping the skin from my face.

I moaned softly, and in moaning, heard the sound of myself.

Sound. Ears!

I listened and found that I could hear a melancholy hooting, a thing I once called "wind". Carried on the wind was the resounding cry of a bird, wheeling high overhead, searching the ground for prey.

Screeee!

From the dark hole of my mind, a word swam up for that sound. Lenthe, or what you modern humans would call a "hawk" in your English language. I could hear the hiss of the wind in the grass, and the rustle of leaves, a dry ticking, as from the tips of brittle branches. Further away: the low murmur of human voices, the crackle of a campfire.

That was where the smell of blood was coming from! The voices. The… men.

I sniffed the air and found I could smell the odor of their flesh, sweaty and unwashed, the fats they had smeared their skin with to protect it from the wind. I could smell the animal furs they adorned their bodies with, their leather footings and the cords they tied their hair with. I could smell their cocks and their balls and their filthy, unclean asses. I could smell the hares they had eaten, the gas of their belches. But their blood… that was the strongest odor I could smell, and I wanted to fly at them and tear them to pieces and glut myself on the hot red fluid that issued forth.

I tried to move my limbs, but my limbs would not obey me.

Frustrated, I opened my eyes to see why I couldn't move.

Sight! I could see!

It was daylight, and the light stabbed into my eyes, into my brain, like two burning spears. I hissed and bared my teeth, trying to turn my head from the light, but there was no shade in which to retreat. I was trapped in that blinding glare. I felt black tears bead my eyelashes. The all-encompassing light drilled into my skull.

I snarled and snapped at the light, trying to drive it away.

Bite it! Kill it!

I peeked at the world through the slits of my eyelids, maddened, furious. Slowly, then, my pupils contracted. The glare began to dim, and with that dimming, the pain it caused to me began to diminish. Sniveling, I blinked around myself, seeing without comprehending the broad rolling plains of the cold-blighted tundra in which I had awakened. I squinted up and saw ribbons of hazy, far-away clouds drifting across the blue sky. I turned my head down and saw that I lay upon a jumble of gray stones, and from the cage of my ribs there sprouted a twisted, stunted little tree, hardly more than a bush really, but it came up through the center of me, and its roots were threaded through my torso.

What is this madness?

My mind could not grasp what my eyes were reporting. I only knew that it was wrong. It hurt and it was wrong. There should be no tree screwing up through the center of me!

I tried to move my hand, to claw the small tree out of me, but my hand still refused to obey me.

I turned my attention from the bush and squinted down my shoulder to my hand. My limb, I saw, was grotesquely flattened and broken. My white flesh was fused to the gray blocks I lay sprawled across and mottled with lichen and moss. There appeared to be an unnatural number of joints throughout its length, and bones protruding from my bicep and forearm like the sharp points of broken sticks.

I tugged at my arm, but it would not move. Even my fingers were stuck, smashed flat to the stones and fused to them, unrecognizable.

I remembered then that I should have more limbs than just this one, so I looked all around for them.

My arm… where was my other arm?

Though I searched with my eyes for it, all I could see was the knob of my shoulder. I thought then to move it, or at least to try, and felt it twisted around behind my back. And my legs? Where were my legs? When I peered down my torso, I saw that my legs were submerged in the frosted earth and covered over with low grass. Here was a knee, floating in the sward like a little white island, and there, too far away from my body, the end of my foot poked up at a weird angle, my toes curled and shriveled.

Where was I? I wondered. How did I come to be this horrible, broken thing in the middle of a wind-blasted wasteland?

I tried to remember, but all I could envision was ice… an eternity of creaking white ice… pain and hunger and ice…

And the blood! The smell of blood was making me crazy! How could I get that blood? I wanted to drink it! Feel it gushing in my mouth! Gulp it down! Have it inside me!

But I couldn't move. I tried to jerk my body back and forth, but I couldn't pull free. I had become a thing of dry flesh and stone, with a tree growing up through the center of me.

Blood! Give me that blood!

Panting and snarling, my fangs protruding, I sniffed the wind blowing against my cheeks. I squinted to and fro, searching with my eyes for the source of the blood-smell.

There!

Small with distance, a party of men squatted in a circle around a low cooking fire. They were dark headed and broad, their size exaggerated by the fur-trimmed garments they clothed their bodies with. I listened to the low rumble of their chests. The sounds they were making were words, I knew, but they were words I did not understand. One of them spoke in a louder voice, and the others laughed. I counted them with my eyes—six big ones in all, with one or two small ones. I drooled as I watched them, desiring only to leap upon them, tear them apart, swallow the hot blood that squirted from the pieces. I watched them greedily, thinking only of how I might free myself stone and tree, how I might get to them so that I could feed.

I could smell the juices of the animal they were cooking over their fire. If I had been a living man, the smell of the dripping fat and sizzling flesh would have sparked my appetite, but I was no longer a living man with a living man's tastes. I was a monster, and I longed only for the blood of the hunters, not the seared meat of their prey.

I watched them hungrily all through the afternoon, hardly aware of the sun passing overhead, or the day's lengthening shadows.

Presently, one of the smaller members of their party rose to his feet and trotted away from the fire. I realized with a flash of excitement that the little one was trotting my direction.

Yes! Come, little one! Come this way!