Chapter 80 - The Last Mammoth Hunter part 6

When I woke the following evening, the sun a squashed and bloody thing in the western sky, the constant wind of the steppes carried to my sensitive ears the sound of a child's weeping. Feeling ashamed that I had wrought such terror and deprivation on another soul, I turned my back to that distant lamentation and ordered my legs to carry me away. There was nothing I could do to atone for my crimes, not to this group of unlucky hunters-- save to spare the survivors any further harm.

But after a few steps, I faltered. Why was the boy crying so inconsolably? Why was his voice the only voice I heard riding on the wind?

Reluctantly, I turned and followed the sound of his grief.

I found the crying child sitting beside the old man. The boy's legs were crossed, his head hanging. I crouched to look at him, watched his shoulders tremble up and down as he mourned the fallen elder.

The ancient Mammoth Hunter was lying on his back in the grass. Even from a distance, I knew the old man had passed on to the afterlife. The ancient one's body was cold and gray. His eyes were rolled up in their sockets. No steaming breath stirred the chill night air from his blue and unmoving lips.

Yes, he was gone, and out of love, the child had folded the old man's arms across his chest, lingering to weep at his side, one of his hands placed lightly on the old man's belly.

Even as I felt pity for the boy-child, my appetite for his blood gnawed at me.

You should go, I counseled myself. Better to leave him to his fate than tempt your blood-lust with his company.

I knew he would not survive any attempt on my part to assist him. Eventually, my hunger would win out, and I would take him.

Yet, either way he would die, I argued with myself. Look at him! He cannot survive here in this cold and desolate waste. With no elders to look after him, he was doomed. Isn't it better to make the attempt and fail than to slink away like a coward?

I don't know why I went to him. I don't know whether my motivation was pity or guilt. Perhaps I was simply lonely, having realized I had no wives and children to return to.

I try to be noble, but I am a selfish creature at heart, so perhaps I desired a companion with whom to share my pain and loneliness with. It was probably a stew of all those motives, but regardless of the reasons, I finally went to him.

But before I did, I took a handful of earth and rubbed it on my shining flesh. I did not want him to know I was the fiend who'd taken his family from him. The single time the boy laid eyes on me, I was a crushed and hissing monster, fused to stone with a tree growing out the middle, an inhuman thing, a fearsome earth spirit. I had healed, but I did not want to startle him with my twinkling white flesh. I wanted him to think I was a man who'd crossed his path by coincidence. He was young. He would accept my arrival as good fortune.

As I approached in the moonlight, I whistled a quiet tune, giving him time to hear me. I walked as a man walked, thinking cleverly to pass near the boy, not come at him directly.

I heard his weeping fall silent. I heard him listen to my whistling. He'd gone as still as a hare, fearful of the fox, waiting in terror, I'm sure, for some demon to come flying out of the dark to claim him.

I passed him at a distance and continued on. As I passed, I hummed a song I once sang for my children. It was a song about young rabbits playing in a field, seeing who could hop the highest. It was one of my kids' favorite songs. Whenever I sang it, they would scramble to their feet and start hopping, trying to out-jump one another.

After a short distance, I stopped and gathered tinder to make a campfire. It was a quick, easy chore. I had no flint to make sparks, so I found a couple pieces of wood to rub together. I employed a bit of my superhuman speed and the wood promptly burst into flames. Not my best trick, but gratifying. I built the fire up as large as I could, using what wood I could scrounge in the immediately vicinity, and even some freeze-dried mammoth piles. They were good, if redolent, fuel.

After a while, I sensed the boy approach. I heard his cautious movements as he circled my fire.

Smiling pleasantly, I sang another song my children once favored, a song about a magic deer that jumped into fires to feed hungry children. The smell of the boy's blood was tempting. I wanted chase him down and chew his neck open, but the blood of my last kill was still warm inside my flesh, and I was able to wrestle the blood-thirst down. It was actually a little easier than I thought it would be, now that I had made the decision to fight it.

I could hear his breathing, the rapid beating of his heart.

After a time, I curled up near the fire and feigned sleep.

It was good to lie near a fire as a man would lie. The brisk wind of the steppes tossed the flames of my campfire one direction and then another. The tongues the fire flapped and twisted. Sparks spun away into the night sky, orange embers, flaring for just an instant before dying away.

I watched the flames whip. I watched the moon creep slow as a snail from one end of the heavens to the other. Moonlit clouds drifted, restlessly changing shape, like foam in the rapids. I finally did sleep then, like a real mortal man. I dreamed I was a boy, helping the Neanderthals fish near the bank of our river in the valley. The big Fat Hand Stodd was there, my youthful hero, so strong and careful of me. I was just a little boy from a neighboring tribe, no kin of his, but he always treated me kindly, and he never let me come to harm. "Grab it quick, Little Worm, before it flaps away!" he called to me.

I snapped awake as the boy approached.

I heard the whisper of his feet in the grass. The thud of his heart. I smelled the fear in his sweat.

I didn't move. I lay as if in slumber.

Finally, he called to me in the tongue of his people. "Utt! Ne n'ghoi? Utt!"

I sat up abruptly, as a mortal man would sit up, startled from his sleep. Though I knew exactly where the boy stood, I pretended to blink into the surrounding darkness, confused and a little frightened. I'd picked up some of his people's language in the last few days, so I called out in his tongue: "Ne w'ae? Ne st'oh?" which roughly translated as: "Who is it? Who's there?"

The boy crept into the circle of dancing firelight, pointing a spear at me. He was small, thin, with a round face and large, worrisome eyes. It was probably those eyes which preserved his life in the days that followed. They reminded me tremendously of the eyes of my companion Brulde. Large and slightly bulging, a blue-gray color, and full of nervousness, always looking out at the world as if something large and hungry was about to pounce.

And who knows? Maybe this boy-child was a descendant of my companion Brulde? Our people had abandoned our valley when the glaciers returned, so very, very long ago. Perhaps Brulde's descendants had flourished, even while I slept in my tomb of ice.

It was certainly possible this boy was a great-to-the-nth-degree grandchild, that our progeny had bred with the Mammoth Hunters. I did not know what became of our descendants after they abandoned the valley.

Not then, anyway.

I put my hands up, showing him my empty palms, then nodded apprehensively toward his weapon.

Seeing my unease, the boy lowered his spear. He said something I did not understand.

I shook my head, lowered my hands. I looked him up and down sympathetically.

"What's your name, boy?" I asked, in the tongue of the River People. "Are you cold? Come, warm yourself by the fire."

The boy narrowed his eyes, watching me warily. He didn't understand the language of the River People, didn't like my foreignness.

I smiled and gestured for him join me by the fire, which he did, but his big, careful eyes didn't stray from me for a moment, and he sat well out of my reach, the shaft of his spear lying across his thighs. He pulled the fur-lined gloves he wore off his hands and held his palms up near the fire. His hands, I saw, were trembling from the night chill.

"Thest-Un-Mann," I said, tapping my chest.

He stared at me fretfully, then his shoulders fell and he tapped his chest and said, "Ilio."

I smiled again, careful not to expose my fangs. "Thest-un-Mann. Ilio." Gesturing from me to him.

He finally smiled-- faintly, hesitantly-- back at me, then repeated my gesture. "Ilio. Thest-un-Mann."

I chuckled and nodded. There was not much else we could say to one another. Though vampires are quick at adopting unfamiliar dialects, my mind had not been my own those first few days I was stalking the Mammoth Hunters. I was little more than an animal until the cursed blood repaired my mind. I had paid little attention to the sounds the hunters grunted at one another. For now, we were divided by ignorance, and could only sit and eye one another suspiciously.

I gestured that I was lying back down and he nodded, still warming his hands by the fire. I lay on my side and watched him across the fire. The terror that sprang to his eyes every time a sound arose in the darkness made me feel very ashamed. I was the cause of that fear. I had killed all his companions save one, the old man, and the ancient hunter Elk had probably died because of me as well, their fearful flight overtaxing his ancient heart. Now here I was, lying on the ground across the fire from the boy, a deceiver as well as a destroyer. Could I ever atone for so many offenses?

The boy slowly relaxed. He took off his outer coat and made a sleeping roll for himself and wrapped up in it. He lay down as if to sleep, but his wide eyes rolled at every sound, and he trembled long after the fire should have warmed him.

Monster, I accused myself, watching him through the leaping flames. You are worse than the Foul One who made you!

After a little while, I began to sing again. I sang the song of the deer that jumps in the fire. It is a sweet and soothing song, a kind of lullaby. I'd sung it to my children many times as I sat cross-legged by the fire, rocking them in my arms and brushing their hair from their brows. Little Gan. Little Breyya. Little Hun. All my children. I remembered how their eyes would glaze over in sleepiness, then roll back in their sockets, their little thumbs in their mouths.

As I sang my people's lullaby song, the boy Ilio relaxed, and then his eyes drifted closed. He slept as my children once slept, his eyes slightly open, little crescents of white showing between the lashes.

I fell in love with him a little, seeing him drift off to sleep as my children once had. I swore to myself that very night, I would keep this child safe… at any cost.

It was a promise I did not keep.