Chapter 107 - The Battle with the Elders part 6

In truth, I had every confidence I would return. I prepared the boy for the worst only because I knew: the outcome of battle is never a sure thing.

Fate is a fickle mistress. She had conspired to make me immortal. She had preserved me for untold millennia, even in the belly of a glacier. Yet, who could say when she would tire of my foolish endeavors? As I raced across the Pannonian Plain, all but flying beneath the lowering sky, I wondered if this night, by some disastrous misfortune, might be my last on earth.

And for what? I wondered.

Was this justice? Or petty revenge?

I like to think I am a peaceful man, that my heart is inured to such base emotion, but for all my vaunted powers, for all the eons I've walked this world, I am still a man. My soul is still a man's soul.

And those old men had offended me.

As I drew near the country of the Ground Scratchers, I prepared my heart for war. I gripped my purloined spear, set my mind apart so that it would not worry needlessly for the flesh that was its seat.

Light splashed the lowering heavens. Thunder rattled across the plains. Spicules of cold rain spattered my flesh as I hurtled through the night, each striking me painfully due to the speed at which I was racing.

Up ahead, flickering torches.

They were waiting for me.

Two lines of warriors stood, ready for battle, arranged in a narrowing corridor. There were some six or seven dozen warriors lined up, assembled on the plain at the edge of their village, eager to defend their masters. At the center of the phalanx, the three remaining elders waited, armed and armored. Hault stood in the middle of the trio, tall and imperious, a spear clutched in his hands. His weapon was large and ornately decorated, with a carved shaft and a large, curved stone point, more a symbol of office than an instrument of battle, but deadly all the same. On both sides of him crouched his cohorts Gant and Ungst, their bodies laden with fine armor made of bone and leather and lined with glossy black feathers. A great cry went up when their warriors caught sight of me.

I came to a stop, facing them across the whipping field of grass.

This place, this great open plain, would be the sight of countless battles through the ages. How many empires had skirmished here for supremacy? The Huns, the Gepids, the Ostrogoths. The Habsburgs and the Ottomans, too. But this night… this night was mine, a rogue vampire, intent on justice.

"Depart from this country, Blood Drinker!" Hault demanded. He had to project his voice, as I'd paused a good distance away, cautious of his bowmen. "Go, and return here no more!"

I cannot give you an exact translation of what he said, as I was only halfway familiar with their tongue by then, but I am sure that was the gist of it.

"You have offended me, and I will have my vengeance!" I cried back at him. I spoke in the Denghoi tongue. Perhaps he understood me. Perhaps he only understood a little. Nevertheless, he shouted his rejoinder.

"I warn you. We have battled your kind before… and we have always triumphed!"

"Not tonight!" I roared, and then I bolted toward them.

Three dozen arrows whistled in my direction. In the dark, with the torch flames twisting and lightning pulsing in the heavens, it was difficult to mark each projectile that flitted toward me. I tried to dodge the weapons as they converged on me, pivoting this way and that, my hands snapping one direction and then another to slap them out of the air, but there were so many! Despite my superhuman speed and agility, I was impaled half a dozen times.

I stumbled to my knees, the shafts quivering in my flesh. There was one in my neck, three in my torso, and yet two more in my thigh and upper arm. I tore them from my flesh and rose to my feet. I could feel the Living Blood inside me, healing the wounds even as I stood. Before the bowmen could fire again, I cocked back my javelin and let it fly.

My spear flew straight and true. The elder Gant was bowled clear off his feet. In fact, I struck him down with such force that his feet came straight out of his boots. He rose, tottered forward with the shaft protruding from both sides of his torso, then he squawked once, clutching the shaft protruding from his heart, and collapsed.

Another barrage of arrows shurred in my direction.

Rather than try to dodge them on the ground, I leapt straight up. Lightning flared as I sliced through the heavens, great tongues of electricity racing across the contours of the lowering clouds. Time seemed to stretch in that stark white light, every drop of rain gleaming like a tiny jewel, every arrow hanging suspended as if from invisible threads-- even I, perched upon the wind, my stolen clothes and great black cloak flapping languidly, as if drifting underwater.

Then the night returned. I dropped to the ground.

Crouched in the center of the gauntlet, I bared my fangs and hissed. Several spears whisked toward me, and I plucked them from the air.

Leaping between the two remaining elders, I drove the spears into the fat one named Ungst, piercing him through. The plump old man bellowed in fury, blood bursting from his lips. I used the spears to drive him to his knees, then pushed him onto his back and pinned him to the loess. The whoremaster died, blood boiling out of his mouth in a bubbly red froth.

The smell of his blood enflamed my passion. I felt drunk with hunger and the sheer monstrous pleasure of murder, all the world painted red and slick and salty. I turned at last to Hault, my lips peeled back from my fangs, but before I could wrap my hands around his wattled neck, a strange weapon seized me by the shoulder.

It was an anchor with multiple hooks. Made of bone and attached to a long and slender woven cord, the strange weapon sunk its barb into my shoulder before I could puzzle out what I'd been snared by. An instant later, the rope went taut, and I stumbled back.

Another rope with a hooked anchor arced through the sky above me, and being reeled quickly in by the warrior who'd cast it, sank its flukes into my upper thigh.

And another was cast upon me, and another. I felt myself hauled from the earth, my flesh ripping as the ropes were pulled ever tighter. If I were a lesser vampire, those barbed weapons would have been my doom. Even strong as I was, the clever ploy nearly bested me.

But I am powerful. If it were not so, how could I have endured some 30,000 years? For naught am I the oldest living vampire? No, this outlandish tactic would not defeat me!

Hault stalked toward me, thinking me beaten. The old man thrust his lance into my belly, his lips peeled back from yellow, crooked teeth. "DIE!" he shrieked in triumph.

Enraged, I grasped hold of the ropes suspending me from the ground and yanked them with all my strength. Some of the old man's warriors let go, the flesh stripped from their palms. Others were flung into the sky, their bodies pinwheeling away in the dark like windblown leaves. I dropped to the ground and lunged at Elder Hault.

His eyes went wide in shock and terror.

I grabbed him by the shoulders, and, with one swift jerk of my head, tore his throat out with my teeth.