Chapter 155 - Life Among the Tanti part 1

The Tanti were the descendants of the tribe I was born to millennia before, but a great gulf of time separated the Tanti from the people of the German valley from whence I'd come. Seven thousand years, to be exact.

Seven thousand years is nearly the whole of recorded human history, and yet the days I speak of now to you, sitting here in this snow-covered city, is four times that length receding into the past, and the bucolic summers of my mortal life yet another seven thousand years deeper still.

The Tanti were much changed from the River People who had occupied the forested valley of the Swabian Alb. So much so that I had only gradually come to recognize our familial relationship. The Tanti were shorter and stockier than they had been in the past, owing, I am sure, to the rigors of the last glacial epoch. They were no longer the lanky forest dwellers I remembered from my mortal life. Their forms had slowly adapted to the long chill that was by then only just loosening its grip upon the world. While I lay insensate in my prison of creeping ice, they had shrunk, gotten fatter and more muscular. The physical alterations were also influenced, I suspect, by the Neanderthal DNA that my unusual group family had thrown into the mix. My tentmate Brulde and I had both made babies with our Neanderthal wife Eyya, and those vigorous hybrid children had lived to make even more mixed species children. Seven thousand years later, the influence of those Neanderthal genes was faint, a weak chin here, a sloping forehead there, but it was easy enough to discern the lingering traits once I realized who the Tanti were. And there were even a few among the Tanti—throwbacks, I suppose you could call them—who resembled their Fat Hand ancestors to a remarkably large degree. Enough to give me pause when I first saw them among the others.

The noble race we now call Neanderthals, the people I had so admired when I was a young man—so much so that I'd taken one of their women for a wife—had strut and fret their hour upon the stage. They had passed from the world of living men but for a dwindling essence, which their surviving cousins, Homo sapiens, carried forward through time like a guttering candle. Their bloom had withered while I lay insensate in the ice, but they lived on in the Tanti, just as they live on to this modern era in many of you.

Height and weight were not the only physical changes the ice age had wrought upon my people. The sexual dimorphism of my descendants had become more pronounced. The women were fuller in the breasts and hips, their behavior more submissive. It was another ice age adaptation-- one that has only recently begun to reverse itself. The women of my mortal era were much like your modern females—assertive and athletically built. More so than the buxom and dutiful Tanti women. They were not masculine, the women of my day, simply more self-possessed and powerful. The Tanti men had changed as well. Their features were more crudely drawn, their bodies hairier. They were also much more aggressive than the men of my era, more confrontational and domineering. I suppose natural selection chose those traits—aggressive males, submissive females—over the more egalitarian gender roles I was accustomed to. Extreme environmental conditions breed extreme cultures-- even gross physical adaptations, given a long enough span of time-- and my people were no more exempt from this rule than any other race. 

Physical appearance was not the only way my people had changed in the intervening millennia. In times of plenty, when there is less pressure on a group to reproduce and provide for their young, sexual mores become more relaxed. I was born at the end of a long interglacial period, a time of abundance and ease. When I was a mortal man, food was plentiful and there was little competition between my people and neighboring clans. Because of that, my tribesmen were lazy and laid back. There were few cultural restraints placed upon our sexuality. We had group families, traditions of wife sharing, ritualized orgies. Homosexual behavior was not only tolerated, it was an institute of our culture.

The sexual practices of the Tanti were much like the sexual customs of this modern era. Orgies were no longer a part of their religious celebrations. A man took only one or two wives, and homosexuality was frowned upon. Men no longer shared their wives with visitors. In fact, Tanti men and women had become quite jealous of their mates, and extramarital affairs had become a punishable offense. As I'm sure you've already deduced, jealousy and intolerance have distinct evolutionary advantages, especially in times of deprivation and hardship.

Their technology had advanced. They no longer lived in crude domed tents and caves, which was the standard when I was a living man. They lived in lodges made of wood and stone, with thatched roofs. Though they had rudimentary furniture—benches, tables and shelves—they still slept on mats of woven reeds, padded with fur and primitive textiles. In the center of the village was a community workshop, a freestanding structure with a central hearth. There, a variety of tools and weapons were constructed of wood and bone and stone by the Tanti men. To supply the large community with tools as efficiently as possible, the men sat in a line and passed the work down from man to man, each performing only one task in their production. An early assembly line! Other groups worked as boatsmen or hunters. All hours of the day, and sometimes into the night, Tanti fishermen plied the still waters of the lake, fishing with string and hook or with woven nets. The hunters stalked the dense forest that surrounded the village, armed with spears and bows.

The women were just as industrious as the men—perhaps more so. While the older women looked after the children, the younger women foraged for fruits and vegetables and nuts and berries and grains. They prepared meals together at the communal cooking pits that stood alongside the central lodge. They made and mended clothes in what I suppose you could call "sewing circles". They even tended to the community's livestock—goats and pigs, which they kept penned near the tannery, and a type of domesticated fowl (extinct now) which they called Nukku.

I realize you're thinking, "But, Gon, archeologists say mankind did not raise livestock or plant crops until much later." I assure you, however, neither of these things was invented by any particular culture at any particular time. They are technologies that were developed by man again and again-- lost, reacquired, and lost again—until the invention of written language some thirteen thousand years later. Until mankind learned to preserve its knowledge, mortals lived in a constant state of forgetfulness, a perpetual dream existence, its progress lost to disaster, disease and warfare like sleeping fantasies flee when one is woke abruptly. Before written language, all knowledge was passed down orally, easily lost should a single link in the chain of telling be removed. It also resulted in exaggeration, not to mention outright lies and misinterpretation.

In other words: religion.

The spiritual beliefs of my people had grown quite elaborate over the course of seven thousand years. Crossbred with the myths of all the other cultures they had encountered during their ice age wanderings, the Tanti had become polytheistic god-worshippers. They still believed the spirits of their ancestors resided in the heavens, but they now held that the journey to the afterlife could not be made by man alone. They insisted that the spirit must be carried there by one of their deities, and then only after his deeds had been weighed by his patron god, the good versus the bad. If a soul were not judged worthy of Esselem, the Tanti word for the afterlife, they believed that person's life-force remained bound to the physical plane, a miserable wandering spirit, until such a time as their suffering put paid to whatever misdeeds they'd committed while they were alive.

And there were certainly plenty to choose from. Patron gods, I mean. The Tanti had a god for everything, from the least little nature spirit—Tselbhe, the deity of small brooks and pools of water—to the most powerful-- Tul, Great Sky God and supreme ruler of the heavens and earth. They called their pantheon the Tessares, and I bore the name of their wind deity Thest.

Don't get me wrong. I don't prescribe to the notion that the souls of men must be judged at death by gods. It seems to me to be a kind of faulty logic. If man was created flawed, then the onus of responsibility for those flaws would fall upon the maker, not the made, wouldn't you agree? What God had any right to condemn His flawed creation for the very imperfections that He or She instilled in them? It would be like a sculptor dashing his sculptures to the floor, infuriated by his own inadequacies. Surely, a perfect being would be above such petty displays of self-indulgence. Who knows... Perhaps the gods are sadists.

All I can tell you is this: in my 30,000 years, I have never met a preternatural creature I might consider deserving of the title "god". I have met vampires-- and even some rare humans—who have displayed exotic and impressive talents, but no transcendent beings.

Whatever the case, I had no compunctions about assuming the identity of the Tanti deity of wind so long as it greased their acceptance of me and my adopted son.

Lack of faith can be very liberating.

Not all of the Tanti accepted my divinity at face value. In fact, a good number of them were suspicious of me. I was accused—and rightly so—of being a charlatan, a deceiver, a T'sukuru trickster. Remember, unlike the modern era we live in now, vampires were known to mortals then. Reviled, feared like any other lethal predator, but known. We did not fully camouflage ourselves in the raiment of mortal superstition until much later in human history. If not for the accolades of the returning Tanti slaves, Ilio and I would have surely been turned away, perhaps even attacked. In the end, however, we were accepted. Grudgingly, objects of fear and distrust, but we were accepted… and we lived for the first time among mortal men and women.