Chapter 159 - Life Among the Tanti part 5

Getting comfortable near the hearth, Valas surveyed my lodge. "Your home is very well made. Very warm." He had shrugged off his heavy outer coat and gloves, and was warming his hands by the fire. His sons had done the same. I was heating water in a wicker bowl across the fire from them, sprinkling in dried mushrooms and herbs. Ilio watched nearby.

"I constructed it in the Tanti way," I said. "It is a very sturdy design."

"The T'sukuru of the east do not build their homes in the same manner?" Valas asked.

"As I have told you all, I am not of that tribe," I said.

Valas smiled. "Forgive me. I am old. Sometimes I forget. Where did you say you are from again?"

My water was beginning to steam, and I leaned over the bowl to smell it. The scent was familiar and pleasing. I had felt a thrill of nostalgia when I found the leaves and fungi I needed to make this concoction, but I had not yet had mortal guests and thus the need to prepare it for anyone. Vampires can eat and drink like any human, but it literally runs right through us… explosively so, at times.

I stirred the liquid with a wooden spoon. The infusion needed to steep a few more minutes, but it would be done soon.

"I was born in a valley far north of these lands," I said, sitting back. "My people were the ancestors of the Tanti, before the great cold came and covered the world in ice. When the ice devoured our valley home, your forefathers fled to the south. Out of loneliness, I sacrificed my body into the jaws of a glacier and found myself reborn, far from the lands from which I was born."

It was the same story I'd told the rest of the Tanti when I was questioned about my origins. I had left quite a few details out of the explanation, but I would not soon forget the ambitious Kuhl. He had tried to kill me and my adopted son, planning to drink our blood and make himself immortal. I decided then that I would never reveal to mortals the secret of our living blood. I had explained the need for discretion to Ilio, and he had seen the danger and agreed to keep our secret. He glanced at me furtively as I explained to the man where I was from, but he did not add anything to my tale. The boy sat next to me, staring anxiously into the fire.

The old man squinted at me. "You say you sacrificed yourself out of loneliness. Why did you not accompany our forefathers when they fled from the devouring ice?"

"I gave myself to the gods so that our forefathers could escape," I answered smoothly.

That was a pretty big lie, but it could not be helped.

"And you emerged thus changed?"

I shrugged. "I do not understand the workings of the transformation, or the reasons the gods must have had for it. I do not remember anything of the time I spent in the womb of the ice, nor can I tell you of the afterlife. I am what I am. What you see is all that there is. I was once a man like you. My people called me Thest. I died and then I was reborn."

Valas nodded, accepting my answers. "A miracle and a mystery," he said, "but life so often comes that way, does it not? Like twin children born with their bodies co-mingled. Mortal men also remember not the womb. I suppose it is fitting, though you certainly seem to have taken after your mother with that white and icy skin!"

He meant the glacier, I realized. He and his sons laughed.

My decoction had steeped long enough. I took my cooking bowl from the fire and poured the steaming tea into several cups. The Tanti used short, deep bowls of polished wood for drinking. I passed the steaming bowls around the fire.

"Careful, it's hot," I cautioned them.

Valas sipped loudly after sniffing the drink. "It's good. A bit bitter. What is this?"

"It's called framash," I answered. "Your forefathers drank it long ago. It can make you a little giddy, so drink it slowly."

"You are not drinking it?" Valas's son said suspiciously.

I smiled. "You know my kind only drink blood."

"Gibbus, don't be rude," Valas said, and the young man dropped his eyes.

We conversed leisurely as the snow began to swirl more thickly outside. All three finished their drinks, growing more at ease as the night wore on and the sedative in the infusion took effect. They took off a couple more layers of clothing, and stretched out on them, their cheeks flushed by the framash. Valas asked if I would teach his wife how to make the drink and I nodded. "It would be my pleasure," I said.

"So explain to me—and I don't mean to be rude," Valas said, his eyes glassy, "how your boy here became the same as you. My daughter insists that he was a mortal when they mated in the village of those accursed Oombai. She said she saw him struck down."

Ilio glanced at me, eyes wide, and I scrambled to come up with some lie that would assuage the man. It had to be plausible without revealing the secret of our living blood.

"There is no easy explanation," I finally said. "He was a mortal boy. He was fatally injured. He should have died. I do not know what happened. I prayed for him to live, and he was transformed."

"But you do not believe in our gods, or so you have said."

"Must the Tessares be believed in to intercede in the affairs of the living?" I countered.

"I suppose not…"

"If they rely on faith to exist, we could kill them with a thought. Then what kind of gods would they be? Nothing worthy of our respect, I would think."

"That sounds suspiciously like double-talk, my white-skinned friend," Valas said, but he smiled when he said it. His twinkling eyes asserted, I will let it go, but do not think I am fooled.

I did not.

"My father always said: take great care when asking the gods to meddle in your affairs," Valas resumed, looking into his empty cup with a frown. "Disappointment is always the result, he claimed. When they do not answer, which is most often the case, but also when they do. I never quite knew what to think of that... until now. You are either a very lucky man… or a very unlucky one!" Valas chuckled, his ruddy face crinkling.

Unlucky, I thought. Definitely unlucky.

"At least we know the seed takes root," Valas laughed, nodding toward the boy. I glanced at Ilio with a smile. I didn't know then that vampires were incapable of impregnating mortal women. I suspected it might be so. The glittery black fluid that issued from my organ seemed incapable of striking the spark of life in a woman's belly, but I didn't know for sure.

We shall see, I thought, worrying vaguely for Valas's daughter. If Ilio somehow managed to get her with child again… but my imagination shied from the thought.

Valas sat up suddenly, looking intensely into my eyes. "Priss said that you mated with my Aioa before she was murdered. That you went mad with rage when they killed her. She said that you slaughtered the Oombai's chieftains in vengeance. Every one of those bastards!"

"Yes!" I hissed, and I am fairly certain my eyes flashed at the memory. There is no word for the feeling that coursed through me right then, no modern equivalent for it, anyway. My people called it "kel'hrath", which was the joy you feel in avenging a terrible offense. Filled suddenly with kel'hrath, I spoke, my voice rough with emotion: "We met only briefly, but I was quite taken with your daughter. She was beautiful, and she had a fiery spirit, which is something I have always valued in a woman. I tried to bargain for her life, for the lives of all three of your daughters, but the Oombai killed her instead. So I killed them. I killed them all!"

He nodded, his eyes misty with tears. They did not fall—not the tears of a man such as Valas—but they glittered there at the edge of his eyelashes. "I thank you, Thest!" he said huskily. "Twice we tried to rescue our stolen ones from the Oombai, and twice their warriors turned us back. My family suffered greatly at their hands, but you have avenged our honor. If your boy wishes to be mated with my daughter, I would be proud to call him my son."

Ilio's head jerked up, his eyes bright. He looked at me with a grin, fangs exposed in his excitement, but no one seemed to notice, or if they did, they chose to ignore the unsightly display out of politeness.

We never did get the roof of Ilio's hut finished that night. Valas and his sons stayed to discuss the dower, and the details of the marriage ceremony. I poured them another round of framash and enjoyed the woodsy sweet smell of the merh they smoked when Valas's younger son produced a satchel of the dried leaves from one of his coat pockets. I partook of the merh when Valas passed the smoldering pipe to me, even though the drug in the smoke would only elevate my mood for a moment, at best, before the Strix eliminated it from my system, as it does all drugs or poisons. I didn't do it to be social, but for the nostalgia. Sitting around a fire, talking and smoking with my fellow tribesmen, recalled previous nights of like camaraderie.

Priss's dower was modest. Valas was not a greedy man. When we had agreed on the terms, her father and I discussed less pressing matters.

Valas was a family man, as I once was, and his thoughts turned to family and faith more than any other subject. He was frustrated that I could tell him nothing of the spirit world, but enjoyed my tales of the time before the ice, when our forefathers still lived in the valley by the river.

His two sons, Gibbus and Sephram, kept Ilio occupied.

"You are our brother now!" Sephram declared excitedly.

Though Gibbus was more reserved, he somehow managed to talk Ilio into showing them his fangs, and goaded him into demonstrations of our vampire speed and strength.

"Our grandchildren will be great warriors if they have even half his T'sukuru strength," Valas said as he watched Ilio stand upside down on one hand.

Our grandchildren…!

I felt a great upwelling of happiness as his words echoed in my mind-- for the man, for these simple people, and for the thought of having a family once again.

I also realized that I had not once thought of killing them and drinking their blood. The bloodthirst was there. It was always there. I was just so used to its clamoring, living among the Tanti, that I had put it out of my mind.

I was adapting to living in the world of mortal men.