Chapter 160 - Life Among the Tanti part 6

Ilio and Priss wed shortly after.

When the first storm of the season had come and gone, the weather warmed back up for a few days. It was not what you might call balmy, but it was warm enough to melt the snow that had accumulated on the rooftops and in the avenues of the Tanti village. The sky cleared, the sun flashed off the lake and the air smelled earthy and pure. Spring fever spread through the village like a virulent contagion.

As melting snow dripped from the thatch roofs and the runoff coursed in gleaming rivulets down the hill to the pristine lake, the village women prepared for the wedding ceremony. I watched with amusement from the doorway of my lodge as groups of women tramped back and forth in the streets all day, paying little attention to the mud and muck.

The entire village was swept up in the excitement of the nuptial. Everyone was talking about it. It was very much like a modern celebrity wedding. Even the villagers who had previously been standoffish were coming up to me to converse about the wedding. They visited our hut to gossip and gawk under the pretense of bartering for goods. The village shaman and his protégé performed fertility rituals, good luck spells and came to our home to purify the boy's spirit with prayers and sweet smelling incense.

Ilio had not moved into his own hut, despite the fact that we had completed its construction. Now that the time had come for him to fly the nest, he was strangely hesitant to leave my side, but I didn't comment on his reticence. I really wasn't too eager for him to go either, even though I'd been preparing my mind for him to leave.

I had missed out on this human experience when I was first made into a vampire. In those early days, I was much too dangerous to go anywhere near my mortal family. I had been forced to watch my children grow up from afar, and had missed the sweet agony of my offspring leaving home to start families of their own.

I loved Ilio like he was my own, and I doted on him shamelessly. I made sure his lodge was outfitted with every comfort I could think of: mats, rugs, furs, hangings for all the doors and windows. I bartered for furnishings, all manner of utensils and dishware, spices and stores of food. I had new clothes made for him, and rebraided his hair so that his bride would find him more fetching. For his part, Ilio was especially attentive to his chores and, in general, was behaving much more maturely.

"Do you think I am ready to be on my own, Thest?" he asked one evening as we prepared to go out to hunt.

"As ready as you'll ever be," I answered lightly, showing no sign of my own concerns.

Then later: "I am so afraid I'll hurt them. What if I lose control of the bloodthirst, Father?"

He was talking about his wife and children, of course.

"I feared the same thing when I first took you into my care," I answered. "I'm certain your affection for your new family will stay your hand, as my love for you stayed my hand when I took you under my wing. You should be mindful of the bloodthirst, at all times, but you have always had more control of it than I. I think you will be fine."

"If I feel my restraint weakening, I will flee to the wilderness and hunt until I'm as fat as a tick," he said seriously, and I nodded in sympathy, laughing a little. Then we slipped out into the dark avenue and raced like pale revenants to hunt the forest for blood.

Twice, Ilio announced that he was going to move into his new home, and twice he reneged, but I did not comment.

One evening, Priss's brothers came and stole Ilio away. They were boisterous, as fresh young men often are. They said they were taking him across the lake to engage in some kind of pre-wedding tradition— the Tanti equivalent of a stag party. I grew bored waiting for him to return and began to straighten up my lodge, and that is when I found all the little toys I had carved for him when he was a mortal child.

I found them wrapped carefully in some hides beside his sleeping mat. They were pressed into the corner of the wall behind the rolled up fur he rested his head upon when he slept. I squatted and picked them up from the floor after they had tumbled from the hide. Turning them over in my hands, I examined them. Little wooden men, a carving of a wooly mammoth, a spear-tooth cat (one of the hind legs broken off). My eyes stung suddenly and I wrapped them back up and returned them where I'd found them.

You've become a sentimental fool, Gon! I berated myself, wiping black tears from my cheeks.

At least I could take solace from the company of Priss's extensive family.

As the nuptial drew nearer, Priss's father had become a frequent visitor in my home. He had taken a liking to my framash… and a liking to me as well. He enjoyed gossiping about his fellow villagers, especially who was coupling with who behind who's back. He had an inordinate amount of interest in the sexual escapades of his neighbors. He also derived great enjoyment from complaining about his wife, his ungrateful kids, and was not averse to the telling of tall tales—"big fish stories", the Tanti called them. It often felt as if we were co-conspirators in some plot I was only half-aware of, but I liked him. I enjoyed our conversations, especially with Ilio absent so much of the time now.

Nearly every evening, usually around sundown, Valas would yell from my doorway: "Oya, Shast'pa'ulm! Thest, you old bloodsucker! Rise and tend to your guest!" Sometimes he came with his sons or his cousins or sons-by-marriage, but usually he came on his own. When I swept open the door hanging to admit him, he strolled in without hesitation, giving my crotch a passing swat—a gesture of affection among Tanti men, somewhat similar to the way your modern athletes will slap one another on the rump during games. "Are you hiding a hogleg in there?" he would ask-- or something in that vein-- and then he would throw himself on a mat beside the hearth and wait for me to prepare some framash.

If Ilio was still home, the boy would roll up in his bedding, complaining about the light. Usually he was gone by the time Valas came around, however. Ilio had begun to venture out before nightfall more and more frequently. Trying to get better accustomed to the daylight, he claimed.

"You'll never guess who I caught sneaking off into the woods with my brother Hale today, Thest," the old fellow grinned, running his fingers through his great frizzy beard.

"Who?" I asked, building up the fire in my hearth.

"Lettia! Tateron's new wife!" and then he proceeded to tell me of Lettia and Hale's longstanding affair, opining at length how calculating some women can be when it comes to their own satisfaction. "Hale is a lazy man. A terrible provider. He is my brother, but I am only speaking the truth. She would have been crazy to choose Hale over Tateron. Still, there are some things more important than a full belly and a warm hearth! While Tateron is out fishing on the lake, Lettia goes fishing as well." And then he burst out laughing.

The sons of Valbaulm, Valas's father, were renown in the village of the Tanti for their fertility… and their physical endowments. Valas, like most religious men I'd ever met, was inordinately obsessed with carnal things. He took great pride in his family's reputation as cocksmen and the number of children he had sired—sixteen, at present count, by two wives, the first of whom was (unsurprisingly) dead. Yet he was strangely prudish about subjects outside his experience. He acted appalled when I asked him if Tanti wedding rituals included a celebratory orgy, as his forefather's had practiced when I was a mortal.

"Great Tul, no! How would we know what children were ours if we all just humped in a pile? And you say our forefathers indulged in such rituals? Ha! I'd be afraid some nearsighted fool would mistake my fat rump for a woman's hindquarters!"

He was scandalized when I revealed that my group marriage had included a co-husband-- my lifelong companion Brulde, who raised our children after I was made into this thing that I am.

"Sometimes our young males will dabble in such behavior, but we try to discourage it whenever we can," Valas said. "It is not productive for a man to lie down with a man." He snorted. "Although I have heard some pretty lurid tales about those fishermen! Sometimes we see the boats rocking, but none of the men hauling in nets! They say they're napping-- ha!"

"There are advantages to such a living arrangement," I countered.

"Oh, I'm certain there are!" he exclaimed merrily. "There would be less children to tend to, for one thing. And a lot less haggling for sex!"

That wasn't really what I meant, but I didn't bother to debate the matter with him. Most people will not tolerate ideas foreign to their upbringing. I merely steeped his framash and let him ramble until he left.

In the meantime, Ilio was staying very busy himself.

Tanti marriages were often arranged, although allowances were made if the betrothed were irreconcilably incompatible, or a woman became pregnant by another man. The Tanti also tended to discourage intercourse between the prospective bride and groom before the wedding ceremony—socially as well as sexually. This was supposed to make the couple pine for one another, but I believe it was really just to make sure both parties had less of a chance to find fault in their mate and spoil everybody's plans. Ilio had only been allowed to visit with Priss a few times since our arrival in the village, and once the two of them were officially betrothed, he was not allowed to see her at all.

He spent his days adding the finishing touches to the home he had built for her, and gathering the dower we had all agreed upon (mostly foodstuffs, but also animal hides and trinkets for her mother and father and all her brothers and sisters).

 He was restless and uncertain, and constantly sought my advice on everything from lovemaking to childrearing.

Childrearing I could tell him about. I had fathered six children. Lovemaking was the topic that neither of us were quite certain of.

I had plenty of experience with human sexuality. My people had been very casual about sex. But sex between a vampire and a mortal… that was a different matter altogether.

I knew it could be done. I had made love to Priss's sister Aioa when we visited the village of the Oombai. But it was the first and only time I'd made love to a mortal woman, and she had allowed me to drink of her blood in the midst of our congress. It had been a rapturous experience for me, my spirit soaring to the peak of sensual ecstasy, but I could not in all honesty encourage the boy to do anything but approach the act with the utmost care.

"I would discourage you from making love at all while she is with child," I counseled the young man. "With your strength, you could easily injure your bride, and your unborn child. If you wish to have congress with her after the child is born, do not use your hands on her until you are certain of your self-control. Allow her to make love to you."

I also advised him to depart from her temporarily during her monthly cycle. The blood that issued from her body, I feared, might tempt him to unsavory behavior.

"Blood?" he asked. "What do you mean? Why would she bleed every cycle of the moon?"

"It is her estrus," I explained. "Have I never told you of the female cycle?"

"No."

"No? I'm certain that I did."

He shook his head, eyes wide.

His ignorance did not surprise me. He had been raised almost exclusively by men in a tribe of nomadic mammoth hunters. The Denghoi were quite circumspect about their sexual practices as well. He had been ignorant of even the rudiments of human sexuality when I adopted him.

So I had to educate him about the monthly cycle of the female reproductive system, how blood would issue from her sexual organ once a month unless she was with child, and that childbirth, too, would be a rather bloody affair.

"When the child comes, you must leave her to the care of her mother and sisters, and then come here immediately. You'll have to stay with me for a while afterwards as well, I should think. The mother of your child will bleed for several weeks after the child is delivered."

"Ancestors, they bleed an awful lot!" Ilio said with a nervous titter. It was obvious he was overwhelmed by all that I'd just told him.

"It is just the nature of things," I replied. "Birds fly, fish swim and women bleed."