By Blood We Live (19 page)

Her eyes closed again. The bleeding had slowed. Phlegm rattled in her chest when she exhaled. I realised I was looking—a flower of absurdity opened in my heart—at her breasts, which were small and hard, nipples dark as blackberries.

I felt very rich in the body and confused in the head.

“You have nothing to fear from me,” I said, pointlessly. For a moment her eyes focused and I saw all her dreadful power, the monthly rhythm of her need for living meat, the work it had been to find room for the beast. The souls of her dead babbled in her blood, not knowing if her dying would release them. My own dead stirred, wondered how it was for these others suddenly close by. “Something’s happening,” I said. To her, to myself, to the universe—or was it the universe saying it through me, matter-of-factly? Something’s
happening.

By accident or her own intention her giant knee relaxed and touched mine where I knelt. Then her eyes closed again.

A
LONG AND
unhinged night for me, walking up and down outside the cave telling myself what was happening wasn’t possible. I kept laughing out loud. The sound of which frightened me and made everything worse. Details were urgent and vivified: a bare white-branched tree; the shadows of small stones; the odour of snow. The moon sailed by slowly like a delighted intelligence, faceless yet somehow grinning, somehow
in on it.
My guest’s breathing sounded as if she had a slight cold. I kept going back to her—(Her! Upper case was ten thousand years in the future but she’d acquired its mental equivalent)—ostensibly to see if she was awake or to check on the progress of her budding palms and fingers. In fact to keep feeling what I was, against all reason, feeling.

What I was feeling.

Yes.

I laughed again, and again it made me feel worse. I lost my balance—actually found myself falling sideways and reaching out; I would’ve fallen over—fallen over! Me!—if I hadn’t been so close to the sheer side of the hill. Instead I leaned there, imbecilic, incredulous, full of dumb certainty. The blood in my head was colossal and unruly, a giant who’d drunk too much.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking the shock derived from the hilariously inappropriate
object
of my desire. (I could see the faces of my vampire friends going from plain surprise to crimped bafflement to wrinkled disgust. Really? A
gammou-jhi
? A dog? Gods, Rem, you’re sick in the blood!) But you’re wrong. It wasn’t the object of my desire. It was the fact of desire itself.

Desire.

After a thousand years.

(Or two thousand. One loses count.)

I’d passed thirty-nine summers before I became a vampire. I’d fathered
several children. My equipment had, back in the human days, worked. Splendidly, on occasion, if the shrieks and teethmarks and flailing not-quite-knowing-what-to-do-with-themselves limbs of my various lady friends were to be believed. But since my Turning, nothing. Not impotence. Just a complete absence of desire. It’s common knowledge in modern times (thanks not least to peskily scribbling Jacob Marlowe) but back then we had to make the wretched discovery for ourselves: The Lash murders libido.

But here I was … Here
I
was …

Nor was it merely desire. Desire alone would have cracked the paradigm’s egg and scrambled it. But I repeat: It wasn’t merely desire. Every time I went within range of her scent reality’s tectonic plates shifted, threatened to come apart entirely. Because here, along with desire, was an unbalancing recognition. I knew her. I
knew
her. The ether between us shivered with dark remembered joy.
Remembered
joy. It wasn’t perversion. It wasn’t—I searched myself thoroughly for this—the titillation of taboo. It was … It was …

A burst of laughter from the moon smashed the reverie and I looked up to see it was almost below the horizon.

IT
’
S NOT SOMETHING
they want you to watch.

So said the lore, and my roused shame as I approached the cave endorsed it. But I had to see. Had to.

She was on her feet, leaning back against the left-hand wall of the cave, head lowered, jaws open, panting. Her tongue went back and forth with each pant. The wounds had healed. Only the claws on the regrown hands hadn’t yet arrived. The smell of her dizzied me. Its soft kernel was in her somewhere, an infinite source. I wanted to find it. Go into it. Lose myself.

I stepped inside the cave. She knew I was there, of course, could have snarled or chased me out, made a need for privacy plain. But she didn’t. Instead she turned her magnificent head and looked at me.

I know you. You know me.

How?

All my past gathered, as if it knew what was about to happen would draw a line marking the beginning of a New Age.

Then with a strangled sound she grabbed her belly, doubled up, and crashed forward onto her knees.

It was compelling and ugly to watch. After that first choked gargle she didn’t utter a sound. Which made her body’s mad monologue of bone-squeak and muscle-crunch loud. A jerky series of implosions, the beast done bit by bit out of its molecular rights as the long femurs shuddered through their appalling compression and the head thrashed from side to side as if the inner skull were trying to shake off the outer. Her odour bloomed, swelled for a moment at the edge of rottenness, then in an instant atomised around her and hung, suspended, waiting to resettle in its human version. And all the while my baffled certainty grew, reached a warm fullness as all but the now resting head returned in three, four, five slow spasms (she would climax with these same pretty convulsions, I knew) to its human form. She turned her face away for the last and most
intimate part of the transformation, though I watched the scalp’s short fur hurry out as thick dark human hair, one long wave curved as if by design over the breast nearest me.

Moments. Her face turned away, her breathing slowing. Our mutual awareness naked. I thought: Was I mistaken? Am I mistaken?

Then she turned her face to me, and I knew I wasn’t.

I
N THE LANGUAGE
of the upper river people, she said: “I’m freezing.” Her voice was low and soft and confident and the colour of the river at night.

I answered her in her own tongue: “Take these. I’ll make a fire.”

“These” were the fur, emptied of its human remains, plus my own bearskin cloak. When she wriggled into them giant desire uncoiled in me. Laughter rushed up immediately, made itself available. I only just resisted it. The vastness and simplicity of wanting her in that way—of wanting anyone in that way—was
so
vast and simple laughter seemed inevitable. It was as if someone had lifted the sky like a lid to reveal a completely different wonderful realm beyond, one that made everything we thought we knew redundant—and hilarious. Every drop of my blood stared at its new reflection, scared to recognise itself, convinced that to accept this gift would be to lose it.

“Hurry,” she said. “The sun’ll be good for me but not for you.”

I’d known from the start she knew what I was, but to have it casually confirmed like this was another sweet shock. I thought: Has she been with
other
vampires?

“If you have to dig, I can help you. That’ll give us more time.”

She spoke with such swift control, as if we’d known each other for years, as if she knew just the sort of moronic dazes I was liable to fall into. She was as tall as me, supple, dark-eyed. She’d seen thirty winters in her human life and now would never look a minute older. Her face—the bold eyes and wide mouth ready to find delight—said she was at fierce peace with what she was. Whatever terms her condition demanded she’d met them long ago. The thought that monstrosity had stripped her of a right to live had never crossed her mind. She’d had her teeth and nails in life’s pelt from birth;
this
wasn’t going to make her let go.

“It won’t hurt you, will it?”

The fire, she meant.

“No. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

Modernity tells you vampires are afraid of fire. Well, that’s true, but only in the way you’re afraid of it: we don’t, any more than you do, want to get burned. We don’t much fancy, you know,
going up in flames.
We’re certainly not impervious to the charm of its warmth. We feel the cold and the heat much less than you do, but that’s not to say we don’t feel them at all. I was cooler without the bearskin, but I could have gone out—as the modern idiom has it—stark bollock naked and wandered in the snow for several hours without much more than minor discomfort. (The more delicious and immediate discomfort—and speaking of bollocks—was that sans cloak I was left in only footwear and a doeskin loincloth, loose enough to make my feelings apparent.) The fixings for fire were—to my luck, or in accordance with the forces softly engineering this encounter—available. Amlek and Mim had slept here with me not long ago. We’d fed early and come back to the cave hours before dawn. Amlek had found flint and lit a fire, more for aesthetics than warmth, since the night had taken a reminiscent turn, and the scar of the burning near the cave mouth was still visible. There was very little dry stuff, but I found the flint and did what I could, and in a few minutes had a dozen small flames frolicking. Fir trees growing fifty feet below the cave supplied pine cones, which, together with what dead wood I could find, would be fuel enough till sunrise. I busied myself with the flames, poking and prodding and blowing, conscious all the while of her watching me, the space between us rich with our potential movement through it, to each other. The ghost of myself was already moving through it, an erotic whole-body version of the phantom limb. And still the fever of incredulous certainty enriched the thud of every passing second.

Then, suddenly, I stood up and turned, and there we were. Looking at each other. The fire marked her with little wings of light: cheekbones, knees, one bare shoulder. We didn’t speak. Her face was full of knowledge of me. The lights in her dark eyes were steady. We didn’t speak. It was a concussive pleasure, the not speaking. I only realised I’d been thinking:
You’re not alone anymore
when I felt coming from her:
No, we’re not.

There was no decision. One minute we stood facing each other, the next I felt the little distance between us going, going, dissolving into fluid warm nothing, until our arms were around each other and there was the shape of her perfectly fitting my own.

T
HE MYTH OF
male and female as an originally single hermaphrodite being survives, even now.
My other half
, you say. Read literally it shortchanges homosexuals—which ought to be more than enough to let literalists know their reading needs work. Genitals aren’t the issue. The issue is the feeling of homecoming. Of recognition. Of re-encounter. Of knowing that you knew each other once, were forced into separated forgetfulness, mistook others for each other (wilful myopia or innocent near-misses) but now, by sheer chance or ineffable design, you’ve found the
real
each other again. Thank the gods. Thank accident. Thank the determined universe. At any rate the impulse (endearing, if you think about it) is to thank
some
thing.

And my cup, obviously, ran over. A brand-new sex life and a life-changing lover to share it with. We didn’t congratulate ourselves. Shared intuition said it would be asking for trouble. We were very quiet and careful, going about our loving business. We didn’t want to attract the universe’s attention. We didn’t want the universe noticing it had made an obscene mistake and, appalled at its negligence,
rectifying
it at a brutal, hurried stroke.

“How is this possible?” I whispered to her (since the universe might be listening) in the firelight. We’d made the cave home, temporarily. Clearly the cave was ours. Clearly the world was ours. We were deep in the mesmerised phase of quiet entitlement. I’d often wondered about the point of the everything. Well, here it was.

“I don’t care how,” she whispered back, clambering onto me. “Only
that.
”

“I love you.”

“I know.”

She did know. She was delighted and appalled at her greed for it. If she hadn’t loved me my love would have invited her cruelty. If she hadn’t loved me my love would have made a tyrant of her. Fortunately, she did love me.

“That’s it, just like that. Oh God, that’s good. That’s what good means.”

I’d never known peace and pleasure and profound necessity as I knew when I was inside her. She liked to sit astride me (“cowgirl,” as contemporary pornography has it, in one of its rare female-friendly coinages), said I hit her in just the right place like that. (The G-spot was thousands of years in the future. But just as people knew sound reasoning before Aristotle formalised logic …) She liked to sit astride me with my hands on her hips, occasionally lowering her mouth to mine for kisses that took us both out into the void. There were these dips into darkness which momentarily solved our selves’ separateness. But the real sweetness—you’d say the
human
sweetness—was in the moments either side of transcendence, the frenzied attempt to get all, enough, everything of each other, the delighted disbelief in what we were experiencing, the outrageous undeserved gift of it. Oh, we made rare pigs of ourselves! We often fell asleep having just come, in whatever position we’d ended up in. And yet there was a little infallible gravity of tenderness that always drew us, half-asleep, back into each other’s arms. Sometimes we’d become aware that we’d both woken, and were thinking.

“Stop thinking,” she said, when this happened.

“
You’re
thinking,” I answered.

“I’ll stop. You stop, too.”

“Okay.”

Once—and only once—she said: “My lifetime will be the blink of an eye next to yours.”

I almost said: “I won’t go on without you.” But didn’t. Because even though I believed it I knew it would annoy her. She knew I was thinking it, anyway. We were in the cave, lying naked on the bearskin. The fire was low, but we were flushed from lovemaking. She was on her side, one leg bent. I was lying with my head resting on her thigh, breathing the smell of her cunt, which to me had become (had always been; I’d just forgotten it, along with all the other things I’d forgotten and was now being given back) the smell of love. The thought of losing her filled me with frantic energy. Energy that didn’t know what to do, but couldn’t stop believing there was something it
could
do.