By Blood We Live
Page 65

“But we were attacked,” I said. “Twenty hunters from the other tribe. My kinsmen were killed. I was wounded, but I got away. Obviously they took the boar, too.”
“Where were you wounded?” Caleb asked.
“Guts,” I said. “A spear went straight through my intestines, destroyed my kidneys. I broke the shaft, but when I tried to pull it out I realised the head was barbed with teeth. The pain was unbearable.”
“So how come you got away?” Reflex modern teen scepticism: Look for cowardice, lies, trickery. Things aren’t what they seem unless they seem shit.
“I was lucky,” I said. “We were still in the forest, and darkness gathered quickly. I slipped them and struggled on for what felt like miles. It was so tempting to lie down and close my eyes. I was very cold.”
It was a minor, separate fascination to Caleb that I was making the drink as I spoke. Sweet vermouth. Bourbon. Angostura bitters. There were maraschino cherries in a jar on the shelf—but I doubted we had an orange for the peel rub around the glass. Shame. Caleb would’ve been tickled by that.
“It rained,” I said. “By the time I found the cave I was crawling on my hands and knees. I knew I was dying. I was hoping there’d be a big cat inside to finish me off. There was something in there, but it wasn’t a big cat.”
“Your maker?” Caleb said.
I strained the bourbon, vermouth and bitters over ice into a funnel glass. I was right: we didn’t have oranges. It offended my inner bartender, a tiny aesthetic pain. A missing piece. He lied in every word.
“It was a good place to die,” I said, sliding the cocktail to my imaginary customer (I pictured a tired midtown businesswoman with fractured blue eye-shadow and a creased pinstripe skirt, shapely, aching calves, coffee breath, the day’s migraine of corporate jabber draining away in the first sip of the drink) and leaning on the counter on the heels of my hands. “It would have been a good place to die. The mouth of the cave looked west, out over the tops of the trees. On the horizon the last flakes of sunset like blood and gold. When I heard a sound behind me I thought the gods had answered me. He came close. I felt his breath on my neck. He said: ‘Answer me something. Do you want to live?’ To this day I can’t recall whether I answered yes or no. It didn’t matter. He said: ‘I’ve seen this place in my dreams. It’s a relief to come to it.’ Then he took me in his arms and put his teeth in my throat.”
I was remembering the darkening land, those last flakes of light and the night coming down inside me, his drinking to the rhythm of my heart, to what felt like the rhythm of the land itself. It was such a thin, light-aired place between life and death. In it you could see the universe was like a frail smile.
“When he opened his wrist and put it to my lips, I remember I said: ‘Why?’ And he answered: ‘Because someone must bear witness. My time is over. This is the last thing I can do. Now drink.’ So of course,” I said, smiling, feeling the tears coming again, “I drank.”
Caleb had forgotten to smoke his cigarette. It had burned all the way down, and its ash had fallen on the carpet. I could feel Mia trying to make the emotional calculation. She was barely six hundred years old. There was, I knew, a determination in her to pass the thousand-year jinx—but twenty thousand?
“What happened to him?” Caleb asked.
I swallowed the tears. Blinked. Blinked. There’s no fool like an old fool.
“I never saw him,” I said. “I crawled deep into the cave and slept. When I woke the next night, there were only the remains.”
“What remains?”
The other youth demand—for end-points. Prime movers and final destinations.
“Not much,” I said. “I couldn’t see. It was still dark. Something like wet ash. I left the cave and went out into the night. I had a woman. Children. There was no going back. I knew that from the very beginning.”
“And did you have to feed straight away?” Caleb asked—but Mia shook her head.
“That’s enough questions,” she said. She, at any rate, could see or sense the state I was in. You’re a bit fragile …
Caleb, snapped out of it, saw what had become of his unsmoked cigarette. “Oh,” he said. “Shit. Sorry.”
“Sir?” Damien’s voice came over the PA. I picked up the phone by the bar.
“Yes, Damien?”
“Sir, we’re starting our approach. We should be on the ground in twenty minutes.”
I turned to my guests. “Okay,” I said. “Seats upright, please. Fasten your seat belts. We’re landing soon.”
59
IT WAS OBVIOUS before the Caminata installation came into view that whatever had happened here, we’d missed it. The air (to noses of our refinement) stank—beyond the quiet base notes of meadow grass, gorse and rain—of explosives and gunfire.
Something very bizarre had happened to me en route.
We’d parked the car a quarter of a mile away on a chalk track that led off a rutted lane and made our way through a thin line of woodland up towards the ridge. A stream ran through a gully some thirty metres into the trees. Mia and Caleb went over it in a single leap, but I found myself compelled to wade. Not just the threatened unsteadiness in my pins (my body had decided to experiment with various anomalies and I’d decided to keep quiet about them) but a psychological necessity. A sort of dim curiosity about what the water would feel like, although I had no earthly reason for expecting it to feel like anything other than water. Fortunately, by the time I began to cross mother and son were far enough ahead not to see what happened.
What happened was that after three or four paces, shin-deep, I became convinced that I was treading not on what were obviously—visibly—the rounded stones of the stream bed, but on the heads and bodies of dead people.
I made it to the opposite bank and sloshed out, shaking, wondering not only what new doolally gimmick my brain was trying out, but also why the feel of the non-existent corpses underfoot reminded me of the old geezer I’d seen that night on the drive at Las Rosas, with his crutch and his bloodshot eye and his baffling bulletin that I was “going the wrong way.” Him and that wretched horse I’d had to shoot the night I went after Justine in North Vegas. I’d forgotten both of them until just now.
Needless to say I didn’t mention any of this to Mia and Caleb when I caught up with them at the edge of the tree line.