The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All: Revised and Expanded (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 1) Page 2

  “You play here on the bank, Little Worm. The river is too dangerous for you to help us fish today,” he said.

  “Yes, Stodd,” I breathlessly replied, water dripping from my hair.

  I’ll never forget how carefully Stodd watched after me. He always kept a wary eye on me whenever he was around, as if I were his special responsibility and not just some brat hanging around and pestering the adults. In that he was like a kindly uncle. Contrast that with the modern perception of those prehistoric men!

  My father rarely chastised me for my unusual disposition. Gan had a lot of respect for our Neanderthal cousins and trusted them to keep an eye on his rambunctious son. My brothers, however, were not so understanding. Sometimes Epp’ha would tell me I should go live with the Fat Hands if I loved them so much, or Aldh would drag me cruelly by the ear when father sent him down to the river to fetch me home.

  The Neanderthals were gentle with us most of the time. We were like children to them, I think. Even our burliest men were slight compared to them. Sometimes they would pull one of our young ones into their lap and sing to them or relate one of their strange religious fables. Neanderthals had larger craniums than their Cro-Magnon counterparts. I do not think they were smarter than us, but they certainly thought differently than we did, if you can imagine that. Their reality was wilder and brighter and much more colorful than ours.

  They called us what could roughly be translated as Fast Feet. I think they were amused by our frenetic activity. We were always running hither and yon, making tools and weapons, building new tents or repairing old ones, squabbling and hunting and mating.

  By comparison, they were a sedentary people. They rarely hurried. They rarely even seemed to get angry, although when they did it was best to clear the area and let them fight it out. When he was a boy, my companion Brulde had gotten caught in the middle of a knife fight between two enraged Fat Hands. The encounter left him with a pitted scar that curled from his left eye to his jawline. It was a rare outburst, something I witnessed only twice in my life. Poor Brulde was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  If I sound overly sentimental about this long vanished race, don’t expect me to apologize. It was from this stock of strong but genial people that my Eyya descended… my beautiful, beloved wife.

  3

  I have to be truthful. This is a “tell all” book after all, and I swore to myself when I decided to write my memoirs that I would be truthful above all else. Not only was I married to a Neanderthal, I was actually quite fond of her.

  Her name was Eyya.

  She was the love of my mortal life, my shy and tender Eyya, and her absence still pains my frozen heart, even now, some 30,000 years later. It seems to me that she was always there, even in my earliest memories. Even when I was a boy and mostly uninterested in girls, she was there, at the periphery of my awareness, as if she were merely biding her time until I was mature enough to appreciate her countless and varied charms.

  Eyya often accompanied her father when the Neanderthals came down to the river to fish. Even as a child, she skipped along beside the hulking men, tiny in comparison, or scurried around nearby, nibbling on edible plants or gathering herbs to take back to her mother. Most Neanderthal females stayed near the limestone cliffs and mountainous woodlands of their home territory, but not Eyya. For a Neanderthal child, Eyya was adventurous.

  She was also her father’s favorite.

  She was a runt by her people’s standards, which is probably why she was her father’s pet, but I thought she was very pretty. Well, pretty for a girl. She had long dark hair, which she braided in a very intriguing manner, and olive-colored skin and eyes that were almost too big for her face. While the Fat Hand men speared fish or trapped crayfish in woven baskets, she played or foraged for nuts and berries. Sometimes she followed us Fat Feet children around, observing our games as if we were particularly clever beasts. Her condescending attitude often angered me when I was a boy, but I found her very appealing when I got a little older, for she matured into a voluptuous young woman, with plump breasts and a narrow waist and smoothly flaring hips. And she had that exotic golden skin, which I had always found quite attractive.

  She never strayed far from her father, never ventured into our village without an escort, but other than that she was free to do whatever she liked when she came down to the river.

  I think she enjoyed the company of the more rambunctious Fast Feet children. She did not exactly play with us. It was more like she was supervising us. She often pretended to be our mother—ordering us around and mock spanking us when we misbehaved and feeding us food made of mud and sticks and rocks. Sometimes she even engaged in sex play with the older boys.

  The Neanderthals were just as casual about sex as my people were and rarely chastised us for our tomfoolery. Neither of our tribes harbored the delusion that children were sexless creatures. We did not punish the young for masturbating or engaging in sex play. The concept of Original Sin would not be invented for tens of thousands of years. Sin for us was endangering another member of the tribe, hurting our loved ones, acts of foolishness or neglect—not pleasuring our genitals or engaging in mock sex acts with our peers. For us, sex was a fact of nature, part of the cycle of life and death, and it was rarely considered embarrassing or shameful. It was the well from which we sprang and the well from which we drew from to promulgate our way of life.

  I confess, I have never understood your Judeo-Christian prudery or why it still persists in these supposedly enlightened times; this hysteric sheltering of children from their own sexuality, and the demented compulsion to mutilate their sex organs. What shame must be instilled in your hearts to take a knife to such a pleasurable part of your anatomy!

  Our people did not subscribe to such nonsense.

  I remember playing with Brulde one afternoon in a shallow tributary pool, both of us naked and splashing, young boys with hairless bodies and tiny little hairless penises. We were probably about seven or eight years old. It was a warm late spring afternoon, the sun flashing on the water, the clouds like vast white mountains hanging weightless in the endless blue depths of the sky. We were catching crayfish and trying to get the little creatures to snap one another with their pincers. To be completely truthful, we were trying to get the little creatures to latch onto one another’s acroposthions, that little nipple of loose skin at the tip of the foreskin.

  Yes, I know. Boys are ridiculous!

  Neither of us noticed the dark-haired girl who had wormed her way through the reeds to watch us play. Not until she giggled.

  We spun around guiltily, covering our genitals with our hands. Not because we were ashamed of our nakedness but because we were doing something foolish and we knew it.

  “What are you silly Fast Feet doing now?” she demanded.

  We spotted her finally, hiding in the rushes on her belly. Round cheeks, great grave brown eyes, white teeth and full lips. I thought she was pretty even then, but it was the way little boys regard female prettiness, not lustily, with the urges of a man, but just the observation: She’s pretty. Now let’s catch some more crayfish!

  “Playing,” I answered defensively.

  Brulde took advantage of my distraction to put a crayfish in my hair. I yelled and brushed it out and then I chased after him. I caught ahold of his arm as he tried to climb up the bank and the two of us wrestled for a moment before tumbling back into the pool. Pinning my cousin beneath my knees, I scooped mud from the bottom of the stream and smeared it in his face.

  “Why are you trying to get those crayfish to pinch your pee-pees?” Eyya asked.

  She had come out of the reeds and stood at the edge of the water, hands against her back, as pregnant women stand when they are tired.

  We took a break from our battle. Brulde washed the mud from his face as I stood up, dripping, to answer her. “We are toughening them up,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “If you don’t know I’m not going to explain it to you. Stu
pid girl! Go back to your dad and ask him what a man’s organ is used for!”

  Brulde laughed.

  Our derision offended her.

  “I know what they’re for!” she retorted, balling her hands into fists.

  “Oh, yeah? What is it then?” I asked.

  “It’s for when a man puts his pee-pee in a woman and then they have babies! I see it all the time at home. I just wanted to know why you were putting crayfish on your dingles. Why do you want to make them tougher?”

  “Because they must be strong enough to crack the nut inside your pussy,” I said. “My brother told me all about it. He said that women have a nut inside their pussy, and men have to crack the nut with their cock to make the seed take root. If our cocks are not strong enough, we’ll never be able to crack the nut and get our wives with babies.”

  “Ohhhh…!” Intrigued, Eyya lifted the front of her dress and regarded her genitals. She spread the lips of her vagina to get a better look. “I wonder if there’s a nut inside my pussy. I don’t think there is. I put things in there sometimes but…”

  I looked at Brulde with a mischievous grin. He grinned back. “Let’s see if we can find it,” I said. My child’s pecker was standing at attention.

  She glanced up as I approached. “Your organ certainly looks hard enough,” she said. “But it’s so little! My father’s organ is almost as big as my arm.”

  She wasn’t exaggerating. I had seen it.

  “Ours will get bigger when we grow up,” Brulde said.

  “I hope so,” Eyya replied, squinting at our penises critically. “If there really is a nut inside my pussy, I don’t see how you could reach it with those little things.”

  We spent the afternoon exploring one another’s bodies. You modern people call it “playing doctor”. Eyya allowed us to examine her vagina, even let us put our fingers inside. Try as we might, however, we could find no nut inside of her. We let her examine our penises in return, and she held them in her hands and compared the size of them to one another. She sniffed them and pulled back the skin to look at the bulbous part within and gently squeezed our testicles to feel the spongy little plums roll around the crinkled sacks.

  Now please be mindful that I do not relate this event to inspire prurient thought but merely to illustrate our innocence and sexual freedom. We were children of nature. Sex had not yet been subverted by religion to control the simple-minded. It had not been commercialized to sell automobiles or microwave dinners. It simply was what it was, a way to give and take pleasure, the propagation of our species, and for my tribe in particular, with its ritual orgies and spouse sharing customs, the cement that held our society together.

  “Well, I think they’re very pretty,” Eyya said at last, having satisfied her curiosity.

  “They’re not pretty!” I exclaimed. “Ancestors! Don’t you know anything?”

  “Let’s see if you can feel the nut with your penis,” Eyya suddenly announced. She sat on the bank that overhung the pool and cocked her knees into the air, exposing her sex to us.

  Brulde was too scared. Even then he was the reserved one. I was the bolder of our twosome. I tried to mate with Eyya as I had seen the older men do with the women. I positioned myself between her thighs and pushed the end of my turgid penis inside of her.

  “Can you feel it?” she asked.

  I shook my head no.

  We coupled for a minute or two. I rocked my hips as I’d seen the older men do, but I was too young to climax and Eyya complained that it was hurting so we abandoned the act.

  Afterwards, I strutted around cockily in the pool, a man now, or so I believed. Brulde's eyes gleamed worshipfully.

  “You see that, Brulde? Did you see me mate with her?” I said.

  Brulde nodded, eyes shining.

  “Heeeeey…! My pussy is bleeding,” Eyya cried, inspecting her vagina with dismay. She jumped to her feet and exclaimed, “I better not have a baby, you silly Fast Feet!” Her ire made us laugh so she threw rocks at us and then pelted away through the reeds.

  I swaggered around the village the rest of the evening, thinking I was all grown up. Chest thrust out, I bragged to all the other boys how I had mated with a female, and they were all duly impressed until Brulde let it slip that it was Eyya, the Fat Hand girl, I’d coupled with that day. Then they teased me, saying I should check myself for fleas and that my pecker was going to fall off.

  And if the passage I just related alarms you in some way, you should ask yourself why you are not similarly appalled by the violence so often depicted in your popular mass media. I could explain it to you. I could tell you exactly when and why your ancestors were taught to revere violence and death rather than pleasure and procreation, but I doubt that you would believe me.

  4

  I grew into a strapping young man, the tallest in my tribe, and forsook the domed hut in which my father and his women resided. I constructed a wetus with my companion Brulde at the edge of camp, and we shared it as bachelors. We hunted our own food and did as we pleased. Slept all day. Got high on merje. We mated freely with the unattached females in our camp and attended all the ritual orgies, but eventually my father took Brulde and I aside and told us it was time to find some wives.

  “You boys are getting too old to be wifeless,” he intoned in a scolding voice. This, at the far end of camp where we tanned animal hides for our clothing and tents.

  It was an odorous task, which involved soaking the skins in urine and then bating them with feces and animal brains. My father was scraping the hair from a deer hide as he chastised us, his lips curled back from his teeth as he labored.

  “If you don’t find wives soon, my sons,” he said, “I’m afraid you’ll become too fond of Good Practice and never bless me with grandbabies.”

  Brulde and I were mortified.

  Bisexual behavior was an integral component of our society, as it has been in so many ancient cultures throughout history. The Greeks. The Romans. The Spartans. In our tribe, the men were expected to bond together as adolescents before taking a wife, or wives. It was called, with a small degree of snickering disdain by the older married men, “Good Practice”. I could list for you a dozen reasons such behavior was advantageous in a primitive hunter-gatherer society, but as it has become somewhat taboo in your modern technological society—some actually believe it unnatural!—I will gloss over the finer points. It was simply an element of our group marriage customs, perhaps even an essential part of it, for it kept the men from becoming overly jealous of one another. While it was common to mock unmarried men-- to dismiss them as boys by saying, “Oh, them? They’re still Practicing!”-- our males were only considered strange if they never sought female companions to share their tent. The only thing that was a little fuzzy was the acceptable age one could remain unmarried.

  Apparently, my father had decided we were getting a little too close to that time of life for his own peace of mind. It made me wonder: were our tribesmen laughing at us behind our backs?

  Brulde wanted to travel to a nearby camp and steal a couple of their women for our wives. It was a common thing for our tribesmen to do. In fact, there were at least two other Cro-Magnon camps within a week’s travel that our males often raided for wives—and they us. My brother Epp’ha’s wives were from those foreign tribes, and Aldh had gone to live with the Blue Tree People in the south with his companion Klosthe. Maybe that sounds strange, but it was our custom. There was even some degree of ceremony involved with the practice.

  In the spring and fall, we would send a messenger to a neighboring camp to announce that a group of “stags” was planning to raid their camp for wives. The unmarried women who wanted mates would then adorn themselves in grass skirts and jewelry and paint their skin in bright colors and wait to be “kidnapped”. Sometimes there were mock battles or games of strength with the men of the other tribe. It was all rather exciting. There were rarely any serious injuries, and no women were actually forcibly abducted. It was mostly just a bunch of l
usty boys in deerskins chasing after girls as they laughed and pretended to elude the panting young men who pursued them. I know our tribeswomen got terribly excited when a messenger from a neighboring tribe proclaimed the coming of the stags.

  I, however, found my thoughts turning to Eyya.

  I thought Brulde would mock my desire for a Fat Hand bride, but I brought him around with surprisingly little debate. He only objected for fear of ridicule, but he admitted that he thought she was finely made for a Fat Hand female. “It is settled then!” I cried. “Eyya will be our wife!”

  She seemed to sense my interest from afar the next time she came to the river with the Neanderthal fishing party. I watched her intently, heart racing, and she watched me back, smiling and flashing her eyes at me as she gathered berries. No matter what bush she picked from, she always seemed to position her body so that her rump was pointed in my direction.

  (I won’t tell you what was pointed in her direction!)

  It was a cool and blustery afternoon. The sun dazzled on the surface of the river. Eyya bent and picked, and I stared and pointed. Brulde watched us pick and stare and point until he lost all patience, after which he sighed very loudly and said, “If you don’t make your move soon, I’m going home and taking a nap! Look how she's bending over to pick those berries! That's practically an invitation to mount her!”

  I recalled the sensation of her lips pressed to mine, so warm and yielding, and could not help but tremble with desire. Twice already I had managed to steal a kiss from her in the sun-dappled shadows of the woods that fringed the river, pressing her against the trunk of a tree with my body, well out of her father’s sight. She had met my kisses both times with her own fervent desire, her nails raking down my back, but always she managed to wriggle away from me before I could plant myself inside of her. She would go running back to the water with a teasing little laugh, leaving me hot and trembling with unconsummated passion.