Blood Across The Ages
I.i
Stabbing hunger reigned supreme.
Life could be measured in terms of periods of hunger, interrupted by brief moments of satisfaction. Inevitably, however, the comfortable silence from the center of the body disappeared, replaced by a painful rumble, the earthquake within that brought with it a curious feeling of imminent vomiting. The sun rose, N-ta and her tribe would emerge from the trees onto the grassy plains and stalk the great beasts with their sharpened wood spears and stone-tipped implements.
Sweat poured down her brow. Wielded in her right hand was a long stick, whittled straight by her father’s stone knife, and tied to the tip by rope made from leaves was a stone spear tip. At her age, she’d survived many moons by taking her tribe and family’s lessons to heart.
“N-ta!” whispered her father sternly, gesturing with his head at the herd grazing fifteen body lengths ahead. He pointed at himself and at the tips of the herd, and she understood.
“Ku-t,” she said. By saying her father’s name while nodding, she affirmed that she would follow his lead and back him up. Her left hand first pointed at herself and then made a sharp downward motion at the ground.
“Mmm-hmm,” Ku-t uttered, not taking his eyes off the herd. She turned and gave hand signals to the six members of the hunting party sneaking behind her. They nodded.
She marveled at his ability to creep. The tall grasses barely rustled as he masterfully snuck into the gaps between tall reeds and shoots. Her father had wrinkles around his eyes and his skin hung less firm than it used to. According to the tribe’s spoken legends, forty winters had come and gone since her father had been born, making him the second oldest their tribe had ever been. Only Am-oh the ancient had lived longer, making it to forty-four winters before he sacrificed himself to kill a lion that had taken to hunting the tribe.
N-ta herself stood three winters shy of half her father’s lifespan. In order to make it that far, she’d have to learn to sneak as quietly as he did. Despite his thick arms and taller stature, his footfalls registered even softer than hers. She made up for the disparity with speed. Sneaking slower, drifting between reeds and shoots at slug’s pace, she took her position in the hunting party arrangement. Go-a and Be-ih drifted to her left and far left, respectively, spears in hand. They also carried stone knives, sharpened by battered stone blows over many nights, for the cutting and stabbing needed to clean the carcass.
A modestly young beast, its great horns glistening in the sun, had a little too much bulk on it, making it react a little too slowly. N-ta watched with bated breath as her father drew his firing arm back, hands clenching the shaft of the spear tight, the muscles in his arm tense as can be. Underneath his ebony black skin, droplets of sweat visible, his muscles bunched into a familiar shape. The spear tip vibrated not at all under his sure stance and grip. Ku-t gave a sharp burst of wind from his nose, and at the same moment, let fly his spear. The snap of his body turning, his torso spinning as his arm shot forth like a lightning strike, created an ever-so-slight whistling sound as the throw came so fast, most of the hunting party had scarcely seen the change.
A loud, wet thunk sound preceded a moment’s bleat of agony from the beast, and it took one step and collapsed onto its opposing side. The herd exploded outward, beasts charging in every direction, their hooved feet creating a thunderous din as they stampeded away. The big cats would soon come, the lions and leopards, and soon, the scavengers. The younger men, about her age, charged in with their stone knives and began working on Ku-t’s kill. They had meat to recover, to retrieve before the humans’ natural enemy arrived. They had, wrapped around their waists, animal hide that could be wrapped in such a fashion as to contain chunks of meat close to their bodies.
N-ta had arisen from the grass after her father’s throw. Before the herd escaped completely, she broke into a dead-on sprint, locking her aim on the middle-aged beasts, stampeding slower than the rest, and carefully took aim. Using the wind in her hair as a guide, she carefully pictured the pathway of the spear. Drawing back her arm, she tensed until her muscles bunched like her father’s. She inhaled a sharp breath and snapped her arm forward and spun her torso into the throw, loosing the spear with all her might.
A hard thwack echoed. She let out a curse. The herd escaped into the distance, and the injured beast turned to the left, running into the trees, the dense jungle, her spear sticking out of its upper back.
“It lives,” her father told her. He pointed to Go-a and Be-ih. “We will handle food. You must find beast that lives.”
She nodded and gave the sound of agreement. She drew a stone from her hip covering. She jogged into the distance, tracking the creature she’d wounded.
Even with the mixture of tree sap and mud she’d rubbed onto herself, the insects still bit at her shoulders and neck. She tracked, stepping over fallen tree branches and avoiding deep pits disguised by fallen leaves with agility and expertise. The scent of blood as well as droplets leaving a trail led her in the right direction. After a few hundred steps, she began to see more blood.
“Graa!”
Instinctively, she launched herself behind a large tree and stymied her breathing. The noise that propelled itself out of the distance was unlike any she’d ever heard before. Her elders had taught her of monsters that looked unlike any animal they’d hunted or been hunted by. They spoke of sounds, growls and cries not of the world, but this was the first time she’d heard one. A fierce desire to live conflicted with her curiosity and her desire to secure more food for the tribe for the day. At least thirty adults and a handful of children depended on their food.
“Graa!”
She peered around the tree and saw a creature.
Her eyes went wide and she pulled back.
Her hand went over her mouth to stimy a cry.
She risked another glance.
The monster had holes in it where blood poured out, and claw marks up and down its back and front. It stood about as high as two children of four winters old stacked on top each other. It had a human-like arrangement, with two arms and legs, and one head. The strange part was, though, its head had stubby horns on opposing sides, and its skin was the color of wood ash.
The strangest of all was its blood.
Humans bled one color of the rainbow. This creature’s blood was the opposite end color.
The creature let out another “graa!” as it poised over the beast, which had died of her spear. To her astonishment, despite its small stature, it draped a hand around the shaft, and yanked out the spear in one smooth motion. It clawed at the wound, taking great handfuls of blood and splashing them into its mouth.
“Arrpuruh!”
The creature threw its arms downward in a universal gesture of disgust. Something about the blood of this dead creature didn’t please it.
Then, as its own blood poured out, a baffling purple liquid, it stumbled and collapsed against a tree. She drew her stone and clenched it tight, then stepped out and uneasily stepped towards the monster. Wounded and dying, the tiny human-shaped abomination barely registered as she approached it, sharpened stone wielded overhead.
“Raafffff…”
The creature let out a harsh sound, its breath airy and shallow as its wounded chest lifted and heaved. It lifted a weak arm towards her.
Her eyes went wide as a fist as a ball of fire formed in its extended palm. At once her arms lifted to shield her vital parts and face.
“Raaa…”
The ball of fire died as the creature breathed its last.
Out of curiosity, she touched the tip of a finger into the strangely colored blood. Despite her senses telling her not to, she touched the tip of the finger to her tongue.
Her entire body tensed as a rigidity brought upon with a feeling like burning passed from her tongue throughout her. A scream boiled up but pain in her chest caused it to escape like a faint rush of air. She’d accidentally stuck her hand in a cooking fire as a youth. This felt like that, except everywhere, including inside her. Her mind began to slip as pain ratcheted up without stopping.
Visions of scenes completely alien to N-ta shot through her mind. Somehow, information poured into her like water into an animal bladder. She became aware that the creature that died was something called a “goblin,” and even the sounds that made up the language to describe the name seemed utterly not of the world. She saw the world from a distance, but not a physical distance. Concepts like numbers and written language poured into her head. She’d heard of tribes with different sounds to describe things, but formal clusters of sounds and, curiously, the symbols that indicated what those sounds were, came to her at once. A worry crossed her mind that her head would expand and bloat like an overfilled bladder and burst from all the knowledge entering her.
Her body seemed pulled out of the world and into a blackness as dark as night. All around the dark flashed into a spectrum of colors she hadn’t imagined before, and before she knew it, she found herself lost in another world. Despite knowing it was an illusion—somehow—she sensed everything as though she were there. Her feet touched down on solid rock. The terrain beneath her looked unlike any she’d laid eyes upon before. The ground bore the black of cooled lava, but upon closer inspection had a texture like gravel, seemingly stuck together with a hardened liquid. It was about twenty adults wide extended off in both directions into the horizon. It had solid lines of yellow on the sides and short lines of white with gaps between them going down the center.
Before she had time to marvel at the impossibility of such a thing, a beast’s cry caught her attention and as soon as she turned, a giant monster barreled towards her at speeds impossible for a creature of such size. It was easily the size of several men tall and dozens of men long, and its two eyes in front shone with brilliant light. In its head sat a person garbed in strange clothes, holding onto a wheel of some kind. Having no time to dodge, she simply threw up her arms and let out a scream of fear.
The beast passed through her as though she were not there. She felt no pain.
With a shock, she breathed quickly to catch her breath. Walking past the line of smaller beasts travelling across the strange terrain, she came to a short stone wall, slightly above chest height. She climbed over it and walked through the woods by the unusual pathway. A short track through woods and her mouth hung open yet again.
A cluster of the most unusual huts she’d ever seen stood before her, impossibly well arranged.
Walking on the short grass, she came to the closest one to her. It stood as tall as three men on each other’s shoulders and had a curved roof. She recognized a lattice of stone for the walls, but what materials made up the slanted, tiled roof, she couldn’t imagine. The wooden door gave no resistance as she walked straight through it.
She clutched her arms with a surprised cry of shock. Unlike the hot air outside the hut, a cool breeze wafted through the inside of the hut. Once more, she stood at a loss to make sense of anything she saw. The floor had a soft light blue fur over it, and when she entered another room, the floor changed to strange smooth material. There were rectangular objects all over and things made of wood, but it was the woman at the center she marveled at.
The woman stood much taller than N-ta, and had substantial body fat on her. She cut what had to be the largest chunk of meat the huntress had ever seen, and the knife she used had a wooden handle and a blade made out of some kind of shiny material. N-ta had never seen such a material in her life.
As if by request, the word popped into her head. Metal, she somehow knew. She pushed, and more knowledge poured into her. Weapons made from metal cut better than stone, and were easier to repair. Better yet, to make them required the melting down of certain rocks.
Before she knew it, the world she’d been given a glimpse of faded like a dream as the sleeper awoke.
“Ah!”
With a sharp utterance and a breath of hot, moist air, mosquitos (the flying insects, she somehow knew, were called that) biting her, she awoke. Pressing her arm against a tree, she regained her balance.
Strange, she thought. A dream so bizarre.
She looked down at the goblin. It lay dead, its purple blood congealing under the heat of the jungle. She draped her left hand around one of the legs of the beast she’d felled and pulled to be able to make a cut to ensure it had not been infiltrated by bugs.
It dragged under surprisingly little strength.
She leapt back, throwing up her hands in shock. Her breath ran ragged.
How? Her question went unanswered. Normally, it would’ve taken three or four adult men to drag the beast across flat terrain. In jungle like this, at least seven or eight to carry it. She nervously crept forward, grabbed the leg, and stepped backward, pulling. The creature dragged as though it were a small stone.
As an experiment, she wrapped her hands around its body, hoisting it off the ground. It weighed as much as a small child. She walked on, dragging its lower body over terrain as she walked.
“N-ta!” Ku-t cried out, scanning the edge of the tree line. They’d slain three more beasts. With the younger boys having cleaned the first one, they’d gone back to the tribe to get more men to drag the carcasses as far as they could. He couldn’t afford to wait. If his daughter had indeed located the kill, she’d wandered farther than he’d ever taught her to go. He’d taught her that, should a kill wander too far away, to leave it. This was unlike her.
“I see her!” shouted Go-a.
“N-ta!” he chastised. “You…” His words died in his throat. The sight didn’t register at first. He shook his head and finally he was forced to believe. His daughter was carrying the beast like two men carried a log, arms wrapped around it and tucked by the side. Except, she had no second person carrying the rear. “How…”
“Not now,” she said.
The reality of the situation took a backseat to necessity. They had beasts to move. It delayed the scavengers and big cats that would threaten them if they moved the kills to a safer location. As men from the tribe arrived, they stopped and stared at the young woman carrying a beast all by herself, before Ku-t yelled and they got to work dragging carcasses.
One of the carcasses got caught and a man’s grip on it slipped. “Curse it!” one man shouted as the leg slipped out of his grasp.
“I got it,” N-ta cried, and then did something that caught everyone off guard.
She took one hand off the beast she carried under arm, grabbed the other carcass by the leg, and began dragging it effortlessly.
“What,” more than one man cried out.
“Coming?” she asked, turning around.
This snapped them out of it and they followed, helping the others.
Now at the second location, they set the carcasses down and began cutting with stone and wood tools. Chunks of fresh meat they liberated from each beast carcass. They draped the meat on top of laid out animal hides, then curled them up and started carrying them. N-ta curled up two hides and carried one in each hand. Her newfound strength, though startling and frightening to everyone, allowed more meat to be carried back, lessening the possibility that tigers or lions would find their way to the tribe.
That evening, the fires raged, and large chunks of meat cooked on charred wooden sticks. Mothers served their husbands and children. At first, only Ku-t and N-ta’s brothers sat and listened to her speak. As she continued to speak, though, of the insanity she had witnessed, more and more men, women, and even children gathered. Few looked on in genuine belief, and most stared in a mixture of bewilderment. A few even looked on with raucous laughter at the absurdity of her visions.
Finally, after laughter and gossip had died down, her mother asked, “you sure it was a goblin?”
She nodded. “I saw its horns,” she said. “Its purple blood spilled.”
“You tasted its blood,” the mother declared. It was not a question.
“Yes.”
Her mother paused, hand to chin. “And you lived,” she declared. Again, it was not a question.
“Vi-bu,” Ku-t said, “you cannot believe this.”
N-ta’s mother and Ku-t’s wife did not regard his dismissal. “My mother,” she explained, “and her mother before her, told of the goblins. They are rare. Their blood will kill someone. They never spoke of someone surviving.”
N-ta looked around in confusion. “I did,” she simply stated, as baffled as her mother.
“Nonsense,” Ku-t reasoned. “Surely training made her strong.”
Go-a finished his meat and sat by them. “If true,” he said, “Everything will change.”
After the meal, and all the mothers put their children in reasonably safe positions, N-ta joined her father and brothers in the cleanup. They gathered flat stones and dug trenches, dropping leaves covered in the blood and fat cut from the meat into them. Burying leftover waste from the meals had two main goals. First, it minimized the likelihood of foul stenches that always accompanied sickness, and second, it lessened the likelihood of big cat attacks.
As they walked towards a nearby water source to wash the blood off their hands, Be-ih tapped N-ta on the shoulder. “You made the story up?” It was a question.
She shook her head. “No,” she insisted. “It is true.”
He stuck his hands into the dingy water until the red came off. “Madness,” he replied.
After that, the group walked back to the entrance to the cavern. The rock formation provided a secure setting. Behind them was a rock wall with a roof overhead to keep out the rain. In front of them, a clearing before the dense jungle, so they could see predators as they came.
“I’ll take the first watch,” Ku-t told N-ta. “Wake you for the second?”
“Yes,” she said, spreading the hide onto the rocky floor and lying down. She piled the leaves into a comfortable shape and lay her head in the center.
“Good girl,” he praised. “Now sleep. No more false stories.” He ignored the pout on her face and spread the hide blanket over her.
Her stomach full, sleep crept in on her and she drifted away.
“Ker-aaaa!”
The scream of agonizing pain cut off abruptly by death drove icicles into her heart. Her eyes snapped open, and she launched to an upright position, blanket thrown aside.
“What?” Ku-t shouted, hearing the cry. Before he even had a chance to notice the clamor of his daughter waking up, N-ta jaunted past him with speed much closer to the swiftest big cats. Propelling from the slightly raised second layer to the dirt and grass of the clearing, she barely paused to right herself before turning her head in the direction of the shout and throwing herself outward with incredible leg strength.
Dense jungle and undergrowth barely gave her pause as she threw up mounds of leaves and dirt with each foot fall. She cleared giant fallen logs with single bounds, and after less than a minute of running, bounded off a tree to turn a corner.
When she landed, her hands covered her mouth, and her blood ran cold.
“Oh no…” she uttered, her voice shivering. “Be-ih!”
The young man lie dead, the black of burnt leaves having spread outward from the center of his body. Only his skeleton remained, with two-thirds of his head unburnt. Fires had spread outward, incinerating everything before it stopped. By his body was the corpse of the goblin. A thin line of purple blood told the story.
He'd tasted the blood of the goblin and had paid the ultimate price.
A few minutes later, Ku-t and several others arrived. The patriarch had to clasp a hand over his wife’s mouth to stifle a scream as she collapsed into his arms.
“I can’t believe it,” Ku-t uttered, staring at the horned creature lying there, flies picking at the corpse.
Go-a blinked away tears. “So…it is true,” he commented.
“No one touch it,” Ku-t ordered. “Why N-ta survived, it may never be known. Certain death seems to come to any else who taste it.”
Sure enough, a quick glance around revealed the burnt remains of several scavenger birds who’d tasted the goblin’s corpse and been incinerated as a result.
That night, when the group returned to the encampment, word spread like a disease, and everyone gave N-ta wide berth. She had been a fairly uninteresting member of the tribe for most of her life. Others had praised her for taking to combat quickly, but besides that, she blended in. Now, everyone knew who she was, and it was for something that had happened to her that could not happen to them. As she returned to sleep, worry ate at her that jealousy would soon arrive.
In the days that followed, N-ta rapidly became the center point of the entire tribe. Whereas before, in several days’ span of hunting, they’d occasionally see an injury, and the occasional death would occur, now they saw no injuries and no deaths. The herds would get smart as they got hunted, and she would use a sense of smell none of her tribesmen could equal to find the herd. They’d always get exactly enough kills to secure food for everyone, and if the big cats came, she could scare them off or overpower them. In time the tribe began to see her as a key provider.
One night, when the children were asleep and the young boys guarded the edge of the encampment, her parents pulled her aside.
She looked between them, and the animal hide sacks, bulging full, and gave a confused look. “What is this?” she asked.
Vi-bu cleared her throat and looked at her daughter. Tears began to well up. “This is most difficult to say,” she uttered, her voice cracking, “but your father and I think you need to leave the tribe.”
As if a sharp stone had been driven through her heart, she gasped, stepping back as if slapped. “Wh…wha…?” In disbelief, she shook her head, blinking away tears. “How…? What have I done?”
“Not so loud!” Ku-t declared in a harsh whisper. “We didn’t want to come to this decision.”
“I never betrayed you!” she argued to them, her hands gesturing wildly. “Have I insulted you?”
Ku-t looked conflicted, as though saying his thoughts out loud would cause the sky to open and swallow him. Finally, he looked her in the eye and steeled his will.
“You’re not weak like us anymore,” he insisted.
Of all the millions of scenes playing in her mind, of countless ways she might have incurred their wrath, have somehow earned her expulsion from the tribe, this was not one of them. “What?” she simply uttered.
Her mother gave a placating yet frustrated look. “The older boys and girls who knew you before,” she explained, “are starting to go lax in their training. They’re relying on you.”
N-ta tilted her head in confusion. “Are you serious?”
Vi-bu nodded. “Worse,” she continued, “the younger children are starting to worship you.”
“Worship me?”
N-ta’s exclamation escaped much harsher than she expected. Both her parents and her looked around and saw no one had heard.
“My mother’s mother prayed to the sun and moon,” Ku-t explained. “Some of the more nervous tribesmen and women pray to the wind. I caught Ze-il’s children praying to you before they slept.”
“You must be lying!” N-ta declared.
“No,” Vi-bu replied.
“If you stay with us much longer,” Ku-t said, his voice stuttering as he blinked tears away, “we will be little more than children coming to their goddess for support. A few generations down the line, and anyone who remembered you as…human…will be gone.”
“And you’re sure I’d live that long?” N-ta insisted, gesturing wildly.
“My daughter!” Ku-t insisted, sharp breaths cutting into his words. “Every time a predator has cut you or bitten you, you heal at once. You leave no scars. You drink the same water as us and eat the same food and you do not get sick. You haven’t retched since before the incident. Not once has your excrement came violently.” He put his hands on her shoulders and stared into her. “You. Are. Not. Like us.”
Her tears flowed readily. “Am…Am I destined to be alone?” she uttered.
Her mother embraced her, clasping her arms tightly. “N-ta!” she uttered. “My love for you is with you everywhere.”
“Wherever people are,” Ku-t told her, “You will bring goodness. I believe you have been given a gift.”
They handed her four animal hide sacks and tied them to her waist with rope made from leaves.
“I…I wish I could stay,” she pleaded.
Her parents embraced her again. “I wish too,” Ku-t said. “But we’re just becoming like children to you.”
She held on for a moment longer. With an ache in her heart like rocks crushing down upon her, she held on, wishing the moment would stretch outward for all eternity. A rustle of the wind broke the tension. With watery eyes, she pulled back. “I promise,” she said, “I promise I will never forget you.”
Turning away from them, she took two running steps forward, before planting her foot on the edge of the step leading down and propelled forward with a mighty thrust. She cleared all the way to the edge of the clearing with a single push and hit the ground running.
In the lifespan of a spear throw, she was out of sight.
With feet impacting the ground like stone hammers, she raced through the jungle at impossible speed. Her exit had awoken many of the tribesmen. The loss of their ‘goddess’ would surely upset many of them. Her heart fell as it came to her that bad hunts and the deaths of brethren she could have saved would return to the tribe. She paused several times and pondered the possibility.
If I turn back, she thought, could they really stop me?
Surely, if she’d wanted to stay, even her father, strong as he was, could not prevent her from staying. Still, even as her heart told her to pursue the thought, her mind told her otherwise. As if granted the ability to see the future, a scene came to her mind.
She could picture a scene far from now. If she indeed healed without scar, maybe the ravages of aging were wounds she could not be harmed by. A scene came to her of hundreds of winters and summers coming and going. Entire lifespans of men and women would occur. Children would be born, and their ‘goddess’ would be there, providing the hunt, chasing off the big cats, and ensuring that everything was prosperous. Men and women would grow old, and on their deathbed, they’d be visited by their ‘goddess.’
She pictured farther out. Thousands of winters and summers going by. Without death by famine or predator, the tribe would grow, and everyone would have undeniable proof that they had divine protection. In time, would she come to doubt her mortal origins? In time, what if she developed stranger abilities yet? The goblins she once thought of as not real could, in the stories her mother had told, change shape and alter the very things you thought of as real right in front of your eyes. What if her power grew?
She could picture herself believing she was a goddess.
It made a sickening kind of sense: what could someone say to doubt her at that point?
No. The thought bashed at her like a boulder falling. The tribe would have death by predator and famine, but they would have control of their own fates. Their boys and girls would have to learn hunting, fishing, and many other skills, but no divine being would impose their will upon them from above.
She dashed off into the night, into an unknown future.