Fevre Dream Page 0,76

with me freedom from the red thirst.

So we drank, and passed many nights, while from their lips I began to learn the history and ways of the people of the night.

We are an old people, Abner. Long before your race raised its cities in the hot south, my ancestors swept through the dark winters of northern Europe, hunting. Our tales say we came from the Urals, or perhaps the steppes, spreading west and south through the centuries. We lived in Poland long before the Poles, prowled German forests before the coming of the Germanic barbarians, held sway over Russia before the Tartars, before Novgorod-the-Great. When I say old, I do not speak of hundreds of years, but of thousands. Millennia passed in the cold and the darkness. We were savage, the stories say, cunning naked animals, one with the night, swift and deadly and free. Long-lived beyond all other beasts, impossible to kill, the masters and lords of creation. So our stories go. All that walked on two legs or four, ran in fear of us. All that lived was but food for us. By day we slept in caves, packs of us, families. By night we ruled the earth.

Then, up from the south, your race came into our world. The day people, so like us and yet so unlike. You were weak. We killed you easily, and took joy in it, for we found beauty in you, and always my people had been drawn to beauty. Perhaps it was your likeness to us we found so captivating. For centuries you were simply our prey.

But changes came with time. My race was very long-lived, but few in number. The mating urge is curiously absent in us, while in you humans it rules as surely as the red thirst rules us. Simon told me, when I asked him of my mother, that the males of my race feel desire only when the female enters heat, and that happens but rarely-most frequently when male and female have shared a kill together. Even then, the women are seldom fertile, and for that they are thankful, for conception usually means death for our females. I killed my mother, Simon told me, ripping my way out of her womb, doing such damage inside that even our recuperative powers were of no avail. So it is most often when my people enter this world. We begin our lives in blood and death, even as we live them.

There is a certain balance in that. God, if you believe in him, or Nature, if not, gives and takes away. We may live for a thousand years or more. Were we as fertile as you, we would soon fill this world. Your race breeds and breeds and breeds, swarming in numbers like flies, but you die like flies as well, of little wounds and illnesses my kind shrugs off.

It is no wonder we thought little of you at first. But you bred, and you built cities, and you learned. You had minds, even as we did, but we had never had cause to use ours, so strong were we. Your kind brought fire into the world, armies, bows and spears and clothing, art and writing and language. Civilization, Abner. And, civilized, you were no longer prey. You hunted us down, killed us with flame and stake, came upon our caves by day. Our numbers, never great, diminished steadily. We fought you and died, or fled you, but where we went your kind soon followed. Finally we did as we were forced to do. We learned from you.

Clothing and fire, weapons and language, all of it. We never had our own, you see. We borrowed yours. We organized as well, began to think and plan, and finally melted into you entirely, living in the shadows of the world your race built, pretending we were your kind, stealing out by night to slake our thirst on your blood, hiding by day in fear of you and your vengeance. Such has been the story of my race, the people of the night, through most of history.

I heard it from Simon's lips, as he had heard it years before from those now slain and gone. Simon was the oldest of the group I had found, claiming almost six hundred years.

I heard other things as well, legends that went beyond our oral history back to our ultimate origins in the dim dawn of time itself. Even there I saw the hand of your people,