ah, but that had been a grand and dangerous game! One time, Radu had been taken in an animal trap.
... Given a knock on the head that near-brained him, he'd come to on a Roman ship on the Danube, on course for the Black Sea and eventualy Rome itself, and doubtless the Games! Several of his pack were with him, taken with common wolves in nets or pitfalls. Perhaps their captors considered them a new species!
Wel, so they were, in a way. There were also caged bears, and wild boars from the woods of eastern Pannonia, chests of local gold in thumb-sized ingots, barrels of spices, and wines galore in racks of amphorae. A varied cargo.
But the wolf is a wily beast, and the werewolf even more so; while the sheer physical strength of a Lord of the Wamphyri... is awesome! The oak-staved cages were like so much kindling in Radu's hands. And above decks a ful moon rode high in the Dacian sides, and the night was by no means done ...
The ship had beached itself near Zimnicea; its crew, and a handful of legionnaires retiring out of the army and returning to their homelands, were found hanging by their heels from the rigging, naked, pale and bloodless. But despite that their bodies had been ripped apart and their throats torn out, there was litle of actual blood to be discovered. Later, local Dacians had paid for this atrocity; a hamlet in the foothills, wel known for the rebellious nature of its citizens, was put to the sword and razed to the ground.
It stil amused Radu to think of it: how he had freed the wild creatures to swim ashore, stolen much of the wine and destroyed what couldn't be carried away. As for the gold ... wel, in his way Lord Radu, too, had been naive in those early times. And gold had been common in Starside.
He'd seen no use for the heavy stuff; his thralls had thrown a fortune overboard! There it had stayed (for al he knew) in the silt of a shallow reach of the river for over fifteen hundred years. If ever he revisited those parts, he would know where to find it again.
But there had been two other items of cargo that Radu had found much more interesting, which years later he had cause to remember and utilize: several amphorae filed with a glutinous golden liquid, at first mistaken for honey; and ... a chest of yellow stones? The first was resin, used throughout the Mediterranean as a preservative in wine, and the second was fossilized resin, turned hard as rock and rounded by the Baltic into polished amber pebbles. And Lord Radu - originally an untutored nomad, litle more than a savage from the woods of a paralel world, then a mutated Lord on the dark side of that world, now finaly a werewolf in this world -had seen the connection between the two, and might wel have been one of the first men ever to see it.
For on Starside it had been the practice of certain Lords of the Wamphyri to bury defeated enemies alive (or undead) out on the boulder plains, to 'stiffen to stones' and fuse with the earth in their deep and inescapable graves. But in this case it was different - here the preserving resin itself had stiffened, keeping intact whatever was caught within. For the translucent, softly glowing pebbles had contained flies and beetles trapped in the exuded life-fluids of coniferous forests dead and gone for countless years.
Radu had no idea of the span of time, of the aeons it had taken to turn resin to amber, but the principle had astonished him all the same. Especially when he examined some of the specimens locked in the amber: such as a perfectly preserved dragonfly, or an ant with a fragment of leaf still clearly visible in its mandibles. These creatures were dead, of course, and in the terms of men might well have been dead 'forever.' But what if a Lord of the Wamphyri should choose to preserve himself in this fashion? What, a metamorphic vampire, with self-regenerating flesh? And from that time forward Radu had worn an amber bauble, with its captive insect intact, on a slender chain of gold around his neck ...
Amber: the ultimate end product of resin.
Resin: the blood of great pines ... which fifteen hundred years ago, and indeed in far more recent times, had covered the mountain slopes like winter