Today is the eve of the anniversary of my mortal body’s birth.
Each year I commemorate this event by visiting my grave and pruning the rose and hawthorn bushes that my widow planted on the site. A thorough woman, that. Lives in a garlic farm on a river island. Remarried too; to a crossbow manufacturer. Very thorough. Makes child contact a bit difficult occasionally, that does.
Still, I have few regrets having come into this life. The strength and the longevity are fine things to have, of course, and if the diet is unvaried it is at least low on cholesterol except for when I meet gluttons.
It’s difficult to remember after twenty years what daylight felt like, but my Lucy makes the night a warm and bright enough place for me.
It’s only the damned predators and the remorseless slayers that they inspire that keep life being from being pretty damned perfect.
It just isn’t necessary to kill humans for us to live. A sip here, a good long slug there, and we can be on our way to the next party or a midnight conference call with our offshore portfolio managers, or just go for a stalk or hang around in a favourite graveyard. All this taking over the world nonsense is pointless, dangerous, and expensive. If they’d only lay off the humans for a generation or two, hit the bottle all the while, and let the chick lit and films do their work, and we could come out of the casket and be acknowledged as yet another interesting tribe of mankind. We’d be able get a lot of work as historians and mine rescue workers and detectives, and the priests and the pubescents could go back to their parishes and pimples and leave the rest of us in peace.
As it is, since Sumerian times and even before, some of – well, almost all of – our kind have decided upon a manifest destiny to rule and dine on the rest of humanity. The bastards. The total, utter bastards. Do they know how easy life can be in an industrial civilization with sterile needles and refrigeration and 24/7 online shopping and banking? But, no! They have to rule the cringing mortals / own the Power Of The Night / hunt through eternity to satisfy their Endless Thirst. It buggers it up for the rest of us who’d like to live as peaceful citizens of good standing, and we could truly rest in peace. It’s inevitable really. Though paying taxes does not look at all appealing we’ve got the death part beaten into a cocked hat.
Well, it’s fully dark here, and they’re doing mince pies and mulled wine at the Cathedral, so I’d better run so as not to miss the rush. Amazing what a spoonful of cinnamon and ginger in a drop of heated vin ordinaire will do to even the nicest catholic girl’s inhibitions.
I won’t even be able to see my widow’s dancing shoe heel marks on the turf, either.
Cheers,
4 comments:
Blackburn, you are an abomination and a stain on my line. I curse the night Richard took the milksop Skelton woman to his bed and to her grave. Now I have great-grandspawn who not only plays with his food, but who also treats it as equal. They are cattle. Property. Meat and drink. That’s all they are, Blackburn.
You write of the comforts of dwelling amongst the cattle openly, of investments and paid employment and sterile needles. We Undaed take what we need, boy, and damn the consequences. We do not offer payment. We do not ask for friendship or mercy and we offer none. If I had known that a thousand years of Christianity would reduce my line to mewling weaklings who believe in treating their meals as worthy of respect I’d have offered my throat to Alfred’s sword and not accepted baptism.
Damn you, and be aware you are not welcome in my house. Not this longest night, nor any other. You can tell Prudence that if she defends you or complains of this, then she too shall be barred from the House of Ericson.
Erik Ericson.
That’s the point, though, isn’t it? Loving your neighbours, or at least not feuding with them, is better because it’s more practical.
Look, we can go on murdering a few homeless people here and a handful of illegal immigrants there, and maybe they won’t be missed for a while, but we’re all of us recorded and registered and databased more and more often, and sooner or later they’re going to be looking at patterns of property inheritance and governments are going to remember what some of us did during the last world war an fear what we might do in this one if we choose the wrong side and start checking the land registry really systematically. And then it won’t be the voluntary sector and lone academics coming after us most of the time - the government will have something more solid to give to the Vatican and it’s napalm at dawn and nobody human left at liberty to gather up the ashes.
Besides, if it’s recent immigrants you plan to ‘take’, remember their strong ties of family and unaltered belief in our existence. If girls and boys from Bucharest and Sofia go missing in large numbers, then their kinsmen will recognise the signs and come a-hunting.
The long and the short of it is, Jarl Erik, that it’s easier and safer for everyone to live in a nice, civilized, democratic country full of machines and businesses and communications and huge surpluses of merchandise and food (of all sorts), and to take food without killing the donors, than it is to prey on them like Iron Age barbarians. Iron Age barbarians were defeated, as you know, kingdom by kingdom, as Christianity and knowledge followed and the swords of men like Grandsire Richard, and eventually we arrived at a place where we shouldn’t have to fear the crow-bar and the stake at noon any more.
Peace isn’t only for the weak, if the other side doesn’t want war; it’s sensible and it gives us a better future.
I’ll miss the festivities tomorrow; so be it. You can explain to Prudence why her favourite spawn is not there. If you read my next post you’ll notice that there’s some nutcase with a grimoire on the loose planning to let the End of the World in, and I’ll be busy finding him and dealing. When I do come home from that – if I do - I shan’t be expecting my neighbours to break my door down and drag me into the sunlight, either.
Happy Solstice to you anyway, Jarl Erik.
Adonais Blackburn,
Spawn of Prudence Skelton,
Spawn of Richard of Hessington,
Spawn of Erik Ericson.
You should not remind me, you abomination, of your descent. Humans are food. They have been so ever since they crept into our caves to bury their dead and to paint their own prey onto the walls. So shall they always be- what other purpose or fate should they have?
Stay away on Friday, toothless weakling, for the Longest Night, and all subsequent nights.
That’s your ambition them, is it, Jarl Erik? To be a thing that lives in a cave and who, thousands of years after they extinguished the last of the Neanderthals, seeks still to lurk in shadows and kill humans for food?
Humans; who have walked on the Moon, made all the art and literature and medicine there ever was, and who are devising more and better ways for us to enjoy passing eternity every single day; and all you can think of doing to them is killing to feed. Is that the imagination you’ve got, Erik? You presumably still notice and possibly enjoy their invention and craft. You heard Beowulf performed in the original and saw Shakespeare’s plays on their first public performances, or even the private ones at Court, and your plan is to sneak up on these wonderful creatures one at a time and kill them?
No wonder the Count was outfoxed by a handful of gentry, a single nobleman and one aged doctor; you elders lack imagination and flexibility.
Just like the madman with the grimoire. I now know who he is and must visit him. Good thing I’m not superstitious about invitations, isn’t it, or I’d just have to burn Dundee Street down to get him and his damned book before he opens a portal and let the Outside in.
Enjoy the rest of your eternity, Erik; this one’s on your toothless weakling of a great grandspawn.
AB-
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