The job of a good father is to take care of his offspring. No matter what. More and more I found myself pondering the meaning of this as I look back at deciding moments of my nine-thousand-year existence. I first saw the light of day in what would later be called Somalia, long before Islam, and the conflicts that follow wherever followers of that faith tread. I existed long before the Christians, and probably before the Hebrews too. Across the ages I've been called many names. The one that I prefer to this day is Waaq.
Long before the Arabs began invading our lands and colonizing parts of what would later become the Horn of Africa, Africans and their Arab neighbors lived peacefully. My father, Cha'Agar was a tribal chieftain of the Aurhai people who lived in Somalia at the time and my mother, Awitar was a tall, bronze-skinned and raven-haired woman from distant lands. Her people lived in what would later be called the realm of Assyria. In those days, in the interests of peace between various lands and peoples, women of noble birth were exchanged as wives in order to bring different peoples closer together. Think of it as a sort of honey offering.
So it was that I came into the world, the offspring of a most unique couple. The territory ruled by my father's people comprised hundreds of kilometers, and our tribe, the Aurhai numbered only a few hundred people. I was perhaps twenty when a more aggressive tribe known as the Ha'Bar invaded our territory. I was on the Great Ma'k Hunt, the one every young male of the tribe must undergo in order to be considered a man. Only then will he be allowed to leave his father's house, take a woman as wife, and establish his own household.
I was gone for several days, and sought a most dangerous prey for my Ma'k Hunt. A male lion. For in those days, lions and leopards roamed the African desert. Humans hadn't hunted them nearly to extinction just yet. I fought one of the local pride's top males, and brought him down using only a spear. I hurled it with such strength that it penetrated the lion's neck, and he fell, dead as a rock. Crying triumphantly, I began carving off the lion's head, and used its carcass as food. Then I began the long trek home. When I arrived at my village three days later, my world had ended. The Ha'Bar tribe had slain every man, woman and young ones of my clan. I found their mutilated corpses strewn apart, often missing limbs, and vital organs. And they left nothing but smoldering ruins after burning our village to the ground.
That night, I wept tears of rage and frustration as I began the long task of burying each and every last one of my tribespeople. Two days later, after the last body was properly buried, I stalked the land, eventually finding the Ha'Bar's trail. With vengeance in my mind I prayed to all the Gods for fortitude as I sought those who destroyed my life. Six days later I found them. I waited until nightfall, when the entire Ha'Bar tribe, some four hundred strong, slept. The fools left only a few sentries around, and I dispatched them easily and silently with my stone knife.
Afterwards, I stalked from hut to hut, and my blade tasted the blood of men and women, and sometimes young ones. It was a grisly scene, in later years I grew disgusted with the very thought of it. That night, though, I gloried in the destruction of my enemies, slaughtering my sleeping foes like sheep. Fathers and mothers, grandsons and grandmothers. I spared none. For these men and women had violated the worst taboo in the world. They had consumed human flesh. They deserved no mercy. I saved their chieftain for last. In his hut I found my father's ceremonial dagger. I used it to kill his wife and daughter in front of him, and then I cut off his head.
Still unsatisfied, I gathered the blood of several men and women into a bowl, and drank it. I don't know what possessed me to do this. As soon as I ingested their blood, I fell ill. I lay on the blood-soaked ground, writhing and moaning. For you see, the tribe I had just slaughtered practiced cannibalism, and had done so for untold millennia. I didn't realize it then but I had effectively damned myself. There's a reason why these cannibals had been so easy to slay. Consuming human meat had poisoned their systems, and they were all ill in one way or another. By drinking the blood of the infected, I caught their malady.
It had a disastrous effect on me. It didn't kill me, unfortunately. When I woke up three days later, I was...changed. I had become an abomination. An evil thing sickened ( but not burned or killed ) by the light of the sun. An unholy monster that drinks blood. For as I drank the blood of my tribe's enemies, I doomed myself to sharing their curse. Unlike them, my curse did not end in death. In fact, death was only the beginning.
Thus I began my journey, wandering across the Horn of Africa, into the lands that would later be called Ethiopia, Djibouti, Eritrea and of course, Somalia. In my deranged, borderline animalistic state, I couldn't help myself. I fed on humans, and drank their blood. The infection had changed me. My teeth had become fangs, the better to rend human flesh with, I guess. My fingernails lengthened and sharpened to the point of becoming three-inch claws. As I ranged the African motherland in search of prey, I have been shot with arrows, speared, and even stabbed with swords and stone knives. I must have died a hundred deaths in those early years, but I always came back. As long as I drank enough blood, I always returned to the land of the living...as a dead man that preys on his fellow man.
Eventually, I began to gain greater control over myself. You see, in the early years, I was little more than a beast. I slept in holes, I stalked men and women in the woods, the deserts and the ravines. The more blood I drank, the more lucidity I regained. Disgusted with what I've done, I sought to end my life. Better to die a horrible death than to go on like this, as a monster. I found a cliff and leapt to the bottom. A fall of several hundred meters, which surely would have killed any living thing on the planet. It didn't kill me. Instead, it left me badly broken. I lay there, praying for death, but knowing it would not come.
At last I was rescued by a strange woman. Her name was Adanech, and she was of the tribe of Am'har, whose territory matched the borders of what people call Cush in later days. Adanech took me and nursed me back to health. I came to three days later, and although I could not speak her language, I thanked her profusely for her kindness. I had been, not alive, but I had existed, for about thirty summers by that point, and hadn't aged a day since I drank the blood of that tribe, on that cursed night so long ago. Thus I will always be a caramel-colored, curly-haired and bronze-eyed man of twenty.
Adanech taught me her language, and I learned about her as well. This young Cushite woman was estranged from her tribe, which cast her out for being a witch. Like me, she was cursed. Adanech had the ability to see the future, and her people almost killed her over it. That's why she ran away from her tribe. Cast out by her own kind, Adanech cast her lot with me. I endeavored to protect her, the only woman to show me kindness.
In time, we fell in love. Adanech was truly heaven-sent. When I revealed my curse to her, I expected her to be frightened but she wasn't. Instead she embraced me and told me that I was only a monster if I chose to be one. I took her as wife, and swore to her that I would only feed on animals. I hunted animals, and brought them to her. I took the blood, and she took the meat. Thus I began to see myself as a man once more, instead of a monster. I built a house for my wife with my bare hands. Monsters don't build houses, I think. Men do. It wasn't much, but it was home.
