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“You seem uncomfortable.”
Marko cleared his throat, validating the point. “I’ll be fine.”
Lord Bojan smirked and motioned to his stemmed artisan glass. “Is it the Ihman blood in my cup?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Ihman. As in you? As in non-vampire?”
“N… I- I- didn’t know it was blood.”
Lord Bojan showed his most disarming warm smile and relaxed into his meal. “I’m not much for wine.”
Dobrivoje, the other ihman invited to the hall alongside Marko, rose to his companion’s defense. “I suspect my friend is discomforted by the human servants”
Lord Bojan was genuinely amused, and only lightly exaggerated the smirk to split his features. “Now, come, that kind of language is insensitive.”
“Excuse me?”
“Of course, of course! What am I if not a human slightly changed?”
“you’re bleeding a human out into a cup!”
Dobrivoje was fiery, pointing a lightly used fork at his obvious Lord .
Marko, sheepishly, daringly, reentered the conversation. “I’m going to have to agree with my… Ihman… if you will… acquaintance… there.”
“Well, now how on earth can Ihman be an offensive term! Such a petty thing to quibble over!”
“Are you baiting me?” Dobrivoje snapped.
“Oh not at all!” Lord Bojan replied, deeply relishing the discussion.
His curiosity could never fail to be piqued by a distressed ihman.
What did they say in their defense? What occurred to them to raise against the order of the Orpian Islands, ruled and guarded by the nearly millennium old King Miloje.
“Would you refer to an Ursan,” Bojan continued, “as less than human because he can turn into a bear?”
“This…” Marko hesitated. “…is obviously not what we’re discussing?”
“And what does that matter?” Bojan wanted to draw out this discussion.
While no others at the table appeared to have thoughts, he wanted to see if Marko in particular would be one of the rare beings able to wrest the conversation back to its course.
“Everything you say will be endlessly interpreted by a million, maybe even, ha! Maybe even a thousand, different listening pairs of ears. Nothing in the entire plane of Midvaafi you say will ever carry only what you mean.”
Bojan heard himself stress the word “you” in a way that felt disrespectful.
“I apologize,” he added, noting the other Vampires nobles’ irritated discomfiture at his breach of class protocol, another of tonight’s many amusements. “Nothing in Midvaafi we say, will ever carry only what we mean.”
Marko’s face displayed his notice of the… indiscretion? Indiscretion! A lovely addition to Bojan’s many quite discrete indiscretions.
Marko replied, “Then how am I to interpret what you’re saying?”
“Oh my friend you already have! So! What did you interpret? I can see whatever it is, it is not what you wanted to hear.”
Marko appeared… distracted… by that last remark.
“Oh!” Bojan chirped. “Did you expect that I wouldn’t be familiar with the face of my fellow human?”
Another twinge in Marko’s expression, he began to open his mouth before Bojan let his excitement spill. “My dear young friend, I have existed for so many centuries I am likely a figure of myth, no less a part of the local folklore than the local Sava .”
Dobrivoje, just outside of Bojan’s gaze and long past the scope of his attention, snapped, shouted and… shattered a plate? Stabbed it? Oh, Milos will be displeased… no, likely Milos’s humans will be displeased at the loss of the-
More shattered crockery as Bogdan, the tearing, bulky mass of lord from, ohhh… “the island over ,” cracked the air itself and splattered both his own and the now limp and white and progressively piss-stained Dobrivoje’s meals as he now had the man’s likely throbbing head in his massive paw.
He ignored the spectacle of yet another human dragged away in some brute’s maw. Paw? A slip of the mind’s tongue.
“My dear, Marko. You had, I believe two thoughts before we were… well I suppose I interrupted you.”
Marko had dropped his cutlery and his head was now in his hands, eyes glued to the fellow ihman.
After a moment of hesitation, he answered, “I… I fail to remember the question.”
“I believe we were discussing the merits and demerits of the terms ‘Ihman’ and ‘human,’ and the nature of perception.”
“I think,” Marko paused, his terror not yet fled, “we’ve had a fair amount of… perception.”
“Indeed I think we’ve had enough of perception!” It was the returning Bogdan, fortunately, without any blood on his lip.
An ihman needed to be tried and sentenced to be bled, either as a prisoner or as an executed. To do otherwise, save in extreme or definite cases, was to be beaten to death by King Miloje.
Bojan found his head rested, boredom showing, on his fist. “Do you think he’s going to die, Bogdan?”
Bogdan sat down and grunted, either ignoring the question or having given what he presumed passed for an answer in some circles.
“Who the fuck are you?” Bogdan snapped at the remaining ihman.
He was holding a spoon thrust in the young creature’s direction. It appeared that the staff had already replaced a measure of his meal of… blood as the soup base, obviously, some onions in it? Spicy! Not quite like garlic, more of a “warm” flavor, like how some more distant emigrants describe “guava.”
Oh! He had missed the response!
Milos had answered, though. “He’s a good worker. An excellent weaver. I think you killed my potter, though.”
Milos was unbothered to discontinue filling his bovine Minotaurs snout.
“Thank you, milord,” Marko answered, now attempting to stab a few times into a weak… lettuce and herbs. How stereotypical!
“Milos, did you give him a salad!”
The ancient scion of the ancient Gorlab puffed his nose with what was certainly amusement, but continued munching on his… whatever he was eating.
“It was a courtesy upon my request, milord.”
Milord, he says.
“I don’t eat meat.”
“Ahh, I see. A very ethical… non-vampire.”
His expression was puzzled, shifting between question and various uncertain answers involving how to answer.
Bojan looked at Bogdan to his right and waved off his hard stare, receiving a moment of it himself, which he ignored, before the lug returned to eyeing… whatever else.
“Has life on the Orpian Islands tainted you so? Do your fellow humans disgust you?”
“ Vampires do not disgust me.” After all this time and effort at politeness, the young human finally grew a hard edge in his voice.
Lord Bojan’s half smile began to return broadly.
Marko continued. “There is a cruelty in food.”
“So you see yourself in the livestock?”
“Am I different than the animal?”
A round of chuckles, of course. An obvious joke that cut against the very charade he kept trying to goad the human with, that over terminology.
“And you think you and I are more different than you and the cow.”
Marko’s eyes flashed. “There is political purpose in our separation.”
The room began to slow. Rebellion?
The man continued, clearly watching his tread, an effort that may not be enough, “We human serfs daren’t maintain ourselves as equals to the vampire elite.”
More spoon scraping began, cautiously.
“I’m intrigued. Do you think us cruel?”
“I wouldn’t dare say.”
“Wisely. But I believe you would. You cannot kill what you can look in the eye. You feel them. Tell me.”
“I suppose…” he trailed off, eyes pensively tracing the middle distance with flicks and darts and thoughts and things. “I suppose the heart and the mind do not always find themselves so simple so as to be explicable in brief. The plant is alive. But the animal that draws the same breath as I. I…”
“What is cruel, is not our killings. It is that we die without them. There is very little one can do to reach immortality in this world, and most of it unknown to most.”
There were no words for some time.
Bojan spoke next. “You are… done aging, yes?”
“I am always aging, milord.”
“No you’re not, you’re always… are you an adult? It’s been five hundred years since I’ve thought of the question for myself.”
A brief moment of hesitation wasn’t allowed to culminate in action before Bojan continued. “I am asking if you have applied to be vampirized. I doubt you would have.”
Several shouts from around the hall. Bojan’s frustration started to ache his head.
Bogdan had barely started before “Shut your mouth or I claw out your eyes!”
The noises stopped.
“My friends seem concerned that I might sponsor you. I am not asking you to attempt the trials, I am simply curious what you and your human sympathies and animal sympathies would think of the prospect of immortality at the cost of those who would already die, or, if you prefer, those who are simply bled. You would have the ability to draw solely from volunteers if you so chose. Go hungry at times, but be kind to a… hypothetical staff, or… farm, or… artisan shop if you will. You wouldn’t be the only. You would even be liked by King Miloje. I am curious if you would be so… principled?”
“Does the meat get to choose?”
Snickers around as the vampires enjoyed his verbal slip.
“Not usually. Is that the source of your… ethic? Or is the blood? Is it the death? What about the executed? For running away? No, you would help the serfs all the way to Cassandra’s Wolves. But for… ohh… say… well I will simply crimes of violence against their fellow ihman?”
A long silence. A tense silence. A churning silence in all but, clearly, the mind of a contemplative ihman.
“I suppose,” he finally said. “That while there are certainly others who would turn down the offer with anger. I would be lying to dismiss the feeling of… safety from many of the vicissitudes of life and, in your view a very quick death. I have not had to consider the idea, I admit.”
“Oh of course. I have quite a few scars from both human and vampire rebels.” He realized he had slipped, but at this point his game of pretending that human and ihman were not used interchangeably amongst both or… all legitimate classes was done.
“Some of those rebels I had personally sponsored. Oh, maybe three? Was it the lieutenant or captain… Levi, has left a few of his own marks on my arm in the past.”
“Why are we discussing rebels, milord?”
“Hm. I’m unsure. No. Possibly. No.
“My dear Marko, you have a mind I would like to preserve. You are clearly worn. You may leave. If you so choose, you may wait at my darkcarriage. Or not. I’m certain Milos would begrudge me his weaver, but I’m not certain whether your principles would more cleanly break with those who you appear to see as an enemy, or would you take advantage of the tools given to you. You can argue your case for the humans. You do not bore me. And among immortals, boredom is equivalent to death.”