The Second Lesson: Antiquity

The Second Lesson: Antiquity The worst of the storm is past now, leaving a legacy of winds chill enough to keep the ice frozen. Andrew’s pack spends two nights seeking out stranded motorists and feeding on them. Andrew makes it a training game, with the object of inflicting the most thorough carnage without any residue for police or others to track. Ming shows the most creative flair, cleverly arranging blankets of temporal shadow to catch the mess she makes eviscerating her victims.

On the third night, Andrew stirs to wakefulness in the pack’s communal haven. Some subconscious signal tells him to keep the pack together. He makes sure the neonates discuss Demba’s lesson and related subjects, so that they’ll be prepared to answer the bishop’s pet questions at the next Festival of the Dead. He’s not very surprised to find more reasons, as he sits up in the old hotel basement.

A small Cainite sits by the door. He’s dressed in a tan suit and wears lightly tinted glasses. His complexion is slightly swarthy. Andrew knows him by reputation and immediately assumes a formal manner. “Welcome to our haven, sir. I trust you had a pleasant enough trip, and that His Excellency the archbishop won’t need your services tonight.” The small Cainite is one of the archbishop’s paladins, a scholar and first-rate torturer.

The paladin moves his lips in a rough approximation of a smile. “Thank you, lord. Yes, I did, and no, he won’t.

Demba spoke with us last night about her educational effort.

She would have returned to continue, but other matters required her attention. I offered to help.”

Andrew doesn’t speak his thoughts while rousing the pack, introducing them to the paladin and arranging the haven for a lecture. Is Demba now destroyed? Is an invasion from some credible enemy underway? Andrew knows he likely won’t ever know and tries to calm himself as the paladin stands to lecture.

The Antediluvian Be careful not to let the gift of skepticism degenerate into the bane of mindless doubt. The fact that one element of a story is false or at least unsupported is not warrant to dismiss the rest. I remind you of this at the outset, because I speak to you of facts that generally travel in the company of lies.

Regardless of the truth or falsehood of Noddist myth, the Antediluvians really do exist. In fact, at least 13 progenitor Cainites, each responsible for one of the major clans, still infest the earth, or at least they did once (there may well have been more, whose lines failed or who have been forgotten for various reasons).

I believe they all endured well into the Christian era

and even now, more survive than not. To understand an Antediluvian is often to understand much about its clan.

The Lasombra Antediluvian was certainly real enough. It perished only a few centuries ago, and we have accounts even in the modern nights from those who saw it, spoke with it and dwelled with it. Its origins substantially influence our nature.

The Antediluvian originally lived somewhere in the western Mediterranean. In time, Sicily became the creature’s favored haven, for reasons I’ll discuss in a moment. It may have been born and lived there, or it may have originated elsewhere. I favor Malta. It has some very old temples built from black stone with obsidian artifacts, and it has sufficient caves with attached legends about monsters. It pleases me to think of Calypso as some mortal’s effort to explain away a thaumaturge of our clan. Other Lasombra historians point at Corsica, Sardinia or the Balearics. Realistically, we have no way to settle the question definitively. It’s primarily a way to justify further research and argument.

Cainites do have some solid facts at hand, however. The first is that our founder was in life part of the Mediterranean region. Unquestionably, the oldest Lasombra all spring from that part of the world and spread elsewhere over the millennia. The second is that it came specifically from the western Mediterranean; it always spoke of the civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean as something a bit foreign, targets rather than homes. The third is that it was a creature of the sea, either an island-dweller or a resident of some coastal community.

These are not just facts of history. They echo inside you now. You must have felt that peculiar fascination to rise in time to see the sunset without feeling any comparable urge to catch the beginning of dawn. You might even know the drive to spend time on, near and under the water, even if in life you cared nothing for it. Those are part of your heritage just as much as the power over shadow. You are, that is to say, part of my field of study, as I am myself.

One excellent reason to doubt Noddist myth is that the proposed roster of Caine’s childer matches the actually existing Antediluvians so poorly. Who would have been a suitable sire for the Lasombra Antediluvian?

None of the three fit very well. They serve to account for the Camarilla clans well enough, I suppose, but the story has more players than the pathetic seven. In any event, some Cainite Embraced our founder, and it set about building its haven in the shadows. Speculation rages within the scholars’ ranks about the motives and nature of the sire. We generally (though not always) agree that the Antediluvian didn’t spontaneously transmute itself into a Cainite, but frankly of the sire we can know nothing.

The Sea Peoples Our clan has a long heritage of leadership in a very primal and pure sense. We do not soil ourselves with the petty details of reckoning every little scrap; we command and seize. In antiquity, you find us leading this way among pirates. Demba, I believe, spoke to you about Catal Huyuk, but she has a sometimes disproportionate fascination with settlements. It comes from her personal history. I wish to speak of peoples on the move. Quite early on in history, we find records of great raiders.

In the second millennium B.C., the so-called “Sea Peoples” ravaged all the settled lands around the Mediterranean. The Hyksos even ruled Egypt for two successive dynasties. For a while, the Sea Peoples dominated all commerce in the Mediterranean. Nobody sailed without paying tribute to them or courting destruction. Indeed, around the turn of the millennium, the Sea Peoples played a major part in smashing the Bronze Age civilizations in and around Greece, ushering in an era that more landbound historians like to call a “dark age.” An age of darkness. Need I belabor the point?

Pardon? Yes, sir, you are quite correct. Lord Emory, I wish to commend your student Druitt for his attention
to detail. It is indeed one thing to point at a historical phenomenon, another to show that it matters to our kind. Let me cite some specific examples. This is from an Egyptian account of the execution of a band of Sea People raiders captured in the Nile Delta. “As the fire rose, all the prisoners cried out to various gods. Some named gods of our land, even offering prayer to Anubis in the most correct way. Most called upon the power of darkness that they named Laza Omri Baras, which the priests said signifies ‘The God of the River of Darkness.’ But he did not attend to their prayers, and so they perished.” Another record, from a ship captain who was the only one of his crew to escape a massacre while on a voyage from Thebes to Athens, gave the name of the god in question as “Lau-Som-Bheu,” which is quite passable Proto-Indo-European for “profiting together by knowledge” or “profiting together by domination.”

I could multiply the examples, but these should suffice. Our Antediluvian’s name came to the lips of pillagers wishing to invoke a power of potency and authority. This may not constitute proof in a purely academic sense, but then this is not a university. You will not be graded for failure to master points of detail, merely destroyed at some point for want of knowledge that could have saved you if only you’d bothered to grasp more fully your heritage.

The First Dispersal In 1627 B.C., the volcanic island of Thera erupted.

Foolish scholars try to link it with everything from the Exodus to Atlantis, when it was simply what it was — a tremendous eruption, spewing ash and dust around the world. The sea recovered quickly enough, but many coastal havens suffered. In the wake of the eruption, something like a third of our clan chose to seek better feeding and opportunity elsewhere.

The Antediluvian made one of its periodic great wanderings at this time, returning centuries later with the childe Montano, whose name we associate with the foolishness of honor. More of that another time.

It didn’t travel alone, and we can establish firm connections between the post-Thera dispersal and the appearance of Lasombra Methuselahs in Africa and interior Asia. The subject of Lasombra in the New World before A.D. 1492 is a little more complex, and we’ll save that for later. Suffice it to say that Lasombra of the Fourth and Fifth Generations established themselves throughout much of the world at this time, albeit in small numbers.

I see a question. Ah, yes. Yes, certainly a world filled with dark skies is good for us. But a world in which our food supply is diminished and more defensive isn’t. The mortal toll of the eruption is what motivated the dispersal.

Parasites and Plagues I will not speak in detail of our clan’s involvement with pirates during the Greek-dominated centuries after the dark age. One man’s pirate is another man’s hero, to begin with. The line between soldier and pirate is the line between you and me. The decentralized governments of the time favored opportunity and… I must address a point of terminology.

Cainites stricken with conscience, that most lamentable retention from their mortal days, sometimes rant about us as a race of parasites. We aren’t, of course. We are predators. We are also, in a rather literal sense, a disease upon humanity. Consider the course of a plague. It emerges, sweeps through the area, kills all those most susceptible and then fades into inactivity. That’s the way raiders and warriors within humanity operate. They emerge, gather all the interesting loot and then wait until more loot arrives. We do the same, when we operate in a style more mobile than the Camarilla’s favored hiding. Piracy is part of our clan’s legacy. It’s also a remarkably sensible way for Cainites to exist.

Kine epidemiologists refer to humanity and other target species as a disease’s way of making more disease.

The same rule applies to them. Humanity is a Cainite’s way of making more Cainites, or of simply feeding well.

Note that this perspective immediately cures the common misconception that human history as such is driven by our desires. It isn’t, and it doesn’t need to be.

The kine choose as they will. So do we. Events that favor our good feeding and continued reproduction endure.

Events that make existence harder for us do not, because at those times we seek to cull out those responsible for the problem. We don’t initiate many developments because we don’t need to, any more than evolution has to wait for a species to deliberately innovate. The myriad choices human beings make every year are the social equivalent of mutations, and we are the force of unnatural selection.

Like a disease evolving toward commensurate relations with its host, we aim toward a state in which the kine prosper (insofar as we wish them to) and so do we.

None of this requires us to be kings over them. As their true masters, we can and do take what suits us without the petty demands of being first among equals. Human beings don’t participate in the social life of their herds, and we don’t need to, either.

The Second Dispersal All good things must come to an end, we are told.

So it was with the golden era of Mediterranean piracy.

Alexander’s empire seriously constrained our operations in the eastern Mediterranean — for half a decade one simply couldn’t mount a suitably profitable large sea campaign, and things remained relatively grim for decades thereafter. For all their various squabbles, Alexander’s warring successors often maintained their guard against our folk and our comrades in spirit.

The crushing blow came from Pompey, a Roman general, 68 years before the commonly reckoned birth of Christ. The man should have been one of ours, so great was his talent. In mere months, he took the vast power and wealth the Roman Senate granted him and eradicated essentially all organized piracy throughout the Mediterranean Sea. No longer was the sea ours.

Now the Roman name “Mare Nostrum” or “Our Sea” was something more than an idle boast. Many of our clan’s havens fell to joint sea and land invasions, including the Maltese stronghold that had until then most often provided the Antediluvian with its home.

Thereafter the black citadel in Sicily served as our father’s frequent haven.

With piracy no longer an option, our clan went through a second era of dispersal. By the end of the first Christian century, Lasombra had spread everywhere in the Old World, though many of those who went east subsequently perished at the hands of Cathayans and other menaces. Pompey’s crusade also gave significant reinforcement to the terrestrial faction of our clan.

I have spoken primarily of our clan on the waves.

It is also true that some lineages felt more comfortable dwelling on land, weaving themselves into the fabric of human societies and wearing the resulting garments as both camouflage and lure. The Antediluvian itself experimented on mortal communities, though primarily as part of its ongoing search for desirable childer. As members of the Sabbat, you know that identification with humanity cripples us, blinds us to our true potential. You inherit an ancient and glorious tradition of mastery from outside. However, certain things must be said about the rival tradition of mastery from within.

As you meet Cainites who belong to other clans, you’ll find a straightforward correlation. The more dedicated a clan is to preserving the foolish illusion of humanity, for whatever reason, the more its members boast of their glories in “controlling” or “manipulating” human societies. The Ventrue and Brujah in particular make much of this, to the extent that childer Embraced mere nights ago seem determined to reenact the Punic Wars in their social relations. You should feel at liberty to mock such pretensions — in fact, you should feel compelled. I hope to point out a few of the complexities Lasombra Havens and the Course of Empire Our clan has a very ancient practice that is regrettably not generally available to you newcomers. Ever since human empires began to expand, some of us have followed just behind the front lines, setting up havens in conquered lands and letting the imperial forces keep away all other troubles while we make them take care of our sundry needs. Lasombra went with Hittites and Sumerians and Parthians, so it should come as no surprise that we went with Romans as well. Elders describe those centuries as good ones for the clan, because dissenters could spread out to engage in experiments without cutting off contact with the main body of the clan. Not until the last three hundred years or so did we get so much routine exchange of information and resources.

Alas, I do not see how you and your peers can enjoy anything comparable without either cheap travel to the stars or a massive collapse of existing social institutions. Some of your clanmates tried to engineer a nuclear war or global plague for precisely that reason, but none of their efforts worked out.

The Courts of Blood authorized the destruction of all involved. You may not purchase your haven at the cost of everyone else’s.

of the real situation, which are in my opinion vastly more interesting than Cainite mythology.

Rome As I was saying, Pompey’s campaign shifted the focus of clan attention. It simply wasn’t feasible to continue piracy as our primary mode of predation.

Many of you probably think of the Roman Empire as a looming, static sort of thing. It wasn’t. For one thing, in 68 B.C. it wasn’t an empire. It was a delightfully corrupt and convoluted republic of a sort, dominated by an aristocracy who made a fetish of hobbling the strong. A century before Pompey’s crusade, the republic controlled territory from eastern Spain over to the westernmost tip of Greece. Carthage still stood, though most of its empire was already gone. By the time Pompey went into action, the republic had pushed its frontier south to include former Carthaginian lands (and the blighted ruin of Carthage itself), all of Greece, Egypt and much of Asia Minor.

Fun as it might be to claim otherwise, Cainites had very little to do with this. Certainly our forebears did their part to build up networks of contacts, cultivate mortal protégés and the like. We read of the occasional general stricken with a mad fear of shadow or of mysterious murderers in the night, and you may smile in recognition. Nevertheless, an empire doesn’t run on such things. All vampiric influence amounts to corrective nudges and reefs in the path of human history. The very futility of vampiric rulership should be a lesson to you that it’s not what we’re fitted by nature (or perhaps unnature) to do.

Pompey’s success led to the downfall of the republic. The details are complex. Suffice it to say that a jealous Senate tried to strip him of power and deny his requests on behalf of his troops, and that when the dust settled twenty or thirty years later, the republic was gone. Julius Caesar ruled openly as emperor, and by the time he died the empire had grown to almost its furthest extent.

At least two codified versions of the Path of Night date to around the beginning of the Christian era.

Christianity itself spread so rapidly because Roman citizens traveled with unprecedented ease and safety, and you know how interesting the Christian faith has been to many of us. The Courts of Blood moved away from their Babylonian origins to reflect fresh thought among both humans and Cainites about efficiency and justice, with results that remain largely applicable even tonight.