The Fourth Lesson: The Rest of the World

The Fourth Lesson: The Rest of the World It’s been fifteen nights since the battered freighter left Bangkok. Andrew and his pack are having a marvelous time. They came on business: The Pacific Rim cardinals “asked” several reliable bishops to investigate rumors of heterodoxy and possible infernalism among the Southeast Asian packs. Andrew decided to bring the pack along, to help them make contacts (and establish some Vinculum ties that might come in handy somewhere down the road) and for a change of scenery. Back in his living days, Andrew sometimes corresponded with a mysterious old crone named Dun Meiling who resided in Bangkok and wrote some of the most scathingly nihilistic revolutionary screeds Andrew ever encountered. It was, in the end, not a great surprise to learn that she was a Cainite — Brujah antitribu — and had been for decades.

Dun’s pack shows unusual prowess, enough to fuel suspicions that they’ve received infernal investments. Andrew introduced himself and his pack, and promptly got an invitation to join Dun and her brood on piratical rounds.

The time since then has been glorious. The freighter, with a base crew of completely conditioned mortals, maneuvers alongside a target ship and asks for help. Dun dispenses with the mortal trappings of Asian piracy, the speedboats and so on, in favor of brute strength. She leads the pack over the side of their ship to the target via leaps or sprint swimming.

They destroy any resistance by hand, take whatever valuables catch their fancy and depart. Sometimes they scuttle the ships, sometimes they leave empty derelicts to confuse mortal authorities.

Tonight the two packs rest comfortably on the forward deck of a chartered yacht. Pieces of the crew and tourist passengers drift behind them, the wake glistening red in the reflected June moonlight. One of Dun’s brood turns out to be Lasombra, and a Chinese Jew at that. This boggles the Americans. Lin Baloh laughs at their confusion and succinctly explains the Jewish settlement in Nanking, synagoguebuilding under the Qing dynasty and other strange matters.

He’s something of a scholar, and a random question about some aspect of Sabbat history turns into an increasingly formal lecture. Andrew sits back and listens to Lin’s careful cadences.

The Clan in the World I’ve noticed that while many proletarian Americans and Europeans hate to admit that anything’s wrong with their lands, many bourgeois and intellectual Americans and Europeans seem afraid to admit that anything’s right.

The culture you were born into leads the world. The same is true in vampiric affairs. We childer of Caine all spring from founders in the arc from Europe through Asia to India, as nearly as I can establish, and our sires spread from there.

So the Europeans among you can take proper pride in being close to the heart of the clan and the sect, just as the Americans among you should glory in being so close to the great events of our time. You do not, I assure you, give offense by pointing out facts of history, nor should they embarrass you.

Asia I can establish with some certainty that Lasombra were creating childer in China before 1300 B.C., and that Brujah and Malkavians established broods in the Korean peninsula not later than 1100 B.C. Dating early arrivals by the other clans is difficult. Of course, many of these strangers didn’t last long in the face of opposition by the native Cainite-spirits, whom some of you call Cathayans. It takes great determination and intelligence to flourish amid hostile natives, which of course is why the Lasombra in particular did well for
themselves. We have never enjoyed large numbers here, but throughout the recent millennia, a few dozen of us have always made our havens here.

China Traditionally, more Lasombra exist in China than, say, Japan or India, for several reasons. India sees enough Cainite presence from the other clans to make competition both fierce and relatively unchallenging. Little seems distinctive, from our perspective, in grappling once again with Ventrue and Ravnos and so on. No great glory comes to those who survive in such conditions. Further east, matters change. The Cainite-like things who dwell here do afford us great challenges. So do the peculiar mortal hunters with their various preternatural gifts and the fiendish alliances of Lupines and comparable werecreatures of other breeds. Even now, three thousand years after our arrival, much remains mysterious to us.

I shouldn’t give the impression that it’s all just fighting other monsters. One can go decades or centuries encountering no other supernatural beings at all, apart from perhaps the occasional ghost. My sire and her sire and his sire and so on back to the Chou dynasty have often exercised power in mortal courts, and half of them never had direct experience with the “Cathayans.”

One Clan, One Blood Separate bloodlines don’t arise among the Lasombra outside Europe. They all share the same clan disciplines. What differs is the range of common out-of-clan disciplines.

Mind you, mortals can be great challenges by themselves. The philosophical tradition in which I grew up regards supernatural manifestations not so much as blasphemous intrusion, the way many of you were taught, but as a private matter best handled through polite silence until it goes away. That’s opportunity. The concomitant challenge is that observers who believe themselves skilled in omens and propriety feel at liberty to attack those who engage in “improper” manifestations, where your mortal ancestors would have deferred or fled. Fully a third of those in my lineage have perished at the hands of mobs.

I’ve heard that Western Lasombra date their clan’s first great expansion to the aftermath of the Thera eruption. That fits my research. My great-great-greatgreat-grandsire arrived, as I said, sometime before 1300 B.C. — that gives three centuries to travel from the Mediterranean to China, plenty of time even with stops to establish broods and pursue goals other than travel.

I can only prove the arrival of my remote ancestor in the Blood, but I would be unsurprised to find that he traveled with companions whose lineages have since perished. I know of another Chinese Lasombra lineage, in the upper Yangtze Valley, of about the same vintage, and I can trace back a Japanese Lasombra lineage to 1200 B.C. or so.

More Lasombra arrived around the dawn of the Christian era, as part of the post-Pompey dispersal. Many of you never learned this in school, but for a century or more, the eastern edge of the Roman empire and the western edge of the Chinese empire were within a few hundred miles. While diplomats never made the crossing officially, traders did. At least half a dozen lineages run back to the period from about 50 B.C. to A.D. 200, when the Han empire fell into civil war and the western frontier became much less hospitable.

Lasombra who presented themselves as gods of darkness seldom flourished — the Confucian tradition is not receptive to claims of authority on the part of evil spirits, given Confucius’ obsession with moral government. Confucians do respond quite well to sage spirits in shadow who offer wise advice and speak with the voices of ancestors.

Thus my ancestors in the Blood have often emphasized the mental arts of domination over Obtenebration. Some of the early Lasombra settlers brought with them mastery

of the diviner’s arts, secrets of concealment and disguise and some forms of blood magic. Auspex in particular is as common among us as Obtenebration, which I gather confuses hidebound classifiers of clan.

Vampiric immigration came to a nearly complete stop for centuries after Rome and Han China fell. Climatic changes dried up old routes, and various internal conflicts among the “Cathayans” made it difficult to develop new ones. The existing lineages settled into an isolated existence, drawing intellectual stimulation from their mortal environs rather than the interplay of kindred thoughts. Some, like my own line, flourished in great cities, playing subtle games of influence and study. My own sire and grandsire still compile their notes for a comprehensive mathematical model of human behavior, with enthusiasm not noticeably dimmed despite centuries of data collection. The Yangtze lineage I mentioned earlier occupies itself by acting as oracles, flitting here and there to answer prayers and petitions.

A small brood ranging through the northwestern desert seems to spend most of its time desecrating tombs in the search for evidence of elders in torpor. Whatever keeps one’s attention focused, I suppose.

Contact with Europe resumed in the 15th century, and an era of purges followed once more Lasombra arrived. Some Asian lineages had become just plain peculiar and not dedicated to behaving in ways conducive to survival. Word of the Antediluvian’s destruction and rise of the Sabbat came less than a century after the initial contacts with Lasombra who’d come on Portuguese and Spanish vessels, and it was a deeply confusing time. The fact that I am here now, comfortable among you, shows that the Sabbat view prevailed, but I can and do still regret that nearly half of the Lasombra lineages active in 1400 had to be destroyed by 1600 for their refusal to adjust to the new reality.

In a way, the news that one of the founding Cainites had been destroyed helped win us relief from some confrontations with the native Cainite-spirits. Their mythology teaches a version of the Wheel of Ages in which, as time passes, more demons arise. Creatures capable of slaying the eldest are sufficiently demonic for many “Cathayans,” and while they didn’t like us much, they left us alone at least some of the time, as harbingers of the age. We were of course glad to exploit this belief to secure ourselves.

Industrialization was a boon for us. Large urban populations in a condition of extreme alienation make wonderful prey and also sometimes cast up just the sort of humanity-hating visionary who becomes an asset to our clan. The smoke of factories, particularly the old coal-burners, makes a marvelous night sky, all cloud and
reflected fire, much more interesting (at least to my eye) than irrelevant stars. I myself was one such visionary in the wake of the Taiping Rebellion, bitterly disillusioned by the manifest failure of my revered leader and by association disillusioned with all of Chinese tradition.

I threw myself into Westernization wholeheartedly, though it did not relieve my soul. My sire spotted some of my poetry — why, Bishop Emory, you smile. You too?

Heh. Once again we find that the Toreador hold no monopoly on the arts as a tool for recruitment.

In any event, when I speak of the desirability of the wretched age, you must understand that I have a personal attachment to it all. I give thanks for the circumstances that brought me here.

Lands Around China To the best of my knowledge, few Lasombra flourish in Japan, the Koreas, the Indochinese peninsula and elsewhere in Asia, nor have they ever done well there.

My sire used to speak of bands of “feral” Lasombra who roam the New Guinea highlands, encouraging tribal warfare and feeding on the fallen. I didn’t hear the phrase “urban legend” until much later, but even at the time I suspected a tale.

Africa Discussing Cainite history in Africa before the colonial powers’ arrival is a mess at the best of times.

In recent years — the last generation or so — mortal scholars have argued quite passionately and sometimes entertainingly about the real ethnicity of this civilization or that, the flow of ideas from one civilization to another. They don’t realize that arguments over who owes what to whom have been going on since before anything their history records.

The best person I know of to talk with you about this would have been our packmate Liu Dou, who resided in Kenya from 1575 until 1976. Unfortunately, last year he ran into a mid-level bureaucrat whose view of herself as a monster hunter in training proved much less delusional than we would have guessed. She’s dead now, but Liu is ash. I will do what I can to pass along his thoughts, along with my own study.

It’s very difficult to distinguish early Lasombra from early African Cainites of any other sort. As the saying has it, they all look alike to European-based chroniclers.

I myself cannot readily distinguish the various tribes that produced Liu’s childer, or even predictably identify an African as Bantu or Nilotic or what have you. Many observers, particularly those with axes to grind, fail to make important distinctions or create divisions where none exist. I am quite certain, for instance, that while some of the members of the African bloodline sometimes called “Laibon” do refer to one of their distinctive gifts of Caine with the Swahili name “Abombwe,” none of them did so before the invention of Swahili, and that even now Cainites inhabiting all the places in Africa that do not speak Swahili are unlikely to do so. In some eras, mania for grand syntheses arise, often at the expense of particulars.

When dealing with Cainites, the problems that affect the study of mortal cultures only get worse. Few of us exist, and when we get powerful enough, our delusions become very hard to shake. In his final decades, for instance, my grandsire refused to acknowledge that the Ming dynasty had in fact fallen to the Qing. And within his haven, it hadn’t, or at least you couldn’t tell that it had. His hapless, mind-controlled guests created artifacts to support his views, and no one in the area could disagree without a tremendous act of will. So the fact that an elder believes it was a great force in the land in the time of this dynasty or that does not itself constitute proof, even if you find the account credible in some ways.

So you must understand that everything I have to say on these matters is tentative and conditional.

Proceed carefully.

Where No Lasombra Have Been As nearly as I know, there has never been a significant Lasombra presence in Egypt. The Setites have always thrived there, as have Lupines with a particular fetish for hunting Cainites. Even more so than their kind’s general obsession with that pastime, I mean. Only the advantages of Sabbat practice make it possible for a band of Lasombra to venture in reasonably safely on a particular errand, and even then they shouldn’t linger.

Likewise, I know of no Lasombra presence among the Pygmy peoples.

Ancient Kingdoms Now, clear-cut evidence places Lasombra in eastern Africa south of Egypt even before the post-Thera dispersal. Half a dozen words in the ancient language of Meroe, far up the Nile from Egypt, reflect names of known childer of the Antediluvian. Pottery from the Khartum Mesolithic culture, around 10,000 years ago, sometimes depicts scenes of shadows flying under the moon, images that look familiar to anyone who knows our powers. The Antediluvian’s Sicilian stronghold contained silver artifacts crafted in styles that flourished in Nubia and Meroe in Mesolithic and Neolithic times, and as nearly as I know they came across the sea not long after their making. One of them, at least, features in Pompey’s account of his attack on Sicily’s pirates as

“a chalice of great antiquity, ascribed to the power of a night spirit from far to the south,” which the pirates filled with blood and drank before their raids.

A little further south, we find similar evidence of Lasombra presence in Ethiopia. It is, of course, well known that the Antediluvian’s eldest surviving childe, the great failure Montano, came from one of the tribes wandering through the land that modern maps divide between Ethiopia and Kenya. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear that the stories speak of previous experiments by the Antediluvian among those various tribes. The nomadic peoples who settled Kenya 4,000 years ago almost immediately took up maritime activity. I strongly suspect that the Antediluvian’s interest in seafaring had something to do with this, with it using them for its sundry ventures. I find intriguing hints of an ancient Lasombra presence in what’s now Mozambique, but the migrations that settled Kenya also wiped out preexisting societies on the southeastern coast. Too little evidence exists to settle the question.

Shadows Among Many What interests me most is that once our clan arrived in Africa (or returned to it, depending on your preferred theory of vampiric origins), our predecessors never made much of a mark on the mortal societies they preyed upon. The Antediluvian itself engineered catastrophes of various sorts but gave that up after the second dispersal, and few or none of its childer attempted to do the same. Did the Antediluvian fear the creation of some destructive rival? The ironist in me wants to believe that it did, and that this set the scene for its destruction thanks to the absence of a real challenger to Gratiano, later.

Cainites of other clans set themselves up from time to time as kings and sages. We did not. We inspired fear. Our influence was indirect and indeed undirected.

While you may trace the evolution of myths about dark gods and night powers and show how they stem from our activities, you will find precious few accounts of any of those powers speaking to fearful mortals, providing explicit lessons or commands. We were what we were, and they reacted as they deemed fit.

You will also find a surprising number of havens — literally dozens, if not hundreds — inhabited by tightly bound brood lineages for centuries or millennia, that seem to have had no impact on any nearby kine.

They fed, chose childer, pursued their philosophical or religious ambitions and passed without a trace. Abyss mysticism flourished among the African lurkers, along with research into the nature of our blood-borne powers.

Perhaps if some strong leader had risen among them, the African lineages would feature prominently in clan history. As it is, they’re scarcely a footnote.