Arili Kutaripa

Arili Kutaripa, the Ashen Arrow, was an unaffiliated vampire slayer of the Bronze Vigil, a shock fighter who broke nine covens across Anatolia in eight years. His story survives in a granary tally and a ferrymen's ballad, and both end at the same burned dye-house in 1062 BCE.

Two documents carry most of what is known about Arili Kutaripa, and they disagree about nearly everything except the ending. The first is a clay tally from the granary at Tishamuipa, written in the cramped hand of a clerk who counted barley and had no opinions. The second is a ballad called "The Ashen Arrow", sung by ferrymen along the rivers of Anatolia in what is now Turkey, a song with eleven verses in some villages and four in others. Where the tally gives a number, the ballad gives a feeling. Where the ballad says he fought a hundred, the tally says that after the fire one dye-house was lost, two bodies were removed, and the vats were not recovered. The age is The Bronze Vigil, and its clerks wrote on clay. This biography leans on the tally for facts and on the ballad for what people were afraid of. The ballad opens with a boy from the river village of Muruus, where he was born in 1100 BCE: "Muruus had reeds and Muruus had mud, / and Muruus bred a boy for blood." The tally says nothing of the childhood, but the song has it right in one respect. He was a stormer, a shock fighter hired by lowland lords to go first through a gate or a ford, and that was a trade with a short working life. His method was a straight run with a bronze blade held low, no feints and no pauses, which his fellows called the line. Later he gave it a name of his own, Frenzy Line. It was less a skill than a bargain with his own body, a dozen heartbeats of the whole frame working at once, and it left him deaf in one ear after a hard day, with a jaw so locked that he ate soup through his teeth for hours afterward. Of all the fights he took part in before thirty, he could recall perhaps half. The ballad's sixth verse is the one every ferryman knows: "A dawn-lit shape came to his bed, / and walked him where no road had led." Biographers have mocked it, and the man himself, as the village told it, never claimed more than a dream. In 1070 BCE, at thirty, Arili Kutaripa woke one morning in the grip of it and walked three days into the high country without eating. He came to an unmarked cairn above a spring, and driven into the stones was an olive-wood stake, a rare thing so far inland, worn pale by hands. He took it. Who had left it there, he never found out, and nobody trained him in what to do with it. He answered to no vigil and sat in no council. In the lists of the Slayerverse he is Unaffiliated, and a clerk who would not have understood the word wrote it down anyway as "the one who comes alone". His work over the next eight years was as plain as a storm. He broke nine covens, the tally of which is kept on a notched stick that was buried with him, in the foothills, along the caravan road and in two walled towns whose names the ballad does not agree on. He had a habit of removing his sandals before a door, which the song takes for reverence and the ferrymen for good sense, since a barefoot man on packed earth could hear the floor. He wanted a house with a roof that would not leak, and he talked about it so often that his stepsister ended up giving him one, in Muruus, which he slept in for perhaps eleven nights in total. He was not much admired. A vampire slayer who works alone is a bad neighbor, and he left the fear of what he hunted behind him on every doorstep. The song first names his enemy in 1066 BCE. "She crossed the court before a heart could beat, / and left a blade where his ribs would meet." The tally supports it in its way, recording that a man was carried out of the night market at Zilaas with a hole under his arm and was nursed by a cheese-seller for forty days. The woman was Shaa Shamua, whom the song calls the Gaunt Architect, a vampire who had designed the market's hidden passages herself and ran it for the Crimson Line. He went in for her, and she crossed the courtyard faster than he could turn. The wound she gave him was not deep, but it was exact. What saved him was the water. The market stood over a canal, and when he fell back across the plank bridge, she stopped at the near edge and did not follow. He noted that, in the way a soldier notes a gap in a wall. He was slow to forgive himself for the next four years. The ballad shortens them to a single verse, but the tally shows him in the granary at Tishamuipa, where barley rations were drawn against his name more than once, over a season. A town's clerk makes no judgments, though he did note that the man asked many questions about the dye-works on the mill-race, who worked there, which door they used, and how deep the leat ran. In the song this is called a plan. In the tally it is called a nuisance. The last verse is the shortest. "The water ran at the door, the fire ran at the roof, / and neither would say who won by proof." In 1062 BCE, at Tishamuipa, he turned the mill-race across the threshold of the dye-house and lit the reed roof from outside, and when the Gaunt Architect came through the smoke anyway, as quick as anything in Anatolia, he was waiting inside with the stake. She had burned and healed three times before she reached him. The needle-blade went in under his jaw, and the stake went into her at the same moment, and they went down together on the wet floor with the dye running between them in red and blue. The tally gives the rest: two bodies, one lost dye-house, the vats not recovered. Arili was thirty-eight years old. After that the villagers of Muruus kept the house. It was only a room, with a good roof, and nobody lived in it for a generation. Children dared one another to sit in it. Somebody had left a pair of sandals by the door, set side by side, toes outward, and no one moved them for years.