Arpia Yawaili

Arpia Yawaili, the Bright Thorn, was an Anatolian soldier who woke in a burned granary in 1243 BCE with skin like boiled hide and spent forty-two years as a vampire slayer of the Bronze Vigil. He destroyed the Eternal Envoy in 1203 BCE and died two winters later.

Zuwa, a donkey driver in from the south with copper ingots, was the first to describe the man, and he described him at every inn between Kukuaripa and the coast until the story wore smooth. It was dusk in 1234 BCE. The caravan stop sat where two roads crossed a dry watercourse: a well, a long mud-brick yard, a shed for the animals. In the yard stood a man with an oxhide shield on his left arm and a stake in his right hand, grey with road dust, chewing a lump of juniper resin. He did not look at the donkeys or the drivers. He looked at the envoy's covered wagon, and the envoy, a tall woman who had taken no supper at any stop since the coast, stepped down and looked back at him as at a debt coming due. The man was Arpia Yawaili, who would be called the Bright Thorn. The woman was Muipa Lamuus. Zuwa, who had the sense to get under his own cart, said afterward that the shield was the only thing in the yard still in one piece. Arpia Yawaili was a soldier before he was anything else, a man of what is now Turkey in the years of the Bronze Vigil, and he never stopped thinking like one. Arpia was born in 1273 BCE at Kukuaripa itself, the son of the woman who raked the animal yard, and he grew up carrying water to strangers. It taught him to read a man by how he tied a rope. At eighteen he took a spear in the king's levy because the levy paid in barley, and for years he guarded toll posts, buried men who died of the flux, and wanted nothing grander than a walled plot of barley behind the Kukuaripa mill, which he talked about the way other men talk about women. He had a habit of humming a drovers' counting song under his breath while he worked, always stopping at the same number, as if the next one were unlucky. The war found him in 1243 BCE, when he was thirty. A grain store on the Pilaaripa road had been shut up for a week, and the levy sent a section of six to see why. Five did not come back out. The store burned that night, whether to hide what was inside or to finish the section, nobody ever settled, and Arpia woke at sunrise lying in the ash with the skin of his back and arms unburned and so dense that when he dragged a knife across his forearm the blade skated. No one taught him what to do about that. No old hand found him and no temple claimed him. He learned from drivers' stories, from the old woman at the Kukuaripa mill whose mother had kept rules about certain dark roads, and mostly by getting things wrong and living. The Slayerverse files him as a vampire slayer of the Bronze Vigil, which is accurate and says very little. The gift he named Ironhide, though he never called it that aloud. When he clenched down low in the belly the skin on his forearms, back and shins went dull and heavy, like boiled hide left in the sun. A spear point turned on it. A blade bit and slid. It was not armor you could hold for long, and the bill came after: his joints locked for a day, his hands would not close around a cup, and he ate like three men and slept like a dropped sack. He soon stopped fighting more than one thing at a time. His kit was plain, an oxhide shield built up in layers and an ash stake, and the stake got its silver tip from a smith at Kukuaripa who was paid out of a year of saved levy pay. He had learned the hard way that bronze only angered his quarry and that a silver edge did not. He learned the rest the same way: that salt laid across a doorway made the thing think twice, and that its patience was longer than his. In the yard in 1234 BCE the envoy did not draw a blade. She put one hand on the slaughter trough by the well, and the sheep's blood standing in it rose in a sheet and came across the yard at the height of his head. He got the shield up. It struck like a wet plank swung by a bigger man, and the shield split along the grain, and the force went through it into his arm, which turned black from wrist to elbow. His skin did not break. He never got near enough with the stake. At the first grey in the east she was gone, wagon and all, and what he remembered most was that she had looked relieved, as one does at the end of a tiring errand. He sewed the two halves of the shield back together with sinew that night, ugly and fast, and kept it for the rest of his life. After that he followed her across Anatolia, and the following was most of his career. She was an envoy, and her wagon carried the king's safe-conduct on a clay seal; a levy man who put a stake through a woman under that seal would hang, whatever she was. So he trailed embassies from town to town, arrived a day late, and cleaned up what she left. At the Tuwanaripa salt pans in 1221 BCE he finally caught one of her couriers alone, a thin man who wept and gave up everything. The tablets he carried, once a scribe had been paid to read them, were counts of grain stores, cistern depths and the nights when the moon was down. Arpia did not understand at first why a vampire should care about cisterns. It was a long while before he saw that she was working out which towns could be starved, and when. Across forty-two years in the Vigil of Anatolia he drove two vampire lords out of the cities of the plateau, but those were work. Muipa was the thing he had been sent to finish, and he knew it. He found her at Pilaaripa in 1203 BCE, a hill town with a lower terrace built over a great cistern, where she had wintered under a merchant's name. He was seventy and had been counting the cost of every stair for some time. He carried a sack of salt on his back like a pedlar and laid it down in a line across each of the three doors to the cistern, which took the better part of a night, and then he sat in the dry dark at the foot of the shaft with the silver-tipped stake across his knees and waited for her to come up it. She did, calling him by name, and offering terms, which he did not answer. When he would not talk she opened the water. It came up the shaft in a column and filled the vault, a hand's breadth at a time, and he let the Ironhide close over him and stood in it, and when she reached out of the flood for his throat the silver went in under her ribs. He climbed out by the shaft at dawn with both lungs full of cistern water and three fingers that would not straighten. He went home to Kukuaripa, and in the second winter after Pilaaripa a lung-fever took him in the barley shed he had at last bought behind the mill. He was seventy-two. He died in 1201 BCE with the drovers' song still stopping at its same unlucky number, and the old woman's granddaughter finished the count for him. The two halves of the oxhide shield, sewn together with sinew, were hung on a peg beside the well, and for a long time drivers coming in at dusk looped their water ropes over it.