Col Xopatl

Col Xopatl, the Veiled Bell, was a mountain-shrine tracker of Mesoamerica who survived a bite in 1507 BCE and spent forty years as a vampire slayer who could multiply herself in other people's eyes. She never killed her rival Kupali Ahkuic, and he never killed her.

"If you hear the bell, don't turn round. If you don't hear it, do." An old marsh woman remembered that being said to her in the doorway of a fish-drying shed, by a stranger with a cloth bound round one ankle, some forty years before the old woman told it to a trader who passed it on. The stranger was Col Xopatl, and the age she belonged to was the Bronze Vigil. The bell was a small fired-clay thing she wore tied at the ankle and wrapped in a strip of cotton, so that it rang only when she let it, and the Vigil of Mesoamerica came to call her the Veiled Bell for the silence she carried more than for any sound. The joke among the marsh people was that the bell meant she was leaving and the silence meant she had arrived. Col Xopatl was born in 1531 BCE at Zocul, a mountain shrine in the highlands of what is now Mexico, where her father kept the lamps and her mother kept goats. As a girl she was sent down every dry season to the marsh country to trade cheese and cured hides, and she learned the lowlands the slow way, on her feet, tracking tapir and heron through the reeds for the shrine's feasts. By twenty she was the best hunter in two valleys, and a good deal more content than she let on. Her private want was almost comically modest. She wanted to see the sea, which everyone told her was only a long walk east, and which she kept putting off for one more season of trapping. In 1507 BCE, when she was twenty-four, she was bitten at a river crossing below the marsh by a thing that came out of the cane at dusk. Everyone in the district who had been bitten that way in those years had turned by the third night, and the shrine had begun to lay out her blanket. She did not turn. The fever left her blind for two days, and when her sight came back her eyes disagreed with one another about what was in front of them. No one taught her what had happened. A smith's widow at the crossing, who had buried a husband to the same thing, gave her a copper dagger and a piece of advice about doorsteps, and that was the whole of her instruction. As a vampire slayer she was entered in the Slayerverse's records as a hunter of the Vigil of Mesoamerica from that year, and she did not argue with the word. What she had was the Mirror Legion. A slow blink, a hum held behind the teeth, and every person within earshot saw a dozen of her at once: Col at the door, at the window, behind the pot, none of them real, all of them seen by everyone in the same place. It was not a trick of the mind so much as a trick of the eyes, a rare thing the body does, and it cost her. Her nose bled and she lost her left from her right for the rest of the evening, which is a poor condition for a person holding a knife. She learned to use it for ten heartbeats at a time. She learned to stand perfectly still while it ran. Her first clash with Kupali Ahkuic came in 1504 BCE at Xoxotl, a temple town in the lowlands that had once been prosperous and was becoming known for its sick. Patients went into the house of cures under the temple wall and came out slack-limbed and willing. She went in on a market night with the dagger, past a courtyard full of people sitting in rows, and heard him before she saw him: a low double note, two pitches grinding together in a man's throat. Her own knees folded. She pushed the Legion out in front of her and watched the whole room turn to look at twelve women, none of them hers. The man at the far table was thin and tidy, with a physician's cloth over his arm. He looked at the twelve and then, correctly, at the thirteenth. Neither of them moved. She left by the roof. The Hungering Tyrant, as the lowland people called him, paid her back with a rumor in the market that she carried the sickness. She burned his drying sheds at the Tlakal landing in 1496 BCE, which was a good deal more effective, as fire is the one thing he could not talk his way past. They each found out where the other lived, and neither went there. In 1493 BCE an exhausted headman of the lowland houses brokered a truce between the Vigil's people and the Ember Cabal. It held for ten years. She did not hunt his cellars and he did not feed on the Zocul road. In practice both of them respected the lines because they had been drawn by people who were not afraid of either. The truce lapsed in 1483 BCE without a signal. She did not pick up the dagger against him again in earnest. She went back to nests and cellars elsewhere and hunted the smaller houses with the patience of a woman who had learned that some enemies were best left in a drawer. In forty years she never taught anyone. The shrine's children, she said, would learn the trade soon enough without her help. Col died in 1467 BCE at Zocul of a lung sickness that came with the winter rains, at sixty-four. The shrine keeper, who sat with her, remembered a man standing all night on the far side of the stream at the foot of the steps, not crossing it, in a physician's cloth. In the morning he was gone. Col had asked for the window to be left open, and had said only that she could hear the water. Twenty-two years later, in 1445 BCE, Kupali Ahkuic was sealed away beneath Tlakal by hands the Vigil never traced. The porters took the clay bell from her ankle and hung it, unwrapped, on the shrine lintel, where it rang in every wind. Her body was laid with its face turned east, toward the sea she had never walked to see.