Enbaath Ramela

Enbaath Ramela, called The Bright Vow, was a Levantine soldier who became a vampire slayer in 1989 BCE with no powers and no teacher. He was poor at nearly everything but holding frightened men together, and he spent thirty-one years circling a vampire engineer he never caught.

Enbaath Ramela could not count reed bundles, could not handle a boat, could not read the sky, and admitted cheerfully that he could not stand being alone. The marsh village of Morraa in Lebanon, where he was born in 2007 BCE, offered a boy with those faults very little. The people there lived by counting reed bundles and judging the tide, and Enbaath miscounted the first and mistimed the second. He once sank a neighbor's punt with a full load of salted fish, and the neighbor's family still brought it up thirty years later, at his funeral feast, as the thing they remembered best. What he could do was stand in a doorway. This sounds like nothing, and in the Bronze Vigil it was nearly everything. When he was sixteen a raid of hill thieves came down on Morraa, and the men of the village, who were mostly counters of reeds, began to scatter toward the water. Enbaath planted himself in the lane between two houses and shouted, not words exactly, a long flat bark pitched low in the chest, and the men stopped running. They did not turn around out of courage. They turned around because someone had told them, in a voice that did not shake, where to be. He did not know yet that the thing had a name. Later the Vigil would call it Rally Cry, and teach it to officers who never managed it. The war reached him in 1989 BCE, when he was eighteen and serving as a spear-bearer in the garrison of a river-mouth fort. Something was taking the night watch one man at a time: no bodies, no blood on the stairs, only a bronze cloak-pin left on each empty post. Enbaath, who had been assigned the post nobody wanted, noticed that the pins were all arranged in a line pointing inland. He told the captain, who laughed. He told the captain again two nights later, after the fourth pin. The Vigil of Levant sent a quiet woman in a gray shawl to inspect the fort, and she looked at the line of pins, then at Enbaath, and said he could stay on as a hunter or go home and count reeds. That was how Enbaath Ramela became a vampire slayer of the Slayerverse, and the garrison, who liked a nickname, took to calling him The Bright Vow after the oath he swore on the spot to the gray woman and to nobody else. He had no teacher after that, and asked for none. Nobody in the Vigil offered, and he taught himself from what the older hunters left on their kill-sites: how salt on a sill held and how it failed, how a vampire's feeding left the sleeper cold at the wrists and warm at the neck. He took up a bronze sickle-sword because a straight blade would not hook a door-bar, and because the smith in Morraa gave him the second-hand one for a sack of barley. His first meeting with Sidashon Melalalon came in 1987 BCE, two years into the work, at the Sabu weir, a mud-brick sluice that fed the canals between Morraa and her village of Rayahath. Enbaath did not know her name. He knew only that the weir had failed three times in a season, on nights with no rain, and that the lords of the lower marsh were blaming the gods. He and eleven farmers waited inside the sluice-house with a pot of lamp oil and a line of salt laid across the threshold. What came in did not use the door. Part of it was a woman, and then she was a flurry of small winged bodies hitting the rafters like thrown gravel, and the lamp went out, and Enbaath understood that he was standing in a room where his eyes were now useless. He said afterward that he had never been so afraid, and also that he had never been so clear. He used the Rally Cry. The eleven farmers, blind and shrieking, held the salt line, and the winged things could not cross it twice. By dawn the weir was standing and the intruder was gone. Of that night he kept one flat observation: she had built the weir. The sluice-gate fitted like a thing made by someone who loved fitting things. He chased her, off and on, for the next twenty-nine years. It is the oddest feature of the record that he never once tried to stop her building. In 1982 BCE she raised a drainage cut across the marsh that drained a lord's fields into his rival's, and Enbaath, who was bad at politics, could not decide which lord deserved help. In 1971 BCE he followed her to a cistern under a fishing town and found only the cistern, excellent, dry, ready, and her tools in neat rows on a ledge. He took one of them, a bronze plumb-bob on a cord, and carried it for the rest of his life. He told no one why. Younger soldiers believed it was a charm. It was only that he had a feeling the thing was well made. His faults followed him through all of it. He lost a good horse-team to a river crossing in 1976 BCE by estimating the depth by eye. He could not hold a grudge past a night's sleep, which his commanders found irritating in a hunter. He hummed one tune, an old wedding song of the marsh people, when he was frightened, which made him easy to find. But the men who served under him, and there were hundreds across three decades, said the same thing in different words: that when Enbaath was in the doorway, they knew where the door was. He never married. He raised no pupils, and the Vigil recorded none, though a dozen village boys claimed afterward to have been taught by him in an afternoon. He died in the winter of 1958 BCE, aged forty-nine, of a lung fever caught in a flooded ditch while digging out a family from a collapsed cellar, a job nobody had asked a veteran to do. He had killed no vampire in thirty-one years that anyone could name with certainty. He had moved three of them out of the cities of the coast, and that was what the Vigil's record gave him: moved. Sidashon Melalalon, the vampire he had hunted since the Sabu weir, was then ninety-seven years old, long-lived and tireless. She had been made one of the Velvet Circle in 2015 BCE, and she outlasted him by nearly three centuries before other hands walled her up beneath Tiralalim in 1684 BCE. He never knew how it ended for her, and he would have been annoyed to learn that she had never once been caught by the people who most wanted to. At the burial a woman no one knew left a coil of cord at the foot of the grave, with a lead weight tied to the end. The ground was wet and the cord was plumb. Nobody in Morraa touched it, because they did not know whose it was, and by the spring the marsh had taken it.