Kupali Ahkuic

Kupali Ahkuic, the Hungering Tyrant, was a physician of Xoxotl turned vampire in 1511 BCE, who ruled lowland Mexico with a two-note voice. He is remembered by one porters' ballad and one rival, the slayer Col Xopatl, whom he never killed.

The only surviving record of Kupali Ahkuic that is not a Vigil report is a ballad, sung by the porters of the Tlakal road in a long, shapeless sixty verses and set down much later by someone who plainly did not understand it. The first verse goes: "A man in a physician's cloth / stood in the door with a lamp and a bowl, / and the sick came in as a river comes, / and the river forgot where it ran." Scholars of the Vampireverse have argued for centuries about whether it is praise or warning. The porters, when asked, said it was a song for keeping the beat on the long carry and that the words were nobody's business. Kupali Ahkuic was born in 1532 BCE in Xoxotl, a temple town of the lowlands in Mesoamerica, in what is now Mexico, the son of a woman who sold herbs in the market under the platform. He took to the trade and then past it. He wanted to know why a fever walked from house to house in a certain order, and what the bark of one tree did to the pulse that the bark of another did not. He kept his seeds in small pots labelled by knots, counted every patient's pulse on the left wrist, and was known as the gentlest hand in the temple. In the ballad's second verse he is "the one who asked the leaf its name." He was twenty-one in 1511 BCE and, as a scientist of his town, had about as many enemies as a man who treats them for free. The Ember Cabal wanted a scientist, in the years of the Bronze Vigil when such a thing was rare. That was how it was said in later years, and it is probably true. In 1511 BCE Tzitl Yakal, the Silent Architect, who dug chambers for the vampires of Mesoamerica and spoke when a gesture failed, came to Xoxotl in the dry season and found a physician working late at his bench. Kupali was made a vampire that night. He woke in a dry cellar with a thirst he did not yet understand and Tzitl sitting nearby, drawing patterns in ash. He never made a childe, in his sixty-six years in the role. The Cabal had its use for him, and he for it, and he said that one dependent was a clinical error. His gift was the Thrall Chord. In his throat the voice split into two pitches that beat against each other, like a pair of drums a finger's width out of time, and any listener within a few paces felt it in the teeth and then in the legs. They did as he said. They did not like it, afterward, and the Cabal's patients forgot most of the hour. It cost him a raw throat and a day without his voice; he could not run it long. The ballad's fifth verse, a bad one, calls him the Hungering Tyrant because he took what the room had. Fire hurt him, and so did running water at a threshold, and he kept a bucket and a flint by every door he used, without any visible shame. In 1504 BCE a woman came to Xoxotl with a copper dagger and a clay bell wrapped in cotton, and he understood at once that she was a vampire slayer, because nobody else walked into that courtyard like a person entering her own kitchen. He ran the Chord. She went to her knees, and then the room filled with a dozen of her, none of them real, and he did something no one in the Cabal could have told him he'd do: he stopped, looked at the twelve, and found the thirteenth. She was Col Xopatl, the Veiled Bell, and he would later learn she had spent a month planning the roof. They stood about ten paces apart for as long as it took to count a breath. Then she was gone through the roof, and he sat down at his table and thought for a long time about the way she had held the knife. The ballad turns a corner at the burning of the Tlakal landing, in 1496 BCE, when she fired his drying sheds and a season's worth of dried bark went up, and he stood on the bank with the flint in his hand and watched. In the ballad the Tyrant weeps. In every other account he took notes. The ten-year truce that followed, from 1493 BCE to 1483 BCE, is the quietest stretch of his sixty-six years, and some of the Cabal thought him soft for keeping it. He used the time to work out the one problem she had set him, which was how to hold twelve of her in his head at once. Before the truce he had answered her rumor for rumor, and kept a record of her movements in knots, which the Cabal read as an obsession and he read as data. After the truce he drifted away from the Cabal's high table and into his cellars, writing nothing, and Kupali Ahkuic became a quieter man than the song allowed. In 1467 BCE a porter told him the Bell was ill, and he went up to Zocul, which he had never visited, and stood on the far side of the stream below the shrine steps all night, because he could not cross water at a threshold. A woman's cough came through the open window. He stayed until the sky was grey and the cough stopped. The ballad leaves the scene out, and the porters, who knew perfectly well it was true, thought it too private for a song. He was sixty-five in that year and had begun to be stiff in the knees. He was sealed away beneath Tlakal in 1445 BCE, at eighty-seven, by hands that the Vigil never traced, and the Cabal kept no account of how. The last verse of the ballad survives in two forms. In the common one the Tyrant sleeps. In the porters' own, which they sing slower, a bell is rung once from the highlands, and the man in the physician's cloth lifts his head.