Mennefi Senankhet

Mennefi Senankhet, the Veiled Flame, was a levy soldier from a salt-caravan stop on the Nile who became a vampire slayer in the worst night of their life and lasted three years. They taught a wall of shields to face a predator, and it held.

The rule was: no shield stands alone. Mennefi Senankhet had it from a sergeant of the governor's levy in the year they were fifteen, delivered with a clip round the ear after the sergeant found a boy of the line standing a pace ahead of his neighbors to look brave. A shield beside a shield, shoulder to the hide, and nobody steps back unless the whole rank steps back; that was all of military science, as the sergeant saw it, and Mennefi never improved on it. The rule was tested exactly once in earnest, on a night in 2547 BCE, when there was no rank, no neighbor and no sergeant. There was a salt store, a household of eleven, and a creature at the door. Renrameni was a caravan stop on the Nile in Egypt, in the Nile Valley region, where the western trails came in loaded with natron and rock salt and the donkeys were watered before the long haul to the delta. It stank of animals and was never quiet. Mennefi was born there in 2581 BCE, in the age the Slayerverse calls The First Night, to a family that kept the salt sheds. Nobody in the family was a fighter. Mennefi became one at sixteen because the governor's levy offered barley and a hide shield and it was the quickest way to get out of the sheds. They proved to be good at the work in the plain, unglamorous way of someone who had been trained to count. They counted the rank, the spears, the paces, and the number of the dead they had stood beside. For every comrade they brought home alive they tied a knot in a linen cord, and by the time they left the levy the cord was long enough to wrap twice round the wrist. The cord is a small matter, but it was the one thing they were ever sentimental about. What they wanted, in the way ordinary soldiers want things, was a place with a tamarisk tree in the yard and nobody giving orders. The night came in 2547 BCE, when Mennefi was thirty-four and home on leave. The household heard the donkeys go quiet first. A woman had come to the door asking for water, a handsome woman with a singer's voice, and three of the family had already stepped back to let her in when Mennefi, who had no reason to do it except the old rule, kicked over the nearest sack of rock salt and ripped it open across the threshold. The visitor stopped with one foot lifted. Behind her the dark pooled strangely and deepened. For the length of a long breath nothing happened, and then she smiled and began to talk. Mennefi still had the shield from the levy, and they used the time she took to drag the table, the grain bins and two doors into a line behind the salt. Anyone who has stood in a shield wall knows the feeling of a line that is badly made but holding. It held until others came in by the roof. Ten of the eleven were dead by dawn. Mennefi did not stand alone because no one was left to stand beside, and that was the part they never explained. The Vigil of Nile Valley, which wanted a vampire slayer and had lost its last one in the spring, found Mennefi Senankhet three days later, sitting in the ruin with the cord in their hands, and called them to the mantle. There was no teacher to be had. The vampire hunters of that stretch of river had been few and mostly dead, and the Vigil's old stewards could offer only a bronze sickle-sword, which they had been saving for someone, and a ledger of what had worked before. Mennefi was human. They had no unusual hearing, no inhuman strength, no sense that went beyond what any soldier is given. They worked it out themselves, on a stack of sacks, with a borrowed rank of villagers, over the winter that followed. This they eventually called Shield-Wall Doctrine, though the name was the Vigil's and Mennefi disliked it. It came down to a few ideas. Fight in a rank and never in a circle. Lay salt before the feet of the line and not at the doorframe behind it. Carry ash-wood in the second rank where it can be passed forward. And let the creature come to you, because every creature that comes to a line has already decided to be careful. The woman at the door was Taseni Tahorra, of the Velvet Throne, and Mennefi found her through patient and rather dull arithmetic. Seven villages along the river had lost people in the previous decade in the same way, politely and at the door, and each had been visited by a gracious stranger who asked only for a drink. A dozen retired levy men agreed on the voice. Mennefi walked up and down the Nile Valley with a veil of dusty linen across their face against the sun and the flies, and the villagers who watched them pass began calling the figure the Veiled Flame, for the signal fires that Mennefi had lit on the roofs to warn the next village. There was no flame in it other than the fires. It was a convenient legend, and Mennefi never corrected it. They met a second time in 2546 BCE, at Tarenu, a river granary and ferry landing a few days' march upstream, where the Velvet Throne's people had begun to feed on the grain-barge crews. By then Mennefi had a rank of thirty villagers, drilled to a sort of shabby competence, and a line of salt that ran from the water to the granary doors. The fight lasted from lamplighting to the middle of the night. The shadow came first, a cool dark that drained the light from the torches and took away the edges of everything, and the front rank lost three people to it before the order to keep the shoulder to the shield was heard. It was heard. The line closed, and when Taseni walked into the gap Mennefi stepped out of the rank for the first and last time in their life and drove an ash-wood spear shaft through her heart. They were back in position before she hit the ground. They lived two more years, tired and sunburnt, and trained wall after wall along the river without ever being asked to. In 2544 BCE a marsh fever came up from the delta, and Mennefi, who was thirty-seven, died of it at a village whose name the cord does not preserve. The cord itself was found tied round the handle of the sickle-sword. There were knots in it for everyone they had brought home, and a last one, not quite finished, for themself.