Ninun Bakudamir

Ninun Bakudamir, called The First Flame, was a temple builder from a Mesopotamian caravan stop who became a vampire slayer in 2974 BCE and lasted three years. He never destroyed his great enemy, but his traps unsettled the vampire Dama Zuishash, and an ordinary fever ended him.

The drivers who worked the donkey roads of Mesopotamia told it one way for a generation afterwards. The First Flame, they said, had been taken in his own trap: a vampire had stood across a courtyard, crooked a finger, and let the engineer's blood do the rest. It is a good story and it has the right villain. It is also wrong. Ninun Bakudamir died in 2971 BCE, at thirty-two, in a lean-to by a canal bank, of a marsh fever that took ferrymen and goat-herds that same season in the same plain way. No vampire was within a day's walk. The rumor lasted because the truth gave people nothing to be afraid of, and a story with nothing to be afraid of does not travel by caravan. Damninum, in the Iraq of today, was a caravan stop long before it was a town: a well, a salt store, and a ring of mud-brick sleeping sheds where drivers paid in barley to keep their donkeys out of the wind. Ninun was born there in 3003 BCE, the son of a well-keeper, and he learned the character of every wall in the place by tasting it. Ninun Bakudamir did this literally. A mason's boy was taught to put a pinch of new mud on his tongue, and Ninun never grew out of the habit, so that grown men with plumb-lines would wait while the best draftsman in the district spat on the ground and frowned. He wanted one thing and wanted it badly: a granary that would still be standing after the river had changed its mind twice. He worked for the temple at the larger town upstream, an engineer in everything but the title, and for a decade, in the years of The First Night when a builder's fame ended at the nearest river, he drained, braced and roofed other people's storehouses without once being thanked. The war found him in 2974 BCE, when he was twenty-nine. His younger sister, Enheda, was taken from the Damninum well one evening by men who did not argue about the price. Ninun knew where she had gone because he had drained the place himself: a salt warehouse on the caravan road, with a cellar beneath it whose runoff channel his own crew had cut. He went in through that channel alone, with a lamp, a coil of cord and an olive-wood stake he had bought from a western trader the year before for no reason he could have given. He came out by dawn with Enheda on his back and a cellar burning behind him. Nobody had taught him what he walked into, and there was nobody to ask. The Vigil of Mesopotamia, then a loose watch of drivers, well-keepers and masons, did not invite him in until the smoke had cleared. They simply began leaving food at the well. That was how the calling of a vampire slayer reached him: not as a gift, since Ninun had none, but as a job that no one else in the district knew how to do. What he had met in that cellar was Dama Zuishash, later named The First Hunger, who ran the warehouse as a counting house for the Velvet Circle. Ninun's own account, kept as knotted cord and recited at the well for years, was unflattering to both parties. He found Enheda first, in a side room with her wrists tied to a bench, and had barely cut her loose when the man at the table spoke. Dama had been sorting clay pellets by weight and had not looked up until the lamp reached the stairs. Then he lifted one hand, and Ninun's left forearm began to rise as if a string had been tied to the vein. It was a physical thing, a pull from inside, like a cramp that took orders. Ninun dragged a finger through the bitumen on his lamp and smeared the drivers' old doorpost sign across the vampire's wrist, a mark he had always taken for habit rather than craft. The pull slackened. Dama remarked, in a pleasant voice, that this was interesting. Ninun took his sister up the drain and set the reed matting alight behind him with the same lamp. After that he built. Trap Architecture, as the cords call it, was nothing more than a mason's habit of asking what a place wanted to do and then helping it do so faster. A plank floor over a pit braced to carry one man and not two. A passage a handspan too narrow for a spear held crosswise. A drop-gate of baked brick hung on a counterweight of river stones and released by a reed cord no thicker than a finger. He used bitumen because it was cheap, sticky and burned, and he distrusted anything he could not mend with mud. He had no gifts. He was strong for his size and quick on his feet, and he could sit in a doorway all night without shifting, and that was the whole armory, with the olive-wood stake for the lesser houses that came sniffing. He hummed while he worked, always the same canal-diggers' tune, and always flat. In the spring of 2973 BCE he spent six weeks building a killing yard at the ford of Kesh-Adar, where Dama's grain barges had to be hauled through a shallow in single file. When the day came, Dama did not. A flock of nineteen goats crossed first, driven by a boy who was paid to ask no questions, and the pits and gates went off one after another on animals that had no idea what had been done for them. Ninun watched from a reed bank and understood he was being measured. The following year the vampire came himself. At dusk in 2972 BCE, Dama Zuishash walked up to the Damninum well alone and unarmed and said that the Velvet Circle would pay an engineer who could do that with a pit and a rope more than the temple had ever paid him for a granary. Ninun's answer was to drop a counterweight. Dama stepped out of its arc with the courtesy of a man avoiding a puddle, and left. Ninun looked at the creature as a puzzle first and a menace second, which his sister thought a flaw. It did not sleep when it was supposed to, it counted everything, and it had asked for him by trade. He drew its habits on a damp tablet and then rubbed them out for fear of being found with the sketch. He never solved it. The fever came in the late summer of 2971 BCE, when the canals were low and the reed beds hummed with flies, and it took him while he was setting a sluice gate for the ferrymen, his hands shaking too badly to hold the level. He lay nine days in the lean-to while Enheda sponged him with water boiled in a copper pot. In his clear hours he dictated the last of the cords: where the pits were, which gates were still live, which to pull down before children found them. He was three years into the work. He had no pupils and no successor. The Vigil dismantled most of the yards that autumn, and the ford of Kesh-Adar silted over within a decade. In the reckoning of the Slayerverse he is a short entry, a builder who stayed alive for three years against a thing that had been counting nights since before his grandfather. Enheda buried the olive-wood stake with him under a floor of baked brick he would have found acceptable. She hung his plumb-line on a nail beside the Damninum well, where the drivers took to hanging their water skins from it, and nobody ever told them it had been his.