Raet Tasetu

Raet Tasetu, the Ninth Spear, was a hill-fort soldier of the Nile Valley who became a vampire slayer in 2754 BCE and held a string of besieged towns until sunrise. She had no gifts but a voice, a shield and a stake, and one very patient enemy.

The widow Imenet watched it from the wall of Khenut, with a bucket of sand in each hand, and for the rest of her life she said the same thing about it. The tall creature standing in the ditch below the river gate had not looked at Raet Tasetu the way a hunter looks at prey. It had looked at her the way a mason looks at a wall someone else has built better than he would have. That was the night in 2739 BCE when the Crimson Throne came to Khenut for the first time. Imenet, who was not sentimental, could not decide whether she was more afraid of the creature or of the soldier it was looking at, who was standing on the parapet in the dark with her oxhide shield on her arm, humming. Raet Tasetu had been born in 2785 BCE at Meshorsetu, a hill fort on the western edge of the Nile Valley in Egypt, in the years the records call The First Night. The fort kept ten spears on its roll and she was the ninth, the Ninth Spear, because she had arrived ninth and nobody ever corrected the list. She liked the arithmetic of it. A woman who is the ninth of ten can count the people ahead of her, and the person behind, and knows exactly where she stands. Her father repaired the fort's well. Her mother made bread for the garrison and talked incessantly, a habit Raet inherited in a quieter key. She enlisted at the age most girls were married and became a sergeant of a file of ten, in a country where a hill fort mostly meant guarding a well and arguing with the neighbors about it. In 2754 BCE, at thirty-one, she was holding the fort's gate when something came up the hill in the dark that was not the neighbors. It killed three of the garrison before dawn. She held the gate with the shield and a sharpened post, and it did not get past her. At sunrise it was gone, and a messenger of the Vigil of Nile Valley walked up the hill an hour afterward and told her, with a certain embarrassment, that she had been called to be a vampire slayer. Nobody trained her. The nearest slayer was a month away by river, and the Vigil's whole instruction was a list of three things that had been known to hurt vampires: silver, iron and the sun. She had no gifts, not even the fortunate kind. She had a loud voice and a wooden stake, which she capped with a point of silver beaten out of her mother's wedding bracelet. The loud voice turned out to be the weapon. They called it the Rally Cry, and it was not what the words sound like. It was a low, rising bellow with a rhythm underneath it, three beats and a fourth held, that a line of tired men could breathe to. A garrison that has been up all night will fall asleep on its feet by the third hour, and a vampire waits for that. Raet shouted them awake and kept shouting, in the same pattern, until the night ended. Men who had never fought together found themselves moving in step without knowing why. It is hard to say what it costs a voice to do that for thirty nights running, and she lost most of hers in her fifties. She tapped the stake three times on the rim of the shield before every vigil. She never explained it. In thirty-nine years she held seven towns through sunrise. The first was Khenut, a walled town on the west bank at a bend in the river, in 2739 BCE, against the host of hired men that Rakheep Mesmentai, the Crowned Tyrant, had been given by the Crimson Throne. The creature in the ditch was Rakheep. On the first night Rakheep spilled the slaughtered goats' blood from the gate-ditch into a sheet and lifted it, that is what Imenet saw, a red tide the height of a man, and broke it over the parapet. Raet's shield took most of it. She lost two ribs and a good deal of her temper, then drove the silver-capped stake into the thigh of the person behind the wave, and held the wall with a single shout until the sun came up and Rakheep had to go. She did not kill them. She had not expected to. She had expected, she wrote later in the only letter of hers that survives, to be dead. They fought for twenty-four years. In 2733 BCE she went down the river with a levy of the western towns and burned the barge-yards at Setem Landing, where the Crimson Throne kept its night traders; Rakheep took a knife to her shoulder in the smoke. In 2720 BCE they faced each other across the ditch at Khenut again, at dawn, for the first time in thirteen years, she at sixty-five with a grey head, and Rakheep stood for a long minute without moving, and then stepped back into the tent. It was the nearest thing to courtesy either of them offered. By the account of the Slayerverse, they never killed one another. She regarded Rakheep as a menace and a puzzle an enemy of such regular habits that she could have set her own watches by them. She taught only one person. In 2735 BCE a young slayer named Baraim Sidyahath came down from the Levant, by reed boat from Byblos to the Delta and then up the river on foot, with a letter and a bad stomach, and stayed two years at Meshorsetu. Raet taught him to count the watch, to shout in rhythm and to keep silver where he could reach it. He went home in 2733 BCE and died in 2727 BCE, twelve years before she did, and she did not hear for a season. She said little about it. She tapped the stake on the shield rim an extra time. Raet died in 2715 BCE, at seventy, of a river fever that had nothing to do with the war. She had been a slayer for thirty-nine years. She asked to be moved to the east wall of the fort so that she could watch the light come up, and the sentry who sat with her, a boy named Hori, recorded that she corrected his counting of the watch twice on the last night. Rakheep Mesmentai outlived her by two and a half centuries and was destroyed in 2449 BCE, in a purge among their own coven, a long way upriver.