Yahela Hakaai

Yahela Hakaai, called The Sunlit Wall, was a harbor soldier of Tirsida who survived a vampire's bite in 2819 BCE and spent fifteen years as a slayer on the Levant coast. He had no gifts and no teacher, only shields, a sling and a stubborn count of heartbeats.

On the night the late grain barges came in to Tirsida, Yahela Hakaai stood on the quay with eleven other watchmen and counted heartbeats out loud, which the others took for nerves. He was nervous, and he would have said so. The lamps burned fish oil and smelled of it. The reeve of the harbor, a stout man named Ushu who owed the wrong people a great deal of barley, had locked himself in the salt store behind them and was reported to be praying. The last barge to tie up carried one passenger with no baggage and no oarsman's calluses, and the passenger asked, quite politely, for the reeve. The year was 2819 BCE. Yahela was thirty-three, a soldier of the harbor levy with a bad left knee and no ambition beyond a pension of olive oil, and that night he became a vampire slayer, though it would be a week before anyone used the word to him. The passenger crossed the quay without appearing to cross it. One moment he stood at the barge rail; the next he stood behind the third man in the line, and the third man was on the ground. Yahela had put his watchmen in a ring around the storehouse door instead of a line across the quay, shield rim over shield rim, because a line has two ends and a ring has none. He had also been counting. The stranger moved in the gap between one pulse and the next, and Yahela, who had spent the evening learning the length of that gap on his own wrist, swung his stone at the place the man would arrive. It broke a cheekbone. The stranger's teeth went into his raised forearm in return and stayed there a moment longer than seemed necessary. Then the stranger let go and walked to the salt store, and stopped at the sill. Ushu had hammered four iron nails into that sill to hold a split lintel. Iron was a rarity on the coast, bought from a northern trader at roughly the price of a donkey, and Ushu had grumbled about the cost for a year. The stranger looked at them for some time with the expression of a man reading a bill he could not pay. Then he said, to the door, "Tomorrow, then," and went back to his barge. Nobody on the quay needed to be told that he was Baa Elashbaon, the Bloodless Judge of The Ashen Concord. They found out within the month, and Ushu paid his barley in full and sold every boat he owned. Yahela lay nine days in his sister's house with a fever that the old women of Tirsida had seen before, and they stood about the bed in a manner that suggested they were waiting to see what he would become. He became a man with a bad arm. The wound never entirely closed. It wept in cold weather and ached before storms, and for the rest of his life he could predict rain better than the fishermen could. The Vigil of Levant sent a woman up from Byblos to look at it, and she looked, and said little, and left a clay tablet of names that she thought he should know. Nobody ever taught him anything. What he learned he learned by asking the dead man's mistakes, which is to say his own, and by pestering every old woman on the coast who had watched a bitten neighbor turn or not turn. He had been born in Tirsida, on the coast of Lebanon, in 2852 BCE, the son of a net-mender, and had never wanted to go anywhere. He hated fish, a serious social handicap in a harbor settlement, and ate bread and raw onion on every watch. He hummed the net-menders' song, the one with the long verse about a husband's debts, whenever he was counting something, and he was nearly always counting something. His one large wish was a harbor wall of stone with a gate that actually shut, and he spent most of his adult life pointing out where it should go. The Levant, in the years of The First Night, was a country of cedar rafts and copper traders and small stubborn towns, and the covens of the Slayerverse's old enemy preyed on all of them in turn. He had no gift to set against them. He had the habit of standing where he was told and not moving. That habit became a method, and the Vigil came to call it Shield-Wall Doctrine, though Yahela never called it anything. The shields made a ring or a horseshoe, never a line, so that no gap could be reached between two men. The men counted their own pulses aloud and shifted together on the beat, so that a fast enemy found the wall moving into the space he meant to use. Everyone carried a few iron nails, thumbed into the sill of whatever house they sheltered in. Yahela's own weapon was the sling, loaded with clay pellets wrapped in beaten silver leaf, each one worth about a week of a soldier's pay. He never carried more than six. He recovered them from the mud on his hands and knees, swearing, after every fight. Humans have no gifts against the long-lived, he told the levy recruits, only habits, and his were all learned from watching his mistakes. In fifteen years he broke twelve covens along the coast and the hills behind it. The first was at the salt pans of Nahrabu in 2814 BCE, where a family of feeders had been living in the drying sheds and trading in drowned travelers. He lost five men there and kept their names on a knotted cord, which grew by the end to a length that made his sister look away. In 2811 BCE he cleared a dry cistern outside Sidon, going in on a rope with a torch and two shields, and came out blistered and furious and saved eleven captives. The third, in the wadi below the cedar road in 2807 BCE, was the hardest, because Baa Elashbaon was there, and the wall moved to the beat of Yahela's counting and the Judge simply stood outside the ring for most of an afternoon and watched it. Baa was the one enemy who interested him. By the account kept in the Vigil, the Judge held hearings, in empty storehouses and on moonlit docks, and gave debtors days to pay before he came for them; people said he had no blood in him, which was untrue, and said that his judgments left nothing behind, which was true. He and Yahela met four times in all. In 2819 BCE on the quay at Tirsida, in 2814 BCE at Nahrabu, where each carried off a wound, in 2807 BCE in the wadi, and in 2805 BCE on the quay again, in the evening, when Baa sat down on a bollard a spear's length from the harbor edge and for a long while neither of them did anything. The Judge offered him a place as the door of his house. Yahela said he already had a door, and showed him the nails in it. Baa agreed that they were good nails. Neither of them ever killed the other, and each regarded this as the other's fault. Yahela Hakaai, the Sunlit Wall as the Vigil's clerks later styled him, died in 2804 BCE, at forty-eight, of the old wounds, in the same bed in his sister's house where the fever had once found him. He had been a slayer for fifteen years. He drove four fresh iron nails into his own threshold the week before, with a hand that shook, and told his sister not to pull them out. Baa Elashbaon outlived him by a great many years and was destroyed in the Delta of Egypt in 2358 BCE, at a ferry landing, by a hunter whose name nobody kept. The sling hung from the doorframe of the house in Tirsida until the roof fell in. One silvered pellet was still in the pouch, and nobody in the harbor would spend it.