Yucu Tasara

Yucu Tasara, the Whispering Hunger, was a vampire and a patient scientist of the Velvet Line who spent 250 years in the Andes learning what a body will tolerate. She owned one green stone bowl, and it outlasted her by a very long time.

The bowl was green stone, wider than two hands, with a lip worn smooth on one side where a thumb had rested for longer than anyone could count. It had been Yucu Tasara's mother's, and her grandmother's before that, and it sat on a shelf in Yaqusana, a river village in the Andes of what is now Peru, wrapped in a wet cloth against the damp. Yucu was born there in 1112 BCE, in the age called The Bronze Vigil. She learned to grind in it before she learned to read a cord of knots, and she was an herbalist-physician by the time she was grown, the one the village sent for when a child had a fever or a man had been trampled by a llama. It was a plain, useful life. Everything she knew about plants she learned with that bowl in her lap, and she hummed the same grinding tune over it for most of three centuries. In 1081 BCE the village lost a season's harvest and two of her brothers to a band of raiders from the upper valleys, who took what they wanted and burned the drying sheds behind them. Yucu was thirty-one. She went looking for a way to make them pay, and a stranger found her first. There was a price, which she was told, and one she was not, and she accepted both. The stranger who made her was never named in anything she said afterward, and she did not like to be asked. Her maker is unknown, and so is whether she ever saw him again. What she woke into was a hunger no root in the world would dull, and a body that healed faster than her bowl could grind. She kept the bowl. She carried it through a dozen hiding places and two walled towns, and most nights she used it, because the long-lived are drawn to what they are good at. The Velvet Line took her in as a physician, and the Vampireverse, which was loose and local then, counted her among its quieter minds and kept her as a scientist, a word nobody at the time would have used. She tested everything. She wanted to know what a dose of bitter root did to the hunger, and whether a hunger could be postponed, and how much, and at what cost to the one who postponed it. She kept her results on tally cords, and she kept them better than most scholars kept clay. She also found, early on and without much fuss, that she could make a room forget itself. People called it the Velvet Veil: a warmth that came off her skin like heat off a stone, and that settled over everyone nearby until they lost the thread of what they had been looking at. It did not change what she was. It simply took attention away. The cost was a headache that lasted until dawn. Over the centuries she used the bowl for the thing it was best suited to. In the years she lived among the river towns she spread a bitter root through the wells of eleven of them, so that when her coven fed, the sickness and the deaths looked like the same ordinary flux. It was a clever method and an ugly one. She did not enjoy it, and she did not stop. In 962 BCE a trader from far to the north came south along the coast, a collector of seeds and feathers named Nan Siyen. She was a hundred and fifty years old then, and she had not had a visitor in some time who asked her how things worked. He stayed a season. He watched her grind, and asked her for a pinch of every powder in her store, and in the end she made him what she was, because it seemed to her an experiment worth running. He went north again with his seeds and a cutting from her garden, and he was destroyed there in 924 BCE, a long way from her bowl. She heard about it a year later and said nothing for three days. In 835 BCE she attached herself to the highland league that was laying siege to the city-state of Mamaqui, because armies need physicians and physicians are not questioned. It was an easy arrangement. She had a tent with a lamp that never went out, a flap guarded by men who looked straight through it, and a supply of wounded to practice on. On a dark night a girl came through the back of the tent with an olive-wood stake. Yucu felt her before she saw her, a place in the air where the warmth did not take hold. The stake went through her flank and missed her heart, and she broke the girl's wrist with one hand and, for reasons she could not account for, let her go. The girl was a vampire slayer called Ruinna Pachaqui, and the hill people soon called her the Bright Reaper. Yucu thought she looked about nineteen, and perhaps a little too stubborn to live. She was right about the second part. Yucu Tasara had expected to be hunted by the Vampireverse's enemies, not shadowed by one stubborn girl. For four years the girl stayed on her track, working out the well-root pattern with a cord and a llama, and the Whispering Hunger, as the river towns called her, had to admit, in her own head, to a growing respect. By 831 BCE the coven above Mataqui had dwindled, and the girl was climbing the terraces on frost and wool. Yucu was grinding when she came into the drying house, and she did not look up. She had been, for 250 years, a woman whose preference was to let people come to her. The Velvet Veil rolled down over the room, and the girl kept her eyes on the frozen potatoes and walked through it as if it were weather. Yucu took up the pestle and struck her in the head, once, and it was not enough. The girl got to her knees and put the heel of her marked hand against Yucu's throat, and the paste in it burned like a coal from a fire. The stake went in before Yucu could cross the floor. She was two hundred and eighty-one years old, and the last thing she saw was the bowl lying on its side beside the girl's knee, unbroken, with a crack of light across the lip. A boy found them the next morning and carried the bowl down to his grandmother, who had no use for the story and every use for a good stone. For six generations herders ground chili and salt in it on the high pastures. Somewhere along the way a hairline crack opened down one side, from the lip to the base, and the family kept using it anyway, and the thumb-worn place on the rim went on getting smoother.