Psalm of Vampires: Chapter Twelve

Singapore Sling

Malay tradition holds that the city of Singapore was founded by a fellow named Sang Nila Utama when he climbed a great hill while hunting on Bintan island, across from what is today Singapore’s main island of Pulau Ujong, which to most English speakers is known as Singapore Island. Sang Nila, the legend says, looked across the sea and noticed a beautiful island with a beach of what he thought was shimmering white fleece.

According to that same legend, Sang Nila was the son of a divine, god-like man named Sri Maharaja Sang Sapurba Paduka Sri Trimurti Tri Buana. Let’s call him Sang Sapurba for short. Sang Sapurba was the dynastic leader of the Malay world’s great ancient Pagaruyung kingdom.

In other words, both Sangs were gods, similar to the gods of Greece. You may be seeing the connection here, but if not, you will soon enough.

After being blown away by the beauty of the island he saw from the hilltop, Sang Nila jumped into his boat and tried to sail there, but his ship got tossed around by a wild storm. Being a superstitious god-like dude, he tossed his crown into the sea to pay homage to whatever forces were knocking his ship around, and sure enough, the seas calmed, enabling him to make harbor along the shores of the island’s waters.

When he did, human legend says that he saw a great lion with a red body, a white chest, and a black head disappear into the jungle. Vampire legend is a bit different. Vampire legend has it that Sang Nila was attacked by a red and black Wurdulac and killed it with a sword longer than his own body.

Both stories have strong mythological influences. We didn’t have smartphones in those days, so history didn’t record events as accurately as it does today. But one thing is certain. Both Sang Nila and his dad, Sang Sapurba, were vampires.

It’s fair to make a more general statement that when you read about immortal figures in ancient cultures, in other words, when you read about gods, you’re reading about vampires. Vampires were kind of a big deal before infertility, internecine warfare, the blood plague, and human fear took us down.

In the years just prior to Europe’s bubonic plague, the decade before Sang Nila landed on Singapore Island, I was lodging in a palatial home in Quanzhou. Europe had degenerated into a medieval warzone. I had been lured to the more civilized Yuan dynasty of Kublai Khan’s China. Kublai Khan was no friend to vampires, so I had to lay low, but I still managed to acquire significant wealth.

When Kublai Khan gave Marco Polo his final mission, which was essentially the most expensive ferry ride in the history of mankind, I went along for the ride, just to taste some adventure on the high seas. Marco Polo was assigned the task of transporting Kublai Khan’s niece, a beautiful seventeen-year-old princess named Kököchin, to marry Khan’s nephew, a fellow named Arghun Khan, who governed Persia for the Mongols. The Mongol empire in those days extended from Beijing, then known as Khanbaliq, all the way to modern day Iraq. Arghun lived in Tabriz, which today is an Iraqi city on the Iranian border.

Kököchin’s ferry ride consisted of fourteen large ocean-worthy ships, each carrying four masts and twelve sails. Owens would be glad to know that I can’t say I ever met Marco Polo. I just sort of tagged along for the ride on one of his ships. That claim would probably piss him off, too.

Unfortunately, in those days, ocean trips weren’t Princess cruises. Our fleet got hammered by a storm and we got stuck in Sumatra for five months. I stayed there, and Polo’s fleet moved on. Fun fact: By the time the princess Kököchin reached Tabriz, where Arghun had waited patiently for his young new bride, Arghun was dead. So, she did what any normal young girl who was assigned to marry an old guy would do and married his son instead. Don’t you love history?

Meanwhile, I was shipwrecked on Sumatra, which in those days was a wild place filled with small, four-foot vampires carrying rapacious appetites, and other assorted beings that history books will never describe. It was jungle mania, right out of a fantasy cartoon. Someday I’ll tell you more about it.

But for now, I’ll report that I made my way from Sumatra to the island that Sang Nila had found so beautiful. There, I spent nearly twenty years battling the Wurdulac, who lived in jungle caves scattered throughout the small island.

I killed many of them with a slingshot armed with a stone consisting of silver and arsenic. If you had really good aim with a slingshot, you might be able to strike a Wurdulac’s eye with it, thus ending the Wurdulac’s time on earth in a very satisfying way. A well-formed silver and arsenic stone in the eye was one of the only ways to kill a Wurdulac in those days.

You may have heard of a guy named David, who killed a Nephilim for the Israelites with a slingshot. Biblical history doesn’t mention the silver and arsenic stone David used. The Nephilim weren’t Wurdulacs, but they were wicked enough for civilizations to band together to get rid of them. Bringing just one down was hard.

Little did tour bus driver Alfredo know, when he pointed to the slingshot on the bus, which was there by nothing more than happenstance, the importance of its symbolism. The idea of using a slingshot to kill a Wurdulac was a joke to him. To me, it was serious business.

If I really wanted to annoy Owens, I could tell him that I pacified the islands of Singapore by ridding them of their Wurdulac scourge, which ultimately made it a lot easier to build a civilized town. If I wanted to do more than annoy him, I’d tell him that the seeds of Singapore’s modern glass towers were sprouted from my silver and arsenic stones.

Another fun fact: The Singapore Sling, a popular bar drink, is named after the slingshot I carried around with me to pick off Wurdulac scum. The lore of the slingshot was buried beneath the feet of history’s gatekeepers, as was that of the Wurdulac. But its name lives on.

Sang Nila built his city while I lingered in the island’s jungle. Sang Nila begat a daughter, a beautiful vamp named Resila, who began to frequent the jungle with small bands of royal hunters.

She must have seen me battling the last Wurdulac left on the island, a hybrid that I named Ging Ma, which meant “strange one” in one of the local dialects. It had bright red plumage like a bird, something I had never seen on a Wurdulac. The claws on its giant talons were the size of my feet. Its face was covered by black fur, and it had a white chest full of tiny feathers. The rest of its body was covered in red fur like the one in the story of Sang Nila. The red plumage followed its spine with feathers that grew in length as they progressed from its ass to the top of its head, which looked like it was covered with a mohawk of long, flowing red pinions.

My slingshot had been torn away during the beast’s initial attack. I slashed haphazardly at the creature with my long sword, but on every strike, its wound regenerated almost instantly as if its skin was gratified for the excuse to grow new cells. I cleaved a long ribbon along its abdomen. The beast staggered, but then the wound healed immediately. I slashed its back. The wound healed. I struck its shoulder, opening a gash into which you could fit a football. Healed. Then, I swung with every ounce of energy I had, hacking at its wrist. The stricken hand bounced into a nearby elephant ear plant.

Then, impossibly, the hand escaped the plant’s embrace and attached itself to the Wurdulac’s wrist like it had been lured by a powerful magnet, and the demon was as good as new. While I was hacking away, the Wurdulac swung at me with its long arms and claw-tipped hands. I was too agile even for the whips of its coiling, undulating arms. But Wurdulacs always have the advantage because they don’t tire. They’ll chase relentlessly until you eventually wither from exhaustion.

A loud female voice issued an unmistakable warrior call that bounced across the trees of the forest. At least a dozen armored men charged the Wurdulac with bows and sharp-edged weapons. The Wurdulac staggered around with dozens of arrows stuck into its body while frustrated warriors experienced its healing powers when they drew blood with their swords. “You must chop off its head!” I yelled into the darkening jungle as the fight pushed its way deeper into the tangle of tall plants layered with thick, massive leaves. I didn’t know if they understood me, so I made a slashing motion across my neck.

One of the warriors bellowed a blood-curdling cry as he hacked at the beast’s neck with a large battleax. When the Wurdulac fell to the ground, I ran over and crashed my blade into its neck before it could heal. The neck is, by far, the slowest part of the Wurdulac to regenerate. When you can do some damage there, it’s critical to finish the job quickly. The warrior, his face splattered with Wurdulac blood, grinned at me like I had offered him a harem. I nodded, then hacked once more. Then, with a wave of my hand downward, I offered the final strand of neck to the warrior, who gladly lopped off the vile monster’s head with his battle axe. The happy warrior raised the Wurdulac’s feathered skull into the air like the trophy it was.

I didn’t know their language, but we spoke the common tongue of victory, and the warriors and their princess invited me to join them to celebrate the spoils of their tiny war.

Months passed. I quickly learned Resila’s language in her bed, the world’s most efficient language classroom.

At first, Sang Nila was resistant to the idea of his daughter bedding a stranger from the west. There were more important considerations in those days for decisions regarding alliance and enmity than the distinctions between vampires and humans. Wars between vampire houses still raged. But I sensed that the king was simply playing hard to get. I knew that he was impressed with the Wurdulac slaying and my immediate bond with his most elite warriors. He finally declared us betrothed.

Already, there were rumblings in the vampire world that vampire women were struggling with fertility. Miscarriages were becoming the norm. Still births or deaths shortly after birth were becoming more frequent. Heirs did not emerge from prestigious vampire houses after the occasional death.

I think Sang Nila was aware of this. He considered me good stock. At his enthusiastic prompting, Resila and I were married with the kind of pomp and circumstance that would make an English queen sit up and take notice, even if she were dead. Before long, Resila was pregnant. She gave birth. Another big party.

Then, Moreland came to town.

In the early 1300s, this was not a bad thing. I loved Moreland. She was my best friend. She was my occasional lover. We were a team. We had fought in wars together and battled against some of the more ruthless vampire houses. We had teamed up a few times to battle Wurdulacs. One time, she stopped a Wurdulac from crunching my neck in its jaws by appearing in front of it out of nowhere. It was the first time I had seen her little light show, which she only performed on Wurdulacs. If I had known she had arrived in Singapore, for whatever reason, I would have embraced her with open arms.

But I was in Khanbaliq on a trading mission for the king, hoping that Khan didn’t discover that I was a vampire and respond by lopping off my head. I arrived home aboard one of three masted ships to a burning city. Moreland’s clan, the Asanbosam of the Obayifo, had been in a war of rage with the House of Sang.

And that’s what it was, a war of rage. That’s the only thing to call it. They were at war simply because they wanted to be. Mostly because the Asanbosam wanted to be. In truth, Sang just wanted to be left alone. It’s why he started a city in a remote corner of the world where he thought he’d find some solace. It wasn’t so much that he was looking to found a city. Like I said, he was on a hunt, saw a cool island, and said, “That’s home.” But still. He just wanted to settle somewhere in peace.

But Moreland and her clan said, “No.” No peace. So, they burned the city nearly to the ground, then were driven out before my return home. When I was told the description of the vampires behind the destruction, there was no doubt who it was. Nobody ever found my wife and child. To this day, I have no closure.

That is why I hate Moreland.

“Wow,” said Daphne after hearing the story. “That is some big-time grudge mod.” This was no game, but I didn’t say anything to her. She put her hand on my shoulder. “I mean, that’s really heavy shit, Jade. It must be torture for you not knowing if your wife and son died for sure or not. Cuz, you can’t know, right? And Moreland didn’t know you were there, right? She literally didn’t know what she was doing. Why would she think you’d be off on some tiny island somewhere?”

For the first time, I was a little mad at Daphne. She wasn’t getting it. Moreland’s crime wasn’t the death of my wife and child. It was her commitment to wanton violence that led to their death.

Moreland shook her head as she looked toward the ground.

I got a little madder when Daphne asked, “Do all vampires hold thousand-year grudges?”

“Well, it’s not just Singapore,” I clarified. “But yeah, pretty much.”

“I’ve offered to help find the kid a hundred times,” said Moreland.

“Fuck,” I said. This stuff hurt. I hated talking about it, and I hated Moreland for making me talk about it, and I was starting to hate Daphne for not understanding my agony. It didn’t seem like her. It was almost like she was on Moreland’s side. “Stop calling him that. His name was Sang At. Not the kid. Fuck!”

“What do you mean not just Singapore?” asked Daphne.

“Well, she did once say she had my baby. Which I have never seen.”

“Morelaaaaand!” said Daphne.

Moreland got up from her chair and approached me. “He died an hour after I gave birth, Jade,” she said, kneeling next to me on one knee. “I’m sorry I can’t prove it to you. I was ashamed.”

I didn’t know if I believed her, but I moved on as if. “Good God, Moreland, you have, and I don’t mean this figuratively, a million and a half things to be ashamed of, but that sure as shit isn’t one of them,” I said. Her glow turned a weird color, sort of a yellowish purple. Or something else. I can’t quite describe it. It looked like pain. “Moreland, I’m sorry,” I said. Her glow often said more to me than her words.

I took her hand, fully aware that Daphne was now leaning against me. “I wish you had told me earlier. I’d never have said… so many things I’ve said to you.” God, this was weird. Love. Hate. Love and hate. The thin line of The Pretenders. “Oh, shit. Maybe I would have.” I was a mess.

“Holy shit, I’m sort of the third point in a vampire love triangle,” said Daphne.

“He’ll never love me the way he loves you, Daphne,” said Moreland blisteringly. “I’ve never seen him like this. The way he is with you. And I’ll never love him that way, either. It’s not just that he can’t forgive me. It’s that we are just so very different.”

“Oh, that’s just silly,” said Daphne. “You two go back such a long way. I don’t want to be in the middle of this. And, God, I’m so sorry you lost your baby.”

“You’re not in the middle of anything, Daph,” I said. “Moreland and I are barely friends even when we aren’t at each other’s throats. Which, by the way, is an ancient vampire metaphor, as you can probably imagine.”

“You’re way more than friends,” said Daphne.

“We are,” said Moreland. “But not in the way you think.”

“In what way, then?” asked Daphne.

“More like a brother and a sister, I’d say,” I said.

“Eww,” said Daphne.

“More like,” said Moreland. “But different. I don’t think there’s a human comparison because humans don’t live long enough to develop relationships like this. But Jade said something to me not long ago. Vampires live too long. We can’t co-exist without driving each other crazy.”

“That’s so sad,” said Daphne. “But you can try, right? You make a good team. I mean…” She looked down. “I want you guys to get along, you know? I don’t know. It just feels… important.”

“You’re about the only human I’ve ever liked,” said Moreland. “I think we can try harder for you, at least while you’re still around. Right, Atticus?” And there, right there, was the difference between Moreland and Daphne. Moreland complimented Daphne in a way that I had no doubt was genuine. Daphne probably was the only human Moreland had ever liked. But then, Moreland had to remind Daphne of her extreme mortality, almost saying, in effect, “However, you’re so small in the grand scheme of things. Your life is a tiny flicker of time to me.” Then, driving it home by calling me, “Atticus” in front of her. Daphne would never do something like that if their roles were switched.

Yet with all that said about Moreland, she was a soulmate of sorts. “I’d do anything for either one of you, to be honest. Even you, Moreland.” Love. Hate.

Daphne smiled. “See? You do forgive her. You just don’t know it.”

I shook my head. “I don’t. I can’t.”

“You can,” said Daphne, “Because when this is all over, we’re going to find your son, maybe even your wife. And if we find your wife, I won’t lie. I’ll be sad. But it’s the right thing to do and we’re going to do it. If you want to still be my friend, with an occasional benefit, you will say yes to that.”

“They’re gone,” I said.

“You don’t know this,” insisted Daphne.

“Vampires are good at hiding, but not from each other,” said Moreland.

“And when Moreland has offered to help find them, have you ever said yes?” asked Daphne.

“Of course not,” I said. Having Moreland help me find the son she murdered seemed incomprehensible to me.

“Well, then, there you go. You make a great team. Everything you do together turns into gold, but you don’t look for your wife and son together?”

I shook my head. I was reaching the point where I couldn’t speak.

“Jade,” she whispered loudly into my ear as she grasped my face. “They’re alive. I know it.”

“That’s the reason I stream, Daph. Hoping they’ll see me. I’ve been livestreaming for three years. It was sort of one final, last-ditch effort to try to find them after all these centuries. Technology finally made this possible. But. They’re not alive.”

“Shit, why didn’t you just say so when I bugged you about it the other night?” asked Moreland.

“Why do you think?” I snapped.

“Maybe they’re Luddites?” said Daphne.

“Lu-what?” I asked.

“People who hate technology?” responded Daphne. “Look. Vampires are really hard to kill, right? Did you kill them, Moreland?”

“I most certainly did not. I’d never kill a child, and I didn’t kill any women there. Only some of her guards.”

“And fire, does that kill a vampire?” asked Daphne.

“No,” I said.

“Okay, good, that’s good. But how can it not? That’s crazy.”

“Have you ever seen Star Trek?” I responded.

Daphne nodded. “Sure, a couple times.”

“It’s kind of like that. Our molecules get reconstituted when our body is touched by flame until the flame is gone, then we kind of just come back. Hard to explain.”

“So, if someone lights you on fire you could travel to a different place? Like, Singapore?” asked Daphne.

“No, it’s not like that,” I said. “We come back to the same place. Our molecules stay there but in a different form. I don’t know how it works. It’s not like science has explored it.” I didn’t go into Moreland’s ability to appear wherever she wanted. Daphne had seen her in action but was maybe too focused to bring it up.

“Well, then, it’s decided,” said Daphne. “They couldn’t have died because nothing was there that could have killed them. We’ll find them, Jade. And you can stop your ten century or whatever it is brood fest.”

“It’s just not possible, Daph,” I said. I had tried searching. For so long. Yet, I had given up the search so long ago, too. The idea of rekindling these feelings was almost too much to bear.

“I’m kind of thinking that you need to stop feeling sorry for yourself,” said Daphne, who could read my feelings as if I had known her much longer than I had. “When friends offer help with something, you can’t say no and expect sympathy for the problem you won’t let them help you solve.”

I wanted to say that I never asked anybody for sympathy. I so wanted to scream at her and ask her what gave her the right to tell me I hadn’t tried. She had lived a puny thirty years or so. That was Moreland’s flickering moment compared to the centuries I had spent searching for my wife and child, who were gone forever. But I didn’t want to hurt her, so I said, “Fine. After I help Owens with his shit and after we kill these fuckers.”

She gave me a big hug and kissed my cheek. Moreland smiled a little. “Will you please let me help, Jade?” Moreland asked.

The answer was still no, but I said, “Sure,” anyway.

At that, Charly woke up. He sat up, looking alert, wiped some sweat off his forehead, and asked, “Did I miss anything?”

Notes

You can find the previous chapters here:

Psalm of Vampires

Cover image: bloodlike background licensed from Adobe Stock; image of Sang Nila Utama by Altopian1, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; cover design by author