The Devourers

by Indra Das

  I pushed my thumb against the warm crevice of your mouth, as if to free the words from your coiled form. You uttered a guttural, animal sound as your entire body hardened. “Please don’t be afraid,” I told you. “I think our time is waning. I only want to create.” I could feel the tears streaking your face, salt lines crawling under my fingertips. The slick stones of your teeth. Behind them, your tongue moved, and you said, the words humming against my thumb, “Allah curse you, bastard.” You turned your face away, grimacing, each movement cutting me as sure as your blade did. No, you were not entranced, and spat my thumb from your mouth.

  “Cyrah, I will kill you if you try and fight,” I said again, though it pained me.

  “You really mean that, don’t you,” you said.

  “This is important to me. I will slaughter everyone in this caravanserai if they get in my way.”

  Your eyes glistened with rage, or fear, or both. “The world is yours to take, you loathsome child, you white boy,” you whispered.

  I was shocked to find myself shaking, like you. I didn’t want to kill you, but it seemed like you were testing me, like you were pushing me to that. But you said instead,

  “Fine. Let me go. I’m no fool, I won’t try and fight. I’ve no dying wish.” No words could give me sweeter relief. I let go of your wrists. Slowly you put down the knife and took two steps back, your eyes always on me. “Listen to me, white man. You’ve no right to buy your way into a woman’s bed with nothing to barter with but fear. If you will not stay your hand, I want my fucking payment.”

  “I gave you coins.”

  “For my hair. Not this. Not this,” you said through closed teeth.

  “I will pay you, then.”

  You wiped your eyes and nodded. I saw the muscles tie their graceful knots under the skin that covers your jaw. “Do not think that this will in any way repay the debt you’ve incurred tonight. For that you must barter with your own god or devil in whatever hell they send you to,” you added.

  “If I have any god or devil it is myself, unfortunately.”

  “The blade stays by my side,” you told me, pointing to your blade with one shaking hand. I nodded.

  “Do what you will, you mad fucking son of a bitch, and stop telling me your stupid stories.”

  She-wolf you, Cyrah, moon-shone maiden, I kissed you on your lips, licking the aphrodisiac of your burning anger. My second self struggled to emerge like the latent orgasm but I held it back, you in my arms. As if human-to-human, I came into you. Silent my child came to be, in you, unformed, a seed in the soil, a thousand tales untold.

  Gévaudan’s pelts are stained from the kill:

  Hands and dagger as one with red. A devil’s hands. I can taste Makedon’s blood on my lips. His headless body lies stretched out on the ground, neck stump spewing steam like a doused torch, limbs bound in the banded coils of Gévaudan’s serpent. From across the trees near the bank, and across the river, jackals cry out in the dawn stillness.

  We sit in silence until Gévaudan picks up our companion’s severed head by a tuft of curls. He places it next to Makedon’s final prey. The two heads sit side by side, brothers in death. Like two humans. Gévaudan sheathes his knife, after wiping it on his already stained clothes. With sticky fingers he uncoils his serpent from the corpse and throws it on the ground. Then he sits by me.

  “You’ve made a coward of me,” he tells me, and waits for a response. I give him none.

  “Makedon’s second self could have easily defeated mine in combat. I attacked him unchallenged, unheralded, without warning. I killed him in his weaker self, and I used my weaker self to do it. Like a soft khrissal assassin,” he tells me, crouching next to me but avoiding looking at me.

  “You saved my life,” I say.

  “A traitor’s life.”

  “You didn’t have to,” I say.

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve broken the tenets, the same as you,” he tells me.

  Gévaudan wipes his damp face, leaving a swath of crimson across it like war paint. There is a half-moon of torn flesh on his hand where Makedon bit him. Because of our years of travel and companionship, I feel an instinctual urge to take the hand and lick it, suck the wound and aid its healing. I stop myself. The howling of the jackals in the trees turns to sharp barking. Gévaudan picks up the head of Makedon’s final prey. With a snarl, he hurls it into the air, sending it far into the trees. We hear it crash into the distant undergrowth, and the cries of the restless animals are stilled for a moment. He turns back to me grimacing.

  “In France I would see young human lovers frolicking in the woods during summer and spring, and my hackles would rise with envy. I would shed their blood, eat their bodies, so perfumed with the stink of their love. But it is you who’ve finally turned me into one of them,” he says. It disgusts me how much his words sound like mine, like the words I’ve written on this very scroll.

  I shake my head, utterly exhausted. “What reason have I ever given you to. To love me.”

  Several yards away, the sound of snapping and growling as the jackals find the head.

  Gévaudan laughs. “What reason is there for love? The curse of the Apollonian soul. Makedon’s words, not mine. There was reason for our tribes to slice it from our existence. Still, yours is another aberration entirely. I thought Makedon was the one you wanted, when all the while your eyes were straying to khrissals.”

  He still does not look at me, turning his head to the mausoleum. To the east, the horizon warms. “If this misery is love, it’s no wonder humans have their poets to pine about its mysteries, and palaces to tell the stories of their dead mates,” he says.

  “I’m sorry, Gévaudan. I can’t help you.”

  “Nor I you,” he says. He finally looks at me with a resentful longing that transcends carnal desire. I want to recoil from this. I wonder if you felt the same way as I held you. No, that is a lie. I know you did.

  “I can seek solace in the fact that your khrissal bitch doesn’t want you. Nor will she ever. I’m right about that. Aren’t I,” he sneers, wrinkling his nose to make a feral echo of his second self.

  “You are.”

  Gévaudan claps his sticky hands together, rubbing them as if to rid them of the drying blood. The bite wound, though deep, doesn’t seem to bother him. “Then we’ll be united in our sorrows, at the very least. We’ll be human together, and atone for our sins like their goddamn papists.”

  “Where will you go?” I ask him.

  “Perhaps one day I’ll return to France, to the province where I took my name. To hunt the lovely lads and lasses of Langogne and Les Hubacs again, as they sing on heath and hill in their bliss of spring copulation. Who needs a pack? I will go alone. But for now, a whole empire awaits.” He stops, laughter dissolving as he draws a deep breath. “And you? You’ll go begging at the feet of your forced khrissal mate, like a pet dog?”

  “She said something to me, afterward.”

  “What did she say?” he asks me. I see his bitter amusement, that I should be so shaken by a khrissal female. But he is also curious.

  “She said planting my seed and trying to create new young doesn’t make me any more human than a mangy dog fucking an unhappy bitch amid the feet of the bazaar-goers.”

  Gévaudan throws his head back and laughs loud and cruel, echoes barking across the lapping river water.

  “I could have torn her apart then, Gévaudan.” I look down at my hands. They are trembling in my lap.

  “But you didn’t,” he says, and spits snot.

  I shake my head.

  “Because no matter what your khrissal whore says, you’re more like her than you are your own kind.”

  “I have lived a long time. I have known love, Gévaudan. I have kept it locked away, but I have felt it. I believe others of our kind feel it, have felt it, but hide it as well. You. You know this. There is more than anima* and lust in me, in all of us. But that is all she saw in me. A crea
ture less than both animal and human.”

  “An honest creature. You stupid old fool. You’ve never let humanity go, like your kin. Like Makedon. Like me.”

  “I fear that in trying to become more like them, I have become less so in her eyes.”

  “What does it matter what she sees?” Gévaudan asks. I can hear his teeth creak as he grits them. “I see your humanity with my eyes, be they a devil’s.”

  “Yes, you do.” I laugh. “And you despise humanity. I can see nothing in me for you to love.”

  His cheek twitches. “And you can see something in a khrissal you met once and decided to rape instead of eat? You’re a funny one. When it comes to love, we’re both blind maggots squirming in the mud. Maybe that’s why. Maybe that’s why.”

  I remain silent.

  “Then go, run away somewhere,” Gévaudan snaps.

  “I can’t come with you, Gévaudan. Our pack is broken. We should respect that.”

  His one eye burns against the blood smear on his face. I wait for him to attack, bringing my thumb to the metal wolf head of my Pesh-kabz handle. But Gévaudan gets up, his bone trinkets chiming. He bends down over me. I flinch. But all he does is press his mouth to my forehead and turn to walk away. His kiss burns in the misty air. I want to say something, to bid him farewell, but I cannot bring myself to. I watch him walk away and vanish into the trees by the river. A terrible howl sounds, heralding his departure. The death of a jackal, or two. I turn away, look across the river. Marble and water throw back the light of the sun, setting the river and the mausoleum on fire. I write.

  One bloody jackal, golden in the dawn, sprints out of the shadows and across the mud of the bank. In her fangs a tuft of hair and skin, scalp torn from a hurled skull. She peers at me with wary black eyes, wandering far down the bank and sitting on her haunches to tear the tissue from the hair.

  I will pause here.

  —

  I bury Makedon’s body and head so that he may return to the earth. The jackal watches as she eats her scrap of human. Monkeys emerge from the treetops, dancing as morning becomes itself. Furred minstrels of the earth, uncaring of the quarrels of shape-shifters and of jackals. They prance across the mud and throw stones at the jackal, which snaps and bares her teeth. I dig.

  As I put my pack-mate in the ground, surrounded by waking animals in their kingdom, these creatures barely aware of an empire of humans around them, I think of the dust-clad second selves of the djinn tribes, hunched and lapping the ruddy peaks of a charnel ground in the Sindh. Perched like sphinxes on those rocks, victorious and languid in the sun, haunches coiled, their great claws sunken in trophy bodies of dead humans, tongues snaking between razored teeth to clean blood-wet cakes of dirt clinging to their long faces. Their second selves were shaped in ways foreign to me, some with arches of bone growing from their muscled shoulders, feathered with plumage to resemble great flightless wings. The dust they cloaked themselves in to deceive and blind foes sifted across the baleful sun, stirred by their false wings. They had seemed to me like that human fancy, angels of death. I wonder how human eyes see my second self, or Makedon’s, what nightmares and demons we may represent in your folklores. Here I bury a terror to all of your kind, and no one knows or cares. Only you will know, if you ever read this, and yet Makedon has done nothing to you. I am the monster in your tale.

  When I’m done burying Makedon, I pack mud over the grave and piss on it:

  The jackal sniffs the air and runs back into the trees, chasing monkeys away. The grave is unmarked, hidden. Makedon’s clothes remain on the soft banks of the Yamuna, for someone to weave a tale out of. I can still smell the circle he pissed around them. His fardels I loot, to fill my own. The possessions I find no use for, I throw into the river. I wash my raiment and cloak, which have been stained by Makedon’s murder. They are already dyed dark with years of dried remnants from fights. A little more will do nothing. I take Gévaudan’s dead serpent and hurl it into the river.

  Across the river the long line of workmen returns to the mausoleum site. I get up and walk away from Mumtazabad, the last of the pack that set out from Europe. When we dispersed and left the muddy gates of Nürnberg, we gathered again in the countryside at least twenty-five strong, with a twin pack of another twenty shadowing us. By the time we crossed the borders of the Mughal Empire, we were reduced to three. Infighting, tribal battles, others who chose to remain in the many different empires and kingdoms we passed through. One day I might write of that great migration, of the events that shaped this pack down to me. Me leaving the far-off tomb of Mumtaz Mahal behind me, leaving the unmarked grave of Makedon of Greece behind me like the grave of any murdered mortal man. Perhaps I will write of that exodus when I find a new reader, because why would you want to hear more of my tale? I have asked enough of you.

  I wonder if I will ever see any of my kind again. I wonder if the other packs that joined the migration are somewhere in this empire. Trickling into the vast populace of this new land after the long journey they have undertaken to see the fresh hunting grounds of the eastern realms. I am an exile now.

  A shape-shifter’s love means nothing, but I give it to you and to our child, a gift, like the knot of hair on my necklace. I ask of you only one thing: that you not silence the little heart that beats with yours, marking time’s passage under the smooth brown sheath of your navel-notched belly. It deserves not the wrath of the devouring wolf, but the love of the prolific mother.

  I wonder if I will see you again.

  * * *

  * It’s worth noticing that the shape-shifters appear to use the term anima to refer to a primal aspect of their “second selves” rather than the more conventional meaning of the Latin anima, “soul” or “inner personality.” It isn’t too far from that meaning, but they seem to use it quite specifically to refer to the “beasts” they carry within them.

  It takes me several weeks to finish the transcription.

  Months after I’ve finished, the stranger calls on my landline, asking to meet so that I can give him the typed version. He takes long enough that I figured I’d never see him again. I ask him how he found my number, and he answers simply: It’s in the phone book. Of course it is.

  The handover happens at the Indian Museum, over the stale wrappings of its resident Egyptian mummy. Perhaps he finds that amusing, in a Hammer-horror kind of way. A half werewolf, a mummy, and a human meet at a museum, et cetera. I watch flies peck at the glass of the display case, trying to get to the long-desiccated corpse within, while the stranger flips through the stapled sheets of the typed transcript. He has grown an ungroomed beard, so I don’t even recognize him. His tapering jaws hidden by hair, he takes on the look of a sun-roasted prophet. Thankfully, he remembers what I look like. He seems delighted at my work. We leave the museum and walk up Chowringhee, drinking milky sweet street chai from little clay cups despite the steaming heat of the summer afternoon.

  He points at the baking green expanse of the Maidan, across the sun-reflecting river of traffic oozing down Jawaharlal Nehru Road.

  “I remember when that park was nothing but swamp and jungle, and a few hovels huddling around the dirt road to Halishar. Our pack, we’d pick prey off that road so often—travelers without a clue. Oh, don’t look at me like that. If we didn’t, bandits would have, or tigers, sometimes even the odd mazed elephant. We usually left the villagers alone, though.”

  “When did you finally give in and move into the city?”

  “The city? The city didn’t happen for a long time. And who said I live in the city now?”

  “Don’t you?”

  He ignores my question, of course. “The British messed it all up. Built their City of Palaces here, built Fort William. Everything changed after Plassey. It was something, though.”

  “What was?”

  “The first day they turned on the lights over Chowringhee. Gas lamps. It was a summer evening; July, I think. July of 1857? I forget the year. I only read about it later. Didn’t much
keep track back then. I watched from the wilderness. They didn’t even have bloody pavements yet, but they switched on the lights. A string of fireballs in the dark, unceasing. Quite something. When I saw them flicker to life, I had this gut-wrenching feeling. I knew things were changing faster than we’d ever expected.”

  I look past the dirty metal pillars of the flyover that bisects Jawaharlal Nehru Road, and at the fenced-off Maidan. A kite drifts above the trees that jostle the pointed spears of the wrought-iron fence. We keep walking.

  He is no longer putting up the pretense that the first story he told me at the baul mela wasn’t about him. He is admitting to having a somewhat abnormal life span, and to the admittedly unusual activity of hunting humans. It makes me smile, though I don’t know myself if it’s a smile of patronizing skepticism or just relief at gaining a bit more of his confidence. After all, if the stranger’s stories are real, I’m faced with carrying a truth too enormous and terrifying to contemplate.

  “So tell me truthfully. Did you write the story in the notebook you gave me?” I ask.

  “It’s more than a story. It’s a confession, a journal, an apology.”

  “Right. To the poor woman in it. Cyrah. The one woman in it, I might add.”

  “Yes, to her. And no, I didn’t write it, obviously. I just translated it. Like I said, do I look blond and blue-eyed?”

  “Then who did?” I ask.

  “The narrator wrote it.”