The Devourers

by Indra Das

  “And you’ll not tell me what to do. You offered to help me find Fen-eer, not the other way around. I don’t need to be taken care of by anyone, let alone you. I’ve lived in these lands longer than you have and I’ve gone far longer than a day without anything in my belly.”

  I heard his heavy breathing as he dragged the rabbit’s legs through the ground, playful. I looked again across the river at Mumtazabad’s lights, now almost gone, feeling agitated and sick. I could easily go back, if I wanted. We weren’t that far away yet. Then I heard a sound like the tearing of a cloth, followed by dripping on the ground. I realized that Gévaudan had just twisted the head off the rabbit in his hands.

  I heard more crunching and squelching for several minutes as he skinned and gutted the animals, maybe even with his fingers and teeth. I looked away throughout, light-headed and on the verge of retching once more.

  I jerked away, startled, when he approached me.

  “Here,” he grumbled. I felt him take my hand in his, and put something warm and wet in my palm.

  “Just eat it. You won’t get sick.” He waited a few seconds, before adding, “I promise.”

  I put the meat in my mouth, too tired to argue. It was soft pulp, tasting of metal and salt. As I held this wad of flesh between teeth and tongue, I knew that Gévaudan had chewed on it already so that it wouldn’t be completely raw. When I realized this I didn’t spit it out for some reason. Perhaps I needed to eat more desperately than I had thought, though it was true that I had gone days without any real food on several occasions. The flesh was hot, as if it had been stewed in a pot of simmering water for a minute, though the taste of it belied any illusions of such a thing.

  I swallowed and waited what seemed a long time with my jaw clenched tight as a vise to keep it from coming back up.

  I could hear Gévaudan crunching bone and meat, feeding on the carcasses all the while.

  “See?” he said, smacking through wet lips.

  He handed me another, larger lump of ragged chewed meat. I took it and ate it, choking back the urge to throw it up, unable to understand why I was doing so. My hunger didn’t seem a good enough reason.

  “Your teeth are sharp stones, dulled by civilization,” said Gévaudan.

  His pale face glowed in the dark, his mouth a black smear where the rabbit’s blood had painted him like a courtesan’s colors. The flies and other flying insects hovered around my mouth and crawled across my chin, my palms, and my fingers, tickling my skin as they tried to get to the raw juice of the dead animal on me.

  “What are you and Fen-eer? You don’t look alike at all, and yet you speak of the same tribes, and have the same madness in you.”

  He grunted. I could hear the bubble of blood between his lips as he breathed out, and spoke.

  “Fenrir’s from somewhere else. Some land far north of where I come from.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “A kingdom called France.”

  “I’ve heard of it. I’ve never heard of people like you and Fenrir, though.”

  “You have. They must have tribes of our kind here as well, with names in the languages of these lands. Where Fenrir and I came from, humans are killing one another for fear that we are among them—they burn one another, hang one another, flay one another to check for fur underneath, as if it’s that simple. They tell one another stories—that we turn into wolves at night and live as humans during the day, that we are beholden to Satan, the devil of the Christians. Occasionally, they even catch us. I suppose that’s why we left. Or I did, anyway.” He paused. The moist rustle of his tongue running across his lips.

  “On the outer edges of this empire, past the Indus and beyond, in Khorasan, the land of the Afghans, the tribes of our kind call themselves djinn. They are numerous. There is the tribe of the ifreets, who shape their second selves with great flightless wings, which they flap to make storms of desert dunes, who strike fear in the hearts of their enemies by setting their oily hides on fire. There is the tribe of ghuls, who stalk their prey with stealth, and enjoy mingling often with khrissals in cities to lure prey to death, and sometimes take the hyena as a totem for their second selves.” As I listened, I felt again the ache in my chest, to hear these familiar words—djinn, ifreet, ghul—in a voice not my mother’s. He went on.

  “We lived among these tribes for a while, in the wilds of the mountains and deserts. They didn’t much take to us, though. There were battles. Terrible ones. We brought strife to their land, because we were followed by another European tribe—the Theissians, the Hounds of God, who worship the Christian god. True to their name, they hounded us across the Black Sea to the Khorasan. They think shape-shifters of other tribes are demons, that the power to change shapes is given either by the father-god of Christ or by his fallen angel, the devil. In their eyes, to deny their religion as shape-shifter is to brand oneself as witch and demon. In the Khorasan, the Hounds went from chasing us to chasing the djinn tribes. So in a way, the djinn saved us. I hope they killed every last one of those self-righteous fools, who would betray their own to scrabble at the feet of a khrissal god.”

  “My mother told me stories of the djinn when I was a child. Fen-eer mentioned them also, when he was babbling. Is that truly what your people believe you are?”

  “Believe? Are you not listening? I don’t need to believe anything. Do you need to believe that you are a human? I simply am what I am. I don’t call myself djinn, ghul, or ifreet, demon or witch or wer-wolf, but these are words that might be used to describe me.”

  “So. You and Fen-eer think you are not human.” It wasn’t a question. I thought of us crossing the Yamuna, how it had struck me that no man could have carried me on his back while swimming, like Gévaudan had. I thought, of course, of Fenrir and his vision.

  “We aren’t. And I don’t know what Fenrir thinks. He certainly acts like a human when the whim takes him,” he said, low in his throat. Silence, and then once again I heard brittle bone snap, the slurp of spit and gristle disappearing into his mouth.

  I moved my tongue through my mouth, ushering the bloody bits of rabbit toward my throat as something swelled inside me, making me dizzy. I burped a foul breath of carrion.

  “He raped me.”

  In the gloaming, Gévaudan looked up, and even with no light to reflect in them I thought his eyes gleamed gem green as he moved his head. Like Fenrir’s eyes.

  “I know,” he said. “Like I said. Human.”

  The insects observed our conversation, an invisible congregation as vast as the emperor’s audience. The flies crawled on my lips, trying with desperation to enter my mouth.

  “What am I to you, then, Jevah-dan? To your kind. If not something to use, to fuck. You look at me sometimes like that is exactly what I am.”

  As if to oblige me, to demonstrate, he looked at me. I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew it, I could see it in my head, even after just a day of traveling by his side. I heard the peeling of his stained lips.

  “To me, to my kind. You are prey. Not something to fuck. Something to kill, and sustain us.”

  “You are cannibals, then.”

  “No. We do not eat our own kind. We eat you, little Cyrah. You keep forgetting—we are not human.”

  We are the devouring, not the creative.

  “One of the things Fen-eer told me was that your kind can change shapes. What shape can you take, other than this one?”

  “We have our second selves, yes, that we may turn into, should the time be right. And those second selves may change in time, or use the arts to guise themselves in nature. We may change our first selves as well, though it is difficult and dangerous to molt so.”

  “Can you”—I touched my mouth, stifling nausea—“turn to smoke and fit in a lamp, so I could carry you around like a trinket?” I tried to make myself smile at such a thought but couldn’t.

  If he found this funny, he gave no sign, either. “It is rumored that there were tribes, and still are in some parts of the wo
rld, who have many selves. That their souls are not merely bifurcated, but multifarious things that enable them to change shapes until each of them is legion in itself.”

  “Show me, then. If all of this is truth and not madness, as I thought when Fen-eer told me of it, then all you need do to convince me is show me your second self.”

  “And why would I care to convince you? My second self is sacred. If a human wishes to see it, that human must be willing to give himself to certain death, or to the joining of our tribes.”

  “Then why are you even telling me all this? What pleasure does it give you to recount your own existence as if it were something new? You want to tell me. You want to show me what you are, like my suitors pride themselves on disrobing, as if it were some heroic thing that they were born with cocks between their legs, which they all thrust out in front of themselves like so many monkeys. So show me, right now, this sacred and holy second self. Reveal it. Take off this human you wear.”

  I heard him breathing, panting like he had before. The strange sound of a man behaving like a beast.

  “You’ve never actually talked to a…a human, about any of this, have you. Just like Fen-eer. You were blabbering. You can’t help yourselves. Stop talking. Stop boasting about your superior race and show me.”

  “Stop this now.”

  “I said show me.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Show me, Jevah-dan. I know you want to.”

  I heard the rabbit carcass fall, heard him stand up. The bone trinkets clattered, the giggling of infant skeletons. My heart thundered so loud that the insects and their continuous song were finally silenced by the sound of my own blood flooding my head in fear.

  I felt myself whipped off the ground like I weighed nothing, so hard I heard a crack in my neck as my head was jerked back. He had lunged at me so fast I barely had time to see him cover the few feet of darkness between us. My body felt like lifeless mud and straw. I wondered if he had broken my neck. My feet left the ground, my legs dangling. A livid rain wet my face, and I thought the clouds had broken but it was his spit. His face was inches from mine, hot stinking breath burning the tears from my eyes. I heard a hissing and crackling, like stones grinding together. His teeth.

  I flexed my fingers, then my hands, and felt the fur of his pelts, grasped at them in tufts as if it might hurt him. I could still move. I held on to that thought. My neck wasn’t broken. He wasn’t actually holding me by the neck at all, but by the knot of his cloak (which I wore), right below my throat. I felt the cloth push tight against my neck and begin to choke me.

  Even inches away from my eyes, I couldn’t see his face in the dark. I was glad, because I could feel enough of the ugly, hideous mask of anger that I had brought forth to cover his boyish face. Somewhere, buried deep beneath panic and terror and pain, I felt pride. Just as I felt my throat close off completely because of the tightening knot of the cloak, I fell from his hands.

  I coughed and gasped, the wind gone from my lungs, pain spiking my neck each time I tried to look up. I gave up and just lay there on the ground, curling myself into Gévaudan’s cloak as he stalked away. The earth was cool and soothing against my cheek. I could smell it, too—an odor that I imagined was what clouds might smell like at that moment. I breathed it in, to drive the fleshy smell of Gévaudan’s mouth from my head.

  He was still panting, maybe ten paces away from me. He was staying away.

  “You’re a coward. Just like Fen-eer,” I murmured and tried to laugh. Instead, I coughed until my body shook. Even after it stopped, the shaking wouldn’t go away, leaving me trembling on the ground, cloak drawn tight like a caul around me.

  He said nothing. Once again I heard the ripping of meat and skin, the frenzied twig-cracks of bones being chewed. I doubted he was even eating that poor rabbit anymore. My teeth clicking together, shaky gouts of breath returning through the fevered shuddering, I marveled. Whatever he was, I had scared him. I had scared mighty Gévaudan, whether djinn of France or white cannibal with syphilitic madness. I had scared him. That made two of them now.

  —

  I know it sounds strange, but I think Gévaudan trusted me more after that incident, and I him. He had, after all, not killed me yet. When I goaded him into attacking, I thought I’d pushed too far, that he would at least hit me, or do something to leave me bleeding. But no, he didn’t. Not a drop of my blood was shed. I didn’t know why, but I knew that I wasn’t merely prey to him. I was hurt, that night—I couldn’t move my neck without pain after that for days, but I know I should have ended up dead or worse, facing off against such a man, or thing. I don’t know what I believed at that point, or maybe I just don’t remember. But we said no words that night after he hurled me to the ground. Aching, giddy from the rush of my bitter victory (if you will allow me to call it that), I just stayed curled up in his cloak, as safe and warm as I could get ten paces from that man or monster who had just nearly choked me to death, and decided not to.

  When the sun showered its light over the Yamuna again, splintering it straight into my eyes, I woke to see Gévaudan bent low over the bitten bones of those two accursed rabbits, hands and mouth still encrusted in dry blood. The dawn light tickled his green eyes (I never could tell whether his or Fenrir’s eyes were actually green—it was only at times that they appeared so) and turned them pale as his head snapped up at the sound of my stirring.

  I hissed and put my head back on the ground, my neck seizing with pain as I looked up. I immediately regretted showing him this weakness.

  He laughed, showing his teeth, gone brown with the uncleaned offal. “I have hurt you, little one. Haven’t I? Have I crippled you?”

  I clenched my jaw, closed my eyes, and sat upright, wincing against the pain.

  “No, you have not crippled me, despite your best efforts.”

  “You’re a fool, girl. You’ve no idea,” he said, and turned serious, his soft white face slackening. I saw the glaring light of the sunrise illuminate the fringe of fur around his red mouth, his swollen lips. He looked at the bones.

  “If these were the bones of a human child, they would tell me things, and I could wear them on me to sing in the breeze. Sing you awake, Cyrah. Rabbit bones tell me nothing. They break, too, most easily. But so would yours, I imagine.”

  “What do you want from me, Jevah-dan? Just tell me now. Why did you bring me with you? I’ve had enough of these games.”

  “You’re the one playing games. You gambled with your life last night.”

  “My life is my own to gamble. Tell me what your stake is here. Take off my blindfold. If we’re to play a game, let us play it together at the very least.”

  He ran a finger across his bulbous lower lip, smiling. “Play,” he repeated like a child.

  I stood up. He cocked his head like a curious dog.

  “All right, little girl,” he said, voice thick. “I brought you as bait. I think Fenrir will be more willing to see me, talk to me again, if I have you with me.” There had to be more to his plan than that, but this was a start.

  “I thought as much. You intend to stand by and watch him rape me again? Then settle your quarrels over my corpse?”

  “How dramatic. Did you fathom nothing of Fenrir’s ways? He’d rather die than take you by force again.” He tossed a little bone idly over his shoulder.

  “Is that so.”

  “He thinks he loves you, for fuck’s sake. He knows nothing of love. Neither do I, for that matter. It’s quite clear to me that it is entirely a thing of weakness, and turns the brain to runny porridge.” Rubbing my neck with one hand, I approached him, though not with the caution one might expect. Nor was he startled or surprised by this lack of caution. He looked at me as if he expected this, as I closed the gap until I was standing over him and his mangled bones.

  “You’re human. You’re a woman. What do you know of it?” he asked me.

  “Of what?”

  “Love.”

  “I loved my mother. I don’t think I
’ve known any other love. I’ve only heard stories, and poems.”

  He looked comically disappointed, squatting at my feet. I felt like slapping him, kicking him down, and grinding his face into the mud.

  “You never loved any of your suitors?” he asked.

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Never met any man, or woman, who lit a flame under your heart?”

  “No.”

  He nodded, mulling over this.

  “You hurt me,” I said, as forcefully as I could be.

  “Yes, as I said. So?”

  “I can’t travel with someone who’s going to hurt me.”

  He shrugged. “Then don’t. Leave. What do I care?”

  “You obviously do care. You just said so. You need me as bait.”

  “I don’t need you. It would make it easier for us to find Fenrir if you’re with me. That is all.”

  “Then you need me to make things easier.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m going to keep going with you. And you must promise not to hurt me again.”

  “No. I owe you no promises, khrissal.”

  I laughed, my gut coiling like a snake with fear. “Then show me your second self. Why not? You’re going to hurt me anyway.”

  “It is sacred.” He bared his teeth and gums like a dog enraged, spitting the words. I held my ground. I saw in his darting eyes something other than simple anger—a fear that betrayed his curiosity. “You don’t have any idea what you’re asking, you stupid little bitch. Do you want to die?”

  “I’m not afraid of dying.”

  “What you’re saying is, you want me to kill you. I’m not your personal hound, here to do a job you’re too cowardly to do yourself.”

  I smiled, though I felt nothing if not a fiery emptiness within my chest. “What I want is to see that you’re not a liar, nor Fenrir. Whether you kill me is your decision. But do not call me coward when you can’t muster the courage to show me the greatness, the magic, that you say is within you and your friend, that so justifies your hatred for us mere humans.”