by Indra Das
That curiosity, still kindling in his eyes. Whatever tribe they were from, he and Fenrir were not beings to ignore a challenge. His mouth twitched. “Not hatred. Hunger. We are the greater predator, just as you are a better predator than other animals on this earth. My second self yearns only to hunt you and your kind, and I yearn only to help it do so.”
“Until I see your second self, these words of yours will remain cowardly lies that veil an empty hatred.”
He shook his head, a half smile on his twitching lips, revealing bloody canines. “You really don’t care. You want to meet something that could slaughter you in an instant, just to prove that I’m not lying?”
“I watched my mother die in my arms, shitting herself because of some sickness that fate slipped into her food or water—fate, too, can be a coward. Since she went, I’ve met no one who has left me wanting to stay in this world. No, I don’t want to die. But I’m not afraid of it.”
Gévaudan stared at me in amazement and shook his head. “What sad, pathetic little lives you humans lead.”
“Then show me, Jevah-dan of France, what lives of worth and beauty you live, you and your precious sacred self.”
Gévaudan got up, towering over me, though not as much as Fenrir. He looked as if he were about to say something, not in anger, maybe even in admiration. I could be mistaken, though I don’t think I am. But he closed his mouth, turned away to pick up his fardels and sling them over his shoulders. He shrugged, that half smile turning dark.
“If you can walk, and you seem still able to, follow. We’ve wasted enough time.”
And so I followed, again.
If you were anyone but my son, this is where you would wonder if this is my true tale or some fable conjured from my imagination, such as those Scheherazade wove to save her life. Perhaps this is a fable, even though it is true; perhaps this world I stumbled into when I met your father and his companions is the place where fables come from.
Let us return to the telling.
I followed Gévaudan of France into the forest, only to see him shed his clothes and pelts once again in the midst of the verdant sals and khairs, and he turned to me glowering like a man possessed, eyes so green they seemed filled with the sap of the forest that surrounded us. He snarled at me, and this is not a fanciful use of the word—he actually snarled the words, and I was filled with a holy terror as I realized that he had bowed down to me. He stood upright, panting, taller and stronger and greater than I, but I knew right then that he had submitted to my demands.
“Your wish. Is my fucking command.” He laughed and laughed until it turned into the barking of a jungle cat or a monstrous dog, or both. A stream of piss fell from him, and he walked a circle around his clothes, spraying the golden liquid all over the ground, his legs, his feet.
Trembling, I asked him, “Is this your second self, then, Jevah-dan? You as your mother saw you first? You, unclothed and bare, pissing yourself?”
“I’ve no mother,” he leered. Giving off a powerful stink, he whipped the piece of my dupatta with Fenrir’s blood on it off his hand. His body was horribly white and writ with tattoos, the tangled knots of hair between his legs and in his armpits a jarring contrast, the color of rust. I realized that many of the bone trinkets that hung off him were actually sewn into his body, hanging off his chest and stomach. I could see his cock growing and hardening, and I grasped the handle of my knife in one sweaty palm.
“It is sacred!” he snapped again, peeling back his lips. “No human may lay eyes upon it except as prey, or one of us. But without your eyes. Blind, you can see it blind.” Would he pluck out my eyes? I wondered. He laughed again, his own eyes spinning wild as he took in the world in this sudden frenzy, taking in ground and bark and leaves and sky as if he were just seeing them. He tossed me the dirty, blood-browned rag. I snatched it out of the air, fumbled and dropped it because of my tremors. I picked it up.
“Wear it. For me to open your eyes, you must blindfold yourself.”
I looked at him, lungs hitching with the ghosts of questions.
“Now, for fuck’s sake. Now! Blindfold yourself. Trust me. You will die if you don’t. Quick!”
I did. I tied that bloody rag around my head, fingers barely able to tie the knot amid the grime-thickened tangle of my unwashed hair. I trusted him, trusted madness itself, because I had come inches away from death’s door in his hands last night, and I had been pulled back by those same hands. In that unreal moment, it felt like I had known him for an eternity instead of two days.
“Good girl,” he panted as my quivering fingers completed the knot.
The day was bursting into brightness at that very moment, a rain of light through the leaves and the damp ground-mist rising and turning back into air. My fingers went back to the knife at my waist, clutching it tight.
“I see the knife. Draw it,” he told me, and I did, without hesitation.
“Do you trust me? You asked for this. Do you?”
I nodded.
“Cut your arm, let the blood run.”
I swallowed hard. “Trust me! Fucking do it now!” he shouted.
I did. I felt the cold line I drew across my skin with the blade turn warm as the wound welled up, from the crook of my elbow to near my wrist. It dripped down to my palm, gathering there, sticky.
“Good girl,” he growled, again.
I heard him pacing, feet stamping the dew-damp ground, loud slaps as the pacing became faster. I heard the thump of fist on tree trunk, the bone-breaking splintering of wood, and it felt like the whole forest shook with each crash, the treetops swaying and the leaves hushing, the birds bursting from their roosts and screeching above us. I heard his growls grow deeper until it sounded like he was vomiting out his very soul. I heard the sound of sap spilled and bark torn from the trees, raked with what sounded like blades but could not be.
And then, silence.
—
How can I describe what came to my senses, in that silence? Even the birds stopped their screaming, the insects their singing. The smell of it was overpowering. It smelled like birth, the birth of god or demon, raw and animal and steaming in the morning air. Sweet and musk, like frankincense and myrrh; heavy and pungent, like the juice of living things, blood and piss, sweat and spit; rancid and fecund, like waste, shit, and earth. It stank of both life and death, both so intoxicating I found myself flushed with my own blood, my heart aching. I could hear it, feel it breathing, the rumbling of a mountain slumbering through centuries slivered to seconds. It walked to me, twigs snapping sharp under its great hands and feet, soil squelching under its enormous, impossible weight. It was on all fours, or so its steps told me, and yet I could feel its boiling breath, a hot and humid wind on my face as it approached. Even crouched, it was as tall as me.
“Come,” I whispered to it, and it was as if I could feel it smiling, inhuman, fangs bared. I let go of the blade and held out my hands, palms itching with its heat. The rumbling of its breath grew louder. It was a foot away from me. I stepped forward, and my breath hitched as my fingers met fur and skin, thick and coarse. I have touched wolves and tigers cautiously, through the bars of caravan cages, and their heat was nothing compared with what I felt when I touched this beast. It felt like desert earth rumbling, warming my cold palms. I ran my hands across it, feeling its vibrations hum in my own flesh. My fingers caught on the bone trinkets sewn deep into the skin, a constant between the two shapes of human and beast. The beast rose and fell, and I wondered if I was touching its chest. I felt sweat roll down my face as it breathed its hot, rank life into me.
“Jevah-dan,” I said. Its fur bristled into stiffness at the name spoken, like spines, pricking my palms and drawing blood. I breathed out, a feather-light gasp, the thin air of my lungs meeting with the heavy humor of the beast’s. I laughed. Something wet slid across my arm, wiping the blood from the wound I had made. Once, twice, thrice. Its tongue like a swamp snake, slithering blind. It tasted me. The wound tingled as the beast lapped at it. It stopped.
It said nothing.
I don’t remember if I heard words in my head, or just felt it, but I knew it was waiting. I knew it wanted me to climb onto it.
“Show me how,” I said through my tears, my voice shaking. The blindfold grew damp as it soaked in my tears. I felt the beast move, felt it lower itself into a hunch, my hands following its movements.
I knew I couldn’t hurt it in any way, felt it let me know this.
I walked around it, its great head following me, I knew, its eyes burning against me. I climbed onto its back, feet and hands digging into its sides, clinging to its spiny fur as it bristled and cut new wounds into my skin, like clambering across a slope knotted with bramble. I sat at the ridged peak of its spine, fur sharp as pins against my legs and buttocks and forearms as I clung to it. It stood again on all fours, lurching up, my entire world quaking.
I knew I had to hold on tight, very tight. I couldn’t hope to hurt it, no matter how tight I held it.
With me on its back, it ran.
It felt like it ran faster than any animal I have ever seen, and yet it seemed to restrain its power, perhaps only for my sake. Its muscles moved under my body like thick ropes, melting and re-forming every second, burning the skin of my arms and thighs with the scathing speed of their rippling. Each pounding step it laid on the ground I felt. I clung to the beast until I was sure I would fly off, until I was sure its fur would be torn from its skin because of my grip. My toes and fingers dug into it until its scorching blood pooled under my nails. My hair unwound itself, my tears dried themselves, and the thick cloak whipped out behind me as if it were light silk. I felt branches whip at me, tearing hair from my scalp and scratching skin off my muscles. I felt the open air of the river’s mudflats rip into my face and fill my lungs, heavy with the scent of clay. I felt the spray of the Yamuna as the beast galloped along the river’s silvered flank, heard the feathery beating of wings as flocks of waterbirds took to the air in its wake, felt its fur grow dangerously slick in my grasp.
I felt the impact of the beast colliding into something, and I struggled not to be thrown off. I heard its rolling growl erupt into a roar that hurt my ears, felt it contort under me as something brayed in fear and agony. I held on as it shook with abandon, the warm spatter of fresh blood mingling with the cold spray of the Yamuna as I heard the rip and crack of meat and bone giving way under its jaws and teeth, a strange familiar sound now, like Gévaudan chewing on his rabbits but much louder. The thunderous crash of the animal going down under the beast’s force. Each clench of its claws on the captured prey flickered across the cabled muscles of its entire body like lightning, twitching under my legs and arms so that I felt every moment that culminated in its kill.
I laughed and I laughed and I screamed, louder than I ever had before, not caring who or what heard me, my tears lost to water and blood and wind even as they escaped my blindfold, my body shaking as it purged all the sorrows of my life in one howl that rode with us.
I washed my wounds as best I could in the waters of the Yamuna. Every part of me ached. My neck hurt terribly. I lapped the icy water over the wounds I could reach, rubbing them clear of grime. I didn’t want to take off my clothes for fear of Gévaudan seeing me naked, and I couldn’t bathe with them on because it was too cold, though I was already soaked from before. So I washed with care, reaching under my clothes and rubbing the slashes on my thighs and calves where I had sat on the beast, on my hands and arms where I had clung to it, the bleeding cuts on my head where branches had struck me.
I was still shaking, as I now realize I was wont to do often in those days of discovery. I felt drunk and high, as if I’d swilled an entire pitcher of bhang.* Gévaudan was making a fire for the glistening red swaths of meat that lay on the ground, painted with dirt and grit. From the fringes of golden-brown fur with white spots still visible on the pelt, it looked like the prey had been a chital. I assumed the beast had carried the animal in its mouth after the kill, when it brought me back to the place where we had left our belongings. The smell of Gévaudan’s piss still hung in the air.
I wanted to thank him, but decided not to. I couldn’t tell what he might construe from such a gesture. It was strange to be back in his presence, rather than that of the beast I rode along the Yamuna. Yet I couldn’t stop smiling like the little girl he always called me, so I kept my face away from him, watching the cranes dip their long white necks in the river on the other side.
“I have never done that,” he said. The flames snapped to life, looking weak in the bright morning sunlight. We hadn’t said a word to each other since I had removed the blindfold and seen only Gévaudan, not the thing that had carried me through forest and riverside.
I kept smiling to myself.
“Shown a human, that is. Shown a human my second self, and left that human still alive, or still human. You should be well and dead, lying here by this fire instead of this deer.”
I wondered again if I should thank him, and thought again, no.
“I saw nothing, Jevah-dan. Do not worry yourself.”
He drove one of the ragged chunks of meat onto a spit he had fashioned from some branches hacked off a sal. There was a sizzle of sparks as the flames met wood and flesh, and blood steamed in the heat.
“You’re…clever. Yes. A clever one,” he said, staring into the fire. His hair dripped water, coiling again as the flames began to dry it. I felt a thrill of delight at this compliment.
“You can bathe, if you wish. I will look away,” he said, as if he had read my mind.
“No. I can’t do that, not in front of you.”
“Then come and dry yourself by the fire. You’re shivering.”
I did, because I was very cold. I wrapped the damp cloak around myself and huddled close to the fire, which was growing as it fed on the pile of brush and branches. The meat began to darken. Gévaudan tore into the other raw piece with his teeth.
He looked as shaken as I was, his eyes not meeting mine.
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“Were you afraid, to show your second self?”
“No. But it wasn’t something I’ve done before. It took great will…”
“What did?”
He hesitated. “To keep from tearing you apart.”
“But it didn’t tear me apart.” He said nothing.
“I don’t know about you, Jevah-dan of France. But your second self, it is a wild and wondrous thing. And I sensed in it a purity—no, an honesty—that I have never seen before in any man or woman. I am glad to have been in its company,” I told him through chattering teeth.
He might have been offended by the way I phrased this, but if he was he showed no sign of it. He looked happier than I had seen him until then, his shoulders rising in pride and his brows creasing in a frown to cover his joy. He said nothing. At no point did he look more like a boy than at that moment, despite his size and formidable pelts. He glanced at me and obviously noticed me shivering.
“You will catch a chill. Humans are frail, in that way.”
“Does your kind not feel cold, then?” I asked, sniffling at the river water and snot dribbling from my nose.
“Oh, we do. In the depths of a northern winter, perhaps, hunting during a blizzard with not a stitch on us. Then we may feel a slight chill cut us.”
“What’s a bliz-urd?”
He got up, and walked to me. His smell was different, placid in a way it had not been before—perhaps it was the Yamuna on him. I gasped as he sat down and pulled me to him, wrapping his arms around my shoulders. It was much warmer in his embrace, if it can be called tha
t. I thought I would protest, but I didn’t. Without recourse to taking off my wet clothes as they chilled me to the bone in the winter air, I let him warm me with the unnatural heat of his body.
“Jevah-dan,” I said.
“Yes?” His voice hummed through me.
“If you try anything, I’ll stab you. I found my blade on the ground where I dropped it.” The chattering of my teeth was lessening, but still there.
“I know. If you weren’t ready to stab me, I wouldn’t be doing this.” His voice was tight and subdued. Perhaps it was with disgust? Not quite. But it was clear that he wasn’t comfortable being so close to me, not in this shape, anyway. Nor I him.
The meat lay on the ground uneaten, and on the spit, also uneaten, fat oozing off it like yellow tears, sputtering as they landed in the fire. The Yamuna glistened as the sun rose higher. Gévaudan’s heat spread through me in waves, lessening the clinging discomfort of my wet clothes, the itching wounds that covered me all over. I started in his embrace, on the verge of sleep.
“Jevah-dan. I recognized it. When it licked the wound.” Once again, he said nothing.
“I had a dream, last night, when you were gone to hunt. Something came and scratched my head.” The cut on my scalp from last night, forgotten amid the many others I had now, came alive at this mention, in my mind at least. “It licked the blood from the wound.”
There was only silence.
“Your second self. Its tongue felt familiar. It felt the same. It wasn’t a dream.”
Still he said nothing. I felt drowsy.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
He grunted and took a deep breath. “I needed to taste you. You are prey. It’s difficult to resist.” Something felt wrong about the way he said it. He wasn’t lying, exactly, but he was still hiding something. I didn’t think it was because he felt ashamed in any way about his intrusion while I slept.
“Is that why you made me cut my arm?”
He nodded. “My second self would have overcome any restraint on my part. It would have ripped you limb from limb, if it didn’t see that you were willing to give something.”