The Devourers

by Indra Das

  I nodded, watching the cranes, their bright red heads mesmerizing as they bobbed up and down, their long legs sending ripples across the shallow waters where they waded. Closer to us, at the fringe of the forest, I could see the ghost shapes of jackals as they crackled through the undergrowth, tempted by the smell of the meat lying in the open. Occasionally I’d see a small pink mouth open in a hiss of aggression, ringed with needle-like white teeth. They never came close, though. I knew they wouldn’t, not with Gévaudan around.

  “What did you taste? In my blood,” I asked him, drowsy.

  He moved against me, taking a large breath. I felt it leave him in a soft growl. “You are with child.”

  I sat up, my heavy lids snapping open.

  “What?”

  “You heard.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure, yes.”

  “What is quite sure? What do you mean? Are you sure or not?”

  “I am sure.”

  I closed my eyes and clenched my jaw. I thought of what had happened to me this past day, thought of how nothing could ever be the same. Thought of how this child in me was insignificant compared with that. But I couldn’t make it so. I’d kept the hope alive that Fenrir’s seed might have lain fallow in me. And now that hope was gone. My new companion’s word was hardly the certainty of a bump against my belly, but after that morning, I trusted that Gévaudan was telling the truth, that he could taste the alchemy of a new life in my blood. Still, I tried to make my peace with it at that moment. I am sorry that you must see how painful the thought of your conception was to me, but I must be truthful, or not tell this story at all.

  “Allah damn that fucking bastard to hell,” I whispered.

  Gévaudan nodded, something inside him shifting. “You want Fenrir to take it back. To destroy it, somehow.”

  I said nothing.

  “He can perform that task for you no better than any human being can with the basest of tools. No better than I could, for that matter, if you had the courage to ask me instead. But I can’t, nor can he. There is no power in our kind to take back the planting of one’s seed in the womb.”

  I felt on the verge of spilling tears onto my cheeks, Gévaudan, the river and forest around us blurring. I don’t think I actually cried. I don’t even remember how hopeful I was at that point that Fenrir could somehow take back what he had done to me. After what I’d just witnessed with Gévaudan—was it that impossible to hope for such a thing? When my rapist was a creature of myth, given to changing shape at will and imparting visions? It hit hard to hear Gévaudan make certain my helplessness, and even harder because he could see what I wanted from Fenrir.

  “I am sorry,” he said, and I had to breathe hard to keep the tears back, pushing his warm body away from me. It felt so very wrong to hear Gévaudan say those words, strange and hurtful. I nodded, a silent laugh behind my lips.

  “Why? Why are you sorry, Jevah-dan?”

  Gévaudan said nothing, the knot of his jaw jumping.

  “That’s right. Don’t tell me you’re sorry. You don’t know what that is, really. To be sorry for something. At least, I don’t think you do, nor do any of your kind. Except maybe Fen-eer. I think he has learned.”

  He turned away from me.

  “I will teach him, if he hasn’t,” I said. “I will teach him. I will make him more sorry still.” How I planned to do this, of course, remained completely unclear to me.

  Gévaudan nodded, realizing that I was telling him that I wasn’t going anywhere, that this was the course I had taken, and that this was the one I would stay faithful to until we found Fenrir. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Perhaps he found it amusing that I, a young human woman, thought I could make a being like Fenrir sorry for anything. Or perhaps he wasn’t surprised at all, having seen with his own eyes that Fenrir was capable of remorse, or at least some mimicry of it. Or perhaps he remained silent because he thought that Fenrir’s time for remorse was long over. That the next time we met him, we would find only wrath.

  “You’re still shivering,” he said, and put his arms around me again. I didn’t push him away, though every cord in my body tensed up.

  I knew there was one way to destroy the child, that Fenrir himself had told me before he raped me. A being that changes shapes can bear no offspring. But Gévaudan was right. I didn’t have the courage to ask him, nor to ask myself, truly. So I let him hold me, and dreamed of the great beast that lived within him, and of you, the little child that now lived within me.

  Gévaudan held me and said nothing more, as if he were human.

  —

  It was late morning when we left the campsite by the river, emerging from the trees to travel on a well-worn road. Gévaudan had made quick work of what was left of the chital, cutting the pieces, salting them, and storing them in his fardels. I was warmer by then, if still snot-nosed and heavy-headed. My clothes were surprisingly dry, perhaps from Gévaudan’s heat against me.

  Walking along the road, we saw in the distance a cloud rising off the sunlit horizon like steam off a heated blade, dust pounded into the air by a nobleman’s hunting party, the rumble of horses’ hooves driving the bristling shapes of wild boars out of the groves and darting across the grasses, their yellow tusks flashing. And I could only think to myself how I’d ridden upon a steed like no other at dawn—a creature that fed on my kind as prey, just as those humans on their horses would butcher and eat the boars they ran their spears and swords through.

  As we watched the hunting party in the distance, I turned to Gévaudan.

  “Will you promise me something?” I asked.

  “No,” he whispered, squinting into the sun, eyes set on the tangled shape of the hunting procession, banners twisting in the dust.

  “Can I ask you something, then,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can I ask that your second self kill no human being while we travel together.”

  He spit on the ground and said to me: “My second self does only what it wills. No one commands it but I, and no one commands me but myself.”

  I asked no more.

  So we walked the roads of the empire, as white man and brown woman.

  It wasn’t long before we found the body of a man, naked and impaled through the chest, by the trodden dirt of the road. The sharpened branch run through him shimmered black with flies drinking bloody bark. I’d never seen such a thing by the roads, but had heard of the more cruel among lords and noblemen punishing criminals by impalement, and then displaying the bodies in public. I told Gévaudan so. He seemed especially interested in the gruesome sight, but I asked him if we could leave it behind with haste, and so we did.

  When the sun rested at noon we passed a group of resting dervishes under the greened shade of a chinar tree, turbaned heads bobbing in a drugged stupor from drinking bhang, and I wondered whether I, too, had been drugged into a trance days long. I felt fevered, whether from the strangeness of these days or simply from catching a cold I couldn’t say. The holy men basked in winter light falling through the leaves, their reddened eyes rolling to watch us pass them by, their fingers soiled from crushing the buds and leaves they put into their potions. I wanted to ask them: Can you see this bone-white man walking beside me, dressed in pelts and hauling fardels? Can you see the thing he can become? Have you spied it at night, galloping across the land? Gévaudan peered at them with hungry eyes, and the air sang with silence.

  Then one of them called out to me, as if answering my thoughts. Startled, I went a little closer. He clambered up and came to the side of the road to meet me. The dervish raised a hand and said: “I’ve seen your face, in a dream.”

  “I think you’re mistaken, holy man. I’ve no interest in portents,” I said.

  He smiled under his graying beard, waving away flies, and he said,

  “It was not my dream, but one given to me by a wild white man.”

  I felt a chill run through me. Fenrir. It had to be. Gévaudan was o
n the right trail after all.

  “He came to us last night when we lit our fire, his eyes aflood with tears, speaking our language as if he’d spent all his life in these lands,” the dervish went on, a rhythm to his slurred words, as if he were reciting poetry.

  “He called himself Mangy Dog, an odd name, but well suited to him. Perhaps that was meant to be a joke. I laughed, I don’t know if my brothers did,” the dervish said, looking around. The others were looking at him, listening, but too far gone into their stupor to join in. Or they didn’t care to. One of them snored softly. The dervish went on, ignoring the lack of response from his companions. “He wasn’t a funny man, despite his funny name. Not at all. There are not many things that will frighten me easily at this age, with my brothers at my side and food in my belly. But this man did. That Mangy Dog gave us all a dream, a dream wrapped in a story of his lost love who spurned him. He showed us her face in this vision, and the face he showed us was the face of a Mughal woman.” He pointed at me again. “Your face.”

  “Well. I. Thank you, for telling me that.”

  He nodded, scratching his beard. “Yes. Sister, I don’t know why you are traveling with that boy over there, but he wears the same look as that Mangy Dog. I give no portents, only advice. You should leave these white folk behind. They are wild and not of this world, a different evil from the traders in their companies. I do not think the man who calls himself Mangy Dog has taken well to being spurned by you, if that is indeed the true tale, and I do not think that white boy you travel with can save you from him.”

  “I don’t know who you met, and I don’t think it was me you saw in your dream, but thank you. For the caution,” I said. The dervish watched with glazed eyes as I backed away. I turned and saw him raise a hand to his forehead in farewell.

  As I walked away, he went back to his perch under the tree.

  “Beware the Mangy Dog,” he called out in his singsong way, and leaned against the trunk to return to his afternoon doze.

  I quickly went back to the road where Gévaudan stood in wait. He was still staring intently at the dervishes. “Fenrir and his stories. Always telling stories,” he muttered. He shook his head and walked ahead.

  “You heard all that?”

  “Of course I heard. And I’ve heard that so-called story he told those drunkards.”

  “They’re not drunkards. They’re holy men.”

  “I don’t care what the fuck they are. Fenrir already told me his sick story about how he worships you, right before we parted. And now he tells it to every half-wit khrissal on the road he walks. He is not a man, has he forgotten that he is not a man, to behave like one with no shame, like a common fool husband spurned by a harlot wife? To give himself the totem of a creature as lowly as a sick dog.” He spit his words, drool sliding down his chin. I saw his fist clenching and unclenching, inches away from his sheathed knife.

  “Why are you getting so angry?” I asked.

  “I’m going to kill those men,” he said calmly, not bothering to wipe his chin. “To save his dignity, and yours.”

  “No,” I breathed, swallowing hard. “Please no. I beg you, don’t. My dignity is mine alone to save.” I didn’t mention Fenrir’s dignity, nor whose duty it was to save.

  Gévaudan looked at me for what seemed an eternity, his panting slowly dying down. Abruptly, he walked on. I could hear each step as he drove his boots into the ground to raise a trail of dust behind him. My heart a drum to accompany his steps, I followed. The dervishes began singing a sleepy song that drifted behind us like a lonesome bird.

  —

  When among the long shadows of late afternoon we saw a group of women carrying heavy pitchers of water from well to village, their arms thick and feet caked with damp dust from treading on the spilled droplets of their burden, I wondered if Gévaudan’s leering gaze as they passed us by held any hint of carnal desire, or whether it was pure hunger. The women didn’t cease their loud singing, and ignored us as they tramped past. I watched them pass as well, envious of their simple lives, though I knew nothing of them.

  —

  When in the droning air of red evening we saw a falconer traipsing by the road, ringed by a variety of colored birds seated upon the hoop hanging around his shoulders, calming them with song from the flute at his lips, I wondered if I was like those birds, soothed by an invisible song, following an inscrutable being that might well barter me off to another even worse, or devour me. The falconer passed us by, trailing the nervous flutter of brittle wings.

  * * *

  * Ground cannabis, usually in a drink made with sour milk.

  The day died like fire in the leaves. Gévaudan looked up at the sound of a howl in the distance, squinting at the sky as if it were parchment burned dark by a sun gone out, the stars emerging like the leftover embers of scorched letters. He said nothing, and if he read anything in the stars he didn’t say. I couldn’t tell what animal made that distant, sad sound, which made me sure what it was.

  Gévaudan stared at the moon, wiping his face. His smell was strong, sweet like ripening fruit, making me hock up the snot from my nose. The howl came again, and I didn’t know whether it was closer but it felt so. “It’s time,” Gévaudan said, grabbing my arm and pulling me off the road toward a field of scraggly winter millet through the trees. The stalks were silver under a moon cut in half by the night sky, right along the middle like a sliced cantaloupe.

  I hissed at him, pulling my arm away. We stumbled into the feathery stalks of millet. After a day numbed by wonderment, I felt terror claw its way back into my chest. “Time for what?” I snapped at him, panting, head heavy and stuffed.

  “To move faster. You must get on my back.”

  “You want me to ride upon the back of your second self. Again?” He wiped his face again, slender fingers catching in his long hair.

  He looked to the dark of the forests bordering the field. “Perhaps it would be easier. For me, and for you. If you were better acquainted with it. In my wildest dreams I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but you seemed strangely at ease in its presence. It might lessen the danger to your life if you continued to show it—show me—that.”

  In my wildest dreams. Such a familiar and mundane phrase, one I wouldn’t expect from a creature living a dream. I found myself moved.

  “We’re in danger right now, aren’t we? You’ve found Fen-eer. Or he’s found us. That was him we just heard.”

  “Yes,” he said, and spat. He explained no more, which didn’t surprise me.

  We weren’t following Fenrir anymore. I was certain of it. I was witness to some strange dance of aggression that unfolded on the breeze, with neither player in sight of the other. No, there was only burning musk left under fallen leaves, piss on bark, a dead body uneaten and left by the road impaled—not the work of a nobleman but of Fenrir, of the Mangy Dog that roamed ahead of us, telling his stories.

  Gévaudan started shrugging off his belongings. His fardels crashed to the ground like stones.

  “Fuck all this. I’ve had enough of dragging the weight of twenty pointless lives around. I’ll leave all this,” he said and looked straight into my eyes in the gloom. I clutched the edge of his heavy cloak, which had kept me warm for two days and still did so. “Listen to me. I need to let it out right now, Cyrah. It has met you once, and let you live. I don’t know whether it’ll spare you a second time. Help me keep you alive,” he said to me.

  I was shocked by the strength of his words. Despite willfully bringing me into this ritual between him and Fenrir, swinging me between the two of them like a glittering bauble, he truly meant those words in that moment.

  “What does it matter to you whether I live or die by your hand, or mauled by your second self? Just another meal,” I said, my voice strangely calm even as anticipation churned me sick. He walked close enough that I could smell his carrion breath, his fists crushing the stalks tickling our elbows. The sweet smell coming off him in waves, making me cough again.

&nbs
p; “Fenrir has wronged me,” he said, grimacing. “He’s made a fool of me. A pathetic thing, like—him. We were a pack, and he sundered us. We shared kill, we ate of the same men and women and children, bathed in their fluids, and shared the blessings of the ghost fires. We were bound, and still he sundered us. He has wronged you as well, as his prey. He should have killed you, not left you so, with…”

  “With child,” I said. The howl came again from beyond the forest, sounding across the millet like a wind.

  “Yes. It was a perverse act. If I deserve a chance to set things right with him, so do you.”

  “Of course. And I’m to hop on the back of your second self so you can usher me like a morsel to your friend. So he can finish the hunt, instead of leaving me—so perversely—with child.” I touched my forehead lightly.

  I wanted to keep backing away to the road, flee from this wild white man.

  I wanted to embrace him, to greet what was waiting under Gévaudan’s skin, climb onto its bristling, mountainous back again.

  Where was there to flee? Only into moonlit dark, into the arms of the Mangy Dog.

  “Please,” he said, shocking me with that word. “We’ve idled along this human road long enough. He’s near. I’m weak in this shape. I need to emanate.”

  “All right,” I said, feeling very tired, taken aback by how vulnerable he was, not bothering to deny my accusations. He seemed so forlorn, trying in some way to communicate with me, to bring the two of us closer, as incomprehensible as that was. And for what? It made my chest heavy. I couldn’t understand myself, nor him, nor the world, at that moment. But it seemed he couldn’t, either. I realized then how much he wanted me on the back of his second self. That it was forbidden, thrilling to him in a way fucking me was exciting to Fenrir. Some part of Gévaudan, of his second self, had been taken by surprise, had liked the feeling of a human being, of prey, small hands, legs, clinging to its back without fear. With trust.