The Devourers

by Indra Das

  We ate, the small space of the tent filled with the sounds of loud slurping and chewing from the men. To clear the air, Courten offered Gévaudan something that looked like wine, from a corked glass bottle. I wasn’t offered any, though this was unsurprising. Perhaps he knew that Muslims are not meant to partake of spirits, or perhaps he just thought it uncouth for a woman to drink wine. I don’t know the customs of his people, after all. It was unusual enough that I’d been invited inside the tent. Courten and Gévaudan began to talk in English while I marveled at the clutter in his tent—it was so filled with various possessions that it felt more like a permanent room than a transient habitation. His swords and daggers gleamed in the shadows, stacked right next to a musket. There were chests and saddlebags piled together like bricks for the walls of the tent. Next to his unfurled bedroll was a fat book made in the European fashion, upon which was a silver necklace with the Christian emblem they call the crucifix.

  —

  I excused myself after I was done eating, as Courten and Gévaudan were talking in English and I couldn’t understand. Gévaudan gave me a small glance that might have been concern, but I ignored it and stepped back outside. I waited in the rain until the supper was done.

  “He presses me,” Gévaudan said, sitting outside with me afterward. “About how I came to marry you. Where I’m from, where I’m going. He’s starting to irritate me. He doesn’t know how close he’s coming to death.”

  “Don’t say that. We’re surrounded by humans. Don’t kill him. Please.”

  “I’m not stupid. Of course I won’t kill him. He’s beginning to annoy me, that’s all. And if I did kill him, it would be an easy thing to escape. We can leave this wretched qafila anytime we want.”

  “Maybe we should, then.”

  He grunted, and licked rainwater into his mouth as it trickled down his face.

  “What did you tell the Englishman?” I asked.

  “I tell him nothing. Fancies. I tell him I believe in nothing like his Jesus and one God, that I follow only nature, and want only to wander this land. He sees the bones hanging off me, my raiment. He thinks I’m a warlock on the run from Europe. And that’s true, in some way, I suppose. But he has no belief in magic, except that of his religion.”

  “He won’t have you arrested or killed, will he?”

  “It wouldn’t be so easy to do either to me, but no. He doesn’t care to. It seems in England their fear of our kind is receding, as Fenrir sometimes predicted. It’s been several years since I talked to a human from Europe for any length of time. This Courten, he thinks I’m a man with delusional beliefs in a pagan religion. That’s all. It doesn’t even pass his mind that I could be something more than human.” Gévaudan seemed quite surprised by this as he told me.

  “It’s been a while since you set out on the migration?” I asked.

  “Yes. A while.”

  “There must be a reason he’s pressing you like this. He wants something.”

  “Courten wants me to lead him to some lost tribe of escaped witches and warlocks from Europe, hiding here in Hindustan. He thinks that’s where I’m headed, to a gathering of exiled heathens. He thinks it will be a great discovery and, recorded in his journals, will make him a prosperous and famous man in England when he returns.”

  “He wants to write about you?” I asked, somewhat alarmed on Gévaudan’s behalf.

  “I don’t care if he does. I’ve told him nothing. Though he has no idea how close his theory is to a truth. He would thank me, if he knew what meeting the tribes would lead to for him.”

  “He’s a clever man, isn’t he? To have guessed so much just by looking at you.”

  Gévaudan looked at me, breath white as it escaped his mouth. I could barely see his face, but his eyes caught what light came to us from the tents and lanterns around the camp.

  “Courten’s cleverness means nothing. He’s arrogant. He believes I’m a man, and nothing more. He believes in his one Christian God, and no other. He believes in his empire and its ways, and no other. If he were truly clever, clever enough to believe what I am, he’d end up no more than a pile of shit between my legs, all the endeavors of his little life a morsel dream in my head, his tailbone an ivory bauble to hang from my skin to remind me that khrissals are little more than monkeys that forgot how to swing from the trees.”

  I felt a strange pain at the vicious bite he put into his words, spitting them into the rain-slashed air. I felt as if this sudden revulsion were directed at me. I may not have been English or Christian like Courten, but I was after all a human, though it was so easy to forget that in those days, living in the twilight between humanity and these shape-changers. I didn’t show this hurt, of course. I could also see that Gévaudan was in a way shaken by Courten’s manner, his lack of superstition. Why this should be, I couldn’t tell, since it appeared to me that he had left Europe because of the superstitions of man, and the persecutions that spread from them.

  I searched and searched for something, anything, to say that would diffuse that deep, animal loathing for me that underlined everything Gévaudan did and said. Even in the moments when he seemed most human, it was as if he were pushing that instinct away for a moment, not overcoming it. I knew it wasn’t me he was reacting against, but my whole race; man or woman, young or old, pale or dark, Christian or Muslim or Hindu, we were all khrissals. He saw me as meat to sink his teeth into, to chew up and swallow and shit out. When I talked to him, conversed with him as if he were a true companion, when I shared with him the aspects of my one and singular self, it evoked some form of visceral disgust or anger that I couldn’t begin to understand.

  The rain pattered down on us without respite, dripping off the cowl of my cloak. I searched and I searched, and I said it.

  “You were once human, Jevah-dan. Isn’t that right? Fen-eer told me so. You all were, once.” Even as I said it my heart hammered in my ears, pushing the sound of rain into a faint hiss beyond my cowled head.

  He didn’t offer any reaction, let alone violence or anger. He seemed to think about it, for an endless moment.

  “Yes,” he said.

  I exhaled, my relief overpowering. I waited to regain my breath, and asked him, “Do you remember that?”

  “In a way. Like a dream. It’s for you…” He drifted back into silence.

  “What is? What’s for me?” I urged him.

  “It’s for you that I say I was human. So that you may understand. But that was something else. I was born the moment my soul was bifurcated. The human that existed before is just an aspect of me now. It never was me. His life exists in my head like a dream, like the dream-lives of all the khrissals I’ve devoured in my life. But dreams fade until they have little meaning that resembles their origin. In my own way I’ve lived the lives of many humans, but I cannot know what it means to be human any more than you can truly understand what the worlds of your dreams mean.”

  “And what do you dream of, then, Gévaudan, when you sleep?”

  “Many things. The lives. The lives I’ve eaten.”

  “How old were you when—how old was the human, when you were born?”

  “He was a young man. I was birthed by a tribe in Paris, who lived amid the cemeteries and underground quarries of that city, and hunted the streets at night. And they still do, I’ve no doubt.”

  “Was that a long time ago?” I asked.

  “For you, yes. For the tribes, I am very young still.”

  “You look like a young man. Your kind does not age.”

  “We do. Much slower than khrissals. In your estimation we can, perhaps, live forever.” He paused and looked around. There was no one in earshot, though maybe he was looking beyond the camp, rather than in it. I could see he wasn’t done, so I let him speak.

  “I remember my first human kill. That is the moment the first self stops aging, after the first ritual killing and devouring of a human. If one’s soul is split when he is just a little babe, his first self is allowed to age somewhat like a
khrissal would, though faster than a khrissal child. He goes through the phases of childhood, eating only animals or human flesh procured by his elders, until he comes of age and hunts his first khrissal prey. For me, I didn’t have long to wait, since my first self already held the shape of a matured man.”

  You’re blabbering again, I thought in wonder, and I could only be grateful. I shivered as he continued, his words soft, distant though he was right next to me. Whether this was out of caution or simply because he was transported back to a different time in his head, I couldn’t tell.

  “It was days after I was born, after the injuries done to tear that man’s soul in two to create…me, after those injuries had healed. My imakhr and his pack chased a man from the midnight streets, hounding him into the yards of the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents, where the Parisians piled their dead, and where my tribe scavenged when they were not hunting. There under a full moon, among the heaped dead, I slew him in my second self, fresh-sprung, while my imakhr watched, and there I acquired the insight to transcend the mortality of my prey, and truly be one among the tribes.”

  I waited for him. He said nothing more. I had no idea what this Paris would look like, but just his words, the way he pronounced them, evoked something in me, as if his entire body exuded the essence of his memory, as if I could smell and feel what he had back then.

  “This…This ima…That word you said. That was your parent?”

  “We have no mother or father. He was my imakhr. I suppose to a khrissal that would be a parent, but it is not. He was my guide. He was many times my mate also. When one’s soul is torn in two, one is…” He paused to give a very quick laugh, an innocent curl of the lip that betrayed some fleeting joy in that young face, for just a moment before returning it to its recent dour expression.

  “Overwhelmed, by the new birth. The imakhr fucks the new shape-shifter, to ease its delirium, control its wonder.”

  “He was a man.”

  “His first self was a man, at that time.”

  “Why didn’t he come with you on the migration?”

  “Maybe he did. I left Paris a while ago, to explore the rest of Europe. What he has done since is not for me to know.”

  “Do you miss him?” I asked.

  “I don’t miss anyone. That is the province of those who love, and love is a folly of khrissals.”

  I clenched my teeth. That had been an obvious mistake to make, far too obvious. Somehow I thought he’d be tricked by the question, miss the implications of it, though I hadn’t consciously tried to trick him. But the rote recitation of his words blatantly betrayed his guilt. I don’t know if he ever loved his imakhr, but I knew, by now I knew that he loved Fenrir. And I knew, for him and Fenrir, love was a sin.

  You love Fenrir, I wanted to tell him. I let the words form on my tongue, tried to free them from my lips, but couldn’t.

  “You said your mother died. Was that long ago?” he asked.

  I sat there shocked for a moment. I couldn’t believe that he was asking me something, instead of the other way around. Something personal, something about my life as a human. It was, as far as I could remember, the first time. Perhaps he knew what I was thinking, wanted to steer my mind back to myself.

  “She— Not that long ago. I haven’t been alive that long. Especially compared with you, I’d think. She was a young woman still when she died. People would often mistake us for sisters: she the elder, I the younger.”

  “She was very young when she bore you.”

  “Barely more than a child.” I took a deep breath. “She didn’t expect me. She was very poor, and she was raped, too.”

  The rain fell over his head, endless, making me almost angry that he didn’t cover his head. He was soaked, unmoved. A statue. I wondered if he felt any sympathy. Why was he even performing this pretense of humanity, this interest in my affairs? Why was he mimicking what I had done moments earlier, when I asked about his past?

  “She left Kandahar when she found out she was with child, and a merchant traveling to Lahore took pity on her. She never was very clear about what that meant, but I think he just kidnapped her on the way, and used her as he willed. But how much of that is just my own bitterness, tainting her life?”

  I felt that familiar ache of rage rise up inside me, only stoked by Gévaudan’s lack of reaction. But I went on. He had asked, and I would tell. I had listened, and he would, too. Certainly we deserved that, after he had bared a part of his soul forbidden to my eyes, and I had let my blood for his tongue.

  “Still, whatever it was, he took her in, and didn’t care that she was a mother. In Lahore he had her trained as a tawaif, educated in song and dance and lore. He had her taught to read and write. I remember that city, though not well. Growing up in the mansion of the zamindar, playing in his gardens. Once I grew older, we left his house. Again, I’m not sure what happened, whether he got nervous and kicked us out, or whether my mother got sick of living there, or what. My mother headed east to Akbarabad, where the imperial court was, with the money he’d given her. He said she’d be a fine courtesan in the imperial harem. She never got close. She danced and whored herself out in caravans and serais, but she was no courtesan. We traveled for a time with the Bazigars, who were kind to us, and we pretended we were like them—nomads, entertainers. But friendly as they were, we could never be one of them, either, as they have their own clans. But we went with them on the roads when we could. My mother taught me what she could, what she knew. Then she died of a wretched disease.”

  I heard the patter of rain on our bodies and the ground. The sounds of the camp had died down. Light still flickered in some of the tents. Many of the hired men were still awake, but they talked in hushed tones that I couldn’t hear over the rain. Gévaudan’s jaw was clenched. The anger bubbling in me had simmered down to a painful throb that pushed tears out of my eyes. I rubbed them away and stanched them, taking deep breaths of the cold air, heavy with the smell of wet earth. My cowl dripped on, cold drops on my nose.

  Gévaudan’s head snapped up. He looked past me, toward the edge of the camp.

  “What?”

  He said nothing, staring, his ears twitching through his soggy curls.

  The sounds came to my ears as well. Shouts at the edge of camp, a wave of activity spreading outward from the distance as more people were roused from their state of rest. The blossoming lights of new lanterns and firebrands lit.

  “They’re dead,” Gévaudan said.

  “Who is?”

  “The men Courten sent back to buy a cart, and more camels. They’ve been killed. One got away.”

  “How…”

  “I can hear what they’re saying. Not bandits.” He paused, listening.

  “An animal. A beast. Rakshasa, he calls it.”

  “Demon,” I whispered. I had heard the word used before by the Hindus.

  “He’s here,” said Gévaudan.

  * * *

  * Daily camp/assembly on a journey.

  I can’t describe the rest of that night to you. I will try, but the terror that overcame me was like nothing I’d ever experienced before—it was the inverse of what I had felt riding across the world on the spiny back of Gévaudan’s second self. That night, I was reminded that Iblis*1 was of the djinn, a shape-shifter like the man sitting next to me, like the man out there beyond the firelight of the maqam. I saw how our ancestors saw their race in the shadows and wrote the legends we now know.

  Courten had sent four men back to Akbarabad; one came back, covered in blood from head to toe, foaming at the mouth from frenzied fear, struck with the immovable belief that he had witnessed something not of nature, a dread miracle, a man changing into an awful, gigantic animal. The survivor was a Jat, and for him the beast of supernature that he saw killing his companions was a rakshasa. For the Baluchs who looked on fearfully it was, perhaps, a djinn, a wandering ghul brought on a fell wind from the northeastern deserts. For Courten it was a large animal that had turned man-eater—a great wol
f, a tiger, a lion. The survivor wept, and said their attacker was greater than all those animals.

  Courten scoffed at these claims, but I saw him rubbing his crucifix in one hand.

  —

  It didn’t matter what anyone thought, in the end.

  Fenrir’s roar split the black sky like a bolt of unseen lightning, so loud it felt impossible, heralding his approach. Gévaudan took my hand, unheeding of his own strength.

  A chorus of terrible screams rose up all around us, and for a moment I was frozen with horror, thinking that something inexplicable was happening, that the roar we had heard had overturned nature itself, made the dead rise from the ground in pain. It took me a moment to realize it was the lowing of the oxen and camels as they stirred awake throughout the camp, all woken by the unearthly cry of our intruder.

  I cried out as I felt my hand crushed in Gévaudan’s grip. He didn’t even notice, his eyes wide. “We need to get out of here,” he said.

  He began pulling me through the crowd.

  I grimaced through the pain in my hand, which I was unable to free from Gévaudan’s. “Maybe it’s just an animal, Jevah-dan,” I gasped, hoping that he would say yes, it probably was.

  “It’s Fenrir. He has spoken. He has spoken. To me.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I…I can’t put it into your words.”

  “Please, you’re hurting me.” He let go, holding my wrist instead, lighter this time. My hand was numb.

  I couldn’t believe what I had done. In one moment, I lost all my desire to see Fenrir again, to have him make amends for what he’d done to me and take away his child from my belly. I felt like a coward, a betrayer of my own soul. I felt like a miserable little girl, cold and wet and afraid in the rain.

  Another roar rumbled across the camp like thunder, turning to a bitter howl that seemed to last forever, drawing all the eyes of a woken camp to the outer edges of darkness that surrounded us. Gévaudan winced and shook his head.