The Devourers

by Indra Das

  “What is he saying? Please tell me.”

  Gévaudan ignored me, stumbling to his knees as we reached the pile of our belongings, next to the agitated camels. The animals had stood up in a panic and were trying to escape the pull of their tethers. I grabbed the bundle that held my few meager things, slung it on my shoulder.

  “I didn’t think he’d do this. The city, we should have stayed in the city,” Gévaudan said.

  “What are we going to do? Run? We can’t, he’ll just outrun us!” Screams rang through the camp. They were human. Gévaudan squinted in their direction. I looked. People were running in all directions now, some grabbing their animals, a mob forming as panic spread. Fenrir had breached the camp.

  I saw flashes glisten through sheets of rain as tents collapsed in the wake of something huge, lanterns exploding and setting new fires in the night. There were splintering crashes as carts tilted to the ground and spilled their freight, some toppled by fleeing animals, others hurled aside by the advancing intruder. Rippling flags of flame sprung from the fabric of fallen tents, marking out the path of the beast in the darkness. I saw something bright leave the ground in the distance and fly through the air in an arc toward us, like a falling star in the shape of a man. It was a man, his clothes and flesh burning, hurled into the air with inhuman strength. I watched him soar and return to the earth, crashing into the fleeing crowd, knocking several of them down into the muck. I heard the sound of all his bones breaking even through the tumult surrounding us.

  “Come on,” said Gévaudan, holding my wrist again. We left the camels (he hacked their tethers) and his fardels.

  As I looked back, I heard the sharp pop of a musket, saw its muzzle light glittering in the rain. Courten, or one of his men. The beast responded. A roar burst across the crumbling camp, so deafening it hurt my ears, and I feared the rain trickling down the sides of my neck was blood. Gévaudan’s fingers tightened on my wrist again, and then remembered how frail the bones of a human were.

  “Get on my back,” he said, bending low. “I can run much faster.”

  He sounded calm now, but his eyes were glazed like an opium-eater’s. I fell on his broad back, covered in the coarse damp fur of his pelt-raiment, and put my arms on his shoulders, my hands locking around his neck. He lifted me off the ground and ran, knocking the breath from my gut. My legs flapped limp behind his, feet kicking at his thick calves. He didn’t run as fast as his second self, but he did run faster than any man could. Several times fleeing men came in the way, and I heard the crack of their bones snapping or the slap of their flesh opening as he rammed into them and sent them sprawling. I closed my eyes tight through it, feeling sick. I had brought this upon them, these poor, hapless humans. My fellow humans. I had brought this upon them by seeking Fenrir, by following Gévaudan, by hoping to use the being under me to deliver penance to his friend.

  Gévaudan didn’t stop running till we were in the darkness beyond the camp, his legs working through the mud. If anyone saw us, they weren’t following. Most of the qafila was fleeing on the road we had made maqam around, pouring down it in a tangled wave of animals and men. Their raw cries of confusion and horror; the spit and crackle echoes of the East India Company’s few muskets; the firelit slivers of arrows let loose by those hired men who tried to fight back; the sparking bonfires and boiling steam of burning tents; all of this made it seem like some manic parade churning in the rain to welcome this dark and terrible djinn from a bitter land none of us had ever seen.

  And there amid the despairing flock, there he was, Fenrir of the north.

  The beast I’d imagined when he appeared at my curtain steeped in moonlight and fur, now sprung free from his human form. There it was, looming huge over everything, the eye of the storm pausing to observe the swirling chaos it had created. Surrounding it were corpses of men, oxen, camels opened to the rain, running with reddened rainwater. The beast was like no animal I’d ever seen on this earth. Glowing red in the flickering light of rain-swathed fires, with its war paint of blood and tattered flesh, which hung like ragged pennants off its spines and slicked fur, it was rakshasa of the Hindus, it was asura, lord among their demons. It was glowing, infernal ifreet of the djinn, it was Iblis made incarnate, rising from cold wet earth instead of the arid sand of the desert. It was a towering impostor god of Europe resurrected in this empty stretch of Shah Jahan’s empire and worshipped with fire and violence.

  I let go of Gévaudan, tumbling to the ground, the cloak clinging to me like a skin of slime now in the mud and the rain. “We have to go back. He’ll kill them all. What are we doing? We must go back, Jevah-dan. It’s us he’s looking for.”

  “He’ll kill you. At least I have a chance. He’ll kill you, Cyrah.”

  “He won’t. He thinks he loves me. He would have killed me in Mumtazabad if he wanted to.”

  “This is his second self. It won’t hesitate like his first did. He’ll rip you apart, and devour you and your soul.”

  “Why do you care?” I screamed, and I actually meant it. I wanted to know why.

  He was stumped by the question, but another roar from the road broke the brief stupor.

  “I can’t. I can’t do this,” I whimpered, and my skin prickled as I felt the beast, a hundred yards away, turn its head and look at us. Or maybe it didn’t, but that’s what I felt. I turned, and even through rain and fire and smoke, I saw its eyes blaze like far-off suns. It howled again, making even the rain shiver in a wave that spattered my face, as if the sound were a baleful wind from this monster’s dismal country.

  I saw Gévaudan buckle to his knees, holding his ears. Spittle drooled in strings from his mouth, and he was saying words in a language I couldn’t understand.

  I started to scrabble toward the road again, blinking the rain from my eyes. I could see some of the men climbing onto the beast and plunging sharp weapons into it, and I applauded their bravery, but they looked like children clinging to a trembling giant. It plucked them from its sleeked wet fur with idle ease, using its jaws and tusked fangs, and it tossed them into the sea of bodies that swirled past it. It seemed to revel in whatever pain it received from the human weapons thrown against it. It moved slowly and then rippled with sudden speed, cleaving an ox in half with one swipe, the divided body crushing several men.

  Gévaudan grabbed my cloak and pulled me back, sending me splashing back to the ground.

  “Don’t look at it,” he shouted.

  “It wants—he wants me,” I said, clambering up again. “Let me go to him. How can I run now? After all this? This is what I wanted. Those people are dying because of me.”

  “No, no,” Gévaudan snarled, and returned to the babble of different languages he had sometimes dipped into, as if arguing with himself, his eyes darting in their sockets. He looked like he had when he was about to change shapes.

  The beast had changed direction, tearing through the humans and oxen and camels, the stinging stampede writhing at its legs. It was leaving the road. It was coming toward us.

  I got up, my heart hurting, swollen with terror. I would meet it. This was what I had traveled with its kin for. To meet the devil again. I ran toward it, but Gévaudan grabbed me.

  Gévaudan’s hand lashed out so quickly I didn’t see it. But I felt his hand slap my neck, just by the throat. I heard it in my head like a thunderclap, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe and I felt spit gush into my mouth and I felt my gut coil and I thought I had to vomit and I felt my heart stop its frightened drumming in my ears and the whine of silence flooded them instead. And then the world vanished, and darkness burst in like a great tide released by that approaching monster.

  —

  The rest I felt as if in a dream, rising in and out of darkness. I felt Gévaudan carry me in the arms of his second self (for the first time), felt the speed of his flight across the rainswept plains, the winds lashing at both of us as Fenrir remained always at the horizon behind us, a following storm; the ground shaking with the galloping of thes
e two beasts, the burning caravan receding to a wavering line. I was paralyzed, whether by the blow or by some infernal glamour I didn’t know. I felt Gévaudan slit my arm open with one long claw, lapping and sucking at me as Fenrir approached from afar.

  They stopped then, far from the caravan.

  I hung from Gévaudan’s arms like one dead, he poised over me leechlike, his mouth daubed in my blood, which dripped in ruby lines down the slit in my arm. I don’t know which shape he stayed in when he stopped to face his pursuer. Fenrir slouched in the distance, wary, the mud around him steaming with his heat, the rain boiling off his back. In the distance, the sounds of the fleeing survivors, the white men under Courten emptying the last of their gunpowder into the night air in panic, small lightning in the distance.

  Did they both change back into their first selves? I can’t say. But one way or the other, Fenrir said to Gévaudan, his eyes flooded with tears of rage: << What have you done, you traitor? >>

  << I have done nothing. Come no closer. >>

  << Leave her be, or die like those khrissals back there. >>

  << So you can kill her, feast upon her, and have her for yourself, because she’ll never come to you of her own accord? >>

  << You’ve sullied her, haven’t you? In your jealous fit, you’ve done what I did. >>

  And Fenrir’s tears landed on the ground sizzling and spitting, and his claws dug into his palms to raise blood, his growl rolling across Gévaudan in a fearsome wave.

  << No. I’ve done no such thing. >>

  And Fenrir looked at him and saw the truth. His tears ceased, and his growling slowed.

  << I see you. Makedon called you whelp, and whelp you are. I see you drink her blood, suck from her soul the memories of her night with me. You pretend to be her companion, but you just want what lies in her. You care nothing for the flesh itself, or the person it holds. >>

  << As you care only for the idea of a human lover, and for the idea of the child she carries. >>

  << You’re so young. I see right through you, whelp. You wanted to devour Cyrah, and undertake the long sleep of ekh’du, to shape your first self into her form. That’s why you took her with you on this journey—you were preparing to molt. You wanted to be her, so that I might love you back. You wanted to give Cyrah to me, in you, so that I might love her, and you. >>

  And Gévaudan said nothing.

  << A bold idea and a beautiful sentiment, Gévaudan. If you’d had the courage to actually do it instead of merely wanting to, I might even have come with you. I might have seen past your betrayal and loved the shards of Cyrah’s soul made manifest in yours, and in so doing nurtured your own sickly love. But you wouldn’t have held a child for me. You wouldn’t have sacrificed your second self for nine months. And that alone would reveal the falsity of your new flesh. Even if it looked like Cyrah, it wouldn’t have been. >>

  << You are the mightiest of all hypocrites in this world, Fenrir. How dare you lecture me, as if you were not the one who started this great fucking drama? You are the one who claimed to love a khrissal, and raped one. I had no great bond with Makedon, but we were a pack, Fenrir. We shared the ghost fires, and we ate of man and woman together. He was one of us. And it is because of you that he is dead, and by my forced hand. >>

  Fenrir pounded the bubbling ground around him in fury, bellowing: << I created, like the gods of humankind! >>

  << I created, like the lowliest khrissal can, and we cannot. I usher in a new age for us all, rather than calling the empty mating of our own kind by a human word. I have created progeny. You have created nothing. You couldn’t even steal Cyrah’s shape to create a new self of your own, let alone fashion something from the blood-loam of the womb. >>

  So saying, Fenrir walked forward toward Gévaudan.

  Gévaudan said: << I will destroy your progeny and your human love with it, if you come closer. >>

  And Fenrir smiled as a devil would.

  << Boy-whelp, you have tasted love, and instead of ridding yourself of it, you’ve languished in it, and now it infects your soul like a canker. It casts your world anew, and sickly pale, you see your love for me bleed across the chasm between your two souls, and you understand. You understand how one of our kind may love a khrissal, a small, fragile, beautiful human being. >>

  And he roared so loud the clouds stilled their weeping, and he lunged at Gévaudan. And as Fenrir had foretold, Gévaudan spared my life, threw me aside so that I wasn’t caught between these two unrighteous beings as they fought. Fenrir, flushed and engorged from his feast of humans, oxen, and camels from the ambush on the road, filled with power; Gévaudan, weakened from his abstinence from hunting for several days because of the company of humans, because, though I didn’t know it for all those days, of a promise to me that he never even truly agreed to. Overpowered, his genitals crushed under Fenrir’s knee, throat gripped in Fenrir’s huge scarred hand, Fenrir’s spittle running down his face and Fenrir’s piss streaked over his chest and caved, empty belly, Gévaudan submitted to the challenge. And it was agreed that they would do battle.

  In their first selves they returned to the site of the massacre, I slung senseless in Gévaudan’s arms, and together they retrieved their fardels and clothes. There were no living beings left at the site, only carrion and guttering fires, fallen tents and upturned carts. All else was fled. In a moment of strange regret, Gévaudan searched the sea of bodies for Edward Courten, but could not find him. Of course, the maqam had stretched far across the road, and it’s possible he simply missed Courten*2 if he lay dead somewhere. But Gévaudan chose to assume that the Englishman had escaped.

  Fenrir allowed Gévaudan to feed from a body, though not very much, because there wasn’t much time. Other travelers could come upon them, and it wouldn’t be long before the survivors called for soldiers and formed a new caravan to return to the site of the attack and recover the dead. The two of them hacked limbs from some of the bodies with their blades, salted them, and wrapped them in waxed cloth to keep for later.

  And so it was that I was lashed to Gévaudan’s back along with his carrion-filled fardels, as if I were no more than a possession for these two creatures to fight over, and they traveled ahead to their decided arena, the ghost city of Fatehpur Sikri, which had been Courten’s next destination. They traveled fast, even in their first selves, not stopping once throughout the night. By the time the sky began to lighten with the blue of early dawn, they had reached the rocky ridge upon which the walled city sat—a craggy arm of the hills of Vindhya, which the Hindus say once grew so high they would block the path of the passing sun.

  How my abductors (and they were such, as I had no say in this journey) kept me in the half death of that sleep I don’t know; but they had their ways. Though I dreamed of things similar, I experienced none of this awake, dangling helpless from Gévaudan’s back as he climbed up the ridge with Fenrir, and they entered the quiet privacy of that empty place. For those scarce, anxious hours before their duel, Gévaudan and Fenrir became traveling companions once more, as they had been for the years of their journey from Europe, and as if in respect for those years, they entered the city in silence. Only once did Gévaudan speak, to ask: << What will happen to Cyrah if I lose? >> And to that Fenrir only shrugged and said, perhaps truthfully: << I don’t know. >>

  —

  Then and now, no one lived or lives in Fatehpur Sikri, the “City of Victory” that Emperor Akbar built to honor the spot where a Sufi foretold the birth of his first son. It’s said that it was a thriving and magnificent place when Akbar first unveiled it to his empire. But once the water tanks grew fetid and diseased in the summers, growing parched on the high rocks of that ridge, Akbar’s new city became rife with illness and death, and its people left and never came back. And so Fatehpur Sikri itself died, still young.

  I remember opening my eyes and thinking that I was dreaming of flight, so high above the world was I, with no ground beneath my hanging feet or roof above my windblown hair. I was tied to G
évaudan with my back against his, so Shah Jahan’s empire lay sprawled below me like a painted map feathered with dark forest and threaded with road, stretched across the rocky table of the earth. The lamp of the sun was still hidden behind the edge of that table, though its light had begun to creep up the vaulted tent of the heavens, weakening the pinholes of the stars. The cobweb clots of clouds had torn apart after the rain, and hung threadbare in the dawn. My body lurching with every movement Gévaudan made, I smiled, giving little thought to where I was and why. I raised my hand to the horizon as if to leap away into the open air. The cool of an early-morning breeze tickled my arm and trickled through my fingers.

  With effort I looked to my side and saw the wall of Fatehpur Sikri, and the dark stealthy shape of Fenrir moving up its sheer side like some giant bat in the gloom. My arm turned leaden and fell back. A human hand stuck out of Fenrir’s bulging fardels, having escaped its wrappings. Its rigid fingers reached for freedom. The bony chiming of Gévaudan and Fenrir’s trinkets a soft dawn song. I felt a brief fear of falling when I realized I was not afloat but lashed to Gévaudan, and I wondered if the creaking harness would hold. But my head felt heavy and my eyes shut again.

  —

  The ruins of Fatehpur Sikri are overgrown with wild grass and indigo, the bright flowers always dancing amid the broken buildings. Weeds and other plants now live in the crumbled remains of entire neighborhoods. In the distance, the imperial palace still stands tall over all else, its minarets and walls untouched by time, a reminder of the city’s former glory. I saw this ghostly place through eyes veiled with the visions of dreams—and I wondered if Allah had emptied this once glorious city just to make of it a quiet monument for pilgrims escaping the stench and hardships of real life. I remembered Gévaudan telling me at Chandni-Chauk that he might appreciate a human city if it was empty of humans, and wondered if it pleased him to be in this one. I wondered if this was what Akbarabad and Shahjahanabad would look like in a century.