The Devourers

by Indra Das

  Sunlight burned the edges of the clouds in the sky, and dark birds began to wheel through them, and my thoughts turned to death, and the impression I had that I was somehow already halfway to its door, held there by my godlike abductors.

  I tried to wake, struggling in the bonds that tied me to a beast in human shape. He and Fenrir walked through the endless broken streets. The wind whistling through the shattered city began to rise, or so I thought, and the indigo flowers danced everywhere as if to mock my helplessness. The wound on my arm hurt.

  Gévaudan laid me down and licked my arm, the tip of his tongue flicking against the scabbing edges of the slit. His breath smelled terrible, of some unknowable poison. Fenrir loomed over us, watching. I felt the scalding drip of Gévaudan’s spit fall in a white string on my arm, and he rubbed it into the wound with his fingers. Wild grass lay crushed under me, a soft and fragrant bed. I asked him to wake me up.

  He said: << You cannot be awake for this, Cyrah. You will sleep now. Fenrir and I must fight. >>

  Fenrir watched, and I could feel his brooding thoughts like a sweltering cloud over us three. Gévaudan hesitated, but said it, to me: << I am sorry. For everything. >>

  I wanted to say: Fuck you. Fuck you and Fenrir. I can trust no one, human or djinn, angel or devil.

  But I could only moan like a sick child, and tears flooded my eyes and splashed down my face.

  Gévaudan said: << Goodbye, Cyrah. >>

  * * *

  *1 The devil, in Islam.

  *2 According to my research, Edward Courten of the British East India Company did actually visit India as a factor (a trader), and broke his contract by prematurely booking a passage back to England via the western port of Surat (in Gujarat), after he claimed his qafila was attacked and destroyed three days out from Akbarabad, near Fatehpur Sikri. His journals were never published, and he burned them on his return before changing his mind and saving what he could. The salvaged pages were said to describe the caravan’s ambush by a “demon” that the “Hindoos call rakshasa,” and even go so far as to identify the “rakshasa” as “Kali,” the apocalyptic demon who is a herald of Kali Yuga, the Age of Vice. In his testimony, Courten was said to conflate the Hindu Kali (not to be confused with the goddess Kali, also a figure in Hinduism) with the Christian figure of Satan. His service was terminated, and he was judged mentally unfit and incarcerated at Bethlehem Royal Hospital (also known as Bedlam) of London in 1650, where it is presumed he died.

  Did they fight over me, or over their tattering of the tangled webs of their tribal laws? Who can say, really? But they did fight, and it was a battle to be seen, though I didn’t see it. But I dreamed it, so caught was I in the poisonous glamours the two had cast over me to keep me unconscious during their duel. Glamours that were, I imagine, strongly tied to them, making their violence mine. Or perhaps I just dreamed a dream, which was nothing like the actual battle.

  What I do know is that they fought for a day and a night in the arena of deserted Fatehpur Sikri. They shed their clothes and fardels next to my sleeping form, which they had placed in the cavern of a fallen building, and they each pissed a circle around their belongings. They lifted up my head, and poured water from one of their gourds into my dry mouth till my stomach was full. Then they covered my face in my cloak, so that I could see nothing of their contest even if my eyes opened—leaving me like a shrouded corpse. Naked they walked into streets now flooding with golden morning light, and changed into their second selves. And they began.

  Even in the dream I was far away, high above their battle. Drifting like an invisible bird, I saw them wrestle in the broken city of their prey, slow and languid like lovers, their sunlit fur iridescent in the dawn. Lances of light flashed upward into the sky from them, and I could scarcely believe how beautiful they were. Gévaudan shone in the growing day with streaks of bright orange and crimson against black like plumage, while Fenrir, the larger of the two, seemed a thing of shimmering darkness, pulsing with dark grays and bitter blues, the black of a raven sky at night. Their spines bristled in waves, shattered by the caress of their clawed hands as they grappled. Their long shadows fell across the fields of indigo that now painted the avenues and roads.

  As they tangled into one beast in that blazing winter morning, I observed their dance, and I marveled that these were beings that didn’t know love. Then again, they were fighting because they had, each in their own way, found the same—and their violence was, perhaps, to purge their disgust at that stray human emotion.

  As the sun rose higher, the two beasts drifted apart and circled each other, exploring the ruins but always facing each other, even if miles apart. They licked their wounds and regrew their spines, sealed the ragged tears in their skin with spit, snatched small animals from the undergrowth and devoured them.

  And then, when the sun was at its zenith, they ran to meet each other again.

  I swooped down on a sudden wind to see them leap miles across the city, two monstrous celestial bodies casting their hurtling shadows across the shivering ghost city. The very air shook as they met high above the ruins, and I was sent flying away as they clashed in the rays of the sun and tumbled toward the earth as one, a demon meteor that hung for too long above Fatehpur. When they crashed down to earth, the impact sent the stones of many ruins cascading into dust, gathering in a cloud that hung over them. Their roaring made avalanches tumble down the hills of Vindhya. Their huge clawed feet dug deep trenches into the earth, tore plants and grass to shreds, left deep worms wriggling in the open so that birds lunged down to catch them, only to be thrown from the air and trampled under the fury of the two fighters.

  When the dust settled, paling their giant forms, the sun had begun to set. Streams of their blood had made new gutters for the deserted and overgrown streets, bubbling and hissing and destroying what plant life grew nearby. Their fight had slowed again. They were caught in a fierce embrace, their massive claws swiping bloody swaths through each other’s flesh. Steam robed them as hot piss and blood fell down their legs and pooled in their deep footprints, and clumps of shit fell from between their rippling legs, containing what decayed matter of human souls I don’t know. As night fell I saw one of the two finally fall, though it was too dark to see which. And I saw the other take the hackles of the fallen one’s neck in its jaws and gallop through the city dragging its opponent across the ground.

  When this gauntlet ended, the fallen moved no longer. The victorious beast pounded the fallen into the earth as if to bury him, and the earth shook my grounded body, making me falter from my dream—heavy coarse cloak suffocating my face—only to fall back into it. I rose higher and higher, till Fatehpur Sikri was a miniature sandalwood city, until the clouds dampened my vision, until I vanished into the endless black.

  I woke to see Fenrir crouched over me. Gévaudan lay some yards away on the ground with his back to me, motionless. Both were naked. Fenrir’s bone trophies clattered. They were both red from head to toe. Blood. My hand was crusted in it, too, though the wound had scabbed over. I tried to get up, but my head ached so much that I turned and threw up.

  Fenrir sniffed. “I see my child. It lives in you,” he said. Once again I was struck by the smooth beauty of his Pashto, as opposed to the rough, if fluent, speech of Gévaudan. “I wasn’t sure. That it would grow,” he whispered, the burning reflections in his eyes lighting his tears.

  “Get away,” I managed before starting to cough. He flinched, as though just realizing that I was awake.

  Though weak, I crawled away from him. He didn’t give chase. A cold crescent of moon floated above the dark shapes of the ruins around us, casting a glow that lingered among the rustling indigo and grass. I staggered to my feet, still coughing. I wanted to run, but where would I run? How could I outrun such a being?

  Instead, I faced him, trying to stand as straight and upright as I could in my condition. I was afraid, and I’m not ashamed to admit that—but truthfully, my fear was tempered by the fact that I was no long
er mired in that strange sleep I’d been trapped in for more than a day. I had returned to my body and my own will. Fenrir barely seemed to notice what I was doing, instead going on speaking, like a mullah reciting, face hard-set now.

  “Do you know, Cyrah, that your new companion lapped at your blood like a fool shroud-eater, an undignified upir,* because he couldn’t muster the courage to kill you and eat of you? Gévaudan wanted to devour you and take your shape. So I would love him as he loves me, the fool whelp. When I look at him, I almost understand your disgust at me.”

  He looked at me with his mismatched eyes, his glistening scar showing through the blood his face was painted in.

  “I know he loves you,” I said, my voice broken and sore. “I just can’t see why. Or maybe it’s entirely clear. You’re both monsters.” I was relieved to find my mother’s gifted blade still in the sheath tucked into the saree knotted at my waist, a weight against my hip. I gripped the handle. It gave me some measure of strength.

  “You’re lying,” he said. “I can smell it in the blood on your arm, in your sweat. You don’t think Gévaudan is a monster. Perhaps you thought him no different from me when you first met him. But you’ve changed your mind. In fact, you’re wondering if he’s alive right now.”

  I kept still, as if he might not be able to read my mind if I did so. My cloak—Gévaudan’s cloak—hung heavy with dried mud. I held my breath and didn’t ask the question on my mind. The puddles that Gévaudan lay in were crimson, and I could see gashes torn into his body. The lips of wounds slashed across his thighs and buttocks were so deep they were rimmed with the ghastly yellow of fat. I felt so very tired.

  Fenrir looked at him. “He’s not dead.” He breathed deep. “I think he likes you, in some way. Perhaps in mimicry of me.”

  “He’s not like you. He didn’t force himself on me,” I said.

  “He did worse,” he said. “He tasted you but made no consummation. I didn’t want to hurt you. All I wanted was to create, like the human that died to birth me so long ago I can’t even remember.”

  “You raped me. That’s not being human. It’s an unnatural thing, punished by our laws and religions,” I said, and spat on the ground.

  “And yet you yourself were beget by rape,” he said, and I flinched at this violation, this intimate knowledge that he’d somehow taken from me. He shook his head and smiled, blood and tears and dirt running across his face. “Yet I see khrissal men take their women all the time, with no regard for whether they want it or not, in every kingdom and empire I travel through. Women create. Men inflict violence on you, envious and fearful, desperate to share in that ability. And it is this hateful battle that keeps your kind extant. You have taught me that your race’s love is just a beautifully woven veil, to make pretty shadows out of a brutal war. This, too, is a terrible art. But I don’t know anymore if it is an art worth emulating. I see now that your kind and mine are not so different. We are to you khrissals what human men are to human women. You are prey, Cyrah, no matter how you look at it.” He grinned at me.

  Palm sweaty around the handle, I drew my blunt old blade from its sheath. “I look at it like this. Your only human act was the lowest, most cowardly of our crimes. So congratulations on your success,” I said, fighting my fear to walk closer to him.

  Fenrir growled, deep in his throat, baring his reddened teeth. He got up, unfurling like a giant. “What I committed was not your ugly khrissal crime of rape, it was a gift. In Ragnarök, there must be violence before renewal. The great wolf must attack before his bloodlust is dimmed,” he said, each word barked as he loomed tall over me. But I walked closer still, until there was a foot between us, and I looked straight up at him, blade held at my side.

  “You talk of humanity and how it fears and loathes its women, Fen-eer, as if your kind are faultless as you walk and hunt among us,” I said. “But I see none of you wearing the shape of human woman. Three of you I’ve met, and all big, strong men. Or maybe you are just the scared little boys among your race, each hiding under the armor of a man’s body. Maybe that’s why you are all without pack or tribe.”

  He seemed to consider this for a moment, and crouched again over Gévaudan’s body. “Gévaudan told me you want to kill the child in you.”

  “I don’t believe he would tell you such a thing.”

  “Don’t presume to know our ways simply because Gévaudan allowed you to ride on the back of his second self. Even as we gouge the flesh from each other’s bones, our blood speaks when spilled.”

  Fenrir plunged his fingers into one of Gévaudan’s wounds. Gévaudan convulsed but made no sound.

  “Stop that!” I shouted, pointing my blade toward Fenrir’s face. He ignored the metal poised inches from his face, and pulled his glistening fingers from the wound to examine them. “It is not common for us to eat each other. But what is it, between two traitors among the tribes, to break just one more tenet?” Fenrir reached under Gévaudan’s torso and picked him up, cradling him like a dying brother in his arms. The puddles underneath them sloshed and rippled. Fenrir leaned close to Gévaudan’s bloodied face, his neck, like a holy man embracing a sick one to kiss his forehead.

  Eyes on me and my weapon, Fenrir bit into the flesh of his friend’s neck. I heard the sound of his teeth pierce skin with a squelch.

  “Don’t,” I pleaded, lowering my blade. “Don’t do that. What do you want?” I couldn’t hope to do battle with this feral thing. I knew I didn’t stand a chance.

  Fenrir looked up, stared at me like some repugnant dog.

  “Do you love him?” he asked, his face a mask devoid of hope or happiness.

  “What is it with you two and love?” I shouted, the echoes bursting through the crumbled chasms of the city. I got on my knees next to this false man, not caring that my legs were steeped in cold blood and mud. “You rage against it constantly, but think of nothing else in the human world. I don’t love anyone on this earth but my dead mother. Is that good enough for you?” I asked.

  “Then why should I not kill him right now?” he asked, slack lips dripping.

  “Allah damn you to hell, Fen-eer. He has trusted me, and I him. In ways no one else has since my mother died. I will not leave him for dead. Whatever he may have planned, he resisted it against all the manifestations of his instinct. I will respect that. I have nothing left.”

  Fenrir sighed, his heavy breath a coil of smoke in the air. “I could spare his life, but how do I know you won’t do something to my child later?”

  “It’s my child, too, you son of a bitch,” I said. I know it seems strange and sudden that I would say that, having described how I didn’t want the child, but I did say it. The words jumped out of my mouth as if they were a living thing, or an exclamation spoken by none other than the creature growing in me, or by the sinews and spaces of my own body. I shook my head, and held the handle of my blade in both hands. I turned the point of it to rest between my navel and my crotch, against my womb. My body woke with an invisible fire, raising every last hair on my skin. The point felt clean and sharp against my belly, even though the knife was blunt and tarnished. Fenrir’s eyes widened, shoulders snapping tight like ropes.

  “Only my child,” I said. “Mine. You lost your claim as a father when you forced yourself on me. This child deserved the love of a kind and gentle man, a true father. It deserved a mother that wanted it. You woke it before its time and gave it the life of a bastard-child, in a world that you yourself have observed is full of bastard-begetting men, who brand their own children outcasts after fathering them with women they spit on and call whore after raping them.”

  “I can be kind and gentle, just as any human man can be savage and cruel,” Fenrir said, his fingers clenching, twitching around Gévaudan’s body as if to demonstrate his capacity for affection. For the first time, his voice wavered. “If you had let me, I would have stayed by your side and learned the love that you say belongs only to a human father.”

  I clenched and unclenched my hands
around the handle of the knife, mimicking his fingers. I pushed lightly against myself with the blade, the pinpoint flaring with pain as it opened skin, freeing a tiny bead of blood. Fenrir sniffed sharply, smelling this new wound.

  “As you said, Fen-eer, I shouldn’t presume to know the ways of your kind. But I know the ways of my own kind, and I know that any man who rapes a woman is unfit to be a father by my side, even if he is capable of kindness.”

  Panic in his eyes, Fenrir let Gévaudan’s body slide out of his arms, putting him gently on the ground. “If you will spare your child’s life, I will spare Gévaudan’s. I swear to you,” he said. Your child.

  I removed the point of my blade from my skin. It left a small burning, a pinhead of pain. I sheathed the knife and nodded.

  “Do you promise?” he asked, voice low with fear. His one creation, inside me.

  “I do,” I said, and I reached out against my disgust and touched Fenrir’s face, let my palm and fingers rest gentle against his jaw and wet cheek because I knew how much this would hurt him. He sat petrified as I did this. I let my hand rest there a moment, absorbing the raging heat under his skin, and I let it fall away.

  We sat on the ground, the two of us, our fallen companion between us.

  “You have hurt him badly. You can’t leave him like this. He saved your life, Fen-eer. Have you so quickly forgotten that? He killed for you.”

  “That is our way,” he said, voice different, lower. He made no eye contact as he looked at Gévaudan, removing the clotted hair from his opponent’s forehead. “He has written no poetry, painted no grand pictures, made no promises, built no palaces. He’s as much an impostor as I am. I am grateful for what he did, but I don’t want his love.”

  “You want mine.”

  He didn’t answer for a moment. “Yes.”

  “You’ll never have it. You will never know the love of a human.”