The Devourers

by Indra Das

  Fenrir ran his fingers through the grass and indigo flowers milling around him. He walked to his clothes and began putting them on, disregarding the blood that covered him from head to toe. I said nothing more, letting him dress in silence. For a moment, just a small moment, I felt sad for him.

  “A long time ago, before either you or Gévaudan was ever alive, I once came as near death as I’ve ever been,” he said, turning to me.

  “Not because of a fellow shape-shifter, but a human, wearing the skin of a wolf. He surprised me with his ferocity. His passion. I was much younger, my second self much less powerful, and I hadn’t eaten of a human being for weeks. I killed him, but I was left like Gévaudan here, laid waste. In one night I healed myself, by eating his body. It was the bond that I made with my prey that helped me survive. I saw the fiery anima within his soul, waiting to be freed. He would have made a fine shape-shifter. But he was dead, so I used that anima to heal my own selves. It was powerful enough that I molted overnight, and took his shape as my first self.”

  “I’m not going to kill myself for Gévaudan, if that’s what you’re saying,” I said.

  “Gévaudan has a powerful bond with you, one that he has never experienced with a human before. He was, after all, trying to become you, in a way. You shared yourself willingly. If you give him your blood, he’ll remember the taste.”

  “That’ll heal him?” I asked.

  “No. But it’ll help. I’ll do the rest.”

  —

  So I cut open my wrist once again, wincing at the bolts of pain it sent up my forearm, an old wound woken and given no purchase to heal. If it weren’t for Gévaudan’s spit, I expect it would have festered by then.

  Fenrir had dragged Gévaudan inside the shelter of the broken building where I’d slept during the duel. In the gloom, I lowered my arm to rasping Gévaudan, whose breath was weak and slow, tickling the fresh cut skin on my arm. But as if by instinct, his mouth closed around the bleeding slit, his body sucking for him even though he wasn’t awake. I gritted my teeth and refused to cry, though it hurt. Gévaudan himself looked like some prostrate red monster, his boyish face now grotesque and swollen. His plump lips were even more so now, bruised and blushed into fat leeches that embraced my wound. I could feel my blood leave my body in a surge, rushing into his to nourish his twinned souls. I felt very cold and very weak; I hadn’t eaten in more than a day now, and had been trapped in a stupor for most of that time. I swayed and watched Fenrir, shadowy black against the moonlit opening in the wall of the crumbling room we were in. He sat with a crude carved wooden bowl, emptying blood into it from his own wrist. My blood and his blood, to nourish both souls encased in Gévaudan’s broken form. He spat in the bowl, mingling the two fluids with his fingers. The white threads of spittle glittered in the moonlight pouring in behind him, diamond strings falling from his mouth. He placed the bowl at his feet when he was done, licking his wrist. He looked at me. I couldn’t see his expression, his face dark.

  “You are prey, and he is predator. And yet you let him drink the life from your own body, as if he were your child,” Fenrir said, his voice hoarse.

  “Don’t say that. Don’t say things like that,” I said through gritted teeth, feeling sick. My throat was dry. In the dim light, my head swimming, Gévaudan became just that: a giant infant by my side, wet and crimson and suckling at my wrist instead of at my breast, blood instead of milk, half dead but eagerly drawing from me, sprawled and helpless.

  “You will be a good mother,” said Fenrir.

  I swallowed to keep myself from throwing up, though there was nothing left in my stomach. I burped, and coughed as a retch escaped with it. I could feel sweat gluing my hair to my face and forehead, even though I was shivering with cold. I felt faint. I heard Fenrir get up and walk up to me. My neck prickled.

  His callused hand on my shoulder. He pulled me back, plucking my wrist from Gévaudan’s mouth. The wound burned as if it were a brand across my forearm.

  “That’s enough,” said Fenrir, and grasped my shoulders, helping me stand up. I realized I had almost passed out. “You can’t let that bleed out. You could die like that,” he said. I was so tired I let him lean down and lick my wrist, several times, his tongue sliding up and down my wound. I looked away, not wanting to see what pleasure he took from it. I felt him tie a piece of cloth around my forearm. “There,” he said. I staggered away from Fenrir, who bent down to Gévaudan and tilted the wooden bowl to his lips. I sat down on the weeds, which made a tangled carpet on the rough floor. With a slurping noise, the bowl emptied into Gévaudan, a single dark tear leaking from the corner of his mouth. Fenrir wiped it away with a thumb, leaving a pale smudge in his dark-stained face. He then loosened one of the fardels and unwrapped the salted pieces of dead men the two of them had carried with them. Taking a severed hand, Fenrir bit into it. I heard the little bones crunch loud between his teeth, and my body shook. I was so hungry, and yet so ill, listening to him bite into that dead hand. He chewed for a while and touched his mouth to Gévaudan’s, slipping the flesh into his defeated companion like a bird feeding its chick. In the dim of the room, it looked like a gentle kiss. But I heard the sticky sound of carrion passing between them, and heard Fenrir grunt soft and grind his lips against Gévaudan’s as he used his tongue to push the food down the throat. Chilled sweat dripped down my neck, pasted hair to my temples. Fenrir stopped, and slapped Gévaudan’s face—a meaty, thick thud instead of a sharp sound. I flinched at it. He slapped him again, held his chin and tilted Gévaudan’s head. I heard a low gurgle as Gévaudan swallowed. Fenrir picked up the severed hand again and plucked the thumb and forefinger off it with his teeth, like fruit from a bush. He began chewing again.

  I ran outside.

  The moon shone down bright on the dead city. The wild grass tickled my palms, and the flowery arms of the tall indigo plants trailed across my face, feathery and cool. I cried till I was on my knees shaking, watching piss flow away from between my legs in a little stream. If you asked me why I cried then, I couldn’t say. I felt so many things then that it seemed the only sane thing I could do. My grubby face streaming with tears, I walked the empty streets of Fatehpur Sikri as if it were my home. I climbed the stepped remnants of a ruin, scraping my knees bloody and not caring, opening old wounds left on my legs by the rough hide of Gévaudan’s second self, and I sat on top of a broken rooftop, looking over the fields and tangled gardens that had once been streets, looking beyond the city and to the land that I had lived in as a human for so long. A cold wind blew into me, drying my tears, but the caked cloak of Gévaudan kept me warm enough. I could see no lights anywhere for miles, and I felt like I was the only human left in the world.

  * * *

  * A possible etymological root of the word vampire, present in several Slavic languages.

  After the life I had led, I was not one given to dwelling within self-pity, or wandering and getting lost in ruins while weeping. Having pissed among the indigo and dried my tears entirely, I made my way back to our camp (I say “our camp” still, even though I had basically been their prisoner for two days). Gévaudan lay still, wrapped in the same shrouds that had been used to contain the dismembered corpses. Fenrir had made a small fire, over which he was roasting the carcasses of some small animals, obviously for me. Starving as I was, I ate quickly, not noticing whether or not they tasted any good.

  When I was done, I threw the little bones in the fire, and I admit, I asked Fenrir to turn me into a shape-shifter.

  “No,” he said, terrible and gentle, as he so often was. “It would kill the child. You made a promise.”

  “I have no obligations to fulfill promises to you, who’ve wronged me so terribly.”

  “You are not so callous, Cyrah. You made the promise for your child, and for Gévaudan, not for me. And I know you won’t break it. You don’t want to.”

  “Don’t tell me what I want. Again and again, men, shape-shifters, all of you, you cursed things, telling me what I want
and don’t want. Nothing about this is fair. How can I be expected to keep living my life as a human, as a woman, after everything I have seen since you and Jevah-dan strolled into Mumtazabad?”

  He shook his head.

  Even though it was impossible that early, I felt the life, the child in me. I felt you. I felt you kick from the inside, and a hum filled my head and tingled in my limbs as if a thousand insects had replaced my blood. I walked to where Gévaudan lay sleeping, and I tore two strips from the shrouds covering him. I tied the strips around my knuckles, tight as I could. I faced Fenrir, coming close, standing right over him.

  “I know you want to hurt me. I can see it in your eyes every time you look at me,” I said. He looked up at me, his face calm. Staring straight into my eyes with his, blue and gray.

  I struck him with the back of my hand across his scarred cheek, feeling for the first time since being raped the solidity of this creature’s flesh and bone. The sound of it was loud, shocking. He didn’t even blink as my knuckles glanced off his cheekbone, which felt like a knot of wood under the leather of his skin.

  “Hurt me,” I said.

  This time he looked down, averting his eyes. His hair fell, hanging over his forehead. I curled my hand into a fist, raised it, and hit his face. I saw him close his eyes before my knuckles smashed into him. It hurt, a lot, and I clenched my teeth at the thud. I grabbed my hand and breathed hard to push the pain down into myself. I saw the small blush on his cheek where my knuckles fell.

  “Hurt me like you want to, Fen-eer. Let that djinn monster out,” I said, lungs heaving though I wasn’t tired. I was filled with lightning, with heat, sick to my stomach. I swung my fist into his face again, into one of his eyes, yielding amid the hardness of his face. This time his head moved a little, and I heard a soft huff of breath.

  “Kill me. Tear my soul in two,” I said. Again he said nothing. He kept his eyes closed. He was a statue, a wooden, painted totem. I hit him again, with all the strength I had. I heard his nose snap under the weight of my fist, and I pulled back quickly and hit with the other, hissing through my teeth to ignore the jagged pain in my hands. Streams tumbled down the crags of his face, deepening the red of his already stained mouth, dripping off his chin.

  He said nothing, did nothing, breathing loud through his now broken nose. So I hit him again. And again. And again, again, till my fists could take no more pain, and I felt like I’d broken them. The rags I’d tied around my hands were wet. Fenrir’s face was awash in blood, his features swelling. I swept away tears of pain with my aching hands, stood over him and let the rhythm of air entering and leaving my body calm me.

  He opened his eyes. One of them had turned a dark and gleaming red around the pale gray of his iris, as if to mark him as a monster. He coughed just a little, a spurt of blackened snot and bloody spit falling from his mouth and nostrils.

  “I will not,” he said.

  I nodded slowly, wiping the sweat from my brow. Unwrapped my knuckles and looked at them. They looked swollen, and some had opened. I cared little about this. I stepped back, sat down a few feet away from Fenrir, light-headed.

  I shook my head. “I can’t do this. I don’t know how to live as a human woman anymore.”

  Fenrir breathed deep. He didn’t wipe his face, or even touch it. Red lines were crawling down his neck, little ruby beads falling off his chin. “I have something for you,” he said, his voice rough.

  I looked up. “Don’t you fucking get in my head. Don’t you dare get in my head and show me your visions. You don’t get to show me how to be a human woman.”

  “I’m sorry for that presumption. I’d thought, that night, that my memories would help heal the hurt I’d done, and help you want the child. I thought wrong, again. This is no vision I want to give you, though it also contains within it my memory.” He reached into one of his fardels and took out a tied bundle of brown parchment. It had writing on it.

  “This is an account of some of my travels from when we met. It’s for you,” he said.

  “I can’t read. And that looks like a very long account.”

  “You’ll find a way. Keep it with you. Stories are valuable.”

  I took the scroll, heavy and coarse to the touch, a little smudged with Fenrir’s recent bloody fingerprints. The words scrawled on the parchment were beautiful and curved, an intricate linking of symbols. Some of it was a language and symbols I’d never seen before. But as I unfolded the scroll, I saw that the language turned at some point into something more familiar—Arabic script, which I could recognize. Throughout the scroll, woven through the language, were tiny drawings, intricate miniatures of bodies and designs in motion, telling the story in between the words and letters. I know now, of course, that the part Fenrir wrote after he met me was written in Pashto so that I would be able to read it in my own language, if I ever learned to read it. I had never seen parchment like this before.

  It was a gorgeous thing, so splendid it made me feel miserable at that moment, so utterly miserable.

  “You wrote me a story.” I laughed, shaking my head. “You wrote me a damn story. You want so badly to become human again, Fen-eer. So why don’t you? Why don’t you just stay in your first shape and be human?” I asked.

  “You know why,” he said, his nose whistling. He raised a hand, held it. I winced at the crack as he pushed the broken bone back into place and sniffed sharply, spitting blood on the ground. “Nothing is as simple as it seems. Would you abandon all the raiment of civilization and society to live like an animal?” he asked, his face glistening like a mask of raw meat in the firelight.

  “I’ve wanted to, many times,” I said, rubbing my hands. Some of the knuckles were welling up, crying little tears of blood.

  “It’s not so easy, is it,” he said.

  We sat in silence.

  “I have ended a multitude of stories in the past few days, for no reason other than anger and jealousy,” he said. “I have wasted so many human lives, killing them without respect or thought, consuming neither their flesh nor souls, leaving their bodies to rot on a road, and their stories to evaporate into the void. But that one, that one inside you, it can survive this. It can survive this terrible mistake I’ve made.”

  I said nothing, but he didn’t press me further.

  —

  So Fenrir left. And there I was, human guardian of a fallen djinn. A djinn, or war-ulf, wih-ich, still alive because the one who defeated him wanted to show me he was capable of some aspect of humanity. For days I guarded Gévaudan’s body as it healed. He looked for all the world like a broken human, and not the beast that had planned to devour me and steal my shape, to use me as a key to unlocking the heart of the one he loved. But that was not the beast that I knew, the beast that I had ridden upon blind, the beast that could have easily destroyed me at any time but didn’t. It had chosen not to. He had chosen not to. And so I stayed by his side. I stayed, to honor that. I stayed, because I could not return to that teeming mass of humanity waiting below Fatehpur Sikri without Gévaudan as my companion, without some link to this new world I had walked into.

  There was an easier way, of course. I could jump off the high walls of Fatehpur and shatter my body and soul on the hillsides of Vindhya. But I had always had that option, and had always refused it. Now I had even less reason to take it. Why would I make myself food for worms when I could exchange my human life for another one—that of a djinn, an asura, a shape-changer, as fearsome and beautiful and unshackled as a tigress in the jungle? I could not imagine killing another human being, but I had faith that would change if I transcended humanity and became something else entirely, just as I’d always had faith that Allah exists in some way even though I couldn’t see him or feel his presence through the daily struggles of my life. I didn’t know whether I still believed this in the same way after everything I’d been through, but I believed in a god more than ever before.

  Gévaudan did recover, slowly but surely, whether because of Fenrir’s blood magic o
r simply because of his own resilience, I don’t know. I won’t tell you the first words we shared when he woke from his deep sleep of half death, because those are between he and me alone. But he spoke again, and walked again, and grew back the strength of both his souls, and soon we rode from that broken city and once again into the empire of Shah Jahan, into the world of men. Of humans, I should say. We did so as new beings both, I’m sure.

  —

  Eventually, I rode upon the back of Gévaudan’s second self again.

  Eventually, Gévaudan allowed me, human, khrissal, to look upon his second self without a blindfold. I did, and I survived.

  Just as Fenrir’s second self had been terrible like nothing in this world, Gévaudan’s was beautiful like nothing in this world.

  —

  But I should tell you of Fenrir’s departure, and of his last words to me.

  Before he left, I told him: “Fen-eer. Those things you said before, about my kind. That human men and women only war and rape. The worst thing about you is that you almost make me want to agree with you, with everything you say about my kind. But you’re not human. You’ve no right to say such things. I do. But I’ll never say those things. I am one woman. I am not all women. Do you hear me, you fucking, sad, sad thing? You bring out the bitterness in me, Fen-eer. You bring it out like a fountain. All you do is make me remember rape and agony and hatred, and forget every other moment in my entire life, in which I loved, in which I loved my dear mother and laughed with her and marveled at her courage, at how much she cared for me, in which I danced and told stories with the Bazigars, in which I listened to their songs under the stars, stoned off my ass on their hashish, listened to their throats and tongues just make music like nothing else on this earth and I cried with happiness and not hatred and sorrow and fear. I’ve never loved a man in my life, but I’m not fool enough to think that there are no men and women in this world who truly love each other, and love their children together, and did not conceive them through violence and pain. I will not be your human idol, your little goddess of suffering. I am not all human women, Fen-eer, and you’d do well to remember that while you devour and rape and preach and lament that humans will never love you. You—you are what all women fear in this world. This is why I am here by your companion’s side, and not yours.”