The Devourers (10 page)

I
n Mumtazabad I first saw him, that rapist, that coward monster, that filthy dog-man, that self-pitying deceiver, your father.
^*

His Pashto was flawless, and that wasn't even the start of it. I had never come across foreigners who seemed so utterly foreign before. Three white men (though one of them was brown enough to pass for one of Shah Jahan's subjects) walking through the caravanserai so casually, like wolves stalking through a den of tigers without a care in the world, was something to see. We had seen white men in the town before, more in Mumtazabad and Akbarabad than anywhere else I'd been in the empire, but certainly none of them had looked or walked like these three (who walked alone, instead of with the vast retinues that white folk usually had following them everywhere).

The courtyard of the caravanserai was cleaner than the streets outside—but there was still foot-stirred dust to clog the nostrils, and pats of camel shit simmering in the sun, and squirts of piss left on the walls by dogs and mischievous children with full bladders. And yet I could smell them from twenty feet away, your father and his companions, as they strolled in behind the camels of a merchant.

Your father was the one who lingered in the courtyard when his two fellows disappeared inside to bathe or rest. He was the one who came up to me, without a word, sniffing as if taking in the rank air he carried with him like an invisible cloak.

He was an ugly man: huge and covered in the crudest clothes I had ever seen, stitched from animal pelts, leather, and some kind of coarse cloth. Necklaces of trinkets and bones, some brown with age and others white and fresh as ivory, hung from him and sang a constant clicking song. Slung from his back were great fardels, swollen with weight and carrying who-knows-what, the kind you would expect hung from between the humps of a camel or on the back of a mule, not hanging off a man. The hair that covered his great head was knotted with dirt, braided into thick coils like dusty snakes—it might have once been the wheat gold of those men from the far northern reaches of Europe, but was now a copper brown. His face was monstrous, one eye blue, the other gray and speared by a thick scar that ran from socket to corner of lip, skin the ruddy leather of a white man gone too long under the sun.

He was like no man I'd ever seen, really. I couldn't tell where he was from, or what his calling was. I guessed that he was some northern tribal man from the mountains or that far Arctic land some wanderers call the Rus, or a traveler from one of the European settlements on either shore of Hindustan, now come to see the great tomb that was being built for Shah Jahan's dead wife.

When I began to cool in his shadow, and it became clear his eyes were not simply passing me by, I asked him what he wanted in Pashto, just to see if he would talk to me in some clumsy language from Europe. Not that I could have asked him in very many other languages, as I spoke only a few.

“As a foreigner, I want to talk to one who isn't foreign to this land,” were the first words he said to me, answering my question. I remember them so clearly because the last thing I expected him to do was speak Pashto, let alone Pashto so clear the words poured from his mouth like springwater.

I admit, right then, I was enchanted. Not in love, or in lust. But I couldn't have turned away from him even if I had wanted do. So I let him talk to me, and gave him a lock of my hair for a few coins from Europe.

Trading words with him had a strange magic that I'd never felt before, because he gave no regard to custom. I spoke with him in ways I wouldn't dare in any moment outside of that one, as a commoner and an unwed woman, a woman with no family or harem to fall back on. It didn't matter who I was talking to, foreign or not, woman or man. I just wouldn't, the way I did with him.

I felt like a woman from another time, another world.

It was this that kept me from taking my leave of this smelly, ugly man, that led me to accept his strange and unclean request, even though I regretted that the moment I did it. Still, I was definitely grateful for his blasphemously unconventional company. I should have left Mumtazabad right then and there, ran and not come back, but then I wouldn't be writing this for you, and should I regret that? I don't know.

The white man dressed like a beast came to me that night in the caravanserai, and he raped me. Though he was far from pleasing to my eye, I would have fucked him if he'd asked and given me some money for the favor. That is how I often paid my way in life, after all, and I'm not ashamed to say it, though most asking for such favors do so in a most shameful manner, and mistake the favor for ownership. But this one didn't ask, instead getting between my legs by the most convoluted conversation I've ever had. He took what he wanted, with no regard for my opinion on the matter.

Anyway, if I can say one good thing about him, it is that he promised not to hurt me that night, and he didn't. Not in body, anyway. He was as gentle as a virgin boy, and as clumsy and unsure as one, too, though he loomed like a giant above me, and I nearly drowned in the stinking drizzle of his copious sweat. If you ever venture into the world of men, they will sometimes tell you that some women all but ask to be raped, that women complain to make the lives of the opposite sex hard, that it is all just a game to drive men crazy. I'm your mother, and I can swear to you on your life and mine that I found nothing but fear and regret on the night of your conception. As ever, I say this not to hurt you but to make of you something more than your father.

He talked a lot. I can't even remember most of the many things he said to me as he fucked me, but they were the ramblings of a madman. Or so I thought at the time. Brevity and clarity weren't his best talents. Though considering the circumstances, he could have been the best storyteller in the world and I'd still have hated every word. He told me about a Grecian king who was turned into a wolf a long time ago by some god or the other, and he told me about his tribe and how they don't think of themselves as humans, and how they have two selves and kidnap babies and are forbidden to bear children, and he even cried a bit. He did catch my attention when he said there were others like him who called themselves djinns, a word I grew up with, listening to folktales told to me by my mother. It felt awful to hear that familiar word, which reminded me so of happier times, in that situation, coming from the mouth of a man about to violate me.

Mostly, he made a big show of wanting to conceive a child, because his people couldn't create.

I thought he was a broken man, but I felt no pity whatsoever. If he'd told me such stories in the courtyard where we met, I'd have thought him curious—a giant child. But there in that cramped stall, demanding my body, he was a scared animal. A huge, strong, desperate animal. I'd have screamed or tried to fight harder, if I didn't think he was capable of snapping my neck like a twig before I could spend half the breath in my lungs.

He looked like he had nothing left to lose, and everything to gain by claiming me as his prize.

—

When he finished, he was wise enough not to lie by my side, instead getting off me and gathering his clothes. I could feel what he'd left of himself inside me, his seed like tallow down my thighs, hotter than that of any other man who'd ever been in my cunt. Though the taper was out, I saw the webbing of scars all across his naked back by the moonlight coming in through the curtains. I didn't get up, for fear of pushing him into some other action that I couldn't comprehend. I just lay still and waited for him to leave. He turned to me and for a moment I thought his eyes glowed green, the flicker of sunset on swamp water.

“You're upset. I am sorry,” he said.

“Are you?”

“I truly am.”

“Then why did you go ahead and fuck me?” I asked. My throat was trembling like a plucked string, much to my disgust. I cleared it, to steady my voice.

“I didn't expect that you would resist me so strongly,” he said.

“You thought I'd be pleased, then. Do you know nothing of being human?” I asked.

“No. Not much. It's been so long since I was human. And though I have many human lives within me, they all fade like dreams, as does their meaning. That's why I did this. To create. To be human. I thought you'd
want
to help me.”

He looked at me like the dumb brute he couldn't have been, not if he was able to talk to me with such ease in a language not his own. I shook my head.

“Do you want guilt from me now? Is that how this works in your tribe?” I said in a harsh whisper, just about remembering not to shout and wake the entire caravanserai.

“I have ways of glamouring humans into docility, methods that would have made you calmer prey, should I have wanted it. I didn't use them on you. Because I didn't want to think of you in the way I think of my normal prey. I never intended that.”

I laughed, truly amazed then. “What tricks could a white man of Europe possibly have over Muslims and Hindus, I wonder, to make an unwanted fuck something to be desired? How lucky the women there must be, to have such a privilege. And to be thought of as prey.”

I heard him take a big breath, his massive lungs sucking in a breeze that rattled in his throat like a terrible growl. “I'm not a man. Not as such, though it is one aspect of me. You don't seem to understand this. But how can I expect you to, without showing you? Regardless, I didn't mean to hurt you. That isn't why I came here tonight.”

“I've been raped before.” His head jerked up at the mention of rape, as if in surprise. Perhaps he was about to say something, but I didn't let him. “It's a risk I've long been familiar with, being a woman with no family, in a land ruled by men. Not everyone cares to pay for what they want. I managed to hurt two who tried to force themselves on me, and quickly left their company while they suffered. One I submitted to because he was much stronger than me and better armed. Three men, all different from one another. None of those worthless swine pretended to be sorry about what they were doing.”

“I'm not pretending, Cyrah.”

“Don't use my name.”

“As you wish. I thought wrong when I came here, I admit. I've often been wrong about humans. But if it makes you feel any better, you've done nothing tonight to lessen my respect for your kind.”

“That is cause for celebration.”

Perhaps he had the capacity to detect the irony in my voice, perhaps he didn't. But once again, he gave no evidence of either.

“What's your name? Or are you so cowardly that you won't let me have even that?”

“You. You can call me Fenrir.”

“Well, you should know something, Fen-eer,” I said, struggling to form this strange name between my lips. “Planting your seed and making new young doesn't make you any more human than a stray dog fucking a mangy bitch at the feet of the bazaar-goers.”

He didn't flinch, not that I could see, but then it was dark. I was afraid he might break his promise and hurt me, but I went on.

“It's not just your raiment that lends you the disposition of a beast. It's what you are.”

He actually laughed a little at that, or I thought he did. It sounded like the chuffling snort a caravan tiger gives to his trainer through the bars of his cage, to show affection. Despite the strangely friendly sound of it, for a moment I was afraid I'd gone too far, that I'd pushed him beyond his apparent shame and into some cruel amusement at me. That swaggering confidence he had shown that afternoon in the courtyard seemed to come back, just from that one exhalation. But then he just kept putting on his clothes and necklaces, and only said, “You don't know how right you are.”

“I really think I do. Go now, unless you would break your promise.”

Fully dressed in his fur raiment again, he stared at me. He stood with his back to the moonlight coming in from the parting in the curtains, as he'd done when he first came in. I imagine he considered at that moment whether he should break his promise. I imagine I was very close to death. I don't remember whether I realized this. But when he looked at me then I was once again as terrified as I'd been when he first parted the curtains.

“Listen,” he said, his voice low. “Think of a child sleeping in your lap a year from now, warm and real—a living, breathing creature born out of your body.” Though I was completely awake because of the fear coursing through me, as Fenrir said these words the stall around me seemed to dim and fade away, and my limbs felt heavy.

“You've not seen, as I have, a thousand upon thousand mothers holding their young to them by firelight as the howling nights closed in. It is that incandescent light kindled in the womb, this love between human mother and human child, that so often kept the darkness away from them, burning brighter than any flame. It kept the beast at bay. It kept—me, from them, from my prey, over and over again, when I hunted alone.”

Fenrir's eyes glowed like windows in the dark of some foreign landscape, where the winds of winters past blew cold against my skin. Against my will, I was pulled closer to those flickering windows until I saw within them clear by firelight those myriad mothers, holding their children close as the wind shuddered against their shelters. I realized I was seeing them as Fenrir had seen them, lurking hidden like the predator he was. Like dancing shadows they changed in the light, so that I saw many different mothers with their children. Women and children from places I'd never been to, dressed in clothes I'd never seen before. Some with pale skin, some dark. Some alone, some with families, men, other women, around them. Some terrified, some fierce; some holding weapons, some armed with nothing but fortitude; some huddled around campfires, others in tents, in huts, in houses.

“When you hold a child to you a year from now, and it is your offspring, perhaps you will forgive me,” came Fenrir's voice from somewhere far away.

I don't know when this vision ended and turned to a deep sleep, in which I dreamed of my own mother and wept in her arms. When I woke up, I was drenched in sweat, and Fenrir was gone. His vision, though, lingered stronger than any dream I'd ever had, a memory left fresh as if I'd truly walked across the centuries and seen those distant mothers and their sons and daughters.