The Devourers (15 page)

I
washed my wounds as best I could in the waters of the Yamuna. Every part of me ached. My neck hurt terribly. I lapped the icy water over the wounds I could reach, rubbing them clear of grime. I didn't want to take off my clothes for fear of Gévaudan seeing me naked, and I couldn't bathe with them on because it was too cold, though I was already soaked from before. So I washed with care, reaching under my clothes and rubbing the slashes on my thighs and calves where I had sat on the beast, on my hands and arms where I had clung to it, the bleeding cuts on my head where branches had struck me.

I was still shaking, as I now realize I was wont to do often in those days of discovery. I felt drunk and high, as if I'd swilled an entire pitcher of bhang.
^*
Gévaudan was making a fire for the glistening red swaths of meat that lay on the ground, painted with dirt and grit. From the fringes of golden-brown fur with white spots still visible on the pelt, it looked like the prey had been a chital. I assumed the beast had carried the animal in its mouth after the kill, when it brought me back to the place where we had left our belongings. The smell of Gévaudan's piss still hung in the air.

I wanted to thank him, but decided not to. I couldn't tell what he might construe from such a gesture. It was strange to be back in his presence, rather than that of the beast I rode along the Yamuna. Yet I couldn't stop smiling like the little girl he always called me, so I kept my face away from him, watching the cranes dip their long white necks in the river on the other side.

“I have never done that,” he said. The flames snapped to life, looking weak in the bright morning sunlight. We hadn't said a word to each other since I had removed the blindfold and seen only Gévaudan, not the thing that had carried me through forest and riverside.

I kept smiling to myself.

“Shown a human, that is. Shown a human my second self, and left that human still alive, or still human. You should be well and dead, lying here by this fire instead of this deer.”

I wondered again if I should thank him, and thought again, no.

“I saw nothing, Jevah-dan. Do not worry yourself.”

He drove one of the ragged chunks of meat onto a spit he had fashioned from some branches hacked off a sal. There was a sizzle of sparks as the flames met wood and flesh, and blood steamed in the heat.

“You're…clever. Yes. A clever one,” he said, staring into the fire. His hair dripped water, coiling again as the flames began to dry it. I felt a thrill of delight at this compliment.

“You can bathe, if you wish. I will look away,” he said, as if he had read my mind.

“No. I can't do that, not in front of you.”

“Then come and dry yourself by the fire. You're shivering.”

I did, because I was very cold. I wrapped the damp cloak around myself and huddled close to the fire, which was growing as it fed on the pile of brush and branches. The meat began to darken. Gévaudan tore into the other raw piece with his teeth.

He looked as shaken as I was, his eyes not meeting mine.

“Are you all right?” I asked him.

“Yes.”

“Were you afraid, to show your second self?”

“No. But it wasn't something I've done before. It took great will…”

“What did?”

He hesitated. “To keep from tearing you apart.”

“But it didn't tear me apart.” He said nothing.

“I don't know about you, Jevah-dan of France. But your second self, it is a wild and wondrous thing. And I sensed in it a purity—no, an honesty—that I have never seen before in any man or woman. I am glad to have been in its company,” I told him through chattering teeth.

He might have been offended by the way I phrased this, but if he was he showed no sign of it. He looked happier than I had seen him until then, his shoulders rising in pride and his brows creasing in a frown to cover his joy. He said nothing. At no point did he look more like a boy than at that moment, despite his size and formidable pelts. He glanced at me and obviously noticed me shivering.

“You will catch a chill. Humans are frail, in that way.”

“Does your kind not feel cold, then?” I asked, sniffling at the river water and snot dribbling from my nose.

“Oh, we do. In the depths of a northern winter, perhaps, hunting during a blizzard with not a stitch on us. Then we may feel a slight chill cut us.”

“What's a bliz-urd?”

He got up, and walked to me. His smell was different, placid in a way it had not been before—perhaps it was the Yamuna on him. I gasped as he sat down and pulled me to him, wrapping his arms around my shoulders. It was much warmer in his embrace, if it can be called that. I thought I would protest, but I didn't. Without recourse to taking off my wet clothes as they chilled me to the bone in the winter air, I let him warm me with the unnatural heat of his body.

“Jevah-dan,” I said.

“Yes?” His voice hummed through me.

“If you try anything, I'll stab you. I found my blade on the ground where I dropped it.” The chattering of my teeth was lessening, but still there.

“I know. If you weren't ready to stab me, I wouldn't be doing this.” His voice was tight and subdued. Perhaps it was with disgust? Not quite. But it was clear that he wasn't comfortable being so close to me, not in this shape, anyway. Nor I him.

The meat lay on the ground uneaten, and on the spit, also uneaten, fat oozing off it like yellow tears, sputtering as they landed in the fire. The Yamuna glistened as the sun rose higher. Gévaudan's heat spread through me in waves, lessening the clinging discomfort of my wet clothes, the itching wounds that covered me all over. I started in his embrace, on the verge of sleep.

“Jevah-dan. I recognized it. When it licked the wound.” Once again, he said nothing.

“I had a dream, last night, when you were gone to hunt. Something came and scratched my head.” The cut on my scalp from last night, forgotten amid the many others I had now, came alive at this mention, in my mind at least. “It licked the blood from the wound.”

There was only silence.

“Your second self. Its tongue felt familiar. It felt the same. It wasn't a dream.”

Still he said nothing. I felt drowsy.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

He grunted and took a deep breath. “I needed to taste you. You are prey. It's difficult to resist.” Something felt wrong about the way he said it. He wasn't lying, exactly, but he was still hiding something. I didn't think it was because he felt ashamed in any way about his intrusion while I slept.

“Is that why you made me cut my arm?”

He nodded. “My second self would have overcome any restraint on my part. It would have ripped you limb from limb, if it didn't see that you were willing to give something.”

I nodded, watching the cranes, their bright red heads mesmerizing as they bobbed up and down, their long legs sending ripples across the shallow waters where they waded. Closer to us, at the fringe of the forest, I could see the ghost shapes of jackals as they crackled through the undergrowth, tempted by the smell of the meat lying in the open. Occasionally I'd see a small pink mouth open in a hiss of aggression, ringed with needle-like white teeth. They never came close, though. I knew they wouldn't, not with Gévaudan around.

“What did you taste? In my blood,” I asked him, drowsy.

He moved against me, taking a large breath. I felt it leave him in a soft growl. “You are with child.”

I sat up, my heavy lids snapping open.

“What?”

“You heard.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure, yes.”

“What is quite sure? What do you mean? Are you sure or not?”

“I am sure.”

I closed my eyes and clenched my jaw. I thought of what had happened to me this past day, thought of how nothing could ever be the same. Thought of how this child in me was insignificant compared with that. But I couldn't make it so. I'd kept the hope alive that Fenrir's seed might have lain fallow in me. And now that hope was gone. My new companion's word was hardly the certainty of a bump against my belly, but after that morning, I trusted that Gévaudan was telling the truth, that he could taste the alchemy of a new life in my blood. Still, I tried to make my peace with it at that moment. I am sorry that you must see how painful the thought of your conception was to me, but I must be truthful, or not tell this story at all.

“Allah damn that fucking bastard to hell,” I whispered.

Gévaudan nodded, something inside him shifting. “You want Fenrir to take it back. To destroy it, somehow.”

I said nothing.

“He can perform that task for you no better than any human being can with the basest of tools. No better than I could, for that matter, if you had the courage to ask me instead. But I can't, nor can he. There is no power in our kind to take back the planting of one's seed in the womb.”

I felt on the verge of spilling tears onto my cheeks, Gévaudan, the river and forest around us blurring. I don't think I actually cried. I don't even remember how hopeful I was at that point that Fenrir could somehow take back what he had done to me. After what I'd just witnessed with Gévaudan—was it that impossible to hope for such a thing? When my rapist was a creature of myth, given to changing shape at will and imparting visions? It hit hard to hear Gévaudan make certain my helplessness, and even harder because he could see what I wanted from Fenrir.

“I am sorry,” he said, and I had to breathe hard to keep the tears back, pushing his warm body away from me. It felt so very wrong to hear Gévaudan say those words, strange and hurtful. I nodded, a silent laugh behind my lips.

“Why? Why are you sorry, Jevah-dan?”

Gévaudan said nothing, the knot of his jaw jumping.

“That's right. Don't tell me you're sorry. You don't know what that is, really. To be sorry for something. At least, I don't think you do, nor do any of your kind. Except maybe Fen-eer. I think he has learned.”

He turned away from me.

“I will teach him, if he hasn't,” I said. “I will teach him. I will make him more sorry still.” How I planned to do this, of course, remained completely unclear to me.

Gévaudan nodded, realizing that I was telling him that I wasn't going anywhere, that this was the course I had taken, and that this was the one I would stay faithful to until we found Fenrir. I couldn't tell what he was thinking. Perhaps he found it amusing that I, a young human woman, thought I could make a being like Fenrir sorry for anything. Or perhaps he wasn't surprised at all, having seen with his own eyes that Fenrir was capable of remorse, or at least some mimicry of it. Or perhaps he remained silent because he thought that Fenrir's time for remorse was long over. That the next time we met him, we would find only wrath.

“You're still shivering,” he said, and put his arms around me again. I didn't push him away, though every cord in my body tensed up.

I knew there
was
one way to destroy the child, that Fenrir himself had told me before he raped me. A being that changes shapes can bear no offspring. But Gévaudan was right. I didn't have the courage to ask him, nor to ask myself, truly. So I let him hold me, and dreamed of the great beast that lived within him, and of you, the little child that now lived within me.

Gévaudan held me and said nothing more, as if he were human.

—

It was late morning when we left the campsite by the river, emerging from the trees to travel on a well-worn road. Gévaudan had made quick work of what was left of the chital, cutting the pieces, salting them, and storing them in his fardels. I was warmer by then, if still snot-nosed and heavy-headed. My clothes were surprisingly dry, perhaps from Gévaudan's heat against me.

Walking along the road, we saw in the distance a cloud rising off the sunlit horizon like steam off a heated blade, dust pounded into the air by a nobleman's hunting party, the rumble of horses' hooves driving the bristling shapes of wild boars out of the groves and darting across the grasses, their yellow tusks flashing. And I could only think to myself how I'd ridden upon a steed like no other at dawn—a creature that fed on my kind as prey, just as those humans on their horses would butcher and eat the boars they ran their spears and swords through.

As we watched the hunting party in the distance, I turned to Gévaudan.

“Will you promise me something?” I asked.

“No,” he whispered, squinting into the sun, eyes set on the tangled shape of the hunting procession, banners twisting in the dust.

“Can I ask you something, then,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Can I ask that your second self kill no human being while we travel together.”

He spit on the ground and said to me: “My second self does only what it wills. No one commands it but I, and no one commands me but myself.”

I asked no more.

So we walked the roads of the empire, as white man and brown woman.

It wasn't long before we found the body of a man, naked and impaled through the chest, by the trodden dirt of the road. The sharpened branch run through him shimmered black with flies drinking bloody bark. I'd never seen such a thing by the roads, but had heard of the more cruel among lords and noblemen punishing criminals by impalement, and then displaying the bodies in public. I told Gévaudan so. He seemed especially interested in the gruesome sight, but I asked him if we could leave it behind with haste, and so we did.

When the sun rested at noon we passed a group of resting dervishes under the greened shade of a chinar tree, turbaned heads bobbing in a drugged stupor from drinking bhang, and I wondered whether I, too, had been drugged into a trance days long. I felt fevered, whether from the strangeness of these days or simply from catching a cold I couldn't say. The holy men basked in winter light falling through the leaves, their reddened eyes rolling to watch us pass them by, their fingers soiled from crushing the buds and leaves they put into their potions. I wanted to ask them:
Can you see this bone-white man walking beside me, dressed in pelts and hauling fardels? Can you see the thing he can become? Have you spied it at night, galloping across the land?
Gévaudan peered at them with hungry eyes, and the air sang with silence.

Then one of them called out to me, as if answering my thoughts. Startled, I went a little closer. He clambered up and came to the side of the road to meet me. The dervish raised a hand and said: “I've seen your face, in a dream.”