The Devourers (16 page)

“I think you're mistaken, holy man. I've no interest in portents,” I said.

He smiled under his graying beard, waving away flies, and he said,

“It was not my dream, but one given to me by a wild white man.”

I felt a chill run through me. Fenrir. It had to be. Gévaudan was on the right trail after all.

“He came to us last night when we lit our fire, his eyes aflood with tears, speaking our language as if he'd spent all his life in these lands,” the dervish went on, a rhythm to his slurred words, as if he were reciting poetry.

“He called himself Mangy Dog, an odd name, but well suited to him. Perhaps that was meant to be a joke. I laughed, I don't know if my brothers did,” the dervish said, looking around. The others were looking at him, listening, but too far gone into their stupor to join in. Or they didn't care to. One of them snored softly. The dervish went on, ignoring the lack of response from his companions. “He wasn't a funny man, despite his funny name. Not at all. There are not many things that will frighten me easily at this age, with my brothers at my side and food in my belly. But this man did. That Mangy Dog gave us all a dream, a dream wrapped in a story of his lost love who spurned him. He showed us her face in this vision, and the face he showed us was the face of a Mughal woman.” He pointed at me again. “Your face.”

“Well. I. Thank you, for telling me that.”

He nodded, scratching his beard. “Yes. Sister, I don't know why you are traveling with that boy over there, but he wears the same look as that Mangy Dog. I give no portents, only advice. You should leave these white folk behind. They are wild and not of this world, a different evil from the traders in their companies. I do not think the man who calls himself Mangy Dog has taken well to being spurned by you, if that is indeed the true tale, and I do not think that white boy you travel with can save you from him.”

“I don't know who you met, and I don't think it was me you saw in your dream, but thank you. For the caution,” I said. The dervish watched with glazed eyes as I backed away. I turned and saw him raise a hand to his forehead in farewell.

As I walked away, he went back to his perch under the tree.

“Beware the Mangy Dog,” he called out in his singsong way, and leaned against the trunk to return to his afternoon doze.

I quickly went back to the road where Gévaudan stood in wait. He was still staring intently at the dervishes. “Fenrir and his stories. Always telling stories,” he muttered. He shook his head and walked ahead.

“You heard all that?”

“Of course I heard. And I've heard that so-called story he told those drunkards.”

“They're not drunkards. They're holy men.”

“I don't care what the fuck they are. Fenrir already told me his sick story about how he worships you, right before we parted. And now he tells it to every half-wit khrissal on the road he walks. He is not a man, has he forgotten that he is not a
man,
to behave like one with no shame, like a common fool husband spurned by a harlot wife? To give himself the totem of a creature as lowly as a sick dog.” He spit his words, drool sliding down his chin. I saw his fist clenching and unclenching, inches away from his sheathed knife.

“Why are you getting so angry?” I asked.

“I'm going to kill those men,” he said calmly, not bothering to wipe his chin. “To save his dignity, and yours.”

“No,” I breathed, swallowing hard. “Please no. I beg you, don't. My dignity is mine alone to save.” I didn't mention Fenrir's dignity, nor whose duty it was to save.

Gévaudan looked at me for what seemed an eternity, his panting slowly dying down. Abruptly, he walked on. I could hear each step as he drove his boots into the ground to raise a trail of dust behind him. My heart a drum to accompany his steps, I followed. The dervishes began singing a sleepy song that drifted behind us like a lonesome bird.

—

When among the long shadows of late afternoon we saw a group of women carrying heavy pitchers of water from well to village, their arms thick and feet caked with damp dust from treading on the spilled droplets of their burden, I wondered if Gévaudan's leering gaze as they passed us by held any hint of carnal desire, or whether it was pure hunger. The women didn't cease their loud singing, and ignored us as they tramped past. I watched them pass as well, envious of their simple lives, though I knew nothing of them.

—

When in the droning air of red evening we saw a falconer traipsing by the road, ringed by a variety of colored birds seated upon the hoop hanging around his shoulders, calming them with song from the flute at his lips, I wondered if I was like those birds, soothed by an invisible song, following an inscrutable being that might well barter me off to another even worse, or devour me. The falconer passed us by, trailing the nervous flutter of brittle wings.

*
Ground cannabis, usually in a drink made with sour milk.

T
he day died like fire in the leaves. Gévaudan looked up at the sound of a howl in the distance, squinting at the sky as if it were parchment burned dark by a sun gone out, the stars emerging like the leftover embers of scorched letters. He said nothing, and if he read anything in the stars he didn't say. I couldn't tell what animal made that distant, sad sound, which made me sure what it was.

Gévaudan stared at the moon, wiping his face. His smell was strong, sweet like ripening fruit, making me hock up the snot from my nose. The howl came again, and I didn't know whether it was closer but it felt so. “It's time,” Gévaudan said, grabbing my arm and pulling me off the road toward a field of scraggly winter millet through the trees. The stalks were silver under a moon cut in half by the night sky, right along the middle like a sliced cantaloupe.

I hissed at him, pulling my arm away. We stumbled into the feathery stalks of millet. After a day numbed by wonderment, I felt terror claw its way back into my chest. “Time for what?” I snapped at him, panting, head heavy and stuffed.

“To move faster. You must get on my back.”

“You want me to ride upon the back of your second self. Again?” He wiped his face again, slender fingers catching in his long hair.

He looked to the dark of the forests bordering the field. “Perhaps it would be easier. For me, and for you. If you were better acquainted with it. In my wildest dreams I wouldn't have thought it possible, but you seemed strangely at ease in its presence. It might lessen the danger to your life if you continued to show it—show me—that.”

In my wildest dreams.
Such a familiar and mundane phrase, one I wouldn't expect from a creature living a dream. I found myself moved.

“We're in danger right now, aren't we? You've found Fen-eer. Or he's found us. That was him we just heard.”

“Yes,” he said, and spat. He explained no more, which didn't surprise me.

We weren't following Fenrir anymore. I was certain of it. I was witness to some strange dance of aggression that unfolded on the breeze, with neither player in sight of the other. No, there was only burning musk left under fallen leaves, piss on bark, a dead body uneaten and left by the road impaled—not the work of a nobleman but of Fenrir, of the Mangy Dog that roamed ahead of us, telling his stories.

Gévaudan started shrugging off his belongings. His fardels crashed to the ground like stones.

“Fuck all this. I've had enough of dragging the weight of twenty pointless lives around. I'll leave all this,” he said and looked straight into my eyes in the gloom. I clutched the edge of his heavy cloak, which had kept me warm for two days and still did so. “Listen to me. I need to let it out right now, Cyrah. It has met you once, and let you live. I don't know whether it'll spare you a second time.
Help
me keep you alive,” he said to me.

I was shocked by the strength of his words. Despite willfully bringing me into this ritual between him and Fenrir, swinging me between the two of them like a glittering bauble, he truly meant those words in that moment.

“What does it matter to you whether I live or die by your hand, or mauled by your second self? Just another meal,” I said, my voice strangely calm even as anticipation churned me sick. He walked close enough that I could smell his carrion breath, his fists crushing the stalks tickling our elbows. The sweet smell coming off him in waves, making me cough again.

“Fenrir has wronged me,” he said, grimacing. “He's made a fool of me. A pathetic thing, like—him. We were a pack, and he sundered us. We shared kill, we ate of the same men and women and children, bathed in their fluids, and shared the blessings of the ghost fires. We were bound, and still he sundered us. He has wronged you as well, as his prey. He should have killed you, not left you so, with…”

“With child,” I said. The howl came again from beyond the forest, sounding across the millet like a wind.

“Yes. It was a perverse act. If I deserve a chance to set things right with him, so do you.”

“Of course. And I'm to hop on the back of your second self so you can usher me like a morsel to your friend. So he can finish the hunt, instead of leaving me—so perversely—with child.” I touched my forehead lightly.

I wanted to keep backing away to the road, flee from this wild white man.

I wanted to embrace him, to greet what was waiting under Gévaudan's skin, climb onto its bristling, mountainous back again.

Where was there to flee? Only into moonlit dark, into the arms of the Mangy Dog.

“Please,” he said, shocking me with that word. “We've idled along this human road long enough. He's near. I'm weak in this shape. I need to emanate.”

“All right,” I said, feeling very tired, taken aback by how vulnerable he was, not bothering to deny my accusations. He seemed so forlorn, trying in some way to communicate with me, to bring the two of us closer, as incomprehensible as that was. And for what? It made my chest heavy. I couldn't understand myself, nor him, nor the world, at that moment. But it seemed he couldn't, either. I realized then how much he
wanted
me on the back of his second self. That it was forbidden, thrilling to him in a way fucking me was exciting to Fenrir. Some part of Gévaudan, of his second self, had been taken by surprise, had liked the feeling of a human being, of prey, small hands, legs, clinging to its back without fear. With trust.

I was tired. I wanted it, too, I knew I did.

“You must carry my clothes and my blade. The rest of my things I'll leave. None of it matters,” said Gévaudan.

I felt some regret at leaving behind all the meat in his fardels from the chital he'd—we'd—killed that morning, but I let it go. I couldn't eat anything right then anyway, hunger the last thing on my mind despite my stomach growling like a cub. I burst into coughing again because of the fever all over my limbs and lungs, the thickness in my head waiting to loosen. After the stillness of traveling with Gévaudan as human and human, there was a tensing in my arms and legs, my thighs and calves tightening at the memory of sharp fur and spines and clinging to something too fast to hold on to. I stopped myself from giddy laughter, I was so overwhelmed by what was happening. Finally, it was approaching—a reminder that magic was real, that the morning's ride through the mudflats and the river actually happened.

I watched Gévaudan strip. As if we were adulterers hiding among the millet, out for an illicit night of moonlit romance. I watched him just like I'd watched so many strangers, all men, strip in anticipation of my body. Like I'd watched Fenrir strip as he prepared to squirt his own idea of fate into me.

I told myself that Gévaudan was disrobing for
me,
that this being of raw magic was stripping down to its true self just for me. That I was the rider and keeper of what lived within his naked body. I saw again what looked like a young man leave himself utterly bare. And this time he looked to me like little else—a lean boy, healthy but so very vulnerable despite the fearsome bones and scars sewn into his skin. His skin milky with moonlight and sweat.

I wanted to go up to Gévaudan, hold his face in my hands and pull open those blushing cheeks, take out my blade and cut that skin off him to help free what hid beneath. He bared his teeth—a movement of his lips and face so familiar to me now—and shoved his clothes and boots and knife into one of his fardels. He handed me this bag of his possessions. It was very heavy, and the straps hurt against my shoulders. Gévaudan took a rope from the thrown fardels at his feet, uncoiled it in haste, and wrapped it around his neck.

I wondered if he was about to throttle himself in front of me, full as these shape-changers' lives were with strange ritual. Though honestly, I think humans are no less bound.

He slipped his fingers under the noose he had tied, testing it. He then threw the rope to me. I caught it instinctively.

“The knot is loose,” said Gévaudan. “When I emanate, the noose will widen but hold. Let the rope guide you to my second self. When you are upon its back, tighten the rope and don't let go. The rope will help you stay on. Tie it around your waist, so we're—” He seemed to lose his breath, wiping his mouth.
So we're bound.

I looked at the rope in my hands, pale under the moonlight.

A leash,
I didn't say. “Thank you,” I said. I tied the rope around my waist with both hands as he walked away, letting the coils fall beneath the stalks and disappear. An umbilicus also, I thought, seeing the rough hemp trail away right below my navel.

Gévaudan stood in the millet rubbing his genitals, the rope hanging from his neck. I should have felt horror at this sight. But wearing this man's possessions on my back, having seen this once before, I knew it wasn't a desire for my body that heated his blood and stiffened his cock. It was a desire for emanation, for his second self, for what was about to happen. But despite the glow in his eyes, he was scared like he hadn't been when he changed this morning.

And there was also the rope around his neck, in my sweaty palms, around my hips.

“The blindfold,” he said.

The ritual was little different from the first time—the blindfolding, the cutting of my arm, the wait. The rebirth—the tapestry of the universe itself torn and woven again twenty paces from me. The rope whipped through my grasp as the noose expanded.

My blood against the stalks, an offering taken rustling, serpent-tongue licking my arm.

The smell of the thing filled my lungs and cleared my heavy head, banishing the trembling in my limbs. So overwhelming it made me gag, flushed me with new energy, new spit in my mouth.

Somewhere, Fenrir answered the newborn—reborn—creature's roar with a lowing that stirred the earth and caught in the treetops, emptied them of birds awoken from their roosts. I only heard their wings from under the blindfold as they burst into the night sky. With the rope in my hands I climbed on my companion's second self, carrying my belongings and the belongings of its first self. Feeling for the rocky blades of its spine under hide and mane, I straddled that ridge and pulled hard on the rope to leash this mighty djinn to my hands. An illusion, perhaps—but a powerful one.

The djinn that lived in Gévaudan didn't maul me. It didn't devour me. For the second time it accepted me as its passenger, its rider. One soul, upon two.

—

Cold wind hit my blindfolded face, pushing out tears that dried quickly on my cheeks. There was nothing like that release, and it was only after I had it again that I knew how much I craved it. Darkness, yet freedom from everything, from life, from the growing child in my belly, from thought and worry. It was a waking dream, like flying across the earth as I did in my sleep. So freed that I couldn't think of anything but the wind against me, the animal miracle holding my body up—a blessing. The fur underneath the only thing keeping me tethered to my real, easily broken flesh. A cloak of insects followed us, caught in the thundering djinn's fur. Their wings and legs flickered all over me, tickling my skin and eyes and mouth. The rope taut in my hands and around my waist as I held on for life, my thighs locked and cramping against the shifting crags of sinew and spine, warmed by strange fire raging in the heart that pounded below me. I wished it would run even faster so that I'd fly off it like a bird and come crashing to the earth, the breath of my child-to-be driven from my body by the impact.

Always I was aware of the other presence behind us, so near that I wondered if the beast under me was running or being chased.

Yet on Gévaudan's heart-locked djinn I could feel little fear of what followed us, or anything, really. I let go of the rope and clung to the beast's back as if I were its offspring, clutching its thick mane with my hands and pushing my face and chest into sharp fur and muscle, not caring that my chafed palms were getting cut. With my fingers and toes in the tangle of its hide, the crags became warm earth, and the wind that swept over us felt like time slipping away from me.

Under that blindfold the fur in my fists became wild grass on a late-summer night, and next to me on the dewy earth was my mother sitting on her side, and above us were the same stars we rode under, Gévaudan's second self and I, but much clearer without winter's mist to fade them. I lay on a djinn, and I also lay on the ground on my belly, safe and warm, a small fire of twigs crackling next to us. My mother patiently held her blade to the flames till it glowed like a slice of orange peel. Squinting against the sparks, she dropped a bead of hashish on the blade and huffed the milky smoke that sprang out. Her eyes were amber in the glow. “Careful. And go easy, child,” she said, voice heavy as she exhaled and I leaned in. We shared the sweet smoke and let gobbets swim from our mouths to the night sky. Just the two of us on a little broken island of the past, hurtling across a river of time, carried on the back of the djinn that swam it. Somewhere else, the Bazigars we traveled with washed their hands and feet in a river of water, not time, performing ablutions after supper. My mother spit on the blade and drove it in the ground to cool. A tarnished but valued tool, bartered off a farmer for some of our food, to be carried by me if, when, she died. She had, as far as I knew, never used that old blade for violence.

“Hold on tight, Mama,” I said to her. “This ground, it's carried on the back of a great djinn who hides within a white man. It's running as it carries us on its back, years from this moment. It runs fast, very fast, so hold on tight.”

My mother's eyes rolled in pleasure as she leaned her head back, hair spilling out of her dupatta and falling to the ground. “You're stoned as a goat with a bellyful of ganja, sweetheart,” she said, her laughter coarse from the hot smoke. I nudged her arm lightly. Her skin was cool against my knuckles. “Shh. Goats have cooler heads than you or I. They don't get high from eating ganja trees,” I said, though I had no idea what goats did or didn't.

She looked at me and smiled. “Always took after Scheherazade, you. Night after night, finishing every story I told by yourself, outdoing the queen herself.”

“You're here,” I said.

She laughed as if I'd made a joke. “I'm here,” she said, taking my hand in her rough fingers and blowing on my knuckles. Her breath raised goose bumps on my hand. I stared at the little hairs blossoming under my mother's breath, until I remembered to grab hold of the grass so I wouldn't fall off the world.