The Devourers (6 page)

On the other side of the Indus, before I made this scroll:

By the shores of the Kabul, which flows into that other great river, we came across a group of shape-shifters in a dance around a bonfire. Sunset skirted the hills and turned the tree-clad slopes dark and blue, the shoulders of giants shrugging flame to the sky. We could smell the dancers across the water, their scent rising on the bonfire's heat. We breathed deep that breeze glimmering the air, breathed their tarry musk that raised our hackles even in our first selves.

In winter light we saw the dancers' faces gaunt but arms thick with wattles of pale fat hanging like loose raiment, their eyes black as oil when not lit by their second selves. They soon emanated their second selves uncaring of humans should they be anywhere near, uncaring of us, and in those mighty shapes they danced and shook the ground. Dust rose to curtain the falling sunlight, and the din of their dance sent watering rhinoceroses fleeing down the bank on their rocky hooves.

We watched as the soil of the river's bank ran wet with their blood—they had met to flay one another in their second selves, as some tribes do in the winters. They did this with their teeth and claws, forming a ring and tearing the hides from one another's backs and limbs for what seemed a long and painful time. Their lowing and growling hummed in our ears.

Once the flaying was done, they hung the bristling pennants of their skins on branches. Their pelts dripping above them, they feasted on the pile of human bodies they had danced around, to heal themselves when they changed back to their khrissal forms. From their scent, their ritual, we guessed that they were of the tribe of the vukodlaks. Though they were probably migrating east from the realms of the Ottoman sultan, it is not the Turks but the Slavic peoples who carry the stories their tribe favors. We were surprised to see them so far from their native lands. But the great migrations bring diverse tribes to different lands every passing century, and this one all the greater for the witch hunts that have plagued the western realms.

We observed the vukodlaks, ready to reveal our own second selves should theirs attack. Their skinned backs glistened in twilight as they turned the pile of corpses to bones and scraps, dark streams draining from the gutted bodies to the river. In the fire, the clothes of the men and women they had killed. At least a dozen khrissals tangled in death. I wondered how many villages and farms the vukodlaks had raided, or whether they had gathered the corpses by stealth, taking travelers off the road one by one and dragging them under the moon to this spot. In one village we passed, I remember a toothless farmer, lungs heavy with snot, telling us that his son and his wife had gone missing, and imploring us to help him. We ate of him soon after, I relieved to end his grief. My companions complained of his age. I insisted.

The vukodlaks noticed us three watching their ritual, but did nothing.

We kept our distance until they were done feeding. Their old skins had gathered crows and other birds that wheeled around them in the trees, mazed by the taste of something not quite of their world. By this time it had darkened to night, and the water fed a thin mist. In that firelit haze the vukodlaks shifted to their first selves.

They caked their bloody backs in poultices and walked on their shadows, away from the bonfire. Their white bellies swung full of human meat as they squatted on their thin legs, and their bony cheeks were flushed. We watched as they threw the bones of their prey in the river, their eyes shining on the other shore. Some watched us, too, their black, straight hair stroking the water when they squatted. Others took down their skins and hunched over them, and I saw smoke curl up from between their fingers, and flickers of light.

One waded across. His voice was deep and his chin hard though hairless, and he had small breasts whorled with tattoos. He had wrapped himself in a wet cloak, so I couldn't see between his legs. He called to us, speaking in amalgam. Gévaudan and Makedon ignored him, sitting in silence. I greeted him, separating from my companions. Like my companions and myself, he wore bones in his skin, but otherwise he looked nothing like those of us who travel among humans. His nails were grown long like claws, and bone splinters pierced the corners of his mouth to mimic the fangs of his second self. It is likely they keep to themselves, except when they hunt.

“Viking-eater,” he greeted me, and held out a bloody pelt, its fur wet and sleek, heavy with yellow fat that clung to the pink tissues of its underside. So thick and real, and yet. “A gift, because you watched our dance. It will return to anima. Burn it before it does. If you don't, I will know your scent as vile, and I will mark you for death. It is the pelt of my second self. Next I emanate, I am new, my second self, new.”

I took the gift and thanked him.

“A kveldulf of the Viking-eaters, a son of Lycaon, and a loup-garou,”
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he said, gesturing to me and my companions. “An odd trinity. Omen? I will ask for the blessing of the hags. Farewell.” With that, he, or she, left across the water to rejoin the rest. I was quite startled by the vukodlak's divination of all our tribal origins, since the three of us traveled dressed similarly, and kept our tattoos hidden. Perhaps they are good at such things.

I looked underneath the fur of the pelt and saw letters, words burned into the fat in amalgam:

In hinterland of Raska wanders

A boy with a cunt,

Hounded from home, now parents dead, this one revealed by love:

Branded abomination with bruise and burn,

Ugly with pain.

I watch, follow, eat whole this

Child, sweet.

Now I am abomination, their fear

Returned, I grow my nails and weigh my wattles with stone in skin, chisel my teeth

So they see their abomination

Better before I eat them in second self.

And so I am judged beautiful by pack hag.

It was, I think, the story of the human whose shape the vukodlak now wears as its first self. A fine gift indeed. I felt something, something strange, as I read these words etched into the sloughed fat and skin of a shape-shifter's second self. I felt an urge, to take a burning twig and sear my own words into it, to preserve that moment. I brought the gift to my companions, who scorned it, suspicious. They were fine with me burning it. I didn't show them the words beneath it. We made a fire and threw the pelt in. The fat bubbled away hissing and steaming, taking with it the words of the vukodlak burning in my eyes and casting tears to the ground. I found in this a freedom, to let a sorrow out and ache all over my body, because they could not see, Makedon and Gévaudan could not see, cannot see, their eyes burning as well. By the time the fire had died out, the pelt was gone, and only ashes remained in the charcoal.

Across the river, the hanging pelts had rotted to dust and cobwebs on the branches above the vukodlaks. These remnants they tore from the trees and threw in their fire, turning the flames to flashing white in the gloom. We moved on. It was growing to dawn.

Weeks later, a child, a dead infant, a dead mother.

And so, now: I write.

—

Gévaudan licks the knotted white string of scar that runs down the side of my face. The perfume of his boyish arousal when Makedon stripped came to me quick, and their combined musk, Makedon's lingering still, makes me ache to shift into my second self. The last time Gévaudan and I fucked, it was upon the bed of the Indus, our second selves silted yellow, reddening the water as fang and claw pierced holes in hide and mud.

It has been a while. The days when three of us courted on hunts, each to each. Rare are the days now when we drag the carcasses of man and woman in scented trails through desert and forest, through snow and mountain rock, bringing one or both companions to frenzy.

Perhaps it is simply that we have been too small a pack for too long.

“Not now,” I tell Gévaudan. He thrusts his hand between my thighs, but I grab his wrist, grinding the bones under his skin. His grimace turns to a smile, and he bares his blunt teeth at me, a pearl of spittle falling off his flushed lip. A blow to the neck sends him to the ground. The flesh is soft under the jaw and his cough guttural, but barely a breath is missed before he leaps on me again and pushes me down on my back, his hands on my throat, his mouth on mine, biting the tender of my lip. I ram my fingers into his side, and he springs back from me and staggers wincing. “Not now, Gévaudan,” I say, panting. He charges but I am faster, grabbing his attacking arm and pulling his body close so that my free fist hits his face, the crack of stone striking tree bark. Gévaudan tumbles to the soft ground. There is a familiar sharpness emanating from him, like old peaches.

He laughs and spits red strings into the soil. I am just exciting him, so I draw my Pesh-kabz, taken from the belt of a brave Pashtun we hunted when crossing the land of the Afghans. Gévaudan remembers the blade's bite, no doubt, for in that warrior's hand it had sliced a full five inches of his arm.

This message he takes, and sits licking those bloody lips. He is quiet. No curses, no protest. This makes me uneasy. Still, I sheathe the blade.

“I'm in no mood for it, that's all,” I tell him.

“Go back to your writing, then,” he growls. Suddenly I wonder whether he'll try to hurt me in my sleep, or challenge me later. “Might as well hang up your fucking pelt like those witch-faced vukodlaks and declare yourself a khrissal,” he adds.

“Gévaudan.” I shake my head. “You blame me for acting the khrissal. Yet you cross yourself, and show the signs of jealousy, like a human wed to a mate.”

“Because I've eaten many Christians, and many jealous husbands and wives. What's your excuse? Did you eat a poet while I wasn't looking?”

I smile. “Not everything humans write is poetry.”

“I'm a shape-shifter, not illiterate. I have read their books. As many as you have, I'm sure. Maybe more. The holy ones. The romances. The poems.”

“And what is your opinion on human literature, Gévaudan?”

“All the same. Litanies of arrogance.”

I nod, and laugh. But there remains a glamour of malevolence around him. He is not happy that our fight ended with no catharsis, one way or the other. I would be worried, but there are other things on my mind.

Now night lingers around me:

And I can only think of you in that courtyard, in the afternoon sun yesterday. And then I think of you by moonlight last night, so different. I am sick with fear, should Gévaudan or Makedon find what I'm writing. I take the lock of your hair on my necklace, press it to my mouth. I look at what I wrote after returning from the bazaars of Mumtazabad, after I first saw you. I barely thought of it at the time, but it is as a letter, to you. A letter that is also a lie, though it came so easily and so true. Such is the nefarious magic of this human art.

When I saw you, I did not wish you were not human, as I wrote then.

When I saw you, I saw also the face of that mother outside Lahore, her face gemmed with flies, the created life she'd held inside her wasted. I remembered the urge I had to kiss that corpse on its open mouth.

But it occurs to me that I have the answer to Makedon's question. I could never tell him that, but I do. You: hunted, uneaten, spared. You are the one I write for now. If this knowledge gladdens me, I cannot tell.

A hunt, yes. But it was not to devour.