The Devourers (20 page)

“I've no doubt about that, little khrissal. None at all.” He smiled then, as I knew he would.

*1
Caravan.

*2
Moonlit Plaza. One of the main thoroughfares of Shahjahanabad, and now of Old Delhi. The marketplace was established by Princess Jahanara, Shah Jahan's daughter.

W
e left Shahjahanabad at dawn with Courten's qafila, on camels bought from the Englishman. Before we left, Gévaudan told me something in the courtyard as he brought forward our steeds, his voice low.

“You might hear of this from someone else, so let it be known now. Courten told me that guards found a dead body some streets down from this caravanserai. A woman. Beheaded and torn open. Emptied of her guts, he said. He is suitably horrified.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I said.

“You know why, Cyrah,” he said, his eyes constantly flicking away from me. “Just more reason to keep moving. I didn't want you to hear it from someone else.”

I suddenly felt like forgoing breakfast. A dead body, close to the caravanserai, on streets we had been walking just last evening. This could well have been the work of Fenrir, but I didn't know what Gévaudan was doing after we returned, either. He still looked out of sorts, but better than the previous day. Perhaps he had been unable to resist his hunger. It was clear that Gévaudan was telling me so I wouldn't suspect him. If I heard it from someone else, it wouldn't do him any favors. I tried not to think about this too hard, sweat gathering under my dupatta.

With this ill omen to hound us, we set out.

It was a difficult trip from the start. The Englishman Courten constantly enlisted Gévaudan as a translator so that he could better mediate the constant squabbles between the cameleers, who were Muslim Baluchs, and the ox-drivers, who were Hindu Jats. It became clearer to me that Gévaudan's skill with languages was one of the reasons Courten had agreed to let us travel with his qafila
.
Out of the walls of Shahjahanabad, I looked constantly to the wilderness around us, expecting that great wolf, that mangy dog to be standing by a tree watching us. In the meanwhile, I remained wary of Gévaudan's clear discomfort.

—

In the evening, we came across a troupe of Bazigars. They entertained the qafila with their dancing, juggling, and acrobatics. I found out from Gévaudan that in Europe they have people much like the Bazigars, who call themselves Romani. I was delighted by the show, and filled with an abundance of memories that warmed me along with the fire. Though the men of our qafila leered at the dancing women, the Bazigars gyrated without fear of shame, as I'd once done when I, too, traveled with such a troupe. Their arms and faces shone like gold in the firelight from sweat running free down their skin, and their long hair danced with them, leaping around their heads. I saw Courten observing them like a hawk. From the clapping of the Bazigars' palms and the peals of their laughter, the thumping of their bare feet on the ground raising dust to thicken the light of the bonfire, I was moved almost to tears.

After the dancing was done, I went up to one of the Bazigars. She watched me walk up to her, brushing aside the long veil of her hair to get a better look at me. Her locks were so thick they made a waterfall, turning her for a quick second into a giant peering from behind parted water. Strands of silver caught the firelight as it fell into that darkness around her head.

“Hm,” she grunted, licking the red sheen of betel juice on her lips. “Not a Hindu, though you dress like one. Your eyes are too light,” she said in Hindawi.

I smiled. Such cheap declarations were their way, as they tended to tell fortunes as well. She was right, of course, though I'm sure light-eyed Hindus are not impossible creatures.

“Yes. I hail from the Khorasan, but this is my home.”

She shouted something in a dialect I didn't understand, startling me. But it was to one of the other Bazigars some distance away, a man with a long beard who was juggling some apples before stashing them into a sack. He said something back to her, and she laughed.

“Have you come to buy a basket?” she asked, going back to Hindawi.

“No. Just to—” I paused, looking at her hardened arms, the callused thickness of her hands as they danced around knots, tying baskets to her camel. “I don't know.” I thought of telling her I'd once traveled with Bazigars, but thought better of it. They have different clans and religions, after all. What did she care who I traveled with, once upon a time?

I looked around, wary. She frowned but said nothing, continuing to tie her knots and chew her betel. I reached under my shawl and into the pouch tied to my hip.

“For your troubles,” I said, and held four mohurs out in my palm, looking behind me to make sure no one was watching carefully.

Her thick eyebrows betrayed some surprise at the value of the coins, but she took them without hesitation and vanished them into her person. “I've no troubles that I know of,” she said with a smile, “that require others to pay me for them. But thank you. You're a sweet girl. I hope your rich white husband isn't as cruel a young fellow as he looks, or as barbaric as his clothes.”

To my surprise, she raised her hand and brushed her fingers across my cheek. I could feel her fingertips rough against my skin.

“You're welcome to come with us, you know. We offer our hospitality to anyone in need. If you have troubles unseen that can't be solved by these coins you carry, and dare to steal away into the night when no one's looking, we'll be on the road heading south, and in no haste.” I barely noticed myself touching my cheek where she had, and leaving my fingers there.

“You've no idea how much that means to me,” I said. “I'll remember that. And no, he's not even my husband. I made a choice to travel with him.”

She nodded. “Barely a minute known, and you're already a mystery. Good.”

“Farewell, and peace be with you,” I told her, and hurried away. I saw her smile and nod as she got on her steed. As the troupe left in the opposite direction as the caravan, I watched them with a leaden heart.

—

By the time the sun had set on the second day, one of the carts had already broken in two, and the entire qafila was uneasy from the distant, dreadful howling that had plagued us all night. Some of the workmen swore they also heard the guttural belching of a larger creature than a wolf or a jackal, and that a lion or a wandering tiger from the heartlands of Hindustan was stalking us. The more superstitious said the journey was cursed with a more supernatural hunter.

Courten cared little for any of these murmurs, having lost a cart. Several fardels of his saltpeter and indigo lay mired in the ground under a cold winter rain, turning the puddles blue with seepage, much to the Englishman's anger and dismay. I assumed he much regretted his decision to take a longer course so that he could see the abandoned imperial city of Fatehpur Sikri before turning east. The hired Jats and Baluchs salvaged what they could, pulling the extra fardels onto their oxen, their corded arms shining from rain and exertion under the lanterns. I watched Courten bark in broken Hindawi to the yeomen as they toiled, and watched the yeomen pay no regard to him. Soon enough, the Baluchs and the Jats were fighting again.

“What are they shouting about now?” I asked Gévaudan, pulling my cloak tighter around me, rainwater trickling past my cowl and dampening the shawl underneath.

“What?” Gévaudan mumbled, looking dazed.

“Never mind,” I said. I don't know why I asked, really. No, I do. It was because his anxiety had only increased since we left the gates of Shahjahanabad. He was always peering beyond the bustle of the caravan and into the distance, always sweating despite the cold, always brooding and silent. I just wanted him to speak, to relieve my own tension at seeing him this way.

“One of the camel drivers is missing,” Gévaudan said, as if finally hearing my question. “They suspect the Hindu ox-drivers of murdering him last night and leaving him somewhere beyond the road.”

“The Englishman knows?”

“Of course he knows. He cares little. He thinks the missing cameleer simply deserted his duties and ran back to town.”

“Do you think the missing man ran away?”

“I don't care.”

“He was killed, wasn't he? But not by the Jats. You would be able to smell something like that. If someone's blood was spilled last night. He was killed, and taken. You know.”

“There are many humans and animals in this qafila. I smell nothing but their shit and dirt, all the time.”

And Fenrir. I knew he could smell Fenrir as well, following us.

I heard the slap of fists on flesh as two men came to blows. Under the wildly swinging lanterns I saw the two men churning the muddy ground with their limbs, others trying to pull them apart. I saw the glimmer of red mouths and wet beards as the men spit their blood on each other, their arms a blur of motion, cracking as they hit each other.

“Aren't you going to help the Englishman talk to them?” I asked Gévaudan.

“I've had enough translating. Courten can deal with his own men. It's his fault they're fighting. Overworks them so they blame one another, then ignores them when one of their own goes missing,” he said, sullen.

“It was kind of you to give what help you could.”

“Kindness has nothing to do with it,” he snapped.

“Then why?”

The smell of his sweat came through despite the rain that washed his furs and face. He wore no cowl since I wore his cloak, so his hair stuck to his face. He didn't answer me, glaring instead at the violence unfolding fifteen paces away as if it mesmerized him.

The two men were finally tugged apart by their respective allies, who continued to shout at each other, while Courten and some other white men tried to overcome them all with the volume of their own shouting. The blood of the two men glowed bright under the flame-lit rain. Gévaudan sniffed the air.

“Worms in ash. Maybe this was a mistake,” he said, so soft I almost didn't hear him. But he said it, nonetheless, in Pashto, not any other language.

A
fter the skirmish between the cameleers and the ox-drivers, Courten called for the qafila to make a maqam
^*
because of the turmoil and the weather. The hundreds in the caravan spread out for what seemed a mile, many lying under blankets in the open rain. There were many tents pitched as well, glowing like serried cloth lamps in the darkness, the shadows of their occupants flapping against them, trapped moths.

Gévaudan and I sat in the rain next to our resting camels, having no tent to pitch. It wasn't long before a gruff Armenian (one of the white stragglers Courten had in the qafila) came up to us and told Gévaudan in English that Courten had invited us to his tent. We followed the man through the camp, past the lowing camels and oxen, miserable in the rain, past tents and knots of people huddled together against the chill, looking up at Gévaudan and me with suspicion. But they were more wary of one another than this strange-looking white man and his commoner wife. In any other circumstances we would probably have been the center of attention amid such a mix of people, but the caravan had already reached a boiling point just two days out, and the Baluchs and Jats had set up invisible walls between each other, always on the watch for sneak attacks from either side. I had been in caravans before, and severe wounding, even murder, was not unheard of when men in them began to fight.

I looked longingly beyond the tents and the people at the pitch-black night, wishing I could be out there instead. How I had looked with fear at the wilderness, at the threats it presented to one who is always alone, and how quickly this had changed. That was, of course, the least of what had changed for me in recent times.

We arrived at Courten's large tent, steam and smoke escaping from the open flap, lit from within. The Armenian gestured and walked away. Gévaudan and I ducked inside. At the very least, I was grateful to be out of the rain. It smelled of wood smoke, damp clothes, and lentils inside.

The Englishman was sitting on a little wooden stool with its legs sunken into the soft ground. He was hunched over a little fire that made the air inside the tent gritty. My eyes watered. A lantern also guttered with its own flame, next to the stool. The shash was off Courten's head so his chestnut curls glistened, damp like everything in the camp. He looked tired but glad to see us, or probably just Gévaudan: someone who could speak his language well.

He gestured us inside. I was surprised by how cheerful he seemed, despite the turmoil in his camp.

He started talking too fast for me to remember any words of what he said, but he gestured to the tin pot over the fire. Clay bowls were passed around, into which we took the khichri bubbling in the pot, and he gave us some stiff pieces of naan to dip in it
.
The supper was quite bland, as there seemed to be no spices but salt in the pot, but it was good of Courten to share his food, and I wasn't about to complain.

“You are strange, for a wife of this land,” Courten said to me, in crude Hindawi. I assumed he meant that I had a strange choice of husband.

“You, too, are strange to me, Englishman,” I replied in the same language. Gévaudan sat and watched us both, impassive.

“There is more, behind you both, I can't see it. There is more,” he said, his words slow to come out of his mouth, which was glistening with the soup of the khichri. Though it was clear he had trouble speaking Hindawi, this manner of speaking made him sound sinister to my ears.

“Isn't there always,” I muttered, filling my mouth with naan in the hope he would stop talking to me. He grinned, his teeth looking very yellow, perhaps because of how pale his skin was.

“You are Muslim?” he asked me. Gévaudan looked at me.

“Yes, I am.”

“You are not, eh, covering yourself,” he said, waving his hand over his face.

“My husband does not ask me to, so I don't.”

“Your husband is not one for Allah, I see. Yes?”

“That is his business. He is my lord, and I do not question his beliefs.”

“And what are they?” he asked.

“It is not my place to say.”

“No, no. Of course it is not. Would it interest you, lady, to know that I do not see anybody like your husband where I'm coming from? He is a very interesting man.”

Courten smiled, and flinched a little when Gévaudan shifted in his seat, clearing his throat. The Englishman had a wild look to him, his watery gray eyes wide open. I admired his fierce curiosity in the face of all the obstacles he had encountered, alone and mired in a foreign land. He was clearly fascinated by Gévaudan and me. This scared me, of course, but I too was curious to be so close to an Englishman, and to be inside his private space.

We ate, the small space of the tent filled with the sounds of loud slurping and chewing from the men. To clear the air, Courten offered Gévaudan something that looked like wine, from a corked glass bottle. I wasn't offered any, though this was unsurprising. Perhaps he knew that Muslims are not meant to partake of spirits, or perhaps he just thought it uncouth for a woman to drink wine. I don't know the customs of his people, after all. It was unusual enough that I'd been invited inside the tent. Courten and Gévaudan began to talk in English while I marveled at the clutter in his tent—it was so filled with various possessions that it felt more like a permanent room than a transient habitation. His swords and daggers gleamed in the shadows, stacked right next to a musket. There were chests and saddlebags piled together like bricks for the walls of the tent. Next to his unfurled bedroll was a fat book made in the European fashion, upon which was a silver necklace with the Christian emblem they call the crucifix.

—

I excused myself after I was done eating, as Courten and Gévaudan were talking in English and I couldn't understand. Gévaudan gave me a small glance that might have been concern, but I ignored it and stepped back outside. I waited in the rain until the supper was done.

“He presses me,” Gévaudan said, sitting outside with me afterward. “About how I came to marry you. Where I'm from, where I'm going. He's starting to irritate me. He doesn't know how close he's coming to death.”

“Don't say that. We're surrounded by humans. Don't kill him. Please.”

“I'm not stupid. Of course I won't kill him. He's beginning to annoy me, that's all. And if I did kill him, it would be an easy thing to escape. We can leave this wretched qafila anytime we want.”

“Maybe we should, then.”

He grunted, and licked rainwater into his mouth as it trickled down his face.

“What did you tell the Englishman?” I asked.

“I tell him nothing. Fancies. I tell him I believe in nothing like his Jesus and one God, that I follow only nature, and want only to wander this land. He sees the bones hanging off me, my raiment. He thinks I'm a warlock on the run from Europe. And that's true, in some way, I suppose. But he has no belief in magic, except that of his religion.”

“He won't have you arrested or killed, will he?”

“It wouldn't be so easy to do either to me, but no. He doesn't care to. It seems in England their fear of our kind is receding, as Fenrir sometimes predicted. It's been several years since I talked to a human from Europe for any length of time. This Courten, he thinks I'm a man with delusional beliefs in a pagan religion. That's all. It doesn't even pass his mind that I could be something more than human.” Gévaudan seemed quite surprised by this as he told me.

“It's been a while since you set out on the migration?” I asked.

“Yes. A while.”

“There must be a reason he's pressing you like this. He wants something.”

“Courten wants me to lead him to some lost tribe of escaped witches and warlocks from Europe, hiding here in Hindustan. He thinks that's where I'm headed, to a gathering of exiled heathens. He thinks it will be a great discovery and, recorded in his journals, will make him a prosperous and famous man in England when he returns.”

“He wants to write about you?” I asked, somewhat alarmed on Gévaudan's behalf.

“I don't care if he does. I've told him nothing. Though he has no idea how close his theory is to a truth. He would thank me, if he knew what meeting the tribes would lead to for him.”

“He's a clever man, isn't he? To have guessed so much just by looking at you.”

Gévaudan looked at me, breath white as it escaped his mouth. I could barely see his face, but his eyes caught what light came to us from the tents and lanterns around the camp.

“Courten's cleverness means nothing. He's arrogant. He believes I'm a man, and nothing more. He believes in his one Christian God, and no other. He believes in his empire and its ways, and no other. If he were truly clever, clever enough to believe what I am, he'd end up no more than a pile of shit between my legs, all the endeavors of his little life a morsel dream in my head, his tailbone an ivory bauble to hang from my skin to remind me that khrissals are little more than monkeys that forgot how to swing from the trees.”

I felt a strange pain at the vicious bite he put into his words, spitting them into the rain-slashed air. I felt as if this sudden revulsion were directed at me. I may not have been English or Christian like Courten, but I was after all a human, though it was so easy to forget that in those days, living in the twilight between humanity and these shape-changers. I didn't show this hurt, of course. I could also see that Gévaudan was in a way shaken by Courten's manner, his lack of superstition. Why this should be, I couldn't tell, since it appeared to me that he had left Europe because of the superstitions of man, and the persecutions that spread from them.

I searched and searched for something, anything, to say that would diffuse that deep, animal loathing for me that underlined everything Gévaudan did and said. Even in the moments when he seemed most human, it was as if he were pushing that instinct away for a moment, not overcoming it. I knew it wasn't me he was reacting against, but my whole race; man or woman, young or old, pale or dark, Christian or Muslim or Hindu, we were all khrissals. He saw me as meat to sink his teeth into, to chew up and swallow and shit out. When I talked to him, conversed with him as if he were a true companion, when I shared with him the aspects of my one and singular self, it evoked some form of visceral disgust or anger that I couldn't begin to understand.

The rain pattered down on us without respite, dripping off the cowl of my cloak. I searched and I searched, and I said it.

“You were once human, Jevah-dan. Isn't that right? Fen-eer told me so. You all were, once.” Even as I said it my heart hammered in my ears, pushing the sound of rain into a faint hiss beyond my cowled head.

He didn't offer any reaction, let alone violence or anger. He seemed to think about it, for an endless moment.

“Yes,” he said.

I exhaled, my relief overpowering. I waited to regain my breath, and asked him, “Do you remember that?”

“In a way. Like a dream. It's for you…” He drifted back into silence.

“What is? What's for me?” I urged him.

“It's for you that I say I was human. So that you may understand. But that was something else.
I
was born the moment my soul was bifurcated. The human that existed before is just an aspect of me now. It never was me. His life exists in my head like a dream, like the dream-lives of all the khrissals I've devoured in my life. But dreams fade until they have little meaning that resembles their origin. In my own way I've lived the lives of many humans, but I cannot know what it means to be human any more than you can truly understand what the worlds of your dreams mean.”

“And what do you dream of, then, Gévaudan, when you sleep?”

“Many things. The lives. The lives I've eaten.”

“How old were you when—how old was the human, when you were born?”

“He was a young man. I was birthed by a tribe in Paris, who lived amid the cemeteries and underground quarries of that city, and hunted the streets at night. And they still do, I've no doubt.”

“Was that a long time ago?” I asked.

“For you, yes. For the tribes, I am very young still.”

“You look like a young man. Your kind does not age.”

“We do. Much slower than khrissals. In your estimation we can, perhaps, live forever.” He paused and looked around. There was no one in earshot, though maybe he was looking beyond the camp, rather than in it. I could see he wasn't done, so I let him speak.

“I remember my first human kill. That is the moment the first self stops aging, after the first ritual killing and devouring of a human. If one's soul is split when he is just a little babe, his first self is allowed to age somewhat like a khrissal would, though faster than a khrissal child. He goes through the phases of childhood, eating only animals or human flesh procured by his elders, until he comes of age and hunts his first khrissal prey. For me, I didn't have long to wait, since my first self already held the shape of a matured man.”

You're blabbering again,
I thought in wonder, and I could only be grateful. I shivered as he continued, his words soft, distant though he was right next to me. Whether this was out of caution or simply because he was transported back to a different time in his head, I couldn't tell.

“It was days after I was born, after the injuries done to tear that man's soul in two to create…me, after those injuries had healed. My imakhr and his pack chased a man from the midnight streets, hounding him into the yards of the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents, where the Parisians piled their dead, and where my tribe scavenged when they were not hunting. There under a full moon, among the heaped dead, I slew him in my second self, fresh-sprung, while my imakhr watched, and there I acquired the insight to transcend the mortality of my prey, and truly be one among the tribes.”

I waited for him. He said nothing more. I had no idea what this Paris would look like, but just his words, the way he pronounced them, evoked something in me, as if his entire body exuded the essence of his memory, as if I could smell and feel what he had back then.

“This…This ima…That word you said. That was your parent?”

“We have no mother or father. He was my imakhr. I suppose to a khrissal that would be a parent, but it is not. He was my guide. He was many times my mate also. When one's soul is torn in two, one is…” He paused to give a very quick laugh, an innocent curl of the lip that betrayed some fleeting joy in that young face, for just a moment before returning it to its recent dour expression.