The Devourers (30 page)

I feel Izrail's hand at my wrist. “Come,” he says. I look at his eyes. They are dark. There is no green there. He looks weary, and his cheeks, I am shocked to notice, are damp. I nod, and walk alongside him as we return to the road. The forest glowering at our backs, my head spinning from the span of lifetimes I have just lived, I feel like silence is, perhaps, the only conversation for now.

On the road, we see a twinkling line of lanterns in the distance, returning to the village. I hope to myself that it is the honey-gatherers, returned from the deep forest safe and alive.

W
e eat dinner in haste, tolerating Shankar-babu's conversation, giving brief words of explanation about being tired from our long walk around the island. He laughs and asks if we saw any tigers, and we say that we didn't. We are bid good night, and we retreat into the darkness beyond the dining room, the electricity gone again for the night. We hurry upstairs to our room, shut and lock the door with the rattling rusty dead bolt. Izrail unwraps the sticky whiskey bottle full of honey. We both drink from it, and in silence we kiss with our sweetened mouths, hungry, drawn to each other after the day gone by in that dream-filled forest. By the dim glow of the hurricane lamp, we make love, slow and patient. Again he never comes himself, only bringing me to climax, never asking to be fucked by me.

Again he devours me, licking every spilled part of me like a benign monster.

—

When I kill my mother, I am a shape-shifter, rakshasa, strong and bold, with a second self to make even the bravest of khrissals run from me.

But I am still a child who does not know what it is to have a mother, or a father, and finds that it has both.

Or, in the case of my mother, had. She was khrissal, but she did not run. She did not run from me.

I am slow, sluggish from devouring an entire human body so quickly, with such ravenous desperation. I am surrounded now by my pack, who watch in their first selves. My imakhr leads them.

When she sees me crouched over the stripped bones of Banbibi's human avatar, her brief smile is one of regret. Perhaps she thought she could hide my bastard birth from me all my life, protect me from the curse I carry.

She looks at Cyrah's bones with something approaching fear. The bones of a human goddess. But she approaches despite this, and squats near me, her legs spread wide to let the trinkets hanging from under her thighs show. The baby teeth that fell out of my mouth as I grew faster than any human into the shape of a boy and then a man, burned like tiny pearls into the lines of her imakhr tattoos, shards of tusk and bone and shell hanging off wire and string entwined into scarred bumps, tracing the history of the first animals I ever hunted by myself. I remember clinging to that body as a growing rakshasa in the shape of a human child, hunting with tools as she showed me, yearning for the day I could free my second self, touching and kissing it in mimicry of khrissal sexual ritual right before fucking our second selves when I was grown. Memories poisoned by the khrissal I have just eaten of.

I wait, refuse to react until my imakhr does. Cyrah's remains between us. I want her to embrace me, to comfort me, to give me explication, forgiveness for taking Banbibi's death from our pack, for taking it as my own.

But I know better. I may be Banbibi's devourer, but I am no hero, because I am also Banbibi's son. My imakhr knows me too well. Perhaps she was only waiting for this day, as Banbibi circled our territories on the back of her European vahana, lurking in wait to take back what used to be her son.

I reach out for my imakhr's face, to give her contact, to let her taste Cyrah's blood on my hands. But she grabs my wrist and bites it, quick, and shoves me back. I look at the imprinted half-moon in my flesh. She will have no leftovers. I have kept my tribe from tasting this human goddess, from kindling and sharing her ghost fire.

She gets up. I try to stagger up as well, but she kicks my face and stamps on Cyrah's ribs.

The sound of Cyrah's bones breaking under my imakhr's mud-caked feet.

I leap. My hand cracks against the mouth that fed me as an infant, that kissed me and pleasured me.

My nails have left dark slashes across her cheek. She steps back. Her expression doesn't change. A bead of red oozes from the corner of her mouth. She spits on me. She licks her dark lips, doesn't touch her ripped cheek.

She shakes her head, because she knows. I am changed forever. I have tasted the human life that created the body I wear.

There under the new stars, my imakhr springs her second self. The first falls away a sheath of digested dream. Her second self rises on its hind legs and towers over the beach like a hill thrust out from the sea-damp sand. In that moment it has chosen to bear male and female genitals both, and looming over me it displays the twin rows of flaccid teats running down its massive torso, framed by the embroidery of old bones burned into its skin. A reminder, that I have no mother, no father. Only imakhr. Only pack and tribe. To remind me that I once hung off those swollen teats as a human infant, a pale khrissal maggot stuck to the belly of this gigantic, gorgeous rakshasa, feeding on the oily soma of swallowed souls as it turned me more than human with each suckling breath I took, as it killed that little human being Cyrah gave birth to and began to create what I am now.

I kneel in my imakhr's shadow, desolate. Cyrah's blood dries under the burning breath of the rakshasa that raised me. It lowers its huge head to my torso, a gesture of affection. Its flowing mane snaps in the wind. With its tusks it disembowels me, spilling my entrails on my mother's bones.

Then my imakhr is her first self again. She bends over me as I cradle my own insides, tears and blood drenching my lips. She holds her hand to my bloody mouth, twitches her head toward her wrist. I look into her eyes. She nods. I hold her wrist and bite her flesh, one last time, letting my teeth scrape blood onto my tongue.

In those droplets, my imakhr leaves her first memory of me. Ripening khrissal baby wrapped in palm leaf ripped fresh from the trees and European fabric from a French shape-shifter's fardels. Held out in the hands of Cyrah, her face set rock-hard in resolve but eyes red as a rakshasa's from wiped tears, her companion and negotiator Gévaudan hovering by her shoulder like a ghost. It is a memory my imakhr has never let me experience before, in the innumerable times we have shared our blood, flesh, and humors. The last living moments of the true human being that became me, dappled by sunlight through the leaves, passed from the hands of a mother and into the hands of an imakhr.

I open my eyes and she is walking away down the mudflats, her hair now a sheet of black fire, her feet bare and small on the sand. My imakhr departs with her pack. I used to be a part of that pack. She leaves me to mend myself with my mother's fresh-devoured flesh, to punish me for my betrayal.

I watch her go, crying blood and bile from my mouth. I watch till she is miles away, watch till she walks into the trees naked, letting the verdant tongues of the forest lap her into the dark.

—

I gather my guts off the ground, the spilled remnants of a life suddenly in the past, already swarming with the insects of the beach. I feel them inside me, crawling and darting in hungry panic. How things change.

I make a torch of broken driftwood and burn the great gash my imakhr left on me, stitching it with string made from my own gut and sealing it with my own weeping fat. Vomiting and pissing, I sink into damp ground and lie on the beach as gulls peck at my body and little leaping crabs explore the earthly legacy of my mother. I feel fallen, human. I don't know what that feels like, and yet I feel it, in this misery of mortal pain and confusion.

I capture the gulls and eat them, wet white feathers clinging to my skin. For days I lie there, Cyrah's life coursing through my agonized human shape, in a fever so scorching that I become in dream's eye a pyre at the edge of the ocean, and see Cyrah's bones glow with a faint green flame at night. The sun rises and sets, dancing with the moon that shifts its shape with shadow and light. Far away, I see the glimmering eyes of my pack-mates watching. But I am alone. I have never known what it is to be alone. I call to my mother, my dead, human mother, like a dying khrissal child, and it is the most pitiful experience I have ever known in my short life.

—

When I am able to walk again, I gather Cyrah's bones, stripped clean by salt sea and air, by the days I have lain by them. I choose some of her teeth, and the porous shards of her disconnected fingers, her broken knuckles, and I make them a part of my skin with fire. Newly pierced, fingers still stained with pus, I wash myself in the foam of the tide, snatch the streaks of fish from churning water and eat their silvered flesh with my bare hands.

A smile on my face after what seems an eternity, I piss in the sand and make the ground steam, swallow half my tongue and ululate at the sunrise slicing the horizon. I watch as a wild boar comes to me across the miles of mudflat, galloping with abandon. I pound the ground with my fist, calling it to me with glamour, standing within the yellowed ivory crown of Cyrah's skeleton spread across the sand and silt. It takes it a long time, but it doesn't stop running. I wait.

“I'm sorry, beast,” I say as I usher the panting animal to me. As it runs, it showers spit and water behind it in a rage. “You are a low thing, but I should have hunted you. You deserve that much. But I cannot leave these bones. I am sorry,” I tell it as it attacks me, charges toward my scarred gut, just healed. I am too quick, and grab its tusks in my hands, whipping its hoofed legs off the ground and snapping its back with the force of its own weight. Landing heavy by me, it drools death into the wetland. The gulls speak their awful language over us.

As always, my pack watches from afar. I know my imakhr will not be among those watching. I eat the boar's flesh, tear off its bloody skin, wash the hide in the sea. I take every bone that once anchored Cyrah's body and soul to this world, and I gather them in the skin of the boar. Knotting this sack in twine from the animal's guts, I sling it from my neck. For a human, the bones would be surprisingly heavy.

I look to the forest I grew up in. My pack, my kin, waiting. Waiting with dread, disgust, curiosity.

Bastard thing, son of Banbibi, eater of Banbibi.

Khrissal-rakshasa.

Khrissal-rakshasa-kveldulf.

I can feel their fear, from far away.

I
reach over, the wooden bed frame groaning. I touch Izrail's bare back, tracing the furrows of scar tissue that whiplash him from shoulders to buttocks. As if he'd once been mauled by a wild animal. He turns. His body is cold, and damp with sweat or dew. I kiss him, giddy with broken sleep, a teenager again. “How are we still here? It's not morning still,” I ask him, and he silences me by licking my mouth. “Sometimes we wake and wake, and one night becomes a thousand, each dream a life lived,” he says. Where did his bone trophies go? Centuries of history inscribed on him. I could live with this being beside me for the rest of my life and never tire of him, never know enough. But would I be a historian or a lover to him? He reads my silence, and speaks.

“Don't even listen to me, Alok. I can't believe I'm here, with a human in my bed. It is as much a strange dream for me as it is for you. I'll make this night last,” he says, eyes taking in the brittle light from the window. His hair falls against my face, black fire thrown from his head.

—

And so it is that I leave the country of eighteen tides, my home. Wrapped in a langota, wearing the crown of a tiger's skull, pelt draped across my back and sacks lashed to my shoulders, long hair oiled with coconut and tucked under the teeth of the dead animal, skin cleaned of mud, Cyrah's canines in my earlobes, I venture forth as man.

I am followed by those rakshasas who seek a new life outside the forest, those who want to bear witness to a new age, who want to see what lies beyond the delta with their own eyes and not the memories of their prey. They follow on the trail of my scent, my intent, wearing their first selves of men and women. Curious, willing defectors.

I carry with me the scroll Fenrir handed to my mother, who handed it down to me.

I carry with me my mother's bones.