The Devourers (22 page)

Fenrir pounded the bubbling ground around him in fury, bellowing: << 
I created,
like the gods of humankind! >>

<< 
I created,
like the lowliest khrissal can, and we cannot. I usher in a new age for us all, rather than calling the empty mating of our own kind by a human word. I have created progeny. You have created nothing. You couldn't even steal Cyrah's shape to create a new self of your own, let alone fashion something from the blood-loam of the womb. >>

So saying, Fenrir walked forward toward Gévaudan.

Gévaudan said: << I will destroy your progeny and your human love with it, if you come closer. >>

And Fenrir smiled as a devil would.

<< Boy-whelp, you have tasted love, and instead of ridding yourself of it, you've languished in it, and now it infects your soul like a canker. It casts your world anew, and sickly pale, you see your love for me bleed across the chasm between your two souls, and you
understand.
You understand how one of our kind may love a khrissal, a small, fragile, beautiful human being. >>

And he roared so loud the clouds stilled their weeping, and he lunged at Gévaudan. And as Fenrir had foretold, Gévaudan spared my life, threw me aside so that I wasn't caught between these two unrighteous beings as they fought. Fenrir, flushed and engorged from his feast of humans, oxen, and camels from the ambush on the road, filled with power; Gévaudan, weakened from his abstinence from hunting for several days because of the company of humans, because, though I didn't know it for all those days, of a promise to me that he never even truly agreed to. Overpowered, his genitals crushed under Fenrir's knee, throat gripped in Fenrir's huge scarred hand, Fenrir's spittle running down his face and Fenrir's piss streaked over his chest and caved, empty belly, Gévaudan submitted to the challenge. And it was agreed that they would do battle.

In their first selves they returned to the site of the massacre, I slung senseless in Gévaudan's arms, and together they retrieved their fardels and clothes. There were no living beings left at the site, only carrion and guttering fires, fallen tents and upturned carts. All else was fled. In a moment of strange regret, Gévaudan searched the sea of bodies for Edward Courten, but could not find him. Of course, the maqam had stretched far across the road, and it's possible he simply missed Courten
^*2
if he lay dead somewhere. But Gévaudan chose to assume that the Englishman had escaped.

Fenrir allowed Gévaudan to feed from a body, though not very much, because there wasn't much time. Other travelers could come upon them, and it wouldn't be long before the survivors called for soldiers and formed a new caravan to return to the site of the attack and recover the dead. The two of them hacked limbs from some of the bodies with their blades, salted them, and wrapped them in waxed cloth to keep for later.

And so it was that I was lashed to Gévaudan's back along with his carrion-filled fardels, as if I were no more than a possession for these two creatures to fight over, and they traveled ahead to their decided arena, the ghost city of Fatehpur Sikri, which had been Courten's next destination. They traveled fast, even in their first selves, not stopping once throughout the night. By the time the sky began to lighten with the blue of early dawn, they had reached the rocky ridge upon which the walled city sat—a craggy arm of the hills of Vindhya, which the Hindus say once grew so high they would block the path of the passing sun.

How my abductors (and they were such, as I had no say in this journey) kept me in the half death of that sleep I don't know; but they had their ways. Though I dreamed of things similar, I experienced none of this awake, dangling helpless from Gévaudan's back as he climbed up the ridge with Fenrir, and they entered the quiet privacy of that empty place. For those scarce, anxious hours before their duel, Gévaudan and Fenrir became traveling companions once more, as they had been for the years of their journey from Europe, and as if in respect for those years, they entered the city in silence. Only once did Gévaudan speak, to ask: << What will happen to Cyrah if I lose? >> And to that Fenrir only shrugged and said, perhaps truthfully: << I don't know. >>

—

Then and now, no one lived or lives in Fatehpur Sikri, the “City of Victory” that Emperor Akbar built to honor the spot where a Sufi foretold the birth of his first son. It's said that it was a thriving and magnificent place when Akbar first unveiled it to his empire. But once the water tanks grew fetid and diseased in the summers, growing parched on the high rocks of that ridge, Akbar's new city became rife with illness and death, and its people left and never came back. And so Fatehpur Sikri itself died, still young.

I remember opening my eyes and thinking that I was dreaming of flight, so high above the world was I, with no ground beneath my hanging feet or roof above my windblown hair. I was tied to Gévaudan with my back against his, so Shah Jahan's empire lay sprawled below me like a painted map feathered with dark forest and threaded with road, stretched across the rocky table of the earth. The lamp of the sun was still hidden behind the edge of that table, though its light had begun to creep up the vaulted tent of the heavens, weakening the pinholes of the stars. The cobweb clots of clouds had torn apart after the rain, and hung threadbare in the dawn. My body lurching with every movement Gévaudan made, I smiled, giving little thought to where I was and why. I raised my hand to the horizon as if to leap away into the open air. The cool of an early-morning breeze tickled my arm and trickled through my fingers.

With effort I looked to my side and saw the wall of Fatehpur Sikri, and the dark stealthy shape of Fenrir moving up its sheer side like some giant bat in the gloom. My arm turned leaden and fell back. A human hand stuck out of Fenrir's bulging fardels, having escaped its wrappings. Its rigid fingers reached for freedom. The bony chiming of Gévaudan and Fenrir's trinkets a soft dawn song. I felt a brief fear of falling when I realized I was not afloat but lashed to Gévaudan, and I wondered if the creaking harness would hold. But my head felt heavy and my eyes shut again.

—

The ruins of Fatehpur Sikri are overgrown with wild grass and indigo, the bright flowers always dancing amid the broken buildings. Weeds and other plants now live in the crumbled remains of entire neighborhoods. In the distance, the imperial palace still stands tall over all else, its minarets and walls untouched by time, a reminder of the city's former glory. I saw this ghostly place through eyes veiled with the visions of dreams—and I wondered if Allah had emptied this once glorious city just to make of it a quiet monument for pilgrims escaping the stench and hardships of real life. I remembered Gévaudan telling me at Chandni-Chauk that he might appreciate a human city if it was empty of humans, and wondered if it pleased him to be in this one. I wondered if this was what Akbarabad and Shahjahanabad would look like in a century.

Sunlight burned the edges of the clouds in the sky, and dark birds began to wheel through them, and my thoughts turned to death, and the impression I had that I was somehow already halfway to its door, held there by my godlike abductors.

I tried to wake, struggling in the bonds that tied me to a beast in human shape. He and Fenrir walked through the endless broken streets. The wind whistling through the shattered city began to rise, or so I thought, and the indigo flowers danced everywhere as if to mock my helplessness. The wound on my arm hurt.

Gévaudan laid me down and licked my arm, the tip of his tongue flicking against the scabbing edges of the slit. His breath smelled terrible, of some unknowable poison. Fenrir loomed over us, watching. I felt the scalding drip of Gévaudan's spit fall in a white string on my arm, and he rubbed it into the wound with his fingers. Wild grass lay crushed under me, a soft and fragrant bed. I asked him to wake me up.

He said: << You cannot be awake for this, Cyrah. You will sleep now. Fenrir and I must fight. >>

Fenrir watched, and I could feel his brooding thoughts like a sweltering cloud over us three. Gévaudan hesitated, but said it, to me: << I am sorry. For everything. >>

I wanted to say:
Fuck you. Fuck you and Fenrir. I can trust no one, human or djinn, angel or devil.

But I could only moan like a sick child, and tears flooded my eyes and splashed down my face.

Gévaudan said: << Goodbye, Cyrah. >>

*1
The devil, in Islam.

*2
According to my research, Edward Courten of the British East India Company did actually visit India as a factor (a trader), and broke his contract by prematurely booking a passage back to England via the western port of Surat (in Gujarat), after he claimed his qafila was attacked and destroyed three days out from Akbarabad, near Fatehpur Sikri. His journals were never published, and he burned them on his return before changing his mind and saving what he could. The salvaged pages were said to describe the caravan's ambush by a “demon” that the “Hindoos call rakshasa,” and even go so far as to identify the “rakshasa” as “Kali,” the apocalyptic demon who is a herald of Kali Yuga, the Age of Vice. In his testimony, Courten was said to conflate the Hindu Kali (not to be confused with the goddess Kali, also a figure in Hinduism) with the Christian figure of Satan. His service was terminated, and he was judged mentally unfit and incarcerated at Bethlehem Royal Hospital (also known as Bedlam) of London in 1650, where it is presumed he died.

D
id they fight over me, or over their tattering of the tangled webs of their tribal laws? Who can say, really? But they did fight, and it was a battle to be seen, though I didn't see it. But I dreamed it, so caught was I in the poisonous glamours the two had cast over me to keep me unconscious during their duel. Glamours that were, I imagine, strongly tied to them, making their violence mine. Or perhaps I just dreamed a dream, which was nothing like the actual battle.

What I do know is that they fought for a day and a night in the arena of deserted Fatehpur Sikri. They shed their clothes and fardels next to my sleeping form, which they had placed in the cavern of a fallen building, and they each pissed a circle around their belongings. They lifted up my head, and poured water from one of their gourds into my dry mouth till my stomach was full. Then they covered my face in my cloak, so that I could see nothing of their contest even if my eyes opened—leaving me like a shrouded corpse. Naked they walked into streets now flooding with golden morning light, and changed into their second selves. And they began.

Even in the dream I was far away, high above their battle. Drifting like an invisible bird, I saw them wrestle in the broken city of their prey, slow and languid like lovers, their sunlit fur iridescent in the dawn. Lances of light flashed upward into the sky from them, and I could scarcely believe how beautiful they were. Gévaudan shone in the growing day with streaks of bright orange and crimson against black like plumage, while Fenrir, the larger of the two, seemed a thing of shimmering darkness, pulsing with dark grays and bitter blues, the black of a raven sky at night. Their spines bristled in waves, shattered by the caress of their clawed hands as they grappled. Their long shadows fell across the fields of indigo that now painted the avenues and roads.

As they tangled into one beast in that blazing winter morning, I observed their dance, and I marveled that these were beings that didn't know love. Then again, they were fighting because they had, each in their own way, found the same—and their violence was, perhaps, to purge their disgust at that stray human emotion.

As the sun rose higher, the two beasts drifted apart and circled each other, exploring the ruins but always facing each other, even if miles apart. They licked their wounds and regrew their spines, sealed the ragged tears in their skin with spit, snatched small animals from the undergrowth and devoured them.

And then, when the sun was at its zenith, they ran to meet each other again.

I swooped down on a sudden wind to see them leap miles across the city, two monstrous celestial bodies casting their hurtling shadows across the shivering ghost city. The very air shook as they met high above the ruins, and I was sent flying away as they clashed in the rays of the sun and tumbled toward the earth as one, a demon meteor that hung for too long above Fatehpur. When they crashed down to earth, the impact sent the stones of many ruins cascading into dust, gathering in a cloud that hung over them. Their roaring made avalanches tumble down the hills of Vindhya. Their huge clawed feet dug deep trenches into the earth, tore plants and grass to shreds, left deep worms wriggling in the open so that birds lunged down to catch them, only to be thrown from the air and trampled under the fury of the two fighters.

When the dust settled, paling their giant forms, the sun had begun to set. Streams of their blood had made new gutters for the deserted and overgrown streets, bubbling and hissing and destroying what plant life grew nearby. Their fight had slowed again. They were caught in a fierce embrace, their massive claws swiping bloody swaths through each other's flesh. Steam robed them as hot piss and blood fell down their legs and pooled in their deep footprints, and clumps of shit fell from between their rippling legs, containing what decayed matter of human souls I don't know. As night fell I saw one of the two finally fall, though it was too dark to see which. And I saw the other take the hackles of the fallen one's neck in its jaws and gallop through the city dragging its opponent across the ground.

When this gauntlet ended, the fallen moved no longer. The victorious beast pounded the fallen into the earth as if to bury him, and the earth shook my grounded body, making me falter from my dream—heavy coarse cloak suffocating my face—only to fall back into it. I rose higher and higher, till Fatehpur Sikri was a miniature sandalwood city, until the clouds dampened my vision, until I vanished into the endless black.