The Devourers (32 page)

Without warning I am face-to-face with my father, slouching out of nowhere stinking of me.

—

We are ringed all around by my pack. But I keep them back. Fenrir attacks me. It is larger and older, but I am quicker, and bound away wearing the stripes of tiger. Somewhere over Bengal the sky opens and washes the land with rain. High winds whirl dervish-like with robes of cloud across the earth in thunder that calls far away. Lightning cracks the edge of the world, rewriting the vanishing sunlight.

It calls me its child and attacks me, and I know from the longing it trails, I know from every bead of musk that clings to the strands of its fur as dew clings to blades of grass. I know it smells Cyrah still burning within me, just as I hear her whispering to me just out of reach, and it knows that I have killed her. It shakes its dark gray mane as if nodding, agreeing. A misshapen fool, a monster that wants vengeance for the death of a woman it raped.

I reveal my own fangs, to mirror its display. It tears the earth stomping, its rage shaking the ground. A roar erupts across the marshland, sending a veil of birds to clothe the sky and speckle the storm-flickers to the north. I take my chance at this unnecessary show, lashing across swamp water and grass, soaring to meet Fenrir. My tusked maw closes around the great wolf's singing throat, a vise of cruel bone. I silence its war cry even as the scythes of its clawed hands rake trenches in my hide and meat. Our mingled blood hisses and rains across the swamp water. The panicked birds rush across approaching dark screaming, and the ground hums with the stamping of my pack all around lighting new night with their eyes. Fenrir and I embrace, just as he and Gévaudan once held each other close, drunk on their own bloodletting in the distant, empty city of Fatehpur Sikri. I ignore the chasms of fire opening across my back under Fenrir's claws, and keep my jaws shut on its thick neck, letting each tooth snag on sinew, tying a knot between me and my father, a bond that cannot be broken. I drink of Fenrir, and Fenrir drinks of me. When the moon has crossed the sky and the sun is lit again in the east, when our shed blood running from Fenrir's throat and my back has cut a crimson stream across the earth of the marshy plain, I let go of Fenrir and let him crash into the dark waves.

Fenrir's second self becomes as a hillock again. Panting, I look at the great wolf fallen, though it looks like no wolf or animal on earth, no more than my second self looks like a tiger though it wears its colors. My pack are phantoms against the rising sun, shades of human man and woman. The insects have returned, drawn by the powerful taste of this opened being, and they crawl over it thick, dying in the breath of its open mouth. Fenrir's maw yawns in pain, and I lower my head to it. Our tusked teeth clatter in the dawn, raising sparks, and our tongues lap our shared blood and spit. Our eyes meet, guttering with sunrise.

Fenrir knows as it looks me in the eye, it knows that Cyrah burns in me by choice, that she asked to be devoured. That she is now forever devi among the rakshasas and khrissals I have left behind in the country of eighteen tides. Pitiful monster, lonesome exile, unasked-for father. Perhaps it feels a gladness in its two hearts for the first time in centuries.

Slowly and painfully it sheds the form of its second self, letting it fall to dream. I look upon the false man who cruelly spared his prey death in Mumtazabad, and thus became father. He does not seem worth the mud on Cyrah's bare feet when she lived. He looks like a defeated, fallen hero from the myths of pale humans from the farthest north. He has been burned by the sun and reddened by our battle, his visage broken and scarred, his long golden hair knotted into shaggy vines. His eyes are different, one grayed by a scar crossing his face, another a blue so bright in his dirty face it becomes iridescent in the early light. He looks at me with these eyes now.

Even as Fenrir's second soul retreats into his khrissal form, the worst wounds of the battle remain, his neck torn to shreds and feeding the red water that licks my ankles. “I had a friend called Makedon once,” Fenrir gurgles. He speaks in amalgam. “His throat was cut. I've always wondered what it feels like. It itches.” He laughs, convulsing. “He, he told me to let my blood flow, to give my life as penance for. For raping Cyrah. I refused. I refused. He's dead.” He coughs. His throat whistles.

As the blood runs off my back and patters off my slick fur, I bend close, the breath of my second self blowing the wet hair off Fenrir's face. He heaves with shuddered gulps, rapt in the scent of my life as it steams off my fangs and tongue.

“Please, show me. The other half,” he says.

Growling, I close my eyes, feel the marks Fenrir has made on my back, my life, Cyrah's life. I can feel Cyrah whispering from somewhere within the worlds that nestle between my bones, revealed by Fenrir's claws. I can feel my entire pack watching. Two hearts in me enfold. I open my eyes in the body Cyrah gave birth to, my back flayed by a great wolf, each mark shining in the rising sun. In revulsion and glory I feel Fenrir's mismatched eyes on me as I stand over him. Every cord of muscle under my skin taut as I hold back the victor, for this moment.

He nods, slowly, and gets up even though this should be impossible. He can make it only to his knees. He is barely able to speak. “I've seen. My son,” he manages, and smiles with his teeth. Not child this time, but son. I want to deny him, but cannot. I too am monster, after all. I know, as Fenrir stares unfailing into my eyes, that he is speaking to Cyrah as well as me. To Cyrah in me.

“Do it,” Fenrir spits. I let my second self return, a drowned man breaking to the surface. In front of my pack, by the light of new day and the death of old night, I devour a shape-shifter for the first time.

I
t is like death.

—

A thousand upon thousand deaths and lives burning my self to a husk in that summer morning. I don't know how far my cries carry across Bengal, whether the humans in their villages look to the horizon and wonder if their world is ending, whether my pain echoes the distant nor'wester spending its rage across the forests and sending its winds howling across the swamps. My pack watches, but does not interfere. It is my choice to do this, to eat of a shape-shifter and risk destruction. They are impassive, even repulsed, by this act. But they are also witnesses to my victory over an ancient hunter, and they are my companions. They are, also, curious.

I see Fenrir long in secret for human love over and over again, and forget that he has done so over and over again as he devours these men and women he thought himself in love with. I see Fenrir battle a Norse wolf-man gone berserk, and take from him the body he wore till his death, molting into the warrior's shape over a single night. I see moments older still, memories faded to worn parchment. I see him as woman in dim pasts long lost to him. I see her in ancient tribes, attacked and ostracized by pack-mates for wearing a female first self, until she dwells in barrows alone and drags travelers to their deaths in the sunless days of northern winter. I see her prey, their bloody throats entwined in locks of golden hair that whip away into silvered hide as she springs her second self. I see Fenrir (as him) swallow Fenrir (as her) to nothing over the centuries. I see him live among humans in secret as a Norse mercenary in the Varangian Guard, protecting some long-dead Byzantine emperor, feeding legend by allowing his second self to come free in the battles of human men. I see him marvel at a Thracian woman with the Aegean Sea in her eyes and phoenix-fire in her hair. I see him watch as she runs a spear through one of his human comrades who tried to rape her. I see him fill with pride when his fellow men give her their dead friend's belongings to honor her bravery. I see him kill and devour that very Thracian woman in the throes of what he thinks is love, not daring to recognize that he, too, could rape like the human man he saw shitting out of a hole in his gut for attempting such an act.

I see him leave the yellow-haired men of the Varangian Guard and hunt in the streets of Byzantium, eventually return to the tribes. I see him roam with and without packs, as beast and man, watching human love unfold from the fringes of civilizations, carrying between his two selves an envy as heavy and old as passing history.

Over and over.

And I see him see Cyrah, in time not so far in the past. I feel her uncoil within me.

I vomit into the rich soil, my second self twisting and snapping. Flickers of flame run up and down my body, flashing in the heat of this trance. My pack takes the wet mud in their hands, takes the red water, and runs it over my hide to cool me, splashes it into my gaping maw, my weeping eyes. I purge these lives as Cyrah, somehow, somewhere, helps throw them from me. She crushes the single memory of Fenrir fucking her, throws it out from within me, so it lives only on parchment, and in her own memories that she still keeps from me.

For a day I live as Fenrir and his thousands upon thousands of prey, purging them to stay alive. When I am myself again, I see my reflection in the twilit blood-waters under me, and I see my hide washed of its fire, gone to dark gray and black, to glistering silver that shines with the moon.

I wear now the colors of the great wolf.

—

Over the years, I keep on my second self the dark blacks and grays of the wolf and the bear. Some of my pack-mates imitate me in curiosity, though their mimicries look different. Others keep the brighter colors of the rakshasa tribes alive in our pack.

I lead my pack out, farther into Bengal. Into the slowly dying Mughal Empire, where once in a far-off town called Mumtazabad a trio of shape-shifters, each from a different land of Europe, walked past a young Persian woman sitting in the courtyard of a caravanserai.

—

By the time the Mughal Empire is dead, and Hindustan is under the British Empire, I am alone, an exile with no pack. Cyrah wakes in me, and writes her story as if she still lives and breathes, writes on the skin of a dead baul, a woman I killed. A second scroll.

—

Then, in a Hindustan now independent, a nation and republic known to the world as India, in a lodge in the Sundarbans, I hold you, warm and real and wrapped in a crumpled blanket. You of one self and one soul.

I am truly my father's son.

And I am truly my mother's son.

When I came home; on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world. I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now perceived by the minds of men, & read by them on earth.

How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,

Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

—
W
ILLIAM
B
LAKE
,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell