The Devourers (5 page)

A hunt:

A man, his face whittled by starvation to woody gnarl of cheekbones and sticky pebbles of teeth, jaundiced marble of bloodshot eyes, lean body wrapped in moldering cloth and goatskin.

He was not attractive prey, no. But we were hungry, and he was enough. He walked by the shore of the Yamuna, breathing heavy with sorrow of some sort, leaving a trail of oily scent. His stave of hacked branch etched little holes in the fragrant mud, which also reproduced in all their divine symmetry the impression of his feet across time.

We followed these tracks from afar, I slicing the water, my companions slouching across the land as shifting hills in the dusk, their fur the whispering thatches of coarse grass. It was too dark for this man to see us, so we let the wind rattle through our great throats and teeth, let him run in fear so that we had some mild sport at least. But still it was no effort.

He saw dancing lamps flare in those hills in the distance and realized some immense reckoning had come upon him, and he said words of prayer loud in the evening, tripping and smearing his knees with the soft ground. He ran straight into my jaws as I leaped from the water, drenching him in a final blessed rain before his death. He fed the water and the mud a deep and rich red of holy dread. I drank, the meat and bone between my fangs, the soul trapped, making my entire second self bristle in waves.

A meal:

Enough of the past.

Now here we sit, for all the world like three men camped under the starlit sky. Between us is another man, human to the bone and dead. We light our gathering with the dead man's soul. The moon is bright enough by far, but it pleases Makedon to show his mastery over ritual.

He spits in the wounds, anointing the litany of red trenches left on face, throat, chest, and sides by the fangs of our second selves. He cuts the body open from cock to throat with his dagger. The heat of the soul, condensing in cold air. He speaks our words until pale flame dances on the Hindu's violet insides as if he were a split skin-sack of kindling.

“Rise, Will o' the wisp,” Makedon says, blowing on the false smoke of steam rising from the fresh kill, like a man coaxing fire from wood, “and name yourself chir batti instead, for in this empire no man, woman, or corpse is called Will. Be gone, Saxon tongue!”

With that he pries the corpse's creaking jaw open and cuts the still-slippery tongue from the mouth with his blade. He eats it raw.
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Beside me, pale Gévaudan sticks his thin-fingered hands through the corpse fire and touches his face, rubs his hands. I do the same. The corpse light feels like nothing to the touch, but its glow calms me, reminding me of the burning of northern night skies many lifetimes in my past.

We sit on our haunches and take from our prey with bare hands. Soft iron from the man's liver sits on my tongue, fatty with some sickness engendered by poverty. From the smoking rupture of his gut, I taste the dregs of his last meal—sun-boiled berries scrounged from a seller's basket in nearby Mumtazabad. He was a thief, and a desperate one. Gévaudan digs the rest of the shit out of the stomach and throws it on the ground, cutting out the emptied tripe. Makedon takes the kidneys and guts, and slices out the rest of the sweetmeats for us to share. Under his blade, the precious bounty of the heart flowers into thick wet petals. These I covet eagerly.

We share the pieces of his life as his stories evaporate, his ghost fire invisible to his fellow humans who toil for the emperor of this land. When the flame has waned, his organs have been eaten, and we are satiated, we begin cutting up the rest of his body to store in our fardels, each using our favorite blades, gathered from across the world. As we work, humans in the distance work as well, across the river. I must describe the ingenuity of their endeavor, which we see clear by the moon's light:

An earthen ramp leads to a construction pit, miles of damp ground flattened by feet, the ruts left by cart-wheels smoothed by ox hooves and the callused, soiled soles of the humans. The pit holds an unfinished palace.
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From the distance, its incomplete minarets lie under moon and star-bitten clouds like the fresh-hatched eggs of a roc,
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the pit an abandoned nest swarming with ants—the thousand bodies of toiling workmen marble dusted and sweaty, glistening in torchlight. But this giant nest of stone and mineral gathered from across the empire is raised not to shelter the thousands that build it, but to place on the skin of the world a memorial to one human's mate.

From the incense-sweetened balconies of his great citadel at Akbarabad, it is the emperor Shah Jahan who waits for this place, his miracle, to be born. Perhaps he lets tears of shame slip down his cheeks, thinking of the many hands that build his dead wife's tomb, none of them his own. Perhaps he paces in impatience, thinking these men and elephants and oxen too slow. Perhaps he does not care, wanting only to hold his beautiful Mumtaz Mahal, who held fourteen imperial whelps in her womb for him, just one more time. Perhaps he would give his entire empire, give the power to have this wonder built at the snap of his fingers, just to feel her lips on his again. Or perhaps it matters little, and she is just one of his many wives. It makes me wonder what secrets his body would hold; how his life would taste guttering between the jaws of my second self.

This man we have just eaten of, whose remains we dismember, he is no Shah Jahan, emperor of Mughals. He is an insignificant wastrel, but he, too, had love in his heart. My companions tasted it, but barely lingered on it. For centuries they have consumed men and women and children, and they find these opiates of emotion pleasing but unremarkable. Mere marinade for our carrion. Though I don't know Gévaudan's age, he smells young. Makedon has much time behind him. He hails from the lands that lay claim to one of the earliest kings of our kind. But I find it ever strange that we ignore these storms within our prey's bodies, simply because we ourselves have forsaken such things.

—

Watching the emperor's workmen from afar, we sit in the darkness. We have shattered our prey's bones, and sown the dust and shards into the earth for birds and worms to make their meal once the sun rises. The remains of the man are salted and stored in our fardels for later.

I have seen many things with my companions when crossing Eurasia, the ways and works of this manifold race we feed on, in all its diversity. Perhaps I will write one day of all these things. The luxury and poverty of nobility and peasantry in the Holy Roman Empire, all sharing their shit and piss and food within the stone cages of cities—hubristic pomp of the elder empires of Roman Caesars and dire morality of the squabbling Christ followers, trickling intermingled into the stones of monasteries and cathedrals, verminous shrines of holy art left by an age since passed. Fishermen roaming the shores of the Black Sea, eating their catch under the open sky with callused hands, ever watching a horizon crowned with the sails of Moorish pirate ships, beach fires marking the watered edge of the Ottoman Empire, leagues from the sultan's seat in that glittering city which the Turks call Kostantiniyye and I once knew as Byzantium. The hard-won lives of nomadic badawi as they herd their animals and villages across badlands, springing forth the lights of fleeting tent cities in desert darkness; the valor of the warrior Pashtuns riding their horses in the sand seas and bladed mountains of the Khorasan, their scimitars hammered Damascus steel, razor-sharp against even the tough hide of our second selves.

But it is always the strange intimacies of humans, differently expressed yet prevalent across all their empires and lands, observed in the darkest hours of night, that stick with me and stir my appetites in unexpected ways.

A conversation, as if between two men:

Makedon watches me scratch wetted bone nib over parchment on my lap. “Let us talk, like two men,” he says. I nod. “What exactly is it that you're scribbling on that scroll? An epic to make of us three great heroes, demigods to the hapless humanity we crush between our jaws—our shifting selves twinned deities to the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses of the khrissal,
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who remains forever stranded between the two?” he says to me.

“I'd say the more accurate precursor for my journals isn't your Homer but Columbus, writing in curiosity on the shores of new worlds across the Atlantic.”

“Is that right? I suppose that's fair. Columbus didn't eat the peoples of those ancient worlds, but he and his imperium have treated them as well as cattle and fowl for the cooking fire.”

“What's that to do with anything, Makedon?”

“I know how you silently worship our prey. No doubt it's in that scroll of yours. I mention the expeditions of your professed antecedent Christophorus Columbus not because he was exceptional among humanity in the practice of cruelty. I mention them, because all of his race, which you so admire while devouring, treat themselves just about as well as we treat them.”

“There is a difference between cruelty and killing. You, I've seen, don't much separate the two. I don't think a wolf killing a lamb exercises cruelty. I don't see myself as treating khrissals poorly, though I eat of them for sustenance.”

“You've never seen a wolf play with a still-living lamb bleating its blood across the snow, then. Khrissals are not the beautiful, intelligent lambs you see, nor are we impossibly noble wolves. No, khrissals are fierce, wombed, cock-slung spiders—yes, spiders, spewing the filth of excess thought across the earth in the glutinous webs of civilizations that scrabble for space to weave their own webs over those of their brethren. They have a fire in them, I'll give them that; no other animal has it, this Promethean fire. And I will forever cherish the taste of that fire dancing on my tongue. Oh yes, there is no substitute. But it is ultimately a destructive flame, and eventually it will consume the planet and turn it to ashes. If I were a religious being, I'd say
our
purpose on this earth is solely to keep
them
in check.”

“With rhetoric like that pouring from your mouth, I'd say you long to write as well. It would make an impressive screed on a scroll, wouldn't it?”

“No, I don't think it would. Because, in honesty, who cares to listen to my screed? Not me. It bores me. We live to eat of humankind, not ask ourselves why. You travel as North-man, not poet. Don't you feel shame? Do you not long to live up to the legends the Vikings and their people made? You are magic, North-man, dread hamrammr.
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In your lands our tribes take the names of jotunn and troll, aesir and vanir. Names and stories khrissals spoke, and wrote, and carved, because they remember the titanic battles of our tribes before their history. Even in the sleep of their witless egotism they remember. And here you sit and write journals, like a limpid mortal Englishman.”

“Limpid Englishmen have written their own tales of gods and blood, and they are no more mortal than Vikings.”

“Well said. Tell me something, in honesty. Why do you write?”

“Why? I write to record, to study. For curiosity. To keep our stories in the worlds beyond our bodies.”

He laughs. “Yes, but for whom? A khrissal writes for other khrissals. But who does a shape-shifter write for? Do you think the tribes will read it and champion you as their great scribe? Or do you think khrissals will read your scrolls, your book, and worship you as their benevolent devourer, an Old Testament god-beast come to them bearing a—a what? A new Bible that seeks only to understand their poor benighted souls, and asks only for the occasional blood sacrifice?”

I am chilled by these words, and hope I don't show it.

“I'm not the first of our tribes to keep a journal, Makedon,” I say. “No one need read it. You criticize because you're bored. And remember as you do that you haven't read a word I have written.”

“Would you like me to read it, then, and give my honest judgment?”

“No.”

“Good. As you say, I'm bored, and I've no wish to be further bored.”

“Leave him alone, will you? If he wants to write, let him write. You're giving me a headache with your bilious wit,” says Gévaudan. He is still wearing around his shoulders a banded serpent that he throttled to death this morning, when it bit his ankle. “The pup speaks. Bilious indeed. Our prey was too steeped in bitterness. An unhappy fool practically begging to be killed, blundering along the countryside with not so much as a weapon to protect from bandits. His spleen has infected me with a distemper.”

I see a fury run across Gévaudan's soft face, and wonder at this passion.

“Why try so hard to strip this man of dignity in death? Have you abandoned your ideas about khrissals and their destructive Promethean fire now?” I ask Makedon.

He laughs without humor. “I find it difficult to believe that he cares if I mock him, in his current state as slurry in our bowels and pieces in our fardels.”

“You may have lived longer than I, but do not underestimate man and his ingenuity, nor the growing venom of his fear for things beyond his ken,” I say.

“Shall I not underestimate woman also? No, for man and woman both are equally succulent, and fear's venom flavors them all the better by stirring the iron in their veins.”

“We should give thanks now to the man who feeds us and strengthens our souls,” I say, yearning for quiet.

“How about we give tribute to the whelp whose skin you write on, North-man? He had many lives within him yet, none of them ripened when we took him,” Makedon says, now playful.

“And one of those lives was that of an orphaned beggar, wandering in misery on the streets of Lahore. Would he have liked to live that one?” Gévaudan asks.

Makedon laughs again, this time more genuine. “He's got your back, this one.”

Gévaudan whispers tribute to our prey, touching the earth and blowing the clinging crumbs of soil into the air from his fingertips. I stroke the damp earth and do the same. Makedon removes the dark curls waving in front of his face, looking up at the stars. He gets up.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

Makedon walks a few feet from us and begins to shed his furs and raiment. “I'm going to hunt,” he replies, tossing his clothes on the ground. His eyes seem to glow already with fervor, the green of their orbs waking with reflections.

“Again? We have remains in our fardels,” I say.

“Then I'll hunt to kill. What is one less worker out of the twenty thousand over there? In fact, why settle for a worker? I will bring you the head of the emperor himself come sunrise,” says Makedon, his smile as bright as his eyes.

Gévaudan sits up. “Would you like to bet on that? I could do with some coin. Buy myself a fancy new blade from the next blacksmith I happen upon. And if I lose the bet, at least we'll have the head of an emperor, and we can sell it to his subjects for riches.”

Makedon snorts. “What's so unbelievable about it, Gévaudan?” He pulls off his boots and stands tall and proud and naked on his bare feet, taking his hardening penis in his hands and pissing a steaming circle around his clothes. The rising smell of his waters fills my nostrils, pungent, clinging to the winter air as the ground melts to frothing mud. He stares at the mausoleum rising out of the ground. The many bone trophies sewn and burned into his skin writhe with his movements, the rib shards down his back bristling like the nubs of worn skeletal wings. He looks at me.

“Write all you want of their giant baubles to dead mates and gods, North-man. Write it down, all the details. Your text matters as little as these cities and temples and palaces. They'll all be gone in time. Ours is the true power. Let even the great Shah Jahan see what I can become, and see if he doesn't shit himself. Let them provide our words: djinn, devil, or werewolf, though I never saw a wolf that looked like my second self. We'll take all of them. What's in a name? By any name we are greater than human. I can slaughter his whole imperial guard in one night, and swallow him whole as the final course. The Shah Jahan is a man, and as easily killed as any of those poor fools building his wife's tomb or guarding his body, should he folly to challenge a shape-shifter.” Makedon turns toward the Yamuna, raising his arms to the air, the sour musk of excitement falling from his lean and muscled body and riding on the wind, raising the hairs on my neck.

“Well, then. Be careful,” says Gévaudan. Makedon turns his back to us and sprints toward the river in a crouch. “And good hunting,” Gévaudan adds, crossing himself as the Christians do. When Makedon is very far, I think I see him shift, his run changing to a bounding lope before he vanishes into the river.