The Devourers (12 page)

*
The Perfume Market.

N
ow, I know you'll judge me for actually going to the Northern Gate at dawn the next day, my possessions gathered and my will strong. It seems the most stupid and reckless thing I could have chosen to do. And it was. But you have to understand, the possibility that Fenrir's child was growing inside me horrified me more than the possibility of being attacked by his fellow devil from Europe. I had my knife, and I decided when I set out into the crisp cold of this new day that if this one tried what Fenrir had, I'd rather die defending myself than give myself to his whims. If my last breaths were taken while cutting a rapist open, I might just allow myself to slip into death content. I know that times have changed since, that this might seem rather extreme, that people might value their lives a little more now than they did back then.

To be clear, it's not that I wanted to die. I didn't, especially not violently at the hands of a mad white prophet, and that not even a Christian one (I don't know if I ever had a conception of white men who weren't Christians before I met Fenrir). At least that would have made some sense, what with the stories of the Crusades and all that. No. I didn't want to die, but I was
prepared
to. I had no one to look to or leave behind—no family left, and no friends or companions. I was used to living day-to-day, surviving by myself and myself only. I'd done so for years. I simply decided, that morning, that if I found myself with no more days to have to survive by myself, it wouldn't be the worst thing that could happen to me. It would be quite terrible, but not the worst.

Was I scared? Of course I was. But I was ready to see this through to its end, though I had no idea what that end was. I was compelled by Fenrir's prophecy. Compelled not to accept it, but to chase him to the ends of the earth, and demand that he use whatever ungodly power he had to take back this new destiny he'd written into my body and mind, to erase it from me like ink from parchment. If he was truly anything like a djinn—like the ones the Fisherman and Al' ad-Din met and bargained with—there was a chance he could take back the woe he'd given me. And if he couldn't—then I didn't know. I could always demand more money from his endless fardels. Or his life, even if it meant ending my own.

Most important, I would face him prepared this time.

So it came, the time to leave Mumtazabad, with the companion of my rapist.

“S
o I know you and your lot don't seem to give much worth to names, but if we're to travel with each other I need to call you something.”

“Hm. Gévaudan. Call me that.”

“Jevah-dan?”

“As you wish. And what's your name?”

“Cyrah.”

I tightened my scarf and shawl around me against the morning chill, wishing I had Gévaudan's furs and cloak instead. He was not in a talkative mood, and we had left Mumtazabad in near silence. I'm sure I saw something like relief cross his face when he saw me at the gate, though. It made me uneasy to see that—he
did
care whether or not I accompanied him, and I didn't know why.

“So how does this work, Jevah-dan? I'm not just going to follow you blindly, you know. Where are we going? How do you intend to find Fen-eer?”

“I told you, I'm good at tracking. We all are. So I'm going to the place where I last saw him, and I'm going to pick up his scent from there. Depending on how careful he's been, it might work. It hasn't rained, and the weather's been cool, so his spoor should linger.”

I remembered how Fenrir had taken my hair and come back at night.

“Wait. Would a bit of his blood help? I spilled some, on my dupatta.” I decided not to tell him about the stained knife.

“You spilled Fenrir's blood?”

“Yes.”

“That's pathetic. Pathetic.” He thought about this for a while, grimacing all the while. Then, becoming aware that I was watching him, he nodded.

“Yes, that would help. Give it to me.”

“Right now?”

“Yes.”

I hesitated, then turned away from him to loosen the bundle I had slung on my shoulder, and pulled out the dupatta. I didn't want to just hand him a piece of my clothing, since I was wearing the only other dupatta I had to live with, so I bent over and cut a bloodstained portion of the cloth out with my blade. I heard him pacing about, but he didn't ask what I was doing. It left a ragged hole in the dupatta, and that hurt a bit. But I could mend it later.

I put the blade away and turned back to Gévaudan, holding out the stained piece of fabric. He glowered at me and took it.

“Are you angry that I cut him because he's your friend?”

“No,” he grunted, looking at the dark-brown spots on the rag. Then he held it up to his face as if he were blowing his nose into it, and began taking deep breaths with his eyes closed. I looked away quickly, feeling as if I'd happened upon something private and vulgar. He did this for an entire minute or so before shoving the rag somewhere under his cloak.

“Let's go,” he said, and strode forward.

—

We passed through the gardens that Shah Jahan had planted around the banks of the Yamuna to delight the eyes of visitors to his wondrous wife's tomb. I was only just able to keep up with Gévaudan as he wove in and out of the morning mist, which the numerous fruit and cypress trees had gathered under their eaves like a damp bounty. I trampled many a rose and daffodil on the way, which I admit gave me some pleasure despite my trepidation (as a child I used to love running through flowers, snapping crisp green stems and kicking petals into the air). I was also very nervous we would get caught, as I didn't know if we were even allowed in the gardens. I had never been in them before. It was an impressive sight to pass through, though Mumtaz Mahal's incomplete tomb wasn't visible because of the mist. I've heard that these emperors' charbaghs
^*1
are meant to give us an idea of what Paradise looks like, and though this one wasn't finished it already looked like it could be a nice enough place to spend a while in, if not an eternity.

I could hear the faraway calls of the workmen from beyond the trees, and each time I did, I would duck low, wondering if we'd be caught as trespassers. Once or twice I fell straight into the great mounds of cold earth dug up between the trees (for more trees and flower beds, I assume). To my surprise, Gévaudan came running back whenever this happened to help me up with such strength and speed that I barely had enough time to shrug him off and tell him I needed no help.

By the time the sun was two fingers above the mist-smudged horizon (we had left Mumtazabad before it emerged) and burning bright enough to call the day a day, the tomb was visible beyond the foliage, looking half there in the wet and sunlit air. Indeed, it was only half there, its ivory-white façades and minarets gaping and toothless, yet to be finished. The scaffolding was already crawling with workers.

As I followed Gévaudan, I thought we were heading straight for the tomb. But we were heading northeast, as I realized when the ghostly vision of the mausoleum in the distance began orienting itself to our left. By the time we reached the banks of the Yamuna I was feeling warm under my shawl. The sun had crawled up another inch and set the mist aflame across the dark line of the earth, so that it looked like there was a fire blazing all across the distant horizon. The tomb was a mile or two down the riverbank we stood on. Across the river I could see nothing but muddy flatlands and forested wilderness.

“We have to cross the river,” Gévaudan said.

“We can keep going to the next bridge.”

“It'll take too long. We're crossing here. The campsite where I was last with Fenrir is a straight line from here, beyond the other bank.”

“We can't just cross here. I can't. It's too cold, and deep!”

“I'll carry you on my back. Sit on my shoulders, and I'll swim us across.”

“That's ridiculous. You can't swim with me on your shoulders. The Yamuna isn't some shallow stream. We'll sink like stones.”

“You needn't tell me what I can or can't do, little girl.”

“Cyrah. I'm not a little girl.”

“Just get on my back, Cyrah. There are lands north of here where it's so cold that this river would be frozen to white ice, and we could just walk over it. So stop your whining. This is weak winter. If I begin to sink you can jump off and swim back to shore. It won't kill you. And I won't sink.”

He squatted and patted his shoulders, gazing at me dolefully. Tired already, I decided I couldn't be bothered to argue. There were far worse dangers possible in this journey than taking a dip in the Yamuna.

Grimacing, I sat on his back as if he were a camel, legs on either side of his neck. I flinched when he put his hands around my ankles to steady me as he got up. But they didn't move up any farther. If he was at all bothered by me sitting on his back, he didn't show it. His gait didn't even change, as if my weight made no impression on him. I wasn't the heaviest woman, certainly, but I felt like I was made of nothing but straw and air, sitting on his shoulders.

He waded straight into the Yamuna without hesitating. I gasped as my feet dipped into the water. Gévaudan made no sound, cutting across the water with the ease of a crocodile. There was a gut-lurching moment when his entire body dipped and the water lapped up to my knees, and I swore to say that I'd been right to worry, but it was just the point at which his feet left the riverbed and he began to swim. Though my legs got soaked, he stayed true to his promise and didn't sink us both, somehow managing to swim while still balancing me on his shoulders. I held my breath for no real reason as he carried me over, the world gone quiet as I swayed on this man, his wet hair tickling my thighs. My feet had gone cold and numb in the water even though its ripples glowed in the sunrise as if the Yamuna were a river of liquid fire, like those that run from broken mountains in far-off lands. I don't know how long the crossing took. It felt like hours that I sat on Gévaudan's back, listening to the huff of his breath, my thighs aching to prevent myself from falling off, watching the wheeling patterns of ducks skimming the river before flying off into the haze.

By the time we reached the shore, I was rigid with pain from trying to keep from falling off Gévaudan. But I felt more tranquil during that crossing than I had for all the days since I met Fenrir.

“My feet are numb. How can you not be cold?” I muttered, not really asking him, as we walked away from the river, our feet sinking into the cool mud. He didn't look the least bit bothered despite being soaked. He walked around dripping in the morning chill, his hair clinging to his face and his cloak and furs stinking like the coat of a wet dog.

He turned and bent down in front of me. I stepped back, but he took his cloak in his hands and wiped my ankles with it. The cloak itself was wet, so it did nothing but smear cold water over my skin, but he pried my left foot off the ground and cradled it in his cloak-clad hand as if it were a brittle toy, and wiped it down, and then did the same for my right foot. The coarse cloak left a cool and not unpleasant itching across the soles of my feet. As he let the cloak fall from his hands, I noticed how white and delicate his hands looked, how small compared with his height and bulk. He had long nails, which had blushed a dark purple against his pale cuticles because of the swim. His plump, tapering fingers and smooth knuckles were unlike Fenrir's hands, which had been massive and thick, rough like sandpaper against my skin when he had touched me. Abruptly, Gévaudan got up and squelched ahead, breaking me out of my daze. I would have thanked him for his unsettling, gentle gesture, were he anybody else.

It was a ten-minute walk from the river's edge to the campsite. It didn't look like a campsite. There were no traces of fire, or anything, really, to indicate that anyone had camped there. I wondered if Gévaudan was mistaken.

“Are you sure this is it?”

“Yes,” he said with a grunt as he squatted. He got on all fours and peered at the wet ground. To be honest, there were other things on my mind at this point.

“Who are you?” I asked him.

He looked up at me with vague curiosity. “Have you forgotten my name already? I know it's hard for you to say, but you'll have to make some effort here.”

“You know what I mean, Jevah-dan. No man can swim across the Yamuna in the dead of winter with another perched on his back, no matter how strong he is.”

He spit on the ground and shrugged. “I'm not a man.” He said this as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“Fenrir would talk like this also. You both keep talking like you're not human. What are you then? What are these tribes you come from?”

“That's a long story, for later.”

“Who are you people? Does your madness give you strength? Are you some kind of white faqirs?”
^*2

Gévaudan fished the bloodstained piece of my dupatta out from under his cloak and began smelling it again. I shivered before I could stop myself. He looked like a white man I'd once seen in a caravanserai, snorting a rag soaked in opiates as if it were the only thing keeping him alive.

Then he started digging. He used his hands, which looked even whiter with dark soil on them, the bone-white hands of a ghost. His long fingernails became black as he shoved clods out of the ground and tossed them aside, his face fixed in a frown. I watched mesmerized, wondering what purpose this ritual would serve now, surprised as I was at every turn by him.

He pulled a man's head from the hole he'd made in the ground. Sheathed as it was in a skin of watered mud, I thought it was a rock at first, until I saw the smaller white pebbles of its teeth glittering in the rising sun. They sat in the bubbling hole of the mouth, breathing out the gases that dead flesh produces.

I don't remember if I screamed or gasped, but I do remember that I kept my wits about me. I observed Gévaudan's face, managing to surmise that he wasn't digging up this gruesome trophy to scare me, or to serve as a prelude to violence. In fact, he barely seemed aware of me, wiping the sopping earth from the stiff features of the dead face that stared up at him.

Gévaudan laughed, and then suddenly turned serious again.

“The sentimental bastard. He buried Makedon,” he grumbled.