The Devourers (28 page)

T
he forest is a wall of scent and sound—the constant hiss of leaves, the bone-crackle of branches and dry detritus shifting and warming in the morning, the unending song of insects. The smell of wet earth and shadow-brewed chlorophyll makes it feel like entering the threshold of a new atmosphere, a different world than the one we were just walking in. I twitch and stumble with each tickle of leaf or bug on my skin, my entire body coiled tight in fear. I grip the stranger's hand as if it is a talisman. He gives no reaction, never loosening his hold on me as he marches through the web of roots and shrubs, our palms sealed in sweat, fingers of his other hand scraping the bark of the sundari trees that surround us. It is very dark for the beginning of the day. I trip and fall many times, each time helped up by him. I'm wearing sneakers, but it's near impossible to walk without stumbling because of the overgrown net of roots that overlays the earth. Tiny insects hover in the light hanging from the eaves like living dust. They enter my nostrils, making me sniff and sneeze. Flickering little lizards ghost their way up bark, and pulsing brown globules of earth leap across the ground, only to be discerned as frogs by my confused eyes. I duck in horror at a huge spider suspended between branches, just a foot above my head, the twitching triangle of its body banana yellow and coal black, legs plucking its web for prey.

Already, behind me, the village field we came from is invisible. By the clustered mossy pillars of sundari trunks we stop and sit on the carpet of roots, the mulch of soil and rotted leaves.

“Here,” he says, breathing deep, his face calm and eyes glistening, as if he's just smoked a joint. His legs are crossed like a meditating sadhu. “Don't be afraid, Alok. We're not far from our little human enclave. Don't be afraid.”

I can't even speak. I am shaking, wondering what's beyond the tree trunks, in that dazzling profusion of green. Every second I expect the sharp stab of a snake's fangs piercing my jeans. I feel eyes beyond my visibility, in every bead of sunlight that pokes through the ceiling and curtains of foliage that contain this world.

“This,” he hisses, and closes his eyes. “This is where I grew up.” His mouth is open, cheeks flickering with small spasms. I begin to fear that he will go into some kind of trance, leave me alone and helpless here in the forest where he grew up.

His eyes open. They're the same color as the forest. The green, so intrusive and strange in that brown face. He holds both my trembling hands and kisses me on the mouth, bringing damp to my dry lips. The insects rejoice.

“Talk to me, Alok. Say something. Is it not beautiful?”

I swallow hard. Force myself to form words. “Yes. I've…I've never been in a forest. Not like this.” His thumbs run over my knuckles.

A speck of gold with legs crawls through the thick waves of his hair. In my daze, I can't tell if it's a wasp or a bee. He doesn't take his eyes off me.

“My mother ended her scroll by addressing me directly. I left that out of the translation.”

“What?”

“It said, ‘To my son, Izrail.' She never was too sentimental. But that was the name she gave me. If you want one for me, you can have that one. It's a human name.”

“Izrail?”

“After the archangel, in Islam. Malak al-Maut, the angel of death.”

“Izrail,” I whisper. He smiles.

“Thank you,” I say.

“You're welcome, Alok.” The golden insect leaps from his hair, hovers around Izrail's head, and vanishes back into the thick air of the forest. He takes off his backpack and unzips it. The sound slices across my oversaturated mind, making me shiver. He takes something out. It takes me a while to understand what it is—two bundles of brown parchment tied together into fat rolls. The manuscripts. The ones he translated, and I spent the last year editing and typing out. I am finally looking at the source documents.

“You know what this is, Alok. You were patient. You deserve to see what you gave new life.”

“I didn't do anything. I just typed them out,” I tell him, breathless.

“If you say so. But here they are. The two scrolls. One written by Fenrir, to Cyrah. The other told by Cyrah, for me.”

He unties them and hands them over to me. They are heavy, almost like pieces of wood, the scrolls stiffened and leathery. They smell like leather, too. There are no pages—each scroll is made of several pieces of parchment rolled into a fat bundle. I've never seen paper or parchment like it—it's thick and tough, and so dark a shade of brown that I can't make out the inked black script very well. The parchment feels coarse under my fingers.

“This parchment was used by many of the tribes. It's made from the skin of their prey. I assume they fashioned it during their travels through the Middle East, where they had desert sun to treat and dry it. Or perhaps they brought it with them from Europe. I, too, made my own.”

I feel no repulsion as I realize that I'm holding scrolls of ancient human skin in my hands, unwrapped and taken from people who lived their lives four centuries ago, inscribed with the stories of their killers. I unroll a bit of one scroll, looking at the script. It looks like nothing I'm familiar with, a scrawl that appears to have symbols from various alphabets and languages, all suspended in a medium of lines and letters that look entirely made up. The first, and shorter, scroll seems to be in Arabic script, though it also has unfamiliar-looking symbols and lines that look incongruous amid the language. The writing is pitted, etched into the skin of the scrolls, as if the ink was acidic. The scrolls are also, to my surprise, illuminated, every inch of space without text filled in with drawings and designs that are sometimes too small to be anything other than an intricate swirl of designs. The drawings on the first scroll are simple yet graceful—like cave paintings looped through the language, showing figures and animals, often in flux. The second scroll's illuminations are more detailed, darker, sometimes filling the borders of the parchment with shaded visions of human faces and bodies that weep across the leather with dark-blooded ink.

“What, what language is it?”

Izrail lets his fingers run across mine, and the scrolls. When he speaks, his voice is slurred. “Fenrir's scroll is mostly in Pashto, so Cyrah could understand. The second scroll, and the earlier parts of the first, are in an amalgam. The language has no name, and parts of it are used by shape-shifters across the continents. It combines all the languages of humanity, cobbled from all our prey. If ever there was a tongue before Babel fell, it was this one. It has spawned words of its own as well. It has its own shifting rules, its own recombinant script.”

“It's your language?”

“You could say that. It doesn't have to be.”

“Izrail, this is. I don't know what to say.”

“Yes, the scrolls. They say enough, don't they?”

“God. How. How did you get these? What happened to Cyrah and Gévaudan?”

I look around, and it wouldn't surprise me too much to see both of them watching us. The forest has become magic itself, burning with filtered sunlight. I am a character in myth, in folklore, and no one even knows it. The villagers are living out their lives just a mile away.

“I'm going to tell you, of course. You deserve to know,” says Izrail, his eyelids lazy as they droop over those green irises, unrealistic in their ability to capture the morning light sneaking in through the leaves.

His smile returns, wistful. “You know, I blame them,” he breathes.

“I blame my mother and father. So very human of me. It is their blood that runs in me: Fenrir's weak indecision; Cyrah's cloying, overpowering humanity. They made me what I am. I was drawn, always drawn, to my own prey in ways that I shouldn't have been. Even more so after reading, absorbing the stories of my mother and father. It was as inevitable as the doom of this world, as the trumpet call ringing through the cosmos when this orb falls into the bloated sun. I blame them for the decision to rescue that baul girl from my own hunt, that poor girl who hated me for saving her life. I blame them for thinking I had fallen in love, like my father, or like a human. I blame them. I live in the twilight between worlds, like they did. I was born to be an exile. It was decided from the moment Fenrir raped Cyrah.”

I don't know what to say, but I say, “Don't—”

His hand goes to my neck, thumb on my throat, stilling my words.

“Don't comfort me, Alok,” he whispers. His thumbnail is sharp, and it runs down my neck, waking my entire body with nervous lightning.

“This is where I was going to kill you. In this forest.”

I let him say these words, feeling sluggish looking at his drooping eyes and swaying torso. It doesn't even surprise me, doesn't frighten me any more than being in the middle of a forest filled with tigers and shape-shifters. If my heart begins to beat faster it is because I am filled with wonder and curiosity. Tears gather at the corners of my eyes.

“Like the baul girl that you rescued from your own hunt. You killed her.”

“Of course I did. Of course I did. I am ever like Fenrir, but she was no Cyrah, even though she reminded me of her, just because I saw the face of a young human female with a strong will, with strength in her. I tried to talk to her, to soothe her with stories. But she hated me. I thought I could do what Fenrir couldn't with my mother, that perhaps I could rewrite that story and make this human creature I rescued from her death love me. A foolish whimsy. She was crippled with terror and grief. What could I do? I gave her respite.”

“You killed her, and ate her,” I say. The forest swims beyond Izrail's body, its living tapestry rippling as the sun rises higher, somewhere beyond our sight. He nods, a droplet of sweat rolling down the side of his forehead, a glass line.

“Ate her,” he murmurs. “And wrote on her skin the story of my mother. Yes. You have so many questions, but you don't ask, because you're kind and you listen to me. So many untold things, inconsistencies and secrets. What human can sit before me and not have questions?”

“And me, Izrail. Will you kill me now?” I remember Cyrah in the forest by the Yamuna, Gévaudan tranced into a frenzy, about to bare his second self. “Are you going to show me your second self?” There is a panic attack roiling inside my body, but I let it envelop me instead of reacting against it, let it thunder in my blood vessels and head like the sea that inundates this delta. I lick my dry lips, feeling their skin split.

His eyes close and open, languid, catlike. “No. I won't. I liked you from the moment I met you, Alok. I remember the things I said to you in our early conversations, and it embarrasses me so deeply. I behaved like a whelp performing the part of a werewolf, the father I never really had, swaggering and telling white lies and acting mysterious. Yes, I liked you from the very beginning. That's why I wanted to bring you here, where I made my first human kill, where I first sprang my second self, where I grew up. I had it all planned out, Alok. Here I would have brought you, and I would have used my knuckles to break your nose, quick, shatter it so you fell to unconsciousness, so you could not cry out or scream. I would have broken your back with my knee to cripple you, and I would have sliced your windpipe with my fingernail to preserve your silence. Then I would have taken off my clothes and let my second self out, drawing my fellow rakshasas from the forest, have them watch me tear your throat out with my teeth, and dismember you, tear you to pieces and eat you, bit by bit, until you were gone, until only the cracked bones of your skeleton remained. They would watch, and they would wait, to see if I dared come deeper into their forest. But this is close to Banbibi's protectorate, to human habitation, and they would allow me this one kill, because it is a fluid place. Because even though I am an exile, I am also Banbibi's son, and that is no ordinary thing. By my scent they would know both these things, and remember the time I was once one of them, remember the change that crept along my musk the day I found out I was bastard son to the human guardian of the forest and a European exile. They would remember how I left with my own pack, and they would sniff out the deep trace of shame that tells of my betrayal of that pack.

“But I am Banbibi's son, and because of this they would leave me be. So I would stay here and dig a deep hole and bury myself naked with your bones, to sleep the molting trance of ekh'du, which centuries ago the Slavs saw the scavenging shape-shifters of their land waking from out of the ground of plague-graves, and so called our kind undead. And in this trance I would digest the life you have lived, live off it as a bear lives off the fat it has gathered on its bones for winter, let my souls absorb it and send its echoes calling through my mind as if it were the longest dream I ever dreamed, and in the womb of the earth I would change and shift as befits my kind, and in a night or a day or a week or a month I would either be dead, or emerge with a new first self—you, my dearest friend, Alok. And you would live in me, as me, or I as you, forever, or until my distant end, whenever that may be.”

As I listen to Izrail's confession, I realize that the rhythm of it has hypnotized me, that I am in a waking sleep, even though I hear what he is saying. I feel his fingers touch my eyelids, close them.

—

I am a shape-shifter, strong, young. It is winter now, the mudflats covered in low mist fanned out of the forest by the trees.

I watch her still. There are now gleaming strands of silver in her black hair. She is wearing an extra fur pelt now over her tattered cloak. As I observe her, she leaps off the beast on her strong legs, feet slapping the soft ground of the mudflat. I retreat deeper into the foliage, shocked by this. She has always seen me watching her, but she has never once left her perch on that great mount.

She walks forward toward me, dimpling the mud with a trail of her footprints. The beast watches, its eyes like the stars above us.

I think of running, returning to my pack. I think of seeing if she will come any closer.

“Come out of the trees, young rakshasa,” she says in Bangla when she is twenty feet from me. She says it softly, knowing that I can hear her. It is the first time I have heard her speak. It is strange and frightening to hear the voice of a khrissal so calm and clear while she addresses me. No khrissal has looked me in the eyes and shown anything but fear. Feeling like it would be a sign of weakness to stay hidden, I walk out of the edge of the forest, standing tall in my first self.

I see the beast behind her crouch lower, ready to charge. I tense, ready to shift and flee should I need to.

“Don't be alarmed,” she says, bringing my gaze back to her calm face. Her words are lilting like a song, as if she is not used to speaking Bangla. “Jevah-dan will not hurt you. He's just protective.”

She looks at me, and I feel ashamed, almost, of my nakedness. It is like nothing I have ever felt before.

“Do you know Pashto?” she asks.

I nod. Though it is not common to do so, I have ranged far enough and hunted enough Mughals to know their languages, and I know even the language of the pirates and smugglers that roam the waterways of the delta forest in their wooden ships from the land they call Portugal, and the languages of other intruders from the far places that fall under the banner of Europe.