The Devourers (29 page)

She smiles, and my chest hurts. I wonder why. I have never seen a khrissal smile while looking at me, just as I have never seen one look at me and not flee. I feel uneasy to see that she looks proud, almost like my imakhr when I made my first kill.

“That is good,” she says, in Pashto this time. “Come closer, child. We must talk.”

“I'm not a child.”
I could destroy you easier than a tiger swats a mouse dead,
I am about to say, but remember the beast behind her. “Why do you want to talk to me?” I ask.

Her chest rises and falls, a puff of her breath clouding her lips. Her eyes are a crystal gray, almost green in the half-light of the moon. “In your bones, those of your first self, you can perhaps feel it already. You know,” she tells me.

The smell of my fear escapes me like a cloud. The shape-shifter bristles behind her, shaking its head and snapping its jaws in loud clashes as it catches the scent.

She smiles again, but it is a sad, terrible smile that makes me want to wither at her knees and beg her to leave me alone.

“You are a child, young rakshasa. To me, you're still a child. In human years, you've just grown beyond boyhood. You're so very young. You'd be on the brink of manhood, mustering the courage to court girls, confused by everything in the world; a sweet and delicate thing.”

“I'm no khrissal. What is it you want? Why are you saying these things to me?”

“You're not human, no. But you could have been, so easily.” She looks down, the curtain of her hair sweeping past her face as she clutches her fur and cloak closer to her shoulders, and for a moment she is incredible in her fragility. But it is her words that leave me breathless.

“Look at you. Tall and beautiful, so powerful and sure of yourself,” she breathes, looking into my eyes. “And yet, I still wonder every night whether I made the right choice.”

“What are you—”

“Come closer,” she says, her words piercing the damp air with their sharpness. Not aggression, but force. It is the first time she has raised her voice to a normal tenor. I am so startled I obey her, walking up to her so that I am a foot away, so that I can feel her khrissal blood iron-warm in the air, smell her scent of unwashed sweat and skin, beast-musk and forest dirt. Yet I feel no appetite, no urge to rip her open and free that tumult of tastes and odors.

She reaches out with one hand. I flinch, almost pouncing backward into a crouch but suppressing the instinct.
She is a khrissal,
I tell myself.
She cannot hurt me.
Her fingers touch my face, light, grazing the line of my jaw, and her cool palm rests against my cheek.

“I'm sorry, my son. I did what I thought was best.”

I keep my eyes locked to hers. She lets her hand fall away. “Who are you?” I demand.

“I'm your mother. I gave birth to you, here in this forest. I nursed you, and held you, and cared for you, for as long as I could allow myself, and I gave you to the tribes.”

I stare at her, my breathing now harsh.

“You're not my mother, khrissal. The creature you gave birth to was your son. That is none of my concern. It died when I was born.”

The corner of her lip twitches, her eyes darting for a second like those of a frightened deer. I can see the gouges my words make in her. Her face is placid and calm again within moments, but I know that I have hurt her. It is the only thing I can do to keep from fleeing, from never seeing this khrissal goddess and her vahana again. I feel sick. She licks her lips. I see her throat move under the skin as she swallows, and speaks.

“You're cruel, but it's just the way of your kind. I have seen even that overcome, by those who have proven themselves far stronger than the mightiest of beasts natural and magical. But it is as you say,” she says. She is so gentle, so unlike anything that I have met, or talked to.

“That…creature, that was my son,” she continues, looking straight at me without flinching. “He had a father, who was a rakshasa as well, though not like you. A shape-changer, I should say. He came from a different part of the world, and the tribes there do not use the word
rakshasa,
and are different. Jevah-dan was his friend, once.”

I say nothing.

“Seeing as how you came from that creature my son, I thought that you had a right to know how that creature came to be. How you came to be. So I give you this. Look at it if you wish.”

She reaches under her cloak, bringing out a sackcloth bundle and handing it to me. With that, she stands on her toes and presses her mouth to my cheek. Her lips spark in the winter air like a brand against me, the kiss tingling and evaporating on my scorching skin. She looks at me one last time and strides away, holding her cloak bunched to her hips because it is too long by far for her, her bare mud-spattered calves visible under its torn fringe, the waves of her hair dangling around her like thick black cords from out of her cowl, tangling themselves around her legs and body. I watch her as I always have, watch her return to her companion Jevah-dan, watch them gallop away across the mudflat until they are gone.

I look inside the sackcloth. Nestled inside is a scroll of parchment, made by a shape-shifter.

—

After reading it, I bury the scroll in the forest, in the center of one of the islands. I mark the spot with nothing but my piss, so anyone digging there will have slighted me.

—

The next time I see her, winter has just begun to wane, and she is alone.

I stand at the very edge of the country of eighteen tides, the forest miles behind me. A plain of salt clay stretches before me. It meets the ocean on the horizon, where the falling sun burns and bleeds across the great waters. It is the first time I have seen the open sea, or come this far. I have followed her trail here, through the delta to the end of Hindustan.

Somewhere out there, the cannon-heavy ships of pale-skinned khrissals who call themselves Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, compete on the waves for their futures in this land, occasionally dredging up on the sieve of the Ganga's mouth, where we hunt them and glean their strange stories, so different from those of the delta people. Though I have dreamed their patchwork lives, learned from their flesh and blood and souls the different ways of this world, I have never before seen with my own senses how massive this orb we all make our stories on truly is. What I see in front of me is but a fraction of it, but it looks like eternity itself.

She looks into that vastness, as if she came from it.

I watch her, small against the wide tidal plain, surrounded by shrieking gulls that pick and feed from the wet ground. Crests of foaming water crash in the distance, a constant thunder in the air.

I follow the glare of the setting sun and walk to her. She turns to look at me.

“Your guardian is gone,” I say to her.

Her face is wet, flushed not just from the carnal red of sunset but from crying. She smiles.

“Yes. He was never at home here. He was lonely, like I am. Even though we always had each other. I knew that, even if he could never admit it, even if he couldn't face the fact that one way or the other, he couldn't care for me forever. I've never before known loyalty like his.”

“If he cared so much for you, why has he fled, leaving you ready prey to his kind?”

She looks disappointed that I would ask such a question, her brow furrowing. The cloak shifts on her shoulders, heavy but stirred by the hurtling damp wind from the ocean. She shakes her head.

“He did not flee, young rakshasa. I told him to leave. I demanded it. It wasn't an easy thing for him to do, but he has respected my wishes. Jevah-dan has journeyed beyond the delta, and, I hope, will one day return to his home of France.”

I spit at her feet. “Your friendship is an abomination. You are his prey.”

She takes off her cowl, her hair lashing out across her face as if in anger. Then she slaps me, hard, on the cheek. In that second when she raises her arm I see it coming, and am compelled by instinct to grab her limb and snap it like a twig, but something keeps me from doing so. The crack of it echoes in my skull as her nails rake past the edge of my chin. The blow does not hurt me, but the shock of it is tremendous, makes me stagger back. She is still a khrissal, goddess or no.

“I am prey to you all: to your father, to my dearest friend, to you, my son,” she says.

I bare my teeth. “You're not my mother.”

She bites her lower lip. I see tiny jewels of blood emerge in the seams left by her teeth. “Then kill me. Devour me,” she says. I see her shivering in the cold wall of knotted air rushing over the desolate sun-churned sea. Somewhere above the thin dark line of forest far behind us, a half-moon waits.

Piss runs down my thighs, spatters and hisses in the silt. The gulls scream and recoil from us, from the vapors of my spoor. I can feel the change coming, but again, again that doubt congeals the membrane between my souls, stifling their separation, sending a crawling ache deep through my chest.

“I'm your prey. Do what you were born to do. Destroy me,” she says.

“Why?” I say between gnashing teeth, spittle spraying against her. She doesn't even blink, doesn't back away as I loom over her, my jaws inches from her forehead.

“Why not? I can't go back to humanity's shores. And I don't belong here, either. If I had kept you as my son, I could have gone back, could have tried to make a life for us both somewhere. But I didn't. I made my choice. I have seen you safely to adulthood, even if it is the adulthood of a creature not human. And I shouldn't regret that. You're far stronger this way.”

Still I let her speak, am drawn to her words, want them to keep falling against my ears in that soft, abhorrent,
human
voice.

“What have you done to me, khrissal? Have you cast a spell on me? Are you truly some devi of your people? You…you really are Banbibi,” I say, my hackles rising, breath blowing the hair from out of her eyes, drying the traces of tears from her cheekbones.

“My dear boy,” she says, her eyes widening. Her small hands hold my wrists, tight so I don't shake them off, though I could, easily. But again, I don't. “I've cast nothing on you, nothing at all. I'm no devi. I have no powers. I should have died the moment I met Fenrir, or become a shape-changer myself. And I do not want to become a shape-changer. I thought I did, once. The thoughts of a young woman. But devour me now, and perhaps I'll always be Banbibi, never aging, never seen. I've lived my life like no human, and now I can't die like a human of old age, not alone and mired between worlds.”

I retch, drooling slime at her feet. Her hands stroke my arms. Once again, I feel her fingers against my cheek.

“Don't be scared. They're coming. We had a pact, because I gave you to them. Jevah-dan negotiated it. But Jevah-dan is gone now. Our pack of two is gone. They won't abide by the pact anymore. So I'm dead anyway. You'll be the hero of your tribe, the one who slew this human avatar of Banbibi, khrissal who wormed her way into living among the rakshasas in their realm, and helped your tribe's prey escape from them and suffered no consequence for it. Let go, my love. Let your second self out. I'm here, unprotected.”

She's right. I can feel it in my guts and in my head, the approach of my pack-mates and my imakhr. They have followed. They are coming. Miles away, I see the forest disgorge dark shapes that speed across the silt plain.

The sun shatters through clouds clinging to the edge of the ocean, its million shining pieces flung across the leagues of water, carried from the crests of surf by wind and thrown to burn in her black hair, turning it bloody gold. From over the far forest, darkness creeps across the wetland, as if brought by the advancing harbingers of my tribe. I can feel the rumble of their clawed feet and lashing of their long tails in the soles of my feet.

Her thumb brushes across my cheekbone. I fall to my knees in front of her like a wretched devotee, as if I am my father the exile, author of that accursed scroll, pitiful rakshasa from Europe who gave himself to a khrissal, who spun off the thread of time that ends here between the sinking sun and the floating moon, the ocean and the land.

They're coming. Her guardian is gone. They will kill her when they arrive. I realize with sudden clarity that I have to be the one to kill her; that I cannot let any of the others touch her or eat of her. I must be the one. I must. I look up into her, and I know she sees this in my eyes.

There is time yet.

She nods, and smiles at me. Blood on her lips, salt water in her eyes. Even though she is shivering, there is no fear in her. I would smell it if there was. I let my second self emerge.

—

For a moment I don't know where I am, for a moment I still feel an ocean wind in my eyes, still feel the blood of a human demigoddess in my mouth. We're walking across the field by the forest, heading toward the raised dirt road. I stagger and spit copious, bitter saliva into the furrows of the field, almost falling into the hard stalks sticking out of them. Izrail steadies me with his strong hand, and already has a shawl ready to wrap around my shoulders.

I take deep breaths, as he once told me to. Pins and needles prickle across my limbs. I look back at the blackening wall of the forest against the rich pink sky.

“We were in there all day?”

“Don't worry, I told Shankar-babu we'd be gone all day. I convinced him we wouldn't wander off and die. They're not going to send search parties. Not yet, anyway. We should be getting back now.”

I stare at him.

He smiles, reassuring. “I know. Come. We'll talk about it later.”

I look again at the forest. The setting sun twinkles between the leaves of the uppermost canopy. In the dense dark between the tree trunks, I sense the shape-shifters watch us depart their realm. I can see nothing, hear nothing of them. But they are there, as real as the insects hammering my skin in the dimming dusk air.