Whispers of the Flesh (10 page)

Eleven

M
ARY MOTHER OF grace,
David prayed silently when he realized what this unholy creature was about to do.
Mother of mercy, do thou protect me from the enemy and receive me at the hour of my death.

David’s body may as well have been a hunk of clay, so heavy and lifeless did it feel. Much as he dreaded the prospect of being strangled, had he the wherewithal to speak, he might very well have begged for death rather than spend the remainder of his life as a lumpish thing to be spoon-fed and diapered and hauled about like an infant. His only real regret was that he was going to his Maker without Last Rites.
Forgive me, Father . . .

David closed his eyes and waited for Darius to tighten his grip and squeeze, putting an end to this grueling struggle for air, but he could barely feel the demon’s hands about his neck. Perhaps he was losing sensation there, too. Were that the case, though, would he feel this strange, ticklish heat spreading downward from the base of his skull?

He opened his eyes and saw Darius scowling in concentration as he lightly cradled David’s neck, the movements of his fingers barely perceptible. Heat flowed down David’s back like a river of lava, sprouting smaller rivulets that sizzled down his arms and legs, into his fingers, his toes, every last part of his body. His flesh started prickling all over, like a foot that had fallen asleep but in a more intense, sparkly-hot way that made him gasp.

That was when he realized he was breathing,
really
breathing, not just struggling to suck air into his lungs.

The prickling peaked and gradually abated, flooding him with a soothing warmth not dissimilar to being immersed in the Lake of a Thousand Diamonds. All too soon, though, the warmth dissipated, to be replaced by pain—just a hint at first, focused mostly in his right leg, left arm, and the side of his head, but it escalated rapidly.

David didn’t care; he was grateful for the pain, evincing as it did the return of sensation to his body. He flexed his feet, wriggled his fingers, closed his right hand around a fistful of pine needles, which pricked his palm.

“You . . . you didn’t kill me.”

“You noticed that, did you?” Darius moved his hands from David’s neck to the painful area on the side of his head, which grew warm and ticklish as the flesh there re-formed itself into what it had been before—for it felt as if that was what was happening. It was astounding, miraculous—but no more so than watching a man turn into a bird in the blink of an eye.

Darius pulled a penknife from his pocket and used it to slice the sleeves of David’s frock coat and shirt from cuff to shoulder. “You’ll want to hold still for this.”

Darius began moving his hands over David’s grossly distended upper arm, not quite touching it, but generating the now-familiar tingling warmth. His face was bleached of color, and he had a drawn look about him.

David’s stomach pitched as he felt the bones moving about and locking together beneath the flesh. Once the broken halves were aligned and merging back together, the pain began to dissipate.

David said, “Whatever you are, Darius, human or non, you are clearly doing the work of God. He has graced you with the power to heal. It is an extraordinary gift.”

Darius scowled as he took his penknife to David’s right trouser leg. “Try living with this ‘gift,’and tell me if it isn’t more of a curse.” Parting the rent trouser leg, he said, “This one is a bit thornier.”

David’s lower leg was curved like a bow, with two bloody gashes one above the other; from the bottom one emerged a few inches of jagged white bone.

“Both bones are smashed,” Darius explained as he passed his hand over the injury, “the tibia in three main pieces, the fibula in two—and there are a good many bits of bone floating about in there. This is one you really are going to want to keep still for.”

David lay motionless, his eyes closed, as he tried to ignore the sensation of dozens of little fragments of bone coming together along with the five larger pieces.

“The dicey bit’s over now.”

David looked up to find Darius moving his hand back and forth over the two still-gaping wounds, which fused together as he watched, until all that was left were two ragged pink scars amid some redness and swelling.

This is really happening,
David thought.
This isn’t a dream. This isn’t my imagination.

“With my type of healing,” Darius said, “the bodily tissues regenerate with extraordinary speed. By tonight, you’ll feel virtually as good as new.” He closed his eyes on a long, exhausted sigh, looking for all the world like a man dying of consumption.

“I say, are you quite all right?” asked David, pushing himself to a sitting position, which brought on a wave of dizziness. He managed to scoot himself back and lean against the tree trunk, relying mainly on his two relatively uninjured limbs.

Draping an arm over his forehead, Darius said, “Doing that drains my vital humors. The more severe the injury or illness, the more it depletes me.”

“Is that why you consider it a curse?”

“Partly.”

David waited for him to continue.

Darius sighed. “Mostly, it’s because of things that happened a very long time ago, in my homeland.”

“Where was that?” David asked.

“What is now called Petra, in northern Arabia. It was an ancient city sculpted into a mountain of pink rock. The people had their gods and goddesses, various demigods, and my kind—the djinn.”

“
Djinn?
As in the
Thousand and One Nights?”

“The djinn existed long before those stories were first recorded.” Darius sat up with a groan of effort, stretching his neck until it popped. “Many in Petra knew that I was a djinni—too many. When it was discovered that I could heal the sick and wounded, I was captured by a Bedouin priest named Raz and held in chains for years.”

“How could they have kept you from turning into a bird or a cat, or becoming invisible, and escaping that way?”

“Djinn can be born with any number of different powers, but shape-shifting is among the rarest, and for a long time I had no idea that I could do it. The chains held me. The sick and lame were brought to me, and I was made to cure them or I would be weighed down with stones and thrown into the stream that flowed through Petra—which would have been the end of me.”

“You can be killed?”

“Only by drowning, which sets me apart from most Follets, who are only susceptible to fire. The threat worked. The more healing a human requires, the more it depletes me. It wasn’t long before I was barely alive myself.”

“Obviously you got away.”

“A woman came to me,” said Darius as he rubbed his fingers, “the widowed daughter of a Persian warrior-chieftain of great renown. Her name was Parmis. She was a learned and well-traveled woman who spoke fluent Aramaic. And she was beautiful, very beautiful, with a laugh . . .” Darius looked beyond their patch of pine-scented shade as if he were gazing back in time.

“She was seeking a respite from her sick headaches,” Darius continued, “but before I could heal her, she laid her hand upon my arm. Those who were brought to me were told never to touch me, but I suppose, being a princess, she felt herself above such constraints. As she touched me, I felt her desire. She wanted me, and so I took her—or rather, I let her take me. I was weak, I was in chains, but it was still . . .” He shook his head. “I had forgotten the joy of lying with a woman. It reminded me of all that had been stolen from me. I told Parmis that I wouldn’t heal her unless she used her father’s influence to free me from my enslavement.”

“Weren’t you afraid of being drowned for refusing to heal her?” David asked.

“I didn’t care anymore. Parmis agreed on the condition that I return with her to her tribe and remain there for as long as she cared to keep me. I consented to this, her father bought me from Raz with a sack of gold, and Parmis took me to her home in the mountains of Persia. It was a large stone house, palatial even by modern standards. The Persian variant of my name was Darayavahush, and this was what she called me—Darayush for short. I couldn’t marry Parmis because I wasn’t from a kingly Persian family, and she was a respectable widow, so I lived with her in the guise of a high-ranking slave, a sort of librarian. She collected writings from all over the known world, mostly papyrus scrolls and tablets of stone and clay, and I helped her to acquire and translate them. In private, well, my bedchamber was connected to hers by a secret passage. She was . . .” Darius almost smiled. “She was the last woman I have loved.”

“Was it known that you were a djinni?”

“God, no. We were very careful about that, after what had happened to me back in Petra. It wasn’t easy to assume the role of a human. It rarely is, for any kind of Follet. There are some humans, the gifted ones especially, who sense that we’re different, even if they’re not quite sure how.”

“Gifted?”

“These are people with faculties beyond the usual scope of humankind. We call it the Gift. It is an inborn trait, which both parents must possess in order for the child to inherit it. The only other way is for the mother to have been impregnated by a dusios, like Elic.”

“Elic . . . Of course.” It would have been Elic, David realized, who had been summoned there by the Dusivæsus effigy.

“You know about dusii?” Darius asked.

“I
am
a demonologist.” Albeit, as it turned out, a pitifully ill-informed one.

“Gifted humans tend to have heightened senses. Some have dreams that foretell the future, and many can detect coronas of colored light about the heads or bodies of others, or even listen to their thoughts. They can utilize certain spells if they’re taught to do so, but they rarely are. Most of them don’t even recognize their abilities, just as I hadn’t recognized that I could shape-shift. Sometimes they realize they’re different, but they don’t know why, and they find it deeply troubling. In the past, those who accepted and nurtured their Gift were revered as seers, soothsayers, oracles, druids . . .”

“Were there gifted people in Parmis’s tribe?” David asked.

“Unfortunately, yes. It was they who suspected I wasn’t quite human. I worked very hard at passing for one of them. It is a taxing business, hiding one’s true nature. Yet at the same time, those nineteen years I spent with Parmis . . . Of the thousands of years I have been alive, they were by far the happiest.”

“She sent you away after nineteen years?” David asked.

“Oh, no.” Darius looked down, a muscle tight in his jaw. “She became ill—cancer. No sooner did we realize something was wrong than she was bedridden, unable to swallow, in terrible pain. I wanted to heal her, but she said it was too risky, that those who harbored suspicions about me would deduce the truth if she were to arise from her deathbed miraculously cured. I insisted, so she ordered me confined in my chamber by armed guards until she had passed, at which point her home and riches were to become mine. But she must have missed me as much as I missed her, because when she was on the verge of death, she sent for me, not thinking I would try to heal her with her family and retainers at her side. But I cared more for her welfare at that point than for my own, and I tried. She had her guards take me away, screaming and . . . well, it was the last time in my life that I have shed tears. She died soon thereafter, and I was branded a
daeva,
which was a demon that brings disease upon humans. They assumed that Parmis’s illness was my doing, and that she’d had me locked away because I’d been trying to steal her soul. They tried to kill me several different ways, but of course none of them worked, so they tied me up, dug a deep hole in a remote place, and buried me in it.”

David sat forward, his lingering pain all but forgotten.
“Alive?”

“To spend eternity trapped in the earth. As they were shoveling in the dirt, I admitted that I could be killed by drowning, and I begged them to do it, but they thought it was some kind of demonic trick, so they filled in the hole and left.”

“How . . . how long were you . . . ?”

“Months, perhaps even years. It’s hard to say for—”

“Years?”

“There was no way of judging the passing of time. I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t move or breathe. I went a bit mad, imprisoned in my own thoughts. In my sentient moments, I would often think about Parmis. I grieved for her even in that fucking hole. Other times, I entertained fancies about wriggling free of the ropes that bound me and digging my way out, but I was like a worm lodged in the dirt. I used to wish I
was
a worm, so that I could tunnel up to the surface and feel the sun on me, breathe the air. I would imagine it constantly, just to comfort myself, until it began to seem real to me. At one point I thought I’d lost my sanity altogether, because I felt a lurching sensation, and the earth seemed to shift and rumble all around me. When it stopped, I couldn’t feel the ropes anymore. It felt as if I were inhabiting a sort of fleshy tube—the body of a worm. I found myself contracting my muscles while taking in dirt through what passed for my mouth, burrowing through the cooler earth toward the warmer. I sensed sunlight through the dirt, and although it repelled me on a physical level, I was thrilled beyond measure. When I finally broke through . . .”

Darius put his head back and closed his eyes, as if reliving the moment. “Ah, to feel the sun on me once again. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel myself growing warm. I hadn’t been warm for so long. For a while, I just lay there on the ground, stunned and jubilant—but then I realized I was growing stiff, drying out, and that I needed to find shade, fast. I crawled over giant blades of grass and fallen leaves until I found a cool, dark nook where I addressed the question of how to return to my natural form. It took some time and a great deal of fierce concentration, but finally there came a tremendous concussion, and a crack of scalding white light. When I opened my eyes, I was lying facedown beneath a tree, still wearing the clothes I’d been buried in, although they were filthy and threadbare. I was emaciated and parched, and my skin . . .” He shuddered. “But I was alive, and in a man’s form once more.”