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. *6 From the distance, its incomplete minarets lie under moon and star-bitten clouds like the fresh-hatched eggs of a roc, *7 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
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. *6 From the distance, its incomplete minarets lie under moon and star-bitten clouds like the fresh-hatched eggs of a roc, *7 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
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