The Devourers by Indra Das Page A

morality of the squabbling Christ followers, trickling intermingled into the stones of monasteries and cathedrals, verminous shrines of holy art left by an age since passed. Fishermen roaming the shores of the Black Sea, eating their catch under the open sky with callused hands, ever watching a horizon crowned with the sails of Moorish pirate ships, beach fires marking the watered edge of the Ottoman Empire, leagues from the sultan’s seat in that glittering city which the Turks call Kostantiniyye and I once knew as Byzantium. The hard-won lives of nomadic badawi as they herd their animals and villages across badlands, springing forth the lights of fleeting tent cities in desert darkness; the valor of the warrior Pashtuns riding their horses in the sand seas and bladed mountains of the Khorasan, their scimitars hammered Damascus steel, razor-sharp against even the tough hide of our second selves.
    But it is always the strange intimacies of humans, differently expressed yet prevalent across all their empires and lands, observed in the darkest hours of night, that stick with me and stir my appetites in unexpected ways.
    A conversation, as if between two men:
    Makedon watches me scratch wetted bone nib over parchment on my lap. “Let us talk, like two men,” he says. I nod. “What exactly is it that you’re scribbling on that scroll? An epic to make of us three great heroes, demigods to the hapless humanity we crush between our jaws—our shifting selves twinned deities to the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses of the khrissal, *8 who remains forever stranded between the two?” he says to me.
    “I’d say the more accurate precursor for my journals isn’t your Homer but Columbus, writing in curiosity on the shores of new worlds across the Atlantic.”
    “Is that right? I suppose that’s fair. Columbus didn’t eat the peoples of those ancient worlds, but he and his imperium have treated them as well as cattle and fowl for the cooking fire.”
    “What’s that to do with anything, Makedon?”
    “I know how you silently worship our prey. No doubt it’s in that scroll of yours. I mention the expeditions of your professed antecedent Christophorus Columbus not because he was exceptional among humanity in the practice of cruelty. I mention them, because all of his race, which you so admire while devouring, treat themselves just about as well as we treat them.”
    “There is a difference between cruelty and killing. You, I’ve seen, don’t much separate the two. I don’t think a wolf killing a lamb exercises cruelty. I don’t see myself as treating khrissals poorly, though I eat of them for sustenance.”
    “You’ve never seen a wolf play with a still-living lamb bleating its blood across the snow, then. Khrissals are not the beautiful, intelligent lambs you see, nor are we impossibly noble wolves. No, khrissals are fierce, wombed, cock-slung spiders—yes, spiders, spewing the filth of excess thought across the earth in the glutinous webs of civilizations that scrabble for space to weave their own webs over those of their brethren. They have a fire in them, I’ll give them that; no other animal has it, this Promethean fire. And I will forever cherish the taste of that fire dancing on my tongue. Oh yes, there is no substitute. But it is ultimately a destructive flame, and eventually it will consume the planet and turn it to ashes. If I were a religious being, I’d say
our
purpose on this earth is solely to keep
them
in check.”
    “With rhetoric like that pouring from your mouth, I’d say you long to write as well. It would make an impressive screed on a scroll, wouldn’t it?”
    “No, I don’t think it would. Because, in honesty, who cares to listen to my screed? Not me. It bores me. We live to eat of humankind, not ask ourselves why. You travel as North-man, not poet. Don’t you feel shame? Do you not long to live up to the legends the Vikings and their people made? You are magic, North-man, dread