The flayed man gave a laugh, drawing Grammar’s second shot. The pistol jammed; Grammar swore and threw it after them, as the soldiers’ shadows faded like ghosts under a curtain of warm monsoon rain, leaving officer and second-in-command alike behind, entirely at the forest’s mercies.
Grammar snarled, a tiger’s half-cough.
“Cowardly bastards,” he said, in English. Adding, contemptuously: “’Rhakshasa’, am I? Hardly an opinion worth dying over.”
Romesh Singh, wisely enough, said nothing—his own eyes kept firmly shut—as a long, wet, green moment passed over them, darkening both their scarlet coats to rust.
Grammar laughed, and let the sheath drop away from his sword, falling point-down. It quivered by one foot, mud-supported, forgotten.
“Well, come then, my shadow,” he told the curtain of underbrush before him (having, without even noticing, slid fluidly back into Urdu.) “Or shall I haste to meet thee? For either way, you will find me as I find myself: Ready.”
And still Romesh Singh stood, feeling the rain seep down through his clothes and lave his trembling body abruptly to life, every nerve set winking in the gloom like unseen stars above.
(Thinking only: But now we are alone at last, thou and I. Together.)
&nb
sp; They were both wrong, of course. Grammar, all his impressively flaunted rage aside, was nothing near to ready—as Romesh Singh might have told him, had he cared to solicit a second opinion—and neither was alone, with or without the other.
For I was already here. As I always had been.
The rain, the mud, the dead and cooling bodies, the silent trees. I was present and accounted for in all of it at once, a speck of me everywhere the eye might care to light, pixilating slowly to fruition. In the very air itself, between every falling raindrop—sub-dust, sub-viri, void-breath on the back of the neck, a shadow on the face of the whole. I spread out around the carcass of the dead former sepoy like a stain, over the clearing’s seared floor, so fragrant yet with ash; and ah, but that fire had burned brightly, for all it was only a heap of corpses doused in lamp-oil. Brown corpse melting to black, black rivulets twining like veins across the soaked earth, black snakes rising in their wake. A black river, abruptly, in full flood, lapping the British soldier’s remains in as well with no visible distinction—rearing, seeping, clotting—knitting both together like some prescient scab, the kind that outlines itself before a wound has even been opened.
One hot whiff caught on the wind, a brief, intestinal stink: Eau de massacre. One sentient platelet left swimming in a sea of blood, shed and unshed alike.
Beyond the fire’s sodden ring, Desbarrats Grammar had already slashed the first layer of leaves aside and forged on ahead into the jungle (bent on finding any kind of explanation for the night’s work, or his sadly smirched reputation, that did not involve the word Rhakshasa), leaving Romesh Singh to plead vainly after him—sick to heart and increasingly cold, with his empty hands ineffectually raised against the drumming rain.
(For the bell tolled in him still, o my beloved—fluid, subterranean. Mateless, but crying for its mate. And this suited me so well I would have smiled to see it, had I but the lips to smile with—or the eyes to see.)
Such a lack, however, was easily remedied.
“Romesh Singh,” I called him, softly. He turned.
Upright now, a loosely wavering column of matte black against the clearing’s larger blackness—hollow, scarring, extruded from the space between all things—I drew myself in tight, and called Grammar’s all-too-familiar face to me, simultaneously making myself both a spine to hold it up and a skull to hang it on. I let flesh drip over me, pore by pore.
Over the flesh, I drew skin; over the skin, blood.
Naked under the rain’s caress, I opened Grammar’s eyes—so blind, so pale, so very, very British, in the raw mask that was his truest reflection—and raised them, meeting Romesh Singh’s.
“My good soldier,” I said.
He swallowed, pupils wide, his dry throat grating tentatively back upon itself.
“Thou . . . ” he began. “Thou art . . . ”
“Oh, I.” Stepping, cat-sure on Grammar’s smooth-soled feet, to print the mud between us. “A wandering minstrel, I,” I said. “A knight of air and darkness.”
“ . . . Rhakshasa,” finished Romesh Singh.
He said it with a sigh, so soft the word was part of his exhalation. That fatal—that only—name. I nodded at the sound. To prove the truth of his assumption, I spread my hands—my fingers—on which the claws bend back so far they are not really claws at all, but twisting knives of sharpest horn.
“Shreds and patches,” I said. “Dead man’s fingernails.”
And I peeled back Grammar’s lips, to show how my teeth arced up from his narrow British jaw like some ill-timed jest, sharp and yellow as a carrion dog’s.
Yet Romesh Singh held his ground, back straight, like the warrior he was.
(For we both knew Grammar was too far ahead now to hear him, even if he chose to call for help. But no man really wishes aid at such a moment, o my beloved—not when his longest-held dream finally stalks towards him on nude white feet, arms out, and smiling.)