The Ghrivit
A short story, or perhaps a "tale"
All his life, Zeder had been taught that the Ghrivit had once been a man. When he was a young child, this knowledge had fascinated Zeder, and he spent many hours pestering the shamans. Yet the shamans had refused to answer Zeder’s many questions. Instead, they taught Zeder and all the other children of the village how to avoid the Ghrivit, now that it was a man no longer.
Never leave babies alone. Nothing tastes sweeter to the Ghrivit than the fear of a child too young to understand its fate. A mother’s grief is the Ghrivit’s delight.
Never travel in pairs outside the village wards at night. The Ghrivit loves to steal one away and leave the other wondering and alone.
If your children have an animal they love, it must be kept indoors. The Ghrivit loves the sound of children weeping over a bundle of broken bone and matted fur.
Do not hunt the Ghrivit. You will not find it. Someone you love will, instead.
There were many rules like this. The Ghrivit had stalked the hills and jungles surrounding the village since at least the time of Zeder’s grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, but the shamans had learned to keep the people safe. The rules came from trial and error, and the shamans still did not understand all there was to know, but the deaths grew fewer every season. A few fools were taken, and a few too weak to run if they heard it lumbering towards them through the undergrowth, but most of the people lived their lives unharmed.
The Ghrivit killed Zeder’s grandfather when he was already an old man. Perhaps he broke some unknown rule, or perhaps the Ghrivit was simply hungry. Zeder had been taught that it drank blood when there was not enough fear or sorrow to maintain itself. Whatever the reason, Zeder found his grandfather lying on the path before his house, his neck broken, his brown skin turned ashen and pale, with deep wounds on his inner thigh where the Ghrivit had fastened its fangs. The shamans took his grandfather, burned him, and hung his ashes in a woven basket at the edge of the village. Zeder’s tears turned to fury.
Many young men and women swear an oath to kill the Ghrivit, and the shamans were used to fielding questions from eager, grieving children. But Zeder, in thrall to the fiery solipsism of youth, firmly believed that it was his destiny, as though the ancestors had placed their mark upon him, and he was still scheming and plotting when the strangers arrived.
They came to Zeder’s village, an assemblage of fifteen men and women, most wearing clothing far too warm for the heat. Six of them were warriors, escorting the remaining nine, who were shamans of some kind. Most did not speak the language of the village, and conversed among themselves in a strange, slow tongue that seemed devoid of life and passion. Zeder could sense no relation between the meaning of their words and the pitches at which they were spoken. The words were broken apart, lonely, and quiet. Zeder wondered how you could be angry in a language like that. How could you be afraid at the same tone in which you spoke of love, or trade? When Zeder asked one of the shamans, Chinna, about these things, the old man shook his head and held his hands to the sky.
One of the strangers spoke the language. She spoke slowly, haltingly, and with an accent none of the people of the village could place. Many of the strangers carried what at first Zeder took to be spears, but what Chinna told him are called muskets: devices from distant places that throw balls of fire at their targets, like slings or blowguns, but faster and louder.
The chief had been warned of the arrival of these strangers by a scout from another village, who told him the people only asked strange questions and scribbled markings on bundles of bound leaves. They camped outside the village, and sought permission from the chief to bring him gifts and to speak with his people. After much consultation with the elders, the chief allowed the people of the village to speak with the strangers, and sought to learn what he could of their ways.
The strangers came from a village far away, and they claimed that their village contained more people than could be found in 10 villages the size of Zeder’s. He did not believe this. How could the hunters keep them all fed? How could the chief have time to settle all the disputes that must arise? But Zeder did not speak – he only listened. The strangers spoke of vast boats, and of places of learning where many of their shamans gathered to teach and learn magicks and hidden knowledge. They came from one of those places, and were spending four whole seasons traveling from village to village, asking questions, seeking to learn about Zeder’s people and their jungles.
They asked about the sacred milky liquor brewed by the shamans for ceremonial purposes or grand celebrations. They asked about the many baskets filled with ashes that hung around the village. They asked how the chief adjudicated disagreements between villagers, and seemed particularly interested in the relationship between the chief, the shamans, and the village elders. Who had the authority to command the warriors, and had the village ever made war upon another?
At last, they asked about the Ghrivit, and they were fascinated by the rules the shamans had deduced for evading its attention. They asked often about the consequences for breaking these rules, and seemed dissatisfied with the chief’s insistence that the rules existed only to safeguard his people from the Ghrivit. He did not impose other penalties – these were not laws, but rules for survival. Disobeying one of these rules would bring its own punishment.
On the fifth day after the strangers came to the village, there came a piercing scream from their camp. Zeder and many others ran towards the scream, grabbing obsidian knives or hardened wooden clubs. When Zeder arrived, he found several people, both from the village and the camp, standing around the broken and bloodied form of one of the warriors.
His clothes were shredded, and his arms and neck were broken. There were deep gouges all over his body, and his eyes were missing. Two deep punctures on his inner thigh removed all doubt: the Ghrivit had claimed one of the strangers. The warrior had ventured into the jungle with one of the women who had traveled with him. They were separated, and she became lost, but when she found her way back to the camp, she found his body, waiting for her, just outside her tent. No one else in the camp had seen or heard anything unusual at all.
When this information was relayed through the interpreter to the people of the village, they nodded grimly and made signs of mourning. “Never travel in pairs outside the village wards at night,” they said to each other.
This time, when the strangers asked about the Ghrivit, they asked different questions. The leader of the warriors, a large man with dark hair and thin eyes, interrogated Chinna for a long time. Where was the Ghrivit’s lair? How often did it come out to prey? What was the size of its territory?
These were hunters’ questions, and Chinna tried to dissuade them. “Do not hunt the Ghrivit,” he said, and implored them not to go. He did not wish to see these strangers harmed for nothing. It leaves no tracks, Chinna said, but the big man held up a metal box that ticked and whirred as though it was full of insects, and told him that the Ghrivit did not have to leave tracks. They could find anything that breathed.
Zeder watched the four warriors leave the next day. They were silent and grim, and Zeder’s people had already begun to mourn. He shook his head, unable to believe that these foolish people would ignore Chinna’s warnings. A few days later, the village heard sounds like thunder or the falling of a large tree off in the distance, and Zeder knew the men were dead.
But the warriors returned to the village, and they brought with them the corpse of the Ghrivit. They flung it into the center of the village for all to see, and crowed and laughed about their triumph. The woman who spoke the language could be seen smiling, her face radiant. She wept as she clasped the chief’s hands.
Thrown into clear light, the Ghrivit seemed small. It looked more like the corpse of a deer, killed by some jungle predator and left to rot. Pale, bloodless skin, gray like ashes, could be glimpsed through mattes and tangles of thin, black hair. Its face looked stretched, as though the nose and jaw had pushed themselves out of the rest of the skull. It had long, narrow fangs, one of them broken by the ball of foreign metal that had killed it. Its limbs were too long for the rest of its body, its arms and legs stretched out far away from its torso. Its legs had too many joints, as though it was given a second set of kneecaps. Its body showed many scars.
But as Zeder knelt beside it, he knew that it had once been a man. He saw it in the outline of the creature – saw where bones and sinew had contorted, guided by some invisible and unmerciful hand. Among the scars caused by seasons of doomed warriors, seasons of knives and spears and clubs, Zeder could see the faded remnants of tattoos, tattoos not unlike those on his own arms – given to him when he became a man. They, too, were stretched, and no pattern was discernible, but they were there.
The village celebration lasted long into the night. The warriors from far away were given flutes and necklaces, precious stones, and sacred clothing. One mother offered her daughter in marriage to the warrior who had fired the killing shot, and he graciously declined after many meaningful looks from the interpreter. Much of the liquor was consumed that night, so much so that afterwards, the shamans spent many more weeks than normal preparing enough to replenish the stock.
But Zeder did not join the festivities. He slipped out as soon as he could and lay in a clearing not far from the village, gazing at the stars, and wondering about the stone of anger that had hardened in his stomach.
The people from far away stayed another week, and when they left, the village changed. Couples snuck into the woods together, no longer afraid that the Ghrivit would take them, giggling and gasping in the jungle. The hunters ranged further afield, bringing back game in greater quantities. Parents realized they no longer had to teach their children the long-held rules to protect them. The shamans held many secret meetings where they debated whether or not to leave the ashes of the departed hanging in the trees. The young men struggled to find anything to talk about, now that the Ghrivit was gone, buried beneath the chief’s threshold.
The shamans now had to answer many new questions. Must pets be kept indoors, now that the Ghrivit was gone? Must babies be watched at all times? Did the spirits of the forest and of their ancestors still guard them? Or were they now left all alone, now that the threat had passed?
After the first few weeks of celebration had ended, a nameless uneasiness began to enter the minds of the people. Women began to make signs at the doors of their houses once again, signs to protect them from a monster that no longer lived.
All the while, Zeder grew angrier.
He performed his duties quickly and rashly, often leaving them to be done again by another when he was finished. He ate little. He snuck out at night to stare at the sky, his mind screaming with a thousand contradictory thoughts. He was angry with the warriors, who seemed to fearlessly wander the jungle as if the Ghrivit had never lurked there, smiling to itself in the shadows. He raged against the strangers who had shamed the whole village by strolling into the dark and murdering his ancient enemy. But most of all he raged against the Ghrivit, for killing his grandfather, yes, but also for dying by someone else’s hand.
He spent weeks like this, his days filled with drudgery, his nights filled first with these eternal, repetitive thoughts, and then with dreams which chased him over the same territory. He hunted the Ghrivit; it hunted him. He hunted the warriors from far away, and they laughed and laughed at his weakness. Once, he hunted the people of the village, and awoke shaking and weeping.
One night he was clumsy as he stole more of the sacred liquor, and Chinna caught him. But rather than whipping him, or scolding him, Chinna beckoned Zeder to his room, and together they drank in silence. After several cups, the old man sighed and slapped his thighs.
“You have spent these weeks in a deranged state. You are rude to your fellows, and you leave your work unfinished. You steal more liquor than anyone in the village – yes, we know these things. We, too, were once young. For weeks I have told my brothers that Zeder needs only time, that all of us have to face this new world in our own way. But it has gone on long enough! I doubt my wisdom in leaving you alone so long. So! Tell me: how can I help you to live in this new time?”
Zeder poured out all the fire within him, asking many unanswerable questions and saying many unkind things about the strangers, about the warriors, about the chief, and about the shamans. Chinna listened to these things, unmoved. Zeder’s voice grew until it was almost a shout before he suddenly stopped, embarrassed by the placidity of the old man at whom he had been screaming. He cast his eyes downward and picked at the brushed dirt floor.
Chinna poured each of them another cup, and strove for the words that would quiet the young man’s anger. But he could find nothing to say that was not trite or weak. So he silently prayed for guidance, and said nothing for a long time.
In the silence, spent and tired, Zeder took another deep draught. As he felt the liquid burning within him, he suddenly had a new thought, for the first time in weeks. He felt a flush of embarrassment that he had not thought of it more quickly. He hesitated, but Chinna still seemed unwilling to speak. Zeder straightened his posture and looked the old man in the eye. “How did the man before become the Ghrivit?” he asked.
Chinna sighed. “I have told you so many times, beyond counting, that the shamans do not know who the man was, or why-”
Zeder held up his hand, and Chinna fell silent, astonished at the young man’s arrogance.
“Yes, my teacher – I know all you have said. But I ask not who, or why, or when, but how. How did a man, flesh and blood like you or I, become the stretched and murderous thing we saw? The shamans cannot have lived and studied our enemy for all these seasons and never have asked this question. So I ask you again: how did the man become the Ghrivit?”
Chinna wondered at the fire in Zeder’s eyes, and the passion with which he spoke. Later, he would wonder at his own words that night, and would often lie awake and interrogate his motives. He blamed the drink (for he was older than he once was); he tried to tell himself that he had not guessed what the young man was planning. But whether it was the drink, or his desire to share his knowledge, or some quieter notion that the boy was right, Chinna cleared his throat and told Zeder what he knew.