The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (28 page)

Sometimes women loved us, and sometimes they sent guns to kill us and told us we were not living up to their standards. Some of us hate women and some of us imagine lives in women's arms, but most of us know that none of it matters. The jungle sings in a woman's voice, and we listen, uneasy.

The Second and Third Comings of Nobody

Nobody kills three more of our company, tearing them from their hammocks and from their campfires: the expert in the Sixth Mercy, Slowness to Anger, Reversed to Swift and Killing Rage. The expert in the Second Mercy, Mercy After Repentance, Reversed to Deeper Rage After Confession. The expert in the Fourth Mercy, Mercy Without Confession, Reversed to Invented Crimes.

“This is the mission,” says the general. “These are the measurements. Cut the wood to size.”

He sends men to the jungle's edge to chop and strip trees, and in the mud he draws a structure, an arc of branches and boughs. Others of us weave rope from vines.

When Nobody comes to us for the third time, she's neither man nor woman, but crocodile. She's made of scales and coils, and she takes three more men, our experts in the First (the Mercy Before the Sin, reversed to Punishment Before the Sin Is Committed) and the Fifth (Unearned Kindness, Reversed to Unearned Violence), pulling them into the river and dragging them down. She takes Kvingsman as well this time and he screams for help, but we cannot help him. We are ourselves at the mercy of the general.

We watch Kvingsman's fingertips shudder above the waterline, and then they're gone, only a ripple marking the place Nobody has passed. And so we lose the Seventh Mercy, Kvingsman's expertise in the Mercy of Abundance, reversed to Famine and Loss.

In Kinotra, Kvingsman was photographed with his foot in the mouth of the enemy, forcing the man to swallow not only his boot but also the magic the sole contained, a magic that would keep the enemy, those who survived the Thirteenth, beneath our feet and starving for another two thousand years.

This crocodile isn't the incarnation of an enemy. She's our punishment. I know it, even if the general does not. We're meant to die of her. Something's changed in the outer world and she's been assigned to haunt us.

We missed a crucial order. We forgot how to pray.

The general says, “Cut the wood to size. Spin the rope.”

Things Said by Good Men

In the tribunal, I was named personally. I stood beside General Steng in my dress uniform as the slide show of photos passed before us.

Though I was sleeping during the culmination of our cycle, though the working of the Eleventh had taken years from my life, though I'd now live to be no older than forty, I was proud.

I opened my mouth before that panel of deciders and told them I had no regrets about what I'd done. I told them my men had courage, and that we were acting on faith. I told them that we were good men seeking the truth.

The Feeding of the Animals

In the moments after Nobody takes Kvingsman, Major Mivak Priest has two stakes in his hands, and then he's running into the dark, outside the safety of our circle, the jungle live and hissing as he passes, and out there, the last screams of someone, the voices of the dead or of our invisible guards. No one yells anything we recognize.

We stand in shock in the clearing, waiting for the general to give orders to pursue him, but they don't come.

This is the first time one of us willingly leaves the circle of our prison. He's out there with the old woman, in the rain.

“He performs his Mercy now,” says General Steng, and we hear an abrupt shriek, the voice of Major Priest, and a whoosh as the trees bend to the Twelfth Mercy, the Mercy of Errors Transformed to Merits, Reversed to Generosity Transformed to Cruelty.

Every animal in the jungle eats, and Mivak Priest is eaten. There's a great splashing, a struggle, but no more screams. Major Priest is gone.

The general looks impassively into the trees.

The left arm of Mivak Priest lands in the clearing, torn from his shoulder by too many teeth. The song of the old woman grows louder and the rain comes harder. We're wet through. Some of us are crying.

“Raise it,” General Steng barks, and we look at each other, uncertain, but we do, finally, lifting the trees we've cut and hewn into their new configuration, a rectangle, and at the top an intricate structure of knots.

“Today we hang the crocodile,” the general says. “We will bear no more loss. We will bear no more.”

A Recipe for Mercy

I think yearningly of my Eleventh Mercy, the Mercy of Rebellion. The Reversed Mercy is the Crushing of the Rebellious. It says that the sins of rebellion shall not be lifted up. The spell is simple enough, though it requires wire and a razor blade, a grinding of coarse salt, a dish made of fine glass, and an envelope of something stronger than cocaine.

I have none of those ingredients here in the jungle.

There will be no more Eleventh, nor the feelings it evokes, the way the spell is crafted to fill its victim with hope of revolution, the way the room seems to disappear as my hands and the wire move closer. It's a Mercy, and it is a magic, and in the cycle of magics, I've had nearly as much power as the general does.

I will never see my son again, nor know what sort of soldier he may become.

I feel something rise inside me, a rebellion against the Mercies, a knowledge that there will be no forgiveness.

I decide to think about the desert and how we trained there until our skin was one with the sand. This was nothing regular, our training. We were elite. We were the good men, the best men, the only ones trained in the Thirteen Mercies, and all our training went to hell when the country turned against us. None of us knows why we've been condemned to a crocodile. Nothing like this punishment exists in our manuals.

I remember the way we learned the Mercies. I remember the blood I took from my son, how I poured it out into a circle and lit it on fire. I knew what he would feel, thousands of miles away, and I did it anyway. My baby in his crib. His mother leaning over him, puzzled, then frantic.

The skin of the sky peeled back like a wound full of gravel.

Our training was more important than love.

We would win the war with these weapons, we thought then. We'd take the land and pour our burned burdens out upon it. We'd be merciful, all of us, Reversing the Mercies of god until the sand turned to salt and then to fire.

There were no gods who could ignore it. There was no love that could satisfy it. We were the men, and we were winning.

I don't know anything like that now. The magic's worn off and all I am is a man in the dark, surrounded by men in the dark.

The Fourth Coming of Nobody

The general stands straight, his arms crossed. “Now we wait,” he says.

We sit in the mud. We wait night and day, in the dark, in the gray downpour. All around us, the jungle crackles and things move within it. Our guards whisper but we can't understand them.

We're on an island surrounded by sharks, and the sharks are like Mercies. Any one of them could kill us, or they might all do it at the same time. We feel fed upon.

Eight of us are dead, and we have only five men left. Perhaps we're the last five men in the world.

“
There was an old woman,
” sings Major Rivel Harmer, practitioner of the Ninth Mercy—Keeping Kindness for Thousands of Generations, Reversed to the Keeping of Hatred, the grudge against grandchildren and great-grandchildren. “
Who lived in a shoe—
”

General Steng puts up a hand to silence him. None of us will take Harmer's tongue, but the general can do as he pleases. There will be no babble here in the jungle, no matter how frightened we are, no matter how the seventh year ebbs into a winter that isn't.

“There,” the general hisses, staring into the trees where something orange glows. “She's there.”

I crouch on legs that've lost muscle. An old man now, all at once, and us in possession of only five of the Mercies, not enough to break anything strong.

She comes out of the trees, body like a tree trunk, tail long and narrow, face pointed. We have our stakes, but our stakes are only twigs. She's older than we will ever be.

She looks us each in the eyes and smiles.

“Who are you?” the general shouts at her. “Who sent you?”

The crocodile writhes and her skin splits, blood dripping from hide. Her mouth opens wider.

“Who are you?” I shout in echo. “What kind of Mercy are you?”

The crocodile's no longer a crocodile. She ripples up out of the skin, her face through the teeth, her fingers through the claws.

“I am,” the old woman says, “the Thirteenth Mercy.”

The Mercy of the Uncleaning

The Thirteenth Mercy was originally the Mercy of the Cleansing of Sins. In Reverse, the Thirteenth is the Mercy of Filth, the bestowal of all of our sins into the souls of the enemy, the crushing beneath sins of everything living. Everyone is evil in the Reversed Mercy. It's constructed around the knowledge of hopelessness.

It is performed with bleach and wool.

Had we completed it at Kinotra, a cloud would've risen over the prison, and in it, the enemy would have drifted, driven forward across the sky by our hatred, sleepless and hungry forever.

The sacrifice stands for everything we've lost, everything we've given over to fighting, soldiers' lives spent placing bombs in public squares and buses, centuries of soldiers' time spent poisoning and lynching, all the labors of war both just and unjust, all the orders followed, all the sins accrued by souls that did not ask for them. The pursuit of the truth is complicated. Sometimes the truth hides in the organs of the enemy, and sometimes it does not.

There is no way to know unless one looks deep.

The Execution of Nobody

The general signals and the ropes spin up from the mud, wet and twisting, lassoing her legs and tail, knotting around her throat.

Major Harmer hauls Nobody up, grunting, hissing the phrases of his half-broken Mercy, cursing her children and her children's children, cursing her past and future.

Nobody opens her jaws and shows us teeth, and then opens claws and shows us fingers, the delicate hands of a woman pressed beneath the claws of a crocodile.

She has silver hair and orange eyes. Her scales are black enough to make her disappear. Our camouflage doesn't hide us. She's the kind of thing that can see in the dark.

At last we see her in full.

This crocodile hangs from our gallows now, we five remaining Merciful around her. We're winning. She's our enemy. When we kill her, we'll be free of everything.

We'll complete our Mercies and end this torment. Then home. We're all thinking it.

She's our mission, revealed to us at last. She's what we came here to destroy.

I can see her moving, her tail lashing. The rain doesn't cease. It's harder, hard enough to bend the trees surrounding us, and a wind gasps into life, breaking branches around the clearing.

Our gallows hang heavy with the monster and she swings, jerking, strangling, the bodies of our company already in her belly. She gags and chokes and becomes an old woman again. She's thin enough to break, but she doesn't. She hangs by her neck at the end of the rope, but gravity doesn't hold her. Not her, this old woman not old woman, her claws and her black-scaled tail, the crocodile parts that surround her body.

The Photographer

There's a click, a sound from the world, and I turn my head to see the general holding a camera like someone from a hundred years ago, a hood over his head to make a portrait of Nobody's execution.

Major Harmer makes a noise of betrayal.

The photos from Kinotra.

I think of a pale young man walking out of a cave with two charred heads in his hands, our punishment part of his Mercy.

“I will be Merciful,” Nobody says, and smiles at us from the gallows. Her mouth is full of teeth. She isn't seven hundred years old, I think, but seven thousand, and she's been hired by someone to destroy everything.

That was supposed to have been our mission, not hers.

“You're mistaken,” the general says, his eyes brighter than they were before, his face clenched. “This is the last round of Mercies. My Reversed Mercy will complete it.”

She laughs, and her skin shudders off entirely from her female body and becomes a crocodile, smaller now, and then another woman, still smaller. The noose doesn't tighten, though we lean backward, gunless, ropes slipping through our hands.

We've failed in our Mercies, and now the general stands and shouts, and the woman in the noose doesn't. She does not hang. She doesn't die.

The crocodile skins she's left behind are jerking in the mud, and they rise up to tilt the gallows while she hovers there, arms extended, smiling.

The mud of the world begins to dissolve. The dirt of my garments, the filth of my skin, the matted hair and snarled beard, the quiet horrors I've fed on to fatten myself, all the dark things I've kept inside my heart.

The general screams, and I watch his body rise to her hands. She touches his face, and he hangs high in the air, the noose leaving her neck and looping around his.

“The Thirteenth Mercy,” she whispers, “is the Mercy of Cleansing of Sins.”

The Flood

Waters rise then. I remember, as we stand in river to our knees, as the jungle roars and sings, as our guards disappear beneath the surface, that the Mercy of the Flood is another Mercy, not one of the Thirteen, but an older measure. A Mercy that cannot be performed by humans, neither itself nor its Reverse.