The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  Our second-in-com­mand, Ma­jor Mivak Priest, looks out into the trees and or­ders the men to sharpen their stakes. Hu­mid­ity jams our rifles. Mold grows in our cart­ridges and fungi bloom in the bar­rels of our pis­tols. The sharpened stakes are — this is un­spoken — also meant for fall­ing upon should we reach the point of sui­cide, though there is no sui­cide pro­tocol in our or­ders. We've been ordered to do the op­pos­ite of die.

  “Nobody's com­ing!” Granger screams. “Do you hear me? Nobody!”

  Then he stops mak­ing words and just ut­ters sounds. I don't see the thing that takes Granger, but some of my men do. A tail, whip­ping and black. Claws.

  My men be­gin to shout and shots are fired, but Nobody takes Granger into the dark, and there's not a man among us strong enough to fol­low. We stand in armed con­fu­sion for a minute. We can't go into the trees. They're out­side our bound­ary.

  “The old wo­man!” cries Lieu­ten­ant Lep Kv­ings­man, ex­pert in the Sev­enth Mercy, Gen­er­os­ity shif­ted to Re­verse Abund­ance, the ex­pert­ise of fam­ine pro­vi­sion. He's best friend to the de­ceased, and there are tears on his face. “It was the old wo­man! She came out of the trees and into the camp! I saw her!”

  He's been in his ham­mock too long, scratch­ing at his legs, hum­ming a high spell­song that in bet­ter times would've summoned a na­ked girl to fall from the clouds and drape her long hair over his body. Here it only sum­mons a bat, wings prin­ted with slo­gans from the years when we thought we'd win this war.

  I may be the only sol­dier who thinks about per­form­ing a Mercy for Lieu­ten­ant Kv­ings­man, but I sus­pect I'm not. We've not done it in seven years. It's an ec­stasy. I have ex­pert­ise in the El­ev­enth Mercy, the Re­versed Mercy of Re­bel­lion. My hands itch, and my teeth.

  “It was the old wo­man,” Kv­ings­man whis­pers. “She'll take us, one by one.”

  We re­fuse to listen to him.

  Out in the trees, Nobody de­vours Lieu­ten­ant Mat­thias Granger, bone by bone, hair by hair, and we hear one scream, and then an­other. No one moves.

  It's a Mercy, we de­cide. We'll take it as one.

  The Bright­est Col­ors, the Highest Res­ol­u­tion

  There are worse Mer­cies than those we in­voked at Kino­tra, but ours were im­mor­tal­ized.

  The pho­to­graphs of my men per­form­ing the Thir­teen Mer­cies are now as mem­or­able to the view­ing pub­lic as paint­ings by the Old Mas­ters. They could be clicked into life-size, and then into sizes lar­ger than life. A wound the size of a cater­pil­lar be­comes a jagged ex­cision the size of a car. I am told, though I didn't see them, that for a time there were bill­boards on the roads lead­ing to and from the cap­ital, show­ing me with the pris­oner in my arms, our faces the size of build­ings and our ex­pres­sions clearly vis­ible, his agony, mine cer­tainty.

  We never learned who took the pho­to­graphs. Who­ever it was, he's among us now. We were all brought here to­gether on the trans­port. Our be­trayer is with us, liv­ing, eat­ing, shit­ting. Our be­trayer is our brother. Per­haps Granger was the pho­to­grapher. We don't know.

  Tor­ture was noth­ing sur­pris­ing to the pub­lic by the time the pho­tos went viral, but the world's ca­pa­city for right­eous hor­ror was greater than we might have ima­gined. Be­fore the pho­tos of our com­pany's mis­sion at the Kino­tra Prison were leaked, we would've been ac­quit­ted. We were elite sol­diers, after all. We were dec­or­ated.

  Im­ages hit the In­ter­net, and then the news­pa­pers and tele­vi­sions. There were protest marches, boy­cotts, as­sas­sin­a­tion at­tempts. One of our moth­ers was murdered by a mob.

  Does no one in the world real­ize what we did to save them? What we did, we did ac­cord­ing to our or­ders. What we did, we did to save the world from worse Mercy.

  The Gen­eral and His En­emy

  Gen­eral Hyk Steng stands at his tent flap, tall and wiry, his head shaven with a knife made of slate. He's not a young man, thirty-five years into his ca­reer, but he spends nights lift­ing his own weight and his muscles are lar­ger than they were when we ar­rived. There's noth­ing to do here but build mass in misery. We're liv­ing on liz­ards, coconuts, and Ready-Pac ra­tions.

  “I dreamed it would come,” Gen­eral Steng says, his eyes the eyes of someone damned a long time ago. His ex­pert­ise is in the Thir­teenth, the Mercy that would've ended all this.

  “This be­gins our true cam­paign,” he says. “The ex­e­cu­tion of our or­ders. We've been de­ployed to fight the en­emy, and this is the en­emy's in­carn­a­tion.”

  Ma­jor Priest looks to the gen­eral for fur­ther in­struc­tion, but the gen­eral says noth­ing more. He just stares out into the green, smil­ing a little.

  Things were bleak in the years after the war began, bleak enough that a man like Steng seemed like what we'd all been wait­ing for. The coun­try wanted a man will­ing to shoot to kill, and he was put in charge of the mil­it­ary.

  The gen­eral was a pris­oner of war early in his ca­reer. There's video of him emer­ging from a cave in the moun­tains of Ghen­ari, a young man, hobbled and pale as bone, all his nails miss­ing and his voice broken from scream­ing. This was in the days be­fore the en­emy began to take tongues. He went on to lead our coun­try through sev­eral of the wars that didn't end. That was the way we spent the last years of that cen­tury.

  In the moun­tains of Ghen­ari, the story went, the gen­eral ate his captors. He walked out of that cave car­ry­ing two men's roas­ted heads in his hands. He was nearly elec­ted pres­id­ent after that.

  We haven't seen our ori­ginal or­ders, of course. This is a pun­ish­ment, not a true de­ploy­ment, or so we all thought un­til this mo­ment, the gen­eral now in­form­ing us of our task. Some of us still be­lieve that even­tu­ally our time here will end and a trans­port will come to re­claim us. The world will have for­got­ten our faces, and we'll be able to go home, wherever home is.

  This pun­ish­ment is, by all ac­counts, a Mercy unto it­self. There was, in the months be­fore the trial, talk of our ex­e­cu­tion by fir­ing squad. The word Mercy doesn't mean what it once meant, not to us. Not to any­one.

  We've been in the rain too long. Our skin is soft as felt, thin and tear­ing, and in­sects eat us from the in­side out.

  Gen­eral Steng looks into the jungle. Out there, we hear them singing, who­ever they are.

  We're un­der con­stant in­vis­ible guard, but we aren't guarded from Nobody.

  Jus­ti­fic­a­tions for Things Not Termed Tor­ture

  “Had we not torn out their fin­ger­nails,” Com­mander Ver­ald Wrenn said dur­ing the Vetroiso Of­fens­ive, “they'd have used them to tear out our eyes.”

  “Had we not si­lenced their sol­diers,” the other side's High Of­ficer, Chem­rai Lirez, said dur­ing the af­ter­math of that same ne­go­ti­ation, “they'd have screamed spells to call their gods. It was a ser­vice to the fu­ture of hu­man­ity to cut out their tongues. We could not al­low the heav­ens to drop to Earth.”

  After Vetroiso, bat­talions of our tongue­less sol­diers were re­turned to us, and to the other side we re­turned sol­diers with their nails peeled to the beds, along with a sep­ar­ate cargo of am­pu­tated fin­ger­tips and prints rendered in blood. It was all part of the busi­ness of war. The pris­on­ers were ex­changed, and every­one agreed to for­get about them.

  There've al­ways been vari­ations on Mercy. The en­emy's chil­dren, for ex­ample, have al­ways tied our chil­dren to trees and scalped them, and our chil­dren have al­ways held the en­emy's chil­dren un­der­wa­ter un­til they drowned.

  Gen­eral Steng went in per­son to the court in full uni­form on the day of the ver­dict, not to plead but to show him­self. He made no pro­gress, never mind his fame.

  By the time the events at Kino­tra Prison happened, our spells had largely stopped work­ing. Our gods no
longer re­spon­ded. Their gods were stronger. We were los­ing. The rest of the world had over­taken our repu­ta­tion.

  We were every­one's en­emy.

  The roads began to rise, rip­pling as­phalt, and be­neath them were tun­nels filled with in­sur­gents. A whole coun­try crossed the bor­ders into an­other. What else were we to do? We were angry, and we were in the right. We'd lost loved ones. We were de­fend­ing our home­land.

  We were trained in the Thir­teen Mer­cies, all of us, in a si­lent camp in the desert. Each of us paid in his loved ones’ blood. Each of us knew loss.

  The Thir­teen Mer­cies were a fi­nal at­tempt to blast our en­emy into the dark.

  I didn't say this when I was called to testify. I couldn't. There are still secrets. I was third-in-com­mand when the Mer­cies at Kino­tra oc­curred. I was off-shift, ex­hausted, and asleep on my cot when the rituals of the Twelfth were done, and no one called me to wit­ness them, or to take part, yet here I am, along with my men and my com­mand­ers. Justice came down on us all, no mat­ter our in­di­vidual crimes. The gov­ern­ment had been shamed, and the pres­id­ent him­self ac­cused by an in­ter­na­tional tribunal of 587 counts of war crimes against the Con­ven­tion.

  “My men were per­form­ing the Thir­teen Mer­cies, and they were re­spond­ing to dir­ect or­ders,” test­i­fied Gen­eral Hyk Steng, but he re­fused to ex­plain to the tribunal what that meant. He could not.

  We'd all sworn, and the swear­ing was per­man­ent. To speak the Mer­cies to the un­ini­ti­ated would be to choke on blood. Those oaths couldn't be de­fied.

  Those Who Love These Sol­diers

  Our or­ders say that we must stay alive at any cost, that we must take our in­struc­tions from no one but the pres­id­ent. We no longer know who the pres­id­ent is. For the first few years, planes flew over us. Once, they dropped a con­fetti of leaf­lets, but they were not in our lan­guage. One of my men claimed he could read them.

  “They're love let­ters,” he said. He had a fiancée at home, from whom he hadn't heard since our ar­rival on the is­land.

  I have a son who's grown into a man since this de­ploy­ment began. I've worked for this gov­ern­ment my en­tire ca­reer, taken or­ders from my com­mand­ers, and to be aban­doned here —

  This jungle sings, but it doesn't sing for us. The mos­qui­toes here are as big as kites, and they come at night to drink us dry. Our uni­forms are rot­ted. None of us can dress in a man­ner that shows re­spect. We're in shreds of cam­ou­flage, and our skin is smeared with mud.

  There are no air­planes now, no mes­sages dropped. There are no sounds com­ing from our ra­dios. We don't know if there's still a world, and if there is, whether it re­mem­bers our faces.

  We are loved by in­sects, by rain, and by Nobody.

  The Qual­it­ies of Mercy

  The Thir­teen Mer­cies were a prayer, to be­gin with, a prayer for com­pas­sion, stat­ing the many forms of god's good­ness as re­vealed to a man named Moses, back in an­other world, back in an­other book.

  The Thir­teen Re­versed Mer­cies were cre­ated by men as an in­sult to god, as the back edge of the ori­ginal at­trib­utes. Everything good has some­thing bad be­side it. That's a thing we know by this point in the his­tory of the world. To speak the Thir­teen Re­versed Mer­cies is to pray for un­for­give­ness. There are no gods to make things right. There are only men like us.

  No one re­mem­bers, really, the Re­versed Mer­cies’ ori­ginal pur­pose — we've for­got­ten the pur­pose of most old things — but the thing they are used for now is power. To speak them is to break one­self open and crack one's own heart. That's a por­tion of the train­ing.

  The Re­versed Mer­cies be­come part of a sol­dier, and as he per­forms them, he en­twines with them. The Thir­teen Re­versed be­long to an an­cient tra­di­tion of bad ma­gic that once bal­anced the good, be­fore the world went wrong. There's no good now. There hasn't been in some time. There's only bad, over­whelm­ing the last little scraps of everything.

  When our mil­it­ary took the Thir­teen Re­versed Mer­cies on, we did so with full know­ledge of the dangers. We knew they were tain­ted, and that they'd wound us. We needed them. None of us would've made it in­tact out of Kino­tra, not if the Mer­cies had been com­pleted. We were pre­pared to die to save our coun­try.

  In­stead our coun­try sent us here to die con­demned, not as sa­viors but as vil­lains, as though our en­emies were not the ones who'd forced us into this. Without pro­voca­tion, we'd never have brought the Mer­cies into the war. It was the fault of the dead.

  We per­formed the first Twelve. Only the Thir­teenth re­mains, but we have no hope of com­ple­tion.

  Things Done by Wo­men

  The old wo­man keeps it rain­ing. We can hear her singing, her voice more like a bird's than a wo­man's, and then more an in­sect's than a bird's.

  We don't know what wo­men's voices sound like any­more. It's been years since we last heard them. We haven't spent our lives among wo­men, most of us, and though I must still have a son, I never knew his mother. We met in the dark, and left one an­other be­fore the sun came up.

  We're sol­diers, and our lives are the war and the Mer­cies, not wo­men, not chil­dren. We still don't know what the wo­men did in the war, not with any cer­tainty. Some­times a wo­man in a po­s­i­tion of au­thor­ity gave an or­der and killed an en­tire com­pany of men.

  En­emies re­aligned and com­mands shif­ted. We weren't al­ways warned. We were too oc­cu­pied, there in our desert camps, map­ping ter­rit­or­ies over an­cient lines, tun­nel­ing, sling­shot­ting into the sky in search of crows to au­gur over.

  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 t
he 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.