Heaven waits for those who run.
-Chris Cornell

Prologue

Mercadia was picking berries with Andun when first she was hunted.
She was nine years old and he was eleven. He was reaching puberty faster than the average boy so he wanted to kiss her face a whole lot, but she felt nothing sexually corrupt in his affection, so she welcomed it and kissed him back very much. He never touched her when they were children save for the hugs and the kisses, for he loved her and wanted never to scare her away, and certainly not with his affection.
They were hiding in the great vineyard where a hundred different kinds of grapes and berries were grown for all sorts of confectionery uses. The berries she picked were perfectly round like marbles, and the lightest shade of violet imaginable. They tasted just like grapes but they were as pungent and tart as pomegranate. These were the same berries that would be used to make wine for their wedding celebration in seven years.
They were not supposed to be here. Legally they could be punished for trespassing here despite their age and her royal status. But Andun has always been very good at running and Mercadia has always been very good at sneaking around. She plans entry and escape and the locations for hiding and he moves his feet so that they don’t get caught. Andun has also grown quite a lot for a boy his age and Mercadia is only a little bit of girl, he carries her when they sneak around in here. In fact he carries her a lot in public.
Mercadia loves to be carried.
“They’re such a cute couple” passers-by say, when they are in the market together with their parents whether Andun is holding Mercadia or not, but they joke not. With people their age, the public likes to joke when children are thusly affectionate with each other. But these children are famously engaged and have been since Mercadia’s infancy. When the passers-by say this to them, or about them, they mean it the same way they would with an adult couple or teenagers with an approved relationship.
Andun is holding her right now. His arms are around her stomach which is flat and very warm, he is holding her against him so his face is pressed against her back which he kisses occasionally, she does not notice. Her dress is thick and fluffy cotton so she cannot feel his arms around her very well either, she just feels the gentle pressure of being held by him; she is not old enough to feel the pleasure of it.
Mercadia works her finger between the leaves and plucks another fine ripe berry and drops it into her hand basket. These berries do not expose themselves to the elements; they hide inside a gathered fold of leaves like a rose, so you need to separate the leaves with your fingertips to see if the berry is ripe. These berries are delicate as though they were rotting already when they are in the final stage of ripeness, so it takes love and delicacy to harvest them. Mercadia can only touch with love and delicacy; she feels no other impulse to touch anything and does not have the fierceness to touch any differently anyway.
She reaches in and takes another berry away but this one she pops in her mouth. The juice is so very strong but not dark at all so there will be no stain inside her mouth, no evidence of her trespassing for when her parents inspect her mouth when she gets home soon.
She is a sneaky one and she always will be.
Mercadia plucks one last berry and wants Andun to let her down.
“I’m done” She says. Her voice is soft and sweet as sponge cake. Andun gets to his knees so that her feet touch ground, and when she turns around she pops a berry into his mouth.
Because he loves to touch her and because his affection is not frightening or invasive, Andun keeps his arms around Mercadia. She reaches into the bag on her back and places a heavy sheet over the basket of berries. It is course cloth filled with stuff like lead that is heavy but not toxic. She swings the basket around in circles around her wrist and none of the berries spill out.
“Mercy?” Andun asks, she loves it when he calls her that. She is pompous and loves to be referred to as universal goodness “Yes, Andy?” she asks, loving him for whatever he is about to ask, not caring what it is he may want.
“Can I kiss you?”
At first Mercadia is quiet. Her head tilts a bit; she hoods her eyes and sighs softly against his face. Her countenance is sagely; this is not out of place in her nine-year-old body, nor is it due to her pompousness. He wants something that he is not allowed to have, but she knows that his yearning and intentions are true. He does deserve what he is asking for but higher authorities would have him hanged for asking this.
In fact Mercadia’s parents, despite adoring Andun and his friendship with Mercadia, would have him disemboweled at once and on location for daring to ask this.
In the realm Milera, no girl must be kissed before her wedding day. Throughout the realm it is believed zealously that any girl who kisses or does anything more intimate than a kiss before her wedding day is cursed to give birth to something that is not human. Every plague, every touchable nightmare, every abomination, that has come upon this world has come from the loins of a girl or woman.
Girls and women who are shaped like or similarly to pears or hourglasses are considered safe temples for sex and conception. If you have shapely breasts and or hips -the hips are necessary in this judgment but the breasts are not—then you are a normal girl. If your body looks like it was designed by god to give birth to another human body then you are good, you are safe.
Mercadia is a skinny girl from her scalp to her toenails, and she is going to stay that way.
She wants him to kiss her. What is the harm? It is believed by all adults in this world that premarital affection of that caliber is what makes girls stay skinny, and give birth to catastrophes but there is no proof. Love and affection can only create goodness, is that not true? Mercadia knows this is the boy who she will marry when she is a woman and he is a man. She knows that her duty in life is to give birth to his child, to raise it and protect it to keep the species and religion alive. She feels as though he is her husband now, she felt that way when they were infants playing together in the pen.
So why has she not kissed him yet?
“I love you Andun.” she says, and this is meant to invite his lips and he understands her. His lips touch hers, the kiss is chaste and spills love between them like the warm sugar running down a pastry.
Then the loudest sound they have ever heard destroys the air behind Andun’s head and leaves sparks behind that burn his hair. In the next second their eyelids are opened wide the way paper is shrunk by heat, all sound is zeroed out and replaced by a high pitched sound. It is the same note in each of their heads.
Andun breaks away from their kiss and dives through the bushes behind Mercadia. Mercadia turns her head to the source of the noise, and her neck creaks like thousand-year-old gears. She cannot run by herself, she needs Andun to carry her, she needs somebody to help.
Several yards away is a muscular black figure with no face. His sensory organs are invisible but in perfect health; he can see her plain as day, he can hear her panting like a dying dog, he can smell her sweat-like fear. In his right hand is a wooden weapon designed to launch flaming metal balls at high velocity to destroy bodies. In his left hand there is a sack flung over his shoulder that is filled with balls of lead.
He slams the sack on the ground and pulls another ball out of the sack with his bare fingers which looks like they are protected by white armor. Much of his flesh is thick and bonelike, but not his face.
Mercadia does not find her voice; it leaps out of her like a cat that has just struggled out of the river.
“Andun!” she screams, as the man slides a golf-ball-sized hunk of lead into the gun coiled around his forearm.
Andun wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her inside the bushes in one swift motion. Less than a second later the spot where Mercadia was standing is a smoldering hole fifty yards long.
Much wine for the future is lost.
Andun brings Mercadia into a part of the vineyard where the berries and grapes are grown are not in rows. Much of this vineyard had grown naturally so only about half of it is in rows. Andun and Mercadia have been sneaking in here since they could walk on two feet; they know the grounds as well as they know each other. And Andun is a fast boy.
The hunter will not be able to catch them as easily as he expected.
The hunter kicks off of the ground and launches a pound of dirt into a long vine. Another future bottle of wine is lost.
He slips between the trunks of the tree and vines like a squirrel and the enormous sack of bullets brushes gently through the foliage. No wine is lost to the bullets that are not fired from the pistol. The hunter does not know just what direction Andun went in but he is fast. Andun is very fast but the hunter is much faster and the bullets are faster than either of them. Andun is not yet in the hunter’s sights.
Twenty feet away Andun is running clumsily in fear and Mercadia’s weight. She only weighs between sixty or seventy pounds at her age but Andun is only a fast boy, not a strong boy. He is not strong in any sense of the word in fact, just very, very fast, however clumsy.
Andun has Mercadia ten feet away from civilization when the hunter can see his feet.
He is nine feet away when the hunter takes aim.
He is eight feet away when the bullet flies.
The bullet touches his heel and Andun’s left foot is blown off. It rolls several feet ahead of him, the blood is disintegrated by the heat of the blast before it can splatter anywhere, the ankle wound on his leg and disembodied foot are sundered black and dry.
Mercadia falls out of Andun’s arms and they both scream as though they were both wounded by that bullet. Andun is stopped by his pain and he has forgotten about Mercadia completely, his brain is shaking from his own screaming and he cannot think.
Mercadia gets up. Andun’s foot is reeking like cooked meat in front of her face. Seeing the foot of the boy she loves makes her heart shudder, but she does not scurry away from it. She is one foot away from the gate that will lead her to civilization and help.
But she is too brave and protective to do what anybody else would have done, to do what Andun would have done to her had he been in her position.
She looks to where the bullet came from and she can see the hunter crawling out of the foliage. He is not charging now, he knows that he has his prey. This mercenary’s job will be done and he will receive his payment by tonight.
Instead of running out of the gate Mercadia runs to the bawling Andun. She holds him and rocks him back and forth and stares down the faceless mercenary who has thrown down his sack and reloaded his weapon for the third time.
The hunter points his weapon at Mercadia’s face, then fires.
But just as the bullet is five inches from her nose a stream of dark purple smoke splits it apart and the two halves of lead fall on either side of Mercadia.
Andun’s thoughts are taken from his pain, and he scurries away from the split bullet. Mercadia scurries with him so their bodies are still touching.
Though he has no face, the hunter has ridge shapes on the front of his head that would pass for alarmed eyebrows.
The skin around the hunter’s elbow bubbles up like roiling soup and his shooting arm blasts off of his body in a gush of dark purple smoke. The arm lands where Andun and Mercadia scurried from, quickly melts and becomes mulch.
Andun and Mercadia scurry closer yet to the gate but Andun can only scurry so much with one foot so they are slow going.
The mercenary bubbles up from his groin to his non-face and splits in two. Just as his arm did, both halves of his body become light brown mulch and sink into the ground, leaving the grass and soil damp and soggy like vomit. Everything smells like death and fruit.
Their danger gone, they stop, and Andun groans over his missing foot again. Mercadia is equally scared as though she had lost a bit of herself too. Though he is blazing with pain from his scorched amputation, there is an air of safety around Andun; she can tell that he thinks they are safe now, if frightened and hurt.
But Andun, just as he is not very strong, is usually not bright either. Having seen the hunter destroyed, Mercadia knows that they are not alone. She cannot tell what it is but she senses something wise and pungent around them. Andun cannot feel it because the spirit is only watching over her.
The air before them darkens as though night is manifesting in that one isolated spot. It looks just like the destroying mist the darker and thicker it becomes, but soon it is the texture of cloth and it falls around an invisible body. An abundance of long wavy hair falls out the top of the cloak and a head lifts out.
She cannot decide if his skin is blue or green. He is the color of the ocean behind the cloak and beneath the hair. He has no lips but his nose is prominent and noble and one eye is closed. The other eye is unusually large, it is the same color of the berries she has been picking and it is webbed with thick black lines that look like licorice which do not impair his vision. He sees things the same way the hunter did.
The manifested man leans forward. He stretches his body several feet away from Mercadia; his face is only a few inches away from hers. He said:
“Run along, little girl.” And it echoes around Mercadia a thousand times before she can stand up again.
At first Mercadia shudders inside and tries to talk. She wants to scream that she sees a monster, but she cannot speak more than blubbering gasps. Beside her Andun is rocking back and forth holding his leg and he does not notice the man in front of them at all.
And why should he? Redemption cares not for cowards.
“Run along little girl.” he says again, and it echoes a thousand times more, and that is what it takes to move the girl. She scampers to her feet and screams at Andun to run with her. He senses nothing but he trusts Mercadia just like her little dog and he tries to run with her. She takes his weight on one shoulder and he tries to hop on his one foot while she tries to run. He thinks that she saw another hunter.
The ocean colored man vanishes the same way he appeared: And when he is gone the mulch and the split bullet burst forth with gorgeous fruits and flowers the likes of which could only be found in exotic jungles… or in the history books, where the most devastating plague in history is recalled.
When it is discovered later by the workers of the vineyard it will be isolated in a fence and considered an evil omen too dangerous to touch.
The echoing voice follows her all the way to the hospital and as soon as she is with people again the voice goes out like a flame and lingers slightly like the stub of a dead candle. She will never forget it, and she will not hear it again for seven years.
In the realm of Milera, names do not have meanings; they are just a means of identification. But if you translate them into languages from other realms they are no longer proper names.
In other realms, ‘Andun’ would mean ‘The Coward.’
In other realms, ‘Mercadia’ would mean ‘The Mother.’

1

Just as on most other planets inhabited by humans, the history books of Milera are filled with violence and prejudice and rape and pillage. But its most notable chapters are the plagues.
Milera is a small realm and everybody in it belongs to the same religion. This has occurred only in the past few hundred years. But Milerism is a vast religion, and any one person can interpret it in a dozen ways that the next person could never dream of. But each and every person who has ever been born in Milera agrees about the plagues. Every interpretation is centered on them, any interpretation could be right.
Three major interpretations are widely and equally believed all over the world. It is thirty percent of the population to each of these three interpretations –the other ten percent makes up those who are undecided and simply love to toy with multiple interpretations at once—and none of them congregate. These different interpretations do not have names; if they did they would not be able to hide amongst each other. All of the different believers are scattered equally all over the planet. The people of Milera prefer to be closer to their enemies.
And it is almost impossible to tell an enemy from a friend in this world since everybody is so very similar.
The first is the most passive: They believe that the plagues are normal to the planet’s cycle and the so-called womb abominations are no exception to that. It is fair to run to safety when in danger of a plague –or any other natural occurrence of the planet- but there have been those who are particularly devoted who don’t run when in danger. They accept death no matter how gruesome, because they think that their deaths are no different than when the apple falls from the branch.
The second is the meekest: They believe that the plagues are negative karma brought on by mass acts of wickedness –there have been plenty, remember now that Milera is inhabited by humans—they run from all sorts of danger, then pray and meditate to be spared. They are the hardest workers and are responsible for the erection of most cities and monuments, for they believe that this will accumulate enough good karma so that they can survive. Their life spans so far are not any longer than the different believers and their numbers have never escalated higher.
The third is the most savage: They believe that the plagues are divine justice and that imitating the effects of the plagues is to imitate divine justice. Whenever there are mass acts of wickedness it is usually this group that is suspect. It could be any of the three really, depending on how devout the individuals are in their particular beliefs, but it is usually the savage.
Mercadia is among the ten percent. She is far too selfish to give thought to the workings of the planet.
The plagues that have occurred in this world are so numerous that not every one can be recounted. The history books could not tell you how many have occurred. The oldest clans could only guess and none of them will guess accurately. Jenta is forgotten these days.
One might think that a world that has been plagued thusly would have no population but in this world ‘Plague’ is a loose term. Plague simply amounts to a magnificent natural transformation. However, when somebody uses that word they usually mean one of the abominations that have spawned forth from a skinny girl.
Of that type of plague there have been ninety-nine, and since ninety-nine being such a psychologically unsatisfying number, it is no wonder why Mercadia is in danger.
The history books have been careful to note that these abominations have only been born from slender women, and slender women have always been extremely uncommon in Milera. They would be murdered ritually around the time they’re supposed earn their hips if not for the fact that slender women have turned out perfectly normal before. They are indeed uncommon but in this planet’s history only ninety-nine women have given birth to an abomination and, to be fair, there have been a great deal more than ninety-nine slender women in this planet’s entire history.
The most famous, the most decimating plague this world has seen happened just twenty-five years before Mercadia’s sixteenth year. Her parents were only five years old. They can only remember the adults were frightened and the numbers in their country were drastically reduced. It took a new leader and many pilgrimages from every corner of the globe to repopulate the area. By the time Mercadia was born everything was operating well again, but nobody has forgotten about this plague and nobody ever will.
The girl must have given birth in the middle of nowhere because nobody expected it. Usually when one of these girls is pregnant she does look pregnant… but not always. Usually there are witnesses and horns and sirens who can alert everybody inhabiting the immediate area in case a plague does occur. But sometimes these girls do not look pregnant at all. Some of them do not even feel pregnant when it is wicked what they are brewing. This girl might have been strolling in a field when Melkam spewed forth from her, because it did not occur in a village or a city and there was nobody around to scream the warning. Number ninety-nine was a discreet one even though she did not mean to be.
On the realm of earth, ‘Melkam’ would mean ‘Redemption.’
It was a black and purple fog that moved just outside of the city like a dam exploding from pressure. It split off in ten long tendrils that slipped through the city and into the hills and through the fields and into the rivers. Every sentient life form touched by it went necrotic instantly. Then from the rot the most colorful, gorgeous exotic fruits and flowers burst out, it blossomed as fast as water splashing from a heavy stone. Most people and animals were consumed completely; it seeped into the body the way cancer seeps from organ to organ, but some people only lost limbs.
Plants, unliving things and most animals were untouched by it and it was not because they hid. Those who went untouched –they were few—noticed that the plague was sentient too, that it was selecting what was rotted. If only you lost a limb that meant you were spared.
To a few of the ones it spared it spoke. It spoke about the next plague.
It said that someday it would be back to make sure that number one hundred would not be stopped.
This made people think that it could be stopped.
And that made people think that it had to be stopped.
In Milera’s history nobody ever tried to stop one of these abominations. It never even occurred to most people. To those to whom did it occur, they guessed that it would be just like trying to carve out cancer. To remove the tumor only makes it spread faster for its survival. They guessed that if you tried to abort the non-child or kill the mother that would only make the abomination spill out sooner… and possibly with a vengeance.
Somebody guessed, somebody who was spoken to by the plague Melkam, that lucky number one hundred would be different. And he was right. He would have young skinny girls hunted until a mercenary did not come back from the mission. He did not have to wait long, his first guess was right, so there was no homicide controversy. Only one mercenary lost is pretty good.
“No Mercy.” he said.

2

“Mercy,” Andun says from the other end of the hall, and Mercadia stops in her tracks. Her hands are supporting her lush round belly; she is so pregnant that she has to hold it up at all times. She loves Andun when he carries it for her. She loves him when he touches her.
Mercadia, sixteen beautiful and still too slender to be safe from this world’s judgment, turns around and smiles for the man who is ten minutes her husband. She has been looking for him. She just made a new friend mingling at their after-wedding party and she wanted to introduce them.
“There you are, silly.” she says with so much affection and she starts towards him. Her walk is graceful despite the weight she must support. Her baby hangs from her really, so that it does not interrupt her delicate and narrow skeletal structure. Andun runs to her from across the shadowed hall so she does not need to take another step, she takes two before he gets to her. Rather than embrace her completely Andun puts his hands under her belly with hers. When he lifts her stomach it elevates two whole inches with no resistance just like the limb of a corpse.
The heavy eight pounds of life rolls around as soon as the father is putting warmth into it too. Mercadia loves it; it is just like being massaged with oil but on the inside. The sensation of the baby moving against her womb is akin to orgasmic brushing but different, it is a divine sensation without being sexual. The only kind of non-sexual divinity she has ever felt in fact.
“You should tell me.” She is still too happy from the ceremony –and the wine they might have picked seven years ago, wine too pure to be poisonous to the baby—to sound it, but that demand is born of unhealthy possessiveness she feels over Andun. He has been instructed not to talk to any of the other girls tonight, especially the ones who have boobs.
“I was just going to the bathroom darling.” He responds sweetly and she responds to that with a giggle and a smile, but it is on account of the baby they are holding together, and the way it moves in her. If there were nothing rolling around in her she would be angry with him.
With her husband helping her equilibrium Mercadia can slip her right foot out of its shoe and brush her toes against Andun’s left foot “How does it feel sweetheart?” She says to change the subject; she can tell he is sorry enough that he deserves to be spared her pissyness.
In Milera: There exists a farmed pet called the Lemph. It is not harvested for food and produces no product. It is a green scaled land creature that looks just like a lamprey in its natural born form. Humans raise and nurture these animals to be all different sizes and lengths to serve as replacement limbs. Whenever a person is in need of a replaced limb or digit a Lemph of the proper length and thickness can latch itself to the open wound and change shape according to the muscle memory it reads in the wounded body. They can grow and age with the body but tend to have longer life spans than humans so when a body dies its Lemph just falls off and returns to its lamprey shape.
His replacement foot is kelp green and appears to be scaled. It is just the right size and shape, and save for the row of pearl smooth teeth around the base of his ankle it feels just like his flesh too. Mercadia brushes her toes against his sock and dress shoe and rubs her big toe against one of those soft teeth. She loves doing this when they make love –avoiding the teeth—so that she can pretend they were not hunted seven years ago and that he never lost his foot at all.
“Let’s go back in, love.” She is insistent. She turns around and he puts his arms around her so he can support her stomach with her from behind.
The indoor court is magnificent and Mercadia could not have asked for more –though she would have, had there been something grander available. This ballroom is half the size of a football field. The ceilings are so high the drunken people think the curtains are the night sky, and the chandelier candles the stars. The floor is checkered with pearl and copper colored marble, the ceiling and walls are artistic black frames and polished glass. And the room is lit with torches that are a liquid fungus that, when lit, burn bright for hours like yellow lava and illuminate the room so that it looks just like daytime.
As soon as they are back in the ballroom everybody in the immediate area applauds for them and Mercadia pretends modesty. She places one hand on her breast as though to calm her heart and she blushes. Andun widens his smile and holds Mercadia’s belly, he thinks that is why they are applauding him.
Mercadia waves to the crowd with the motion of screwing in a light bulb. Her eyes look dazed as though she is intoxicated: she is so enthused by receiving this attention that she has forgotten Andun is holding her stomach. She has almost forgotten that she is pregnant and that the attention is actually for her.
But the truth is, the crowd is applauding because they have to. Everybody in the room is afraid that Mercadia is number one hundred. That the… thing, in her belly is no human but an abomination that might kill them all. It is widely believed that the one hundredth human-born plague would be the most decimating, that not even an evacuation would be able to save the city.
Or the world.
But Mercadia is oblivious. Though the worry burns as bright as the fungus torches in everybody she interacts with, Mercadia does not see it. She chooses not to, because to be the one hundredth would degrade her importance in society: in fact it would be a shame worthy of exile. She would not be the first. She is just like a grandmother, who pretends that her junkie grandchildren are dead already. She is just a normal girl, that’s all.
She’s going to be somebody’s mother.
The crowd’s applause dies down and everybody drinks the wine she and Andun might have picked seven years ago had they not been interrupted. Everybody faces her though, everyone in the court is obligated to face the bride whatever they are doing.
Andun takes this opportunity to let go of her. Mercadia does not remember that he was behind her until she feels that weight hanging in front of her again. “Can I get a drink and talk with my friends, love?” he asks just like a child, and just like a snobby older sister, without turning around, she looks at him sharply. She is hurt that he let go so abruptly.
“Go ahead.” She says coldly, with so much warmth reserved in her throat for when he is polite again. Why does he not understand that she is cold with him because he is impolite, and that she will be sweet again as soon as he is?
Andun walks away to the patio where he will brag with his friends and avoid any mention of plagues or the number one hundred.
The crowd disperses, careful to keep facing Mercadia. Few of them are still paying total attention to her and the rest mingle amongst themselves, moving with Mercadia as she moves. It is those who pay total attention to her that she chooses to mingle with when that commotion dies down.
Mercadia does not have two minutes to mingle before her dearest friend Murcilla flings herself from the crowd. She latches onto Mercadia’s belly and hangs like a lamprey does on the shark. Murcilla nuzzles her face against Mercadia’s swollen belly. Mercadia, embarrassed, dismisses everyone surrounding her gracefully with laughter and a smile. But she cannot shake the feeling she is being judged by them after they leave her because of their obligation to face her throughout the ceremony.
“Sweety stop, people will think that I’ve married you.” Mercadia tries to wave her friend off but Murcilla still snuggles against her just the way a child or even a lover would. Murcilla is close to her but…
But the truth is… Mercadia feels relieved to be touched this way by somebody. Andun only ever touches her sexually any more. He never touches her just for the sake of touching her; just for the sake of being loving and keeping her warm. In fact, since she became pregnant he has not touched her so much at all. She cannot imagine why.
She cannot even see the fear in her husband.
Murcilla is the ideal woman in Milera. Her body is deliciously pear-shaped and her every thought is of devotion to loved ones. She will make a fine mother in her husband’s eyes. Perhaps not in her child, but certainly in her husband.
Murcilla reaches around Mercadia’s back, almost touching her butt, but not quite. “Oh Mercy, I love this baby.”
Murcilla is perhaps the only person in this room -other than Mercadia—who has not wondered if the child is not human. She squeezes her friend, she holds her ear against the swollen belly and that convinces her, this child is human. No plague could feel so solid, so wonderful, so soothingly innocent.
Mercadia can ignore the fear in anybody –she ignores it instead of missing it, her pompousness cannot take seriously anybody who demeans her—but her friend pierces that shield with admiration and love. It is not until now that Mercadia has considered that she may be number one hundred, now that she is forced to because of trust.
But she trusts her friend’s bad judgment. She does not believe she is the one hundredth abominable mother.
Mercadia looks sad suddenly but she is smiling at her friend who is oblivious to all depressed emotion, “I love this child too sweetheart.” She puts one hand on her friends head and the other on her stomach. She feels the life in her roll and she thinks it feels just like flesh rolling inside flesh.
Mercadia returns Murcilla’s affection by stroking her hair; she runs her hand down her friends neck and back just as a lover would, but not a lover sexually inclined. Murcilla’s hair is wavy, black, and soft as down. As she strokes Murcilla’s hair a secret part of Mercadia speaks to her.
“You wish Murcilla could be your lover instead of Andun.” it whispers with cruel honesty.
“Yes, I do.” Mercadia whispers to nobody, without shame. She whispers not because of fear, but because of the emotional exhaustion born from unhappy union.
Just for a second, while nobody is looking, they do look like lovers. With Mercadia adoring Murcilla, and Murcilla pining to Mercadia from her belly, they do look like they are in love.
“You’re going to have a baby Mercadia, I know it.” Murcilla promises with heavy emphasis on baby. She is so quiet that only Mercadia can hear her: it is considered catastrophically bad luck to mention the Mother Plagues during any stage of the wedding ceremony.
“Yes.” is all Mercadia says. She speaks absently as though she isn’t actually listening to her friend but she is. She continues stroking Murcilla’s hair and giving her the immortal adoration she promised to Andun twenty minutes ago.
My friend is right, she thinks.
“But she isn’t.”
Mercadia’s eyes shoot ahead and her very soul shrinks and shrivels as though frozen in an instant. She has not heard that voice for seven years, and she thought that her nightly prayers had promised she would never hear him again.
She forgets that Murcilla is there and she turns around, letting go of her friend. Murcilla looks at Mercadia hurt, and asks her what is wrong. But Mercadia does not hear her, and never will again.
Mercadia looks behind her but the spirit is not there. She does not see him nor sense him in any way. But she knows he –or “it” perhaps, she doesn’t know what the hell the spirit qualifies as—is here with her, he is here as surely as she is chilled by his voice.
He speaks again, “Run along, little girl,” and that chill contracts a migraine that will swell in her brain for the rest of the night.
Murcilla screams but Mercadia still doesn’t hear her.
Then the first bullet of the night shatters one of the great windows, diving for Mercadia’s skull.
She hears the sound of hot metal clashing next to her ear and she jerks her head with inhuman speed to see the bullet right before it splits. An arm the color of the ocean has caught the bullet with a sickle of rust. The walnut-sized bullet looks like it is stuck to the blade like a burr in that instant. Then with a flick of the wrist the sickle breaks the bullet and the two halves hit the checkered floor before the screaming starts.
Mercadia backs away from her guardian, staring at him horrified, as though he were the one who fired the bullet.
He looks exactly the same, and he leans toward her the same way he did seven years ago, “Run along, little girl.” His voice is abrasive with impatience now; she thinks that if he says it again, he will scream it.
Mercadia looks around her.
Murcilla is gone, and her father still isn’t here at all. In fact not a one of her loved ones is in sight.
Andun.
“Andun!” She screams and another bullet that would have destroyed her pregnant stomach breaks, hits the floor in front of her. She didn’t even see him do it this time. Her guardian is in front her suddenly and he is staring at her just as her father does; with bitter masculine authority she thinks belongs in no man.
“Your husband is not the one in danger, Mercadia!” He shouts and hacks another bullet without even looking at it. When the two halves start blossoming with gorgeous red leaves the crowd disperses around it as though it were a man eater. “I cannot guarantee your safety, little girl; RUN!”
Mercadia bolts, but not out of the building. She needs to find Andun, she won’t leave without him, she couldn’t leave him last time this happened and she won’t leave him now.
“Andun!”
She screams but her voice is caught in the collective cacophony with everybody else’s screams.
Andun does not have a hope of catching her voice in this mess, never.
“Andun!”
She pushes through, moving against the crowd. She is much stronger and more agile than one would expect a pregnant girl to be. Nobody is facing her now; nobody is even trying to help her escape. It is every man for himself now and the women are no exception, not even the bride.
Mercadia runs out onto the balcony where Andun was drinking and talking with his friends. I’ll grab him, she thinks, we’ll find a carriage or something and daddy will get us somewhere safe…
But there is nobody out on the balcony.
Mercadia’s body shivers but her thoughts are outside her body: it takes the sound of another blast to snap her back to reality.
“The Coward is gone.”
The spirit is behind her again and the chill becomes roiling hatred. He calls Andun a coward as though it were his title.
“Andun is no coward!” she screams, but she is screaming just to defend her husband. She knows that he’s a coward, and she knows that she failed to help him conjure his courage as they grew up together.
It’s my fault he’s a coward, she thinks.
“No, Mercadia.” The spirit says “You are wrong. But this is no time to cast judgment, let alone talk.” The spirit walks towards her and she hears the sound of heavy boots as he walks. She thought that spirits floated, and made no sound except when they spoke.
But this one makes footsteps, and breaks bullets in half with sickles of rust.
She only sees him make the first few steps towards her. All of a sudden he is clutching her by the arms and his hands feel just like flesh without temperature, while still pulsing with the vitality of life. She is on his cloaked shoulder which feels like animal fur, and she feels as though she is being carried away to be raped and eaten.
“Put me down!” She screams for help, but her voice is instead a lure for her hunters.
“Quiet.” the spirit says, and his voice is just like a nail buried by a hammer, “The more you scream the more they will chase you.”
He steps up the stone rail of the balcony and just for a second, they are in full view of every hunter in the immediate area.
And Mercadia sees them. The great hall is encased in a rectangular dome of glass and artistically twisted metal. Her hunters are perched all over it in humanly impossible ways, like spiders and flies, clinging with inhuman agility. In one instant they look to her like black acne on her fathers beautiful courtyard.
In the next instant there is a bright flash then a bullet in front of her face.
The next instant that bullet is stopped by rust just inches from her face and she has stopped breathing, her heart feels it has been chiseled in two by the air pressure of the bullet. Then the blade is swiped back beneath the spirits cloak and the bullet is two halves of a walnut shell spinning on the marble deck.
The spirit jumps off the balcony and against his advice she screams as though she has fallen into the great pit and Abaddon is waiting for her where she thinks the bottom is.
At this point, the spirit Melkam understands that Mercadia is not going to listen to him.
They fall twelve stories. The spirit feels nothing but the instinct to save Mercadia, but Mercadia feels the powerful wind that eagles feel in flight when they dive for their prey. She hates the spirit that has captured her, but she clings to him for dear life. Her life is very dear to her.
Too much so.
There is no impact when they land. The spirit hits the ground with all the force of shredded parchment, and the only reason Mercadia can tell they landed is that they have stopped. Her body absorbed no impact, and she did not feel any stress in the spirit that carries her. All of his stress is in his mind, which is a landscape she cannot set foot in.
The spirit sets Mercadia on the grass which crunches beneath her bare feet -her shoes came off when he picked her up on the balcony. The grass fills the space between her toes with juice thinner than water.
Mercadia is shivering; the night is freezing and all the heat of her body crawls into her belly to incubate her baby.
Mercadia’s skin tightens against her muscles from the cold, and the moonlight makes her skin gray-blue. Her brown eyes stand out in her face like bon-bon’s imbedded in ice. The spirit is impassive, and is not moved by her misery and immature innocence.
“What are you doing, you said I was in danger?” she asks. She is quiet now; she has finally caught on that she needs to escape.
“Run.”
She thinks that he doesn’t understand her so she says, “Why aren’t you carrying me?”
When she screams she shakes her head and her hair tangles in the frozen wind. The spirit is still impassive, not insulted that she thinks he does not understand her misery.
“Though I am not flesh, Mercadia, I do tire. I am here only to protect you, so you must bear this weight on your own.”
“I can’t run like this!” She yells grabbing her hanging stomach, as though the spirit needs this pointed out to him.
“You were running earlier.” He states matter-of-fact, “You need only run as far as the old battlegrounds.”
Mercadia turns around. Down the hill, perhaps one hundred feet away, is a crack in the great mountain where a territorial war was waged between her city and the people of the hills beyond the mountain decades ago. It is said that at the height of the conflict, the ninety-ninth plague rushed through and wiped out every single soldier. It is a vertical chasm of useless fertilizer now. Though it is pungent with human mulch, in these few decades not a thing has sprouted there. It is considered unholy ground, nobody ever goes there.
Mercadia and Andun once swore to each other they would certainly never go there, not without each other.
She starts to say his name but the spirit cuts her off like a whirling saw.
“The Coward is gone, Mercadia; I am your companion now and I say GO!”
The sky shouts fiery snaps at them and he spins around to protect her. He is a small tornado of noxious gas and rust, and the wind of that spinning almost knocks her down. The bullet halves hit the ground at his feet and they are so heavy that they imbed themselves into the earth.
Mercadia thinks about something that heavy, and that hot, moving that fast.
She thinks about Andun’s foot.
And that is what it takes to make her run.
Mercadia grabs her pregnant stomach and runs down the hill so much faster than pregnant girls normally can move. She can lift her knees a whole foot up which makes her load swing up and slap her cleavage. She hugs her hanging stomach close to her breasts as though she can hold her baby already so that it doesn’t hit her as she escapes.
She feels the baby nestle comfortably inside her as though going to sleep.
Mercadia only makes it twenty feet down the hill before her foot hits a sharp rock pointing at the castle like an accusing claw. It cuts her foot down the center between her big and index toe and catches her shoe. She hits the ground face first and feels her nose pushed inside her face. She rolls down the hill uncontrollably, cut by tiny stones and smeared with soft grass and runny mud. She wraps her body tight around her swollen stomach and rolls all the way down the hill like a lumpy cannonball.
Back up the hill the spirit dashes as fog left and right, slashing at every bullet sent Mercadia’s way. The poison he leaves behind dissipates slowly, and still floats invisibly in trace amounts where the hunters think it has evaporated. He dashes as fast as the bullets, and the sound when they are broken is twice as loud as when they are fired.
The hunters leap from the castle walls and land together, tip toe, on the soft ground without sinking an inch. They rush forward in scattered formation several feet apart from each other, their faces as low to the ground as their running feet. If Mercadia looked over her shoulder she would not be able to count how many there are, she wouldn’t even be able to tell if they were coming from anywhere other than the castle.
The hunter’s bullets come even faster now but the spirit can move faster still. The bullets come closer now in great sprays like huge sparks. The sound of their breaking is deafening now, sounds like a thousand knives being sharpened at once on rough stones. The smell of burning pepper is noxious in the air. Even with her face filled with sticky grass goop and mud she can smell the gunpowder; she feels it’s disintegrating her lungs to ash, that she’ll be coughing them up as spicy muck.
The bullets fly in fewer spurts now but Mercadia is too drowned in her misery to notice. As the hunters pass through the fog left by the spirit they slow down, poison stuck in their flesh like so many flea eggs, enough to immobilize a joint. Some of them have to stand up as they run, and half of them stop shooting altogether.
One hunter drops its bag of bullets, which is as full as a scrotum now.
Mercadia comes to a very slow stop at the base of the hill. She feels so stiff she thinks she can’t lift her head, but she tries and does, and her hair hangs from her like loosened seaweed. She looks up directly into the eyes of the spirit, who has stopped paying attention to their pursuers.
“Kill them.” she hisses and she does not sound like a young woman anymore, her voice is guttural and wicked now like the voice of a phantom from a hundred years before.
“They will die soon,” he promises. He is impassive and noble looking, like the Easter Island heads of Earth.
“Now!” She hisses so loud she hurts her throat, and she feels a wad of something wet climb up her throat.
“I already have, Mercadia. They will die soon; now pass the crack in the mountain.”
Mercadia stares at him just for a minute. She stands up and her every muscle is infested with soreness. She’ll be as stiff as a log as soon as she rests. If she gets to rest.
The hunters pursue them still, but slowly like drugged turtles.
Mercadia turns around, belly in hands, and she is in new territory after just one step. The whole world is light brown beyond the green grass hill it seems, everything is emaciated; it smells like smooth fruity shit.
If her life were not in danger then Mercadia would turn right around and shout at the one forcing her this way. She is too important to walk through the land of shit, too sweet and merciful to be made to step on unholy ground.
The trees loom low over her and sway in the wind like perverted grasping hands.
Mercadia passes through the crack and feels the whole world tighten around her. The smell is gone as soon as she has stepped into the mountain path. Everything beyond the unholy ground smells like dew and ancient stone. She is in frozen air all of a sudden but she welcomes it because it calms the deathlike blaze beneath her skin.
She senses that her spirit is not following her. She turns around and sees that he is waiting by the entryway for their pursuers to catch up; they have nearly reached the bottom of the hill.
They have stopped shooting altogether. They really do look like they are dying on their feet now.
“What are you doing?” she asks quietly, too tired now to show the spirit her anger. A human would not have heard such a quiet whisper for it was too low even to echo in these stones, but the spirit heard.
“I am showing them what they face pursuing The Mother.” And just as they step on the foot of the hill he thrusts one arm to the sky, sickle of rust pointing to the moon.
And the mulch bursts like exploding fruit, transforming into the greatest most beautiful trees Mercadia has ever seen. The transformation is instantaneous, as if the trees were waiting in the ground and shot up by a mechanism. The colors are vibrant and impossible to count. The shapes and sizes differentiating each tree are marvelous in the way they clash. Part of Mercadia finds it more beautiful than the courtyard she just left behind, more beautiful even than her wedding ceremony.
Their pursuers will never get through forest that thick. No matter how many bullets they have to spare.
The spirit turns around, “There is a cave nearby. You can rest there.”
And rest she will, but she will not sleep. Never again will Mercadia have sleep.

3

Mercadia’s pompousness has been shocked out of her forever, so she doesn’t mind that she must rest in a cave.
It is a narrow but deep pocket in the mountain. It is frigid, the ground and walls are dusty and dissolve to the touch but the foundation feels as dense as steel. Mercadia’s body gives off steam like will o’ the wisp when this cold atmosphere touches her scorching hot skin, but she does not feel any real relief until she has collapsed in the corner at the end of cave and presses her back against the dusty stone.
The grass jelly and mud on her body stiffens in the cold but she is too sore to peel any of it away. Her whole body is rigid with soreness; she has a thousand aches that feel like tooth cavities lined with acidic sugar that erode her further. It is like syphilis, except in every part of her body but the brain. She needs to rest, she needs to rest.
And the worst pain is in her loins. She feels as though her sexual organs have been scooped from between her legs with a sharpened shovel. Yet, in reality, that opening is as tight as can be, so narrow it has become that not even urine could pass out of her right now.
But her baby is safe.
“But can I even call this a baby?” This is the first time she has spoken about her child as though it were not here. Always she coos adorable, motherly affection at her belly. But the idea that this is no child has starved that affection.
Baby or not it has swelled inside her noticeably in the past twenty minutes since her pain has had time to set in. She feels as though her eyes and loins will vomit, her muscles are starting to contract both in her stomach and her head.
For a whole minute she fears that she is going into labor and she can’t breathe. Her brain spins wildly in her head and she thinks that she’s having a seizure. After that painful tingling stops, after that seizing discomfort drips from her brain and down her throat, her stomach becomes a volcano of bile and bonbons. Now she has to vomit in the literal sense.
Her head tilts up involuntarily and she pukes on the floor next to her. Brown and green sparks of liquid bounce off the floor and splatter on her dress but she doesn’t even feel it. Her pain is as armor to all of her senses, touch in particular.
She spills her champagne and chocolate all over the floor, then she sits up and breathes heavily again, pressing herself against the jagged freezing wall. The vomit seeps across the floor and soaks her legs but she doesn’t feel it. She feels nothing but the pain and the blessed icy air relaxing the fire of her body.
“I need to rest, I need to rest.” she whines, and the baby replies by rolling over in her belly.
“So rest, Mother.” That dreaded voice is just calling her a mother, not his mother, but nonetheless it reminds her that she may give birth to something like him.
Sleep is beyond her now; she knows that, she cannot but stay wide awake no matter how tired she may be. But she cannot even rest with him here. She wonders now, briefly, if he is even capable of being apart from her, but shoves that horrible thought aside.
“Get out.” she whines. She can only whine now, her every other tone of voice was left behind at the party.
Mercadia’s vomit begins to bubble with life of its own then evaporates all at once into a mushroom cloud of black and purple mist. If her senses were working, she would notice the putrid smell is gone. The fog shifts to the floor in front of her, and the spirit fades into the physical plain through it; the fog becomes hair and cloth then falls around a shape that was not there before, and the spirit raises his head.
He looks just the same, he is not an entity who ages.
Seeing him again Mercadia’s face, wet with sweat and acrid chunks, scrunches up so much that in this dark cave she closely resembles a mean-tempered pug. She can still only whine, her voice holds no authority at all.
Perhaps, her pompousness has not been shocked out of her completely.
“How dare you?” she says.
“How dare I?” he states, contemplating that. He doesn’t understand the question, doesn’t understand why there is a question.
Mercadia shakes enraged. She wants to hit her head against the wall to smash it open to spite him, but he seems too heartless to be touched by self-mutilation. She fills her lungs as much as she can, she feels them stop as they inflate against the life in her belly, and she screams a cyclonic wail that could be heard in the valley if not for the newly grown jungle there.
“I’m somebody’s mother!” Some of the dust falls to the ground around her, the spirit is still untouched by her rage.
The spirit looks to her belly then back to her eyes.
“I’m sure you are.”
She is too delirious to decipher if he doesn’t understand her implication or if he is pretending not to understand. “I mean I’m not a girl anymore!”
The spirit is quiet.
“Run along, little girl!” She tries to make mock but even if she were not restricted to whining she could never imitate his diction, but she mocks nonetheless –her mouth is the only part of her not too sore to work—“I’m a mother now!”
“Not yet.”
Mercadia shivers and screams louder than before but the spirit is like a rod impaled in the bed of a rushing river.
“You don’t understand,” she declares like royalty spitting on a peasant, “you’re not a thing that suffers. You’ll never know what I’m going through.”
“On the contrary, Mercadia.” She keeps looking away but she is listening to him, spitefully wishing she couldn’t. “I am one with this planet, and you are part of it –granted not more than a hair follicle is to the human face. The crust is the earth’s skin, the trees are her hair, and the lava at the center is her heart and blood. I feel this planet just the way you feel your own body, and because your body is a part of this planet I feel your suffering too. I do know suffering, Mercadia, and more than that I know yours.”
She wants to scream at him again but she has not the energy nor can she take in such a deep breath again. She stares at the floor, and pretends that she is not listening to him so she can pretend that he is the villain.
She has to put a face on this whole situation after all, and his is the only one she knows of to blame.
“You still shouldn’t call me a girl.” She whispers with the voice of the suffering child. “I’m somebody’s mother now. That makes me more than a girl.”
“We are all sons and daughters.”
Obeying her intuition and not her childish stubbornness, Mercadia looks at the spirit’s face. She is honestly paying attention to him now, and the wailing baby in her soul hates her for it.
“Feel not sorry for yourself, Mercadia, for that will make you weak. Pity is the modern malignancy, and will grow in you tumors far larger than that bundle you’re carrying now. Pity yourself not, Mercadia, for such self-indulgence makes a plump seed for evil, and will turn your little bundle into murderous flora.”
Logically, she should not believe it, but intuitively she understands that this spirit knows what she is incubating.
“It isn’t human, is it?” The thing in her that distrusts the spirit has become silent, but not dead. “I am number one hundred.”
“Yes, Mercadia, and that is why you mustn’t surrender to your corruption, for it is your spirit that feeds your child.”
“You said it’s not human.” She spews harsh with distrust.
“But it is still your child. It is a sentient thing. You are the Mother of the Tree of Life.”
Hearing her proper title, Mercadia’s well of pride fills up again, and thus her child is fed.
“You said murderous flora.” She asks suspicious.
“If you feed your child with wickedness, less than righteous emotion, then it will suck this planet dry after you have given birth to it, and all the nourishment in the world will be dissolved. The only nutrients that sentient things will find will be in each other, and rampant cannibalism will be the end of all societies.”
He speaks not then, and she feels dread grow in her belly as large as her bundle until she can make him finish. “Or?” She demands encouraging him to keep talking.
“Love and righteousness will turn it into a great tree. It will dig its roots deep into the planet, and there shall be no more plagues.”
Suddenly, despite the gravity of his claim, Mercadia feels like she is floating. “No more plagues?” Though she feels skeptical, the hope that this is true outshines all of her doubt, “you mean that Milera will never see another plague ever again?”
“Well,” he sounds uncertain for the first time and Mercadia feels struck down, “plague is a loose term here in Milera. Women will no longer birth abominations, but natural disasters that humans have nothing to do with will certainly still happen.”
Mercadia is much less impressed now; she believed she was stopping all natural disasters too. This damned spirit shouldn’t have said ‘plague.’
But regardless! Her people have been ruined by these plagues for hundreds of years and for so long they have dreaded that they would go on as long as humans were on Milera. Cynics have been sure that the plagues would outlast the human race. And she can end all of that, is destined to end all of that. She’ll be one of the most important figures in human history.
The Mother of the Tree of Life.
She has forgotten her pain, and will not remember it until she tries to stand up again.
“What is your name spirit?”
“I am Melkam.”
Mercadia’s face falls though her spirit stays up. “That was the name of the ninety-ninth plague.”
“Yes.”
“You’re named for a plague?”
“I am that plague, all things born from the loins of a woman are granted souls, human or not. I sense, I feel, I think just as you do, though much more.”
Though she hates him, she admires what he is. This… solid spirit who claims that he feels all of Milera as though the planet were his body; he can destroy those deadly bullets, vanish, and become vapor. Surely he must be an immortal as a spirit of the planet.
“Can I become like you?” She asks, and she sees something on that face but she doesn’t think it’s pity. It couldn’t be, not after he dishonored the very idea of pity a moment ago.
“You are human.” He states impassive, cryptic as her father at his worst.
“That’s not an answer.” she says, pretending authority that she would never use with her father. He seems to ignore her impudence because he changes the subject.
“Not all of my territory lies on your path. The first two you will find to help you are a married couple living in the hills miles from the nearest town. The husband is Malk, the wife is Ning. You will be safe there.”
“Good, I was afraid I’d have to suffer your company this whole time.”
Melkam is not offended, cannot be offended, for he knows her suffering just as much as she herself. “On more thing, Mercadia.” As he speaks his skin gives way into dark, opaque fog which vanishes within inches of him.
“What?”
“If they give their lives for you, then your child will suck the life from this world.” Then he melts into chunks and her cold vomit spills all over the floor again. The only trace left of Melkam is the frustration burning up her brain.
Mercadia tries to sleep, but she can’t even close her eyes.

4

Malk’s Ghurka knife hacks through the stem of a giant avocado, which falls directly into the basket on top of the rest of today’s harvest. One more and the whole basket would spill and splatter against the stones. But Malk is a careful man, and has spilt not a thing since he married Ning at thirteen. He must not drop a thing, lest he become careless someday and drop her. And he never has.
But there was a time some twenty years ago when he couldn’t even hold her in time.
Malk sheaths the knife in his belt, then leaps down to the ground. He lands on his feet then hoists the basket over his shoulder with his one arm, then starts up the hill.
He is a very tall man, blonde hair the shape and length of mown grass. His nose is flat as a cliffside and his eyes are the opaque blue of an exotic gecko. His gaze is like a laser to most, but to his wife it is relaxing as the summer sun.
In the village a few miles away –where they used to do business from time to time trading their roots and vegetables for equally important resources- it was joked behind their backs that a man with just one hand couldn’t appreciate a woman such as Ning, for she is exotic as his eyes and warm as his gaze. They knew of these jokes and laughed at them far more than the villagers did at them for they make love like worshippers of sex.
Malk reaches the top of the hill and sets down the basket, smiling, silent as a gecko. He creeps across the soft, humid soil; it is as fertile as the men into made mulch by Melkam. The dirt is wonderfully sensuous between his toes and beneath his toenails. He sees Ning is wriggling her toes in the soil too, uplifting enormous sweet onions with a hooked pole.
Ning thrusts the pole into the soil and it sinks in like a candle into frosting, then Malk wraps his great arm around her waist and lifts her up against his chest. Ning yelps but in joy and wriggles her limbs feigning desperate struggle. He hefts her breasts with his forearm touching nerves beneath her skin. She moans and smiles with such wide lips, they are so wide across her face they nearly spread from ear to ear. She wraps her hands over his shoulders and hangs so he is wearing her like a necklace, and can run his hands wherever he likes.
Malk pulls up Ning’s sundress and runs his hand up her right leg, touches his fingertips over the pearl-smooth row of teeth where her groin becomes her leg. She shivers outside, quivers inside.

They both came from manipulative families. Being born mutated and three limbed, Malk naturally was not lived through by his parents as fiercely as Ning. Instead he was used by his family with that fierceness, and thus he understood her, and thus they met.
Malk was used as a plowman and was hired out to whoever bid highest. The one arm he was born with was extraordinarily strong and more than made up for the one he was without. He grew tall fast and in that way made his family thrilled they could start renting his services right away. Always the highest bidder –there were many—and the last bidder was Ning’s family.
Ning was lived through her parents in the usual way. She was expected to take the education they made for her, marry the man they sold her to on the date of her first birthday, then produce more heirs than ever her mother could. For her mother could only produce her, the measly little thing –she wouldn’t be voluptuous until womanhood—with an unnaturally broad mouth. She’d have to make up for mother’s deficiency.
They ran away together on his first day in their fields. They caught eyes at once, she on the third floor watching him through the great window, and he staring at the building plowing his first row. She got her permission to run out to the fields to converse with the plowman. She followed him and talked to him as he worked. By the time his work for the day was done they were in love.
By sundown they’d run away together.
He carried her most of the way. They traveled, vagabonding across the country ‘til they found the barren hill. It was owned by a poor family who’d been planting roots with no financial luck in town. The happy couple bought the property for a few coins they found on their quest for this home. They hated this place. But they loved being alone together, they loved that they had a home.
It was like an anthill in ruined concrete. This farmland had very little hope of producing any kind of food and according to the people they bought it from had no hope of selling in the town miles away. But they had survived worse conditions during their travels, and accepted this desolate place as home; it would mean no more traveling.
When the plague Melkam hit, Malk and Ning were among those who had no warning. He was inside the house, sleeping in for the last time of his adult life. Ning was outside harvesting miniscule potatoes from brittle earth. He heard the rumble of that floating death river before it came, but it rushed by and made their barren home a land of mulch. Malk only had time to look out the window when it happened, and Ning was trying to run inside. She was caught by her leg as though by hooks and white water and was thrown far down the jagged dusty hill.
When Malk ran out of the house the plague had already passed and Ning was at the foot of the hill leaking with blood and mulch. He kicked up dust and jagged pebbles as he ran, but as he ran down the hill his feet began sinking into the soil and not kicking it up. It became tougher with moisture until he was near the bottom and he was practically wading in the sweet liquid shit, Ning was sinking slowly at the bottom of the hill.
As soon as the plague was over, seconds from then, the spirit showed himself in his humanoid form for the first time.
Malk was already carrying Ning on his back headed for town for a Lemph, both of them dripping brown and red. The black and purple fog was clearing, curiously straying from them as they moved, not entering their bodies.
“Stop.” He said, speaking to them for the first time.
Malk did stop, and Ning did not scream for him to keep moving for she heard the voice too, and felt its ambiguous trustworthiness. Her life was pouring out of her now, soaking up Malk’s clothes from rib to foot.
Melkam manifested solidifying from the fog. For a moment the three only looked at each other, the only sounds were the fog clearing and Ning’s groin dripping shit and blood.
“I apologize,” the spirit began “I was expecting you to sleep in this morning Ning. You weren’t supposed to be caught up in this desolation.”
The couple replied not, and the breathing of both slackened for different reasons.
“I have a proposition.”
The fog had cleared by then revealing a landscape of mulch as bright brown as the desert. A tendril of fog came from the direction of the town from behind Melkam. Slithering and coiled, it was holding something.
The tendril swerved in front of Melkam then vanished and a long Lemph was dropped in front of the couple. It writhed and slapped itself in the liquid ground like a fish trying to swim on land -Lemph’s normal habitat is tall grass where they slither through the thick blades as though the fields were water. Its maw opened smelling Ning’s wound, yearning to latch onto her.
Malk kneeled in front of the little green lifesaver and sat Ning down in front of the Lemph. His knees and her butt sank into the Mulch deep as though they had lain in pond scum. The Lemph tried slithering towards Ning’s ever growing puddle of blood for sustenance, survival. Ning snatched the Lemph so hard Malk thought she was trying to strangle it, and she forced its maw into her wound as forcefully as ever she had pulled his mouth to her loins. Its teeth blossomed around her gaping wound and sealed it with a permanent kiss.
The Lemph straightened out first, then it bulged here and there and flexed of its own accord until its accord became Ning’s. Before long the Lemph had formed itself into a perfect-shape replica of her leg. She felt relief of her wound as soon as the nerves finished linking so she could wiggle her new toes, but she didn’t feel relief for her blood loss. She leans, her back to Malk, her eyes slits but her ears wide open.
“I will give you paradise, and in exchange you will protect the mother of the one hundredth plague.”
Sinking in shit so ripe it can be smelled for miles around, Ning’s blood drying up on their bodies, and their miniscule harvest for the season ruined in an instant, Malk and Ning hesitated.
“One hundred will be the greatest one of them all, but if we help this one then the nightmare of the millennium can be over before the one thousandth year is reached. These plagues have been desolation because that has been what the mother’s spirits feed them. We all know the slim girls in this world are mistreated from the start. That is why the world is repaid with such living hatred.”
Malk and Ning have sunk waist deep now, still not wanting for him to pull them out and save their lives from this land of shit.
“The next one will be the worst unless if we help her. If we do then she’ll save us all.” Melkam reaches his arm out to Malk whose arm is tight around Ning’s waist. He seems to be closer to them all of a sudden. Malk looks the spirit in the eyes and sinks.
Then Ning grabs Melkam’s arm with both hands.
With strength as powerful as the smell in this wasteland, Melkam lifts them both out by Ning’s grip and holds them just above the puddle they nearly drowned in. Then he throws up his other hand: the odor blows itself away.
And in its place they are given paradise.
The land literally explodes with greenness and exotic colors. The grass blades are as thick as fingernails, and all the trees shake so vigorously in their birth that many leaves float to the ground fresh with life. Fruit hangs from every tree, berries from every bush enormous and riper than at the height of the season. At the top of the hill, the soil is lumpy with root vegetables equally ripe that will burst if they step on them.
Melkam sets them down and the grass is so strong that it supports their weight without breaking or laying flat to the ground. Malk sets Ning down but he still holds her and she leans against him for support. She needs to rest she needs to rest.
“Nobody can get in or out, you will be safe here and so will she when she arrives. I will not ever permit anyone else in here unless if you choose to leave after you have repaid me.”
In that moment, they didn’t know if they would want to stay –they were skeptical that he’d let them stay in fact- but when she would arrive they would never be able to leave. When they ran away together it was on account of Malk’s bravery and helping Melkam was Ning’s decision. To leave this place would dishonor their marriage as much as going back to the people who’d used them when they were young.
“Her name will be Mercadia, The Mother of the Tree of Life.”
Melkam vanished then, but they would always feel his presence in this place.

“Malk,” Melkam says, speaking from the wildlife he created for them “she is coming.” They do not feel interrupted hearing his voice. They feel that Melkam is a part of them, because he is this place, and they feel that they are a part of this place. But they are disappointed that they must stop.
Decadence gets away with you.
Malk sets Ning down who this day is vibrant. She shows her excitement, she feels like they’re being visited by the niece they could never meet.
“Where?” She asks to the sky, knowing he can hear her wherever she speaks.
“She is coming from the very path you followed to get here. She is from your old neighboring kingdom, Ning.”
Suddenly Ning feels she really is meeting the niece she could never meet.

5

Mercadia had hoped that rest would heal her but with each passing second she became stiffer like drying cement. She did not feel replenished in the least; she would have been much better off if she had just kept moving and not listened to Melkam at all. She felt as if her muscle tendons were snapping inside her like so many brittle rubber brands as she stood up. She was sure that she would come apart on the inside and collapse again like a snapped fish, and her baby would have to simply crawl out of her like a rotten heart sliding out of a split rib cage.
But she did stand up, and she did make it out of the cave without falling over. Beyond the cave mouth the way was a beaten path of the dissolved stone. It was an upward diagonal slope that looked endless at first through her squinting eyes. She might have seen the end of the path, but every inch of her skin is swollen and she cannot open her eyes all the way. Her body temperature has reduced so the constant cold here is no longer welcome; she is riddled with goose bumps from it though it is doing nothing to shrink her swelling.
The swelling inside her stomach has gotten bigger.
It takes forever for her to see the spot of light at the end of the path and at first she thinks it’s just Melkam using magic to torment her. She secretly believes the truth, that he would never do that to her, but she needs a face to blame. She needs his face to blame. As soon as she knows it is true light, her heart lifts up inside her. If she could start running then she would.
Mercadia takes the last step too eager for escape and her toes curl around the lip of the exit and she falls forward through enormous leaves that slap her like rows of paddles during the fall. In the instant before she lands she imagines hitting the ground belly first and the baby splitting her vagina open to the belly button on impact.
Then she lands into somebody’s arm.
She can tell that he has only one arm at once, not because he catches her one armed but she feels the impact reverberate through his large body, and that reverberation stops at the left shoulder. She trusts this man the instant he catches her.
Malk expertly maneuvers Mercadia’s body so that she lie’s in the crook of his arm and he cradles her without palming her butt. She looks like she is sleeping, but the couple can tell that this little soul’s torment is too stimulated to let her sleep. She pretends to sleep though, rests her head on Malk’s chest like the stiffest of pillows.
Before she knows it she is lying in a tub of warm water and her muscles are comforted. At first even being relaxed is painful, but soon the heat and buoyancy unravel the tightness in her limbs. She feels like seaweed flapping freely in the ocean. She has not yet opened her eyes but she thinks the man is gone, because she feels feminine hands picking apart the ragged seams of her dress and peeling it off. Bathing naked feels very liberating, she’d like to just have the baby right now. She trusts this woman completely already; she imagines that she has been undressed by Murcilla.
These delightful hands pick all of the crud and filth from her every crevice and flat dimensions without being the tiniest bit invasive. These hands know her woman’s torment, and not a single touch scratches her nerves.
Mercadia has no idea how long she stays in the bathtub but it feels like an eternity and she wishes it could be. Even if she had not suffered as she has in these hours past, then plopped in this tub she would still never wish to leave. She will not open her eyes until she has been dried off.
She is not lifted out of this water until her soreness is healed and all the swelling but that inside her goes down. She is lifted out by those hands and she is much stronger than Mercadia would expect from any woman –when she learns that Ning is a farmer she will understand. She is dried off swiftly, then dressed in a sheet and laid in bed.
Mercadia basks in comfort so gentle it seems not to touch her. She stays in bed for untold hours –perhaps days— but she never sleeps. Not for a second.

6

Mercadia opens her eyes to a cool wind just like a chilled blanket brushed over her skin.
She was taken out of the bed eventually –apparently her hosts wanted her up and moving around—and she was lain on grass so strong that her weight was not enough to flatten it. The wind is touching her everywhere, nature’s decadent pleasure has her even less inclined to stand up.
But she does give in; she opens her eyes to gentle light so she opens them all the way. She feels strength in her so new she’s sure it isn’t her own strength. Oh, but it must be hers, as surely as these helpful hosts are hers. Mercadia sees one of them now, and after the initial shock of seeing lips that literally spread to both ends of the jaw, she is stunned by the woman’s beauty.
This smiling beauty reminds her very much of Murcilla, whose lips are very small.
“You’re awake.” Her voice is beautiful too, if she didn’t know any better she would swear this woman loves her.
“I was always awake dear,” Mercadia replies regretfully. “I can’t sleep anymore. I feel like I never will again.”
“Oh dear,” the woman strokes Mercadia’s hair and pouts. “We’ll help you sleep, I promise.”
“No, that’s okay.” Mercadia musters the will to stand up –for she certainly has the strength now, she just feels very lazy—“I don’t think I’d want to miss a second in this place.” Mercadia looks at this land for the first time, and for the first time feels her first great temptation.
The strong lush grass supporting her weight –and the weight of the baby mind you—is blanketed throughout the valley. Along the perimeter of the whole place, an imperfect circle, are trees that stretch as far as the eye can see. Great black fruits shaped like gourds hang from the trees almost as plentifully as the leaves do. There are other trees and bushes scattered with no pattern, and each of them sprouts with different fruits of bright varying colors.
Though she has never seen this place before she recognizes the kind of fruition here: this is the work of the plague Melkam, her people would consider this place unholy ground. Fruit and foliage brought forth by the death of innocents can be nothing but unholy. This place was probably bustling with people once. Innocents swept away by that horrible black and purple mist.
“Melkam did this didn’t he?” Ning misses the contempt in Mercadia’s voice, for hearing Melkam’s name swells her admiration for her home.
“Oh, yes. Malk and I have always been so happy here. We don’t mind that the nearest village is beyond our reach.” She looks at Mercadia then, apologetic. “I’m sorry dear, my name is Ning.” She holds out her hand and Mercadia grasps it, these are those loving hands.
“I am Mercadia.”
“Oh, we know. Melkam told us.”
Mercadia feels her whole body tighten, the baby is uncomfortable inside her suddenly, and she says “that was rude. I should be the one to introduce myself.”
“Mercadia darling, you weren’t around to introduce yourself then.”
“… Explain.” she says rudely, but Ning understands that rudeness isn’t for her.
And Ning tells her everything. She even begins with meeting Malk when they were very young even though Mercadia didn’t ask. And despite her impatience to hear about the spirit she hates, she is touched by their story. A cavity in her somewhere twitches painfully for Andun. Even though he abandoned her, and deserves more hate than Melkam does for it, she misses him.
“My husband ran away when the bullets came.” Mercadia says “I don’t even know if he’s safe. Not sure I care.”
Ning is silent and when Mercadia looks up she is staring at her. The pity in that gorgeous face makes the baby feel twice as heavy. Ning says, “I can’t imagine that. If Malk were in danger I’d have to find him.”
“I wanted to find Andun.” Mercadia says harshly, and that accusation is a dart to Ning’s breast “But Melkam made me run. He said that Andun was The Coward, as though that were his title. It made me sick, it still does.”
Ning is quiet again but not for long, she thinks carefully before she talks. Mercadia is easily offended it seems. “Melkam visits us sometimes. He once told us that The Mothers first trial would be to leave The Coward behind.”
Mercadia’s eyes are wide suddenly, as though she’d been struck in the back of the head and her eyes almost popped out. “He never said anything to me about trials.”
“Oh yes.” Ning says compassionate, but that compassion is lost on Mercadia. This woman has no idea what she’s going through.
No fucking idea!
She goes on seeming to quote Melkam, for words this cryptic could only come from him. “The Mother has three trials to overcome before she can give birth. The first is to abandon The Coward. The Coward ties her to childhood, and hides her from maturity. Only a woman can give birth to a child, only girls are given birth too.”
In her heart, she knows that Andun did just that for her. She has always known he did, that was why she loved him after all. It made him seem like a real man, to able to protect her from something unavoidable like adulthood. Growing up has always been the last thing she wanted to do. She always hoped she wouldn’t have to go through with it. She feels adulthood creeping up on her now, and she is thusly losing her love for Andun. It makes her feel dirty.
“Did he tell you about the other trials?”
Normally she would be so outraged that she would demand that Melkam show himself and tell her everything right now. But she is growing fond of this Ning, and would much rather hear it from her.
“Not the last one.” Something in Mercadia falls, hearing that; as it would not surprise and adult, it doesn’t surprise her. “He told us about The Coward. Then he told us about your trial here.”
“Here?” A trial here? But this is paradise. This place is love, nourishment, and cleansing. She feels like she could live forever in this place. Ning is fantastic company and surely her Malk is too. And the soil is fertile here, soft and alive, just perfect for her baby to take root in and save the world…
My baby isn’t human. She thinks. But I love it anyway.
She’s shocked at herself.
Melkam isn’t.
“What is it?” she asks, solemn.
“To leave.”
For a second, just a second before she asked Ning what it was, she was sure she could do it. She was so sure.
“But…”
“I’m sorry, Mercadia.”
She wishes she had called her Mercy, she needs to be called that. “That’s what I’m supposed to tell you. I pity you, darling, he said we could leave when you did but I don’t think we will.”
“We love this place.” Mercadia turns around and sees the one-armed man. In the first instant she is shocked by his face too, but then she finds him handsome. “It is symbolic of our love. We will never leave, but...” he holds up his one index finger, “if it were for your sake Mercadia, we would leave. But Melkam told us that this is the only thing we can do for you. We were to heal you, then to tempt you to stay, to test your resilience.”
Mercadia’s forehead becomes ridged like the barren earth this place once was. “He would do that. He doesn’t want me to have any help.” Mercadia tries to hide her face in her knees but her pregnancy keeps her knees too far apart. Malk is kneeling and can still see her face.
The lovers look each other in the eyes and show each other the pity they have for this little girl. Crossing over to adulthood should not be this hard for anybody. It’s so hard for this girl; Malk thinks she’ll just sit around and wait for somebody else to do her task for her. Sadly, that only means that she’ll suffer more.
But that is the point of this trial, isn’t it?
“Mercadia,” Malk says, and then holds out his hand to her. “You can stay here as long as you want.”
Her forehead becomes smooth again and she takes Malk’s powerful arm. It’s just like taking hold of a tree’s thick branch. Malk lifts her to her feet with ease she knows she could never muster. She’s sure in fact that she won’t be able to stand up on her own with the baby swollen this big.
“Thank you,” she says but her gratitude is silent, Malk and Ning are left to pretend her graciousness. “I think I’ll be staying for a while.”

7

And Mercadia does stay; she stays for weeks and weeks. She becomes slothful from the comfort of paradise, and the burden in her belly only gets heavier. The child becomes so large in fact that Mercadia must constantly hold it with both hands; otherwise it feels as though it will simply fall out of her stomach. The pain of letting go is frightening and enormous.
Though she does not want to leave this place –ever- Mercadia decides that she should know how to leave. Even the air here is euphoric, and deludes her that she can be happy in this place forever. She has to try, to think hard to form the words ‘murderous flora.’ The wonders of paradise are making her forget the consequence of her slothfulness, and she knows it.
So one day after a rich meal with the lovers she has grown to love, she went outside to walk alone. Malk offered to help her but she refused him and staggered down the hill, almost falling many times. The couple looked on but didn’t follow her, and eventually went back inside the house.
Now Mercadia is so far away that she can’t hear them, and she’s very glad of that.
Her first guess was to look around the perimeter of paradise. She takes most of the day to examine it entirely but she finds no way out. Not only do these trees stretch for miles and miles, but they have grown so close to each other that she could never squeeze through this pregnant. If she were her old skinny self maybe, but certainly not now.
“Am I supposed to fly away or something?” she yells eventually “The sky’s the limit here; I don’t see any other way out!” She means to talk to herself, but she knows that now, when she talks alone, she is talking to Melkam.
She has accepted that she must leave but she has no idea how.
“So you have earned some help.”
Mercadia lowers her gaze to the ground and Melkam is manifest again. It’s been so long since she has seen him she has forgotten what exactly had made her so angry at the spirit.
Bitterness still lingers in her, however.
“I’m thrilled to hear you of all people say that.”
“The way out is through the bushes.”
“The bushes?” She shouts but not in anger, just surprise.
The bushes?
“You can’t fly as, you said. And you can’t pass through the forest. That just leaves you the one option.”
Mercadia looks around, there are a number of bushes scattered nearby, “Which one?”
“Right there.” He gestures with his head to a bush not far away. Mercadia stares at Melkam then, suspicious of how blasé he sounds.
Mercadia looks to the nearest bush, an enormous burst of vegetation that reaches higher than Malk and hanging on one end is the only fruit. An earthling would think it like a weeping willow.
Mercadia is surprised at herself for a second. When she and Andun were little they hid in the bushes together all the time. She might have checked the bushes first for nostalgic nourishment.
“Try the fruit,” Melkam says. She wants to defy him, but refusing his fruit seems silly for some reason.
She goes to the bush, picks the fruit and eats it without peeling. The skin is tender and thin like the skin of the berries she used to eat back home, but the pulp is layered with thin membranes and pure juice. She swallows it in a couple of bites getting some of the juice on her dress. She wipes it away and licks her fingers.
Mercadia parts the green curtains and walks into the bush and all at once she hates Melkam again. She screams and jumps back, staring at the center of the bush.
“You sick bastard!”
The core of the bush is a cage of hooked thorns. Each wooden claw must be the size of Malk’s hand, the tips drip with green poison just like the fangs of a drooling snake. Each one drips every few seconds, the sound is sickening and…
…and none of it is absorbed by the soil.
Mercadia listens carefully, there is a hollow whistle, and in the distance something smacking against soil.
“I’m supposed to crawl down that.”
“Precisely.” His voice is next to her though his body is still outside the bush.
“Couldn’t you have grown a reasonable tunnel, like a rabbit hole or something?”
“It’s been done.” She feels him smile.
“That’s no excuse.”
“I choose not what grows in my wake, Mercadia. If I could then there simply would have been a bridge to bring you from the ball directly to the Birthing Grounds.”
Mercadia sits down, wishing she could cross her legs. She was never taught any geography, nor history, nor mythology of Milera that suggested a place called the Birthing Grounds. “Where am I going?” She asks.
“To the most dangerous place for you in the world.”
Mercadia shakes. He hates the way he said that more than what he said. It wasn’t blasé, it wasn’t haughty; he makes it sound as if she can’t but move on. He makes it sound like destiny.
“What are the Birthing Grounds?”
“It is a land empty of sentient existence. No human has ever dared go there for fear of sinking in the soil, for that is just what happens when they have seen animals set foot there. It is a mountain of rich soil, richer than the soil here. It is the only place where your child can properly be birthed.”
Mercadia can imagine that place. The way Melkam talks about makes it seem as real as the poison dripping before her. She imagines a green sky with yellow clouds. She imagines that not even birds dare to fly overhead lest they crash and become part of the malleable mound.
If she is imagining this place properly then it really is the right place to have her baby. Maybe the only place.
“How do I get through these thorns?”
Outside, Melkam feels pride for Mercadia for the first time. “The fruit you ate is the antidote to that poison. You’ll have to crawl through those thorns. I imagine you’ll have to throw up again later.”
No, she thinks. “I’ll get Malk to help me. He’ll hack them away.” And I’ll get to say good-bye.
“Those thorns will move for no hands but yours, and no knife shall cut them without the wielder stung a dozen times.”
“…no help at all.” Mercadia says, her whine crawling back into her tone. “I have to do all of this alone.”
Melkam is silent.
“Fine!” she says with steel in her voice for the first time. “I wish I could have the baby here with Malk and Ning but I guess your soil isn’t fertile enough for my baby, is it Melkam?” She gets on her belly –which does little for her point of view but her reach is better—and grasps the base of one stem. It’s thick and feels jointed like a wrist, and like a wrist it has limited opposability. She bends it one way and the thorns snap against each other flicking droplets of poison every which way. One drop hits her in the eye but instead of letting go and skittering away, she grips it with strength she didn’t know she had and nearly busts the wooden wrist.
It doesn’t feel acidic, but she feels something seeping from the poison and into her body. This must be the vomit catalyst Melkam mentioned. She really needs to move now; there will be time for puking later.
Mercadia hooks that wooden claw into other thorns not in her way and lets it go. She rejoices when it holds, smiles even. She does the same with every thorn in her way and every one covering up the tunnels mouth. Poison soaks her dress and runs off her skin like rivulets of sweat, and her pores drink it like unassuming infants with drain cleaner.
When every thorn is bent away Mercadia crawls to the lip of the tunnel, she dives in without looking inside.
And Melkam feels pride for her once more.

8

Jared slices the orange in half in the palm of his hand. The knife cuts into his skin and smoldering citrus burns into his cut. His hand doesn’t flinch and he doesn’t drop the orange, doesn’t even throw down the knife. Jared is a man made of stone: if his spirit were made of flesh he would be a golem of concrete with gossamer joints.
He is sitting on the porch of his cabin where he has lived with his mute wife for a month. It was an arranged marriage –so many arranged marriages in Milera- but not unwanted, which in Milera is common. Sexual independence is uncommon in Milera these days, since the horrors of the Outcast.
The bride is inside.
Jared sucks on the first wedge of his orange, then chews the pulp without swallowing as though it were tobacco. It’s from one of the trees she planted here when she was a child, and she planted many. He plans on eating each and every orange in her grove, then burning the trees in memory of her, for that is what his father would have told him to do. Sacrifice and blazing images, he was taught, is the proper way to honor the dead.
Jared poisoned Mella to death by accident. He knew very little about her so he did not realize that she was deathly allergic to the food he cooked for her this morning. It was no wonder she had insisted on doing the cooking up until today. Why she agreed to eat his food today is beyond him. He dreads that she expected culinary death, and preferred that over a lifetime with him.
But even if that is true he loves her. He will love her until he dies and his misery, like strangling thread, is undone from him.
Jared sucks the last drops of juice from the orange wedge and spits the pulp into the grass. The citrus in his palm feels like a blade severing his hand but he will do nothing for his pain. The heat of the acid feels comfortably warm compared to the oozing grief pulsing in his heart.
Jared’s love will preserve his wife’s body until he dies and he loves her no more. She will look like she is sleeping with still lungs as long as he is still sucking in breath. He will not move her body from their bed, no matter who comes and finds him grieving.
This is how Jared is found by his true love.
In other realms, ‘Jared’ would mean ‘The Lover.’

9

Mercadia falls into the underground lake of mud and poison and disappears beneath the surface as soon as she touches it. The sludge is so thick that there are no ripples, and no visible disturbance of something having fallen in.
Mercadia rises out of the muck covered in an inch of deadly mud. She looks like a glistening rock formation. She slaps her face with both hands and the mud absorbs all the impact, and she flings the mud away from her face with dignity she thought she’d lost. When she opens her eyes she is surprised.
It’s gorgeous down here.
After seeing Melkam’s wake firsthand at the part in the mountain Mercadia was expecting another terrifying land of shit. But this cavern is extraordinary. She feels like she’s in a naturally formed cathedral, where the pews are a pool and the music is the dripping from thorns above.
The shit lands were light brown much like infantile secretion –smelled that way too—but this place is a deep dark brown, it would be easily mistaken as a cavern of copper colored jewels. And the only smell is soil, fragrant, earthy, and invigorating. She takes a deep wonderful breath and feels like she’s just drunk a tall glass of ice water.
She’s not sure how there is so much natural light in here. The only opening she sees in the immediate area is the hole she just fell through. Perhaps the walls and ceiling here are made of ore and reflect endlessly what little light trickles in.
Mercadia looks around her but sees no exit. Behind her is a great wall with no cracks or crevices and the walls to her side look the same. In fact, this whole place is oval shaped… she is inside an egg of earth.
Straight ahead the cavern only becomes narrower. If the way out is that way then she‘ll have to submerge to get out…
“This better not be a trap.”
This is not the first time Mercadia has thought Melkam the villain, but this time the feeling is powerful. A pregnant girl trapped beneath the earth, nobody looking for her but mutants with pistols, no way out. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time in Milera’s history that an innocent was tricked and murdered by a wandering spirit.
But maybe she’s just being suspicious. Still… her distrust is justified.
Melkam is proud.
It takes Mercadia the better part of an hour to cross the lake of mud and poison, but her bundle is buoyant and the mud carries it for her. This is perhaps the easiest part of her quest thus far –not including being doted on by Malk and Ning, that doesn’t count—this poison proves to be a blessing before it hurts her.
Mercadia feels something lurching in her stomach that is not the bundle, and her pores spit out real sweat this time. The nausea hits her in an instant; she dawdled too long, she can’t know how much of that poison has seeped into her while she’s been wading in it. It’s been seeping into her pores, her ass, her vagina. No wonder it’s her stomach that’s wrenching.
Mercadia swoons at the end of the earth egg and falls forward. She hits her head against the wall but it doesn’t cut her, it gives, like soggy, shattered Styrofoam. Conscious but swooning, Mercadia sinks into the mud and feels for an opening against the wall, she scrapes her fingertips over the brittle wall and pounds her fists against the floor. She can’t stand up, she can’t stand up…

10

“No Mercy.” He whispers to himself, he’s scarcely said anything else for days.
The wizard gardener kneels down exactly twelve feet from where he planted the last patch of seeds. He plants other things: hairs, teeth, scabs if he can get them. The supple parts are always the best for planting spells.
And this one is decadent. There is scarce a person still living in Milera who could face it. He’s sure The Mother won’t.
He parts the earth with his hands and drops the bits into the hole and covers it up again, pats the soil without packing it tight.
From a distance he appears to be a pole wrapped in a flapping black sheet. He’s a skinny one this wizard, it runs in the family.
In the distance is the Birthing Grounds sticking out of the earth like a filthy abscess on a green cheek. The sky above is poison green; the clouds are a swirling vomit yellow. It was easy for him to get here. The Spirit gave him an easy route to follow. According to Melkam The Mother wouldn’t reach paradise by the time he got here. To him it took forever but he is eager, nothing slows down time like anticipation. And he is saving the world from number one hundred; could he rightfully be blamed for being impatient?
Certainly not.
“You haven’t told your men about me?” Melkam had asked him.
“I swear not.” It was the truth.
“Only you are to know about this, if they understood my power they’d send every one. We want her to overestimate me, and to underestimate your hunters.”
“I understand.” He had said, then, impatient, demanded his directions. The spirit explained then vanished. He’s not communicated with the spirit since, doesn’t expect too.
He wasted no time as soon as he arrived. He’s been planting around the perimeter of the Birthing Grounds immediately. She’ll never get past the wall that grows here, surely not, surely no one could.
“No Mercy.” He whispers, and when he stands he finds himself where he started. The wall is planted, his work is done. He can only watch and wait now, watch and wait.
“No Mercy.”

11

Jared almost chokes on an orange rind when he hears the swamp bubble pop.
The environment here is largely forest with paths wide as roads leading to the nearby villages. The most curious thing to see in these woods besides his cabin is a tiny swamp, only twelve feet in diameter standing out like a belly button on the forest’s belly.
Jared hears a huge bubble of poison muck pop from his front porch. He doesn’t fathom how somebody would end up in the quagmire, because that sound tells him there is someone in there.
He spits the orange into the lawn and throws his knife into the porch burying it an inch into one plank. He throws his enormous body into the lawn and runs into the forest to that little spot he only showed the bride once.
Jared drops to his knees and plunges his arm into the muddy poison without a second thought. He knows what it is, he was sick for a week the last time he touched it. But that time was stupidity, and somebody needs his help now. He grabs a shoulder and immediately knows the weight of the poor person. The skin feels soft, it must be a woman.
Or a girl.
Jared plunges his other arm in, grabs the other shoulder and lifts her up. When he pulls her out his hands are sunk to the wrist in her cocoon of mud and poison. The stuff becomes a sticky film over his arms and her body as soon as it touches the air. It has the texture of dry pudding skin. He lays her down on what he thinks is her side then drops on his ass and heaves as though he nearly drowned. She is so much heavier than any person of that size, that muck must be heavier than he though.
Jared grabs the end that must be the head and tears at the elastic muck. It comes away like room temperature caramel and releases a stink nothing like darkened sugar. But the smell is just murky air to him, he’ll flinch at nothing. Concrete and gossamer, concrete and gossamer.
He flings the stuff back into the pool from whence it came and sees his true love for the first time. He doesn’t flinch, not even at this, but he does stop. He does forget that sickness is seeping into his pores.
But he remembers fast, rips that wicked shit from her and he is just like Fool hundreds of years ago ripping apart Julia’s burial wrappings, he rips much of it away from her and lifts her out of the muck bed that molded itself into the grass. He runs to the grass to wash the unconscious girl in his washtub.
Part of him is upset when he sees she is already pregnant.
The air in the cabin feels like death but nourishes his lungs nonetheless. Everything will be preserved by Jared’s love here, just like his wife, dead though it all may seem.
Jared doesn’t look at the woman on the bed as he carries the pregnant girl into their bathroom.
It still smells like bile in here from when his bride threw up in her death throes. The corner where there is neither the bathtub nor the doorway is splattered yellow and red. The wood is dissolved beneath this mess but Jared doesn’t know that, hasn’t dared to clean up yet. Everything happened just this morning.
The tub is already prepared. He had prepared to slip his wife into this water after feeding her. Instead he’d had to wipe off her face and place her in bed. She lays there with crossed arms now, wearing the sundress he gave her on their wedding day.
Jared puts the pregnant girl into lukewarm water, she stays unconscious –she seems dead or unconscious, this is no state of wakefulness—there’s no temperature to shock her awake.
The girls hand comes out of the water and grasps his arm tight enough to put her fingerprints in him. He thinks it’s this girl’s death throes and rigor mortis.
No, he thinks, not two in one day. Please, two in one lifetime is too much.
Then he sees it, she’s as alive as he is, but that muck has gotten inside her. The girl tries to open her mouth and speak but there is no sound, not even a breath for her throat is clogged. She tries to open her eyes but they are glued shut with that muddy poison. Brown drops are sliding out of her ears and nostrils now, he sees.
With his other hand Jared pinches the muck in her eyes then pulls. It gives as much resistance as flesh does. It comes off with a snap and she tries to scream but her throat is still stopped, she just moves like she is screaming. He flicks the wicked shit onto his floor. Her eye darts left and right quick as a skittering animal. She’s awake alright.
His strength is such that he moves his clutched arm despite her stiff grip on him. He takes her jaw in one hand and holds it open for his other. His fingertips dip into muck not two inches passed her lips and he pulls it all out in one big gob, throws it on the floor.
The girl gasps a gust into her throat, sustenance for the lungs. Jared suddenly feels that he shouldn’t touch her.
She heaves breath and for a second he fears she’s gone into labor, but she relaxes gradually. He still feels that he shouldn’t touch her, just as one shouldn’t touch a wolverine with one’s bare hands.
Eventually she pinches the muck in her other eye and pulls it out, she doesn’t flinch this time and flings it against he wall. It sticks there like a tacky booger. Then she pulls the stuff out of her ears and nostrils in the same fashion. She drops her fingers back in the water and breathes, relishes the feeling of closing her eyes for real.
She turns and looks to Jared, who can scarcely focus on every feature on her face, he finds her so beautiful.
“Look away.” She says, with authority, not shame.

12

Mercadia is glad when the giant obeys her. He is solemn to feminine wishes, she can tell.
She waits for a moment and watches him, making sure that he will not sneak a peek at her. She waits a whole minute and he doesn’t even move. He’s like some kind of stone, she can’t decide what. He only breathes; he doesn’t even ask if he can look yet. He is patient, as patient as she wished Andun could have been.
Satisfied by the giant, Mercadia lifts her dress in the water and for all its newness it feels like ragged skin against her. She pushes a few fingers into her anus and pulls what feels like a mile of muck out. This she lifts out of the tub and drops it on the side where the man isn’t sitting. She can’t help but look at it, how like a hellish eel it looks…
Reliving her vagina of the stuff is easier but more painful. She feels like she peeled some of her flesh away on the inside. She feels like she is full of piss but it is actually her urinary tract riddled with the poison.
Melkam said I would vomit. That’ll be relief enough.
Mercadia relaxes and covers herself with her dress again, can finally enjoy being in water. “Thank you for humoring my modesty. You can look now.” He does, and looks so endearingly dumb.
She expects him to speak but his dumbness maintains. She thinks for a second that he is retarded somehow… but then the feeling that Melkam would have something to say about that creeps up. She hates him, it is true, but internally she admits to everything he has said to her. Melkam is indeed the wise plague.
This man is not retarded.
But he is something.
Mercadia smiles for him and knows not how seductive she looks. “Speak to me giant, I would know my rescuers name.”
Lot of good Melkam is after all, I almost died down there. I wonder… I wonder if he’s even on my side.
He hesitates, but finds his words. “My name is Jared, you must be…”
“The Mother. Yes, I am Mercadia.” Mercadia doesn’t know it, but Jared’s heart and penis now throb in synchronicity.
“Yes. I was visited upon by Melkam some time ago. But I married anyway to the woman I was anointed to. I didn’t believe him… didn’t trust him.”
I like you, “I understand. I’ve found him difficult to trust too but I’ve no choice. I’m in great danger you see.”
“The hunters.”
“Yes, and he has mostly been keeping me alive. Except right now, I was alone down there. I’m sure he could have come with me; it is part of his territory, but he did nothing. Not even when I was drowning.”
Jared reaches into the tub and strokes her hair which is still slick with muck. For a moment he cradles her head, and she feels that she may sleep yet. But his hand comes away, dribbled black and he stares at it for a moment. Mercadia is compelled to look at him, he has such focus. She’s never seen such intensity but in the likes of Melkam.
“I will get you some towels and fresh clothes.” He says and he stands up to leave. She is amazed by his size, and with no shortage of shame, wonders for a moment what his clothing hides…
“Thank you Jared.” But he does not seem to hear. His focus is away from her suddenly. She feels sad now, to be disconnected thusly.
As soon as he shuts the bathroom door Mercadia lurches, and all the sickness in her body rushes into her stomach.

13

Jared decides he will leave Mercadia in the tub for now. He’ll check on her soon to see if she’s fallen asleep, if so he’ll rescue her from drowning again and set her in the other bed. His own bed is occupied.
He collects the bride’s shortest dress –Mercadia is at least two feet shorter than her, she’d trip inside any of the other dresses—and three towels from the closet, pauses, and sets them on a chair. His hand shakes, his heart quivers, but the tears are too deep to well up out of his eyes.
Already he is tending to another woman, it isn’t right.
“But Mercadia needs help.” He whispers apologetically, sorry to himself and to his wife.
In life, his wife declared that if another woman passed through their forest he should hole himself up somewhere and let her care for the visitor. The reason she agreed with Melkam, that they should live out here, was so she’d be the only woman he’d ever lay eyes on. In fact, she told him to stop thinking about other women at all. He swore at the altar he would, and he lied. It had never occurred to Jared that his thoughts could be stopped. He imagined the human mind as an ocean; sometimes still, sometimes storming, but not stoppable, no. Never stopping.
Jared sits and the bride’s bedside and drops his face between her breasts. They still feel healthy and robust but she is quite dead. They rise not, fall not, they just shake a little when he lays his head down. Her face is not so beautiful –except to Jared—for its sternness. Her brows are close together, her nostrils wide and her lips narrow.
Even in death it looks like she is judging him.
Oh, but he loves her. He can’t but love her, and his love can’t but preserve her corpse. He won’t see her decay; he’ll sooner see his own body dissolve before a single flake of her skin falls away. This work of art must last forever.
Permanence is what marriage is all about after all, isn’t it?
“Nothing is permanent.”
The voice Mercadia dreads is too quiet for her to hear, but to Jared his words fill the whole cabin. He looks up and sees the spirit Melkam looking down on him with eyes inhuman, and without judgment.
“But she deserves it.” He whispers, pleads as though the spirit had any authority over longevity.
“Your wife needs you not, Jared. The Mother needs you now. Humanity depends on her, and she depends on you.”
“I know, and I shall help her with all my body and soul… but.”
“But?” Melkam doesn’t understand. Jared understands what he must do, and he will do it. What third factor could there be? Melkam is not human after all, and does not understand all of our subtle selfish disappointments.
“I shouldn’t have to, Melkam!” He ejaculates and almost pounds his fists but remembers his wife. “It’s not fair, Melkam, life isn’t fair!”
“Life is fair, Jared. Life and death are a process that happens continuously, and evenly. People aren’t fair. And for reasons that even I can’t decipher, that unfairness is part of life’s cycle.”
Jared won’t hear it, won’t respond.
“Just remember that you must turn around after you have escorted Mercadia to the Birthing Grounds.”
Jared doesn’t say anything for a long time, he hates himself for what he is about to say. Mella would not approve, but it is the truth, and no matter how much he loves her, the truth is always more important than the stubbornness of the dead.
“I want to be with her at the end.” He whispers, so ashamed he is saying this that he doesn’t even want to hear himself say it. But, of course, he does hear his own mouth, and it clutches his own mind with thorns.
“If you do then she will fail.” He says passively and begins to dissolve out of the cabin.
“How?” he asks refusing to believe this spirit who has not lied once.
“Because her third task is to give up true love.” And he is gone. Jared clutches his wife as the black fog drifts out of the cabin sparing the house his ruinous touch.
Mercadia screams the second he is gone.

14

Jared grabs the towels and leaves the dress in the bedroom. The bride, in her deathly stillness, seems to disapprove.
When Jared throws the door open Mercadia is on the floor hurling venom into the already acrid corner –how she got out of the tub on her own he’ll never know. For just a second he sees the bride there instead, and he moves all the faster. He grabs her hair and holds it all above her head gently with expert dexterity. He had a few hours of practice this morning after all.
The venom Mercadia is spewing parts the dry vomit all over the wall. There’s so much it looks like bits of scrambled eggs floating on green water past their knees and into the living room. This feels limitless; Mercadia is like a hose linked to a lake. The bride was only in here for about fifteen minutes, but Mercadia soaks the washroom for the better part of an hour. When she finally stops there’s an inch of rejected fluid on the floor. Jared hates to think how much of it has soaked into the living room by now. His pants are soaked; he can feel the stuff seeping into him now. But he is made of tougher stuff than this girl, he may get a little sick but he won’t be vomiting.
She whispers then, she lurches and he fears that she will puke more but she doesn’t. “Put me back in the tub will you?”
Jared lifts her up and sets her back in the water as she wishes. He waits to see if the weight of her belly will drag her face below the water. She holds herself up well enough. “I’m going to get your dry clothes.” He says and she nods.
Back in the bedroom the floor is just as wet as the bathroom. This place is such a mess. He isn’t sure that he wants to clean it up. He’s not even sure if he wants to come back after he’s escorted Mercadia to the Birthing Grounds.
But he will. He knows he will. Somebody needs to tend to the dead bride. Because that is what she deserves. It’s what he deserves.
The karma in Milera is harsh.
Jared steps back into the bathroom, the poison and stomach acid splashing beneath his feet and contaminating his shoes. He’ll have to change his own clothes before they leave. Mercadia must be tended to first though. The Mother needs him, to put it Melkam’s way.
He sets the dress on the window sill and kneels next to the tub again. Mercadia hasn’t even wiped her mouth she’s so exhausted. She certainly doesn’t look like somebody who’s visited paradise. It’s no wonder she needs help, this poor girl wouldn’t have even made it as far as paradise without Melkam, just as she won’t make it as far as the Birthing Grounds without him.
Mercadia looks at him and he is instantly seduced by her again. If Mella weren’t in the next room he’d kiss her now, and he would ignore the bile and poison smeared on her lips. She says, “Wash me Jared, change my clothes for me.” She pleads not, orders not, but she speaks to him just like she is his lover. Just like she is the lover he just lost.
Without a word, with his enormous soaking hands he brushes away her filth. It feels abrasive and sickening but she is so soft he doesn’t care. Mercadia deserves to be clean.
He hesitates at first to remove her dress but she smiles and nods; he’s like a child hesitating to take his gift. He unbuttons her dress and peels it away, lets it sink to the bottom of the tub where it will stay until this part of the world dissolves.
In Milera, skinny girls are not considered extraordinarily beautiful, but Jared has never seen such a girl before, so Mercadia shocks him.
Unlike other pregnant girls Mercadia herself has gained no weight because her baby is not nourished like human babies are. Her body is still a slender shape; her breasts are small pert cones just large enough for the average man’s mouth.
For the first time, both of them feel free, they don’t feel like they are cheating on their spouses. Hers was a coward –THE coward in fact—and his wife is dead. They are two open wounds pressed together, trying to protect each other from infection.
Mercadia adores him already. She feels no shame in showing him her body.
Once she is clean Jared lifts her out of the tub and brings her into the living room. He sets her down on a large chair and dries her off with a towel, she smiles at him the whole time and he is so embarrassed he can’t look at her face. She gasps when the towel brushes over her nipples and Jared makes himself stop.
“I’m sorry.” He says, he’s adorable to her. But this timidity is unbecoming of him.
“Jared.” She whispers, sounding so in love.
Jared just looks up, unwilling to touch her. He’s crushing the towel in his hands.
“It’s her isn’t it?” She gestures with her head to the corpse on the bed. Jared nods, so like a child is he.
“My wife.”
Mercadia watches him, can’t help but smile at such husbandly honor. “You don’t need to touch me in front of your wife.” Mercadia takes the towel out of his hand and dries herself off herself. Jared watches her run the towel over her body without blinking. He doesn’t look at his wife.

15

As soon as they were both dressed and dry Jared kissed his wife good-bye and they set off through the forest. By the absence of bullets, and the ease with which Jared walked with her, Mercadia became suspicious of something. She looked at the forest around them, saw bright colors and leaves darker and fuller than she’d seen anywhere else, but for one place of course.
“This is Melkam’s territory too.” She said and Jared nodded.
“Much of this forest is I think.”
“He told me before I reached paradise that he wouldn’t be able to protect me everywhere. But I’ve been within his territory this whole time.” She pauses and thinks for a moment. “Come to think of it I’ve probably been in his territory my whole life. I’d never left the city until a few weeks ago when the hunters came.”
“That part of your quest is coming. Otherwise I don’t think you’d need me.” Mercadia looks at Jared and smiles, but he keeps looking straight ahead and doesn’t see it.
“I think I’d need you anyway, Jared; Melkam has no sense of tenderness.” Mercadia takes Jared’s hand and squeezes it. He hesitates for a long time; Mercadia thinks that he’s thinking shamefully about his wife, but he squeezes back eventually.
While they’re still safe, Mercadia wants to stop Jared and kiss him at least. She would make love to him, but she has a feeling that he won’t be with her at the end. Oh, but she wishes he would be. Never has she met a man such as this. She hopes that somewhere else they can meet again, and next time be lovers as they should have been here in Milera. Safe, as they should have been here in Milera.
But their time together is too short, for when she looks away from Jared they have reached the clearing on the outskirts of the forest. Beyond the clearing they see a world of normality; fields of grass and nothing else untouched by the plague Melkam. There is a great hill of soil so fertile it’s as black as an eclipsed sun. The sky is poisonous green swirling with vomit-yellow clouds. This she envisioned, this she expected, but she has to stop on the outskirts of the forest, she is just one step away from leaving Melkam’s protection. She has to stop because she wasn’t expecting that.
“Melkam, you never said there would a wall.”
Melkam does not manifest, but he does speak. The clearing they stand in serves as his mouth. “I told them you were coming.”
For a second she can’t speak –not out of surprise, goodness no—but she thinks this proves her so-called guardian’s corruption. “You’re not my guardian,” she begins like a volcano dribbling lava before the eruption, “you’re just a wicked thing that toys with me and wants me dead!”
“No Mercadia.” Melkam says, but Mercadia interrupts him with an uproarious scream.
“You just want me dead!”
“No, Mercadia.” he says again, but he waits for her screaming to stop before he continues. He feels that her esophagus is hot and abrasive but refuses to pity her. Pity is the modern malignancy. “You needed to grow up. Children cannot give birth to other children.”
“This is no child!” Mercadia protests clutching her rotund belly.
“It is your child, and like any other child deserves an adult mother.”
Begrudgingly, Mercadia quiets herself because she knows he’s right. But she still wants to protest him. She didn’t deserve this; nobody deserves the suffering she’s gone through. Paradise wasn’t worth this.
“Why did I have to go through this then? Why did I have to suffer?”
“Maturity is the way we carry our knowledge, and knowledge is largely obtained by suffering. I might have just brought you to the Birthing Grounds. I might have sneaked you past the hunters and their commander. But you wouldn’t have been able to give birth. Instead of the healing plant you’ve worked for, you would have been destroyed by the murderous flora, it would have taken root through your corpse and felt no remorse. Milera is depending on your suffering Mercadia.”
“…am I still a girl to you?” She asks, her voice still acidic for this spirit.
“Yes. Your third trial approaches.”
“What is it?” She clearly doesn’t want to know, but Melkam is proud that she asks out loud anyway. He almost wants to not tell her to spare her feelings. But he knows she’ll never grow up with that treatment.
“Give up true love.” He says, then his presence is gone from the forest.
Mercadia is sure that he’s still here though. She’s sure that he’ll smile when she starts to run.
And he will.

16

Mercadia squeezes Jared’s hand tight as a wrench. If he clutched her just as hard her bones would be crushed. Mercadia cries an uninterrupted stream; it reddens her cheeks, jaw, her neck. The cloth over her breasts darkens and clings to her. She digs her fingers into the cut in Jared’s hand, minding his pain not. He doesn’t flinch or make a noise.
“Jared.”
“Yes, Mercadia?”
“Please carry me.”
For the first and last time with her, Jared smiles. She couldn’t have asked anything simpler of him.
Jared puts her arms behind her knees and shoulders and she leans back into him. He hefts her as easily as Malk ever hefted Ning’s breasts. Mercadia curls up as close as he can to him and he looms over her, trying to guard as much of her body as he can with his massiveness.
He sees the hunters in the field scattered like gunpowder after the blast. They’re throwing down their sacks and loading their pistols. He knows they’re watching him too. They’ve been expecting him. He sees some of them taking aim already but nobody fires. Apparently they know that this forest is part of Melkam’s territory. If any of those bullets came within inches of Mercadia it would shatter like a chestnut inside a fire.
“Run.” Mercadia says, and he takes the first step out of the forest.
Had the commander found Jared before Melkam he would have wanted to turn the giant into a hunter himself. He is just their size and runs just as fast, which is the last thing the hunters expect.
The first volley of bullets misses him entirely. He covers twenty feet of ground by the time the battalion needs to reload for the first time. As soon as they pull their triggers Jared has moved out of the line of fire. He makes ten more feet by the time they take aim again, and this time Jared’s speed is of no help.
The second volley of bullets almost topples him. They bury themselves in his arms and legs, his back is riddled with holes in a matter of seconds, but he keeps running. Six clever hunters aim for his kneecaps but each bullet narrowly misses him. His clothes are seared by the shots that nearly hit him, and some of the cloth falls away. Mercadia snuggles against him –and her baby snuggles inside her; tears are shaken from her eyes whenever a bullet strikes him.
Jared is studded with lead and soaked red but the volleys of searing hot metal do not stop him. They don’t even slow him down; he sprints as fast as a frightened gecko from the start and doesn’t stop until he’s reached the wall. Once he does stop, Mercadia looks up at her final task, and regrets that Jared suffered for her.
She can’t do this.
This is no wall: it’s a grotesque tapestry of suffering people, naked and sewn together with leather strips by their bones. The grass has absorbed so much blood that the green is gone and all the plant matter is a decadent red. Everybody’s looking at her, everybody’s judging her.
“It’s everyone I love.”
“It’s a hallucination.” Jared says panting, bullets sliding out of his wounds and bouncing on the ground. “Melkam said that it’s the people who love you, this wall does not represent your love for others.”
Another volley of bullets penetrates Jared but he stands strong just like concrete and gossamer. Bullets ricochet off of the bullets still imbedded in his back and more blood squirts out of his wounds. The sound is brain-shaking; the smell is burning peppercorns popping in boiling blood. Jared’s flesh sizzles miserably.
Mercadia sees Murcilla and her other friends all sewn together by their thigh and breasts. Murcilla herself look like a Cyclops, her left eye sewn tight against the nipple of a girl she’s not seen for seven years. She sees Malk and Ning, sewn together by their spines so they can’t look at each other or make love. She even sees Jared. And Andun, she sees Andun. He pleads her to help him down, and why is she letting herself be held by that bloody monstrosity stuffed with bullets?
And mother… mother is asking just the same thing Andun is. Except she’s asking something else too, she wants to know:
“Where’s your father, Mercadia?”
“Daddy?” She looks over the wall frantically, recognizing face after face, growing less sickened by the macabre nakedness as she searches for her father. Murcilla, Malk, Ning, Jared, Andun, Mother, Murcilla, Malk, Ning, Jared, Andun, Mother, MurcillaMalkNingJaredAndunMother…
“Where’s my father?”
Jared is quiet, waiting for the next volley of bullets that might actually kill him, or for Mercadia to finally pass the wall. “Look away from the wall, Mercadia.” He is looking in the distance himself, and she looks with him.
Hundreds of feet away Mercadia sees a familiar shape like a pole covered in a flapping black sheet. The man she didn’t see at the party … the man she thought who loved her.
Mercadia’s inner child shrivels then, dries up in instant mummification, then dissolves. She has no father.
We are all sons and daughters.
“You were right, Melkam.” She whispers, and even Jared can’t hear her speak. She lifts her head up and kisses Jared, a kiss he deserves. He deserves so much more, so much more. “Put me down.” She commands and it is her last command for him, he obeys instantly. By the strength with which he sets her down, one would think that he isn’t injured at all.
Mercadia squeezes his hand on last time. They are surrounded by the sound of bullets sliding down gun barrels.
“Good-bye Jared.” She says then lets go of his hand. Then she turns around and plunges her body between Murcilla and her mother. The two hallucination women wail like they’re being disemboweled through their loins but Mercadia isn’t slowed down. She vanishes through the unreal flesh just like a worm slithering into the ground.
When he turns around six of the hunters have surrounded him and seem to look without eyes. He grins at them, bullets slide out of his wounds and roll down his enormous body like stones; he is a living mudslide of blood and lead.
“Failures you are.” He has the breath left to say.
One hunter smashes Jared in the head with his sack of bullets. Jared falls over without struggle or protest. He bleeds and bleeds like a disembodied heart but he does not die.
He has ages yet to live.

17

Mercadia crawls through six layers of bodies before she falls out the other side. She slides out by sweaty lubrication and falls onto the grass on all fours. The first thing she notices -other than the searing chill throughout her body- is how dim the wailing is on this side. The misery of the wall of loved ones gets quieter by the second over here.
Soon she won’t hear it at all.
She stands up, hefting her load in both arms and she starts toward the black soil hill. She takes the first step and it squishes, molds to her foot like avocado pulp. This soil is all give, offers no resistance.
The plagues will end where they began.
Mercadia doesn’t know there is a city beneath this mountain. History from that time is gone, all records of the city are rotted with the city itself. She doesn’t know that this place is so fertile because it has absorbed every corpse that was buried alive by it. But this is the richest dirt in Milera, she knows that, and if she knew how this place came to be she wouldn’t care.
It would all be worth it for her baby.
She doesn’t care that it’s not human. In fact, based on most of the human behavior she’s seen –and by how she herself has behaved—she is now proud that her baby isn’t human. Better to give birth to plant life. Something peaceful. Her precious child probably won’t even know how to speak. Good.
“My baby won’t waste words.”
At the top, the give stops at her knees. Mercadia trudges up the hill with her swelling belly gliding over the top of the soil. She turns around to look for her enemies, but the wall is too high, they won’t be able to shoot her up here. It’s so high up she can only see the night sky, not a forest or mountain range in sight.
Mercadia closes her eyes. The soil at the top goes up to her waist, it feels chilling and inviting, it sucks all of the excess heat out of her from the top of her head down to her vagina.
Before the first contraction, the last membrane of childhood is stripped from her, pulled down just like a rabbit skinning. Her mind feels totally exposed to the open air and the powerful smell of soil.
“I’m going to die.”
There is only one contraction.
The baby literally grabs her spine then crawls down it like a sloth squeezing itself down a hollow tree. She feels two hands grab her hip bones from the inside and push them apart. Her muscles stretch and the pain is incredible but not one sinew snaps, her bones don’t split. The baby is careful not to damage its mother.
She feels not ten, but dozens of gnarly fingers squirm out of her and push her legs apart and all of the amniotic fluid rushes out and feeds this soil more. Her belly shrinks back to its normal size emptied of that saltwater. She feels it crowning.
Milera’s prince is coming, as it were.
Then, quick as a fish the baby slips out of her and into the core of the mountain. The whole birth takes fifteen minutes. Most girls would probably be envious of that. Mercadia would probably say, “You shouldn’t be.”
Mercadia would fall over but the soil holds her fast and she just leans back, her arms hang behind her, her jaw hangs open, she stares up at the night sky and sees white stars. It is black up there now, the clouds are gray and still. Mercadia breathes deep and lets it out slowly, enjoying the feeling of air blowing against the inside of her lips.
I did it.
“But it’s not over yet.” She’s not gullible anymore, “That would be too easy.”
They’re still out there. The hunters weren’t really after her after all. They wanted her baby, and now that she isn’t carrying it she’s nothing. They’ll burn him down, or chop him up with axes. Perhaps they’d prune him first for spite, never mind this tree will end the plagues of Milera as they know them. Never mind that those horrors are over.
She feels Melkam’s presence before he speaks. She wonders for a moment how he is here away from his territory, but she supposes this mountain is his sibling. That’s probably just as good as territory. He says:
“Run along, woman.”
Mercadia stands up straight and stretches, smiles, it’s a mother’s smile. “I’ve already run to my grave, Melkam. Where else is there to go?”
Melkam smiles too, facing her now, and she doesn’t hate him. “Very good, Mercadia, are you ready for your final trial?”
Mercadia nods, more tears but these are good ones. She knew there wouldn’t just be three trials. “I must die for my child.”
“Yes.” He holds out his hand and she grasps it. “Come.”
They walk down the mountain and stop at the foot of it. Melkam cannot set foot off the soil.
But the wall is his doing, so he can undo it.
A great rusted sickle bursts out the bottom of the wall and cleaves upwards; the non-flesh there explodes into liquid mulch and the hunters can see them again. They reload; aim at the spirit and the woman. Squeezes Melkam’s hand, holds her breath, shuts her eyes tight.
Then the last volley of bullets.

18

The crack in the wall that Melkam opened blows apart opens thirty feet wider like a dam shattering. The rest of the wall dissolves the same way as though set with explosives. A rush of supernatural mist pours out of the hallucinatory rubble
But it is not Melkam.
For it is white and bright blue.
A fog of holy feathers drowns the entire field and lingers there as though everything has been washed with milk. Little wings float of their own accord all over the field just like fireflies at midnight. Everything glows now, everything glows.
Mercadia’s father watches in the distance, is about to run away. But a giant and terrible eye like a great spear of ice opens up in the fog and freezes him with hatred. The eye becomes a swarm of steaming daggers and rolls across the fields at him, kicking up the earth like a rabid harvester.
He doesn’t have a second to move an inch, his body is mutilated beyond repair, and with him the hill is sliced in half.
There is not a living body here this night. Mercadia’s father and his army of mercenaries evaporate and become oxygen, enriching the air for her baby.
At the top of the hill there is a luminous white bud shaped like a candle flame, glowing in the moonlight.
Thus ends Milera’s sixteen years of Mercy.

Epilogue

It takes the tree of life a whole year to grow to its fullest potential.
When Jared steps out of his woods he is met with the coolest rush of air in the world. The oxygen here is as nourishing as a mother’s love. He has ages yet to live.
He has come here to visit every day since that night. Sometimes he stays just for a few minutes if he has many chores. But it is normal for him to spend the better part of his day here. He has loved watching Mercadia’s child grow. He has loved sitting here with the new Mercadia.
The Tree of Life is glorious. He stands a hundred feet tall and his branches reach for miles in all directions. His leaves are dark blue spades and his bark is luminous white, it glows like the fish at the bottom of the ocean. The knots in the wood turn occasionally, as though they are eyes scanning the horizon. He is an amazing and powerful life form.
You’d think he wouldn’t need any protection.
In Milera, heaven is not a place: it is a higher form of life. When her body was destroyed by that swarm of flaming lead, she became a spirit like Melkam with the power to protect her child. For as long as this tree stands nourishing Milera, she will be the invisible barrier between him and all vicious things.
Jared picks up a rock as the base of the tree and hurls it at the center. But instead of striking the bark a whirl of feathers catches the rock, drops it and it falls back to the ground, never coming even close to the tree.
“Stop being rude.” Mercadia says, using all the land as her mouth.
“Just making sure you’re still here.” He mocks, and he smiles. He feels Mercadia smile too.
Jared plops down and looks up at Mercadia’s wondrous creation. He reaches into his bag and pulls out an orange. He peels it and tosses the rind on the ground. Mercadia doesn’t care, “Compost for my baby!” she might declare. Jared has not burned a single living tree.
Of course, Jared does not just come to admire the tree of life. Blue and white feathers float around it constantly just like dust particles in a shaft of light. This is Mercadia as she is now: a guardian for her child just as Melkam was a guardian for her.
Melkam merged with the planet. Mercadia tells Jared that his consciousness has become something new. She won’t tell him what. He asked her once if he is even on Milera anymore, and she said nothing.
“Didn’t you think he would be immortal as a spirit of the planet Mercadia?” He asked.
“Oh I did.” She admitted, not being human she now finds it easy to confess the truth. “But he is somewhere else now, something else now. And the same thing will happen to you and me. My child too.”
“Because nothing is permanent.” Said Jared, then Mercadia:
“Not even death.”

THE END

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 18.01.2010

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