The Bargain That Smuggled Falsehood Aboard the Ark

The rain had been falling for an hour, and already Falsehood had nothing to do.

She walked the drowning streets looking for a mouth to lie into, and found none. The wicked had bolted their doors. The merchants had stopped weighing their false weights, because the buyers were carrying their children to the rooftops. A liar needs a listener, and the listeners were all screaming at the sky. By the time the first valley filled, the only dry thing left in creation was a great black hull rising above the water like the back of a whale.

The Stranger at the Gangplank

She climbed toward it over the rising flood. Up the slick ramp came the beasts in their pairs, lion beside lioness, raven beside raven, the slow ox nosing its mate up the boards. Noah stood at the door counting them, and behind him the dark belly of the ark swallowed creature after creature. He had been at this fifteen days. The herding, the bellowing, the sheer impossible scale of it had hollowed his face, and still the animals came, two and two, two and two.

Falsehood pushed up among them and knocked on the timber.

Noah looked down at a creature he had never once seen in all his years, because he was a righteous man who had never told a lie, and a liar is invisible to a man with nothing in him for the lie to catch on. He spoke the rule plainly. "Only pairs come aboard," he said. "Where is your mate?"

She had none. She had never had one. Falsehood is born alone and dies alone, and she stood there in the spray with no second self to show him. Noah shook his head and turned back to his counting, and the door did not open for her.

The Contract on the Drowning Shore

She went back down the ramp in grief, and a little way along the shrinking shore she met Wickedness, soaked to the bone, also turned away, also alone. He looked her over with the eye of a man who smells a deal.

"Is it true," he asked, "that you have been refused for want of a partner?"

"It is true," she swore, "on my word of honor." She did not so much as blink at the words, for the word of honor of Falsehood is the funniest thing she owns. "Be my mate. Two honest, ruined creatures, perfect for each other. We will go up together and they will let us in."

Wickedness was willing, but Wickedness drove a bargain. "I will marry you," he said, "but on one condition. Everything you earn aboard that ark is mine. Every coin, every profit, all of it comes to me. Agree, and we are a pair."

She agreed. What did she care for terms, who had never kept one? They wrote a contract there on the last strip of dry ground, signed it, sealed it, and climbed the ramp arm in arm. Noah counted them as a pair and let the happy couple in, and somewhere above the water God closed the door of the ark with His own hand and sealed the world's one dry room shut for a year.

A Year of Lying in the Floating Dark

Outside, the old world dissolved. The mountains went under. The generation that had filled the earth with violence breathed water and was gone, scrubbed off the face of the ground as if it had never schemed or stolen or struck a brother down. God had meant the flood to wash the world clean, to drown every crooked thing and leave only the righteous man and his sons and the breeding pairs of the beasts to begin again.

And in the belly of the ark, in the swaying lamplight, Falsehood went to work.

She did splendid business. There is always business for a liar, even with the world reduced to eight souls and a cargo of animals. She traded and cheated and swore and earned, lying and earning through the long floating dark, while beside her Wickedness said almost nothing. Each night he took out his ledger and tallied her takings by lamplight, every coin entered in his own hand, then closed the book and said nothing of what he meant to do with it. Falsehood worked. Wickedness counted. The rain went on.

Dry Land and the Reckoning of the Ledger

Twelve months later the waters fell. The dove went out and came back with the leaf, and the door opened on a washed and empty world, green at the edges, smelling of mud and beginnings. Down the ramp the pairs went into the new earth, and down went Falsehood with her arms full of everything she had earned, a whole year's fortune in lies.

Wickedness held out his hand and took all of it.

She stared at him. She had knocked on the timber, sworn the oath that got them aboard, lied through twelve months while he did nothing but watch and write. "Give me my share," she said.

"Your share," said Wickedness, and the contempt in it could have curdled the new sea, "is nothing, cheat. We agreed. I take everything you earn. It is written, it is signed, it is sealed." He held up the ledger. "Would you have me tear up our own contract? That would be a wicked thing to do."

And Falsehood, who had cheated her way onto the one boat that survived the end of the world, stood empty-handed on the clean new earth and held her peace, beaten for the first time in her life, and beaten at her own game. She had built the lie that got them both aboard. Wickedness walked off with it, into the washed world, the pair God's flood had failed to drown. Falsehood earns much. Wickedness carries it all away.