The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  “You must have been a boy!”

  “No, no. I was a man by Stakhi reckoning.” He shook his head, dizzied by the gulfs between cultures: to think back on his voyage was to cross not just time but an entire mode of being. “At least I was a man by my age. In the mountains we don’t … it’s not like Incrasticism, see, there’s no concept of an essential male or female nature. You become as you act. That’s why the Stakhi people in Aurdwynn are so fixated on manliness and womanliness: because you can lose those things by acting incorrectly. You can imagine how it was for me at home … wearing a man’s crampons and sitting at the high table as a prince, but making a woman of myself in bed. They would have liked me better if I called myself Princess.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I’m not a woman. Anyway, princesses don’t inherit. They’re married off to other Mansions. Or they become sacred weatherworkers. They go up onto the mountaintops when they die, to be mummified in the cold dead air. There are crevices full of princesses.”

  Baru shivered. Then she thought a dire thought. She had already promised this man back to his brother; she had offered to sell Apparitor to the Necessary King.

  What would that do to him? Would he be murdered? Tortured? Forced into a symbolic role as Princess?

  Hastily: “Tell me more about the voyage.”

  “Ah, the voyage! What a romance it was! I knew Lindon wanted me. I knew he was too noble to act on it, because I was his prisoner, and younger than him”—he laughed, and wheeled on Baru, suddenly intent—“you should’ve seen the man’s torment, all alone with his horny prisoner while his crew carried on!”

  “What do you mean, carried on?”

  He poured himself a shallow shine of whiskey, the red-gold of the sun and his hair. “You were raised in one of Itinerant’s schools, right?”

  “Yes…”

  “And then sent to Aurdwynn, a laboratory for suffering. You think all the sodomites and the tribadists live like you. Hidden and secretive.”

  “How else would we live?” Baru asked, and she hid her bitterness under a camouflage, the placid acceptance of a well-conditioned woman. Mostly, at least, she hid it.

  “Well, Agonist, I suggest you sail on a long expedition some day, where the officers are mostly women, and the sailors are mostly men, and fraternization between officer and sailor can get you keelhauled.” Apparitor leaned in laughingly. “What’s Hesychast’s word? Ah, yes: everyone goes a bit isoamorous on a long voyage.”

  “People don’t change like that,” Baru protested. “I’ve always known—my taste.”

  “Maybe you’re different from most people.”

  “A ship wouldn’t change me.”

  “No?” He patted Helbride’s long prow fondly. “People unfold themselves at sea. They get more complicated. Say a man has a wife ashore, but he goes to sea, nine weeks off the edge of the map. So he takes up calligraphy with the other junior lieutenant. Friends and companions for the journey, with a little sodomy. Then he goes home and he folds himself into his marriage again.”

  “He’s lying to himself,” Baru said, “he’s always been that way, drawn to men and women both. He only gets a little freedom on the ship.”

  “Maybe. I think most people are like slushy water. Pour them into a new vessel and they’ll change their shape.”

  Rage slashed at her, like a knife across the knuckles of her hand. How accomodating of these men to accept that their love could only exist on the edge of the map. Go home, accommodating men, and ask your hygienist about your loves. They will tell you that you are tainting the germ line with sterility, helping to bring on the degenerate doom of all humanity.

  Cowards. How dare they be content. If they were real, they would suffer as she had suffered.

  “Is that,” she asked, with more acid than she meant to reveal, “why the navy hates your man? Because he’s a sodomite?”

  “Oh, no. You think Ahanna Croftare cares about who he fucks? No, she hates Lindon for a simpler reason.”

  “Because he’s never been in a war.”

  “Exactly. And Ahanna has never lived for anything else.”

  She’d met Ahanna Croftare once, during her first days in Aurdwynn, when Croftare commanded the province and their pursuer, Juris Ormsment, was still a rear admiral. Croftare was true salt, a shark-leather sailor with bitter eyes and an old woman’s wiry strength. You could see the muscles in her arms, small and hard, straining against thin brown skin. Baru had studied her cooly, answered her questions competently, and relished a thrill of forbidden lust. On Taranoke you weren’t supposed to notice people outside your decade.

  “Svir,” she murmured.

  “What?”

  “Why was Ormsment promoted to Province Admiral Aurdwynn this winter? In the middle of a rebellion, and just in time to mutiny and come after me?”

  “The world’s a big deck of cards, Baru.” He paused to drain his whiskey. “Sometimes you just get a bad hand. It’s not all conspiracy.”

  “What if it is?” Imagine, for a moment, that everything is a conspiracy. Imagine that all really does proceed as the Throne desires it. “What if someone needed this mutiny to happen? And they sent Ahanna Croftare on to be Province Admiral Falcrest, where she’s in place to threaten your Lindon.…”

  Pieces on the Great Game board, moving themselves … and across the board there were two figures: a great porcelain mask, smiling, and a face with horns for its eyes.…

  “What if it’s all been arranged for us?” she said. “This whole board? The navy ready to mutiny, the Oriati ready for war, and we’re like the match tossed into the oil?”

  “Then,” Apparitor said, “we’re pawns too, you and I.”

  “You, maybe. Not me.”

  He laughed at her. “You know the best class of pawn? I don’t even have to say it, do I? But you’re one of them.”

  The Llosydanes towered ahead. Down from the heights came the wail of a long horn blown in greeting.

  * * *

  “I HATE this place,” Apparitor grumbled. “I always feel the whole thing’s going to crack and come toppling down.”

  Once, probably, there had been a single Llosydane Island, as tall and proud as Taranoke. But the ages had done their work. The surf had battered the rock, the rock had begun to crack, the sea had rushed into the cracks, and in whittling time the island had been divided into fifteen fat rocky pylons that stood above the crashing rivers of surf and foam. Waves struck the cliffs and broke skyward in rainbow-frothed plumes, burst out through vents and blowholes, drifted downwind as lovely vapor. In some places the pylons were visibly thinner at the base.

  “I like heights,” Baru told Apparitor, smugly.

  “The Llosydane Islands,” Yawa recited, apparently from memory. “A federated cultural preserve sustained entirely by the sale of dates to foreign concerns, which pays for the import of food and finished goods.”

  “Wait a minute,” Baru said, as, behind them, Captain Branne argued fiercely with the Sydani pilot over docking fees. “What’s a cultural preserve?”

  “They’re allowed to maintain their own ways.”

  Baru could have spit in outrage. An island under the Imperial Republic’s control, and they’d just been allowed to keep their own culture? That wasn’t fair! They should’ve been acculturated and digested like Taranoke—oh, Baru, what are you thinking?

  “There’s nothing here to use. No timber, no workforce, no good harbor. So Falcrest decided to preserve them for study.” Yawa took Baru’s hand and pointed. “Do you see those mills in the tide? The ones that turn those wheels of flags? Those are worship engines. The Sydani worship the ykari virtues, just as in Aurdwynn.”

  “Those engines hardly seem ilykari.” Thinking of the subtle serene priestess she’d known, Ulyu Xe, who looked so much like cousin Lao. Ulyu Xe hadn’t needed a mill-wheel temple to turn her faith (or Baru’s eyes).

  “No. Faith here is closer to the ancient Belthyc practice. More crass and monumen
tal than Aurdwynn’s ilykari.”

  “Who you murdered by the droves,” Apparitor said, which made Baru think, yes, Yawa knew about the ilykari palimpsest, of course she would be the one to take it. But how did she know Baru had received a copy? Just a lucky guess?

  “Who I pruned as necessary to assure Falcrest of my diligence.” Yawa gave him a formidably baited smile. “The infanticide here should make you feel right at home, I imagine.”

  “Oh, don’t you—”

  “What infanticide?” Baru looked between them. “Yawa, what infanticide?”

  Her smile snapped shut on them. Oh, Baru thought, with a sort of delight, she practices that face, doesn’t she?

  “Rather like the Stakhieczi Wintercrests,” Yawa said, “this is a very hard place to live. They fish, they grow dates to sell, they shit the fish out and use the shit to grow more dates. So—as in most civilizations, Falcrest and the Mbo are the great exceptions—they murder a good number of their children by exposure to the weather.”

  “That’s not true,” Baru said, suspiciously. “Is that true?”

  Apparitor nodded silently.

  “The sanctity of the infant,” Yawa enunciated, “is a very modern construct. Do you see those bridges?”

  Baru and Apparitor fought over the spyglass until Yawa gave Baru hers. “Rope bridges,” Baru marveled. “The islands are bridged together!”

  “Indeed. When I was your age, there was a war fought over those bridges.”

  “I thought you were a kitchen wench when you were my age.”

  “I was, I was, but everyone in Lachta heard the news. The old Duke had business here, and the Llosydanes are full of Aurdwynni families.” She was settling into the cadence of the old storyteller, and Baru was surprised to find herself soothed. It had been fifteen years since she listened to a Taranoki elder teach.…

  “Now don’t interrupt,” Yawa snapped. “They called it the Datefig War, but deep down it was about honor, not trade.”

  “Honor,” Apparitor murmured, “is just a credit rating for violence.”

  Baru found that metaphor rather clever. The Handbook of Manumission said that honor was the most primitive form of government: Insult me, honor said, and I will avenge the insult. Lose your honor and people would believe they could hurt you without fear of retaliation. Just as a good creditor always paid back debts, an honorable man always answered insults.

  “It was a men’s war,” Yawa said, and clucked exactly like the great-family matriarchs Baru had met in Vultjag. “Call that anti-mannist if you will. The date crop was bad, money short, not enough food coming in to feed families grown too fat off good years. Some families had enough. Others didn’t. The disagreements spilled out of the markets and councils. Inevitably, there was a killing, the killing was avenged—you know how it goes. Young men started to climb underneath the bridges at night, past the constabulary, to fight. Then they started sabotaging bridges to kill each other as they climbed.”

  “And?”

  “And the women of the Twelve Families called a meeting, and because the violence showed no sign of slowing, they decided to reinstitute the traditional Manning.”

  “Yes.” Apparitor sighed. “I thought as much.”

  “What’s the Manning?” Baru asked, imagining a Manning and a Womaning, in which large committees debated the exact definitions of each.

  “They give boy children a test of patience,” Yawa said. “The child must pass up an easy pleasure, ignore a vile insult, endure a mild pain, and hold a stranger from a fight.”

  “And if they fail?”

  “Then,” Apparitor said, “they go into exile. On a boat with no water.”

  Yawa nodded at Baru. “And that is why the Llosydanes have three women for every man today. The women are gentler, more suited to crowded life. So the date groves flourish, and the date trade prospers, and they are all fed.”

  Baru was very troubled. No matter what the Incrastic creeds said, she didn’t believe that men were intrinsically more passionate and emotional than calculating, restrained women. But how could the Sydani have arrived at the same conclusion if there weren’t some truth to it…?

  And if she smashed Falcrest between the Oriati and the Stakhi—then what would happen to the Llosydanes?

  “There’s no formal Masquerade presence here, so of course the Morrow Ministry haunts the place instead. I sent the prisoners from Baru’s inner circle to the Ministry station here for covert debriefing. It was too dangerous to keep them in Aurdwynn.” Yawa looked between them. “Do I need to explain that?”

  The Morrow-men were Falcrest’s spy service. As Baru understood it, they spent about half their effort on spying and the rest on fending off Judiciary attempts to purge them.

  “You go find the station,” Baru said. “Interrogate them.”

  “Why, Baru, you don’t want to taunt them a little?” Apparitor said. “Walk them through all your clever lies? I did promise to make you confront them. I mean to keep that promise.”

  She wanted that less than anything in the world. “I’m going to go check the harbormaster’s records,” she said. “If anyone here sold supplies to the Oriati war fleet, I want their trail.”

  * * *

  ALL three of them had the same objective here: discover the origins and funding of the Syndicate Eyota attack fleet, and, perhaps, some clue to the Cancrioth.

  Naturally, they all split up.

  Apparitor would not come ashore. “I’m keeping Helbride offshore,” he insisted. “When Sulane finds us, I want to be ready to run.”

  Xate Yawa and Iscend Comprine took a launch ashore without a word of good-bye. That left Baru, alone, to confront a strange harsh archipelago of stone needles, armed only with her wardrobe, her false identities, and an account cached at a local exchange bank.

  A boat ashore. The crash of the waves inside the Llosydane pillars, like light through lenses, refracted and split and split again. Seabirds above: a sea eagle, shearwaters, a fat pelican. On the dockside Baru showed the legend of Payo Mu to the customs officer. She must have betrayed her reverence for the exquisitely falsified legend, which the officer misread: “Proud of your school marks, aren’t you?” she sniffed. “Means nothing here.”

  But the legend passed inspection.

  She climbed up the long stairs to the top of Samylle islet (all the Llosydane’s pillars had charming Belthyc names, Eddyn and Lynnedy and Jamascine and so on). She asked a passerby where the islanders got their freshwater. The passerby didn’t know.

  She went about her work.

  By sundown she owned a restaurant and a flophouse, the Fiat Bank branch by the docks was on fire, and two pirate captains were dueling for her hand as she sold prostitutes in lots of half a hundred.

  13

  BARU’S DATES

  IT began with two spies, and it ended with them, too.

  Tain Hu had given her some advice on the detection of Masquerade agents. “Check the boots. The first thing they do with their wages is buy good boots.” Baru thought that was particularly good advice on an island that made no leather of its own.

  She identified the lead by the shine of his heels, a man who crossed the windswept plaza ahead of her, stepping among the birds who squabbled over the girls who salaried their favorites with dates. And that woman in a sealskin coat was the tail. Both Sydani, with long oval faces and olive skin from the ancient Belthyc blood. They might be Morrow Ministry; just as likely they were Oriati Termites.

  “All right, Hu,” Baru muttered. “Let’s practice our craft.”

  First she circled the Samylle islet a few times, to watch her lead and her tail move with her. Swing your partner, Baru thought, swing your partner round and round.

  She broke north across a narrow rope bridge to Eddyn islet.

  Wide-eyed and wondering, with a lightness in her chest and childhood instincts under her feet, she made the delightful perilous crossing. The bridge swayed amiably in the wind, and the wind played stone flutes and struck ch
imes, and the chimes rang out over the chatter of Apacaho creole, Aphalone, Iolynic different from Aurdwynn’s, even Kyprananoki tongues. No one at home liked Kyprananoke, Baru remembered; a rotten evil place. Not like here, where the sacred was everywhere. Below her feet the waves turned worship engines of wood and gleaming fish-scale. Young girls oiled the mechanisms. Their stone, she noted, was mortared even underwater: what additive did that?

  “Watch how I work,” she murmured, “watch this, Hu, watch and see.…”

  She imagined the Llosydane Islands as a woman.

  The Twelve Families, say, were the head, and the stone of the fifteen pillars the legs. The people inside her did the work of bridge building and food distribution and shipping: the pumping heart. But she needed air, she needed food for her heart to pump. And the air must come into the port of her mouth.

  The woman must inhale foreign food, and exhale dates.

  So her throat—the place Baru might strike to get what she required—was the date market, where dates turned into Masquerade money, which would buy the Llosydanes’ food.

  Whoever controlled the date trade had a hand on the throat of the Llosydanes.

  On high Eddyn, three-story allhouses of mortar and recovered rubble glistened in a damp wind. She let the spies watch while she bought a kelp smallbeer, a coffee, and a shot of very expensive and wonderfully briny whiskey. Then she went (staggering not at all) into the Fiat Bank branch, with its Sydani staff and Sydani bankers and desperately Falcresti hive windows.

  “Everything,” she told the clerk, as she supplied the number and password for the Throne’s stash account here. “In fiat notes, of course. But I want them in single-bearer bonds, not paper. I’ll hire some bravos for security, if you’ve got them?”

  They did: two fine young women with Oriati rapiers and matching hats. She explained to them what a single-bearer bond was, just in case they thought they could kill her and take them.

  “We know,” they said. “We guard the date merchants who come in from Aurdwynn. Our discretion is quite assured.” And the bolder one winked.

  She took them outside.

  “Those two,” she said, pointing quite openly to the spies, “are tailing me. I don’t want them hurt, understand? Not unless they come in at me. Good.”