The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  Do you see the operation of trim? Trim drew Tau to Kindalana out of loneliness, and thus led Tau to Kindalana’s father, who perhaps saved Tau’s life.

  If Tau had died everything afterward would be different. Trim makes small things like friendship important to large things like war.

  “Go to your sweatroom,” Padrigan snapped. Tau knew he was afraid, for what if Tau-indi died while Tahr was away? She would never forgive Padrigan. “Go tell your housekeep that you have snails growing in you. I’ll get the antimony cup.”

  Every day Padrigan sat in the sweatroom in a breechcloth, poured a little white wine into an antimony cup, and waited for the antimony to turn the wine into poison. This took a full night.

  On the first day he did this, he said, “There are tiny eggs growing inside you. We need to kill them.”

  “Will a worm come out of my foot?” Tau-indi was terrified of the worm parasites.

  “No, no, not unless you drank water from down in Mzilimake or Devi-naga, and where would you get that kind of water?” Padrigan scooped up Tau-indi and helped them drink the poison wine. “Your father might send you Mzilimake water, hm? Your father the explorer?”

  “My father never sends anything,” Tau-indi muttered, and noticed, even in their sickness, that Padrigan was secretly glad of this. Padrigan didn’t want Tahr’s husband to ever come home.

  The wine was sweet and sharp. Tau-indi drank it in slow sips until the antimony made them throw up, gushing spring water and sweet potato, gagging, miserable. Padrigan held their hair back until they were done. “We’ll do this every morning. Rinse your mouth.”

  The fever got worse. Much worse. Abdumasi showed up to talk about his kittens and his money work, but as he spoke, his hands balled and twisted. Guilt! He was guilty!

  “Tell me what you’re doing.” Tau-indi had to rasp through an acid-ravaged throat. “Tell me what you’re up to.”

  “I flew a kite. Hey, I won a bet! My oldest kitten killed two pigeons in one leap.”

  “No. Tell me the truth”

  Abdumasi wouldn’t answer, he wouldn’t say what Tau already knew: yes, Tau-indi, it’s true, it’s true, she and I are going on without you. You will never be a part of us. You were born alone and alone you will always remain.

  Kindalana came too, as if drawn by the curl of trim between her and Abdumasi. She read from a beginner’s text in Uburu.

  “You want me to learn?” Tau-indi moaned.

  “Of course. I’ve finally got you in a place to listen.” She refused to look up. The wedge of skin between her brows held worried furrows.

  “Please take care of Abdumasi,” Tau-indi said, in spite. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Oh. Abdu.” Kindalana turned the page. “He’s going to Jaro to learn barter. I don’t see much of him.”

  I’m sure you don’t, Tau-indi thought.

  After a long wet time balled up inside sweaty blankets with their nose full of the stink of vomit, Tau-indi looked up to see Padrigan’s eyes all red and wet. Why was Padrigan here? It wasn’t time for antimony wine. And why oh why was there white ash on his brow? Why was Padrigan grieving? Had something happened to Kindalana?

  The man said: “Are you lucid, manata?”

  Manata. Beloved friend. “I’m here, Abdumasi,” Tau-indi said, for the word had blurred Padrigan and Abdumasi together.

  Padrigan looked down at them, and little flakes of grief ash fell off his brow to dust the wet sheets. “You’re here?” His breath stank of wine. His hands were stained by earth. “You’re here with me?”

  “I’m here, manata.”

  “I’m in love with your mother,” Padrigan said, “and she’s gone.”

  “She’s gone?” Tau said, in confusion. “Where has she gone?”

  “The Falcresti took her captive. They tricked our armada into harbor at Kyprananoke, and somehow they bought the Kyprananoki into burning our ships. We’re at war with Falcrest.”

  “You’re in love with my mother?” Tau-indi felt a great upswelling of gratitude and relief. Abdumasi was in love with their mother. A very odd love, and certain to go unanswered, for ten years was the undisputed limit of an age gap. “But what about Kindalana?”

  “Kindalana’s safe with me.” Padrigan’s eyes brimmed with tears. He hugged Tau-indi close. “Of course she’s safe. I’ll keep her safe for you.”

  “I killed my father’s other child,” Tau-indi whispered. “He knows. That’s why he doesn’t come back. He knows I killed my twin in the womb.”

  “Hush, hush.”

  “I killed his child so I could be born alone.”

  “Shh,” Padrigan said. “Not today. No talk of killing today. It’s a calendar taboo.”

  “Let’s fly kites,” Tau-indi said. “It’s hot in here. It’s hot and bright.”

  * * *

  WHEN Tau’s fever broke, of course, they felt like a damn fool. Falcrest had taken Tahr and now their house needed them in her place. Service was the best balm for grief. So they dressed themself in silk, jeweled their nose and lips, painted their face in royal gold and stars of green, and summoned the Bosoka household together in the yard.

  “We grieve for our mother,” they said, feeling at once ridiculous and deeply proud. “But we trust in the principles of our family. Tahr kept the finest trim. Let us call her back to us by remembering her place in the community. Housekeepers, what can you do to remember her?”

  They could bring wash water for her in the morning and empty her basins in the evening. They could repair her combs. They could take food from the table for her to eat.

  “Groundskeepers, what can you do to remember my mother?”

  They could prepare garlands from the Devi-naga exotics she loved to raise. They could smooth the garden path and the beach path behind her ghostly footsteps. They could (one of them weeping now) fly her kite over the lake.

  “Clerks, what can you do to remember Tahr Bosoka?”

  They could write to her correspondents in Jaro and beyond. They could sell the house skiff and give the money to the ferry project, as she’d wanted. They could continue the education of her laman, Tau-indi.

  “Let it thus be done. Let her be remembered back to us.”

  Tau-indi smiled at them and went back into the sweatroom to drink antimony wine and vomit.

  After that the house was livelier, and Tau-indi felt taller. They had taken their first steps as a true Prince.

  * * *

  SUMMER passed, and then storm season, and then spring and summer again. Tau turned fourteen. The Armada War raged across the Ashen Sea. What happened in the war that year was important, of course—but this is a story about Tau-indi, who ended the war.

  And what mattered to young Tau-indi was their mother’s release.

  She came up the slope from Lake Jaro at a run, and Tau tried to hold their place in the welcoming crowd, but in the end it was too much: they broke from the line and ran down to embrace their mother.

  Tahr kissed their brow. “Oh, lama.”

  “Mom,” Tau said, with shaky bravery, “I kept the house.”

  “You did. You did marvelously.”

  “You’re all right?”

  Tahr showed them respect, and not pity, when she answered honestly. “Hard times are coming,” she told Tau. “Hard times you’ll inherit soon. I want you to meet two men from Falcrest, sent here with me as hostages against atrocity, both eager students of our ways.…”

  They were in their early twenties, still youth by Oriati standards (adulthood was earned by works and knowledge, not merely a calendar). But they strolled about with the loose-limbed confidence of old men. Tau would realize, later, that this arrogance had developed in the coffeehouses and testing rooms of the Faculties, and that they meant it entirely for each other.

  The groundskeepers murmured that they were brave, brave men, to come here to Jaro, when they must know the full wrath of Oriati Mbo would awaken against Falcrest soon. When a lion attacked a water buffalo the lion might chew on t
he buffalo’s rump for a very long time while the buffalo stood there twitching and snorting. But when the lion was exhausted, the buffalo would turn its horns.

  The first of the hostages was beautiful and shy. Cosgrad Torrinde was a slim tall man of twentysomething, a few shades lighter than already cool-skinned Kindalana and Padrigan. His eyes folded elegantly, his nose flat and thin, his smile easy, his laugh full of wonder. He did not have the name Hesychast yet, of course. Tau-indi would only learn about that later.

  The second man was generous and funny, with a booming big-chested laugh that made you at once glad to laugh with him and afraid that some day he might be laughing at you. Unlike clean-shaven Cosgrad, he affected a beard, and where Cosgrad dressed in formal trousers and the waistcoats of the Falcresti civil service, this man took merrily to khangas and farmers’ jellabiya and formal kaftan suits and Invijayish deel with jeweled chests and Segu’s saris in their infinite permutations and the rest of the Mbo’s dizzyingly broad wear. He seemed eager to learn, rather than to study from afar, and he took quickly to housework and chatter. His name was Cairdine Farrier. The shared C consonant on Cairdine and Cosgrad caused no end of trouble: quickly the two became Farrier and Torrinde.

  Prince Hill threw a tremendous party to celebrate Tahr’s return. She stood in a circle of griots, dressed in full Prince-Mother finery with chains from her ears to her nostrils and banded jewelry over her breasts, a vision, a firelit icon of strength. The honeymakers brought comb and the gardeners brought sweet yams and the herbalists brought weed and people even came across the lake from Jaro to attend.

  She told the griots everything, and bid them tell everyone they knew.

  The two Falcresti men drew much interest. The Bosoka house taught them how to act with a child’s manners, eating and socializing with the right hand and saving the left for matters unclean. When instructions were given to masturbate with only the left hand (by a whole line of people solemnly jerking themselves off in charade), the shy one, Torrinde, gagged in embarrassment, and the loud one Farrier had to explain to him that they were being teased.

  Tau-indi drifted through the revels feeling strange and hollow. Something was wrong. Shouldn’t Tahr’s return fill them with hope? Shouldn’t they weep in relief? Ought not the restoration of their family fill them with the warmth of nations?

  Why did they feel so alone?

  Because Kindalana and Abdumasi weren’t here.

  Shy Torrinde had been convinced to take off his shirt and display the principles of isometric bodily control, which Farrier insisted allowed him to twitch his tits individually. Under cover of laughter Tau scrambled up to the high rock point where Abdumasi used to fly kites with them. They wanted a little solitude, the special adolescent solitude which many teenagers use as a plea. Please notice how hurt and alone I am, please come care.

  The kite rock was already crowded, though.

  There were two people on it, naked silhouettes in the moonlight, having sex. Kindalana’s slim back moved intently, her shoulder blades crowding and separating. She was on top.

  “That’s better,” Tau-indi heard Abdumasi say, cheerful and unguarded, “I think that works! Yes, just like that.”

  “I banged my knee,” Kindalana said.

  “There’s a rock under my shoulder.” Abdumasi’s lean waist swelled into narrow strong hips. He had his arms up, to show off his growing shoulders.

  “We could stop.”

  “Why, am I too long for you?”

  “I bet I can make you forget your rock.”

  They both laughed. The shadow of Abdumasi’s legs moved under her and Kindalana made a startled noise, falling forward, one hand braced on his chest.

  Tau-indi turned away out of instinctive respect. Their naked bodies were familiar but sex was new and confusing. They did not want to want either Kindalana or Abdumasi, especially because it drew out the uneasy gap of age.

  Tau sat there and decided to be happy for them. How happy, how satisfied, how glad, how delighted Tau must be to have this new joy in the Prince Hill mbo.

  How happy. How glad.

  They prodded at the thought like a bee sting and it made them sick with jealousy—not for sexual want of one or the other of them, but for jealousy of this secret Kinda and Abdu had. Listen to them! Listen to those curious secret sounds, those answers to questions they had asked each other in the past months, with odd silences and shy hesitations. Listen to them becoming less alone.

  And to have sex on this rock, on this place for kites. Hadn’t Abdumasi known Tau-indi would come here? Hadn’t Kindalana? Hadn’t they known Tau-indi would hurt tonight? Surely they had.

  Maybe Kindalana and Abdumasi had come up here to wait for Tau-indi, to comfort them. And then forgotten all about Tau, because they had found they mattered more to each other.

  Tau-indi sat down hard on a stone and put their head in their hands. It was a sign, of course. It had to be this way. The world knew that Tau-indi had to be alone.

  Out on the kite rock, Tau-indi’s two best friends articulated that loneliness enthusiastically.

  Tau-indi stumbled back down toward the fire.

  * * *

  THE bonfire at the revels went out a week later.

  But the war fire burnt up higher.

  After the debacle at Kyprananoke, Segu had seized control of war planning away from Lonjaro. As the Mbo’s chief naval power (unless you asked the Devi-naga) the Segu were best qualified to unfuck the grand strategy of Falcrest’s containment. Eyotana Six-Souls was declared War Admiral, and she immediately broke up their armadas into separate swarms to blockade Falcrest’s ports. This would allow Falcrest to win battles by concentrating its forces, but the destruction would be limited to a few places, and a blockade would show Falcrest how hugely outnumbered they really were. Why strike the Falcresti like a big angry fist, if they could be driven off by a bee sting?

  Of course, the Lonjaro Princes insisted, they would keep a fist ready, just in case. An army would march up the coast, counterclockwise round the curve of the Ashen Sea, up through Invijay lands to the great Tide Column. Across the Column lay Falcrest’s Butterveldt, where the army would eat everything, steal the herds, and generally force the enemy to reckon the sheer size of the Mbo’s forces. Battle itself would be unnecessary, although a few sporting engagements might be arranged against Falcrest’s militias: fought to the break, not the slaughter.

  This was how Lonjaro preferred to fight. Smother the enemy in games of mercy and demonstrations of might. Eat their crops and buy away their friends. Leave their bones unbroken for the handshake and the peace.

  Six hundred years ago the Tu Maia had ridden south into Oriati Mbo with warhorses and a will to conquer. All that majestic fury, all the hot blood of the Emperors and the Empresses who carried the legacy of Shiqu Si, had availed them nothing. They had stumbled on the hard earth and crawled into the arms of the Oriati begging for water and salt. They’d made good husbands, good wives, and that was all that remained of them now: except for the Invijay, who were, in the opinion of most, less than bandits.

  What would little Falcrest, a small nation of mad kings and nebbish bureaucrats, manage against the mbo? The mbo was soft like quicksand. You couldn’t cut it apart or put your foot through it. It would just flow around you.

  Only Mother Tahr seemed concerned.

  * * *

  CHANGE grew up like kudzu vine and it took over the hill.

  Mother Tahr spent more time writing and more time in Jaro and much less time on matters of trim and taboo. Tau took command of the house compound, lest it fall into disarray and argument.

  In Lonjaro’s stories, the Segu-woman, once awakened to sex, always seemed to become a notorious rake and heartbreaker. But Kindalana, apparently satisfied to scratch her adolescent itches on Abdu, instead drew into a sort of hermitage. Her house attracted a constant stream of historians, griots, book-readers, rhetors, merchant captains, navigators, critics, adventurers, radians, guides, and even cooks of F
alcrest’s odd cuisine. Every night Kindalana hosted an occasion and every day the house staff ran about in exhaustion cleaning up and soothing the bees and arranging raspberries and cheeses for the night to come.

  Tau-indi really wanted to be invited. But Kindalana did not seem to think of them.

  Abdumasi decided to sell his caraval cats to the gamblers in Jaro. On the ferry across the lake the caravals mewed and protested the waves and rubbed their cheeks all over everyone’s ankles. Tau-indi almost cried. Abdumasi certainly did.

  “I put a deposit down with some of the griots,” Abdumasi said, while they walked together through the bazaar. Bosoka sentries in gold paint parted the crowd for them. “I hired a satirist, a gossip, an epic, and a comic. They’re going to come down to Prince Hill every month and tell us about the war.”

  “You sold your cats for that?”

  “Do you think it’s not important? To know what’s happening?”

  “No, of course it’s important. But we could have paid the griots with Mother Tahr’s stories about Falcrest.”

  “Well, I don’t have your mother’s stories, do I?” Abdumasi scowled and looked at something behind him. When he thought Tau-indi couldn’t see his face he said, lightly, “You’re in a mood lately.”

  Tau-indi, thick-tongued, pretended not to hear him. Kindalana wasn’t there, and yet it felt like Kindalana was walking between them.

  “Do you think it’s a good mix?” Abdumasi said hopefully.

  “Eh?”

  “A satirist, a gossip, an epic, and a comic. Do you think they’ll help us understand the war?”

  “How should I know?” Tau-indi snapped. “How should I know anything about that?”

  “You don’t have to know.” Abdumasi, much taller, didn’t have to work to catch up. “I just want you to say you approve.”

  He was trying his best to be soothing. Soothing! Just one more thing Abdumasi did better. Fah. Abdumasi deserved no credit for it. Anyone could be magnanimous if they had a secret advantage, if they knew that they could hurt without being hurt in turn. Why wouldn’t Abdumasi admit he was sleeping with Kindalana? Because he knew that it would make Tau lonely. Because poor little Tau wasn’t old enough to have lovers.