The Monster Baru Cormorant

by Seth Dickinson

  Poor little Tau.

  Tau-indi stalked along, rubbing the broken bones, that’s what Tahr always said, carrying on while upset was just like walking on a broken bone.

  “When will the griots come?” they made themself say. “I want to listen.”

  “That’s good. You Princes, you’ve got to listen to us merchants, we’re the ones who are really in touch with the world!” Abdumasi grinned his big buy-my-cats grin, everyone’s funny friend. Tau-indi hated him with a sick, self-loathing totality. “We have to keep you in touch, or you might not realize what’s going on!”

  “No,” Tau-indi said, pouncing oh so sweetly, thinking of Abdumasi and Kindalana on the rock. “We might not realize what’s going on at all.”

  * * *

  THE griots came up Prince Hill to tell them about the war. They all gathered in the garden of House Abd to eat and drink and listen.

  The epic stood up and recited all the great names of the captains, the Segu navigators Kolosan ayaSegu and Eyotana Six-Souls, Cho-oh Long Oar and the Man with the Rudder Thumb, and Lonjaro’s champions too, the sons and daughters of house Mbunu who had sailed so far north they could breathe smoke, Nyoba Dbellu who had salt crystals in her earlobes. Thrill at the names, O listeners, thrill at these thinkers of sharp thoughts!

  Next was the gossip griot, who wandered from family to family whispering about the dalliances of both the champions and the enemy. He had a warm old smile, big as the calendar on the first day of the new year, and after he talked about Cho-oh Short Cock and who exactly might be breathing smoke into who, he reminded them all that they had nothing to fear from war. A war could be fought between champions on the clean sea. Neither the Mbo nor Falcrest need suffer.

  Kindalana stood behind her father with her arms across the shoulders of two of her clerk friends and grinned in delight. Tau-indi felt a spiteful need to make her sad, to beg her pity.

  Instead they sidled up to the Farrier man, who was stroking his beard and listening intently. “Your Excellence Farrier,” they murmured, with an overt politeness, “does it trouble you to hear our griots discussing your defeat?”

  Farrier knelt with them. He had a charmingly self-satisfied face, like a clever raccoon. “No,” he said, “it doesn’t bother me, or, rather, it fascinates me to see the war from your perspective. Do I kiss you on the cheek? Is that the right thing?”

  “If you like!” Tau said, pleasantly surprised. The Falcresti had both been very standoffish. “Or kiss the air beside the cheek, like this—”

  Farrier tried this, and accidentally made a childish poot with his lips. Tau laughed. Farrier wiggled his eyebrows and sat back, beaming at the firelit gathering. “I’m so happy to be here,” he said.

  “Why are you happy?” Tau couldn’t imagine being so far from home and family.

  “Because,” Farrier said, “Oriati Mbo has stood for a thousand years, and no matter what my people say, I think we have things to learn from you.”

  Tau-indi felt a sudden warmth toward him. “I’m sure the converse is true, as well! What do you think you might learn?”

  Farrier’s eyes sat deep in their sockets, as thoughtful as they were guarded. But they seemed to open and allow Tau inside. “Young lama,” he said, “I want to know how to make a civilization last a thousand years. And since you do not have eugenics, I know the answer cannot lie there—”

  They were interrupted by the satirist, who reeled out into the center of the circle on unsteady toppling stilts. They shaded their eyes, a young laman with white ash around their mouth, and looked around.

  “Behold!” they said. “Behold the people on Prince Hill, chosen to rule! We voted your families to give birth to our lords, and we are very satisfied with those young lords, oh, what else would we be? We are a satisfied people, the Oriati, a smug people, we do everything best. Don’t we?”

  There was a hesitant cheer. Hooray? We are the best?

  The satirist rose up nobly, their chin to the sky. “It is best to raise our Princes on a high hill away from the city, away from the fields and the grasslands where our people do their labor. Far away from the sickness and the filth of the cities, where we have invented new ways to debase and ruin ourselves. Up here our Princes can concern themselves only with trim and taboos! Up here our Princes can play games of principle instead of working in the fields and the filth! Today the taboo is against going uphill too quickly! That is the most important thing!”

  The crowd murmured. Abdumasi put a worried hand to his mouth. Kindalana frowned in thought. Farrier made a note in his book.

  The satirist took a huge stilted step, struggling to mount an invisible slope, and almost fell on their face. “My trim!” they howled. “Oh, my trim! Oh Princes, aid me, aid me! I do not have malaria or any rent to pay! I have good water and I am free of bandits and ugly spouses with rotting teeth! But my trim is wounded, for if it were not I would grow bored, and pick fights with little cities far away! Help me avoid boredom, oh Princes!”

  The crowd began to revolt. “This isn’t satire!” an Abd housekeep yelled. “You’re just saying horrible things!”

  Kindalana had pulled her clerk-friends closer, and she was muttering to them with an expression of deep thought. Tau-indi wished they’d brought some clerk friends to hold close, too. Maybe three clerk friends, instead of two.

  Why did they feel this way? Why had their own mood had been hooked to Kindalana and Abdumasi, like a plow dragged behind a horse, splitting the earth to wet soil and worms?

  They saw Kindalana’s father, Padrigan, looking at Tau’s mother, Tahr, with nervous longing, admiring the green star on her throat and the snake of jewelry that curved across her bare stomach.

  But Tahr was looking upward, pensively, at the sky.

  She had been to Falcrest.

  “I sense a certain barrier of class,” Farrier said, and took another note.

  14

  IS THE OATH KEPT?

  SHE woke in the captain’s suite of her new flophouse, alone, angry, still tangled in a dream about money.

  She had been a child. She was showing Cairdine Farrier her butterfly collection, her killing jar. She had a gorgeous monarch in the jar, and it was beating its wings of paper money against the glass as it died.

  “Look, da,” she said, “I’ve caught money.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” her mother said, giving Baru’s head an affectionate scrub with her knuckles. “If you keep money in a jar, it’s just a piece of paper. It’s worthless without the people who value it. You cannot capture money. It lives only as it moves.”

  “That’s right,” Farrier said, giving her mother a kiss on the cheek. “Remind you of anything?”

  It did. It reminded Baru of the Llosydanes. How could you treat a culture as separate from its connections? How could you draw a circle around it and say, “This, this is the culture, and so it will remain?” A culture wasn’t a final product, like a cup of coffee in alabaster, or a sordid climax in an execution alley. People didn’t have culture, they did culture. In fact, culture was like a mill: it accepted knowledge and people, and it changed them in certain ways, and it even redesigned itself in the process. Change was intrinsic to culture.

  How could you draw a preserve around the Llosydanes and say, “They shall not be altered,” if intercourse and dialogue between cultures was culture?

  And if that were true—

  Then what right did Baru have to “save” Taranoke?

  How could she pretend that the culture of her childhood was the right one, the one that had to be preserved, rather than the culture of a hundred years before or a hundred years after? How could she deny the arrival of Incrasticism, when her own people were the descendants of Maia arrivals on distant shores?

  Cairdine Farrier had called Falcrest’s ascendancy as inevitable as the rising tide.

  How could Baru fight the tide?

  She rose up from her appallingly soft covers, stretched, growled, looked out the window, and saw her cousin
Lao standing in the sooty, fire-touched square outside.

  Baru gaped in shock. Could it be Lao? What obscene unlikeliness would put her on the Llosydanes? But the woman did have Maia skin, and those rapturously long full legs, and strong swimmer’s shoulders that Lao might have trained into, if she decided to bulk up. She wore a diver’s costume, a tightly knotted strophium, a breechcloth, an ankle knife. As divers in Aurdwynn did, she’d even shaved herself seal-smooth from head to toe except for a cap of black hair.

  Baru dashed the cup of freshwater over her face, tied herself up, and wiggled back into her trousers. Someone rapped at her door. “What!” Baru called.

  “Secretary of the Trade! Open up!”

  Oh fuck. Baru shrugged into her jacket, snapped up her purse, and shouted, “Uh, what about?”

  “We want to ask you some questions about yesterday’s events in the currency trade!”

  “Right. Just a moment, I’ve got to wake up my whores!”

  There was a murmur at the door. “Would you let them go in peace, please?” Baru shouted. “Just step away a minute so they can have their dignity?”

  While the Secretary of the Trade waited, she got out the window, spider-climbed down the loose mortar and stone, and dropped to the flagstones. “Lao!” she called, almost laughing. “Lao, over here!”

  Lao stood there watching her quietly. Baru would’ve expected more surprise. With a thrill of unease Baru fetched up on her toes, staring, trying to remember—

  It wasn’t Lao.

  Before the massacre at Haraerod, Baru had called a priestess to her tent. She had to confess something and so she called for someone to listen. Everything I’ve done. For Taranoke. But I’ve come too far …

  The woman had been a diver, and a midwife, and she’d sat with her long legs beneath her while Baru thought how much she looked like cousin Lao.

  Her name was Ulyu Xe. The ilykari priestess of Wydd who Tain Hu had teasingly implied might be Baru’s lover. She had soothing eyes, and a summer-ice calm. She might be in her thirties.

  So she had gone with the rest of the rebellion to Sieroch. So she had been captured with Tain Hu’s other companions and dispatched to the Llosydanes for interrogation.

  But she was not under interrogation. She was here, and she was wearing a knife, and she had every reason to murder Baru on the spot, a killing which Yawa could deny any part in.

  “Oh shit,” Baru said, and would’ve run—

  —except that the woman who wasn’t her cousin fell gracefully to her knees, prostrated herself, and said, in Aphalone as wonderfully accented as Tain Hu’s, “Your Majesty. I am your sworn companion.”

  * * *

  “LET me understand,” Baru said. “Yawa found you yesterday.”

  “Yes. And we refused to speak with her.”

  “And you were at this Morrow Ministry station. But the station chief, he just lets you run around like chickens? He lets you try to buy passage off the islands? That’s the stupidest interrogation protocol I’ve ever heard.”

  “Is it?”

  Baru shook her finger at Ulyu Xe, very nearly prodding the other woman in the throat. “Stop that. Stop that Wyddish ‘everything’s a question’ horseshit, I can’t stand it.”

  Xe smiled and drank her beer. Behind her a Maia journeywoman sawed away at her gut fiddle and sang of green-gold Aurdwynn and its lonely lads. This was a tavern called the Floating Island, full of Aurdwynni expatriots, and they called out to Ulyu Xe her in the homeland accent, ulYou shee, not the mangled Aphalone Ullyu zee.

  Baru tried, again, to prod at the bruise. “You’re not horrified I’m here?”

  Xe set her cork mug down. Dark still eyes and pads of fat over swimmer’s muscle. Like a long sleek otter. Of late, Baru’s luck had been exceptional in this one respect: from Iscend Comprine’s choreographed grace to Shao Lune’s viperscale composure and now Ulyu Xe, she had met some fearsomely striking women. More than any attraction, though, Baru felt a stupid cowish tenderness toward Xe. She wanted to make everything all right for the priestess.

  “I just can’t believe—” Baru waved in frustration at several abstract concepts, including loyalty, hope, and vendetta, her wave accidentally getting the bartender’s attention, which she had to dismiss with an apologetic shrug. “I can’t believe you’re calling me Majesty.”

  “You were acclaimed queen. On the Henge Hill after the battle. It was made known to us.”

  “But then I … what I did to your people…” Baru shook her open hands before Xe: here, do you see what I have done? “What I did to you, I mean, you left your great-family to fight with us. And I betrayed you.”

  “You remember,” Xe said, without gratitude, but with satisfaction, as if fitting a missing piece into a puzzle.

  “Yes, I remember—I remember you told me that you’d been a diver, and a midwife, and that your great-family had spared you to come fight for me. You told me your story. And I lied to you.”

  “You told me the truth.”

  “How?” Baru hissed. “How did I—”

  “You told me that everything you did was for Taranoke. I didn’t understand then. But I do now.” Ulyu Xe looked at her and Baru saw in her a power like a river, the power to wait and course and watch, certain that in good time she would find the proper course, full of all that she required.

  She said, “Tain Hu told us what you’d done.”

  Baru drank deeply. The fucking beer was too weak. She wanted Svir’s vodka. “And what had I done?”

  “You wanted a post in Falcrest. You sold us to buy power to help your own home. The bargain would have destroyed you. You would have done Falcrest’s work, and died alone.” Xe’s legs trembled beneath the table. She had been at her morning swim before she came to Baru’s hotel. “My lady the duchess was determined to go back to save you.”

  “From the Throne?”

  “From yourself.”

  Damn you, Hu. Damn your maps of me, and damn their accuracy. Baru drank the rest of the tepid piss-water and then, unsatisfied, traded her empty mug for Xe’s. “Why were you traveling in her company?”

  “You exiled her at Sieroch. You sent her away.”

  “I wanted to save her,” Baru rasped.

  “At first she thought you’d decided to marry the Necessary King. She wanted me to come along and teach her Wydd’s acceptance.”

  “What did you want?”

  “I like traveling with her.”

  “You were friends?”

  “Occasionally lovers,” Xe said, as if this were a slightly less serious commitment than friendship, and then she smiled. “She was a good woman. Impossible to teach. A very good woman.”

  “She’s dead,” Baru croaked.

  “I know.”

  “How?”

  “She told me that if you ever cared for her, you’d kill her. And if you didn’t kill her, she’d die before she let herself be taken to Falcrest for reconditioning.”

  “Yes,” Baru said, now trembling too, and not with exhaustion, “yes, she was right. She convinced me what I had to do. She was magnificent.”

  But the pure awe of Hu’s death was tainted now. The call of the frigate birds over the drowning-stone rang false with laughter, Farrier’s laughter, his venom was in this story now. Falcrest is saved! He had celebrated Tain Hu’s death and somehow by doing it he had slithered back into her and seized her choice and made it his own.

  Baru couldn’t talk about this anymore. She threw a coin at a small and heavily defaced statuette of the late Hasran Cattlson.

  “What happened when Yawa found you?”

  * * *

  OUT west and down south, past the bridges that bound the twelve civilized islets together, there stood a tall tower islet called Moem, too stony for agriculture, covered in scrubgrass and wildflowers. But an old Falcresti man named Faham Execarne had set up a little farmhouse there.

  Execarne was the Morrow Ministry’s station chief on the Llosydanes.

  He had simple rules
for prisoners. If he didn’t make regular signals that he was well, all his guests would be killed. Other than that they had their freedom. They might row over to one of the other islets and work a trade. They might try to hire a ship off the Llosydanes. Of course they’d have no papers, so no legitimate trader would take them on, and even smugglers would hesitate—the navy paid very well for the names of captains who transported fugitives.

  He would prefer if his guests stayed with him, helped him keep his chickens and work his fields. He cooked a mean fishsteak. He could put a little weed in their pipe and a little leaf in their cheek. And if his new field hands decided to talk a little about their past as insurrectionists, that was their business, in their own time.

  “It’s a pleasant life,” Xe said, equitably, “and some of us want to stay. Although I miss my daughter.”

  Baru, of course, stumbled obliviously past this invitation to ask after Xe’s family. “Do the Oriati spies ever trouble him?”

  “No, no. I believe Execarne’s good friends with their spymaster here.” She fell into a gravelly imitation: “‘A collegial exchange of information helps keep the peace.’”

  Fingers clasped in Baru’s mind. A Falcresti man had asked the harbormaster to cover up traces of Oriati warships. Could that be Faham Execarne? Cooperating with the Oriati to prevent a greater war?

  “You haven’t asked who else was taken,” Xe said.

  Little minnows thrashed and nipped in Baru’s stomach. She very badly didn’t want to know: for the other prisoners would be Tain Hu’s dearest, and all of them would mourn the duchess, and in a fiercely stupid selfish way Baru wanted that all to herself.

  “Do they want me to know their names?” she said.

  “Of course we want you to know. We all swore an oath. All the Vultjagata.”

  Vultjagata. Stakhi for fighters of Vultjag. “What oath?” Baru whispered.

  “We kissed Tain Hu’s sword,” Xe said, “and we promised her that we would serve you in your work. If you kept her faith.”