Baru knelt to be closer. “What do you know about Farrier?”
“I know that he was once a good man,” Tau-indi said, still shivering, “and that he now seeks a single treasure in his wars and expeditions—”
“A secret that will turn you against each other in civil war.”
“Yes.” A little clever gleam in Tau’s eyes. “You are his agent, as was rumored.”
“I pretend to be,” Baru said, with every scrap of belief she could scrounge. “And Tain Shir?”
“Tain Shir led his atrocities. The Invijay were not all warlike, before she led one of their nations to victory over the others. The Invijay horsefighters called her ahuihane, the Bane of Wives, because she would take husbands as her prizes. On their jungle patrols the Jackal soldiers were so afraid of her that they would whisper,” Tau swallowed, and went on, bravely but with profound fear, “a ut li-hen, a ut li-hen, ayamma, ayamma.…”
Baru knew the Invijay, distantly: Tain Hu spoke of them with contempt. Distant Tu Maia cousins from failed invasions of Oriati Mbo, diminished into nomadic tribes. But she didn’t know those words, a ut li-hen, ayamma.…
“It means,” Tau-indi husked, “it grows in her, the cancer grows. The Jackals were afraid that she had the old power.”
Baru hesitated, caught between the desire to ask—do you mean the Cancrioth?—and Execarne’s warning. She didn’t believe Tau would lie about such things. But then again, Tain Hu probably hadn’t believed Baru would lie about the freedom of her nation.…
She tried a little quip. “Shall I befriend her, then? As you befriended me?”
“No.” Tau-indi turned away, quickly, too quickly for their wound; she saw them crease up around the pain of the glass-cut down their back. “She cannot be reached. Death would be a mercy for her. Murder would be justified. Ayamma. The cancer grows.”
“You’re hurt, Your Highness.”
“You cannot help that,” Tau said, with terrible dignity. And they left in a rush of bright khanga, without saying good-bye.
Yawa picked her delicate way across coils of rope and canvas to Baru. “You should be careful,” she said, “consorting with royalty like that.”
“You seem to like Heingyl Ri well enough,” Baru said.
“She is aristocracy, and a virtuous young woman besides.”
“Do you think the Cancrioth’s just a Morrow Ministry mirage?”
“No,” Yawa said, instantly. “No, Hesychast’s shown me things … they’re real.”
“I think Tau just told me how to find them.”
“Did they,” Yawa said, with sudden interest.
“I think Tain Shir met the Cancrioth.”
Yawa hissed and pulled Baru into the shadow of a canvas tarp. “What did you say?”
“Tau just told me that Shir led an expedition into the deep jungle. In search of the ‘old science.’ Apparitor said the same thing. That she never came back.”
“That’s not possible.” Yawa jerked her chin upward, a classical Maia no, or, wait, Baru remembered now, it was not no but refusal of an inferior’s request: a very succinct get out of here. “I know she went into the jungle, but what drove Tain Shir mad wasn’t any cancer.”
“She calls you Auntie,” Baru said, unthinkingly: her mind was on that dim gallery under Moem, where Tain Shir had promised to follow her forever, and ever, and ever. Oh gods. What if Shir was actually immortal? What if she had what Hesychast sought?
Yawa recoiled. Too late Baru realized what she’d implied.
“Little girl,” Yawa purred, “I’ve had enough of your threats. First my brother, now my niece?”
“That’s not what I meant—”
“Isn’t it? Didn’t you just imply that my niece could be taken to Falcrest as proof of the Cancrioth? Didn’t you suggest that I might be tarred by that association?”
“I didn’t mean to imply that—”
“How cruel of you, Baru. Do you think this is what Tain Hu wanted of you?”
“You don’t know a damn thing about what she wanted—”
“I didn’t know her? My dear, I half raised her!”
“That didn’t stop you from betraying her to Falcrest—”
“Nor you.”
“At least I tried to save her!”
“Very successfully, I see.”
“Fuck you. She came back for me.”
“And my brother followed her!”
In the sudden silence beneath the wind-whipped canvas, Baru realized that of course Yawa was right. Baru had ensnared them both for Falcrest.
“I think we should be plain with each other,” Yawa said. Baru could see her vicious smile only in the tightness around her eyes. “I know you’re working to steal Aurdwynn from me. I know you’re the one who killed the Priestess in the Lamplight, so you could secure her ledger of secrets. Now you’ve sent your agents to pry the North away from Heingyl Ri. You want the trade money, yes? Or is it the Stakhi you’re after? Is that it? You think you can conspire with their King? Is that your dream, little Baru, to be the next Shiqu Si?”
Baru’s suspicions clicked together like teeth.
“You stole the Priestess’s ledger! Not Iraji, you did it, you—you common cutpurse! Give it back, or I’ll—”
But she could not make herself threaten Yawa’s brother again.
“This is the last time I’ll warn you.” Yawa summoned the ice and finality of the Judge passing her verdict. “Stay away from Aurdwynn. I spent my whole life gaining power over my home. I will not now surrender it to an islander whelp with delusions of empire.”
A STORY ABOUT ASH 3
FEDERATION YEAR 911:
24 YEARS EARLIER
SOMETHING had to be done about the tumor growing in Tau-indi’s soul. Something had to kill the botfly-friendship curled up in their heart.
Tau-indi respected Abdumasi and Kindalana’s choice to be together. Oh, did they respect it! And yet Tau-indi hid in empty rooms and plucked unripe fruit and cried sometimes, wishing that they had the courage to say, listen my friends, I don’t mind, I’d be glad to know, so why do you have to make it a secret between yourselves?
Why do you have to keep yourselves from me?
One day Mother Tahr made time to go for a walk with Tau-indi. Laman and mother went away from the lake, down the rock gardens on the south slope. Jewel-eyed krakenflies hovered and darted across the streams, hunting tiny nymphs in the water, hunted in turn by frogs and bats. Tahr pushed Tau-indi to name a few of them, but Tau-indi was in no mood for that child game.
“You’re not happy,” Tahr said, gently.
Tau-indi was silent.
“Is something wrong with Kinda and Abdu?”
Tau-indi had worn calf-wrapped thong sandals and a sharp sari. They felt quite silly and overdressed, walking alongside their mother in her gardening gloves and old khanga wrapped up around her thighs, but they had wanted to seem grown-up. It would be impossibly embarrassing to cry in tall sandals and a nice sari.
“There are much bigger things to worry about,” Tau-indi said, voice cracking horribly, “than my friends Her Highness and Abdumasi Abd. Don’t you think, Mother?”
Tahr touched their chin. Her voice was hard enough to make Tau-indi hurt but it was a good hurt, a respectful kind of hard, she was only giving them the respect they had asked. “You want to be brave? You want to pretend you’re okay?”
“We are mbo people,” Tau-indi said, spitting all the words with stubborn bravery, “bound together. I’m okay as long as I have my friends.”
“Oh, lama, you say that like it hurts.”
“How can I ask anyone to help me when I can’t help anyone?” That was the trap of trim, wasn’t it? What if you felt awful, awful, and yet you were unable to ask for help, because you could give nothing in return?
Tahr stopped and made Tau-indi look at her. “You learn principles well,” she said, her hands touching Tau-indi’s throat, their cheeks. “Okay, brave lama, here’s my advice. Trim doesn’t work
like that. The whole reason we have trim is so the helpless can cry out for help, knowing that others are glad to give without return.
“But I can’t be the one to help you right now. I am fighting a war of letters, trying to convince the Princes of the Mbo to understand the true danger of Falcrest, and I’m losing. You are all alone. Hush, hush, don’t cry, we all have to figure out how to be alone before we can be good for anything else. No one can help you? Then figure out what you have, what you have that nobody else has, and pick it up, and use it.”
Tau-indi couldn’t keep the bitterness out of their voice. It felt like they had bitter anger in their blood, in their loins, changing their body and the shape of their thoughts. “What is that thing I have, Mother? The thing that will make me useful to others? Kindalana is smarter than me, and Abdumasi more practical.”
“You want me to tell you?”
“No,” Tau-indi said, thinking. “No, I have an idea.”
* * *
THEY called the household together and asked to be told everything that anyone knew about their hostages from Falcrest, Cosgrad Torrinde and Cairdine Farrier.
Cosgrad Torrinde lived in a room in the sentry house, where he kept curious habits. He ate grapefruit constantly and started like a child at the sight of insects. He was terrified of compost and nudity. He was very beautiful, everyone agreed, although because his skin was paler than even a Segu man, the slim contrast between his eyes and his skin made him seem ill. He dwelled on ancient medical texts and asked after griots who had witnessed works of surgery. Many attested (with glee) that he had a comically, foolishly huge cock, which he naturally hid out of shame.
As for Cairdine Farrier, they had never met a man so eager to be elsewhere. Not that he hated his guesthouse (he stayed with Padrigan and Kindalana), far from it; rather he was constantly eager to be at the next place, to meet the new people, to think the new thought. When he wasn’t skittering around Lake Jaro on his kayak, which he had built himself, using techniques “taught to him by the Bastè Ana,” he was holding court among the housekeepers or working in the fields, where he tugged weeds energetically and listened in fascination to the most ordinary things.
Cosgrad was, it was felt, the cleverer and quicker of the two, but Farrier was more likable, and he had the art of laughing at Cosgrad, which made Cosgrad sputter and clench his fists.
Gossip suggested that the two remained implacably at odds.
Tau-indi decided to seek their special purpose in the hostages. If they could be made happy, that happiness would return to Tau.
So they dressed carefully and painted on the gold paint and green stars of their station from breast to nose. When honeycomb and raspberry water was arranged they sent sentries out to request a palaver between Their Highness Tau-indi Bosoka, Federal Prince, and the two Falcresti hostages.
Cosgrad Torrinde arrived first and threw himself prostrate across the packed earth floor. “Your Federal Highness! I am humbled, humbled.” He was so young! He’d said he was turning twenty-three, but that he didn’t want to celebrate his birthday, because to celebrate the fact of a birth was royalist.
“Please,” Tau-indi said, talking from their stomach, trying desperately to keep their voice from cracking. “Stand. Why would you bow before us? Don’t you hate royalty in Falcrest?”
“Oh! I don’t bow? I wasn’t sure, I thought I might, it’s how we met Princes in the books about old Falcrest, which I always loved.” He leapt to his feet and put out his left hand, then, blanching, his right, trying not to grin but grinning anyway. “I’m so happy to speak to you, Your Highness. I feel that I have everything to learn.”
Tau-indi felt a little warmth, deep down in their gut, for this poor man. All his time on Prince Hill he’d been questioned and interviewed and plied for stories of the far northeast—but what had he been allowed to do for anyone else?
His trim must be in a terrible snarl.
Tau took the man’s hand and smiled through his incredible grip. Oh, he was strong. “We are here to ask you to be our tutor.”
“Oh, no no, there’s been a mistake.” Cosgrad pumped Tau-indi’s hand twice, up and down. “Didn’t Miss Bosoka tell you? I’m the one who needs a tutor, I need a guide, I’m the one who should be at your door asking for your help!”
Tau-indi smiled generously at the Falcresti man. He had a strange face, didn’t he? His pale skin made him seem as if he’d been emptied out, or never filled: awaiting the breath of life, the gust of storm wind out of the east.
“The first thing you should understand about us,” they said, “is that we are mbo people, bound together, and that we are always happiest when helping someone else get what they want.”
Cairdine Farrier arrived a few minutes later. He begged Tau’s forgiveness, for he’d thought there was a directional taboo today, and he’d taken a long route around the lake. “I’m surprised you care,” Tau said, quite struck by Farrier’s conscientiousness. “The calendar taboos have been rather sliding out of practice these past years.”
“I want to learn everything about you,” Farrier panted, “and be as good at it as you are! Can’t slip up now.”
“Hello, Farrier,” Cosgrad said, warily.
“Cosgrad,” Farrier clapped him on the shoulder. “Have you started talking about squid yet? This man can’t go a week without bringing up squid.”
Cosgrad blinked three or four times. Tau couldn’t tell if he was trying to control himself, or steel himself to fight back. “Tau would like you to be their tutor,” he said. “How would you like that, Farrier?”
And he fixed Farrier with a look of such challenge and conviction, such utter doubt in the man’s good faith, that Tau was instantly fascinated. What did this mean? What did Cosgrad think Farrier would do, or fail to do?
Farrier sighed. “I’m sorry, Tau. Kindalana’s already asked me to tutor her, and I simply felt it wouldn’t be seemly. If I refused her, then accepted you, how would it look?”
“Why?” Tau asked, utterly bemused. “How could it be unseemly to tutor someone?”
Farrier looked at Cosgrad. His smile was, for the first time, fake. “Some people,” he said, “believe that men have impulsive flesh, and that this flesh responds to signals emitted by women. Particularly women in their earliest fertility. I am twenty-two, and Kindalana is nineteen. We’re both … highly charged. In some people’s eyes it’s already too much that I stay in her home.”
This seemed so immediately ridiculous to Tau-indi that they had to mind their manners and not laugh. Sexual attraction was simply a by-product of the need to exchange joys: like any powerful principle it could be deranged and made terrible, but it had nothing to do with flesh and signals! Even if, dwelling upon it, Kindalana did have a sort of magical effect on Tau lately.
“Farrier was quite the womanizer in school,” Cosgrad said, with no trace of jealousy or bitterness, an absence so marked that it was like an eclipse; you can see that something is in the way, concealing the truth. “With no one else around to keep an eye on him, I’ve got to be sure he doesn’t misbehave.”
Farrier winked at Tau. “If only he knew, Tau, that my students are the women I don’t pursue. One has to have principles, eh?”
Tau-indi wanted to ask Kindalana about all this, but the idea of bringing up sex meant they would have to ask Kindalana why she and Abdumasi were being so secretive, and that secret made Tau sick with rage.
* * *
NOW Tau-indi, too, went to war. It was a war against their friends.
In the morning and the evening they helped Cosgrad Torrinde catalog insects and plants, telling him about the ratoon rice that had once grown on the monsoon-plains south, and about the new development that had raised the farmers up to better crops. He was monstrously curious about everything—and Tau-indi did not use the word monstrous idly, because he was also stupidly rude. A field hand came up the hill with a machete wound, rotted and swollen, and Cosgrad insisted furiously that they had to wash it out with boiled
water and put maggots in the wound—maggots! As if he’d never heard of botfly or nagana! Insects could never, ever be allowed to grow in anyone’s flesh.
“What does that mean?” Cosgrad struggled with the phrase Tau had just pronounced. “That didn’t sound like Seti-Caho, the words you just said.”
“A ut li-en?” Tau-indi shivered. “Yes, it means to grow in us, in the old tongue the Cancrioth used. We use those words when we speak of taboo parasites like botfly.”
“The Cancrioth, yes, that’s what I thought. Who were they?” Cosgrad hovered with his incredibly smooth paper and his charcoal pencil. “In Falcrest, see, there are legends of the Cancrioth—legends and, of course, rag-paper novels. We think of them as raiders, highly degenerate, bred to survive in tropical climes by a partial regression to the animal template.…”
“Degenerate, no.” Oh, the griots had always been so oblique about this topic! It was hard to teach, for fear of tearing a little hole in the mbo with the words, and letting in old power. “The Cancrioth were councilors and philosophers who ruled the continent of Oria before the Mbo. They gathered in Mzilimake, in the southern lands beyond the veldt, where the fish in the water glow with inner light, to study the heat that boils up in the uranium land.”
Cosgrad’s pencil whirred and jagged. He broke it and threw it aside and snatched another from his breast. “Yes, yes … why did they gather there?”
“They wanted to find immortality, down in the hot places where the uranium seeps in pitch. The heat of the hot lands never dwindles: an invisible fire burns in the caves below, and fills the rivers with light. Because the heat never dwindles, it must be immortal. And—ah, Cosgrad, this is hard.”
“Courage, Prince! Courage!”
“The Cancrioth said,” Tau-indi vomited up in a rush, “that the water coming out of the uranium mountains had a special charge, and if prepared and applied properly, that charge could induce cancer, which was a higher form of vitality: for does not cancer grow in living flesh, and displace that flesh? Is it not more energetic and prosperous?
The Monster Baru Cormorant Page 41
