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 chimes, 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 small-beer, 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.”
FIRST, a quick stop at the post. She bought a clipper-rate seal, rolled up her letter to Purity Cartone, and left it for the next mail ship to Treatymont. Her letter to Aminata went in for routing through the navy.
So that was that. Despite her fear for Apparitor’s personal anguish, she had promised him to the Necessary King. She was too busy to feel anything of it.
“We’re going to the harbormaster,” she told Hu. “It’s the Cancrioth money we want, isn’t it? So first we find if anyone supplied those Oriati warships. Then we find out who.”
A paper ticket got her an appointment, and a competitively priced bribe put her on the priority list. Her bravos played grids over a rudder table and whispered about her.
“Miss Payo Mu?” The harbormaster, a compactly fat Belthyc woman of very handsome build and alert features, ushered her inside.
“Nice desk,” Baru said, meaning it. She’d hammered planks across half a wooden wheel, creating a sort of formidable half-moon balcony. She looked as if she sat at the helm of a great ship.
“Thank you. I do well at it. I understand you paid an urgency fee?”
“Yes, your Excellence.” Baru curtsied extravagantly. “I’m with the Ordainments, Imperial Republic shipping insurance and futures. I’ve been asked to reassess the risks of trade near Kyprananoke. As your islands are not so far north of the kypra, here I am.”
The harbormaster looked up sharply. “And you came to me? Not the Sydanemoot? Do you understand that any peril to the date trade means people starve?”
“I work from the bottom up, your Excellence. It’s the republican way. I only want to see your shipping records.”
“Why?”
“I’m looking for unusual transactions,” Baru said, “transfers of water, salted goods, medicines, anything which might supply a large group of warships.”
“Pirates. I see.” The harbormaster nodded very firmly. “We’d be happy to open our books to an authorized factor. I’ll just send a girl to check your papers against our records? Not to imply that you’re a fake, but an unscrupulous party might try to cause a panic. . . .”
“Yes. About that.” Baru winced theatrically. “If word of my presence got out . . .”
The quartermaster’s hand twitched. “Yes?”
“Don’t you think it might cause a run on the local currency?”
She made a face like Baru had gutted a rat on her desk. She very much thought it might cause a run on the local currency. And she knew that would doom her.
The exchange rate between the Sydani ring shell and the Falcresti fiat note was nearly eighty to one: you paid eighty ring shells for one fiat note. Fiat notes were scarce here, because as soon as they came into the islands, they went out again to buy food. Just like any other good, their value depended on their rarity.
If Baru actually were an insurance agent, she might decide the Llosydanes were dangerous. She might advise trade ships to stay away. Suddenly Masquerade fiat notes would be much more scarce here . . . and therefore more valuable. Four times as valuable, say. And suddenly you would need four times as much Sydani money to get a bushel of grain.
If you were a harbormaster who (say) bought Masquerade goods and sold them locally, you’d lose everything. You’d need to quadruple your sales price, and then no one would buy.
“Mam,” the harbormaster said, “I don’t think we’ll need to send a girl to check your papers after all.”
“Excellent.” Baru smiled innocently. “Should I give you privacy, so you can inform the necessaries?”
“Necessaries, mam?”
“The Oriati spies who’ve asked you to alert them if anyone comes probing in your books.”
“Oh, Wydd help me.” She flattened her palms firmly on the desk. “If I have diplomatic contacts, they’re entirely aboveboard and legitimate.”
But she gave Baru her books to inspect.
The book made a big dog’s bark when dropped on the wood. Two plates of bronze guarded pages of chiseled driftwood. Baru scanned the numbers, letting her savancy sift the money like a new vintage on her mind’s palate. She could taste honeyed relief when a trader arrived with rare textiles for a hungry market; brackish salt when rival ships unloaded preserved meats and the market raced to the bottom; an airy sense of peregrine speed as the end of trade season drove prices to extremes . . .
. . . and a bitter false note.
Baru frowned and flipped backward a few weeks, to the spring of AR 130, this very year, in the closing weeks of the Coyote rebellion. Her fingers probed the shipping figures for freshwater casks.
They were completely unremarkable.
They were fake.
“Just so you know.” She pushed the book over to the quartermaster. “You botched up the counterfeit records.”
The harbormaster groaned. “On what grounds do you—”
“The first digits of your water sales that month were randomly distributed. See? About as many numbers start with five, or nine, as one or two.” Baru prodded the page. “Real accounts always have more ones and twos on the first digit. It’s called the Littler Law. Remember it next time you need to forge a page.”
Someone here had sold a lot of water to a lot of ships. And it had been kept off the books.
The harbormaster looked as if she might withdraw her head into her neck and vanish under a shell. “It’s not what you think.”
“Oh? What do I think?”
“That I’m a traitor. But the man who told me to do this was Falcresti. He told me that I had to cover up the sales. He said the Llosydanes could be destroyed if I didn’t.”
Baru spun that around in her head, considering the angles, and decided on the most likely scenario. A Morrow Ministry agent had buried the evidence of the Oriati attack fleet to try to avert war? Sensible enough. Yawa might be speaking to him right now.
“Is there anything I can do to make this go away?” the harbormaster asked.
“Sure.” Baru leaned up grinning on her desk. “Some people are going to come ask you some questions. Tell them the truth. Tell them there might be no date season this year, on account of fear of pirates.”
The harbormaster raised her chin. “I won’t drive the Families to a panic.”
“Yes you will. One day of panic for me to profit from . . . and I promise I won’t ever report this to Falcrest. Let them think the season’s ruined, and I’ll see that it isn’t.” She dropped a ten thousand note bond on the desk. “I’ll sign that over to you tonight. If you’re good.”
She waved at the two spies in the plaza outside, went down to her bravos at the base of the steps—and found them both, two very fit and self-possessed women, nonetheless terribly besotted, laughing and making big eyes at one Miss Iscend Comprine, who was demonstrating gymnastics while chatting in fluent Iolynic.
“Yawa,” Baru hissed, and turned, and—
THERE you are.”
Xate Yawa’s voice sprang out of her blindness, close enough to brush noses. “Fuck,” Baru snapped. “Don’t do that!”
“Hello. I thought you might need a chaperone,” Yawa said. She had absolutely crept up to nose-distance of Baru just to frighten her. “The bank told me you’d gone to the post, the post to the harbormaster. I just had to ask for ‘the woman with the angry Maia face and the money.’”
She’d worn a canvas jacket and silk trousers, and her bright green scarf was so ghoulishly out of place that it looked like plunder off another woman’s corpse. “No!” Baru shouted. “I don’t need a chaperone!”
“Good, then, we’ll go together. Would you like to know how this island gets freshwater?”
“No . . .” But Baru really did.
“It’s all a matter of age,” Yawa said, taking her arm. “The years have chiseled the islands to a certain hardness.”
Baru groaned. “Oh, tell me more about the hardness of age.”
“Simple! The base of these pillars”—she pointed down, a thrilling reminder of their altitude—“must be the hardest and most impermeable stone, to resist the sea so long. That creates a cup against which freshwater aquifers can pool.” Yawa conjured a cup of her own from her pocket, a little cork travel thimble. “The old and hard supports the new and bountiful, hm? Together they survive.”
“You should be careful here. They might know who you are.”
“Of course they’ll know!” Yawa adjusted the bun of her hair. “Your dear grandmother, who resembles Xate Yawa by coincidence.”
“I have some work in motion here I need to look after—”
“Baru,” Yawa murmured, in a raw cold voice like city slush, “we should talk. You drink all day and lie awake in your hammock all night. You’re sick. You’re dying, in fact, and you don’t know it, because by the time you’re dead it will feel quite normal to be lifeless. And you talk to Apparitor like he’s your friend, when he’s poisoning you day by day.
“I tried to keep you out of all this. I failed. You are in it now. I won’t see you waste what my niece gave you. Will you listen, please?”
BARU did not want to listen. “Did you find the Morrow Ministry station?”
“Never mind that.”
“Did you steal my ledger?”
“Your ledger?”
“Never mind. There are two spies following me—”
“Oriati, I expect,” Yawa judged. “The Termites must have a post here. Keep an eye out for a tunk case officer.” She dropped the obscenity without apology or hesitation. The streets had brought out the commoner from behind the judge. “Through here, now, we’ll take the bridge back over to Samylle.”
They crossed the dizzying height across sand-roughened hardwood. Yawa clung to Baru and refused to look down. Around them passed crowds of women. The way they held hands made Baru reflexively nervous. It was a culture of public adoration and touch, not a sign of romance, but fear was fear.
In Samylle plaza an old fat man in handsomely drab costume played the role of Wydd, sitting patiently as children tickled and tugged on him. Merchants sold little scrimshawed idols of Wydd and Devena and Himu: Devena, a tall spare woman with flat breasts and her hands opened equitably; Himu, a delightful dancing grotesquerie with motherly hips and a jutting erection.
“Vile,” Yawa muttered, surprising Baru, her anger not Incrastic at all, “vile to sell likenesses of the virtues.”
“Why?”
“The virtues must come into you and live in you and express themselves through your works. Idols teach you to keep them outside. Idols mislead.”
“Unuxekome told me you were a believer,” Baru ventured, “but I didn’t know whether . . .”
“Whether I’d lied to him?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, child!” Yawa laughed sadly. “Do you think Falcrest would choose an unbeliever as their persecutor? When you want to slaughter the cattle, you spare one of them, and then you send her to the next herd to lead them. You don’t waste time putting a man in a cow suit. Come, come down here, see what a believer I am. I had to visit it.”
She led Baru down the road called Llallyrd (she said yee-a-yeerd) to a square at the edge of the islet.
Baru gasped in wonder.
A tremendous cylindrical device of tapering bronze stood upright, like a pillar, beneath a sailcloth awning. The central shaft had been fixed in place by six stone columns and an ingenious apparatus of rope and precious bronze. Yet it could not be a functioning telescope, for even if, by some miracle, mirrors of that size had been made, it was aimed straight down.
“What kind of telescope is it?” she asked Yawa.
“A spiritual one.”
“A spiritual telescope?”
“Of course. It peers into the world.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Come, come along, you balk like a baby goat.”
Yawa led the way down the ampitheater steps into the telescope’s pit. Directly beneath the apparatus was a pool of clear water—but no, no, that couldn’t be water, it didn’t seem to catch the light quite right.
Baru peered over the edge.
The well plunged into shimmering confusion. Far down below shone a blue-green light, like tide fire. But it came up to Baru through illuminated layers of color character, golden, greasy, soap-shine iridescent. “What is this?”
“An oil pit. The lens of the World Telescope.” Yawa tucked her feet beneath her on the bottom step. “Five years ago, in Duchy Lyxaxu, a dry pit was found in an ancient valley. I ordered it filled with concrete. Not the worst thing I ever did. But close.”
It smelled faintly but bitingly of alcohol. Open-mouthed she breathed the well air, until hints of deeper flavor gave her a theory. “Ah! The well’s full of different layers of chemistry. Alcohol water is the lightest, so it comes to the top. Next should be, ah, I can’t remember my densities. . . .”
“Lamp oil, I should think.”
“Yes! A vegetable extract next—”
“And freshwater at the bedrock base. The light from the bottom of the world comes up through the layers of oil, see, and becomes distorted by each layer—”
“But why would anyone want the light distorted?” Baru protested.
“Because this telescope observes messages from the heart of creation! One dares not see such things too clearly.”
“I’d dare,” Baru grumbled.
“Because you’re already quite insane.”
Baru stared at her wavering reflection. The tiny motions of the earth and air must stir this pool of layered oils. The very subtlest derangements of the universe, captured in the tremble of the surface. . . .
“I’m not insane,” she said, softly.
“Oh, come now,” Yawa clucked. “Let’s not bicker over the obvious. You have blunt-trauma dextral hemineglect with an alien limb and possible complicating fugue flight. If I were reviewing your marriage license I’d never let you bear children. Imagine them all born half-minded. Or half-bodied, goodness.”
She let that rest a moment. “And if I’d been asked to develop a case for your institutionalization in the Metademe, I would have no trouble writing a very convincing report.”
Nothing Baru could imagine would be worse than the Metademe. Conditioning and endless reconditioning, mush and children’s block puzzles, and the memory of brilliance pierced by a steel lobotomy pick.
“Hesychast asked you to do that?” she said. “Develop a case for my insanity?”
“Mm. In case you needed to be removed. He thinks you are too deeply in Farrier’s control to be managed.”
“Can I persuade you to stop?”
“He has Olake. I can’t refuse him.”
Once Baru had asked Olake, what will Yawa do when Treatymont falls to us? The mobs will tear your sister apart. . . .
And he’d said, with gleaming earnest eyes, I’ll save her, of course. She’s saved me often enough. Devena knows these things come back around.
“Thank you for the warning,” she said. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”
“Baru, I want to help you. I don’t want us to be at odds forever.”
“The way you helped me with Cattlson’s duel?”
“Baru,” Yawa said, and then, chuckling, “what would you have done in my place? Let a foreign girl take the reins of the scheme you’d grown so carefully? And Treatymont doesn’t show us honestly. We were always watched. You never knew me as I truly am.”
“I didn’t change much when I left,” Baru said.
“What a remarkably self-deprecating statement.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“You need my advice, Baru. You haven’t been cautious enough with Apparitor. He’s playing a very subtle game with you.”
“Oh? I should come running to hide under your skirts?”
Yawa’s eyes flashed: lids peeled back, teeth glinting, bone-white rings around irises of lightning blue. “You think you’ve nothing to learn from me?”
Baru knew at once that she’d trespassed on Yawa’s pride. Stupid to assume the old woman had infinite patience. Stupid, Baru, stupid. But her throat ached, and her head felt thick, and she wanted to hurt Yawa for what she’d done to Muire Lo.
“How about this,” Yawa said, unctuously sweet. “You go on trying to do everything yourself. When you have your first seizure, then you come to me.”
“Why would I have a seizure?”
“Experience tells me they often strike in cases like yours.”
Baru sighed. “That’s not what you mean.”
“Don’t tell me what I mean, child—”
“You’re telling me that once I have a seizure, you’ll have an excuse to poke me with a lobotome. You want to be sure I come report it to you, don’t you? You want to be sure you get the confession. Then you can put my mind out.”
“Hmm,” Yawa said, thoughtfully. “You want me as your enemy, don’t you? That’s too bad. Much too bad. I thought, maybe, we could cooperate to help Aurdwynn. But Hesychast’s right, Farrier has cut the possibility of friendship out of you. You don’t want to help anyone but yourself, do you?”
“Tain Hu never trusted you,” Baru said. And in the silence afterward she got up and went, quickly, quietly, not looking back.
SHE had the spoor of the pirates’ passage in the erasure of the water sales. Now she had to learn who had sold that water.
She followed her bravos’ directions to the date market.
This early in the season the market was nearly empty. Date trees were a poor fit for island growth, even the hardy, stubby, peculiarly tangy Sydani dates—like the people, they clung to this place with a stubbornness Baru admired. The families would be thinning the dates now, pulling some so others could grow to full size. Infanticide.
It wouldn’t be until late summer, the seventy-fifth or the eightieth, that the harvest would come in. Just as Parliament in Falcrest planted a harvest of its own: the vote on war or peace.
“Futures.” Baru spun her half-sight round the plaza. “Who sells the date futures?”
With a little ruckus and shouting Baru caused the appearance of a junior niece from the Jamascine family, a gaunt Belthyc woman who was minding the trade office in case of unannounced visitors. “Hello,” Baru said, sitting on the woman’s desk. “I’d like to buy some date futures.”
She pinched her nose and blinked, trying to get adjusted to the daylight. “I’m afraid we have an exclusive relationship with the Radascine Combine.”
Baru fanned her bonds across the breast of her jacket. “Totally exclusive?”
“Well.” A single one of Baru’s bonds could make this woman the pilotfish of her family. “If you’re interested in an exploratory arrangement . . .”
“I am indeed.” Baru extracted her cream-paper pad and licked her pen. “I would like to buy your dates on the eightieth of Summer at six notes a pound. As many as I can get.”
When she was done laughing, the Jamascine woman said, “Your Excellence, we’ve already hedged our crop at twelve notes a pound. That means we will not sell for less than twelve to anyone else. Do you understand how a futures contract works?”
Baru did indeed—she’d taught them to Tain Hu. A futures contract was a way to remove uncertainty. The date farmers wanted to be sure they got enough money to profit off the season, even if the price of dates plunged. The date-buying merchants wanted to be sure they wouldn’t need to mortgage their children to afford dates if the price of dates spiked.
So they got together and said, listen, I’ll give up my chance at selling these dates for a really high price, if you’ll give up your chance at buying them for a really low price. Let’s agree on a price in the middle, so we can plan our finances with confidence. Okay?
“Yes,” Baru snapped, “I know how a fucking futures contract works. I’m here to buy your dates at six notes a pound. Haven’t you heard the news? All your contracts are shit now. In a month you’ll be begging to get six notes a pound.”
The woman was about to sneeze. She stopped. “What news?”
“You haven’t heard?” Baru gasped. “A Masquerade inspector was in the harbor today. She found faked records. Apparently someone’s been watering pirates for a very busy summer. That’s grounds to close trade. I think you’re looking at a run on your money, a visit from a navy flotilla, and, friend, a very bad date season.”
SHE asked her bravos where she could watch powerful people, so she’d know when the panic began.
“At the execution, I expect.” Both seemed very excited about this. “They’re killing a thief, I think, a thief of metal.” With sudden apology: “I know it might seem harsh to you, but it’s our way.” A phrase that made Baru feel reflexive contempt and skepticism, for what good was an unexamined way? Only much later would she come back to this moment and break the wall before her to find the truth.
“I understand,” Baru said. “I’ve seen people executed before.”
“Selfish people?”
Baru swallowed the hurt. “People who knew they couldn’t put themselves before their home.”
As they went toward the killing square the crowd thickened. One of Baru’s bravos bumped into a man, black-haired, strong, shielding a clay pot with his broad back. He saved the pot, and she began to apologize, profusely, and with an excess of touch. She was so sorry. Did he need help getting home? He shouldn’t be out here, passions were up and the streets weren’t safe right now. She had friends with her. Why didn’t he come with them?
The man had the height and build to throw her like a little idol but he held himself so as to be small. He did not need help, he was saying, he only wanted to be left alone.
Alone? Why? She touched his chest. Others might be so cruel to him. Didn’t he know she wasn’t like that? Didn’t he want to be appreciated by the gallant?
He said, “I have to bring this water home.”
Did he know, she asked, that he was very handsome? She hoped he was proud of that. He did not look proud. Was he stuck-up, then? Was he an onanist?
Baru, uncomfortable with the direction of all this, shouted, “Let him be! Come along, I’m not paying you to flirt!” Though it wasn’t flirting.
“What a cutter,” her bravo muttered, to the other. “Did you see his fish? He could hardly think for wanting it.”
It occurred to Baru that she had never, in all her life, been powerless in a city street.
The execution was a public spectacle, of course. The state had to keep up its credit rating, too—see how we punish the transgressor? See that you can trust us to punish the thief, and therefore, please, do not start murdering thieves yourself.
Baru admitted a certain admiration for the morality play of the method. The guilty woman pushed a wheel, the wheel pulled a rope, the rope looped through pulleys to lift a coffin-sized stone. A couple of bored constables waited for the thief to hoist the rock high enough that they could drop it and crush her under her own labors. Men watched from the rooftops, their children slung on strong backs and curled up in their arms.
Life, Baru thought, was cheap here. Not cheaper than in Aurdwynn, really, but cheaper than it ought to be. When your civilization was sustained by the regular and necessary murder of infants, when you watched your friends devoured by storm or cast from cliffsides, how couldn’t it be cheap? Make enough death, and like any other currency it loses its value.
Wasn’t this barbarism? Wasn’t this the disease Incrasticism sought to cure? Hadn’t Farrier asked, “What does the Mbo have to offer us? What medicines? What sciences? What is worthwhile about their society?”
Baru wanted to be able to answer that question, not just for the Mbo but for the Llosydanes. But for some mad reason the answer would not come: as if she had lost the measuring tools she needed.
The quieter bravo cackled suddenly and nudged Baru. “Friend of yours?”
In the narrow way between two houses Baru saw a young Falcresti woman, vitiligo-spotted and thus probably from eastern Grendlake, wearing a student’s waistjacket and a smirk of satisfied hunger. She had her trousers round her knees and a man’s head between her narrowly parted legs. The roar of the execution crowd climbed again and she groaned with that roar. Her eyes slitted in pleasure. One of her fists was in his hair, and the other full of coins, which she let slip, one by one, to slide down his scalp and roll along his naked back into the muck.
The boy wore the same costume as the old man who’d played ykari Wydd, but cut down to scanty straps. Here was Falcrest, fucking Wydd’s face. Indulging itself in the primal vitality of a cultural preserve.
Baru wanted to spit at the woman.
Then she thought, am I not here, ruining their money, rooting through their books? Wouldn’t I hire a prostitute, if I had the courage?
One of the parties of Family observers suddenly exited the square. A moment later a second Family’s party began to beat their way out of the crowd. Baru perked up. Was the panic beginning?
The fire bells began to jangle.
THE panic was swift and thorough.
Baru knew the young Jamascine woman must have returned to her family with Baru’s promise of a bad season. The Jamascines scrambled to purchase all the Masquerade fiat notes they could get, to secure their food supply: there would be no more coming in if the date season failed. And those buys did not go unnoticed by the rest of the Twelve Families.
Baru went back to the Fiat Bank branch to see how high the exchange rate had climbed.
There was no exchange rate to be found. Nor any Fiat Bank at all. An Eddyn fire crew, women caked to their ears in soot, pumped seawater up the cliffside to soak the wreckage.
“What happened?” Baru asked a constable.
“Lynnedy,” she spat. “Their fucking Allmother panicked and sent muscle to open the Fiat Bank vaults. It went all wrong.”
“Oh,” Baru said, innocently.
She would need a bank of her own to make her sales. So she selected a longhouse restaurant called Demimonde (on the theory that it must be very fine, to justify its footprint on the tiny island), walked in the front door, found the owner whispering with her family about the failed trade season, and bought the whole place, from rafter to foundation, for a pittance in fiat notes. A kicker fee got her the hotel for foreign merchants next door, in case she needed a place to rest.
“Will you post a sign?” she asked the ex-owner, whom she had installed as executive manager. “The Payo Mu Bank. No Fiat Notes on Premises: Encrypted Bonds Only: Do Not Pillage. Please Queue. And then lay out refreshments for a great many wealthy visitors. Don’t spare the good vintages.”
She sent her bravos to inform the Sydanemoot families that she would entertain offers of their ring shells for her fiat note. She was like a spring erupting in the desert: an unforeseen well of fiat notes, which could become food. And all she asked was the local money they had so much of to spend.
They came in small parties at first, dire old women with their dark-eyed bodyguards and their local fortunes to turn into fiat notes. It was desperation, yes, but speculation, too. The fiat note had become so impossibly valuable, was still growing more valuable as the Families raced to capture the supply, that you could make a fortune simply by buying fiat notes, waiting an hour, and changing them back to ring shell.
As they came to her to buy her bonds, she took them behind a little silk screen and, as price of doing business, asked them who had sold the water to the pirates.
Everyone, they told her. Every family had sold water futures to an Oriati merchant named Abdumasi Abd. He had spread his buys around in case of a well failure. No one had ever seen his fleet come and take the water, but quite a few water-laden ships had been “taken by pirates,” and if that was not code for a rendezvous then Baru would call Taranoke Sousward.
Again and again that name sounded in her ears. Abdumasi Abd.
As the families bartered with her and with each other the Demimonde became a spontaneous open currency market, a crackling point of discharge like a ship’s lightning spike. The kitchens brought in the bored staff of nearby restaurants to meet the hunger of so many rich women. By second dogwatch the Families were making, and losing, entire fortunes: they were drinking, smoking, singing, going mad. The crew of an Oriati “privateer” stumbled in drunkenly round the beginning of candle watch, and threw up a cheer for the richest woman on the Llosydanes. “Payo Mu!” they called. “May she never wake alone!”
The ordinary people looked on in bemusement. The street value of the ring shell was unaffected, for no one had had time to adjust their prices. This was a madness of the rich.
Someone hired the prostitutes who served sailors as second spouses to come and amuse. When those ran out, someone else hired the low-end seasonal whores who worked off debt indenture during trade season. These were, to Baru’s pleased surprise, as much women as men, or at least as much female as male. Some were even trawling for Falcresti trade—women in severe buttoned-down formalwear and waistcoats, subtly made up to look stern and severe, their hot eyes prepared to deprecate and dismiss those who would buy their attention. The game worked on Baru, too, who had suffered her fair share of adolescent torment in Miss Pristina Struct’s class.
She made a tipsy advance toward one of the women, in the only language she really knew. “Could I buy out your indentures? You’re in debt, right, your madams hold the debt? Could I buy those out and—I don’t know, what could I do with them?”
“Oh, certainly!” she said, in charmingly thick Aphalone. “We talk about it always. We’d bundle our debts together, and sell them to a proper bank.” Meaning they would promise to pay off their debts to the bank, rather than to their creditors (who would get a fee from the bank). “We’d pool our incomes to pay them all off together, you see? If one woman came up short another could take up her slack. And since the bank would trust a lot of us to pay our debts more than one or two alone, we could get some credit, use it to hire doctors, a barrister, some nicer rooms . . .”
“Good idea,” Baru said, and she sent for the madams.
By midnight Baru was dealing bundles of prostitutes’ indentures to local banks in batches of fifty. Two of the Oriati had beaten each other silly with baking pins for the right to woo her. She had written so many sell orders and contracts that she could not remember them: she was nursing a nervous suspicion that she had not even been aware of some of the things her right hand recorded.
A woman in a sealskin jacket approached her table.
Baru looked up from the sprawl she’d been reduced to (the prostitutes gave wonderful back massages). “Oh,” she said. “You’re finally here.”
The spy said, expressionlessly, “I have been asked to beg you to stop. I have been asked to tell you that you have no idea what you risk provoking.”
“Tell your case officer,” Baru said, enunciating in clear Aphalone, “that I want to meet with them. Understand? I want to talk to your Oriati case officer on neutral ground. Find a way.”
The spy departed. Baru looked at the party she had invented. The Family elders were dancing with the privateers, and the privateers with the prostitutes; the ruined were weeping and the fortunate glowed with euphoria. An old woman comforted her sister. Two laughing daughters (each of a different family) reclined with linked arms and watched the dance. The severely dressed prostitute who’d suggested the indentures trade looked at Baru over the shoulder of her dance partner, bright-eyed and curious, and Baru was suddenly terrified and sick with grief.
She slipped out the back of the restaurant. The moon was high and bright; the air had grown wet and charged, and the southern horizon boiled with ramparts of stormcloud.
North a ways, plain as the teeth of a striking shark, the red sails of the Imperial Navy’s frigate Sulane swayed on high waves.
SHE dreamt that night of Itinerant’s utopia.
She was in the school at Iriad, and the halls were not of ash-concrete or coral but deep warm brown panels of koa, Taranoke’s warrior wood. Koa had a black grain that swirled like ink in water and made strange symmetrical shapes like narrow moth wings. Here some artist had used brushed ink to emphasize parts of the grain, teasing out Aphalone characters, as if the Taranoki trees had grown Falcrest’s language. In this school the mingling of cultures was encouraged, as fuel is encouraged to go into a fire. The passage was crowded with bookshelves. Farrier’s school served a banquet of texts for its gifted students, and everywhere Baru went she was tempted by the titles. This was a school that let you choose your own studies as you pleased . . . for what it taught was the correct way to choose.
She was going to an assignation. She could feel it in her heart and in her thighs. But when it came it was over almost before she recognized it: by impulse (that was how the decision would plead, like a guilty trafficker, before the judges of memory—It was only an impulse!) she took a roundabout way to her class, so that she would pass second cousin Lao coming back from her graces, the special lessons where Lao learned how to avert her eyes and attention from those she wanted to smite with her beauty and her charm. Indirection, the teachers taught her, indirection and passivity; you create the opportunity for them to choose to admire you, and they will never know they are in your power.
Lao came this way to think without eyes on her. In this dream she had been taught early and well to mind her eyes. There had been no accusation of incipient tribadism, and no prescription of “manual stimulus”—even in the dream Baru knew it was rape—to rejoin Lao’s pleasure with the image and scent of a man. (A useless task, as well as abhorrent, for Lao was never only a tribadist). But she did not seem surprised to find Baru in her side corridor.
Baru looked at the floor. There came that moment, that wordless tension, when it was right to raise her eyes and say hello—
But Lao was not looking at her. She turned a little as she passed, to peer up at the shelves, where a beam of sunlight through clear hive glass illuminated a Manual of Expedition. She reached up to brush the spine with her fingers, walking for a moment on her bare toes, so the sheer full-body modesty veil drew up over her calves. For a moment she was in the sunlight, poised beneath the translucent veil. And Baru knew she was using her grace in invitation.
Baru wrenched her eyes away. The thrill felt better than a long meal with her family, a day’s joy in an instant, but it passed as quickly. She—she knew what she was and wanted what she wanted. But there were bigger things to consider, her career and her contributions to the sciences, her chances of teaching bright young girls. She would use her discipline to focus on those goals. And anyway, what could she do with Lao? Whatever they began would only end in hurt and hardship for both of them. If she cared for Lao, she would protect Lao by avoiding her.
So resolved, Baru went on to class.
But when she looked back down that corridor of koa and books, she saw Lao’s chin in Tain Hu’s hands, those dark gold eyes daring Lao, daring her, to look away, to pretend she didn’t want: and Lao laughed and laughed and yelped as Hu lifted her against the bookshelf and kissed her and the books came tumbling down like dead birds over Lao’s slim shoulders and long arms, over Hu’s bare muscle and lazy self-satisfied smile as she bent to kiss again.