FEDERATION YEAR 912:
23 YEARS EARLIER
The summer of 912 grew hot.
The termites built their mounds and the crows fished for the termites with sticks.
The griots came up Prince Hill to tell the war.
Cosgrad Torrinde recovered from his frog-licking and developed diarrhea. He was appalled and embarrassed that everyone had to work to filter enough water for him. He would boil his own drinking water on a little pot-fire even after they filtered it, and the housekeeps murmured that this ingratitude and mistrust was making him sick. His room filled up with smoke and steam and damp, which caused mold, and he scrubbed miserably in between bouts of shit. Cairdine Farrier came and visited him now and then, and they muttered together lowly, but inevitably the mutters would rise to shouts and Farrier would leave and Torrinde would crouch miserably over his pot.
Tau-indi couldn’t figure out how to go talk to Kindalana and Abdumasi and repair their friendship.
The griots began to soften their proud words. Kindalana noticed the change in the epithets and pointed it out to Tau, as she would point out anything she thought was hidden from others. “The unsurpassed cunning of Eyotana Six-Souls” became merely “the clever words of Eyotana Six-Souls.” House Mbunu’s captains slipped from “invincible” to “formidable.” The skittish, fragile-looking Falcrest frigates were promoted, in metaphor, from water-bugs to makos and barracudas.
Tau didn’t need Kinda to explain that this was a bad, bad sign. To the extent that the Mbo had a military, it was made of the brave and the venturesome, and its goal was to intimidate and dazzle so the enemy could be embraced and absorbed. When the heroes lost their shine, they lost that war, too.
Padrigan and Tahr brought their children together to explain that it was time for their Instrumentality, a course of lessons that would make them ready to go anywhere in Oriati Mbo. They would be prepared to visit the archipelagos of north Segu and the very southern outposts of Zawam Asu, where indigenous tribes watched the Mbo’s explorers guardedly, and the Mbo’s explorers tried very carefully not to disturb them.
Tau-indi and Kindalana had to spend hours cloistered together, reading or speaking to griots. Tau liked the griot lessons better: here they were encouraged to talk back, to question, to share their own stories, for griots were the living texts of Oriati Mbo. But Kindalana excelled at the written word, and what Tau at first took for brooding was, they realized, an almost trance-like absorption in the work.
“Everyone is unhappy in the Butterveldt farms,” Tau-indi said, after they’d listened to the griots who’d talked to the griots who’d been to the Butterveldt. “How can Jaro feed itself without the farms?”
The Butterveldt was the great temperate grassland that divided Falcrest and the northeast of Lonjaro Mbo. Right down the middle of the Butterveldt ran the Tide Column, the long narrow waterway that connected the Ashen Sea to the huge Mother of Storms in the east. Tau-indi imagined the farmers’ unhappiness as a plague of urchins, crawling up out of the Tide Column to eat their crops and pleasures.
“It’s the blight,” Kindalana said curtly, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands tracing shapes in the air. She liked this memorization trick, which Tau-indi secretly suspected she’d learned from Cosgrad: she could associate certain facts with motions of her arms. “Something’s killing the millet and the wheat. Something from Falcrest, the farmers say.”
“What can we do?”
“Burn the whole crop.” She drew a line from her chin to her throat, like she was putting on her Prince paint.
“But then we’ll starve.”
“Yes, Tau, we’ll starve. So we’ll have to open the treasury and buy excess crop from Devi-naga and Mzilimake, if they have it. And if we can get ships through the Tide Column to Devi-naga without Falcrest taking them.”
Tau-indi wished Kindalana would stop saying useful things, and say something warm instead. Every day Tau tried to break the chill between them. Every day Tau failed. “Yes, fine, we can buy grain from the other mbo nations. But what can we do for the farmers who lost their crop?”
“What?”
“The farmers aren’t going to have anything to sell. They deserve help.”
“Talk to Abdumasi.” She touched her nose, and her ear, like one of Tahr’s chains. “He knows trade. He could figure something out, perhaps.”
Tau did not want to go talk to Abdumasi.
MEASLES!” the ferrymen on the lake reported. “Measles in Jaro!”
Measles ripped through the city people, and cruelly, so cruelly, it killed their babies first. The morgue bakery ran out of ways to make ash cake, and so the mothers couldn’t burn and eat their infants children properly, which left the city swarming with wailing sobbing child-souls. Tau and Abdu wanted to go and call the souls out of the city, but Padrigan and Tahr forbade it. Measles was too dangerous.
And the month after that, as Jaro griots raced to spread the word of the measles and the names of the dead (this made Cosgrad Torrinde panic, and beg Tau to stop the griots, lest they carry the disease—but Tau tried to explain that the mbo knew disease, that the griots moved too quickly for their exhalations to pool in one place), a mother-of-worms was found in the cisterns in the Segu capital Kutulbha.
Nothing revolted Tau more than the mother-of-worms, a great mass of mature and fecund parasites, gathered in a snarl in the water. Cistern inspectors found the colony creature squirming in white lashing loops, shedding and peeling off masses of egg to fill up the drinking water.
No mother-of-worms had ever been seen in Segu Mbo. They lived in southern Mzilimake and Devi-naga. But somehow one had made it to Segu, and worse yet, some merchant in Devi-naga, some cruel and selfish soul who Tau cursed with balled-up fists, had bought all the wormsbane and hoarded it. Wormsbane only grew in the jungle that bordered Devi-naga and Mzilimake, and it was the best treatment for worm infestation in a body: there was no easy way to get more.
Rumors circulated, of course, that the merchant was a Falcresti agent. Tau wondered, cynically, if Falcrest had moved the merchant, or if the only motive was greed. The mbo should prevent such atrocious avarice . . . but the mbo, of late, seemed thin, like a ragged net.
Ships refused to dock in Kutulbha. If you drank a worm egg it would grow inside you and crawl out through your foot over agonizing weeks, burning like a bee sting.
Wracked by famine in Lonjaro and a shipping stoppage in Segu, the mbo staggered.
And then all the money froze.
Tau-indi couldn’t understand it! Everyone still needed everything, the goods were out there, the money was available, supply and demand existed, nothing had changed! But all the griots complained that the merchants had tightened their fists and the families on the road were ungenerous. The hawala banks stopped conducting transfers across the mbo, preventing merchants from moving their fortunes.
The principles of anxiety and miserliness had snarled up the mbo.
Tau went over to Jaro and talked to the merchants in the bazaar, who had talked to their suppliers, who had talked to the shipping captains, all of whom were slashing their prices, down and down and down, trying to get anyone to buy: no one would, not even at ruinous discounts.
“Something must be wrong with our trim,” Tau-indi said, baffled. “Why would everyone just . . . stop spending money?”
“It’s not trim!” Kindalana shouted, throwing down the knotted string she’d been using to do figures. “You idiot, you idiot, don’t you learn anything from Cosgrad? It’s a deflationary collapse!”
“A—a what?”
“Everyone’s uncertain and afraid,” Kindalana snapped, her posture perfect, her gestures articulate, every inch the young Prince. “Why would they invest in new business right now, or try to sell their crops abroad, when ships are being taken and ports are being closed? You might lose it all. Better to eat your own food, and keep your goods to yourself, and wait, wait until the world stabilizes. So the ports idle, and the businesses who rely on the ports close down, and the hawala banks stop loaning and sending. The mbo’s gold and shell and jade is all locked up in vaults and attics. It’s not moving. Do you understand?”
Tau did, actually: there was less and less money on the market, so each piece of money was worth more, each golden coin or silver bar could buy more things, which made people even less willing to risk it on a loan or a shipping expedition. It was like water freezing, a phenomenon Tau had never seen: it grew slow, and thick, and clotted.
“I think,” they said, politely, “that the solution is clear. We must make everyone unafraid. We must cheer them up, and make them brave. The griots should be encouraged to tell the ancient epics, and the comedies.”
Tau’s politesse just enraged Kindalana further. “You,” she said, stalking to the door, “think like an old person.”
“I think like a Prince.”
“Haven’t you learned anything from him?” Kindalana shouted. “Anything at all? This isn’t about trim! We’re like an old, old elephant, and Falcrest is running us down, herding us toward the pit!”
“No,” Tau said, calmly. “There’s no Falcrest, really, nor any Oriati Mbo. Just two groups of people. It’s always about the connections between people. That’s where we’ll make a difference.”
Thinking back upon it, Tau realized that Kindalana had taken inspiration from this moment: if not, perhaps, in the way Tau expected.
That night Kindalana drank sorghum malt beer with Cairdine Farrier and told him loud jokes. The bearded man seemed to relax a little. Tau couldn’t figure out why Kindalana was acting so crudely, until they realized Kindalana was trying to behave like a commoner, and an adult.
COSGRAD Torrinde’s diarrhea cleared. Tau went to visit him, to be sure he was comfortable.
“What should we do,” Tau asked him, “if everyone stops spending their money, for fear of risk?”
“Print money,” Cosgrad suggested.
“Print money?”
“Yes. Use fiat currency. Paper notes that say they can be exchanged, later, for gold or gems or bone. Flood the market with your paper, and expand the supply of money: you must shock the market back into motion, you must lubricate it with, ah”—he searched for words in Seti-Caho—“with lube? Is that the word?”
“No,” Tau said, giggling, “that means sex oil. Perhaps fish oil, or olive oil?”
“Oh. But my point stands! You must print fiat money.”
“Cosgrad,” Tau said, deeply concerned, “that would be lying. You can’t trade someone a promise to give them something valuable later. You’d be inventing something from nothing. You’d be paying them with magic.”
And in accord with Tau’s fear for Cosgrad’s trim, not even a week later Cosgrad developed tetanus.
“Your Federal Highness!” a clerk screamed, running into the sleeping-quarters. “Your Highness, come quick!” Tau-indi leapt out of bed to find Cosgrad curled up and snarling in irritation. He insisted it was just a backache but no, the signs were clear, he had tetanus. Tau-indi made a hasty calculation on the calendar. Tetanus hit hardest when it hit fastest. If Cosgrad had contracted tetanus on Tau’s birthday, up in the frettes, then it should now be survivable.
“Get frogsweat and weed,” Tau-indi ordered the groundskeeps.
“Apple ester,” Cosgrad said. He stared balefully at Tau-indi. “If it’s tetanus, I want apple ester.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Of course you don’t!” He snarled, and tried to turn over, and screamed.
Tau ordered a chorus to sing around his room to drown out his agony, lest his pain spread. Cosgrad shouted at them with incredible distemper until his jaw locked up.
The griots came to Abdumasi’s house to sing about the ongoing war, about the principles of justice, the elephant slow to anger but terrible in its fury. The Oriati Mbo would show no more mercy. Kolosan and Cho-oh Long Oar would sail a thousand ships east to smash Falcrest, smash them so decisively that the fish would lose their taste for the flesh of people and turn to eating seabirds.
Tau watched Abdumasi and Kindalana as the griots sang. They sat together between two raspberry bushes, and Abdumasi settled against Kindalana’s side, his head pillowed on her breast. Kindalana stroked his head, but her eyes were far away, and thoughtful.
The men of Prince Hill were all love-struck, and the women of Prince Hill all thoughtful. It was up to Tau, as it had been up to the lamen in ancient and more traditional days, to mediate.
The mbo continued to fray.
Between Prince Hill and the frettes to the south was a great expanse of irrigated rice-field, fed by long canals. The fish that lived in the canals began to die. Birds shed their feathers and flew blindly into rocks. Ants were found presenting themselves on the grass to be eaten by goats, which was an awful omen. Tau-indi imagined principles of death moving under the earth, under the clouds, leaping from man to laman to woman.
Something terrible was happening.
And then Tau-indi was seized by a thought as hard and hateful as tetanus muscle. They remembered their own spite, their desire to possess Cosgrad so as to make their friends jealous. Hadn’t they said, in fact, that they were fighting a war against their friends?
Cosgrad Torrinde was bound to the mbo as a hostage, a prisoner volunteered by Falcrest to maintain tenuous diplomacy. Thus trim bound Cosgrad to the very war itself. The large reflected the small.
Tau-indi Bosoka had made Cosgrad a guest of their house, and used Cosgrad in their battle against Kindalana and Abdumasi, a foolish selfish battle.
Without realizing it, Tau-indi had connected the war between Falcrest and Oriati Mbo to their own childish war against their friends.
The logic of trim was irrefutable.
The war could not end until Tau-indi Bosoka made peace.
THEY walked to Kindalana’s house. The bees were gone, as was Cairdine Farrier, who’d gone over to Jaro to study the death rites. The raspberry bushes had withered. Tau used the mallet to ring the door, and smiled at the door sentry, and walked up to Kindalana’s room, dry-throated, wishing that they could do something with their hands.
“Yes?” she said. She’d been dyeing cloth. Her arms were wet to the elbow. Sweat and motion had pressed her ratty old work shift close against her, but Tau-indi noticed that with distant disinterest compared to the fright and buzz of meeting her eyes. She swallowed very slowly, as if to hide the motion from them: as if to pretend that she did not need to inhale or swallow, she never needed to move anything into herself, only out.
“Do you still want to go together?” Tau-indi asked.
She’d ask a clarifying question now. She’d make Tau-indi say something she already understood, so that she could draw them out.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Do you still want to work together to serve the mbo, as Prince companions, the way we used to talk about?”
“Oh.” Kindalana wrung the wet from her hands in short snaps of the wrist. “Your mother’s going to be here soon. I don’t know if it’s a good time to talk.”
“Do you want help with the dye?”
She looked at Tau-indi with her jaw set and her hands loose at her sides, turning, turning again, as if she could stir up the air between them and knead it out flat and simple.
“I don’t understand you,” she said.
Tau grinned and shrugged. “Me neither.”
“Okay. Come help.”
Someone came into the house later to visit Padrigan, and the housekeeps brought the two filtered mint water. Tau-indi and Kindalana both knew who it was, so they talked to each other stiffly and loudly, to warn their parents not to have sex.
When they were done, Kindalana said, “I’m trying to seduce Farrier.”
“What?” Tau squawked. “Why?”
“Because you’re right,” Kindalana said, “there’s power between people, and I don’t think Falcrest understands that power. And Farrier’s afraid of his attraction to younger women, to foreign women, and whatever he’s afraid of, I need to pursue. Because that’s how I’m going to beat them.”
Tau imagined “seduction” as a ridiculous theatrical process in which one’s clothes “accidentally” fell off. “Kinda,” they said, “this doesn’t seem like good politics. . . .”
But Kindalana looked back at them with those serious studious eyes. “We’re Princes,” she said. “The Mbo trusts us to do our jobs. If Falcrest thinks women have special seductive powers, then I’ll take advantage of it.”
It seemed troublesome and unfair and strange to Tau. But it was also so complicated that they didn’t know how to argue.
COSGRAD Torrinde’s tetanus passed. For a while he suffered spasms and babbled. “I have to go,” he’d say, trying to charge out through a wall. “I have to go! Renascent told me, she told me, go out and determine by what means matter becomes meat and meat becomes flesh and flesh becomes thought! Determine the mechanism of heredity, so that I may write my law in it! I can’t fail her, I can’t, I can’t, I have to go work!”
“You’re not making sense,” Tau-indi said, patiently. They’d seen so much of Cosgrad by now that the man’s body had lost all mystique and become faintly comical. It was hard to be impressed by a man’s cock when you knew it got hard and wibbled while he slept.
He stood there panting and hunched over, grimacing at the wall. “If I don’t get the Metademe,” he said, out-and-out whining, “they’ll give it to Farrier, and all Farrier wants to do is breed plagues. Plagues and vile thoughts. He doesn’t understand eugenics, or anything else, except flattery and pageant!”
But soon Cosgrad’s muscle spasms faded away like a knot coming undone. For a few months Cosgrad was weak and biddable and profoundly apologetic. The only lingering problem was his stiff neck.
His stiff neck didn’t go away.
After a while he began to complain that his neck hurt so much he couldn’t move his knees.
Tau-indi, sitting with him, wanted to scream in frustration. They knew what would happen now, and they were afraid Cosgrad would die of it.
Meningitis hit Cosgrad harder than anything before. He contorted into shapes like the letters of an underwater alphabet. He fought with dreams. When they gave him frogsweat and everything else they had, the dreams only got worse. He stared at Tau-indi with red-rimmed eyes and hissed, “What are you? How do they make you? Tell me how!”
“Me?”
“Tell me how they made you!”
“I came from my mother and father. . . .”
“And where did they come from! Where, Tau, where! No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, no one knows that.” He lapsed into silence for a moment and then he came up shouting. “They made you special. They made you different. Tell me how!”
Oh. It must be the Falcresti confusion. “No,” Tau-indi said patiently, “they didn’t make me into a laman. I chose my gender. Didn’t you choose to be a man? Or do they say, you have a penis, so you’re a man? What about people with both? What about the people who don’t want sex and all the other sorts? How do you sort them, if you don’t let them choose for themselves?”
“Degeneracy,” Cosgrad muttered. “The Oriati have decayed. Too much drift. Not enough competition among you, to keep the breeding healthy . . . but oh so rich . . . so much raw material to work with, so much pedigree to study, if only, if only I had the Metademe. . . .”
Tau brought Cosgrad cold water, chilled in the night and stored belowground. He wept it back out and screamed about a world unbound by law, spectral shapes in the mangrove shadows, bloody leeches clinging to his calves. “Farrier!” he would scream, red-eyed and roaring in his meningitis dream, “Farrier! They are not yours to take!”
On the next month, the gossip and the comic refused to come to Prince Hill to tell the story of the war. There was nothing funny to say. There was no gossip to tell.
The epic came up the hill, trudging and broken, covered in grief ash, with the satirist trailing behind.
At the beginning of the war the epic had named Kolosan and Eyotana Six-Souls, Cho-oh Long Oar and the Man with the Rudder Thumb, the sons and daughters of House Mbunu, and even salt-jeweled Nyoba Dbellu. The epic had bound himself to those stories. He was fated to tell of their thousand-dromon fleet, advancing bravely up the wind, into the skittering Falcrest frigates with their forest of sails and their unquenchable fire.
The ruin of these heroes and hunters, whose lays and sagas now darkened and dripped with unnumbered tears.
The thousand-ship main assault on Falcrest had failed. The fish would not lose their taste for the flesh of people, for no flesh had come into the sea, only wrack and ash. The swarming armadas of the mbo had been tricked and drawn in and then Falcrest’s fireships had fenced them in. Everything had burnt.
Already they were calling this defeat the Unspeakable Day.
The satirist got up to mock the dead, the foolish overconfident leaders who had brought more than a hundred thousand sailors and fighters to ruin. Everyone wept silently and clung to each other, trying to be polite and strong: trying to let the satirist do their necessary work.
The satirist fell on their knees. “My brother,” they wept, their voice rent, the principles screaming through them, “my brother, my brother. My brother is burning!”
They had no brother. But no one doubted they told the truth.
Padrigan and Tahr embraced each other and wept, she in the place of his missing wife, he in the place of her missing husband. Kindalana went off into the darkness and then came back to the fire with an armful of her fine garments, which she cast into the flame, to burn into ash for mourning. Abdumasi ran to his mother’s arms and then looked at Tau-indi trembling with some inexpressible grief.
Tau-indi stood there trying to imagine some way in which this was not their doing, the course of the war as selfish and disastrous as their own conduct, the world visiting retaliation on Oriati Mbo for the monstrousness of its young Prince.
Cairdine Farrier whispered, “Tau, Your Highness, there are better ways than war. Please remember, as the news comes bitter, that there are many in Falcrest who would rather trade and teach than fight with you.”
“There are many in the Mbo who would trepan themselves before they forgave this loss,” Tau said, with more grief than bitterness.
“Perhaps,” Farrier said. “Perhaps the Mbo needs to learn how to rid itself of those people. So we may have peace.”
The next day a mob sailed across the lake from Jaro to kill Cairdine Farrier and Cosgrad Torrinde.
And in the chaos there came up Prince Hill a sorcerer, her hands and eyes alight with blue-green uranium power, to cast a spell of ruin. She spoke En Elu Aumor, the tongue of the Cancrioth. Abdumasi Abd witnessed her, and Tau-indi, and the two men of Falcrest. And in that spell all their fates were written: three men to seek that power, and one laman to refuse it and all it represented.
But first, before they could go to their fates, they had to survive that day.