“WHERE are you taking me?” Aminata shouted. The four Termites hauling her were too strong, and no matter how she struggled she couldn’t get at their knives. All she had left was her voice. “Masako, where the fuck are you taking me?”
“Everyone always asks me that,” the Scheme-Colonel sighed. “Where are you taking me? If I didn’t want you to know, I’d lie. If I wanted you to know, I’d tell you. If anyone put a moment’s thought into the realities of their situation, they’d stop asking that question. But they never do. It’s always where are you taking me. Why doesn’t someone ask why I’m taking them? Or how I took them, so at least they could improve their security?”
“You kidnap a lot of people?”
Bored as a baker making injera: “All in the service of the Mbo.”
“Service? Please. The Cancrioth’s anathema to the Mbo. It’s acid on your skin. You’re a traitor.”
“This is why the Mbo has people like me, Aminata. To be the glove between the acid and the skin.”
“Baby killer,” she spat. “You gave the Kettling to those rebels. You killed every child on Kyprananoke.”
“Falcrest killed children when they burnt Kutulbha.” He had sweat stains under the arms of his blouse. Aminata wished they were blood instead. “Cholera killed children in Devi-naga last year. Do you know what the parents do, when there’s cholera? They give their own children clean water first. They understand that not all the children can live, so they prefer their own children to others’. My job is to protect the future of our children. Yours and mine, Oriati children, one Mbo, our Mbo, united against all enemies.”
“Your people won’t be one Mbo when they learn what you’ve done. They’ll hate you for consorting with the Cancrioth. You’ll be buried in concrete, Masako!”
“Do you hear that?” Masako cocked his ear. “Listen to that. That sound won’t be buried.”
They passed a storeroom, all the flour and salt pork unbarreled and eaten. Now it was full of Cancrioth men and women, lined up in rows with poles and fishing spears, mimicking the motions of a Termite instructor. They were learning to fight.
“The monastery,” Masako said, “must become a fortress.”
“You’re going to get everyone on this ship killed, Masako,” she hissed. “You can’t fight the navy.”
“What can’t we fight? You know, when the Maia invaded us, centuries ago, the stories say that we—”
“Opened your arms and welcomed them in.” Aminata had a particular eyeroll she reserved for Oriati hagiography. “Gave them a warm hearth and a full belly and a place to lie down.”
Masako looked back at her with bright, brave eyes. “My whole life I’ve been told that story. Oriati Mbo embraced its enemies. Oriati Mbo met the Maia with gifts of silver and incense. But it wasn’t that way for my forefathers. In Segu we fought. While the thirteen kingdoms of Lonjaro married the Maia emissaries, while the two thousand Mzilimaki tribes gave the Maia bribes of gold for slabs of salt, while the Devi and the Naga pirated their fortunes from Maia fleets, it was Segu that fought the war. We held back the warlords’ ships as they made the crossing from the Camou. We sifted the conquerors out of the Maia tide, so the rest of the Mbo could drink sweet broth. And the sieve of that sifting was made from Segu’s men, Aminata. Men who were your ancestors. Women rule in Segu, yes. But make no mistake, a man still works the field, and a man still carries his assegai in the impi. Your forefathers fought. And we will fight again.”
“Fight? Is that what you call giving weapons to helpless islanders?” Aminata sneered.
“I will arm anyone willing to fight Falcrest. I will destroy anyone seduced by Falcrest’s lies. I may pity them, but I will not show mercy. The Mbo is all that matters now.” He reached out and tapped her cheek with the cold maw of his pistol. “Clear your mind. The Brain will know your thoughts. Do not exhaust her with pointless rage.”
THEY covered her eyes with silk and surrounded her with glaring oil lamps. She could see, through white haze, rows of pews climbing away to the ceiling. Like an amphitheater.
A shadow came. A woman’s silhouette in broken armor, too big for the body that wore it. The same woman who’d promised to snuff out all her senses, one by one, until she was just an endless sense of sickness in a void. The shadow shuffled wearily, but her voice was strong.
She asked Aminata the same question over and over, in different ways. “Can we trust Baru Cormorant?”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t know.”
The shadow closed in on her. “You say that you are Baru’s beloved companion. And now you cannot make even a guess about her honesty?”
“Not unless I talk to her. Learn what she’s about. She confides in me, sometimes.”
A murmur from all around. The shadow of the armored woman put up a hand to silence them. “Kimbune sends us a message by uranium lamp. Baru wants us to disguise Eternal as a merchant vessel. She tells us to hide our cannon, to fly Free Navigation Commons trade flags. She guarantees our safety on the approach to Isla Cauteria. Is this message honest? Can Baru do these things?”
“I don’t fucking know!” Aminata shouted. Why were powerful women always summoning her to interpret Baru’s will? The Baru she knew was fond of books, cunning, and Miss Pristina Struct. The idea of smuggling Eternal into Falcrest’s waters for repairs was difficult, daring, and half mad, which meant it probably really was Baru’s plan. But it was also a grand criminal violation of Aminata’s duty. Isla Cauteria lay within the Caul, the sea boundary around Falcrest’s home province. To allow a plague ship over that boundary would be an abrogation of her vows.
The shadow stooped. Its voice fell to an intimate whisper. “You know this ship is maimed. You know we’re running out of water. I think we might throw ourselves on Cauteria and at least die fighting. But if Baru gives us safe harbor … Do you believe she can do that, Aminata? Is there a chance for all of us to live?”
If Aminata said yes, she might give the Cancrioth a chance to sneak into safe harbor and release the Kettling. If she said no, then she might as well advise them to make an open attack on the island.
And there was still that grinding, broken-bone uncertainty way down inside her, splintering every time she put weight on the thought of Baru. Tau said Baru wanted to see Falcrest destroyed. Tau had Aminata thinking that maybe Ormsment and her mutineers were right.
“Let me talk to Tau. I need to talk to Tau, and then I can answer your question. Tau will know what Baru really wants.”
The shadow raised her arms through quivering fatigue.
“The prisoner wants Tau-indi Bosoka’s counsel.” The flat shadow shape of the woman, transforming as it turned. “But Tau-indi has broken. Their strength is exhausted. Do you see the weakness of the Mbo? Do you see what becomes of their mightiest Federal Prince when they are tipped out of the cradle of trim? Falcrest has no trim. The war to come will have no trim. The Oriati people need a new covenant. The time for gentle words and kind neighbors is done; the time for Princes with open doors is done. Who would let a thief and a murderer into his house? Who would welcome a tyrant with bread and water? The Princes would, and leave their people desolate. Let us raise a different lamp for the people to follow, out of the burnt place, into new life!”
There was a great murmur of assent, a storm’s first wind through trees. Aminata realized that the interrogation had only been theater: you did not ask questions before your followers, except to demonstrate that you already had the answers.
“Baru is ours,” the Brain cried. “Baru is bound to me by the power of Incrisiath. She will give us water, and harbor, and safe passage. Then she will use her own flesh to carry our weapon into Falcrest’s heart, to finish what we began on Kyprananoke, to save our people and our souls from the faceless power on its faceless throne. A ut li-en! Am amar!”
Aminata wanted to laugh. It was ridiculous. It was superstitious nonsense, it was nothing to be afraid of! There was no magic, no spell on Baru to bind her!
Aminata wanted to scream. Some part of her knew it was all true.
“A ut li-en!” the crowd roared, that whispered sacrament becoming a war chant. “Am amar! Am amar!”
Aminata felt herself trapped within a chrysalis, drifting in the thick fluid of something becoming something else.
Huge, gentle hands lifted Aminata and led her from the amphitheater. “I have not forgotten your request,” the giant man whispered. “I will take you to the Prince.”
THERE was no living spirit, no intestinal complication of space, which made Eternal such a maze. It was just simple math—a ship’s internal volume grew faster than its linear dimensions. Eternal was tremendously long, terribly wide, ridiculously tall, and therefore unfathomably vast.
That was what Aminata told herself to keep the fear at bay.
Her captor Innibarish was the biggest man she’d ever met. Not big like an able sailor or a bearish muscleman, but big like he’d been laid out on a different scale, overplanned by some mason-addled draftsman, stuffed past capacity with muscle. Aminata felt like he might burst if someone laid a nail on his abdomen. The cells of muscle there were the size of her fists, and probably harder.
“Where are we going?” she asked him, just to defy Masako. “Where’s your master keep Tau?”
“Don’t use that word, please,” he said, in a pleasant voice as big as a forge exhaust. “It stinks of slavery.”
“I thought you people were slavers.”
His face was ordinary-sized: when he smiled it seemed too small and too far away. “We change, too, Miss Aminata. Please, this way.”
She saw things she had never imagined. A room where old men and women in cassocks tended a city of copper pipes which pumped water according to the settings of corroded valves. A chamber with a recessed floor, where scorpions wandered in mazes of wood. A compartment where pots of colored sand had spilled and mingled, bright green and deepest blue, like the scales of two snakes. And everywhere a fireless light shone down from stripes and signs of greenish paint, marking the combings of hatches, the lips of steps.…
“Do you believe in magic?” she asked her guide.
“I was made out of magic.” He showed her the massiveness of his arm, showed her how he could turn his wrist, his elbow, his shoulder, all nimble as you please. “I could hardly disbelieve in myself.”
“Huh.” Aminata was an idiot with men, and therefore said the first thing that came to mind: “You must get a lot of tall chasers.”
“I am not interested in carnal things.” He shrugged. “My father had thousands of lovers. He was famous for it. But he was very lonely in the end.”
“He’s dead? I’m sorry.”
“All those who carry Elelemi the Giant die young.”
“Oh.” What a waste, she thought, and then reprimanded herself for disrespect. “Does your, uh … your tumor. Did it come from your father?”
“Yes. It was cut from him and passed to me before he died. The immortata prefers the flesh it knows.”
Aminata twitched like a hooked fish. “That’s why you wanted Iraji back so badly?”
“His mother carried Undionash, the Spine. It is a dangerous Line to host. It can kill when it is implanted, or when it grows. We hope he will inherit his mother’s agreement with Undionash.”
“You answer a lot of questions.”
He smiled. “I have never had to lie before.”
They came up a companionway, steep and narrow and clearly torment on Innibarish’s neck, out onto the weather deck at Eternal’s bow. The sea was glassy smooth under a steady wind out of the southwest, and, straight above, a sugarspill of stars fell so clear and high that Aminata could taste their light.
“Oh,” she said, and she was glad to be at sea, no matter why.
“Elelemi!” a voice screamed. “Elelemi, come quickly!”
“MOTHER!” Innibarish barked. Aminata scrambled after him down the deck. The dry laundry slapped aside by his body swung back to claw at her face. The sterncastle stairs rose up from nowhere and she stumbled up on all fours, trying to keep up with Innibarish and his huge leaping legs, desperate not to be left behind, alone, in this place where anything could happen.
Ordinary ships had one level of construction above the weather deck but on Eternal the sterncastle was like a ziggurat, deck after deck, stepping up to heaven—but at last the black wood gave way to night sky, and a dead garden. And to a woman with burning hands and a huge pregnant belly who knelt over Tau-indi Bosoka’s curled body.
Tau-indi lay in the dry dirt, among the crumbled leaves, with black scab caked from fingertips to elbows.
“Oh no,” Aminata gasped.
“Do they live?” Innibarish bellowed. “Do they live?”
But the Prince was smiling. The black crust on their arms was only dry ink. “Aminata,” they breathed. “Look at you. And you still haven’t decided? You still don’t know?”
The Womb snapped to Innibarish in En Elu Aumor, and he went to his knees to scoop Tau up and carry them away to safety. But Tau put up one black ink hand in Innibarish’s face, and he froze.
“You know,” Tau said, apologetically, “that I was trained in magic? When I was in Mzilimake, a village sorcerer taught me to defend myself. I have the black hand, Elelemi. I’ll put my life into yours. You’ll die of growth.”
“What’s happening here?” Aminata barked, in the voice she’d use to frighten sailors from their gambling stoops. “What have you done to the Prince?”
“What have I done?” The Womb laughed helplessly. “The Prince did this! They told their bodyguard they were going out to find drugs to treat her burns. And they certainly found the drugs, Miss Aminata.”
“Your Federal Highness,” Aminata said, “you are an idiot.” Tau-indi should have known better: the suicide of an ambassador was the suicide of their peace. “We’ve got to feed them charcoal and as much water as you can find. If we’re lucky they’ll piss it all out—”
Tau’s face had little dimples when they smiled. “You know Hesychast, don’t you, Aminata? Cosgrad Torrinde the Hesychast, Minister of the Metademe.”
Aminata had not met any Ministers of the Metademe lately. “Come on,” she grunted, checking vitals—pulse rapid and shallow, breathing same, eyelids hugely dilated—“up with you, we’re going to pump you full of water and charcoal and laxative, shit your royal brains out.”
“Kindalana.” Tau’s eyes so close and knowing. And the tang of virtues-knew-what poison on their lips. “You’ve been told you’re like Kindalana. Haven’t you?”
And she had. Faham Execarne had told her she looked like “old Kindalana.” The man she’d met on the Llosydanes, Mister Calcanish, he’d said that Kindalana was going to cause an Oriati civil war, Kindalana as a pawn of Cairdine Farrier. Calcanish had told her to fear Baru. Calcanish had told her that Baru should be sent to Aurdwynn and exiled into the Wintercrests.
Restless, eager for an outlet while she was still ashore, Aminata had taken Mister Calcanish into the alley behind Demimonde and fucked him. And when she’d said, pretend I’m Kindalana, he’d passed from the slow thrusts of a practiced, whorish man to the bestial desperation of passion.
Pretend I’m Kindalana.
She jerked away from Tau. The Prince’s limp head dropped back into the dead garden soil. “Aha,” they said, smiling at her. “I knew it.”
“What did you do?” Aminata cried. “How did you know that? What have you done?”
“Oh, I’ve done what Cosgrad told me to do.” They curled up on their side and smiled at the moon. “Cosgrad told me that if I ever lost all hope, I should use his ideas, and change my flesh to change my thoughts. Drugs, he said, entheogenic drugs, ergot and psilocin mushrooms”—the Womb groaned loudly at that—“they are all known to relieve the Oriati Emotional Disease, to transform the wounded personality. ‘Don’t be arrogant, Tau,’ he told me, ‘you’re wise enough to know you need help in every other part of your life, so don’t pretend you can force yourself back to sanity all alone.’
“And,” Tau ran one finger across their scabbed brow, “failing that, I was to give myself a concussion. Or be struck by lightning. Either one, he said, could relieve the despair of the Disease. Jar the mind from its grooves. Oh, Aminata, how you must hurt.…”
That bruise on their forehead: they’d been smashing their head on things. “Oh, queen’s cunt,” Aminata groaned. Truly the aristocrats were fools.
“What have they done to themself?” the Womb hissed.
“They’ve tried to treat themself for the Oriati Disease.”
“What’s that?”
“Persistent despair. Helplessness. The urge to self-annihilation.” Whenever Aminata felt it she got drunk and went whoring and either the filthy ecstasy or the aching shame afterward seemed to help. The Book of the Sea had a mantra about it: cock cunt and drink, sailors don’t think; payday and stormcloud, thinking allowed; plotting and steerage, thinking encouraged; fire and blow, thinking’s too slow.
“Why’s it called the Oriati Disease?” the Womb asked, warily.
“I don’t know,” Aminata said, not wanting to explain that the Metademe considered it a disorder of social withdrawal, a special curse of the Oriati, who were bred to live in groups. “Bad luck to call it the Falcresti Disease, I suppose.”
“I’m all right,” Tau said, in wonder. “I’m all right. I’ve figured it out.”
And they vomited thin, medicine-smelling fluid onto the dead garden.
Aminata, grimacing, helped the Prince upright. “Bed,” she told the Womb, confident in her medical advice if nothing else. “Bed and water, and alternate charcoal and emetics to soak up whatever’s left in their stomach and get it out. Then laxatives to clean out the intestines.”
“Baru,” Tau croaked.
Aminata froze. She had forgotten all about the reason she’d come. “Baru,” she repeated, in place of the question she wanted to ask: what does Baru want?
Tau answered anyway. “What I told you is true, Aminata. Baru wants to destroy the Imperial Republic. She wants vengeance on Falcrest and justice for what was done to Taranoke. But she fears that she will have to destroy herself to do it. And she fears that if she does not destroy herself then she will be corrupted.”
Baru was a traitor.
A fucking Federal fucking Prince, foreign royalty, was calling Baru a traitor. And Aminata believed it. Utter obscenity.
All the things she’d shared with Baru just a lie. That moment on Kyprananoke when they’d clasped each other by the back of the neck and rubbed their foreheads together like two ship’s cats—idiot! What an idiot she’d been, what a sucker, what a fool! To think that a woman who’d deceived an entire rebellion would be honest with her! To think that Baru was her friend just because she’d clung to a good saber and tricked a duchess into sending a letter!
She’d killed Ormsment for Baru. She’d destroyed a flag officer and all her subordinates for a woman who was a grand traitor—
“I’m an idiot,” she said, and barked a little laugh.
“She needs our help now,” Tau said, with such misplaced sympathy that Aminata laughed again. “Your help in particular. You are the Burner of Souls. I never thought of it before. I always took it for a torturer’s name. But flame has other uses, too, doesn’t it? You burn a sample, in chemistry. And the color of the flames tells you what it’s made of.”
She shouldn’t be here. She shouldn’t be listening to this mad drugged Prince while two living tumors watched it all in silence. Oh, virtues, she would be so tainted.
“Promise me you’ll be Baru’s friend,” Tau said.
“What?”
“The most meaningful power in the world is the bond between two people. The dyad. You will retain the most meaningful power over her, Aminata.”
“You’re high.”
“Yes, but soon I will be sober again. But you, Aminata, will be exactly the same. You will still need the approval of Falcresti superiors to feel better than other Oriati people. You will still despise your Parliament, your Metademe, and all the other organs of Falcrest’s government. You think you despise them as enemies of the navy but in truth you hate them for the way they make you feel about your own Oriati body.”
Tau said it all without the slightest condescension, with a genuine joy, as if the view into Aminata’s eyes was wider and more wonderful than all the stars above Eternal and all the sea around. “And the idea of you and Baru against the world, even against that part of the world which you pretend to love to serve, will always fill you with longing. You must stay close to her, Aminata. Now, more than ever, she cannot be alone. She cannot become the wound. You and she are the last string of connection holding the world from its final hernia into chaos.”
Tau took several gasping breaths. Their heart fluttered hummingbird-quick in their throat.
“And if she becomes terrible,” they said, still smiling, “one of us needs to be close enough to kill her.”
AFTERWARD she wanted her uniform reds so badly that she made Innibarish fetch them. They were still salt-caked and filthy, ruined when she’d gone overboard from Sulane. The Cancrioth hadn’t spared any water for the wash.
Aminata turned the jacket over in her hands, marking the places where it would need alteration. It would cost the better part of a season’s pay.
“Damn,” she said.
Innibarish’s huge hand fell on her shoulder. She stiffened warily. It was the strangest thing in the world to be among people who looked like her. Stranger yet to look down at her uniform and see it not as proof she fit in but as a marker of separation from the people around her.
“You’re all right?” the Cancrioth man asked. “Tau said many strange things.”
She wanted to tell him what she felt about the navy. But how could she articulate it? The joy of being one body among many useful bodies as you sailed the ship? The pure knowledge that your talent and labor could not be denied, could not be stolen and given to someone else, when you were up there in the rigging of a ship, sailing with your own skill?
The isolation of shore leave, where the other women made it silently clear you would not be looking for lads in their company. The strange propositions of Oriati fetishists, the casual assessment of her body by strangers’ gaze and comments, the remarks on her height, the size of her thighs and shoulders and breasts: an assessment which became internal, and constant, so that Aminata saw herself through Falcrest eyes in every mirror, heard the other women muttering in their own minds when she was naked among them.
On Taranoke, a sailor had remarked to her, once, that men thought about women’s bodies nearly as much as they believed women thought about their own. The novelists were wrong: women did not measure themselves in mirrors and stare down their shirts.
Maybe you don’t, she’d wanted to snap. Maybe a Falcrest woman doesn’t. I am constantly thinking about how to hide myself. How to deny the assumption that I’m a slut.
Here on Eternal she was unremarkable. She had only one set of her eyes: her own. The second set, the imaginary Falcrest eyes she carried with her and looked at herself through, were shut.
“Is there any water to wash this uniform?” she asked Innibarish.
“Only if it comes out of your drinking water.”
She would pay in thirst to know who she was again. She would pay eagerly.
“Fine,” she said. “Take it out of my ration.”
ON the next morning, as Aminata and Iraji washed Osa’s powder burns, the Prince returned to them.
“Excuse me,” Tau-indi said, in a clear, bright voice, like a warm breeze after days becalmed.
Aminata stared.
Tau-indi stood in the doorway of the stateroom, open-handed, scoured clean by dry strigil and alcohol, wearing a simple gray Cancrioth cassock. “I’ve been very poor to all of you,” they said. “For that I will not apologize, any more than I could apologize for sickness or frailty. Without trim I was unmoored. But I treated my grief as well as I can. If I cannot go back I will go forward.” They clasped their hands before them. “Osa, I am so sorry you’re burnt, and as soon as I can, I will find a salve for it. As for the rest of you, I feel that I owe some explanation.”
“Your Highness?” Osa gasped. Hope stirred in the creased-paper wreck of her face. Shao Lune lifted herself from folded knees with wary interest.
“Whether you believe in trim,” their eyes found Aminata, “or not, you must know that I believe in it, and so it affects me. I accept that I am excised. I cannot ever return to the mbo. But I still believe in the mission I set out to achieve. The salvation of my people from war, through the influence of the intimate bonds between us.
“I came to find Abdumasi Abd, and to repair the wound in trim between us. It is a wound made when we were children, scarred over and torn open. Now I know that Abdu has taken a Cancrioth implant, and that I can no longer repair the wound. On Kyprananoke I saw that wound devour a whole nation: what Abdumasi began there led to catastrophe. Now the Brain has control of this ship, and she is going to lead all those aboard, willing or otherwise, to tear that wound further open, and to begin the war she wants. Isla Cauteria is her target. We must stop her.”
“Agreed,” Aminata said, loudly.
“This isn’t right,” Shao Lune snapped. “Lieutenant Commander Aminata, you’re not to speak to this person. They’ve been drugged into obedience—”
“Indeed I have. My current good cheer and spiritual clarity are the result of a dangerous dose of entheogens and hallucinogens. I cannot expect the cheer to persist, but I hope the clarity will.” Tau opened their hands to Iraji and Aminata. “When you told me about Baru’s surrender to Ormsment … it led me to a hope. Consciously or otherwise, Baru seemed to be acting according to the principles of trim. They are not so easily explained, but when I teach them, I often introduce them this way:
“To maintain trim is to act in a way that puts the well-being of others before your own. Not in the hope of reward or advantage, but in the knowledge that the only way to a good world is for all people to put themselves second so that all people will be put first. To keep good trim, you must be a good friend to those around you, so your own happiness and health must be maintained. But it is also good trim to go to your enemy, and to offer forgiveness and recompense, to deliver yourself into their judgment: that is a high act of trim.
“It seems to me that when the Womb cut me out of trim, the bonds that once defined my place in the human context may have fixed upon another person. A woman who was reaching out, in desperation, for some hope of reconciliation. In short”—they bowed their head, shuffled, made themself speak with visible effort—“I believe that Baru now occupies the place in trim where I was removed.
“This means that it is her actions which will ultimately reunite my scattered friends Abdumasi Abd and Kindalana of Segu, and, in that reunion, bind the mortal wound that has opened in our world. Whatever happens at the end of our journey, it will happen through Baru, and it will save the Oriati people. It is destiny.”
They turned, with obvious worry, to Aminata. “I know that you most of all will be skeptical of this idea of mine.”
“I don’t understand it,” Aminata hedged. She could not conceive of a worldview in which something as grand as a second Armada War could be stopped by reuniting two people.
“I know.” They smiled. “So I must ask you something. Will you answer honestly?”
“What is it?”
Shao Lune hissed in fury.
Tau-indi swallowed, and said, in one excited run, “Have you, in recent months, found yourself entangled by seemingly spontaneous connections with the lives of others? In particular Cairdine Farrier the Itinerant, Cosgrad Torrinde the Hesychast, Abdumasi Abd, Kindalana of Segu, and myself? Have you noticed these names, or the people themselves, appearing to you in unexpected places?”
“Bit of a leading question, isn’t it?” Shao Lune sneered.
It surely was, Aminata thought, it was the very definition of a leading question.
Only—only—it had all happened exactly the way Tau said. Hadn’t it? Aminata had been given a prisoner to torture: Abdumasi Abd. He had blurted out Baru’s name. The hunt for Baru led her to the Llosydane Islands, and to Mister Calcanish, who’d told her about Kindalana, and who’d been so aroused and troubled by that name. Then on to Kyprananoke, and to a meeting with Tau-indi, and with Baru, who wanted to know if Cairdine Farrier had twisted their friendship.…
“Yes,” she admitted. “I know all these people. Except Cosgrad Torrinde. I know he’s Minister Metademe but I’ve never met him personally.”
“No?” Tau looked crestfallen. “He moves under many identities. He would be an extremely lithe, supple, athletic man. A bit like the illustrations in an anatomy textbook you weren’t supposed to find exciting as a girl.”
“Oh, no,” Aminata groaned. “Oh, no. Calcanish—?”
“Oh, well conquered,” Shao Lune purred. “The man who denies the navy’s women their marriage permits? What a fine catch. You really will let anyone—”
For the first time in Aminata’s life, the room was full of Oriati people, and their collective bristling disapproval drove Shao Lune back.
“Tau,” Iraji said, carefully, “what made you seek … treatment? Who convinced you that you needed help?”
Tau blinked at him. “Child, I am almost forty years old. I’ve spent my entire life thinking about how to be a better person. My capacity to be a terrible person is undiminished by that work, as a pit is undiminished by the construction of a tower. But I can set myself aright when I falter. I don’t need to be spurred.” They self-consciously smoothed their cassock over their hips. “I recommend psilocin mushrooms to all those who suffer an overcast of character. I’ve used them before.”
A quick sly smile at Aminata, and then they gathered the room’s attention with open arms. “I must ask all of you for your help. I cannot be ambassador for the Mbo any longer, but perhaps there is a reason for that. Perhaps fate took everything I loved because those bonds held me back from who I need to be. I was ambassador to Falcrest, a place without trim. I must believe that people without trim are still capable of good. I must believe the Cancrioth can make human choices. Will you help me help them?”
Aminata, against the cold judgment of Shao Lune’s eyes: “Help them with what?”
“Retaking the ship, of course,” Tau said. “Preventing the Brain from leading us to war.”
“That’s impossible,” Shao Lune scoffed.
“I’m afraid I agree,” Osa croaked, from Iraji’s supporting arms. “How could we possibly…?”
Tau smiled a little, and Aminata smiled, too, helpless, because she loved the foreign Prince’s impish delight.
“Magic,” they said. They bowed to Iraji, not deep, not long, but a bow nonetheless. “Child, have they taught you any war magic?”
“No,” Iraji said, staggering a little under Osa’s weight, fighting that old, old conditioning to faint. “Not yet…”
“Then it is very fortunate for us,” Tau said, wringing out their hands, “that I know a great deal of it myself.”
FEDERATION YEAR 912:
23 YEARS EARLIER
UPON THE ASHEN SEA
OFF SEGU MBO
THESE were the terms of Oriati Mbo’s surrender, as demanded in the document held by Cairdine Farrier.
Oriati Mbo would yield its sole claim to the Ashen Sea and cooperate in establishing a Free Navigational Commons along the northern Oriati coast, in which Falcrest’s convoys and their escorts could move untroubled. The eastern Mothercoast along Devi-naga would remain open to Falcrest’s ships. They would make no claim to the western coast and the Black Tea Ocean (because, Tau thought, they could not practically reach it: not without fighting through Segu’s islands, or looping south and west around Cape Zero and the deadly horn of Zawam Asu).
Oriati Mbo would receive damages: blood money, in Oriati terms. Falcrest would send paper money by the shipload, good tender in any Falcresti market; they would send more in exchange for counterpayments of gold, silver, and gems, at generous rates of exchange, practically devaluing their own currency. They would buy up Oriati debts, paying cash for the right to receive the debt when it was paid—a practice not foreign to the Oriati, but usually used compassionately, not for profit.
Oriati Mbo would not be asked to yield its pride or culture or its political independence. This was a trade dispute, the Falcresti said. A market correction. For many decades, Oriati Mbo had overvalued its strength, and undervalued Falcrest’s.
Violence had been transacted as a result.
The treaty put a name to the whole tragedy. It would be called the Armada War. As if it had all been fought at sea, among the willing and the glorious. As if burnt Kutulbha had been a particularly large ship.
Maybe one of the spoils of a war was the right to name it.
“Well,” Tau’s mother Tahr said, reading it again. “Segu’s not going to like this. Are they, Kinda?”
Kindalana eshSegu shook her head. She was watching the man beside her with a gaze Tau couldn’t decipher.
“That’s why Segu was hit hardest.” Farrier frowned through his beard. “And Devi-naga, I assume. Both the great nautical federations would need to be shocked into surrender. I wish we could get news of Devi-naga’s coast.” But the Tide Column was blockaded, and with it all sea traffic from the Mbo’s eastern nation, so news had to come overland. “I visited it when I was younger. A marvelous place. Have any of you been? No? Oh, I recommend it. Such resilience in them, the Devi and the Naga both. A land of cholera and typhoid, terrible floods … which reminds me, Tahr, I wanted to talk to you about the captain’s problem with the ship’s owner. If we can sort it out for them I expect it would be good for both our trim.…”
Tahr and Farrier went forward to speak to the captain. Cosgrad Torrinde, leaning against the back wall of the compartment, put his hands together and sighed into them. Tau-indi bit on their toothache and wished that they could all go home to Prince Hill again, and fight over small troubles of sex and honey.
“I don’t want Oriati Mbo conquered,” Cosgrad said. He looked between Tau and Kinda with thin-lipped determination. “This treaty is the beginning of the real war. Not the end. Don’t forget that.”
He drew away. Tau-indi watched him go, thinking of jellyfish and squid and thin membranes moving languidly down in the deep.
“You have to marry Farrier,” Kindalana said.
Tau-indi’s head filled with a hollow ringing sound, as if they had just stood up, hard, into the corner of an open cabinet door. “What?”
“I can’t do it.” Kindalana crossed her arms and stuck her jaw out. “You’re right. I have to take care of Abdumasi. You have to do it, Tau-indi. We need to find a way inside them, a way to use influence where force will fail. Or we’re lost.”
“He’s older than me!”
“He’s a foreigner. The age difference can be excused.”
“He’s never shown a lick of interest!”
“You don’t need to fuck him. You don’t need to love him.” Kindalana and her awful way of solving things. “You just need to marry him. We’re Princes, Tau. We do what the Mbo requires. Think of what a marriage bond to Falcrest could do. It worked with the Maia. It could work again.”
“Why not—” Tau shifted awkwardly. “Why not Cosgrad?”
“Because Farrier’s more dangerous.” She put her face in her hands. When she looked back up her eyes were soft and her jaw was oh so hard. “Falcrest will get inside us and change us. I think our only chance is to do the same to them.”
Tau-indi could find nothing to disagree with that.
“We’re Princes,” Kindalana said, simply. “We have to save the mbo.”
Tau-indi choked down bitter unseemly protests about the meaninglessness of marriage, about their absent father, about Kindalana’s runaway mother. “Falcrest will destroy itself in time. What they do will turn back on them.”
Only if you’re right, Kindalana’s eyes said. Only if you’re right, and trim is more powerful than fire.
“Then both sides will be ruined. Is that what you want? Each of us broken? History has given them the power to take what they want from us. We cannot pretend it is otherwise. We must accept our defeat, and find a way to make something from it.”
THEIR dromon sailed toward Kutulbha through a green sea scummed with ash. Tau woke in the night to the sound of the prow parting corpses. The rowers coughed so much that Tau couldn’t get back to sleep. Fat sharks circled with grins full of human meat, and the black sky lowered limbs of ash to feed from the funerary water.
They sailed between two plates of death and they were like one torch moving across a charred savannah under a starless sky.
The principles in Kutulbha were the principles of a tomb. No, Tau-indi thought, that was wrong. A tomb was, after all, a place people made to consecrate and remember the dead. It had a purpose.
There were no principles in Kutulbha. This was a hole, a breach in the mbo, severed from trim and life. The world here had been rubbed naked to the primordial chaos.
They arrived in Kutulbha harbor among the dromons of other Princes flying flags of war and grief. Here they found the sleek shapes of Masquerade frigates, red-sailed, like the wings of a bloody carrion bird peering up from its feast. On their decks engines of fire and racks of rocket arrows waited for orders to kill. The Masquerade sailors wore white masks and red waistcoats. From a distance they might have all been painted figures positioned in some scholar’s diorama.
These ships had burnt Kutulbha. Some of the griots said they’d fired arrows into the city with messages to surrender, and then messages to evacuate, printed with a dire warning: FIRE HAS NO MERCY.
Some said they’d given no one any time to do anything but burn.
Many of the Princes had come here simply to grieve. Many more had come to bring supplies to the refugees. The survivors met them with gratitude, or dull acknowledgment, or pure inconsolate rage that the Princes still cared about trim or principle when this had happened.
Tau met Princes who had come with their own Falcresti hostages. Men and women who carried the same terms of surrender Farrier had presented. And they met Princes broken in contrition because they had allowed their Falcresti hostages to die, or killed them in revenge, and in doing so invited doom on their houses, their tribes, their squadrons, their rivers.
Of all the Princes who had come, Kindalana and Tau-indi were the youngest. That gave them power. They had the most future to speak for. They bore the trim of the unborn, and if there was any purpose to the world at all, it must be to make it kinder for those who waited across the Door for their time to be born.
“The war must end now,” they told the others. “We must surrender.”
But they also found Princes mad with rage, Princes who wanted to declare the Falcresti as enenen, an alien enemy without trim, and refuse their blood money. Princes who wanted to raise armies like Tahari or White Akhena and march on Falcrest. And there was worse. Some of them wore no paint except white corpse ash and they said that there were powers older than trim, powers down in the south of Mzilimake, in the hot lands and the jungle, that would fill the wombs of Falcrest with empty cysts of blood.
“Before principles,” these Princes said, “we had a god whose brain is a tumor, whose eyes protrude on horns of cancer, whose pregnancy swells forever. Let us break the lead seals and the clay tablets. Let us set that god on Falcrest.”
Tau-indi saw in their eyes a burning woman with green hands and too many green eyes, and wanted to scream.
It was decided, swiftly and generally, without any one clear formal decision, that they would vote on the articles of surrender: whether to yield to Falcrest now, or go on, somehow, with the losing war.
On the day of that vote, Tau-indi brought Cosgrad Torrinde to walk among the Princes. “Tell them about your study of the mangroves,” Tau-indi prompted. “Tell them about how you licked the frog out of curiosity.”
Cosgrad tried to be charming. But Tau-indi tripped him up and teased him and made him stammer and stumble over complicated ideas that barely fit into his knowledge of Uburu and Seti-caho, so that he looked human and unthreatening. Tahr the Prince-Mother walked with Cosgrad to show her favor toward him, chained and jeweled, haloing Cosgrad in a reflected authority that would impress Segu’s princes. To the Segu women, Cosgrad was something to be cut down to size, a jumped-up laborer and spouse. They could handle him better when Tahr seemed to own him.
Kindalana spoke, everywhere she went, of Cosgrad’s unlikely friendship with young Tau-indi. “See?” she said. “We can learn to love each other. This man saved my father’s life, and in that healing, a greater wound might be sutured.”
It was strange to hear this from Kindalana, because Tau knew she felt a deep cynicism about Falcrest’s response to kindness and generosity. But many of the Princes were comforted by her assurance, because it eased their own guilt about allowing a war to break out.
It was, Tau thought, very Oriati to feel more guilt for the wound in their own conduct than anger at Falcrest’s aggression. It was a noble thing to constantly ask yourself to be better. But it could also be arrogant, self-involved, oblivious. As if everything that mattered was ultimately about Oriati people and their conduct. As if they were so powerful, so central to the world, that only they could be blamed for their own defeat.
That was when Tau knew Kindalana was right. It was not enough to tend to the Mbo’s trim. Something had to be done within Falcrest.
On that evening the Princes at the grave of Kutulbha voted on the terms of surrender.
These were the votes.
Lonjaro Mbo, the High Heart of the World, the Thirteen-in-Three-in-One that carried on Mana Mane’s faith as recorded in the Kiet Khoiad, voted by a sweeping majority to surrender to Falcrest. Time and population were on their side. They could stop the killing and start the healing. Only the eastern kingdoms of Umbili the Savan Antelope and Kinde the Torch Cheetah, pressed up against Falcrest, voted for war: their shua had been raiding and skirmishing along the border for years, and they stood to lose huge tracts of land in the surrender. The Princes of Abdeli Bduli, the landless thirteenth kingdom which traditionally represented the renegades and common folk, voted for peace but warned of a great and growing anger among their people.
The tribes of Segu, the People of the Ships, voted by the narrowest margin to surrender to Falcrest. Kutulbha was a bone ash ruin. Their archipelagos were troubled by starvation and shortage after the loss of so many ships. They needed years to lay down new fleets. But the Princes of the western coast and the southern territories, the mighty uroSegu and far-ranging yeniSegu among them, declared themselves unbound by the vote.
The Mzilimaki Paramountcy voted to continue the war, claiming solidarity with their northerly neighbor Segu. This drew outrage, even and especially from Segu’s princes. Mzilimake wanted to see Segu’s shipping entirely devastated, so that trade would abandon the coast and come south again, through the Moonlight Kingdoms and their thousand rivers. So much for the people who spoke Maulmake, those bitter Segu-women said; the name of the language meant moon truth, but the Mzilimaki had filled it with lies.
(Tau was not personally convinced of any malice, though. Mzilimake contained some two thousand tribes, banded into confederations according to the lakes and rivers that connected them. Even White Akhena had only been able to unite them for twenty years. Tau did not think they could possibly all support a single conspiracy against Segu.)
Some of the Mzilimaki Princes suggested, to Tau’s absolute revulsion, that they knew of deep places in the jungle where one could catch certain bushmeat. A bushmeat that, when eaten, produced a plague they would not dare name. This virulence could defend the Mbo against any invaders.
“Millions would die!” Kindalana cried. “Millions! Can you count that high, you fools? There would be a corpse for every hair on all of your heads, and enough left over to pluck your genitals naked!”
Devi-naga the Stormblown Flock, the Land of Jet and Flood, which ran down the continent’s eastern edge along the Mother of Storms and toward far Zawam Asu, voted for peace. Falcrest’s Second Fleet loomed off their shores, sitting on their trade, enforcing brutal and high-handed “mandatory quarantines” on the rice paddies and floodplains. The Squadron Princes were more afraid of starvation than of surrender. Without the grain trade through the Tide Column, it had crept too close to bear.
By vote of the Princes, born by vote of the Mbo, the oldest and longest of civilizations would accept a conditional surrender to the youngest and least known.
All this time Cairdine Farrier was nowhere to be found.
Later they learned he’d gone ashore to help Kutulbha’s orphans, finding them sponsors so they could be adopted and raised in Falcrest.
THEY signed the surrender aboard Tau-indi and Kindalana’s dromon, because the future belonged to the young.
Off the ship’s port side, the city of Kutulbha smoldered like a cook fire, and the meal it cooked was a hundred thousand people, and the mouth that ate those people was the mouth missing from the white Falcrest masks that stared across the table as their clerks offered silver pens.
Tau-indi took the pen. A treaty was a spell to force the human world to obey a truth that existed only in paper. There was no reason to accept the world the treaty described as true, except that Falcrest had made continued war a part of any other world.
They wrote their name.
So it was signed.
Afterward Kindalana and Tau-indi went ashore and gathered ash for ash cakes. Cosgrad watched them cook with uneasy fascination. When offered a cake he looked away, throat cabled with unease.
“No,” he said thickly. “I can’t. I can’t.”
He felt too much a part of it, Tau-indi thought. He couldn’t eat his own guilt. Because then he would begin digesting it, whether into poison or acceptance.
The war would go on a while after this. Falcrest kept track of the dates and times of each battle and assembled a schedule of penalties. The last great battle was Nyoba Dbellu’s, who led her ships against thirst and scurvy all the way around the Ashen Sea, up past the old Maia lands in the northwest, east across the coast of Aurdwynn, down from the north at Falcrest itself. She traveled far from the coast to avoid Falcresti pickets, at the mercy of dehydration and storm. Of all those that set sail, not two in three survived the entire journey.
At the end of her voyage, among Falcrest’s islands, the Porpoise Carousel, the tern-stained Nautilus, and the scrubby Little Squid, Nyoba Dbellu’s ships burnt under the siphons of Falcrest’s First Fleet, and their ash filled up the waterway that would forever after be called the Sound of Fire.