The Traitor Baru Cormorant Read online

  Baru kept the coin.

  At the end of the day the red-sailed frigate in the harbor put down boats. The soldiers began to come ashore, led by officers in salt-stained leather and steel masks. Through her spyglass Baru watched Iriad’s elders escort the Masquerade soldiers into their new building: a white embassy made of ash concrete.

  Later Baru decided this must have been when the treaty was signed: An Act of Federation, For the Mutual Benefit of the People of Taranoke and the Imperial Republic of Falcrest.

  At sunset they raised their banner: two open eyes in a mask, circled in clasped hands. And the next morning they began to cut tufa to build the school.

  * * *

  STORM season blew down on Taranoke and everything began to fall.

  Baru relied on her mother’s love of knowing and telling to understand. But Pinion grew distant and temperamental, her loves overshadowed by a terrible brooding anger, and so left Baru to piece together the clues herself.

  This was how she explained it to some of the other children, Lea Pearldiver’s and Haea Ashcoke’s, her second cousin Lao oldest among them and already growing into a long-limbed stork of a person who had to fold herself up between the salty rocks of their secret seaside bolt-hole to listen to Baru’s stories—

  “The plainsmen are angry with us,” Baru would say, “because of the treaty. They say it’s because Taranoke stands alone, and we’ve betrayed that by letting the Masquerade build an embassy. But we know better.” (At this everyone would murmur in agreement, having been raised to know the jealous ways of the soggy people from Taranoke’s eastern plains.) “They think we’ve bought a foreign ally to hold over them. They think we want a monopoly on the new trade.”

  And events proved her right. Early in the rainy season all the children from around Halae’s Reef packed themselves into their briny seaside fortress so Baru could explain the fires. “The plainsmen sent a war party,” she told them, relishing the power to make them gasp and lean in, and especially the power to make Lao hug her knees and stare at Baru in terror and admiration. “They came over the mountain and burned some of our sugarcane and coffee. It was a message, you see? So the harborside families took council at Iriad, and sent out a war party of our own. Champions to bear their shields east and answer the challenge.”

  “What will they do?” Lao asked, to Baru’s immense satisfaction.

  “Talk if they can,” Baru said, playing at nonchalance by tossing a stone to herself. “Fight if they can’t.”

  “How do they fight?”

  How extraordinarily satisfying to be the daughter of Salm the shield-bearer and Pinion the huntress, foremost among the harborside champions. “Wars are fought between champions in a circle of drums. The drums beat and the champions trade spear-cast and shield-push until the loser yields or dies.” Baru cracked her throwing stone against the stone beneath her, to make them leap. “And then the plainsmen go home to sulk, and we sell them textiles at outrageous prices.”

  But it didn’t happen this way. When the war party set out to cross the mountain and challenge the plainsmen, the Masquerade garrison marched with them. The treaty spoke of mutual defense.

  This was where Baru lost track of events, because mother Pinion and father Salm marched with them too—the war party with their shields and man-spears and obsidian knives climbing the flank of the mountain in a motley peacock throng, Salm’s braids a mark of glory among them, Pinion’s spear strapped across her brown back. And the Masquerade garrison masked and columned behind them, banners flying, churning the road to mud.

  It had been a long time since war between harborside and plainsmen. Around Iriad there were old vendettas, wives who would not take plainside husbands, men who would not add their seed to a plainside woman’s child. But it had been easy to forget that hate as long as times were fat.

  Baru and father Solit stayed at home. The glassmakers had stopped burning kelp and so there were no mirrors to grind. Without Masquerade traders in harbor the paper money was worthless, except it wasn’t, because everyone wanted to have it when the trade winds picked up again, and bartered outrageously for even a few slips.

  The wool-merchant Cairdine Farrier came in person to invite Baru to attend the new school, a great tufa-walled compound above the cove. “Oh,” father Solit said, his voice hard. “I don’t know. What could you teach her that she couldn’t learn from us?”

  “Lands around the Ashen Sea,” Farrier said, smiling conspiratorially at Baru. “New sorts of arithmetic and algebra. Astronomy—we have an excellent telescope, built by the Stakhieczi in the distant north. Science and the disciplines within it. Various catalogues”—his smile held—“of sin and social failure. The Imperial Republic is determined to help those we meet.”

  “No,” father Solit said, taking her shoulder. “Your help is a fishhook.”

  “You know best, of course,” Farrier said, though the avarice had not gone from his eyes.

  But without Salm and Pinion, father Solit was lonely and disconsolate, and Baru insisted that she be allowed to attend this wonderful school, which might be full of answers to questions she had barely begun to form—what is the world and who runs it and more. Whether because she made Solit furious, or sad, or led him to realize he no longer had any control, her pleas struck home. (She wondered about this often, later, and decided it was none of that. He had seen the fire on the horizon and wanted his daughter safe.)

  She went into the school, with her own uniform and her own bed in the crowded dormitory, and there in her first class on Scientific Society and Incrasticism she learned the words sodomite and tribadist and social crime and sanitary inheritance, and even the mantra of rule: order is preferable to disorder. There were rhymes and syllogisms to learn, the Qualms of revolutionary philosophy, readings from a child’s version of the Falcresti Handbook of Manumission.

  They know so much, Baru thought. I must learn it all. I must name every star and sin, find the secrets of treaty-writing and world-changing. Then I can go home and I will know how to make Solit happy again.

  She learned a great many other things as well: astronomy and social heredity and geography. She made a map of the Ashen Sea and its seasonal trade winds, which carried ships in a great easy circle that ran clockwise (another new word) around the ocean, starting at Falcrest in the east and running south near Taranoke and Oriati Mbo, onward past lands with many names, all the way north to Aurdwynn and then back to Falcrest again.

  So many lands. Oriati Mbo below, learned and fractious, a quilt of federations. Cold Aurdwynn above, where instead of a storm season they had winter, and no decent fruit, and wolves.

  And Falcrest. It must be full of secrets to learn.

  “You could go to Falcrest, Baru Cormorant!” The social hygienist Diline, a gentle man the color of whitefish, aimed his stylus at her. “At the end of your schooling, every child of promise will sit the civil service exam, the Empire’s great leveler. Through the methods of Incrastic thought, we will determine your social function. You may become a translator, a scholar, even a technocrat in a distant land.”

  “Does the Emperor live in Falcrest?” second cousin Lao asked. At night they whispered rumors of the silent Emperor and the Faceless Throne on which he sat.

  Diline smiled blandly. “He does. Who can recite the Hierarchic Qualm?”

  Baru could.

  The civil service exam became Baru’s guide-star. It would ask her to recite the secrets of power, she imagined. It would require her to make father Solit smile again.

  But that very same day Diline taught them the proof of strict limited inheritance. “One male father,” he said, watching the class carefully, as if waiting for a boar to burst out from among them. “One female mother. No less. No more.”

  The class did not believe him. Cousin Lao began to cry. Baru tried to disprove this idiot proof, and had her first shouting match. She was the daughter of a huntress and a blacksmith and a shield-bearer, and now they would tell her she was not?

&
nbsp; She had to ask mother Pinion.

  But Pinion came home alone.

  Came home from the war, the blood-soaked catastrophe at Jupora, where Masquerade marines shot dead the plainsmen champions and slaughtered their war party. Cradling father Solit’s trembling face in her hands, she rasped her own catastrophe: “Salm vanished on the march home. There were men among the foreign soldiers who hated him. I think they took him.”

  “For what?” Solit’s voice sealed, frozen, desperate to keep things within or without. “What could they find to hate?”

  “You. None of these men have husbands. They hate husbands.” She lowered her forehead to his. “He’s gone, Solit. I looked—I looked so long—”

  When this happened, it was because of the class on Scientific Society and Incrasticism that Baru could only think to ask: “Was Salm my real father? Or was he only a sodomite?”

  It was because of this that father Solit cried out, and told mother Pinion about the school. It was because of this that mother Pinion struck her in rage, and cast Baru out of the courtyard to run sobbing back to the white walls and the masked banner.

  Her mother came to apologize, of course, and they cried and were reunited as a family, or at least a grieving part of one. But the hurt was dealt, and the school seemed to know more than even mother Pinion, who taught no more—only whispered with Solit about fire and spear and resistance.

  “Stay at school,” Solit said. “You’ll be safest there. The Farrier man”—his nostrils flared in disgust—“will not let you be harmed.”

  I must learn why this happened to Salm, Baru thought. I must understand it, so I can stop it from ever happening again. I will not cry. I will understand.

  This was Baru Cormorant’s first lesson in causality. But it was not quite the most important thing she ever learned from her mother.

  That came earlier, long before the school or the disappearance of brave father Salm. Watching the red-sailed warship in Iriad harbor, Baru asked: “Mother, why do they come here and make treaties? Why do we not go to them? Why are they so powerful?”

  “I don’t know, child,” mother Pinion said.

  It was the first time Baru could ever remember hearing those words from her.

  2

  SHE lost her father Salm, and from this she nearly lost her mother, too.

  “You cannot believe what they teach you,” mother Pinion hissed in her ear. (They smiled together at the chaperones who brought Baru to visit her home, which seemed strangely squalid now.) “You must remember what they did to Salm, and give them nothing. The families are taking secret council. We will find a way to drive them back into the sea.”

  “They will never go back,” Baru whispered, pleading. “You cannot fight them, Mother. You don’t understand how huge they are. Please find some way to make peace—please don’t die like Salm—”

  “He isn’t dead,” Pinion growled. “Your father lives.”

  Baru looked at her mother, at Pinion’s eyes red with fatigue, her shoulders bunched in anger, and wondered what had happened to the woman who was a thunderbolt, a storm cloud, a panther. Of all things Pinion looked most like a wound.

  And Pinion, looking back, must have seen an equal disappointment in Baru’s eyes. “He lives,” she said again, and turned away.

  The argument grew between them like a reef.

  By Baru’s tenth birthday, she came to expect visits from the wool merchant Cairdine Farrier more often than her mother or father. He always had advice. Dress this way, never that way. Befriend her, or him—but not him. She liked his advice better than Pinion’s, because it was full of things to accomplish now rather than things to avoid forever.

  The school’s Charitable Service instructors came from many foreign places. There were more and stranger people among the Masquerade garrison than Baru had ever seen at Iriad market. “If they can be teachers,” Baru asked, “then I can be one, too? I can go to another land and make little girls stop reading at unjustly early hours?”

  “You can be anything you want in the Empire of Masks!” Cairdine Farrier, grown fat these past few years on island life, tugged affectionately on her ear. “Man and woman, rich and poor, Stakhieczi or Oriati or Maia or Falcrest born—in our Imperial Republic you can be what you desire, if you are disciplined in your actions and rigorous in your thoughts. That’s why it’s an Empire of Masks, dear. When you wear a mask, your wits matter.”

  “You don’t wear a mask,” Baru said, studying him intently, wondering if there might be flaps behind his ears, fastenings in his hair.

  Farrier laughed at her words, or her stare. He was like Pinion or Solit in his love of her sharpest thoughts. But he was like lost Salm in another way, in the way he relished Baru’s effrontery, her willingness to reach out and ask or take. “The mask is for acts of service. The soldier wears a mask on his patrol. The mathematician wears a mask defending her proof. In Parliament they are all masked, because they are vessels for the will of the Republic. And on the Faceless Throne the Emperor sits masked forever.”

  A deflection. How unacceptable. Baru pursued her question. “When do you wear a mask? How do you serve?”

  “It’s too hot on Taranoke for masks. But I am here to sell wool, and help occasionally in matters of charity.” He scrubbed Baru’s close-shaved scalp with his knuckles. Fat had plumped out his cheeks and weighted his jaw, but when Baru thought of fat men she thought of happy old storytellers at Iriad, pleased to be old, and large with joy. Cairdine Farrier did not seem that way. He carried his weight like a thoughtful provision, stored in preparation.

  “What if you could wear a mask?” he asked. “What would you want, Baru?”

  It had not occurred to Baru to want anything except stars and letters until the day when the red-sailed frigate moored in Iriad harbor. It had not occurred to her to want the impossible until she lost father Salm, first to that awful doctrine, and then to death.

  Perhaps the death of fathers could be outlawed.

  Perhaps doctrines could be rewritten.

  “I want to be powerful,” she said.

  Cairdine Farrier looked down fondly. “You should study hard for your service exam,” he said. “Study very hard.”

  * * *

  THE service exam would not come for eight years. Baru worked herself raw for it.

  Falcrest, she whispered to herself at night. Empiricism. Incrasticism. The academies of Falcrest. Parliament, and the Metademe, and the Morrow Ministry, and all their secrets. If only I can go to Falcrest—

  So much to master, in that distant axis around which the Empire of Masks and the world turned. Secrets her mother had never dreamed of.

  The terror did not stop with Salm.

  Outside the walls of the Masquerade school, plague swept Taranoke. Quarantine closed the gates. The Taranoki children in the school, unable to get news of their relatives, waited bravely through their inoculations (a Masquerade concept, like a feeble sickness carried on a swab or a needle). But the quarantine did not lift, not that trade season nor the storm season after.

  When rumors of the dead crept into the school, the sobs of bereaved students kept Baru from her sleep. Sometimes the rumors were false. Not often.

  On lonely nights in the dormitories, surrounded by mourning, Baru would think with cold resentment: at least you know. Better to see the body, and to know how your beloved kin passed—better that than to lose your father in the night, as if he were a misplaced toy, a ship at a fraying moor.

  Then the scale of the death outside became clear—the pyramids of corpses burning on the black stone, the weeping sores and lye stink of the quarantine pens. Baru didn’t weep at that either, but she desperately wanted to.

  “Why is this happening?” She cornered Cairdine Farrier during one of his visits, furious and desperate. “What does this mean?” And when he made a gentle face, a face for blandishments and reassurance, she screamed into the space before the lie: “You brought this with you!”

  And he looked at her with
open eyes, the bone of his heavy brow a bastion above, the flesh of his face wealthy below, and in those eyes she glimpsed an imperium, a mechanism of rule building itself from the work of so many million hands. Remorseless not out of cruelty or hate but because it was too vast and too set on its destiny to care for the small tragedies of its growth. She saw this not merely in the shape of his eyes and the flatness of his regard, but in what they recalled—things he had said and done suddenly understood. And she knew that Farrier had let her see this, as a warning, as a promise.

  “The tide is coming in,” he said. “The ocean has reached this little pool. There will be turbulence, and confusion, and ruin. This is what happens when something small joins something vast. But—” Later she would hold to this moment, because it felt that he had offered her something true and grown-up and powerful rather than a lie to shield her. “When the joining is done there will be a sea for you to swim in.”

  The Masquerade teachers and sailors came and went freely. They were immune. Baru deduced the arrival of a second Masquerade frigate from a whole flock of new faces, including a lanky black-skinned midshipwoman who couldn’t have had more than two years on Baru but got to wear a sword. Baru was too embarrassed of her accented Aphalone to say hello, to ask how an Oriati girl had made herself an officer in the service of the Masquerade so soon after the great Armada War between the two powers.

  Children began to vanish from the school, sent back out onto the island, into the plague. “Their behavior was not hygienic,” the teachers said. Social conditions, the students whispered. He was found playing the game of fathers—

  The teachers watched them coldly as their puberty came, waiting for unhygienic behavior to manifest itself. Baru saw why Cairdine Farrier had advised her on her friendships. Some of the students collaborated in the surveillance.