The Traitor Baru Cormorant (2 page)

The man looked bored, so Baru felt no qualms about climbing up onto his stall. He had guards, two women with shaved heads and sailors' breeches, but they were busy trying to bridge the language barrier with a young Taranoki fisherman.

“Hello, dear,” the man in the stall said. He moved a stack of samples and made a space for her. Baru made curious note of his excellent Urunoki. He must be a very dedicated trader, or very good with tongues—and cultures, too, because traders did not often understand how to be friendly on Taranoke. “Do your parents need cold-weather cloth?”

“Why are they bald?” Baru asked, pointing to the guards. By gesture or linguistic skill, they had made their fisherman friend blush.

“There are lice on ships,” the merchant said, looking wearily out into the market. He had heavy brows, like fortresses to guard his eyes. “They live in hair. And I don't suppose your parents need cloth, given the climate. What was I thinking, trying to sell broadcloth here? I'll go home a pauper.”

“Oh, no,” Baru assured him. “We make things from your cloth, I'm sure, and besides, we can sell it to traders headed north, and make a profit. Do you use the paper money?”

“I prefer coin and gem, though when I buy, I'll pay in paper notes.”

He had to his left a stack of sheepskin palimpsest—ink-scratched records that could be scraped clean and used again. “Are those your figures?”

“They are, and they are certainly too important to show to you.” The broadcloth merchant blew irritably at a buzzing fly. “Do your parents use paper money, then?”

Baru caught the fly and crushed it. “No one used it at first. But now that your ships come in so often, everyone must have some, because it can buy so many things.” Then she asked about something she already knew, because it was useful to hide her wit: “Are you from the Masquerade?”

“The Empire of Masks, dear, or the Imperial Republic. It's rude to abbreviate.” The man watched his guards with a paternal frown, as if afraid they might need supervision. “Yes, that's my home. Though I haven't seen Falcrest in some years.”

“Are you going to conquer us?”

He looked at her slowly, his eyes narrowed in thought. “We never conquer anyone. Conquest is a bloody business, and causes plagues besides. We're here as friends.”

“It's curious, then, that you'd sell goods for coins and gems, but only buy with paper,” said Baru. The shape of her words changed here, not entirely by her will: for a few moments she spoke like her mother. “Because if I understand my figures, that means you are taking all the things we use to trade with others, and giving us paper that is only good with you.”

The broadcloth merchant watched her with sudden sharpness.

“My parents are scared,” Baru added, embarrassed by his regard.

He leaned forward, and abruptly she recognized his expression from markets and traders past. It was avarice. “Are your parents here?”

“I'm fine alone,” she said. “Everyone here knows everyone else. I can't get lost. But if you want to buy a telescope—”

“I
crave
telescopes,” he said, perhaps thinking she had never heard of sarcasm. “Where are they?”

“Up there,” she said, pointing. “My mother is the huntress Pinion, and my fathers are Solit the blacksmith and Salm the shield-bearer.”

At that his mouth pursed, as if the idea of fathers troubled him. Perhaps they had no fathers in Falcrest. “And you?”

“My name's Baru,” she said, as names were gladly given on Taranoke. “Baru Cormorant, because a cormorant was the only thing that made me stop crying.”

“You're a very clever girl, Baru,” the merchant said. “You're going to have a brilliant future. Come see me again. Ask for Cairdine Farrier.”

When he came to speak to her parents later, he could not seem to stop looking at her fathers, and then her mother, and pursing his lips as if he had swallowed his own snot. But he bought two telescopes and a set of mirrors, and even wary Salm was happy.

*   *   *

T
HE
last Masquerade convoy of the trade season circled Halae's Reef and anchored off Iriad harbor in the company of a sleek red-sailed frigate—the warship that father Salm had expected. Barking sailors swarmed her deck. A child with a spyglass might, if she were too curious for her own good and too poor a daughter to attend to her work, climb the volcano and watch their proceedings all day long. Baru had such a spyglass, and she was just that kind of daughter.

“They have soldiers on board,” Baru told her parents, excited to discover such a portentous thing herself. Now she could be included in the courtyard councils and whispers of poison treaties. “With armor and spears!”

But father Salm did not buckle on his shield to fight them. Mother Pinion did not take Baru aside and explain the taxonomy of sergeants and officers and the nature and variety of Masquerade weapons. Father Solit fed her no pineapple and asked for no details. They worked in the courtyard, murmuring about treaties and embassies. “Once they have built it,” Salm would say, “they will never leave.” And Solit would answer in flat fighting-without-fighting words: “They will build it whether we sign or not. We must make terms.”

Feeling neglected and therefore unwilling to attend to her chores and figures, Baru nagged them. “Solit,” she said, as he bagged their kelp harvest to carry to the burners, “when can you start smithing again?”

When Baru was young he had made beautiful and dangerous things out of ores that came from the earth and the hot springs. “Once the trading season's over, Baru,” he said.

“And will mother go across the mountain, into the plains, and use the boar-killing spear you made for her?”

“I'm sure she will.”

Baru looked happily to her mother, whose long strides and broad shoulders were better suited to the hunt than to telescope-making, and then to her other father, who could drum as fiercely as he could fight. “And when the soldiers come, will father Salm use the man-killing spear you made for him?”

“You're covered in filth, child,” Solit said. “Go to Lea Pearldiver's home and get some pumice. Take some paper money and buy their olive oil, too.”

*   *   *

B
ARU
read at great length about
treaties
and
currency
and
arbitrage,
and when she could read or understand no more, she bothered mother Pinion, or sat in thought. Clearly there had been some mistake: her parents had been happier last year than this.

The trend would have to be reversed. But how?

At Iriad market the merchant Cairdine Farrier sat in his stall with his two guards, who had the satisfied look of gulls. That market fell on a stormy end-of-season day, gray and forbidding, close to the time when the Ashen Sea's circular trade winds would collapse into winter storm. But the Iriad cove sheltered the market from the worst of the chop and the drummers still drummed. Baru made straight for the wool-merchant's stall.

Farrier was speaking to a Taranoki plainsman who had clearly come all the way across the mountain, and Baru had always been taught not to speak to plainsmen, so she went to Farrier's guards instead. The bald women looked down at her, first with perfunctory regard, then irritation, and then, when she stayed, a little smile—from one of them, at least. The other woman looked to her companion for guidance, and thus told Baru that they were probably soldiers, and also which one was in charge.

Her reading and her thought had not been idly spent.

“Hello, little one,” the woman in charge said. She had skin the color of good earth, wide lips, and brilliant blue eyes like a jungle crow. She wore a stained white tunic with her breeches. Her Urunoki was as superb as Cairdine Farrier's.

“You've been here all season,” Baru said. “You never leave with the trading ships.”

“We'll go home with the last convoy.”

“I don't think you will,” Baru said. The other woman straightened a little. “I don't think you're Cairdine Farrier's personal guards, or even merchants at all, because if you were you would have learned by now that you don't need guards at Iriad market, and he would have sent you to find more business.”

The stiff woman said something in Aphalone, the Falcresti language, and from reading the dictionary Baru caught the words
native
and
steal
. But the woman with the blue eyes only knelt. “He said you were a very clever girl.”

“You're soldiers, aren't you,” Baru said. “From that ship. The warship that stayed here all season, anchored out of sight while the other traders came and went, sending back your reports. That's obvious, too. A trader wouldn't learn a little island's language as well as you have, which makes you spies. And now that the trade winds are dying, your ship's come in to harbor to stay.”

The blue-eyed woman took her by the shoulders. “Little lark, I know what it means to see strange sails in the harbor. My name's Shir and I'm from Aurdwynn. When I was a child, the Masquerade harbored in Treatymont, our great city. They fought with the Duke Lachta, and I was scared, too. But it all ended well, and my aunt even got to kill the awful duke. Here—take a coin. Go buy a mango and bring it back to me, and I'll cut you a piece.”

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.

*   *   *

S
TORM
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.”