The Traitor Baru Cormorant (3 page)

“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
?

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

S
HE
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.”

*   *   *

T
HE
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.

When Baru turned thirteen, her friend and second cousin Lao, two years older and bitterly unhappy, came to her with twisting hands. “Lao,” Baru whispered, in the limited privacy of her curtained bed. “What's wrong?”

“My special tutor,” Lao said, eyes downcast, “is a—” She lapsed from Aphalone into their childhood Urunoki. “A pervert.”