A STORY ABOUT ASH 5
Federation Year 912:
23 Years Earlier
Upon Prince Hill, by Lake Jaro
in Lonjaro Mbo
It was the night before the day of the sorcerer, when the mob would come across Lake Jaro to kill Cairdine Farrier and Cosgrad Torrinde. It was a night for doubt and fear, for cutting off old scabs to patch over new wounds. And in the dark hours of that night, hours when hyenas come to beg for their wage of meat, the young Federal Prince Tau-indi Bosoka grieved for the war they had brought on their people.
But at dawn they rose, put on their bravery like a caftan, and went to see Abdumasi in the merchant house of Abd.
For as long as Tau had lived, Oriati Mbo had been the whole of the world, their favorite and only place: a never-drying fresco of thought and commerce at the center of a gray-fringed map. If they were self-centered, who could blame them? Their parents had been elected to conceive and raise a Federal Prince. Tau was that child; Tau existed to serve the Mbo.
Though Tau often felt they were too much of a child, and not enough of service: except the service of falling ill, troubling parents, and causing misunderstandings with dear friends.
Now the gray edge of the map had come for Tau. The eastern nation of Falcrest had made adventures into the Ashen Sea. They wanted ports. They wanted favorable terms of passage. They wanted to buy low and sell high and to force families who had been sailing the same routes for hundreds of years to give up their trade. Oriati Mbo had shrugged them off at first, slow to anger, certain of their strength. Falcrest made provocations. They seized ships, took Tau’s mother, Tahr, as a hostage, and returned her only in the company of two Falcresti emissaries, Cosgrad Torrinde and Cairdine Farrier: men who had proven, respectively, to be beautiful and bemusing, and charismatic but alarming.
Finally, evitably—Tau had to believe it was not inevitable—it had come to war.
The Mbo did not have an army: there were no Jackals or Termites in these days, and the shua warriors of Tau’s homeland would not leave their lands. But the Princes had elected war leaders and dispersed funds to raise crews, and a thousand ships had set out to strike directly at Falcrest-the-city. Last night the news had come, and it had driven the poor griots nearly mad with grief to deliver. All was lost. A hundred thousand Oriati had died in battle against Falcrest’s First Fleet. Tau had no idea how the masked city had defeated a thousand ships, and couldn’t make themself care. Weapons and stratagems didn’t matter. What mattered was the pain and the hate that would poison the Mbo now, the septic need for vengeance, the grudges and orphans that would make more of each other, cleaving together like womb and testes to breed death.
What if Tau had caused it all?
What if it was all their fault?
Trim bound the Mbo. One of the principles of trim was that the small found itself reflected in the great, that the littlest kindness could sway the fate of a tribe or a federation. Tau, in particular, had to take incredible care to maintain trim in their own life, because they were, as a Prince, bound so powerfully to the entire Mbo. Tau existed only because the people of Lonjaro had voted for it to be so; they were made out of obligations.
And they had betrayed those obligations! They had let their own friendships coil up with jealousy and confusion. They had resented Abdumasi and Kindalana for turning to each other, leaving little Tau out of their almost-grown-up affair. They had even used the Falcresti hostages, Cosgrad in particular, to make their friends jealous, and so bound the small world of Prince Hill’s human dramas to the great conflicts between Mbo and Falcrest!
Last night, as the world of Prince Hill went mad with grief, Tau realized what they had to do.
If they had caused this war by poisoning their friendships, then by the grace of the principles, repairing those friendships might also end the war. Also Tau was lonely, and desperately in need of Abdumasi and Kindalana, their laughter and their smell and their silent companionship at sunset. Those two needs fit together, the great need and the ordinary one.
Tau really did believe that.
So they ate two kola nuts for vigor, and sat for a little while picking at the dry skin between their fingers, before they got up, said, “Now, now,” hesitated anyway, and went.
It had rained overnight. In the wet dawn they walked across Prince Hill to Abdumasi Abd’s house, where the lake wind smoothed out the banners and tugged the awnings. The air smelt of earth. There was not much fog, though, and you could see for miles all around, bright bliss-addled cranes parading in the shallows and the clay-brick city of Jaro across the lake to the north. Tau stopped at the termite mound to wish the bugs luck with the monsoon season, and to give them a little honey, which made the termites bumble around excitedly.
“We’ll keep the drains clear,” Tau-indi promised them. “You’ll be okay.”
In the house of Abd, hungover groundskeepers sniffled and groaned as they cleaned up last night’s heartbreak. Tau-indi caught everyone’s eye and smiled. “Your Federal Highness,” the staff murmured. A few genuflected. Tau was glad.
“Abdu?” they asked, and the housekeepers pointed them to the morning room.
Abdu sat at the small family table, crushing kola nuts with his right hand. When he saw Tau-indi, he squawked and tried to throw his khanga over the pile of nut debris. “Tau! Uh. Hi!” He fumbled for his etiquette. “Welcome to my house, it must be, uh, much less full of cats than you had hoped?”
“You really like nuts,” Tau-indi said. “Oh, Abdu, are you trying to work out your arms? Are you trying to get big arms like Cosgrad’s?”
Abdumasi looked down at his khanga, the pattern speckled in kola dust, his long seventeen-year-old legs sticking out all pimply and hairy. He sighed. “I don’t understand how he makes his arms like that. But Kinda likes the way he looks.”
It was the first time he had admitted to Tau that there was something between him and Kindalana. It had happened after Tau had pushed them both away, but maybe not because Tau had pushed them away. However it had happened, it had left Tau more alone and Abdu knew it. He swallowed and looked at Tau with bloody, tired eyes, waiting for Tau to take up the confession and hurl it back. Tau had been more than a little awful to him and Kinda, recently.
Tau-indi smiled as plain as they could. “You’ll never be like Cosgrad,” they said, and then, when Abdumasi looked hurt and angry, “Abdu, it’d take every kola nut in the world to give you diarrhea as bad as his.”
“Oh, ha ha. Is he better?” Cosgrad had suffered diarrhea, tetanus, and meningitis in rapid succession.
“Recovering.” Like you and me, Tau wanted to say.
Abdumasi puffed out his cheeks, froglike, and looked at his toes. “So. You want to talk?”
They ambled down the hill toward the lake, where the wind separated the water into glittering scalloped patches and smooth silver-black flats. They talked about things that weren’t Kindalana or each other: which sort of shua warriors had been winning martial arts tournaments, the renegades (who Tau found quite dashing) or the hunters (whose prowess Abdu admired); the exact boundaries of the House Bosoka lands, which extended as far as farmers paid tribute to Prince Hill; gossip passed by the capillary shouting of shepherds, wood gatherers, griots, and water carriers; and even the sad state of Jaro’s municipal affairs, since the common city was traditionally neglected by all the Princes in favor of the rural estates. “When you’re a Prince,” Abdu suggested, “in between adjudicating important stolen-cattle cases and memorizing five hundred years of boring land disputes, you should send some money to fix up the Jaro market. It could be the jewel of the Flamingo Kingdom.”
Tau-indi said, “Do you think this is my fault?”
Abdumasi stopped picking kola chunks out of his khanga’s weave and stared. “Fuck me, manata, are you serious?”
“I am,” Tau said, feeling foolish.
“Were you just too young to notice? Your mom and Padrigan have been dancing around that bed for years.”
<
br /> Tau-indi, caught between a giggle and a sob, brushed hair out of their eyes to buy a moment. “I don’t mean, is it my fault my mom and Kinda’s dad are having an affair.” Tau’s father had vanished on an expedition into Zawam Asu, far away south, and Kindalana’s mother had disavowed the marriage to go seek her fortune in gold trading.
“What, then? What could be your fault?”
“I mean the . . . the war.”
“Oh.” Abdu kicked a stone downslope with a little grunt. “Like a trim thing? Like that thing you asked me about a while ago, with your twin?”
Tau had been born with a stillborn twin, and they had always feared that somehow this would poison them, turn to gangrene with lonely years.
Tau wanted to learn to walk with a little sway in the hip. They tried it out. It would need practice. They looked back at Abdu, to see if he was watching, and said, “Yeah. That thing.”
“Tell me what you’re afraid of.”
Tau said, in a very much rehearsed rush: “Maybe, because my twin came out dead, I was born a fratricide. Maybe I was born as someone who hurts their friends. A principle of selfishness. I was selfish with you, and Kinda, and I used Cosgrad to try to hurt you, and Cosgrad’s connected to Falcrest and the war. So maybe my nature tainted the whole Mbo. Maybe the war is . . . because of me.”
Abdumasi kicked another rock. “Kinda would tell you how stupid and selfish that is,” he said, “and how naïve it is to believe that your friendships could control entire nations. But I guess that’s why I can’t stand her sometimes. She always says the correct thing and not the right thing, the friendly thing, which,” he began to rush, too, “is why I wish you wouldn’t spend so much time being a Prince, no matter how good you are at it. And you are really good. People admire you, Tau, though you don’t know it; people think you’re unambitious, compassionate, thoughtful, kindhearted, all the things they want in a Prince. But I could use you around as a friend, so Kinda doesn’t walk all over me. I should’ve come to you for advice before I started sleeping with her. I should’ve come to you for advice a lot. I need a friend a lot more than I need another Prince.”
“Oh, Abdu,” Tau said.
“The war’s really not your fault, Tau.” Abdumasi kicked a third rock. It skipped into a cypress shrub and a bird began to shriek. After a moment he grabbed Tau-indi’s hand, held it, and made one small circle with his big rough thumb. “I know it’s not.”
“How?”
“Because you’re good. Because the only hurt you do is on purpose.”
Tau-indi nodded and coughed (his hand was very strong). “So. How are things with you two?”
“I don’t know.” Abdumasi looked at their joined hands like he might obtain from those laced fingers the secret of how to grip what he wanted to say. “I wanted, uh . . . she thought you knew about us, she thought you’d kind of asked us to get together, but I didn’t want her to tell you we’d . . . started. Because I wanted. To have something you didn’t. For a little while.”
Why not me? Tau-indi wanted to ask. But it was a stupid question. They’d known Abdu since before they could talk. What room was there for anything like desire between them? Desire required distance. They’d left no space for it to grow.
“Do you love her?”
Abdumasi’s face knotted up like the tetanus wreck of Cosgrad Torrinde and he made a long growl. “I don’t know.”
“Do you want to be with her?”
“That’s a complicated question. It turns out it’s really hard to quit kola nuts, or coffee, or Kindalana, especially when you’ve had some for a while, and then you try not to have any more—” And then, as he stared past Tau-indi, his eyes suddenly wide, he said, “Oh, principles, I think we need to run.”
“What?”
“Tau, look!”
There were boats on the dawn lake. A flotilla, a fleet, an armada of boats coming south from the city of Jaro, south to Prince Hill. On those boats there was a mob. And all the mob’s shouts were death. There were people from every Kingdom of Lonjaro, all of the Eleven Gates and Jaro itself and even the wandering renegade shua do-gooders of Abdeli Bduli the Thirteenth and Unfailing Kingdom, who had no homes but those they were invited into.
Tau and Abdu both stared incredulous at the vision riding the lead skiff. It was the comic griot Abdu had hired to tell them about the war, painted scalp to fingertips in ash, holding, in each hand, a pole bound up with a dead-eyed totem of a Falcresti man. They were extraordinarily well-made totems, and they illustrated exactly what would be done to those Falcrest bodies. Totems like that had not been made since the Maia invasions centuries ago, when some Princes declared the Maia to be enenen, alien to trim, nonhuman enemies who could not be paid blood money or granted guest right.
“They’re coming for Cosgrad and Farrier.” Tau’s stomach swooped horribly. “Oh, principles, if they do—”
Two Falcresti lives taken in vengeance for a hundred thousand Oriati dead. And more later. And more. And more forever. Who ever heard of an avenger satisfied? Even one?
They looked at Abdumasi, and their swoop of fear struck the earth and dashed like vomit into mud. Abdumasi wanted to let Farrier and Torrinde die.
Tau cried at them: “If our guests die in our care, we suffer ten generations of ruin!”
“I know. I know.” Abdu took a big breath. “We have to do something. We’ll go down there and meet them—”
Tau took Abdumasi’s other hand. “Abdu, they won’t listen to you. You’re a merchant’s boy, they’ll beat you!”
“I can slow them down.” His eyes flashed with pride. “They know me in Jaro. They know my mom all over the Mbo, wherever her ships land. And anyway, what will you do? You’re dressed like a house clerk, not a Prince. You haven’t even finished your Instrumentality.”
“I need my paints and jewels. I need the regalia. Then they’ll respect me, and maybe I can turn them away—”
“Your house is too far! And you can’t go down there alone!”
“I’m not going back to my house. And I’m not going down there alone.”
When he understood what Tau-indi intended, Abdumasi tore away, crocodile-faced with jealousy. This was something he could never be part of, a power he would never wield, and that wounded him.
But he swallowed it up and nodded. “Go get Kindalana. You need her. Go be Princes.”
“Get your sentries.” The voice of command came to Tau-indi without any guilt. Going to Abdu this morning had set their trim a little closer to right, and so the principles had brought them here, now, on this lakeshore, where they could make a difference. “Go to my house and guard Cosgrad and Farrier. Another party might sneak around south of the hill, and come up on them in secret.”
“They’re a mob, manata, I don’t think they’ll try a flanking attack—”
“Don’t you underestimate them,” Tau shouted, already running, “don’t you think they’re stupid! Those are still Mbo people!”
They tore across the hillside, through bramble and vine, over gutter and stream. If they could save the hostages, they could save the peace, and that might inhabit the whole Mbo with principles of reconciliation.
The war might end.
2
Eternal
They hoisted Baru out of the Tubercule pit by rope and pulley, up into a compartment of dark resinous wood. There was no metal anywhere. The rich brown-black planks had been fixed together with wooden treenails. All the light came from a single uncaged candle cupped in the shadow ambassador’s hands.
“Careful with that,” Baru warned her. “Your wood looks flammable.”
The ambassador smiled thinly. “We’ve managed so far.”
“You won’t manage another day if I come to any harm. Remember, my people are prepared to burn this ship if I’m not returned safely.” A lie that was Baru’s only protection.
“Set her down,” the ambassador ordered. “But hold her.”
The man working the hoist pinned her arms at her sides
, and held her dangling. His grip was ginger, as if either her filth or her nakedness troubled him. She heel-kicked him in the shins. He did not even grunt.
“Are you done?” The Womb, the shadow ambassador, rested her candle’s cup against the curve of her stomach. “I am prepared to offer you parole, with terms.”
“I am not a prisoner!” Baru squirmed against the man holding her arms. No use; he was impossibly strong. “I am a representative of the Imperial Republic and the Emperor Itself. I demand to be treated with full diplomatic privilege. Let me down!”
“What did Kimbune ask you?”
“Not as much as she told me! Why are you keeping me hidden from the rest of your ship?”
The shadow ambassador pursed her lips in frustration. “I put a taboo around you. Kimbune broke it. Did she tell you why?”
In the edge of the candlelight stood a young woman with deep black skin and a neat cap of kinky hair. The sign of the Round Number was tattooed on her forehead: a circle with a long line beneath it, divided into three large parts and a tiny fraction—the ratio of the circle’s circumference to its diameter, three point one four. A number representing the portions of the body, the philosopher Iri anEnna had said. One part of water, one of air, one of flesh, and a little fraction of mystery.
No wonder she’d tried to conduct the interrogation herself. Leave it to a pure mathematician to think she could solve it all alone.
“Hello,” Baru said, staring at her curiously. “You almost drowned me.”
Kimbune looked away defiantly. “I didn’t mean to break it. The design was flawed.”
Baru’s pinned arms made her furiously aware of every itch, splinter, and raw spot on her body. “I want fresh water. I need to wash.”
“I see nakedness doesn’t bother you.” The Womb refused Baru’s bait—if they had fresh water to spare it would mean they were near an aquifer, and Baru could guess their position. “Would you bargain information for linens?”
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