The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “Go tell my mother that a mob’s coming for the hostages!” Tau bolted across the compound, coughing on charcoal dust, until they smashed through the door and ran right into Kindalana’s arms.

  “Tau!” She caught them and they almost fell together on the welcome mat. “What is it?”

  “There’s a mob from Jaro on the lake.” She smelled of smoke and the touch of her hands yanked up a dizzy memory of swimming with her, Kindalana kicking off their thighs, Kindalana whispering in Tau’s ear that mother Tahr would come back okay.

  Tau had been so ashamed that Kindalana thought they were just a child afraid for their mother. But Kindalana was right, in the end. Tahr did come back okay.

  Kindalana blinked at them from two finger-widths away. Her eyes were wide-set and keen, like buffalo horns. There was a little dimple at the base of her throat, marked at each side by her clavicles. Everything seemed to move with her breath.

  “A mob?” she said, Kindalana demanding that the world clarify itself, so she could fix it. “What do they want?”

  “They want Cosgrad and Farrier. They made enenen totems.” How precious it was to be this close to her. The mask of her power, prince-power, beauty-power, broke down into simple facts: the little ridges between her nose and the top of her lips, shaped in the echo of her throat. “We have to stop them.”

  “Oh,” Kindalana gasped, probably a gasp of panic, probably a little excited, too. Kinda did love a chance to command. “We have to talk them down! But I’m dressed like—”

  “You look like a gardener and I look like a clerk.”

  “We need our paints, the declaration paints—”

  “—and jewels—”

  “—and silks; one of my old saris might fit you—”

  “—there’s a taboo on burrowing things, maybe we can use that—”

  “—what, Tau, should we shove Farrier and Cosgrad down a hole, is that what you mean to do—”

  Laughing: “It might work!”

  They ran into the inner rooms, watering and oiling the paint pots, yelling at a scorpion they found curled up in a bolt of cloth, arguing over whether it was a burrowing animal, smashing it, arguing again over how much paint they had time for as they unwrapped each other and dabbed warm water and scents on flesh and hair. Just the bold striped throat and chin highlights of a Prince out on function? Yes, that would do, the important thing was to look authoritative, but wait (Kinda scrubbing furiously at the earth on Tau-indi’s feet, Tau trying to strip leftover paint from the night before off her brow and cheekbones), wait, wait, they had to be recognizably the Prince Bosoka of Lonjaro the Thirteen-in-Three-in-One and the Prince Kindalana eshSegu, so Tau would do gold Segu stripes on Kinda’s clavicles while she did green star points on Tau’s larynx and brow. There was no time for their hands or legs.

  “Hold still,” Kindalana snapped. “No, actually still!”

  “Mmf.” The application tickled. “Mmp.”

  “All right.” She bared her throat in turn. “Quick. Oh, principles, can you hear them? I think I can hear them.”

  “Maybe they’ll tear us apart, too,” Tau-indi said. “Maybe they’ve been talking to that awful satirist, the populist one who thinks we’re spoiled.”

  “We are spoiled, Tau. We don’t work fields or carry water or make bricks. The shua resent us, you know?”

  “What?” Tau loved stories about the shua, the self-taught warrior societies who guarded the realm. “Why?”

  “Don’t you read any history? The struggle between the power of the Federal Princes and the local authority of the shua? Oh!” Kindalana shivered and made a small sound. “That does tickle.” Her throat moved lightly under Tau-indi’s circling thumbs.

  “I missed touching you,” Tau said. It was a stupid thing to say, but the paint had to get done, and it was a better topic than Kindalana showing off. “As, you know, just a . . . not like Abdu, but I missed it.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “We haven’t been right.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  Her breath ran in and out like seasons. Her hips brushed Tau-indi’s thighs and she rearranged them awkwardly to keep a little distance. “You didn’t want things to be right,” she said. Tau-indi cleaned their fingers in the pot of stripper and got the paint for her clavicles. Her bones trembled when she spoke. “You wanted to be alone. You wanted to be hurt. You think you have to be miserable alone, so everyone will know you’re too noble to put your misery on them. But you want us to know you’re miserable. Your favorite thing in the world is to be too hurt for anyone to help.”

  She adjusted Tau’s head a few inches and began to star their brow. Her hands were stiff, her motions sharp. “You told me I had to take care of Abdumasi. You told me you wanted to go off and be a Prince.”

  “I was proud. I didn’t want you to think I was a child.”

  “Let me talk.” Kinda finished the star and swept two clean lines along Tau-indi’s cheekbones. “You’ve always been the one people trust. When your mother left, your house trusted you. When Falcrest captured her, my father came to talk to you. He never talks to me, because he just sees my mother. You saw the war coming before anyone else—”

  “I didn’t!”

  “Why did you send me to Abdumasi, then? Why were you so convinced you had to be a Prince alone?” Her eyes followed Tau-indi’s motion for motion and they couldn’t look back, they had to finish the paint. “Why did you want the three of us at war?”

  She was very warm, this close. Tau bared their throat for the green Lonjaro star, painted on the larynx. Kinda’s fingers were quick and hot.

  “Do you love Abdu?” Tau-indi asked.

  “Maybe right now,” Kindalana said crisply, her two fingers moving down-sideways-down-up-down, “maybe right now, I suppose I do, half of me is thinking about him all the time, but Tau—” She rinsed her hands and they both went for the saris; they wrapped each other up. “Tau, in Segu women marry late, and people will question your womanhood if you haven’t had lovers before. There’s a . . . it’s a tenuous thing, being a Segu woman. You have to prove yourself to other women, and part of that is your ease with men. I thought I could learn some of that by practicing on Abdu, like the grownups do, like our parents, we’d just fuck and be friends—”

  “Our parents are in love, Kinda.”

  “No.” Kindalana smoothed the sari down over Tau’s shoulders, and then her own. “My father’s in love with your mother. But not the other way.”

  They turned around each other like serpents, checking knots, and both bent to lace their sandals. Outside the sentries yelled and beat their fists against the bird-cymbals, sending up irita, the alarm cries that would rouse nearby farmers to help.

  “I guess, when you start fucking, you can’t skip over the childish part, the part that feels like love.” Kindalana caught Tau-indi by the earlobe to swipe paint from the side of their chin. “Or I can’t, at least. You left us alone, Tau, and what were we supposed to do, with you taking charge of everything? You took all the burdens on yourself, your house and your mother’s trim, and then you took Cosgrad, too.”

  “You wanted to seduce Farrier! I wasn’t the only one who—”

  “You’d already seduced Cosgrad, hadn’t you?”

  “Not like that!”

  “You befriended him. I don’t make friends easily, Tau. That’s your gift.”

  “You make me sound so mighty.”

  “You’re a Prince.”

  “Everyone knows you’re cleverer.”

  “And everyone knows you have better trim.”

  “That doesn’t seem to do much good,” Tau said, a little bitterly.

  “Of course it does,” Kindalana sighed. “People listen to you. I know all these things, I’ve figured out so much, but who wants to listen to me? You’re strange with women here in Lonjaro, did you know that? Not hateful, but particular. Women have certain jobs, certain roles. You don’t like it when we go be
yond them.”

  They fumbled together in the keepsake chest for the jewelry. Kindalana took a locket for her breast and chains to link her nose and ears. Tau-indi gauged their earlobes, grunting at the stretch of the skin, and found four Aurdwynni bracelets to chime on their wrists.

  Kindalana lifted her arms and turned around once. “Am I proud?”

  She was a vision. Tau-indi’s heart stopped up. “You’re proud,” they managed, voice wobbling. “Am I proud?”

  “You’ll do,” Kindalana said, and then, with an obvious and powerful effort to say more, give more, “Tau, you’re beautiful.”

  They went out the back gate together, to face down the mob.

  The ferries had landed. The mob came up in their silent hundreds, ash-streaked, grim-faced, bowed by the weight of what they had to do. There were potters, weavers, wheelwrights, all sorts of craftspeople from the city; there were shua warriors of both kinds, professional hunters and renegade vigilantes; there were clerks, administrators, drummers, gamblers, braggarts. Tau felt a profound empathy for the mass of them, and for the grief that ran like floodwater between the reservoirs of their bodies. This could be the whole Mbo, soon. The whole great people raised to war. And what a terrible waste it would be, what a betrayal of a thousand years of work.

  “Shall we?” Kinda murmured.

  “Yes.”

  The mob saw them. The comic griot raised the totem of the two dead men as if to call down lightning. “They are enenen. They owe us a blood price, and they cannot pay it in gold. Give them to us.”

  “Stop!” the Princes cried, Tau and Kinda together. “Stop and listen!”

  And Tau saw (in a gasp of joy ragged as wind through reeds) that the people were not too far gone from trim to hear.

  Kindalana told them of the foreigners who had come to Lonjaro Mbo to learn. She was a guest in Lonjaro, too, for she was a Prince of Segu, and did they not recognize the obligations of hospitality that bound guest to host? Tau’s mother had been taken by Falcrest, and returned safely. Would they not reciprocate? Would they be the first to snap the sacred circle of trust?

  Then Tau-indi spoke beside her, the laman with the round hips and the coiled hair, telling the mob in a voice like the monsoon drumming on mangrove leaves that Lonjaro’s principles had already visited revenge on Cosgrad Torrinde.

  “He was paralyzed by a frog,” Tau-indi said—Kindalana puffing up her cheeks like that frog—“and he waded among leeches”—Kindalana plucking at her calves—“and then the frog seduced his tongue, and he had dreams of the defeat of his homeland, dreams out of the mangrove forest”—Kindalana touching her wrists, her throat, making the comic griot who led the mob smile helplessly—“and then his bowels were emptied by the waters of Segu, and his bones were bent by the rust of Devi-naga, and the heat of Mzilimake burned up his mind!”

  Tau wondered what all the misfortunes Cosgrad had suffered meant about Cairdine Farrier’s trim.

  “They might burn our ships,” Kindalana bellowed; she must have practiced that low-in-the-gut roar, “they might ask us to answer blood with blood and fire with fire, but we are Mbo. We do not want! We give, and we are satisfied! Falcrest will come to us to get what they want, and we will bind them to us, and in the end they will be Mbo, too! Will you kill these men who came to learn from us? Or will you let them learn, and yield?”

  The mob faltered. They could have stormed a line of house guard, a company of local shua, or even Falcrest’s masked marines. Against two bright young Princes in their regalia they had no chance at all.

  The comic griot set down the totems. “I was wrong,” he said. “It is not in my power to declare anyone enenen. Do you all hear me? I was wrong!”

  After that there was nothing to do but go back to the ferries.

  Kindalana turned to them grinning like a fed tiger. “Tau, that was amazing.”

  They grinned stupidly back at her.

  At that moment the sentries guarding the southern approach began to scream.

  Tau ran until their gut cramped. Clots of gardeners and groundskeeps stumbled past, fleeing for the House Bosoka.

  “Stand with me!” Tau cried to them. “Stand for your house! Tell me, someone, what you saw!”

  But not all the paint nor all the jewelry of a Prince could arrest the sentries’ fear, and they fled inside the compound.

  “Good morning, Tau. Mind taboo.” Cairdine Farrier jogged up easily, fresh from helping in the gardens: there was dirt on his hands and somehow he had gotten clay on his nose. Unlike Cosgrad, he had adopted Mbo clothes, but he wore them in his own way, a short khanga wrapped rakishly around his shoulders and puffy linen trousers cinched into Falcrest boots. He was a deep-eyed, thoughtful man who never showed too much, like a fashionably dressed clam. “What’s all the alarm?”

  “A mob,” Tau panted, “come to kill you. But we turned them away.”

  “Ah,” Farrier said, thoughtfully. “From the city, I expect? A manifestation of urban resentment against your principalities’ agrarian ways?”

  Tau stared at him. “I said they were here to kill you!”

  “But to kill me, they must be angry enough to ignore your authority, yes?”

  Tau expected the reasons were much less abstract than urban resentment, and much more to do with the hundred thousand Oriati dead. “The mob’s gone, but now everyone’s running. I heard irita to the south.”

  “Really now.” Farrier ambled off downhill. “Let’s go see what has everyone spooked.”

  “Cairdine, wait! It’s not safe!”

  Farrier trotted cheerfully down the south road, fishing out his notebook. The raspberry bushes clasped at his shirt as if trying to hold him back.

  There were men coming up the road, onto Prince Hill. Kindalana’s father, Padrigan, blocked the way with a file of eshSegu tribal guard. Oh principles, they had their spears raised to kill. Who was coming? Lonjaro had a proud warrior tradition—nearly every farmer and hunter trained as a shua fighter—but even in the skirmishes that sometimes erupted, no one ever raised sharp spears.

  “Go back,” Padrigan called. “Go back now, and we’ll forget we saw this!”

  Tau saw, and would never forget.

  4

  The Eye

  The Womb rapped at the door. “Are you modest?”

  “No,” Baru called back, irritably, “but who gives a shit?” The existence of a Cancrioth body taboo was academically interesting, but it also meant they’d left her naked in Tubercule as a deliberate humiliation. That stung her pride. “Are we safe?”

  “No. I had to make concessions to the Brain to stop the fighting. You will meet with her, alone.”

  Excellent. If the Brain was the radical aboard, maybe she had control of the Kettling.

  From the other side of the huge bed, Shao Lune whispered: “The Brain?”

  “I think they’re all named for . . . for where their tumors grow.”

  “I know that. But wouldn’t a brain tumor cause madness?”

  “We’ll see.” Baru raised her voice to call: “I’ll dress. Where is this Brain?”

  “We’re not going to the Brain.”

  “I thought—”

  “She is our very last resort. If you knew what she’d do with you, you would agree.” The huge teak door combed the high notes out of the Womb’s voice. “You will come below with me to visit the Eye. You and Tau will persuade him that our journey is over, and that it’s time for this ship to disappear from history again.”

  Baru blanched. “Tau will be there?”

  “Of course.” Green light flickered beneath the door. “Tau came here searching for Abdumasi Abd. So did we. Tau will convince the Eye that Abd is lost forever. And you will tell the Eye what will happen if Falcrest captures us. He doesn’t believe the things he’s heard about your people.”

  The light faded. Baru covered her eyes and groaned. She would have to see Tau again, so soon after they had been so hurt. . . .

  She couldn’t let herself be d
ragged down by emotion so close to the prize. So Tau had trusted her, and felt betrayed—fine! Tain Hu had trusted her first. She had to focus!

  “Shao.” She got up from the bed. “I need you to—”

  The flash of victory in Shao’s eyes at those words, I need you, almost made her change her mind. But would she react any differently in Shao’s position?

  “I need you to get out of this room and discover anything you can about this ship. Dimensions, design, port of origin, a list of keel owners, charts—”

  “A rutterbook,” Shao Lune corrected her. “I should look for the rutterbook.”

  “The what?” She vaguely remembered the term from the federated Oriati navigator she’d talked to last year on the tax flotilla, hairlipped Pan Obarse.

  “The Oriati equivalent of our navigational charts. Like all things Oriati, it is secretive, convoluted, and highly personal. Each Oriati navigator keeps their own, often in code, so their secrets can’t be stolen. It could tell us where this ship was built, where it makes harbor. Who provisions and waters it.”

  “Good.” Baru rewarded her with a smile. “I want that. But most of all . . .”

  Shao Lune smiled back and turned her finger. Go on.

  “I need you to look for signs of conspiracy with the Mbo Oriati. Rocket-powder pistols, federal Oriati uniforms . . . a source of the Kettling. Parliament will vote on whether to move toward war with the Oriati on 90 Summer. If we brought home evidence that could sway the vote . . .”

  “We’ll be heroes.” An electrum glitter of ambition in her smile, like expensive cutlery before a meal. “I’ll have a post in the Admiralty.”

  “I expect you will,” Baru said.

  But she knew she was lying. Her women did not survive.

  Baru did not exactly mean to get down on her knees and sniff the ship. Her right foot slipped, and the wood made her go the rest of the way.

  “What are you doing?” the Womb groaned. “Why are you smelling the timber?”

  Baru stroked the grain. Warm brown heartwood, like teak; it had pores like teak. But it didn’t smell like teak. Not oily enough. “You use this lumber all over the ship. In the hull, in the decking, in the furniture. That means you have a lot of it, and it’s easy to work with, and it must last for ages. . . . It’s beautiful. What is it?”