The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

Kindalana rubbed her eyes with her wrist. “Abdu, can you go to your house and ask your mother to fly up a battle flag?” He loved that idea, and ran off after it, while Kinda turned to Tau-indi with determined eyes and said, “I want Cosgrad to take care of my father. Can you do that?”

  “Cosgrad? He puts maggots in people!”

  “He does strange things, yes. But he knows medicine outside the Mbo, and the men who made the wound . . .” She shuddered.

  Tau-indi had a wonderful thought. “Kinda, if Cosgrad can save your father from a wound . . .”

  If Cosgrad from Falcrest could bind up a wound in the Mbo, then trim might heal the wound between Falcrest and the Mbo in turn. It was possible. That was the promise of trim: the small reflected in the great.

  “Excuse me.”

  It was Farrier. He lowered his head and brushed his brow, in the place where you would smear grief ash. “I want to help,” he said.

  “How?” Tau demanded, too sharply.

  “The men with the sorcerer. They were shua hunters. They came here, to Prince Hill, to attack their own royalty.”

  “They came to attack you!” Tau protested.

  “They had to cross the barrier between classes to do it, Tau.” Farrier lifted his head, and his eyes were deep with knowledge. “We know a little about anti-royalist violence in Falcrest. I have studied it here; I know people who have expressed antiroyalist sentiments to me. Perhaps I can discover what drove rural hunters to attack their own Prince. Perhaps I can learn where that sorcerer came from.”

  Tau began to refuse.

  “Yes,” Kindalana said, with that full deep-throated Prince force in her voice. “We would be grateful. Do this for us, Cairdine Farrier.”

  Pus and slimy tissue and snot-thick blood ran in the house Padrigan, in the place of honey and raspberries. Cosgrad came to see the wound, leaning on Abdumasi for balance. Kindalana led him into her father’s sickroom with warmth and respect even as everyone in the house watched the Falcrest man with suspicion. He was the reason a sorcerer had come to Prince Hill. He was the reason, some said, that this ground was tainted forever. If he was not enenen, who was?

  “Too late for maggots.” Cosgrad mapped the colors of the cut with a charcoal pen, and the pain of the wound with touches of a small burnt stone. “It’s infected almost to the shoulder.”

  “I cleaned it.” Kindalana looked more affronted than upset. “I cleaned it well.”

  “You did well. But some things survive. The fiercest things.” Cosgrad slumped against Abdu, overwhelmed by an aftershock of fever. “His arm has to go.”

  There was a rebellion at that. No one could be healed by separating their parts! He needed teas and opiates and tinctures of mercury while his body made itself whole! Keep the pieces together so they remember the shape they make.

  But Kindalana was insistent. “Falcrest knows fire and the shape of wounds. That knowledge can save my father.” And, when there were protests, “I am his flesh! I choose for him!”

  On the evening of that day, the three parents of Prince Hill gathered for the last time. Padrigan lay feverish on a sack of crushed lake reeds, selected and gathered by his groundskeepers. Abdi-obdi Abd and Tahr Bosoka sat with him, hands linked, confessing whispered secrets that would keep him bound to them and draw him away from death. Tau sat beside Kindalana up on the second-floor balcony, overlooking the inner courtyard, so that their bonds to Padrigan would raise him up like a pulley from the sick place.

  “They knew,” Tahr said, grimly. “Farrier says they knew, in Jaro, that the mob was coming. They had time to send up signals. But we were not warned. They wanted us to lose our guests. They wanted us shamed, or dead.”

  The attack had troubled other nearby Princes so badly that some had offered Tau a shua swap—a cruel and punitive maneuver in which two Princes sent their own shua to guard each others’ lands, denying the people the comfort of friendly faces on patrol. Tau would not have it.

  Abdumasi’s mother, Abdi-obdi, had white hair, a small face, and a brilliant smile. She was not smiling now. “What I hear in the markets is vicious. People want revenge for their dead. They think we’re sheltering—” Her eyes hooked toward the room where Cairdine Farrier labored over his journals. “They think we don’t care about the war, and won’t until it touches our fortunes. They think we’re too far away, and much too rich.”

  “I was in Falcrest! I was taken! How can they think I don’t care?”

  “Tahr,” Abd-obdi said, “a hundred thousand of our people just died there, and you came back safe. They hate you even more for it.”

  Tahr wiped sweat from her hands and took up Padrigan’s grip again. “What about the sorcerer? Where did she come from?”

  Padrigan groaned and arched. The women held him down.

  “I’m going to Segu,” Abdi-obdi said, “and I know you’ll try to stop me, Tahr, but Abdu’s a man now, and he can handle the house. I’m going to Kutulbha, where my ships come to harbor. All the legends say the Cancrioth went into the jungle; well, the jungle is along the Black Tea coast, so unless she came across the sahel and the desert, that sorcerer had to take a ship up the coast and through the Segu islands. Maybe she was seen in Kutulbha.”

  Maybe, Tau thought, eavesdropping without guilt, she was passed from the jungle to the villages around Jaro as a tumor. Maybe she has had a thousand bodies. But at least she must be dead now, dead forever. Not even a tumor could survive that fire.

  Good.

  “I wouldn’t stop you.” Tahr squeezed Abdi-obdi’s hand. “Abdi, I’m sorry about . . . all the years when I was too eager to tell you how to live. I think being a Prince-Mother made me haughty. I think I—”

  “Tahr!” Abdi-obdi cried, almost laughing, “Tahr, don’t you dare start.”

  “I want to set things right,” Tahr said, as Tau-indi’s bruised heart swelled with love for their mother.

  “That,” Abdi-obdi said, “is exactly why you mustn’t. Leave some unfinished business between us, Prince-Mother, to summon me back.”

  “Be careful on the sea,” Tahr said, remembering, certainly, how Falcrest’s ships had seized her own. “Mind how you sail.”

  “It’s my captains you should mind. The Devi-naga pirates are back out in force. I haven’t taken losses like these since the storms in ’88, when half the Column was fenced off by sunken masts. . . .”

  And they went on bantering quietly, being companionable, in that precious ordinary way that cannot be fully valued until it is gone forever. Tau wanted to elbow Kindalana and beg her to pay attention, to treasure this moment as she would treasure a new book or a letter from abroad, because it was so ordinary, so perfectly the weft and foundation of their lives.

  But to call attention to the ordinary would be to make it extraordinary, and to ruin it.

  So Tau was silent, and witnessed, glad that the ordinary was worth witnessing.

  After Abdi-obdi left for Kutulbha to hunt sorcerers, and mother Tahr resumed her long absences in Jaro invigilating the reasons for the mob’s attack, the Princes ruled the hill. Tau began to take on the duties of an adult Prince, holding court to hear land disputes, inviting bands of shua warriors to demonstrate their martial arts and to sing the long songs of their ililefe, the codex of warrior feats their ancestors had assembled. Hunter shua pleased by Tau’s hospitality paid tribute in pelts, but Tau’s favorite were the renegades, men and women who had taken vows of poverty and chastity to fight against evil: if renegades were not pleased with a Prince they would sometimes set up governments of their own in the lands between estates. Tau thought them very romantic. On other days Tau went by mule to the farming estates of the Bosoka territory, to ask after local problems, check on water and health, and keep up the relations of mutual gratitude. All of it was exactly what Tau had dreamt of since they were young.

  But there was no joy in it. All they could think of was Padrigan’s amputation, and whether he would survive.

  “I’ll operate—tomorrow,” Cosgrad grunte
d, doing pushups on the floor of his cell. Tau leaned in the door and watched his back gather itself in ridges and fans. “Will you—walk with me? I need—spider webs.”

  “Spider webs?”

  “Yes—two hundred—”

  “Two hundred spider webs?”

  “No—to go with the—two hundred and one—wet bread.”

  Tau repeated this to Abdumasi a few minutes later. “I’ll mix the wet bread with the spider webs,” Tau-indi explained to Abdumasi, pretending to be Cosgrad, “because my brain has been cooked by meningitis. Pretend I’m not flexing my abs.”

  “Urgh,” Abdumasi said, crunching up. “Me Cosgrad. Give frog. Want lick.”

  “Should we ask Kindalana?”

  “Yes,” he said, not hesitating at all. “Yes, of course.”

  She was agreeable. So the four of them went down through the rock gardens to the mulberry grove where the spiders lived. Tau-indi carried a big cloth basket, and sticks to pick up the webs. Abdumasi had his own stick, “for protection,” and they took a long easterly loop around the road where the sorcerer had come. Kindalana had given up writing an essay on the difference between martial culture and warfare, because (she claimed) it was hard to articulate to foreigners how Lonjaro could train so many amateur warriors yet fight no wars, but (in fact) because she didn’t want to be left up on the hill with her father’s weeping wound.

  Cosgrad stumbled over an inflection stone in the rock garden, and Tau caught him. “Thank you.” He winced sharply, touching his back. “Your Highness, did I say awful things when I was in my fever? Ungrateful, prying things?”

  Kindalana was watching them intently.

  “You asked me how I’d been made,” Tau-indi said. “There are no lamen in Falcrest, are there? Is that what you meant?”

  “In Falcrest they taught me that lamen were sacred Oriati hermaphrodites who could, ah, be conjugated by men, and conjugate women in turn. Having seen you,” and here Cosgrad flushed faintly, something that could be seen more easily on his skin, “less than modest, as I understand is common and natural here given the climate, I know . . .”

  Tau-indi laughed. Cosgrad’s ideas of lamen might have fit in rural Segu, four hundred years ago, when men were raised in convents and girls became women by wearing gloves made out of biting ants. “You thought I had a penis and a vagina?”

  Cosgrad scowled stiffly. “I thought there must be a way for the parents to know if their child was a laman.”

  “Why would the parents need to know? I’ve heard from griots that some people are born that way, and it is a wonder and a difficulty. But genitals have nothing to do with choosing to be a laman.”

  “What are lamen for, then?”

  “Now? In these enlightened days? Whatever trim moves us toward.”

  “Just like anyone else,” Abdumasi interrupted. “I mean, what are you for? What about me? What are men for, really? Why don’t people with wombs just pop babies out all on their own, and live in big termite mounds? Wouldn’t that be a lot easier?”

  Cosgrad’s forehead knotted up and he looked like he might think himself back into a fever. “Termite mounds,” he muttered. “Termite mounds . . . I’d never considered . . .”

  Years later, when Cosgrad Torrinde produced his seminal (an Aphalone word that meant exactly what it sounded like) work on the similarities between Oriati Mbo and the colonies of insects, Tau would regret this conversation.

  As children they’d come down to the mulberry grove to pretend they were farmers on Taranoke all married to each other, which was quite sickly sweet in retrospect. But they had always been afraid to go too deep into the grove, where the leaves kept off the rain and the spiders built their homes. And how they’d built! Everywhere Tau looked there was spider silk, white and wind-smoothed, like the shredded banners of some cotton army.

  “I’ll take Abdu.” Kindalana slipped an arm around him. “Come on, merchant boy.”

  That left Cosgrad and Tau-indi to pluck lengths of web with their sticks, spool them up, and basket them. The light came through the webs soft and white, and it painted Cosgrad in colors of gentle death. He whistled softly as he worked.

  Inevitably, Tau-indi saw a spider the size of their face scurrying around. Inevitably, Cosgrad spoke up right then. “Will saving Padrigan’s life give me good trim?”

  “Yes.” Tau-indi backed up against him, waiting for the spider to go. “Of course it will. You’re helping a father and a good man.”

  “I was trying to write an equation to explain trim. I had a chart of things that people said would help my trim, and things people told me would hurt it. I was going to solve it and give you the equation, as thanks for your hospitality. But I couldn’t make it work at all. I was so afraid. All the children understood trim, so why couldn’t I?”

  “Why were you afraid?” The stink of rotting mulberry-fruit rose up around them as the wind changed. The spider sat in thought for a few moments and then ran away, up into the boughs. Tau-indi dared to turn around, and found Cosgrad looking at them thoughtfully. His queue of dark hair had stuck in the web.

  The clouds rose up against the sun. The tree-shadows and the web-shadows thickened across Cosgrad. “I thought maybe trim was real, and that I was sick because of my trim. I thought I’d come to Oriati Mbo to find my idea of the world undone.”

  A spider unreeled itself from the shadows behind his head and began a nervous, exploratory descent. “What idea?” Tau-indi said, hoping he wouldn’t turn and frighten it. “How could trim possibly undo your idea of the world? Trim is about people.”

  Cosgrad knelt and picked up a rock. “I’m going to throw this.”

  “Don’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “It’ll land on a spider!”

  Cosgrad looked sly. “How do you know the rock won’t just go up and up and never come down?”

  “It’s a rock, you daft man,” Tau-indi snapped. The spider peeked at them from behind a low shrub, its two forelimbs up in the air as if to wave. “Rocks aren’t like people, who can choose. A rock just wants to get back to the other rocks and do its job of holding things up.”

  “That’s how you describe things here in the Mbo. Stories about connection, how things fit together. The spider you mentioned, for instance—” Cosgrad turned, saw it in all its enormity, and yelped.

  Tau-indi caught his arm. “Let it be, let it be.”

  “It could eat a bird!” Something in that gave him an idea, and of course he burped it up right away. “That spider, why does it exist?”

  “To eat small insects and bats. So they don’t trouble us too much.” They tugged Cosgrad back. “The way we’re troubling that spider now.”

  Cosgrad threw the stone sidehand. It missed the spider, ripped through the underbrush, and clattered against a trunk. Tau-indi felt his strength moving through him like a principle of wind.

  “The arc,” Cosgrad said, pointing, “the mass, the velocity of the stone, the force of the impact. You say they happen because the rock wants to be with other rocks, as its principle demands. But how does that story help you predict anything? How does it help you launch a stone from a slingshot, or fire a rocket from a hwacha?”

  He turned on Tau-indi with his foreign face as flat and finely arranged as calligraphy, the bones like birdwings, his nose a little punctuation mark, his chest heaving with excitement. In his eyes there was an omen like a pendulum that had come into its downstroke. He was very beautiful.

  He pronounced this:

  “I am a savant in Falcrest. I have a license. We have observed the motion of stones very carefully, our savants, and now we can write an equation that describes the motion of all stones on all arcs, from the day the world was born until the resolution of time.”

  “I know what an equation is,” Tau said, moved by pride in the Mbo, “I’ve read my Iri anEnna and my Eastward Eye. And didn’t we invent zero, anyway?”

  “You did,” Cosgrad said, breathlessly. “But you did not apply it far enou
gh.”

  But how, Tau wanted to protest, could you describe a stone entirely with a set of letters? How could an equation about the movement of a stone contain the ways in which a stone might be thrown to hurt someone, or ground to help make flour, or mortared into a wall? How could the equation capture the way in which a certain kind of stone might be venerated by one house, because their forefathers had died to the last in a battle on that stone, and cursed by another house, because that stone had been used in the arrows that killed their herd?

  To understand Cosgrad, Tau-indi tried to look past what he was saying and find the hurt, the fear.

  “That’s why you’re afraid? You can describe the motion of a stone, but not the movements of the principles in trim?”

  “I can’t describe trim with mathematics, no.” Cosgrad looked at his stick wrapped in cobwebs. His eyes were meningitis bright, fever bright. “Nor the reason for the separation of men and women. Nor the separation between people and termites, or between the cuttlefish and the octopus, or the Stakhieczi and the Oriati, or anything else alive. Not yet. But I will.”

  Kindalana called out. “Tau! Where are you?”

  “Why does it make you afraid?” Tau-indi pressed. “Why are you afraid of things you can’t describe?”

  “Because if trim is real, if your beliefs are real, then Falcrest will lose the war, the future belongs to you, and I will never have what I want.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to describe everything in a sentence, of course.” His calligraphic face relaxed with the thought of it, became clean and easily read, and the word upon it was joy. “How else am I going to change the letters and numbers, one by one, until I find a way to make everything work right?”

  “Cosgrad.”

  “What?”

  “If you want to make everything right, will you help end the war?”

  Cosgrad looked away. Grief made him bite down hard, like he had tetanus again. Tau felt a great, general tint of sorrow and loss, as if Cosgrad were somehow already gone. They did not know why.

  “Your Highness,” Cosgrad said. “The war is already over.”