The Tyrant
Page 38
“Oh, don’t be petulant. It suits you when I’m allowed to punish you for it, but otherwise it’s pathetic. Think. Think. How are you going to defeat your masters in Falcrest?”
“By war, I thought . . . I’d have the Stakhieczi invade from the north, and the Oriati from the south. . . .”
The razor scraped hair from the skin above her spine. “War? Who keeps telling you there’s going to be a war?”
“Everyone! Everyone keeps saying it! Tau, Execarne, Yawa, everyone’s convinced a war’s imminent.”
“Yes, yes.” She pulled Baru’s head down, brow pressed into her shoulder. “But who really put the idea into your head? Who startled you with the idea that all your work in Aurdwynn had really been designed to lure out the Oriati who wanted war with Falcrest?”
“Wait a moment,” Baru snapped, into Hu’s armpit. “Wait. You can’t tell me that’s not true. It is true. I lured Abdumasi Abd to his doom and didn’t even realize it.”
“Fine, yes, but turn the flank on that idea, Baru. Who told you all your work had been a prelude to war? Who insisted on that framing? Who have you recently realized is a master at manipulating you by forcing his stories into your life?”
“Farrier. . . .” Baru breathed.
“That’s right. He’s the one who got you thinking about everything in terms of war. He led you, no matter how unwittingly, to this idea that war was the way to destroy Falcrest. Even when you reached Eternal, you thought about everything in terms of weapons, of ways to kill. Tell me, were you educated all your life in war? Have you ever been a general, a warlord?”
“No,” Baru sighed, “I was your accountant. . . .”
“So why do you think that you’d use war in your great work? When you’ve realized so proudly that power comes not from brute strength but from the control of the context in which strength is deployed?”
Hu rose up to get at the back of Baru’s head, the whole length of her brushing close, hard muscle and soft fat, a map of lost territory. Baru lay her ear against the warmth above Hu’s heart.
“Trade,” she realized. “My life’s mission is the use of Falcrest’s power to end Falcrest. Falcrest conquers by trade. My plan must involve trade.”
“Correct. And therefore the trust you established on the Llosydanes is for . . .”
“The trust is going to be used to prepare the Llosydanes for trade.”
“Correct,” Hu purred. “To prepare the Llosydanes as a way station between the Oriati Mbo and the Stakhieczi Necessity.”
The idea burst like a clove beneath her tongue. “Incredible,” she breathed, across Hu’s breast. “Let me think . . . Oriati commerce would land on Taranoke, and then sail north to the Llosydanes. The Sydani would buy goods and send them north in turn, to Welthony Harbor in Aurdwynn, where river traffic could move up the Inirein and the Vultsniada to Duchy Vultjag . . .”
“To our home,” Hu said, with satisfaction.
“Where it would be sold to the Stakhieczi. And then you could run it all in reverse! You could sell Stakhieczi goods back to the Oriati! Salt and lumber and spices north, metals and glasswork south. . . .”
And then reality washed down across the wound of hope. “But you couldn’t. It couldn’t work. The Welthony harbor’s not dredged. The river’s full of brigands and seine fishers. And Vultjag is . . .” Oh, she had failed Vultjag so terribly. “I appointed Ake special governor for Vultjag, but all I’ve done is drag her further and further away from her post. All the links in the chain north of the Llosydanes are broken.”
“So fix them.”
Baru shut her eyes and pressed against Hu’s heart. “I can’t. I don’t know how.”
“You know exactly how. The problems are all in Aurdwynn, so go to the source of power in Aurdwynn. You need an investment from the Governor to get the river and the harbor ready.”
“Governor Ri?” Baru jerked up in thought, nearly headbutting Hu in the chin. Hu, hissing, got the razor blade out of the way so fast that Baru felt only a steel whisper against the back of her head. “I always forget about Heingyl Ri—”
She remembered what else she’d forgotten.
The gray space inside her, the crown that clamped down on her thoughts, had melted away under Hu’s touch. But now, sensing hope, feeling Baru’s hands on the edge of the pit and Hu ready to lift her out, the gray lunged back:
Kyprananoke.
“Oh no,” Baru moaned.
Hu seized her by the back of the neck, did not shake her, only forced their eyes to meet. “You didn’t do that. You tried your very best.”
“It’s gone, Hu . . . everything’s gone . . . I couldn’t stop it.”
“You can’t stop everything. You certainly can’t expect to force your own idea of salvation on every people you meet. If you try to carry everyone else’s mistakes you will break, Baru.”
“But what if it wasn’t a mistake, Hu? What if I’d made the same choice . . . I might’ve brought down that mountain, Hu, I might’ve killed them all. . . .”
Hu cocked her head, golden eyes hawk-keen. “Why?”
“Because the plague would’ve spread to Taranoke.” Baru’s courage broke. She hid her face in Hu’s shoulder. She smelled of horse-leather, of grass under a high cold mountain sky. “And Aurdwynn, by the trade ships. And then to Falcrest. Is that what I want? Is that what I need to do? I didn’t take the Kettling when I could’ve . . . oh, Hu, if I could kill you for advantage, then shouldn’t I be able to damn myself, too? Isn’t that justice? Isn’t that right?”
“No! This whole thought is backward. It’s not what you swore to me.”
“I swore to paint you across history in the color of Falcrest’s blood!”
“You want to paint me in plague blood? I hate plague.” Hu gripped Baru’s chin with her hand, gripped Baru’s eyes with hers, so Baru dared not even blink. “What did you learn on Kyprananoke, Baru?”
“I don’t . . . I’m not certain . . .”
“Don’t let your sentences trail off. It’s unseemly for a queen. What did Kyprananoke teach you?”
Baru twisted away bitterly. “That it’s a lot easier to kill people who don’t deserve it than those who do.”
“No. No. Come on, Baru, think. What did you learn from Kyprananoke?”
She had learned how people could disembowel themselves. She had learned about the grove of smashed children, the sinkhole full of corpses, the terrible crimes committed in the name of revolution.
But the savagery and the barbarism were ultimately Falcrest’s. Falcrest had destroyed Kyprananoke’s old laws and agriculture. Falcrest had put merchants and barbers in charge, ordered them to stamp out disease, to maximize profit. Falcrest had erased Kyprananoke’s history and replaced it with a sketch of cleanliness and exploitation.
She looked back into Hu’s eyes.
“Falcrest has us hostage. When they conquer us . . . they disfigure us.”
“To be disfigured,” Hu warned her, “is not to be reduced. Or to be made evil. That’s an Incrastic idea.”
“No. But it is a way for them to control us. On Taranoke they released smallpox, cut off the old sea trade, and provoked fighting between plainside and harborside. In Aurdwynn they’ve wiped out the dukes and taken control of the food. On Kyprananoke they left behind a ruling class that clung so hard to power it was willing to use thirst as a weapon. They take away what we need to survive on our own, and they erase everything that tells us who we were before them. They want us to need them. If all of Falcrest began to die tomorrow . . .”
“The innocent would still pay a terrible price. As they did on Kyprananoke.”
“So Falcrest has to be made to . . . disentangle itself. To shrivel up and withdraw, and to pass its power over to those it has injured.” A question of useful butchery.
“Because if Falcrest dies like a wounded animal, snarling and biting—”
“The burden of repairing the damage would fall upon the damaged. And that’s not justice.”
“Yes, Baru
,” Hu said, nicking the back of Baru’s neck, clearly on purpose, to leave a thin clean score like a tally-mark. “I think that’s right.”
“I was considering trade, wasn’t I?” Baru breathed. “No wonder I kept thinking about the wood on Eternal! And about the amount of cargo the ship could carry! If only I’d found their rutterbook, or bargained for it . . . Falcrest wants access to the Oriati because it can make profit off them. If I could beat them to it, if I could secure that access first, I would have control of the mightiest trade in the world. . . .”
“You would have control. Not Farrier. Not Hesychast. At last you remember to frame it in terms of your power, your progress. You are a cryptarch unbound! You don’t serve them!”
“Yes . . .” Baru gasped. “Oh Devena, how did I forget? How did they lead me so far astray?”
Hu began to change. Her face narrowed, her eyes darkened, hair fell away and blew into infinity on a silent wind. Baru giggled. “You’re turning into me.”
“You egotist. You’re so pleased with your ideas that you want to fuck yourself.”
“I do not!”
“Then explain this,” Hu-with-Baru’s face said, poking Baru in the chin.
Baru touched her face. Her nose had been broken and reset—her throat was thicker, stronger—her chin! She had Tain Hu’s chin! “Oh, I’m you!” She set about testing Tain Hu’s arms. They surpassed. “You devil, no wonder you’re always so cocky!”
Hu looked back at herself. “Damn,” she said. “I am a sight, aren’t I. Do you know what I wanted to tell you now? The last time you came and spoke to me?”
“You were going to tell me the difference between acting out Falcrest’s story, and actually obeying it.” Tain Shir had said there was no difference at all—“Please, please tell me!”
“But you know,” Hu said, smiling Baru’s narrow, curious smile, speaking in Hu’s throaty voice. “You taught me. I didn’t understand, not completely, until you exiled me from Sieroch. Then I saw how utterly you had devoted yourself to the answer.”
“But I don’t know, Hu! I call myself the liberator, the secret hope,” she spluttered at her own arrogance, “but what have I managed? What have I done for anyone? Just killed a lot of Aurdwynni and Oriati and Kyprananoki, hardly anyone from Falcrest at all, and I don’t even remember home, I never learned the holidays right, or the gods, or—”
“Shush.” Hu wiped away her tears with Baru’s smaller, finer hands. “You think too much, that’s your problem. You can think up a way to ruin anything.
“Listen, now, listen, here is the difference between serving Falcrest and pretending to serve Falcrest. It is the difference that holds whether you sacrifice a lover to your mission, or a nation: whether you kill one person out of necessity, or a hundred thousand. It is the difference between you and a monster. Are you ready?”
Baru stroked the hard frowning brows of the face Hu had borrowed from her. “Yes. Please tell me.”
“No.”
“Hu!”
“Make me.” She leaned back on her hands, smiling up at Baru: the cocked grin was Hu’s but the face was Baru’s, the body was Baru’s, and for the first time Baru-as-Hu felt the deep feline satisfaction of at last getting the brooding young savant in helpless and willing range of her hands. Oh, wretched field-general Tain Hu! She’d executed a reversal, seized Baru’s accustomed ground, forced Baru to fight on unknown and delightful territory.
Hu twisted from her waist. “Here I am. All full of secrets. Make me tell you.”
“Hu,” Baru complained, “this matters—”
“So does this! You and the women in your arms! You think this doesn’t matter as much as thrones and treasuries? You think you paint a portrait of me with your life if you ignore your heart, your hands? I couldn’t.” She touched her smaller nose, her narrow lie-corroded throat, the small groove down her abdomen where muscles lay against each other like books in a shelf. “This is what tormented me, all those days I couldn’t have you. This is what I saw. Do you see what I saw? Someone worth love?”
“I need the answer, Hu,” Baru whined. “Tell me why I’m better than Farrier—please, tell me!”
“And I need you to keep looking for the answer. I need you to chase that question until the day the whole work’s finished.” She smiled the way Baru might smile: impishly. “We are at a diplomatic impasse. Maybe you need to pursue your policy by other means.”
Baru had never been the bigger one before. It turned out to make very little difference in resisting Hu.
Afterward Baru whispered, with her own lips, “I thought dreams always stopped before the good part.”
“Never dreams about me, I’m sure. I have a reputation to uphold.”
“Preening aristocratic ass.” Baru swatted her.
“Guilty on three counts.” Hu was herself again. They had entwined their borrowed flesh and come apart as themselves. “I’m sorry for embarrassing you in front of my cousin.”
“That was you? You made me . . . ?”
“There are only so many ways to speak through the spine, Baru.”
“Ah, it’s all right.” It had been all right. “Do I have to wake up now?”
Tain Hu looked at her across her pillowed arm. For the very first time, Baru let herself remember their time together at Sieroch—not the sex, a memory which she had worn down to rags by running her fingers over it, but the quiet time afterward, when she had decided to measure every dimension of Hu’s arms and legs by prodding them and counting the little white marks left by her fingers. Hu had bruised her ass in the day’s cavalry battle, through saddle and sheepskin pad. Baru ought to have considered the logistics of battle wounds before naming Hu as her consort in sight of everyone on the Henge Hill. Wounds and exhaustion might keep a woman from fucking, and in some eyes this might be their wedding night (what else was it called when the queen named her consort?). It was bad luck to sleep apart on your wedding night.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Hu whispered. “You must wake up. If you don’t, I’m afraid you’ll die.”
“Why? What’s wrong with me?”
“Something touched your brain, kuye lam. Through that hole in your skull. You have meningitis.”
“Oh. Yes.” Baru yawned. Hu covered her mouth and Baru nipped at her palm. “Please, kuye lam, before I go. If you won’t tell me why I’m right to do it, at least tell me what I have to do.”
“You already know. Trade is your weapon.”
“But that’s not a specific plan, Hu. I’ve got this ship full of Cancrioth, I’ve got Yawa and her plans to send me to the Stakhieczi king, I’m supposed to destroy Yawa for the Reckoning of Ways but I don’t want to . . . somehow I’ve got to put all this together with the notion of trade so I can get out of this victorious. So please, just tell me—”
“It’s not good security.” Hu rolled on her back and stretched. She was one golden-brown coil of power from toe to fingertip; she was a catamount. Baru, intellectually calibrated and mentally awakened to the highest planes of aesthetic and philosophical appreciation, stared at her tits.
“Oh, fine.” Hu smirked at Baru. “The plan has never changed. You’ve known exactly what to do to defeat Farrier and Falcrest since the moment I drowned at the Elided Keep. I don’t mean that in some abstract sense. You have stated, quite clearly, exactly what you plan to do.”
“No, I really haven’t!”
Tain Hu reached over to tap her lips. “Hush. Hush. Your Majesty, my lord, you know your plan. You spoke it as I died. I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.”
“That’s just tough talk—it’s not policy—”
Tain Hu lowered her eyes, offering respectful council to her queen. “Yes, it is, my lord. You were quite specific. First, you will write my name in the ruin of them. My name will be recorded in Falcrest’s destruction. My name will play a central role.”
“Tain Hu?”
“I have another name.”
No. This was the wrong way to think about it. Whatever her plan might be, it would proceed from her strengths. Armies, fleets, and diseases were not the center of her strength. Money was the center of her strength.
But Vultjag was so poor, so far from the center of the trade circle, that it could not possibly be a financial player—unless—
“The trade route,” she breathed. “That’s why I said I’d paint you across history in the color of Falcrest’s blood.” On the night she’d slept with Hu she had seen the Empire Itself in her dreams. She had seen the sea become steel and porcelain, a web of roads and plumbing, circulating the empire’s blood from Taranoke to far Falcrest . . . and in that blood there had run currents of molten gold.
“Money. Money is the empire’s blood.” She frowned. “But there was regular blood, too. What does that mean?”
Hu stroked the skin between Baru’s eyes, smoothing out her frown. “Do you really think a proper Incrastic hygienist would agree that there’s such a thing as ‘regular blood’?”
“The blood of each race is of a distinct character . . . the races have distinct and specialized uses!”
“Correct. That is the cornerstone of Incrastic eugenics.” Hu slipped a hand behind Baru’s head, fingers digging into the muscle of her shoulders. “How could you paint me, an Aurdwynni duchess, in molten gold and Incrastic blood? How could Vultjag’s name be linked to Falcrest’s downfall in those specific colors?”
It was a very simple riddle. “I would need to use the flow of money and of blood, namely Falcresti’s trade and their programs of eugenics, to record your name as a duchess . . . but that doesn’t make any sense. Even if Vultjag was important to trade, I don’t see how you would ever be central to Incrastic eugenics.”
“What if your status as my consort is involved? You are, in a sense, the inheritor of the line of Vultjag.”
“But Falcrest doesn’t have aristocracy. The line of Vultjag could never hold an aristocratic seat in a republic where the only elite are merchants, politicians, and philosophers. . . .”