The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

“There’s the river,” Solit said. “I helped design those buildings along it.”

  Pole barges and skiffs drifted at moor by a trim white municipal office. A clinic and a school snugged up side by side. A commons, a garden, a flower-choked apiary clouded with bees, a constabulary post with a huge ceremonial shield above the arch . . . oh, it was nothing like the real Iriad, but it was a perfect image of the Iriad that nostalgia had refurbished in Barhu’s heart. Each tiny brilliance of layout and plumbing tasted as sharp as a peppercorn in her teeth.

  “Trade negotiations,” she muttered. “I’m holding trade negotiations in Iriad. Svir’s right. I really am recapitulating my childhood.”

  “Pardon?” Solit said.

  “Nothing, da. I talk to myself. You’ve seen nothing too odd around here? Nothing that could threaten a diplomatic meeting?”

  “Odd?” Her mother stole a piece of Solit’s tart. “Of course there’s oddness. Didn’t you read the book on Cauteria? Hell’s Embassy? This island’s mad. Gas kills in the forest, sounds the old can’t hear, compasses turning madly. . . .”

  “Everyone’s bothering me for not doing my reading.” Barhu sighed.

  “Of course we are! We didn’t have printed books in my day, you know. Everything had to be hand copied, and the moment I heard of a new book, I’d go and trade a whole boar for it. You young people think a book’s like a lover, maybe you want one, maybe you don’t—”

  Solit snuck his arm around Pinion and hugged the tirade right out of her lungs. “Baru, aside from the vents, I don’t think there’s anything dangerous here.”

  “What sort of vents?”

  “Invisible gas comes out of the ground. Usually it stinks if it’s dangerous. If it doesn’t, you can watch for birds gathering over the deer kill. I think people go huff the vents, sometimes.” He traded sidelong glances with Pinion. “Like Tapu Sunfish. That man says the strangest things—”

  At that moment one of the horses whinnied and balked, afraid of the steep descent. Pinion shot bolt upright in snarling terror.

  Barhu laughed in delight. “Still adjusting to horses?”

  “They’re foolish! I swear they live to find stupid ways to die.”

  “I’ll have to tell you about the time I won a great battle with skillful deployment of cavalry.” Barhu shoved her hands into her pockets so that she would not fold them arrogantly behind her head. “I have a proposal for the town . . . elders. What’s the word, the Urunoki word? Is it, ah, matai?”

  “Yes, of course it is,” Pinion said, worriedly. “Did you forget it? Did we forget to teach you?”

  “You taught me very well, Mother.” Barhu swallowed again. It hurt. “So. How’s home?”

  Pinion and Solit scooted a little closer together. Pinion put an arm around her husband. Solit blinked rapidly.

  They told their daughter how one in four Taranoki had died.

  Smallpox had piled bodies so high they had to be mass-buried in the caldera. The disease was endemic to the Mothercoasts of Devi-naga Mbo and Falcrest, where it flourished in cities. It had never reached Taranoke before. The Falcresti said that was a risk of faster shipping. And there were only so many inoculations to go around. Was it any surprise that they’d prioritized their friends?

  Barhu had been inoculated, a procedure called variolation. Her parents hadn’t been so lucky. “The ones who died,” pox-scarred Pinion said, “their skins rose up with black blisters, everywhere, toes to nose. You’d think they’d been cooked.”

  Smallpox passed. Then came the flu, and it never stopping coming. Waves of influenza from the pigpens and slaughterhouses of Falcrest’s second city Grendlake rippled out across the Empire. There was no inoculation. A treatment existed, but it required the transfer of blood from a survivor, and more often than not this produced a hideous syndrome characterized by a conviction of imminent doom. Usually the prophecy was true, and the transfusee died horribly.

  The flu didn’t kill as many as smallpox, but it kept Taranoke on its ass. The Falcresti set out to “help,” erecting shipyards and better roads, putting bright young students to work on a census of people and wildlife, gathering up talented children for “educational protection” in schools. The coffee and sugarcane plantations expanded even as basic food production collapsed: it was easier to raise coffee and sugar, sell them for fiat notes, and buy from Falcrest’s imported stores. Why would anyone remain a food farmer? The imported goods made everyone fat, Pinion said, and fond of salted butter.

  Of course there was violence. No one could bring plainsiders and harborside together under one roof without violence. And at first those old grudges were the cause of the fighting, with only a little encouragement from Falcrest.

  Province Governor Oya-dai Mahoro instituted something called the Risk Market (this name accompanied by eye rolls from Pinion and Solit), in which wages at provincial jobs were tied, inversely, to the rate of crime and sedition. If your neighbors rioted, your wages would be cut. When your neighbors behaved again, your back pay would be filled. It had not worked very well. Which was, perhaps, the point, to illustrate that the people of Sousward were irrational, unable to see their own best interest.

  Here Pinion and Solit hesitated.

  Barhu knew what would come next.

  “We killed people,” Solit said. His strong hand put white marks on Pinion’s arm.

  “I know,” Barhu said. “I’ve done it, too.”

  “People who were just trying to keep their families from starving. People we’d known all our lives. I . . .”

  He felt for Pinion’s hand. His sorrow faltered and her fury rose.

  “People worked for the masks because the masks could feed them. Or inoculate their children. Or secure their land, put the deeds down in paper.” She looked like she wanted a knife. “At first we’d pretend not to see the ‘home guard’ Mahoro raised, and they’d pretend not to notice us. They’d warn us about raids, we’d warn them about bombings and fires. We thought we’d focus on the shipyards, the record halls, the banks, the export warehouses . . . steal from the mask and give to the people.

  “But the falca were so fucking reasonable about it. They’d offer amnesties, and usually honor them, for a while. They’d offer to withdraw their constables from certain ‘culturally sensitive areas,’ and we’d come in to claim the liberated land, and then we couldn’t feed the people there, we couldn’t rule with all the elders dead of smallpox and flu. So the people in those free zones went back to work for Falcrest. They went back to their fucking jobs and the fucking courts. Like they’d forgotten how to live without masks.”

  She trembled but she never blinked. “Some of us said, if we can’t pay people in Falcrest money, we’ll pay them in plunder. If we can’t give them matai courts, we’ll give them wartime discipline. So then we had brigands and warlords on Taranoke, for the first time since Mad Malassee. They would raid the plainsiders and the plainsiders had their own brigands who’d raid back. And who could protect the people? Falcrest’s marines, of course.”

  Her voice on the edge of a shout. Solit squeezed her hand and took over.

  “People turned on us in the last couple years. Young people who came through the Masquerade schools, all of them calling us radicals and regressives. None of them know a damn thing about being Taranoki. We relied more and more on the Oriati money and the Oriati weapons to keep the fight going. We mined the harbors and we sunk merchanters and, oh, people didn’t like that, losing the imports they’d paid for, the goods they’d contracted for and counted on to keep their businesses up. And the more people turned on us, the more we started punishing collaborators. I don’t know how—it wasn’t something we meant—”

  Long exhale. Short inhale. “We were just so angry the first time a family turned our people over to the masks. We didn’t know what to do except kill them.”

  “Please stop,” Barhu whispered.

  “You have to know what it’s like, Baru,” Pinion growled. “You have to face this—”

 
“I know what it’s like, Mother! I helped them do it!”

  They all fell so quiet.

  “I’m sorry.” Barhu covered her eye—realized too late that she’d only covered her left. “I left you to suffer all this.”

  Her mother stared at her rock-scarred knees.

  Her father cleared his throat. “So,” he said. “It’s your turn.”

  Barhu told them almost everything.

  That night they ate together as a family. They poached salmon in wine and butter and ate bread from the Falcrest-style bakery. Barhu pulled up an empty chair for Salm. Solit burst out weeping, and had to go draw water from the well to wash his face.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, to Barhu and Pinion’s mumbles and waves of dismissal. “Knowing he’s alive out there, without us . . .”

  “Who’s the woman?” Pinion teased. “Your forest friend?”

  “Don’t,” Barhu growled. “You have no idea the things I’d have to explain.”

  For the first time in fifteen years, Barhu woke in a hammock in her parents’ home.

  She sat up, feeling crisp, like a fresh sheet folded up. There was no ring of hurt around her skull, no hook on her soul dragging her back to sleep. She went to the rattan windowscreen, looked out into morning fog on the Rubiyya bay. Eternal’s masts wandered in and out of reality. Sterilizer lurked half a mile off, a triple-decked brute, diminished only by Eternal’s titanic proximity. Her hwacha batteries could loft fifty thousand arrows in a full salvo. Her siphons were worse.

  The Brain was out there. The Kettling was out there. There would be no more pigs to slaughter, no more chickens or goats. Whatever was left alive on that ship carried either tumor or plague.

  And she’d brought it to her parents’ door.

  “Baru,” her mother called, attuned by some parental proprioception to the motions in her house, “get washed, please, you have visitors.”

  Visitors! Shit. “Is it Governor Heingyl?”

  “No, dear. It’s much more important. All your aunts and uncles have come.”

  Oh no. Barhu did not even remember having aunts and uncles, except as vague presences around her parents. She was reasonably certain in retrospect that one “uncle” had been a man her father Solit was either sleeping with, or who shared with Solit an obsession with ancient arrowheads.

  She went outside to the shower chute, washed in water from the solar. Took quick inventory of all the glass bottles of creams and solutes involved in her parents’ skincare routine, from monoi oil to coconut milk and jasmine water. Glass bottles! Her parents had done well. She had nothing to wear but the wardrobe she’d brought from the fortress, and that meant a waistcoat and trousers, not Taranoki at all. Even her linens felt like they somehow didn’t belong here. When she’d left for the Iriad school, she’d never had a period and hadn’t needed to tie up her breasts.

  She went out into the common room rigid with fear.

  The men and women at the long table looked up from their bowls of sugared black coffee, smiling, calling out hello, every one of them no doubt trying to connect this eight-fingered scrimshaw woman with the moody little girl they’d known.

  “Hello,” Barhu said, and began, helplessly, to cry.

  “Oh, you poor dumb thing,” one of her aunts clucked. “You sound just like you did when you were born. Someone find a cormorant.”

  “Do they starve her? Is that why she cries at food?”

  “She’s been in Aurdwynn. She’s probably been eating horses.”

  “They don’t eat the horses. They eat the cows.”

  “Solit, how’s your cow?”

  “Full of coffee,” he said, tending to some kind of glass apparatus that dripped coffee into a bowl. “Baru, how do you take yours?”

  “Neat, please,” Barhu said, as if she were ordering whiskey. It didn’t mean anything in Urunoki: “Plain, I mean.”

  “Black,” her mother corrected her.

  “Black.”

  They engulfed her in their chatter, drew her in to the table. They had prepared coconut meat, cooked pineapple in iron salt, baked banana with tapioca and coconut cream, an iron pot of chicken in a thick Aurdwynn-style curry, pork roasted in an underground oven so it tasted like the smoke of Barhu’s favorite whiskeys, sour taro pudding and cubes of raw tuna so powerfully peppered Barhu began to sneeze. She ate until she felt she would doze off in her chair. She was horrified to discover that she could not understand everyone’s Urunoki.

  “It’s all right,” her mother whispered, seeing her confusion. “You never went far from Iriad. There are other accents.”

  “Are they really my aunts and uncles?”

  “By blood? Some of them. Not most.”

  “Well,” Barhu said, “I’m glad you brought them.”

  Her mother wrestled visibly with I’m glad you’re here, and settled for a nod.

  The coffee came from the “cow,” an apparatus of glass and steel which Solit tended like an unpacked baby, some unfortunate yet well-loved infant born with all its organs on the outside, glands and visceras which required constant adjustment. “It’s his latest invention,” Pinion murmured. “We call it the cow because it is large, many-chambered, and bad at doing what it’s meant to do. He says he’s going to register it and sell it.”

  “I heard that,” Solit said. “Your mother just hates cows because she’s not allowed to hunt them.”

  “Comes from a life killing boar,” the aunt across the table suggested. “If it’s bigger than a rat and it goes on all fours, Pinion wants to spear it.”

  “I spear your mother on all fours,” Pinion said.

  She and the aunt saw Barhu’s face and both began to laugh.

  “She looks like a fish,” Pinion said, “all pinched up and sour,” and the aunt sucked her lips into a little beak and made fish gulps.

  “I’m being teased,” Barhu said, which made her think of Iscend, who she had abandoned, naked, in a forest, and barely spoken to in the morning. “Er, father—all this glass must be expensive. How does this coffee concern work?”

  “Catering to idiots,” Pinion said, passing the cubes of tuna across the table, to an uncle with an elephant war-mask tattooed onto his face.

  “The idea is,” Solit explained, “that our innate racial expertise in coffee adds a premium quality to those beans we hand-select. We sell to a very narrow audience, an audience with a taste for luxury. Our revenue allows us to send people all over the Masquerade to explore new markets. It’s a useful way to get travel papers for folks who . . . may not want to linger at home.”

  He looked warily to the open window. “That woman who follows you around. Can she understand us?”

  “Probably,” Barhu admitted. “But if she were listening, she’d tell me. It’s—complicated, the way she thinks.”

  “You have such a charming lover,” Pinion said.

  “Mother, she is not my—”

  “Pussy hands,” Pinion stage-whispered, and the aunt across the table had to put down her cup for sake of laughing. Barhu was going to faint of embarrassment.

  “Have you thought about registering your concern for the joint stock trade?” she suggested, desperately. “Cauteria’s inside the home province. I’m sure it must be legal.”

  Pinion grumbled. “I knew she’d have some clever idea. ‘Joint stock trade.’ Just a fancy new name for selling shares, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a wonderful way to diffuse risk, Mother! You can attract investors and use their money to grow.”

  “I don’t want us owned by some clique of falca fools in the Suettaring. What’s the point, anyway? If you want to trade, then trade. Why bother asking for investment if you haven’t tested the route?”

  “Some trade’s too risky for any one concern to attempt on its own,” Barhu explained. “Like—like an idea I have in mind, for example. You’d need a navy’s worth of shipping, escort from the actual navy, doctors for tropical and alpine diseases, wages for crews, insurance . . . actually, Mother, I think m
y idea could do real good for Taranoke. Could I speak to the matai? The elder council?”

  “Oh, we are the matai,” the aunt across the table said. Everyone’s chatter fell away with her voice.

  “You’re the matai?”

  “Who else would come greet you, Baru? You’re an important person. Not just to your parents.”

  “The news about Salm was good,” the uncle at her right side said. “You did well learning it.”

  “But there are two warships in our harbor.” Another aunt leaned in to scoop up a handful of pork with a big taro leaf. “You sent them here, Pinion says. We don’t like warships in our harbor, Baru. For reasons I know you remember.”

  “I remember.” Barhu tasted puffer fish–flavored nostalgia, yearning for a time when she had not known how bad things had already become. “I’ve put you all in danger by coming here.”

  “You’re not the easiest woman to trust, these days,” the elephant-masked uncle said, with a fondness that made Barhu wish she could remember his name. “There were people who wanted to give you the carpets when we heard what you’d done in Aurdwynn.”

  “I’m sorry.” Was there nothing at all she remembered? “Give me the what?”

  “It’s a ritual of abandonment,” her mother said, glaring dangerously at the elephant-masked man. “You lie down beneath carpets. Or a proxy does, if you can’t be found. Then we walk across you. It means you’re dirt to us. Cast out forever.”

  The aunt at the head of the table watched Barhu compassionately. “Your parents opposed it. They said you were trying, in your own way, to help us. Is that still true?”

  “Yes.”

  “You truly mean to help us? Not simply cut us in on the profits of some scheme that—” The aunt paused a moment, assembling Aphalone words. “—ultimately reinforces the masked power?”

  “Yes! If you knew what I’d given up to be here—”

  “She told us,” Solit said, from his place at the coffee apparatus. “Look at her hands. Look at her face. She’s suffered for us, matai. Maybe not the way all of us would have wanted. Maybe not in a way we’d all have approved. She’s done things I don’t understand. She’s certainly collaborated. But she’s still our child at heart.”