The Tyrant

by Seth Dickinson

  “That idiot,” Solit said, fondly. “He has no idea who he’s playing with, does he?”

  Pinion came back inside, breathing hard. “I just want to know one thing.”

  She blinked. Tiny images of candles caught on the water in her eyelashes.

  “If you didn’t have to do this,” she husked, “then you’d come visit us, wouldn’t you? You’d have come to visit us again? You’d write, at least?”

  “Oh, mother,” Barhu said.

  And felt deep-soul awe as her own tears multiplied the image of Pinion, the image of the candles, everything smearing into light, like bright eyes at the bottom of the sea.

  Her mother went to the matai to explain that Barhu needed to face the carpets. Her father Solit went to the smithy to make her a dive knife.

  Barhu went to walk among her people one last time.

  The bazaar was at its peak. News of the treaty had all the Cancrioth in bright spirits, and they were bartering for things to make their long voyage home more comfortable. There was not one hint in the wide river or the slow wind that the world was about to change. Because a few tired, angry people had gathered in a room and, through frustration, terror, and the slow concession of principle, come to a bargain.

  Was that how history should happen? It seemed uncouth.

  Maybe she and Yawa and the onkos were just avatars of impersonal and inhuman forces. Little sinewy joints in the skeleton of the world, bent by huge muscles of need and excess, mistaking the motions forced upon them for the action of their own wills.

  Maybe what was about to happen was like the loose scree of el-Tsunuqba’s face. A huge potential pent up and waiting to move. And Barhu was the little bomb that started the avalanche.

  She felt exactly like she had on that last night after the victory at Sieroch. Giddy. Bent near to breaking. At least at Sieroch she’d gotten laid before the worst.

  “Barhu!” Solit called, from the river pump where he was drawing water. As if moved by trim: “There’s a woman here! She says she’s your lover!”

  Barhu was immediately and excruciatingly embarrassed. “It’s not Shao Lune, is it?”

  “Who’s Shao Lune?” Solit repeated, innocently. “There’s another one?”

  Ulyu Xe sat on the grass with her legs tucked beneath her. “Hello. I walked here from Annalila. I wanted to see you before I left for Aurdwynn.”

  “Any sign of cholera?” Barhu asked, to her father’s mutter that this was not how one should greet a lover.

  “I heard it was in the town. That’s all.” She rose from the ground like water poured in reverse. Barhu did not even chide herself for admiring the long calves, the strong grass-stained thighs. “Your father suggested I take you upriver for the day.”

  “Oh.” Barhu frowned. “Maybe we’d better stay in the village. This might be my last chance to—”

  “Baru,” Solit said, in exasperation, “would you please demonstrate to your mother and I that you can entertain an agreeable woman for at least one afternoon?”

  She rowed Xe upriver on the Rubiyya. The diver sat alertly in the prow, absorbing the birdsong and the madly colored blossoms, the heat of the day, the frogs and krakenflies hunting among the reeds. Barhu grounded them in a flood meadow and showed Xe how to take temperature readings with a mercury thermometer.

  “It’s like magic,” Xe said.

  “It absolutely is not!”

  “You told me that masters in Falcrest spend two years calibrating each thermometer to the tenth of the degree. That they must be stored with a certain ritual. That they can kill you if you break them open. That they must be destroyed before falling into foreign hands. That they can tell when people are sick before they even know.”

  “But this thermometer works by clear, well-understood logical rules. Magic doesn’t work at all.”

  Xe lay down on the bank and trailed her bare toes in the water. “You’d only be satisfied if magic were like a rag novel. A wizard shoots a bolt of lightning to animate a corpse. A warlock calls down a star from the sky to blind his foe. But that’s not really magic. It’s just made-up science.”

  “No it’s not!” Barhu sputtered.

  “Yes it is. If you can see how it works, it’s science. If a wizard were to show you a book of rules by which he combines various gestures and words and gems and metals to make his spells, it would be science, not magic.”

  “What isn’t science, by your definition?”

  Xe rolled onto her back and squirmed out of her skirtwrap. “When a witch raises a rabbit with the same name as a man, and kills and skins the rabbit, and then pisses through the rabbit’s skin into a pit of gravel, and the man gets kidney stones. The witch never touched the man. She never acted upon him. She only touched symbols of him.”

  “Oh, fine.” Barhu crossed her arms and glared. “So magic doesn’t work except when it can be disguised as the coincidence of symbolic manipulation and natural occurrence? That’s very powerful.”

  “The most powerful thing in the world,” Xe said, untying her strophium and sliding deeper into the water.

  “Women in rivers are always telling me stories lately.” Barhu sighed. But that last conversation with Iscend had inspired a tremendous idea: what Barhu was beginning to think of as the Huntress Qualm. Perhaps there was another one to be gained here.

  “Xe,” she asked, “if someone asked me, what was lost at Kyprananoke, why should we care that they died, what would I say?”

  “Beyond their lives?”

  “Yes. What makes all the Kyprananoki dying worse than the death of an equal number of Falcresti in a bad winter?”

  Xe thought about this for a while. Krakenflies buzzed past. Sediment swirled over her toes.

  “In Aurdwynn,” she said, “we call the marshes to the east of the river Inirein the wuxunanikome, the sea of wet chaos. Falcrest calls it the Normarch. I never thought anyone could live there, especially not in the winter.

  “But the rear admiral in the fortress, her people come from there. The Bastè Ana. She told me, at the Governor’s Ball, how her people lived. She also told me that I looked like a whore and that I should go put on a coat.”

  This might have been Xe’s way of making it into a joke: Barhu could not read the diver’s deadpan at all.

  “She told me that the greatest naturalists in Falcrest come to the Normarch to study the seals. But they need the ana hunters to find the seals, hunters who are taught to hunt just as their ancestors did. No naturalist, no matter how clever, can know as much: How the seal maintains air holes in the winter ice. How it sniffs for the scent of hunters before coming up to breathe. How its territory is generally of such a size, how it is most active at this time of year and quiet at that time. What parts of it are safe to eat, which are best raw, which are best cooked.”

  “What does this have to do with my question?”

  “What if I am thinking through my answer?”

  “I’m sorry. Go on.”

  “At around the same time, a Falcresti frigate, the Auroreal, was caught in the northern icepack. She had barrels of preserved food, a veteran crew, special arctic furnaces, and hunting poisons to bring down large game.”

  Oh, she remembered Auroreal from Shao Lune’s story! “What happened to them?”

  “The bears were too hard to catch. The seals they never found at all. By the end of the winter they’d resorted to eating their own dead. The survivors of Auroreal were physically overcome by a local ana tribe, carried south, and delivered to Falcresti authorities.”

  Barhu shuddered. Those details had not been in Shao Lune’s version. “But the local ana tribes had survived winters like that for centuries.”

  “Of course. Because they did what their ancestors taught them to do. They were able to hunt and catch seals when Falcrest’s most rational, well-equipped thinkers could not. Obeying their ancestors made them smarter than anything Falcrest’s explorers could invent.”

  “You’re talking in circles!”

  “I
like circles,” Xe said, sliding herself down into the water.

  Me too, Barhu thought, with daft and sun-sleepy desire. “How does this answer my question? You think there’s something the ana culture knows, some secret of catching seals, which can’t be replicated or invented by Falcrest? Something magical?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “Whatever it is that can only be learned by living for hundreds of years on the wuxunanikome. How to fashion spears when you live on an icepack without trees. How to locate the seal air holes and how to approach in stealth. How to know exactly when the seal has to come up to breathe, how to avoid the seal panicking and tearing itself off the spear tip, how to prepare the seal meat when fuel runs low, how to make sledges which run well on ice, how to identify exactly which patches of sea ice are low on salt and safe to drink. Maroyad told me about all these techniques. Falcrest’s finest did not discover them with rational investigation. But the Bastè Ana did, simply by living there so long.”

  Barhu wondered if her parents would be proud or concerned that she was sitting here beside her half-naked lover arguing arctic survival tactics.

  “The Metademe tried to rationalize their diets, did you know?” Xe was now in the water to her lower lip. “Tried to make the ana stop eating disgusting things like seal blood pudding. At once they began to die of scurvy. They knew that going back to the old food would cure them, but they couldn’t explain why. My ykari is Wydd the Patient, Baru, and so I admire the ana people. Because they patiently and obdurately do what their ancestors taught them. No one involved can explain why seal blood is necessary. But it is, and they know it.”

  “Nardoo,” Barhu said, remembering a lesson from school.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nardoo. It’s a fern that grows in the south of Mzilimake Mbo, near Zawam Asu. You can crush the seeds to make flour. But no one eats it, because it poisons you. Once you’ve got nardoo poisoning you shit enormously, more than you eat. The more of it you eat, the faster you’ll starve.

  “But in Devi-naga, on the opposite side of the Oria continent, everyone knows how to eat nardoo. It grows well after floods, so they’ve discovered how to prepare it safely. The women crush the nardoo seeds, wash the flour out with water, cook it, and serve it as a porridge. You eat the porridge off a mussel shell—never anything else. It’s not poisonous if you do it that way. No one knows why.

  “When Falcresti sailors arrived they thought the nardoo seeds would be good provisions for long voyages. But the crushing, the washing, and the cooking are all time-consuming and dull. So the sailors skipped the simple women’s work, milled the seeds into flour, and used the flour for bread. And they ate the bread, and shat their bodies out, and starved. They had all the best of Incrastic science and they couldn’t figure out what the Devi-naga all knew.

  “It’s as if . . .” She groped for a way to say it. “It’s as if all the people who live anywhere in the world, no matter how primitive or savage Falcrest says they are, are accumulating interest. Learning things which can only be learned by being who they are, for as long as they have been. Oh, damn it, am I just calling them stupid? Am I just finding roundabout ways to say that these people are too backward to do science?”

  “That’s a Falcrest conceit,” Xe countered. “We’re saying they’re clever in a way that’s not valued by Incrasticism.”

  “How? How is it clever to do whatever your ancestors teach you?”

  “Because your ancestors are smarter than you. Not any one of them, but all together. All those different ways of seal-hunting and flour-making combining and leaping down from generation to generation, sieved out by centuries of practice until only the best forms remain.”

  “Oh!”

  Barhu felt the idea like a punch to the breast. All her life she had orbited around that word, savant, the clever one, the one who does the figures and writes the book and changes the way people think. The clever one. She does her great work, and history remembers her, only her, as a bright star of intellect. A great name like Lapetiare or Shiqu Si or even Mana Mane.

  But what if she imagined the entire thousand-year Mbo—

  Now it lay before her, as lucid as the water running over Xe’s shoulders. As real in her mind as the iron salt and the black beaches of Taranoke, as the sky whirling from sun to moon and stars to sun again as days raced days to the end of time.

  The continent of Oria. Land of jungle and sahel, mangrove forests and rice flats, and mountains and rift valleys and lakes and desert. And it all swarmed with brilliant life. Generations of Oriati trying to live in new places, failing, trying again. An endless, ever-changing challenge, humanity against the thousand climates of this land of dense-packed difference: and then all those tribes of humanity against each other.

  The griots ran like thread between the peoples to carry the trembles of triumph and grief, the pale flame of innovation, the red rope of war. Children listened to their parents as their parents had when they were children, learning to sing the songs, to mind their trim, to do good and to hold fast to their principles, even when circumstances wanted them to bend.

  In the thirteen kingdoms of Lonjaro, princes conspired to advance their own families as commoners suffered. The game of golden seats was so all-consuming that those good princes who attended to the betterment of their people were overtaken and destroyed by the selfish who attended only to their own power.

  Until someone began to preach the belief that it was more important to do what was right, to treat others as if they were your own kin, to add to the common pot rather than pour it into your own private treasury. This idea of trim became so fixed in the culture, through personal faith and through its glorification in great works like the Whale Words and the Kiet Khoiad, that people obeyed it for no rational reason at all, even in the face of mortal temptation. They were good even when they had no reason to be good.

  The Oriati Mbo had never invented inoculations. Or rocket-launched naval incendiaries. Or citrus anti-scurvy regimens. Or soap before surgery. Or techniques of social control. Thus Falcrest believed that its method triumphed over the Oriati way.

  But Falcrest found the Oriati utterly resistant to their suasions and enticements. Not because the Oriati were primitive or ignorant, not because they were all the same, but because the one thing that united their vast nation of nations was a belief in trim: doing the right thing just because it was right. Stubbornness and faith in the old ways could be a good thing; it could be the greatest thing, when your enemy wanted to sway you from your path. And there were other good things in all the peoples of the Mbo, things no one could imagine or invent, ideas which could only be produced by being who they were, in the places where they lived, with the history they had.

  Oriati Mbo was a book of incredible and unread wisdom. A book made of millions of living souls.

  And Falcrest wanted to erase the book. Burn the pages for kindling, the people for labor. No one in Falcrest understood that there was anything written in it at all. They believed that some societies were civilized and some were primitive and that the civilized had nothing to gain from the primitive at all.

  “You’re looking at me very oddly,” Xe said.

  “I’ve just had another theoretical breakthrough,” Barhu said. “An articulation.”

  “Oh? What was the first one?” Her warm deep eyes half-hooded.

  “It was about women who fuck women,” Barhu said, waving that aside as unimportant. “Listen, I do believe in science. I think it’s the most useful invention of all time.”

  “Useful for what?”

  “It saves children from the pox, and it makes faster ships, and it explains the motions of the stars and the shape of the world—”

  “And it would take my child from my belly right now. I’d be sterilized. Because I’ve been with women.”

  “Yes, yes, it can be misused, obviously I know that, but listen”—she rose up on her haunches, waving at invisible things in the shape of the sun on
the river—“that could be changed. If I could bring proof to Falcrest that Incrasticism is wrong—”

  “Baru,” Xe said.

  Barhu smashed her fist into the palm of her three-fingered hand. “They’re losing their grip. The eugenics experiment is falling apart, because people take too long to breed. And now I’ve got a theory that could challenge their need to scour and dominate other cultures. They’re finished! By Himu, I’m going to run Incrasticism down like a deer in the woods.”

  “Baru,” Xe said, infinitely patient, “do you listen to me at all?”

  “Of course I do,” Barhu said, thinking of monographs and the Metademe.

  “What was your great theory about women who fuck women?”

  “Oh, I had this idea that tribadists might play an important role in child-raising—not necessary to justify our existence, but useful as a political tactic to legitimize—”

  Xe was looking at her with the patience and tolerance one might aim at a difficult but beloved child.

  “Oh.” Barhu started. Xe had said, quite clearly, take the child from my belly, right now. “Xe, you’re pregnant?”

  She nodded: smiled shyly. “My second.”

  “It’s not mine, is it?” Barhu joked.

  “A little, I suppose. I was taught that the fathers add their characters to the child through the way they speak to and touch the mother, just as much as through their semen. The baby will have felt us together, at least once, and it will remember that joy.”

  Barhu thought a moment: keeping track of her lover’s lovers was not yet a habit. “The baby is Dzir’s? On the Llosydanes, before he left?”

  “The baby is mine. Though I suppose you’re used to thinking of children as half the father’s, in the Falcrest fashion. Dzir wanted a child, he said. Though I don’t think he meant by me.”

  “It wasn’t an accident?”

  “Of course not,” Xe sniffed. “I wanted something to bring back to my family. To thank them for letting me go so long . . . longer than I meant to go.”

  “You’ve been very patient with me. Thank you. It means so much.”