The Traitor Baru Cormorant

 

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For Gillian

 

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sine qua non: Rachel Sobel. Jennifer Jackson. Marco Palmieri.

Sophia and colleagues. Jackals, Blue Planet, my brother, and a loon.

 

A P
ROMISE

This is the truth. You will know because it hurts.

 

A
CCOUNTANT

 

1

T
RADE
season came around again. Baru was still too young to smell the empire wind.

The Masquerade sent its favorite soldiers to conquer Taranoke: sailcloth, dyes, glazed ceramic, sealskin and oils, paper currency printed in their Falcrest tongue. Little Baru, playing castles in the hot black sand, liked to watch their traders come in to harbor. She learned to count by tallying the ships and the seabirds that circled them.

Nearly two decades later, watching firebearer frigates heel in the aurora light, she would remember those sails on the horizon. But at age seven, the girl Baru Cormorant gave them no weight. She cared mostly for arithmetic and birds and her parents, who could show her the stars.

But it was her parents who taught her to be afraid.

In the red autumn evening before the stars rose, her fathers took Baru down to the beach to gather kelp for ash, the ash meant for glass, the glass for telescope lenses ground flat by volcanic stone, the lenses meant for the new trade. When they came to the beach, Baru saw Masquerade merchant ships on the horizon, making a wary circuit around Halae's Reef.

“Look, Das,” Baru said. “They're coming in for the Iriad market.”

“I see them.” Father Salm shaded his eyes and watched the ships, peeling lips pressed thin. He had the shoulders of a mountain and they corded as he moved. “Go fill your bucket.”

“Watch.” Father Solit, keen-eyed, took his husband's hand and pointed. “There's a third ship. They're sailing in convoys now.”

Baru pretended to dig for kelp and listened.

“Pirates make a good excuse for convoy,” Salm said. “And the convoy makes a good excuse for escort.” He spat into the surf. “Pinion was right. Poison in that treaty.”

Watching their reflections, Baru saw Solit take Salm's shoulder, callused hand pressed against his husband's bare strength. Each man wore his hair braided, Solit's burnt short for the smithy, Salm's an elaborate waist-length fall—for glory in the killing circle, against the plainsmen.

“Can you see it, then?” Solit asked.

“No. It's out there, though. Over the horizon.”

“What's out there, Da?” Baru asked.

“Fill your bucket, Baru,” Salm rumbled.

Baru loved her mother and her fathers dearly, but she loved to know things just a small measure more, and she had recently discovered cunning. “Da,” she said, speaking to Solit, who was more often agreeable, “will we go to Iriad market and see the ships tomorrow?”

“Fill your bucket, Baru,” Solit said, and because he echoed Salm instead of indulging her, Baru knew he was worried. But after a moment, he added: “Grind your glass tonight, and we'll have enough to sell. You can come along to Iriad and see the ships.”

She opened her mother's hand-copied dictionary that night, squinting at the narrow script in the candlelight, and counted through the letters of the Urunoki alphabet until she came to:
convoy
—
a caravan, or a group of ships, gathered for mutual protection, especially under the escort of a warship.

A warship. Hm.

It's out there,
father Salm had said.

From the courtyard of their ash-concrete home came the shriek of stone on glass and the low worried voices of her mother and fathers, a huntress and a blacksmith and a shield-bearer. Worrying about
the treaty
again.

She looked that word up too, hoping to understand it, as understanding gave her power over things. But she did not see how a treaty could be poison. Perhaps she would learn at the Iriad market.

Baru put her mother's dictionary back and then hesitated, fingers still on the chained stitches of the binding. Mother had a new book in her collection, bound in foreign leather. From the first page—printed in strange regular blocks, impersonal and crisp—she sounded out the title:
A Primer in Aphalone, the Imperial Trade Tongue; Made Available to the People of Taranoke For Their Ease.

There was a copy number in the bottom corner, almost higher than she could count.

*   *   *

W
HERE
the sea curled up in the basalt arms of the Iriad cove, beneath the fields of sugarcane and macadamia and coffee that grew from the volcanic loam, the market preened like a golden youth.

Since a time before Baru could remember how to remember the market had filled the Iriad docks, the most noisy and joyous thing in the world. There were more ships in harbor this year—not just Taranoki fishers and felucca, not just familiar Oriati traders from the south, but tall white-sailed Masquerade merchant ships. With their coming the market had outgrown the boardwalks and drifted out onto bobbing floats of koa and walnut where drummers sounded in the warmth and the light.

Today Baru went to market with a new joy: the joy of plots. She would learn what troubled her parents, this knot of warships and treaties. She would repair it.

Her family went by canoe. Baru rode in the prow while mother Pinion and father Salm paddled and father Solit kept nervous watch over the telescopes. The wind off the sea lifted flocks of scaups and merganser ducks, gangs of bristle-throated alawa giving two-toned calls, egrets and petrels and frigate birds, and high above great black jaegers like wedges of night. She tried determinedly to count them and keep all the varieties straight.

“Baru Cormorant,” mother Pinion said, smiling. In Baru's eyes she was a coil of storm surf, a thunderbolt, as slow and powerful as sunlight. Her dark eyes and the teeth in her smile were the shapes that Baru imagined when she read about panthers. She worked her paddle in strokes as smooth and certain as the waves. “It was a good name.”

Baru, warm and loved and hungry to impress with accurate bird-count, hugged her mother's thigh.

They found a quay to unload the telescopes and the market swept up around them. Baru navigated the crowd of knees and ankles, trailing behind her parents because the commerce distracted her. Taranoke had always been a trading port, a safe island stop for Oriati dromons and islander canoes, so Baru grew up knowing a little of the structure of trade: arbitrage, currency exchange, import and export.
We sell sugarcane and honey and coffee and citrus fruits,
mother Pinion said,
and buy textiles, sailcloth, kinds of money that other traders want
—
Baru, pay attention!

Lately she always paid attention. Something fragile had come into the air, a storm smell, and not understanding made her afraid.

The market smelled of cooked pineapple and fresh ginger, red iron salt and anise. Through the drums and the calls of the dancers and the shouts of the audience in Urunoki and Oriati and the new trade tongue Aphalone came the ring of hard coin and reef pearl changing hands.

“Sol-i-i-i-i-i-t,” Baru called. “I want to see—!”

“I know.” Solit spared a smile from his work. He had been a smith, and he was generous to everything he made, including Baru. “Go wander.”

Excellent. Now she would pursue the true meaning of
treaty
.

She found a foreign trader's stall painted in Masquerade white. The man who watched over the piled broadcloth—woven from sheep, which she understood were large dull beasts made entirely of hair—could have passed for Taranoki from a distance, though up close the different fold of his eyelids and flat of his nose gave him away. This was the first impression Baru had of the Falcrest people: stubborn jaws, flat noses, deep folded eyes, their skin a paler shade of brown or copper or oat. At the time they hardly seemed so different.