The Traitor Baru Cormorant (4 page)

Lao's special tutor was the social hygienist Diline, from Falcrest—gentle, patronizing, skin exotically pale. He took sessions with rebellious or homesick students. Baru had decided a long time ago that Diline could not help her on the civil service exam. “What has he done?” she hissed. “Lao, look at me—”

“He thinks I have a social condition.” Lao covered her eyes in shame, a gesture they'd all learned from their teachers. “He thinks I'm a tribadist.”

“Oh,” Baru said.

Later she would hate herself for the calculation she made here:
What will it cost me to be associated with her, if she is?
For the science of sanitary inheritance they had learned made it very clear what a horror it was to lie with another woman, and what punishment the tribadist would receive. The Imperial Republic had been born in revolt against a degenerate aristocracy, their bodies and minds twisted, Diline had explained, by centuries of unhygienic mating. From this Falcrest had learned the value of sanitary behavior and carefully planned inheritance.
The diseases of tribadism and sodomy must be eradicated from the body and the bloodline …

But she and Lao were both Taranoki, born of Taranoki families, and that loyalty had come before the Masquerade and its doctrines.

“What will he do?” Baru asked.

Lao drew her knees to her chest and looked out through the curtains around the bed. “There's a treatment. Conducted with the hands. Last time he suggested it, I told him I was on my period.”

Baru nodded. “But you have appointments with him every week.”

Lao's face folded in the shadows. “I don't think there's anything we can do,” she said. “Even you, though you're their favorite. Perhaps it's for the best—it has to be cured young, they say, before it enters the hereditary cells—”

“No. No!” Baru took her hands. “Lao, I know exactly who to talk to. I can fix this.”

Lao squeezed her hands gratefully. “I can survive this. You have so much to lose.”

But Baru was already planning her movements, drunk on the thrill of it. Later, just as she would hate herself for her calculation, she would remember:
This was my first exercise of power. My first treason
.

*   *   *

B
UT
she was wrong. She did not know exactly who to talk to. Cairdine Farrier was no help at all.

“Listen to me, Baru,” he said, speaking softly, as if afraid they would be overheard here in the empty tufa courtyard in the corner of the school compound. “Young women express numerous hysterias and neuroses. It is a scientific fact, an inevitable consequence of the hereditary pathways that have shaped the sexes, that the young man is given to rage, violence, and promiscuity, while the young lady is given to hysteria, perversion, and disorders of the mind. If you want to be a powerful woman—and there are powerful women in the Empire, a great many of them—you must be a
strong
young woman. Is that clear?”

She took a step away from him, her eyes too wide, her mouth betraying her shock. It was the first time he had ever seemed angry with her. “No,” she said, with a naïve directness that she would later regret. “That's not true! And besides, it's Lao who has this problem, and—and why is it about Lao, anyway? It's that tutor Diline who wants to put his hands on her!”

“Quiet!” Cairdine Farrier hissed. “Diline reports on social hygiene to the headmaster, and those reports go into your permanent files. Do you understand what it means for your future if you make an enemy of him?”

A year or two past she would have shouted
I don't care!
but now she knew that sounded like hysteria, and despite her revulsion she focused on practicalities. “If you act,” she said, “then
I
won't be making an enemy of him, will I? Just have Lao ejected from the school. She hates it here anyway. The headmaster could judge her unfit for service.”

From the near distance came the sound of a dish shattering in the kitchen and a man shouting angrily in Aphalone. Cairdine Farrier steepled his hands, a gesture that he always made when explaining things he thought were complicated. “Men like Diline give up their lives to work for your betterment. You will respect them. You will be agreeable toward their arts, even when they seem unpleasant. If Diline thinks your friend shows unhygienic tendencies, then he will cure her.” His eyes were dark beneath the redoubts of his brow. “Child, believe me: the alternatives will bring her much more pain.”

He's explaining it to me, Baru thought, which means he thinks I can be convinced, which means he hasn't given up on me. But if I push—

It's not worth losing his patronage over this.

“All right,” she said. “Forget I asked.”

Cairdine Farrier smiled in pleased relief.

*   *   *

“D
ID
it work?” Lao whispered, while they swept the floor beneath the quarantine seals.

Baru met her eyes and smiled half a smile, a crow smile, a lie. “I'm still exploring the options,” she said.

Looking back on this from adulthood she could not deny that she had considered abandoning Lao. Sacrificing her in the name of forward progress.

If she got to Falcrest, if she learned the mechanisms of power, surely she could save more than just one Taranoki girl. No matter how clever and brave Lao was, no matter how dear.

But Baru had another plan.

*   *   *

“H
EY,”
Baru said, as throatily as she could manage. She was thirteen, gawkily tall, intimidated by her target.

“Hey yourself,” the lanky Oriati midshipman said. Every other day she brought a package to the headmaster's office and left the school through this back corridor, and that was where Baru had waited to intercept her.

Baru combed her louse-free stubble with one hand. “You're an officer, aren't you?”

“With an officer's duties.” The midshipman squared her shoulders and began to push past, toward the outer door. Her Aphalone had its own accent. Perhaps she had been raised in a Masquerade school, just like Baru. “As you were, student.”

“Wait.” Baru caught her by the elbow. “I need your help.”

They stared at each other, almost nose to nose, Baru trying to stay up on her toes just to match the other woman's height. She had very brown eyes and very dark skin and an intelligent brow and her arm worked with muscle.

“You're a curious thing,” the midshipman drawled, adopting the easy superiority of Masquerade officers speaking to Taranoki. “Mind your hands.”

“That's my problem,” Baru muttered, drawing closer, gambling that her impudence was more intriguing than revolting. “Hands. If you know what I mean.”

She had done a little thinking and a little reading about the Imperial Navy, a navy that expected its sailors to climb masts and work ropes and rigging, a navy that boasted a cadre of women captains and admirals who were by any account capable and respected. A navy that must, in the course of packing crews of mostly men onto tiny ships for months at a time, have confronted problems of this order.

The midshipman disengaged sharply, a quick step back and a turn that tore her free of Baru's grip. Baru drew a nervous breath, ready to be struck or reprimanded.

“My name's Aminata,” the other woman said. She checked the far end of the hallway, a guilty glance so familiar that Baru had to drown a chuckle. “I'm from Oriati Mbo. My family used to trade on Taranoke, and if you tell anyone I spoke to you I'll gut you, you understand?”

Baru lifted her chin. “Not if I gut you first.”

Aminata considered her, smiling a little. Baru thought of a kingfisher eyeing a colorful frog. “We can't talk in here,” she said. “I could get in real trouble for letting you out of quarantine.”

“I didn't ask you to.”

“You certainly never did,” Aminata said, lifting a small brass key. “Now come on. I'll tell you how to solve your hands' problems.”

*   *   *

S
HE
followed Aminata down the path behind the school to the edge of a bluff that overlooked Iriad harbor, giddy with fresh salt air and disobedience, with the rumble of thunder on the horizon, with the conspiratorial wariness of the older girl's glances. “It won't matter if anyone sees us,” Aminata said. “There's a million of you little island rats, and if you're not in the school they assume you're just an orphan looking for errands.”

“Orphan?” Baru frowned at that. Taranoke's robust nets of mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, had never left many children alone.

Aminata hawked and spat off the edge of the bluff. The sea rumbled and crashed below. “The plague's been hard.”

“Oh,” Baru said, thinking: yes, of course, I knew that. The island of her childhood was gone. It had died in pus and desperation while she took lessons behind white walls.

It was storm season. In the harbor a pair of Masquerade warships roosted with their sails furled.

“C'mon.” Aminata sat on the bluff, legs dangling, and patted the rock beside her. “Tell me about your trouble.”

“I have a friend—”

“You don't have to pretend it's a friend.”

“I have a friend,” Baru said, although Aminata snorted, “who has attracted some unwanted attention. From a man.”

“And he's done something to your friend already?”

“Not yet.” Baru sat beside her, fascinated by her red uniform. The Masquerade officers wore exquisite wool waistcoats, the broadcloth tight against weather. Aminata, sensible about the heat, wore the coat rakishly loose, and it seemed rather dashing. “Not yet. But he's tried.”

“There's a rule here.” Aminata squinted out at the horizon, an old-sea-hand squint, strange on her young face. “No false claims. You can't be doing this because you fucked and now he's bragging. Men like to think that false claims are a woman's weapon, you know. Men close ranks about these things. Even good men.”

Baru had never thought about these things, and said the first thing that came to mind: “Bragging? What would he brag about?”

Aminata leaned back on her hands. “I don't know how it is on Taranoke, but in the Masquerade you play by Falcrest rules. And Falcrest rules say the man gets to brag and the woman's got to be silent.”

That's not fair
was a child's protest, Baru reminded herself. “Okay,” she said. “I understand the rules.”

“Now what you do,” Aminata said, not without a certain relish, “is you get your friends, and you wait until he's asleep, all right? Then you gag him and you tie his hands and feet to the bedframe, and you beat his stomach and feet with stockings full of soap. If he does it again, you beat his balls until he can barely piss. And if he tries to complain, everyone will know what he did. Those are the rules in the navy. They're not written, but they're true.”

Baru, who had been expecting some political subtlety, did not try to conceal her disappointment. “We're not in the navy,” she said, “and we don't have stockings, and besides, we can't get into his room at night.”

“Oh.” Aminata's eyes narrowed. She uprooted a hibiscus flower and began to pluck it methodically. “A teacher.”

Baru shrugged. “Might be.”

“So he's got some excuse to paw your friend. He's got protection from on high. That's difficult.”

“There must be a way to stop it,” Baru said, staring down into the harbor, at the place where Iriad market had been. The Masquerade had torn down the promenades and boardwalks and built a dockyard that cradled the skeleton of a new ship. Troops drilled in the muddy streets of the village. “What do you do in the navy when it's an officer who comes after you?”

“It used to be there was nothing you could do.” Aminata finished plucking the hibiscus and cast it aside. “But now there are enough women—women, and men who've served with them—in the officer corps that all it takes is a quiet word in the right ear. It's all done unofficially. But it's done.”

“So you can go to your officers for her, and they'll stop it!”

Aminata pursed her lips and shrugged, and Baru remembered that for all her uniform and stature, she was a midshipman, and probably not more than sixteen. “I don't know. Could be risky, setting the Navy against the Charitable Service just for the sake of one little islander girl. What's in it for me?”

Baru felt her own lips curl, felt her own jaw set, and did not try to hide it. “Nothing, I suppose,” she said. “You haven't even asked my name, so I suppose you don't really have to care.”

They sat on the edge of the bluff in cold silence for a little while. The wind picked up.

“You should get back,” Aminata said. “And so should I, before the watch officer notes I'm overdue.”

“You'll have to let me back in,” Baru said stiffly.

Aminata shrugged. “Won't. Those doors only lock from the inside.”

“Oh.” Baru got to her feet and turned back to climb the bluff, wishing sullenly for her mother's boar-killing spear, or just for her mother, who would have had fierce words for Aminata, and fiercer treatment yet for the hygienist Diline.

Maybe she'd been right. Maybe the only way to stop this kind of thing
was
the spear—

“So what is it?” Aminata called. The wind had begun to gust fiercely.

“What's what?”

Aminata made a little
out-with-it
gesture with her hand and, to Baru's perplexingly mingled anger and pleasure, smiled a little.

“Baru Cormorant,” Baru said. “And the problem's name is Diline.”

*   *   *

D
URING
the next week, in the middle of the night, her second cousin Lao came to her in the dark and kissed her brow. “Thank you,” she whispered. “You're the only good thing left, Baru. Thank you.”