The Traitor Baru Cormorant (50 page)

“You will not die at Sieroch,” Baru said, because although she could not know that, she felt some new fatalism in Oathsfire's words. “You need make no confession to me.”

“But I must. A good man never goes to battle dirty.” He stroked his horse's neck, smiling gently. “I took such vindictive pleasure when you sent Unuxekome away, you know. The Sea Groom and his salt and his smiles—I hated him, hated the way you pinned your plans on him, the way you spoke to him, the respect you gave him. When he left, I was sure all my bowmen and barges would give me a suit.” He flinched as the distant mountains strobed with lightning, and then laughed at himself. “I wanted to be king. Or, maybe—to be the kind of man who you would want as king.”

Baru pitied him, in spite of herself, in spite of the little anger down there:
All of you jousting for me like a prize. You could have spoken, and had your answer
.
“
You know about the Necessary King, then. The offer he made to Aurdwynn.”

“I have my spies in Vultjag's court.” The wide child eyes had gone, replaced by a kind of stillness, an inner peace. “You face a terrible choice, Your Excellence.”

“What is it?”

“You will need a king. If you are to rule, you will need children to avert civil war. And the more you have, the stronger your position will be, the firmer our confidence in your dynasty.” He avoided her eyes, looking instead to the marching longbowmen. Beneath his beard he flushed a little. “Among the Maia you would seek many fathers. Among the Stakhi, only one. I have heard it whispered that on your home the men are sodomites and the women must dress as boys and go among them. Whatever creed you follow, Baru Fisher—and I will not pretend that I do not favor the Stakhi ways, that I did not meet some of the Masquerade's edicts with gladness—soon you will need to choose a general for the army at Sieroch.”

“And it will be a sign of my favor.”

Now he spoke with obvious care, his stillness troubled. He wanted to be selfless, but he was still a duke, and he had pride. “If you pass through victory at Sieroch without the appearance of a lover, real or intended, many will give credit to the whispers directed toward your association with Tain Hu. That you are sterile, a gelding. Or a tribadist, drawn only to fruitless congress, a threat to your own dynasty. Or a creature made in Falcrest, bred in the Metademe to pass among men and women, but separate from them. Like the Oriati and their lamen.”

He made the recitation seem obscene, and Baru did not hide the cold in her voice. “Or they will know that I have given my word to a distant man, and that I will keep it.”

“Is that true?” he asked softly. “Please, tell me. I thought you had yet to judge him. I thought perhaps I—still had a chance to speak my case. It is not only ambition.”

“You fool.” She spoke rashly, unwisely, but with honesty. She had never wanted to care about these politics of courtship, the intrigue of who would own her and what everyone would think about it. “You cannot care for me. We've hardly met.”

“I spent the winter listening to my people cry your name.” He stroked his charger's mane between thumb and forefinger. “A good duke looks to his people's loves. I have, of late, wanted to be a better duke. So. Perhaps I studied too well.”

The noblemen of Aurdwynn had clearly been raised on some profound lie about courtship. In no mood for more lies, she lashed out, spoke with care only for her own thoughts.

“You court an illusion. A mask. You could have been my comrade. You will never be my lover.”

She struck his pride. She saw it in the way his eyes hardened. “My man in Vultjag says you walk into the forest with the duchess. I know her appetites. Please, Your Excellence, look to the future of Aurdwynn.” He still spoke with an earnest open need, but now it filled her with wrath. “
You must have children
. Don't squander our victory on the Maia perversions of your youth. Don't break the alliance over rumor of your ill-chosen bedmates.”

She seized his horse by the bridle, gloves tangled in the leather tack. “Duke Oathsfire,” she hissed, furious, affronted. “Will you fight at Sieroch? Will you lead your fighters, and in turn be led by those I set above you?”

“Yes.” He lowered his eyes, in shame, or in resentment. “You are the Fairer Hand. The hope of Aurdwynn.”

“Good. Then see to your responsibilities, as I will see to mine.”

She rode ahead, up a gentle rise, and at the crest found herself looking down across the floodplains, irrigation channels shining, the fat river lapping at the levees, stained by the effluent of the army—the enormous camp gathered there, a colony of tent and horse and cattle and banner planted in fertile earth. A painting in steel and horseflesh and sweat.

The rebellion in Aurdwynn, gathered at Sieroch, waiting for its queen, and for the name of her chosen general.

*   *   *

W
HEN
the Stakhieczi jagata came to Sieroch, the army was complete. The sight of them raised awe and fear among the Aurdwynni: ghost-pale brave men, leading their cadres of armorer-boys aspiring to one day wear the plate themselves, and grim-faced gray-haired women with ash flatbows, whose eyes snapped like heat lightning.

The army was complete. So easy to think that. Very swiftly Baru learned the truth was much harder. Duke Lyxaxu had command of the camp and he brought her into his tent with curt alarm: “Plague and chaos. I keep this walking cataclysm bound together only by the most desperate exercise of my learning. We must fight, or they will eat each other like dogs.”

Baru scanned the ledgers. “You kept fine records.” In truth they were better than fine—Lyxaxu had managed a miracle.

“I don't need flattery.” The fox in his eyes snapped at her. “Look at the numbers.”

The army swallowed bread, beer, and coin at an unsustainable rate. Old resentments bred internal violence and that violence bred new resentments in turn. They were killing each other in brawls, coughing up their lungs, choking up the Inirein with their bloody shit and the sky with the ash of their corpses.

An army in camp was a
terrible
thing.

But Lyxaxu had done the necessary work, dividing the camp into wings, assigning commanders, messengers, procurement officers, treasurers, constables, herbalists, translators, wheelwrights and hunting-wardens and every other kind of specialist. He had bricked together the skeleton of an army out of the bickering and the floodplain silt.

“They are enough.” Baru set down the papers. “Lyxaxu. You did well.”

Aurdwynn had its legion, twenty-five thousand strong. Tain Hu, at last, had her wish—yes, that was good, they could use Tain Hu's name: an Army of the Wolf. Lyxaxu had even arranged for training. It could deploy in a line, send out its squadrons of cavalry, pass simple orders, advance and assault. Probably not make an orderly retreat, that most difficult of maneuvers—but if it came to that they had already lost.

“I could have managed no more,” Baru told him, profoundly grateful. “What can I offer in gratitude?”

“I miss my wife and children. I want only a safe future for them, and for my people.” She expected him to remind her of their bargain, but he only snapped his fingers and sent two of his guardsmen for beer. “Duke Oathsfire hoped to speak with you.”

“And he has.”

“Ah.” Lyxaxu considered her with level, undemanding eyes. “I see you were unmoved?”

“I will not marry him.” She spoke to the fox-sign hidden behind all his etiquette. “I know it was your design. I know you supported him. But he does not bring me advantage.”

“So be it.”

She held his gaze and wondered. He had such lively eyes, but something had come into them: a weariness, or a shield. “You have some concern?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Oathsfire has tempered his pride. He will accept it. It is only that—well.” When he straightened it was like a willow unbending: she had forgotten his height. “I have a question to ask you, about your future. But allow me to raise it in my own time.”

“Of course.” She went to the plotting table at the center of his tent. “How long do we have before the battle?”

“Unless he sends his cavalry forward, Cattlson will be upon us in three days.” Lyxaxu tapped the parchment, tracing the calligraphy of some masterful ilykari scribe. “Coyote scouts hold the woods and roads. We will see the Masquerade's approach in time to respond.”

Her Coyotes. Men she had known and led. All of this went forward as designed, as their converging schemes had dictated. She had expected this battle would come, with all its fearful cost—but she had not expected she would care so deeply for Coyote-men.

She frowned down at the map, hunting the weighted banners and pinned lines of yarn that marked the motion of troops. “Look at Cattlson's march. The deployment of his scouts and skirmishers. His southern flank is naked.”

“Yes. Nothing guards his force from a naval landing, or an attack from Welthony.”

“Do they not fear Duke Unuxekome?”

“I sent word to him this morning.” Lyxaxu studied the map with troubled eyes. “I fear what we may learn.”

*   *   *

W
ORD
came with the next sunrise. Duke Unuxekome the Sea Groom, friend to pirates, implacable enemy of the Empire of Masks, supplicant for the throne of Aurdwynn, beggar of stories, had gone to war.

While Baru rode with Oathsfire alongside the Inirein, the combined ships of Duchy Unuxekome and the pirate Syndicate Eyota struck at Province Admiral Ormsment's Fifth Fleet. It made for a terrific story, the germ of a legend: the greatest naval battle since the Armada War.

Unuxekome led forty-three ships, lateen-sailed dromon war-galleys armed with rams, mines, siphon-fire, even the latest Oriati torpedoes, in an attack on Treatymont's Horn Harbor. His target was the Masquerade marine flotilla. He meant to pin the defenders against their arriving marine transports, burn them all, mine the harbor, and set a blockade.

(Baru had told him:
I would be greatly impressed to see the Masquerade's navy rebuked from our shores
—and she had known, she had
known
what he would do.)

Any good story about a swashbuckling sea duke needed a worthy foe. Admiral Ormsment, Baru's dinner companion the autumn past, ascended now to command of the Imperial Navy in Aurdwynn, turned out to stop him with seven frigates—
Scylpetaire, Juristane, Commsweal, Welterjoy, Stormbreed, Dominaire,
and her flag
Sulane
. Behind the frigates she held her great torchships
Egalitaria
and
Kingsbane
. Her nine stood against the rebel fleet, transports strung vulnerable at their back.
Kingsbane
still suffered from the rudder damage done in autumn by the ilykari diver attack.

Unuxekome circled west to gain the weather gage. The stories reported his calm commands, beaten from ship to ship by the drums:
Marines to the rails. Ready oars. Prepare to sand all fires. Form line abreast
.

Charge
.

The rebel fleet swept down on Ormsment, wind at their backs.

Nine against forty-three and Ormsment could manage her figures: her frigates broke and ran, south and east, out to sea. The two huge torchships rowed north for harbor in desperate asynchronous strokes. If they could not save the transports, these maneuvers said, then they would flee and fight another day. And they couldn't save the transports: great clumsy ships full of marines, naked now, ready to die.

This was the story Ormsment told Unuxekome.

Reports of drumbeats from Unuxekome's
Devenynyr
suggested he might have seen the trap. But the momentum of his hungry forty-three could not be broken. The Syndicate Eyota ships stooped on the line of transports.

In the pirates' story they were a prize.

In Ormsment's battle plan they were a wall.

There were no marines aboard. Instead the transports carried torpedoes in wooden racks. The twin-tailed copper eggs were inaccurate, unreliable, their rockets prone to drowning as they skimmed along the surface of the water. But the transport crews, drilled and disciplined, could fire a salvo of ten every other minute.

Smoke and spray tracked the torpedoes across the waves.

Syndicate Eyota's sailors were seasoned, the captains alert. Cries of
torpedo, torpedo!
went up. They broke off to the south and east, away from the Horn Harbor, leaving their lead ships holed and foundering.

And found Ormsment's frigates crashing back down on them across the wave tops, ranging rockets shining.

To the north,
Kingsbane
and
Egalitaria
opened their sails and hooked west, then south, behind Unuxekome's fleet. Ormsment's desperate retreat had only been a way to scatter her ships—position them to box Unuxekome's force. Now the trap was complete. The torchships were the western wall, the frigates the southern, the torpedo-rigged transports the eastern. To the north was the Horn Harbor and the shore.

Syndicate Eyota's privateers ran aground or burned. The Falcresti warships danced their gruesome steps, closing to barrage with incendiaries, pulling back out of range. The Oriati had a three-to-one numerical edge, strengthened when fresh-minted
Dominaire
caught her own sails aflame and had to withdraw. They fought like wolverines. It didn't matter. Ormsment had Masquerade seacraft, Masquerade hulls, Navy crews, and the Burn.

Most of the Syndicate Eyota sailors had lost ancestors to the Armada War. Now their children would know the same grief.

Unuxekome led his ships in a charge back up the weather gage, a glorious hell-bent attack on the torchships. Those of his ships that came through the rockets and the hwacha barrages, those crews who poured enough sand on the fires, those captains who kept order through the poison smoke and the impossible shrieks of men drowning
and
burning alive at the same time, met the bane of Oriati Mbo, the dread arbiter of the Armada War—the Burn siphons of torchship
Egalitaria
.