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November 21 - December 1, 2024
Hu was herself again. They had entwined their borrowed flesh and come apart as themselves.
For the very first time, Baru let herself remember their time together at Sieroch—not the sex, a memory which she had worn down to rags by running her fingers over it, but the quiet time afterward, when she had decided to measure every dimension of Hu’s arms and legs by prodding them and counting the little white marks left by her fingers.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Hu whispered. “You must wake up. If you don’t, I’m afraid you’ll die.”
Baru, intellectually calibrated and mentally awakened to the highest planes of aesthetic and philosophical appreciation, stared at her tits.
“Hush. Hush. Your Majesty, my lord, you know your plan. You spoke it as I died. I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood.”
“I’m a genius,” she said. “It’s that simple.” “Yes,” Hu sighed. “To my constant bewilderment, you really are.” She leaned over, put her warm lips on Baru’s, and exhaled.
“I picked a good name,” Barhu croaked. “It invites pain, and survives it.”
Of course it had been Iscend to execute the decision. Who else would act so swiftly and fecklessly in service of the Republic? In a sense there had been no decision at all. Iscend was the hand by which the power of Falcrest had reached out and pulled that mountain down. She had acted in service of the Throne. In the Throne’s eyes she was blameless. And it was through the Throne’s eyes that she regarded herself.
“So be it,” Barhu said, resolving to accept what could not be changed, but to never, ever forget it. She had her course. Now she would sail it to its end.
When people were threatened, they closed up their hands into fists.
Barhu, kissing her own right palm thoughtlessly, tried to find another way to explain it.
Of course, the last duel she’d seen was Tain Hu against Governor Cattlson, and Hu had beaten in Cattlson’s brow with the pommel end of her sword. But never mind that.
Yawa hated herself for wishing that she’d gone ahead and lobotomized Baru.
That was apparently ordinary for boys in Falcrest, and in fact mandatory for reasons of hygiene. But neither women nor Souswardi were permitted nakedness, both being intrinsically sexual.
You’re her testament, Baru. She loved you. You’re all she left. You and that seagull she trained.”
It was incredible to feel grief without being undone by it. The difference between an amphora, a vessel that contained and carried something, and a septic leach field, which wallowed in the plume.
“You think you volunteered, I’m sure. That’s how they operate. On children, in particular.
SHE had to go to the Vultjagata. Tain Hu had left her a message, somewhere, something she’d forgotten in the haze of her grief.
“He was unhappy with me.” “Because you weren’t like a Stakhieczi woman?” “I wouldn’t stay in the space he made for me. As the wise ones say: the man who tries to hold water ends up with soggy pants.”
“You mustn’t believe that she’s the sort of lover you deserve.” “What sort of lover?” “One who hurts you. One who treats you like a tool. One who makes you feel as if you’ve failed her.”
But you’re young. Everyone you let into your heart will leave a seed in the soil there. I don’t like what would grow from her. That’s all.”
“Xe,” Barhu said, slowly. “I think I might be Tain Hu’s widow.” “Her widow?” “I don’t know. I never thought about it, I could never bear to think about it … but I chose her as my queen-consort. I think it could be argued that I chose her to marry me. I was queen for a night, wasn’t I? If I declared the marriage in sight of witnesses, wasn’t it executed?”
Hot, full lips pressed against the side of Barhu’s neck in the dark. “She can hear me? She can feel me?” “Yes—” “Then I will say what she is trying to tell you. Everything ends. Everything will end and you cannot fear that. But you must decide what the endings will mean.”
Ask Barhu to respect knowledge, warn her that knowledge might change her forever, and she would always say yes, yes, these are the laws that I worship.
Why were powerful women always summoning her to interpret Baru’s will?
The Baru she knew was fond of books, cunning, and Miss Pristina Struct.
oh you know so little about baru
Who would let a thief and a murderer into his house? Who would welcome a tyrant with bread and water? The Princes would, and leave their people desolate.
Hm
“Cosgrad told me that if I ever lost all hope, I should use his ideas, and change my flesh to change my thoughts. Drugs, he said, entheogenic drugs, ergot and psilocin mushrooms”—the Womb groaned loudly at that—“they are all known to relieve the Oriati Emotional Disease, to transform the wounded personality. ‘Don’t be arrogant, Tau,’ he told me, ‘you’re wise enough to know you need help in every other part of your life, so don’t pretend you can force yourself back to sanity all alone.’ “And,” Tau ran one finger across their scabbed brow, “failing that, I was to give myself a concussion. Or be
...more
You will still need the approval of Falcresti superiors to feel better than other Oriati people. You will still despise your Parliament, your Metademe, and all the other organs of Falcrest’s government. You think you despise them as enemies of the navy but in truth you hate them for the way they make you feel about your own Oriati body.”
“And the idea of you and Baru against the world, even against that part of the world which you pretend to love to serve, will always fill you with longing.
The novelists were wrong: women did not measure themselves in mirrors and stare down their shirts. Maybe you don’t, she’d wanted to snap. Maybe a Falcrest woman doesn’t. I am constantly thinking about how to hide myself. How to deny the assumption that I’m a slut.
“To maintain trim is to act in a way that puts the well-being of others before your own. Not in the hope of reward or advantage, but in the knowledge that the only way to a good world is for all people to put themselves second so that all people will be put first. To keep good trim, you must be a good friend to those around you, so your own happiness and health must be maintained. But it is also good trim to go to your enemy, and to offer forgiveness and recompense, to deliver yourself into their judgment: that is a high act of trim.
Maybe one of the spoils of a war was the right to name it.
It was, Tau thought, very Oriati to feel more guilt for the wound in their own conduct than anger at Falcrest’s aggression. It was a noble thing to constantly ask yourself to be better. But it could also be arrogant, self-involved, oblivious.
He felt too much a part of it, Tau-indi thought. He couldn’t eat his own guilt. Because then he would begin digesting it, whether into poison or acceptance.
Duke Oathsfire has written, and he was there at her side, beard fluffed up like an angry possum, confessing that he had, in the end, fallen in love with her: really with the idea of her. A common-born liberator, a high and noble cause to redeem his life of arrogance and privilege. If he devoted himself to a belief, couldn’t he be as respected as his friend Lyxaxu, as noble as his peer Lyxaxu, as beloved, as wise? No wonder he’d tried to kill her. She’d betrayed so much of him.
She couldn’t bear to see Lyxaxu reduced. He had been the only one of the Coyotes to detect Barhu’s treachery, because he had listened to her, listened to her beliefs, and really understood what they would drive her to do.
She had written—Barhu burst into laughter—also, and often, I have fucked Oathsfire’s wife—
Barhu described the qualifications with her hands. Yawa laughed like a gutter girl. “Oh! You always struck me as the one on the other end—”
Lmaooo
“I recall Ri’s rather fetching,” Barhu said. “And more pronouncedly feminine. I could be a plausible husband, don’t you think?”
You act, you think that you are changing the world, shaking the whole mess on its foundation: but really all you have done is move yourself.
“You’re my punishment,” he said. “You don’t know it, but the stars have chosen you to punish me. I didn’t save Hu. I didn’t save Kyprananoke, or even Iraji. So you, Baru, will use the power of Hu’s death to compel me to my doom.”
He’s the softest kind of evil, the kind that thinks through all the hurt it does, and does it anyway.”
I had good intentions, Baru. Every time. I had sterilization quotas to meet, so I sterilized women with lots of aunts and uncles. I had to show I was tough on my own people, so I filled up the prisons with men I knew deserved it. I had famines to fight, so I built my own food supplies through corruption. “But it doesn’t matter now, does it? I sacrificed my soul for a better future that will never come. All my work just … ice sculpture in the spring. The Stakhieczi invade, and the first thing they conquer is all the good work I’ve ever done.”
“If Hu was willing to die for Vultjag … how can I do any less?”
The farthest she’d ever come from her home, and still she found it waiting for her. Tau would call it trim.
If all logical and ethical paths toward freedom have been twisted by your conqueror to lead instead to submission, then abandon logic. Abandon ethics.
She’d once considered how the Oriati might resist Falcrest’s infiltration so well: by holding to basic principles of kindness, charity, and honesty, they prevented themselves from succumbing to the pressures of circumstance. Circumstance could be manipulated. Principle could not.
“What I want is some damn consistency! Either you’ll sacrifice people for your purposes, or you won’t! Just don’t,” he snarled and came two steps toward her, “don’t treat me more compassionately than Tain Hu. It makes me feel like I need to be better than her. And I don’t like it when people expect the impossible of me.”
People were hashes. You could only see their output, the passwords they showed to the world. You could not know the truth of them. But with sufficient time and study you might become familiar with the functions that transformed the shape of a man’s soul into the choices he made:
