“Because it was no more use,” Shao said, indifferently. “No cash crops, desultory fishing, no minerals. Your Sousward would serve better as a trade hub and fleet base. Kyprananoke could be left like rotting bait, to draw up the smugglers and pirates.”

“And they didn’t go back to their old ways?” Baru probed, thinking of home.

“I told you,” Shao said, with sudden spiteful interest. “We destroyed everything that kept them together, so that they’d need us more than we needed them. And then we didn’t need them at all. So we left. And like the savages they are, they came apart.”

In Baru’s memory, Cairdine Farrier asked the question again. What do they have to offer us? What medicine? What sciences? What is worthwhile about their society?

She hadn’t known how to answer that on the Llosydanes. Here she felt that even if she had the correct instruments, she would find that most everything worthwhile had already been lost beyond recall.

But were the Kyprananoki to blame? No.

Hadn’t they been pillaged, and wounded, and left to die?

*   *   *

THE kypra had no edge. Dead Mount Tsunuq’s molten gore had spattered down in strings and mounds across miles of shallows, and the coral had grown up between the stone into a maze of channels, lagoons, and pocket coves. A good diver (Baru thought of and wished for Xe) could easily bottom and return.

Helbride was the only proper clipper in the mooring swarm on the east side, and therefore any boat from Helbride was remarkable, but Baru had hoped that they would get ashore without much attention. She had hoped they would not be marked as a major political event.

She did not get her wish, for they were serenaded by a floating band.

Barber-General Thomis Love’s Singing Marshals, forty strong, beat their big drums and blew their trumpets from a barge moored off the promenades of Loveport. A tangle of stalls, shops, boardwalks, and tent pavilions drifted at moor in Loveport cove. “Rather like your Iriad, isn’t it?” Tau said and, seeing Baru’s face, detecting some clue she couldn’t fathom, “Oh, I’m sorry. You must miss it so.”

“I do,” Baru admitted.

It was like Iriad. Pirate captains haggled over sealed map-cases, privateer mates traded letters of take with Oriati attachés, stilt dancers advertised ratting dogs and birding cats for sale, teamsters hauled bundles of planks to the south quays, taciturn cooks called to customers with bursts of spicy hot-stone steam, acrobats mimed brutal war and vigorous sex on bamboo frameworks, addicts staggered from pole to pole in mumbling trance, rhetorics shouted their retorts from the posts of floating galleria, geometry clubs of old Kyprananoki and Oriati gathered to work on tile puzzles on the ground between big pots of dried beans and raisins and candied corn, pulque-makers and ash-paper sellers moved product in narrow stalls where coins clicked and flipped like game pieces, money everywhere, money and sun-touched flesh, the smell of spices hammered into fresh sizzling fish and the delectable sound of crab legs torn by teeth. Somewhere close by a handball game had drown a raucous crowd.