Wherever you went in the Oriati Mbo you found culture layered on culture, like a palimpsest never fully scraped. Take one of the four great federations, Lonjaro: it had its Eleven Gates and One City and Thirteenth Crown, but even if you memorized every kingdom from Jaro the Flamingo Kingdom to Jejuje the Otter and Unkinde the Female Lion, you would still need to learn the Three Cereals, Brown Millet and Rice and Einkorn, which were social rates left over from the tax structure of the ancient Cheetah Palaces, and then you would have to study Mana Mane, who united the Thirteen-in-Three-in-One with the saga called the Kiet Khoiad, which was why the Great Seal of Lonjaro bore the letters MKMK, Mana Kiet Mane Khoiad, sometimes extended to 13MK3MK1: only it was not actually clear that Mana Mane was from Lonjaro at all, they might well have been from Mzilimake to the south, home of the moon god Mzu and the gray parrots who lived as long as a man, and anyway no study of Mana Mane could explain Lonjaro’s great stelae, hundred-foot-high obelisks stabilized by underground counterweights, designed ages before they should have been possible—the point of all this not being the need to memorize many Mbo facts, but that the Mbo was far too complicated, too lively and old, to understand.

“Why,” she asked Farrier, astounded, “don’t they have better banks?”

Banking was the most powerful weapon in the world, because people stored their wealth in banks, and the banks could loan that wealth out to fund great labors. You could tax your people dead to fund your armies, and they would hate you for it. But give them a bank and a fair interest rate and they would give you everything they had and let you do what you pleased with it and ask only to have it back when you were done.

Barring a sort of informal hawala system, the Mbo did not have large organized banks. When a Federal Prince wanted funds, they had to raise them personally.

“It’s because they have a poorly developed idea of property,” Farrier explained. “Too much of Oriati society is a shared commons. You don’t own the pasture where you graze your sheep—your village takes care of it together. If you don’t own the pasture, you can’t post it as collateral for a loan. If you can’t take out a loan, why have a bank?”

“How primitive,” Baru said, because she thought he’d like to hear it.

But he frowned. “Don’t dismiss them so swiftly. Watch…”