A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent

by Marie Brennan

  “Wake Mr. Wilker,” he said at last. “I’ll load the guns.”

  This I did with alacrity. Mr. Wilker, it turned out, was not an easy man to rouse, and I did not quite dare elbow him as if he were my husband. I don’t think he was quite fully conscious when he stumbled downstairs to join Jacob, and in retrospect it might have been better to trust that ten-year-old boy with the rifle I pushed into his hands. Remembering the wolf-drake incident, I wasn’t entirely certain I should have one, either; no one had taught me to shoot in the intervening years.

  But I could at least aim the barrel skyward and make noise to frighten the creature off, so out I went with the men, gun in hand.

  Fog had settled into the valley that cradled Drustanev, and its touch made my skin crawl. Of course it could not be a clear night: I was doomed never to see this threat properly. There was an unpleasant stink in the air, too, that made me wrinkle my nose. Then I glimpsed movement through the fog. “There!”

  I bless the chance that made me point with my finger instead of the rifle. Jacob and Mr. Wilker both brought their guns swinging around, but they were seasoned enough men not to pull the trigger immediately; and so we avoided shooting Relesku, one of our porters from the hunt.

  He, too, carried a rifle. “You heard it?” he whispered, hurrying to our side.

  Many people had, it seemed. There were others outside that night, most of them armed. But, as with my fright in the sauna, the sound had stopped. Whatever had brought the dragon to Drustanev, it seemed to have gotten bored and flown away.

  At least, I thought it was a dragon—until we heard a cry from behind our house.

  Everyone rushed in that direction. The cry was human, though, and one of shock and fear rather than pain. We arrived on the slope behind the house to find Astimir pressed against the wall, eyes wide in horror and rifle dropped to the ground.

  Some ten paces away, the grass was blackened and scorched as if with fire. In four places, I saw as I forced myself closer; and the unpleasant smell was strongest here. Jacob came with me, then went ahead and knelt alongside one of the marks. After a moment’s study, he lifted his head and looked at me in confused alarm. “It—it looks like a footprint.”

  My hands wrapped tighter around the rifle. The print—if so it was—stretched nearly two feet front to back, and there were four of them. The size of beast that implied …

  Mr. Wilker had joined Jacob. “It’s almost like a dragon’s print—but not quite. And it seems to be burnt into the soil, not pressed.”

  He spoke quietly, but not quietly enough. Murmurs sprang up among the villagers, and then Astimir shattered the tension by wailing, “Zhagrit Mat!”

  A swift glance showed me the words meant nothing to either Scirling gentleman. The Vystrani, however, were murmuring prayers, and gripping their rifles as if no longer sure they would do any good.

  I knew they would not like me asking, but I had no choice. “What, or who, is Zhagrit Mat?”

  Everyone immediately spread their fingers against evil. No one answered. Astimir flung himself forward, though, and seized the nightshirt of a man toward the back of the group, who I realized was the village priest. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Astimir babbled, falling to his knees. “I should never have taken them. I thought it was just a story—something to keep the children from being hurt in the ruins—I’ve been there before! Nothing had ever happened!”

  The ruins. I remembered the crowd that had greeted us on our return to Drustanev, the graggers and prayers. Evil spirits, or some such. At the time I had dismissed it as local superstition. But now …

  Astimir suddenly wheeled on his knees to point at me. “Her! She must have done something! She wandered off, I don’t know where she went—she must have roused him!”

  The accusation did not banish my fear, but it gave me something else to feel as well: annoyance. “I roused nothing,” I said sharply. “What is this creature supposed to be? Some kind of dragon? You have enough of those about; no need to go inventing demonic ones.” Though no rock-wyrm had ever left its prints burned into the ground, that I knew of. Their extraordinary breath was ice, not fire, and even an Akhian desert drake did not have feet of flame.

  “He was not—” Astimir began, but stopped when the priest gripped his shoulder.

  “We should not speak of it here, now,” the priest said, glancing about. Whether he meant at night, so near the prints, or when the beast might still be about, I do not know, but everyone spread their fingers again. “Tomorrow. You will come to the tabernacle—we may speak there safely—and I will tell you.”

  I stiffened at the thought of entering that idolatrous place. Recall, I was very young; to me, Temple-worshippers were pagans. I had not yet been to parts of the world where Segulism of any sort held no sway at all, and the various heathen rites I underwent later would have given my nineteen-year-old self indignant vapors.

  But my desire for knowledge was stronger than my religious sensibilities, which after all were more a matter of unthinking habit than real conviction. I nodded. “Very well. But I sincerely hope what you have to say is not a waste of time.”

  FIFTEEN

  The tale of Zhagrit Mat — An offer of help to Dagmira — A chilly cure for our supernatural woes

  I was young, and Scirling, born and raised in a pragmatic land where many of the more intricate points of religion had long since been discarded as unnecessary complications.

  I’m afraid I gave very great offense to the priest of Drustanev by walking in the front door of his tabernacle.

  Those among my readers who are Temple-worshippers have likely just dropped this book in horror. Alas, I was (and still am) a natural historian, not an anthropologist or a student of history, and although in these enlightened times we acknowledge men to be a higher order of animal, I concerned myself only with the nonhuman sort.

  This is my grandiose way of saying: I hadn’t paid the blindest bit of attention to the local tabernacle, even during the Feast of the Reception. I had not noticed that only men went in the front door, while women used one on the side. The Grand Magister of Scirland, after all, ended segregation by sex nearly two hundred years ago, though some Magisterial traditions in other countries maintain the practice in their Assembly Houses. Jacob, it seems, no more thought of that issue than I did, for he walked in along with me, and we were ten feet in before our brains figured out what the low wooden wall at our side was.

  We stopped at the same instant, and exchanged looks of identical dismay. And that, of course, was the moment that the priest chose to enter and spot us.

  Had I thought I could manage it gracefully in my dress, I might have tried to vault over the wall. (It only came to my waist.) Images of my skirts catching and sending me over face-first stopped me. Would it be better to retreat and come back in by the side door I had now spotted, much too late? Paralysis over this question resulted, as it so often does, in me taking a third, entirely unsatisfactory, route: I curtsied to Menkem Goen and offered a stammering apology. “I did not realize—it’s quite different in Scirland, you see—”

  He scowled at me. He had been scowling the night before, too; clearly my status as the bringer of evil spirits did not endear me to him in the slightest, and this error compounded it. I was not surprised to see him in full religious garb once more, though at least we were spared the racket of graggers. Wordlessly, he pointed at the door behind me.

  Was I to leave permanently, or come back in the proper way? I decided on the latter, mostly because I refused to be shamed into scurrying away. If he wanted me gone, let him say so.

  But when I came back in through the women’s door, Menkem made no comment. He simply gestured for both of us to sit down on our respective sides—we both chose the frontmost benches—and then went through a routine not unlike the one he had performed upon my return from the ruins. Over both of us; perhaps Jacob was contaminated by virtue of our marriage.

  I filled the time by studying the interior of the tabernacle. Wh
en I was six, we briefly had a nursery maid with very strong opinions on the goat-killing heathens (her phrase) that followed the Temple. To hear her talk, the interior of the building should have been a dank, foul place, liberally decorated with entrails, with perhaps a baby’s skull rolling forgotten in some corner.

  It was stuffy, but no more so than any other building in this freezing and near-windowless land. The priest had lit candles for this meeting—proper candles, not the tallow dips used by most Vystrani peasants. There was an altar, but its stone surface was ruthlessly clean apart from the scorch marks, and the air smelled of nothing worse than incense. Behind the altar, an oil lamp burned with a steady flame, carried from the sacred fire in the Temple itself; it would be used to light the fires for the sacrifices, and was never permitted to go out.

  Menkem finished his prayers. He turned to face us, and then stopped, appalled anew, at the sight of me with my pocket journal braced against one knee.

  “You’re going to write this down?” he asked, disbelieving.

  Confused, I glanced down at the journal. “Should I not?”

  From across the dividing wall, I heard a muffled sound from Jacob that might have been a laugh.

  It was, after all, a very Magisterial response. Ours is a religion of scholarship and intellectual debate, rather different from the sacrifice-and-purity concerns of the Temple. It baffled Menkem—or perhaps he simply did not expect such a response from a woman; I could not say. Either way, I had thrown him off his script, and he chose to ignore me in favor of recovering. “If I’d known you were going to the ruins, I would have forbade it, for your own sake. There is evil there.”

  “So you said, when we came back.” Jacob sent me a quelling look across the wall, and I went on more temperately. “Where does this evil come from?”

  Menkem cast a glance over his shoulder toward the altar and the eternal flame, as if looking to them for strength, or protection. Then he took a deep breath and began.

  I will not attempt to reproduce his exact wording here. Between my imperfect Vystrani, the haste of my notes, and his tendency to punctuate every sentence with an invocation to the Lord, the result would be unreadable. Instead I will give you the tale as I understood it then.

  “Zhagrit Mat” is the name the inhabitants of Drustanev give to the man who supposedly once ruled the kingdom surrounding the ruins I had seen, back in Draconean times. Such kings are invariably either well beloved by their subjects or complete tyrants; Zhagrit Mat, to my surprise, was the former. But it seems he had one ambition that led him badly astray: the desire to become a dragon.

  For many years he prayed to the gods to transform him, but with no success. At last, unhinged by this obsession, he turned the other way, and instead made a pact with a demon.

  But the demon, of course, did not properly fulfill his end of the bargain. Some error in wording on the king’s part, or simple maliciousness on the demon’s, led to a terrible result: the king became not a dragon, nor the man he had been, but a monstrosity, caught forever halfway between. And not in the manner of those heathen gods, either, Menkem was careful to tell us, with a draconic head on a more or less human body; he was four legged like a wyrm, but with human skin, and a half-human face, and human hands at the ends of his twisted wings.

  Driven mad by this transformation, the king became a plague on his own people. He declared himself a god, and hoarded all the riches to be had, while his subjects starved; worse yet, he demanded humans for sacrifice, and the blood ran out the front door of his shrine like a river. His evil grew and grew, until one night he took flight in a storm, and lightning struck him; he fell atop the roof of his own shrine, collapsing it, and that was the end of both king and kingdom.

  Those who have read David Parnell’s Reliques of Vystrani Wisdom will recognize this tale. It is told in other parts of the mountains as well, though the details differ; in some versions the evil dragon-king is slain by an angel of the Lord, or by a brave hero, or else the pact was for a limited time and afterward the demon claimed him. Even the notion of the monstrous king’s spirit haunting a nearby ruin is not unique, though that epilogue is not as often heard.

  ZHAGRIT MAT

  I knew nothing of such tales that day, taking notes in the Drustanev tabernacle. And although the struggle to follow Menkem’s account gave me some distance from what he said, the dim interior, and the memory of those monstrous footprints burned into the ground behind our house, made me shiver. Did I believe what the priest was saying? No, of course not; I prided myself on being a rational woman, and the notion that the spirit of a twisted dragon-human hybrid would lurk about for thousands of years after the downfall of his civilization, ignoring all visitors to his ruins (for certainly there had been some), only to latch on to me for no good reason—

  Then I remembered the firestone.

  Nonsense, my rational mind said again, once it had recovered from its brief stagger. True, we knew the Draconeans had valued the stones; many had been found in their ruins (which is why so many sites have been ransacked by looters). But the story Menkem told said nothing about treasure.

  The part of my mind that remembered the noise outside the sauna, and the footprints in the grass, was not reassured.

  Then— “Lord Hilford!” I said abruptly, interrupting the priest.

  Menkem nodded gravely. “Yes.”

  I might have imagined the noise, but the footprints were undeniably real. Which meant something was out there—something that might, based on the evidence thus far, have an interest in me—and if that interest had anything to do with our trip to the ruins, then both Astimir and Lord Hilford might be in danger. The young man was here in the village, but the earl …

  Jacob stood swiftly. “I’ll go talk to Wilker.”

  I could tell he was not convinced. Neither was I, really—but I didn’t have to be. I would far rather take the precaution of sending Mr. Wilker after Lord Hilford and feel a fool for it later than not take that precaution, and feel an even bigger fool if something did happen.

  To my husband as much as the priest, I said, “I have a few more questions. If I may?”

  Jacob’s hand extended as if to grip my shoulder briefly in comfort, but the wall kept us too far apart, and it might have been a breach of etiquette to reach over anyway. His fingers curled into a fist that jerked once, a curiously masculine gesture that seemed to exhort me to strength. Then he went out.

  The end of my pencil was between my teeth, I realized, as I glanced down at my notes. I removed it and said, “If this is some kind of … evil spirit.” A little of my doubt crept into my voice, but I did my best to sound agreeable. “What would you recommend?”

  “You must be cleansed,” the priest said with an air of finality. “It should have been done when you came back from the ruins; I said so at the time. But we will do it now.”

  The Temple’s obsession with washing had not been part of my nursery maid’s tales—she was too convinced their followers were all dirty and foul—but I knew of it from other sources. Well, if this was the price for laying Menkem’s fears to rest, then it was a small one to pay. Tucking my pencil into the journal, I held out my hands. “Where is your basin?”

  It required rather more than a basin.

  Menkem sent me to gather Jacob, Mr. Wilker, and Astimir; the latter certainly needed purification along with me, and it was judged best to give a scrub to the gentlemen as well, just to be on the safe side. Lord Hilford could be cleansed when he returned.

  By the time I had done this, somehow the entire village knew what was afoot. (This might have been the Drustanev gossips at work, but I think it more likely Menkem had said something the night before.) Quite a crowd of them gathered outside the tabernacle, including Dagmira. “I’m told this is to be a full bath,” I said to her. The notion was rather appealing; I never felt quite properly clean after using the sauna. “Will that be done inside the tabernacle?”

  Her look was scandalized, as if she sincerely hoped I had bot
ched my Vystrani and meant to say something else entirely. “Of course not! I’m surprised he let you in there, heathens as you are. No, it has to be living water.”

  Reciting Scripture in a loud voice, Menkem began leading the crowd forth. “Living water?” I repeated, unsure if I’d heard her correctly.

  Dagmira nodded, but seemed uninclined to explain. I translated the words into Scirling for my companions, and Jacob stumbled over a rock. “Living water? Oh, surely they don’t mean— Yes, they do.”

  I followed his gaze, and saw the icy stream up ahead.

  No amount of protest would convince the priest to back down. His rural theology included nothing that would cover this situation, but he was determined to use what little he had. Jacob, whose scholarly interests had at one point included religious history, mustered some very learned-sounding arguments that lost half their force when translated into broken Vystrani; to no avail. Nothing would do but that we be dropped into the deepest part of the stream, where the water could cover every last inch of our bodies.

  Every last inch. I realized, halfway through the argument, that Jacob was less concerned with the cold, and more concerned with the spectating villagers who were about to see his wife stripped naked in front of them. And I had thought the sauna was bad! Menkem seemed to believe that this being a ritual affair meant it didn’t matter who saw me; I could only chalk that up to rural practicality, since surely any religion that requires women to sit apart from men in tabernacle ought not to approve of nudity in mixed company.

  My willingness to tolerate their superstition only went so far. “You have a choice,” I told Menkem firmly. “You can bathe me publicly with my clothes on; you can bathe me privately with my clothes off; or you can bathe me not at all. But I am not removing a stitch out in the open like this, nor so long as any of these other men are around.” My gesture took in everyone but Jacob and the priest himself. I would have excluded Menkem, too, except that I was fairly certain the ritual required him to be present.