Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369)

by Marie Brennan

  A few sharks became embroiled in a conflict over the bounty. One was enormous—surely at least six meters in length—but even slower than most of his breed, and two others were attempting to take advantage of that fact. Their quarrel drifted toward the port side of the Basilisk, and many of us were engaged in watching the fight. Jake, who had permission to remain topside until a serpent was sighted, was standing on a crate with one hand wrapped tight around the rigging, observing the whole thing with eyes so wide, you half-expected his eyeballs to fall right out of their sockets. “Mama,” he called out to me, “is that the biggest shark in the world?”

  Even when one wishes to foster intellectual curiosity in one’s offspring, it can be vexing to be asked a question to which one hasn’t the faintest clue of an answer. I was racking my brains for what I knew of shark breeds when a frantic bellow came from above: “Port beam!”

  Perhaps the lookouts had been distracted by the fight. They later claimed, and I believed them, that the fault was not with their vigilance, but with the serpent, who came up from deep waters completely without warning. Directly off to our left—which is what “port beam” means—a shadow came surging upward. The sharks attempted to scatter, but they are not quick beasts; an instant later, one was in the serpent’s jaws.

  This was entirely too close to the ship for comfort. The men had their guns and harpoons ready, and began to fire. “Jake, get down,” I said, reaching up for him. “You must go below, now.” I did not fear him toppling overboard, for his grip upon the ropes was firm; but with that many firearms about, it was much too easy to imagine a bullet going astray.

  Abby joined me, and together we got him down (though not without many protests) and headed for safety. I was climbing to the poop deck for a better view when the guns fell silent, and I turned to see what had happened.

  The waves off our port beam were sloshing restlessly, but there was no sign of the serpent.

  Aekinitos was a few feet away, standing next to the helmsman, Mr. Forde. “Has it fled?” I asked him—and then I had my answer.

  The ship staggered to one side. I have no better word for it; the entire frame lurched, quite out of its usual motion. The men shouted, and a few more fired shots. Aekinitos bellowed for them to hold fire. The serpent had struck us below the waterline; on the lower decks, men raced to stop the leaks that began spraying water into the hold. Silence fell again, ragged and broken by the occasional call. Guns in hand, the crew scattered to the railings on both sides, looking for their target.

  “Two points off the starboard bow!” came the cry, and Aekinitos bellowed again for his men to hold. He knew the behaviour of sea-serpents well; an instant later the creature was curving around our bow and back to port, and had the men all rushed to shoot at where it had been, they would have missed where it was. More gunfire, but no one had yet gotten a clear shot with the harpoons, and only those can be trusted to penetrate a sea-serpent’s tough hide deeply enough to do it any true harm.

  All bullets generally do is anger the creature.

  Sailors tell exaggerated tales. So far as I have seen, this is true the world over; and so one easily grows into the habit of discounting anything one hears from a sailor as being more than the reality. A four-meter shark becomes six, or eight. A bad storm becomes a hurricane. A narwhal sunning itself on a rock becomes a beautiful maiden combing her hair.

  I am not a sailor, and I tell you with utter and scientific honesty: a sea-serpent can and will come hurtling up out of the sea like a geyser, just as the stories say, a column of grey-blue scales five, ten, fifteen meters high, streaming water from its length—and then curve itself midair so that when it falls, its head enters the water on the far side of its prey.

  The lighter ropes of the rigging snapped like twine. The great stays that held the masts, cables as thick around as my arm, gave it more trouble. The serpent’s head dove between two of these and splashed into the sea once more—but stays are meant to withstand the worst storms the ocean can devise. The shining coil of body was suspended from the mainstay, sliding forward as it tightened, until halted by the foremast.

  The serpent did not know what transpired above. It knew only that there was a great beast in the water, as big as the largest whale, and that the beast was the source of its wounds. Had we been hunting in southern waters, our mark might have struck us with a jet of water, and the Basilisk might have taken a wound from which she could not recover. But this was the icy northern sea, and the serpent therefore aimed to crush us to death.

  Men rushed forward, howling. One fellow at the starboard rail put the barrel of his gun right against the serpent’s scales and pulled the trigger; gore exploded outward from the wound. Others followed Aekinitos’ shouts and concentrated their fire together, chewing ragged holes in the creature’s side. These then became targets for the men with harpoons, who hurled their spears with all the force they could muster, hoping to strike something vital within.

  But all the while, the coil was tightening. The mainstay groaned in protest; then, with a dreadful tearing sound, it snapped. The serpent’s body crashed into the deck, splintering the railings on both sides. With the Basilisk now properly in its grip, the beast settled in to crush us.

  The one advantage was that the serpent’s body was now within better reach. With cutlasses, a few of the men hacked away enough scales to make a good opening. Then, roaring, a knot of sailors threw their weight behind a harpoon, driving the point deep into the creature’s side.

  It reached vital organs, and the serpent spasmed. The movement nearly threw Tom off its back, for he, along with two others, was climbing atop the coil. They too had cutlasses, and began chopping with desperate ferocity at the scales. Blood and bits of scale flew, while the decking below creaked and bent. Their blades finally exposed their target: the creature’s spine.

  By then the beast was trying to escape. Its length slithered across the deck, doing more damage as it went; two of the men atop it lost their balance and fell. Tom, the last of the three, followed a moment later—but his cutlass did not. It remained lodged in between the vertebrae, and when the serpent slipped free of the Basilisk, it was apparent that the front half was dragging the dead weight of the back.

  Though it still moved, the serpent was finished. Half-paralyzed, a harpoon in its vitals, and bleeding from the great rents in its sides, it tried to swim away, but soon it floated lifeless atop the waves.

  * * *

  And what did I do, while this epic battle raged?

  I crouched in front of the helm and took notes. Not on the fighting, you understand, but the creature itself: its movement, its behaviour. It is exceedingly difficult to observe a sea-serpent at close range, and as this might be my only opportunity, I did not want to squander it. I would not have been any use in the fight regardless, as my last (and only) experience with a gun had been when I was fourteen.

  In some ways I think it might have been easier had I thrown my lot in with the men after all. When one is in a fight, the hot blood of the moment overwhelms many other considerations. Watching from a slight distance as I did, with my mind set to record every detail, I could not help but be sickened by the butchery. We had dissected dragons before, but that was clinical, conducted after the beasts were dead. As for the killing itself, it had always been done neatly, with a few shots fired from a rifle. Never had it been this sort of mêlée, with swords and spears and men howling to give themselves courage. Nor, for that matter, had the lives of my companions ever been in such direct danger—as I had no doubt that, given a little time more, the serpent might have broken the Basilisk’s back.

  All things considered, we escaped rather less scathed than we might have been. A few men had been injured by falling debris and the recoil of snapped ropes, but none of the rest suffered more than scrapes. The burst stay was a serious concern, but our mast had not been broken, nor our hull too badly ruptured. We could afford to stay for a time and enjoy the fruits of our victory.

  I could a
lso release my pent-up feelings by chastising my son. Fixed as I was upon the battle against the serpent, I did not realize until afterward that Jake had not gone below with Abby as instructed. He had instead climbed the rigging up to the “top”—the platform where the lower section of the mast met the one above. He had taken with him a knife concealed inside his shirt, which he intended to use against the serpent by diving heroically on it from above. Fortunately for both his safety and my own sanity, common sense had prevented him from following through with this plan when he saw the bloody reality below him.

  He was not as much daunted by this as I should have liked, though, nor did my reprimand leave much more of a mark. Mine was not the only tongue-lashing he received, though—Abby had already delivered one, as did the sailors in the top, several of the ship’s officers, Aekinitos himself, and Tom—and in the aggregate, they did have the effect of making him promise to be more obedient in the future.

  In the meanwhile, we had other tasks to which we must attend. The crew lowered the ship’s boats and used them to tow the beast back to our side, as they do with whales. We had to work quickly; already the carcass was drawing attention. Gulls flapped down to consider it, but disdained the meat after a few pecks; as with terrestrial dragons, the flesh of a sea-serpent is rather foul, owing to the chemical composition of the blood. There are scavengers in the sea, however, who do not mind its taste, and many of these came to investigate as we conducted our studies.

  This at least was familiar work, although I had never before carried it out while straddling the carcass with my feet turning to ice in the sea. (I was, of course, wearing trousers, and had been since we left Sennsmouth.) I had to sit atop a piece of tough sailcloth, for the edges of the scales are viciously sharp; their serration had contributed to the destruction of the mainstay. Tom and his two allies had suffered numerous cuts, though that did not prevent him from joining me in the dissection once bandaged.

  Those scales were the first focus of our interest. We had studied a few specimens donated to museums, for they are sometimes kept as items of curiosity by the sailors who kill the beasts. Without detailed information on their collection, however, those scales told us little. We hoped that by examining these closely and then comparing them against scales taken from a serpent in the tropics, we might establish more about the relation between the two. We also had the chemical equipment to try preserving a bit of bone, and extracted a vertebra for the purpose.

  Then it was the basics, as we had practiced them before: we took a variety of measurements, and then Tom (whose tolerance for the cold water was much greater than my own) cut open the body to survey the internal organs. I meanwhile had the sailors remove the head and bring it on board, where I could study it in peace and relative warmth.

  Jake knew I was a naturalist, of course. He had looked through my scholarly works, more for the plates that illustrated them than out of any deep interest in the text. Enough of the plates depicted anatomical drawings that he knew perfectly well what his mother did in her work. Knowing, however, was quite a different matter from seeing her in communion with a severed head.

  He made an awed noise and laid his hand on one of its fangs. “Pray do not block my view,” I said, sketching rapidly. I wanted to finish quickly, so that I could deflesh the head and draw the skull. There appeared to be faint scars above its eyes, which suggested it might have once possessed the tendrils seen on its tropical kin.

  “Is this bigger than the other dragons you’ve killed?” Jake asked.

  “I have not killed any dragons myself,” I said. “Can you open its mouth? Or call one of the sailors to do it.”

  Jake pried the head open, giving me a look when I warned him not to cut himself on the teeth. It is a look I think all children master at about his age—the one that insists the looker needs no warning while, by its very confidence, convincing the one looked at that the warning was very necessary indeed.

  Open, the jaws could easily have swallowed my son. That gave me an idea. I said, “Stay where you are; I want to use you for scale.”

  He mimed being eaten by the serpent, which would have been less unnerving had I not just been reminded of precisely how much danger I was placing him in by bringing him on this voyage. I had underestimated the hazards of hunting a sea-serpent. But I would not do so a second time; I vowed to put him ashore before we went after one in the tropics.

  Jake soon tired of pretending to be a victim and so began mock-wrestling with the head, pretending to be its mighty slayer. “I’m going to kill one of these someday,” he proclaimed.

  “I should prefer you didn’t,” I said, rather sharply. “I did this for science, but it having now been done, I hope it needn’t be done again. Only the fangs have any real value on the market, and those only as curiosities and raw material for carving; should an entire animal die, just so we might take four of its teeth? I almost feel sorry for it. At the end, it was trying to swim away. It only wanted to live.”

  “She,” Tom said, climbing over the railing. He was dripping with bloody water. “No eggs in her abdomen, but the ovipositor marks her very clearly as female. I wonder where they lay them?”

  My chastisement had made little mark on my son, but Tom’s revelation silenced him. Much later, he admitted to me that the pronoun was what struck him so forcefully: the pronoun, and the possibility of eggs. With those two words, the sea-serpent changed from a terrible beast to a simple animal, not entirely different from the broken-winged sparrow we had once nursed back to health together. A dangerous beast, true, and one that could have sent the Basilisk to the bottom of the ocean. But she had been alive, and had wanted to go on living; now she was dead, and any progeny she might have borne with her. Jake was very quiet after that, and remained so for several days.

  Tom set to work defleshing the skull, and talked with me while he did. “The lungs are much like those we’ve seen in other dragons—more avian in structure than mammalian.” I sighed, thinking of my debate with Miriam Farnswood. I feared I was likely to lose that particular argument. “The musculature around the stomach and oesophagus is interesting, too. I’ll have to look at one of the tropical serpents to compare, but I think the purpose is to allow the creature to suck in water very swiftly, without having to swallow, and then vomit it back up again.”

  JAKE FOR SCALE

  “The jet of water,” I said, excited. “Yes, we’ll have to compare. If they do not migrate, perhaps their life cycle leads them further north as they age? A creature this large might have a difficult time keeping itself cool in tropical waters. That would explain why those in the north are generally larger, if their growth continues throughout their lives.”

  We debated this point until the skull was clear of the bulk of its flesh. As I began sketching again, he asked me, “What do you think? Taxonomically.”

  “It’s difficult,” I admitted. By then my hand was capable of going about its work without demanding all of my attention; I could ponder issues of classification at the same time. “The dentition bears some similarities to those reported or observed in other breeds, at least in number and disposition of teeth … though of course baleen plates are not a usual feature. The vertebrae certainly pose a problem. This creature has quite a lot of them, and we do not usually consider animals to be close cousins who differ so greatly in such a fundamental characteristic.”

  Tom nodded, wiping his hands clean—or at least less filthy—with a cloth. “Not to mention the utter lack of hind limbs. I saw nothing in the dissection, not even anything vestigial. The closest thing it has to forelimbs are some rather inadequate fins.”

  “And yet there are similarities. The generally reptilian appearance, and more significantly, the degradation of the bones.” I thought of the six criteria customarily used to distinguish “true dragons” from draconic creatures: quadripedalism, flight-capable wings, a ruff or fan behind the skull, bones frangible after death, oviparity, and extraordinary breath. We might, if we were very generous, count the s
erpent’s supraorbital tendrils (presuming it had once possessed them) as the ruff, and Tom had just confirmed that the creatures laid eggs. Together with the bones—which decayed more slowly than those of terrestrial dragons, but did become frangible quite rapidly—that made three of six. But was there any significance to the distinction between “true dragons” and their mere cousins? What if there was only one characteristic that mattered?

  Yet there were problems as well with declaring osteological degradation the true determinant of draconic nature. We had established a fair degree of variation in the exact chemical makeup of different breeds, ranging from the rock-wyrms on whom the process had originally been developed to the simple sparklings who could be preserved in vinegar. There was every chance that it would prove to be a spectrum rather than a simple binary. Where, then, would we draw our boundary?

  I could not answer those questions that day—nor, indeed, for years to come. But that dead sea-serpent, for whom I had conceived a belated sympathy, brought me one step closer to understanding.

  FOUR

  Wyverns in Bulskevo—Protégés—Jake’s disinterest—In the doldrums—Jake’s promise

  I had not forgotten the message Wademi brought to me regarding the peculiar appearance of the dragons in Bayembe’s rivers. I had, however, put my thoughts on the matter to one side for a time.

  There had been enough to do in preparing for our departure that I told myself I would discuss the matter with Tom after we had gotten settled on the Basilisk. Once on board, however, I found the flaw in my reasoning: there was simply no privacy on such a ship.

  The sailors attended very little to our scientific discussions, caring naught for such matters. I could not trust, however, that they would continue to ignore us if phrases like “queen dragons” caught their attention. There were opportunists among them who might pursue such a prize—or at least sell word of it to an interested buyer. Even if they did not, they might reference it in their dockside gossip. Whether this might rebound ill upon Bayembe and Mouleen, I could not say for certain; but I did not like to risk it.