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

by Marie Brennan

  “And be blasted through the holes on the far side if a serpent took offense at my presence.”

  He had clearly forgotten about the jet of water a serpent can expel. I almost found myself apologizing as his face fell. But he recovered soon enough, saying, “I see now why you thought the bell would serve. It might do. But I would not call it safe.”

  “Do you think a serpent could crush it?” I asked. The thing had seemed very sturdy to me when it was loaded onto the ship—its sides were solid steel—but he would know its limitations better than I.

  Suhail shook his head. “Perhaps, but that is not my concern. The diving bell is open at the base. There are reasons for this, but chief among them is that I intend to use it for excavation: if I sink it into the ocean floor in shallow waters, I can pump the water out and then dig in the silt for artifacts.” He dismissed this with a wave of his hand, for it was a digression from his true point. “An attack from the serpent, whether a blast or simply a strike of its tail, could turn the bell on its side. If that happens, the air will escape.”

  And I would be left floating in the water, easy prey for the serpent. “Oh,” I said. Now it was my turn for my face to fall. It had seemed like such a very good idea.

  When I looked up, I found Suhail standing with one hand hovering in front of his mouth, fingers poised as if to catch something. His eyes were wide. “You have had an idea,” I said, smiling. “Should I be afraid?”

  “If we were to close off the bell,” he said, still gazing into the distance. “It would not be able to go as deep—there are issues of pressure. But ten meters should be safe. Do sea-serpents swim in water that shallow?”

  I rose to my feet, feeling suddenly alive again. “We shall find out.”

  TEN

  Searching for a site—Differences of scale—Scripture and history—My new theory—Draconean writing—An impudent thief—Two tongues

  We did not find out immediately, for it was some while before we had the chance to put our theory to the test. As chronicled in Around the World in Search of Dragons, we did not have much luck in locating a place where both the draconic and archaeological halves of the expedition could further their efforts.

  Modern-day dragon naturalists are much more organized about this than I was. They correspond with colleagues in their intended region, or at least with people who know the place, and make plans in advance for where they will go and how long they will stay. At the time, however, the Broken Sea was too unfamiliar to Scirlings, and my sense of what I needed to do too vague. I could only flit about, chasing rumours of possibility. For a while we were largely a trading expedition, Aekinitos choosing where we went, the rest of us asking questions in every port, seeking fire-lizards, sea-serpents, and ruins.

  Jake grew bored, and annoyed Abby in equal proportion to his boredom. I sent them through the markets to hunt scales and fangs from the serpents, so that I could try to make a comparative collection. Tom occupied himself with a careful regimen of exercise to regain his strength. I pored over the book I had acquired in Va Hing, which Suhail had been kind enough to translate for me; it sparked a great many thoughts on evolution and taxonomy. (Also no small amount of frustration that I had so little gift for languages. I would have liked to compare that book against others, for of course with only one author to draw from, I could hardly be certain that the facts were rigorous to begin with.)

  Suhail fared better than the rest of us, at least initially. At our first Puian port of call, the island of Olo’ea, he discovered that the locals used bits of carved stone as charms for good fortune—stones which were retrieved from beaches or found by pearl divers in the course of their work. He traded for one of these and brought it to me in great excitement. “Look!” he said.

  I looked, but shook my head, for I did not see the significance. “These are found around Draconean ruins,” he said. “Very common—too common to fetch any great price among treasure-hunters. I think there is a ruin offshore.”

  “Will you use the bell?” Jake asked, almost bouncing in his excitement.

  Suhail grinned at him. “Not to begin with. I will use something else.”

  The “something else” proved to be the contents of one of the crates he had brought on board. I had never before seen anything like it: a suit of bulky, waterproof canvas twill over rubber with a metal collar, and a copper globe I initially thought was a pot of some kind. It had a glass window in one side, however, and proved to be a helmet, which could be affixed to the collar in a perfect seal. A hose entered the helmet at the back.

  It was what we now call a standard diving dress, though Suhail referred to it by an Akhian term. As he had described to me, it allowed him to range underwater for an extended period of time, thanks to a pump supplying fresh air to him via the hose. “For excavation, it is not the best,” he said ruefully, showing me how stiff his fingers were in the canvas gloves. “That needs the bell. But I can use this to find the site.”

  Jake, of course, would not hear of being left behind. We went out in a canoe paddled by men from Olo’ea, and Jake splashed around on the surface while I oversaw the operation of the pump.

  It was not very interesting to watch from above. Through the waves, I could just make out Suhail below, drifting across the shallow seafloor. Clouds arose wherever he poked into the sand, and fish startled away in a quick rush. Jake called out reports to me: “He just tucked something into the bag! Now it looks like he’s found a wall!”

  I scarcely listened, content to wait for the more detailed account after Suhail was done. Instead I sat in the canoe and contemplated taxonomy. In my pocket I had a set of three sea-serpent scales—one from our specimen in arctic waters, the other two acquired locally—which I laid along the bench in front of me.

  Examined under the microscope we had on board the Basilisk, they did show differences. All sea-serpents possess ctenoid scales, meaning that they have a toothed outer edge, but certain structural features are more similar to the placoid scales of sharks. This created an interesting puzzle for the taxonomist: are the serpents more closely related to bony fish (and evolved to acquire characteristics of cartilaginous fish); are their nearest cousins cartilaginous fish (while the serpents evolved to in some ways resemble bony fish); or was the answer some third thing entirely? But while the basic structure was the same in all three instances, the arctic one was substantially thicker, and the features of its exterior surface less prominent. Small differences—but in the field of natural history, such minor discrepancies can herald a large enough separation to merit distinguishing two different species.

  Or it could simply be age. I knew from my reading prior to the voyage that ctenoid scales grow outward in rings, like trees. The arctic sample, in addition to being thicker and less textured, had many more rings. Very well, so far as it went: our arctic serpent was older. Did that explain all the differences? Or was it simply a bias in my (admittedly small) sample, that the tropical scales came from younger specimens? Perhaps there was a scale somewhere in the Broken Sea that would show as great an age. Or perhaps the Puians and Melatans hunted their serpents too energetically for them to ever become so elderly.

  SCALE DETAIL

  It is a very good thing that the canoes we had hired were outriggers, with a stabilizing lateral float on the port side. Had I been in an ordinary canoe, I might well have tipped myself into the water when Suhail broke the surface. I had been too caught up in my contemplation of scale anatomy to notice him rising from below.

  Jake swam over to help me fumble the weighty brass helmet off. Suhail could not assist us; all his effort went into staying afloat. (Ordinarily this was no challenge for him, but diving dress includes lead weights all over the body to keep the air within the suit from constantly dragging it upward.) Once the helmet was off, Suhail and Jake removed the weights, and then he easily hoisted himself over the gunwale into the canoe.

  I retrieved the scales just before he would have sat on them. “Did you find anything interesting?�
�

  “Of artifacts, very little,” he said, turning out the string bag he had taken down with him. A few pieces of stone fell free. “The waves have washed most of the small pieces ashore, I think—I will not find more without excavation. But there is definitely a site there. Likely a peasant village.”

  “A peasant village?” I said, startled.

  Suhail laughed. “Did you think the Draconeans lived only in great cities and temples? There must have been many villages, but most of them are gone now. Plowed under by later peoples. This is why I’m looking underwater: because those sites are untouched, except by the sea.”

  Jake hung off the side of the canoe, kicking his legs idly in the water. “Why are they underwater now? Did the islands sink?”

  “Quite the reverse,” Suhail told him. “A geologist I know thinks the seas have risen since the glory days of the Draconeans.”

  I laughed. “Like the tale in the Book of Tyrants? I do not know if you have that one in your Scriptures.”

  “We do,” Suhail said. “And if you read through the metaphors, there might be truth hidden there. What if the great beasts that ruled over mankind were in fact the Draconean kings?”

  “Great beasts?” The canoe rocked slightly as Jake pulled on it in excitement. “What great beasts?”

  Readers of these memoirs know that I have never been very religious. I am not ashamed of this fact; I have endeavoured to be a good woman nonetheless, and to do good for those around me. Still, it was embarrassing to have it revealed that my son was a little heathen, ignorant of even the most basic stories in Scripture. Flushing, I said, “I thought that most scholars agree the beasts are symbolic of the state of sin into which mankind had fallen.”

  Suhail shrugged. “There is no reason they cannot be both. The Draconeans worshipped dragons as gods; surely their civilization would count as greatly degenerate because of it.”

  “Does your geologist friend also think the other calamities described in that book took place? The plague of vermin, the skies falling dark for a year and a day, the slaughter of the children?”

  Jake was listening in openmouthed fascination. The islanders were sitting idle, enjoying their leisure, as we were speaking in Scirling (and they might not have cared a fig for our conversation even had they understood it). For my own part, I had never thought to discuss theology while sitting in a canoe in the middle of the Broken Sea; but here I was. Suhail said, “The writer of the Book of Tyrants surely exaggerated to make his point. But why should there be sunken villages, if the waters did not truly rise? And archaeologists have found remnants of things—trees, plants, animals—far south of where they should be. Creatures of cold weather, in areas that are too warm for them.”

  “Too warm now,” I said, following him. “But why should warmth—oh. Seas cannot rise without water to swell them. He truly thinks it changed enough to melt such a volume of ice?”

  The notion seemed outrageous to me, but Suhail nodded. “It would not take as large a change as you think. Or at least, he does not think so.”

  It was hardly my field of expertise. Still—“I cannot imagine the temperature rose overnight, however small of a change it might be.”

  “No,” Suhail agreed. “And so we are back to metaphor: the oceans swamped the coastal settlements under, but it happened over a long period of time. Not in three days, as Scripture would have it.”

  “A fascinating theory,” I murmured. It will surprise no one, I think, that I was less interested in its implications for Draconean civilization (or theology, for that matter) than in the consequences for draconic species. They are so well adapted to their circumstances that such a change in the environment would necessitate migration or further change—or else it would drive them to extinction. I cursed again the peculiar quirk of their osteology that robbed me of any fossil record to study … even though I knew that without it, I likely would not have any dragons larger than ponies to study, and those almost certainly flightless.

  This speculation put new thoughts into my head, though, which stayed with me long after we returned to shore, and kept me up quite late that night. Suppose (I said to myself) the world had indeed changed in that fashion, many thousands of years ago. It had—according to Suhail—driven many cold-weather creatures toward the poles, allowing residents of warmer climates to expand their ranges. Might this have some bearing on the question of the sea-serpents? I could imagine the changing world inspiring a great deal of movement and turmoil, as the beasts went in search of waters whose temperature was more congenial. But because there is variation in all species, some tended toward higher latitudes, while others preferred to remain closer to the tropics.

  If that were the case, then it put a new wrinkle in my taxonomical questions. What if they had been a single species, back in the days of the Draconeans … but were in the process of differentiating into two?

  I did not know if the hypothetical progenitors had been tropical or arctic to begin with, but I suspected the former. Our globes, after all, featured the Tropic of Serpents, not the Arctic Circle of Serpents. They were more common in tropical latitudes than temperate ones, let alone the far north. Which made sense if they had gotten their start here, and had expanded as the world changed around them.

  Some of you may read the preceding paragraphs and shrug at them. I had an idea; very good for me. The scientists among you, however, may understand why this was a matter of sufficient excitement to keep me awake well into the night. I had studied dragons before, and contributed something to our stock of knowledge about them. I had even made a few discoveries of note, among them the natural preservation of dragonbone, the mourning behaviour of Vystrani rock-wyrms, and the peculiar life cycle of the dragons of Mouleen.

  But never before had I devised a theory. Even my purpose on this voyage—to reconsider draconic taxonomy—did not have the same glamour as this new idea. The former was merely (I thought) a revision of other people’s ideas. It might win me acclaim in some quarters, but others would resent me for it, as an upstart woman arguing that a respected authority like Sir Richard Edgeworth was wrong. My theory regarding sea-serpents, however, was entirely new. It brought natural history together with observations from archaeology and geology to craft something never before considered. It was a fresh contribution to the field—and, I thought, the one that would make my name.

  I said in the first volume of my memoirs that one must be cautious of imagining patterns in data, especially when that data is scant. Alas, on this occasion I did not take my own advice.

  That night I rose from my hammock, crept out onto deck, and by the light of the moon penned an explanation of my ideas. This was the first draft of an article later published as “On the Differentiation of Sea-Serpents,” which I, in a state of great excitement, sent off to the Journal of Maritime Studies not one week later, when we came into port at Moakuru and had an opportunity to send mail. Tom, to his credit, cautioned me to wait; although he found great merit in my idea, he felt it would be better to submit a more substantial work after the expedition was done. I, however, wanted this to be the first volley in a series of publications that would astonish the scientific community.

  In a way, it was. “On the Differentiation of Sea-Serpents” garnered quite a bit of attention while I was still abroad, and while a portion of that was negative (for the aforementioned reason of my being an upstart woman with little scholarly standing), many found merit in my ideas. And certainly I have followed that article with many later works that have indeed made my name.

  Unfortunately—as many of you know—my theory was entirely wrong.

  I did not know it when I posted my article back to Scirland. I did not even suspect until some months later, and confirmation had to wait until M. Esdras de Crérat published the definitive work to date on sea-serpents, years after my expedition ended. But had I delayed and allowed my ideas to mature, I might have escaped a great deal of embarrassment later.

  * * *

  I suffered a sch
olarly frustration of a different sort soon afterward, when we had left Olo’ea for a more volcanically active archipelago—one that might be home to fire-lizards.

  On that day Suhail had asked to have the use of our cabin, because it was out of the wind. When I returned some time later (intending to retrieve one of my sketching pads), I found him ensconced with a stack of three books, one small notebook, and an array of little boxes, which seemed to be filled with cards. “What on earth are you doing?” I asked, peering shamelessly at the notebook. Suhail was doing mathematics; that much and no more was apparent to me.

  “Oh,” he said, looking up with the distracted air of one who had not noticed his interlocutor approaching. Given the minuscule size of the cabin, that meant he had been concentrating very hard indeed. “I am working on Draconean.”

  Given his talent for languages, I was not surprised. Good manners warred with curiosity, and lost. “Very well; I concede my ignorance. What use are mathematics in deciphering an ancient language?”

  He stretched the kinks from his neck and gestured at the little boxes full of cards. “An analysis of the frequency of each character—that is the simplest part of it. Sadeghi thinks he has found a mark that indicates separation between words, so if he is correct, it is also possible to record how often a character is found at the beginning of a word, or the end, or in its middle. After that, it becomes more complex: the likelihood that two characters will be found in conjunction, or three.”

  When I described this to Natalie much later, she saw very quickly what Suhail was about, but between my difficulty with languages and my limited grasp of mathematics, I did not. “Very well—that would give you a sense of the patterns in the language. But it cannot tell you what the words mean … can it?”