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

by Marie Brennan

  “Not yet,” Suhail said. “It tells me, though—or rather it told ibn Khattusi, who was the first to observe this—that the Draconean script is likely a syllabary, with many characters representing groups of sounds.”

  “How can you be sure of that?” I asked, fascinated.

  “Because of the number of characters. There are only so many individual sounds in a language; even the largest has no more than a few dozen. Your alphabet has twenty-six letters, while mine has twenty-eight, with marks sometimes employed for vowels. The largest have fifty or sixty. But even a small syllabary usually has at least eighty characters—more often hundreds.” He nodded once more at the cards. “Draconean has two hundred forty-one—perhaps. It is not easy to count. If an inscription carved in clay adds a downward serif on one symbol, is that a different character, or was the scribe simply careless in making his mark? If three marks overlap one another, is that significant, or is it just an artifact of the small size of the writing?”

  My eyebrows went up, and he dismissed his own rambling with a wave of his hand. “The point is this: knowing the script is a syllabary tells me something of how it must have sounded. And calculating the frequency of different arrangements helps me find patterns—”

  “And where there are patterns, there are words,” I said, understanding at last. “You can find the shape of them, at least.”

  “That is the hope.” Suhail stretched in his seat, and his back popped alarmingly. “It will be a great deal of work, though, and I have only just started.”

  Getting from the shapes of words to their meaning seemed like another hurdle entirely, but Suhail did not need me to point that out. Instead I reached my hand toward one of his boxes, and when he nodded permission, browsed through the cards. I could read nothing of his notes, which were all in a tidy (and microscopic) Akhian hand, but the Draconean characters in the upper left were vaguely familiar to me. “I have found a few inscriptions myself,” I admitted.

  “Oh?”

  “Most of them from a ruin in Vystrana—near a village called Drustanev.”

  Suhail made a sound of recognition and picked up one of his books, flipping through it with practiced fingers. “These, yes?”

  The book, I later learned, was the most recent supplement in a series begun by the Akhian scholar Suleiman ibn Khattusi, who had made it his mission to collate all the Draconean inscriptions then known and to encourage people to gather more. At the time, all I knew was that I was looking at two pages of unintelligible Akhian script, captioning a pair of line drawings I knew quite well.

  My voice was much too loud for the small cabin. “Where did you get these?”

  “The books? I—”

  “Not the books, these.” I stabbed one finger down on the Draconean inscriptions.

  Suhail took the volume from me, perhaps as much to rescue it from my violence as to read what was on the page. “It says these were gathered and submitted by Simon Arcott of Enwith-on-Tye.”

  The first sound to emerge from my throat was an outraged squawk. It was shortly followed by a string of epithets, the kindest of which was, “That sneak! I sent him those drawings myself, made from the rubbings I took in Vystrana. And he has the gall to pass them off as his own work?” I snatched the book from Suhail once more, studying the images to make certain there was no error. Indeed there was not; I had painstakingly copied them for Mr. Arcott, and knew every line.

  Suhail did not question my certainty. He said, “If you wish, I can send in a correction.”

  I did my best to moderate my tone. “That is very good of you. ‘Correction’—pah. That is the word, but it makes the attribution here sound like a regrettable error, rather than a damnable lie. Oh, when I get back to Scirland … or really, why wait? There is such a thing as mail service.”

  “Having been in a similar dispute once myself,” Suhail offered, with the wary air of a man who is hoping a cat will not bite him, “I would advise waiting. If you write to him now, he will have months in which to prepare a defense.”

  What defense could protect Mr. Arcott, when I had the original rubbings in my study and he had never been to Vystrana in his life, I could not imagine. Still, Suhail’s advice was good, and I nodded in reluctant agreement.

  (When I finally did confront Mr. Arcott, after my return to Falchester, he had the cheek to try and argue that his intellectual thievery had been a compliment and a favor. After all, it meant my work was good enough to be accepted into ibn Khattusi’s series—but of course they never would have taken a submission from a woman, so he submitted it on my behalf. What I said in reply is not fit to be printed here, as by then I had spent a good deal of time in the company of sailors, and had at my disposal a vocabulary not commonly available to ladies of quality. But I had greater satisfaction in due course: he was drummed out of the Society of Draconean Scholars, and subsequent editions of ibn Khattusi’s series had not only my name but a note explaining the discrepancy in thoroughly condemnatory terms.)

  I returned the book, restraining my uncharitable urge to throw it across the cabin. It would not have gone far, but the impact might have satisfied my sudden need for violence. “Well. I may take comfort that he cannot possibly have stolen the other inscription I found, as I never took a rubbing of it.”

  Suhail gave me a sharp look. He knew well enough by then that I was not often the sort to pass up a chance to record knowledge. “Why not?”

  I laughed, my ill humour not gone, but receding to where I could think of other things. “I had very little paper with me at the time, and nothing fit for a rubbing. Nor could I stay long enough to try and draw it—I had other tasks to address.” (To whit, getting off an island in the middle of a waterfall without breaking my neck.) “Besides, I am not certain it would be useful to anyone. The Draconean part of the inscription looked very odd—quite primitive.”

  My dismissive words might as well have been the scent of prey, for Suhail perked up like a hound that has caught the trail of a rabbit. “Primitive? How so? Where was this? And what do you mean, the Draconean part of the inscription?”

  “Which question do you wish me to answer first?” I asked with asperity, for he seemed likely to go on pestering me without pause for reply.

  He apologized, and I said, “It looked … well, let me show you.” I fetched out my own notebook and sketched a few shapes as best as I could remember them: awkward scratches at bad angles.

  Suhail frowned at the images. “Were they arranged precisely like this? No vertical stroke here?” One brown finger traced a line through what I had drawn.

  “My dear fellow, this was six years ago, and I have already said I kept no record of them. This is me trying to recall the general style. I have no idea if there were any characters that even looked like this.”

  He conceded this with a nod. “And the rest of the inscription?”

  “You mean the part that wasn’t Draconean? I have no idea what it was. Rounded little blocks; they might not even have been writing at all.” I sketched another few shapes. These were decidedly more fanciful, as I had not even my vague familiarity with Draconean to aid recollection.

  Suhail seemed to recognize them nonetheless. “Like this?” He took my notebook from me and wrote a quick line.

  “Yes!” I exclaimed, hands flying up. “What is it?”

  “Ngaru,” he said slowly, looking at the page. “A very old script—logosyllabic—ancestral to the writing systems now used throughout eastern Eriga.”

  “Well, that makes sense. I was in eastern Eriga at the time.”

  Suhail pushed the notebook back at me. His movements had gone suddenly cautious, as if too quick a gesture might cause the mirage in his mind to dissipate. “Draw the whole thing, if you will. Not the inscriptions themselves—I know you do not have them recorded—but what it was that you saw.”

  I obligingly laid out the general shape of it: the slab of granite, divided roughly in half, with the chicken scratches of Draconean at the top and the Ngaru scr
ipt below. When I showed it to Suhail, his expression gradually lit up, until he was glowing as if every birthday gift for the rest of his life had arrived all at once.

  “Truly God has sent you!” he cried. I think that, had I been a man, he would have embraced me on the spot. “Do you realize what this is?”

  Laughing despite myself, I said, “Clearly I do not.”

  “If my guess is right—if I am the most fortunate man in all of creation—then this is a bilingual!” He saw my incomprehension. “The same text, written in two languages. Draconean above, Ngaru below. We cannot read the former, but the latter…” His hands flapped with his excitement. “That has been known for years!”

  During my childhood education, I had labored through various works of foreign literature in facing translations, with Scirling on one side and the original on the other. The idea had been that my native tongue would aid me in learning the other language—and so it would have done, I imagine, had I been inclined to effort, instead of reading only the Scirling side.

  I mentioned this to Suhail, and he crowed with delight. “Better than that! It is the key to the code. Find names in the Ngaru, or some other element that will not change much between languages—count them. Count the Draconean, and find the words with the same frequency. Likely they will even write the same sounds, or close to it. This is the key!”

  He did almost seize me then, so caught up was he in his joy. I startled at the movement, and that recalled him to his manners; he clasped his own hands instead, shaking them with his eyes to the heavens.

  His good cheer was infectious. I came down to earth a moment later, though, when he asked me, “Where is this stone?”

  “In Eriga,” I said, drawing out the words while I thought. “But the stone—it is not very accessible.”

  “I do not care,” Suhail vowed. “God willing, I will climb the highest mountain to reach it, cross the deepest gorge. Is it in a desert? I grew up in one. I do not fear the heat of the sun.”

  His grandiose declarations made me smile, but my heart was heavy. “It is not that. Well, it is that to some degree—the way is indeed dangerous. But the greater problem is not the land; it is the people. The stone sits in a place that is … sacred. I was permitted to go there as part of a trial, a rite of passage. But I do not know if they would let you do the same.”

  This checked him in his headlong dreams of success. “Is the stone itself sacred to them?”

  “Not that I know of. I am not even certain they know it is there; I only found it because I went searching.”

  “Then I could buy it from them.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him how little the Moulish cared for money, but stopped myself. I had not yet said the stone was in the Green Hell, and thought it better to leave that unspecified. Everything I knew of Suhail said he was a good man, but the dual inscriptions dangled before him the possibility of the kind of achievement most scholars can only dream of. I did not think he would go after the stone without permission … but without certainty, I could not risk it. The Moulish had shown trust in sending me to that island, and I did not want to betray it.

  “I do not know,” I said at last. “But I can tell you who to contact. There is a woman in Atuyem, the half-sister of the oba—Galinke n Oforiro Dara. She knows the people who keep the stone, and can ask them on your behalf.”

  This roundabout path made Suhail sigh with impatience, but he nodded. After all, we were halfway around the world from Bayembe and Mouleen; he could hardly go racing off there right now. I fear I quite destroyed his concentration, though, for soon after that he packed up his notebooks and cards and took to pacing the deck instead—dreaming, I suspect, of what secrets the Draconean inscriptions might hold.

  PART THREE

  In which the expedition makes substantial progress by running aground

  ELEVEN

  The storm—Encounter with a reef—An island welcome—The needs of the Basilisk—Our new home—Hostile responses

  One consequence of my eventful life is that it has given me an utter horror of helplessness.

  Put me in peril, and so long as it is something I may struggle against, I will be well. Not happy—for despite what others say about me, peril is not a thing I enjoy—but I will keep my equilibrium, diverting all my fears into the effort to find safety once more. This tendency has preserved my life in a variety of circumstances and places, from the skies above the Green Hell to the lethal slopes of the Mrtyahaima peaks.

  What I do not handle half so well are situations in which I may do nothing. This is why disease is one of my especial nemeses: when I am ill, I am capable of little more than refusing to die, and when others are ill, I cannot even do that. I was helpless when my husband died in Vystrana—and perhaps that incident, even more than the general tenor of my life, has instilled this horror in me, for I have never forgotten the fact that I could do nothing to save him.

  All of which is by way of explaining that when the great storm arose on the Broken Sea, it began what may well have been the most wretched span of time in my entire voyage. I suffered other misfortunes that were arguably worse, but in those cases I could do something. On this occasion, however, I was rendered totally helpless.

  Ackinitos had warned me of the storms, but thus far I had only seen rain showers, blowing past so regularly you might set your pocket-watch by them. When I saw clouds on the horizon that day, I felt no particular apprehension. Aekinitos, however, spent a minute and a half contemplating them in silence. Then, nodding once, he turned and ordered all his passengers below.

  “How long are we expected to stay there?” I asked him—for I lacked the captain’s weather sense, and did not understand what the shadow in the distance portended.

  “Until it is safe,” Aekinitos said.

  This was not a reassuring answer. First, because it advertised danger; second, because it was so very unspecific; and third, because Aekinitos delivered those words with a mad gleam in his eye. As I have said before, he was of my mind in preferring perils against which he could pit all of his strength. He was not quite so mad as to seek out such things, at needless risk to the lives of his men; but if such incidents presented themselves, then he did not hesitate to throw himself into the fray.

  I tempered my frustration and asked, “Is there nothing we can do?”

  Aekinitos said, “Stay out of the way.”

  It was the worst possible instruction he could have given me. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to obey. My time aboard the Basilisk had given me a very rudimentary understanding of which bits were which, but not enough to be useful even in calm weather. In a storm, I would be a positive liability, as conditions required the men to do precisely the right thing at precisely the right time—without any landlubber standing in the way.

  Jake protested when he heard he was to be sent below. “I’m not a passenger!” he insisted. I privately cursed the arrangement that treated him as a “ship’s boy,” which now gave him notions. (Though I cannot fault Jake for wanting to help. My impulse had, after all, been the same.)

  Aekinitos settled the matter quite tidily. “You are not a passenger, and so you obey my orders. Which are to go into my cabin and stay there with the others.”

  It is a mark of how much our voyage and that arrangement had transformed my son that Jake did not continue his protest. He looked mulish and set his jaw, but he did not argue against Aekinitos’ logic. Instead he turned to me and proferred his arm, saying, “Ma’am, if you’ll come below with me?” Abby muffled a laugh.

  There was no laughter an hour later, when the first edges of the storm reached us. We had been in tempests before, this past year and more. On those occasions Tom had been permitted to help, and Jake as well; Abby and I had not so much been ordered out of the way as advised to step aside, and we had occupied ourselves with tasks such as making certain food and drink were distributed when conditions allowed. Now, however, the lot of us were packed into the captain’s cabin, Suhail included—that being
the only space where we could all fit and be out of the way.

  Nearly everything on a ship is “stowed,” meaning that there are measures in place to make certain things will not fall out or down or over when the ship pitches or rolls. In our own tiny cabin, for example, thick straps held the books on the shelves. In the captain’s own quarters, everything was as neatly stowed as could be, and yet soon after we had a demonstration of the limitations of such measures.

  It began with an ominous creaking and swaying as the winds rose. The lights had been extinguished, but in the grey gloom that came through the stern windows, we could see the hammock and hanging sacks swing in ever-wider arcs. This lasted until a sailor hurried in and closed the shutters, to protect us against the possibility of broken glass; in exchange he left us one meager lantern. The latter risked fire, but I am glad we had that one allowance, for otherwise we would have spent the next two days in utter darkness.

  Yes, we were two days in the grip of that storm—or perhaps it was a whole series of them, striking us one after the other. I cannot tell you the details of what transpired outside the cabin, for I was not there to see them, and what explanation we got afterward was both incomplete and somewhat incomprehensible to me. It was not a hurricane; had it been that severe, the Basilisk should certainly have been sunk. But a whole ocean of rain came thundering down upon us, drowning the decks and half-drowning the men, and the wind whipped the seas into waves that must have made the ship look like a toy lost in the bath. Against this, Aekinitos and his men struggled not to sail to safety—we were caught too far from land to have any chance of that—but simply to keep our bow turned into the waves. If at any point the ship turned broadside to the waves, the next one would have swamped us, sending the Basilisk’s masts into the water and dooming us all.

  Had there been a harbour available nearby, we might have tried to run for it and take refuge there. This would certainly have doomed the Basilisk—we would have found her wreckage scattered across the Broken Sea—but we ourselves might have been safer. Lacking such an option, however, the open waters in which we found ourselves became a blessing, for they meant we could run as the winds and waves directed us … to a point. But I get ahead of myself.