The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons)

by Marie Brennan

  Mr. Wilker did not leave me long in suspense, of course. Rising from his stool, the other man a heartbeat behind him, he said, “Ah, Mrs. Camherst, Miss Oscott. I’m glad you could join us. May I introduce M. Gregoire Velloin?”

  M. Velloin’s hand was solidly calloused, with thick, blunt nails. A working man’s hand, I thought. When he spoke, I was surprised to find his voice tinged with an Eiversch accent, instead of Thiessois. “Mrs. Camherst, a pleasure. Miss Oscott, very nice to meet you. There has been much gossip in advance of your arrival. You are not what I expected.”

  “Oh?” I said, mildly nettled for no reason I could discern. Perhaps my audience with the olori had put me out of sorts. “What did you expect?”

  “Someone older and plainer,” he answered, with bluntness that was likewise much more Eiversch than Thiessois. “I had heard you were a widow.”

  Now, at least, I had reason to be nettled. “I am, sir. But my late husband’s passing has no bearing on my age or appearance.”

  Rather than taking offense, he laughed. “Oh, indeed. But that is rumour, is it not? Making assumptions with no basis, just to fill the time. I am sure gossip will be more accurate, now that you are here.”

  Based on my experiences thus far, I sincerely hoped I would not be there for long. I had far rather be out in the bush, pursuing dragons, than dealing with the people in Atuyem, be they Erigan or Anthiopean. “What brings you here, M. Velloin? You cannot be with any Scirling delegation, and I note your accent—and yet you affect a Thiessois title of courtesy.”

  “And a Thiessois name, too. My father was of that land; he was born in Fonsmartre. You know of it? Quite near the border, yes. He emigrated in his youth, and married an Eiversch woman. But I am monsieur instead of Herr because I have made my home in Thiessin for ten years now, and it is owing to the generosity of a Thiessois patron that I am here.”

  I frowned. “You have not yet answered my question, monsieur.”

  “M. Velloin is a hunter,” Mr. Wilker said, intervening.

  Thinking back over my words, I winced; the hostility I was showing to our Anthiopean companion held some echoes of my early behaviour toward Mr. Wilker himself. I made an effort to moderate my tone. “I see. Is it the elephants you are here for, or the leopards?”

  Velloin smiled, as if our conversation had been friendly all along. “I do not discriminate, Mrs. Camherst, except to choose only the most dangerous of prey. There is no challenge, without risk. I have hunted tigers in Rematha, bears in Kaatsedu, and mammoths in Siaure. Here I will hunt the elephant and the leopard and the dragon.”

  So much, I thought, for friendliness.

  Natalie laid a restraining hand on my arm; she knew what the stiffening of my posture meant. It did not stop me from speaking. “The dragon. Indeed. In that case, I cannot honestly wish you luck in your endeavours. I have little fondness for sport hunting in the first place, and less in the case of dragons. You may not be aware, sir—unless you make a habit of reading scientific monographs, which I doubt—but on our Vystrani expedition—”

  “You discovered mourning behaviour among Vystrani rock-wyrms.” Velloin’s mouth had compressed, though he maintained a good approximation of his amiable tone. “I do read monographs, Mrs. Camherst, where they concern the great beasts. A good hunter must know his prey.”

  “They are more than prey,” I said, biting the words off. “That you should see them so, for the mere prize of teeth and claws, is a very great pity.”

  Pity fell far short of what I truly meant, but Scirling politeness restrained my tongue. Now, years after the fact, I have no compunctions about telling you what I truly felt.

  It is true, yes, that my companions and I have killed dragons in the course of our research, and sometimes even for the purpose of that research. But even before I developed reservations about such practices, I had an utter loathing for trophy hunting, which was (and in many places still is) considered a wonderful expression of masculine virtue. Rarely do such men hunt verminous creatures, of the sort that truly plagues the common people; if they foxhunt, it is with a fox captured for the purpose and released in a pleasant park, not the one eating the chickens of the peasant outside that park.

  No, the beasts they hunt are the splendid ones, the majestic kings and queens of the wild, and they do so for no better reason than because a splendid trophy is far more glamorous than a scrubby one. The occasional hunter will test his courage by going after a hippopotamus, which is as dangerous as it is comical looking, but most prefer those with pelts or hides they can display after the fact. To kill a creature simply to decorate one’s study is repellent to me, and I cannot help but be repelled by those who engage in such activity.

  And that abhorrence is redoubled when the hunter’s target is a dragon, for I, as all the world knows, am partisan to their kind.

  Velloin seemed unconcerned by my disapproval. Why should he be? I could do nothing but seethe. “Teeth and claws are prizes, yes, but hardly the only ones. I have captured animals, too—even a dragon, once. You may have seen it yourself.”

  “What dragon?” I asked. The question came out sharp, for a dreadful suspicion had taken shape in my mind.

  “A Moulish swamp-wyrm,” he said. “Took it from near the coast; only safe place to go, really, and hardly even then. The creature was a runt, but it made its way into the menagerie at Falchester.”

  He was watching me as he spoke, and I could not hide my reaction. I had indeed seen that dragon, along with two other runts, on the very day that I met my husband. Without those dragons, I might never have married Jacob, with all the consequences, both good and bad, attendant upon that decision. The thought of owing even a fraction of my happiness to a man like Velloin was infuriating.

  Casually, he added, “I hope to try again, in the jungle or out in the savannah. Buyers are much harder to find for full-grown dragons—too difficult to keep them caged—but still, the challenge is the thing.”

  It would be hypocritical for me to wish him luck in that endeavour. It would also, however, be hypocritical for me to condemn him, given the joy I had derived from seeing those captive dragons. In the end, I clamped my jaw shut and let others take the conversation onward.

  Unfortunately, it transpired that Mr. Wilker had engaged us to dine with the bloodthirsty M. Velloin that afternoon. He was on good terms with a number of people at Point Miriam, which served not only as a defensive fortification but also as the home of Nsebu’s colonial government. Given that we were newcomers to the royal palace, unfamiliar with the rhythms of life there and (thus far) ignored by the oba who had invited us in the first place, it made all the sense in the world that we should accept Velloin’s invitation. But I did not like the idea, and regretted that I saw no acceptable way to beg off.

  On the contrary, our plans rapidly expanded from a single meal to a full day in the man’s company, exploring the lower town of Atuyem before riding back down to Nsebu. As we left the royal compound, Natalie making light conversation with M. Velloin, I seized hold of Mr. Wilker’s sleeve and dragged him back, so that I might hiss my words without being overheard.

  “How could you put us in the company of such a man? And with no warning? You know quite well my feelings on the matter.” I glared at M. Velloin’s broad back.

  Mr. Wilker freed his sleeve from my grasp with an irritated jerk. “I did so because he can be useful to us. Or would you rather kill more dragons, for the purpose of our tests?”

  We had passed under the arch of an unfamiliar gate and out into a street, whose surface was not so well maintained as the one that led us in. At Mr. Wilker’s words, I stumbled over an uneven bit of stone. We had agreed, when this expedition was first planned, that one of our tasks must be to test Rossi’s preservation process on the bones of an Erigan dragon, to determine whether it was effective only on Vystrani rock-wyrms, or for a broader selection of species. And for that purpose, indeed, we required a dead dragon.

  “Then—” M. Velloin’s back had taken
on an entirely different cast in my eyes. “You mean to steal his kills.”

  “Once he has his trophies, there’s no reason for him to deny us the rest. We can tell him we’re trying to make plaster casts of the bones; it’s a reasonable enough excuse for us to take them.”

  Plaster casts had, before the preservation method, been the only means of keeping dragon bones for study. It did not work very well—encased in plaster, the bones deteriorated more rapidly than usual—but Elia Paradino had improved the process a bit. Mr. Wilker was right; it made a very good cover.

  Still, I sighed. “It will require us to be in his company. Quite apart from his hobby, I do not like the man.”

  “No one is asking you to marry him, Mrs. Camherst.”

  Three years had passed; my grief for Jacob was no longer an open wound. Or so I had thought. But I was tired, and vexed with M. Velloin, and above all, I was on an expedition to study dragons. Bayembe was a vastly different place from Vystrana, but the fact remained that it had been on such an expedition that Jacob died.

  This time I did not stumble. I stopped entirely. Only for a moment—then I forced my legs into motion once more—but it was enough to tell Mr. Wilker he had erred. He stopped, too, and turned to face me, so that I had to halt again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and I think it was not the heat alone that had flushed his face red. “I—I didn’t mean that as a jab. It was supposed to be facetious, but I didn’t think before I said it. Please, forgive me.”

  I wondered, irrelevantly, how long our relative harmony would have to last before I stopped reflecting on the change from our early interactions. But for that harmony to last, I had to do my part, which did not consist of standing in the middle of a street reflecting on such things, while Mr. Wilker’s apology hung in the air. “Forgiven,” I said. “I did not take it as an insult; it simply—well. You understand.”

  We had, of course, attracted the attention of the other two, who had paused in the street up ahead. “Is everything all right?” M. Velloin called.

  “Yes, quite,” I called back, and offered Mr. Wilker a reassuring smile before going to join the others.

  * * *

  Dinner at Point Miriam was oddly disorienting. The heat and scent of the air were inescapably Erigan, but the house in which we dined had been built according to the standards of my people. The table was laid as if it stood in some lady’s country house, and beforehand we enjoyed hors d’œuvre in a drawing room that might have been a small piece of Scirland transplanted onto foreign soil. The effect might have been intended to reassure, but it made for a sweltering evening; our architecture is not suited to the climate.

  The composition of the group was quite as unbalanced as Lord Hilford’s snare-setting meal had been. There were only three ladies in attendance: myself, Natalie, and a married woman from Uaine named Erynn Anne Kerwin, who was there with her husband.

  “Such a relief it is to have other women here,” she said upon our introduction. Her accent was much like Mr. Wilker’s, but stronger. Uaine, lying as it does to the north of Niddey, is the most isolated of the large Scirling Isles; it is isolated even now, and was more so then.

  “I take it you don’t find much company among the Yembe,” I said, which was perhaps not the most politic response.

  Mrs. Kerwin did not take offense. “Oh, I spend a mort of time with them—but that’s work, not leisure.”

  Despite my having come to Eriga for work of my own, I had assumed Mrs. Kerwin was here as an adjunct to her husband, whose profession I had not yet determined. Embarrassment leashed my tongue, and so it fell to Natalie to say, “What work is it that you do?”

  “We’re sheluhim,” Mrs. Kerwin said.

  Embarrassment had put a leash on my tongue; startlement took it off again. “What—do you mean to say that you’re proselytizing to the Yembe?”

  “That is precisely what we’re doing,” Mrs. Kerwin said. If her warm smile had cooled somewhat, I could not blame her. “We have brought the sacred fire of the Temple to this land, and will carry it to all peoples. Already a number of men and women here have chosen to become the Chosen of the Lord, following His laws. Sure I am that number will only grow.”

  It was unfair of me to be so startled. Sheluhim have been traveling all over the world since men invented ships safe enough not to drown their passengers in the ocean; it was only that I had never encountered any myself. There were a few Bayitist sheluhim in Scirland, trying in vain to convert Magisterials back to the old ways, but the proselytizers of both major sects devoted the bulk of their efforts to lands where Segulism held no sway in any form.

  Mrs. Kerwin was almost certainly a Temple-worshipper herself, being from Uaine. The Magisterial reforms in Scirland never penetrated that island very deeply. I had dealt with her co-religionists in Vystrana, but theirs was a rural theology, not the sort that sought to convert others to its way. And no Magisterial sheluhim had yet taken it into their heads to convert the Vystrani.

  This, however, was a land of heathens, and with the Scirling presence, prime territory for such efforts. I should have expected to find her kind here.

  “Erigans worship their ancestors, do they not?” Natalie asked. She and I had both done a certain amount of reading during the preparation for this expedition, but very little of it had been devoted to religion.

  “Together with idols of nature, yes,” Mrs. Kerwin said primly. “They are entirely lacking in scriptures of any sort, and of course what few of the laws they follow, they follow by accident.”

  Had I known more about Erigan religion at the time, I would have pointed out to her that what they lacked were scriptures of our sort. At the time, however, I was both ignorant of such matters and distracted by a different thought. “Have you gone down into the swamp at all?”

  Mrs. Kerwin looked horrified. “You mean into Mouleen? Certainly not. We wouldn’t survive two days there. Wild beasts, fevers, not to mention the natives—”

  “I take it they don’t welcome visitors?”

  “They have the Ikwunde on one side and the Yembe on the other.” M. Velloin had overheard our conversation. “And the Satalu lurking in the wings, hoping to snatch up Bayembe for themselves—though to what extent the Moulish are aware of that, who can say? They trade occasionally with the peasants along their borders, forest ivory for food, that sort of thing. But those who go deeper into the swamp never return.”

  I wanted to shift away from Velloin, but he was clearly somewhat informed about the region, and I could not pass up the chance to ask. “There are stories about the Moulish, that say they worship dragons as the Draconeans once did.”

  We were gathering quite the audience now: not only Mr. Wilker, but Sir Adam Tarwin-Bannithot (who was then the governor of the Nsebu colony) and a man whose sober dress and Uaine accent marked him as Mr. Kerwin. The latter said to me, “I take it you’ve read the work of Yves de Maucheret.”

  By M. Velloin’s expression, so had he. “Yes,” I said, “though he was writing two hundred years ago, and not everything he put to paper has proved to be true. Still, it’s enough to intrigue the mind, isn’t it? Dragons rarely tolerate human company well, and Moulish swamp-wyrms are not known to be the most approachable of breeds. If the Moulish do indeed worship them, do they do so from afar? Or are they able to partially tame them, as the Draconeans are said to have done?”

  “They are nothing like the Draconeans,” Mr. Kerwin said, dismissing the notion with a wave of his hand. “That ancient civilization—well, it was a civilization. They built great temples, developed art, administered territory across multiple continents. The Moulish bang on drums and run about naked. They may worship dragons, but there is no reason to suppose their manner of doing so bears any resemblance to Draconean religion.”

  “And yet, it would be closer to Draconean religion than any other example we have before us today,” I said. “Do not ethnologists use modern evidence to analogize to the past? We might learn a great deal from the Moulish,
regardless of their musical traditions and sartorial habits.”

  I spoke with the assurance of a young woman who thought her experience with natural history and ad hoc education in other subjects more than qualified her to hold forth on topics she knew nothing about at all. The truth is that any such comparison is far more complicated and doubtful than I presented it that evening; but it is also true that no one in my audience knew any more about it than I did, and most of them knew less. My assertion was therefore allowed to stand unchallenged.

  For those who wonder why I showed such interest in the Draconeans, whose works I dismissed in the previous volume of my memoirs, do not think this meant I had undergone any great change of heart in the intervening years. I still at that time cared little for their ruined temples and stylized art; my interest was in living things, not dead civilizations. But as I said to Mr. Kerwin, the Draconeans were said to have tamed dragons. That was of great interest to me indeed, and so if Moulish religion was able to shed any light on the matter, then it, too, fell within the sphere of my attention.

  Of course, there was the minor problem of the Green Hell being one of the deadliest regions on earth. But my interest was, that evening, still academic; my purpose in coming to Bayembe was to study the dragons of their arid plains. Moulish swamp-wyrms were a minor note—in much the same way that a fisherman’s lure is a minor note in the world of a fish.

  Sir Adam said, “I wouldn’t waste much time or thought on the Moulish, if I were you. Whatever you might learn regarding dragons cannot possibly be worth the risk, and as for learning anything about humans—feh. That swamp is a backwater, in every sense of the word.”

  “A backwater which is presently protecting this country, is it not?” I said.