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

by Marie Brennan

  He shrugged. “For now.”

  A brief silence fell, broken a moment later by Sir Adam’s uncomfortable cough and too-loud amendment. “Besides, you won’t get into the swamp, not without the oba’s permission. And he won’t give it.”

  There is nothing in the world so enticing as that which you have been told you may not have. “Whyever not?” I asked. “Or rather, why should I need his leave in the first place? Mouleen is an independent state, is it not?”

  Mr. Kerwin muttered something about not dignifying that festering pit with the name of “state,” but my attention was on Sir Adam. He said, “At times like these, with the Ikwunde interfering with our work at the rivers, we must keep a careful eye on our borders.”

  Which was not much of an answer, but it was all that I could get from him, in the wake of that momentary lapse. Sir Adam had taken a bit too enthusiastically to the prescribed regimen of gin and tonic, with which we all held the malarial fevers at bay, and had said something he should not. Why would the Green Hell cease to protect Bayembe? Were the Moulish looking to ally themselves with the Ikwunde on the other side?

  I did not know, but Sir Adam’s slip had made me wary. I wanted only to study dragons, but first I had to get past the humans, and I feared they might be a greater danger to me than all the fevers of the tropics combined.

  SEVEN

  A certain taboo—The agban—Galinke—Matters of lineage—Natalie joins me—Making use of M. Velloin

  I must warn my male readers that I am about to address a topic which may be deeply discomfiting to them, taboo as it is for their sex.

  When I awoke a few mornings later, I found my bedding stained with traces of blood. I clicked my tongue in annoyance; caught up in our affairs, I had not monitored the days as closely as I should, and my menses have never been the most reliable besides. But this was, I thought, only a minor irritation. I wet a cloth, washed myself clean, changed into a fresh chemise, and called for a servant.

  When she came, I gestured at the stained bedding, washcloth, and chemise, indicating that she should take them away to be laundered. “And I will need rags,” I said—as yet blissfully unaware that in many parts of the world, rags are not employed, but other, less comfortable alternatives.

  (Indeed, for those young ladies who wish to follow in my footsteps, I must warn you that this inconvenient fact of our sex is one of the most vexatious aspects of being a lady adventurer. Unless you contrive to suppress your courses through pregnancy—which, of course, imposes its own limitations—or through strenuous exercise and privation, you will have to handle this necessity in many circumstances that are far from ideal. Including some, I fear, where the smell of fresh blood is a positive danger.)

  Returning to the moment at hand: the serving girl’s eyes widened at the sight of the stains, and she darted out of the room almost before I had finished speaking. So rapidly, in fact, that she left the laundry behind. I sighed, wondering if the fault was with my imperfect command of the language, or whether she—being prepubescent—was the sort of silly nit who bolted at the sight of blood. Well, I thought, if it came to that, I could sacrifice the rest of the stained chemise for rags.

  The girl returned with equal speed, though, this time accompanied by a much older woman, who went to gather up the bedding and other articles. The girl herself approached me and draped an undyed robe over a bench, indicating shyly that I should wear it.

  I saw no rags. “Thank you,” I said, “but I have my own clothing; I only need something to stanch the bleeding.”

  The older woman—who was, by the look of her, well past the age of bearing herself—said, “Put it on; Lebuya will take you to the agban.”

  This was not a word I had encountered, either in my studies or my time there. “Agban?” I repeated.

  She indicated the soiled items. “Until you are clean.”

  My first thought was that she meant a bath. But I knew the word for “bath”—that was where Natalie had gone, while I worked on rousing myself to wakefulness—and had she meant such a thing, would she not have said “where you can wash yourself”? Suspicious, I asked, “How long will that be?”

  By her reaction, I might have been as young and ignorant as Lebuya, needing an older female relative to explain the basic matters of womanhood to me. “Seven days.”

  I recoiled. She did not mean blood on my skin; she meant impurity. It was not a topic that concerned us much in the relaxed Magisterial traditions of Scirland, and although I had encountered traces of it in the Temple-worshipping environs of Vystrana, many of the finer points of religious doctrine there had been whittled down to accommodate local practicality. The women of Drustanev could not afford to seclude themselves for the duration of their “impurity.”

  But I had not expected to find evidence of the Kerwins’ success here in the oba’s own palace. Startled, I said, “I didn’t realize you were Bayitist.”

  She frowned at me. “What is Bayitist? You are unclean; you cannot stay out here, where you will pollute others. Go with Lebuya. She will show you.”

  No, this was not the work of the sheluhim; it had the sound of a standard practice, and surely I would have heard if the entire ruling class of Bayembe had converted to Segulism. But I could no more afford to lose a week of my life than the women of Drustanev could. (Or at least I was not willing to; that, I think, is the more accurate statement, though it benefits from hindsight.) I planted my hands on my hips, drew myself up like a proper Scirling lady—taking Judith and my mother as models—and said, “Nonsense. I have gone about in this condition once a month for my entire adult life, and never polluted anyone.”

  The old woman made a gesture I thought was probably a ward against evil and said, “Then the oba will throw you into the Green Hell—if he does not have you executed for witchcraft.” She picked up her bundle and left.

  My certainty that the oba would do no such thing faded when I looked at Lebuya, who would not meet my eyes. She had avoided them, as she avoided touching me, placing the robe on a bench rather than handing it to me directly. She had brought an old woman to take away the stained fabric—someone past her own bearing days. The implications I saw there might be my own invention, but I did not doubt that some manner of significance clung to those actions. Whether the oba punished me or not, I would not be able to carry on my work as usual; it would be all around the palace before lunchtime that I was unclean, polluting everything around me. The consequences would damage us far more than a week of enforced idleness would.

  Had we stayed at our hotel down in Nsebu, or better still among the Scirlings at Point Miriam, I might have avoided this difficulty. Since I had yet to see any particular benefit from being housed in the royal palace instead, it was with no little annoyance that I picked up the robe and put it on. The thing was shapeless cotton, draping to the floor, the sleeves long enough to cover my hands; there was even a hood for me to draw up over my impure face. Lebuya produced a pair of rough sandals and set them on the floor for me to don. I wondered if someone would come into the room after I was gone to purify it, and thought they probably would.

  Natalie chose that moment to return, saving me the confrontation of insisting that, impure or not, I would go nowhere until I spoke with her. Her eyebrows rose at my explanation, and when I was done, she sighed. “Unless there’s an exemption for unmarried women—which I doubt—then I’ll be taking your place in this agban of theirs just as you’re ready to leave. How can we be expected to get any work done, if one or the other of us is locked away two weeks out of every four?”

  It would not be that much time—as I said before, my courses have never been fully regular—but I brooded upon Natalie’s question as I followed Lebuya out. We might escape the restriction by going into the bush for an extended period of time; even then, though, we would need porters to assist us, and what if they rebelled against serving impure women? Perhaps we could hire foreigners from the docks. But they would not know the bush as the locals did, and lack of e
xperience on that front might prove very dangerous.

  With the hood blocking the edges of my vision, I could not see our path clearly, but it was not one I had traced before. We left the women’s wing by what I suspected was a back entrance, passed through a low wall—not leaving the palace, but entering a new region of it—and came at last to a modest building that seemed almost like an ordinary house.

  I did not need Lebuya’s pointing arm to tell me where I was to go. This, obviously, was the agban: the prison for menstruating women. And I was to remain here for seven days? I should have brought my notebooks—presuming, of course, that they would not be irredeemably contaminated by such use.

  Sighing, I muttered a thank-you to Lebuya that was not very heartfelt, and went inside.

  The interior was pleasant and not at all prisonlike. It was, after all, where palace women spent one week out of every four; I suspect servants had their own agban elsewhere, as neither Natalie nor I ever saw one there. The front room had benches and hooks along the walls, one of which held a robe like mine, with the sandals beneath. I took this as a sign that I could discard my own. Thus freed, I ventured onward to a small courtyard, where a woman I judged to be around my age lay on a carpet beneath a tree, reading a book.

  She looked up as I entered and smiled, showing only a little surprise. “I have not seen you before. You must be one of the new guests, those who came to study dragons.”

  “Isabella Camherst,” I said. “I’m afraid you have the advantage of me.”

  The woman rose, laying her book aside, and touched her heart in respect. “Galinke n Oforiro Dara. I’m glad you came. It’s pleasant to have time to read, but after a day or two I find myself eager for company.”

  “We’re allowed to have things with us, then?” I said, gesturing at her book. “I was afraid they would burn my notes if I brought them here.”

  Galinke laughed. “No, no. We would go out of our minds if we couldn’t have distraction! But why would you work, when you could relax?”

  I joined her under the tree and discovered that, to Yembe women, and those of other Erigan peoples who engaged in similar practices, seclusion was not an exile, but more in the nature of a holiday. The other three weeks out of the month, they were obligated to work at various tasks—not the backbreaking labor of the peasant in the field, certainly, but weaving, child rearing, and other duties suitable to highborn women. When their impurity sent them to the agban, they could enjoy complete leisure. (They could also enjoy a respite from their husbands, which for some of them was even more valuable.)

  Galinke herself was not married. “For now,” she said with a sigh. “My brother would make a match for me, but he has to wait, in case it ends up being necessary for me to wed the mansa.”

  “The mansa?” I repeated, sure I had misunderstood the Yembe sentence. That was the title given to the Talu leader.

  She nodded. “He has one wife from each of his subject peoples—as our ancestors had to do, when Bayembe was young. Even now, my brother has a Mebenye wife and a Sagao one, to keep the different peoples happy.”

  Had she been Scirling, I never would have blundered in such fashion. We trace descent through the paternal line, and pass on family names in the same manner; the Satalu do likewise, as do societies in many parts of the world. But the Yembe and the other peoples of their country are matrilineal: individuals belong to their mother’s lineage, not their father’s, and inheritance therefore passes from a man to his sister’s son.

  Galinke’s lineage name was Oforiro Dara, which is to say she came from the Oforiro branch of the Dara line, as her mother had before her. Her mother, clearly, had been a lesser wife of the man who wed the mother of the current oba of Bayembe—whose lineage was Rumeme Gbori—and Galinke herself was the oba’s half sister.

  (I say “clearly” as if understanding came to me in an elegant flash. It didn’t; I sat openmouthed for a solid minute while my brain struggled to bend itself around a system of kinship and inheritance utterly foreign to my way of thinking.)

  “But—” I said, still working through the implications. “If you wed the mansa, would that not mean your children would have a claim on Bayembe?” The feud between Talu and Bayembe was an old one, as old and as bitter as that between Thiessin and Eiverheim, and it had only grown worse in recent decades. Anthiopean influence to the north had encouraged several Erigan kingdoms to band together against them, though their Union had swiftly transformed into something much more like an empire, with the others in a client-state role to the mansa of Talu.

  Over time the Union had begun to intimidate their neighbours into joining them: a less violent approach to conquest than the Ikwunde used, but still not very appealing. Getting a claim on the rule of Bayembe would be exactly the sort of tactic the mansa might use, and I did not think the oba would be so foolish as to allow it.

  “How could he have a claim?” Galinke asked, politely baffled at the wrongheadedness of my question. “I’m not Rumeme Gbori. Only our sister Nsami’s sons can inherit.”

  Nsami, presumably, being the oba’s full sister. Give me dragons any day; I understand their ways far better than those of my fellow human beings. We make our world much too complicated.

  “I thought your brother detested the mansa,” I said, then winced. “Forgive me. This is turning into gossip, and I have no business talking of such things.”

  Galinke waved my apology away. “What else does anyone in this place talk about, other than politics? You are right. But a wise ruler must be prepared to do what is necessary for the well-being of his people. Even if that means giving his sister to a man he detests.”

  Or inviting foreign soldiers to come defend his land—but I kept a better leash on my tongue this time, and did not say it. Still, the entire point of Bayembe’s alliance with Scirland was to make sure this land would not have to give in to Talu pressure, just to defend themselves against the Ikwunde. If the oba was keeping Galinke in reserve, it suggested that he was less than entirely confident in our aid … or less than entirely pleased with it.

  Galinke seemed matter-of-fact about the possibility of marrying the enemy, which is more than I could have managed in her place. I said as much to her, and she shrugged, looking philosophical. “Such trades are common. Not with the Satalu, perhaps, but others, to join one lineage to another. I have always known my marriage would be arranged.”

  I squelched the urge to tell her I had helped Natalie flee Scirland, that she might avoid any marriage at all. “I hope the good efforts of our soldiers can at least spare you that particular fate,” I said. “I have heard rumours that the Ikwunde are moving their forces toward the rivers, which means we may have a chance to prove our use quite soon.”

  The words were as much a test as conversation, and I think Galinke knew it. Her full mouth curved in a hint of a smile. “The Ikwunde can never stay still for long,” she said. “No sooner do they digest one meal than they go in search of another.”

  So she, unlike Faj Rawango, was permitted to discuss politics with me. I pressed the advantage. “You are fortunate to have Mouleen defending most of your southern border. I am told that anyone who tries to venture beyond the edge of the swamp is never seen again. Is that why the oba restricts travel there? To protect his people from the Moulish?”

  Galinke laughed. “Few people wish to go there in the first place, except for hunters, sometimes. But my brother must keep a close eye on his borders in these troubled times, until we can build better defenses for them.”

  The only defense we had built thus far was Point Miriam. Were we planning another, or more than one, for points along the border? I had no chance to ask her; a servant entered then with food, and in the course of dealing with that, Galinke turned the conversation so deftly that I did not even notice until hours later.

  I came to know her rather well over the four days we were in the agban together, and liked what I saw. Although we never returned to the specific matter of the Ikwunde, I learned a great deal abo
ut Bayembe politics from our conversations. This I absorbed more out of duty than anything else, for while Galinke seemed to view such things as a puzzle, an engaging challenge for her intellect, I could not bring myself to enjoy them in the same way. I had not been raised to such a life, and was grateful indeed for my freedom.

  In retrospect, I wonder about those conversations. Galinke had not been forbidden to discuss politics; had she been instructed to do so? Certainly my time with her changed my view of the alliance between Scirland and Bayembe, which until that point had largely been shaped by the news-sheets of Falchester. Those sheets spoke glowingly of economic opportunity, and disapprovingly of the rapacious behaviour of Bayembe’s neighbours, from which we were nobly protecting them.

  This was not inaccurate, but it lacked nuance. From Galinke, I began to understand the unequal nature of the “alliance”—which is why I scar it with quotation marks—and the extent to which that economic opportunity favored Scirland. She spoke obliquely, of course; at no point did she tell me outright that her half brother resented the dependent condition of Bayembe, which he had inherited from his predecessor, the last oba of the previous royal lineage (and a less than competent ruler). Nor did she spill details of our government’s plans, though I think she knew them. She did not even say that the aggressive movements of the Ikwunde and the Talu Union were driven by a desire to build strength against Anthiopean influence; that, I think, is something she did not think of consciously, as both nations were the enemy to her, and she was uninclined to view their behaviour in a tolerant light. Galinke merely talked, in the delicate and subtle manner of a well-trained courtier, and the ship of my thinking heeled slowly over to a new course.

  Despite all the trouble that came of it, I thank her for that work, whether it was carried out on her brother’s orders or not. Had she not laid those foundations in my mind, I might have failed to grasp the significance of later hints, and the course of history might have been very different.