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

by Marie Brennan

  Faj Rawango warned us. But he was a servant of the oba, and the oba wanted us to go; he did not warn us very strenuously. We, for our own part, were fools. None of us had experienced a rainy season in Eriga, let alone in the swamps of Mouleen, and Yves de Maucheret, the great Thiessois traveller whose writings were one of our only sources regarding the Green Hell, had not said much about the rain. We shrugged off Faj Rawango’s warnings, loaded our pack donkeys (with a twinge of conscience for the fate to which we were about to subject them), and bade farewell—though we did not know it—to our last dry moments for a long, long time.

  PART THREE

  In which we suffer many privations for the sake of our research, and risk death by a variety of routes

  TWELVE

  An introduction to the swamp—The drakefly—Moulish notions of property—Five visitors—We are tested

  Words, I fear, will again fail me as I attempt to describe the environment into which we now entered. But words are what I have, along with my humble line drawings, and so I must employ my tools as best I can. For it is important that you have a clear sense in your mind of the world I inhabited for the better part of the next seven months, and keep it always in your thoughts as you read of the events that transpired there.

  The first thing and the last, the thing that was there at dawn and still with me at dusk and present all through the day and the night, the thing that, it seemed, could not be escaped for even the briefest moment, was the heat. Even for a creature such as I, who passionately favors warmth over cold, it was oppressive and often foul. The high plateau that makes up much of Bayembe is arid and windy; these factors mitigate the tropical heat. But in the airless, low-lying swamp so aptly called the Green Hell, there was no such happy aid. In a region that humid, sweating brings no relief, for the air is as wet as your skin. You drip with sweat; it pours from your body; if you wipe it away then more comes to replace it in mere seconds, and all you achieve is to dehydrate yourself. So you endure the sweat, long past the point where you would give your left arm for a cool bath, and this becomes your new reality, until you cannot remember what it felt like to be dry, let alone cold.

  I learned to survive it. I cannot tell you how. It is a trick of the mind, one I chanced upon when I reached my absolute limit of endurance and knew there was nothing I could do to relieve my state. Somehow I accepted the situation; I acknowledged it, then laid it to one side and went on with my work. I was still filthy with sweat and longed for a cool breeze, but these things no longer consumed my thoughts. (Natalie and Mr. Wilker, I presume, must have made their own peace with the heat, for neither of them ran mad with a shotgun or tore off their clothes in a futile quest to lessen their suffering.)

  Other matters, however, could not be disposed of through tricks of the mind.

  After the heat, there are the insects. Gnats, mosquitoes, dragonflies, butterflies, black flies, beetles, moths. Ants and spiders; my temperate-dwelling readers cannot imagine the spiders. They are every size, from too small to see to larger than my outstretched hand, and some of them are quite viciously poisonous. Others will lay their eggs below your skin, with predictable and gruesome consequences. The ants, at least, have the courtesy to advertise their hazard; there are some, fully three centimeters in length, that are the most amazing shade of electrical blue. They warn you, very clearly, that you will not be happy if you provoke their bite.

  So your skin crawls not only with sweat but with insects and their effects. In the meanwhile, you stab yourself with thorns and spines if you are so careless as to lay your hand upon a tree; and you will lay your hand, because you will lose your balance on the rough ground, or slip in mud, or tangle your foot with an unseen branch or root. The wounds inflicted by flora and fauna alike risk infection, plus even the slightest hint of blood (and yes, my female readers will be thinking now of the occurrence that sent Natalie and myself to the agban) brings all manner of creepy-crawlies flocking to gorge themselves upon it. Leeches are not even the worst; I came to be quite sanguine about leeches, if I may be forgiven the dreadful pun. Once you overcome your disgust, it is easy to pull them off and cast them away—and this I did more times than I can count.

  But not all the denizens of the forest are unpleasant. Such an environment teems with life not only on the small scale but the large: guenons and mangabeys and colobus monkeys, gorillas and chimpanzees, bongos and duiker and okapi, pygmy hippopotami and forest elephants and night vipers and more birds than a hundred naturalists could hope to catalogue in a year.

  And, of course, dragons—but I will come to them in time.

  Amidst this panoply of life, humans are not easy to find. Had I given in to the impulse I entertained from time to time and gone blundering into the Green Hell without proper guidance—and if I had, through divine Providence or sheer blind luck, managed to survive a month, which I doubt—I still might never have found the Moulish. There are fewer than ten thousand of them in an area more than fifty thousand kilometers square, and they shift camp regularly; it is like looking for a migratory needle in a haystack the likes of which you have never explored.

  With Faj Rawango guiding us, we still could not find the Moulish. We could, however, go to a place where they might find us.

  After leaving Atuyem, we traveled along the Bayembe border a hundred kilometers or so inland, keeping to the savannah, where our progress was easier. But we drew steadily closer to the broken land that fell from the plateau into the swamp, and the Green Hell loomed ever larger to my left; I stared frequently at it while we rode, even to the point of neglecting my other observations. Was it my imagination that supplied a distant sound of drumbeats? That emerald sea seemed an abyss to me, full of dragons and fevers, from which I might never emerge. Perhaps the sound I heard was only the pounding of my own heart.

  But I had committed to this purpose. When at last we came to the region Faj Rawango sought, we bade farewell to the landscape that had been our home these four months, and which had grown almost comfortably familiar, and addressed ourselves to the forest below.

  Our descent from the plateau was swift, but we were still some way above the swamp floor when we came upon a clearing. It had obviously been hacked out of the jungle more than once, but as swiftly as men cut the vegetation away, it grew back. “It is a place of trade,” Faj Rawango said when we asked. “We—the villagers bring their harvest here, and the Moulish bring meat and ivory.”

  “How long will it be until they come?” Mr. Wilker asked.

  Faj Rawango only shrugged. They would come when they came. It was not a formal market, to be held every four days.

  We set up our tents. There is a hazard to having a party with multiple naturalists in it; we occasionally shirk our camp chores in our rush to observe the world around us. (I fear Mr. Wilker and I left Natalie to do much of that work herself.) Myself, I became distracted with only two tent pegs in the ground, because a buzzing, fluttering sound drew my eye to the trees.

  The creature I observed was birdlike but, with my recent taxonomical efforts fresh in my mind, I hesitated to classify it as such. In size it was comparable to a bird, with feathers of a luminescent blue-green, and a drooping bifurcated tail. Its head, however, was distinctly draconic, with a muzzle in place of a beak.

  I had only a moment to observe it; then it spread its wings to fly across the clearing, and I saw the reason for the buzzing sound.

  Like a dragonfly, it had two long pairs of wings.

  I exclaimed in delight, and then had to explain the cause to my companions, who had not seen the creature. Natalie is the one who coined the term “drakefly,” on account of their insectoid wing configuration; Mr. Wilker objected to it, as the animals were clearly not insects of any sort, but it is the common designation even today.

  We were still arguing this point the next morning, when Faj Rawango returned from the forest around our camp. His appearance stopped us short, and set both Natalie and myself to blushing, for he had discarded the wrapped garment of th
e Yembe, and in its place wore nothing more than the briefest of loincloths, held on his hips by a thin cord.

  Dressed that way—I might better term it “undressed”—he seemed an entirely different man. With his Yembe trappings shed, those details which marked him as separate could no longer be overlooked: the smaller stature, the reddish cast to his skin, the leaner facial structure. He did not look like the other peoples who had surrounded us since our arrival.

  Mr. Wilker broke the silence first, clearing his throat. “The iron knives we brought. We’ll be bargaining with those for their assistance?”

  Faj Rawango shook his head. “No bargain. We will give them the knives. They will help us.”

  It sounded like sophistry, but he appeared to believe there was a genuine difference. “Why would they help us,” I asked, “if not in trade? Is there something else we will be offering?”

  He squatted down near us and picked up the pot that had contained our morning porridge. He had, I think, spent his time out in the forest not only changing his apparel, but considering how to explain the situation to us. “This,” he said, holding up the pot, “isn’t yours anymore. Not only yours. It belongs to the camp. Everything you have, you’ll share. And they’ll share with you. This is how they do things. It’s how they survive.”

  I quote him as exactly as I can; if his meaning is not clear, that is because the kind of society he described is foreign beyond the ability of mere words to explain, at least for all who are likely to read this account. The Moulish have few material possessions, and little concern for personal property as most of us see it. Their way of living neither permits it nor derives much benefit from it. To own more than you can carry is folly; you will have to abandon it when the camp moves. But most of the things you own—if the “you” in this instance is Moulish—are easily replaced anyway, so their abandonment is no great loss. To try and hoard more than those around you have is a grave insult to social harmony and, I think, to the spirits; it invites ridicule from your fellows and, if that fails, more aggressive methods of forcing you to share. From this the Moulish get their reputation as thieves, but that word belongs to a different world.

  Faj Rawango explained it as best he could, but we had little basis on which to understand him; and besides which, he was not Moulish—not precisely.

  “My father came from the forest,” he said, when Natalie pressed him for his story. “My mother was a villager in Obichuri. I went into the forest for a time when I was a boy, but came back and studied, and went to Atuyem.”

  He was an intensely private man; it took us months to expand that brief summary into something more like a story, one fleeting detail at a time. I will share the whole of it now, though—as much of it as I ever learned.

  His mother had belonged to one of the Sagao lineages whose traditional role is that of the griot. To this day, I cannot tell you that lineage’s name; Faj Rawango never shared it. Despite the matrilineal nature of Sagao society, he was not welcomed by his mother’s people—likely out of distaste for his Moulish blood—and so he did not claim kinship to them. It was, I think, this same estrangement that sent him into the forest. But he declined to stay there, and upon returning to Bayembe, laid claim to the education that was his right. It did not suffice to make him a griot, but it won him a place in the civil service, and thus he came to us.

  What lineage did his mother’s family serve? Not the royal one, that much I knew. How did he end up with his name? It was neither Sagao nor Moulish; I found out much later that it came from the Mouri, the people dwelling at the northern edge of the forest, who are close kin to the Moulish. I had only fragments of story, never the full tale. He was a man who did not properly exist in any single world, but he seemed to have found a place between them, and that, more than his past, was who he was.

  This, of course, is the judgment of later years. At the time, those fragments made my curiosity itch like mad. We thought we had discovered more, though, the day that a group of five Moulish—two men, one old woman, and two male youths—showed up in our clearing.

  We heard them coming well in advance of their appearance. It is no advantage to be silent when traveling in the Green Hell; animals will attack silent creatures. The Moulish sing and stomp as they go, making themselves sound a far larger party than they are, to scare off beasts that might otherwise trouble them. We were therefore ready when they emerged from the trees.

  All were dressed in the manner of Faj Rawango, in brief strips of barkcloth hung from their hips, and (apart from the occasional ornament) nothing more. The old woman was bare-breasted like the men—a sight that startled me a great deal at first, but soon became routine. (Nudity, I find, rapidly becomes boring when it is not treated as scandalous.) They looked at us with open curiosity, and listened with interest as Faj Rawango explained our purpose there.

  Philologists say that there used to be a Moulish language unrelated to the Sachimbi family, that today only survives in some of their songs and chants. It was fortunate for our purposes, though perhaps tragic in other ways, that it has since been replaced with a language derived, through the Mouri villagers, from Yembe and other Sachimbi tongues native to the region. Because of this, while I had difficulty understanding Faj Rawango, the task of learning this new language was akin to learning Chiavoran when one has studied Thiessois. I could, by extrapolating from that common foundation, expand my vocabulary with good speed, although grammar took more time. For one such as I, with average skill at best on that front, this was a vital advantage.

  I was therefore able to determine that Faj Rawango greeted the two adult men as “Brother,” and the old woman as “Mother.” “I thought he said his mother was a villager,” Natalie whispered to me, confused.

  “It may just be a title of respect,” I whispered back. “The men, though … Mr. Wilker, can you understand him? It sounds like he’s actually claiming to be their relative.”

  Mr. Wilker waved me to silence, the better to listen in, then nodded. “That’s why he wants to join them in their camp. Because he’s their brother. Half brothers, perhaps? They don’t look much alike.”

  Indeed they did not, beyond the simplest resemblance arising from their shared heritage. Faj Rawango gestured at our camp, and as if that were a signal, one of the men and both of the youths began to prowl around, examining our tents and equipment. One of the boys approached the three of us and asked a question I could not understand.

  “Your names,” Faj Rawango said. We obediently gave them, which led to much merriment on all sides; the Moulish had great difficulty pronouncing them, as we did we with theirs. The old woman was Apuesiso; the men were Natchekavu and Eguamiche; the youths were Kisamilewa and Walakpara.

  It was Kisamilewa who had approached us, and his attention soon alighted on the notebook I held. He extended one hand for it, in a manner that struck me as peremptory; but, mindful of Faj Rawango’s comments on property, I handed it over. Not without misgivings: it was a fresh book, not the one in which I had recorded my savannah observations, but it did have my sketch of and notes on the drakefly, as well as sundry less memorable creatures. I did not want to lose them.

  And lose them I did. Kisamilewa smiled broadly and walked off, notebook still in hand. (I did not regain it until nearly a month later.) It was, of course, a test: would we share as we were expected to? My notebook was not the only thing the Moulish claimed that day. Much of it, I realized in time, was not even “sharing” by their own standards; they pushed as far as they could think to go, beyond the boundaries of their usual sense of propriety. We were strangers to them, more so even than the “villagers” (a category encompassing not only Mouri, but every Erigan who is not Moulish), and it was necessary to see what we would do.

  We handed over pots and pans, notebooks and compasses, an entire crate of gin. (A drink they returned as soon as they tried it; the taste was not at all to their liking.) I began to wonder where it would end, and no sooner had the thought but found my answer: Walakpara pointed at m
y blouse.

  I almost did it. The heat was intense—I understood why the Moulish wore so little clothing—and I had been insisting to myself so vehemently that I must cooperate that I almost began to undo my buttons. Mr. Wilker’s gaping stare stopped me, though, as did the understanding that I would be eaten alive by insects if I stripped. (And although I had an undershirt beneath the blouse, would they not ask for that next? Would it end before I was naked?)

  “I’m afraid not,” I said firmly, in Yembe, and vowed to take the consequences.

  My refusal was met, not with anger, but with laughter. Apuesiso said something to the boys; it had the sound of calling them off from the hunt. My blouse stayed on; some of our belongings were restored; and so we packed up and went to join their camp.

  THIRTEEN

  Entering the Green Hell—Moulish society—Hunting and other tasks of daily life—Geguem—Trousers—We go deeper

  Faj Rawango had given us other warnings on the ride to that clearing, chief among which was to show no fear of the forest. The villagers fear it—with good reason; they do not know how to survive in it—and the Moulish scorn them for this; to show fear, therefore, is to mark oneself as a villager, and not welcome.

  Is the swamp frightening? In some ways, yes. I have mentioned the great variety of creatures that live within it; what I have not yet said is that they are invisible to the untrained eye. You hear them on all sides, but the dense growth conceals them, sometimes even when they are scarcely two meters away. It is also as near to trackless as makes no difference. The clearing in which we had camped persists only because the nearby villagers maintain it; Moulish camps vanish almost as soon as their inhabitants depart. I never did acquire the skill by which they find their way, and so following our quintet of guides felt like plunging into an abyss from which I might never return. I had been far from home before, but never had I felt so strongly that I was in a different world entirely. I could only trust to those around me, and hope it would be enough.