Within the Sanctuary of Wings

by Marie Brennan

  I caught myself thinking of the figure as “it,” and shook my head. “Truly,” I murmured under my breath, “I must contrive a way to see some male Draconeans.” Thus far I had no data on sexual dimorphism among their kind. Certainly the sisters had no breasts, which was only to be expected among organisms that laid eggs. (Monotremes notwithstanding—that is to say, the platypus and certain kinds of echidna—mammals are not generally oviparous.) There might well be some males upstairs, but I did not quite dare to go back up and search for them.

  Indeed, I should have departed already. With one last glance about the room, I hurried back down the corridor, my little lamp flickering with my speed.

  When I flung the curtain aside, two Draconeans spun to face me.

  * * *

  Ruzt leapt forward, clapping one hand over my mouth. She needn’t have bothered: by then the instinct to remain quiet was deeply ingrained in me. I sagged in boneless relief, for it was only Ruzt and Zam, not strangers, who had come upon me.

  My relief did not last long.

  Zam wrenched me from Ruzt’s grasp, snarling. I had seen the sisters confront their neighbours who came begging; I had never seen one in a true fury before. Her ruff stood up high, her wings spread, and her lips peeled back to expose her formidable teeth. The words she spat at her sister and myself were too gutteral for me to have any hope of making them out, but I could guess at their meaning: she was enraged that I had trespassed upon their holy place.

  My reasoning in entering the temple was sound. But reasoning is of very little use when faced with a sight like that; guilt and fear came down upon me in equal quantities. I could only babble apologies in my broken Draconean: “I think no bad” was the closest I could come to “I meant no harm.” But “I am sorry” came easily to my tongue, for it was a phrase I had used a thousand times before, albeit never with such heartfelt fervor.

  Zam was not mollified. She divided her snarls between me and her sister. When Ruzt stepped forward, hands outstretched, Zam hurled me toward the altar. I had seen her lift heavy sacks of feed, but had never been on the receiving end of that strength before. I was briefly airborne; then I struck a bench and went sprawling. Instinct told me to stay down, to appear as contrite and unthreatening as possible. Zam disliked me; Zam had feared me from the start. Now she could kill me with one swipe of those claws.

  When she seized me again, all the restraint in the world could not keep me from yelping. Zam dragged me to my feet and shoved me forward, in the manner of one marching a prisoner to execution. But a swift, terrified glance showed me that Ruzt was re-lighting my fallen lamp and following along behind. Surely I could trust her to protect me, if Zam had decided upon my death? I did not know. Perhaps she had concluded that this enterprise was a failure, that they never should have troubled themselves to rescue a human from the snow. Our legends and Scripture were filled with tales of murderous Draconean rituals, and a part of me expected to be the victim of one now.

  Zam shoved me through the opening to the left of the altar. I did not expect stairs, and half fell down several of them, catching myself against the walls. When Ruzt passed through the curtain, providing a pittance of light, I saw the path led downward in a spiral much like the one I had followed upstairs. More hibernating Draconeans? The ruler of this place, who would decide my fate?

  Neither. Reaching the bottom of the steps, I stumbled into another small room, this one painted with murals in a much older style.

  Zam took me by the scruff of the neck and spat out the first intelligible word I’d heard from her that day. “Look.”

  I would have looked even if she had not forced me to. The murals were crude imitations of those I had seen in the Watchers’ Heart, but I could follow their meaning clearly enough. On the right, which was the customary beginning for Draconean sequences, adoring humans knelt at the feet of a splendid dragon-headed figure, who dispensed livestock, baskets of grain, and other largess to its subjects. But this was soon followed by scenes of strife: layered bands in which humans turned their backs on pleading Draconeans and set fire to buildings or killed cattle in pointless slaughter. Warfare ensued.

  “This is the past,” I whispered, heedless of which language I was speaking. It might have been Akhian; it might have been Scirling. I cannot recall. “The past as you remember it.” Their account differed from ours rather a lot: Segulist and Amaneen scriptures tell of tyrannical rulers who lived in decadence and oppressed their subjects until the Lord’s prophets led the people to overthrow them. Stories in other parts of the world have their own variations on that theme.

  The central image dominating the back wall also have parallels in our tales, though I had never thought to connect my own evidence to them. Human figures, now grown monstrously large, poured black liquid over a field of eggs. Inside the shells, tiny Draconean figures in postures of agony turned to grey stone.

  My knees gave out from beneath me, and Zam let me fall.

  The eggs on Rahuahane. I had wondered at the process that petrified them, turning the albumen to the gem we call firestone. We found that gem in so many places worldwide, often associated with Draconean sites … I had not thought it through, because my attention was on the disintegrated embryos, not the matrix that once held them. Why so much firestone? Why so many petrified eggs?

  Because ancient humans had poisoned them. They had found some compound that, when poured over the eggs, induced a fatal change of state. It was the slaughter of the children from Scripture, the punishment the Lord levied upon those ancient tyrants for their sins. It was the Keongan hero Lo’alama’oiri, travelling to the cursed isle of Rahuahane and turning the naka’i to stone.

  We had done that—we humans. Our ancestors had massacred unborn Draconeans in untold numbers.

  Zam left me there on the floor. It was by my own will that I turned to see the end of the tale: weeping Draconeans, murdered by humans, or fleeing in terror. Retreating into mountains, hiding. The Sanctuary in which they now resided.

  No wonder Zam feared me. No wonder the sisters were so determined to keep me out of sight. I was the monster of their myths: a human being, a vicious, merciless beast. Never mind that they towered thirty centimeters over me and had teeth and claws I could not hope to match. We fear poisonous snakes a hundredth our size, for they can kill us in an instant.

  Were the Draconeans’ eggs hidden somewhere in this temple? Did Zam think I had come here to turn them to stone?

  I had to choose my words with exquisite care. I could not let my distress hamper my speech; Zam was clearly in no mood to wait while misunderstandings were sorted out. Three breaths were necessary to steady me: then, still kneeling upon the floor, I turned to face the two sisters.

  “I am sorry for this,” I said, indicating the story upon the walls. Now was not the time to quibble over historical interpretation, to debate whether the ancient Draconeans had been loving rulers or hideous tyrants. We had slaughtered their children; I was indeed sorry for that. “We now—humans—” I had to use the Akhian word; I did not know what the Draconeans called us. Likely nothing flattering. “We do not know about this—about you. We have forgotten. I do not want to hurt you. No one wants to hurt you.”

  That last was only true because no one knew about them, not as anything other than vague ice demons defending the borders of the Sanctuary. I could not blame them for hiding.

  THE DOWNFALL

  I looked at Ruzt. Zam could not be reasoned with right now; I could barely speak with her, given the archaic cast of the words I had learned. But Ruzt, I thought, was the mastermind of this entire scheme, the decision to hide me away and teach me to speak. “Why?” I asked. “If I am this—” I gestured at the walls again. “Why did you take me into your house?”

  It was the question I had been wanting to ask them since I awoke. I had avoided it until now because I did not trust my command of the language to carry me through so complex a matter; but now I felt I had no choice.

  Ruzt, I think, had delayed fo
r the same reason. Now she paused, clearly choosing her own words carefully, so that I would understand. Finally she pointed at the leftmost panels and said, “For a long time we have run. Humans come, and we hide. Humans come again, and we hide again. Now we are here—where else can we go? Are there others? Like us?”

  Isolated in the Sanctuary for who knew how many years, decades, centuries … if there were other enclaves, they would long since have lost contact with them. My answer came in a whisper. “I do not think so.”

  Ruzt bowed her head. “As we thought. Then—we are the last. When humans try to come here, we defend ourselves. One here, two there. Not many. But we watch, because what if one day there are more?”

  It would happen, inevitably. The Sanctuary was too inaccessible to be worth settlement by anyone who did not want to hide—but sooner or later a human would escape their border guardians and bring tales of dragon-headed beasts to the outside world. Most would laugh at the notion, but not all … and then more would come, and more, until someone showed up with an army. And then the Draconeans would have nowhere left to run.

  The sisters had saved my life as an experiment. To see whether a human could be reasoned with.

  I must, on peril of my life, be reasonable.

  “Humans will find you,” I said, employing the word I had heard her use. It was not related to its Akhian counterpart, and I wondered what root it derived from. “Murderer,” perhaps. “You are right. I wish it were not so, but…” Explaning the Aerial War was beyond me. Ruzt did not need it, though; she nodded in resignation.

  Slowly, keeping Zam in my peripheral vision, I stood. She still watched me with hostility, but made no move to strike. She had brought me here to confront me with my people’s crimes, not to kill me.

  Addressing both her and Ruzt, I said, “You have my help. What can I do?”

  PART FOUR

  In which matters become exceedingly complicated

  FOURTEEN

  Plans for the future—How I was found—A change of perspective—Caring for Draconean eggs—Origin stories—Politics

  Once the last of the scattered beasts had been collected and I returned with Ruzt and Zam to Imsali, I had cause to be glad that my yak-herding vocabulary was by that point quite well developed. We no longer devoted more than the bare minimum of our attention to such chores; all our efforts were bent to a different set of topics.

  Ruzt’s plan, as she explained it to me, was frighteningly simple—and I was certain it was her plan, though she always spoke of it in the plural, as something she, Kahhe, and Zam had developed together. They would keep me concealed until spring, when the hibernating Draconeans awoke … and then they would reveal my presence, using me as proof that humans were reasonable creatures with whom the Draconeans could attain peace. Between now and then, my chief task was to prepare for the discussions that would ensue.

  “What if I am not ready by then?” I asked.

  Zam glared at me. Kahhe laughed, though she did not sound amused, and said, “Be ready.”

  It would not do to keep me hidden longer, even if I were insufficiently prepared. The sisters had been able to manage it before because everyone else in the village was making arrangements for their winter sleep; the day they left me with Zam was the day they went out and persuaded the villagers who had drawn the short straw that year to let the three of them take over the task of caring for the herds. (I doubt it took much persuasion. Remaining awake was considered an unpleasant duty, and while Imsali settled this by the democratic means of drawing lots, I later heard that other villages fobbed it off on whomever was least popular among them. Fortunately there was a law that said no one could take on that burden two years running, as winter wakefulness was considered detrimental to their health.)

  But once the Draconeans awoke, I could not long remain concealed in the sisters’ house. I must sally forth, ready or not, and represent my entire species to those who dwelt within the Sanctuary of Wings.

  For it was not only myself who called that place the Sanctuary. That was the Draconean name for it as well: in their tongue, Sratar Vrey, the Sanctuary of Wings. “Anevrai,” I said to Ruzt when she taught me the phrase. “That is how we have been saying the name of your people—at least, we believe that word refers to your people. But you do not call yourselves that.” The word I had learned for the Draconeans was mranin, which clearly came from a different root.

  “It is a very old word,” she said. “For those who ruled in ancient days. We have not gone by that name since the Downfall.” She paused, remembering. “You said that to me once before, didn’t you? When you woke up. I was so nervous—I didn’t even recognize it. You pronounced it so strangely.”

  I could not conceive of what that must have been like: rescuing a dying monster in the hope that she might prove a friend. “How did you come upon me? I have been meaning to ask for ages, only I did not know how.”

  This was something of a fib. I could have managed, if I were determined—as I was managing now, for you must not imagine that my conversations were as simple and straightforward as I am presenting them here. Circumlocution and mime were still my frequent tools, along with my charcoal drawings, whenever I could not come directly at my target. I had allowed the difficulty to turn aside my curiosity because thinking about that day would remind me of too many things I did not wish to dwell on: the avalanche, and the unknown fate of my companions.

  But I had a better heart for it now, and so I asked. Ruzt said, “We are watchers, the three of us—we look for signs of humans at our borders.”

  “Do you cross the mountains?” I said, intrigued.

  “We used to. We stopped years ago.”

  The Nying had pushed almost to the limits of possible habitation, short of entering the Sanctuary itself. Patrolling outside the ring of mountains risked beginning the confrontation the Draconeans had striven so long to avoid. “But you saw me?”

  “We saw two humans,” she said. “Up there.” I followed her pointing claw to the col; the day was sunny and nearly cloudless, which made it look only a short stroll away. Tom and I had ventured a little distance to the west when we first stepped out, so as to look down into the valley beyond. Likely it was the two of us whom Ruzt saw.

  But a great deal of time had passed between that moment and when I stumbled half dead down the western slope, not to mention a storm. “Were you watching us dig?” Even though the sisters were now my friends—two of them, at least; I was not certain I should count Zam as such—the thought of them spying on us from concealment was unsettling.

  Ruzt denied it. “Zam insisted that we collect our weapons first. And we argued. As we were climbing, the mountain came down, and she said you must all be dead. But we agreed to search before we gave up.”

  “I was very lucky that you did,” I murmured. “I should certainly have died otherwise.” At no point had the sisters carried weapons in my sight. Where did they keep them? What did they arm themselves with? Not firearms, I suspected; I had observed nothing in the Sanctuary that led me to believe the Draconeans had the technology to manufacture anything so complex. Bows and arrows? Swords? I was surprised Zam had not insisted on arming herself around me, every waking and sleeping minute.

  As it turned out, I was not the only one who had been sitting on her curiosity. “Zabel,” Ruzt said, “why were you there? You do not live here.”

  She did not mean in the Sanctuary. My pictures and attempts at storytelling had made it clear to them that I hailed from a more distant land—and of course they had seen the Nying from a distance, and knew I was no kin of theirs. But I suspected that my rough charcoal attempts to sketch dead Draconeans in the snow had not made much of an impression when I scrawled them on the plastered wall of the yak barn.

  To answer her, I made more drawings, these of a wide array of draconic creatures: everything from drakeflies to desert drakes, swamp-wyrms and tê lêng and fire lizards. “These are all dragons,” I said, giving her the Akhian word, and resuming the co
nversation we had abandoned that night in the cave, when I was examining the wings of a mew. “As all birds are birds, but different kinds. Does that make sense?” Ruzt nodded. “My task is to understand dragons: that is what I do for my people. I have been doing it for most of my life. We believed…” I hesitated, searching for the correct words. “There are many … places in the world, like your temple, but old and fallen down.”

  “Ruined.”

  “Yes, ruined. From the days of the Anevrai. There are pictures of the Anevrai in those places, but we did not understand them; we thought they showed—” Here I floundered, for I lacked the word for “gods.” Rather than fall down the pit of religion, I merely said, “We thought there were no such things, outside of the mind. We did not know you existed.”

  Ruzt pulled back in startlement. “You—did not know we were here?”

  “Not at all. When I woke up and saw you, I was very surprised!” I could laugh about it now, with my delirium and terror so far behind me.

  This was so astonishing to Ruzt that she insisted on sharing it with Kahhe and Zam before we went any further. Zam stared at me, frankly incredulous. “It is true!” I kept insisting. Then the sisters retired for a conference—not, I think, because they wished to keep their discussion secret from me, but because they did not want to slow themselves down for my sake. It was only then that I realized their plan had been predicated on the assumption that humans knew they were in the Sanctuary (or at the very least, that they existed), and had simply not bestirred themselves to wipe the remaining Draconeans out.