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

by Brennan, Marie

  The island was not large. I estimated it to be no more than thirty meters across where it met the cliff face, and less than that in depth. Here and there the rocks projected through the vegetation, but much of it was thickly overgrown, and rivulets from the thin falls behind traced paths through and under the green. It was a beautiful place, and I intended to draw it before I left, but I saw nothing that looked like an answer.

  So I went to the edge of the island, where it projected into the air. My gaze went first to the cliff above, to the place from which I thought Tom, Natalie, and Faj Rawango might be watching. Between the distance and the mist, however, I could not spot them. Next I looked down (with a careful grip on a stone to make certain vertigo did not send me over), but there was no hope of seeing Yeyuama. He should be watching for me, though, and we had arranged to meet by a particular large and identifiable tree.

  I did, however, see something else.

  There was movement in the water below that was not turbulence from the falls. It moved crossways to that turbulence, in a smooth and sinuous curve, shifting as I watched. The curve was not large relative to the lake as a whole but, measured against the bank, must have been at least ten meters long. It reminded me of nothing so much as a serpent I had seen eeling through the muddy, still waters of the swamp.

  Serpent. Sea-serpent. Dragon.

  Heedless of my lofty perch, I dropped to my knees, then to my stomach, so I could lean out in greater safety and get a better view. The movement I had been watching faded—dove deeper, perhaps?—but there was more to the south. A second disturbance. Watching, scarcely daring to blink, I counted three in all, that I could be certain were distinct from one another; there might have been more.

  This, I was certain, was what Yeyuama had sent me to see. There were dragons in the lake below.

  (I was glad all over again that I had not chosen to try and swim those waters in my quest for the island.)

  Dragons in the lake. What might it mean? They were not swamp-wyrms; of that, I was sure. They were too large and too mobile, eschewing the stalking tactics of their downstream kin. Kin—that was an intriguing notion. How did these dragons relate to the other local breeds? Surely the lake could not support a large population. How did they propagate, with so small a number?

  The chain of thoughts that followed was not, I confess, entirely scientific. My astonished mind leapt from one idea to another with the speed and unpredictability of a grasshopper, making connections and then discarding them. But the picture formed by those it did not discard felt right; it explained the data, albeit with some intuitive leaps along the way.

  I had been asking about dragon eggs. Mekeesawa put me off. Akinimanbi told me I would get no answers so long as I was under the baleful eye of witchcraft. I duly got myself out from under it, and Yeyuama appeared. He brought me here, saying I would understand once I saw.

  And our expedition, in all our observation, had not managed to record the differences between male and female swamp-wyrm anatomy.

  Humans have a small degree of what we term sexual dimorphism, with males generally a bit larger than females, and slightly different in form. Other species have more. And in some insects, for example bees, the number of fertile females is extremely low, with all others being males or infertile females.

  In Vystrana, I had speculated briefly about the existence of a “queen dragon.” Rock-wyrms had no such thing … but lying full-length on that waterfall island, I became convinced that swamp-wyrms did, and they were in the lake below me.

  The full shape of the thing did not become clear to me until later, when Yeyuama, satisfied by my achievement in reaching and returning from the island, shared with me the details of his calling. (Details I will, out of respect for his wishes, leave incomplete here. The biology is of concern to my audience, and that I will share; the rituals and geographic specifics will remain with the Moulish.) But my theory was correct in its general outline, which is that what lived in the lake were the females of the breed, and those we had seen until now were exclusively male. And while I might have seen that from the shore—with difficulty, on account of the turbulence in the water—this rite of passage served a multifarious purpose, not only showing me the female dragons, but testing the qualities necessary for carrying out the work of Yeyuama and his brethren.

  I sat back, breathless with speculation and delight. A thousand questions wanted to burst from me, about the dragons, about how the Moulish interacted with them, and what I might do now that I understood.

  Alas, the man who could answer them was a very long way below me, and I had not yet passed his test. First I had to return to the ground in one piece.

  Newly energized by my excitement, I retrieved the pieces of the Furcula and set to work stitching closed the holes that had formed in my wings. My needlework has never been impressive, but the necessity of repairing our clothing, not to mention modifying my skirts into trousers, had made it functional, and I included patches cut from my shirt-tails to cover the seams for extra reinforcement.

  When that was done, I drank some water and ate a little, surveying the island with an eye toward sketching it before I departed. It was only partially a delaying tactic, putting off the moment when I would have to test the glider; but I am glad for that delay, as it led me to notice the oddity of my surroundings.

  Some of the island’s stones were too regular in shape.

  Not very regular; they had been badly weathered by the elements. But here there was something like a row, and there, a corner. Heedless of my raw palms, I began to dig at the covering growth and dirt, hacking away with my penknife when the roots and vines resisted my pulling. And I uncovered enough to confirm my suspicion.

  There were ruins on this island.

  Ruins of ruins: if Natalie was right, and there had once been a more continuous ledge interrupting the progress of the Great Cataract, then the rest of what once stood here had gone tumbling down with it. But there was enough for me to be certain that what I saw was not natural.

  The Moulish do not build in stone. There is no reason they should; the Green Hell is not well supplied with it, except at the edges, and stone houses cannot move with their owners when the nearby food runs out. Anything they might build would be lost to the jungle by the time they came back, and so it is far easier and more sensible to simply fashion a new hut at need. The peoples of Bayembe use some stone, but much more mud brick, whose raw materials are abundant and cheap. And with these ruins so weathered and overgrown … it was not the work of anyone recent.

  My instant thought, of course, was that the ruins were Draconean. Yeyuama had sent me up here as a rite of passage, so that I might “touch the dragons”; it seemed obvious that this should be a relic of the civilization that had once worshipped them, the civilization to which Yves de Maucheret had compared the Moulish religion. There was nothing here, however, to indicate a Draconean connection, apart from their apparent great age—and I was no archaeologist, to estimate more precisely than “thousands of years old.” No great walls stood on this island, no striding statues or other characteristic pieces of Draconean art.

  Nonetheless, it was intriguing enough that I felt obliged to document the remains. In several places the overgrowth was too thick for me to pursue the remnants of the walls, but I sketched as much as I could uncover, working my way methodically across the island. This systematic approach soon brought me to another suspicious regularity: an alcove in the cliff, where the water of the falls parted around the promontory of the island. It was nearly my height, and oblong in shape—almost like a door.

  “I will feel like an idiot if I was right,” I remarked to the air. If there truly was a tunnel to this place, and I had simply failed to find its entrance … but at least that would save me jumping off the island when I left.

  Closer inspection told me I was not so lucky as to be an idiot (at least not where this matter was concerned). The alcove was far too overgrown and silted with dirt to be the means by which the “pur
e” reached this place, and my probing hand, reaching through the leaves, found stone beneath.

  Smooth stone. Far too smooth to be natural.

  Thrusting both hands into the greenery, I found more smoothness—indented with lines, as if it were carved.

  The vines resisted my tearing them away, as they had a good foothold in the dirt along the sides. But I was stubborn, and my curiosity was up; and once I had torn enough out to see what lay behind, nothing short of the island dropping out from beneath me would have turned me from my task.

  The entire back of the alcove was filled with a vertical slab of granite, much discoloured by the ages, but inscribed from top to toe, except where a gap in the middle broke the text into two portions.

  I stared at it, mouth open. This was not, I felt sure, what Yeyuama had sent me to see; it was too thoroughly buried. No one had laid eyes on this in a long time. But then what was it? The writing in the top half reminded me of Draconean—well, truth be told, it reminded me of chicken scratches, which had been my first impression of that ancient script when I saw it as a child. But I had seen enough Draconean writing since then to know this was far more chicken-scratchy, as if a child had tried to imitate their work.

  Or had been in the process of developing it. Could this place be older than the Draconean ruins we knew? I wished I were archaeologist enough to guess. Regardless of the truth, I had no idea what to make of the text in the lower half, which was quite different in appearance: little rounded blocks, which I might have thought decorative had there not been so many, in tidy lines.

  I take the time to describe this stone to you, even though many of my readers have likely seen photographs (or the thing itself, in the Royal Museum or a touring exhibition), because I want you to understand what I found that day. I did not know what I was looking at, other than a puzzle. And one which, alas, I could not take with me: had the Lord Himself given me the strength of ten men, to pluck that slab from its sheltered pocket, I could not have taken it off the island. The weight would have sent the Furcula straight into the lake. Nor did I have any large sheet of paper with which to take a rubbing.

  I briefly contemplated tearing all the blank pages from my notebook and making a kind of mosaic, but it would have taken an age, and my sunlight was rapidly vanishing. As nervous as I was about trying my wings, darkness would make that task neither easier nor safer. I must do it now, or wait until the morrow, and I did not relish the thought of a night spent up here in the thunder and the cold spray.

  Were it not for that ticking clock, I do not know how long I might have dithered. Instead I set to work, slotting the two pieces of the glider together, tightening their lashings, tying my bundle to my back.

  That sufficed to get me physically ready. My mind was another matter entirely.

  The wind tugged at my wings as I went toward the edge of the island, though not so strongly as to risk lifting me off my feet. I almost wished it had; that would have reassured me that this contraption was indeed capable of supporting my weight. But no: like a baby bird, I must hurl myself into the air, and see only then whether or not I could fly.

  (I had always thought baby birds adorable beyond words. Now I found myself admiring them for their courage.)

  Have you ever stood at a precipice and felt a sudden fear, not that you will fall, but that you will fling yourself over? That the instincts which preserve our lives will fail you for that one vital moment, and in the gap, you will, for no good reason, step forward and seek your own end? I have, on more than one occasion. That afternoon in Eriga, however, I discovered that it is not so easy as your fears would have you believe. I had reason to step forward; flinging myself over was my purpose in being there. Yet my legs stood frozen. They might have sunk roots into the ground, so little capable was I of lifting my foot even an inch. With the harness of the Furcula wrapped about me—a promise that I would not die—I became convinced of my own doom, and could not move.

  The wind jarred me from my paralysis. A stronger gust knocked me a little sideways, slightly off balance, and before I could regain my inertia, I ran forward and leapt from the island, into the rainbows and mist.

  TWENTY

  On dragon wings—Air currents—Demise of the Furcula—Journey downward—I spend a miserable night—Movement in the forest—Labane—The use of a Scirling woman

  And I flew.

  Glided, rather—but it was enough. Instead of falling to my death, I hung suspended in the air, floating on currents and the carefully measured physics of my wings.

  It was a miracle.

  An uncomfortable one, I must say. We have invented better harnesses since; the one I wore dug unmercifully under my arms, and I held the crossbar in a strangulation grip out of fear that I would somehow slip free. This dragged the nose of the Furcula downward, and I began to descend more rapidly; a hasty shove sent my nose upward once more, leveling me out. My heart pounded so hard it seemed in danger of leaping from my chest, but I was flying.

  My panicked gyrations had not only changed my altitude; they had altered my direction. I was headed swiftly for the northwestern corner where the Green Hell met the Great Cataract and the plateau above, and while the dragonbone struts might survive the collision, my own bones would not. I attempted to turn right, over the forest, but something—a wrong shift in my weight; a trick of the air currents—fought me, so that it was easier to go left instead. I skimmed along the falls, back toward the center and the waterfall island, though too low now to make a landing where I had begun.

  Landing there was not my aim regardless. I had lost sight of the tree where I was supposed to meet Yeyuama, but was more concerned with finding a safe place to alight. My original intent had been to plunge myself into the lake, in preference to crashing into a tree; now that I had seen the queen dragons, such plans seemed less wise. If I could direct myself to the edge of the lake, though, it might be safe enough.

  No one, man or woman, can take into account factors they do not know in the first place. So it was with me and the behaviour of air currents.

  Hot air rises. Birds take advantage of these drafts, which we now call thermals, to gain altitude. The air near the falls had been cool, owing to the mist thrown off by the water and the growing shadows of the setting sun, but over the forest proper it was the full blazing heat of a tropical afternoon.

  The Furcula rose. I was trying to direct it downward, but my control was minimal and my skill even less; I was, even more than I had realized, at the mercy of the elements around me. Instead of settling, my glider lifted me up, up, above the shorter trees near the lake’s bank, above the giants beyond. Glorious as flight might be, this was not at all what I wanted.

  As before, I would have to turn myself about and head back the way I came. I threw my weight to the side … and lost stability altogether.

  Some unexpected draft—from the Great Cataract or the slopes of the Green Hell, I do not know which—sent me veering sharply to the side. This sudden shift in my balance made my legs swing wildly, turning my course still more erratic. The attempt to bring my lower body under control caused me, by reflex, to draw my arms in; the Furcula tipped downward. My toes slapped a high branch. I forced my hands outward again, and the glider lifted, but by then there was no hope of regaining control.

  I was going to crash.

  I knew this, very clearly. I felt I had all the time in the world to know this fact, to study it, to imagine what the consequences would be. I saw the forest below me and tried to evaluate one spot or another for its desirability as a crash site. A foolish waste of time: the emerald sea that was the canopy of the Green Hell had little to offer in the way of variation, and I had not the slightest control over where I would fall. I saw the top branches approaching, and had the presence of mind (though it threw my glider off even more) to draw my legs up, so I would be less likely to catch my ankle somewhere and dislocate a joint.

  Then I struck the branches, dragging through them for a short distance before the resistance
grew enough to stop my forward momentum.

  And then I fell.

  * * *

  I did not fall very far. I was strapped into a dragonbone glider; the wings were too large to pass easily through the trees, and too strong to break. But they dragged some distance through the branches before catching against a few sturdy enough to hold, and then I jolted to a halt.

  I almost kept going. The Furcula had stopped at an angle that left me dangling from the crossbar, my weight only partially supported by the harness, and the jolt caused my grip to falter. I made an undignified noise, half yelp, half squeak, and clutched for dear life at the wishbone. My devout wish at that moment was for it not to break.

  The bone held. But my grip would not; sooner or later it would give way. Thinking to support my weight by some other means, I glanced about, saw a nearby branch, and attempted to hook my leg over it.

  This jarred my glider loose from its precarious angle. With a cracking of branches, the Furcula and I slid free once more. For a moment we were in relatively open air, and I, driven by terrified instinct, dragged the glider’s nose down as hard as I could, lest I lose the support of the harness entirely. The Furcula struck another branch, nose first, and flipped entirely upside down—and there, again, it stopped.

  Once my heart slowed to something like a sustainable pace, I realized that I had inadvertently improved my situation. I still sat above a lethal fall, but at least the glider was now between me and my potential demise.

  Moving carefully, I persuaded my hands to let go of the wishbone, extricated my arms from their harness, and shifted myself around until I sat atop the bones that formed the central frame of the glider. The branches beneath me might give way, but the bones, at least, would hold.

  There I sat for several long moments, concentrating on nothing beyond my breathing and my pounding heart. When at last I achieved a semblance of composure, I opened my eyes and looked about.

  I was still in the forest canopy—a fortunate thing indeed. Beneath the level on which I sat, the branches became much more numerous, and might have speared me through the canvas. Below that would be a gap in which there were few branches at all; had I plunged through the understory, I would not have stopped until I reached the ground thirty meters below, and there I would have died. As it was, I had suffered nothing worse than an assortment of scrapes and bruises, and two wrenched shoulders. For an uncontrolled landing in a glider, I considered myself virtually unharmed.