A Natural History of Dragons (36 page)

J
ACOB

For all the differences of religion that lay between us and the Vystrani, I will say this for them: when it came to mourning, we were not treated as outsiders. I think everyone in the village came to visit while we sat shiva, even if only from a sense of obligation. Nor did we hold ourselves apart: when the Sabbath interrupted our mourning, we attended Menkem’s service in the tabernacle, with nary a murmur of protest, even from Lord Hilford.

It’s possible we offended them by our behavior after our shiva ended. We felt we owed certain obligations to the village, though, and in discussion amongst ourselves, Lord Hilford, Mr. Wilker, and I agreed that it would be no insult to Jacob’s spirit if we brought our work to a proper conclusion, rather than leaving at the first opportunity. It was different than it had been, of course; there was no tramping around the mountains, collecting samples from dragon lairs. But while Lord Hilford rode off to handle the matter of Khirzoff’s death, Mr. Wilker and I confirmed that the dragon carcass had been taken from the ruins to the graveyard, and we documented the latter as thoroughly as we could. We could not apologize to the rock-wyrms for what had been done to their kin, but Mr. Wilker held a sober conference with Mazhustin and the village elders, and we hoped that would lay a foundation to prevent such difficulties in the future.

We also studied Rossi’s notebook, as fervently as if it had been Scripture. (I had, of course, lied to the man about its fate; I would never destroy knowledge so recklessly.) Mr. Wilker had enough chemistry to grasp the general outline, but I was entirely baffled by his attempts to explain why adding a solution of sulfuric acid to dragonbone, however slowly, whatever it was mixed with, could
preserve
anything. Upon one point, though, we were in perfect agreement.

“This knowledge is dangerous,” I said to him one night as we sat by the light of a few candles in our workroom.

Mr. Wilker’s face was drawn and weary in the dimness. “The things that could be built with dragonbone … Rossi was not wrong. There have already been minor wars over iron, and there will be more; we have too much technology that needs it, and a hunger for more. Anything that could replace iron, much less improve upon it, is priceless. But harvesting the bone, if you will pardon the phrase, makes the dragons angry, which makes them attack people.”

“To which the only solution is to hunt them more,” I said. “Between that and the demand for their bones … they will be driven to extinction.” Khirzoff and Rossi had already made progress toward that, in this region. No wonder so many lairs had been empty.

Mr. Wilker paged slowly through Rossi’s notebook, as if brighter thoughts might leap from it. “It may only work on rock-wyrms. We know too little of dragon biology to be sure.”

Even if the process, or the mourning behavior, was specific to only the one breed, the effect would be catastrophic. People would pursue all dragons, in the hope of getting something useful from their bones. Big-game hunters would want trophies; engineers would want bones for their inventions. It was bad enough when animals were wanted only for their pelts or ivory. This had the potential to be vastly worse.

I hated the thought of destroying knowledge—but what if the alternative was even more unbearable?

Mr. Wilker caught me looking at the book, and must have read my thoughts in my expression. “It wouldn’t do any good,” he said warningly. “Men have been trying to find a way to preserve the bones for some time. Rossi figured it out; someone else will, too.”

“What are you saying?” I asked sharply. “That I should accept this as inevitable? Allow you to publish the contents of that notebook in the
Proceedings of the Colloquium of Philosophers,
and get it over sooner rather than later?” A discovery of this sort could do what he so clearly craved, and lift him above the the limitations of his birth.

“No, no, of course not,” he said, his own anger and helplessness so evident that they calmed my own. “Concealing it at least defers the problem, and perhaps…”

“Perhaps?” I prompted when he trailed off.

Mr. Wilker sighed and laid his hand atop the notebook, staring as if sheer force of determination could make its contents more clear to him. “Perhaps, in the interim, an alternative could be found.”

An alternative. A different process would not eliminate the base threat to the dragons. He must therefore mean— “Some method of, oh, what is the word—”

“Synthesis,” Mr. Wilker said. “Artificially producing a substance that would have the
properties
of preserved dragonbone, without any need to kill a dragon at all.” He grew more animated as he spoke, sitting up in his chair and gesturing energetically enough that he almost knocked over a candle. “Whatever it is that gets precipitated by the acid titration—it
must
be the major component of dragonbone, but we could never analyze it because it breaks down so quickly in air. With a preserved specimen to work from, we can determine what elements the molecule consists of, and attempt to re-create them in a laboratory—”

“Do you think it’s genuinely
possible
?” I asked, partly to stop him before he sank into a babble of chemical jargon I could not follow in the slightest.

He sank back in his chair with a sigh. “I’m sure of it—someday. Whether we can do so
now,
with the knowledge and tools we have … you would have to ask someone more qualified than I.”

It was reason enough to preserve the notebook. Without that, our hypothetical chemist would be set back by months, if not more. This way, we at least had a head start on anyone else re-discovering Rossi’s process.

Neither of us knew, that night in Drustanev, how vital the issue would eventually become. The Aerial War and similar matters lay years in our future. But I do not claim undeserved foresight when I say that we saw trouble coming, and did what little we could to prevent it.

“We speak of this to no one,” I said, “except Lord Hilford and whatever chemist you recommend.”

Mr. Wilker nodded. “Agreed.”

The tsar of Bulskevo was distracted enough by the deposit of firestones in Vystrana—of those mined so far, there were nineteen of sufficient quality to be set in jewelry, and dozens of smaller chips—that he forgave Lord Hilford for the tragic loss of a boyar in a dragon attack.

I thought nineteen more enough for any one man to acquire at a single stroke. He did not need a twentieth, or a twenty-first. The stone I dug out of the ground beneath the ruins was sold discreetly later on, and the money sent by even more discreet means back to Drustanev, sometimes as coin, sometimes in the form of items useful for the village. It was one part apology, one part compensation for the temporary suspension of hunting (lest it attract angry dragons), and one part incentive for them to say nothing about Rossi’s research.

Also, if my husband must be buried in a foreign land, I wanted some form of tie to bind me to his resting place.

The stone I found during my first visit to the ruins remained in my pocket, a reminder of too many things to count.

We made our farewells in late Messis, packing up our belongings and loading them onto the cart of a trader we had paid to come to Drustanev just for us. Not everyone was sorry to see the backs of us, of course; the villagers were more than ready to return to normalcy. Urjash Mazhustin bid us a stiffly formal farewell, with Menkem at his side. Astimir apologized for the hundredth time; he had initially thought the boyar’s suggestion a great joke, scaring the foreigners with the specter of Zhagrit Mat, but he had not reckoned with the fear it would evoke from his neighbors. I repeated the same forgiveness I had given him a hundred times before. The rote words became less heartfelt every time I spoke them, but there was nothing to be gained by railing at him for his stupidity.

Dagmira … I will not say she was reluctant to see me go. But she and I had achieved a kind of equilibrium, and I realized, to my surprise, that I would miss it. “Thank you,” I told her, and if I could not quite put into words what exactly I was thanking her for, she understood me regardless.

“I hope you at least got us a better boyar,” she said with the straightforwardness I had come to expect. “He’ll probably be just as bad, though—another damned Bulskoi stranger. And Iljish, the idiot, wants to go to school.”

There was a stone for Jindrik Gritelkin, in the same field where Jacob and the others were buried, even though his body had never been found. By now it would be anonymous bones, I supposed, stripped of the one item—his ring—that might have identified it. Although I had never met the man, I found myself in sympathy with him. “It isn’t necessarily a bad idea,” I said. “Having someone educated to speak on behalf of Drustanev, whether as razesh or not—there could be a great benefit in that.” What I did not say was that she and Iljish were already on the fringes of village life; schooling would not mark him out much more, and it could give him something of value to bargain with.

Dagmira only shrugged, kissed both my hands with perfunctory Vystrani courtesy, and walked off.

And then, by slow stages, we made our journey back to Scirland.

I did not suspect a certain change until we were on the ship, and was not sure of it until after we arrived back at home. The symptoms might, after all, have been a simple consequence of the stress of mourning and travel.

But they were not. I gave birth to a son in late Ventis of the next year, and named him Jacob, after his father.

Of him, I will say much more in future volumes. For now, I will limit myself to this unlovely admission: that there were times, both during my pregnancy and after his birth, when he was less a source of joy and more a painful reminder of what I had lost. I risked falling once more into the depression that had gripped me after my miscarriage, and took comfort in intellectual work. I corresponded often with Mr. Wilker, making arrangements to find someone to study our samples of dragonbone, and I spent long hours transcribing our notes, finishing my sketches, and otherwise preparing the results of our expedition for public consumption. My marriage contract provided for me generously enough to live on, but not enough to pay for the book’s publication; Lord Hilford kindly undertook a subscription on its behalf. One afternoon, some four or five months after my son was born, the earl paid me a visit in Pasterway and presented me with a finished copy.

My fingers trembled as I brushed them over the green leather cover, then opened it to the title page.
Concerning the Rock-Wyrms of Vystrana,
it read, and in smaller letters,
Their Anatomy, Biology, and Activity, with Particular Attention to Their Relation with Humans, and the Revelation of Mourning Behavior.
And then, a short distance below the title,
by Jacob Camherst and others.

“It ought to have
your
name on it,” Lord Hilford said bluntly. “Alongside his, at the very least.”

I shook my head. I had not taken much care in dressing that morning; my hair was only hastily pinned up, and a hank of it fell forward at the motion, half obscuring Jacob’s name. “This is all the scholarship that will ever be credited to him; I have no desire to claim it as my own.”

“Claim it or not, it’s still yours, at least in part.” Lord Hilford dropped into a chair without first asking permission, but I did not begrudge it. If I was going to receive him in a shabby old gown with my hair falling down everywhere, I could hardly stand on formality. He said, “If we’re ever going to get those old sticks at the Colloquium to let you present to them, we must start laying the groundwork now.”

“Me? Present?” I stared at the earl. “Whyever would I do that?”

He snorted through his mustache. “Come now, Mrs. Camherst. Books are all well and good, but if you intend to be a scholar, you must have the acquaintance of your peers.”

With careful hands, I closed the book and laid it aside, then tucked my hair behind my ear. “Who said I intend to be a scholar?”

“I did,” he said bluntly. “You aren’t going to give this up. Right now you’re grieving; I understand that. I’m not here to chide you out of it. But you have a shed full of sparklings out back, and a book you wrote even if your name isn’t on it; any woman who puts in that kind of effort is not a woman who could simply turn her back on intellectual inquiry. You’re dragon-mad, Mrs. Camherst, and sooner or later you’ll be keen to have another chance at it. When that day comes, let me know.”

Having pronounced those odd words, he levered himself up out of the chair, nodded a polite farewell, and headed for the sitting room door.

It was swinging shut behind him when I found my tongue. “What do you mean? What ‘other chance’?”

Lord Hilford caught the edge of the door and peered around it, his whiskered face all studied innocence. “Oh, didn’t I mention? It so happens that— But no, if you intend to give all this up, then it’s of no interest to you.”

I had risen from my chair without realizing it. “Lord Hilford. I will thank you not to play games with me. If you have something to say—as you so obviously do—then stop hanging about in the doorway, come back in here, and tell me.”