Somewhere Beneath Those Waves (2 page)

He was pleased and proud to be part of the Director’s dream (he said at the Welcome Dinner organized by the Curators’ Union), and if there was any irony in him, the curators did not hear it.

All that season, the taxonomist, impeccable in suit and crisply knotted tie, assisted by a series of tithe-children, none of whom he could distinguish from any of the others, clambered among the bones of the eighty-nine dragons, scrutinizing skulls and teeth and vertebrae, recovering from the mists of misidentified obscurity
Draco vulcanis
,
D. campestris
,
D. sylvius
,
D. nubis
; separating a creative tangle of bones into two distinct specimens, one
D. maris
, the other
D. pelagus
; cleaning and rewiring and clarifying; entirely discrediting the identification of one specimen as the extinct
D. minimis
. It was merely a species of large liazard, said the taxonomist—any fool could see that from its teeth—and should be removed from the collection forthwith.

Meanwhile, the Director ordered the Salle des Dragons opened and cleaned. The tithe-children worked industriously, washing and polishing, commenting excitedly among themselves in the sign-language that no outsider has ever learned. They found the armatures where they had been carefully stored away, found the informational placards, beautifully written but entirely wrong. They found the tapestries, artists’ reconstructions worked in jewel-colored yarns by the ladies-in-waiting of the current Empress’s great-grandmother. These, they cleaned and re-hung, and the Director gave them words of praise that made their pale eyes shine with happiness.

Swept and garnished, the Salle was ready for its brides, and as the summer waxed and ripened, the taxonomist and the tithe-children brought them in, one by one, bearing them as tenderly across the threshold as if they came virgin to this marriage.

vi.

The dragon lies piled like treasure on the stairs, cold and pale and transparent as moonlight, its milky eyes watchful, unblinking. It is visible only on rainy days, but even in full sunlight, the staff prefer the East Staircase.

The tithe-children, though, sit around the ghost dragon during thunderstorms, reaching out as if they could touch it, if only they dared.

vii.

Once, as the taxonomist was making comparative measurements of two
D. anthropophagi
skulls, a tithe-child asked, “Are there any dragons still alive, mynheer?”

He was surprised, for it was not customary for the tithe-children to speak; he had not even been certain that they could. “Perhaps, although I have never seen one.”

“I would like to see a living dragon.”

The taxonomist looked at the tithe-child, its twisted body, its pale, blinking eyes. He said nothing, and the tithe-child turned away from his cold pity. It would never see a living dragon, would never see anything that was not catalogued, labeled, given a taxonomy and a number and a place in the Museum’s long halls. But it had dreamed, as every living creature must.

The taxonomist returned to his measurements; the tithe-children, watching, wondered what
he
dreamed.

viii.

One does not wander in the Museum after dark. Even the tithe-children stay in their rookeries; the security guards keep to their strait and narrow paths, traveling in pairs, never any further from each other than the length of a flashlight’s beam. And of all the Museum’s staff, it is the security guards who are hardest to keep. For they, who see the Museum’s night-veiled face, know more clearly than any of the daytime staff the Museum’s truth, its cold, entrapping, sterile darkness. They know what its tall, warped, and shining doors shut in, as well as what they shut out.

In the reign of the Empress Heliodora, a security guard committed suicide by slitting his wrists in the main floor men’s bathroom. No one ever knew why; the only suicide note he left, written in his own blood across the mirrors, was:
All things are dead here.

Later, the mirrors had to be replaced, for although the tithe-children cleaned and polished them conscientiously, the reflection of those smeared letters never entirely came out.

ix.

It was a sultry afternoon in mid-August when the taxonomist descended the ladder propped against
D. campestris
’s horned skull, turned, and found the lady watching him.

She was a tall lady, fair and haggard, dressed with elegant simplicity in gray. The taxonomist stared at her; for a moment, recognition and memory and pain were clear on his face, and it seemed as if he would speak, but the lady tilted her head infinitesimally, and he looked over her shoulder, seeing the two broad-shouldered men in nondescript suits who stood at the door of the Salle, as if waiting for someone or something.

His gaze met hers again, and in that glance was exchanged much that could not be spoken, then or ever, and he bowed, a formal, fussy gesture, and said stiffly, stiltedly, the pedantic mantle of his profession settling over him, “May I help you, mevrouw?”

The lady smiled at him. Even though she was haggard and no longer young, her smile was enchanting, as much rueful as charming, and heart-breakingly tired. “We loved this room as children,” she said, lifting her eyes to gaze at the long, narrow wedge of
D. campestris
’s skull. “I remember coming here with my brother. We believed they were alive, you know.” She waved a hand at the surrounding skeletons.

“Indeed.”

“We thought they watched us—remembered us. We imagined them, after the Museum had closed, gathering in a circle to whisper about the people they’d seen that day and make up stories about us, the same way we made up stories about them.” Her face had lost some of its haggardness in remembering, and he watched her, almost unbreathing.

“Indeed.”

“Tell me about them. Tell me about this one.” She pointed at
D. campestris
.

“What do you wish to know?” he said, his gaze not following the graceful sweep of her arm, but remaining, anxiously, on her face.

“I don’t know. We never read the placards, you see. It was so much more interesting to make up stories in our heads.”

Their eyes met again, as brief as a blow, and then the taxonomist nodded and spoke: “This is
Draco campestris
, the common field dragon. This specimen is an adult male—you can tell because his wings are fully fledged. He is thirty feet long from snout to tail-tip and would probably have weighed well in excess of three tons. The wings are merely decorative, you understand, primarily used for display in mating rituals. The only dragon which can fly is
Draco nubis
, the cloud dragon, which is hollow boned—and much smaller than
campestris
in any event. Contrary to popular belief,
campestris
does not breathe fire. That would be
vulcanis
,” he pointed at the magnificent specimen which dominated the Salle, “which must breathe fire because it would otherwise be unable to move fast enough to catch its prey.”

“Yes,” the lady murmured. “It is very large.”

“
Campestris
, like the other dragons, is warm-blooded. They are egg-layers, but when the kits hatch, the mother nurses them. It is very rare for there to be more than two kits in a
campestris
clutch, and the sows are only fertile once every seven years. Even before that Arc was lost, sightings of them were very rare.”

“Yes,” the lady said sadly. “Thank you.”

He took a step, almost as if he were being dragged forward by some greater force. “Was there something else you wanted to know?”

“No. No, thank you. You have been very kind.” She glanced over her shoulder at the doors of the Salle, where the men in suits still waited. She sighed, with a tiny grimace, then straightened her shoulders and defiantly extended her hand.

The taxonomist’s startle was overt, but the lady neither flinched nor wavered. Slowly, gingerly, he took her hand. He would have bent to kiss it, if she would have allowed him, but her grip was uncompromising, and they shook hands like colleagues, or strangers meeting for the first time.

Then she released him, gave him a smile that did not reach the fear and desolation in her eyes, and turned away, walking down the Salle toward the men who waited for her.

The taxonomist stood and watched her go, as unmoving as the long-dead creatures around him.

At the door she paused, looking back, not at him, but at the great skeleton towering over him. Then one of the men in suits touched her arm and said something in a low voice. She nodded and was gone.

x.

Even the Museum cannot preserve everything, though it is not for want of trying. The Director is vexed by this, perceiving it as a failing; tithe-children and curators are allied in an unspoken conspiracy, tidying the riddles and fragments out of her way on her stately progresses through the departments and salles of the Museum.

But always, when she has gone, the riddles come out again, for scholars love nothing more than a puzzle, and the tithe-children have the gentle persistent curiosity of
Felis silvestris catus
, as that species is classified in those arcs to which it is native, or to which it has been imported. It is as close as they come, curators and tithe-children, to having conversations, these attempts to solve the mysteries left by the receding tides of history and cataclysm:

A fragment of a ballad from Arc ψ19:
The Dragon Tintantophel, the engine of Malice chosen . .
 . But Arc ψ19 has been lost for centuries, and no one from that array has ever heard of Tintantophel.

A pair of embroidery scissors, sent to the Museum by one of its accredited buyers in Arc ρ29 with a note saying
provenance to follow
. But the buyer was killed in the crash of the great airship
Helen d’Annunzio
, and the provenance was never discovered.

Two phalanges from the hand of a child, bound into a reliquary of gold wire. This object was found in one of the Museum’s sublevels, with no tag, no number, no reference to be found anywhere in the vast catalogues.

And others and others. For entropy is insidious, and even the Museum’s doors cannot bar it.

xi.

The tithe-child said in its soft, respectful voice, “I saw in the papers today that the Lady Archangel was beheaded last week.”

The taxonomist’s face did not change, but his hands flinched; he nearly dropped the tiny
D. nubis
wing-bone that he was wiring into place.

“They say she came to the Museum last week. Did you see her, mynheer?” There might have been malice in the great pale eyes of the watching tithe-children; the taxonomist did not look.

“Yes,” he said, the words grating and harsh, like the cry of wounded animal. “I saw her.”

Then the taxonomist did dream, the tithe-children saw, and they did not speak to him of the Lady Archangel again.

xii.

You who visit the Museum, you will not see them. They are not the tour guides or the experts who give informative talks or the pretty girls in the gift shops who wrap your packages and wish you safe journey. They are the tithe-children. Their eyes are large, pale and blinking, the color of dust. Their skin is dark, dark as the shadows in which they live. The scholars who study at the Museum quickly learn not to meet their eyes.

They might have been human once, but they are no longer.

They belong to the Museum, just as the dragons do.

Her predecessors’ portraits hang in the antechamber of her bedroom. “A reminder,” the king says. There is space for her portrait to hang beside them.

The ghosts come to her for the first time on her wedding night, after the sated king has departed for his own chamber.

They call her sister.

They stand just inside the doorway, Queen Katharine and Queen Isobel, each wearing a wedding gown as sumptuous as that which hangs now in the new queen’s wardrobe, each cradling her own severed head in her bloodstained hands, and they call her sister.

They whisper to her in voices like the tapping of branches at the window. They tell her she is beautiful, as they were; they tell her that she will recognize her own successor merely by the light in the king’s eyes. They tell her not to be jealous, not to be afraid. They tell her they will welcome her gladly to their company. The queen imagines standing next to Queen Isobel, the weight of her own head in her hands. She imagines calling her successor sister and shivers.

The dead queens appear after each of the king’s conjugal visits. They drift closer and closer as the weeks go by, trading bits of their unceasing threnody back and forth. Once, she tries to speak to them, but they will not break their chain of words to answer.

In the fourth month of her marriage, the new queen and her physicians determine that she is pregnant. The king is delighted. “I thought I was cursed to marry only barren women,” he tells her that night, his weight pinning her to the bed. He expects no response, and she offers none.

Later, alone, she waits, heavy with guilt. She has succeeded where Queen Katharine and Queen Isobel failed. They called her sister, and she has betrayed them.

But the dead queens do not come, and eventually she sleeps.

She wakes in the middle of the night. Queen Katharine and Queen Isobel are standing at the foot of her bed.

“He will have an heir.”

“The murderer—”

“—
our
murderer—”

“—will have an heir.”

“Our sister will grow heavy with his child.”

They start toward the new queen, one on each side of the bed.

“She will bear
his
child.”

“She will not be our sister.”

“She will be his.”

“His forever.”

The ghostly queens stand beside the bed, close enough to touch. The new queen grips her hands together, her knuckles turning white.

“She is not his.”

“She is ours.”

“
Ours
.”

“She is
our
sister.”