The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons) (10 page)

“Erigans worship their ancestors, do they not?” Natalie asked. She and I had both done a certain amount of reading during the preparation for this expedition, but very little of it had been devoted to religion.

“Together with idols of nature, yes,” Mrs. Kerwin said primly. “They are entirely lacking in scriptures of any sort, and of course what few of the laws they follow, they follow by accident.”

Had I known more about Erigan religion at the time, I would have pointed out to her that what they lacked were scriptures of
our
sort. At the time, however, I was both ignorant of such matters and distracted by a different thought. “Have you gone down into the swamp at all?”

Mrs. Kerwin looked horrified. “You mean into Mouleen? Certainly not. We wouldn’t survive two days there. Wild beasts, fevers, not to mention the natives—”

“I take it they don’t welcome visitors?”

“They have the Ikwunde on one side and the Yembe on the other.” M. Velloin had overheard our conversation. “And the Satalu lurking in the wings, hoping to snatch up Bayembe for themselves—though to what extent the Moulish are aware of that, who can say? They trade occasionally with the peasants along their borders, forest ivory for food, that sort of thing. But those who go deeper into the swamp never return.”

I wanted to shift away from Velloin, but he was clearly somewhat informed about the region, and I could not pass up the chance to ask. “There are stories about the Moulish, that say they worship dragons as the Draconeans once did.”

We were gathering quite the audience now: not only Mr. Wilker, but Sir Adam Tarwin-Bannithot (who was then the governor of the Nsebu colony) and a man whose sober dress and Uaine accent marked him as Mr. Kerwin. The latter said to me, “I take it you’ve read the work of Yves de Maucheret.”

By M. Velloin’s expression, so had he. “Yes,” I said, “though he was writing two hundred years ago, and not everything he put to paper has proved to be true. Still, it’s enough to intrigue the mind, isn’t it? Dragons rarely tolerate human company well, and Moulish swamp-wyrms are not known to be the most approachable of breeds. If the Moulish do indeed worship them, do they do so from afar? Or are they able to partially tame them, as the Draconeans are said to have done?”

“They are nothing like the Draconeans,” Mr. Kerwin said, dismissing the notion with a wave of his hand. “That ancient civilization—well, it was a
civilization.
They built great temples, developed art, administered territory across multiple continents. The Moulish bang on drums and run about naked. They may worship dragons, but there is no reason to suppose their manner of doing so bears any resemblance to Draconean religion.”

“And yet, it would be closer to Draconean religion than any other example we have before us today,” I said. “Do not ethnologists use modern evidence to analogize to the past? We might learn a great deal from the Moulish, regardless of their musical traditions and sartorial habits.”

I spoke with the assurance of a young woman who thought her experience with natural history and
ad hoc
education in other subjects more than qualified her to hold forth on topics she knew nothing about at all. The truth is that any such comparison is far more complicated and doubtful than I presented it that evening; but it is also true that no one in my audience knew any more about it than I did, and most of them knew less. My assertion was therefore allowed to stand unchallenged.

For those who wonder why I showed such interest in the Draconeans, whose works I dismissed in the previous volume of my memoirs, do not think this meant I had undergone any great change of heart in the intervening years. I still at that time cared little for their ruined temples and stylized art; my interest was in living things, not dead civilizations. But as I said to Mr. Kerwin, the Draconeans were said to have tamed dragons.
That
was of great interest to me indeed, and so if Moulish religion was able to shed any light on the matter, then it, too, fell within the sphere of my attention.

Of course, there was the minor problem of the Green Hell being one of the deadliest regions on earth. But my interest was, that evening, still academic; my purpose in coming to Bayembe was to study the dragons of their arid plains. Moulish swamp-wyrms were a minor note—in much the same way that a fisherman’s lure is a minor note in the world of a fish.

Sir Adam said, “I wouldn’t waste much time or thought on the Moulish, if I were you. Whatever you might learn regarding dragons cannot possibly be worth the risk, and as for learning anything about humans—feh. That swamp is a backwater, in every sense of the word.”

“A backwater which is presently protecting this country, is it not?” I said.

He shrugged. “For now.”

A brief silence fell, broken a moment later by Sir Adam’s uncomfortable cough and too-loud amendment. “Besides, you won’t get into the swamp, not without the oba’s permission. And he won’t give it.”

There is nothing in the world so enticing as that which you have been told you may not have. “Whyever not?” I asked. “Or rather, why should I need his leave in the first place? Mouleen is an independent state, is it not?”

Mr. Kerwin muttered something about not dignifying that festering pit with the name of “state,” but my attention was on Sir Adam. He said, “At times like these, with the Ikwunde interfering with our work at the rivers, we must keep a careful eye on our borders.”

Which was not much of an answer, but it was all that I could get from him, in the wake of that momentary lapse. Sir Adam had taken a bit too enthusiastically to the prescribed regimen of gin and tonic, with which we all held the malarial fevers at bay, and had said something he should not. Why would the Green Hell cease to protect Bayembe? Were the Moulish looking to ally themselves with the Ikwunde on the other side?

I did not know, but Sir Adam’s slip had made me wary. I wanted only to study dragons, but first I had to get past the humans, and I feared they might be a greater danger to me than all the fevers of the tropics combined.

SEVEN

A certain taboo—The
agban
—Galinke—Matters of lineage—Natalie joins me—Making use of M. Velloin

I must warn my male readers that I am about to address a topic which may be deeply discomfiting to them, taboo as it is for their sex.

When I awoke a few mornings later, I found my bedding stained with traces of blood. I clicked my tongue in annoyance; caught up in our affairs, I had not monitored the days as closely as I should, and my menses have never been the most reliable besides. But this was, I thought, only a minor irritation. I wet a cloth, washed myself clean, changed into a fresh chemise, and called for a servant.

When she came, I gestured at the stained bedding, washcloth, and chemise, indicating that she should take them away to be laundered. “And I will need rags,” I said—as yet blissfully unaware that in many parts of the world, rags are not employed, but other, less comfortable alternatives.

(Indeed, for those young ladies who wish to follow in my footsteps, I must warn you that this inconvenient fact of our sex is one of the most vexatious aspects of being a lady adventurer. Unless you contrive to suppress your courses through pregnancy—which, of course, imposes its own limitations—or through strenuous exercise and privation, you will have to handle this necessity in many circumstances that are far from ideal. Including some, I fear, where the smell of fresh blood is a positive danger.)

Returning to the moment at hand: the serving girl’s eyes widened at the sight of the stains, and she darted out of the room almost before I had finished speaking. So rapidly, in fact, that she left the laundry behind. I sighed, wondering if the fault was with my imperfect command of the language, or whether she—being prepubescent—was the sort of silly nit who bolted at the sight of blood. Well, I thought, if it came to that, I could sacrifice the rest of the stained chemise for rags.

The girl returned with equal speed, though, this time accompanied by a much older woman, who went to gather up the bedding and other articles. The girl herself approached me and draped an undyed robe over a bench, indicating shyly that I should wear it.

I saw no rags. “Thank you,” I said, “but I have my own clothing; I only need something to stanch the bleeding.”

The older woman—who was, by the look of her, well past the age of bearing herself—said, “Put it on; Lebuya will take you to the
agban.
”

This was not a word I had encountered, either in my studies or my time there.
“Agban?”
I repeated.

She indicated the soiled items. “Until you are clean.”

My first thought was that she meant a bath. But I knew the word for “bath”—that was where Natalie had gone, while I worked on rousing myself to wakefulness—and had she meant such a thing, would she not have said “where you can wash yourself”? Suspicious, I asked, “How long will that be?”

By her reaction, I might have been as young and ignorant as Lebuya, needing an older female relative to explain the basic matters of womanhood to me. “Seven days.”

I recoiled. She did not mean blood on my skin; she meant
impurity.
It was not a topic that concerned us much in the relaxed Magisterial traditions of Scirland, and although I had encountered traces of it in the Temple-worshipping environs of Vystrana, many of the finer points of religious doctrine there had been whittled down to accommodate local practicality. The women of Drustanev could not afford to seclude themselves for the duration of their “impurity.”

But I had not expected to find evidence of the Kerwins’ success here in the oba’s own palace. Startled, I said, “I didn’t realize you were Bayitist.”

She frowned at me. “What is Bayitist? You are unclean; you cannot stay out here, where you will pollute others. Go with Lebuya. She will show you.”

No, this was not the work of the sheluhim; it had the sound of a standard practice, and surely I would have heard if the entire ruling class of Bayembe had converted to Segulism. But I could no more afford to lose a week of my life than the women of Drustanev could. (Or at least I was not willing to; that, I think, is the more accurate statement, though it benefits from hindsight.) I planted my hands on my hips, drew myself up like a proper Scirling lady—taking Judith and my mother as models—and said, “Nonsense. I have gone about in this condition once a month for my entire adult life, and never polluted anyone.”

The old woman made a gesture I thought was probably a ward against evil and said, “Then the oba will throw you into the Green Hell—if he does not have you executed for witchcraft.” She picked up her bundle and left.

My certainty that the oba would do no such thing faded when I looked at Lebuya, who would not meet my eyes. She had avoided them, as she avoided touching me, placing the robe on a bench rather than handing it to me directly. She had brought an old woman to take away the stained fabric—someone past her own bearing days. The implications I saw there might be my own invention, but I did not doubt that
some
manner of significance clung to those actions. Whether the oba punished me or not, I would not be able to carry on my work as usual; it would be all around the palace before lunchtime that I was unclean, polluting everything around me. The consequences would damage us far more than a week of enforced idleness would.

Had we stayed at our hotel down in Nsebu, or better still among the Scirlings at Point Miriam, I might have avoided this difficulty. Since I had yet to see any particular benefit from being housed in the royal palace instead, it was with no little annoyance that I picked up the robe and put it on. The thing was shapeless cotton, draping to the floor, the sleeves long enough to cover my hands; there was even a hood for me to draw up over my impure face. Lebuya produced a pair of rough sandals and set them on the floor for me to don. I wondered if someone would come into the room after I was gone to purify it, and thought they probably would.

Natalie chose that moment to return, saving me the confrontation of insisting that, impure or not, I would go nowhere until I spoke with her. Her eyebrows rose at my explanation, and when I was done, she sighed. “Unless there’s an exemption for unmarried women—which I doubt—then I’ll be taking your place in this
agban
of theirs just as you’re ready to leave. How can we be expected to get any work done, if one or the other of us is locked away two weeks out of every four?”

It would not be that much time—as I said before, my courses have never been fully regular—but I brooded upon Natalie’s question as I followed Lebuya out. We might escape the restriction by going into the bush for an extended period of time; even then, though, we would need porters to assist us, and what if they rebelled against serving impure women? Perhaps we could hire foreigners from the docks. But they would not know the bush as the locals did, and lack of experience on that front might prove very dangerous.

With the hood blocking the edges of my vision, I could not see our path clearly, but it was not one I had traced before. We left the women’s wing by what I suspected was a back entrance, passed through a low wall—not leaving the palace, but entering a new region of it—and came at last to a modest building that seemed almost like an ordinary house.

I did not need Lebuya’s pointing arm to tell me where I was to go. This, obviously, was the
agban
: the prison for menstruating women. And I was to remain here for seven days? I should have brought my notebooks—presuming, of course, that they would not be irredeemably contaminated by such use.

Sighing, I muttered a thank-you to Lebuya that was not very heartfelt, and went inside.

The interior was pleasant and not at all prisonlike. It was, after all, where palace women spent one week out of every four; I suspect servants had their own
agban
elsewhere, as neither Natalie nor I ever saw one there. The front room had benches and hooks along the walls, one of which held a robe like mine, with the sandals beneath. I took this as a sign that I could discard my own. Thus freed, I ventured onward to a small courtyard, where a woman I judged to be around my age lay on a carpet beneath a tree, reading a book.