The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons) (15 page)

I must grant Sir Adam this: he had sufficient discretion that he had not said anything of Lord Denbow’s letter prior to our return. (He would not want our internal troubles known among the Yembe.) He also was sufficiently chastened to leave the matter in peace during the weeks it took Natalie to overcome her malaria and regain a modicum of strength.

Before he had an opportunity to raise the matter again, someone else stepped in and, in the manner of one who takes a chessboard and flings its contents into the air, changed the game entirely.

TEN

The oba’s interest—Ankumata’s history—Legs of iron—Royal greetings—Guard dragons—A mission to Mouleen—The carrot and the stick

I said before that the oba of Bayembe had first invited us to the palace, then ignored us. I have never been a political creature, and so I can only guess at his motivation, but I believe he was testing our ostensible purpose in coming to his land. In short, he brought us under his eye, then left us to our own devices, in order to see what we would do.

The Scirlings who visited Bayembe came for a very narrow list of reasons. First there were the merchants, trading through the port of Nsebu even before it was established as a Scirling colony. After them came the diplomats, to represent our interest in Erigan iron, and they made arrangements for the soldiers (who equipped and trained the Yembe with Anthiopean guns against the Satalu and Ikwunde) and the engineers (who would build railways and dams, from which Scirland would subsequently profit). Beyond them were a handful of sheluhim and hunters like Velloin, and very few others.

My little group was therefore an aberration—and one that, as I came to understand, held particular interest for the oba. When it became apparent that Natalie would live, but while she was still recovering in her bed, he sent messengers to summon myself and Mr. Wilker to meet him at last.

This summons put a nervous chill in my heart. Given his previous neglect, I could only assume Sir Adam had spoken to him, and he was going to order Natalie at a minimum and possibly all three of us out of the country, lest Lord Denbow speak out in the Synedrion and cause diplomatic trouble. If he did, I could not think of a single thing I might say that would retrieve the situation.

Good grooming was unlikely to sway him, but I attended to my toilet with the finest care I could manage—much finer than I had ever troubled with before. (My Season does not count; Mama and the maids took care of it then.) Then, my heart fluttering with nervousness, I went to meet the ruler of Bayembe, in a courtyard before the golden tower of Atuyem.

*   *   *

Given the man in question, I must provide a certain amount of context first. Ankumata n Rumeme Gbori has been the subject of so much mythologizing during the course of his life that I feel it necessary to set the record something closer to straight before I proceed with any account of my dealings with him.

It is true that he was born to his father’s fourth wife (putting him out of what was then the royal lineage), and that he was born deformed. The exact medical nature of his deformity I do not know, but it left his legs unable to bear his weight; though healthy in other respects, he was not able to walk until well into his childhood. Some sources claim he was seven when this changed, and others ten. The exact number does not matter.

What matters is that his mother died, and there is credible evidence to say that she was murdered by one of her co-wives. Ankumata would likely have died, too, except that a man of his father’s court took him and raised him away from Atuyem, as his own son. And this man happened to be a blacksmith.

I cannot adequately convey the importance of that to a non-Erigan audience. For my Scirling readers, blacksmiths are a feature of village life: strong men, but not expected to be particularly bright. Their reputation in Eriga, and particularly in the eastern part of the continent, is a good deal more impressive. More than a few peoples there trace their origins back to a legendary blacksmith-king, and many more attribute magical powers to men who work in iron. It is part of the reverence they give in general to artisans, but it goes beyond that. An ethnologist could theorize for you whether this has something to do with the abundance of iron in Erigan soil, or whether it arises from some other aspect of Erigan existence; I can only report the fact of it. For Ankumata’s subjects, it was as if he had been taken to be raised by a particularly wise magister, the sort who knows the secret of bringing golems to life.

And that is nearly what this blacksmith did. When Sunda n Halelu Gama took Ankumata into his home, the boy still could not walk; he rode there on his rescuer’s back. But once there, Sunda—who, in the more dramatic version of this tale, is said to be Adu himself, the Yembe god of blacksmithing—set about crafting for him a set of iron leg braces that would do what the boy’s own muscles and bones could not. So wondrously did he craft them, the story goes, that they weighed nothing at all, and no sooner did Ankumata don them than he leapt over the blacksmith’s house to show his joy.

The truth is rather more prosaic, I am sure, for I never saw the oba leap any distance at all. But the braces do exist, and I believe he could not walk without them, which means Sunda deserves every bit of the credit he receives. He, perhaps more than any other save Ankumata’s own father and mother, made the man who came back and claimed the rulership of Bayembe (a tale in its own right), and held it for so many years.

And what of the man himself? I found his age hard to judge; history told me he was fifty or thereabouts, though (as I have said) mythologizing has obscured some of the finer points of his life. He was broad of feature, as Yembe often are, and I think his shaved head was a disguise for natural hair loss (a bald scalp being more regal than a patchy one). He gave a sense of being both shrewd and good-hearted, which is an impressive combination, and not one many people of either sex can easily convey.

He greeted us sitting on a stool that made up in splendor for the deliberately simple appearance of his braces. The stool, as some may know, is an element of Sagao regalia adopted by the Yembe from their riverine subjects centuries ago, and although it is often likened to an Anthiopean throne, the truth is that its significance more closely parallels that of the crown. Yembe rulers are invested in their office by being seated upon the stool—and not just the oba, but the lineage chiefs as well, each with their own ancestral stool. This one was of sufficient size that I might have called it a bench instead, and moreover was crafted of solid gold, but it had its origins in the smaller and more humble wooden stool found in every home in the region.

Beyond that, much of the scene was a common one. I have, at this point in my life, met enough heads of state to know they are almost always seated in some kind of frame—before a tapestry or painting or coat of arms, atop a dais, or, in this case, beneath a splendid awning—and surrounded by ministers, servants, and assorted hangers-on. How else is one to know that they are important? His wives were there, and various youths bearing enough resemblance to one of those women or to the oba himself for me to guess them to be his children; the olori Denyu n Kpama Waleyim and her son Okweme were in the group, and I was not glad to see them.

Nor was I glad to see Sir Adam and several of the army men. To my heightened nerves, this seemed like proof that we were all to be ordered back to Scirland. (The truly irrational part of me tried to combine this with one of my other problems, and invent a scenario in which Natalie and Mr. Wilker would be sent back, but I would be forced to marry Okweme.) But they could not command my attention now; it must all go to the oba of Bayembe.

A court functionary had instructed me beforehand that I would be permitted to show respect in the Scirling way (by curtseying) rather than the Erigan way (by kneeling and, before a personage as august as the oba, lowering my face to the ground). I have never been especially graceful at curtseying, and my knees have a regrettable tendency to go tremulous and unreliable when I am nervous; I almost wished they would let me kneel instead. It is difficult to fall over when one is already on the ground. But it might have looked a mockery if I tried, and so curtseying it was, with Mr. Wilker bowing at my side.

Our progress was marked by sonorous words from the
griot
at the oba’s side. These learned men and women are sometimes called bards, but more often we use the Thiessin word, which serves as a synonym for a full dozen terms in different Erigan languages. I might equally use a dozen terms to describe them in Scirling: historians, storytellers, poets, musicians, praise-singers, and more. They are attached to aristocratic and royal families, and are often aristocrats in their own right, with all the power and wealth that implies.

I could not make out what the
griot
was saying; he spoke in the highly stylized form of Yembe used for his work, which bears as much resemblance to ordinary Yembe as Akhian or Yelangese calligraphy does to ordinary text, and is even less comprehensible to me. (Calligraphy at least will sit still and give you a chance to puzzle it out.) Knowing what I do now of their customs, however, I expect the bulk of it was a recitation of the oba’s praise-names, his ancestors, his ancestors’ praise-names, and other things meant to impress us with our insignificance in comparison to him.

One of those praise-names, rendered into English, is “he whose legs are made of iron”—or “Iron-legs,” I suppose, though that lacks elegance, sounding more like the nickname sailors might give to a particularly salty captain. Certainly the braces, at least in their most recent iteration, deserved a degree of elegance. Gold had been inlaid along their sides in the characteristically geometric patterns of Yembe art, for it would not do to clothe the country’s ruler in anything ordinary. But no effort had been made to gild the steel completely; to do so would defeat the purpose. Nor did he wear the lower-body wrap affected by many in his court that might have concealed the braces. Instead he wore an elaborate loincloth, for Ankumata n Rumeme Gbori understood the role of his own infirmity and its cure in his legend, and used them to his advantage.

This was a man who had taken weakness and made it strength. If you understand only one thing about him, that would be enough.

We minced our way through the opening formalities and the inquiries into Natalie’s health. I half-expected this to lead into Sir Adam’s demands, but no; the ambassador stayed silent (looking, if truth be told, a trifle bored), and the oba said nothing of Lord Denbow.

Instead he waved back the youth cooling him with a large fan and stood. I heard a quiet hiss as he did so: the braces contained cunningly engineered hydraulics. In a mild voice that did not obscure the weight of command, he said to myself and Mr. Wilker, “You will walk with me.”

“Yes,
chele,
” we chorused. I suppose I might render the word as “Your Majesty,” since an oba is the sovereign ruler of his nation (though in a different manner than a Scirling king); this, however, would obscure its derivation from
eche,
the Yembe word for “gold.” Polite address for the oba meant something closer to “Golden One.”

To my startlement, the invitation appeared to extend only as far as the two of us and his
griot.
By subtle signals Ankumata indicated to his wives and his servants that they would stay behind; the servants were less subtle in communicating this to our fellow Scirlings. Sir Adam’s protest faded behind me as we followed the oba through a shadowed archway into a garden—the same garden in which I had walked with Galinke a few months before.

The oba walked slowly, though how much of that was his braces and how much the dignity of his rank, I cannot say. After we were well through the arch and out of earshot of the others (though not out of bow or rifle shot from the guards on the high walls), he addressed Mr. Wilker. “You have studied dragons. What have you learned?”

Unlike the boyar of Drustanev, who had once asked a similar question of Lord Hilford, Ankumata seemed genuinely interested in the answer. Mr. Wilker collected his thoughts and delivered a good précis of our findings thus far, adding—unwisely, from the perspective of my still-twitching nerves—the regretful coda that “Miss Oscott’s illness forced us to suspend our work for the time being.”

The oba nodded. Then, without warning, he spoke to me. “You have a desire to study the dragons of the swamp.”

My heart gave a great thump in my chest. It was not precisely a secret, but I had only spoken of it to a very small number of people, and did not like the reminder of how easily gossip spread. But I could hardly lie to the man, and so I said, “Yes,
chele.
There is more we could learn about the dragons here—there will be more for years to come, I imagine—but comparison is useful; we might in some ways learn more about savannah snakes and other breeds by looking at Moulish swamp-wyrms than by studying the others alone.”

We had reached the end of the garden, where a staircase led up the wall. One hissing, mechanical step at a time, Ankumata climbed; we followed, though not before exchanging a look of puzzlement.