The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons) (19 page)

No dragons fell on my head during our return to the camp, nor in the days that followed. We were about three weeks in that location, with hunts every few days, and smaller excursions to gather food every morning: nuts, berries, roots, frogs, whom the Moulish ate in vast quantities, without ever seeming to dent the supply.

(Because someone always asks: yes, I ate termites. Also ants, beetles, caterpillars, and the cicadas whose cacophony woke me every morning. If one is to live without the benefits of agriculture beyond sporadic trade with villagers, every source of food becomes vital. I will not, however, pretend I ever became fond of the practice. Insects are too crunchy for my taste.)

During those three weeks, we applied ourselves assiduously to being good members of the camp—a task made easier by the absence of dragons, at least that we saw. Moulish came and went, some of them drawn from other camps after word reached them of our presence; others moved to visit kin, or to get away from neighbours who vexed them. It meant constantly learning new names and, as our command of the language improved, explaining ourselves again and again; I began to feel we would never truly settle in, but be trapped forever in this limbo of novelty. But in time the questions stopped.

With the fluctuation of the camp (most of which I will gloss over here, except where it becomes pertinent), you might rightly ask whether we stayed with the same people our entire time in Mouleen. For sufficiently small values of “the same people,” the answer is yes. Akinimanbi, I discovered, was newly married, and she and her husband Mekeesawa shared a fire with her grandparents, Apuesiso and Daboumen. At all times except a few I will note in due course, we were always in camp with one or the other of those two couples, and often both.

As in the previous volume of my memoirs, I will not force you to toil through broken sentences that would more accurately represent my early lack of skill with the Moulish tongue. You may simply imagine that when I said to Akinimanbi, “I’ve heard that the dragons here are rather bad-tempered,” one morning shortly before we left that campsite, my phrasing was not nearly so fluent.

She shrugged, cracking nuts with great efficiency and throwing the shells into the fire. “A hippopotamus is worse. The dragons usually won’t chase you.”

I had less faith than I might in that “usually,” owing to my experiences with the “usually” approachable rock-wyrms of Vystrana. “Do you ever hunt them?”

Akinimanbi stared at me as if I’d suggested throwing a baby into the fire along with the shells. “
Hunt
them? That would be”—and she finished with a word whose meaning I could not guess. (
Geguem,
which I suspect is a term left over from the older language.)

“I don’t understand
geguem,
” I said, apologetically.

She looked to her grandmother, Apuesiso, who was squatting on the other side of the fire. I could not imitate their posture; a lifetime of chairs has trained me out of the position. I sat on one of our crates, having discovered that sitting cross-legged on the ground meant unpleasant visitors crawling up my skirts.

Apuesiso was braiding a rope from some fiber I had not identified. Without pausing in her work, she sang a song, at least half of which was in the older tongue. I could not understand a word of it, and prepared to say so. But Apuesiso knew that; I think she began with the song for reasons of tradition or propriety. When it was done, she shifted without pause from music to speech. “A long time ago, a man killed a dragon. He was ashamed of what he’d done, so he tried to hide it by getting rid of the body. He ate the meat, used the skin, and turned the teeth and claws into tools. But it was no good: the spirits knew what he had done.
Geguem.
”

Murder, then; or perhaps sin. “Did they punish the man?”

By her snort, I might have asked whether rain fell from the clouds. “Because of him, we die.”

The broken quality of our conversation meant I had to ask several more questions before I properly understood what Apuesiso meant. The death of the dragon was, in their view, the reason human beings are mortal.

I am more a natural historian than an ethnologist; my immediate thought was to wonder how hungry that man must have been to resort to eating foul-smelling and fouler-tasting dragon meat. But of course such myths change over time; the exact phrasing owed more to the usual hunting practices of the Moulish than to the actual disposition of a dragon’s body. (Indeed, I later heard another rendition of the story wherein the bones were also said to have become tools. I was far too excited about that one, until it became apparent that, no, the Moulish ancestors did not have their own method for preserving dragonbone.)

But if I have relatively little interest in the religious practices of other people, there is no surer way to draw my attention than to bring up dragons. “Why did he kill it? Was it for food, or did the dragon attack him?”

They laughed my questions off, as well they might. It was a myth; such narratives are not known for their exploration of the human psyche and its motivations. As well ask why Chaltaph refused the gifts of Raganit in the Book of Schisms: scholars may think up interpretations, and those are enlightening in their own fashion, but in the end the story itself gives no clear answer. But the taboo against further dragon killing was clear.

I brought this up with Natalie and Mr. Wilker that afternoon, as we went through the tedious routine of washing our clothes in buckets of water collected for the purpose. (We could not use groundwater, as it was too often muddy. Fortunately, the storms that came every afternoon as regularly as clockwork made it easy to collect rain.)

“So they won’t look kindly on us killing a dragon,” Mr. Wilker said, wringing out one of his shirts. It is a credit to the man that he never once asked Natalie or myself to do his laundry for him—though on reflection, it may be more a discredit to our own clothes-washing skills, or lack thereof. We were both too gently reared to have firsthand experience with such matters; Mr. Wilker, with his working-class childhood on Niddey, knew more than we.

“About as kindly as we would look on someone pulling another fig from the Tree of Knowledge,” I said, trying, with less than total success, to scrub mud from the hem of one of my skirts.

Natalie was hanging the clean articles from a line to dry (inasmuch as they could, in the eternally damp air of that place). “No tests on bone, then, unless you want to try and do it in secret.”

Mr. Wilker and I exchanged glances, then both shook our heads. “Not yet, anyway,” he said. “Too much risk of being found out and losing their goodwill.”

“Besides,” I added, “it works, with modification, on both rock-wyrms and savannah snakes, who cannot possibly be related except in the most distant sense. I think we can assume it would work on swamp-wyrms as well. And as much as I would like to be able to study samples for reasons other than preservation, Mr. Wilker is right; it would lose us their goodwill, which would do more harm to our work in the long run.”

I had gone on with my skirt-washing efforts while I spoke, but my thoughts had drifted from that task; it startled me when a pair of hands appeared and took the skirt away. Mr. Wilker set it against the crate lid he was using for a washing board and began to scrub it, doing in mere seconds what would take me minutes to achieve, if indeed I could at all.

“Thank you,” I said, blushing. “Would it scandalize you terribly if I cut that apart after it dries and turned it into trousers?”

“Oh,
please
do,” Natalie said, with vast relief. “Then I won’t feel guilty for doing the same. Skirts in this place are sheer madness.”

Mr. Wilker had seen me in trousers before, in Vystrana. He had not liked it at the time—but then, we had not liked each other at the time, either. He said, only a little stiffly, “It seems the practical choice, yes.”

Natalie and I accordingly spent the evening cutting up and restitching our clothing, much to the amusement of our hosts the following morning. The only differentiation they observe in clothing the two sexes lies in how they hang their loincloths; skirts versus trousers meant little to them in that regard. But Natalie and I both felt awkward in such masculine garb, and it showed. We soon adjusted, however, and this is the origin of my practice of wearing trousers whenever I am on an expedition, which has been such an article of gossip over the years. (Whatever the scandal-sheets may claim, I do not wear them at home, though I have considered it once or twice.) (The incident at Booker’s Club should not be counted; I was
extremely
drunk at the time.)

Our decision was timely, as we moved camp the very next day. I have spoken already of the tendency for the Moulish to come and go from a camp; there is also the migration of a camp wholesale, when they have been long enough in an area to exhaust the nearby sources of food, and must move elsewhere to find game and wild fruits.

This created a spot of difficulty for our expedition, as we had known it must when they slaughtered the donkeys. With no beasts of burden, the Moulish carry all of their belongings with them, in baskets strung from tumplines on their heads. Although this is quite an effective method for those whose neck muscles are conditioned to it, the four of us (Faj Rawango included) could not be so described, and also had more equipment than we could carry in such fashion.

Our best guess at conversion from “distance a Moulish man carrying a burden can walk before noon” to Scirling units told us they intended to move about fifteen kilometers farther into the swamp. Some of our things we could abandon, having discovered we had no real need of them. (A proper Moulish sentiment, and one that has become habit for me over the years.) Others we could get rid of, so to speak, by encouraging members of the camp to take them; they rarely resented us borrowing things back when we needed them. But some items—foremost among them the crate of gin and the box containing our preserved dragonbone—posed a genuine problem.

“Well,” Mr. Wilker said with a sigh, “I suppose we could conduct another experiment. Bury the bones, and see how they fare in this muck.” He kicked at the wet soil.

That box was nailed firmly shut; the Moulish did not know what was in it, and I preferred to keep matters that way. “Will we be able to find it again? I feel I’ve come to know this area quite well, but I’m sure that a week from now it will look like every other bit of swamp to me.”

“They know the spot,” Natalie said, fishing a machete from among our baggage. “And I think Faj Rawango could find it again. We’ll just have to ask for help. I fear, though, this is the closest thing we have to a shovel.”

We dug the hole with two machetes and our bare hands, which would not have gone very well in more solid earth. In that terrain, however, it was more a matter of hacking through a mat of roots, then scooping away what muddy dirt remained. (And then pausing with every handful to shake off the small creatures crawling up one’s arms.) This, of course, attracted an audience, but we were able to satisfy their curiosity by saying we only wanted to spare ourselves the effort of carrying the box’s contents with us.

Everything else went into packs and baskets and so on. Akinimanbi talked her husband Mekeesawa into taking our bottles of gin, removed from their crate and wrapped in clothing for protection; he grumbled at carrying a tumpline-hung basket “like a youth”—grown men carried their nets and spears, not other burdens—but agreed without much rancor, as the rest of us were taking on substantial loads of our own. And so, shouldering our loads, we went with our hosts to their next camp.

FOURTEEN

The heart of the swamp—Leeches—Egg-hatching season—Hunters of knowledge

I thought I had seen the Green Hell during our weeks in that first camp, but I was wrong.

Compared to the swamp proper, those upper reaches are dry and scrubby, with dwarfish vegetation (however much it may tower above the trees and brush of the savannah). Once you descend into the heart of the Green Hell, you find yourself in a land of water and giants.

The trees there soar forty or fifty meters high, as if they were the pillars of some great temple. Their roots form great bladelike walls, bracing the trunks in the soil, sometimes growing closely enough that earth accumulates in between and a smaller tree begins growing in the cup thus formed. The space beneath is emerald and dim, save for where a stray beam of sunlight breaks through the many layers of vegetation to strike the ground. There the swamp grows even warmer, but at the same time the light is a glorious thing, as if it carried the voices of angels.

Most of the light is to be found where the waterways grow wide enough that branches cannot fully bridge the gap. But these are rare; storms and floods along the three rivers that feed the swamp can change the landscape enough that what last year was a minor stream has now become a main artery of the delta. “Rivers” in Mouleen therefore have trees growing in them like islands, and are patched with sunlight like a piebald horse.

When we came to a waterway deep and broad enough to be troublesome, or (more often) turned to follow one for a substantial distance, the Moulish paused to make simple rafts, on which they floated their belongings for ease of transport. “Tuck the hems of your trousers into your stockings,” Mr. Wilker said, suiting action to words. “It will reduce the chance of you finding a leech on your leg.”

“I think trousers just became my favourite thing in all the world,” Natalie said.

We tucked our hems into our stockings and half-waded, half-swam downstream. When we came out again, our hosts picked leeches off their limbs with an unconcerned air. We Scirlings examined ourselves and one another; Natalie circled behind me, and I felt her tug on the fabric of my shirt. Then she made a most peculiar noise—a sort of strangled moan.

“Ah, Isabella?” she said. “You, ah—your shirt—”

My shirt had come loose from my waistband during our exertions. I put my hand to my back, very unwisely, and felt the soft, disgusting mass of a leech just above my right kidney.