The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons) (24 page)

That swiftly, the scab was torn off. Little Jacob: he did not deserve to be thought of as a wound, but there it was, and with my defenses lowered by illness and this ritual, I could no longer pretend otherwise. A sudden jolt rattled my shoulders, as if something—a laugh, a sob, a shout—wanted to burst free. “My son. Oh, God. What am I to do with him?”

“What do you mean?”

The words came forth, slowly at first, then increasing until they formed a flood. “How could I risk coming here, when I have a son? Of course, few people ask that question of men who leave
their
sons behind to go abroad—because those sons have mothers to care for them. But even if the man is a widower, he does not face a tenth the censure I have received. Should his child be orphaned, everyone will pat the boy on the head and praise his father’s courage. Should
I
die, Jacob will grow up knowing his mother was an unfeeling madwoman who got what she deserved.”

I could not bear to look at anyone, whether they spoke my language or not. I fixed my gaze on the fire, as if its flames could burn this tangle out of me, and leave me free of such conflicts. “I
resent
my son. There—I have said it. I resent him because he shackles me; I cannot live the life I want, not without feeling guilty for devoting my heart to the thing that makes me happy. Surely it is selfish of me to care so much about the contributions I could make with my intellect; surely the greatest contribution to society a woman can hope to make lies in raising her children. No sacrifice she might make is too small, in service to that great cause.

“And all the while I have people telling me,
at least you still have something of your husband.
Do they mean the book chronicling our work in Vystrana? No, of course not—never mind that we undertook that work together, with intent. That cannot
possibly
be as valuable as the accidental consequence of biology.”

Very quietly, Tom said, “Is not a child worth more than a book?”

“Yes,” I said violently. “But then for God’s sake let us value my son for
himself,
and not as some relic of his father. When he is grown enough to read, I will be delighted to share his father’s legacy with him; it is my legacy as well, and I hope he has inherited our curiosity enough to appreciate it. I would not mind a motherhood where
that
was my purpose—to foster my son’s mind and teach him the intellectual values of his parents. But no; society tells me my role is to change his napkins and coo over the faces he makes, and in so doing abandon the things I want him to treasure when he is grown.”

At long last I brought my gaze away from the fire. Akinimanbi sat with one hand on her belly; she was bearing, and seemed glad of it. I was happy for her—but I had never particularly wanted that for myself, and at least half of my disinterest in remarrying stemmed from that fact.

“‘Would that I were a man,’” I said, quoting Sarpalyce’s legend. “Except that I do not wish I were a man. I only wish that being a woman did not limit me so.”

The fire crackled quietly. Then, nodding—in understanding or acceptance, perhaps both—Tom Wilker brought his hands together in a clap.

The others followed suit. I did not cry; I have rarely been prone to tears. But I felt purified. There is a word I learned later, a term from Nichaean drama:
catharsis.
I had, at long last, said what was bottled up tight in my heart, and while I still did not believe in evil spirits, I felt infinitely more free for having spoken.

Of course, others believed in evil spirits. Daboumen gestured me out of the way. I obeyed and watched, mystified, as he dug in the soil beneath where I had been sitting. I had chosen the spot of my own free will—no one directed me there—but a few inches below the surface, he found a twisted, ugly piece of wood. (Cynic that I am, I believe he placed it there by sleight of hand, though I am uncertain how he managed that when his only garment was a loincloth.)

“The witch put this there,” he said, and gave it to me. I did not need his gesture to guess my part in the script: I threw the twisted thing into the fire.

“Now,” Akinimanbi said, “you are free.”

PART FOUR

In which I make several discoveries, not all of them related to dragons

SEVENTEEN

Improved fortune—A newcomer in camp—The “pure”—The Great Cataract—Yeyuama’s challenge

When I have related an abbreviated version of this tale to others, every last one of them has asked the same question: did the ritual work?

I am not sure how to answer that. Did we suffer no more mishaps in our research? Of course not; we were still in the Green Hell, which had not transformed itself into the Garden of Paradise simply because my companions and I voiced our woes. Furthermore, I doubt there is a single person reading this account who is not aware of the even larger problems I was to encounter before long.

But it is true that I no longer felt myself jinxed. In part, I attribute this to the improvement of my mood and my concentration; I no longer made the sorts of careless errors that had caused me trouble before. The rapport between myself and my companions improved, and so did the coordination of our efforts, with concomitant good effects. And since human minds are very good at finding patterns, and ours had recently shifted from looking for bad luck to looking for good, we wrote off setbacks as expected, rather than proof of misfortune. This is how I explain it, at any rate; our Moulish hosts, of course, viewed the matter differently.

What mattered was that both groups were in better spirits, and as a result my companions and I soon found ourselves offered the very opportunity we had been looking for.

*   *   *

It began with the arrival of a newcomer into camp, a man I had never met before. Mekeesawa introduced the man as his brother Yeyuama, and I soon realized he was an
actual
brother: related by blood, not merely by age, as the Moulish measure such things.

Yeyuama was not like the other Moulish men we had known, in any age group. “Did he go out hunting with you yesterday?” I asked one morning, about three weeks after I had purged myself of the witchcraft taint.

The intimacy of the ritual had changed matters between Thomas Wilker and myself; he was Tom to me now, and I was Isabella. (Natalie remained “Miss Oscott” to him, I think because of his situation with her grandfather. I found myself much more aware now of his little deferences, the ways in which he acknowledged his lower-class origins and made certain no one would think him trying to rise above them.) Tom said, “Not that I saw. Was he here in camp?”

“Not that
we
saw,” Natalie said. And that was peculiar indeed, for it did not fit any of the patterns we knew for Moulish responsibilities.

Yeyuama did not keep us wondering for long. He came over to the fire we had built in front of our much-bedraggled tents and squatted on his haunches with the ease of a man who has sat thus his entire life. “You follow the dragons, Reguamin,” he said.

Followed, and stared at. “With caution, yes,” I said, hoping my humourous tone would come through. Yeyuama had an air about him that intrigued me: both gentle and watchful, as if he could spring into action at a moment’s notice. He was
extremely
fit; the Moulish are not a fat people, as a consequence of diet, behaviour, and natural physique, but Yeyuama had the compact musculature of a man who both eats well and exercises often.

He cocked his head at me. “Have you killed?”

“A dragon? No, of course not. I know the story.”

Yeyuama waved that away. “Not only dragons. Anything.”

My thoughts raced back to the savannah snakes we had hunted, the rock-wyrm in Vystrana, the wolf-drake I had shot (but not killed) when I was fourteen. “With my own hands?” He nodded. I was about to say no—I
wanted
to say no, as it was clear which answer Yeyuama was looking for—when I remembered the Great Sparkling Inquiry.

Both ethics and pragmatism prevented me from lying to him, the latter because my face fell before I could stop it. “Yes. In my homeland, there are these creatures…” I held out my fingers to indicate the size of a sparkling. “Like insects.”

(Lest anyone accuse me of dishonesty, I must assure you that my taxonomic speculations had not yet gone so far as to change my thinking about sparklings. Would I have admitted it to Yeyuama, had I begun to think of them as members of the draconic lineage? I do not know. The honourable answer, of course, is yes—but I am not certain my ethics would have carried me that far.)

Yeyuama brushed this off as being of no consequence. Everyone in Moulish society killed things like insects, but only grown men were hunters. He looked next at Natalie, who denied killing anything, and Tom, who confessed it. Yeyuama nodded, as if he had expected that. “What I have to say is not for you,” he told Tom. “Only the pure may hear it.”

The pure: those who had never hunted and killed. Yeyuama was pure; he never went with the other men. He was, I realized, the closest thing to a priest one might find in Moulish society. This must be what Yves de Maucheret had meant.

With our recent conversation so fresh in my mind, I could easily read Tom’s expression. Here, where there was no stratification of wealth or birth, he had expected to be able to participate in full; to be refused, as the Colloquium refused him, cut deeply. On impulse, I said to him in Scirling, “You’ve shot animals with a gun. Perhaps that doesn’t count as ‘with your own hands’?”

That provoked a rueful, bitter laugh. “No, I imagine it counts. And besides, when I was fifteen I cut the throat of my family’s carthorse after he broke his leg. Don’t offer,” he said, forestalling the next words out of my mouth. “It may upset them if you share what he says afterward. If this is a research opportunity, then you two should make the best of it.” He got up and left.

As it transpired, the core of what Yeyuama told us was not so secret that I feel obliged to leave it out of this narrative. (There would be a great gaping hole if I did, as if you walked in at the tail end of some tremendous anecdote being told over drinks. Everyone in the room would be goggling and laughing and you would wonder where the elephant came from.) I may elide some details, but the bulk of it should be clear to you.

“There is a test,” Yeyuama said, once Tom was gone. “Before you can touch the dragons. This test is dangerous; sometimes it kills those who try.”

A Moulish man—a lifelong resident of the Green Hell—was telling me something was dangerous. I said before that the Moulish do not fear their home, because they know how to survive it; this does not mean, however, that they fail to respect its perils. I asked, “Do we have to say now whether we will try? Or may we decide after we know what the test is?”

Yeyuama laughed, breaking the atmosphere of hushed secrecy. “Only a fool would agree without knowing. I will show you. There is no shame in refusing; most boys do.”

For there to be men like Yeyuama, who have abstained from killing in order to remain pure, this test must be offered while they are still young—before they, as youths, join the men on the hunt. I use male terms; virtually all of those who “touch the dragons” (a phrase whose meaning will become apparent later on) are men, though the Moulish denied any prohibition against women when I asked. It is simply that the challenge is a strenuous one, and few women choose to undertake it. But there was no resistance to Natalie and I trying. Merely a great deal of curiosity, to see how the Scirling women would do.

This challenge required us to go with Yeyuama on a lengthy journey. He would not name our destination, but we knew it lay west, toward the cliff from which the three rivers fall. It would take us the better part of a month to get there and return, he estimated, and no one could go with us who was not also pure.

Which meant leaving behind both Tom and Faj Rawango. The latter said, “After this, you will get eggs for the oba.”

The way he phrased it, I wasn’t sure whether it was a statement or a command. “After this, I may finally have some notion of how to
do
that. But much will depend on when the egg-laying season is.” I thought about how long we had already been gone, and added, “Would you like to go back and report to him? He must be wondering.”

“No,” Faj Rawango said. “I will stay here.” (A decision which I chalked up mostly to his unwillingness to report so little progress. He did not seem to be enjoying his sojourn among his father’s kindred.)

Tom was another matter. “You’ll be going from camp to camp,” he said, having queried Yeyuama for details. “Not going entirely on your own. Still…”

“You do not like it,” I said.

“First that business with witchcraft, now this test of theirs. I didn’t expect you to embrace so many of their ways.”

I had not
embraced
anything. In the case of the witchcraft ceremony, it was more “shoved unwillingly,” and as for this—“We require doctors to obtain certification before they can practice, and lawyers must sit examinations before they can pass the bar. Whatever this test may be, think of it in that light. It is a matter of qualification, nothing more.”

“Passing the bar,” he said dryly, “rarely threatens one’s life. But you’re right about one thing: it appears to be necessary. We can observe dragons all we like, but there are some secrets we won’t know unless you go through with this. I’m not trying to stop you. I only wish we had another way.”

For my own part, I wished he could come with us, though I had wit enough not to pain him by saying so. Natalie and I packed up what we could; it was not much, as neither of us had the strength of neck to carry a basket on a tumpline. Then we made our farewells to Tom and Faj Rawango, Akinimanbi and Mekeesawa, Apuesiso and Daboumen, and ventured deeper into the swamp.

I will gloss over the process of our journey, in favor of coming more quickly to its end. Suffice it to say that we did, as Tom had predicted, go from camp to camp, meeting both strangers and people who had formerly been part of our own camp, and enduring a thousand questions when they discovered that Yeyuama was taking us on this pilgrimage. I soon realized our destination was not secret; it was merely taboo, a thing not spoken of except when the occasion arose. Those we passed seemed to have at least a general understanding of what Natalie and I faced, and few of them seemed to think we stood much chance.