The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons) (27 page)

Velloin snorted. “How does he think to make us leave? We have rifles.”

“And we have poisoned spears,” Yeyuama said, through me. “We have nets and traps. We have the forest. You are villagers, and our home will eat you. Go now.”

The other Yembe heard my translation and looked uneasy. They were indeed villagers, outsiders to this place, and although they had spent this entire time looking for the hunters they
knew
must be about, they had not yet spotted a single one.

It was a fragile threat. These people could easily kill Yeyuama; the Moulish, however, could kill more than a few of them. Then the oba might send a larger force, this one hunting not dragons, but men. However well the Moulish knew the Green Hell, they were safe here largely because no one cared to face the difficulty of coming after them. If they gave the oba a reason to change his mind, they would lose.

But those were future possibilities; the present was this confrontation, and I could see that the other men were not eager to gamble their lives against the demons of the forest.

“I recommend you take his advice,” I said. “The Moulish are quite fierce in defending what they hold sacred. Please assure the oba that I will have useful information for him soon; he must, however, be patient a while longer.” Information, of course, was not the same thing as eggs, nor was “useful” the same thing as “encouraging.” But it would, I hoped, buy us a little more time.

“Very well,” Velloin said, and shot a look at Okweme that silenced whatever the prince had been about to say.

Tom spoke, for the first time since this entire affair began. “I don’t recommend trying to come back at a different point. By this time tomorrow, the entire swamp will know of your hunting party, and I doubt they’ll be so generous a second time.” The talking drums. The Moulish were not a unified state, but at times like this, they could act in concert, and would.

I did not know whether Tom had convinced Velloin or Okweme, but it at least gave the other Yembe something else to be worried about. The two leaders might have a mutiny on their hands, if they tried to come back.

They left for the time being, at least, and I sagged in relief when they were gone. But not for long: there was still Yeyuama to deal with, and the revelation Okweme had forced upon me. As little as I wanted to return to that topic, delaying would be even worse.

But when I tried to explain further, he stopped me with the same answer as before: “You will be tested, Reguamin. Then we will see.”

Ominous words. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to accept them.

NINETEEN

Into the open—Constructing the glider—Wishbones—Across the river—Abseiling again—The waterfall island—Movement in the water—Bees—Strangely regular stones—My great leap

Given the dangers I had already faced in my short life—deadly disease, attacks by wild beasts, kidnapping, and other threats from human sources—you would not think that leaving the forest for the more open ground of the savannah should be frightening. Yet so it was.

The villagers of the Moulish border fear the forest, and when I went into the Green Hell, I experienced a taste of their fear. But the reverse side, which I have not yet mentioned, is that the Moulish themselves fear the land outside the forest. It does not quite go so far as what physicians term agoraphobia—the fear of open places and crowds—but after a life lived in the close embrace of the swamp, the savannah feels like a desiccated wasteland by comparison, one in which there is no shelter to be found. You are exposed: the sun beats down without mercy, the scattered trees providing only tiny oases of shade, and everything can
see you.

Being not Moulish, and only a visitor to the Green Hell, my reaction was not so extreme as theirs; but I did gain a degree of sympathy for it. My months in the swamp had acclimated me to an environment never further away than my elbow. Now I felt as if I teetered atop a small and unstable perch, and might at any moment go tumbling away into the emptiness.

This feeling was all the stronger because I knew I would only be in the open air for a short while, after which I would tumble (or, one hoped, serenely glide) back into the confines of the swamp. I was not particularly eager to return to the Green Hell, but at the moment it felt familiar—and besides, I hoped, great discoveries awaited me there.

Having departed from our Moulish hosts, Tom, Natalie, Faj Rawango, and I picked our way across the broken land where the fault that created the Great Cataract began. It was not easy going, but moving out onto flatter land would bring us too near the villages, and the men who fortified and held the rivers against Ikwunde advances. We did not want their attention and their questions. In due course, however, we came to the bank of the Hembi and settled down, under Natalie’s guidance, to build a pair of wings.

I would not be able to fly with them, of course, in the sense of achieving the kind of lift and maneuverability that most breeds of dragons can manage. I lacked the thoracic muscles necessary for such a thing; the best I could hope for would be to glide. Even that was the fulfillment of a girlhood dream, though, and so I threw myself into this task with goodwill.

The center of the frame was an oval shape, made by lashing ribs together, with a division where they could be pulled apart for easier transport. Two femurs reached out from this to form the leading edges of the wings, the surface itself consisting of canvas stretched over fans of alar cartilage. I painted that canvas with the sap of the rubber vine to make it airtight, while Tom helped Natalie lash the bones and cartilage together with gut and cord.

I myself would hang feet-down from the center of this affair, just behind the femurs, with a crossbar for me to grip. Natalie was going to use a fibula for the crossbar, but I had, out of nostalgia for my childhood, insisted that a wishbone be among the pieces we preserved, and it seemed too apt not to employ here. (Apt and—I must admit—superstitiously lucky. If wishbones were a thing of flight, and I wished to fly … an irrelevant connection, of course, as it would not be serving anything like the anatomical function of a furcula in this instance. But when one is going to fling oneself off a cliff, these little superstitions become oddly vital.)

Tom and I had spent enough time studying the mechanics of flight for me to need little instruction in the use of my glider. By leaning my weight to one side or another, I could turn; by throwing it forward or back, I could direct myself down or up. But only so far: the control offered by such a design is limited in the extreme, as enthusiasts of more advanced designs are no doubt shouting at the page even now. Furthermore, while I might not need instruction, to undertake such a thing without practice is little short of suicidal. But the art was in its infancy back then, and that meant there had been no dramatic accidents (such as the one that claimed the life of Mr. Garsell, Natalie’s Lopperton friend, three years later) to instil the proper fear in me. I therefore had only enough fear to make myself terrifed—not enough to turn back.

While we did this work, Faj Rawango scouted the river. He soon returned with good news. “If you can cross the Hembi,” he said, “and come at the falls along the spit of land between it and the Gaomomo, I think you will be almost directly above your island.”

“That sounds ideal,” I said. “I would prefer not to have to glide along the waterfall any farther than I must, as the air currents there are likely to be unpredictable.” (We had, in those days, a general sense that air currents were relevant to flight; the specifics had not yet been tested with anything more complicated than a kite. If they had … but it is quite useless to second-guess my own actions at this late date.)

To cross the Hembi, I would need some sort of vessel. Faj Rawango accordingly went out again, and while he was gone, I held my final conference with Tom and Natalie.

“There’s a good vantage point a mile or so back,” Tom said. “We’ll watch from there—though to be honest, it will make no difference one way or another.”

A born gentleman would not have shown his nerves at the thought of what I faced. I was glad Thomas Wilker was not a born gentleman; it made me less ashamed about the storm of sparklings dancing in my stomach. “I will feel better for knowing you are watching,” I said, and shook his hand.

Natalie embraced me. She had been all efficient concentration during the building of the glider, but with that task done, she had nothing to distract her from the situation. “I think the design is good,” she said into my shoulder, “but if it is not—”

“I have every confidence,” I told her. “Come, though—we must give my conveyance a name. What shall we call it?”

A dozen possibilities fluttered through my mind as I said that. I had named my son after his father, but to call a glider after them both seemed a bit much.
Greenie,
after my beloved sparkling trophy?
Ankumata,
in an attempt to flatter the oba, or alternatively
Lord Hilford?
Draconean,
in honour of the ancient civilization?

Tom made a sound I had never heard from him before, which I can only call a gurgle, as if he almost swallowed his tongue laughing. “Furcula,” he said.

I had related the story while we built the glider, of how I dissected a dove in my childhood to discover the purpose of a wishbone. “It
is
vital to flight,” I admitted. “And if it breaks, well, that is supposed to make my wish come true.
Furcula
it shall be!”

*   *   *

And so it was that, with the wondrous
Furcula
in two pieces athwart my lap, I came to be rowed across the Hembi River near the border of Bayembe, for the purpose of flinging myself over a waterfall.

Faj Rawango rowed the small boat, and studied me with an unblinking gaze as he did so. “What is it?” I asked, when I could bear the silence no more.

He did not answer immediately, to the point where I thought he might not do so at all. At last he said, “You could have gotten eggs more easily than this.”

“Perhaps,” I said, after some reflection. “We still know nothing about dragon mating: when it happens, where eggs are laid, even how to tell a female swamp-wyrm from a male. I would have had to go searching. That would have upset the Moulish, possibly to the point of violence—which is a different sort of cost, and one I am not eager to pay. And then there are other things I would not have learned. They may not be entirely relevant to natural history; tree-bridges, for example, are not directly concerned with dragons, but rather with how humans coexist with them. That is, however, something I am interested in knowing. As is this priesthood, or whatever term I should use for it, that Yeyuama belongs to. So perhaps I pay in difficulty, but I believe I gain more than enough in return.”

Faj Rawango pulled steadily on the oars, not taking his eyes off me. “You do not do this for them.”

The Moulish. In all honesty, it took me a moment of thinking to understand what he meant. Some years later—after stories of my exploits aboard the
Basilisk
began to filter back home, and the outrage over my Erigan deeds had faded somewhat—there were those in Scirland who romanticized me as some kind of champion of the Moulish, nobly aiding them with no desire for my own gain. This is entirely false, and I cannot decide if its falsity is too flattering to me, or perversely insulting, to myself and the Moulish both. One could imagine that I approached my research the way I did out of respect for our hosts and their traditions, but insofar as that is true, I cannot claim credit for it. It was the accidental consequence of my true reasoning, which was concerned with how to achieve the best results with a minimum of fuss. Flinging myself off a waterfall was, in my ledger, less fuss than Velloin’s approach; that is as noble as I can claim to have been.

We were nearly to the far bank of the Hembi. The Moulish had not been on my mind, not in that fashion, but now Faj Rawango had put them there, reminding me of a conversation in Vystrana years ago, about what good our expedition could do for the people of Drustanev. This time we had done better; we had not held ourselves aloof from those around us, but had assisted in their daily work, contributing where we could in repayment for their hospitality. Still, it was not as much as we might have done.

Now was hardly the time to be thinking about such matters, when I needed all my concentration for the task of not dying. I said to Faj Rawango, “I hope I have at the very least not been detrimental to our hosts. But if you know of any way I can be more beneficial to them—”

The prow of the boat scraped against the bank. Faj Rawango did not answer me. It was, I think, not his place; I was asking about the Moulish, and although they were his father’s people, they were not his own. Furthermore, the point was not so much to effect a trade, wherein I gave them a particular thing in exchange for what I had received thus far, and would receive in the future. The point was to make me think about the question.

I did not intend to think about it right then, not when I had more immediately perilous concerns at hand. But as I turned to brace myself against the boat’s edge and step out, I swept my gaze across the long, shallow valley where the three rivers came together, just to reassure myself the Ikwunde were not even now sneaking a raiding party across.