A Natural History of Dragons (18 page)

I did not, in the end, vomit into a bush. But I am glad I removed myself from the immediate vicinity of that smell, or my fortitude might have failed.

Jacob came and stood at my side. His expression was much like the one I’d seen the day our Chiavoran drivers went on to the boyar’s house: he was regretting having brought me along. It was to banish that look from his face that I mustered my best smile and said, “Well. I don’t imagine the carcass would have been useful for much further study anyway, and now we have learned something new.”

I watched him very nearly say three or four things, discarding them all, before he settled on answering me in kind: with scholarly detachment. He had not forgotten our conversation before the hunt. “It may be related to the attacks. There are many legends telling of people sent mad by eating human flesh; the same might well be true of dragons.”

If so, it answered one question and raised another. Why had dragons begun eating their own kind? For they must not do so habitually, not if what Dagmira had said was correct.

It was not a question we could answer that day. At Jacob’s suggestion, I went back down to the camp and began packing things up; there was nothing more for me to draw at the kill site. The gentlemen investigated the now-abandoned lair, collecting droppings and other materials for later study. And so, much chastened, we returned to Drustanev.

TWELVE

The Feast of the Reception — New Vystrani words — Draconean architecture and inscriptions — Something unexpected in the grass — Something even more unexpected belowground

The village, of course, did not cease its usual activity simply because there were Scirling visitors present. The calendar followed its usual course, and not long after our dragon hunt the Feast of the Reception came around.

I have not discussed religious matters yet. (Not in this book, and my earlier publication is, again, not to be relied upon for this matter. Please do me the kindness of ignoring all references to religion in that work.) Vystrana, of course, was and is a land of devout Temple-worshippers. All of our Scirling party were proper followers of the Magisterial path, which made us very much the odd men (and woman) out in Drustanev. But we held a brief conference two nights before the feast and agreed that, although we were loath to interrupt the pace of our work—which had most recently produced evidence of the differences in male and female rock-wyrm anatomy—for the sake of harmony, we should at least make a nod to the local practice.

We did not enter the tabernacle and participate in their ceremony. But we stayed awake through the night—a harder job in the Temple calendar, I must say; they celebrate the feast a good fortnight earlier than we do, in late Floris instead of early Graminis—reading our scriptures, and then joined them outside the next morning for a celebration.

There would be no pleasant strolls through the surrounding countryside for flowers; snow had fallen during the night, though fortunately not very much of it. But the villagers set up trestle tables in what passed for the center of Drustanev, and there was singing and dancing, and everyone dressed in their finest. For that morning, Vystrana looked more like it does in the stories: yokes of colorful embroidery stretching across snowy-white shirts, men playing lively tunes on their violins, and so on.

In keeping with the generosity of the season, we Scirlings gave out small trinkets from among our belongings, such as we could spare, and received pipes and beads and a fine wool shawl in return. This latter I wore draped over my arms as I attempted to learn the local dances, which everyone else seemed to execute without the slightest trouble—even when so drunk they could scarcely stand. I wondered if some of the smugglers’ brandy finished its journey in Drustanev, or rather in the bellies of its inhabitants.

One young fellow asked me in comically simplified Vystrani whether I had seen much of the surrounding countryside, and upon hearing I had not, brightened like the dawning sun. “No? You must go to the—” And then he said a word I did not know. When I shook my head, he said, “Building! Go down!” He gestured with his hands: something toppling, with a crash at the end. “Very old. Very old.”

“Ruins!” I said in Scirling, and then all at once remembered the blocky shape I had seen during our hunt.

Draconean ruins are rare in Scirland—or rather, the ones that exist are none too impressive. I had seen one as a girl, shortly before the beginning of my gray years, but it took a scholar to recognize it for what it was; the remains had none of the distinctive art that gave the ancient civilization its name. I did not mind; the illustrations I had seen in books were enough to show me that fantastical dragon-headed gods were much less interesting than actual
dragons.
But my recent tastes of freedom had given me a hunger for more; I had much rather visit Draconean ruins than sit cooped up in Gritelkin’s dark house, failing to have conversations with the incomprehensible Dagmira.

A blind man might have missed my sudden excitement; my interlocutor did not. “I show you! I take you!” Then he gave up on keeping his sentences simple enough for my poor ear, and let spill a flood of words, from which I gathered that he would be more than happy to guide me there and back at my earliest convenience—tomorrow, if I liked.

I extracted the young man’s name from him—Astimir—and the location of his house, a shabby place he occupied with his ailing mother. Though he had said nothing about payment yet, I suspected that was his eventual goal. Well, so be it; by the standards of Drustanev we were absurdly wealthy, and could afford to share a bit of it with this energetic young man. “Not tomorrow, though,” I said, laughing, when he tried to urge me onward. “A few days. We will go soon enough.”

Whether the others would be interested or not, I could not say. Draconean ruins had very little to do with actual dragons, and our reasons for being here. But there was only so much paper-filing I could do; I was determined to go, even if I had to go alone.

For a time it seemed I
might
be going alone. “It’s hardly worth our time,” Mr. Wilker said. “We aren’t archaeologists, and I hardly think anything in the ruins would shed light on why the dragons are attacking people—which is, you may have forgotten, a rather more pressing question. It leaves little time for sightseeing.”

“
I
have a great deal of time, which I am permitted to spend on very little other than sightseeing,” I replied sweetly. “Perhaps if you could arrange to produce more in the way of useful observations, I would have more work to do here.”

That sounds cattish, and it was. Our research was at last making something like progress, and a good deal of that was owing to Mr. Wilker’s effort. Indeed, it was one of the things about him that annoyed me, for I would gladly have taken on some of his labors, if he would only let me. But he was jealous of anything that might diminish his usefulness in Lord Hilford’s eyes. I might have said as much, too—embarrassing all parties in the process, myself included—but Jacob intervened. “Wilker and I cannot both go to the ruins and do useful work, Isabella. And we
must
gather data, if we’re to have any hope of stopping these attacks. Too many of the lairs we’ve visited so far have been abandoned; we need to find occupied ones, so we may examine the evidence of their eating habits. If they’re eating their own kind, of course, the bones won’t be there—but a
lack
of bones from other animals would tell us something.”

Since we could hardly take the pulse and examine the tongues of the local wyrms, I had to concede that made sense. “But why can’t I be spared? It will hardly end the world if your notes remain unfiled for a day or two.”

My husband had the grace to look awkward. “It may seem a silly concern, but—I do not like you going alone. With that fellow, I mean. It would not look right.”

I raised my eyebrows at him. I was kidnapped by smugglers in the night, and he worried about my reputation if I went sightseeing with Astimir? But Lord Hilford spoke up. “Eh, that’s easily solved. My joints would never permit me a strenuous climb; that’s a job for younger men. I’ll go with your wife, and keep her safe. Unless you don’t trust
my
intentions.” He mock-leered, and I laughed; and that settled the matter.

It was a mark of the relaxed standards creeping upon us during this expedition that everyone accepted the propriety of this arrangement: Lord Hilford, though unmarried and not my husband, was judged a suitable enough chaperon, at least in comparison to a Vystrani villager. I have often found this to be true since, that matters which seem terribly important in the early days of such a journey (what
will
people back home say?) fade into triviality with the passage of time. It has the consequent effect of making one question how vital those matters truly are—which goes some way toward explaining my increasingly extravagant behavior, as time went on.

We set out at the crack of dawn. No camping gear this time; it would take about half the day to reach the ruins, but there was a hut used by the boyar’s huntsmen, Astimir told us, in which we could pass the night before returning to Drustanev.

Buoyed by the exciting prospect of our goal, we hiked quickly. After a few hours the overgrown, rectangular silhouettes of the ruins became visible on the opposite slope, but Astimir did not lead us directly toward them. Lord Hilford questioned him, but got enigmatical replies. “I’ve half a mind to leave him; we can find our way from here,” the earl grumbled.

I persuaded him not to—if anything went wrong, I could
not
hope to carry Lord Hilford back on my own—and soon had cause to be glad. The reason for our roundabout path, it seemed, was Astimir’s sense of the dramatic: he led us down into the valley, then back up again by another trail, so that we might approach the ruins by way of their great gate.

This stood cloaked in pines nearly as tall as the ancient stones, but the trees had no foothold on the gateway itself. The central figure strode out boldly on an outcropping of solid rock, its human feet planted on the ground, its draconic head staring through the clear mountain air toward Chiavora. Vystrani winters had been harsh to the mighty sculpture; its features were so eroded as to be almost indistinguishable, and the lintel of the right-hand passage had fallen, leaving the unknown god with only one wing. The damage somehow made the figure more inspiring: nowadays we may carve as large as the Draconeans—the Archangel in Falchester is even larger—but no amount of artistic “weathering” can counterfeit the sheer weight of time.

D
RACONEAN
R
UINS

I stood, awestruck, pinned as surely as if a rock-wyrm had stooped on me from the sky. My reverie was only broken by Lord Hilford’s chuckle. “Never been to the ruins at Nedel Tor, have you?”

My gaze was still riveted to the statue, but the spell was weakened enough for me to respond. “Only Millbridge, and those aren’t very impressive.”

“No, they aren’t,” he agreed. “Nor is Nedel Tor—not compared with what one can find in the Akhian desert—too much looting of stone for later use. But the gateway is in moderately good condition, aside from the loss of the head.”

He went on talking; I think he said something about double gateways, so characteristic of Draconean architecture, and theories as to their purpose. (My favourite is the one promoted by Mr. Charving, the great urban reformer: that the Draconeans regulated traffic into their settlements by guiding arriving riders and carts through the left gate, and those departing through the right. It is utterly fanciful, as no one has ever discovered evidence of sufficient traffic at these ruins to require such measures—but as Mr. Charving parlayed this into a very successful scheme for the regulation of traffic in Falchester, where it very much
was
needed, I cannot but applaud his rhetoric.)

I hardly attended to Lord Hilford’s lecture, however, for I was already fumbling my sketch pad from the bag I carried. My hands found it and the pencil by touch alone, while my eyes gauged proportions and noted evocative details. There would not be enough time at these ruins to draw them properly—not on this trip, at least, though my subconscious had begun to plot a return—but I could at least compose a brief sketch.

Astimir was impatient with this plan; he could not understand why I wanted to stop out here, without even entering the ruins. “A moment more,” I said absently, casting onto the page a rough outline of the fallen lintel stone, cracked in two. How long ago had it fallen? It had rolled forward when it did; the face pressed into the earth might preserve more detail of the wing than now visible in the one still standing. But it would take a crane to lift the thing, and so its mysteries would remain hidden, alas.

The promise of further wonders finally tore me from my work. I turned to a blank page and kept the sketchbook out as we walked beneath the surviving arch and into the ruins. That single day in Vystrana taught me more about working at speed than anything that has happened since: I threw down the most cursory lines, suggesting the perspective and decay of the structures we encountered, and spent days afterward filling in the details from memory. (You may still see the results in
Sketches from the Vystrani Highlands,
published when I began to acquire enough notoriety that anything from my pen could turn a tidy profit. I do not recommend them for scholarly purposes—too many of those “remembered” details are generic or downright fanciful—but they will give you a sense of the place.)