In the Labyrinth of Drakes (7 page)

Tom shrugged helplessly. “How can we judge? We have no way of knowing what
he
thinks.”

“With a horse or a cat,” I said, “one can tell. Or at least guess. But that is because we know their ways, and can recognize the signs of their moods. My father had a dog who drooped about the house as if she had three paws in the grave already, but she would curl up at his feet and whack her tail occasionally against his shins, and you could see she still took pleasure in his company.” I wondered, but had never asked, what happened to that dog in the end. She had passed, of course—but had it happened naturally, or had the day come when the tail-whacking stopped? Had my father put her down, out of mercy? Had I not been a woman grown, thirty-three years of age, I might have written him to ask for advice.

“There is our answer, perhaps,” Tom said. “Learn their ways, before we make a decision we cannot take back.”

And so Lumpy lived. He never became a true pet; I did not let him out of his pen to follow around at my heels, for fear he might bite those heels off. But I visited him regularly, and brought him choice bits of meat, and did what I could to improve his health. When later events took me away from Qurrat for an extended period of time, I was told that Lumpy became quite dejected—inasmuch as we could discern such things by then. He did not live as long as his species might ordinarily hope for; a desert drake that survives its first three years (during which time many of them are killed by other predators) may hope to see as many as forty, and there are tales of some living far longer than that. Lumpy perished after a mere seven, as his increasing size exacerbated his physical difficulties. But that was a good deal longer than he might have had otherwise; and although I cannot read a dragon's mind, I believe he enjoyed the time he had.

*   *   *

Dealing with Lumpy put my mind on thoughts of life expectancy and maturation rates, which were of prime importance to any breeding programme. Indeed, if Lumpy's continued existence had scientific benefit, it was that he gave me an idea which ultimately proved to have revolutionary consequences.

The problem was this: desert drakes mate but once a year, near the end of the wet season, and lay ten or so eggs. The resulting offspring take approximately five years to reach sexual maturity; they ordinarily do not begin producing offspring until they are seven. Even if Tom and I met with success the moment we arrived and kidnapped every dragon in the desert for our needs, it would have taken years for the breeding programme to reach anything like regular production; and of course we could not be expected to succeed the moment we arrived. That much was understood, and allowed for. But each failed season would mean another year of delay.

In short, we needed to practice on something that bred a good deal faster.

We were making our morning circuit of the pens when the idea came to me. Lieutenant Marton was serving as our interpreter—Tom and I had both studied Akhian, but what one learns from a textbook and what a man speaks on the streets of Qurrat are rather different things—and we were taking notes on what the labourers could tell us of the dragons' health and behaviour. Before we could make any useful changes, we had to know the current situation inside and out.

But of course I could not stop myself from beginning to form theories and hypothetical scenarios. This put me to thinking about a draconic species that is far less finicky about its mating habits—which gave me an idea. In such a state of excitement that I nearly dropped my notebook into one of the enclosures, I said, “Honeyseekers!”

“What?” Tom said.

“My honeyseekers! Miriam Farnswood can send them to us!”

Tom frowned. Already his nose was peeling from the intense Akhian sun, even at the gentler angle of winter; his Niddey ancestry was simply not suited to this latitude. “And why should she do that?”

“Because they,” I said triumphantly, “will breed like
anything.
”

It was not simply that they would breed. The females lay a single egg at a time, but these are watched over by the male honeyseeker; he repeats his mating display until he has what he considers to be a sufficient number of eggs. By removing those eggs when his back is turned, one can persuade him to mate again and again, much more frequently than he would have under ordinary conditions. It is therefore possible, even with just a pair of honeyseekers, to produce a moderately regular supply of eggs—a fact I had discovered when I took one clutch away for dissection.

I had not made much use of this so far, as honeyseekers do not make such good pets that I wanted to send hatchlings to all of my friends. But the man who had gifted my pair to me was Benedetto Passaglia, the great explorer; and he had taken
extremely
detailed notice of their habits in the wild. Experimentation with those conditions might teach us valuable lessons about egg incubation in draconic species.

“It isn't going to be anything like a precise match,” Tom said when I was done explaining this to him. (I fear I was somewhat less coherent in the actual moment, producing a great many fragmentary sentences which lacked vital bits of information.) “Honeyseekers aren't what I would call close cousins of desert drakes.”

They were barely cousins at all, except in the broadest taxonomic sense. As my readers with an interest in dragon naturalism will know, they hail from the eucalyptus forests of Lutjarro, clear on the other side of the world from Akhia. “It would still be data, though,” I said. “And more than we have now.”

“True enough. Let's speak to Colonel Pensyth, and see if he will arrange for them to be shipped here.”

*   *   *

Honeyseekers were far from the strangest things we might have asked for; Pensyth acceded to the request without a quibble. We ran into a difficulty, however, with our plans for keeping them.

“They are insectivores when the season requires,” I told Andrew as he escorted me from Shimon and Aviva's house to Dar al-Tannaneen, “but their primary sustenance comes from eucalyptus nectar. I have a stand of trees in my greenhouse at home—do you suppose it would be possible to uproot one and ship it? Or would the shock of transition kill it?”

My brother laughed. Although an escort was (in my opinion) not necessary, I had come to enjoy these walks, passing through the bustle of the city to the estate outside the walls and back again at sunset. Andrew had always been my closest sibling, both in age and in our rapport, but we had not seen much of one another for years: he had joined the army just after I departed on the
Basilisk,
and his military assignments had kept us almost completely separate since then. Now I spoke to him morning and evening, on topics ranging from our respective duties to family to the places we had seen.

“You're asking
me
?” he said, in a tone that made it clear just how fruitless this line of inquiry would be.

I was forestalled from answering by our passage through the city gate. There were wider ones elsewhere, suited to the passage of carts two abreast, but those would take us too far out of our way; I went in and out of Qurrat by the old Camel Gate, so named because it was scarcely wide enough to admit one camel laden with goods. By the time we had squeezed through to the other side (Akhian propriety about contact between unrelated men and women bowing to necessity in such spaces), Andrew was looking thoughtful instead of amused. “Actually, there are a lot of gardens and parks here, and some of them are full of exotics. The ones belonging to rich people, of course. Marton would know more; he's a keen gardener. Maybe one of them has eucalyptus trees already.”

That would be a good deal better than trying to transplant my own trees to Qurrat, or growing new ones from cuttings. “Thank you,” I said, and we hurried on to the House of Dragons.

Marton did not know where eucalyptus trees might be found, but he promised to ask around. A few days later, he came to the office while both Tom and I were there, looking excited. “It's easier than I thought!” he said. “One of the Akhian fellows told me he thinks the sheikh has trees like that in his garden. Hajj Husam ibn Ramiz, I mean.”

This was indeed fortuitous—perhaps. “I'll write him a letter asking if we can come look,” Tom said, reaching for paper and pen as he spoke. “You'll know better than I will whether they'll be sufficient for your honeyseekers.”

He dispatched his letter post-haste, and the next morning a reply was waiting for us when we arrived. Tom's brow creased in a frown before he had even finished reading. “What is it?” I asked.

“He says I can come tomorrow,” Tom said, laying clear stress on the third word.

Tom alone. Not us both together. “You did mention us both, yes?”

“Of course I did.” It came out with a hard Niddey lilt—a sure sign that Tom was angry. “And his phrasing here is very clear. He doesn't say outright ‘leave Isabella at home' … but that's what he means.”

I was at a loss. I have been snubbed many a time for my sex, but rarely with such bluntness, under circumstances where my purpose is so solid. Nor could I think it some kind of misunderstanding—not after how I had been treated on my arrival here. Lieutenant Marton, who had delivered the letter, was hanging about in the doorway. I turned to him and asked, “Is the sheikh noted for being especially insulting to women?”

“No, Dame Isabella,” the young man said promptly, his tone anxious. “He's got two wives, I think.”

I forebore to say that a man may have any number of wives and still not be pleasant to them. “Then perhaps it is Scirling women he does not like,” I said. “Or Segulist women. Or scientific women. Or women who are overly fond of the colour blue.” The words were coming out with an increasing edge; I made myself stop and take a slow breath. Once that had been expelled, I said more quietly, “Then I suppose you will go, Tom.”

He straightened up to an almost military bearing. “No. We'll go together. The Crown hired us both, Isabella—under duress, maybe, and none too happy about doing it—but they hired us both. I'll not be leaving you at home as if you were some mere assistant of mine, here only to file papers and make tea.”

That had been precisely the grounds on which I accompanied our first expedition, to the mountains of Vystrana. My heart contracted sharply at his words, with the sort of pain that is very nearly sweet. To think that we had come so far: not only myself, from such trivial beginnings to my current position, but the pair of us together, from rivals circling one another like suspicious cats to this unshakeable alliance. I would not have predicted, so many years before, that we would end up in such an arrangement … but it made me more glad than I could say.

“Thank you,” I said, very sincerely. Then I shook myself straight. “Tomorrow, you said? That gives us all of today to be useful. Let us not waste it.”

*   *   *

The sheikh had asked us—or rather, Tom—to come by in the late afternoon, near the close of our usual working day. I brought a change of clothes to the compound that morning, and had a quick scrub with a rag and a basin of water before shifting into them. I could not prevent myself from accumulating dust on the way to the sheikh's house, as dust was inevitable in that climate … but I could at least make certain there were no drips of blood from Lumpy's breakfast on my skirts.

Hajj Husam ibn Ramiz ibn Khalis al-Aritati dwelt in a large and gracious estate on the bank of the river, with the main buildings situated on a low rise that would catch what breeze might be had. A servant greeted us in the forecourt of this compound and brought us through an archway to an inner courtyard. It was apparent even then that we had thrown them off their stride: the man clearly had been prepared to take Tom to some other, more masculine preserve … but it would not be appropriate to bring a woman there. (My Scirling readers can imagine this location as a gentleman's smoking room. I leave it to the invention of my readers in other lands to substitute an appropriate venue.) We sat on wickerwork chairs in the courtyard, without even coffee and dates to occupy us, and waited.

After a few minutes had elapsed, I murmured to Tom, “I imagine he is debating with himself whether to come down and greet us at all.”

“He had better,” Tom said. “I've got Pensyth's measure now. I can make quite a stink if the sheikh doesn't cooperate.”

I did not like to think of us having to cause trouble just to get our work done. To distract myself, I occupied my time studying the courtyard. As I had not yet seen the caliphal estates outside Sarmizi, I thought this place the pinnacle of Akhian elegance; even by those standards, it was exceedingly pleasant. Detailed panels of stucco adorned the walls, some of them painted in bright colours, and
jardinières
edging the gallery above spilled a wealth of greenery into the air. The fountain at the center held a Nichaean figure that was either a reproduction or a relic in surprisingly good condition. Given the sheikh's apparent status and wealth, my bet was on the latter.

Tom, however, grew steadily more restless. I think he was on the verge of speaking again, or even getting up to leave, when the sheikh emerged from an archway to our left.

He was not pleased to see us—not pleased to see
me,
I suspected—and made very little effort to hide this fact. He neglected the usual greetings and said to Tom, “Is it customary in your land to arrive with an unwelcome guest?”

This was a
shocking
breach of hospitality on his part. Tradition there holds that no guest is unwelcome: an Akhian nomad may be starving in the middle of the wastes, and he will still be expected to share his last scraps with a visitor. At the time I did not know how egregious his behaviour was, but it still rocked me back on my heels, metaphorically speaking.

Tom took it in better stride than I did. He merely said, “I beg your pardon, Hajj, but we're here on a matter of business, and our duties to the Crown have to take precedence. I requested an audience for Dame Isabella and myself together because we're partners in our work. Even if we weren't, the idea we're pursuing right now is hers. She understands far better than I do what is required. If I came here alone, I would be wasting both my time and yours.”