The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons) (20 page)

I fear it may damage my reputation to admit this, but I yelped and promptly began to dance in a circle like a cat chasing her tail, trying to see the leech and also to get away from it. The latter was futile; it had fastened onto me, and slapping at it with my hand was hardly persuading it to let go.

The Moulish were no help, as they found my antics utterly hilarious. Finally Akinimanbi took pity on me; while Mr. Wilker held me by the shoulders, stopping my dance, she lifted my shirt and pried the thing off. I shuddered at the sight of it, and kept shuddering for a good while afterward, obsessively running my hands over various parts of my body to make sure I had no more bloodsucking passengers, at least none of any size larger than a mosquito. (I did, as I have said, eventually become accustomed to leeches, but this being my first encounter with them, it did not proceed so calmly.)

On we went, until we came to the place the camp had agreed upon for its next site. How they identified it, I do not know; with the landscape as changeable as the shifting waters, there seemed no guarantee a location would still be where one remembered it, even if one could find it again.

With what remained of the day (and our energy), we helped the others cut away brush and saplings from the new site, trimming the detritus to make huts for them to sleep in. Pitching our own tents took longer, and when it was done, I had no will even to eat. But Natalie insisted we feed ourselves, so I swallowed a plantain and some starchy root whose name I had not yet learned, then collapsed face-first into my pillow.

This was the basis of our routine for the next several months. The camp—or rather, the portion of it that consisted of us and Akinimanbi’s family—never stayed more than three or four weeks in any one place. We were in the depths of the rainy season now, which meant a daily deluge each afternoon, and often showers at other times of day; it is not the near-constant rainfall seen elsewhere in the world, but it is more than enough. The mountains farther inland had melted their snowcaps by now, feeding the three rivers; it began to seem that the swamp was eighty percent water and twenty percent land. Campsites were wherever the ground rose high enough to have a chance of staying above the flood. Nor were such places accidental: Mekeesawa told Mr. Wilker that they piled branches and planted certain vegetation in what passed for their “dry” season to ensure these miniature hillocks would persist.

There was, I began to realize, more organization to their society than met the eye—though it is still nothing like as structured as those which develop in less ecologically hostile regions. The Moulish cannot afford stratification by class, nor even much in the way of gender roles; all must do what they can. But they not only understood their environment, they shaped it in small ways to suit their purposes. They also maintained a surprising degree of connection between camps, firstly through the constant migration of people, and secondly through the use of talking drums.

Natalie was fascinated by these. For a people with so few material possessions, and most of those temporary, the drums were treasures: carved with elaborate designs, and carried with reverence each time the camp moved. Their use is too complex for me to explain, but the Moulish have a way of translating their language into drumbeats, which can then be used to send messages between camps. By passing a message from one camp to the next, they are able to communicate from one end of the swamp to the other, much faster than any human could carry a message. The drums therefore permit them to stay in touch with kin far away, and are often used to ask or tell where someone is, so that another may find them.

Mekeesawa explained this to me one afternoon, while Natalie was questioning the current drum bearer about the method of translation. He added, “It is very useful during this season. No one wants to wander for too long.”

By now my command of the language had improved substantially, such that I could converse with him in more than my early mixture of nouns and mime. I laughed and said, “Because of the rain? I can understand that.”

“The rain,” Mekeesawa said, “and the dragons.”

We were not busy with any task for the camp; I judged it safe to question him, without fear that my interest would seem selfish. “What makes them more dangerous in this season than another? Do they object to this much water?”

He grinned. “They love it. Full of things to eat. But this is when the eggs hatch.”

I attempted not to perk up like a scent hound that has come upon the trail of a fat, juicy rabbit, but I fear my success was middling at best. It was easy to forget that a world existed outside the Green Hell: a world, and perhaps a war. Had the Ikwunde backed off from the rivers, or were Scirling soldiers and Bayembe warriors fighting them as we spoke? I had no way of knowing.

Even if open conflict had broken out, nothing I did here could affect it—or so I thought. Eggs would not help Ankumata immediately. Even so, Mekeesawa’s words reminded me that the oba would be waiting for us to deliver on our promise.

If the eggs were in the process of hatching, though, he would have to wait a while longer, until there was a fresh set. “Do the dragons lay them in the water?” I asked. “Or on dry land, and they hatch when they become submerged?”

It was not, I thought, an alarming question. Mekeesawa, however, clapped his hands together, which I recognized as a sign to ward off bad luck or evil spirits. “I don’t know about such things,” he said.

The peculiarity of his response arrested me. The key factor distinguishing the Moulish from their neighbours—even the closely related Mouri—is not physiognomy or language; it is their relationship to the swamp they call home. They know every plant that is useful and every one that is hazardous, every insect that can poison you and every one that can be eaten for lunch. They hunt a wide variety of creatures, even hippopotami and forest elephants (against whom they use some of those poisonous insects), and are as well versed in the behaviour and life cycle of those beasts as any naturalist could hope for.

Now a Moulish hunter claimed to me that he did not know where swamp-wyrms laid their eggs. You may understand, gentle reader, when I tell you this made me suspicious.

I considered several possible responses and settled on, “Many animals become quite violent if they believe you might threaten their young. I should like at least to know what to watch out for, so as not to stumble upon swamp-wyrm eggs.” Of course I would go
looking
for them eventually, but this made for a more discreet way of questioning him.

Much good it did me. “They’ve all hatched by now,” Mekeesawa said.

“Yes, but if we are still here when the next set are laid—”

I should have known better. Yves de Maucheret had claimed the Moulish worshipped dragons; I had seen no sign of it thus far beyond that one myth, the tale of how humans became mortal, but I should have known that
something
gave rise to that claim. I had clearly stumbled upon a taboo subject, and it is my fault for letting my intellectual curiosity drive me into pursuing it too directly.

No more would Mekeesawa say on the topic, and I had to restrain the urge to question others in the camp, in the hopes of finding someone more willing to speak. Instead I passed this along to the others, and we discussed how we might proceed.

“We have a fair bit of time to spare,” Mr. Wilker said. The rainy season meant the Moulish had only to drop a net in the water to get their supper; they spent much of their day at leisure, singing and dancing, when they were not occupied with household tasks like pounding out fresh barkcloth or weaving baskets. “We’ve gathered useful information for the general purpose of naturalism, but perhaps it’s time we devoted ourselves more strictly to dragons.”

I nodded in agreement. We had caught distant glimpses of a few, and likely been closer to more; a swamp-wyrm who wishes to remain concealed is not easily spotted. But those glimpses had taught us very little so far. I said, “Not pursuing eggs, of course; not immediately. But we know virtually nothing of what swamp-wyrms eat, or how they hunt, where they sleep, the differences between male and female, their mating habits…” I ticked each item off on my fingers, and stopped when I ran out on that hand. I could have kept going. My understanding of what a naturalist
did
had greatly deepened in the years since Vystrana.

“We don’t even know how one might safely observe them,” Natalie pointed out; and that became our first question to answer.

For some time we had been agreeable if moderately inept members of the camp, mostly going along with the day-to-day activities of our hosts. Now that we reared our heads as naturalists, however, we met with more difficulty. Not hostility, per se, but simple confusion.

“This is the lazy season,” Akinimanbi said, suiting inaction to words. At her side, Mekeesawa was stripping the bark from a branch to make a new spear, but his movements were desultory. He might have been a Scirling farmer, whittling wood to give his hands something to do. “Why would you go out when you don’t have to?”

“We
do
have to,” I said, and then stopped. Most of the reasons I could give her were so foreign to the world in which she lived, I might spend the next hour explaining them and still not convey my point. There was nothing like the Philosophers’ Colloquium here, nor journals in which one might publish, nor acclaim given for that sort of thing. And simple scientific curiosity, as I had learned in Vystrana, rarely meant much to the people for whom my object of curiosity was their daily and sometimes disagreeable reality. (One need look no further than Scirland for proof of that: while we have naturalists who study local birds and bugs, they are far outnumbered by those whose interest lies in more distant lands—myself chief among them.)

Akinimanbi waited patiently while I considered how to explain myself without seeming like a madwoman. At last I said, “If you consider the three of us to be hunters of a sort, then what we are hunting is knowledge.”

Her eyebrows went up at this, and I realized my error. “Except it’s not like your story, where the man did wrong by killing the dragon! We don’t want to kill anything. Forget what I said about hunting; we
gather
knowledge, as you gather food. To, ah, feed our minds. Or—”

At this I stopped, because Akinimanbi and Mekeesawa both were laughing at me, slapping their thighs and rolling back where they sat. I deserved it, for the way my words had tumbled over one another; I might have explained myself, but the part about not seeming like a madwoman had been a resounding failure.

Belatedly, I thought of a better way to make my point. “Your people understand the forest: how the animals behave, where to find them, and so on. I want something similar—but instead of the forest as a whole, I want to understand dragons. They are not only here, you know; there are dragons in the savannah—” Mekeesawa nodded. “Well, there are more than that, all over the world. They live in the mountains and on the plains and maybe even in the ocean. I want to know them as you know the creatures of this forest.”

“But why?” Mekeesawa asked. His eyes were still merry with laughter, but his question was serious. “You don’t live in all those places.”

With the amount of time I have spent traveling in my life, one might make the argument that I
do
live in all those places, if only temporarily. But Mekeesawa’s point was a good one, and not easily dismissed. The Moulish understood the creatures of the Green Hell because their survival depended on it; my survival did not depend on my traveling the globe to find dragons. (Indeed, it has on more than one occasion nearly been detrimental to my life expectancy.) How could I answer him?

Thinking back on the matter now, it is possible my only true answer to that question is now in its second volume, with more to come. These memoirs are not only an accounting of my life; they are an accounting
for
it.

But that day in the Green Hell, I could hardly present these books to Mekeesawa. I gave the matter my final try. “There is a man—an elder of my camp, in a manner of speaking. He has asked me to do this for him.” That was the best explanation I could give for Lord Hilford’s role as my patron. “And if
that
does not make sense to you, then I can only ask you to tolerate the madwoman.”

I suspect that last suggestion was the one they accepted in the end. One way or another, we got the freedom to continue with our work—and, at long last, an explanation for Akinimanbi’s overhead gesture so many days before.

FIFTEEN

Traversing the flood—Moulish engineering—Swamp-wyrms on the hunt—I miss my footing—My misfortunes—Witchcraft, again

I have described to you how the inundation of the Green Hell made the place almost more lake than land. We had gained two newcomers to the camp since settling there, and lost five others; I had assumed they went by raft while I was otherwise occupied. But travel by raft is too dangerous during that season: apart from the usual predators, swamp-wyrms not excepted, the water swarms with small, eel-like creatures we had dubbed fangfish, which are rapacious carnivores. To avoid these hazards, the Moulish traveled by other, more exciting means.

Three of us went out with Mekeesawa; Faj Rawango elected to stay in camp, I think to mitigate any sense that we were being antisocial by pursuing our own ends. Mekeesawa took us to the end of the long spit of land on which we had pitched our camp, and we waded across a shallow stretch to another spot that was not so much island as tree. It was one of the great forest giants, tangled about with smaller parasitic trees, and he indicated to us that we should climb.

Tamshire’s rocky soil does not support much in the way of good climbing trees; nor do Tamshire’s gentry support much tree-climbing in girls. Mekeesawa clambered up with no trouble, and Natalie followed him with surprisingly little, but I required Mr. Wilker’s assistance. My face, I am sure, was flamingly red by the time we reached the others; in part because of the heat, but much more because of the indelicate physical contact his aid required. We had swept aside our conversation on the hunt—or rather, swept it under the rug—but it is difficult to ignore questions of propriety when a man places his hand on your posterior to help you up a tree.