The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons) (22 page)

But I cannot deny that the dragon’s share of those problems fell upon my head. It was I, not Mr. Wilker or Natalie, who fell from that bridge. I am the one who, on a subsequent day, was bitten by a venemous snake; I am the one who fell inglorious victim to an intestinal parasite, which had to be purged with a careful dose of strychnine. I broke two fingers on two separate occasions, attracted leeches like iron filings to a magnet, and knocked one of my sketchbooks into the campfire one night. I was, in short, a recurrent disaster.

The effect of this upon my mood was if anything worse than the incidents themselves. In Vystrana I had ostensibly been my husband’s companion and secretary to the expedition; here I was supposed to be an equal partner with Mr. Wilker, yet I felt incompetent in comparison. It raised the spectre of our old strife—less, I should say, through any fault of his, and more through my own self-doubt. I tried harder to prove my worth (which led to things like the broken fingers), bore an unjustified grudge against Mr. Wilker for seeming proof against all perils, and generally made an utter shrew of myself. (How the two of them never gave in to the urge to chuck me into the swamp, I will never know.)

The most detrimental effect, however, was upon our pursuit of a certain goal.

I had not forgotten the matter of dragon eggs. Remembering Mekeesawa’s reticence on the subject, I tried asking Akinimanbi; Natalie’s theory was that the Moulish had a gender taboo, and such things were considered the proper province of women.

As theories go, it was not a bad one, but in this case it was incorrect. It might have been a seasonal taboo—eggs not to be spoken of in the season of their hatching—but I did not know enough to suspect such a thing, and in any event that was not it either. This frustrated me enough that I began to press more sharply than was polite.

Which did not earn me an answer, but did give me something else. Akinimanbi rounded on me at the edge of camp and said, “Why should I tell you? You’re cursed!”

By then the “camp” had dwindled to Akinimanbi, her husband, her grandparents, and our crew of four. This was usual for the season; later they would come back together in larger groups. I had cause to be grateful for the smallness of the camp, as it meant the embarrassment of our argument was seen only by a few. “What do you mean, I am cursed?”

“All these accidents,” Akinimanbi said, gesturing at my splinted finger. “A witch has put an evil spell on you, Reguamin. Everyone knows it. No one will tell you anything until you deal with it.”

Before the last division of the camp, some of the youths had been telling stories in my presence—quite loudly—about people under the influence of witches. I had not realized their stories were meant as a coded message to me. It was the same notion I had gotten from the grandmother in that village, when Natalie became ill with malaria; and I had as little patience for it now as I did then.

“No one has put a spell on me,” I said, “evil or otherwise. It’s simply bad luck. Or who are you saying has done this? Your husband? Your mother? One of the people who has been with us in camp?”

“The witch doesn’t have to be here,” she countered. “It could be a villager. Or someone in the land you come from.”

That struck me as very convenient. Blame misfortune on someone not even present: it was the same as saying the Lord did it, with an extra helping of blame. “No one in my land practices witchcraft,” I said. “If anyone does such things, it’s your own people.”

“
Everyone
practices witchcraft,” Akinimanbi said forcefully, stepping closer. With my advantage of height, she should not have been able to glare
down
at me, but somehow she gave the impression of doing so. “They practice it in their hearts, when they become angry or upset. Maybe your brother here in camp lusts after you, but you won’t marry him, so his heart works witchcraft against you. Maybe you have a child who wasn’t mourned properly, and so its spirit has cursed you. Who have you wronged?”

I thought of the tension between myself and Mr. Wilker, my mother’s disapproval, Lord Denbow’s fury at Natalie’s disappearance. But if he were working witchcraft, would it not target his daughter instead?

It was all nonsense, just like the legend of Zhagrit Mat. I even wondered for a moment if one of the Moulish might be responsible for my misfortunes. But no; it was simply bad luck, and I said so.

“Bad luck has a cause, Reguamin,” Akinimanbi told me darkly. “If you spent your time staring at the right things, you would understand. Until you take care of it, the bad luck will not go away.”

And she would not tell me what I wanted to know. Controlling my impatience and frustration as best I could, I said, “Assuming for a moment I believe a word of this … how would I take care of it?”

Even the hypothetical possibility of my cooperation made her look relieved. “Find the cause. Think who you’ve wronged, and make peace with them. Undo the witchcraft.”

I could hardly go back to Scirland for a tearful reconciliation with my mother. “I will think about what you’ve said,” I told Akinimanbi, and hoped that would be the end of it.

But the worst, of course, was yet to come.

SIXTEEN

Yellow jack—The dragon roars—Akinimanbi’s argument—The ritual—Natalie and Mr. Wilker—My confession

You may recall that I praised Natalie Oscott in an earlier segment of this narrative, for not being so foolish as to attempt to press on with her work when she suspected that she might have contracted malaria.

I was less sensible than she.

My excuse—and it is a poor one—is that I already felt a keen sense of my insufficiency, owing to the string of misfortunes I had suffered. My broken fingers had healed enough for me to be of use once again; I did not want to delay us more, or put my share of the burden on Mr. Wilker and Natalie. (No, that phrasing is too noble, though I shall leave it for posterity. I did not want to surrender to others’ hands what contributions I might now make.)

When I felt the first stirrings of a headache, therefore, I shrugged them off. The ache in my body I attributed to the ongoing lack of a proper bed; stiff muscles were a familiar problem, and if they pained me more now than before, surely that did not mean anything. Nor did my lack of appetite, which could be attributed to weariness with a diet of hippo meat, honey, and termites, and a craving for the familiar comforts of home—never mind that I felt no such craving, not even for foods that were ordinarily a pleasure. Part of me recognized the peril in these signs, but I was not yet ready to admit their significance, not even to myself.

That stage of my denial may, perhaps, be excused. But as the day wore on, I began to shiver, and then I acted like a proper fool: I strove to conceal my shudders from the others, knowing they would insist we return to camp at once. The three of us had found a swamp-wyrm wrapped around a tree, lying in wait for unwary prey, and I had at last a good opportunity to draw it; I told myself that the opportunity should not be wasted, and that evening would be soon enough for me to lie down and rest.

But soon my hand began to shake badly enough that it affected my work. And Natalie, who had been crouched where she could study the jointing of the dragon’s wing, noticed.

“Isabella,” she whispered, in a tone of concern.

Before she could say anything further, my lack of appetite abruptly asserted itself in the other direction. I dropped my sketchbook and vomited into the underbrush, and from there matters only got worse.

The dragon fled, which brought Mr. Wilker back to us, and he wasted no time in lecturing me as I deserved (though at the time I was bitterly angry with him for it). He insisted we return to camp on the spot, and I was no longer in any condition to argue; indeed, I was in no condition to walk. Before long he resorted to carrying me, and by such ignominious means did I find myself back in my tent.

Once laid on my pallet, I moaned and curled into a ball. Mr. Wilker, about to depart, stopped and turned back. “What is it?” he asked.

“My back,” I said. “It
aches
.”

He dropped to his knees and rolled me over against my protests, peeling back my eyelids with careful fingers. Whatever he saw there made him recoil. “God almighty. This isn’t malaria.”

“What?”

I will never forget the look of abject fear in his eyes. “I think you have yellow fever.”

And so I did. The early stage is much like malaria; the back pain and sometimes a yellowing of the sclera in the eyes are what distinguish the two. For the next three days I shuddered and sweated on my pallet, alternately attempting to take sustenance and refunding it a short while later. It was like a dreadful case of the ’flu—dreadful first because it was so physically unpleasant, and second because I knew the peril I was in. Yellow jack rarely kills Erigans; they most often contract it in childhood, and afterward are immune, as we Scirlings are with measles or the pox. But for those of us not exposed to it from an early age, it can be very hazardous indeed.

I knew all this, and yet when my fever abated, I still fell prey to the unfounded optimism that accompanies the course of the disease. “I feel quite better,” I insisted, and ate a hearty meal to prove it. “We shall be back at work tomorrow.”

But Mr. Wilker would not let me take refuge in hope. “If you remain healthy for a week,” he said, “then we may consider it. Until then, you rest.”

He was, of course, correct. Some people escape yellow fever that easily, but I was not among them. Shortly after my apparent recovery, I entered the second, and far worse, stage of the disease.

I can tell you very little of what happened during those days, at least from my own perspective. I was delirious with fever and pain, which rendered my memories little more than a hallucinatory smear of impressions. Natalie told me afterward that Akinimanbi’s grandmother Apuesiso stripped me bare and coated me in cool mud, changing it as necessary to bring my fever down; this explains why, when I came to my senses, I was filthy and naked even by the minimalist standards of the Moulish. She also told me I vomited black bile, which is a terrible sign and heralds death more often than not. I dreamt of the talking drums, pounding out my doom. I shook and I raved; I sweated blood out my pores, and where the mud did not cover me my skin was gold with jaundice. In short, I nearly died—a phrase I can write with equanimity only because it was so long ago, and because I have the reassurance of knowing I survived. (As you can plainly tell, for I am not writing this memoir from beyond the grave.)

But at the time, it was nothing short of terrifying, even once the worst was past. Knowing that, having recovered, I was thereafter proof against further infections comforted me little; I had thought myself recovered before, only to be dragged under once more by the second stage of the fever. I lived in fear that this new reprieve was likewise temporary, and I would soon succumb entirely.

My will to live was sufficient to make me bathe, so that I could dress once more in something other than mud. But my enthusiasm for our research was shattered by the conviction that the Green Hell was going to kill me.

In this fragile state did the dragon find me.

*   *   *

If you have never been seriously ill, you cannot understand how sensitive your mind is afterward, how easily jarred by the world around you. But remember that state, if you have experienced it, and imagine it if you have not.

Now imagine that a sound begins in the forest, beyond range of your sight. It is a snarling, roaring sound, which your tired, sensitive mind immediately tries to identify, fitting it to one beast or another you have seen. You fail, because this is nothing like any animal call you have heard before, and this failure makes you afraid. Is the creature something new, or is your mind going to pieces?

Before you can answer that question, the sound changes. It draws closer, in a trampling rush that paralyzes you where you sit. And then
something
comes bursting between the trees, a beast like none in all the world, with a terrible maw and a seething, many-legged body behind it, which snarls and rages in a swift circle around you, then turns its fury upon your camp. It knocks down tents, flings your belongings into the dirt, scatters the fire and stomps your clothing into the ashes. It is chaos and noise incarnate, and if you were healthy and well rested you would recognize it as nothing more than someone wearing a wooden dragon mask, with others trailing behind it under cover like a Yelangese festival puppet.

I was not healthy, nor well rested, and I had never seen such a puppet. I shrieked and cowered, the noise and destruction too much for me to encompass. The dragon saw my fear and fed it, rushing at me again and again—and then, with one final snarl, vanished back into the forest.

Silence fell, more complete than any I had heard since coming to the Green Hell. The display had shocked even the natural beasts of the swamp into quiet.

Just as I began to regain my breath, Mr. Wilker broke the silence. Red with rage, he stormed forward, to where Apuesiso was picking herself up from the dirt. He swore the air blue in Scirling, then mastered his tongue enough to speak in a language she would understand. “What is the meaning of this? Your people have just destroyed half our things! They’ve terrorized Isabella—is this how you treat a woman only barely recovered?”

“It is how we warn those who do not listen.”

The voice was not Apuesiso’s. I turned, still trembling, and saw Akinimanbi standing a little way behind us. She and Mekeesawa had not been with our camp in some time—not since before I fell ill. When had she returned?

Only just now, by the surprise with which Mr. Wilker and Natalie faced her. Akinimanbi nodded to her grandmother. “She sent word of what happened, through the drums. We brought the
legambwa bomu.
It is a thing we do, when people ignore the advice of those around them.”

That gave me the strength to rise to my feet. “You are saying I brought this upon
myself?
How? And what is this—this
destruction
supposed to teach me?”