Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369) (13 page)

“Isabella,” Tom said in warning, but by then I had already launched myself toward the captain.

It did not matter to me that the man likely did not speak Scirling; the words burst out of me regardless. “That’s what you came here for, isn’t it? To kill those dragons! Are you the ones who laid waste to the countryside below? Now you will come up here and slaughter this pair—”

At this point Tom caught up with me. Eschewing propriety, he flung one arm around my waist and stopped my forward charge, catching my wrist with his free hand when I fought against his grip. I think he tried to say calming words, too, but I did not hear them over my own shouts. “They just
mated,
you fool! The female is likely pregnant. If you kill her, there won’t be any new generation; you’re burning the forest down just to get a few logs. You
can’t
shoot them, you
can’t
!”

I will not relate the rest of my words. Few of them were polite; some were the unfortunate byproduct of months spent in the company of sailors, whose language can be as colourful as advertised. Tom dragged me away bodily while Elizalde and Khüen fell over themselves with apologies; no doubt they had visions of my tirade ending in the lot of us being shot. What the captain said to them, I do not know, for Tom quick-marched me out of the village, not even bringing our packs with us, trusting the other pair to collect what we had left behind.

Which they did, and then we went back to Va Hing.

I would like to tell you that I came up with some clever plan for protecting the
tê lêng
against the soldiers who had come to kill them. I would not kill the soldiers myself, and my attempts to persuade them (if I may use the verb loosely) had failed—but perhaps I might have found a way to scare the dragons off, at least for long enough that their hunters would give up the hunt.

But I did not. I tried; I racked my brains for any method that might suffice. Unfortunately, this was not Vystrana or Mouleen. I had not spent long enough in this locale to know the terrain, nor even the habits of the dragons themselves in any great detail. None of the information that might have given me a chance of success was in my possession. I was a stranger here and a foreigner; and I had a son waiting for me in Va Hing, who needed me to come back to him, rather than being arrested in a foreign country—or shot.

Some of you reading this memoir may think me a hypocrite for my rage. After all, had Tom and I not killed dragons in the course of our research? It was not long since I had sat astride the corpse of a sea-serpent, wet to the knee in water bloodied by its death. But I thought then, as I do now, that there is a great deal of difference between shooting one or two animals for the purpose of better understanding their live cousins, and hunting many for profit. The one makes it more possible for humans and dragons to live in harmony. The other … I had seen the first fruits of that already.

We went in silence for the rest of that day. When we stopped for the evening, Tom said, “Soldiers. Are they doing this on their own time, for money? Or is this something the Yelangese government is backing?”

“I thought dragons were supposed to be
protected
by the government,” I said.

He shook his head, baffled. “So did I.”

Against my better judgment, I turned to look back in the direction of the mountains—where, I feared, one or both
tê lêng
already lay dead. “Give me the jungles of Mouleen again,” I said. “I had rather face wild beasts and diseases than the perils of civilization.”

There is a proverb, which Tom was kind enough not to voice:
be careful what you wish for.
Unfortunately, not only did I get it, but so did those around me.

EIGHT

Deportation—Survey work—Tropical fevers—An unexpected encounter—Not quite shipwrecked—A new passenger

In our absence, Jake had assembled a monumental collection of starfish and miscellaneous shells, which he showed to me with great pride. I praised it, wondered where we would put it aboard the
Basilisk,
and decided it did not matter; I remembered my own childhood collection of oddments and how it had pained me to lose them. I would not subject my son to the same.

Aekinitos might have complained, had he not been distracted by the delay in our return, which had left the
Basilisk
sitting for several unproductive days in port. Fortunately—for suitably broad values of that word—he was almost immediately distracted by yet another matter, which was our impending deportation from Yelang.

“What did you
do
?” he demanded of me, after a visit from a very stern-faced official.

It says something about Dione Aekinitos that he sounded less angry than impressed. Because I do not wish to defame the man, I will not say here what suspicions I had about his past and the activities he engaged in then … but he had a tendency to admire trouble with the law, provided the cause was either good or entertaining enough.

Tom and I had already related to him what occurred during our overland sojourn, but we had not given him the background: dragonbone, the Va Ren Shipping Association, and the apparent trade in dragon poaching. Now we exchanged glances, for we had not planned in advance what to say on that topic if queried.

(And why, I ask you, did Aekinitos look at
me
when asking what we had done? I did not think I had done anything while aboard the
Basilisk
to make him assume that between Tom and myself, I would be the troublemaker. Perhaps the stern-faced official had said something of my behaviour during the incident in the mountains.)

Now, choosing my words very carefully, I said, “There may be an … organization here in Va Hing that has a grievance against the two of us. It is a long story, and involves some research being stolen from an associate of ours in Falchester several years ago. We did not expect it to cause trouble.”

Aekinitos was standing in front of the windows that formed one wall of his cabin. He linked his hands behind his back and paced the short distance available to him, side to side before the windows, the light briefly limning his profile from each angle in turn. “Research. On dragons? I have never yet heard of dragons causing someone to be barred from entering a country.”

“It happens, I assure you,” I said dryly. “This is not even the first time it has happened to
me
.”

The novelty of that statement halted him in his pacing, with a tilt of his head I interpreted to mean curiosity. I waved it away, saying, “That is a story for another day. In the interim—are we truly barred from Yelang?”

“You are.” Aekinitos sighed and pulled out the chair behind his desk, then dropped onto it with a complete lack of grace. “We are permitted to go into Yelangese ports, but you may not leave the ship. Either of you.”

Tom made an inarticulate noise of frustration. “But that makes complete hash of our plans. We were going to the Ph
ă
n Shân river to look at the
kau lêng,
so we could compare it to Moulish swamp-wyrms. The
hung,
the
yin lêng
—”

Aekinitos cut him off with a growl. “And if you had kept to your schedule, coming back here rather than pressing on ahead, you might have had a chance to do those things. But now? You have a choice. Sit aboard the
Basilisk
with your specimens and your notebooks while we trade through Yelang, or make different plans.”

The galling part, of course, was that he was right. Going up into the mountains had been a mistake—one that had cost us more than we knew at the time. Our fleeting observations of the dragons there did not counterbalance all the work we might have done elsewhere, which was now barred to us. It is possible the Shipping Association might have caused us difficulty elsewhere; I did not know if the hunt for dragons was confined to the lands around Va Hing. But they were a Hingese company, and I had to believe their reach did not extend clear across the Yelangese Empire. We might have been able to work in peace. But Tom and I had chosen wrong, and this was the price.

*   *   *

We were not the sort to sit idle, so it will surprise no one when I say we chose to make different plans.

We had promised to do various bits of surveying for the Scirling Geographical Association, and one of the places they showed an interest in was the Melatan island chain of Arinevi. After our Yelangese debacle, we backtracked to spend more than a month in this region, tramping about doing the meticulous (not to say tedious) work that surveying requires. It felt like penance: our zeal for dragons had led us to err, and so we separated ourselves from dragons for a time, putting our efforts into repaying those whose support had made this voyage possible at all.

With all due respect to the organizations that funded my expedition, our time in Arinevi was sheer drudgery of a sort I did not enjoy at all. Furthermore, hindsight proved it to be an unwise choice—though in all fairness, the same misfortune could have befallen us elsewhere in the tropics, whether we were studying dragons or not.

The islands of Arinevi are tropical, with all the perils that implies. Several of the sailors fell ill with malaria, which is a common enough occurrence. (Several others fell ill with diseases endemic to ports the world over, or rather to certain establishments within those ports.) We thought very little of this, and upon completion of our survey work, set sail with the intention of resuming our draconic research.

Not long after we departed, however, I was struck by a fever. I choose the word “struck” quite deliberately, for it seemed to come out of nowhere; one moment I felt fine, and then before the hour was out I was shivering in my hammock. “It can’t be yellow fever,” I said to Tom, through my shudders. “I’ve had it already.”

The hammock was soon an agony to me, for all my muscles and joints ached, while my skin flushed and became quite sensitive. The ship’s doctor, who had been through the tropics before, diagnosed my affliction as dengue fever. As the more colloquial name of “breakbone fever” implies, the aches can become quite painful, and my flushed skin soon developed into a rash not unlike the measles.

Upon hearing I was ill, Aekinitos promptly locked Jake and Abby into his cabin, allowing no one other than himself in to see them; he even brought them their meals. (It did little good; we know now that dengue is transmitted by mosquitos, of which there were none at sea. But at the time that was not certain, and so I am grateful to him for the precaution.) Jake, I am told, objected strenuously to confinement, and spent an entire afternoon shouting imprecations through the door at the man who would not let him go tend to his mother, until his voice quite gave out.

Three of the sailors who had assisted us similarly fell ill with dengue. Like myself, they were fortunate enough to escape with a mild case of the disease—mild meaning that we suffered a few days of nauseating, painful fever, during which we bled from the nose and the mouth, but after that we recovered. Partway through this ordeal, I was shifted from my hammock to a proper bed; I did not understand until my fever broke that Aekinitos had brought us to Seungdal, which was the nearest port of any real size. When I woke free of pain for the first time in days, Abby told me where we were—and why Aekinitos had diverted from his course.

Weak as I was, I insisted on rising from my bed. With Abby’s aid, I limped from my room to Tom’s.

When I had fallen to yellow fever in Eriga, I had been one of the unlucky few who pass from the first, milder stage of the disease to a more serious secondary one. For Tom, it was the same with dengue. His breathing was rapid and shallow, as if he could not get enough air, and he was shockingly pale. Someone—I later learned it was the ship’s doctor—had shaved his head to bring down his fever. Bereft of that cap, his face seemed raw and unfamiliar, as if it belonged to a different man, and the alienation unnerved me greatly.

I will not pretend that what I suffered then in any way compares to Tom’s own trials. His life was in great danger; we were exceedingly lucky that he recovered not long after. But I was weak with my own recovery, and it had not been long since I was forced to abandon those mated dragons to the soldiers who were trying to kill them. Now it seemed I might lose the man who had been my friend and comrade for the better part of my adult life. My knees gave out beneath me; Abby very nearly had to carry me back to my bed, where I wept into my pillow and wondered if this entire journey had been a mistake.

The storm of my emotional outburst soon passed, leaving in its wake a terrible itching and the realization that my head, like Tom’s, had been shaved. I scarcely recognized my own drawn, mottled face in the mirror, bereft of the hair which had been its frame since I was a child. When I recovered enough to go out, I wrapped my stubbled head in a kerchief before putting on my bonnet, and still felt terribly self-conscious.

It did not help that our location was completely unfamiliar to me, and unwelcoming. Seungdal only allows travellers from their favoured allies to roam freely about the city and countryside; all others are confined to an islet in the harbour. Scirland not being one of those favoured allies, we were on that islet, and furthermore lodged in a rather dreary hotel used for quarantine. I could not blame the authorities for their caution, but it meant my immediate surroundings were dingy and the streets beyond them dedicated to little other than trade.

I had some cause to be grateful for the menagerie of foreigners, at least, in that among them I could find a few with whom I shared a language. On a voyage of this sort, visiting so many different parts of the world, I could not hope to do as I had done in Vystrana and Eriga, attempting to learn the native tongue: there were simply too many. I had until now gotten by mostly on what I possessed of Chiavoran, Thiessois, and Eiversch, and the mercy of those who spoke some Scirling. I had also studied the simplified pidgin known as Atau, a Puian language spoken by traders throughout much of the Broken Sea—but that did me no good in Seungdal, where the locals (who are of Dajin stock, not Puian) frown on that tongue as a degenerate interloper. As a result, I was unable to engage with much beyond my own door, and between that and my exhaustion, I stayed largely in the hotel.