Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369) (29 page)

“It’s a long way to migrate,” Tom said. “And how do you account for—oh. I see. The difference in size is also a difference in age. We would need a larger sample of scales to confirm that, though.”

I nodded. “All of this needs more observation before we can be sure of anything. But here is a new theory for you: sea-serpents hatch here in the tropics. They migrate, but not all the way to the arctic; the young are too small to survive such cold. As they age, however, the center of their movement shifts northward.”

Tom was sketching it in the sandy ground, a looping spiral moving steadily toward the pole. “As they get larger, the tropical waters would be less comfortable for them—they would overheat here. Presumably at some point they become too old to reproduce, or else their home waters are simply too cold for the eggs to be viable.”

“Which might be why they lose the tendrils. And they cease to expel water as a weapon, again because of the cold. The shock of drawing it in might kill them.”

He brushed the dirt from his fingers. “It’s possible. But certainly not confirmed.”

“I have to share it, though,” I said wretchedly. “No one can test the idea if they are not aware of it. And I cannot bring myself to sit on my hands, waiting for someone else to think of it and
then
test it.”

“But that will mean retracting your previous theory.” Tom fell silent. He knew as well as I did where that would lead.

A scientist should never be afraid to theorize, publish, receive criticism, re-examine, and revise her thoughts accordingly. For one such as me, however, there was indeed reason to fear. My scientific credibility was tenuous to begin with, and to recant my original ideas would make me a laughing-stock: not because of my theory, but because of who I was. A misstep that would be brushed away from a great eminence in the field was seen as a fatal error on my part.

Even now, the memory of my foolish haste stings. A part of me wishes dearly that I had taken my time, as Tom advised. Another part, however, treasures the heady excitement with which I penned that first draft, talked it over with Tom, edited my words into a more polished state, and sent it off for consideration. The day when I held a copy of the
Journal of Maritime Studies
and saw my own piece in it ranks as one of the proudest moments of my life … when I can see through the haze of shame that hangs over it.

The consequences did not come until later, of course. I relate them here because these volumes focus on key expeditions in my career, and so this one will conclude before the aftereffects of that article become fully apparent. But it is common for people to gloss over my errors, as I have become one of those great eminences, and I wish readers to know that not all of my scientific ideas have been sound.

Conscience would not permit me to save face, though. Tom raised a questioning eyebrow at me, and I shook my head. “No. What matters is the advancement of our knowledge, not the advancement of my reputation. And if my original theory was wrong, it will come out sooner or later. At least this way I might be credited with the correction as well as the error.” I managed a rueful laugh, holding my hands up to forestall what he might have said. “But I have learned my lesson. I shan’t send a retraction right away—not that I could, of course. I will wait until I have more data.” The only thing worse than proving myself wrong would be doing so twice in quick succession.

Gathering more data, though, would have to wait until we were off Keonga. There was only so much I could do with the local population of serpents, especially without a dead specimen to dissect.

I grew restless, wishing I were not trapped on a single island. Jake did likewise, which surprised me; a boy of his inclinations ought to have been in paradise. The sea was right there, its waves cool and inviting in the tropical sun. He could collect coral and shells, practice
se’egalu
and fishing with a spear, and generally shrivel himself into a very brown raisin with long days in the water. And indeed, he did all these things—but occasional outbursts of temper said that all was not right with him. Abby dealt with these as best she could, in her masquerade as his mother, but one evening I discreetly drew my son aside and inquired what was wrong.

He dug one toe into the sand, hands locked behind his back, not meeting my eyes. His shrug was both noncommittal and unconvincing. “Nothing’s wrong.”

“Have the other boys been troubling you?” I asked. This seemed the most likely source of trouble.

But Jake shook his head. “No. It’s just—I’m tired of Miss Abby being my mother.”

My first thought was that he chafed at his governess telling him what to do. It had happened before; like all children, he had his rebellious periods. Tension thrummed in his body, though: as if he wanted to step forward, to come under my arm as he had not done in weeks.

I sank to one knee, putting myself below his head. Once, when he was very young and I was both grieving and conflicted, I had kept my distance from him. Here in Keonga, with so many issues to occupy my mind, I had not felt the gap between us returning—until now.

“I miss you, too,” I whispered, and it was true.

Jake’s will broke. He had been very good about our masquerade, but now he darted forward and flung his arms about my neck. I clasped him briefly to me, heedless of the risk that the Keongans might see us. “The ship will be repaired soon,” I promised him, hoping it was true. “Then we shall go back to normal.”

We did not stay like that for long. Caution and youthful dignity both took Jake from my side soon after; but there was a spring in his step now that had been missing before. Although he never said this outright, I believe he remembered my absence when I went to Eriga, and feared I wished to be free of him again. Reassured otherwise, he could go about his days with a light and joyful heart.

I took care after that to show my affection in small ways that would not be remarked by the Keongans, and to involve Jake in my daily affairs where his own patience and interest would permit. This was not so often as it might have been, for I passed my time studying fire-lizards, having endless debates about taxonomy with Tom, and drawing up chart after chart, trying to shuffle the sprawling assortment of draconic types into something like a coherent order. It was not enough merely to point at similarities and declare the job done: there had to be a logic behind it. How did lower forms give rise to higher? Which ones
were
the lower forms, if the family included everything from sparklings to swamp-wyrms, fire-lizards to wolf-drakes? And if it did not include all those things, then where did the boundary belong?

There must, I believed, be some key—some concept I had not yet thought of—that would sort it all into a sensible shape. But no matter how I grasped for it, the resolution kept slipping through my fingers.

Heali’i found me scowling over these charts one afternoon, after we had been stranded in Keonga for nearly two months. “What is this?” she asked. “You spend so much time on it.”

She could not read, much less read Scirling, so of course the charts meant nothing to her. I had long since told her the purpose of our voyage in broad terms: I wanted to study dragons. I had not gone into the scientific detail of it, though.

A thought came to me, and I put my pen down. “Heali’i … you said you identified me as
ke’anaka’i
because I showed interest in the fire-lizards and the sea-serpents. Yes?” She nodded, and I asked, “Why? That is—it suggests you see fire-lizards and sea-serpents as belonging in a category together.”

“They do,” she said.

“Indeed, I agree. But I know why
I
think that: I have seen creatures all over the world that share characteristics with those two. You have never left these islands. Fire-lizards are small and gregarious; they live at the tops of volcanic peaks, eat animals of the islands, and spit lightning at things that trouble them. Sea-serpents are large and solitary; they live in the ocean, eat vast quantities of fish, and spit water at the things that trouble them. They both have scales and a slight similarity in the shape of their heads, and that is where the obvious resemblance ends. But many things have scales, fish included—and you would not say they are in the same category, would you?”

Heali’i shook her head. “There is a poem—the
O’etaiwa
—you have never heard it, of course. It tells how the world came into existence, one kind of creature at a time. The fire-lizards and the sea-serpents are together in that poem.”

This intrigued me even more, and I jotted down a note to find someone who could recite the poem for me, with Suhail translating. (I did not think to allocate four hours for it, which is the length of time the recitation ultimately took.) “But why?” I asked. “Does the poem say why they belong together?”

“Because they used to be one creature, in the early days of the world,” Heali’i said. “Before the
naka’i
changed them.”

It was highly unlikely that fire-lizards and sea-serpents shared an immediate common ancestor, no matter which of my charts I favored at any given moment. But allowing for poetic license, the evolutionary point might well be true. “Fascinating,” I murmured.

Heali’i studied me with a curious eye. “Why do you care? Even
ke’anaka’i
do not go this far—at least, I have never heard of one that has.”

Once again, it was the fundamental question of my life. In one sense, my answer has changed again and again, from year to year and person to person; in another sense, it has not changed at all. Only my fumbling attempts to put it into words have altered.

This time I said, “It is a mystery. And I suppose I cannot look at a mystery without wanting to solve it.”

It was a dangerous answer to give, in a land where
tapu
rendered certain things entirely off-limits. Heali’i’s expression sharpened. “Take care you do not offend the gods. Some things are intended to be mysteries.”

“I will do my best,” I said—which was not the same as saying I would stop.

*   *   *

We were returning from another stint at the top of Homa’apia, emerging from the lava tube and blinking in the sudden brightness, when I saw something new to me: a fleet of canoes approaching from the southeast. These were not the usual small craft of the fishermen, but long canoes rowed by a dozen men or more, and a large double-hulled vessel in their midst. “It seems you have visitors,” I said to Heali’i.

She made no reply, but stared intently at the ships as if she could divine their nature from this distance. Perhaps she could: the largest canoe had a distinctive sign painted on its sail that I thought might be an abstract representation of a shark. “Do you recognize it?” I asked. Her expression told me she did, but I hoped to draw her into conversation.

Heali’i shook her head, a smile appearing on her face as if conjured there. “Foreigners,” she said—using the word that means islanders from elsewhere in the Broken Sea, rather than non-Puians. She spoke dismissively, and suited action to tone by heading back toward the main path without so much as another glance toward the canoes. I did give them another glance, long enough to fix the image from the sail in my memory; and when I did so, I saw something else. An indistinct shape, much further out to sea, that looked like neither the square rigging of an Anthiopean ship nor the unusual crab-claw sail of the Raengaui island cluster. I could not judge its size, not without any landmark against which to measure it or its distance from shore, but it was a rounded blur in the haze above the water, and it certainly had not been there before.

I could not stay there staring at it, though. It was plain enough that the approaching fleet had Heali’i concerned, and furthermore that she did not wish me to pay any attention to them. I had already lingered for longer than I should. I hastened to catch up, and spoke of fire-lizards all the way back to camp.

No one there said anything about the visitors, who must have come to shore out of sight on the far side of the promontory. I greeted my son, but did not attend to his excited tales of
se’egalu
as closely as I might have, occupied as I was in looking for Aekinitos.

I found him overseeing the men who were replacing planks in the side of the
Basilisk
. “Can you spare a moment?” I asked him.

He waved for me to speak on, but I shook my head. “This is perhaps not something we should speak of in public.”

That gained me his full attention. Aekinitos picked up his crutch and followed me across the sand to a rock upon which he could rest, safely distant from anyone who might overhear.

Once there, I told him of the fleet I had seen coming in, the odd shape in the distance, and my growing sense that something was amiss around us—something the Keongans were hiding. “Though I cannot imagine what it might be,” I finished. “My knowledge is of dragons and the natural world, not people and their politics. Am I seeing trouble where none lies?”

I wanted him to say “yes.” Had the
Basilisk
been intact, I could have faced the prospect of local danger with much more confidence, knowing that if necessary we could flee to safer waters. But until our ship was repaired, we were trapped in the Keongan Islands, with whatever secrets might lurk nearby.

Aekinitos did not oblige me.

“I’ve had my men asking questions for weeks now,” he said, digging the point of his crutch into the sand and overturning a broken piece of conch shell. “Nothing obvious—well, some of them have been more obvious than others. Men say stupid things in the arms of a woman. But the islanders are on a war footing.”

“War!” I exclaimed. “Against whom?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. The Yelangese, most likely. The king’s wife is the cousin of Waikango, after all. The islanders of Raengaui paint their sails as you described; I would wager my spare anchor that was one of their chiefs paying the Keongans a visit.” He scowled. “If I had not lost my anchor in the storm.”

“The Keongans would be mad to invade Yelang, though,” I said. “They cannot hope to retrieve their war-leader. Outside their own waters, against Yelangese ships—every advantage that protects them here would be lost.”