Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369) (6 page)

Then it was the basics, as we had practiced them before: we took a variety of measurements, and then Tom (whose tolerance for the cold water was much greater than my own) cut open the body to survey the internal organs. I meanwhile had the sailors remove the head and bring it on board, where I could study it in peace and relative warmth.

Jake knew I was a naturalist, of course. He had looked through my scholarly works, more for the plates that illustrated them than out of any deep interest in the text. Enough of the plates depicted anatomical drawings that he knew perfectly well what his mother did in her work. Knowing, however, was quite a different matter from seeing her in communion with a severed head.

He made an awed noise and laid his hand on one of its fangs. “Pray do not block my view,” I said, sketching rapidly. I wanted to finish quickly, so that I could deflesh the head and draw the skull. There appeared to be faint scars above its eyes, which suggested it might have once possessed the tendrils seen on its tropical kin.

“Is this bigger than the other dragons you’ve killed?” Jake asked.

“I have not killed any dragons myself,” I said. “Can you open its mouth? Or call one of the sailors to do it.”

Jake pried the head open, giving me a look when I warned him not to cut himself on the teeth. It is a look I think all children master at about his age—the one that insists the looker needs no warning while, by its very confidence, convincing the one looked at that the warning was very necessary indeed.

Open, the jaws could easily have swallowed my son. That gave me an idea. I said, “Stay where you are; I want to use you for scale.”

He mimed being eaten by the serpent, which would have been less unnerving had I not just been reminded of precisely how much danger I was placing him in by bringing him on this voyage. I had underestimated the hazards of hunting a sea-serpent. But I would not do so a second time; I vowed to put him ashore before we went after one in the tropics.

Jake soon tired of pretending to be a victim and so began mock-wrestling with the head, pretending to be its mighty slayer. “I’m going to kill one of these someday,” he proclaimed.

“I should prefer you didn’t,” I said, rather sharply. “I did this for science, but it having now been done, I hope it needn’t be done again. Only the fangs have any real value on the market, and those only as curiosities and raw material for carving; should an entire animal die, just so we might take four of its teeth? I almost feel sorry for it. At the end, it was trying to swim away. It only wanted to live.”

“She,” Tom said, climbing over the railing. He was dripping with bloody water. “No eggs in her abdomen, but the ovipositor marks her very clearly as female. I wonder where they lay them?”

My chastisement had made little mark on my son, but Tom’s revelation silenced him. Much later, he admitted to me that the pronoun was what struck him so forcefully: the pronoun, and the possibility of eggs. With those two words, the sea-serpent changed from a terrible beast to a simple animal, not entirely different from the broken-winged sparrow we had once nursed back to health together. A dangerous beast, true, and one that could have sent the
Basilisk
to the bottom of the ocean. But she had been alive, and had wanted to go on living; now she was dead, and any progeny she might have borne with her. Jake was very quiet after that, and remained so for several days.

Tom set to work defleshing the skull, and talked with me while he did. “The lungs are much like those we’ve seen in other dragons—more avian in structure than mammalian.” I sighed, thinking of my debate with Miriam Farnswood. I feared I was likely to lose that particular argument. “The musculature around the stomach and oesophagus is interesting, too. I’ll have to look at one of the tropical serpents to compare, but I think the purpose is to allow the creature to suck in water very swiftly, without having to swallow, and then vomit it back up again.”

J
AKE
FOR
S
CALE

“The jet of water,” I said, excited. “Yes, we’ll have to compare. If they do not migrate, perhaps their life cycle leads them further north as they age? A creature this large might have a difficult time keeping itself cool in tropical waters. That would explain why those in the north are generally larger, if their growth continues throughout their lives.”

We debated this point until the skull was clear of the bulk of its flesh. As I began sketching again, he asked me, “What do you think? Taxonomically.”

“It’s difficult,” I admitted. By then my hand was capable of going about its work without demanding all of my attention; I could ponder issues of classification at the same time. “The dentition bears some similarities to those reported or observed in other breeds, at least in number and disposition of teeth … though of course baleen plates are not a usual feature. The vertebrae certainly pose a problem. This creature has quite a lot of them, and we do not usually consider animals to be close cousins who differ so greatly in such a fundamental characteristic.”

Tom nodded, wiping his hands clean—or at least less filthy—with a cloth. “Not to mention the utter lack of hind limbs. I saw nothing in the dissection, not even anything vestigial. The closest thing it has to forelimbs are some rather inadequate fins.”

“And yet there
are
similarities. The generally reptilian appearance, and more significantly, the degradation of the bones.” I thought of the six criteria customarily used to distinguish “true dragons” from draconic creatures: quadripedalism, flight-capable wings, a ruff or fan behind the skull, bones frangible after death, oviparity, and extraordinary breath. We might, if we were
very
generous, count the serpent’s supraorbital tendrils (presuming it had once possessed them) as the ruff, and Tom had just confirmed that the creatures laid eggs. Together with the bones—which decayed more slowly than those of terrestrial dragons, but
did
become frangible quite rapidly—that made three of six. But was there any significance to the distinction between “true dragons” and their mere cousins? What if there was only one characteristic that mattered?

Yet there were problems as well with declaring osteological degradation the true determinant of draconic nature. We had established a fair degree of variation in the exact chemical makeup of different breeds, ranging from the rock-wyrms on whom the process had originally been developed to the simple sparklings who could be preserved in vinegar. There was every chance that it would prove to be a spectrum rather than a simple binary. Where, then, would we draw our boundary?

I could not answer those questions that day—nor, indeed, for years to come. But that dead sea-serpent, for whom I had conceived a belated sympathy, brought me one step closer to understanding.

FOUR

Wyverns in Bulskevo—Protégés—Jake’s disinterest—In the doldrums—Jake’s promise

I had not forgotten the message Wademi brought to me regarding the peculiar appearance of the dragons in Bayembe’s rivers. I had, however, put my thoughts on the matter to one side for a time.

There had been enough to do in preparing for our departure that I told myself I would discuss the matter with Tom after we had gotten settled on the
Basilisk
. Once on board, however, I found the flaw in my reasoning: there was simply
no
privacy on such a ship.

The sailors attended very little to our scientific discussions, caring naught for such matters. I could not trust, however, that they would continue to ignore us if phrases like “queen dragons” caught their attention. There were opportunists among them who might pursue such a prize—or at least sell word of it to an interested buyer. Even if they did not, they might reference it in their dockside gossip. Whether this might rebound ill upon Bayembe and Mouleen, I could not say for certain; but I did not like to risk it.

I therefore had to wait. Fortunately, we were not always ship-bound, and in time I had my chance.

The
Basilisk
stopped in Svaltan to replace the broken stay and repair the other damage inflicted by the sea-serpent, then rounded the northern edge of Anthiope and dropped anchor off the shore of Lezhnema at the mouth of the Olovtun River, some distance north of Kupelyi. We had the goodwill of the tsar; he had not forgotten that we were instrumental in the discovery of a firestone deposit in Vystrana, from which he had profited handsomely. Because of this, not only had we been granted visas, but he had arranged for a guide to take us inland, where we might observe wyverns.

These haunt the mountains of eastern Bulskevo and up into Siaure. A part of me wished that scientific rigor did not require me to carry out research in such places; even in late Caloris and early Fructis, and even confining ourselves to the foothills rather than going up into the mountains proper, what passed for their “summer” was decidedly on the chill side. The long days gave us ample opportunity to chase our prey, though, while the
Basilisk
continued down to Kupelyi and the markets there before returning to retrieve us from Lezhnema.

I will not say much of the wyvern-hunting itself, for it has little bearing on the key aspects of this narrative, and its scientific significance has been recorded elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the limb configuration of a wyvern—wings and two legs, instead of four—was of interest to us, chiefly as a possible link between the near-limbless serpents of the ocean and the quadripedal winged dragons.

This terrestrial detour gave me ample time to speak with Tom, particularly when we lay in interminable wait for a wyvern to happen past. I recounted what Wademi had said to me, and my speculations as to its possible import.

He frowned, laying one hand over the stock of his rifle. “I have a hard time believing the Moulish would make such an error.”

“We must consider the possibility,” I said. “Their usual treatment of the eggs is traditional, handed down to them through who knows how many generations. Things become habit, done because that is how one’s father and grandfather did them, rather than because their import is fully understood.” I paused, dissatisfied, and then was distracted by movement that proved to be some farmer’s errant goat.

When it was gone, I returned to the point. “But I must consider other possibilities, too. For example: what if the Moulish
want
queens in the rivers?”

Tom blew out his breath in a quick huff. “To what end? Do they mean to conquer Bayembe for themselves?”

We both knew that was ludicrous. The Moulish loved their swampy forest, even when it was trying to kill them; to them, the arid savannah of Bayembe was a wasteland. And they had no government at a scale larger than the elders who happened to be in camp at any given time, no warfare beyond small gangs of young men scuffling over personal insults. They had no desire to conquer Bayembe, nor the means to do so if they did. Not even with dragons.

“I wish I could go see them for myself,” I murmured—not least because an icy wind chose to blow through at that precise moment, reminding me of how much warmer it was in Eriga.

Tom knew why I could not. He was no more free to travel there than I. “What you need,” he mused, “is a protégé you can send in your stead.”

This made me sigh. “I am not likely to ever have one of those.”

He said nothing. After a moment, I became aware of his gaze on me. When I turned my head to look, he was staring. “What?” I asked.

“What of all those people who flock to your house every Athemer?”

“None of them are dragon naturalists.”

“Well, no—but gather enough bright young things about you, and sooner or later one of them will be. Likely sooner, if you go on a speaking tour after this expedition.”

I wanted to protest that the speaking tour, if it even happened, would simply be a means of raising money (which I expected to be in short supply by the time I returned home). My talks would be popular, not scholarly. But if I could be inspired to my career by something as trivial as a sparkling preserved in vinegar, was it so ludicrous to think that someone else might be inspired by hearing my tales? I thought of protégés as the sort of thing a man like Lord Hilford had: a respected peer, a Colloquium Fellow. Yet I might someday have one, too.

It even crossed my mind that Jake might go, though of course he might have been refused on the grounds that he was my son, and in any event it would have been at least six or seven years before he was old enough to send to Eriga on his own. By then, the matter was likely to be resolved in one way or another. But as I soon discovered, he seemed unlikely to follow that path regardless.

While Tom and I were lying in wait for wyverns (and occasionally venturing into their dens, which did lead to Tom getting poisoned, wyverns having no extraordinary breath but more than adequate venom to take its place), I had left Jake in the keeping of Abby Carew and Feodor Lukovich Gavrilenko, the guide the tsar had provided. This was, to my way of thinking, a splendid example of the sort of education Jake could receive by travelling the world: Feodor Lukovich was a hardy man, very familiar with the environs of the Olovtun Mountains, and could teach my son a great deal about the environment and the creatures to be found there. After more than a month cooped up aboard the
Basilisk,
I expected Jake would welcome the opportunity to tear about the countryside.