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

by Marie Brennan

  (Why, you ask, did I bother to acquire the book if I could not read it? Because I intended to have it translated when I returned home. Which, it is true, would have been rather late in the day for my consideration of taxonomy—but as it happened, I was able to have it translated much sooner. That, however, comes later in this tale.)

  I had no hope of studying all the dragons to be found in Yelang. There are simply too many, from the subterranean hok tsung lêng to the aquatic kau lêng to the winged bê lêng, not to mention the various draconic cousins: the lêng ma or dragon horse; the hung, said to have two heads; the pa siah, which will hunt even elephants. One could spend a lifetime simply attempting to understand them all—as indeed several naturalists have done, from Kwan Jan Siong in the forty-ninth century to Khalid ibn Aabir in recent years.

  My chief aim was a simple one: to lay eyes on one or more Dajin dragons. The specimens of that continent constitute a major branch of the draconic family tree, quite distinct from the Anthiopean one, and no amount of reading about them would give me the same understanding that observation could. I knew that many Dajin dragons were not winged (which led Edgeworth to dismiss them as not ‘true’ dragons), and that a number of them were water-loving; I knew they had often been revered in Yelang, though not in the same manner as the Draconeans were thought to have done. With the quetzalcoatls of Coyahuac so fresh in my mind, I wanted to study the creatures to be found here, and see if I could derive any insight regarding possible relationships between them.

  To do that, of course, we had to find them first, which has always been the most vexatious hurdle encountered in my work. Lacking a friendly tsar who might provide us with a guide, we had to hire one ourselves; and this task, too, belonged to Tom, while I scoured the bookshops for that text.

  The day after I returned victorious, Jake came running down the deck toward me, with Abby in hot pursuit. I would have liked to take a hotel room in Va Hing, as we had done in Namiquitlan, but the expense of the bribe meant I had to practice economy and stay on board the Basilisk. I was therefore ensconced near the bow, perusing the woodcuts in my new acquisition, when Jake skidded to a halt beside me. “Mama! Mama! Can we go to see the dragon turtles?”

  “The what?” I said, which I fear did not make me sound very clever.

  “The dragon turtles! The man said there are lots just down the coast. He said I could go swimming with them. Please, can we go? Please?”

  My son seemed liable to vibrate right out of his skin with excitement. Abby puffed to a halt behind him, one hand on her stays, and said between gasps, “He ran all the way from the other end of the docks.”

  How could I say no? It was the first time Jake had shown much interest in anything draconic. I suspected his interest would have snuffed right out had they been dragon tortoises instead of turtles, and therefore land-bound—but I was not one to look a gift drake in the mouth.

  Presuming, of course, that there were any such things as dragon turtles. I could not read my book, but paging through it, I found a woodcut of something that indeed appeared to be a swimming dragon with a turtle’s shell. That did not guarantee that the beast existed; the book also had a woodcut of a hung that showed it with two heads, which is arrant nonsense. (It has a club at the end of its tail, which can be mistaken for another head in poor light or stressful conditions.) But it was enough to merit investigation.

  Asking questions around the docks, I learned that there was indeed a region just down the coast where dragon turtles or lêng kuh were known to be found; unsurprisingly, the place was generally called Dragon Turtle Bay. I also learned that the fat of the creature’s body is considered a great delicacy, and that the poor beasts are rather easily slaughtered, being on the slow and trusting side. The only reason that any of them survived in the area was because the local villagers take pains to cultivate good conditions for them, ensuring that the breed does not go locally extinct.

  Tom was still engaged in the hunt for a guide to the interior, and Aekinitos was busy trading, to keep our expedition in hardtack and potable water. I therefore bought passage on a small junk for myself, Abby, and Jake, as well as Elizalde, the Curxia sailor who had helped me with the book. He served as our interpreter, and I must note for the record that without him, we would have been entirely adrift.

  The Basilisk would not have been able to sail in close regardless. The region of Dragon Turtle Bay is breathtaking; the coastline there curves in for a small bay, which is dotted with countless steep-sided islands, their rocky slopes thick with greenery. The waters are treacherous for any ship with a draught deeper than two meters or so, especially if her helmsman does not know his way about.

  Through Elizalde I heard the legend of the bay, which holds that those islands are all the bodies of dragon turtles, variously said to be either sleeping or dead and petrified. Even in the latter case, however, the fishermen assure you that if not kept happy with offerings of incense and charms, the lêng kuh will rise from their places and swim away into the sea, taking the wealth of the bay with them.

  This last point was particularly stressed to us, for the locals insisted on our making suitable offerings before we could be permitted to go swimming with the dragon turtles. When I nudged Jake to cooperate, he looked at me with wide eyes. “Aren’t you coming with me?”

  “I am sure you can report to me very well,” I said.

  “But—they’re dragons!”

  “They may be dragons. Or they may simply be turtles with peculiar-looking heads.”

  Jake nodded firmly, as if I had proved his point. “Exactly. You have to come and see!”

  I sighed and knelt, lowering my voice. Of all the people around us, I think only Abby and Elizalde spoke any Scirling, but I still did not want to advertise my thoughts to the world. “Jake, I cannot go swimming. I haven’t brought the costume for it.”

  He stared at me, a puzzled line creasing his brows. “What do you mean? What costume?”

  My son had grown up in Pasterway and Falchester, at a time when we could not spare the money for seaside holidays. “When ladies go sea-bathing, they wear special clothing. So as not to be … indecent when the fabric gets wet.”

  You may doubt that I delivered this explanation with a straight face, given that I was kneeling on the shore in men’s trousers at the time. But I meant it quite sincerely: trousers were an eminently practical choice—even the local women wore them, with long tunics over—but getting sopping wet in them was another matter entirely. It had happened from time to time in Eriga, but only by accident or when I had no choice. And besides, when those around you are wearing only loincloths, immodesty becomes a relative thing.

  “Who cares?” Jake said, with the careless shrug of the young. “There’s nobody here to see. Only Abby.”

  “And Elizalde,” I pointed out. “And all the people of Dragon Turtle Bay.” I might never see them again, but that did not mean I wanted them telling stories for years to come about the scandalous foreign woman who went swimming in men’s attire.

  Jake did not see my reasoning. “So? There’s dragon turtles! Isn’t this what you came here for? Isn’t this the whole point of us going around the world?”

  It was. And as much as I hoped to encourage my son to follow in my footsteps as a naturalist, sending him to observe dragon turtles in my place was not the best way to conduct my research. Why, then, was I so reluctant to go into the water?

  Again, readers may disbelieve me when I say this, but the reason was right in front of me: my son. Jake knew I was a naturalist, and knew this involved me doing a variety of things that were not considered socially acceptable at home. He had heard some percentage of the rumours about me, I was sure, because it is impossible to quash such matters entirely. But if I had been outrageous on previous expeditions, I found myself surprisingly reluctant to behave in such ways in front of my son. The nobler part of me said I did not want to set a bad example for him. The more selfish part said that I did not want him to think less of me.
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br />   But which sort of mother would I rather be? The sort who did not go swimming without a proper costume—which in those days consisted of voluminous pantaloons and a knee-length overdress, all in a stiff fabric which would not cling when wet—or the sort who did what she had sailed halfway around the world to do?

  “Very well,” I said. “Let us go swimming with dragons.”

  * * *

  We paid two local women for the use of their goggles, which they employed in pearl-diving. With the glass lenses protecting my eyes, I was able to see clearly beneath the water—and found myself in a different world entirely.

  The ocean floor spread out below me, plunging steeply downward in narrow gulches between the islands. Kelp forested the sides of these gulches, and fish swam through them in glittering schools. The sunlight here became a visible thing, bars of radiance slicing through the water. Floating above it all, I felt as if I were flying—and my readers, I trust, understand what joy that brought me.

  Jake became my instructor, passing on what he had learned from Suhail: how to pike my body and dive, how to pinch my nose and blow to relieve the pressure in my ears. I was not as agile in the water as Jake, for he was young, had more (and more recent) experience, and was less burdened by fabric besides; he swam in his drawers, while I swam fully clothed. But I did not need to be a champion swimmer to see the dragon turtles, for they are both huge and relatively fearless of human company.

  In shape they are more like enormous turtles than anything else. Their shell alone is often two meters or more in length, and when they extend their flippers, a swimmer feels positively tiny in comparison. The name “dragon turtle,” however, derives from the shape of the head, which is indeed like that of a Dajin dragon: a thrusting, squarish muzzle; flaps of skin depending from the jaw; long whiskers which dance in the current as the turtle swims.

  They come on land to lay their eggs, and I am told they are pathetically clumsy then, hauling themselves along the ground with their flippers. In the water, though, they are serene and graceful, propelling themselves with easy strokes, changing direction with the casual turn of one limb. I floated above one, watching as he steered a course between two up-thrusting rocks, and scarcely remembered to lift my head for air. (There are hollow tubes one may use for breathing without having to lift the head. They were not employed in that region of Yelang, however, and I lacked the experience to know in advance that such a thing might be of assistance.)

  When I had seen all I could for the moment, Jake swam over to me. “May I? Please?”

  “By all means,” I said, and my son dove.

  We had delayed this maneuver because of the risk that the lêng kuh would startle and swim off. As indeed it did—but not before Jake had laid hold of its shell.

  DRAGON TURTLE

  Then its slow drift turned much more business-like, moving off at what I estimated to be two or three meters per second. Which is not so very fast when compared with a galloping horse, but in the water it is impressive—and all the more so when your son is not moving under his own power, but rather is being pulled along by an enormous dragon turtle.

  I swam after them in some alarm, fearing to lose my son out among the islands, but did not have to go far before Jake released the creature and kicked for the surface. He broke into the air with a shout of joy. “Mama! Did you see?”

  “I did,” I said, and then did not get another word in edgewise for several minutes, as Jake told me every detail several times over. I had never seen him so exhilarated. His only regret was that he had not been able to go farther, but it transpired that when the lêng kuh began swimming away, the sudden acceleration had startled Jake into releasing some of his air. He wanted to try again, but by then the creature was gone, and despite the tropical waters I was beginning to feel a chill. We returned to our fisherman’s boat, and thence to the shore, where Abby had bargained for blankets to wrap us in. I was grateful for both the warmth and the concealment of my bedraggled state.

  Once I was something more like dry, we ventured among the tile-roofed huts of the village to one where some men were butchering a dragon turtle. Much of its substance was already gone, but I was able to study the flippers and the shell, and (through the good assistance of Elizalde) confirm with the men that neither the bones nor the carapace disintegrated after death. Indeed, the people of that region make use of almost every part of the lêng kuh, even carving the bones into needles—though not fish-hooks, for they believe it would be deeply offensive to the creatures of the sea if they put the bones to such use. The scutes of the shell, once separated, boiled, and polished, are used in the same manner as ordinary tortoiseshell, and are much prized for ladies’ hair ornaments throughout Yelang, for their distinctive blue-and-green mottling.

  I would very much have liked to see a carcass that had been less thoroughly interfered with, but the people of the bay do not take a dragon turtle every day, and we could not afford to spend too long there. We therefore bid them farewell, with many thanks, and returned to Va Hing.

  SEVEN

  Tom’s new contact—The gold rush—Into Yelang—A mated pair—Soldiers in the mountains—Return to Va Hing

  The city of Va Hing has long been a cosmopolitan port. It drew trade from all over Dajin well before Yelang seized it as one of their possessions, and although that seizure still draws resentment from the native Hingese (who dislike being forced to exchange their own ways for the pigtail and other Yelangese habits), no one can deny that the local economy has thrived under Yelangese control. From the deck of the Basilisk I could see the streets and buildings of the city spreading out through the shallow bowl of the valley in which it sat: a sea of orange roof tiles packed closely together around small courtyards and narrow lanes, more densely populated than any city in the world. Va Hing is not large in terms of geography, but it boasts wealthy merchants and great temples, industrial companies and busy markets, two separate universities and a strong navy.

  It also, like all great cities, has an underclass of people who engage in work that skirts the line of legality, where it does not cross that line entirely. During my absence, one fellow of this sort approached Tom with a peculiar offer.

  “He thought I was here to hunt dragons,” Tom said upon my return, quite late that night.

  I was caught between exhaustion and elation for what I had seen that day, and did not quite follow him. “I would not object to studying a carcass—although I thought there were laws restricting the hunting of dragons?” (Their status as a symbol of imperial authority means that the emperors of Yelang do not much like having the common folk shoot them. It strikes a little too close to home.)

  Tom nodded. “This wasn’t what you would call a legal offer. But it seems there’s a lot of money to be had in hunting dragons right now, laws or no laws.”

  “What?” This penetrated the fog that had enveloped my brain, making me sit upright on the barrel where I had perched. “For sport?” I had not forgotten M. Velloin, the big-game hunter we had clashed with in Eriga.

  “With the kind of money apparently on offer, I don’t think so. And it seems to be more of a local phenomenon—Yelangese doing the hunting, rather than foreign visitors. But it’s been going on for long enough that this fellow assumed I had heard about the business and wanted my share.”

  If people were thinking to profit … I let out a soft but heartfelt curse. “Dragonbone.”

  Even in the scant light of the moon and the distant docks, I could see the grim set of Tom’s mouth. “I think so. I didn’t pursue it, though—didn’t want to make any promises to this fellow before telling you.”

  I forced myself to think it through, ignoring the cold knot that had formed in my stomach. “We already know who has the formula for preservation, but it would be of value to know for certain whether that is where the remains are going.” I snapped my fingers as a thought came to me. “If this is for preservation, they must be sending chemists with the hunters; the bones would be too badly decayed other
wise. Did the man who approached you sound like he was working with the Va Ren Shipping Association?”

  “No, he sounded like an opportunist. But that’s entirely plausible: if there’s a gold rush on for dragonbone, there will be all sorts of fellows jumping on board, without really knowing what they’re doing.”

  As much as I wished for Tom to be wrong, I knew he wasn’t. Which meant this could be the start of what I had feared when we first discovered what Gaetano Rossi had done: the wholesale slaughter of dragons for their bones, with potentially disastrous consequences.

  I rubbed my hands over my tired eyes, willing my thoughts to stop racing ahead. We didn’t know for certain that there was a rush, only that one man in Va Hing thought he could turn a profit by taking Scirlings to hunt dragons. But it merited investigation.

  Tom said in a low, cynical voice, “I wonder if they even bothered to try synthesis.”

  “It has been years since they obtained the formula,” I pointed out, trying to be optimistic. “If they had been harvesting bone so energetically all that time, we would have heard about it before now. They may have spent some time trying, at first.”

  Neither of us said what we both must have been thinking: if they did try, then it seemed they had failed. Just as Frederick Kemble had, thus far. If so much effort could not produce an answer—if synthesis was ultimately impossible …

  I was not doing a very good job of improving the mood, and I was too tired to do better. “I think you should follow up with this man,” I told Tom. “If nothing else, we need someone who knows how to find dragons. The rest … we will deal with it later.”

  * * *

  Tom’s contact reminded me of nothing so much as a squirrel: small and full of seemingly inexhaustible energy. He was not entirely trustworthy; no man who offered to take another on an illegal hunt for dragons could be given such a recommendation. But his untrustworthiness was, as Tom said wryly, “within allowance”—a phrase we had both acquired from Natalie and her engineer friends. It meant that working with the fellow was unlikely to harm us, or at least unlikely enough that we could risk it.