And yet for all of that, it was one of the grandest experiences of my life. I lost all awareness of time and distance; I had no idea how long it had been since I dove into the sea, nor where we had gone in the interim. There was only the sun and the water, the serpent beneath my knees and the wind in my face, islands appearing at unpredictable bearings and then vanishing when we turned, and Suhail at my side. He laughed like a madman any moment we were not submerged, and if I did not do likewise, it is only because I was too breathless for laughter. I was riding a dragon. In that moment, I felt invincible.
Then the serpent dove once more. I saw a shadow in the water up ahead, a dark and irregular oval. I had just enough time to think, Oh, it is a cave—
And then the serpent dragged us inside.
PART FOUR
In which we uncover secrets both ancient and modern
SIXTEEN
In the cave—Ill-omened Rahuahane—Eggs in the water—A tunnel leading in—Hidden ruins—Firestone—A shadow outside—The uses of dragonbone
Had my brain worked only a little faster, I would have let go the instant I realized a cave lay ahead.
Every previous time the serpent dove, I had known that if I ran short of air, all I had to do was release my grip and kick for the surface. The beast was reluctant to dive very deeply while two people had hold of its head, so there was little chance of a repeat drowning. (My peril would come after, when the serpent was free to turn around and seek me out.) In a cave, however, there was no such safety: I was trapped, and the serpent was dragging its body along the roof of the cave, attempting (with very near success) to scrape its burden off.
If the preceding minutes had been one of the most glorious experiences of my life, the next few seconds were among the most dreadful. I wrestled with an impossible choice: should I relinquish my hold and hope I could swim free of the cave in time? Or should I stay where I was, and trust that the serpent would emerge into open water before it shredded me on the stone above?
In moments of such crisis, the mind becomes oddly focused. I remember calculating, in a very cold-blooded fashion, the likelihood that even if I escaped the cave, I would not make it to the surface before my air was depleted. In open water, however, I could hope that the canoes might find me. I had been revived from near death once before, after all. If I drowned inside the cave, however, I was surely doomed.
All of this passed through my mind in mere seconds. It could not go on for longer; indecision kept me where I was, and then we were too far into the cave for me to have any hope of escape under my own power. My only remaining chance of survival lay with the serpent, who might yet drag me to safety—if it did not grind me to powder first.
We often speak of hope as a “ray of light.” In this instance, that was less metaphorical than usual. The cave was not entirely dark; sun came in where we had entered and was refracted through the murk. But there was more light than a single opening could account for; other beams pierced the water here and there, and up ahead I saw more. The cave was in fact a tunnel.
With a surge of its great body, the serpent shot through into the warm, shallow waters of a lagoon. I did not wait to see where it might be going; the instant I saw light above my head, I kicked hard off the creature’s body and shot for the surface. The air that filled my lungs a moment later tasted sweeter than I can possibly describe.
I had lost track of Suhail during all of this, not because he had gone anywhere, but because the situation had so overwhelmed my thoughts, I could spare none for him. (An unlovely admission, but a true one.) When I turned to look, however, I found him floating only a meter or two away, gasping for breath and wild in the eyes at our near miss.
A miss which might yet turn to a hit, if we did not act. “Quick,” I cried, “out of the water”—for we still had an angry sea-serpent to contend with.
Land, at least, was not far away. To the left of the tunnel’s exit there was a gentle enough slope that we might ascend it. Suhail and I clawed our way out of the water, scraping our palms, for what lay before us was a coral face rather than a kindly beach. Plants had secured a footing on it in places, but this was not the volcanic terrain I was accustomed to, which told me I was not on Keonga. We had, without meaning to, violated the edict restricting us to that island. But which island were we on?
Still breathing hard, I surveyed our place of landing. The coral stretched above the waves to either side of us, a narrow and barren ring enclosing a lagoon scarcely deep enough for the serpent to swim in. (It was still thrashing about, looking for the creatures that had so vexed it.) Within the ring rose the more familiar shape of a volcano’s mass, badly gouged where landslides had sent its matter into the sea. It was not a large island, forming a green spot in the midst of its encircling coral—like the pupil of an eye.
The words I said then are not fit to print.
Suhail whirled in alarm. “What? What is it?” He looked about as if expecting the serpent to have climbed up on land after us.
With a laugh that sounded half-hysterical even to my own ears, I said, “We are on Rahuahane.”
* * *
The island did not look especially ill-omened. The waters of the lagoon were bright and clear where the sea-serpent had not disturbed them. Birds fluttered above the trees. The only ominous note was the total lack of human habitation—that, and the awareness of what our Keongan hosts might do when we returned.
If we returned. Looking the other way, I saw the sprawling mass of Keonga. It did not seem so very far away; we were close enough to make out the canoes, searching for us among the rocks that dotted the sea between the islands. My hand shot out, as if of its own accord, to seize Suhail’s shoulder, dragging him down until we both lay flat on the rough coral.
His dark eyes met mine. “What is it?” he whispered.
“The Keongans,” I said. “We are not supposed to be off the island; that is bad enough. But this island is tapu to everyone. If they see us here…”
He did not need me to say more. Suhail closed his eyes and murmured something I think was an Akhian curse. Then he crawled forward until he reached a point where he could study our position.
“Can we swim back to Keonga?” I asked. It was hard to make myself speak in a normal voice, even though I knew my voice would not carry to the men in the canoes. Sound may travel far over water, but they were windward of us.
“Not a chance,” Suhail said, without needing to pause for thought. “The current flows against us; that is why the serpent came this way. I am not sure I could reach Keonga—certainly not without rest. And we are both bleeding.”
My hands and knees were cut from the scales, as was my shoulder from where the serpent had nearly scraped me off on its passage through the coral ring. There were sharks in the waters here; we had both seen them. They did not come near the sea-serpents, but two humans on their own would be easy prey.
My heart was heavy in my chest. “Then we have no choice. We will have to signal the canoes, and hope for the best.”
“Perhaps not,” Suhail said.
He was looking the other way, toward Keonga’s neighbour Lahana. To my eye it lay farther off than Keonga … but given what he had said about the current, it might in truth be the easier target. Even so, the distance was daunting.
“Yes,” he said, when I mentioned this to him. “We would have to wait until our cuts stop bleeding. And we might fare better if we had something buoyant to cling to—even if it is just a branch.” Suhail curved his body on the stone until he could look directly at me. “But we do not know how long they will search for us. If we wait, we may lose any hope of rescue.”
I laid my forehead against the warm coral, trying to think. “They will not come here regardless. This reef is considered part of the island; they will not approach it. If we want rescue, we will have to swim out between the islands and hope to be spotted. Then we will have to pray they do not kill us for having been on Rahuahane, or simply for having left Keonga.” Not to mention
praying that the sharks did not get us, or the serpents.
That thought gave me a new idea, but it was dashed an instant later. The lagoon behind us was quiet once more; the serpent that had brought us here was gone. Even had I been willing to risk mounting one again and steering it back through the underwater tunnel, there was no beast here that might carry us back to safety.
Which left us with only one real option. “We will try for Lahana,” Suhail said.
I crawled down the coral until I was concealed enough that I could sit up. This put me facing the central mass of Rahuahane, idyllic in the tropical sun.
Heali’i had said the serpents laid their eggs here.
And, as I had thought before, the possibility of impending death was no reason to cease being a naturalist.
“Before we go,” I said to Suhail, “might we look around a bit?”
* * *
With no serpent troubling the waters, it was an easy swim across the lagoon to the main body of the island. Even so, my arms were trembling with exhaustion by the time I reached the shore. Suhail knocked down some unripe cocoanuts and broke them open against a stone; we gulped the water inside with no attempt at delicacy. Our wild ride through the sea had left me parched.
After we were sated, he raised a curious eyebrow at me. “What precisely is the story of this island?”
He had heard fragments, but not the full account. I related to him what Heali’i had said, the tale of the ancient naka’i monsters and the hero who turned them to stone. “I wonder,” I began, and then stopped—for I had not told Suhail about dragonbone preservation. He had seen the fragments I gathered on Homa’apia, but I had taken care not to draw attention to them; likely he thought them in the process of decay. I could not tell him that I wondered whether more preserved skeletons might be found on this island.
Fortunately, Suhail took my aborted sentence in a different direction. “Whether there might be ruins? It does not sound all that different from the Book of Tyrants. And although there are no great cities here, there might be some smaller remains.”
Our shared intellectual enthusiasm restored some vitality to my body. I smiled at him and said, “Shall we go look?”
I soon had cause to be glad that I had gone barefoot so often in camp. Without that conditioning, my feet would not have fared well. Suhail and I followed the shore to begin with, but the sand here was littered with small, sharp bits of detritus. Even with calluses to protect me, I was forever stopping to pick something out of my skin or from between my toes.
“They are not amphibian, are they?” Suhail asked.
“Not that we know. They breathe air, but show no adaptation for land, and are likely too large regardless. I expect the eggs are in the water.” I shaded my eyes with one hand, trying to see any sign of them below the bright surface. I had removed my hat and kerchief before diving into the water, and my cropped hair was stiff with salt.
Suhail paused and craned his neck. “If I climb a tree, I might have a better view.”
He was not so skilled a climber as the locals. They are accustomed from childhood to swarming up palm trees with nothing more than their hands and feet to aid them. Suhail’s hands, while strong, were not so callused, and his feet took many splinters in this endeavour. But he made no complaint as he climbed, and after a few minutes he achieved a good vantage. I waited below, trying not to fidget with impatience, to hear his report.
“I think I see something that way,” he said at last, sparing one hand to point in the direction we had been circling.
Once back on the sand and relatively clear of splinters, he dusted himself off and followed me around the beach. Mindful of the time, I tried to move quickly; no one would believe we had not been on Rahuahane if we ended up spending the whole day here. I reached the relevant curve of beach before Suhail did and waded out into the water to see.
There were indeed clutches of sea-serpent eggs, in water so shallow I wondered how the creatures avoided fatally beaching themselves. They were half-buried in the sand and almost gelatinous to the touch; the material was partially translucent, so that I could make out the faintest outline of the embryo inside. Had I not assumed that removing an egg from water would abort it, I would have tried to carry one home with me, and never mind the question of how I would bring it along on our intended swim to Lahana.
I dove again and again to study these, while Suhail kept watch from the beach. Finally I surfaced, intending to offer a change of duties; he was not a dragon naturalist, but I thought he might enjoy seeing the eggs.
The words caught in my throat. I had noticed when I came to the beach that a thin stream of water ran through the sand, but had paid little heed to its source. From out here, though, I could see that it poured out of an opening that looked a great deal like a lava tube. The tunnel on Keonga had been beautifully carved; might the inhabitants of this island, whoever they were, have done the same?
“We should look for something to use for flotation,” Suhail called out as I came back to shore.
“You are right,” I said. “But there is something we may want to examine first.”
He was not difficult to persuade. (In fact, I do not recall applying any persuasion at all, apart from the bare description of what I had seen: that is the kind of man I was stranded with.) We picked our way up from the beach to the mouth of the tunnel, which was indeed a lava tube, though much more clogged with dirt and plant matter than its Keongan counterpart.
Suhail examined the walls closely, even running his hands over them to see if his fingertips might detect patterns that escaped his eyes, but found nothing. I, in the meanwhile, had been peering up the tunnel. We had no torches, nor any means of making fire, but I thought I saw a faint light in the distance. “We might go a little way in,” I said to Suhail. “Just to see.” And again he agreed.
I once answered a particularly cockle-headed question about how I conducted my research by saying, “I do one thing after another.” However malapert that response was at the time, there is truth in it. Many of my discoveries have been made by doing one thing after another. Each step leads to the next, and sometimes there is virtue in not allowing common sense to call you back.
* * *
The tunnel was narrow and difficult to navigate in places, for repeated subsidences of the ground had broken the ceiling. The light I had seen proved to come from one such opening, but by the time Suhail and I reached it, we could see more light ahead. So we continued on, and when we emerged from the tunnel at last, we found ourselves in a place of wonder.
It was no natural volcanic formation; a glance was enough to tell me that. A hollow may have existed in the volcano’s side, but hands and tools had carved it into more regular shape, creating a chamber walled off from everything around it. Only a collapse in the ceiling above, like the oculus of a dome, permitted a glimpse of the sky. With the sun’s light slanting down, the chamber seemed an enchanted place.
There could be no question now as to whether anyone had lived on Rahuahane. The statues around the chamber’s edge proclaimed it. Badly weathered as they were, with some of them fallen to stretch in pieces across the ground, the site was unmistakably Draconean.
Suhail sank to his knees, as if he did not want to spare even the smallest fraction of his attention for the task of remaining on his feet. He stared in awe at our discovery, lips moving soundlessly in something that might have been a prayer—or notes on what he observed.
Strange though it may seem, my own reverence was mixed with disappointment. I had, without realizing it, fixed my hopes upon the notion that the “people turned to stone” were preserved draconic skeletons. Instead this discovery was Suhail’s: a hitherto unknown Draconean ruin, undoubtedly of great archaeological interest, but holding little relevance for natural history.
I could not remain disappointed for long, though—not in that place. It reminded me of the waterfall island in the Great Cataract of Mouleen, especially where lianas hung in a curtain from the oculus
above and dripped the traces of rainwater on the ruins below. Shrouded in shadow, lichen, and vines, the statues seemed to hold terrible power. I was not surprised the Keongans held this place in dread. I cursed the circumstances that had prevented me from bringing a notebook along: any rendering I made of this scene would have to be done after the fact.
With that goal in mind, I set myself to observing every detail and recording it in my memory. So absorbed was I in this task that I jumped when Suhail spoke. “I have never heard of anything like this before,” he whispered.
“The statues look much like the others I have seen,” I said, gesturing at them.
“To a point, yes—but this chamber? They did not build in caves. And the statues…” He leapt atop a block of stone too deeply buried for me to tell whether it was natural or man-made. “I have seen fragments like them, but little that was intact.” He whirled, gazing upon me with a look of absolute rapture. “This is the discovery of a lifetime!”
I could not help but laugh at his delight. “I thought your interest was in the smaller things, sir. The lives of the ordinary people, the evidence of day-to-day existence—”
His answering laugh rang off the walls. “Yes, yes. But I would have a heart of stone if I were not moved by this!”
Suhail bounded over to study one of the fallen statues, dragging at the plant matter veiling its head to see if he could uncover the face. I picked my way with greater care around the chamber in the other direction, wincing whenever I put my bare foot down atop a hazard. There seemed to be a kind of broad, shallow pit in the floor on the far side, and I wanted to see what it contained.
When I finally saw, I did not care that something was stabbing me quite painfully in the foot. I stood there with a splinter of wood embedded in my sole, unable to believe my eyes.
Earthquakes had shifted them from their places; rain and the accumulation of clutter inside this chamber had choked the gaps between them. But for all of that, the shapes that lay within the pit were unmistakably the rounded forms of eggs.
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