I thought at first to go for the Yelangese ships, as the other riders were doing. But there were any number of difficulties in doing that: a churning sea of chaos lay between us and those targets; we should have to steer through the canoes, which I did not at all trust our ability to achieve; the Yelangese would be shooting at us the whole way, both from the ships and from the caeliger; and we might do more damage to the side I intended to support. The sea was simply too crowded for me to have any certainty of directing the serpent’s blast in a safe direction—given that I had not practiced for it at all.
Suhail was shouting something at me, but I did not hear it. My gaze had fallen upon the caeliger.
Had ours been functional, we might have used it in the battle, but the puncturing of its bag had released whatever gas the Yelangese were using to create lift, and the engine had taken a wetting besides. I had no way to get at the enemy caeliger, and would not have been much use with a rifle even had I thought to take one from our ship.
But it was possible that someone else—some thing else, I should say—might be able to strike that high.
The caeliger was approaching, completing one pass across the battle and preparing to make a turn. I saw one of the men above notice us. He was too distant to have a good shot, but held his rifle and waited. That, I realized might be my death—or Suhail’s.
“Pull!” I cried to him, and suited action to words, hauling with all my might upon the tendrils we held.
Even our combined strength could not have moved the serpent’s great head. I did not expect it to: I sought instead to vex the creature enough that it would lift its head of its own accord. And so it did, flanks rippling with the motion I knew meant it had drawn in water, preparatory to expelling it. But its head barely crested the waves, which would not be enough at all.
Half a dozen thoughts and more flashed through my head at once: serpent cranial anatomy, the tendrils we held, rings in bulls’ noses. The strength of dragonbone. The likelihood that I would fall into the water before I could even test my theory. The bullets now piercing the water around us as the caeliger drew near—and above all, an internal voice crying, What are you doing?
What I was doing was releasing my grip upon the tendrils behind the head and hurling myself forward, down the serpent’s long snout. There were tendrils there, too, much smaller, fringing the serpent’s nose … and it was these I now seized hold of and pulled.
I thought to bring the serpent’s head up to an angle where it would expel its blast of water at the caeliger, hopefully damaging it as the other serpents had damaged the ships. The dragonbone components would likely survive unbroken, but if I could break the machinery, or knock the men from their perch, or rupture the caeliger’s bag, I might yet save some of those below.
It shames me as a natural historian to admit this, but: I had not stopped to consider that I was riding a younger cousin of the beast we had killed in the arctic.
The serpent did not merely lift its head. The entire front of its body rose snakelike into the air, just as its cousin had done in attacking the Basilisk. I found myself dangling from its snout by a desperate grip on the edge of one of its nostrils. It did indeed release its water—I could not see where it aimed—but a moment later it struck something hard, as its head collided with the passing caeliger.
We all crashed into the water together, serpent, riders, and flying machine. They had swooped too low in approaching us, believing that we had no way of striking back at them. No one else had been foolish enough to try what I had done (for the Keongan riders know that the anatomy of the snout is exceedingly tender, and that interfering with it is a good way to send the beast out of control). It would not even have worked had we not been at the edge of the battle, in waters quiet enough that the caeliger felt safe in descending for a better shot.
But descended they had, and I was too ignorant to know how unwise it was to try and take a serpent by the nose. In my recklessness, I had succeeded in removing the caeliger from the sky.
I saw quite a few engravings of that moment in subsequent months and years; some of them are still to be found today. All of them depict me standing proudly atop the serpent, feet planted firm on its scales, hair blowing majestically in the wind (conveniently ignoring that it was less than ten centimeters long at the time), and often in a dress. (Skirts, I suppose, blow more majestically than trousers.) None of them show me dangling for dear life from the serpent’s nostril. However prosaic the reality of my act, though, it made for very good storytelling later on, and I am not surprised it became so widely known. The crew of the Scirling ships had seen it; the Yelangese had seen it; the islanders had seen it. My son had not, and I thank heaven for that, as it was bad enough once he heard the tale of what his mother had done. But I made myself well and truly famous with that act, which many say ended the Battle of Keonga.
NINETEEN
Return to Keonga—The temple—Exile—Phetayong—I read my mail—A letter for Suhail—Life in Scirland—My new hobby—A plaster cast
Reality, again, is somewhat less dramatic. The fighting continued; the Yelangese were not vanquished for some time, and then only because it occurred to Admiral Longstead that he could gain a degree of goodwill from both sides by moving in to halt what would otherwise have been a long grind to the finish. The Scirlings ended up playing peacemaker between the two sides, at first militarily, then diplomatically, once the princess stepped in.
The process by which that occurred was a marvel of misdirection, and even now I am not sure how it was arranged. No one wanted to say out loud where Her Highness had been; there were too many onlookers, ranging from some of the Yelangese sailors to the men of the Basilisk to a surprising percentage of the islanders, both local and visiting with the war fleet, who did not know she had been on Lahana. Admitting the truth would not have made anyone look terribly good. So everyone pretended she had come in with the fleet; that Suhail and I had never flown away on a stolen caeliger; and that when I rode into battle on the back of a sea-serpent, I did so from the shores of Lahana, where I had been recuperating after my harrowing first ride. There were rumours, of course—there are always rumours—but it has never, until now, been public knowledge that Her Majesty was once a political hostage in the Broken Sea. (I would not reveal it here, save that I have royal permission to do so.)
All of that, however, came later. In the immediate aftermath of my deed, Suhail and I floundered in the water, putting as much distance as possible between us and the downed caeliger. The sea-serpent had decided that vehicle was the cause of its suffering, and set about destroying the thing with all dispatch. The Yelangese crewmen floundered with us, and one seemed to have a notion of setting upon us as the sea-serpent had upon the caeliger; but fortunately he was forestalled by the arrival of a longboat. Men aboard the Boyne, one of the other ships in Admiral Longstead’s little fleet, had seen me go over the side and, not having any notion of what was going on, had set out to rescue me.
The sailors pulled us in, then took on the Yelangese, who judged that captivity in Scirling hands was preferable to remaining in the water with an angry sea-serpent that might soon go looking for new prey. It had done quite a good job on the caeliger, considering all the dragonbone; the bones themselves had survived its bite, but the lashings had not, and so the waves were now littered with a motley osteological assortment.
When the battle was done, we came ashore on Keonga, escorted by a dozen war canoes. There the chief greeted Admiral Longstead, but I saw very little of that meeting: Liluakame wormed her way through the crowd to my side, the first friendly face I had seen, and beckoned for me to follow her. “Where are we going?” I asked. Fear sprang up in my heart. I could think of no reason that my wife should be there, but not my companions or my son, save that something dreadful had happened to them.
“To the temple,” Liluakame said. “Quickly.”
This was the platform I had seen when we first came to Keonga, high upon the promontory that divided the
Basilisk’s cove from the place where the chief dwelt. There were still a few sailors up there, watching over the cannon Aekinitos had brought up for the battle, but I did not pause to speak with them. Apart from reassuring me that the others were safe and well, Liluakame had discouraged any conversation. This was a side to my wife I had not seen before, in our brief cohabitation: focused and urgent, taking me in hand as if I were a child she could not spare the time to educate. Weary and confused as I was, I found myself happy to follow her lead.
The temple itself was a modest structure by Scirling standards, but an impressive feat of engineering for the islanders, being a series of stone platforms and low walls constructed entirely without mortar. The walls demarcate a system of enclosures, the inner ones being more tapu than the outer, and ceremonies of different sorts are performed at different locations depending on their nature. Liluakame took me only within the outermost enclosure, that being the only one I was considered fit to enter. There I found Heali’i waiting.
She led me through a process of purification and repentance, which, she said, might earn me a degree of mercy from Pa’oarakiki when he was done with Admiral Longstead. (Suhail, I later learned, had been taken to a temple the warriors use.) She spoke as if the transgression for which I repented was departing from Keonga against orders, and that indeed was part of it; I did not ask whether she knew my crime was greater still. Ke’anaka’i were believed to die if they set foot upon Rahuahane, yet I had gone and lived. I suspect Heali’i knew, but to this day I cannot tell you what she made of that: whether she questioned my identity as dragon-spirited, or the reality of the curse upon that island, or merely chalked me up as a very fortunate exception.
My Scirling companions were waiting outside the temple when I emerged. Jake flung his arms around my middle hard enough to squeeze all the breath from me; Abby did much the same. Tom, looking more haggard than usual, tried to offer me his hand; I flung my arms around him instead, and damned what the gossips might say if they heard. The last few days had been distressing enough that I could not be content with a mere handshake.
Fortunately, dealing with two errant birds was not particularly high on the Keongan agenda, not with the aftermath of the battle to address. Four of the Yelangese ships had fled, but that still left the islanders with a great many prisoners to sort out, agreements to settle, and other matters to arrange. All of us from the Basilisk were told to remain in the area of our cove, where the sailors alternately worked on repairs or stood around and gossiped about recent events, depending on how closely Aekinitos was watching them. I fear I may have doomed them to a lot of profane shouting, for I was not free to tell the captain where I had been and what I had done, and the lack made him as grumpy as he had been when he broke his leg.
There I remained for three days, until Heali’i came to us once more.
“You are lucky,” she said. “Because you made sacrifices at the temple”—sacrifices of flowers, I should say; I do not want anyone thinking I cut a pig’s throat—“you are only to be sent away.”
“Sent away?” I repeated, as if I had not understood her. I had spent those three days planning another excursion to the peak of Homa’apia, so as to give the sea-serpents time to calm themselves. My research had scarcely begun. How could I leave?
Heali’i gave me a look which said I should be grateful for my good fortune. “Yes. You earned great mana with your deeds, but you also violated tapu. Even ke’anaka’i can only go so far, and this one does not have that protection.” She nodded at Suhail. “You must leave, and not return.”
I had been exiled from Bayembe, but by my own government; I had been deported from Yelang, but as a result of political machinations I deplored in any case. This was the first time I had been sent away by the people whose goodwill I had hoped to earn, and it stung me deeply. Telling myself that I had earned their goodwill—that was why I was not being threatened with execution—did little to assuage the hurt.
But I could not argue, for Admiral Longstead had no intention of leaving me on Keonga in any case. The diplomatic arrangements the princess had made were delicate things; he could not risk me trampling all over them. And trample I would, even if I did not mean to, simply by the nature of my involvement with preceding events. I had stolen a caeliger from the Yelangese navy; I had violated tapu in Keonga; I knew far more than was good for anybody about what had really transpired with Her Highness. He wanted me well away from this place before I made anything worse.
The Basilisk, unfortunately, was not yet seaworthy, though supplies from the little Scirling fleet meant she was close to it. So it was that we found ourselves bundled onto the Boyne, the smallest of the admiral’s three ships, and bound for the port of Phetayong: myself and Suhail, of course, for we had been exiled, but also Tom, Jake, and Abby, for they would not be separated from us.
It was a bitter leave-taking. I divorced Liluakame before I went, breaking the promise of marriage in order to fulfill my promise of freedom. She thanked me with a brilliant smile, no doubt already dreaming of her sweetheart. I would not have wanted to take her to Scirland regardless, nor would she have wanted to go; and yet it was peculiar to bid farewell to someone who, for however short a time and under whatever strange pretenses, had been my wife. But I was lucky even to have that farewell: I had no opportunity to speak with the other islanders we had come to know, such as the men who took us to ride the sea-serpent. Furthermore, I could not stop thinking of the work I was leaving undone. I had hoped to make a stealthy visit to Rahuahane when the Basilisk departed; that was now barred to me. I could not return to the peak of Homa’apia and continue observing the fire-lizards there. I could not question Heali’i about the stories her people told of the creatures that had dwelt on the cursed island, to see what nuggets of truth might have survived the intervening centuries of narrative embroidery. I had only my notes, my memories, and the petrified egg, which I had retrieved from the admiral’s flagship.
Heali’i’s final words to me before I departed were, “Do not be so sad. You are dragon-spirited. Your soul will return here when you die.” I suppose she meant it to be comforting.
* * *
In Phetayong we sorted out our affairs and waited for the Basilisk to rejoin us. The admiral had at least been kind enough to send us with a letter of credit, so we could afford a respectable hotel; if that was the princess’ idea (and I think it may have been), then I am grateful to her for it.
I struggled with the question of what to report to the Winfield Courier. I had been out of contact since before the Basilisk was wrecked; how could I resume the thread of my narrative now? I must account for more than two months of silence and explain what had transpired during my absence, but the full story could not possibly fit into a single missive. Furthermore, some parts of it must be omitted—Rahuahane, the caeliger, Her Royal Highness—but I could not pretend nothing had occurred, for stories would soon be reaching home by other routes, and what I said must not look like a falsehood.
You may see the result in Around the World in Search of Dragons, and entertain yourself by comparing that text with this one to find the points of divergence. It is a brief account, which sufficed for the moment, if not very well; by the time I returned to Scirland, word of the battle had reached audiences there, and I was pressed into telling a much more detailed story. But by then I was prepared to do so.
The Basilisk rejoined us a little over a week later, bearing in its hold the diving bell we had abandoned on the reef of Keonga. It was a gesture of friendship from Aekinitos to Suhail, and did much to make us feel as if the proper order of our expedition had been restored. We made energetic plans to sail to Ala’ase’ama, where (as many of you know) I resumed my study of fire-lizards.
Before we could depart, however, our arrangements underwent a sudden and unexpected change.
A packet of mail found us in Phetayong, having in some cases chased us from port to port for months. It was like receiving letters from another lifetime, so far had the w
orld of my correspondents faded from my thoughts. I learned that the Journal of Maritime Studies would be publishing my article with its incorrect theory of sea-serpent evolution, and dashed off a note begging them to withhold it until I could write a new version; this, alas, did not arrive in time. I read and answered a great many other letters … and, in so doing, discovered at last what rumours had grown from my supposedly innocuous reports.
My first instinct was to burn the letters and pretend I had never read them. After all, the rumours merited no better treatment. But it was not fair to hide something that involved another person, and so, after much pacing (and more cursing than I should admit to), I went in search of Suhail.
I found him on the shore near the docks, slumped against the algae-covered stump of a post, a letter fluttering in his hands. It was covered in flowing lines of Akhian script; that much I saw before he noticed me and put it away, though he knew I could not have read it regardless. “Is everything all right?” I asked him. Surely, I thought, rumours from Scirland had not reached his own people—not so quickly, at least.
My question was a foolish one. I knew by his expression that everything was not all right. Before he saw me and put the letter away, he was as grim as I had ever seen him, though now he looked resigned. “A message from home,” he said. “My father has died.”
“Oh,” I said. Words seemed to have escaped me entirely. Here I had been fretting over scurrilous gossip, as if the tattered state of my reputation were the most important thing in the world. I felt ashamed of myself. “My condolences.”
Suhail shook his head. He seemed to be dismissing my unspoken imputation of grief. I still knew nothing of his family, save that he was estranged from them to a sufficient degree that he did not even use their names. Whatever had lain between him and his father, it meant he did not weep now.
“Thank you,” he said, as if realizing that a shake of the head was not a proper response to condolences. “But I’m afraid it means I must return to Akhia.”
Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369) Page 29