by Mackenzi Lee
Johanna runs a finger along the bridge of the dragon’s nose, and a jet of mist shoots from its nostrils as they break the surface. It smells like seaweed and sugar. “Did you ever think,” she says as the dragon purrs at her fingertips, “all those years ago, when we played at exploring, that we’d ever actually be here? Or find something like this? This feels like a dream.” She pulls her hand from the water, shaking the water off, then turns to me. “Do you really think we can keep this to ourselves?”
“It’s not ours to share.”
“We could take this to the Royal Society. They’d have to take us seriously with a discovery like this. We could be the first women ever.”
“First women to do what?”
“Any of it. All of it. We could lead expeditions. Publish books and papers and give lectures. Teach at universities. Can’t you imagine it—you and me and the sea?” She spreads her arms and throws back her head, neck dipped like a dancer’s. “Maybe it’s worth sacrificing a few creatures so that we can better understand them all.”
“What about sacrificing a few African cities?” I reply.
She sighs, letting her arms fall to her sides. The dragon raises its head from the water and nuzzles upward into her palm. “It’s all very complicated, isn’t it?” she says. “Or is it simply that I am not a good person because I even think that?”
“I’m not sure anyone is all good when you break us down to raw materials,” I say.
“Max is all good.”
“Max is a dog.”
“I don’t see how that changes anything. He’s a good dog.” The sea monster flips in the water, its tail cresting the surface to reveal a small barb like a prickly burr. Johanna flinches with a laugh at the splash. “Maybe this little thing is all good.”
“Or maybe she’ll sink ships one day.”
“Oh, shush.” She dips her hand again into the water, and the sunlight strikes the waves like the ocean is made of precious stones. “Let me dream that there is something unquestionably pure in this world.”
Johanna and I manage to free the little dragon from its prison in the tide pool, but it seems reluctant to swim out into the open ocean. Instead, it keeps darting back to where Johanna and I stand, up to our knees in the ocean, and winding itself between us. Johanna wades out with it under the pretense of luring it to deeper waters, but it’s clear they’re both playing. Her skirt bubbles around her like a jellyfish, pulsing with the waves. She chases the tiny dragon through the water, and it lets out another screeching purr, which makes Johanna shriek, though it seems to be a noise of pleasure from deep within them both. She dips a hand into the water, and it comes to her touch, its tail wrapped around her round calf like a living ribbon beneath the sea.
I return to the shore where Johanna left her mother’s bag and folio, and draw a handful of the loose papers from inside. Pages and pages and pages of notes, most that it would take time and a magnifier and less potent sunlight that doesn’t butter the lenses of my spectacles to decipher. There are several sheets with drawings of the dragons, each one a little different as she formed a more complete picture of what they look like. There is a long list of chemical compounds with two columns beside them, one with the word obtained dotting it and the second marked with either a P or a G.
It reminds me of something, and I dip into my pocket and pull out the list I have been carrying since the hospital in London, now ripped and spotted and practically molded to the shape of my thigh after so long pressed against it. The only line still completely legible is at the top: I deserve to be here.
I’m not sure I believed it when I wrote it. As much as I boasted a stiff upper lip in the face of rejection, every man who turned me away raised in me a fear that maybe they were right. Maybe I did not deserve a space among them. Maybe there is a reason women are kept in houses, minding children and making supper. Perhaps I never can be half as good a doctor as any of those men, simply because of a natural inferiority, and I am just too stubborn to see that.
But if I cannot always believe in myself, I can believe in Johanna. And Sim. And Sybille Glass and Artemisia Gentileschi and Sophia Brahe and Marie Fouquet and Margaret Cavendish and every other woman who came before us. I have never doubted the women who came before me or whether they deserved a seat at the table.
I crush the paper in my fist and let the ocean carry it from my fingers and out to sea.
I do not need reasons to exist. I do not need to justify the space I take up in this world. Not to myself, or Platt, or some hospital governors, or a pirate ship full of men with cutlasses. I have as much claim to this world as anyone else. No one will offer Johanna and me permission to make this work ours, to take up her mother’s maps and follow their headings to the horizon’s edge, where the sea and the sky smoke together. First of our name, first of our kind.
There’s a bellow from the cove, and I glance over my shoulder. We’re mostly sheltered by the rocks, but a sliver of the beach is still visible to me. The scavengers are leaving. They’re leaving fast. They’re running up the hillside, their faces turned to the sea so that they lose their footing on the sand. Some of them left their tools and bounty behind in shimmering heaps along the beach.
My skin prickles. Something is wrong.
I shove Sybille’s papers back into the folio, then hike up a handful of my skirt and trek back to the beach, away from the shelter of our cove so that I have a full view of the empty sea beyond the bay. The sun has traveled farther than I expected. It sits just above the horizon, the yolk of a broken egg tipped out along the edge of the sky. The water is beginning to bronze beneath the spill.
And silhouetted against that syrupy sky is a massive warship, sails pulled in, anchor dropped and longboats lowering into the water.
I spring back down the beach and stagger into the cove. “Johanna! There’s a ship!”
She looks up from the water. “What? Is it Sim’s?”
“I don’t think so.”
“More scavengers?”
“No, it’s a big ship. A warship. If it’s European men, they won’t let us walk away quietly. At best we’ll be questioned and taken back to the Continent.” I don’t have to say aloud what the worst case is. “We have to hide.”
“Where?”
“Stay here. Lie low.”
“We’re hardly out of sight here. As soon as they make landfall they’ll spot us. And we’ll lead them straight to her.” She glances down at the water, where the dragon pup is twirling between her legs, oblivious to any danger.
“Then what do we do?”
“We run. It’s the only thing we can do. Get over the dunes and hide there and wait for Sim like she said. We have to go now.”
Johanna starts to hike toward me, her steps high in the water, but then stops. “No, stay here!”
It takes me a moment to realize she’s talking to the sea monster, still curling around her ankles with every step. She tries to shoo it back into the cove, but it’s not as well trained as Max. “Stay! Stay here! Don’t follow me.”
I run through the water—as much as one can run when the waves are pressing you the opposite way and the sea floor keeps abandoning your step—to where Johanna is begging a creature that does not understand her. I splash as loudly as I can, batting the water right in its face. It shimmies away from Johanna with another one of those ear-splitting whines. It is a horrible thing, to cause so much fear in something. If it were older and had a few more teeth, it would turn predatory. I know—I’ve felt that sort of fear too. I’ve felt cornered and turned on, and I’ve bitten back.
Instead, the little dragon looks cowed, floating a few feet away from us, its big wet eyes fixed on Johanna but too scared to return.
I’m sorry, I think. I wish you understood.
But it doesn’t, and Johanna and I leave it behind in the cove, frightened and alone with its mother rotting upon the beach.
We pull up short at the edge of the rocks, crouching behind them and out of sight of the ship. The l
ongboats have almost reached the shore. The sailors in them are distinctly European—all of them fair skinned and light haired and speaking English to one another. They’re none of them in any sort of uniform, but they are outfitted with hatchets, and several are hauling cases for collection between them. They drop them on the beach and unfold them into sample boxes, glass jars, vials. Rifles are fired into the air to scare off the few remaining scavengers upon the beach. They all go scrambling for the dunes.
The English know about the dragons already. They came here knowing about the beached monster, to harvest it. We’re too late.
“Do we run for it?” I whisper to Johanna as we peer out from our hiding spot. “Or do we sneak for it?”
“I don’t think they’ll follow us if we run,” she says. “They just want the area clear. We get up over the hillside and wait for Sim.”
There’s really no way to sneak. It’s scrub and sand and the crumbling cliffs. But if we can get up among the trees, I think we can hide. “Come on.”
Johanna and I start to scramble over the rocks. On the beach, the men are so absorbed in their work that it seems a good chance they won’t notice us. Then, in the cove behind us, the tiny monster lets out its most earsplitting scream yet. It stops the world, but only for a moment. The sailors all look straight at us, and Johanna and I both start running.
Though running in sand is perhaps the most futile task one can undertake. Johanna is bigger than I am, and with no shoes and her sopping dress weighing her down, she’s slower. I almost stop, but there’s nothing I can do to help her other than offer words of encouragement, and words never won a race.
I had expected the sailors would leave us alone once they saw we were leaving—at most, they’d fire a gunshot in the air—but instead, they’re advancing. I was prepared to be chased off but not to be pursued. “Johanna, hurry!”
But we’re pressed against the rocks, the sailors closing in and cutting us off from the path. I try to dodge around one and he grabs the back of my skirt, yanking me off my feet. I sprawl backward in the sand, and the sailor flips me over, then pins me to the ground with my hands twisted behind me and his knee pressed into my back. I’m spitting out mouthfuls of sand. It’s in my eyes and my ears. I kick backward at him, hoping it will land hard enough to weaken his grip, but instead, the marlinespike wedged in my boot flies free and lands in the sand, out of my reach. Another man snatches it up. Johanna screams, and I raise my head as high as I can, just enough to see her hit the ground beside me, then a heavy boot, black and shiny as a beetle, presses into her back.
It is perhaps a very conventionally feminine thing to say I recognize those shoes. But when the only bit of a man you get a good look at is his footwear, and when that footwear appears again, this time pressing your friend into the dirt, shoes tend to make an impression. I crane my neck to look up at him, though I wouldn’t have recognized him, for I never actually got a good look at the man in Platt’s living room in Zurich. But I’m certain it’s him. He’s tall and fair skinned, his cheeks red with the sun and hair beneath his cornered hat cut short, like it’s usually tucked under a wig.
“Alex!” he shouts down the beach, and my heart sinks. “Are these your lost girls?”
A shadow stretches up the beach toward us. Beside me, Johanna lets out a whimper. I half expect the little dragon to answer again, their fear matching in pitch.
His shadow strikes my face and I flinch like it burns. Dr. Platt looms over us, a curved cutlass in one hand and his shirtsleeves already stained with the dragon’s blood. He looks ill; his hair is greasy and his skin like it’s one of Quick’s waxworks. Perhaps it’s the time on the ocean, but the sun tends to lend color to a man’s cheeks, not turn them pallid and bruised.
“They are indeed.” He pushes a toe under Johanna’s chin and tips her face up to his. “I had a sense we might cross paths here.”
“How did you find us?” I ask, and it comes out with a mouthful of sand.
Platt spins to face me, his feet tipping as the sand caves under them. “We followed the monster.”
I remember the wound on its side, the ripped-up flesh around its neck. Like something from a harpoon. “You killed it.”
Platt doesn’t answer. Instead, he turns to the man with the boots and says, “Do we tie them up?”
“Probably best while we harvest.”
“Harvest?” Johanna cries, and while we had just considered taking samples ourselves, these men look ready to extract far more.
Platt doesn’t acknowledge her. Instead he says to his sailors, “Bind them together. We’ll take them back to the ship when we’re done here.”
I want to scream. I want to spit and writhe and kick my feet like a child. This pathetic, deceptive man I wasted years of my life idolizing, followed across a continent on a chance, who had his knife so deep in my side I didn’t feel it until he twisted. I’ve never wanted so badly to punch someone in the face as I do him in this moment.
Where are Sim and all those threatening pirates when we need them? As much as I believe in the power and strength of a woman, what I wouldn’t give for a flock of barrel-chested men with cutlasses for limbs to emerge from the hilltops and leap to our defense. But instead, Johanna and I are bound back to back, our wrists knotted to each other and legs tied at the ankles and knees, with a length of coarse cloth looped around each of our mouths. We are then made to sit and watch as the sea dragon is stripped of its scales in chunks that scatter along the beach like shells. Even after they’ve been collected, they leave dark circles of blood in the sand.
The sailors work long into the night. They light fires, burn the fat from the leviathan body for fuel. The men take turns standing watch over us. Johanna is facing the ocean; I have my back to the sailors, looking up at the tops of the cliffs. So it’s me who sees the pirates when they appear at the top of the hillside, dark silhouettes that feather from the shrubbery and spread. The moonlight makes their weapons look like they’re made of smoke. Me who sees Sim creep to the edge, the same spot we three stood this morning, and hold up a hand, watching Johanna and me, and the English sailors and the ship. Calling a halt.
And then a retreat.
I’m the one who watches them disappear into the darkness, leaving us tied on the beach as Platt’s men strip the dragon to its bones.
18
We are kept upon the beach until the sun rises and the men begin to load their spoils into the longboats to be ferried back to the ship. The carcass of the monster is rotten flesh and raw bones now, the remaining skin pinked and bloody and bare. It looks like a vein burst open upon the shore. Johanna and I are unbound from each other and hauled into the last longboat, then forced to sit wedged on the floor between cutlasses and hatchets, their blades clinking together like coins in a purse. We’ve hardly cast off before my socks and skirt are soaked through with the blood and bile collecting in the bottom of the boat.
The sailors stink of the rotten entrails they’ve been picking apart, all of them punchy from whatever they’ve been chewing to keep themselves awake and popping blisters upon their palms from where their work has rubbed them raw. I could tell them that will lead to nothing but infection, but at this moment, I’d prefer if all their hands fester and rot off. Any man who takes a lady against her will deserves a far more sensitive body part than the hands to drop off slowly. As our boat is hauled up to the deck, I catch a glimpse of the name painted upon the side: Kattenkwaad. Dutch or Germanic, and though I couldn’t say which, I’m certain it’s a ship from Johanna’s uncle’s fleet.
We are marched to the captain’s cabin at the back of the ship, where we are at last untied and ungagged. My tongue feels hairy and dry after so long pressed against the thick material. Beside me, Johanna sucks in her cheeks, trying to generate moisture in her mouth.
Platt is waiting for us in the cabin, leaning against the captain’s desk like it’s holding him up. His eyes are bloodshot, his skin even yellower than it looked on the beach. Before him is Johan
na’s trunk, left behind at Frau Engel’s in Zurich—he must have tracked her there, same as I had, and I say a quick prayer of thanks that we didn’t spend another night there before we left. A prayer rendered pointless by the fact that he’s caught us now. He also has Sybille Glass’s bag and the leather portfolio collected from the beach. The bag has been ripped apart, emptied, and then turned inside out so that its contents are strewn across the floor. The papers have been far more civilly looted, leafed through, and left lying in stacks upon the desktop.
Johanna and I both stop as the cabin door slams at our backs, the trunk in between us and Platt. “Where’s the map, Johanna?” he demands with no prelude.
“What map?” she says, really leaning into that girlish trill of her voice. The pitch could shatter glass.
“Your goddamn mother’s goddamn map. Where is it?” Platt pushes himself up and staggers around the trunk. I’m not entirely sure what the answer is—I didn’t see the map when I flipped through the folio earlier, but I had assumed it was there. Either Johanna had taken precautions or it had been lost somewhere along the way, though that seems impossible. I think briefly of Sim, seeing her lurking upon the top of the hill watching the English ravage the dragons they’d sworn to protect. Perhaps she had taken the map without us noticing, and all these noble intentions had been a lie. Or rather, more of a lie than previously thought, for no matter her motives, she had still abandoned us.
Platt kicks the trunk out of his way, and Johanna takes a step back, straight onto my foot. I grab her by the elbow and push her behind me, putting myself between her and Platt. “We don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. My voice is hoarse after a night with my mouth full of wool, but at least that disguises the fear that would have dried it out anyway.
“I know you have it,” Platt says. His legs tremble under him, the ship’s bobbing in the water seeming to unsettle him more than it should. “You’ve every other damn thing she left behind on that ship. You wouldn’t have left Zurich without it. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have it.” He picks up the portfolio case and shakes it at us. He’s already emptied it, so it is a gesture made primarily for symbolism. “Where is the map?”