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

by Brennan, Marie

  There is a proverb, which Tom was kind enough not to voice: be careful what you wish for. Unfortunately, not only did I get it, but so did those around me.

  EIGHT

  Deportation—Survey work—Tropical fevers—An unexpected encounter—Not quite shipwrecked—A new passenger

  In our absence, Jake had assembled a monumental collection of starfish and miscellaneous shells, which he showed to me with great pride. I praised it, wondered where we would put it aboard the Basilisk, and decided it did not matter; I remembered my own childhood collection of oddments and how it had pained me to lose them. I would not subject my son to the same.

  Aekinitos might have complained, had he not been distracted by the delay in our return, which had left the Basilisk sitting for several unproductive days in port. Fortunately—for suitably broad values of that word—he was almost immediately distracted by yet another matter, which was our impending deportation from Yelang.

  “What did you do?” he demanded of me, after a visit from a very stern-faced official.

  It says something about Dione Aekinitos that he sounded less angry than impressed. Because I do not wish to defame the man, I will not say here what suspicions I had about his past and the activities he engaged in then … but he had a tendency to admire trouble with the law, provided the cause was either good or entertaining enough.

  Tom and I had already related to him what occurred during our overland sojourn, but we had not given him the background: dragonbone, the Va Ren Shipping Association, and the apparent trade in dragon poaching. Now we exchanged glances, for we had not planned in advance what to say on that topic if queried.

  (And why, I ask you, did Aekinitos look at me when asking what we had done? I did not think I had done anything while aboard the Basilisk to make him assume that between Tom and myself, I would be the troublemaker. Perhaps the stern-faced official had said something of my behaviour during the incident in the mountains.)

  Now, choosing my words very carefully, I said, “There may be an … organization here in Va Hing that has a grievance against the two of us. It is a long story, and involves some research being stolen from an associate of ours in Falchester several years ago. We did not expect it to cause trouble.”

  Aekinitos was standing in front of the windows that formed one wall of his cabin. He linked his hands behind his back and paced the short distance available to him, side to side before the windows, the light briefly limning his profile from each angle in turn. “Research. On dragons? I have never yet heard of dragons causing someone to be barred from entering a country.”

  “It happens, I assure you,” I said dryly. “This is not even the first time it has happened to me.”

  The novelty of that statement halted him in his pacing, with a tilt of his head I interpreted to mean curiosity. I waved it away, saying, “That is a story for another day. In the interim—are we truly barred from Yelang?”

  “You are.” Aekinitos sighed and pulled out the chair behind his desk, then dropped onto it with a complete lack of grace. “We are permitted to go into Yelangese ports, but you may not leave the ship. Either of you.”

  Tom made an inarticulate noise of frustration. “But that makes complete hash of our plans. We were going to the Phăn Shân river to look at the kau lêng, so we could compare it to Moulish swamp-wyrms. The hung, the yin lêng—”

  Aekinitos cut him off with a growl. “And if you had kept to your schedule, coming back here rather than pressing on ahead, you might have had a chance to do those things. But now? You have a choice. Sit aboard the Basilisk with your specimens and your notebooks while we trade through Yelang, or make different plans.”

  The galling part, of course, was that he was right. Going up into the mountains had been a mistake—one that had cost us more than we knew at the time. Our fleeting observations of the dragons there did not counterbalance all the work we might have done elsewhere, which was now barred to us. It is possible the Shipping Association might have caused us difficulty elsewhere; I did not know if the hunt for dragons was confined to the lands around Va Hing. But they were a Hingese company, and I had to believe their reach did not extend clear across the Yelangese Empire. We might have been able to work in peace. But Tom and I had chosen wrong, and this was the price.

  * * *

  We were not the sort to sit idle, so it will surprise no one when I say we chose to make different plans.

  We had promised to do various bits of surveying for the Scirling Geographical Association, and one of the places they showed an interest in was the Melatan island chain of Arinevi. After our Yelangese debacle, we backtracked to spend more than a month in this region, tramping about doing the meticulous (not to say tedious) work that surveying requires. It felt like penance: our zeal for dragons had led us to err, and so we separated ourselves from dragons for a time, putting our efforts into repaying those whose support had made this voyage possible at all.

  With all due respect to the organizations that funded my expedition, our time in Arinevi was sheer drudgery of a sort I did not enjoy at all. Furthermore, hindsight proved it to be an unwise choice—though in all fairness, the same misfortune could have befallen us elsewhere in the tropics, whether we were studying dragons or not.

  The islands of Arinevi are tropical, with all the perils that implies. Several of the sailors fell ill with malaria, which is a common enough occurrence. (Several others fell ill with diseases endemic to ports the world over, or rather to certain establishments within those ports.) We thought very little of this, and upon completion of our survey work, set sail with the intention of resuming our draconic research.

  Not long after we departed, however, I was struck by a fever. I choose the word “struck” quite deliberately, for it seemed to come out of nowhere; one moment I felt fine, and then before the hour was out I was shivering in my hammock. “It can’t be yellow fever,” I said to Tom, through my shudders. “I’ve had it already.”

  The hammock was soon an agony to me, for all my muscles and joints ached, while my skin flushed and became quite sensitive. The ship’s doctor, who had been through the tropics before, diagnosed my affliction as dengue fever. As the more colloquial name of “breakbone fever” implies, the aches can become quite painful, and my flushed skin soon developed into a rash not unlike the measles.

  Upon hearing I was ill, Aekinitos promptly locked Jake and Abby into his cabin, allowing no one other than himself in to see them; he even brought them their meals. (It did little good; we know now that dengue is transmitted by mosquitos, of which there were none at sea. But at the time that was not certain, and so I am grateful to him for the precaution.) Jake, I am told, objected strenuously to confinement, and spent an entire afternoon shouting imprecations through the door at the man who would not let him go tend to his mother, until his voice quite gave out.

  Three of the sailors who had assisted us similarly fell ill with dengue. Like myself, they were fortunate enough to escape with a mild case of the disease—mild meaning that we suffered a few days of nauseating, painful fever, during which we bled from the nose and the mouth, but after that we recovered. Partway through this ordeal, I was shifted from my hammock to a proper bed; I did not understand until my fever broke that Aekinitos had brought us to Seungdal, which was the nearest port of any real size. When I woke free of pain for the first time in days, Abby told me where we were—and why Aekinitos had diverted from his course.

  Weak as I was, I insisted on rising from my bed. With Abby’s aid, I limped from my room to Tom’s.

  When I had fallen to yellow fever in Eriga, I had been one of the unlucky few who pass from the first, milder stage of the disease to a more serious secondary one. For Tom, it was the same with dengue. His breathing was rapid and shallow, as if he could not get enough air, and he was shockingly pale. Someone—I later learned it was the ship’s doctor—had shaved his head to bring down his fever. Bereft of that cap, his face seemed raw and unfamiliar, as if it belonged to a different man, and
the alienation unnerved me greatly.

  I will not pretend that what I suffered then in any way compares to Tom’s own trials. His life was in great danger; we were exceedingly lucky that he recovered not long after. But I was weak with my own recovery, and it had not been long since I was forced to abandon those mated dragons to the soldiers who were trying to kill them. Now it seemed I might lose the man who had been my friend and comrade for the better part of my adult life. My knees gave out beneath me; Abby very nearly had to carry me back to my bed, where I wept into my pillow and wondered if this entire journey had been a mistake.

  The storm of my emotional outburst soon passed, leaving in its wake a terrible itching and the realization that my head, like Tom’s, had been shaved. I scarcely recognized my own drawn, mottled face in the mirror, bereft of the hair which had been its frame since I was a child. When I recovered enough to go out, I wrapped my stubbled head in a kerchief before putting on my bonnet, and still felt terribly self-conscious.

  It did not help that our location was completely unfamiliar to me, and unwelcoming. Seungdal only allows travellers from their favoured allies to roam freely about the city and countryside; all others are confined to an islet in the harbour. Scirland not being one of those favoured allies, we were on that islet, and furthermore lodged in a rather dreary hotel used for quarantine. I could not blame the authorities for their caution, but it meant my immediate surroundings were dingy and the streets beyond them dedicated to little other than trade.

  I had some cause to be grateful for the menagerie of foreigners, at least, in that among them I could find a few with whom I shared a language. On a voyage of this sort, visiting so many different parts of the world, I could not hope to do as I had done in Vystrana and Eriga, attempting to learn the native tongue: there were simply too many. I had until now gotten by mostly on what I possessed of Chiavoran, Thiessois, and Eiversch, and the mercy of those who spoke some Scirling. I had also studied the simplified pidgin known as Atau, a Puian language spoken by traders throughout much of the Broken Sea—but that did me no good in Seungdal, where the locals (who are of Dajin stock, not Puian) frown on that tongue as a degenerate interloper. As a result, I was unable to engage with much beyond my own door, and between that and my exhaustion, I stayed largely in the hotel.

  There my mind worried incessantly at the problems that beset me. Aekinitos, Abby told me, had taken the Basilisk out for trading; he would return in a few weeks and see where matters stood. Although I initially cursed him roundly for abandoning Tom at such a critical time, I had to accede to his logic; they could do nothing for Tom that they had not done already—the hotel had a doctor who was probably superior to the Basilisk’s in any case—and Aekinitos could not afford to sit in harbour doing nothing. I mean that quite literally: it takes a great deal of money to keep so many men fed, to say nothing of the pay they are owed, and had he kept the Basilisk in Seungdal the entire time, our expedition would have ended in bankruptcy. So long as Aekinitos was earning money somewhere, he could give both us and himself a financial reprieve.

  But this did not solve the underlying problem, which was that we were growing alarmingly short of money. The bribe in Yelang had gone almost entirely to waste, the changes to our itinerary had thoroughly mangled our budget, and doctors do not come cheaply. I sat on my sickbed, staring at maps, and thought with bleak resignation that we would have to abbreviate our journey. I did not know what sorts of trading opportunities Aekinitos might find in the Broken Sea, but it was not a region we could sweep through in a week—not even if we ignored both the sea-serpents and the fire-lizards that dwelt on the volcanic islands. If we bypassed it entirely, however, the remainder of our voyage might yet be saved.

  These were not thoughts I enjoyed having. It felt like admitting defeat, in a way I had not done since the beginning of my grey years, when I attempted to forswear my true interests in favour of more ladylike behaviour. But it was no virtue to forge ahead and deepen our difficulties; better to salvage what I might from the situation, while I still could.

  * * *

  I owe Jake a great deal for his actions during that time: first because he kept me company even when I was not good company to keep, and second because, once I regained a modicum of strength, he insisted on dragging me from the hotel into the streets of Seungdal. Without his determination, my voyage might have been far shorter and less interesting, and my own life less complete.

  Abby had of necessity allowed Jake to run about on his own while she looked after Tom and myself, but Jake had taken his freedom with surprising maturity. He showed me about the place, indicating which merchants he had dealt with in obtaining food and other necessities; he spoke none of their language and they spoke none of his, but gestures will go a surprisingly long way in bargaining. Even that small grounding, orienting me in the crowded and unfamiliar maze of the harbour islet, did a great deal to make me believe that this problem, too, could be surmounted.

  My optimism did not long outlast my strength, and the latter flagged with alarming rapidity. Jake, carefully solicitous, was about to lead me back to the hotel when he gave a sudden yelp of recognition and dove into the waterfront crowd.

  His abrupt departure left me off-balance and grasping for the nearest wall. I could not spot him in the press, and called out his name with growing alarm. Then my searching gaze lit upon a face that I, too, recognized.

  “Mrs. Camherst!” Suhail said, his familiar grin spreading across his face. It faltered, though, when he took in my state. “Are you well?”

  I let go of the wall, intending to tell him that I was fine, but gave the lie to those words before I could even speak them. As Jake said later, I turned an alarming shade of paper-white and swayed like a reed. Suhail was there in an instant, one hand on my elbow, the other on my waist, first catching and then guiding me to a seat on the nearest crate.

  When I was sure of my stability, I said, “I have been ill.”

  “I can see that,” Suhail murmured. “Please forgive me. I would not ordinarily touch a woman outside my family, but—”

  I waved away his apology before he could finish it. “I had rather you catch me than let me fall down in the street. If propriety takes issue with that, it can go hang.” I drew in a steadying breath. “Forgive me. I was clearly too ambitious in coming out today.”

  “Are you in the quarantine hotel?” Suhail asked, and I nodded. “Let me help you back.”

  A minor comedy ensued, in which his sense of good behaviour, my own determination not to be a complete milksop, and Jake’s eager gallantry all collided in their rush to determine whether I could get home without leaning on Suhail again. Jake ended up being my support, for all that he was less than half my size, and I could not decide whether I was relieved at not needing a grown man to keep me on my feet, or humiliated that I needed to lean on my own son.

  Once back at the hotel, Suhail offered to leave and come back when I was feeling better, but I said, “No, no. I only need to sit for a little while, and perhaps drink something. It gave me quite a turn, seeing you—not that it was unpleasant! Just a surprise.”

  Suhail nodded, glancing about the unimpressive lobby as he took his seat. “And your companion? Is he here as well?”

  “He is recovering,” I said, and gave him the briefest outline of our recent misfortunes.

  Suhail listened with a grave expression, and shook his head when I was done. “Truly, you have both been very lucky. I have had dengue myself, some years ago, and although I survived, others with me were not so fortunate.”

  “Did they shave your head, too?” Jake asked.

  I could have quite cheerfully strangled my son in that moment, for his question caused Suhail to look first at him, then at me; and after a moment he realized that the kerchief beneath my hat was not covering a very large volume of hair. To his credit, however, he did nothing more than nod in silent acknowledgment of my loss. To Jake he said, “They did not. But they did tie me to the bed, to keep me from sc
ratching myself bloody.”

  As I had frequently been tempted to do the same to myself, I could sympathize. “How long did it take you to recover?” I asked.

  “To be on my feet, only a few days. But I was tired for a fortnight after. Your companion…” Suhail paused, the tip of his tongue resting against his lip as he thought. Then he shook his head. “I cannot remember the name of it. There is an herbal concoction, common in this region, which will restore his strength more quickly.”

  I sighed. “I already asked the doctor here, and he had no suggestions.”

  Suhail waved this away. “Any herbalist here should know it. If you ask them, they can tell you.”

  “If I could ask them,” I said, too tired to hide my frustration.

  “Then I will do it for you. If you would like.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly, apart from the belated realization that perhaps he was overstepping his bounds. That was not at all what put me aback, though. I knew from our interactions in Namiquitlan that he spoke the Coyahuac tongue quite well. His Scirling was accented but grammatically impeccable, and one could presume a mastery of his native tongue of Akhian. “How many languages do you speak?”

  Suhail cocked his head to one side, eyes fixed on a high corner of the room, as if counting silently. “Speak? Or should I also include the ones I can only read?”

  “Good heavens,” I said, marveling. “I have never learned any language as well as you speak mine, let alone so many beyond it. I haven’t the head for such things.”

  He shrugged, seeming unimpressed by his own ability. “I have always enjoyed languages. They are like ciphers. When I was a boy, my father—” Upon that word, Suhail stopped. For the first time in our acquaintance, I saw a hint of bitterness cloud his normally bright disposition.

  Jake rescued us both from that awkward moment. “Can I go with you?”

  Suhail blinked, momentarily confused. Then he recalled the offer he had made, before we embarked upon our tangent. “You should perhaps stay with your mother.”