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

by Brennan, Marie

“Which might be why they lose the tendrils. And they cease to expel water as a weapon, again because of the cold. The shock of drawing it in might kill them.”

  He brushed the dirt from his fingers. “It’s possible. But certainly not confirmed.”

  “I have to share it, though,” I said wretchedly. “No one can test the idea if they are not aware of it. And I cannot bring myself to sit on my hands, waiting for someone else to think of it and then test it.”

  “But that will mean retracting your previous theory.” Tom fell silent. He knew as well as I did where that would lead.

  A scientist should never be afraid to theorize, publish, receive criticism, re-examine, and revise her thoughts accordingly. For one such as me, however, there was indeed reason to fear. My scientific credibility was tenuous to begin with, and to recant my original ideas would make me a laughing-stock: not because of my theory, but because of who I was. A misstep that would be brushed away from a great eminence in the field was seen as a fatal error on my part.

  Even now, the memory of my foolish haste stings. A part of me wishes dearly that I had taken my time, as Tom advised. Another part, however, treasures the heady excitement with which I penned that first draft, talked it over with Tom, edited my words into a more polished state, and sent it off for consideration. The day when I held a copy of the Journal of Maritime Studies and saw my own piece in it ranks as one of the proudest moments of my life … when I can see through the haze of shame that hangs over it.

  The consequences did not come until later, of course. I relate them here because these volumes focus on key expeditions in my career, and so this one will conclude before the aftereffects of that article become fully apparent. But it is common for people to gloss over my errors, as I have become one of those great eminences, and I wish readers to know that not all of my scientific ideas have been sound.

  Conscience would not permit me to save face, though. Tom raised a questioning eyebrow at me, and I shook my head. “No. What matters is the advancement of our knowledge, not the advancement of my reputation. And if my original theory was wrong, it will come out sooner or later. At least this way I might be credited with the correction as well as the error.” I managed a rueful laugh, holding my hands up to forestall what he might have said. “But I have learned my lesson. I shan’t send a retraction right away—not that I could, of course. I will wait until I have more data.” The only thing worse than proving myself wrong would be doing so twice in quick succession.

  Gathering more data, though, would have to wait until we were off Keonga. There was only so much I could do with the local population of serpents, especially without a dead specimen to dissect.

  I grew restless, wishing I were not trapped on a single island. Jake did likewise, which surprised me; a boy of his inclinations ought to have been in paradise. The sea was right there, its waves cool and inviting in the tropical sun. He could collect coral and shells, practice se’egalu and fishing with a spear, and generally shrivel himself into a very brown raisin with long days in the water. And indeed, he did all these things—but occasional outbursts of temper said that all was not right with him. Abby dealt with these as best she could, in her masquerade as his mother, but one evening I discreetly drew my son aside and inquired what was wrong.

  He dug one toe into the sand, hands locked behind his back, not meeting my eyes. His shrug was both noncommittal and unconvincing. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Have the other boys been troubling you?” I asked. This seemed the most likely source of trouble.

  But Jake shook his head. “No. It’s just—I’m tired of Miss Abby being my mother.”

  My first thought was that he chafed at his governess telling him what to do. It had happened before; like all children, he had his rebellious periods. Tension thrummed in his body, though: as if he wanted to step forward, to come under my arm as he had not done in weeks.

  I sank to one knee, putting myself below his head. Once, when he was very young and I was both grieving and conflicted, I had kept my distance from him. Here in Keonga, with so many issues to occupy my mind, I had not felt the gap between us returning—until now.

  “I miss you, too,” I whispered, and it was true.

  Jake’s will broke. He had been very good about our masquerade, but now he darted forward and flung his arms about my neck. I clasped him briefly to me, heedless of the risk that the Keongans might see us. “The ship will be repaired soon,” I promised him, hoping it was true. “Then we shall go back to normal.”

  We did not stay like that for long. Caution and youthful dignity both took Jake from my side soon after; but there was a spring in his step now that had been missing before. Although he never said this outright, I believe he remembered my absence when I went to Eriga, and feared I wished to be free of him again. Reassured otherwise, he could go about his days with a light and joyful heart.

  I took care after that to show my affection in small ways that would not be remarked by the Keongans, and to involve Jake in my daily affairs where his own patience and interest would permit. This was not so often as it might have been, for I passed my time studying fire-lizards, having endless debates about taxonomy with Tom, and drawing up chart after chart, trying to shuffle the sprawling assortment of draconic types into something like a coherent order. It was not enough merely to point at similarities and declare the job done: there had to be a logic behind it. How did lower forms give rise to higher? Which ones were the lower forms, if the family included everything from sparklings to swamp-wyrms, fire-lizards to wolf-drakes? And if it did not include all those things, then where did the boundary belong?

  There must, I believed, be some key—some concept I had not yet thought of—that would sort it all into a sensible shape. But no matter how I grasped for it, the resolution kept slipping through my fingers.

  Heali’i found me scowling over these charts one afternoon, after we had been stranded in Keonga for nearly two months. “What is this?” she asked. “You spend so much time on it.”

  She could not read, much less read Scirling, so of course the charts meant nothing to her. I had long since told her the purpose of our voyage in broad terms: I wanted to study dragons. I had not gone into the scientific detail of it, though.

  A thought came to me, and I put my pen down. “Heali’i … you said you identified me as ke’anaka’i because I showed interest in the fire-lizards and the sea-serpents. Yes?” She nodded, and I asked, “Why? That is—it suggests you see fire-lizards and sea-serpents as belonging in a category together.”

  “They do,” she said.

  “Indeed, I agree. But I know why I think that: I have seen creatures all over the world that share characteristics with those two. You have never left these islands. Fire-lizards are small and gregarious; they live at the tops of volcanic peaks, eat animals of the islands, and spit lightning at things that trouble them. Sea-serpents are large and solitary; they live in the ocean, eat vast quantities of fish, and spit water at the things that trouble them. They both have scales and a slight similarity in the shape of their heads, and that is where the obvious resemblance ends. But many things have scales, fish included—and you would not say they are in the same category, would you?”

  Heali’i shook her head. “There is a poem—the O’etaiwa—you have never heard it, of course. It tells how the world came into existence, one kind of creature at a time. The fire-lizards and the sea-serpents are together in that poem.”

  This intrigued me even more, and I jotted down a note to find someone who could recite the poem for me, with Suhail translating. (I did not think to allocate four hours for it, which is the length of time the recitation ultimately took.) “But why?” I asked. “Does the poem say why they belong together?”

  “Because they used to be one creature, in the early days of the world,” Heali’i said. “Before the naka’i changed them.”

  It was highly unlikely that fire-lizards and sea-serpents shared an immediate common ancestor, no matter whic
h of my charts I favored at any given moment. But allowing for poetic license, the evolutionary point might well be true. “Fascinating,” I murmured.

  Heali’i studied me with a curious eye. “Why do you care? Even ke’anaka’i do not go this far—at least, I have never heard of one that has.”

  Once again, it was the fundamental question of my life. In one sense, my answer has changed again and again, from year to year and person to person; in another sense, it has not changed at all. Only my fumbling attempts to put it into words have altered.

  This time I said, “It is a mystery. And I suppose I cannot look at a mystery without wanting to solve it.”

  It was a dangerous answer to give, in a land where tapu rendered certain things entirely off-limits. Heali’i’s expression sharpened. “Take care you do not offend the gods. Some things are intended to be mysteries.”

  “I will do my best,” I said—which was not the same as saying I would stop.

  * * *

  We were returning from another stint at the top of Homa’apia, emerging from the lava tube and blinking in the sudden brightness, when I saw something new to me: a fleet of canoes approaching from the southeast. These were not the usual small craft of the fishermen, but long canoes rowed by a dozen men or more, and a large double-hulled vessel in their midst. “It seems you have visitors,” I said to Heali’i.

  She made no reply, but stared intently at the ships as if she could divine their nature from this distance. Perhaps she could: the largest canoe had a distinctive sign painted on its sail that I thought might be an abstract representation of a shark. “Do you recognize it?” I asked. Her expression told me she did, but I hoped to draw her into conversation.

  Heali’i shook her head, a smile appearing on her face as if conjured there. “Foreigners,” she said—using the word that means islanders from elsewhere in the Broken Sea, rather than non-Puians. She spoke dismissively, and suited action to tone by heading back toward the main path without so much as another glance toward the canoes. I did give them another glance, long enough to fix the image from the sail in my memory; and when I did so, I saw something else. An indistinct shape, much further out to sea, that looked like neither the square rigging of an Anthiopean ship nor the unusual crab-claw sail of the Raengaui island cluster. I could not judge its size, not without any landmark against which to measure it or its distance from shore, but it was a rounded blur in the haze above the water, and it certainly had not been there before.

  I could not stay there staring at it, though. It was plain enough that the approaching fleet had Heali’i concerned, and furthermore that she did not wish me to pay any attention to them. I had already lingered for longer than I should. I hastened to catch up, and spoke of fire-lizards all the way back to camp.

  No one there said anything about the visitors, who must have come to shore out of sight on the far side of the promontory. I greeted my son, but did not attend to his excited tales of se’egalu as closely as I might have, occupied as I was in looking for Aekinitos.

  I found him overseeing the men who were replacing planks in the side of the Basilisk. “Can you spare a moment?” I asked him.

  He waved for me to speak on, but I shook my head. “This is perhaps not something we should speak of in public.”

  That gained me his full attention. Aekinitos picked up his crutch and followed me across the sand to a rock upon which he could rest, safely distant from anyone who might overhear.

  Once there, I told him of the fleet I had seen coming in, the odd shape in the distance, and my growing sense that something was amiss around us—something the Keongans were hiding. “Though I cannot imagine what it might be,” I finished. “My knowledge is of dragons and the natural world, not people and their politics. Am I seeing trouble where none lies?”

  I wanted him to say “yes.” Had the Basilisk been intact, I could have faced the prospect of local danger with much more confidence, knowing that if necessary we could flee to safer waters. But until our ship was repaired, we were trapped in the Keongan Islands, with whatever secrets might lurk nearby.

  Aekinitos did not oblige me.

  “I’ve had my men asking questions for weeks now,” he said, digging the point of his crutch into the sand and overturning a broken piece of conch shell. “Nothing obvious—well, some of them have been more obvious than others. Men say stupid things in the arms of a woman. But the islanders are on a war footing.”

  “War!” I exclaimed. “Against whom?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. The Yelangese, most likely. The king’s wife is the cousin of Waikango, after all. The islanders of Raengaui paint their sails as you described; I would wager my spare anchor that was one of their chiefs paying the Keongans a visit.” He scowled. “If I had not lost my anchor in the storm.”

  “The Keongans would be mad to invade Yelang, though,” I said. “They cannot hope to retrieve their war-leader. Outside their own waters, against Yelangese ships—every advantage that protects them here would be lost.”

  “I know. And they know it, too. More likely they’re preparing to defend themselves. This emperor hasn’t conquered anything yet; he has to prove himself somehow.”

  Yelangese history was not my strong suit in those days (nor is it much stronger now), but I could follow Aekinitos’ point. The Yelangese Empire was and is a large polity; it reached that size courtesy of the emperors of the Taisên Dynasty, who energetically expanded their territory through the conquest of places like Va Hing. Indeed, it had become de rigueur for an emperor to annex new lands and their inhabitant peoples, if he wished to maintain his status in the eyes of his own subjects.

  But Yelang had reached the point where further expansion had become difficult. Their neighbours on the Dajin continent—Vidwatha, Tsholar, Hakkoto—were not small states, easily overrun by the Yelangese army; conquering them would be difficult and costly, and by no means assured to succeed. The emperor might well cast a speculative eye toward the Broken Sea instead, for all that his people were not the best sailors. The Raengaui island cluster would be a trivial territory in comparison with the size of the empire itself, but at least it was a conquest, and one he could achieve with relative ease—now that Waikango was his captive.

  We were on the far side of the cluster from Yelang, though. “I can’t imagine this is a useful place to prepare for war,” I said. “Not as isolated as it is. Unless the rest of the Raengaui region has been overrun already?”

  Aekinitos sighed and slapped the rock upon which he sat—a rare gesture of frustration. “From here, we can do nothing more than guess. The fleet you saw might be refugees, or emissaries come to beg for aid. Or there might be an entire war fleet beached on the far side of Lahana.”

  I hoped not. Or if there was, I hoped they would wait to launch until after the Basilisk was repaired and we were clear of the whole region. “How long will it be before the ship is ready?” I asked.

  “Too long,” he said grimly.

  * * *

  You might think my two recent brushes with death—three, if you count the dengue fever—would be enough to dissuade me from foolish action for a time. Then again, if you have been reading this series from the first volume, you might not.

  In my defense, my next piece of recklessness did not originate with me. The thought had crossed my mind some time before, but I had dismissed it; Suhail was the one who returned to the idea, investigated it, fixed his will upon it … and then persuaded me to join him.

  He had scoured the waters of Keonga’s encircling lagoons in search of archaeological remnants, but had found very little. “If I could use the bell, I might find more,” he told me at one point. “If there is anything here, it is likely buried in the silt of the lagoons; I would need to pump the water away to see. But without the bell…” He shrugged. The unavailability of the bell was no one’s fault. Even if my excursion to view sea-serpents had not left it sunk on the fore reef, it would have done him no good until the Basilisk was afloat once mo
re. And possibly not even then, I thought: if the remains were all within the lagoons, our ship could not reach them regardless.

  With little to do archaeologically, Suhail had lent his hand where he could in the repairs, but he was neither carpenter nor sailor. And so he had taken to ranging restlessly about the island, going everywhere that was not forbidden to him and taking up every physical challenge he could find.

  It was no surprise that this included the sport of se’egalu. Suhail loved the water nearly as much as my son did, and surf-riding appealed very well to a spirit that craved adventure. He grasped the principles of it fairly quickly, though his finesse could not match that of the more experienced Keongans, and he was forever trying to coax me into trying it myself.

  I always demurred. Our stay on Keonga had greatly improved my swimming skills, but not the point of attempting to conquer the waves. And I did not see the point of teaching myself the practice of se’egalu when there was work that could better occupy my time.

  The same could not be said for another, more hazardous maritime sport.

  I knew something was afoot, because Suhail grew even more restless than usual. He prowled about our camp like a cat trapped inside on a rainy day, unable even to concentrate on his efforts with the Draconean script. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, knowing that he was sidling his way toward a decision, and that I would hear of it when he was done.

  Indeed, I saw the moment it occurred. I happened to be taking a break from my sketching of the fire-lizard bone fragments, standing up to ease my back. Suhail had been sitting on the beach, legs drawn up before him and bare feet buried in the sand, arms propped on his knees with a stick of wood in his hands. This he had theoretically been whittling into some kind of useful or aesthetically pleasing shape, but that purpose had faded from his mind, for the knife had for several minutes just been carving strips off the wood, without any apparent direction from above. Then he stopped—stabbed the knife down into the sand—and stood, hurling the stick into the breakers with an easy, side-armed swing.