In the Labyrinth of Drakes

by Marie Brennan

  The Aritat camp was not where we had left it. I was grateful anew for our rescuers, who saved us not only from the Banu Safr but also from wandering in the desert like something out of Scripture. I nearly lost my composure when I saw that Umm Azali had pitched our tent alongside her own, so that it was ready and waiting for Tom and me to collapse into it. She inspected our burns and other ills, pronounced them not so serious as to need Ghalbi attention, and doctored us as necessary, while Suhail reported to Hajj Nawl.

  He returned to us just before sunset, when Tom was asleep and Andrew was in the tent next door obtaining our supper. I met him outside, so as to avoid waking Tom. “You will both be well, I hope?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Yes, with a bit of rest,” I said. “A few of the blisters need care, but we will heal.”

  “Good,” he said. “It will help if I can say that to my brother and your colonel.”

  The words caught me unprepared, though they should not have. “You mean—you are going back to Qurrat?”

  Suhail shrugged, looking away. The tents cast elongated shadows across the ground, and I could not help but think how much this camp resembled the one I had just fled. Nomads can tell the difference between the tribes based on little more than camel tracks, but such skill is well beyond me. “I have to,” he said. “I can’t write a letter saying, ‘misplaced your naturalists, so sorry, but got them back mostly in one piece.’”

  When he put it like that, I supposed he could not. “I see.”

  He hesitated, then said, “I do not like to abandon you, though.”

  I could imagine what was going through his head. He went off to chase raiders, and came back to find us missing; now he proposed to leave us again. Who knew what might happen in his absence? “Do you think the Banu Safr will attack again?”

  “Yes. We killed one of their own; they’ll want revenge for that. But we alerted the Firiyin when we were chasing the camel thieves—they’re another clan of the Aritat, and they’re nearby. They’ll keep an eye on the Banu Safr, and send warning if they see a force headed this way.”

  How the nomads remained so aware of each other’s locations and movements in the vast expanse of the desert, I could not comprehend. I trusted his trust in them, though. I therefore said, “You would not be abandoning us. Your duty is to your brother, not to Tom or myself. And as you said, people in Qurrat need to know what happened here.”

  During our previous travels, I had often thought of Suhail’s expression as being open and sunny. That was less true in Akhia, however, and now it closed off into a polite mask. “If you are certain.”

  “The language is a difficulty,” I allowed, “but we have dealt with that before. Your responsibility lies in the city: I would not keep you from it.”

  “Very well,” Suhail said—and he left the very next morning.

  ELEVEN

  Moving camp—Al-Jelidah—In search of dragons—A “love note”—The differences of my life—Dragons in flight—On the edge of the Labyrinth

  It took two weeks and a pointed comment from my brother before I realized I had made a mistake.

  Those two weeks were rather busy. We moved camp soon after our return, heading farther from the Banu Safr, even though the grazing to the south was not as good. (I later learned that the other Aritat clans mustered a force of fighting men, and these kept their enemy usefully occupied while we got away.) Our status as guests meant that Tom, Andrew, and I would not have been expected to assist, even had Tom and I not been recuperating from our injuries—but I chafed more than I expected to at the idleness. “At least there are camels to carry things for us,” Tom said wryly. He remembered as well as I did the challenge of shifting our gear through the Green Hell of Mouleen, with nothing more than our backs (and those of the Moulish we could persuade to assist us) to bear it.

  I was exceedingly glad not to have to carry everything this time. I had packed few changes of clothing; in the field I am often resigned to wearing the same garments long after I would have considered them unacceptably soiled at home. We had one saddlebag loaded with field glasses, thermometers, and other scientific equipment; another contained books and empty notebooks, pencils for my sketches, Tom’s dissection tools, and so forth. On the whole, it was not so very much. But there was also the tent and all its furnishings; and Husam ibn Ramiz had not stinted us there. We lived in a style matched only by the local sheikh.

  Because of the duty laid upon them, the Aritat took our needs into account, choosing a wadi that might afford us a better chance to see dragons. Tom said, “I get the impression that’s why they were sent the new breeding stock. The work they’ve been doing on our behalf has lost them more than a few camels and horses along the way.”

  I remembered well the camel that had served as bait during the nighttime hunt. “Then I am glad they are being compensated. They will likely lose more before this enterprise is done.”

  Tom and I, however, had come to the desert to observe life, not death. It was mating flights we needed to see, rather than hunting flights, and those lacked vultures to serve as a signal flag. To achieve our goal, we had to exert much more effort.

  * * *

  Mating flights did not take place over the hospitable wadis where the nomads pastured their camels. True to their name, desert drakes preferred to conduct their displays over the stony, barren ground in between regions of relative bounty.

  I owe a great debt to al-Jelidah, the Ghalbi man we had been told about upon our first arrival. He had returned to the Aritat camp while Tom and I were captive, and we met with him at the first opportunity, to recruit his help in seeking out dragons.

  As I mentioned before, I lack the encyclopedic knowledge that permits the nomads to distinguish between one tribe and another based on small details: the shape of a camel’s footprint, the way they secure their headscarves, the roofline of their tents. Even I, however, could tell at a glance that al-Jelidah was not of the Aritat. He wore a long shirt of gazelle skin, and covered his hair with a tied cloth rather than the more usual scarf-and-cord. Where most of the Aritat wore woollen socks in winter, or else boots of camel leather, and sandals in the summer, al-Jelidah went barefoot regardless of season, and the soles of his feet were as hard as horn.

  He often travelled alone in the desert, which is almost unheard of. Even in these days of relative peace, conflicts often arise between the tribes, and a man alone is easy prey for enemies. But the Ghalb are the enemy of none: many despise them as beggars, but they are permitted to travel throughout the region, and few bother to trouble them. Their camps are small, rarely more than an extended family in total, and individuals may be found in the oddest places—such as the depths of the Jefi, chasing dragons.

  I do not know what he made of our work. To him it hardly seemed to matter; he had been hired as a guide for us, and would have guided us in search of anything we wanted, be it dragons, locusts, or the truffles which liven up the nomad diet in winter. He made no complaint when the sheikh insisted we take Haidar with us, the man who had led us to watch the dragon hunt at night. To the best of my recollection, I never heard al-Jelidah complain about anything. He was as phlegmatic as stone.

  Haidar came with us as a guard, and made no secret of that fact. (He would have brought nine more of his fellows, too, had we allowed it, but such a party would make our work all but impossible. Tom persuaded the sheikh that Haidar, Andrew, and himself constituted sufficient armed force.) His presence was a great boon to us, for we spent more time out of camp than in it, and his hunting both extended our rations and gave us a welcome respite from the tedium of dates, coffee, and unleavened bread.

  This was the group we took into the field proper. They saw me in trousers, as few others did; al-Jelidah did not seem to care (as per usual), Haidar frowned in disapproval but said nothing (I made sure to don a belt, so he would not think my morals suspect), and Andrew clapped one hand over his eyes, proclaiming loudly that he took no responsibility for my behaviour. But if I was to ride
throughout the Jefi in search of dragons, I did not want a skirt or robe hampering my ability to move at speed.

  The first drake we found was male. I noted him on the map I was creating, but we spent little time in his vicinity, for we were interested not only in the flight but its fruit. Female drakes, as we learned from al-Jelidah, will not lair within a ten-kilometer radius of their male counterparts, and so we rode a circuit at that distance from the overhang in which he sheltered, hunting signs of a female. It took days to locate one, for that region has many rock formations that can serve as lairs; but, having found it, now we knew where to watch.

  We made a meager bivouac in a sheltered nook from which we could easily venture forth to watch the site. We took it in shifts to do this latter, for our quarry had hunted with great success just before we arrived; we saw her dragging her full belly up the scree to her home, and then had to wait for hunger to drive her forth once more. Indeed, we were altogether more than a week in that location, twiddling our thumbs and hoping for profit—which left us a great deal of time for other occupations.

  For the most part Tom and I spent our energy on recording desert life more generally, so as to create a picture of the environment in which the drakes thrive. There is a surprising amount out there, at least in winter: everything from large mammals like the onager and oryx down to beetles, scorpions, and an abundance of spiders. But nomads are accustomed to filling their idle moments with conversation, and so we spent a great deal of time talking, whether around the fire at night or during our shifts watching the female’s lair. It was during one of the latter, when I had only Andrew for company, that he enlightened me as to my error.

  I did not think I had mentioned Suhail much. From what I could recall, my work had occupied the bulk of my attention, as it ordinarily does; I only mentioned Suhail at that moment because I was discussing the possibility that the Draconeans had successfully bred dragons. Andrew said—out of nowhere, or so it seemed to me—“You know, Isabella, if you wanted that fellow here, you should not have sent him away.”

  “I—what?” I stared at my brother in complete perplexity. “I don’t know what you mean. I did not send Suhail away.”

  Andrew had been fanning himself with his hat while he leaned in the shadow of a tall rock. Now he gestured with it as if to wave off my words. “All right, all right. I should have said, you ought not to have told him to stay away.”

  Indignation was rapidly overtaking my perplexity. “I did not do that, either. I merely said—”

  “That his duty was in Qurrat. Translation: you didn’t want him to come back.”

  Nothing could have been further from the truth. But I could not say that to Andrew. “What ought I have said, then?”

  Andrew rolled his eyes heavenward. “How about ‘hurry back’? Or ‘we’ll be waiting for you here’? Except that one isn’t true, I suppose; we’ve moved camp again. You might have tried ‘I left something in Qurrat; would you be a dear and fetch it for me?’”

  “Suhail is not a dog, to fetch my slippers on command. And I can hardly go calling him ‘dear,’ when—” I clamped my mouth shut, breathing out through my nose. “Andrew, I am trying to keep my behaviour above reproach. I do not need you encouraging me to do otherwise.”

  “Oho.” Andrew sat forward, folding his legs like a tailor and putting his elbows on his knees. His gaze, above the reddened skin of his cheeks, was more piercing than it had any right to be. “Is that how the wind lies.”

  “Don’t use nautical metaphors; they make you sound ridiculous.” But I was needling him in the hope of distracting him from the topic, and we both knew it.

  Andrew let me squirm for a long moment. Then he said, “I should have guessed, when you asked me to carry that love note to him.”

  My outraged squawk startled lizards back into the rocks. “It was not a love note!”

  “From you? ‘A piece of research material’ is as good as a lock of your hair, tied up in a scented ribbon.” He laughed.

  For once I blessed the lingering effects of my sunburn. It made my skin peel disgustingly … but it also meant no one could see when I was blushing. Andrew had been there when I met Jacob in the king’s menagerie, standing at the edge of the dragon enclosure. He knew that courtship had proceeded along unusual lines. It was true that if I were minded to seek a new husband, an intellectual gift would show my esteem far more sincerely than a more conventional token of love.

  All of that, however, was neither here nor there. I had not come to the desert for personal reasons, but professional ones. “Andrew, I have other things on my mind. You are in the army; you know as well as I do how important this research is. Your work in Coyahuac—were you securing mines there? No, do not answer that; if you were, you likely are not permitted to say.” In theory it was possible to synthesize dragonbone. We had not yet mastered the process; but if we ever did, we would need the raw materials, some of which were abundant in Coyahuac. “Right now, this programme here is our best hope. We must have caeligers to face those of the Yelangese, or we will lose ground to them all around the world. If Suhail staying in Qurrat helps me concentrate on my work, so much the better.”

  “But it doesn’t.” Andrew climbed to his feet, knocking dust and pebbles from his palms. “I can see your thoughts drifting, a dozen times a day. Besides—it doesn’t have to be one or the other.”

  I felt weary, as if I were ten years older than my brother, instead of a year his junior. “Yes, it does. You and I are not held to the same standards, Andrew. People will forgive a slip, a weakness, a minor personal folly—when it comes from a man. They may click their tongues at you, even gossip about your behaviour … but at worst, it will only reflect on you.

  “If I misstep, it goes far beyond me. Errors on my part are proof that women are unsuited to professional work; they are evidence that the Crown should never have assigned a woman to this post. My flaws are not merely my own. And so I cannot permit myself to indulge in anything that might validate the assumptions people have already formed—about me, and all my sex.”

  Andrew scowled and kicked at a small stone, which ricocheted off into the dust. “Bollocks. Sorry, Isabella, my language—you aren’t like other women. People know that.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said ironically. “I have made myself exceptional. It is a wonderful game, is it not? Because I am exceptional, anything I achieve does not reflect on my sex, for of course I am not like them. Strange, though, how that division seems to vanish when we are speaking instead of my shortcomings. Then I am a woman, like any other.”

  I had never seen my brother look so uncomfortable. The last time we had been in the same country, I would never have said such things. I did not even know what provoked me to say them now: sibling trust, the constant irritations I had suffered in Qurrat, or—yes—my wish that Suhail had not gone away. I had not even spoken this angrily to Tom, who knew more of my feelings on the matter than anyone save Natalie.

  Andrew retreated from the awkwardness by returning to our original topic. “Suhail, though. I saw his face, when he was packing up to go back. I think you hurt him, Isabella.”

  Now it was my turn to flinch from his words. But fortune smiled upon me: at that moment a scraping sound drifted on the desert wind, and I turned to see the drake at the mouth of her lair.

  She yawned prodigiously and lay down just beyond the edge of the shade, basking in the sun’s warmth. Her scales brightened gold where the breeze wisped dust away, and her broad ruff rose from time to time, catching the air and, I thought, cooling her slightly, by means of the blood vessels that laced its underside, akin to those on her wings. Apart from that movement, she was so still that a fox ran near her jaws; she was not yet hungry, for she let it pass with no more comment than one opened eye.

  None of this was especially noteworthy, but observing it ended my conversation with Andrew. He said nothing further then, nor when he and I returned to the camp, leaving Tom to keep watch until dark.

  As my readers m
ay well imagine, though, his words stuck under my skin like burrs. Had I done wrong by Suhail? I had only meant to assure him that we would not perish if left alone for a time … but reviewing my words, I saw how they could be interpreted in quite another light. From that perspective, I sounded ungrateful and cold, eager to be rid of him at last.

  Surely he did not think that—not when I was so grateful for his aid. And not after I had given him the rubbing of the Cataract Stone. I blushed to remember what Andrew had said regarding that, but clung to the thought nonetheless. Although calling it a love note was a great overstatement, I would not deny it was a token of friendship. Suhail had understood that, had he not?

  Without him present to ask, I could only speculate. And, of course, plan what I might say when he returned.

  In the meanwhile, I had my work; and it kept me very busy indeed.

  * * *

  When desert drakes rise to mate, they must signal to one another their readiness to entertain callers of the opposite sex. This is accomplished in dramatic fashion, by the female ascending to the peak of the tallest hill, dune, or rock formation she can find and roaring in a powerful voice that, it seemed to me, must carry to the farthest edges of the desert. She accompanies this with many gouts of flame; and for this reason, the display customarily takes place just before dawn, when her flame will be visible at a great distance.

  Male drakes who wish to present themselves for her consideration travel to this location and array themselves around the base of her perch. They make a great presentation of their ruffs and wings, stretching both as far as they can go so as to make themselves appear large; they are of course smaller than their female counterpart, and a male who is too dainty will rarely win the attention of his lady-love.