Ruzt understood me, I am sure, when I turned to her with a pleading, hopeful expression. But she stared at the wall, neither meeting my gaze nor responding.
Kahhe asked her a question, in a tone I recognized as dubious, and jerked her head in the direction of the mountain Anshakkar.
This set Zam off like a firecracker. Whatever Kahhe had just suggested, Zam was adamantly against it. Ruzt silenced them both with a snap of her wings. I lifted a bucket of water, and she nodded; I began to wash my images from the wall.
What was at the mountain? I had my suspicions, but could not be certain. And I was not ready to pursue them just yet, not when it might lose me some valuable goodwill—or simply kill me outright.
But in the meanwhile, we had a new mode of communication, which aided me in expanding my vocabulary. I essayed some experiments with Draconean writing as well, hoping to establish for certain the pronunciation of the different glyphs, but made scant progress; Kahhe and Zam were clearly illiterate, and while Ruzt understood a little, she was very reluctant to help. Suspecting some kind of religious control of writing, I desisted. For my purposes, writing was of little use anyway, as it could only set down the words I heard. Images were better for eliciting new words entirely.
Ruzt and Kahhe seemed very respectful of my newly revealed skill. Their wooden tools and their pots were decorated, but only with abstract designs; as with people in many cold climates, they passed much of their leisure time in carving. Nowhere, though, had I seen any figurative art. The part of me that, despite evidence to the contrary, persisted in thinking of them as particularly clever dragons had taken this as only natural—but of course they were more than that; they were people, albeit only partially human, and their ancestors had been quite capable of both drawing and sculpture. Modern Draconeans did still have representative art, only not in casual use. And it is fortunate they did, for had they possessed no concept of artistic representation, they would not so easily have understood my pictures.
In time I came to understand that figurative artists form a special class in Draconean society, one that is much admired. Without realizing it, I had, by demonstrating my skill, made myself a good deal safer among them.
TWELVE
A fire in the yak barn—Into the Sanctuary—Herding with mews—The perennial question—In search of yaks—Up the path
In the history of scientific discovery, it is my opinion that insufficient credit has been given to the behaviour of the humble yak.
Oh, I could say that what happened next was due to a fire in the yak barn. This would be true as far as it goes; without the fire, the beasts would not have panicked, and nothing of interest would have occurred. But had it been a fire only, with no ensuing complications from the yaks, I believe I would have remained in that village for the whole winter, and what ensued thereafter would have proceeded entirely according to the plans of my hostesses. Instead I departed from Imsali, learned things the sisters did not intend, and made a great deal of progress I had not anticipated in the least.
The carelessness which began the fire was not my own. The interior of the barn was exceedingly dim, even with the doors thrown wide; we often set butter lamps in strategic locations, the better to see what we were doing. Ordinarily we exercised some caution in where we placed the lamps, but errors happened—and on that transformative day, Kahhe made a mistake.
One of the yaks, wandering about its enclosure, jostled the beam on which the lamp lay.
Had either of us been right there, we would have seen the lamp fall, and could likely have extinguished the fire before it grew too large. But I was outside the barn when the trouble began, and Kahhe had gone to fetch a new basket in which to carry away the yak manure; the first one she found was torn, and by the time she replaced it with a usable one, the fire had well and truly taken hold.
Ruzt and Zam were out with portions of the village herd for grazing, which left the two of us to fight the blaze on our own. We first attempted to suffocate the fire with the best material we had to immediate hand—which is to say, yak manure. (Dried, their droppings are often used for fuel. But these were not yet dry.) Had the yaks remained calm, we might have succeeded. Alas for Kahhe and myself, they did not.
The group nearest the fire stampeded first, with their neighbours hard on their heels. The enclosures were not meant to withstand a concerted attempt to break out; the railings splintered and fell. Kahhe bent her knees and sprang upward, snapping her wings out in a desperate attempt to gain altitude; it lifted her high enough to seize one of the overhanging rafters. For my own part, I could only run—sideways to begin with, out of the stream of yak flesh, as if they were an avalanche like the one that had brought me to Imsali; but then onward and out of the barn entirely, for the spreading fire and the stampede soon had the entire place in an uproar.
Kahhe, it must be said, kept her wits rather well. By the time I had steadied my nerves and could re-enter the building without fear of being pulped, she was back at the fire, beating it out with anything that came to hand. This was not only courage at work: without the barn, the sisters could not hope to care for all the herds of Imsali by themselves. And without the herds, their village would starve in the coming year. I had no way of guessing how community-minded the Draconeans were; I did not know whether other villages would contribute bulls and cows to keep their neighbours going. Now was not the time to ask. I tied a rag over my face, seized a bucket, and began dousing one edge of the flames from the nearest water trough.
We got the fire out in time, although it destroyed one corner of the barn. This the sisters could patch after a fashion, with yak hides and bracing beams; the greater damage, in the immediate term, was the near-complete scattering of the herds.
In this I was both a liability and an asset. Although I lacked the physiological adaptations that made the Draconeans of that region better suited to withstanding the cold, I could endure if I had to, and my presence meant the sisters had a fourth pair of hands to help restore order. Four, however, was not enough: multiple people would be necessary to track down the missing beasts and bring them back to the village, but the village itself needed looking after, especially as the yaks returned. The sisters would have to call on the neighbouring villages for help … and that, in turn, risked the revelation of my presence. The only solution was to send me out with two of the sisters on yak-retrieval duty, while a few neighbours from the nearest villages helped keep order at home.
I was not so loath to wander the Sanctuary as you might expect. True, the conditions I would have to endure out there would be dreadful; I did not look forward to any part of that. But my situation, which confined me almost wholly to the sisters’ house, the yak barn, and points between, was beginning to send me mad with claustrophobia. I thought I would be happy to endure some freezing cold, if it meant I could see new surroundings.
(Of course it is easy to think such things from the comfort of a relatively warm building. I did regret that impulse more than a few times in the days to come.)
Three of us therefore set out: myself, Ruzt, and Zam, with Kahhe remaining behind to repair the barn. I spent a miserable night alone in a small snow shelter when reinforcements arrived, lest they see me about the village; then the other two joined me with a pack of mews, and we sallied forth, into the depths of the Sanctuary.
* * *
Much of what followed does not make for good telling, unless one is keenly interested in the finer points of herding yaks in mountainous terrain. The yaks, having fled, were safe enough for the moment; they are bred for that kind of environment, and need very little grazing provided they are in good enough health and fatness. But of course they might slip and fall, or fail to find any grass beneath the snow, or simply wander so far afield their owners would never see them again. We therefore spent more than three weeks tramping through the nearby folds of the Sanctuary, following signs of the beasts’ passage, and herding them back toward the village once found.
I was miserably cold,
as you might imagine. By my best estimate, we were then in the depths of Messis, which in the southern hemisphere is the nadir of winter. The limited diet on offer in the Sanctuary was beginning to take its toll, with scurvy loosening my teeth and sapping all my energy. My warmest moments came when I was chasing yaks; my coldest came at night, when I had neither movement nor sun to counteract the bitter air. Ruzt and Zam had brought along a tent, into which we all packed—not only the three of us, but also the mews. The little dragons arrayed themselves around the tent’s interior perimeter, and I slept tucked between my Draconean hostesses—an exceedingly odd sensation, I must own, but the only way I had of preserving myself against the weather. They were not nearly as warm to the touch as a human would have been, but they were preferable to the icy wall of the tent.
One of the things that kept me from giving myself wholly over to misery and self-pity was my awareness of how my companions also struggled. Until the fire drove us forth, I had not realized how vital the warmth of their house was to counteracting their hibernation instinct. Deprived of that regular haven, they chewed enormous quantities of their stimulant leaf to remain alert. To complain of my own difficulty seemed like whinging in comparison—especially when I realized they did not have to suffer so much.
We could not wander the Sanctuary in this manner without travelling near other villages. They are widely spaced, as the region will not support a denser population, but we ranged far enough afield that we passed several other settlements. In each instance, Ruzt would lead me in a wide arc around, while Zam went in to speak with the inhabitants. My years in the field had given me some facility for moving with stealth, but I have never been in sharper practice than during that journey; for even when we were not near a village, we often had to be cautious of other caretakers leading their herds out to graze.
The significance of this all sank in after Zam came back from the second village bearing both food and a sullen expression. Her mutter to Ruzt, though too quiet for me to make out, sounded resentful.
In a fit of sudden clarity, I said, “You would be sleeping in the village, if I were not here.”
(What I actually said was “You sleep in the village, if I am not here.” Although by then I could converse passably well on our most common topics, I had not yet figured out either the conditional or subjunctive conjugations of their verbs.)
Zam glared at me. “Yes.”
For once I had no doubt as to why she disliked me. “I am sorry,” I said. Then, floundering for more words: “I will sleep alone in the tent. It will be all right.”
This was sheer bravado, courtesy of my wish to mend fences with Zam. Ruzt shot it down without hesitation. “No, Zabel. We must—” The words that followed were incomprehensible to me; I had never heard them before. But when I asked for clarification, she brushed off my question and returned to the task at hand.
If I could not free them to rest warm and snug in someone else’s house, then at least I could lend every last scrap of energy I had to hunting down the missing yaks. I suspect neither Ruzt nor Zam expected much on that front, though; they had brought me along only to ensure that none of the Draconeans helping Kahhe stumbled upon me by accident. Although by then I had been assisting in the yak barn for two months, I was still a novice herdswoman at best.
My lack went further than that, however. As I have said, the Draconeans use mews in their work, much as a Scirling shepherd uses a sheepdog. Suhail, Tom, and I had experimented with training the beasts in Hlamtse Rong during the monsoon, but our model had been that of falconry; the Draconean method is quite different. They employ neither jesses nor hoods, and direct the creatures with a complex series of whistled commands. Each pack of mews is paired with a specific herd of yaks, and is not much use in shepherding unfamiliar beasts.
How any of this was achieved quite perplexed me. Ruzt tried to explain, but we spent enough time attempting to circumlocute our way to simple agreement on what a word meant that digging deeper, into the actual concepts represented by those words, was beyond me. (At home, in a comfortably warm house, I might have managed it. Not with my brain frozen into a block of ice.) Even now it is a mystery. The customary explanation is that the rapport between Draconeans and mews is based on some kind of “shared draconic instinct”—but of course that is no explanation at all, any more than one can explain the survival of fish in water by recourse to some kind of “inherent piscine ability.” Fish survive by means of gills; what the Draconeans use to create understanding between themselves and mews, I do not know.
Whatever it may be, I lack it utterly, and so I could not make use of the mews. I was not quite so useless as Zam expected me to be, though. One cannot spend one’s lifetime tramping through every kind of wilderness the world has to offer in search of beasts without acquiring a modicum of tracking ability; and I had more than a modicum. I doubt I could follow a human or Draconean who sought to hide their passing, but yaks have no such subtlety. I suspect I could track one even now, when my vision is far from what it used to be.
I therefore spent much of my time ranging away from my companions, identifying whether a given set of prints belonged to an errant herd or one being overseen by a Draconean from another village. When we located our beasts, Ruzt and Zam used the relevant pack of mews to round them up, and then Zam escorted yaks and mews alike back to Imsali. These were my coldest nights, especially as the task wore on: without Zam, and with the number of mews inside the tent dwindling steadily, there were many fewer bodies to heat the air inside.
One night while Zam was gone it began to snow again, and Ruzt resorted to sheltering in a small cave on the flanks of Anshakkar itself, that central mountain. (I call it central: in truth it is somewhat off-center, being closer to the eastern edge of the Sanctuary than the western.) There she built a fire, and erected the tent so that it stood between the flames and the outside air, with a gap for the smoke to escape. Without such precautions, I suspect I would have died that night—and even Ruzt might have gone to sleep, not to wake again until spring.
After we had finished eating, I spent some time examining one of the mews. Those bred by the Draconeans are noticeably more docile than their Tser-zhag cousins: an unsurprising difference, but what was its cause? Had the Draconeans tamed and domesticated wild mews, or were those outside the Sanctuary the feral descendants of escapees?
It was one of many questions I lacked the linguistic facility to ask. I confined myself to physical examination instead, which I had not had much leisure for in the preceding days. My recollection of the mews Tom and I had dissected in Hlamtse Rong told me the main alar artery was located in a different position on them than it was on the Draconeans—in fact, it ran through a channel in the bone, where I could not feel it with my fingertips. Holding up the mew I had been studying, I asked Ruzt, “Do they close it? In the wing, as you do.”
She understood me, and circled her head in the motion they used to indicate that the answer was neither yes nor no. “Not as we do. They close … part of it? In the spring—” Her own wings were partly spread to capture heat from the fire; now she tapped one claw-tip against the membrane and made a dropping motion with her hand.
The membrane of the mew’s own wing had not felt especially warm to my touch, nor especially cool; upon reflection, it was about the same temperature as the surrounding air. The only warmth I felt was contained along the wing’s leading edge—as if that were the only place where blood yet flowed.
“They moult,” I said in fascination, staring at the mew. When I tried to tug at its wing, it yowled indignantly and squirmed away. Which is probably just as well; I later saw a fight between rival packs of mews, in which one tore the membrane of the other’s wing clean off. I might have done the same by accident. They do indeed moult when spring comes, growing in new membrane to replace the old. It is an inconvenient time for the Draconeans, as the mews are of no use whatsoever during that time; and indeed they are of decreasing use as the winter progresses, for they lose maneuverab
ility on account of both this adaptation and the damage they may suffer without feeling it.
I made a halfhearted attempt to catch a second mew in my hands, but they were having none of it, and I lacked the energy to pursue them further. Ruzt watched this entire process in silence; then, when I was settled once more, she said, “Why do you ask these questions?”
Never in my life have I been so ill equipped to answer that query. It is hard enough when I must explain myself in my native tongue; in Draconean, I could barely string together an entire sentence that was not about yaks. Floundering, I said, “It is … what I do. I—” At every turn, I ran up against the limits of my vocabulary. “Begin to know? As I begin to know these words.”
“Azkant,” Ruzt said.
I hoped that was indeed the word for “to learn.” It was recognizable as a verb, at least; but I had on previous occasions thought I was asking for one word, only to discover later that Ruzt, misunderstanding, had supplied me with a different one. “I learn about … mews. And other animals.” I had not realized before now that I had no general word for “dragons.” There were none in the Sanctuary save the mews and the Draconeans themselves. The next time I had an opportunity to draw, I would sketch a variety of other breeds—rock-wyrms, desert drakes, queztalcoatls—and see whether Ruzt had a word that encompassed them all. She might well not. Her ancient ancestors might have created enough breeds to need such a term, but here in the Sanctuary, such a thing would fall into disuse and be forgotten.
Ruzt was clearly still confused. “As you herd yaks,” I said. “I learn about animals. It is what I do.”
Within the Sanctuary of Wings Page 16