The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons)

by Brennan, Marie

  Lord Hilford, I thought, had guessed something of what was going on, though whether he knew I was actively helping Natalie, I could not say. I did, however, see him draw Mr. Wilker aside upon his arrival, and whatever he said turned Mr. Wilker’s face to stone. That done, Lord Hilford set himself to diverting his son as best he could. They went together to examine my cabin, to satisfy Lord Denbow that Natalie was not there; I hoped she had found a good place to conceal herself until we were well away from shore.

  Andrew, to my pleasure and relief, set himself the same task with our mother, and accompanied me on board when the time came, as he had done when I departed for Vystrana. “So, where are you hiding her?” he asked as we crossed the deck.

  A heavy step brought my head around. Mr. Wilker had joined us, pacing to my right, leaving me feeling trapped between them. But Andrew was grinning as if it were all a tremendous lark, and the grim set of Mr. Wilker’s jaw told me he would not be surprised by anything I might say.

  “She is hiding herself,” I said. “I honestly don’t know where. This was her decision, you know, though I support her in it.”

  “Miss Oscott is even less sane than you are,” Mr. Wilker said.

  “Then she’s in good company,” I said lightly. That would not be the end of it, I knew; but Mr. Wilker would not go against Lord Hilford’s clear wish, that his granddaughter be permitted her escape. He was too loyal to the earl, and owed him far too much. What arguments we would have—and oh, did we have them—would come later.

  Our ship was the Progress, the famed steamship that for many years formed the primary link in the Scirling-Erigan trade. Built from Erigan steel and fueled with Scirling coal, it was a symbol of the partnership inaugurated by the Nsebu colony—at least, it was seen as a partnership on our side of the ocean, though the truth was less balanced than that word implies. The bulk of its capacity was given over to cargo, some of which would be scattered through various ports like seeds as we made our journey, the rest traded in Nsebu before the holds were filled once more with iron, gold, ivory, and more. But the Progress was the jewel of that sea route, and so it also had passenger cabins, well equipped for the comfort of the dignitaries who occupied them. The three of us were hardly dignitaries, but Lord Hilford qualified, and had arranged for us to travel in style.

  We met him emerging from my cabin with Lord Denbow behind him. Or rather, Lord Hilford emerged; his son charged, backing me against a wall. “Enough of this, Mrs. Camherst! You will tell me where my daughter is, or—”

  My brother was already stepping to defend me. I was very glad that Lord Hilford intervened, before I had to discover what Andrew would do. “Lewis! Control yourself. Or do you want the crew to drag you bodily off this ship? You are making a scene.”

  All hail that bane of the upper class, a scene. The spectre of being publicly shamed was enough to check Lord Denbow. It was not enough to calm him, but with his momentum broken, the baron knew he could not prevent the ship from departing. And if he attempted to detain me, he would face any number of consequences. He could not decide what to do before his father took him firmly by the arm and dragged him away, not quite by force.

  Still, he indulged in one final accusation, shot over his shoulder. “You will ruin her life.”

  “I have not ruined my own, Lord Denbow,” I called after him. “Trust your daughter to find her own way.”

  * * *

  Natalie emerged when we were out of Sennsmouth harbor, and once she was properly attired, I called Mr. Wilker in.

  He shook his head at the sight of her. “I would ask whether you have any notion what you’ve just done. But you’re the earl’s granddaughter, and I know you’ve inherited at least a portion of his intelligence. So I will only ask you, in God’s name, why.”

  “Because I had to,” Natalie said.

  I understood her meaning, but Mr. Wilker clearly did not. Yet we required some degree of comity, or this expedition would be doomed before we arrived in Nsebu. “Mr. Wilker. I am sure you endured hardships of your own, gaining your education, forcing those of higher station to accept you as their intellectual peer. Why did you do it?”

  “This will rebound on her family,” he said, ignoring my question.

  “And were there no consequences for your own family, when you left Niddey for university?”

  It was a guess, but not a blind one; I knew Mr. Wilker was the eldest son of his line. His indrawn breath told me I had struck my mark. Belatedly—as usual for me, I regret to say—I wondered whether his sensitivity on this matter was because of his own experience, rather than in spite of it.

  “When you came to Vystrana, it was different,” he said, as if appealing to me for reason. “You came with Jacob, and with his blessing.”

  “Are a woman’s wishes only fit to be considered when blessed by a male relative?” I asked sharply. “If so, then take Lord Hilford’s for Natalie, and let us be done with it.”

  He flushed, and left soon after. It was not the last time we argued the matter, but my words had lodged under his skin like a barb, and their effect became apparent in due course.

  PART TWO

  In which we arrive in Eriga, where we achieve both success and scandal, and embroil ourselves in various conflicts

  FIVE

  Sea-snakes—The port of Nsebu—Faj Rawango—Half-naked men—Nsebu and Atuyem—We are no threat

  Even at the reliable pace of a steamer, the journey to Nsebu was not short. We stopped in various ports for trade; we battled foul weather; once three boilers broke down in concert, and the Progress made no progress at all until they were repaired. We were at sea for a month altogether, and to alleviate my boredom (for we soon completed the plans for our research, and there are only so many hands of whist one can play without going mad) I began observing the sea life.

  Fish and whales, sharks and seabirds; the latter held the most interest for me, as I had not lost my childhood partiality toward wings. But despite its lack in that regard, I was most captivated by the great sea-snake we saw one afternoon near the end of our voyage.

  We were entering Erigan waters, crossing the latitude known as the Tropic of Serpents, so named for the large numbers of sea-snakes found there. This was the only one we got a good view of, and all the passengers (and half the crew) crowded to the rails to observe it. “People argue about whether they should be considered dragons,” I said to Natalie, watching the great coils rise above the water’s surface and slip away once more. “Your grandfather doesn’t believe the Prania sea-snakes should be, but I wonder about these beasts. There are so many creatures around the world that seem partially draconic in nature, but they lack wings, or forelimbs, or extraordinary breath. I think sometimes that Sir Richard Edgeworth’s criteria may be wrong—or rather, too strict.”

  “Another thing to study,” Natalie said, amused. “Will you ever be done?”

  I smiled into the sun, one hand holding my bonnet against the firm grasp of the wind. “I should hope not. How dreadfully tedious that would be.”

  * * *

  Four days later, with all the passengers lined up at the rail once more, the Progress steamed past the rocky outcrop of Point Miriam and into the deep harbor of Nsebu.

  Because the geography of this region will be of great relevance later, I should take a moment to describe it now. The land of Bayembe lies on the northern side of the Bay of Mouleen, mostly along a plateau lifted above sea level, but beneath the mountains that form their northern border with the Talu Union. Their eastern border and part of the southern are ocean; the rest was, at the time, the disputed territory between the Girama and Hembi rivers, and the edge of the great, sunken swamp of Mouleen, whose streams spill into the bay at a thousand points.

  Mouleen is born from an eccentric quirk of geology. It would, in the normal way of things, be a great river delta, as the Girama, the Gaomomo, and the Hembi converge only a few hundred kilometers inland, the culmination of their long rush to the sea. But a fault in the underlying ro
ck dropped the region nearly to sea level at what should have been the confluence, with the result that all three rivers tumble over a cliff and drown the land below. Furthermore, the prevailing winds at that latitude blow from the east, funneling much of the atmospheric moisture into the low channel formed by that geologic fault, and therefore much of the rain. The resulting morass is the impenetrable jungle of Mouleen—more colloquially known as the Green Hell.

  But that was not yet my destination. Although I spared a few glances for the emerald band that marked the western edge of the bay, the bulk of my attention was on the town perched just off its corner, over which the fort at Point Miriam stood guard.

  Neither words nor images suffice to communicate what greeted me as we came into port, for even the best artwork is a static thing of the eye alone, and words are by their nature linear. I can tell you of the smells that assaulted my nose: the salt sea, the coal smoke of other steamers, the fish and shellfish that even today make up a brisk part of the port’s local trade, the spices whose aromatic vibrancy is all out of proportion to their quantity. Unwashed bodies and tar, fresh-cut tropical lumber, the greasy stench of lunch being fried for dockworkers and hungry travellers alike. But I can only tell you of one scent at a time, and I cannot present those to you at the same time as I give you the sounds and the sights, the mad clamour that was my first experience of Eriga.

  With the knowledge I have now, I can give the proper names to what I saw then only as a bewildering array of peoples. There were Scirlings among them, of course, merchants and soldiers, there to protect our interests in iron production. Nor were we the only Anthiopeans, despite tensions with our rivals over their involvement elsewhere in Eriga; there were Thiessois, Chiavorans, a cluster of Bulskoi looking exceedingly uncomfortable in the heat. Pigtailed Yelangese bustled around their ships, and Akhians were nearly as common as Scirlings.

  But it was the Erigans who dazzled my eye, for they were new to me, and formed the bulk of the crowds.

  Amongst themselves, they displayed a hundred different modes of dress and adornment, a hundred different details of physiognomy that mark one people as distinct from another. I saw complexions ranging from inky blue-black to bronze, mahogany, and dark amber, sharp chins and square jaws, high foreheads and low, full lips and wide mouths and cheekbones that rode flat or stood out like the arches of a bow. The people wore their hair in loose braids or braids close to the scalp, in beads or strips of fabric, in soft clouds and corkscrew curls and sharp ridges held in place by white or red clay. There were Agwin veiled from head to toe and Menke in little more than loincloths, Sasoro in silver and Erbenno in embroidery, Mebenye and Ouwebi and Sagao and Gabborid in variations on the folded wrap, whose subtleties of color and arrangement communicate a great deal to the knowledgeable eye, but escaped my understanding entirely that first day. And, of course, there were countless Yembe, the dominant people of that land.

  I had studied the Yembe language (from a reference grammar, which is an abominable teaching tool), but it had in no way prepared me for the social language before me now. Staring out at the docks, I understood, for the first time, that I had left behind the familiar commonalities of Anthiope, and crossed the oceans to a different continent.

  Mr. Wilker put his hand under my elbow, which tells me I must have reeled. “It will be a little while before we can go ashore,” he said. “You might want to go below until we do. The sun can be brutal, for those not used to it.”

  Once he would have phrased it as “you should go below.” Disagreements over Natalie’s presence aside, we had indeed made great strides in our relationship with one another. “The sun does not bother me,” I said absently, digging in my satchel for my sketchbook. I’d done little drawing since leaving Scirland, the pitch and roll of the ship wreaking havoc on my ability to place a precise line, but I could not pass up this opportunity to sketch the docks.

  I could feel him wrestling with the answer he wanted to make to that, before finally swallowing it—for the sake of harmony, I suspect. “I will make certain our trunks are being seen to,” he said, and went away.

  I had only put the broadest outlines of the scene down on paper when a popping noise sounded behind me, and then my page was in shadow. “Natalie,” I said, annoyed.

  “You’ll burn otherwise,” she said, all practicality as usual. “Grandpapa warned me. About the sun, and about you—that you wouldn’t take sufficient precautions.”

  “The sun here is strong, yes. It was strong in the mountains of Vystrana, too, and I had little trouble there.” I had suffered more from dryness of skin than from sunburn.

  Natalie laughed. “Yes, because you were cold all the time. You covered up and spent much of your time indoors to get away from the wind. But carry on with your work; this parasol is shading us both.”

  I hadn’t needed her exhortation to continue. Line by line, the people were taking shape beneath my pencil, surrounded by crates and ropes and warehouses and shops, with little boats bobbing in the water at the lower edge of the scene. Drawing at speed was something I’d practiced these past few years; the images I produced lacked the polished elegance of my youthful art, but I’d improved greatly in my ability to capture the subject accurately in a short span of time.

  By the time Mr. Wilker returned, I had enough of it down that I could fill in the remainder without trouble later on. “Is it very far to our hotel?” I asked, tucking my pencil away and closing my sketchbook. Certainly there would be other sights worth seeing beyond the docks, but I hoped to manage some individual portraits. Sailors the world over are a visually fascinating lot.

  “Actually,” Mr. Wilker said, “it seems our plans may have changed. See that fellow at the corner there, beneath the yellow awning? The short one, with the band of gold around his forehead? He’s a messenger from the palace, sent to watch for our arrival. The oba has invited us to be his guests.”

  I blinked at him in startlement. “At the palace? Surely not.”

  “It seems so,” Mr. Wilker said. “And we’re expected to come straight on. The messenger brought horses, and he says we needn’t worry about our trunks.”

  No doubt the gesture was intended to be helpful, but in my travel-frayed state, it struck me as faintly sinister. “What is this messenger’s name?”

  “Faj Rawango,” Mr. Wilker said, with the careful air of one who doesn’t trust his tongue not to trip over the unfamiliar syllables. He too had studied the language, but Faj Rawango was not a Yembe name. Was the man a foreigner, or did he hail from one of the other peoples that made up the nation of Bayembe?

  I didn’t realize Mr. Wilker and I had both fallen into a brief silence until Natalie broke it by saying, “Well, we cannot refuse such an honour.”

  “No, of course not.” I replaced my sketchbook and drew the satchel up onto my shoulder. “And I suppose there isn’t much to be gained by delaying. Come, let us go meet this Faj Rawango.”

  We descended to the ship’s longboat and were taken in to shore, disembarking on the salt-stained wood of the docks near where Faj Rawango stood. He was, as Mr. Wilker had spotted, a small fellow by the standards of those around him; in fact, he was a bit shorter than I. His skin, though still dark, was lighter and more reddish in tone than many of those around him.

  Lacking a better option, I greeted him in the Yembe manner, touching my heart, and received the same in return. Natalie and Mr. Wilker echoed us both. But once the formal greetings were done—a rather lengthier process among the peoples of that region than among Scirlings—Faj Rawango spoke in our own tongue. “The oba regrets putting you to the trouble of a further journey, but you will rest in more comfort in the royal palace, in Atuyem.”

  “That’s very kind of him,” Mr. Wilker said. “Our arrangements are for rooms in a hotel near Point Miriam. We had hoped to perhaps gain an introduction on some future date, but had no thought of imposing on his time and generosity so soon after our arrival.”

  Faj Rawango dismissed this with a wave.
“It is no imposition. He has met many Scirling merchants and soldiers, but no scholars. He is very curious about your work.”

  The last time a foreigner with a title had taken an interest in our work, it had not ended well. That, more than anything in the messenger’s words, put apprehension in my heart. But what could we do? As Natalie said, we could not refuse this invitation. I cursed the politicking that preceded our journey. Necessary though it had been to procure our entrance to Nsebu, it had apparently drawn rather more of the oba’s attention than I wanted.

  Our horses waited beneath a striped canopy not far away, in company with enough others that I understood the place to be some kind of waiting room for equines. Ours, however, stood out from the crowd, not only for their quality, but for the grandness of their equipage, beaded and gilt. No fewer than four soldiers stood watch over this wealth, who clearly would form our escort.

  I call them soldiers, but at the time I had difficulty attaching the term to them, despite the Scirling rifles they bore. To my mind, a soldier was a man in uniform. I thought of these men instead as warriors, for their garb looked nothing like the uniforms I was accustomed to—stiff wool in solid colors—being drapes of cotton tied about their waists and dyed in some intricate pattern, with leopard skins hanging down their back like cloaks. Wool, I suppose, does little to protect one against a rifle ball or a cavalry sword, but such logic did not prevent me from fearing for the men’s bare and unprotected flesh.