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

by Brennan, Marie

  Contrary to some of the more foolish reports that have been made about my time in the Green Hell, facing the swamp with courage does not make one an “honorary member of the tribe.” It may suffice to win acceptance in a camp, and from time to time I did wonder whether the Moulish around me recalled any noteworthy difference between us, apart from my childlike incompetence with various tasks. (“Childlike” is a generous term. I might better be compared to the victim of a head injury. Moulish children are astonishingly competent, on account of not being coddled, as offspring in Scirling society are.) But the basic assumptions of life in the swamp are not those of life outside it, and although I reached the point of being able to navigate them with a degree of ease, they never became habit, much less unthinking reflex. I misstepped time and time again, and was tolerated only because of my willingness to learn from my mistakes.

  As an example of this: when we came to the Moulish camp, perhaps two hours’ walk from our clearing, I assumed we would be taken before some kind of chief or headman. It took me days to understand how erroneous this assumption was. The elders of their people are looked to for wisdom and advice, and their youths for judgment in times of conflict (a fact which startles me deeply even now, depending as it does on a view of the cosmos I do not share), but there is no single leader, nor even a formal council.

  How could there be? If there are eight elders in camp today, there may be only six tomorrow, two having wandered off to spend time in another camp. This, also, is a source of the odd acceptance we encountered: membership in a camp is not at all a formalized thing, like the lineages of the Bayembe region. A member is someone who eats and sleeps near the others, and contributes to their work. As soon as that person leaves—and they do leave, very often, while others show up—that membership ends, until the next time.

  This, we came to understand, was the source of our confusion over Faj Rawango’s greeting to the others. Natchekavu and Eguamiche were his “brothers” in the sense that they were men of his own generation, nothing more. Claims that the Moulish have no concept of “family” are not true; they acknowledge that some people are the sons and daughters of the same parents, and such relatives often work together when they are in the same camp. But all those of a given age group within the camp are brothers and sisters, as all those above them are mothers and fathers, or (if older still) the camp’s elders. Faj Rawango calling those two his brothers was simply a way of claiming the right to join their camp, and to bring the three of us with him.

  It sufficed to get us in the door, metaphorically speaking. Those presently belonging to the camp—about fifty altogether—gathered on the open ground at the center, where Kisamilewa and Walakpara, the youths who had brought us in, explained our situation. We distributed the iron knives and a few more things besides, and assured them, through Faj Rawango, that we did not at all mind doing our share of the work. There was a stretch of time during which he was drawn in for further questioning, and the rest of us shooed to the edge of the camp. This was nerve-wracking on two accounts, the first being that we worried about the closer examination they were giving him, and the second being our inability to cope in more than the most atrociously broken Moulish with the questions we still received during that time.

  I cannot give you a full report of why the camp chose to accept our presence that day, any more than I can recount who said what and to whom. At the time they were all strangers to us, apart from our quintet of guides, and even those five I could only understand in snatches. I felt, indeed, as if I had suffered a head injury, and lost all comprehension of the world around me. Curiosity had a great deal to do with it, I know; the Moulish were largely unfamiliar with pale-skinned Anthiopeans. But there were deeper reasons I never fully uncovered. The decision having been made, the Moulish frowned upon us questioning it, as that might disturb the harmony created by their agreement—and they prize harmony to a high degree.

  What I can tell you is that we were allowed to stamp out our own bit of forest, not quite a part of the camp but near to it, rather like the clearing in which their children played. Instead of building temporary leaf-walled huts as the Moulish did, we pitched our tents in that space, stacking the supplies and equipment between them and using a few crates for seats and tables. After some discussion with Faj Rawango, the Moulish slaughtered the donkeys who had carried our belongings from Atuyem (our horses having remained in a nearby village). Both creatures were mild-tempered enough that I did regret their fate, but as Mr. Wilker pointed out, the alternative was to wake up some morning and find nothing but a bloodstain where they had been. Better that our hosts should get the benefit of their meat, rather than some nocturnal predator.

  His logic was sound, but I could not help seeing the poor donkeys as our last link with the world outside the Green Hell. With their deaths, we were committed to this course, for good or for ill.

  * * *

  If we wished to be successful in the mission Ankumata had given us, then we could not pursue it immediately.

  We could not even pursue our broader agenda of research. If we went gallivanting after swamp-wyrms straightaway, the Moulish would have dismissed us as antisocial lunatics, more concerned with our own inexplicable desires than with the well-being of the camp. At best they would have lectured us on our lack of consideration; at worst they would have abandoned us, solving an intractable conflict in their usual manner, which is to simply walk away from it. A group as small as ours does not survive well on its own in the swamp, even with guns to help. We had to prove our worth to the camp first.

  Fortunately, proving our worth was far from incompatible with the work of naturalism. The morning after our arrival, a deafening chorus of cicadas and other insects roused us from our sleep, followed shortly by Faj Rawango. “Today is a hunt,” he said, and nodded at Mr. Wilker. “They’ll expect you to come and help with the nets.”

  “What of Natalie and myself?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Here with the children, or making noise to drive the game into the nets. They will tell you.”

  It was a near thing that morning; the children were fascinated by everything from my clothing to my hair, and wanted the chance to study me. But I, of course, preferred to study the swamp, and so we compromised: Natalie remained behind, and I came to do my part in the hunt.

  This entailed walking past what I later learned to identify as the sacred hunting fire, whose odorous smoke—nearly as foul as a swamp-wyrm’s breath—must touch all those who go out for that task, and then navigating the intricate maze that is the natural environment of Mouleen. We were still close enough then to the swamp’s edge that the land was mostly dry; farther in, one seemingly cannot go ten feet without crossing a waterway. Here I only had to wade through two narrow streams before we came to the area chosen for our day’s work.

  It was as Faj Rawango had said. The men (with Mr. Wilker among them) strung nets between the trees in a broad arc; then the women (myself among them) beat sticks together and shouted at the top of our lungs to frighten the game from us into that arc. Now I began to see all the creatures only my ears had detected before: tree hyraxes, talapoin monkeys, delicate little duikers. Where larger animals charged, the nets were pulled aside to let them through; the Moulish will hunt such beasts, but by different means than we used that day. The smaller ones, once caught, were clubbed or stabbed with fire-hardened spears.

  I had not brought my notebook, but I recorded all that I could in my memory, for commitment to paper that evening. This became the standard mode of my work for much of my time in the swamp; although we did have excursions wholly for the purpose of observation, a great deal of our data was gathered in the course of participating in the daily labors of our Moulish hosts. It is excellent training for the memory, if not quite as good for scholarly progress, which prefers to commit things to paper straightaway.

  I could not, however, resist asking questions. (Nor could I resist paying attention to things the Moulish considered entirely uninteresting. They
are fond of giving nicknames to people; mine was soon Reguamin, which translates to something like “woman who stares at things.” Natalie was Geelo—“builder”—for her good assistance with huts and other such structures, and Mr. Wilker was ignominiously dubbed Epou, “red,” for his permanently flushed face.)

  On our way back to the camp, when we reached the first of the streams, I gestured at the water. Grammar was beyond me as yet, but I knew from Faj Rawango the word I wanted. “Legambwa?”

  The girl leading me laughed. She was no more than sixteen, I judged; her name was Akinimanbi, and in all my time with her I rarely saw her other than cheerful. Her answer meant nothing to me, but she was quickly adapting to my ineptitude, and bent to splash her hand in the water, indicating its shallowness. By way of similar motions and a few Yembe words I inquired as to the depth a swamp-wyrm would require, and got a shrug; her explanatory gesture seemed to indicate a variety of possibilities, from little more than half a meter to a channel that would merit the name of river.

  I pantomimed jaws latching onto my leg, and pretended to scream. Akinimanbi laughed again. That much I understood; she thought me foolish for worrying about such a thing. The significance of her waving arm, however, was opaque to me, as it seemed to indicate the trees. I had thought swamp-wyrms aquatic, but I had not forgotten the so-called arboreal snakes of Bayembe; were their lowland cousins similarly opportunistic, and known to climb? I might be eager to see dragons of any sort, but the prospect of having one drop on my head was alarming.

  No dragons fell on my head during our return to the camp, nor in the days that followed. We were about three weeks in that location, with hunts every few days, and smaller excursions to gather food every morning: nuts, berries, roots, frogs, whom the Moulish ate in vast quantities, without ever seeming to dent the supply.

  (Because someone always asks: yes, I ate termites. Also ants, beetles, caterpillars, and the cicadas whose cacophony woke me every morning. If one is to live without the benefits of agriculture beyond sporadic trade with villagers, every source of food becomes vital. I will not, however, pretend I ever became fond of the practice. Insects are too crunchy for my taste.)

  During those three weeks, we applied ourselves assiduously to being good members of the camp—a task made easier by the absence of dragons, at least that we saw. Moulish came and went, some of them drawn from other camps after word reached them of our presence; others moved to visit kin, or to get away from neighbours who vexed them. It meant constantly learning new names and, as our command of the language improved, explaining ourselves again and again; I began to feel we would never truly settle in, but be trapped forever in this limbo of novelty. But in time the questions stopped.

  With the fluctuation of the camp (most of which I will gloss over here, except where it becomes pertinent), you might rightly ask whether we stayed with the same people our entire time in Mouleen. For sufficiently small values of “the same people,” the answer is yes. Akinimanbi, I discovered, was newly married, and she and her husband Mekeesawa shared a fire with her grandparents, Apuesiso and Daboumen. At all times except a few I will note in due course, we were always in camp with one or the other of those two couples, and often both.

  As in the previous volume of my memoirs, I will not force you to toil through broken sentences that would more accurately represent my early lack of skill with the Moulish tongue. You may simply imagine that when I said to Akinimanbi, “I’ve heard that the dragons here are rather bad-tempered,” one morning shortly before we left that campsite, my phrasing was not nearly so fluent.

  She shrugged, cracking nuts with great efficiency and throwing the shells into the fire. “A hippopotamus is worse. The dragons usually won’t chase you.”

  I had less faith than I might in that “usually,” owing to my experiences with the “usually” approachable rock-wyrms of Vystrana. “Do you ever hunt them?”

  Akinimanbi stared at me as if I’d suggested throwing a baby into the fire along with the shells. “Hunt them? That would be”—and she finished with a word whose meaning I could not guess. (Geguem, which I suspect is a term left over from the older language.)

  “I don’t understand geguem,” I said, apologetically.

  She looked to her grandmother, Apuesiso, who was squatting on the other side of the fire. I could not imitate their posture; a lifetime of chairs has trained me out of the position. I sat on one of our crates, having discovered that sitting cross-legged on the ground meant unpleasant visitors crawling up my skirts.

  Apuesiso was braiding a rope from some fiber I had not identified. Without pausing in her work, she sang a song, at least half of which was in the older tongue. I could not understand a word of it, and prepared to say so. But Apuesiso knew that; I think she began with the song for reasons of tradition or propriety. When it was done, she shifted without pause from music to speech. “A long time ago, a man killed a dragon. He was ashamed of what he’d done, so he tried to hide it by getting rid of the body. He ate the meat, used the skin, and turned the teeth and claws into tools. But it was no good: the spirits knew what he had done. Geguem.”

  Murder, then; or perhaps sin. “Did they punish the man?”

  By her snort, I might have asked whether rain fell from the clouds. “Because of him, we die.”

  The broken quality of our conversation meant I had to ask several more questions before I properly understood what Apuesiso meant. The death of the dragon was, in their view, the reason human beings are mortal.

  I am more a natural historian than an ethnologist; my immediate thought was to wonder how hungry that man must have been to resort to eating foul-smelling and fouler-tasting dragon meat. But of course such myths change over time; the exact phrasing owed more to the usual hunting practices of the Moulish than to the actual disposition of a dragon’s body. (Indeed, I later heard another rendition of the story wherein the bones were also said to have become tools. I was far too excited about that one, until it became apparent that, no, the Moulish ancestors did not have their own method for preserving dragonbone.)

  But if I have relatively little interest in the religious practices of other people, there is no surer way to draw my attention than to bring up dragons. “Why did he kill it? Was it for food, or did the dragon attack him?”

  They laughed my questions off, as well they might. It was a myth; such narratives are not known for their exploration of the human psyche and its motivations. As well ask why Chaltaph refused the gifts of Raganit in the Book of Schisms: scholars may think up interpretations, and those are enlightening in their own fashion, but in the end the story itself gives no clear answer. But the taboo against further dragon killing was clear.

  I brought this up with Natalie and Mr. Wilker that afternoon, as we went through the tedious routine of washing our clothes in buckets of water collected for the purpose. (We could not use groundwater, as it was too often muddy. Fortunately, the storms that came every afternoon as regularly as clockwork made it easy to collect rain.)

  “So they won’t look kindly on us killing a dragon,” Mr. Wilker said, wringing out one of his shirts. It is a credit to the man that he never once asked Natalie or myself to do his laundry for him—though on reflection, it may be more a discredit to our own clothes-washing skills, or lack thereof. We were both too gently reared to have firsthand experience with such matters; Mr. Wilker, with his working-class childhood on Niddey, knew more than we.

  “About as kindly as we would look on someone pulling another fig from the Tree of Knowledge,” I said, trying, with less than total success, to scrub mud from the hem of one of my skirts.

  Natalie was hanging the clean articles from a line to dry (inasmuch as they could, in the eternally damp air of that place). “No tests on bone, then, unless you want to try and do it in secret.”

  Mr. Wilker and I exchanged glances, then both shook our heads. “Not yet, anyway,” he said. “Too much risk of being found out and losing their goodwill.”

  “Besides,” I ad
ded, “it works, with modification, on both rock-wyrms and savannah snakes, who cannot possibly be related except in the most distant sense. I think we can assume it would work on swamp-wyrms as well. And as much as I would like to be able to study samples for reasons other than preservation, Mr. Wilker is right; it would lose us their goodwill, which would do more harm to our work in the long run.”

  I had gone on with my skirt-washing efforts while I spoke, but my thoughts had drifted from that task; it startled me when a pair of hands appeared and took the skirt away. Mr. Wilker set it against the crate lid he was using for a washing board and began to scrub it, doing in mere seconds what would take me minutes to achieve, if indeed I could at all.

  “Thank you,” I said, blushing. “Would it scandalize you terribly if I cut that apart after it dries and turned it into trousers?”

  “Oh, please do,” Natalie said, with vast relief. “Then I won’t feel guilty for doing the same. Skirts in this place are sheer madness.”

  Mr. Wilker had seen me in trousers before, in Vystrana. He had not liked it at the time—but then, we had not liked each other at the time, either. He said, only a little stiffly, “It seems the practical choice, yes.”

  Natalie and I accordingly spent the evening cutting up and restitching our clothing, much to the amusement of our hosts the following morning. The only differentiation they observe in clothing the two sexes lies in how they hang their loincloths; skirts versus trousers meant little to them in that regard. But Natalie and I both felt awkward in such masculine garb, and it showed. We soon adjusted, however, and this is the origin of my practice of wearing trousers whenever I am on an expedition, which has been such an article of gossip over the years. (Whatever the scandal-sheets may claim, I do not wear them at home, though I have considered it once or twice.) (The incident at Booker’s Club should not be counted; I was extremely drunk at the time.)