We did not enter the tabernacle and participate in their ceremony. But we stayed awake through the night—a harder job in the Temple calendar, I must say; they celebrate the feast a good fortnight earlier than we do, in late Floris instead of early Graminis—reading our scriptures, and then joined them outside the next morning for a celebration.
There would be no pleasant strolls through the surrounding countryside for flowers; snow had fallen during the night, though fortunately not very much of it. But the villagers set up trestle tables in what passed for the center of Drustanev, and there was singing and dancing, and everyone dressed in their finest. For that morning, Vystrana looked more like it does in the stories: yokes of colorful embroidery stretching across snowy-white shirts, men playing lively tunes on their violins, and so on.
In keeping with the generosity of the season, we Scirlings gave out small trinkets from among our belongings, such as we could spare, and received pipes and beads and a fine wool shawl in return. This latter I wore draped over my arms as I attempted to learn the local dances, which everyone else seemed to execute without the slightest trouble—even when so drunk they could scarcely stand. I wondered if some of the smugglers’ brandy finished its journey in Drustanev, or rather in the bellies of its inhabitants.
One young fellow asked me in comically simplified Vystrani whether I had seen much of the surrounding countryside, and upon hearing I had not, brightened like the dawning sun. “No? You must go to the—” And then he said a word I did not know. When I shook my head, he said, “Building! Go down!” He gestured with his hands: something toppling, with a crash at the end. “Very old. Very old.”
“Ruins!” I said in Scirling, and then all at once remembered the blocky shape I had seen during our hunt.
Draconean ruins are rare in Scirland—or rather, the ones that exist are none too impressive. I had seen one as a girl, shortly before the beginning of my grey years, but it took a scholar to recognize it for what it was; the remains had none of the distinctive art that gave the ancient civilization its name. I did not mind; the illustrations I had seen in books were enough to show me that fantastical dragon-headed gods were much less interesting than actual dragons. But my recent tastes of freedom had given me a hunger for more; I had much rather visit Draconean ruins than sit cooped up in Gritelkin’s dark house, failing to have conversations with the incomprehensible Dagmira.
A blind man might have missed my sudden excitement; my interlocutor did not. “I show you! I take you!” Then he gave up on keeping his sentences simple enough for my poor ear, and let spill a flood of words, from which I gathered that he would be more than happy to guide me there and back at my earliest convenience—tomorrow, if I liked.
I extracted the young man’s name from him—Astimir—and the location of his house, a shabby place he occupied with his ailing mother. Though he had said nothing about payment yet, I suspected that was his eventual goal. Well, so be it; by the standards of Drustanev we were absurdly wealthy, and could afford to share a bit of it with this energetic young man. “Not tomorrow, though,” I said, laughing, when he tried to urge me onward. “A few days. We will go soon enough.”
Whether the others would be interested or not, I could not say. Draconean ruins had very little to do with actual dragons, and our reasons for being here. But there was only so much paper-filing I could do; I was determined to go, even if I had to go alone.
* * *
For a time it seemed I might be going alone. “It’s hardly worth our time,” Mr. Wilker said. “We aren’t archaeologists, and I hardly think anything in the ruins would shed light on why the dragons are attacking people—which is, you may have forgotten, a rather more pressing question. It leaves little time for sightseeing.”
“I have a great deal of time, which I am permitted to spend on very little other than sightseeing,” I replied sweetly. “Perhaps if you could arrange to produce more in the way of useful observations, I would have more work to do here.”
That sounds cattish, and it was. Our research was at last making something like progress, and a good deal of that was owing to Mr. Wilker’s effort. Indeed, it was one of the things about him that annoyed me, for I would gladly have taken on some of his labors, if he would only let me. But he was jealous of anything that might diminish his usefulness in Lord Hilford’s eyes. I might have said as much, too—embarrassing all parties in the process, myself included—but Jacob intervened. “Wilker and I cannot both go to the ruins and do useful work, Isabella. And we must gather data, if we’re to have any hope of stopping these attacks. Too many of the lairs we’ve visited so far have been abandoned; we need to find occupied ones, so we may examine the evidence of their eating habits. If they’re eating their own kind, of course, the bones won’t be there—but a lack of bones from other animals would tell us something.”
Since we could hardly take the pulse and examine the tongues of the local wyrms, I had to concede that made sense. “But why can’t I be spared? It will hardly end the world if your notes remain unfiled for a day or two.”
My husband had the grace to look awkward. “It may seem a silly concern, but—I do not like you going alone. With that fellow, I mean. It would not look right.”
I raised my eyebrows at him. I was kidnapped by smugglers in the night, and he worried about my reputation if I went sightseeing with Astimir? But Lord Hilford spoke up. “Eh, that’s easily solved. My joints would never permit me a strenuous climb; that’s a job for younger men. I’ll go with your wife, and keep her safe. Unless you don’t trust my intentions.” He mock-leered, and I laughed; and that settled the matter.
It was a mark of the relaxed standards creeping upon us during this expedition that everyone accepted the propriety of this arrangement: Lord Hilford, though unmarried and not my husband, was judged a suitable enough chaperon, at least in comparison to a Vystrani villager. I have often found this to be true since, that matters which seem terribly important in the early days of such a journey (what will people back home say?) fade into triviality with the passage of time. It has the consequent effect of making one question how vital those matters truly are—which goes some way toward explaining my increasingly extravagant behaviour, as time went on.
We set out at the crack of dawn. No camping gear this time; it would take about half the day to reach the ruins, but there was a hut used by the boyar’s huntsmen, Astimir told us, in which we could pass the night before returning to Drustanev.
Buoyed by the exciting prospect of our goal, we hiked quickly. After a few hours the overgrown, rectangular silhouettes of the ruins became visible on the opposite slope, but Astimir did not lead us directly toward them. Lord Hilford questioned him, but got enigmatical replies. “I’ve half a mind to leave him; we can find our way from here,” the earl grumbled.
I persuaded him not to—if anything went wrong, I could not hope to carry Lord Hilford back on my own—and soon had cause to be glad. The reason for our roundabout path, it seemed, was Astimir’s sense of the dramatic: he led us down into the valley, then back up again by another trail, so that we might approach the ruins by way of their great gate.
This stood cloaked in pines nearly as tall as the ancient stones, but the trees had no foothold on the gateway itself. The central figure strode out boldly on an outcropping of solid rock, its human feet planted on the ground, its draconic head staring through the clear mountain air toward Chiavora. Vystrani winters had been harsh to the mighty sculpture; its features were so eroded as to be almost indistinguishable, and the lintel of the right-hand passage had fallen, leaving the unknown god with only one wing. The damage somehow made the figure more inspiring: nowadays we may carve as large as the Draconeans—the Archangel in Falchester is even larger—but no amount of artistic “weathering” can counterfeit the sheer weight of time.
DRACONEAN RUINS
I stood, awestruck, pinned as surely as if a rock-wyrm had stooped on me from the sky. My reverie was only broken by Lord Hilford’s chuckle. “Never
been to the ruins at Nedel Tor, have you?”
My gaze was still riveted to the statue, but the spell was weakened enough for me to respond. “Only Millbridge, and those aren’t very impressive.”
“No, they aren’t,” he agreed. “Nor is Nedel Tor—not compared with what one can find in the Akhian desert—too much looting of stone for later use. But the gateway is in moderately good condition, aside from the loss of the head.”
He went on talking; I think he said something about double gateways, so characteristic of Draconean architecture, and theories as to their purpose. (My favourite is the one promoted by Mr. Charving, the great urban reformer: that the Draconeans regulated traffic into their settlements by guiding arriving riders and carts through the left gate, and those departing through the right. It is utterly fanciful, as no one has ever discovered evidence of sufficient traffic at these ruins to require such measures—but as Mr. Charving parlayed this into a very successful scheme for the regulation of traffic in Falchester, where it very much was needed, I cannot but applaud his rhetoric.)
I hardly attended to Lord Hilford’s lecture, however, for I was already fumbling my sketch pad from the bag I carried. My hands found it and the pencil by touch alone, while my eyes gauged proportions and noted evocative details. There would not be enough time at these ruins to draw them properly—not on this trip, at least, though my subconscious had begun to plot a return—but I could at least compose a brief sketch.
Astimir was impatient with this plan; he could not understand why I wanted to stop out here, without even entering the ruins. “A moment more,” I said absently, casting onto the page a rough outline of the fallen lintel stone, cracked in two. How long ago had it fallen? It had rolled forward when it did; the face pressed into the earth might preserve more detail of the wing than now visible in the one still standing. But it would take a crane to lift the thing, and so its mysteries would remain hidden, alas.
The promise of further wonders finally tore me from my work. I turned to a blank page and kept the sketchbook out as we walked beneath the surviving arch and into the ruins. That single day in Vystrana taught me more about working at speed than anything that has happened since: I threw down the most cursory lines, suggesting the perspective and decay of the structures we encountered, and spent days afterward filling in the details from memory. (You may still see the results in Sketches from the Vystrani Highlands, published when I began to acquire enough notoriety that anything from my pen could turn a tidy profit. I do not recommend them for scholarly purposes—too many of those “remembered” details are generic or downright fanciful—but they will give you a sense of the place.)
The Drustanev ruins are not extensive. Inside the gateway lay a large, open courtyard, now thoroughly choked with underbrush and trees. Lord Hilford scuffed at the ground in one exposed spot and uncovered the chipped corner of a paving stone, tilted up at a sharp angle by a root thrusting beneath. But we did not linger long, for Astimir was urging us onward, to the main temple ahead.
I call it a “temple,” though of course the function of those places has been debated ever since the days of the Nichaeans. All Draconean structures are built on such an imposing scale as to inspire awe; we therefore naturally associate them with religion. Lesser edifices did not survive the thousands of years that elapsed since the dissolution of that ancient civilization; all we have now are the great works. And to what purpose would such buildings be raised, if not for the glory of their dragon-headed deities?
A little further inward lay the pylons of the temple’s front wall, too massive even for time to collapse them. Like the right-hand half of the gateway, the lintel between them had fallen, and an accumulation of debris and dirt raised the passage to nearly a third the height of the wall. Astimir assisted Lord Hilford up this slope, then bent to aid me. My skirts caught on the undergrowth, and one wicked thorn tore a long rent in the fabric, but I did not mind. From the top of that passage I could see into the hypostyle hall, now open to the elements, the thin stones of its roof long since having relocated to the ground, where they lay nearly as buried as the paving in the courtyard.
Some of the columns themselves had toppled, leaning against one another like drunken gentlemen exhausted after a night’s carouse, or rolling in hefty cylinders on the ground. The sun was now high enough to make the space within a warm shelter, secret and still. The proud figures of Draconean gods spanned the walls, flat and odd to an eye accustomed to modern conventions of perspective, but hinting at mysteries forgotten ages ago. I wished I were a painter, to capture the quality of the light as it poured across those weathered shapes; being only a poor woman with a pencil, I marshaled my sketchbook and did what I could.
That particular sketch included Lord Hilford bending to peer underneath one of the tilting pillars, pulling at the tall grasses that choked the space below. Before long, he called out to me. “Mrs. Camherst! You must come look at this. Have you brought anything that might do a rubbing?”
I obligingly fetched out a charcoal stick and a large sheet of loose paper, then picked my way across the space to join him. “What is it?”
“Run your hand across this,” he instructed me, as I had done with the dragon wing.
What greeted my fingers, however, was not the microscopic roughness of the rock-wyrm’s hide. Instead it was deep grooves, somewhat softened by the passage of time, but still clearly perceptible.
I crouched, trying to see, but after the brilliance of the sun, the shadow defeated me. With the assistance of Lord Hilford and Astimir, one man on each side of the pillar, holding my paper in place, I rubbed the charcoal stick everywhere I could reach.
When we pulled it free, a white gap ran down much of the center, but to either side the charcoal’s smear was broken by an arrangement of lines I had seen before, in books. “It’s an inscription!” I exclaimed.
Even more than the art—whose strange, stylized nature had never really caught my interest—Draconean script excited a feeling of mystery and wonder. The markings were indubitably language, though men had once dismissed them as the scratchings of dragon claws. (This is largely owing to the poor preservation of ruins in Anthiope. Once our scholars became aware of less-weathered inscriptions elsewhere in the world, opinions changed—after a certain amount of hidebound resistance, of course.) What message they conveyed, however, was completely inscrutable. Draconean writing had frustrated all efforts to decipher it.
With that clear example to hand, I gazed about with new eyes, and saw the weathering on the other columns for what it was: the faint, nearly obliterated remnants of more writing. There had once been inscriptions all over the columns of the hypostyle, but the exposed surfaces had been badly degraded.
Lord Hilford ran his hand across the leaning column and brushed grit off his fingers. “Limestone. It hasn’t survived well. The walls are marble; that does better. I wonder where they brought it in from, and how?”
My finger traced along one of the gaps in the charcoal, following its raking line. “Why is it that no one can read what this says? Do we not have enough samples yet?” If so, this one might be of some value.
But the earl shook his head. “That used to be the notion, but a fellow named ibn Khattusi made a concerted effort, oh, ten or fifteen years ago, to gather together all the known inscriptions, and encouraged people to document more. He published his findings in a great fat book, and a few years later the Akhian government offered a prize for the man who deciphered the language; but no one has claimed it yet.”
“We don’t even know what language it was, do we?” I asked. “That is—obviously it’s Draconean, or rather, that is the name we’ve given it. But we don’t know what languages Draconean might be ancestral to.”
With a grunt for his stiff knees, Lord Hilford knelt at my side to study the paper. “Precisely. So we have no idea what sounds these symbols might represent, or indeed whether they do represent sounds; they may be ideographic, like the archaic script of the Ikwunde. Codes can
be deciphered, but codes represent a known language, which means one side of the equation is already in hand. Draconean is a complete mystery.” He smiled sideways at me. “Fancy taking a shot at it yourself, Mrs. Camherst? The Akhian declaration did say their prize was for the man who sorted it out, but I daresay you could argue them into paying out for a woman.”
The notion had honestly not even crossed my mind. I laughed. “Oh, no, my lord. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. You’ve heard me butcher Vystrani.” I nodded in the general direction of Astimir, who, having brought us as far as the hypostyle hall, seemed to think his work was done—that, or he’d given up on the tedious Scirling scholars who kept pausing to examine things rather than continuing onward to new sights. “I am no linguist, much less an expert.”
I folded the rubbing carefully, though, on the possibility that ibn Khattusi might want it for his collection, and we spent some time poking about the ruined stones to find other bits with inscriptions not too badly weathered to record. I tore several fingernails digging up a fragment mostly buried in the earth, but was rewarded with the clearest bit yet, once I’d brushed the dirt away.
The central chamber of the temple, unfortunately, had collapsed too thoroughly for us to enter. We instead toured the remainder of the small site, including the bit of wall I had glimpsed on our hunt; I clambered rather higher atop it than was likely wise, and spent some time attempting to guess which open bit of stone in the distance might be stained with that dragon’s blood.
When I climbed back down, peering past my skirts to see where I should set my feet, a twinkle of vivid color caught my eye.
My foot, already descending, almost landed atop it; I swung wide and stumbled, but managed to avoid falling. As soon as my balance was secure, I bent double, searching for that glint of color.