A Natural History of Dragons

  Lord Hilford said, “You forget, sir, that I am a Scirling peer. And your man there has murdered a Scirling gentleman.” The way he pronounced the word “sir,” it might have been the vilest insult he knew.

  Khirzoff seemed entirely unconcerned. “With the feuds between Bulskevo and Scirland? That only gives the tsar more reason to ignore you.”

  “Perhaps,” Lord Hilford said, drawing himself up, “but it gives others more reason to pay attention. If anything should happen to me, or to my companions, it will go very hard for you.”

  Rossi laughed outright, a harsh, ugly sound. “What if you met with an accident? Chasing around the mountains, trying to pet the dragons—there have been so many attacks lately, after all. Who could be surprised if it ended badly?”

  As covers for murder went, that one was unfortunately plausible. And even if the villagers or our families back home could raise suspicion regarding our deaths, it would not do us much good.

  I had little hope that it would be any use, but I had to try. “Didn’t your tame chemist there tell you, Iosif Abramovich? All these attacks—you’re causing them yourself. The more you pursue this course, the worse it will get.”

  As I feared, Khirzoff only shrugged again. “Dead dragons will attack no one. And we can protect ourselves better than the peasants can.”

  He would not keep talking forever; sooner or later, and likely sooner, he would decide to end at least one of his problems by ending us. I glanced toward Mr. Wilker, hoping he might see some way to make use of our firestone discovery to persuade Khirzoff to spare us—but he seemed entirely distracted, squinting into the late afternoon sun.

  Late afternoon.

  I squinted, too, wrinkling up my face so that our captors might think me about to cry. With my lashes filtering the light, I could make out what Mr. Wilker had seen: a large shape in the air, winging its way home for the night, but too distant to be any threat.

  Unless we happened to provoke it.

  There are proverbs about frying pans and fires that I might have quoted to myself, but I preferred to adapt a different one to my purposes: better the devil that would attack everyone impartially than the devil specifically looking to kill us. At the very least, it would create chaos, and we might be able to take advantage of that.

  Or rather, the others might. What I had in mind to do might leave me in no state to take advantage of anything at all.

  I could not let myself think about it; if I did, my nerve might fail me. I simply looked at Rossi and said the first offensive thing that came into my head: “By the way, I burned your notebook.”

  Then I hiked up my skirts and took off for the ruins.

  For the first few steps, I thought it would do no good. One of the soldiers would just chase me and drag me back, with nothing gained. But then I heard Rossi’s enraged sputtering, which resolved at last into words: “Shoot her!”

  Even when you are exhausted beyond any previous experience of the word, adrenaline has the marvelous ability to bring life to your limbs. I ducked and wove through the thin trees, praying desperately that I might make it to the wall where I had found my firestone; the first shot came close enough that splinters rained across my face. It was soon followed by more, and then I flung myself to the ground behind the stone, gasping for air.

  How many shots was that? Eight? Ten? Would they carry clearly enough in the mountain air to draw the rock-wyrm’s attention to this place?

  I had certainly occasioned a great deal of shouting. I wanted very badly to look whether the others were all right, but my respite lasted only a few seconds; then I scrambled once more to my feet and looked for a hiding spot, knowing someone would be after me, if they weren’t already.

  Gunfire broke out again, this time more sporadically. My heart was torn; every shot, I hoped, increased the odds that a dragon would take offense, but it also meant my companions were in danger. Already I was cursing the impulse that had made me run: it seemed such a hopeless gamble. And yet, what better chance did we have? Run and be shot, or stay and do the same.

  I plunged through a concealing screen of brush—and found myself mere feet from a terrified and very dirty Astimir.

  More precisely, from the barrel of his rifle. But I had passed through fear to a region on the far side, where I could without hesitation do things that would have seemed unthinkable risks in the light of saner contemplation. I seized the gun’s muzzle and wrenched it aside, and either my conviction that he would not shoot me was powerful enough to convince him, too, or Astimir was paralyzed with his own fear, for he did not resist.

  “The boyar is going to kill us,” I snarled, and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. “He has already killed my husband. You helped create this disaster; you will damn well do something to fix it. Get out there and help.” Upon that last word, I hurled him bodily toward the fight.

  I honestly cannot tell you whether I remembered to speak in Vystrani or not. It may be that my tone sufficed all on its own. Astimir stumbled through the brush, and then I sallied after him, driven by grief and rage past the bounds of rationality, into a soaring state wherein I had lost all capacity for fear. My husband lay dead on the ground. I must do something more than run.

  As if to give voice to my rage, from above came a furious, inhuman scream.

  I had indeed managed to attract a dragon—and a very angry one at that.

  The ruined wall blocked my view of what happened on the ground. I saw only the penultimate stage of the dragon’s stoop, and heard shots ring out from below. The wyrm screamed again, this time in pain.

  Either none of the boyar’s men had made it this far in pursuit of me, or they had already gone past in their search. I swarmed up the wall, thinking the unexpected vantage point would give me a degree of protection from any guns, and looked down to the ground beyond.

  The dragon was thrashing about, too wounded to regain the air. Its blood seemed to be everywhere, and the frantic beating of its wings, the quick whipping of its head and tail, made it almost impossible to parse the scene. I saw one of the soldiers, half behind a tree, taking aim for the dragon once more; then I spotted Mr. Wilker across the way, crouching for cover. A sudden twist of the dragon’s body revealed Khirzoff lying motionless, and my heart gave a savage leap; but it turned to pain a moment later as the soldier shot and the beast suddenly collapsed into the dirt, dead.

  A banshee howl from just below me dragged my gaze downward. Heaven only knows what had gone through Astimir’s head during those days hiding in the ruins; I think it had rather unhinged him. I doubt it was any sort of vengeance for the fallen dragon, or even for us, that made him aim for the soldier and shoot. Whatever motivated him, the bullet struck true; the boyar’s man cried out and toppled backward down the slope. But there were still others now emerging from cover; and then I heard a snarl from behind me.

  I twisted to see Rossi halfway up the wall, his discolored face contorted into an expression of animal fury. He was close enough to snatch at my foot, braced against the stone; I drew it up just in time. But he caught a handful of my skirt, and only a desperate clutch at the wall kept me from falling.

  I kicked out, twice, three times, and struck his hand hard enough against the rock to make him swear and let go. Then I scrambled higher, drawing myself fully onto the top of the wall, less afraid in that instant of the men with the rifles than of the one pursuing me with single-minded madness. But there was nowhere to go; if I leapt off the wall, I should certainly break something, and be left easy prey.

  The stone crumbled beneath Rossi, giving me a fleeting moment of hope. He caught himself, though, and clawed for a new handhold, after which it was the work of mere seconds for him to attain the top of the wall. I retreated as far as I could, but it put me barely out of arm’s reach, and there was nothing more behind me except a steep angle of broken rock and air.

  Rossi paused, securing his balance. The mountain wind tried to make a sail of my skirt; soon it would carry me off my own precarious fo
oting, and he would not get the satisfaction of killing me after all.

  My attention was so fixed on him that I did not realize those tearing gusts of air were not solely from the wind until a shadow fell across us both.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The price of our victory — My reluctance to write — Rossi’s notebook — Its possible consequences — Our departure from Vystrana — Jacob — Lord Hilford’s offer

  You may say it is pure fancy to think that the second dragon took Rossi and spared me because it somehow knew which of us was the enemy, and which a friend. I will agree with you. Vystrani rock-wyrms are intelligent enough to carry their dead to rest in that great cavern, but they have not the slightest shred of affection for humans, nor any care to distinguish friend from foe. But fancy or not, I have no other explanation for how, when that shadow beat flapping off from the wall, Rossi was screaming in its claws, and I was left untouched.

  (Even fancy cannot explain how I managed to avoid falling, either. That, I must attribute to divine providence.)

  The chaos left Khirzoff and Rossi both dead, along with two of their men; the others had fled. We were, in the end, saved by the dragons: a fitting revenge for their fallen brethren. And the boyar and his chemist were stopped. But the price of that victory had been so very high.

  * * *

  I sometimes think it has taken me this long to write my memoirs because I knew I could not avoid speaking of Jacob’s death.

  The grief, of course, has faded. The Vystrani expedition was decades ago; I no longer weep into my pillow every night for his loss. But coming to terms with one’s sorrow is one thing; sharing it with strangers is quite another. And given how many of the events that led to his death can be laid at my feet, I was deeply reluctant to invite the sort of criticism that would—and still perhaps will—inevitably follow.

  I will not attempt to lay before you the pain I suffered then. I have said what I can; it is insufficient, but then I am a scientist, and not a poet. My feelings are as strong as any woman’s, but I lack the words to express them. It is not true, what some said of me, that I never loved him: I have already refuted that argument. If it lacks the grand passion some demand, I will not apologize; I am who I am, and the sincerity of my affection, the worthiness of my marriage, are not things I care to debate.

  Let us speak instead of what followed.

  We would not leave the bodies for the scavengers, not even those of our enemies. The horses bore those to the hut, where we passed the night. The next day we returned to the village, and there Lord Hilford, Mr. Wilker, and Dagmira took on the unenviable task of explaining matters to everyone.

  The reactions ranged from doubt to anger. The boyar was not loved, but we Scirlings were even more strangers to the people of Drustanev than he was; no one was in a hurry to believe us, and furthermore the explanation for the dragon attacks was not one that could be easily proven. Many people were also worried—very understandably—for what consequences might fall upon them as a result of Khirzoff’s death.

  I attended to none of it. The rock-wyrms of Vystrana bear their dead to the great cavern; we humans have our own rites, and those began upon our return. The old women of Drustanev left their sons and daughters to argue over worldly matters, and quietly went about the business of washing and shrouding the bodies of my husband and my enemies. We buried them all the next day, with ceremonies that would have offended a Magisterial purist; but those ceremonies were all the comfort I had, and I was grateful for them.

  JACOB

  For all the differences of religion that lay between us and the Vystrani, I will say this for them: when it came to mourning, we were not treated as outsiders. I think everyone in the village came to visit while we sat shiva, even if only from a sense of obligation. Nor did we hold ourselves apart: when the Sabbath interrupted our mourning, we attended Menkem’s service in the tabernacle, with nary a murmur of protest, even from Lord Hilford.

  It’s possible we offended them by our behaviour after our shiva ended. We felt we owed certain obligations to the village, though, and in discussion amongst ourselves, Lord Hilford, Mr. Wilker, and I agreed that it would be no insult to Jacob’s spirit if we brought our work to a proper conclusion, rather than leaving at the first opportunity. It was different than it had been, of course; there was no tramping around the mountains, collecting samples from dragon lairs. But while Lord Hilford rode off to handle the matter of Khirzoff’s death, Mr. Wilker and I confirmed that the dragon carcass had been taken from the ruins to the graveyard, and we documented the latter as thoroughly as we could. We could not apologize to the rock-wyrms for what had been done to their kin, but Mr. Wilker held a sober conference with Mazhustin and the village elders, and we hoped that would lay a foundation to prevent such difficulties in the future.

  We also studied Rossi’s notebook, as fervently as if it had been Scripture. (I had, of course, lied to the man about its fate; I would never destroy knowledge so recklessly.) Mr. Wilker had enough chemistry to grasp the general outline, but I was entirely baffled by his attempts to explain why adding a solution of sulfuric acid to dragonbone, however slowly, whatever it was mixed with, could preserve anything. Upon one point, though, we were in perfect agreement.

  “This knowledge is dangerous,” I said to him one night as we sat by the light of a few candles in our workroom.

  Mr. Wilker’s face was drawn and weary in the dimness. “The things that could be built with dragonbone … Rossi was not wrong. There have already been minor wars over iron, and there will be more; we have too much technology that needs it, and a hunger for more. Anything that could replace iron, much less improve upon it, is priceless. But harvesting the bone, if you will pardon the phrase, makes the dragons angry, which makes them attack people.”

  “To which the only solution is to hunt them more,” I said. “Between that and the demand for their bones … they will be driven to extinction.” Khirzoff and Rossi had already made progress toward that, in this region. No wonder so many lairs had been empty.

  Mr. Wilker paged slowly through Rossi’s notebook, as if brighter thoughts might leap from it. “It may only work on rock-wyrms. We know too little of dragon biology to be sure.”

  Even if the process, or the mourning behaviour, was specific to only the one breed, the effect would be catastrophic. People would pursue all dragons, in the hope of getting something useful from their bones. Big-game hunters would want trophies; engineers would want bones for their inventions. It was bad enough when animals were wanted only for their pelts or ivory. This had the potential to be vastly worse.

  I hated the thought of destroying knowledge—but what if the alternative was even more unbearable?

  Mr. Wilker caught me looking at the book, and must have read my thoughts in my expression. “It wouldn’t do any good,” he said warningly. “Men have been trying to find a way to preserve the bones for some time. Rossi figured it out; someone else will, too.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked sharply. “That I should accept this as inevitable? Allow you to publish the contents of that notebook in the Proceedings of the Colloquium of Philosophers, and get it over sooner rather than later?” A discovery of this sort could do what he so clearly craved, and lift him above the the limitations of his birth.

  “No, no, of course not,” he said, his own anger and helplessness so evident that they calmed my own. “Concealing it at least defers the problem, and perhaps …”

  “Perhaps?” I prompted when he trailed off.

  Mr. Wilker sighed and laid his hand atop the notebook, staring as if sheer force of determination could make its contents more clear to him. “Perhaps, in the interim, an alternative could be found.”

  An alternative. A different process would not eliminate the base threat to the dragons. He must therefore mean— “Some method of, oh, what is the word—”

  “Synthesis,” Mr. Wilker said. “Artificially producing a substance that would have the properties of preserved dragonbone, wit
hout any need to kill a dragon at all.” He grew more animated as he spoke, sitting up in his chair and gesturing energetically enough that he almost knocked over a candle. “Whatever it is that gets precipitated by the acid titration—it must be the major component of dragonbone, but we could never analyze it because it breaks down so quickly in air. With a preserved specimen to work from, we can determine what elements the molecule consists of, and attempt to re-create them in a laboratory—”

  “Do you think it’s genuinely possible?” I asked, partly to stop him before he sank into a babble of chemical jargon I could not follow in the slightest.

  He sank back in his chair with a sigh. “I’m sure of it—someday. Whether we can do so now, with the knowledge and tools we have … you would have to ask someone more qualified than I.”

  It was reason enough to preserve the notebook. Without that, our hypothetical chemist would be set back by months, if not more. This way, we at least had a head start on anyone else re-discovering Rossi’s process.

  Neither of us knew, that night in Drustanev, how vital the issue would eventually become. The Aerial War and similar matters lay years in our future. But I do not claim undeserved foresight when I say that we saw trouble coming, and did what little we could to prevent it.

  “We speak of this to no one,” I said, “except Lord Hilford and whatever chemist you recommend.”

  Mr. Wilker nodded. “Agreed.”

  * * *

  The tsar of Bulskevo was distracted enough by the deposit of firestones in Vystrana—of those mined so far, there were nineteen of sufficient quality to be set in jewelry, and dozens of smaller chips—that he forgave Lord Hilford for the tragic loss of a boyar in a dragon attack.

  I thought nineteen more enough for any one man to acquire at a single stroke. He did not need a twentieth, or a twenty-first. The stone I dug out of the ground beneath the ruins was sold discreetly later on, and the money sent by even more discreet means back to Drustanev, sometimes as coin, sometimes in the form of items useful for the village. It was one part apology, one part compensation for the temporary suspension of hunting (lest it attract angry dragons), and one part incentive for them to say nothing about Rossi’s research.