It also provided further evidence for the presence of native peoples, for it had somehow managed to entangle itself in long streamers of black cloth laced with silver thread. These hung from the arching crest as well as the neck and chest. For a moment Smiggens thought the silver weavings might represent some sort of known language, but when he managed a good long look at them he saw that they were only abstract designs, not unlike the footprints a chicken makes in the dirt.
Blackstrap beckoned to his men as he stepped boldly out onto the expansive path. The astonishing creature continued to ignore them, either unaware of or indifferent to their presence. For a second time it dropped to all fours. It seemed to be having some trouble breathing. Its dun-colored flanks shuddered as they processed air with evident difficulty.
Smiggens wondered at the function of that extraordinary cranial lobe. Was it purely decorative, he wondered, or a male device designed to attract the opposite sex? As he looked on, the creature supplied the answer.
Inhaling with difficulty, it threw its snout in the air and slowly exhaled through its nostrils. Trapped air circulating through the bony lobe vibrated, producing the deep, reverberant sonority they’d heard before. Smiggens had once heard an Aboriginal inhabitant of Sydney generate a similar sound, albeit on a much smaller scale, on a long wooden instrument he’d called a didgeridoo, which in truth this beast’s crest resembled in some small measure.
It was a poignant, mournful, and quite comely sound. As he listened to a second sonorous bellow, the first mate could not help but wonder what flights of musical fantasy a natural resonating chamber of such dimensions might produce were the owner of such a remarkable piece of natural instrumentation not merely a dumb animal.
It was instructive to note the reaction of their four captives. Instead of alarming them, the plaintive drone caused them to lower their heads and arms. Clearly there was no danger here.
“Like havin’ a canary in a Welsh coal mine,” O’Connor remarked with satisfaction. “See, all we have to do is watch the big chickens like this one to know whether there’s any danger about.”
“Aye,” agreed his companion. “No gold in that, but value just the same.”
A moment later the two men as well as their fellow brigands were left to wonder at the meaning of their captives’ reaction when they began to whistle and squawk loudly.
Blackstrap’s gaze narrowed. “Now what’s got into the beasts? Smiggens?” But the equally baffled first mate could only shake his head in ignorance. Fingering their weapons, the men looked around restively. Save for the shuffling, droning giant before them, the forest was silent.
Chin-lee stepped over to Blackstrap and indicated the giant. “If that not dragon, Captain, then what is?”
“Do you see it breathing fire?” Smiggens spoke gently, as befitted an educated man declaiming to the ignorant. “Where are its wings? Does it look like any drawing of a dragon you’ve ever seen?”
“Different kind.” Chin-lee was adamant.
What else could you expect from a heathen Oriental? Smiggens mused. But the smaller man was a crack shot, and a terror in the rigging of a captured ship.
“It looks ill,” Thomas commented in his lilting Jamaican accent. “See how hard it work to breathe.”
Blackstrap nodded agreement. “Har. A man doesn’t have to be a physician to see that.” He glanced at their four captives, whose frantic wailing had given way to more familiar mindless chattering. “By Triton’s jewels if I don’t think our brainless beasts were trying to communicate with it.”
Johanssen responded with an amused sneer. “Chickens trying to talk to giant kangaroos!” He proceeded to give a passable verbal and physical impersonation of a foraging turkey, provoking appreciative laughter from his companions.
“The Parasaurolopbus cannot help us,” Shremaza observed sadly. “Arimat, Tryll, you know what this wizened duckbill is doing in the Rainy Basin.”
Tryll responded first. “Going to one of the chosen places, Mother. She’s wearing her funeral banners.”
“As must we all, someday.” Hisaulk saw that the humans were ignoring their conversation, as they had ever since the capture. “Well, there was no harm in trying.”
As soon as they’d seen the big hadrosaur they’d done their best to get its attention. Though by nature no more aggressive than her distant Strutbiomimus cousins, with her size and strength she might have been able to free them. But it was clear now she was too near the Final Passing. Her strength was failing rapidly and, since she had not reacted in any way to their calls, they realized she was also most probably deaf, a poignant ending for a member of a tribe that lived for music.
We do not get to choose our own endings, Hisaulk knew, nor the manner in which we are fated to approach the Final Passing.
“The beast is dying.” In his home on the South African coast, Mkuse had seen many animals die. This one might be larger, stranger, but in its manner of life leaving-taking, it was no different from the elephant or eland.
“Too bad.” Blackstrap grunted meaningfully as he gestured at their captives. “If this lot be worth a couple of thousand pounds, that one’d bring ten thousand by itself.”
“The boats would never hold it, Captain,” asserted Treg-gang. “How we get it out to the ship?”
“Look at its mouth, ya blind beggar. No more than a beak and lot of flat, grinding teeth. ’Tis big but harmless. Get enough rope on it and we could walk it out to the Condor. ’Tis tall enough to keep its head above the water, and there be no waves in the lagoon.” Black eyes glittered. “Wouldn’t that be a prize to unveil to the swells in old London Town! ”
“Dammit, I know these creatures!” Smiggens’s expression was a rictus of frustration as he muttered under his breath.
A huge hand smacked him on the back hard enough to make his spine quiver. “That be the awkward thing about book-learning, Mr. Smiggens. ’Tis useful only when you remember it. The rest of the time it just sits in your head and ferments, like old mush. Reflex, now, and strength ...” He waved his cutlass with blatant disregard for any who might happen to be standing within reach. “Give me a sharpshooter or a good cannonmaster any day.”
Smiggens reached around to rub his back as he returned his attention to the fabulous monster that was shuffling down the path in front of them.
“Deaf and dying,” he declared. “Even if we could get enough lines on it, the poor creature would never make it back to the coast.”
“Where do you suppose it’s going?” wondered Copperhead aloud.
“Look at the way its skin shines.” Watford was quite taken with the alien beauty of the beast.
Chin-lee sulked off to one side. “Dragon,” he mumbled, unwilling to be dissuaded from that opinion by the first mate or anyone else.
Blackstrap sighed. “If you must have it so, Chin-lee, dragons it’ll be, for want of a better name. Mr. Smiggens?”
“No, no; it’s there, I know it’s there, but for the life of me I can’t think of it.” The first mate’s irritation with his faulty memory was undisguised.
“Dragons, then, even if these do not breathe fire and soar above us on great ugly batwings. Right, Chin-lee?”
By way of reply the Cantonese adopted a self-righteous expression, folded his arms, and aimed his gaze significantly skyward.
“Which way, Captain?” asked Andreas.
“Why, I think we might do well to follow this one for a
while. It doesn’t look apt to last much longer, and I’ve a fancy to study it close up.” He winked. “I’m also more than a mite curious to see if that shiny thread in the cloth it has wrapped about itself is real silver.” He toyed with his mustache. “It chooses to ignore us. Even if it were to turn, I don’t see any threat. It can barely set one foot before the other.” He gestured with the cutlass point.
“See how often it stops to rest. Its time is near, I think.”
To the pirates’ surprise, their captives unexpectedly chose to resist the familiar
tugs on their tethers.
“Here, now,” avowed Samuel, “we’ll have none of that.” He jabbed the point of his sword into the backside of the largest dragon-bird, just to the left of the tail. The creature gave a start and resumed walking. It also focused such a penetrating, unblinking glare on the sword-wielder that the latter turned away, irritated and confused at himself for having allowed a mere animal to stare him down.
“Father, you’re bleeding!” Tryll moved to comfort her parent.
He swerved to block her from turning. “Keep moving. It’s only a scratch!”
She hesitated, then complied.
He would have to be more careful how he reacted, he told himself. These mad humans were liable to do anything.
Would they stoop to harming children? Hisaulk could hardly countenance such a thought. But he resolved to take no chances.
It seemed they had no choice but to join their captors in trailing the failing Parasaurolopbus. To do so was to put them all in potential danger. As there seemed no way of communicating this to their captors, the best he could do was try to keep the family calm and together. Perhaps a chance at flight would present itself, leg hobbles and all.
“We must do something.” Shremaza stumbled along next to him.
He responded with the distinctive bobbing motion of his head and long neck that corresponded to a shrug among humans.
“What can we do? We can only hope that when this honored duckbill’s time arrives, those who will come to perform the final rites will choose to concentrate on her and ignore us.”
“It is early yet.” Shremaza glanced skyward. “Many who would come will still be sleeping.”
“A delay would be welcomed,” her mate admitted. Following the dying Parasaurolopbus with his eyes, he wished he knew the proper song for the moment. The family could have improvised, and it would have been the right thing to do, but he didn’t want to do anything that might startle their captors. His hip hurt where the human had poked him. In this case, the family took precedence over etiquette. He was sure that had she known what was going on, the senior duckbill would have understood.
The path wound its way through the woods, its slope gently descending. Gradually all sight of the Backbone Mountains was lost, swallowed up by the surrounding vegetation. If anything, the forest grew lusher still. Only Smiggens paid any real attention to the astonishing, exceptional flora. The rest of the crew had no time for any beauty that did not glitter.
Was every corner of the tropical world represented here? the first mate found himself wondering. Did nothing in this land ever perish or die out? Even the bird life hailed from every continent.
It was not Eden, he reminded himself. Eve did not weave black shrouds for dragons.
Except they weren’t “dragons.” He was sure of that. Curse his capricious memory, anyway!
It was Chumash who first spotted the gathering of greatwinged birds that was circling high overhead. It was a sight familiar to any man who’d spent time in the open places of the land.
“Something’s dead near here,” Johanssen announced with certainty.
“Something big,” the American Indian added.
Again Blackstrap utilized his cutlass as a pointer. “See there, in the middle of the sky-circle. I’ll have a dead man’s share for breakfast if those not be the biggest vultures anyone’s ever seen!”
Many of them were familiar with American vultures, and several with the noted Lammergeier. Andreas knew well the condor of the South Americas, after which their sturdy craft took its name. But none among them had ever seen anything like the pair of Argentavis that dominated the aerial waltz of scavengers. Each had a wingspan of more than twenty feet.
Occasionally a previously unseen flier would rise into the sky and another would descend to take its place. It was clear that the flock was feeding on something.
“Why is our beast heading in that direction?” Watford wondered.
“Who knows?” Mkuse gripped his rifle tightly. “Many creatures have traditional ways of eating.”
“And dying,” Anbaya added. “The Lord Buddha—”
“Never mind your Lord Buddha,” Blackstrap snapped. “We’ll see for ourselves what be happening soon enough, I’ll wager.”
“Perhaps it’s headed for a natural graveyard.” Smiggens’s vision of ivory lying scattered about for the taking put verve in everyone’s step. A dead dragon would have many teeth, and perhaps tusks. At last: something of value with which the men could readily identify.
The trail narrowed and overarching trees, fighting for every square inch of available sunlight, closed in behind the stumbling Parasaurolophus, hiding it from their sight. Fearful of losing their quarry, the pirates increased their pace, chivying their captives along. After all, who knew but that an unwatched dragon might vanish into the ground, for anything might be possible in a place of such wonders.
The trail crooked sharply to the left. Moving at a near run, they were brought up short by the sight that suddenly unfolded before them. A sight that would have challenged the palette of a Bierstadt and the pen of a Poe. Or, as the scholarly Smiggens put it under his breath, “Truly this is a place where a church would come to pray.”
Spread out before them was a wondrous panorama that not even the odor of death could diminish. It was a place of great peace and calm, of regeneration as much as disintegration. A site of leave-taking and new beginnings, of rebirth and recycling. Many were the man or woman who would have gazed upon that scene and seen only desolation, but Smiggens saw Nature in all its intricacy and wonder, hard at work remaking the world.
It was impossible to escape the smell. It was ripe, powerful, and dominating. Many of the pirates removed or adjusted their bandannas to cover their noses and mouths in a feeble effort to diminish the fragrance. Among the crew, only those who had served on whaling ships had ever experienced anything like it.
Fortunately there was not a weak stomach among them. These were, after all, men to whom the stink of dead and dying flesh was not unfamiliar.
It was a garden in which Bosch might have served as groundskeeper. Exotic flowers and succulents thrust up between the bones, climbing gigantic ribs and femurs as readily as any rose ever surmounted a willing trellis. Orchids burst from silent, sun-bleached jaws while vines drank at the water-filled basins of toppled vertebrae. There were hundreds of bones, thousands of bones, and though the awestruck visitors could not know it, this site was only one of several that lay scattered throughout the Rainy Basin. Suppurating in the sodden sunshine, decaying flesh still clung to the memory of the more recently arrived.
Gawking at the greatest of all boneyards they had seen, the pirates continued to trail the now badly tottering duckbill.
Samuel pointed at one especially imposing pile of ribs and vertebrae. “I didn’t know mountains had bones. Look at the size of those legs!”
“Steady, men.” Even Blackstrap was subdued. “They all be dead, they be. See the flies. They should be familiar enough to ye.”
Vultures of every shape and size surrendered possession of corpses under dissection as the visitors passed, only to reclaim them in their wake. Beaks large and powerful enough to snap off a man’s leg resumed scraping and tearing at the collapsing skeletons.
Having drawn himself up to his full height, Chin-lee strode along proudly, chin thrust forward, his expression one of complete vindication.
“Now,” he declared, speaking with the voice of several thousand years of tradition behind him, “if these not the bones of dragon, tell me what else they is!”
“I’m near to conceding the point, Chinaman.” Smiggens brushed his hair straight back. “But not quite. I still have thoughts hanging on the edge of remembrance. I’ll reel them in yet.”
“Good thing we don’t have to rely on your memory to get us out of a tight spot, Mr. Smiggens.” O’Connor smirked.
“Aye,” agreed Watford. “Why, in the middle of a fight Mr. Smiggens would stop a moment to think about it, he wo
uld, while some jack-tar was cutting his guts out.” Several of the men roared. It helped to lighten the unrelieved melancholy of their surroundings.
To his credit Smiggens smiled along with them. Unlike some, he was not above poking fun at himself.
“Bigger than an elephant.” Mkuse used his stride to measure the length of a skeleton as they walked past. “Bigger than ten elephant.”
“We’ve been hungering after something solid to eat, Captain,” Davies reminded his master. “Maybe we can find a fresh one.”
“Aye!” Blackstrap responded enthusiastically. “One of these would feed Her Majesty’s whole bloody fleet for a week.” *
Following the tottering Parasaurolopbus, they passed close by two more corpses. One had a head that was frozen nightmare, all spikes and horns and frill. The skull of the second was similar to that of the creature they were following. It looked, Copperhead remarked, like the mother of all ducks. Smiggens counted over a thousand flat teeth in its jaws before giving up and moving on.
A slightly smaller corpse of relatively recent demise yielded an impressive hunt of haunch, which the pirates planned to place later over a cook-fire. Two stout sailors carried it suspended between them, the support pole resting on their shoulders.
“Look!” whistled Shremaza. “I can scarcely believe it!”
“What are they going to do with that, Father?” Arimat asked Hisaulk.
Hisaulk spoke carefully, so as not to unduly alarm his son. “It is said that before they came to live in Dinotopia, humans were in the habit of eating the flesh of other living creatures.”
“Like they eat fish?” Tryll blinked uncertainly.
“Yes, like they eat fish. We cannot blame these men—for
your mother and I are certain they are all males—for what they are doing. They are only ignorant, and in need of proper education.”
“Can they be taught?” Arimat asked.
“Anyone can be taught.” Hisaulk spoke forgivingly of their captors. “It should not be held against them. After all, they are only mammals.”