In the Labyrinth of Drakes
The female, having attracted her suitors, will snarl and breathe flame at those she finds unacceptable. I am told, though I did not witness it with my own eyes, that a particularly stalwart male may weather this abuse and keep his place; but most who are thus spurned will depart, leaving behind three or so that have gained her favour. These are the dragons who participate in the mating flight itself.
With a great sweep of her wings, the female leaps into the air. Her suitors follow, but as they start without the advantage of height, it takes them longer to become airborne. This gives the female a respectable lead, and she uses it shamelessly, wheeling and soaring above the desert floor. Here a smaller male may sometimes fare better than expected, if he is especially nimble. But a drake who relies on such tactics must succeed quickly, or not at all; otherwise the flight becomes a contest of endurance, and his larger brethren will win out. They maneuver for position in the sky, lashing out at one another as circumstance requires or allows. It is not uncommon for a male to be wounded in this struggle, and to quit the field on account of his injuries. This happened in the very first flight we observed, and the beast in question was not able to hunt for some time afterward. I suspect he did not survive the summer, for a drake that does not feed well in the wet season will lack the bodily resources to last when food becomes scarce.
This drama enters its third and final act when one of the males succeeds in attaining a position above the female. Now he may attempt to stoop upon her; she ordinarily permits this, though I did see one female drive off her would-be paramour in no uncertain terms. (I can only speculate as to why, and none of my guesses are terribly scientific.) Here there is a countervailing pressure against the desire of a female to seek out a large mate: she must sustain them both in gliding flight while the copulation takes place. This is a brief matter, but the strain upon her must be enormous, and more than one flight has ended in failure because the participants had to separate early to avoid crashing.
The airborne stage of the process poses quite a challenge for the landbound audience. Drakes have been known to travel kilometers while conducting their aerial dance, and often the only good perch from which to observe is the one upon which the female began her display. Tom and I opted for a more active approach, which is to say: we threw ourselves into the saddle and set out to see just what Akhian horses were capable of.
Our mounts responded magnificently. On more than one occasion I was charging hell-for-leather after the drakes as they soared away, only to wheel my mare about on her hindquarters when they came swooping back in my direction. At any time other than during a mating flight, Tom and I would have made irresistible bait, easy prey for a drake to claw up or burn to a crisp. But all their attention is on the dance; and so we raced madly about beneath them, crying out observations to one another that often became lost in the roaring.
MATING FLIGHT
This was exhausting work, and by the time the flight ended I would gladly have collapsed in the nearest bit of shade—but I could not stop there. The most vital data was yet to come.
Andrew had been waiting in the shelter of a small cliff, safely distant from where the female made her initial display. Tom and I rode to his side, and I dismounted at a trot—a stunt I had not tried since I was fifteen, but I did not want to lose a single moment. Our camels were already kneeling in the sand, and lurched to their feet almost before we were in the saddles. For rapid changes of direction at speed, horses were the most effective choice; but only camels could do what we needed now.
We set off with al-Jelidah, first at a gallop (to make up the ground we had lost), then slowing to the pacing gait the camels could maintain for an extended period of time. The drake coasted ahead of us, sometimes ascending or making leisurely sweeps from side to side, looking for a good nesting ground. The sun climbed high overhead, and I had not had a drink of water in hours. But ahead of us the land rose steadily, and I whacked my camel with my stick, urging her up the slope.
Just as I reached the crest, al-Jelidah’s borrowed camel surged forward to join mine. As soon as he came within range, he leaned forward to seize the halter, pulling me up short. “What are you doing?” I exclaimed.
He gestured ahead, and spoke a word I did not know.
This has happened to me more times than I can count, in the course of my travels. I had a list in my head of possible translations: dangerous, forbidden, cursed, and so forth. But Tom, pulling his camel to a halt on the other side of me, said, “Isabella, remember the map.”
Our pursuit of the drake had gotten me entirely turned around. I had to work to recall the geography of the area, and every second I delayed, our quarry’s lead grew. The sun was no help, being too high overhead to provide much sense of direction. But when I turned to the ground ahead of me, I saw that it was increasingly broken; and then I remembered.
I stood at the edge of the Labyrinth of Drakes.
This is a curious geological formation, nestled at the base of the Qedem mountain range. Millennia of floods from the higher peaks have carved the sandstone into a maze of canyons and gullies, some of them exceedingly narrow, so that one seems to be riding through a corridor without a roof. There are oases within it, but little space to farm, and no one lives there today.
Thousands of years ago, of course, it was quite different.
The Draconean ruins there are famous, and have been since they were rediscovered by the Haggadi outlaw Yoel ben Tamir while he was fleeing from his pursuers. Whether they constituted a city or merely a ritual site was a matter of long-standing scholarly debate. Giorgis Argyropolous, the Nichaean antiquarian who made the first comprehensive survey of the place, gave fanciful names to each of the structures he found, and termed many of them temples; those appellations have endured, even though in most instances there is not a shred of evidence to support them. It is the natural response of the human imagination, when confronted by the silent, monumental remnants of the past: we assume that surely they were special, that the awe we feel is a sign of their hallowed nature.
That these ruins remained lost for so long is a testament to the hazards of the region. It is not safe to wander long in the Labyrinth: apart from the predators that lurk within, there are rock slides, and one may easily become lost in the winding passages. Furthermore, during the winter and spring there is great risk of sudden floods from storms at higher elevations, which can easily drown the unwary. In ancient times it is thought the Draconeans maintained dams which reduced this risk by channeling the flow in a controlled manner to where it was needed—but these are long gone. The peril of the Labyrinth remains.
Perilous or not, that was our drake’s destination. “We have to watch her nesting behaviour,” I said, trying to pull my camel free of al-Jelidah’s grip. “And take measurements once she is gone—temperature, the depth in the ground—”
Al-Jelidah cut the air with his free hand. “No.”
Tom chivvied his camel until it came around to stand in front of mine. She snapped her teeth at Tom’s mount, as if to express my own mood. “There will be other flights, Isabella,” Tom said. “And drakes who nest somewhere we aren’t liable to drown.”
I gestured at the canyons ahead. “They’re bone dry!”
“At the moment, to be sure. But how much has it rained in the mountains recently?” We did not know the answer to that … which was part of the problem. “The water could be on you in a heartbeat. And how are you going to chase her, when she can fly over the things you have to ride around? I know you aren’t afraid of risk—but this would be a damned stupid way to get killed.”
A damned stupid way to get killed might have described any number of incidents in my life, had my luck been only a little different. Tom’s steady gaze, though, reined in my impulse to give a defiant answer. A past history of reckless decisions did not oblige me to behave recklessly every time the opportunity arose. He would not mock me for showing caution; I had no reputation to maintain here.
And that thought—the notion o
f what other people might say—robbed me of all my momentum. Had my increasing notoriety gone that thoroughly to my head? The account I had written of my travels on the Basilisk, the speaking engagements I had taken after my return … despite my intentions, they had often skewed toward the sensational, rather than the scientific. A headlong charge into the Labyrinth of Drakes would have made a splendid story to tell. But my purpose here was not to increase my fame as an adventuress; it was to study dragons, not merely for the benefit of natural history, but for the future well-being of my nation. Risking my life, in a situation where I stood very little hope of success, would do nothing to further that goal.
Buried beneath that was something even less admirable: the realization that I wanted to go in simply because al-Jelidah had said no.
I released my camel’s rein and lifted my hands, relinquishing any intention of going forward. Tom nodded, looking relieved. He and I both lifted our field glasses and watched the drake for as long as we could; but she soon dropped down behind a promontory and was lost from sight. I imagined her digging the pit for her eggs, somewhere the intense desert sun would find and heat them, and vowed I would see it with my own eyes before long.
TWELVE
Observing a clutch—Umm Azali—Suhail’s youth—The poem—Young drakes hunting—Plans for return
As Tom predicted, there were other flights. We developed quite a good system for observing them, too, stationing ourselves and Andrew at various points and dividing up the terrain so that we need not all race to watch. And very few of the dragons were as inconvenient as our first; most laid their eggs in more accessible locations.
I had an especially splendid chance to observe one of these, by dint of scrambling to the top of a large, rocky outcropping and peering down on the drake from above. She dug a shallow pit, scraping the earth sideways with her claws, rather than between her hind legs as a dog does. This done, she crouched over it and laid her eggs—six of them in total. Then she tossed sand back over them, and lowered her head to the ground to blow across it, blurring the marks of her activity. (They do not breathe fire over their eggs, whatever legend says. Doing so would vitrify the sand, and the resulting plate of rough glass would tell any interested predator that tasty treats lie below, ready to be tunneled out.)
We marked the spot and came back the next day, when we were sure the drake had gone. She would, we were told, revisit her clutch periodically, and rebury the eggs if necessary; but desert drakes do not brood, which gave us leisure to examine the site. Careful excavation netted us a great deal of data, from the depth at which the eggs are buried (fifteen centimeters or so: enough to keep them covered if the wind is not too fierce, but not so deep as to be entirely insulated) to the temperature of the ground (easily thirty degrees at the surface during the hottest part of the day; perhaps ten degrees cooler where the eggs lie). Standing by the egg pit, I could feel for myself how well the drake had chosen her spot. It lay in a shallow bowl, reasonably protected from the wind, but fully exposed to the sun. If our guesses about the role of heat were correct, then such conditions were vital to the successful incubation of the eggs.
“Do you want to take them?” Haidar asked when we were done, gesturing at the pit.
“No, definitely not,” I said. “By all means remember the location—but if we take them now, we will likely have nothing to show for our efforts but dead eggs. We do not know nearly enough yet to interfere so early in the process.”
Tom did take one egg, not to incubate, but to dissect. We had only rudimentary chemical equipment with us, but he analyzed the albumen and yolk as best as he could, and I packed the pieces of shell carefully in sand for later study. Their texture was very different from that of mature eggs, and the comparison might tell us something.
“Even if we can’t breed them,” he said to me one night, over the last scraps of our supper, “at least we’ll have learned a good deal about them.”
“We will figure out how to breed them,” I said. But having watched the mating flights in their full glory, I spoke with a good deal more assurance than I felt.
* * *
I have not yet said much about Suhail’s desert mother and desert father, and should remedy that now.
As with many of the relationships I recount in my memoirs, what I am about to describe came together over an extended period of time, through many small conversations and moments of rapport. I did not learn everything in one fell swoop (a phrase which, I note in passing, originated in the description of dragons hunting). For the sake of convenience, however, I will condense matters here—not to mention smooth over the inevitable linguistic difficulties—so that I might not tax my readers’ patience overmuch.
Umm Azali I came to know far better than her husband. This has generally been the pattern in most of the places I have gone: with the exception of Keonga, where my primary ally was considered to be neither male nor female, I have generally been on closest terms with my own sex. It is an extension of the same segregation I experience at home, which says that the conversation of women is primarily of interest to other women, as men’s is to men, and rarely do the twain meet. I had made concerted efforts to overcome this in the Flying University; but each expedition put me into a new social world, and I lacked both the time and the energy to pursue such ends except where necessary to my work.
(I did not realize until long after I had left the desert that the nomads of the Aritat treated me in some respects like a man. This is a thing that happens sometimes with widowed or divorced women, or those who are too old to go on bearing children: their disassociation from the primary marker of womanhood, which is to say motherhood, reduces the assumed distance between them and the world of men. I shall refrain from extended commentary on this, except to note that my own widowed status and lack of attendant child put me once more into something of a grey area—albeit not to the extent that had pertained in Keonga.)
Umm Azali and I never became what I would call close, largely because I spent so much time out in the desert pursuing dragons, rather than in camp. She was unfailingly friendly, however, which I attribute to my association with Suhail. It was therefore natural that I should talk to her about him.
“How long have you known him?” I asked her one day.
“Since he was a boy,” she answered. “Four years he was with us—for his fosterage. His nephew Jafar will come to us next year, for the same thing. No one would follow a sheikh who does not know the desert!”
I was mending a great rent I had torn in one of my dresses when it caught against a thorny bush; she was baking bread. Many of my conversations in the field have been conducted thus, with one or both of us engaged in some useful task; it is often more productive than when I try to question people too directly. “Was Suhail with you for more than just his fosterage, then?”
Umm Azali shrugged, kneading the dough with tough, efficient hands. “Off and on. Not always with us, not once he began to explore the ruins. More than he had as a boy, that is. But he visits often.”
Of course it would be out here that Suhail had cultivated his fascination with Draconean ruins. Although al-Jelidah had stopped me from going into the Labyrinth, I had seen any number of fragments during my own work: everything from a statue carved into the side of a cliff to the shaft of a stela, abandoned in its quarry after it cracked in half. Their fingerprints were all over the desert, worn down by the ages. “How old was he? During his fosterage, I mean.”
“Eight? At the start.” Umm Azali’s grin cracked her face. “Braids flapping as he ran about.”
I had noticed that the Aritat boys often wore their hair in two long braids, dangling down their chests. I forbore to mention that in my homeland, that style belonged exclusively to little girls; I was too busy reeling at the image of Suhail arrayed thus.
It was on a later day, I believe, that I asked her about the Draconean ruins, and his interest in them. Umm Azali clearly did not share that interest, for she merely shrugged again. “He used to imag
ine himself as an ancient prince. Lord of the desert—all sorts of foolishness, as children do. But mostly it was the language. Every time we rode past one of those carvings, he wanted to know what it said.”
We might soon have an answer to that, I thought, if he could translate the Cataract Stone. I wondered if he was working on that even now, back in Qurrat.
Umm Azali talked a great deal about her family: not merely Suhail and his brother Husam, whom she and her husband had fostered a few years before Suhail himself, but their son Azali and all his children; their daughter Safiyya, married to one of Abu Azali’s nephews; even their son Abd as-Salaam, who had, as Umm Azali put it, “grown his beard.” It took me some time to realize this was a colloquial way of saying he had become a prayer-leader, i.e., one who no longer cut his beard or hair. He lived now in a town on the edge of the desert, in the area where the Aritat would go once the rains ended and the desert became too dry to support the herds. (As nomad tribes go, the Aritat were of middling piety: they prayed, but only twice a day, and they observed the month of fasting according to when circumstance allowed, rather than the dictates of the calendar. Some of the tribes are very nearly heathen; for example, I did not recall seeing anyone among the Banu Safr pray during my captivity. Though admittedly, I had not seen much outside that tent.)
All of this was fascinating to me—but not, I must confess, because I had any great interest in their children and grandchildren. (Apart from Shahar, I had very few dealings with Umm Azali’s kin.) Rather, I prized the way these stories built up my sense of Suhail’s world and his past: the boy he had been when he came to the desert; the ways he had become a man here; the role he had among the Aritat, as his brother’s representative in the matter of the dragons. Knowing that he had once strutted about as an imaginary Draconean prince changed my understanding of him—and I will not relate some of the other stories Umm Azali told, on the occasions when we were sitting privately with other women and the conversation became distinctly improper. He had said so little of himself when we knew one another aboard the Basilisk; all I had known was that he was estranged from his family. To meet a woman who was kin of sorts, with whom Suhail appeared to have a warmer relationship, gave him a very different appearance in my mind.