In time I reached a point where I felt safe inquiring about that estrangement. I began by asking, “Do you know how I met Suhail?”
“During his travels,” she said.
“Yes. We encountered one another by chance, not once but twice. Very happy chance indeed, from my perspective. I was sad when we had to part company—when he received word that his father had died.”
Umm Azali made a noncommittal noise. We were not in public then; we had gone into the shade of the tent, for it was the hottest part of the day, and very few people were moving about camp. Abu Azali was out with his son’s herd, and Tom and Andrew were in the sheikh’s tent, enjoying his hospitality and the masculine company to be found there. It was as good a time as any to press.
“I know very little of Suhail’s father,” I said, “save that he was sheikh before Husam ibn Ramiz, and that he and Suhail were not close.” I hesitated for a moment, considering, then added, “You have no doubt noticed my familiarity in calling Suhail by his given name alone. It is because when I knew him, he used no other; and he said once that his father would not thank him for using his name.”
This time her noise was less noncommittal—rather more of a snort. Umm Azali said, “Hajj Ramiz ibn Khalis would not have wanted his name attached to what his son was doing.”
“Why not?” Scandal had attached itself to me, and by association to Suhail; but that came well after we met. If Suhail had done anything worthy of his own scandal before our first encounter, I had not heard of it.
“Those ancient ruins,” Umm Azali said. “Abu Husam wanted his younger son to grow his beard—he was a pious man. He did not like anything associated with idolatrous pagans.”
Idolatrous pagans? The Draconeans, I presumed, once I sorted out the Akhian words she had used. “When you say he did not approve…”
Umm Azali’s lips thinned. “He threatened to lock his son up until he renounced all connection with the blasphemies of the past. Suhail ran away.”
My mouth was very dry, for reasons that had nothing to do with the desert air. I remembered once, at the age of fourteen, being tempted to say “damn the cannons” and chase after my dreams regardless of consequence. I had not done it; I had endured my grey years and gone obediently in search of a husband, with fortunate results. Suhail, it seemed, had done otherwise—for a time.
I wanted to ask whether the occasion of Suhail running away had been the same journey on which I met him—and if so, how on earth Suhail had come to be as well funded as he was, for certainly he had no shortage of money when I knew him. I doubted his father had given him coin when he ran away, especially not for the purpose of digging up Draconean ruins. But Umm Azali was clearly becoming uncomfortable with this line of conversation, and so I let it rest there for the time being.
From Abu Azali I got a rather different impression of Suhail. I should pause here to explain that among the nomads of Akhia, poetry is a highly developed art; it has the virtue of requiring no material resources and posing no burden to carry from one camp to the next. One cannot go a day among them without hearing a poem, for children recite them in their games, and men and women alike share them during work and leisure, as a distraction from their labours or a pleasant pastime. They use it to remember history, to argue about disputed points, to elicit shocked giggles when in suitably private company … and they use it to tell stories.
I said before that actions like Suhail’s—creeping into an enemy camp in the middle of the night to carry off some theft by stealth—are a thing told of in desert tales. In the more prosaic cases, it is a camel or sheep the raiders go to steal; in the more romantic ones, it is the kidnapped son of a sheikh. Such poems had not been recited much in recent times, I think, for no one among the Aritat had done anything of the sort in many generations; but they became exceedingly popular following Suhail’s exploit. It is only natural that someone would undertake to compose a new poem in honour of the occasion.
Abu Azali missed no opportunities to recite that poem. He was so proud of his foster son, I thought he might burst. It made me regret that I did not understand the nomad dialect well enough to appreciate the poetry firsthand; I gathered that it compared Suhail to a desert drake, moving in stealth through the night, with only the wink of the stars to signal his passage. (I learned rather later that it was just as well I could not understand the poem, for its description of me would have left me unsure whether I should squawk in indignation or burst out laughing. There were descriptions of my beauty that likened me to a camel—a high compliment in that society, but in my case both unfounded and not at all an aesthetic I could comprehend—and a good deal of swoony behaviour that would have been very pleasing to my childhood friend Manda Lewis, but bore very little resemblance, I hoped, to reality.)
This, then, was my second image of Suhail: a noble warrior, the son of a sheikh, esteemed for his learning and his courage. It struck me as both accurate and not, for while I knew Suhail’s courage very well, I did not see him as a warrior. We had ridden sea-serpents, stolen one caeliger and crashed another (by means of a sea-serpent, no less), and I had once seen him cut a man’s arm off with a single blow—but that had been done to save the man’s life, and the effects of that action had haunted Suhail for some time after.
The truth, I knew, was neither the brave raider of the poem—who owed more to the conventions of the genre than to Suhail’s own actions—nor the fanciful boy Umm Azali remembered. Nor, indeed, was it the man I had known on the Basilisk, for that man had been without context or a past. The reality of Suhail ibn Ramiz lay somewhere at the intersection of those things, and other byways besides, which I had not yet begun to discover.
In short, I did not truly know who Suhail was. But I did know this much: whatever obstacles propriety might pose, I did not want him to become a stranger to me again.
* * *
In addition to pursuing mating flights and marking every cache of eggs we could find, Tom and I spent some time observing juveniles. “After all,” Tom said, “once they hatch, we still have to keep them alive. And it may be possible to train them out of some of their most inconvenient habits, if we know how they’re trained into them in the first place.”
We had of course missed the first window for this. The eggs hatch at the height of summer—a most unusual timing, biologically speaking, for that is when food is at its most scarce. Furthermore, we knew that desert drakes estivated, which is of course the summer equivalent of hibernation. It is not so deep a slumber as hibernation, and includes periods of wakefulness; but it rather suggested that the adults were not closely engaged with nurturing their offspring. (Indeed, a female desert drake makes me look like a doting mother by comparison.)
We could, however, learn something from last year’s crop, who were then approximately six months old. They did not hunt in the dramatic fashion of their elders, for they lacked extraordinary breath; instead they subsisted on lizards, rabbits, and the largely terrestrial bustards that form such a significant part of the nomad diet. We soon discovered that the majority of conflicts between humans and drakes occur with juveniles: the nomads will hunt an adult drake if they must, but avoid that whenever possible, owing to a justified fear of being burnt alive. The immature beasts, however, are merely competition, and are fought as such.
It was comical to watch the youngest drakes attempt to hunt. Their flight is not exceptionally well developed at that age; they will launch themselves into the air and sink down again quite rapidly, hoping to land on prey, but often failing. “If their parents are asleep when they hatch,” I asked Tom, “how do any of them survive?”
He shook his head, not taking his gaze from our current subject. “They may cannibalize one another after the hatching. If not that, then something else kills them; otherwise the desert would be overrun with ten thousand starving drakes.”
Cannibalism seemed plausible, given what we knew of swamp-wyrms and their immature form. “Even a nest full of siblings, though, would only feed them f
or a short time.”
“True.” The juvenile staggered on landing, then steadied itself with outstretched wings before sauntering onward, for all the world like a cat attempting to persuade onlookers that no lapse of grace had occurred. Tom turned to me, a grin creasing his sunburnt features. “The only way to answer that will be to come back out here again later.”
We both knew we would have to go back to Qurrat soon. The Aritat themselves would be retreating; the winter rains that made the desert briefly verdant had ended, and pasturage would rapidly become scarce. Most nomads would move to the fringes of more settled areas, to oases and the periphery of rivers, where they could wait out the dry months. The heart of the desert would be left to the drakes.
But our work was no respecter of personal comfort. To understand the drakes properly, we had to see them in all seasons—even if it meant walking into the furnace.
Tom and I planned it out in the shelter of our tent. “We’ll go back to Qurrat for a time,” he said. “Pensyth will want us back; and besides, there won’t be much we can do here until later. We’ll come out again in … early Caloris, do you think?”
“Late Messis would be better. It will depend on how matters are at the House by then. Well before the eggs are expected to hatch, so that we can take notes on estivation and such.” I did not say that I desperately wanted to sneak into the cavern of a sleeping dragon, but judging by Tom’s wry smile, he knew my thoughts regardless.
In the meanwhile, the Aritat would bring us eggs at regular intervals, rather than the system that had prevailed under Lord Tavenor, wherein they shipped their finds as their hunters encountered them. That way we could make reasonable estimates of the eggs’ maturity, which would allow us to experiment more precisely with their incubation conditions, as I had arranged with the honeyseeker eggs.
Our thermometers we left with Haidar, who promised to take measurements of every cache before it was dug up. Our tent we left as a gift to Umm Azali and Abu Azali, who promised it would be Shahar’s when she wed. The Aritat were moving in the same direction as our group, but far too slowly for our purposes; we therefore rode ahead, with a well-armed escort the sheikh had provided.
The morning we departed, I cast one glance over my shoulder toward the Labyrinth of Drakes. I knew I would return; but I had no idea what would happen when I did.
PART THREE
In which civilization poses as many dangers as the desert
THIRTEEN
Back in Qurrat—Enemies of the Aritat—Caeligers in Va Hing—Honeyseeker results—Improving conditions—I feel unwell
The journey back to Qurrat was blessedly uneventful. Shimon and Aviva welcomed me back without much fanfare—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they accepted me back. I was not living with a family; the contrast with our circumstances in the desert made that clear. I was essentially staying in a very small hotel, where both my virtue and my religious integrity could be suitably chaperoned. As this oversight placed no real constraints on me, and my hosts had no objections I could discern, it worked out well for all.
A message was waiting for me at their house, encouraging me to take a day or two of rest before returning to Dar al-Tannaneen. Tom, arriving at the Men’s House in the Segulist Quarter, received a message saying Pensyth wanted to see him the following morning. “Concern for my delicate constitution, which has no doubt been wearied by my trials,” I said. “Very touching, but I think I can find it in me to rub along.”
“I wish I could take your holiday,” Andrew said with a melodramatic sigh. “But that is army life for you.”
He and Tom collected me first thing the next morning, and together we all went to the House of Dragons. Pensyth made no comment upon seeing me there, but was very solicitous of my comfort, to the point of holding my chair for me—a thing he had never done before. I soon gathered that he thought me still in need of recovery from the ordeal of my kidnapping. I sat on the urge to ask whether he had forgotten that Tom, too, had been subjected to that indignity, or whether he merely did not care about Tom’s condition. (Neither, of course, would have been the case; but I wanted to needle him by asking. I was not twenty-four hours back in Qurrat, and already my prickliness was reasserting itself.)
“Did you receive our report about the Banu Safr?” Tom asked. “The guns, and the other signs of wealth? Not to mention where they got the drug that knocked us out. I don’t think that was any herbal tincture.”
“Our surgeon thinks it was ether,” Pensyth said. “Based on the symptoms you described. And no, they wouldn’t be making that in the desert—not unless they have a lot of chemical apparatus you didn’t see. Damned if I—my apologies, Dame Isabella. I have no idea where they got it from. There isn’t much hope of finding out, either.”
Tom frowned. “No one even has a guess?”
“Oh, they have guesses. Too many of them. It could be any tribe that doesn’t like the Aritat, or the caliph. More than enough of those to go around.” The colonel shrugged, leaning back in his chair with an air of resignation. “I know the Akhians are looking into it, and I know they aren’t bl—aren’t likely to tell us what they find out.”
This was frustrating, but hardly surprising. They would have no desire to tell us about their internal conflicts; those would only open up gaps my own nation might exploit. I said, “Without information, though, we can’t do much to stop them in the future.”
By the scowl on Pensyth’s face, he did not need me reminding him. “If it were up to me, I’d march a company into the desert and teach the Banu Safr a lesson they won’t soon forget. It wouldn’t get at whoever is behind this, but it would rob them of one tool, at least. Unfortunately, there’s no chance of the caliph allowing that.”
I imagined not. Doing so would be tantamount to announcing he couldn’t keep order in his own country. Tom said, “The Aritat did what they could on that front. It kept us safe enough, after the initial trouble.”
“Well, you’re back here now, and well away from the Banu Safr.” Pensyth linked his hands and leaned forward, adopting the posture of a man getting down to business. “I hope you have something useful to show for all the time you spent out there.”
“I could share our notebooks with you, if you like,” I said.
It must have come out too sweetly, because Tom shot me a quelling look. He said, “We have a good deal of data, where before we had only guesswork. It will show its value, I’m sure. The current breeding season has passed, but that gives us time to prepare for next winter’s effort. Isabella and I have some thoughts for how to change the drakes’ environment so they’ll be more inclined toward their natural habits.”
He was better at saying that with a sober face than I was. Our thoughts ranged from a kind of overhead sprinkler that might induce them to believe it was the rainy season in midsummer, to a set of harnesses into which we might strap the drakes and then swing them about to simulate flying. The only one that was even faintly practical was a special breeding enclosure, with a pedestal for the female and space enough for all our captive males to gather around her. Without a flight to follow, though, we were not at all certain how much good it would do.
The only way to find out was to test it, and as Tom said, we could not do that right now. The prospect of delay, however unavoidable it might be, clearly irritated Pensyth. “In the meanwhile,” I said before he could complain, “we’ve made arrangements for a more systematic approach to the eggs. Once we have a chance to study the data from the honeyseekers, we’ll be able to make alterations that will, I believe, greatly improve our success rate there.”
It only mollified Pensyth a little: after all, our purpose here was to breed dragons, not merely to hatch them. I wondered what he had expected, when he heard we would be taking up Lord Tavenor’s duties. Was our reputation so tremendous that he believed we could achieve instant success? Or was he simply so impatient for results that any failure to produce them was unacceptable?
The latter, it seemed. “Th
e world didn’t stop turning while you were off in the desert. The Yelangese have unveiled an entire fleet of caeligers in Va Hing—thirty of them. And our observers say the design is different, more refined. How many caeligers do we have? Five. It isn’t enough.”
When I last heard of it, our own fleet had numbered four: one largely reconstructed from components fished out of the Broken Sea, and three built from material acquired since. I surmised that Prima’s bones had been put to quick use. “Have the Yelangese done anything with their caeligers yet? Aside from unveiling them.”
DAR AL-TANNANEEN
Pensyth gave me an unpleasant stare. “Would you prefer we wait for actual war to begin, Dame Isabella? The threat is enough.”
I had not forgotten the Battle of Keonga, where the raking fire of a single caeliger had wreaked havoc on the defenders below. Such tactics would be of limited use against an enemy that had artillery with which to respond; but Andrew had already speculated in my hearing about other applications. A caeliger might drop bombs on ships or fortified positions—or even if it were not used to fight, it could scout the movements of the enemy, giving generals much more accurate knowledge for their own maneuvers.
It was not always reassuring, having a brother in the army.
“We are doing our best, sir,” Tom said.
Pensyth sighed wearily, nodding. “Yes, of course. I should not keep you from it.”
Five minutes more or less would make no difference to our success—but I was glad to escape his office and return to the (in my eyes) more comfortable world of dragons and their needs. Lieutenant Marton had managed things effectively in our absence; Sniffer had died, but he had been in poor health when we departed, and I was not surprised to see him go. “I tried to get ice to keep him in, so you could examine the carcass,” Marton said apologetically, “but it didn’t work out.”