In the Labyrinth of Drakes

  THE WATCHERS OF TIME

  It was not what I had come to the Labyrinth to see, but even a woman as obsessed with living dragons as myself could not help marveling at the place. Had I grown up with such relics nearby, who is to say that I, too, would not have formed a fascination like Suhail’s? The Draconean ruins in Scirland are few and disappointing. The Watchers of Time took my breath away.

  We camped nearby that night. Suhail admitted he had once laid his pallet within the antechamber itself—“But never again,” he said with feeling. “I hardly slept a wink that night. I was convinced the Watchers knew I was there, and did not approve.” I knew what he meant. Though I am not a superstitious woman, I did not want to sleep with their stony eyes on me; we went around a corner to a spot out of their sight.

  We stood watches during the night while we were in the Labyrinth, for the groundwater allows vegetation to persist through the summer—which attracts various herbivores—which, in turn, attracts carnivores. Our tiny fires, built from camel dung, were not enough to keep them away. I alone was not expected to stand sentry, less on account of my sex, and more on account of having refused Andrew’s offer to teach me to shoot … but that night I slept very little regardless, thinking of the Draconeans and the world they had known.

  The next morning my companions searched the area, while I stayed below and sketched the Watchers. (It was hardly necessary, as they have been a popular subject for every traveller who passes through the area and even some who have never even seen them—but I could not look upon those ancient guardians and not wish to render them with my own pencil.) We would not be able to stay long, and knew it. There had once been a well nearby, whose site Suhail pointed out, but it was so thoroughly collapsed that it would be less effort to dig a new one entirely. For water we would have to go some distance. One of our milk camels had foundered after the sandstorm, and the other was not giving as much as we had hoped.

  From high above, I heard a triumphant shout.

  I twisted on my seat to find Tom standing at the edge of the plateau across from the Watchers. He was a dusty blot against a sun-bleached sky, but he waved his hat to attract my gaze, and put his other hand to his mouth to direct his voice. “Up here!”

  He had scraped his hands bloody getting up there—a fact I discovered after Suhail led me by an easier route. (I say “easier”; it is not the same thing as “easy.”) But his suffering paid off, for he had located a clutch of eggs, nestled in the cup of sand above.

  From a dragon’s perspective, the site was ideal. The plateau was high enough that it received almost no shade, except in the very late morning and afternoon. It had a little dip in its center, though, which caught sand that would otherwise have blown away; and in this sand, the dragon had laid her eggs.

  (I had the utterly fanciful thought that she had laid them: the first drake whose mating flight we observed, the one I lost track of when al-Jelidah prevented me from riding onward into the Labyrinth. The odds of it were small … but my mind does not always weigh odds rationally.)

  From a naturalist’s perspective, the site left something to be desired. It was not close to water; furthermore, if Tom and I wished to observe the hatching, we would either have to sit in that cup with the newborn drakes—not a very wise idea—or else climb an even steeper hill a little way off and watch through field glasses.

  This last, as you may imagine, is what we chose to do, while Andrew and al-Jelidah took our camels and went to acquire water.

  There is nothing like an intellectual victory to distract one from miserable heat and thirst. We had found the clutch just in time: the very next day, when Tom and I were still trying to tent our cloaks over ourselves as shelter from the sun, the eggs began to hatch. I lay full-length on the burning stone for hours, field glasses glued to my face, putting them down only when necessary to sketch what I had seen. Suhail stepped around and over us with fabric and sticks, trying to make sure we would not die of heat exhaustion while we were too busy to notice. By the end of the day I had an excruciating headache, but I hardly cared—for I had, at last, seen desert drakes hatch.

  Tom and I had both read Lord Tavenor’s accounts of the hatchings at Dar al-Tannaneen, of course. Many of those eggs produced unhealthy results, though, and we could not be certain how the change in their circumstances had altered the process. Watching that day, we treated the entire affair as a new observation, discarding all of our assumptions and noting every detail, no matter how small.

  The eggs were nearly spherical, which is common among birds that lay their eggs in holes (where there is no risk of them rolling away). Their colour was pale and sandy, but speckled here and there with darker spots, like the eggs of sand grouse—in both cases, we surmised, as camouflage against predators that sought to find and raid the nests. The shell had become hard since the laying, which is not universal among dragons: some lay leathery eggs, like those of reptiles, but others are more like those of birds. The hatching drakes used an “egg tooth” to break through the shell; this is actually a specialized scale, and is shed soon after birth.

  Where our observations diverged most from those of Lord Tavenor was in the matter of the shell membrane. This was a good deal thicker than he had reported, and it became apparent that before the drakes broke free of their shells, they had to shred that membrane. “Why so thick, do you think?” Tom asked me without ungluing himself from his field glasses.

  “Perhaps it is a holdover from the more leathery type of egg,” I said, propping myself up on one elbow so I could sketch with the other hand. “The harder shell could have developed in response to environmental factors, but the more flexible interior remained.”

  It was a nice theory, and I held to it for many years. Tom eventually conducted experiments, however, that gave us a more accurate explanation: the inner membrane of a desert drake egg is a highly specialized material that responds to heat. This connects to the yolk by means of the chalaza, the thready component one sees upon pouring an egg into a glass, and actually supplies the drake with energy supplementing that of the yolk itself. At the time we did not know this, though. All we knew was that the drakes showed a surprising amount of vigor upon emerging from their shells, and were soon stumbling about without having been fed a single thing.

  There are few things more hideous and adorable than the newly born of any species. The drakes had the benefit of scales, which kept them from looking like raw flesh the way so many avian hatchlings do; but they were gawky and pale, and much prone to plowing their faces into the sand when their weight got ahead of their feet. Far from cannibalizing one another, they showed a startling degree of sociability: as night fell, they gathered together among the remnants of their shells, forming a pile to keep themselves warm.

  Tom and I had to retreat from the plateau before the light was entirely gone. We were not much more graceful than the drakes as we made our way down to our camp on the canyon floor, and without my observations to distract me, I felt in full the consequences of a day spent under the sun’s merciless eye. Though I did not say it to anyone at the time, I was more physically wretched than I had been when the Banu Safr kidnapped us—albeit less sunburnt. I drank every drop of water Suhail gave me and passed out on my bedroll, too tired even for the whirl of my thoughts to keep me awake.

  * * *

  Even so, I found myself rousing again about two hours later. A sound had disturbed my sleep, quiet and low, but persistent. When I rolled over, I found Suhail was sitting up, arms loosely linked across his knees. “What is that?” I whispered.

  “I think it is the drakes,” he said.

  It was a steady, soothing hum, in shifting chords as voices dropped out and came back in. The result was not precisely musical—even I, not blessed with much sense of pitch, could tell the various notes conflicted at times—but it was beautifully eerie in its way, like the howling of wolves, but gentler. “They are … singing to one another?”

  Even in the darkness, I could make out his smile. “Pur
ring, perhaps. Like cats. There are stories of this, but I’ve never heard it myself.”

  After a moment he lay down again, and I pillowed my head on his shoulder. I cannot tell you how long I listened to their aimless song; it followed me into sleep and shaped my dreams. But those moments, however many there may have been, have remained in my memory as among the most priceless of my life: enduring a rough camp in the Labyrinth of Drakes, with a man I loved warm at my side, listening to the dragons sing.

  * * *

  Three days passed before we could investigate the nest directly, which is the length of time it took for the drakes to abandon it for good. I will not trouble my readers with too many details of this period, as it is all but prelude to what came next; I will say only that the time was physically unpleasant, for we were down to our last mouthfuls of water, barely enough to keep body and soul together, and I no longer had the joy of new discovery to distract me.

  Fortunately Andrew and al-Jelidah returned on the third afternoon, bearing as much water as they could harvest from the spring without draining it or keeping us waiting for too long. Even then I could not drink my fill—but that water, bitter and goat-flavoured though it was, tasted more glorious than the finest wine.

  “Do we want to look for another nest?” I asked Tom.

  He thought about it, biting his lip, then finally shook his head. “By the time we find one, it may well have hatched. And we’ve pressed our luck rather far already.” Jackals had gone after the camels on the trip to the spring, and my brother had been forced to hide in a crevice to avoid a drake that had woken briefly from its slumber. Suhail had found another lair not far from our current location; we all had our fingers crossed that the dragon there would remain in estivation until we departed. No doubt Tom was thinking of all of these things when he said, “I’d rather finish this one properly, then head back.”

  We had missed the hatchings at Dar al-Tannaneen (in favour of seeing the natural version out here), but we could do some good with the new drakes. “As much as I hate to say it, I agree. Let us see if the drakes are gone yet: if they are, we might leave as early as today.”

  The last of the drakes had indeed departed. They were sufficiently harmless at this stage that Tom had followed two of them when they wandered off the previous day, watching their first, inept efforts at hunting, but in that terrain we could not afford to pursue them far. A corner of my mind was already considering what sort of preparation would be necessary to observe juveniles out here—but whatever the answer might be, it certainly amounted to more preparation than we had made. I therefore turned my attention to the remnants of their nest, which at least had the courtesy to stay in one place.

  Bits of shell were scattered all over. Initially we left these where they lay, scrutinizing the cup of sand from all edges before stepping into it and disturbing the tracks of the drakes. Then we began to gather up the shards. Among them we found a few shreds of membrane, which had escaped the notice of the hatchlings; most of that material had been eaten. We had brought a small quantity of formaldehyde with us, sufficient to preserve the soft tissues of one hatchling (if occasion arose); we used it instead for the membrane, so we could study it at leisure back in Qurrat.

  Because this was the sole hatching we had been able to observe, we wanted to be thorough. We gathered up every last scrap of shell we could find—uncovering evidence that the site had been used more than once—and when that was done, I sat for a time in the cup, running my hands through the sand to make certain we had not missed any.

  My fingers brushed stone.

  This should not have been unusual. I sat atop a great pile of stone, after all; it stood to reason there would be some at the bottom of this cup. But that should have been rough, and what I touched was flat and smooth.

  Curious, I dug away some of the sand to see. This was easier said than done, as sand of course tends to slide right back to the bottom of any hole; but I was able to find what I had touched. It was indeed quite flat—not a figment of my tactile imagination, brought on by too much sun. And as I ran my hand across it, my fingertips found an edge.

  I can only imagine what I would have looked like, had anybody been watching me. I knelt on the sand, flinging handfuls of it to the side like a drake preparing to lay, trying to clear enough ground to see. The stone was perhaps twenty centimeters wide, and featureless—but so regular in its shape that it could not be a natural accident. It was a separate piece, on one side set into the rock, and on the other …

  Some part of me, I think, knew what I had found before the rest of me put it together. For when I raised my voice, it was not my fellow naturalist to whom I called out.

  “Suhail!”

  Whatever note he heard in my voice, it brought him from the floor of the canyon to my side in an astonishingly short time. He knelt in the hole I had made, laying one hand on the shaped stone. “Here,” I said, and guided his fingers downward.

  He felt what I had: a second stone, set below and in front of the first.

  In a voice no louder than a few grains of sand slipping past their kin, he whispered, “Stairs.”

  My heart was pounding in a way that had nothing to do with exertion. I said, “It is only two blocks. It might be nothing more.” Or it might be a great deal more.

  Suhail said, “We have to see.”

  Andrew and Tom had followed him, but more slowly. By the time they reached us, he and I had revealed a bit of the second step, and thrust our hands deeply enough to find a third one below. “We have found something,” I said breathlessly, “only I do not know what—”

  “Water,” Suhail said. “We need water. This will collapse in on us if we do not wet it down at least a little. No, it will only evaporate—” He stopped, hands clenching in frustration. There was no timber we could use to brace the sides of our pit. Then he looked all around the cup, five meters or so across. “Baskets,” he said. “Whatever we can load sand into, and then throw it over the edge.”

  Despite our excitement, we were not so reckless as that makes it sound. I credit this to Suhail, who clung to the rock of his professionalism even as a storm threatened to sweep him away. We did indeed pour out the sand—but carefully, in a single spot, where we could examine it for any bits and pieces that might be mixed in. It fell to the other four, poor souls, to carry these down from the cup and bring the empty saddlebags back up, while Suhail and I dug out the stairs.

  Because of this caution, our progress was slower than it might otherwise have been. We dug our pit wide, clearing an area around the top of the staircase down to the bare rock; this revealed a shaft cutting downward through the stone, which alleviated our fears of collapse. Then we dug out the staircase itself, from one wall to the other. We only made it through the first step that day, and a bit of the second, and when nightfall came we were exhausted.

  Sitting around our camel-dung fire after it became too dark to dig, we looked at one another in silence. At last I broke it. “I do not know what may be at the bottom of those stairs,” I said. “But I do know that I cannot walk away without at least trying to find out.”

  “They must be Draconean.” This came from Suhail, who was staring fixedly into the distance. “There is nothing about their appearance to say, not yet—but the location. Directly across from where the Watchers sit. As if that is what they are watching. It cannot be accident.”

  “Are there any legends or historical records of other civilizations here?” I asked. He shook his head. “Then it is very likely theirs, for that reason if no other.”

  An unrecorded Draconean ruin. It might be nothing: a passage to an unremarkable chamber, used in past ages to store supplies. It might have been—likely had been—looted centuries before, by someone who never noted its location for posterity. But it was not on the lists of remnants in the Labyrinth. No modern person, apart from the six of us, knew it was there.

  Andrew laughed, spreading his hands. “Is there a question here? I’m staying. Good God, what kind of m
an could walk away?”

  By the expression on his face, al-Jelidah could. He was no scholar; his interest was in what he got paid to do, nothing more. But so long as we paid him to carry bags of sand down from the plateau, he was perfectly willing to do that. And Haidar, of course, was Aritat. He would not abandon his fellow tribesman.

  When I looked at Tom, a tired grin crept upon him. “I’m game,” he said. “As they say: when you find the dragon’s lair, you must look inside.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  The staircase—A door—Bones in the corridor—Rebellion—Something missing—Too many fairy tales—The murals—Two backward feet—A narrow gap—More broken shells—A chip of stone

  It was absurd, of course. Six people, subsisting on camel’s milk and the water that could be hauled from a spring a full day’s journey away, digging out a staircase with tiny hand shovels. The shaft was narrow enough that only one person could dig as the hole grew deeper; we took it in shifts. Had it been much longer, we would have been forced to abandon the effort. Our rations were growing perilously thin, even with Haidar hunting to supplement them, and while we would not have starved there in the Labyrinth we might have starved on the way out. But the farther we got, the less any of us could bring ourselves to walk away, even when common sense said we should.

  Fifteen steps, from the top of the plateau to the base of the staircase. We had uncovered six when Andrew called out, bringing us all hurrying to the shaft: the vertical wall of the far side had ended in a lintel. At that point there was no possibility of leaving, for we all wanted to know—had to know—what lay at the bottom.

  Suhail took over digging for a time, relinquishing his position only when it was time to pray. Mere words cannot do justice to my husband’s patience: the desire to tear through the ground must have burned like an inferno in his heart, but rather than hastening his work, he slowed down. And his care was rewarded, for he soon uncovered a mass embedded in one wall below the lintel, which turned out to be the twisted, broken remnants of a bronze hinge.