Within the Sanctuary of Wings

  Before I could work myself up to a proper shout, the creature in front of me reached up and held its own muzzle shut, just as one of its compatriots had done to the ruff-spreading one. It is a thing I have seen people do to dogs who bark too much, and I realized it must be the equivalent of holding a finger to one’s lips. The creature was trying to hush me.

  I almost screamed. Not out of fear, but out of defiance: if they wished me to be quiet, then perhaps the best thing I could do was to be as loud as possible. I had been a prisoner before, and had not liked it on any occasion.

  But these creatures had taken care of me. I was not hungry, nor stained with my own filth; more to the point, I was alive. Whoever had rescued me from the snow, it had apparently not been my companions. Was it these three? Or others like them? Either way, it did not matter. They had looked out for my well-being, likely at a great deal of inconvenience to themselves. I owed my life to three winged, dragon-headed creatures out of Draconean myth.

  No—not myth. I stared up at the tall figure in front of me, standing with its feet apart and its wings slightly spread, in a pose I had seen so many times before. The epiphany came upon me like a lightning strike, so astonishing it momentarily drove all fear and despair from my mind. All those statues and reliefs and painted murals, showing humanoid figures with wings and dragon heads, with humans making offerings to them … we had assumed those figures were gods. And perhaps, indeed, ancient humans had worshipped them as such.

  But they were not gods.

  They were, quite simply, the Draconeans.

  That ancient civilization had not been a human edifice. It was the creation of beings like the one in front of me, who ruled over their human subjects until their downfall. The evidence had been before us for thousands of years … but when the Draconeans were overthrown, their existence faded into legend, easily disbelieved without the proof of it in front of us.

  The one that had approached me gestured toward my bed, with words I still could not understand. It did not seem hostile. Numbly obedient, I limped back to my rest. Two of them worked together to hang again the curtain I had torn down, closing me into my little shelter, shutting away the sight of their hybrid, impossible bodies.

  I lay under the yak fleece and shivered, but not from cold. The truth had crept into my mind while I was occupied with other things, but now, alone in my nest, I could avoid it no longer.

  I was alone. Though the avalanche remained a terrifying maelstrom in my recollection, it was not so chaotic as to erase one simple fact: I had been torn away from my companions, from my husband. I went one way and they went another, and then in my disorientation I compounded that separation by staggering west. They were on the other side of the mountains, or—

  Though I tried to tell myself not to think it, such discipline was beyond me. Or dead.

  What the Draconeans made of my sobs, I do not know, but they left me in peace.

  * * *

  One of them brought me food some time later: porridge not much different from what the Nying ate. Accepting it, I tried to study the Draconean’s dentition, but it kept its mouth shut. Not wholly carnivorous, it seemed, although I had seen before, on the living and the frozen, that they had quite prominent cuspids. They could not give me porridge unless they farmed grain, and would not bother to farm grain unless they ate it. Which made sense, given the terrain; this region could not possibly support a large population of obligate carnivores. Perhaps their diet was like that of bears, omnivorous.

  Such thoughts were the lifeline that kept me afloat while I ate my Draconean porridge.

  They lived. They were real. How could I make space in my mind to accommodate that fact?

  I found myself thinking of the egg from Rahuahane, and the cast I had made of the vacuoles in its petrified albumen. Lumpy and imprecise as it was, the cast had not given me a good picture of the lost embryo; but it had shown enough to be perplexing. The unexpected proportions, the odd configuration of the legs. All quite wrong for a quadripedal creature … but in hindsight, quite natural for a bipedal one.

  MY THREE SAVIORS

  How was it even possible?

  I will not trouble my readers by recounting every occasion on which I lost the thread of my reasoning and sank once more into tears. I could not think of Rahuahane without thinking of Suhail, who had been there with me; I could not think of the egg without thinking of Tom, who had puzzled over its mysteries with me. Moreover I was still quite weak from my trials, and weeping exhausted what little reserves I had, so that I spent far more time asleep than I would have liked. I knew that I must try to get out of that place and back to human civilization; I told myself the others were waiting for me there, as a spur to my determination. But I also knew that if I tried to flee now, then regardless of what the Draconeans did, I would be a dead woman in short order. I was in no state to face the mountains.

  How long had I been in that house? My hands and toes showed clear signs of healing frostbite. I did not think it had been dreadfully severe, as I still had full sensation in all the affected areas, and my skin was not sloughing off. But it had been bad enough to blister, so I had been more than merely nipped by the cold. Judging by my current condition, and the state of my leg … I feared I had been there at least a fortnight, if not longer.

  Even if the others were alive, they would be certain I was dead. I lost a great deal of time to that realization, and could barely eat the food laid at my side.

  What pulled me up again was the conundrum before me, the inarguable existence of living, breathing, dragon-headed creatures. If I could not escape them, I would study them. And perhaps my study would lead me to some useful understanding.

  But first, I had to reach some equilibrium on the matter of my companions. I forced myself through the possibilities with ruthless logic.

  If I assumed them to be dead, and they proved to be alive, then my mourning would be to no purpose. If I assumed them to be dead and was correct, I did not think my mourning would be lessened at all; I would only feel a new wave of grief upon confirmation of their loss. Contrariwise, if I assumed them to be alive and was wrong, my grief would be dreadful; but in the meanwhile I would enjoy a greater use of my faculties, which would undoubtedly be of use in returning me to the human world. And finally, if I hoped for the best and proved to be right … that would be the best of all possible outcomes. I therefore resolved to behave in all ways as if they were alive, until I had proof to the contrary.

  Did it work? Of course not; no mere resolution could hold back all fear and uncertainty. But it did help. With that vow to support me, I could address myself properly to the question at hand: how could the Draconeans be possible?

  Developmental lability had to be the answer; there was no other explanation. Very well, then: under what conditions could a draconic egg develop into something half human?

  It must be exposed to some kind of human factor in its environment. Not a house or the sound of literature read aloud or anything of that sort; no, the factor must be biological. And then I thought of the murals in the Watchers’ Heart: the inscriptions, their glyphs painted red, descending on an egg below. The “precious rain” referenced in the Cataract Stone—and the clause that followed after, which might be read as an elaboration of the previous, telling of the “sacred utterances of our hearts.”

  Blood. Bathe a draconic egg in human blood, and perhaps a Draconean would result.

  How often could that possibly occur? The more extreme the mutation, the less likely the embryo is to be viable; the experimentation carried out at the House of Dragons in Qurrat, both mine and that of my successors, had established that quite clearly. Something like this would not succeed one time in a thousand, I suspected. Or perhaps it was somehow done in more gradual steps—I had no way of knowing. My only certainty was that it had been done, for the proof of it kept bringing me porridge to eat.

  Lying in my nest, slowly regaining my strength, I imagined sharing my speculations with Tom and Suhail. This
was comforting, and soon I imagined myself standing in a place like Caffrey Hall, lecturing to the public on the Draconeans I had met. Unexpectedly, I found myself giggling. (The sound may have been a little hysterical; I muffled it in my blankets.) It had come to me that one way or another, I had my victory. Either this discovery would at last force the Philosophers’ Colloquium to accept me as a member, and I would have the satisfaction of having broken through that door … or they would continue to refuse me, and I could wash my hands of them entirely. I had dreamt for years of achieving status as a Fellow, to the point where I could not surrender it easily—but if this did not suffice, then they would prove themselves a pack of hidebound reactionaries not worth a moment further of my time.

  Of course, that would only be true if I had a chance to tell them.

  Therefore, I must survive and return to the outside world. I would not give them the satisfaction of tut-tutting and shaking their heads over the sad demise of a woman whose aspirations exceeded her worth.

  I will not pretend this washed me clean of all distress. Every minute I stayed in that place was another minute my husband believed me to be dead. I remembered all too well my grief when Jacob died; the thought of Suhail enduring such a loss was wrenching. However joyous our reunion would be, I could not envision it without first thinking of his suffering, which quite countered the effect. But rubbing the Colloquium’s collective noses in my achievement? That was quite a powerful motivator, and every time my will to carry on faltered, I thought of the satisfaction that awaited me.

  * * *

  My trio of Draconeans permitted me to rise from my bed and hobble about so long as I neither shouted nor broke for the door. I did wonder what would happen if I made too much noise: would I provoke an avalanche? Attract a predator? Disturb the local peace and bring wrath down upon my captors? No one came into the house but those three; I could not even be certain there were others out there. I suspected there were, though. Had I been able to stay longer at the top of the col and survey the land on the other side, what might I have seen?

  I shook aside such thoughts in favour of more immediate matters. In order to hobble about, I had to fashion a splint for my leg, to avoid doing it any further mischief. The Draconeans, when they realized what I was after, attempted to bind the splint about my knee; my insistence on placing it around my shin provoked much conversation among them. Of course: they would have little experience with broken bones, when their own were so close to indestructible. Crutches, on the other hand, they understood quite well, for they could damage their tendons and ligaments just like any other creature.

  With my health thus addressed, I turned myself to the task of observation. I began with the Draconeans themselves. They were somewhat over two meters tall: enough to loom over many humans, but I had seen men as large, especially in the Keongan Islands. In the chest and shoulder they were quite broad, presumably to support the musculature of their wings—could they fly? I suspected they would have difficulty, compared with their quadrupedal cousins; their bodies were not shaped for horizontal balance. They might be able to glide, though. They also appeared stockier than their ancient cousins, perhaps as an adaptation to the cold. Their scales were darker than those of the frozen Draconean we had found in the col; whether that was a seasonal difference, a sex-based one, or merely the equivalent of the colour variation seen in horses, I could not yet tell.

  I had ample opportunity to study them, however, as they wore very little clothing while indoors. Although I found the air outside my blanketed shelter quite chill, they seemed perfectly comfortable in loose, plain trousers that did not fall below their knees. I knew that was not all they wore, though. They came and went, and although I kept my distance from the door, I could see through it to some kind of room beyond—an antechamber, I thought, where they donned and doffed heavier clothing, jackets and boots and the like. It would have been wildly insufficient to keep me warm, but it was clear their tolerance for the cold far exceeded my own.

  (Why had the Draconean in the col not been clothed? I will never know for certain, but I do know they can suffer the effects of hypothermia. This sometimes causes people to succumb to a kind of madness wherein they strip off their clothing, feeling themselves to be far too warm. The lost one may have done just that.)

  So much for the Draconeans, at least for the moment: next I turned my attention to their environment. The outside world was presently beyond my reach, but I could and did observe their house. It was not the kind of monumental structure I associated with the Draconeans; but of course I knew from Suhail that the ruins which awe us today are only the great edifices of their civilization, comparable to the Temple in Haggad or the Hall of the Synedrion in Falchester. Ordinary people had lived in more modest buildings.

  (Were all of those ordinary people human? Or had Draconeans been numerous enough that there were Draconean peasants as well as rulers? My list of unanswered questions only grew longer with each passing day.)

  The architecture differed in many ways from that of the Nying. Although the house in which I dwelt was round, it was clearly not built atop a livestock pen as is done in Tser-nga. Instead the floor was covered with that quilted hessian I had noted before, which was remarkably effective at insulating us from the cold—I did not learn why until later. The furnishings were sparse, just a few chests and shelves which held practical items such as pots and blankets. The fire sat in a broad, shallow bowl of bare stone; it was here that my caretakers slept, on thin mattresses they put away during the day. The smoke rose through a hole in the low ceiling (it barely cleared the heads of the inhabitants); the hole must have been shielded in some fashion, for I could not see the sky when I peered into it.

  Our only light came from that fire and a handful of lamps whose odour I recognized: it was yak butter. Unless they traded with the Nying, and the entire region had conspired not to breathe a whisper of it to my party, they must herd their own yaks. They did indeed eat a mixed diet, grains and meat and dried fruit, along with the same staggering quantities of butter and fat I had seen among the Nying. And that, too, inclined me to believe these three were not alone, for it was unlikely in the extreme that they could supply themselves with such variety—especially when no more than two of them were ever gone from the house at one time.

  I could not ask questions about any of it, though, until we could speak with one another. And that led me to my next task.

  We began almost immediately. After my leg was splinted, I came to sit with them by the firepit, swaddled in a blanket, with my three hosts watching me warily. Looking at them, I said, “Anevrai?”

  This was how Suhail had pronounced one of the words from the Cataract Stone. We had not known then whether it referred to the Draconeans or to their gods; now that I had conflated those two categories, I thought it would be a good guess. But they only cocked their heads and said nothing.

  I was not half the linguist my husband was … but Suhail was not there, and so I must make do. I remembered him saying the words that changed the least were usually the most basic, and cast about for something that was both in the room and a word he had reconstructed. Pointing at the fire, I said, “Irr?”

  This only seemed to deepen their confusion, but I kept trying. Leaning forward, I tapped one of the stones that ringed the fire and said, “Abun.” Then I pointed at the fire again. “Irr.”

  The three Draconeans looked at one another and talked in low, rapid tones. One seemed to be asking a question, and the other two encouraging it—but perhaps that was only me laying meaning atop behaviour I could not understand. Finally the one turned back to me and pointed at the fire. “Rrt.” Then it tapped a stone. “Vun.”

  My heart leapt. Fire. Stone. Two tiny footholds on the slope of an unimaginably large mountain; it was a long way from those two to conversation. But it sounded, to my linguistically amateur ear, as if Suhail was right. The Draconean language was ancestral to those of southern Anthiope—which meant it was not wholly alien to me. By look
ing for the points of commonality, I could leverage my way up to comprehension.

  You must not imagine that this epiphany unlocked everything, any more than the Cataract Stone instantly unveiled the secrets of all Draconean inscriptions. It did nothing of the sort. Being raised in the Magisterial religion, I had never studied Lashon (and now cursed that lack), but my Akhian was passable, and gave me a much better starting point than the few fragments of vocabulary Suhail had tentatively reconstructed. But of course things had changed a great deal since those ancient days; the language my host spoke was not that of its ancestors from thousands of years before. Sounds evolved into completely different sounds, following rules my husband might know, but I did not. Words hived off to mean only a single concept related to the original, while something else came in to fill the void: the Akhian word for “to weave” seemed to be a distant cousin to the modern Draconean word for “cloth,” while their “weave” was unlike anything I had heard before. Progress was excruciatingly slow.

  But what else did I have with which to fill my time? Until they allowed me to leave the house, the most useful thing I could do was learn to communicate. Perhaps (I thought with another stifled giggle) I might find a place among the Society of Linguists, if the Colloquium would not have me. And although I am not talented at languages, it is amazing what one can accomplish when one has nothing else to focus on.

  It is not true, though, to say I had nothing else to occupy me. One day—I assumed it was day; in truth I had no way of telling time other than by the wakefulness of the Draconeans and my own hunger—my three caretakers held a quiet and tense-looking conference, huddled in a fashion that made it clear I was not welcome, even though I could not have understood them yet. Then, stiff with obvious tension, two departed, leaving one behind.

  The remaining Draconean took down my curtains and urged me to the back of the rounded room, as far from the entrance as possible. There it made a nest of the curtains for me and enacted a pantomime. I was to sit in that nest and, if someone came through the door, pull one of the curtains over myself and hide.