The Tropic of Serpents

FIVE

Even at the reliable pace of a steamer, the journey to Nsebu was not short. We stopped in various ports for trade; we battled foul weather; once three boilers broke down in concert, and the Progress made no progress at all until they were repaired. We were at sea for a month altogether, and to alleviate my boredom (for we soon completed the plans for our research, and there are only so many hands of whist one can play without going mad) I began observing the sea life.

Fish and whales, sharks and seabirds; the latter held the most interest for me, as I had not lost my childhood partiality toward wings. But despite its lack in that regard, I was most captivated by the great sea-snake we saw one afternoon near the end of our voyage.

We were entering Erigan waters, crossing the latitude known as the Tropic of Serpents, so named for the large numbers of sea-snakes found there. This was the only one we got a good view of, and all the passengers (and half the crew) crowded to the rails to observe it. “People argue about whether they should be considered dragons,” I said to Natalie, watching the great coils rise above the water’s surface and slip away once more. “Your grandfather doesn’t believe the Prania sea-snakes should be, but I wonder about these beasts. There are so many creatures around the world that seem partially draconic in nature, but they lack wings, or forelimbs, or extraordinary breath. I think sometimes that Sir Richard Edgeworth’s criteria may be wrong—or rather, too strict.”

“Another thing to study,” Natalie said, amused. “Will you ever be done?”

I smiled into the sun, one hand holding my bonnet against the firm grasp of the wind. “I should hope not. How dreadfully tedious that would be.”

Four days later, with all the passengers lined up at the rail once more, the Progress steamed past the rocky outcrop of Point Miriam and into the deep harbor of Nsebu.

Because the geography of this region will be of great relevance later, I should take a moment to describe it now. The land of Bayembe lies on the northern side of the Bay of Mouleen, mostly along a plateau lifted above sea level, but beneath the mountains that form their northern border with the Talu Union. Their eastern border and part of the southern are ocean; the rest was, at the time, the disputed territory between the Girama and Hembi rivers, and the edge of the great, sunken swamp of Mouleen, whose streams spill into the bay at a thousand points.

Mouleen is born from an eccentric quirk of geology. It would, in the normal way of things, be a great river delta, as the Girama, the Gaomomo, and the Hembi converge only a few hundred kilometers inland, the culmination of their long rush to the sea. But a fault in the underlying rock dropped the region nearly to sea level at what should have been the confluence, with the result that all three rivers tumble over a cliff and drown the land below. Furthermore, the prevailing winds at that latitude blow from the east, funneling much of the atmospheric moisture into the low channel formed by that geologic fault, and therefore much of the rain. The resulting morass is the impenetrable jungle of Mouleen—more colloquially known as the Green Hell.

But that was not yet my destination. Although I spared a few glances for the emerald band that marked the western edge of the bay, the bulk of my attention was on the town perched just off its corner, over which the fort at Point Miriam stood guard.

Neither words nor images suffice to communicate what greeted me as we came into port, for even the best artwork is a static thing of the eye alone, and words are by their nature linear. I can tell you of the smells that assaulted my nose: the salt sea, the coal smoke of other steamers, the fish and shellfish that even today make up a brisk part of the port’s local trade, the spices whose aromatic vibrancy is all out of proportion to their quantity. Unwashed bodies and tar, fresh-cut tropical lumber, the greasy stench of lunch being fried for dockworkers and hungry travellers alike. But I can only tell you of one scent at a time, and I cannot present those to you at the same time as I give you the sounds and the sights, the mad clamour that was my first experience of Eriga.

With the knowledge I have now, I can give the proper names to what I saw then only as a bewildering array of peoples. There were Scirlings among them, of course, merchants and soldiers, there to protect our interests in iron production. Nor were we the only Anthiopeans, despite tensions with our rivals over their involvement elsewhere in Eriga; there were Thiessois, Chiavorans, a cluster of Bulskoi looking exceedingly uncomfortable in the heat. Pigtailed Yelangese bustled around their ships, and Akhians were nearly as common as Scirlings.

But it was the Erigans who dazzled my eye, for they were new to me, and formed the bulk of the crowds.

Amongst themselves, they displayed a hundred different modes of dress and adornment, a hundred different details of physiognomy that mark one people as distinct from another. I saw complexions ranging from inky blue-black to bronze, mahogany, and dark amber, sharp chins and square jaws, high foreheads and low, full lips and wide mouths and cheekbones that rode flat or stood out like the arches of a bow. The people wore their hair in loose braids or braids close to the scalp, in beads or strips of fabric, in soft clouds and corkscrew curls and sharp ridges held in place by white or red clay. There were Agwin veiled from head to toe and Menke in little more than loincloths, Sasoro in silver and Erbenno in embroidery, Mebenye and Ouwebi and Sagao and Gabborid in variations on the folded wrap, whose subtleties of color and arrangement communicate a great deal to the knowledgeable eye, but escaped my understanding entirely that first day. And, of course, there were countless Yembe, the dominant people of that land.

I had studied the Yembe language (from a reference grammar, which is an abominable teaching tool), but it had in no way prepared me for the social language before me now. Staring out at the docks, I understood, for the first time, that I had left behind the familiar commonalities of Anthiope, and crossed the oceans to a different continent.

Mr. Wilker put his hand under my elbow, which tells me I must have reeled. “It will be a little while before we can go ashore,” he said. “You might want to go below until we do. The sun can be brutal, for those not used to it.”

Once he would have phrased it as “you should go below.” Disagreements over Natalie’s presence aside, we had indeed made great strides in our relationship with one another. “The sun does not bother me,” I said absently, digging in my satchel for my sketchbook. I’d done little drawing since leaving Scirland, the pitch and roll of the ship wreaking havoc on my ability to place a precise line, but I could not pass up this opportunity to sketch the docks.

I could feel him wrestling with the answer he wanted to make to that, before finally swallowing it—for the sake of harmony, I suspect. “I will make certain our trunks are being seen to,” he said, and went away.

I had only put the broadest outlines of the scene down on paper when a popping noise sounded behind me, and then my page was in shadow. “Natalie,” I said, annoyed.

“You’ll burn otherwise,” she said, all practicality as usual. “Grandpapa warned me. About the sun, and about you—that you wouldn’t take sufficient precautions.”

“The sun here is strong, yes. It was strong in the mountains of Vystrana, too, and I had little trouble there.” I had suffered more from dryness of skin than from sunburn.

Natalie laughed. “Yes, because you were cold all the time. You covered up and spent much of your time indoors to get away from the wind. But carry on with your work; this parasol is shading us both.”

I hadn’t needed her exhortation to continue. Line by line, the people were taking shape beneath my pencil, surrounded by crates and ropes and warehouses and shops, with little boats bobbing in the water at the lower edge of the scene. Drawing at speed was something I’d practiced these past few years; the images I produced lacked the polished elegance of my youthful art, but I’d improved greatly in my ability to capture the subject accurately in a short span of time.

By the time Mr. Wilker returned, I had enough of it down that I could fill in the remainder without trouble later on. “Is it very far to our hotel?” I asked, tucking my pencil away and closing my sketchbook. Certainly there would be other sights worth seeing beyond the docks, but I hoped to manage some individual portraits. Sailors the world over are a visually fascinating lot.

“Actually,” Mr. Wilker said, “it seems our plans may have changed. See that fellow at the corner there, beneath the yellow awning? The short one, with the band of gold around his forehead? He’s a messenger from the palace, sent to watch for our arrival. The oba has invited us to be his guests.”

I blinked at him in startlement. “At the palace? Surely not.”

“It seems so,” Mr. Wilker said. “And we’re expected to come straight on. The messenger brought horses, and he says we needn’t worry about our trunks.”

No doubt the gesture was intended to be helpful, but in my travel-frayed state, it struck me as faintly sinister. “What is this messenger’s name?”

“Faj Rawango,” Mr. Wilker said, with the careful air of one who doesn’t trust his tongue not to trip over the unfamiliar syllables. He too had studied the language, but Faj Rawango was not a Yembe name. Was the man a foreigner, or did he hail from one of the other peoples that made up the nation of Bayembe?

I didn’t realize Mr. Wilker and I had both fallen into a brief silence until Natalie broke it by saying, “Well, we cannot refuse such an honour.”

“No, of course not.” I replaced my sketchbook and drew the satchel up onto my shoulder. “And I suppose there isn’t much to be gained by delaying. Come, let us go meet this Faj Rawango.”

We descended to the ship’s longboat and were taken in to shore, disembarking on the salt-stained wood of the docks near where Faj Rawango stood. He was, as Mr. Wilker had spotted, a small fellow by the standards of those around him; in fact, he was a bit shorter than I. His skin, though still dark, was lighter and more reddish in tone than many of those around him.

Lacking a better option, I greeted him in the Yembe manner, touching my heart, and received the same in return. Natalie and Mr. Wilker echoed us both. But once the formal greetings were done—a rather lengthier process among the peoples of that region than among Scirlings—Faj Rawango spoke in our own tongue. “The oba regrets putting you to the trouble of a further journey, but you will rest in more comfort in the royal palace, in Atuyem.”

“That’s very kind of him,” Mr. Wilker said. “Our arrangements are for rooms in a hotel near Point Miriam. We had hoped to perhaps gain an introduction on some future date, but had no thought of imposing on his time and generosity so soon after our arrival.”

Faj Rawango dismissed this with a wave. “It is no imposition. He has met many Scirling merchants and soldiers, but no scholars. He is very curious about your work.”

The last time a foreigner with a title had taken an interest in our work, it had not ended well. That, more than anything in the messenger’s words, put apprehension in my heart. But what could we do? As Natalie said, we could not refuse this invitation. I cursed the politicking that preceded our journey. Necessary though it had been to procure our entrance to Nsebu, it had apparently drawn rather more of the oba’s attention than I wanted.

Our horses waited beneath a striped canopy not far away, in company with enough others that I understood the place to be some kind of waiting room for equines. Ours, however, stood out from the crowd, not only for their quality, but for the grandness of their equipage, beaded and gilt. No fewer than four soldiers stood watch over this wealth, who clearly would form our escort.

I call them soldiers, but at the time I had difficulty attaching the term to them, despite the Scirling rifles they bore. To my mind, a soldier was a man in uniform. I thought of these men instead as warriors, for their garb looked nothing like the uniforms I was accustomed to—stiff wool in solid colors—being drapes of cotton tied about their waists and dyed in some intricate pattern, with leopard skins hanging down their back like cloaks. Wool, I suppose, does little to protect one against a rifle ball or a cavalry sword, but such logic did not prevent me from fearing for the men’s bare and unprotected flesh.

As I turned to mount, I saw Natalie blushing. Until that moment, it had not even occurred to me, in more than an intellectual sense, that the men were half-naked. Then, unfortunately, I could think of nothing else. My own cheeks heated, and I fumbled my rise to the saddle, catching my shoe in the hem of my divided skirts. (My self-conscious embarrassment was somewhat mitigated by seeing Mr. Wilker a bit pink in the ears himself—likely more for ladies being exposed to such a thing than for his own sake, as gentlemen see one another bare in many contexts. We had all known this would happen, the climate of the region being what it is, but knowing and experiencing were separate things.)

To cover for my loss of composure, I questioned Faj Rawango as we rode out of the dockside district and through Nsebu proper. Or rather, that was my intention; it soon devolved into a polite argument wherein each of us tried to insist upon using the other’s native tongue, with the result that he spoke to me in Scirling and I responded in Yembe. Languages have never been my métier, so I fear he had the better of me in the comparison of skill, but my experience in Vystrana had taught me that there is nothing like using a language on a regular basis to better one’s skill. I therefore persevered until Faj Rawango bowed in the face of my stubbornness and began answering me in Yembe.

We conversed on a variety of topics then, exploring as widely as my limited vocabulary and Faj Rawango’s instructions from his royal master would allow. The former was more of a restriction than the latter, but I soon discovered (through my customary curiosity and lack of discretion) that the political climate of Bayembe was not a suitable subject. The man did not chastise me for asking, but he showed a marked disinclination to speak about the movement of Ikwunde troops that had so spooked the new man at the Foreign Office, or even more generally about the expansionist ambitions of the inkosi, their ruler. Nor would he speak of the Talu, the “union” to the north that was, in truth, an empire by another name, assimilating its neighbours one by one. Clearly such matters were not for the likes of him to share with Scirling outsiders—even outsiders here for non-political purposes.

(Yes, I thought my stay in the region would be non-political. When you have finished laughing, you may proceed.)

We spoke instead of the men and women we passed, Faj Rawango giving me my first education in distinguishing one people from another, which in retrospect was at least as valuable to me as his political opinions would have been. Physical distinctions are, of course, often muddied by intermarriage, but enough patterns persist in that region to be of moderate use, and of course the apparel and ornament of each people has its variations. Nowhere, however, did I see anyone resembling Faj Rawango himself, and he deflected me when I asked. My suspicion that he was of foreign birth grew, but I did not press.

In this manner did we ride through the fortified gates of Nsebu and into the grass beyond.

These days the two places have run together into one indistinguishable city, but back then Nsebu and Atuyem were quite separate. The former had a small port district that had, up until fifty years ago, been all there was of the town. Increased trade had spurred its growth, and then the alliance between Scirland and Bayembe had seen the construction of the fort at Point Miriam, with the colony following soon after. Now Nsebu was a strangely hybrid place, creeping across the open ground toward the more aristocratic precincts of Atuyem.

These sit above Nsebu both socially and physically, on a plateau high enough to enjoy cooling winds, but near enough to the port to benefit from the trade; which is why Bundey n Mawo Nsori, the reigning oba a century before, had moved his primary residence there. Atuyem is further stratified between the lower town and the upper, which perches atop a rocky, flat-topped hill, the better to command a view of the surrounding countryside. The walls of the oba’s fortified residence rose higher still, a crown surmounting that stony head, and they shone gold in the afternoon light.

Much of that gold was metaphorical, an illusion created by the color of the soil used in building the walls and the warm glow of the sun. The highest tower within the complex, however, gleamed too brightly for mere dirt. The stories were untrue, that the oba of Bayembe lived in a palace of solid gold; but one tower, at least, had been plated in the substance.

It was a suitably impressive display of wealth—though one the oba perhaps regretted in a time of such conflict and greed. Then again, Bayembe’s gold was not what attracted interest from Satalu, Ikwunde, and Scirling alike. Iron was the prize those three lands sought to claim.

Around that central fortress spread the courtyards and compounds of his chief nobles, patriarchs of the various lineages that made up the aristocracy of Bayembe. These had, over the years, grown too numerous and extensive, crowding all others off the small hilltop, exiling the common folk to houses and shops gathered around the rocky skirts of the hill. Our little party attracted a great deal of attention as we rode through, for our escorts were clearly royal warriors, and Faj Rawango a high official; nor had Scirlings become so common here as to be unworthy of remark, as they were in Nsebu. Natalie and I drew particular commentary, Scirling ladies being very uncommon in any part of Bayembe.

I rode self-consciously, feeling the burden upon me of representing my race and my sex to these people. My clothing—travel wear that was simple to the point of tedium by Scirling standards—seemed fussy and overcomplicated here, designed for sensibilities and a climate foreign to this place. I knew my face was flushed and damp with sweat, and likely sunburnt despite the protection of my bonnet, and the gritty dust of these grasslands clung to me all over. As representatives went, I felt like a shabby one indeed.

We circled the base of the hill along what was clearly the main road, until we came to a gate built in the style of these lands: hard-pounded earth, decorated with bright tiles, and studded regularly with wooden struts that were, as I understood it, both internal supports and climbing aids for when the exterior needed repair. Here Faj Rawango conversed briefly and incomprehensibly with a guard, making it apparent just how much he had slowed and clarified his speech for my sake. Thus interviewed, we rode onward, and began our ascent of the hill at its gentlest point.

The Atuyem we traveled through now was entirely different. Instead of the clamour and crowds of the base, we passed the near-faceless walls of the lineage compounds, whose decorative tiles communicated a message beyond my skill to translate. Guards stood at the gates, and servants traversed the roadway, some of them bearing the shaded palanquins of their masters. Where the curtains were gauzy, I could glimpse dark shadows within, that sometimes stretched out gold-laden hands to twitch the fabric aside and study us directly. These stares were different from the ones before: to the nobles of the heights, we were not mere curiosities, but new variables in the political equation of their land. Whether our effect would be positive or negative had yet to be determined.

It was both a relief and a fresh source of tension to ride through the mighty gates of the oba’s own fortress, away from those measuring eyes. We dismounted in a front courtyard and were met by kneeling servants who offered up bowls of fresh, cool water with which to cleanse our faces and hands. Our escort stood at attention while we conducted our ablutions, then saluted and jogged once more out the gates.

In their place came a pair of what I guessed to be upper servants, one male and one female. “Rooms have been prepared,” our guide said. “These two will show you.”

The presence of two servants gave me a hint as to what we might expect. “Are our quarters separate?” I asked.

Faj Rawango nodded, with an impassivity I read to mean he had anticipated the question, but still thought me a simpleton for asking. “Men and women do not lodge together in the royal palace.”

I wondered what they would have done had Jacob been alive, and here with me. Were married couples given joint quarters, or did husbands have to arrange to call upon their wives? But that was hardly the sort of question I had come here to ask. “We intend to spend much of our time together,” I said instead. “Our work requires it.”

“Of course,” Faj Rawango said, all courtesy. “There are public areas.”

Where we could be watched, I supposed, for any hint of improper behaviour. I had hoped to leave that sort of thing behind in Scirland.

We suffered ourselves to be led away, Mr. Wilker in one direction, Natalie and I in another. Our new guide was an older woman, her hair faded to an iron-grey that reminded me of Scirland’s interests in this region. She led us through a honeycomb of courtyards and colonnades, until at last we climbed a set of stairs to a cool and airy room tiled in blue.

By now I was tired enough that my brain had become sulky about handling a foreign tongue, but I understood from the woman’s words that this was to be a shared residence for Natalie and myself. It was sparsely furnished by Scirling standards, with a few padded benches and stools of the kind that can be folded out of the way when not in use, and chests for our belongings. The bed was draped with gauzy curtains, the better to keep out troublesome insects while still allowing cooling breezes through. After the cramped conditions of the ship and the rigor of a long ride, it seemed to me like a small corner of heaven.

While Natalie asked after the bathing arrangement, I explored. One set of windows, covered with wooden laths hung on string, faced west, and looked out over a section of the palace that, by what I could see of the bustle therein, was a working area for servants. We had not, it seemed, been given terribly desirable quarters, however elegant the tiling.

The windows on the opposite side overlooked another of the myriad of courtyards that made up this palace. (Indeed, I was not far wrong in thinking of the place as a honeycomb; it was composed as much of open space as enclosed, and virtually everything of substance seemed to take place in the former. In a country as hot as Bayembe, fresh air is not only pleasant but necessary for survival.)

Our servant departed, and Natalie collapsed with a sigh on the bed—the benches there being far less suitable for collapsing upon than sophas and divans. “I promise I will say this only once,” she remarked, “but good Lord, the heat.”

(With all due respect to Natalie, whom I love as my own self, she lied. If I took a sip of gin every time she said that during the expedition, my liver would be foie gras.)

I gave in to temptation, sitting down on a bench and unlacing my boots. The coolness of the tiles beneath my bare feet was a blessing. “I can’t decide whether this is a good development or a bad one,” I said. “Has the oba brought us here to offer his assistance, or is he going to interfere?”

“Why would he interfere?” Natalie asked, reasonably. “I can’t see what he would gain by it, and he would risk antagonizing our fellow countrymen.”

“That might be reason enough. It would be minor antagonism at worst—I doubt the military and industrial gentlemen have much concern for our research—and so it would be a relatively safe way for the oba to show that he won’t be pushed around by Scirlings.” I scratched my fingers vigorously along my scalp. “One thing is certain; he has quite neatly separated us from most of our countrymen. Perhaps he thinks we’ll be less of a danger that way.” My fingers came away covered in sweat and grit, and I grimaced at them.

Natalie rolled over to regard me directly. “But we aren’t any kind of threat, are we?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t see how we could be.”

Later I would recall those words with a great deal of irony.

SIX

True to Faj Rawango’s words, there were public areas in which we could socialize with the opposite sex. Before we found them, however, we had to run a gauntlet of women.

The next morning (having dined alone and retired early the night before), Natalie and I sponged ourselves off, dressed in fresh clothing, and went downstairs in search of Mr. Wilker. Trying to follow what we thought was the proper path, we found ourselves in a courtyard full of ladies, all of whom fell silent at the sight of us.

We were, I own, shockingly out of place. Everyone else in the courtyard was Erigan, and dressed in patterned cotton wraps that looked a good deal more comfortable in that weather than our own stays and long-sleeved dresses. Such exotic creatures as a pair of Anthiopean women must, of course, draw attention. But there was, I felt, more to it than that: we had now entered waters not only foreign but political. We were not merely strangers; we were, as I had thought before, new variables.

It soon became apparent whose responsiblity it was to address the change in the local calculus. A woman sat on a low stool at the far end of the courtyard, watching us, and by the disposition of the people around her, she was clearly the most important in the group. Her features were of the sort Faj Rawango had identified to me as characteristically Mebenye: a low forehead and rounded jaw that gave her broad face an almost circular appearance. It was a friendlier shape than a more angular face might have been, but the set of her full mouth and the sharp regard of her eyes warned me not to read personality into physiognomy.

She gestured, and another woman approached us. Speaking in Yembe, she said, “Olori Denyu n Kpama Waleyim bids you come speak with her.”

Then I knew who had snared us. “Olori” was the title given to the oba’s lesser wives; we might translate it as “princess consort,” the position ranking below that of his principal wife or queen, who had the title ayaba. The current oba had three wives, I knew, but that was where my knowledge ended. Information on them had been hard to come by in Scirland, and what little I’d gleaned had to do with Idowi n Gemo Tagwi, the queen.

The only way to learn was to proceed. Natalie and I approached, until the olori held up one hand for us to stop, about four paces from her. She sat beneath a canopy of beaded and embroidered fabric, and her hair was braided with gold, a match for the jewelry that burdened her every limb.

I curtseyed to her as I might to the queen of Scirland, hoping either that other Anthiopean women had been here before me, or that the olori would independently recognize it as a gesture of respect. Scarcely had I risen from this, and Natalie beside me, when the woman spoke. “You are here alone?”

“No, olori,” I said, hoping I was unlikely to go wrong if I addressed her by her title. “Miss Natalie Oscott here is my companion, and we also came with a gentleman named Mr. Thomas Wilker.”

The pursing of her lips did not look impressed by this answer. “Your name. It is Isabella Camherst.”

“Yes, olori.” We must have been a topic of gossip before our arrival.

“Women of your people take the lineage name of their husband, yes? Then this man is not your husband. You came here alone.”

Too late, I understood. “I’m afraid my husband is dead.”

Her gaze flickered across my body. Looking for signals of mourning or widowhood, I supposed. “And his brother did not marry you?”

I thought of Matthew, and narrowly avoided laughing at the thought. “That is not our way, olori.” Tardily, the recollection came that Bayitists in some countries faithful to the Temple still followed such practices—often the ones who also took multiple wives—but I did not trust my command of the language to address so complicated a topic, nor was it particularly relevant. Scirlings did not do such things; that was enough.

“Mmmmm.” The olori showed no sign what she thought of this. She was, I suspected, a deeply political creature, who never showed much of anything unless it might bring her gain. I did not like her, but whether that was because her reserve hid any impulses I should fear, I could not tell.

Then she asked the question—the same question I have gotten dozens, nay, hundreds of times in my life, always with that same air of faint disbelief. “You are here for… dragons?”

“Yes.” She could be reserved all she liked; I made no effort to hide my enthusiasm. “We are scholars of dragons.” It was the closest I could come to saying “natural historian” in Yembe.

“What is there to study? They are not gods or great heroes. They are not even livestock, or beasts of war. You cannot train them to be useful. Are you hunters?”

“Gracious, no!” The words burst from me. “That is—we have hunted dragons, Mr. Wilker and I have, though I suppose it would be more precise to say he did the hunting. I only drew the body afterward. But we are not hunters as I think you mean it, olori, killing them for sport or for trophies. We seek to understand them: their nature, their behaviour.”

Ordinarily this is the thread my conversational partners pursue, the (to them) incomprehensible question of why understanding the nature and behaviour of dragons is worth so much effort, if not for the purpose of killing them. Olori Denyu n Kpama Waleyim had other things on her mind. “Draw them? Then you are an artist?”

“I suppose so,” I answered, taken aback. “I’m much more of a scholar, really, but I do draw and paint. For my work.”

For some reason, this appeared to please the olori, though I could not imagine why. She put her hands on her knees with a self-satisfied air, nodding. It seemed to be a signal that our interrogation was done: other women began to speak then, and Natalie and I passed a pleasant (if mentally taxing) half hour conversing in Yembe. We only escaped by pleading the necessity of finding Mr. Wilker.

This gained us a guide, who showed us through the royal honeycomb to a more public courtyard. We found Mr. Wilker there, beneath the shade of a spreading tree, deep in conversation with another man.

I was not sure whether I should be surprised that his companion was Anthiopean. Foreigners were not all confined to the colonial districts of Nsebu, of course, but I had not expected them to seek us out so quickly. Or had Mr. Wilker sought him out?

He did not appear to be a military man. Blond of hair and reddish of whisker, he wore loose, practical clothing made out of the fabric the Isnatsi call khaki, not a woolen uniform. His fair skin was weathered to a solid brown, much seamed with lines, though I judged him not to be above forty. He had the fit look of an athlete, and I had no idea who he was.

Mr. Wilker did not leave me long in suspense, of course. Rising from his stool, the other man a heartbeat behind him, he said, “Ah, Mrs. Camherst, Miss Oscott. I’m glad you could join us. May I introduce M. Gregoire Velloin?”

M. Velloin’s hand was solidly calloused, with thick, blunt nails. A working man’s hand, I thought. When he spoke, I was surprised to find his voice tinged with an Eiversch accent, instead of Thiessois. “Mrs. Camherst, a pleasure. Miss Oscott, very nice to meet you. There has been much gossip in advance of your arrival. You are not what I expected.”

“Oh?” I said, mildly nettled for no reason I could discern. Perhaps my audience with the olori had put me out of sorts. “What did you expect?”

“Someone older and plainer,” he answered, with bluntness that was likewise much more Eiversch than Thiessois. “I had heard you were a widow.”

Now, at least, I had reason to be nettled. “I am, sir. But my late husband’s passing has no bearing on my age or appearance.”

Rather than taking offense, he laughed. “Oh, indeed. But that is rumour, is it not? Making assumptions with no basis, just to fill the time. I am sure gossip will be more accurate, now that you are here.”

Based on my experiences thus far, I sincerely hoped I would not be there for long. I had far rather be out in the bush, pursuing dragons, than dealing with the people in Atuyem, be they Erigan or Anthiopean. “What brings you here, M. Velloin? You cannot be with any Scirling delegation, and I note your accent—and yet you affect a Thiessois title of courtesy.”

“And a Thiessois name, too. My father was of that land; he was born in Fonsmartre. You know of it? Quite near the border, yes. He emigrated in his youth, and married an Eiversch woman. But I am monsieur instead of Herr because I have made my home in Thiessin for ten years now, and it is owing to the generosity of a Thiessois patron that I am here.”

I frowned. “You have not yet answered my question, monsieur.”

“M. Velloin is a hunter,” Mr. Wilker said, intervening.

Thinking back over my words, I winced; the hostility I was showing to our Anthiopean companion held some echoes of my early behaviour toward Mr. Wilker himself. I made an effort to moderate my tone. “I see. Is it the elephants you are here for, or the leopards?”

Velloin smiled, as if our conversation had been friendly all along. “I do not discriminate, Mrs. Camherst, except to choose only the most dangerous of prey. There is no challenge, without risk. I have hunted tigers in Rematha, bears in Kaatsedu, and mammoths in Siaure. Here I will hunt the elephant and the leopard and the dragon.”

So much, I thought, for friendliness.

Natalie laid a restraining hand on my arm; she knew what the stiffening of my posture meant. It did not stop me from speaking. “The dragon. Indeed. In that case, I cannot honestly wish you luck in your endeavours. I have little fondness for sport hunting in the first place, and less in the case of dragons. You may not be aware, sir—unless you make a habit of reading scientific monographs, which I doubt—but on our Vystrani expedition—”

“You discovered mourning behaviour among Vystrani rock-wyrms.” Velloin’s mouth had compressed, though he maintained a good approximation of his amiable tone. “I do read monographs, Mrs. Camherst, where they concern the great beasts. A good hunter must know his prey.”

“They are more than prey,” I said, biting the words off. “That you should see them so, for the mere prize of teeth and claws, is a very great pity.”

Pity fell far short of what I truly meant, but Scirling politeness restrained my tongue. Now, years after the fact, I have no compunctions about telling you what I truly felt.

It is true, yes, that my companions and I have killed dragons in the course of our research, and sometimes even for the purpose of that research. But even before I developed reservations about such practices, I had an utter loathing for trophy hunting, which was (and in many places still is) considered a wonderful expression of masculine virtue. Rarely do such men hunt verminous creatures, of the sort that truly plagues the common people; if they foxhunt, it is with a fox captured for the purpose and released in a pleasant park, not the one eating the chickens of the peasant outside that park.

No, the beasts they hunt are the splendid ones, the majestic kings and queens of the wild, and they do so for no better reason than because a splendid trophy is far more glamorous than a scrubby one. The occasional hunter will test his courage by going after a hippopotamus, which is as dangerous as it is comical looking, but most prefer those with pelts or hides they can display after the fact. To kill a creature simply to decorate one’s study is repellent to me, and I cannot help but be repelled by those who engage in such activity.

And that abhorrence is redoubled when the hunter’s target is a dragon, for I, as all the world knows, am partisan to their kind.

Velloin seemed unconcerned by my disapproval. Why should he be? I could do nothing but seethe. “Teeth and claws are prizes, yes, but hardly the only ones. I have captured animals, too—even a dragon, once. You may have seen it yourself.”

“What dragon?” I asked. The question came out sharp, for a dreadful suspicion had taken shape in my mind.

“A Moulish swamp-wyrm,” he said. “Took it from near the coast; only safe place to go, really, and hardly even then. The creature was a runt, but it made its way into the menagerie at Falchester.”

He was watching me as he spoke, and I could not hide my reaction. I had indeed seen that dragon, along with two other runts, on the very day that I met my husband. Without those dragons, I might never have married Jacob, with all the consequences, both good and bad, attendant upon that decision. The thought of owing even a fraction of my happiness to a man like Velloin was infuriating.

Casually, he added, “I hope to try again, in the jungle or out in the savannah. Buyers are much harder to find for full-grown dragons—too difficult to keep them caged—but still, the challenge is the thing.”

It would be hypocritical for me to wish him luck in that endeavour. It would also, however, be hypocritical for me to condemn him, given the joy I had derived from seeing those captive dragons. In the end, I clamped my jaw shut and let others take the conversation onward.

Unfortunately, it transpired that Mr. Wilker had engaged us to dine with the bloodthirsty M. Velloin that afternoon. He was on good terms with a number of people at Point Miriam, which served not only as a defensive fortification but also as the home of Nsebu’s colonial government. Given that we were newcomers to the royal palace, unfamiliar with the rhythms of life there and (thus far) ignored by the oba who had invited us in the first place, it made all the sense in the world that we should accept Velloin’s invitation. But I did not like the idea, and regretted that I saw no acceptable way to beg off.

On the contrary, our plans rapidly expanded from a single meal to a full day in the man’s company, exploring the lower town of Atuyem before riding back down to Nsebu. As we left the royal compound, Natalie making light conversation with M. Velloin, I seized hold of Mr. Wilker’s sleeve and dragged him back, so that I might hiss my words without being overheard.

“How could you put us in the company of such a man? And with no warning? You know quite well my feelings on the matter.” I glared at M. Velloin’s broad back.

Mr. Wilker freed his sleeve from my grasp with an irritated jerk. “I did so because he can be useful to us. Or would you rather kill more dragons, for the purpose of our tests?”

We had passed under the arch of an unfamiliar gate and out into a street, whose surface was not so well maintained as the one that led us in. At Mr. Wilker’s words, I stumbled over an uneven bit of stone. We had agreed, when this expedition was first planned, that one of our tasks must be to test Rossi’s preservation process on the bones of an Erigan dragon, to determine whether it was effective only on Vystrani rock-wyrms, or for a broader selection of species. And for that purpose, indeed, we required a dead dragon.

“Then—” M. Velloin’s back had taken on an entirely different cast in my eyes. “You mean to steal his kills.”

“Once he has his trophies, there’s no reason for him to deny us the rest. We can tell him we’re trying to make plaster casts of the bones; it’s a reasonable enough excuse for us to take them.”

Plaster casts had, before the preservation method, been the only means of keeping dragon bones for study. It did not work very well—encased in plaster, the bones deteriorated more rapidly than usual—but Elia Paradino had improved the process a bit. Mr. Wilker was right; it made a very good cover.

Still, I sighed. “It will require us to be in his company. Quite apart from his hobby, I do not like the man.”

“No one is asking you to marry him, Mrs. Camherst.”

Three years had passed; my grief for Jacob was no longer an open wound. Or so I had thought. But I was tired, and vexed with M. Velloin, and above all, I was on an expedition to study dragons. Bayembe was a vastly different place from Vystrana, but the fact remained that it had been on such an expedition that Jacob died.

This time I did not stumble. I stopped entirely. Only for a moment—then I forced my legs into motion once more—but it was enough to tell Mr. Wilker he had erred. He stopped, too, and turned to face me, so that I had to halt again.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and I think it was not the heat alone that had flushed his face red. “I—I didn’t mean that as a jab. It was supposed to be facetious, but I didn’t think before I said it. Please, forgive me.”

I wondered, irrelevantly, how long our relative harmony would have to last before I stopped reflecting on the change from our early interactions. But for that harmony to last, I had to do my part, which did not consist of standing in the middle of a street reflecting on such things, while Mr. Wilker’s apology hung in the air. “Forgiven,” I said. “I did not take it as an insult; it simply—well. You understand.”

We had, of course, attracted the attention of the other two, who had paused in the street up ahead. “Is everything all right?” M. Velloin called.

“Yes, quite,” I called back, and offered Mr. Wilker a reassuring smile before going to join the others.

Dinner at Point Miriam was oddly disorienting. The heat and scent of the air were inescapably Erigan, but the house in which we dined had been built according to the standards of my people. The table was laid as if it stood in some lady’s country house, and beforehand we enjoyed hors d’œuvre in a drawing room that might have been a small piece of Scirland transplanted onto foreign soil. The effect might have been intended to reassure, but it made for a sweltering evening; our architecture is not suited to the climate.

The composition of the group was quite as unbalanced as Lord Hilford’s snare-setting meal had been. There were only three ladies in attendance: myself, Natalie, and a married woman from Uaine named Erynn Anne Kerwin, who was there with her husband.

“Such a relief it is to have other women here,” she said upon our introduction. Her accent was much like Mr. Wilker’s, but stronger. Uaine, lying as it does to the north of Niddey, is the most isolated of the large Scirling Isles; it is isolated even now, and was more so then.

“I take it you don’t find much company among the Yembe,” I said, which was perhaps not the most politic response.

Mrs. Kerwin did not take offense. “Oh, I spend a mort of time with them—but that’s work, not leisure.”

Despite my having come to Eriga for work of my own, I had assumed Mrs. Kerwin was here as an adjunct to her husband, whose profession I had not yet determined. Embarrassment leashed my tongue, and so it fell to Natalie to say, “What work is it that you do?”

“We’re sheluhim,” Mrs. Kerwin said.

Embarrassment had put a leash on my tongue; startlement took it off again. “What—do you mean to say that you’re proselytizing to the Yembe?”

“That is precisely what we’re doing,” Mrs. Kerwin said. If her warm smile had cooled somewhat, I could not blame her. “We have brought the sacred fire of the Temple to this land, and will carry it to all peoples. Already a number of men and women here have chosen to become the Chosen of the Lord, following His laws. Sure I am that number will only grow.”

It was unfair of me to be so startled. Sheluhim have been traveling all over the world since men invented ships safe enough not to drown their passengers in the ocean; it was only that I had never encountered any myself. There were a few Bayitist sheluhim in Scirland, trying in vain to convert Magisterials back to the old ways, but the proselytizers of both major sects devoted the bulk of their efforts to lands where Segulism held no sway in any form.

Mrs. Kerwin was almost certainly a Temple-worshipper herself, being from Uaine. The Magisterial reforms in Scirland never penetrated that island very deeply. I had dealt with her co-religionists in Vystrana, but theirs was a rural theology, not the sort that sought to convert others to its way. And no Magisterial sheluhim had yet taken it into their heads to convert the Vystrani.

This, however, was a land of heathens, and with the Scirling presence, prime territory for such efforts. I should have expected to find her kind here.

“Erigans worship their ancestors, do they not?” Natalie asked. She and I had both done a certain amount of reading during the preparation for this expedition, but very little of it had been devoted to religion.

“Together with idols of nature, yes,” Mrs. Kerwin said primly. “They are entirely lacking in scriptures of any sort, and of course what few of the laws they follow, they follow by accident.”

Had I known more about Erigan religion at the time, I would have pointed out to her that what they lacked were scriptures of our sort. At the time, however, I was both ignorant of such matters and distracted by a different thought. “Have you gone down into the swamp at all?”

Mrs. Kerwin looked horrified. “You mean into Mouleen? Certainly not. We wouldn’t survive two days there. Wild beasts, fevers, not to mention the natives—”

“I take it they don’t welcome visitors?”

“They have the Ikwunde on one side and the Yembe on the other.” M. Velloin had overheard our conversation. “And the Satalu lurking in the wings, hoping to snatch up Bayembe for themselves—though to what extent the Moulish are aware of that, who can say? They trade occasionally with the peasants along their borders, forest ivory for food, that sort of thing. But those who go deeper into the swamp never return.”

I wanted to shift away from Velloin, but he was clearly somewhat informed about the region, and I could not pass up the chance to ask. “There are stories about the Moulish, that say they worship dragons as the Draconeans once did.”

We were gathering quite the audience now: not only Mr. Wilker, but Sir Adam Tarwin-Bannithot (who was then the governor of the Nsebu colony) and a man whose sober dress and Uaine accent marked him as Mr. Kerwin. The latter said to me, “I take it you’ve read the work of Yves de Maucheret.”

By M. Velloin’s expression, so had he. “Yes,” I said, “though he was writing two hundred years ago, and not everything he put to paper has proved to be true. Still, it’s enough to intrigue the mind, isn’t it? Dragons rarely tolerate human company well, and Moulish swamp-wyrms are not known to be the most approachable of breeds. If the Moulish do indeed worship them, do they do so from afar? Or are they able to partially tame them, as the Draconeans are said to have done?”

“They are nothing like the Draconeans,” Mr. Kerwin said, dismissing the notion with a wave of his hand. “That ancient civilization—well, it was a civilization. They built great temples, developed art, administered territory across multiple continents. The Moulish bang on drums and run about naked. They may worship dragons, but there is no reason to suppose their manner of doing so bears any resemblance to Draconean religion.”

“And yet, it would be closer to Draconean religion than any other example we have before us today,” I said. “Do not ethnologists use modern evidence to analogize to the past? We might learn a great deal from the Moulish, regardless of their musical traditions and sartorial habits.”

I spoke with the assurance of a young woman who thought her experience with natural history and ad hoc education in other subjects more than qualified her to hold forth on topics she knew nothing about at all. The truth is that any such comparison is far more complicated and doubtful than I presented it that evening; but it is also true that no one in my audience knew any more about it than I did, and most of them knew less. My assertion was therefore allowed to stand unchallenged.

For those who wonder why I showed such interest in the Draconeans, whose works I dismissed in the previous volume of my memoirs, do not think this meant I had undergone any great change of heart in the intervening years. I still at that time cared little for their ruined temples and stylized art; my interest was in living things, not dead civilizations. But as I said to Mr. Kerwin, the Draconeans were said to have tamed dragons. That was of great interest to me indeed, and so if Moulish religion was able to shed any light on the matter, then it, too, fell within the sphere of my attention.

Of course, there was the minor problem of the Green Hell being one of the deadliest regions on earth. But my interest was, that evening, still academic; my purpose in coming to Bayembe was to study the dragons of their arid plains. Moulish swamp-wyrms were a minor note—in much the same way that a fisherman’s lure is a minor note in the world of a fish.

Sir Adam said, “I wouldn’t waste much time or thought on the Moulish, if I were you. Whatever you might learn regarding dragons cannot possibly be worth the risk, and as for learning anything about humans—feh. That swamp is a backwater, in every sense of the word.”

“A backwater which is presently protecting this country, is it not?” I said.

He shrugged. “For now.”

A brief silence fell, broken a moment later by Sir Adam’s uncomfortable cough and too-loud amendment. “Besides, you won’t get into the swamp, not without the oba’s permission. And he won’t give it.”

There is nothing in the world so enticing as that which you have been told you may not have. “Whyever not?” I asked. “Or rather, why should I need his leave in the first place? Mouleen is an independent state, is it not?”

Mr. Kerwin muttered something about not dignifying that festering pit with the name of “state,” but my attention was on Sir Adam. He said, “At times like these, with the Ikwunde interfering with our work at the rivers, we must keep a careful eye on our borders.”

Which was not much of an answer, but it was all that I could get from him, in the wake of that momentary lapse. Sir Adam had taken a bit too enthusiastically to the prescribed regimen of gin and tonic, with which we all held the malarial fevers at bay, and had said something he should not. Why would the Green Hell cease to protect Bayembe? Were the Moulish looking to ally themselves with the Ikwunde on the other side?

I did not know, but Sir Adam’s slip had made me wary. I wanted only to study dragons, but first I had to get past the humans, and I feared they might be a greater danger to me than all the fevers of the tropics combined.

SEVEN

I must warn my male readers that I am about to address a topic which may be deeply discomfiting to them, taboo as it is for their sex.

When I awoke a few mornings later, I found my bedding stained with traces of blood. I clicked my tongue in annoyance; caught up in our affairs, I had not monitored the days as closely as I should, and my menses have never been the most reliable besides. But this was, I thought, only a minor irritation. I wet a cloth, washed myself clean, changed into a fresh chemise, and called for a servant.

When she came, I gestured at the stained bedding, washcloth, and chemise, indicating that she should take them away to be laundered. “And I will need rags,” I said—as yet blissfully unaware that in many parts of the world, rags are not employed, but other, less comfortable alternatives.

(Indeed, for those young ladies who wish to follow in my footsteps, I must warn you that this inconvenient fact of our sex is one of the most vexatious aspects of being a lady adventurer. Unless you contrive to suppress your courses through pregnancy—which, of course, imposes its own limitations—or through strenuous exercise and privation, you will have to handle this necessity in many circumstances that are far from ideal. Including some, I fear, where the smell of fresh blood is a positive danger.)

Returning to the moment at hand: the serving girl’s eyes widened at the sight of the stains, and she darted out of the room almost before I had finished speaking. So rapidly, in fact, that she left the laundry behind. I sighed, wondering if the fault was with my imperfect command of the language, or whether she—being prepubescent—was the sort of silly nit who bolted at the sight of blood. Well, I thought, if it came to that, I could sacrifice the rest of the stained chemise for rags.

The girl returned with equal speed, though, this time accompanied by a much older woman, who went to gather up the bedding and other articles. The girl herself approached me and draped an undyed robe over a bench, indicating shyly that I should wear it.

I saw no rags. “Thank you,” I said, “but I have my own clothing; I only need something to stanch the bleeding.”

The older woman—who was, by the look of her, well past the age of bearing herself—said, “Put it on; Lebuya will take you to the agban.”

This was not a word I had encountered, either in my studies or my time there. “Agban?” I repeated.

She indicated the soiled items. “Until you are clean.”

My first thought was that she meant a bath. But I knew the word for “bath”—that was where Natalie had gone, while I worked on rousing myself to wakefulness—and had she meant such a thing, would she not have said “where you can wash yourself”? Suspicious, I asked, “How long will that be?”

By her reaction, I might have been as young and ignorant as Lebuya, needing an older female relative to explain the basic matters of womanhood to me. “Seven days.”

I recoiled. She did not mean blood on my skin; she meant impurity. It was not a topic that concerned us much in the relaxed Magisterial traditions of Scirland, and although I had encountered traces of it in the Temple-worshipping environs of Vystrana, many of the finer points of religious doctrine there had been whittled down to accommodate local practicality. The women of Drustanev could not afford to seclude themselves for the duration of their “impurity.”

But I had not expected to find evidence of the Kerwins’ success here in the oba’s own palace. Startled, I said, “I didn’t realize you were Bayitist.”

She frowned at me. “What is Bayitist? You are unclean; you cannot stay out here, where you will pollute others. Go with Lebuya. She will show you.”

No, this was not the work of the sheluhim; it had the sound of a standard practice, and surely I would have heard if the entire ruling class of Bayembe had converted to Segulism. But I could no more afford to lose a week of my life than the women of Drustanev could. (Or at least I was not willing to; that, I think, is the more accurate statement, though it benefits from hindsight.) I planted my hands on my hips, drew myself up like a proper Scirling lady—taking Judith and my mother as models—and said, “Nonsense. I have gone about in this condition once a month for my entire adult life, and never polluted anyone.”

The old woman made a gesture I thought was probably a ward against evil and said, “Then the oba will throw you into the Green Hell—if he does not have you executed for witchcraft.” She picked up her bundle and left.

My certainty that the oba would do no such thing faded when I looked at Lebuya, who would not meet my eyes. She had avoided them, as she avoided touching me, placing the robe on a bench rather than handing it to me directly. She had brought an old woman to take away the stained fabric—someone past her own bearing days. The implications I saw there might be my own invention, but I did not doubt that some manner of significance clung to those actions. Whether the oba punished me or not, I would not be able to carry on my work as usual; it would be all around the palace before lunchtime that I was unclean, polluting everything around me. The consequences would damage us far more than a week of enforced idleness would.

Had we stayed at our hotel down in Nsebu, or better still among the Scirlings at Point Miriam, I might have avoided this difficulty. Since I had yet to see any particular benefit from being housed in the royal palace instead, it was with no little annoyance that I picked up the robe and put it on. The thing was shapeless cotton, draping to the floor, the sleeves long enough to cover my hands; there was even a hood for me to draw up over my impure face. Lebuya produced a pair of rough sandals and set them on the floor for me to don. I wondered if someone would come into the room after I was gone to purify it, and thought they probably would.

Natalie chose that moment to return, saving me the confrontation of insisting that, impure or not, I would go nowhere until I spoke with her. Her eyebrows rose at my explanation, and when I was done, she sighed. “Unless there’s an exemption for unmarried women—which I doubt—then I’ll be taking your place in this agban of theirs just as you’re ready to leave. How can we be expected to get any work done, if one or the other of us is locked away two weeks out of every four?”

It would not be that much time—as I said before, my courses have never been fully regular—but I brooded upon Natalie’s question as I followed Lebuya out. We might escape the restriction by going into the bush for an extended period of time; even then, though, we would need porters to assist us, and what if they rebelled against serving impure women? Perhaps we could hire foreigners from the docks. But they would not know the bush as the locals did, and lack of experience on that front might prove very dangerous.

With the hood blocking the edges of my vision, I could not see our path clearly, but it was not one I had traced before. We left the women’s wing by what I suspected was a back entrance, passed through a low wall—not leaving the palace, but entering a new region of it—and came at last to a modest building that seemed almost like an ordinary house.

I did not need Lebuya’s pointing arm to tell me where I was to go. This, obviously, was the agban: the prison for menstruating women. And I was to remain here for seven days? I should have brought my notebooks—presuming, of course, that they would not be irredeemably contaminated by such use.

Sighing, I muttered a thank-you to Lebuya that was not very heartfelt, and went inside.

The interior was pleasant and not at all prisonlike. It was, after all, where palace women spent one week out of every four; I suspect servants had their own agban elsewhere, as neither Natalie nor I ever saw one there. The front room had benches and hooks along the walls, one of which held a robe like mine, with the sandals beneath. I took this as a sign that I could discard my own. Thus freed, I ventured onward to a small courtyard, where a woman I judged to be around my age lay on a carpet beneath a tree, reading a book.

She looked up as I entered and smiled, showing only a little surprise. “I have not seen you before. You must be one of the new guests, those who came to study dragons.”

“Isabella Camherst,” I said. “I’m afraid you have the advantage of me.”

The woman rose, laying her book aside, and touched her heart in respect. “Galinke n Oforiro Dara. I’m glad you came. It’s pleasant to have time to read, but after a day or two I find myself eager for company.”

“We’re allowed to have things with us, then?” I said, gesturing at her book. “I was afraid they would burn my notes if I brought them here.”

Galinke laughed. “No, no. We would go out of our minds if we couldn’t have distraction! But why would you work, when you could relax?”

I joined her under the tree and discovered that, to Yembe women, and those of other Erigan peoples who engaged in similar practices, seclusion was not an exile, but more in the nature of a holiday. The other three weeks out of the month, they were obligated to work at various tasks—not the backbreaking labor of the peasant in the field, certainly, but weaving, child rearing, and other duties suitable to highborn women. When their impurity sent them to the agban, they could enjoy complete leisure. (They could also enjoy a respite from their husbands, which for some of them was even more valuable.)

Galinke herself was not married. “For now,” she said with a sigh. “My brother would make a match for me, but he has to wait, in case it ends up being necessary for me to wed the mansa.”

“The mansa?” I repeated, sure I had misunderstood the Yembe sentence. That was the title given to the Talu leader.

She nodded. “He has one wife from each of his subject peoples—as our ancestors had to do, when Bayembe was young. Even now, my brother has a Mebenye wife and a Sagao one, to keep the different peoples happy.”

Had she been Scirling, I never would have blundered in such fashion. We trace descent through the paternal line, and pass on family names in the same manner; the Satalu do likewise, as do societies in many parts of the world. But the Yembe and the other peoples of their country are matrilineal: individuals belong to their mother’s lineage, not their father’s, and inheritance therefore passes from a man to his sister’s son.

Galinke’s lineage name was Oforiro Dara, which is to say she came from the Oforiro branch of the Dara line, as her mother had before her. Her mother, clearly, had been a lesser wife of the man who wed the mother of the current oba of Bayembe—whose lineage was Rumeme Gbori—and Galinke herself was the oba’s half sister.

(I say “clearly” as if understanding came to me in an elegant flash. It didn’t; I sat openmouthed for a solid minute while my brain struggled to bend itself around a system of kinship and inheritance utterly foreign to my way of thinking.)

“But—” I said, still working through the implications. “If you wed the mansa, would that not mean your children would have a claim on Bayembe?” The feud between Talu and Bayembe was an old one, as old and as bitter as that between Thiessin and Eiverheim, and it had only grown worse in recent decades. Anthiopean influence to the north had encouraged several Erigan kingdoms to band together against them, though their Union had swiftly transformed into something much more like an empire, with the others in a client-state role to the mansa of Talu.

Over time the Union had begun to intimidate their neighbours into joining them: a less violent approach to conquest than the Ikwunde used, but still not very appealing. Getting a claim on the rule of Bayembe would be exactly the sort of tactic the mansa might use, and I did not think the oba would be so foolish as to allow it.

“How could he have a claim?” Galinke asked, politely baffled at the wrongheadedness of my question. “I’m not Rumeme Gbori. Only our sister Nsami’s sons can inherit.”

Nsami, presumably, being the oba’s full sister. Give me dragons any day; I understand their ways far better than those of my fellow human beings. We make our world much too complicated.

“I thought your brother detested the mansa,” I said, then winced. “Forgive me. This is turning into gossip, and I have no business talking of such things.”

Galinke waved my apology away. “What else does anyone in this place talk about, other than politics? You are right. But a wise ruler must be prepared to do what is necessary for the well-being of his people. Even if that means giving his sister to a man he detests.”

Or inviting foreign soldiers to come defend his land—but I kept a better leash on my tongue this time, and did not say it. Still, the entire point of Bayembe’s alliance with Scirland was to make sure this land would not have to give in to Talu pressure, just to defend themselves against the Ikwunde. If the oba was keeping Galinke in reserve, it suggested that he was less than entirely confident in our aid… or less than entirely pleased with it.

Galinke seemed matter-of-fact about the possibility of marrying the enemy, which is more than I could have managed in her place. I said as much to her, and she shrugged, looking philosophical. “Such trades are common. Not with the Satalu, perhaps, but others, to join one lineage to another. I have always known my marriage would be arranged.”

I squelched the urge to tell her I had helped Natalie flee Scirland, that she might avoid any marriage at all. “I hope the good efforts of our soldiers can at least spare you that particular fate,” I said. “I have heard rumours that the Ikwunde are moving their forces toward the rivers, which means we may have a chance to prove our use quite soon.”

The words were as much a test as conversation, and I think Galinke knew it. Her full mouth curved in a hint of a smile. “The Ikwunde can never stay still for long,” she said. “No sooner do they digest one meal than they go in search of another.”

So she, unlike Faj Rawango, was permitted to discuss politics with me. I pressed the advantage. “You are fortunate to have Mouleen defending most of your southern border. I am told that anyone who tries to venture beyond the edge of the swamp is never seen again. Is that why the oba restricts travel there? To protect his people from the Moulish?”

Galinke laughed. “Few people wish to go there in the first place, except for hunters, sometimes. But my brother must keep a close eye on his borders in these troubled times, until we can build better defenses for them.”

The only defense we had built thus far was Point Miriam. Were we planning another, or more than one, for points along the border? I had no chance to ask her; a servant entered then with food, and in the course of dealing with that, Galinke turned the conversation so deftly that I did not even notice until hours later.

I came to know her rather well over the four days we were in the agban together, and liked what I saw. Although we never returned to the specific matter of the Ikwunde, I learned a great deal about Bayembe politics from our conversations. This I absorbed more out of duty than anything else, for while Galinke seemed to view such things as a puzzle, an engaging challenge for her intellect, I could not bring myself to enjoy them in the same way. I had not been raised to such a life, and was grateful indeed for my freedom.

In retrospect, I wonder about those conversations. Galinke had not been forbidden to discuss politics; had she been instructed to do so? Certainly my time with her changed my view of the alliance between Scirland and Bayembe, which until that point had largely been shaped by the news-sheets of Falchester. Those sheets spoke glowingly of economic opportunity, and disapprovingly of the rapacious behaviour of Bayembe’s neighbours, from which we were nobly protecting them.

This was not inaccurate, but it lacked nuance. From Galinke, I began to understand the unequal nature of the “alliance”—which is why I scar it with quotation marks—and the extent to which that economic opportunity favored Scirland. She spoke obliquely, of course; at no point did she tell me outright that her half brother resented the dependent condition of Bayembe, which he had inherited from his predecessor, the last oba of the previous royal lineage (and a less than competent ruler). Nor did she spill details of our government’s plans, though I think she knew them. She did not even say that the aggressive movements of the Ikwunde and the Talu Union were driven by a desire to build strength against Anthiopean influence; that, I think, is something she did not think of consciously, as both nations were the enemy to her, and she was uninclined to view their behaviour in a tolerant light. Galinke merely talked, in the delicate and subtle manner of a well-trained courtier, and the ship of my thinking heeled slowly over to a new course.

Despite all the trouble that came of it, I thank her for that work, whether it was carried out on her brother’s orders or not. Had she not laid those foundations in my mind, I might have failed to grasp the significance of later hints, and the course of history might have been very different.

After Galinke departed, I had two days in which I shared the agban with three women I did not know, with whom I made polite but uninteresting conversation, and otherwise devoted myself to my work. The leisure time might have been pleasant if I had been tremendously busy prior to my seclusion, but by the time Natalie arrived on my final day, I was more than ready to get back to my affairs.

“Mr. Wilker was less than pleased to hear where you’d gone,” she said with a wry smile. “And even less pleased when he realized this would be a regular occurrence.”

She had arrived at lunchtime, and joined me for the plain but nourishing food that in Bayembe was considered suitable for impure women: eggs and fufu (a doughy mass made from yams). “I imagine Mr. Wilker was unhappy to be discussing the subject at all,” I said; he was unmarried, and so had never yet been forced by domestic necessity to consider that aspect of women’s lives. “I’ll see him straightaway tomorrow. What has happened, while I languished in here?”

“In terms of work, very little. I have met more of the palace ladies, and Mr. Wilker has spent much of his time at Point Miriam, talking to the Royal Engineers stationed here. They’ve been surveying the countryside, which may be of use in helping us chase dragons—though of course that is not why they’re doing it. They are planning a railway, and a dam in the west, too, if the Ikwunde can be pushed back. Did you know that someone has developed a turbine which can use water to generate power? Like a waterwheel, but far more efficient.”

I laughed. “Which one of you has been speaking to the engineers?”

Natalie ducked her head in sheepish acknowledgment. “I have more to converse about with them than with the palace ladies.”

Given that the Royal Engineers are the unit responsible for building and/or destroying anything the army needs or wishes removed, I doubted they were accustomed to young women quizzing them on their work. “What of M. Velloin?” I asked. “Is he still in Atuyem?”

“Yes, though he intends to go out hunting soon.”

This was precisely what I wanted to hear. The next morning I presented myself to the old priestess who oversaw the agban; she purified me by means of prayer and rolling an unbroken egg down my arms and legs and back, and then I was on my way. (No, I do not know the significance of the egg, except that it is a symbol of fertility, and therefore considered to be good luck.)

Mr. Wilker was not in the palace. I sought him down in the lower town, where some kind of festival was under way, with a boisterous parade wending through the narrow streets. Many of the people I attempted to question were drunk; I could discern only that the festival was religious in nature, as evidenced by the finely carved masks worn by the dancers at the heart of the parade. After days of quiet in the agban, the noise and movement were jarring; I was on the point of abandoning my search when I finally saw a handful of Scirling soldiers at the side of the road, and Mr. Wilker among them.

“There you are,” he said when I arrived. “It’s going to be damned inconvenient, Mrs. Camherst—pardon my language—if you and Miss Oscott must be locked away like this.”

“I will see if anything can be done,” I said. “In the meantime—is there any chance we could join M. Velloin’s hunting party?”

“If we can persuade him to wait until Miss Oscott is free, then yes. Or if we are willing to leave her behind.”

I was not willing to leave Natalie, but Velloin agreed to postpone his departure, and so we made plans to join him, combining our research with his hunt for trophies. Credit where credit is due; Mr. Wilker was right in suggesting it. Indeed, without M. Velloin to assist, we might have had more difficulty in beginning our work.

EIGHT

We made quite a cavalcade as we headed out into the grasslands the following week. In addition to the usual necessities of food, water, tents, and so on, plus the guns and ammunition for the hunters, our scientific expedition, which had attached itself to M. Velloin’s group like a barnacle, carried a great deal of equipment. There were no fewer than four pack mules devoted to our notebooks, scalpels, measuring devices, plaster, tubs, and so on, along with a tent to do all the work in—not to mention, of course, the chemicals for preserving bone, which was our true purpose in coming.

It was by then the first week of Gelis—a fact which I consistently forgot, despite my assiduous care in recording the date in my journal every day. It did not feel like Gelis. The Days of Light were drawing near; the weather, my instincts insisted, should have been settling into the kind of damp, aching cold that made one glad even for a candle’s flame. Instead it was as hot as a Scirling summer day, with not a cloud in the sky. Bayembe was firmly in the grip of its long dry season; the intermittent wind kicked up veils of dust from the hard ground, and the stiff grasses rattled as our horses and mules moved through them.

I have not been to Bayembe in nearly twenty years, but my memory of it remains as fresh as yesterday. Not the factual details, but the experience of the place: the enormous quality the sky seemed to take on, and the vast stretches of dry grass rustling in the breeze. Scattered umbrella thorns spread their branches like flat clouds above the ground; I caught occasional movement in the grass that told me small creatures had taken advantage of the shade beneath.

I had put on a bonnet for the ride, of course. My shipboard argument with Natalie aside, I knew better than to ride all day in the tropical sun with a bare head. But compared with the damp chill that had greeted me in Vystrana, this warmth seemed a friendly welcome, a promise of good things to come. I did not yet realize how brutal the heat would become—though even then, I would choose that heat above an equal or even lesser degree of chill. The evidence of natural history points to a tropical origin for our species, and I believe it to be true.

M. Velloin rode with a rifle tucked into one arm, its barrel lying across the pommel of his saddle. I nudged my mare up to join him and asked, “Do you expect to have need of that, this close to Atuyem? I would think there are too many people about for your sort of game to show their heads.”

He laughed easily, teeth flashing predatorily in his tanned face. “One never knows, Mrs. Camherst. Besides, in these troubled times, it isn’t only beasts we need to watch for.”

“The Ikwunde?” I asked, skeptical. “I have heard they are threatening, but even if they overran our troops at the rivers, we would know of it long before they got this far.”

“Single men can be as dangerous as armies, Mrs. Camherst, in the right place. But no, the truth is only that I like to keep my hand in. There are small beasts about that make good target practice—and good eating, too, some of them.”

He was not wrong about the small beasts. I had field glasses with me, and put them to frequent use as we rode; it allowed me to see the creatures keeping a wary distance from our noisy herd. Low disturbances in the grass were occasionally visible as rock hyraxes, while larger ones were the rangy, rust-furred wild dogs endemic to the area. A cloud of dust marked the passage of a herd of zebra. An odd lump on a distant tree proved, upon examination, to be the recumbent body of a leopard, draped elegantly along a branch with its tail curving below. “Keep your distance,” I murmured under my breath, as much for the leopard’s safety as our own.

I had spoken in Scirling, and did not expect to have an audience. But from behind me, a voice said in Yembe, “I would like to learn your language.”

Turning in my saddle, I found my interlocutor was a tall, well-made young man, one of the Yembe who had joined us for this excursion. Not a porter; the richness of the cloth wrapped about his hips and the gold braided into his hair made his status clear. He rode with easy grace, and his horse was, if I did not miss my guess, an Akhian stallion of breeding as good as his own.

“I would be a poor teacher, my lord,” I said, defaulting, in the absence of his name, to a generically polite address. “I have struggled three years to acquire any ability in your language. Such things do not come easily to me, I fear.”

He smiled broadly and touched his hand to his heart. “I am Okweme.”

“Of what lineage?” I inquired. “If it is not impolite to ask.”

“It is not impolite. I belong to the Kpama Waleyim.”

My mare danced beneath me at my involuntary start of surprise. After meeting Galinke, I had vowed to learn more about the various lineages, and now that vow was bearing fruit. “You are the olori’s son!”

“I am,” he said, still smiling. “But here, in the bush, I am only Okweme.”

Only a prince, as we would consider such things. A prince, and the son of the woman who had examined me on my first day in Atuyem as if I were a beetle under a magnifying glass.

But he had nothing of his mother’s calculating manner. Okweme was a font of information about the savannah and its creatures, which he did not hesitate to share with me as we rode. His familiarity came from long experience as a hunter, but he did not put me off as Velloin had, for he seemed little concerned with the glory of his trophies. Or perhaps it was merely that he was a far more personable man.

Okweme took our plain supper with us when we stopped for the night, and traded delicate corrections to our Yembe grammar for some basic instruction in Scirling. Afterward, while Natalie and I helped one another dress for bed inside our tent, I said, “He seems a friendly sort. I’m surprised he’s taken an interest in us, though. Aren’t we far beneath his station?” Galinke had talked to me, but that was because we were locked in the agban together.

Natalie laughed. “An interest in us? I only saw interest in one person.” She poked me in the side.

“Me?” I said, twisting to face her. “What? Why?”

“Oh, let me think,” she said, turning so I could undo her buttons. “A handsome young man, an available young woman…”

Her description took me aback. I was not accustomed to thinking of myself as young, for all that I was barely twenty-three. I had been married; I was a widow, and had a son. In the eyes of society, all those things put me firmly into the category of “mature,” and not the sort of woman with whom handsome young princes would trouble to flirt.

But what were Yembe views of widows and their marriageability? It was not something I had thought to research before coming, and now I felt the lack most acutely.

Fortunately, I soon had other things to occupy my attention. The following day we moved into a region too arid for agriculture, and here flourished the kind of game that attracted M. Velloin’s eye.

In terrain of that sort—an arid mosaic of grassland and savannah, which is a kind of loose woodland—watering holes are everything. Their number is few, and a wide array of creatures must come there to drink; but the predators know this, and lie in wait for their prey. The approach to a watering hole is therefore perilous, and the beasts remain in a state of heightened alertness while there.

M. Velloin had not come this way before, but Okweme and the other Yembe with us knew the area well. They directed our group to a stony hillock, lesser cousin to the one upon which Atuyem stood. It lay downwind from the watering hole, which was as great a benefit as its elevation; if we did not make very noisy spectacles of ourselves, we could observe the area at our leisure, and make plans for further work.

I dismounted on the lee side of the hillock and immediately began scrambling up its slope. M. Velloin would be not far behind me, I was sure, and I wanted the chance to see this for myself, without his presence spoiling the moment. Nearing the top, I dropped into the grass and (silently cursing the long skirt of my dress) crawled the remainder of the way, until at last I could see what we had come for.

My gaze went first to the elephants. They were simply too large to overlook. A group of six had come to the far side of the watering hole; the rest of their herd stood a little more distant, perhaps keeping guard. The largest of those at the pond’s edge, whom I judged to be an old cow, was showering a juvenile with water while he splashed in the shallows. For all that I am partisan to creatures with wings, a delighted smile spread across my face at the sight. The playfulness of the pair was undeniable, and charming. (I may also say that their large, flapping ears would very nearly serve as wings—an exaggeration, but one that crossed my mind whenever I saw the beasts.)

The watering hole itself was a kidney-shaped pond, muddy and reflective under the bright sun. It was, I later learned, fed by a tiny spring, which kept it present year-round; others wither to a tiny puddle or vanish entirely during the dry season. Even with the spring, I could see the hard-packed dirt where the waterline had receded; it would withdraw farther still before the rains came again.

A herd of gazelles had arrayed themselves not far from the elephants, presumably seeing their fellow herbivores as no threat, despite their great size (against which the gazelles seemed positively tiny). Frogs spotted the water’s edge like brown, restless lumps, and flies and other insects made a haze a little distance above. Several pairs of Erigan geese floated near the middle of the pond, muttering amongst themselves and occasionally setting up a great ruckus with their wings, the shading of whose red and grey feathers at rest resembled nothing so much as the scaled back of a Hakkoto carp.

Out of both wariness and eagerness, I looked about for predators, but saw none. Lions, of course, prefer to hunt at dusk and at night; leopards and hyenas are the same. Cheetahs will hunt during the day, but they are less common in that region—their niche being occupied by a Certain Other Beast.

My eye, I am not ashamed to admit, was simply inadequate to the task.

Their business at the watering hole done, the gazelles were loping away, their delicate legs flickering through the grass. Then something else flickered, too, that was most decidedly not a gazelle.

It came low and fast through the cover, at an angle to the herd that caused them to startle and veer in their course. Then, with a surge that caused my heart to give a great leap, it sprang into the air: an Erigan savannah snake.

The dragon’s wings seemed to go on forever. Long and narrow, they are incapable of sustained flight, but they work excellently well for the species’ chosen method of hunting. On the ground, with their wings folded in tight to their bodies, savannah snakes can very nearly equal the speed of a cheetah. Once they come within range, though, they leap upward and spread their wings, gliding above the panicked herd until a suitable target presents itself. Then they swoop down, long necks extended, and bite down hard upon the spine of their prey. If the dragon has gauged his attack well, he retains enough momentum to drag the beast sideways out of the main herd, whereupon the rest thunder off and he may enjoy his meal in peace.

So it was on that occasion. The entire incident was over with shocking speed: a few seconds of the dragon in gliding flight, followed by a bellow and a confusion in the rushing mass of gazelles. Then they were gone, leaving their dead brother or sister behind.

In repose, the savannah snake is not the most prepossessing of dragons. Compared with the Vystrani rock-wyrms I had known before, it seems almost laughably small; the largest specimen on record today weighs ninety-eight kilograms. Its scales are dull, shading to green during the rainy season and dun in the dry, and the elongated structure of its body, along with the contrast between its deep chest and narrow waist, conspire to give it the appearance of a serpent that has recently swallowed a very large meal. But its wings are a glory: slender and maneuverable, their translucent membrane glowing gold when the sun shines through them. (A sight most commonly available to their prey, who do not much appreciate the aesthetics. But I once had the pleasure of seeing a savannah snake airing its wings after being tumbled into water.)

“Ah, she’s a beauty.”

I had a smile on my face and words of agreement on my lips before I realized the remark had come from M. Velloin. At some point—I did not know when—he had crawled up to join me on the hilltop. He had brought field glasses, and raised them to better study the feasting dragon. Beneath that, his expression was not one of wonder, but rather of calculation, and I could guess what equations were in his mind.

On the other hand, I had come here to take advantage of the fruits of his hunt, and could hardly fault him for doing that job. I merely disliked him praising the beauty of the savannah snake with such a purpose in mind.

“They are solitary hunters, yes?” I asked, determined to make use of his knowledge.

“The females are, like that one there. Males will hunt together sometimes, in pairs or trios, occasionally quartets. Especially if they’re brothers. If you hunt males, you must be certain how many there are, or that last one will be on your head while you’re taking aim at the others.”

(I must confess my imagination presented me with a picture of M. Velloin shrieking and running about with a dragon attached to his scalp. The reality, of course, would have been bloody and not at all amusing, but the image entertained me.)

I tugged my hat forward to better shade my eyes. “How do you hunt them? With a rifle, I presume—but do you chase them, or lie in wait?”

M. Velloin snorted. “Good luck chasing them; they can outpace an Akhian without trying. If the terrain allows it, lying in wait works very well. Unfortunately this hill is too distant to be of any use, unless the snake drives its prey right past us.” He put down his field glasses and gave me a predatory smile. “Let me show you how it is done.”

The showing took several days. Even an experienced hunter like M. Velloin is not successful on every outing—not in bagging dragons, at least, though there was not an afternoon in which he failed to bring back some kind of carcass. We dined that first night on roast waterbuck, and he took two zebra the following day, whose striped hides our servants were set to defend from scavengers attracted to the smell. Okweme and his companions went out at dusk in pursuit of lions, but had no luck.

M. Velloin’s tactic for dragon hunting was this: He would watch from the hilltop until he saw a cloud of dust advertising the approach of some group of medium-sized herbivores (antelope or other such ungulates—never anything so large as an elephant). Then he and the others would ride to intercept it, close enough to the watering hole to be within a savannah snake’s likely orbit. The arrival of men on horseback would invariably spook the herbivores, which in turn could sometimes be relied upon to provoke the snake, if present, into striking. Then M. Velloin, galloping along with the herd, would attempt to shoot the dragon from the sky.

This is, of course, a hazardous undertaking. Like all species then considered to be “true dragons,” the savannah snake possesses extraordinary breath, in this case a corrosive mist. On the first instance of M. Velloin successfully flushing a dragon, he failed to shoot the beast, and one of the other men took the retaliatory spray across his right arm and shoulder, even up to his face. This immediately raised painful blisters, which soon after burst; and in a tropical environment such as Bayembe’s, open wounds of that sort are extremely dangerous. They attracted midges and flies, and despite our best care, soon became infected. The man ultimately survived, but he was scarred thereafter, and much weakened in body.

Yet such perils do not deter hunters from their goal. M. Velloin was not the only one to ride out again after the man was wounded, and two days later, he met at last with success. And, as per our arrangement, he immediately quit the field and dragged the body back to where we had set up camp.

Almost immediately. He had, I saw, taken the time to claim his trophies, prising the teeth and claws free. I scowled at him. “I should like to have seen those in place, M. Velloin. We are not only going to make casts of the bones; there is a great deal to be learned by studying the specimen as a whole. How am I to understand its swift running, when you have taken away the claws?”

He looked abashed, and also like he was trying to use his abashment to mollify me. I refused to be mollified, and ordered him out of the way as we got to work.

The routine will be familiar to those who read the previous volume of my memoirs. My words to M. Velloin were true; I had every intention of extracting as much data from this carcass as possible. I therefore set to work sketching, while Mr. Wilker and Natalie took measurements, which I would use to correct my anatomical drawings when I produced the finished images.

We had quite an audience at first, some of whom were even willing to assist rather than getting in the way. M. Velloin, I must grant, was among those who chose to help. But our work is not exciting to watch, and so before long most of the observers drifted away. I was on my knees in the dirt beside the snake, flexing and twisting its hind foot to consider how it ran, when I realized that one was still present and watching very closely: Okweme, the oba’s son.

“Can I help you?” I asked, too distracted by my task to address him as politely as I should have.

He slid one of my sketches from beneath the rock pinning it down and studied it. “You are indeed an artist.”

“Had you any reason to doubt it?”

Okweme shrugged, returning the paper to its place. “Women sometimes exaggerate their skill, to attract a better husband.”

It was very fortunate that Mr. Wilker was undertaking the task of butchery, severing and defleshing a wing on the far side of the carcass. Had the knife been in my hand, I might have cut myself. Was Natalie right? Was he evaluating me as a potential marriage prospect?

Among the Mebenye and the Yembe alike, creativity and artistic talent are considered great virtues in a wife: well, I was an artist. I was also a widow with many fertile years ahead of her, and that is not a thing they tend to leave at loose ends in their society. And this might explain the olori’s interest, when I told her of my work. But surely a prince like Okweme was not so bereft of prospects that he needed to court the first unmarried woman who wandered by, artistic talents notwithstanding. Why should he be interested in a Scirling, anyway?

I had to answer him. “I am hardly a professional,” I said, realizing too late that a disclaimer of skill is a sign of modesty, and also attractive. Was there nothing I could say that would not dig me in deeper? In desperation, I rose up to lean over the snake’s body. “Mr. Wilker, is the wing ready? Ah, excellent. We should take the casts now, if Natalie has mixed the plaster.”

She had indeed, along with other materials none of us mentioned aloud. We retired into our tent with the wing bones: long things, so slender it seemed they must snap beneath their own weight. But of course they did not, for that is the virtue of dragonbone. “The solution is under the cot there,” Natalie said in a low voice, then went out, pulling the flaps shut behind her.

Mr. Wilker took the bones over to the cot. Between the two of us, he was the superior chemist (I being not much of a chemist at all), and better qualified to run the process that should, at least in theory, preserve savannah snake bones as well as those of rock-wyrms. I busied myself with the plaster, which would suffer an unfortunate miscarriage of procedure in the next few hours, resulting in no usable casts at all. The prospect of mockery for my error hardly pleased me, but we had agreed that it would arouse less suspicion than if Mr. Wilker were blamed for the loss. And we did not want anyone giving much consideration to the question of why we had no casts—not when we would, we hoped, be busy hiding the actual preserved bones.

We worked in silence for about a minute. Then Mr. Wilker cleared his throat. “He has one wife already.”

Savannah snakes, as I have said, are not large beasts. Of course Mr. Wilker, on the other side of the carcass, had heard every word. I flushed and answered him sharply. “Is that meant to deter me? I am not looking to make him my new husband.”

“I didn’t think you were,” he said. Then he fell silent: perhaps because he was attending to the task of dripping one chemical solution into another at a steady pace, or perhaps because he was thinking. Either way, when the dripping was done, he went on. “But you haven’t exactly been dissuading him.”

“Instruct me in how to dissuade a prince in a fashion that will not offend him and cause us trouble soon after,” I said, “and I will do it with a glad heart. Until then, I must go on trying to be polite, for the sake of our expedition.”

Mr. Wilker laid the last of the bones in their chemical bath and sealed the top, to protect them from both dust and prying eyes. We would need to remain here for at least three more days before they could be moved; I hoped M. Velloin would not take it into his head to shift his camp. Then my companion stood, looking at me. “Do you want to remarry?”

My hand on the edge of a plaster-filled tub almost overturned it, which would have made a very nice answer for why the casts had failed. “I fail to see how this has any relevance for our work, Mr. Wilker.”

“I should think it’s obvious, when you attract marital interest wherever we go.”

“One princeling hardly justifies that description.”

It would have been wiser for me to leave the matter there. But I made the mistake of looking at Mr. Wilker, whose expression I could not read. With the flaps closed, it was stiflingly hot inside the tent, and I was all too conscious of the need to keep our voices low. Natalie was supposed to be keeping watch outside, but canvas makes a very poor barrier to sound. All these factors and more combined to make me leave my plaster tubs and cross to Mr. Wilker, who, with the cot and the box it hid behind him, could not retreat. “Do you have a personal reason for broaching this topic, Mr. Wilker? Because if so, I would thank you to do me the courtesy of admitting it.”

His face had been reddened by days in the sun, but I think he flushed still further. “Mrs. Camherst—”

I will never know what he would have said. I suspect, looking back, that he would have pointed out to me what the roaring of my heartbeat in my ears had obscured: Natalie’s voice outside, greeting the man approaching our tent, warning us that we were about to have a visitor. But I did not hear it, and Mr. Wilker did not find his tongue quickly enough, and so when light burst upon our dim little scene, M. Velloin found me standing scant inches from my companion, face tilted up toward him, and both of us red as beets.

We could only have looked more guilty had he caught us in an embrace. We sprang apart with exclamations of surprise, me retreating to my plaster. With Velloin silhouetted against the brightness outside, I could not see his expression, but the way his head turned from me to Mr. Wilker and back again said more than enough. “I thought I would see how you’re getting on,” he said, and I could have slapped him for the amusement in his tone.

“Quite well, thank you,” I said, failing to sound at all polite. “Thank you for the specimens.”

He approached me and held out a sack. “The claws. I assumed you would like to examine them.”

Velloin offered them to me, not to Mr. Wilker, which under the circumstances was not only decent of him but surprising. He had to have been questioning my scientific purposes—men like him generally do—and would question them even more now. “Thank you,” I said, this time with more sincerity. “I will draw these this afternoon, while the plaster dries, and return them to you.”

“No need to hurry,” he said. “I’ll be going out with the prince in an hour or so, to see if we can’t bring down a few lions. You’re welcome to join us, Wilker.”

Mr. Wilker was not a hunting enthusiast, but I was hardly surprised when he accepted. It would separate the two of us for a time, which was good both for our own peace of mind, and for quelling suspicion.

Or so I hoped—quite naively. As you may have guessed, this was the beginning of the long-lived rumour that Mr. Wilker and I were on intimate terms. At least, this is the point at which such whispers became common currency in Bayembe; it is possible that the simple fact of my departing on the expedition with him, especially in combination with the to-do over Natalie, began those rumours at home even before more specific word arrived from Eriga. A widow, by virtue of having been married, is protected from a degree of scandal that would ruin a maiden, but it does not mean that she can carry on in whatever manner she pleases without anyone taking notice.

I would like to say that I cared not a whit for the whispers. It would suit my dashing reputation for me to shrug off the concerns that burden more ordinary women. I was younger then, however, and apart from the damage to my own esteem, I cared a great deal for the effect the rumours had on those around me. It undermined Mr. Wilker, to have his scientific work overshadowed by impropriety; it reflected badly on Lord Hilford, to have given his patronage to two such scandalous people. But what enraged me the most was the foul elaboration of the rumour that said our indiscretions had begun in Vystrana, and that Jacob had either winked at it, or died because he did not.

All of that lay in the future that Gelis afternoon. The first stirrings of it, however, began during the hunt that night, when Okweme was (so I later heard) jocular with Mr. Wilker in a way that did not seem friendly at all. It continued for the remainder of the trip, and when we returned at last to Atuyem, the seed nurtured in water found fertile soil in which to grow.

NINE

One might have expected Okweme’s interest in me to cool, with rumour saying I was already involved elsewhere. On the contrary, he pursued me more closely after that—but I did not like his reasons for doing so.

He said nothing directly, of course. But his manner shifted: friendliness taking on an oily sheen, warmth bringing him closer than I wished him to stand. I tried to describe this to Natalie, and could not find anything specific to point to; the problem was in the aggregate. “I cannot help but feel,” I said in frustration, “as if my supposed misbehaviour with Mr. Wilker has, in his eyes, made me available to any man who chooses to claim me. One expects this sort of thing from a rake at a masquerade ball in Vickery Gardens, not from the son of a king.”

“Some of those rakes at Vickery are the sons of kings,” Natalie said dryly. “But I know what you mean. Well, I shall cease telling him where you are; perhaps that will help.”

It did, but not enough. In desperation, I turned to Galinke. My irregularity meant I did not rejoin her in the agban, but I saw her after she emerged, and she invited me to stroll with her in the oba’s gardens. As soon as I thought it reasonable, I directed our conversation to that particular knot. “There is nothing between myself and Mr. Wilker but professional matters,” I told her, when the tale was done. “But I cannot see how to convince anyone of that.”

“Sometimes women keep themselves to our side of the palace for a long time, and after that the rumours fall quiet,” Galinke said. “But only sometimes. And you cannot do that, not without abandoning your work.”

Which I would never do—though sometimes I had cause to be glad for the segregation the palace imposed. “Tell me,” I said. “Okweme is your brother’s son; have you any notion why he might be pursuing me? He did so even before I sullied my reputation. My skill with a pencil is hardly enough to make me a desirable catch, and I do not flatter myself that my beauty or charming manner has anything to do with his intentions. What political benefit might he gain, that I do not see?” Or what benefit his mother might gain, though I did not say it. I was beginning to think she had set her son on me, like a hunter putting a hound after a rabbit.

“Your people are currently very important in Bayembe,” Galinke pointed out. “If they gain more territory and influence here, it could be to Okweme’s advantage to have a connection.”

“But I lack connections. My family, if they were Yembe, would not even rate chambers in someone else’s compound up on this hill. My late husband’s family would, but only barely. Unless—” The hypothetical I had described, the Hendemores and Camhersts as Erigan families, gave me a new idea. “Is it possible he thinks my children—our children, if he married me—would inherit something of value? We pass down such things in the father’s line, not the mother’s. My brothers’ wealth, such as it is, will go to their sons, not mine.”

Galinke had been shaking her head as I spoke, but the way in which she stopped told me a thought had come to her. She cast a surreptitious glance around and then, seeing no one, still took the precaution of drawing me down onto a bench, where we would be half-concealed by a stand of flowering reeds.

“It would be very strange,” she said. “But—to your people, children belong to their father’s lineage. Here, it is the mother’s. Your people would expect Okweme’s sons to inherit from him.”

I began to see what she aimed at. “Is there something of value he has, that he cannot pass down to his own children?”

Galinke nodded. “Certain honours and property from his uncle, yes. And Okweme has no full sisters; all of Denyu’s other children have died, so his heirs are more distant—cousins he does not like. He has two daughters from his wife, but that means nothing. They belong to her lineage, not his. But your children would belong to your lineage—and he could try to argue that, by the customs of your people, what is his should become theirs. To do otherwise would be to leave them with nothing.”

It was almost enough to make me laugh. Okweme n Kpama Waleyim wanted me for my country’s inheritance laws—or at least that was our speculation, though we had no proof as yet. But putting even a possible explanation on his behaviour renewed my incentive to escape it. “I shall have to contrive to be in the field more often,” I said. “Without him, this time. Tell me, what happens if a woman becomes, ah, impure, while out in the bush?”

I will not say it was my desire to avoid Okweme and the agban that led to our second excursion, but they were among the relevant factors. He was not so shameless as to contrive a reason to join us again—not when there would be no hunting on our trip—and Galinke assured me that rural people were more flexible in matters of impurity, so long as we had ourselves cleansed appropriately.

Other factors included our first preservation attempt, which, while not a failure, had been less than perfectly successful. Mr. Wilker (who was exceedingly stiff with me, on account of our as-yet-unfinished confrontation) said the acidity of savannah snake blood differed from that of rock-wyrms, but thought he might adjust the process and achieve better results. And apart from the anatomical study of dragons, we had a great deal to learn about their behaviour and movement, which would require observation under conditions that did not involve Velloin shooting everything that moved.

We spent more time in the bush over the following two months than we did enjoying the comforts of Atuyem, which was exactly as I preferred. Mind you, I cannot pretend the environment of Bayembe is entirely pleasant: as in the previous volume of my memoirs, there is a great deal I am omitting regarding the heat, the dust, and the ever-present flies, whose buzzing I learned to hate beyond all reason. (One night a fly became trapped in our tent, and its aimless wandering in search of an exit brought me to the very end of my tether; only Natalie’s intervention kept me from turning up the oil lamp and lighting the canvas on fire.) But on the whole, I find the hardships I suffer in warm climes vastly preferable to those of the cold—flies being the exception.

What pleased me was the understanding, for the first time in my life, that I was indeed a naturalist. Not the wife of a naturalist, brought along for her artistic and secretarial skills; not a hobbyist, collecting sparklings in her garden shed; but a scholar in my own right, engaging fully in my work. The tasks we set ourselves—to document the prey of savannah snakes, their breeding habits, their sexual differentiation, and so on—gave myself and Mr. Wilker sufficient distraction to pretend our unfortunate conversation had never occurred, and we fell into a rapport (at least for the purposes of our work) that was deeply and satisfyingly professional. I will not bore you with the minutiae of that work; anyone interested may refer to Dragon Breeds of the Bayembe Region, Draconic Taxonomy Reconsidered, or the articles eventually published in Proceedings of the Philosophers’ Colloquium over the years following our expedition. As the second of those titles indicates, however, it was during my time in Eriga that I began to consider the question of what, precisely, constitutes a dragon.

At the time, of course, we were all still operating on Sir Richard Edgeworth’s criteria, which were six in number:

1) Quadrupedalism

2) Wings capable of flight

3) A ruff or fan behind the skull

4) Bones frangible post-mortem

5) Egg laying

6) Extraordinary breath

Our voyage to Eriga had reminded me of the disputes over the great sea-snakes, which at the time constituted the main challenge to Edgeworth’s model; I also thought about “draconic cousins” such as wolf-drakes, wyverns, and even my old sparklings. Furthermore, there were various theories regarding dragons in the Bayembe region, with some arguing for three breeds—savannah snakes, arboreal snakes, and swamp-wyrms—and others for as many as seven. (The latter came closer to the mark, though as it later turned out, for entirely the wrong reasons.) We could not see the swamp-wyrms without permission to visit Mouleen, but we applied ourselves to examining the distinctions between the grass-dwelling savannah snakes and tree-dwelling arboreal snakes, and found them to be entirely opportunistic: there is no meaningful difference between the two, beyond the simple matter of what territory each beast takes for its own.

Dry work to tell of, but it pleased me deeply—all the more so because it took me away from the strict and unfamiliar customs of Atuyem (of which the agban was only one), as it had previously taken me away from the strict and familiar customs of my own land. It was therefore a grave disappointment, as well as a cause for alarm, when Natalie fell ill.

I cannot say it was a surprise. Tropical diseases are legion, and we Scirlings are terribly susceptible to them. We all drank our gin and tonics as advised (I grew to like them, which of course made me a scandal when I drank them for pleasure back home), but one cannot haunt the bug-infested environs of watering holes without risking malaria.

We knew the signs to watch for. For Natalie to develop a headache was nothing of significance—we all suffered them, from the brutal strength of the sun and our appalling excuses for field pillows—but when she began to shiver, on a day when I was having to exercise care lest the sweat dripping from my face mar the page on which I sketched, there was no question as to the cause. And Natalie, to her credit, did not attempt the foolishness I have seen from others (men and women alike), which is to insist that it was nothing, she could go on working, it would pass. Malaria is nothing to trifle with, and we all knew it.

As soon as the porters we had hired could pack our camp, our guide (a chatty Mebenye fellow named Welolo n Akpari Memu, who knew the bush as well as I know my own library) led us to the nearest village, where Natalie could rest in greater comfort. That much, at least, went smoothly.

We ran into difficulty, however, when it came time to treat her illness. I cannot fault the medical assistance she received; they gave her water and herbs for the fever and the pain, which is all we could expect from a small cattle-raising village in the Bayembe bush. Erigans may be less vulnerable to such afflictions than Scirlings and other foreigners, but their people still suffer malaria often enough for it to be a familiar foe.

The assistance they offered, however, did not end at the medical.

Natalie’s treatment was being overseen by an old woman—the oldest in the village, I think—whose name I never did get; they only called her Grandmother. Between her rural accent and missing teeth, I had difficulty understanding her speech, but I soon picked a repeated word out of her explanation: witchcraft.

You will hear more of this later. For now, it will suffice to say that there is a view common across Eriga which attributes most or all trouble to the malevolent action of witches. These are not necessarily the figures of intentional and blasphemous evil my Anthiopean readers associate with the word; witchcraft can, as I understand it, be accidental, the result of ill will or unresolved conflict in someone’s heart. Nor would Grandmother or her neighbours have claimed Natalie’s problem consisted solely of witchcraft, and had nothing to do with our bizarre fondness for spending time in fever-ridden areas. But what sent us to such places, or weakened Natalie so that she fell ill? Witchcraft, clearly. And Grandmother, it transpired, wanted to bring a man from another village to treat Natalie’s spiritual ills.

“Nonsense,” Mr. Wilker said when I told him. “It won’t do Miss Oscott one bit of good, and may upset her.”

We were outside the house in which she rested, so she would not overhear our conversation. Beyond the edges of the small village, which hunkered down as if hoping the sun would cease beating on it so fiercely, the tree-spotted grass stretched forever. I felt very small and very insignificant: any one of us could cease breathing and this place would not care. “Grandmother believes she has one of the worse forms of malaria,” I told him. “The sort that most frequently kills.”

“Then we must get her back to Atuyem, if she can be moved. Sir Adam’s doctor can treat her best.”

This required us to time our journey very carefully. Most forms of malaria afflict the subject with periodic fevers (the interval of which is the primary means of distinguishing them), and during the respite the patient may be more capable of activity. That is not, however, the same thing as being well. Natalie suffered terrible joint pain, and this she did endure with admirable stoicism; she knew as well as we did that there would be no relief for her out in the bush. When her fever returned, we stopped until she could ride again. And so, by agonizing stages, we made our way back to Atuyem.

I expected our quarters there to have been given to another during our absence. (Those of you with good memories may recall we had been invited into the royal palace itself by the oba, supposedly because of his great interest in us; the man had ignored us completely since our arrival. There was every reason to think his interest had vanished.) To my surprise, they had not, and furthermore his own royal physician came with Dr. Garrett to examine Natalie and treat her. I was, in the meanwhile, given my own room, so that I might not have to share a bed with a sick woman.

Sir Adam, however, did not even do me the courtesy of allowing me a chance to sleep in that bed before he sent a message demanding my immediate presence at Point Miriam. I defied him long enough to bathe; you could have grown strawberries in the dirt caked on my skin. Then, wearing one of my non-bush dresses—which is to say, one of the only clean items of clothing I had left—I rode wearily down to Nsebu in answer to his summons.

Our resident ambassador had a fine office set up in one of the rooms, with heavy oak furniture totally at odds with their Yembe surroundings. The tired and therefore cynical part of me wondered if he had imported it so that he might plant his fists on the desk and loom at me across its polished surface in proper Scirling fashion.

“I have received,” he said, biting each word off, “a letter from Lord Denbow.”

My head was full of malaria and draconic taxonomy; it took longer than it should have to place the name. “Natalie’s father.”

“Yes. Miss Oscott’s father. He is demanding I send his daughter home at once. Mrs. Camherst, what the devil have you done?”

“Nothing like you are thinking,” I said, wishing desperately that I had ignored his summons until the following morning. A night of sleep would have been more precious than dragonbone, right then. “Unless you are thinking that I did as Miss Oscott wished, in which case you are correct.”

Sir Adam slapped his hand atop his desk. “This is no subject for jokes, Mrs. Camherst. Lord Denbow is very angry.”

I wondered how long ago his letter had arrived. Not that it mattered; Sir Adam would hardly be persuaded by the argument that leaving a baron to stew for a few more months would improve his temper. “Lord Denbow may be angry, but I will lay pebbles to iron that Lord Hilford is not. Or have you forgotten that the earl is our patron? He knows his granddaughter is here, and does not mind.”

Acknowledging my sponsor’s complicity may not have been my wisest move; I apologized to him for it later. It did no good in either case. Sir Adam launched into a diatribe about Lord Denbow, not Lord Hilford, being the legal guardian of Natalie Oscott, and furthermore the girl’s own wishes not being of the slightest relevance. I suffered this in silence, but when he expanded his theme and brought up Natalie’s illness, I lost my temper utterly.

“So you will blame me for her malaria? As others blame me for my husband’s death—how very familiar. I cannot be permitted to make my own choices, as Natalie cannot either, but I am somehow to blame for the choices of others. What tremendous power I seem to have! But certain things are out of my hands, Sir Adam, and one of them is whether Natalie will even live to be sent home. I suggest you search your heart and find the decency to leave the matter of her disposition until after we know the answer to that question.”

I had risen from my chair during this tirade, and by the look on Sir Adam’s face, the last thing he had anticipated was for me to shout right back at him. (I think he expected me to break down crying—which only goes to show how little he understood this entire situation.) What he thought of the rest of my words I cannot say, but one part at least had clearly penetrated his mind, for he said, “Yes, well, everything of course depends on whether the girl recovers.”

“Indeed,” I said, mimicking the biting manner in which he had begun our meeting. “And if you should breathe even one word of this where she can hear, you and I will speak again.” Whereupon I pivoted sharply and walked out of his office.

I must grant Sir Adam this: he had sufficient discretion that he had not said anything of Lord Denbow’s letter prior to our return. (He would not want our internal troubles known among the Yembe.) He also was sufficiently chastened to leave the matter in peace during the weeks it took Natalie to overcome her malaria and regain a modicum of strength.

Before he had an opportunity to raise the matter again, someone else stepped in and, in the manner of one who takes a chessboard and flings its contents into the air, changed the game entirely.

TEN

I said before that the oba of Bayembe had first invited us to the palace, then ignored us. I have never been a political creature, and so I can only guess at his motivation, but I believe he was testing our ostensible purpose in coming to his land. In short, he brought us under his eye, then left us to our own devices, in order to see what we would do.

The Scirlings who visited Bayembe came for a very narrow list of reasons. First there were the merchants, trading through the port of Nsebu even before it was established as a Scirling colony. After them came the diplomats, to represent our interest in Erigan iron, and they made arrangements for the soldiers (who equipped and trained the Yembe with Anthiopean guns against the Satalu and Ikwunde) and the engineers (who would build railways and dams, from which Scirland would subsequently profit). Beyond them were a handful of sheluhim and hunters like Velloin, and very few others.

My little group was therefore an aberration—and one that, as I came to understand, held particular interest for the oba. When it became apparent that Natalie would live, but while she was still recovering in her bed, he sent messengers to summon myself and Mr. Wilker to meet him at last.

This summons put a nervous chill in my heart. Given his previous neglect, I could only assume Sir Adam had spoken to him, and he was going to order Natalie at a minimum and possibly all three of us out of the country, lest Lord Denbow speak out in the Synedrion and cause diplomatic trouble. If he did, I could not think of a single thing I might say that would retrieve the situation.

Good grooming was unlikely to sway him, but I attended to my toilet with the finest care I could manage—much finer than I had ever troubled with before. (My Season does not count; Mama and the maids took care of it then.) Then, my heart fluttering with nervousness, I went to meet the ruler of Bayembe, in a courtyard before the golden tower of Atuyem.

Given the man in question, I must provide a certain amount of context first. Ankumata n Rumeme Gbori has been the subject of so much mythologizing during the course of his life that I feel it necessary to set the record something closer to straight before I proceed with any account of my dealings with him.

It is true that he was born to his father’s fourth wife (putting him out of what was then the royal lineage), and that he was born deformed. The exact medical nature of his deformity I do not know, but it left his legs unable to bear his weight; though healthy in other respects, he was not able to walk until well into his childhood. Some sources claim he was seven when this changed, and others ten. The exact number does not matter.

What matters is that his mother died, and there is credible evidence to say that she was murdered by one of her co-wives. Ankumata would likely have died, too, except that a man of his father’s court took him and raised him away from Atuyem, as his own son. And this man happened to be a blacksmith.

I cannot adequately convey the importance of that to a non-Erigan audience. For my Scirling readers, blacksmiths are a feature of village life: strong men, but not expected to be particularly bright. Their reputation in Eriga, and particularly in the eastern part of the continent, is a good deal more impressive. More than a few peoples there trace their origins back to a legendary blacksmith-king, and many more attribute magical powers to men who work in iron. It is part of the reverence they give in general to artisans, but it goes beyond that. An ethnologist could theorize for you whether this has something to do with the abundance of iron in Erigan soil, or whether it arises from some other aspect of Erigan existence; I can only report the fact of it. For Ankumata’s subjects, it was as if he had been taken to be raised by a particularly wise magister, the sort who knows the secret of bringing golems to life.

And that is nearly what this blacksmith did. When Sunda n Halelu Gama took Ankumata into his home, the boy still could not walk; he rode there on his rescuer’s back. But once there, Sunda—who, in the more dramatic version of this tale, is said to be Adu himself, the Yembe god of blacksmithing—set about crafting for him a set of iron leg braces that would do what the boy’s own muscles and bones could not. So wondrously did he craft them, the story goes, that they weighed nothing at all, and no sooner did Ankumata don them than he leapt over the blacksmith’s house to show his joy.

The truth is rather more prosaic, I am sure, for I never saw the oba leap any distance at all. But the braces do exist, and I believe he could not walk without them, which means Sunda deserves every bit of the credit he receives. He, perhaps more than any other save Ankumata’s own father and mother, made the man who came back and claimed the rulership of Bayembe (a tale in its own right), and held it for so many years.

And what of the man himself? I found his age hard to judge; history told me he was fifty or thereabouts, though (as I have said) mythologizing has obscured some of the finer points of his life. He was broad of feature, as Yembe often are, and I think his shaved head was a disguise for natural hair loss (a bald scalp being more regal than a patchy one). He gave a sense of being both shrewd and good-hearted, which is an impressive combination, and not one many people of either sex can easily convey.

He greeted us sitting on a stool that made up in splendor for the deliberately simple appearance of his braces. The stool, as some may know, is an element of Sagao regalia adopted by the Yembe from their riverine subjects centuries ago, and although it is often likened to an Anthiopean throne, the truth is that its significance more closely parallels that of the crown. Yembe rulers are invested in their office by being seated upon the stool—and not just the oba, but the lineage chiefs as well, each with their own ancestral stool. This one was of sufficient size that I might have called it a bench instead, and moreover was crafted of solid gold, but it had its origins in the smaller and more humble wooden stool found in every home in the region.

Beyond that, much of the scene was a common one. I have, at this point in my life, met enough heads of state to know they are almost always seated in some kind of frame—before a tapestry or painting or coat of arms, atop a dais, or, in this case, beneath a splendid awning—and surrounded by ministers, servants, and assorted hangers-on. How else is one to know that they are important? His wives were there, and various youths bearing enough resemblance to one of those women or to the oba himself for me to guess them to be his children; the olori Denyu n Kpama Waleyim and her son Okweme were in the group, and I was not glad to see them.

Nor was I glad to see Sir Adam and several of the army men. To my heightened nerves, this seemed like proof that we were all to be ordered back to Scirland. (The truly irrational part of me tried to combine this with one of my other problems, and invent a scenario in which Natalie and Mr. Wilker would be sent back, but I would be forced to marry Okweme.) But they could not command my attention now; it must all go to the oba of Bayembe.

A court functionary had instructed me beforehand that I would be permitted to show respect in the Scirling way (by curtseying) rather than the Erigan way (by kneeling and, before a personage as august as the oba, lowering my face to the ground). I have never been especially graceful at curtseying, and my knees have a regrettable tendency to go tremulous and unreliable when I am nervous; I almost wished they would let me kneel instead. It is difficult to fall over when one is already on the ground. But it might have looked a mockery if I tried, and so curtseying it was, with Mr. Wilker bowing at my side.

Our progress was marked by sonorous words from the griot at the oba’s side. These learned men and women are sometimes called bards, but more often we use the Thiessin word, which serves as a synonym for a full dozen terms in different Erigan languages. I might equally use a dozen terms to describe them in Scirling: historians, storytellers, poets, musicians, praise-singers, and more. They are attached to aristocratic and royal families, and are often aristocrats in their own right, with all the power and wealth that implies.

I could not make out what the griot was saying; he spoke in the highly stylized form of Yembe used for his work, which bears as much resemblance to ordinary Yembe as Akhian or Yelangese calligraphy does to ordinary text, and is even less comprehensible to me. (Calligraphy at least will sit still and give you a chance to puzzle it out.) Knowing what I do now of their customs, however, I expect the bulk of it was a recitation of the oba’s praise-names, his ancestors, his ancestors’ praise-names, and other things meant to impress us with our insignificance in comparison to him.

One of those praise-names, rendered into English, is “he whose legs are made of iron”—or “Iron-legs,” I suppose, though that lacks elegance, sounding more like the nickname sailors might give to a particularly salty captain. Certainly the braces, at least in their most recent iteration, deserved a degree of elegance. Gold had been inlaid along their sides in the characteristically geometric patterns of Yembe art, for it would not do to clothe the country’s ruler in anything ordinary. But no effort had been made to gild the steel completely; to do so would defeat the purpose. Nor did he wear the lower-body wrap affected by many in his court that might have concealed the braces. Instead he wore an elaborate loincloth, for Ankumata n Rumeme Gbori understood the role of his own infirmity and its cure in his legend, and used them to his advantage.

This was a man who had taken weakness and made it strength. If you understand only one thing about him, that would be enough.

We minced our way through the opening formalities and the inquiries into Natalie’s health. I half-expected this to lead into Sir Adam’s demands, but no; the ambassador stayed silent (looking, if truth be told, a trifle bored), and the oba said nothing of Lord Denbow.

Instead he waved back the youth cooling him with a large fan and stood. I heard a quiet hiss as he did so: the braces contained cunningly engineered hydraulics. In a mild voice that did not obscure the weight of command, he said to myself and Mr. Wilker, “You will walk with me.”

“Yes, chele,” we chorused. I suppose I might render the word as “Your Majesty,” since an oba is the sovereign ruler of his nation (though in a different manner than a Scirling king); this, however, would obscure its derivation from eche, the Yembe word for “gold.” Polite address for the oba meant something closer to “Golden One.”

To my startlement, the invitation appeared to extend only as far as the two of us and his griot. By subtle signals Ankumata indicated to his wives and his servants that they would stay behind; the servants were less subtle in communicating this to our fellow Scirlings. Sir Adam’s protest faded behind me as we followed the oba through a shadowed archway into a garden—the same garden in which I had walked with Galinke a few months before.

The oba walked slowly, though how much of that was his braces and how much the dignity of his rank, I cannot say. After we were well through the arch and out of earshot of the others (though not out of bow or rifle shot from the guards on the high walls), he addressed Mr. Wilker. “You have studied dragons. What have you learned?”

Unlike the boyar of Drustanev, who had once asked a similar question of Lord Hilford, Ankumata seemed genuinely interested in the answer. Mr. Wilker collected his thoughts and delivered a good précis of our findings thus far, adding—unwisely, from the perspective of my still-twitching nerves—the regretful coda that “Miss Oscott’s illness forced us to suspend our work for the time being.”

The oba nodded. Then, without warning, he spoke to me. “You have a desire to study the dragons of the swamp.”

My heart gave a great thump in my chest. It was not precisely a secret, but I had only spoken of it to a very small number of people, and did not like the reminder of how easily gossip spread. But I could hardly lie to the man, and so I said, “Yes, chele. There is more we could learn about the dragons here—there will be more for years to come, I imagine—but comparison is useful; we might in some ways learn more about savannah snakes and other breeds by looking at Moulish swamp-wyrms than by studying the others alone.”

We had reached the end of the garden, where a staircase led up the wall. One hissing, mechanical step at a time, Ankumata climbed; we followed, though not before exchanging a look of puzzlement.

At the top, with the guards standing respectfully aside, the oba gestured downward. “I have captured savannah snakes. But only their breath is of use; they cannot run with chains on, and if I remove the chains they escape.”

I found myself looking down into a dry, sandy moat, at the bottom of which two discontented dragons paced at the ends of their iron tethers. “You use them as guards?” I said.

“They impress people,” the oba said. “They are not useful.” He took a piece of dried meat from his griot’s hand and threw it to the sand below, where one of the snakes looked at it with resignation. (They will eat carrion, but prefer their meals to be juicy and running away.)

Offering advice to the sovereign of a country is a touchy affair, but his silence seemed to invite my thoughts. Cautiously, I said, “Were these captured as juveniles, or adults?” He indicated it was the former, and I rubbed one finger across my chin. “Hmmm. Perhaps if you raised them from the egg… some birds will imprint on the creature they see first. I do not know if it is the case with dragons.”

Ankumata smiled. It should have been encouraging—a sign that I had not offended him. His expression, though, was not exactly one of pleasure; if anything, I would call it satisfaction. As if I had played into his hands.

He said, “You will go into Mouleen and get me swamp-wyrm eggs.”

“I beg your pardon?” I said, echoed closely by Mr. Wilker.

“We have tried raising savannah snakes from eggs. It does not work. But the Mouri, the farmers on the edges of the forest, say the Moulish raise their dragons from eggs, and this is why swamp-wyrms eat anyone who tries to go into the swamp. You will bring me eggs, so that I may try it myself.”

As royal orders went, this was a tall one. “Chele… who is to say we will not be eaten by the dragons? Or fall prey to disease, or to the Moulish. I am told they kill anyone who comes into their forest.”

He dismissed this with a flick of his hand. “The forest kills people, not the Moulish. They dislike hunters, but you are different. And I will send Faj Rawango with you.”

I had not forgotten the messenger who came to collect us on the docks. A short man, compared to the Yembe, and more ruddy of skin, nor was his name a Yembe one. He was Moulish? I briefly damned Yves de Maucheret for spending all his words on tall tales of the Green Hell, and none on describing that place’s inhabitants.

Even with a guide, however, our survival was far from assured. Our success was even more so. “If you will pardon me for saying so, chele, your kingdom’s climate is very different from that of Mouleen. I doubt whether any hatchlings would thrive here. And even if they did, this is quite a lot of work simply for a few palace guard dragons—” I stopped, my words cut short by understanding.

An understanding which, as it so often does, trotted out of my mouth without asking leave of my brain. “Ah. It isn’t your palace you intend to guard, or not only. You are hoping to use them against the Ikwunde. Or the Satalu.”

The oba’s face hardened. In conversation with a sovereign, or anyone else of power, it is not generally advisable to say what they have chosen to keep unspoken, especially when it pertains to matters of state. But after a pause, he laughed: a long, hearty chuckle that called an involuntary smile from me. “You see? I am not wrong to send you. Your mind is sharp; you see things well.”

I was also an outsider, not only to the Moulish, but to the Yembe. Such a person might die, and it would be no great loss to his nation.

Mr. Wilker and I exchanged looks. On the one hand, it was a research opportunity, and one we both desired; nor were the physical risks appreciably worse than they would have been without the oba’s involvement. On the other hand, it placed a burden on us, one we might not be able to fulfill. What if he was wrong about Moulish control of the dragons? Or what if they did indeed tame them, but we were not able to learn how? The warmth of our reception when we emerged from the Green Hell might depend heavily on what we brought with us.

I wondered how useful the eggs could possibly be. No large species of dragon reaches maturity in less than two years, and some take longer. Did Ankumata expect to still be at war two years from now? With enemies on both sides, I supposed he might. And even if he were not, it would be no bad thing to improve his country’s ability to defend itself. I doubted this man, heir to centuries of Bayembe sovereignty, enjoyed his present dependence on Scirland.

Carefully, Mr. Wilker said, “What if we decline?”

One dark, gold-ringed hand waved this question away. “Is this not something you want? And your assistant, the young woman. You would want her with you, of course, once her strength returns.”

This time I kept my thoughts behind my teeth. It was bribery, or perhaps I might more charitably call it payment: if we agreed, then he would block Sir Adam’s attempts to claim Natalie. “But if we do not go…”

“Then I imagine the girl’s father will retrieve her. Your ambassador says he is an important lord. I would not want to offend him.”

First the carrot; now the stick. If we did not agree, Ankumata would do nothing to stop Sir Adam. It might even go further than that: if I protested or caused too much trouble, I might find myself evicted from the country as well.

“Might we have time to consider your generous offer?” Mr. Wilker said. “We would have to speak with Miss Oscott before we could make any decision.”

“Of course, of course. Such choices should not be made rashly.”

We descended the stairs. I saw Galinke in a far corner of the garden; she sat with three other women, but I knew from the angle of her head that she had been watching us on the wall. It confirmed my suspicion that her interest in me had not been entirely casual, and that her royal brother knew some of what we had discussed. Which operated to my benefit, at least in part; whether I would thank her for it or not remained to be seen.

ELEVEN

There was no privacy to be had in the palace. Mr. Wilker and I went into the lower town, ostensibly to visit the market, but in truth to talk away from interested ears.

“You are going to tell me I should not have brought Natalie,” I said with a sigh after we had cleared the gate at the base of the hill.

Mr. Wilker shook his head, looking resigned. “That ship sailed from Sennsmouth months ago—and if it were not Miss Oscott, it would be something else. He did not quickly volunteer the threat, but he wanted and expected us to press for it.”

“If I had enemies on my borders and allies only too eager to take advantage of my weakness, I suppose that I too might be ruthless in my use of tools.” I sighed again. “Empathy, however, does not make the tool any happier about her use.”

We entered the market. It was not the chaos of dockside Nsebu; this was laid out in an orderly fashion, though not the grid of streets common in many Anthiopean cities. The merchants and artisans organized themselves instead by lineage, each of which formed round clusters through which Mr. Wilker and myself wound. On all sides we were besieged by vocal and determined hawkers, selling everything from copper pots to religious charms.

Under the cover of this clamour, Mr. Wilker said, “What do you think?”

I shared with him my wall-top evaluation of the risks, and concluded by saying, “I won’t deny that I’ve been trying to think of how we might convince the oba to allow us into Mouleen. I thought I might approach him through Galinke, his sister. To become involved in the affairs of Bayembe, though… not to mention that it may not be fair to the dragons. They did not ask to participate in this war.”

Mr. Wilker’s laughter briefly lightened the concern that weighted his expression. “I might have guessed you would fear for the dragons’ well-being.” Sobering, he went on. “It’s a nice idea, conducting our work without getting tangled in local affairs. Maybe in twenty or fifty years it would be possible. But we chose to come here now, and having done so, I don’t think we can escape politics.”

We were talking ourselves into accepting. I wanted to see the swamp-wyrms of Mouleen; I had wanted to see them since I saw that runt in the king’s menagerie. They were ugly beasts, and not known for their charming personalities—but they were dragons, and that meant I loved them.

I could not in good conscience make that decision, however, without first taking a certain precaution. “We shall have to talk to Natalie. Whether the oba would have found another lever or not, she is the lever he has chosen to use, and I imagine she will have an opinion on the matter.”

At the beginning of our journey, I had thrown some sharp words in Mr. Wilker’s direction regarding the validity of Natalie’s wishes. Now their effect, and that of our trio’s months of partnership, began to show. He nodded, with no hint of surprise or reluctance. “Indeed. Malaria may have dulled her taste for adventure—but if not, then I think we know our course.”

Malaria had not, in fact, dulled Natalie’s taste for adventure. “I knew it was a risk when I came here,” she said cheerfully, despite the pallor that had overtaken her in the aftermath of the fever. “Pity it isn’t one of those diseases where, after you’ve had it, you never need fear it again. But what is this you say about Mouleen?”

I explained the oba’s requirements to her, and his halfheartedly veiled threat. She made a face. “I shan’t ask you to go into the swamp for me. If my impending deportation is the only thing making you consider it, then don’t worry about me; I’ll find some other way to deal with my family. Hide behind Grandpapa’s skirts, perhaps, or run away to join the circus.”

She spoke lightly, but I could see that she meant it. Her resolve comforted me. It is one thing to decide that you are willing to risk leeches and fever; it is another entirely to drag someone else along with you.

What showed on my face in that moment, I do not know, but Natalie’s smile faded and she reached out to take my hand. “Isabella, what is it?”

I could feel my answering smile waver. “Only reflecting on how fortunate I am, that I should not be alone in my madness.”

It sounds like a platitude, but it is the honest truth. I found myself nearly overwhelmed with gratitude more than once over the subsequent days, as we prepared for our descent into the Green Hell. I was grateful for Natalie’s companionship and enthusiasm; for Mr. Wilker’s reliability and professional cooperation; for Lord Hilford, my patron, whose money made my presence in Bayembe possible; for Faj Rawango, without whom this escapade would have stood at best a minuscule chance of success. I was even grateful to Ankumata. Undoubtedly he was using us for his own ends—but he had also permitted us into his country, provided us with quarters in his own palace, and given us both the permission and the guide that made the next stage of our research possible.

The preparations were extensive, and unlike any I had made before. On our previous trips into the bush, we had been able to bring pack animals for our gear, but Faj Rawango warned us that horses, donkeys, and mules all tended to sicken in the swamp. Our supplies must be minimal, or we would find ourselves overburdened when the animals died.

The economies we made, however, were in peculiar places. Two tents (very small) and a minimum of clothing, but seemingly endless quantities of gin and tonic water, which would be our main protection against not only malaria but the parasitic infestations caused by foul water. (On no trip before or since have I carried more alcohol than undergarments.)

We also agreed, in a hurried conversation, to bring with us not only our chemical materials, but also the preserved bones we had gathered. Leaving them anywhere in Atuyem was not feasible; someone would be sure to find them. Destroying them would have been difficult, as the main feature of preserved dragonbone is its remarkable durability. If they became too burdensome to carry—in bulk, not mass, as savannah snake bones were even lighter than those of rock-wyrms—then we would bury them, with the hope of retrieving them later, but until then we would keep them under our watch.

One of the necessary tasks has become an oddly routine part of my life over the decades. I wrote letters to Lord Hilford, my parents, my brother Andrew, and my brother-in-law Matthew Camherst, explaining the alteration in our plans, with the unspoken understanding that this might be the last communication they received from me. Certainly it would be the last for a while; there was no postal service in the swamp, and even these letters would not go out until the next Scirling steamer came into port. I did not have to lay out instructions for what should be done if I perished—that, I had taken care of before my departure—but the implication whispered ominously between every line. I was only grateful that I would not be within my mother’s reach when she read her letter.

Even that missive, however, was easier to write than the one to my son. I was painfully aware, with each line I scribed, that it might be the last he would ever hear from me. That had been the case with each letter, of course, but I felt it now more keenly than before. His brief note took me longer than all the others put together.

It was Seminis before we were ready to go. The calendar used in Bayembe, of course, is not the common Anthiopean one, and most of my Anthiopean readers will have no sense of what that means for the region. I will therefore make clear the significance, so that you may all appreciate our folly:

The long rainy season had begun.

At first the change was refreshing. Bayembe had been parched since our arrival; it was a positive delight to breathe air washed clean of dust, to see flowers bloom and gold things turn green. But the humidity in that season is dreadful—it is true what they say, that dry heat is more tolerable than wet—and, as you may recall, we were about to descend into a region known for its abundant rainfall.

Faj Rawango warned us. But he was a servant of the oba, and the oba wanted us to go; he did not warn us very strenuously. We, for our own part, were fools. None of us had experienced a rainy season in Eriga, let alone in the swamps of Mouleen, and Yves de Maucheret, the great Thiessois traveller whose writings were one of our only sources regarding the Green Hell, had not said much about the rain. We shrugged off Faj Rawango’s warnings, loaded our pack donkeys (with a twinge of conscience for the fate to which we were about to subject them), and bade farewell—though we did not know it—to our last dry moments for a long, long time.