The Tropic of Serpents

TWELVE

Words, I fear, will again fail me as I attempt to describe the environment into which we now entered. But words are what I have, along with my humble line drawings, and so I must employ my tools as best I can. For it is important that you have a clear sense in your mind of the world I inhabited for the better part of the next seven months, and keep it always in your thoughts as you read of the events that transpired there.

The first thing and the last, the thing that was there at dawn and still with me at dusk and present all through the day and the night, the thing that, it seemed, could not be escaped for even the briefest moment, was the heat. Even for a creature such as I, who passionately favors warmth over cold, it was oppressive and often foul. The high plateau that makes up much of Bayembe is arid and windy; these factors mitigate the tropical heat. But in the airless, low-lying swamp so aptly called the Green Hell, there was no such happy aid. In a region that humid, sweating brings no relief, for the air is as wet as your skin. You drip with sweat; it pours from your body; if you wipe it away then more comes to replace it in mere seconds, and all you achieve is to dehydrate yourself. So you endure the sweat, long past the point where you would give your left arm for a cool bath, and this becomes your new reality, until you cannot remember what it felt like to be dry, let alone cold.

I learned to survive it. I cannot tell you how. It is a trick of the mind, one I chanced upon when I reached my absolute limit of endurance and knew there was nothing I could do to relieve my state. Somehow I accepted the situation; I acknowledged it, then laid it to one side and went on with my work. I was still filthy with sweat and longed for a cool breeze, but these things no longer consumed my thoughts. (Natalie and Mr. Wilker, I presume, must have made their own peace with the heat, for neither of them ran mad with a shotgun or tore off their clothes in a futile quest to lessen their suffering.)

Other matters, however, could not be disposed of through tricks of the mind.

After the heat, there are the insects. Gnats, mosquitoes, dragonflies, butterflies, black flies, beetles, moths. Ants and spiders; my temperate-dwelling readers cannot imagine the spiders. They are every size, from too small to see to larger than my outstretched hand, and some of them are quite viciously poisonous. Others will lay their eggs below your skin, with predictable and gruesome consequences. The ants, at least, have the courtesy to advertise their hazard; there are some, fully three centimeters in length, that are the most amazing shade of electrical blue. They warn you, very clearly, that you will not be happy if you provoke their bite.

So your skin crawls not only with sweat but with insects and their effects. In the meanwhile, you stab yourself with thorns and spines if you are so careless as to lay your hand upon a tree; and you will lay your hand, because you will lose your balance on the rough ground, or slip in mud, or tangle your foot with an unseen branch or root. The wounds inflicted by flora and fauna alike risk infection, plus even the slightest hint of blood (and yes, my female readers will be thinking now of the occurrence that sent Natalie and myself to the agban) brings all manner of creepy-crawlies flocking to gorge themselves upon it. Leeches are not even the worst; I came to be quite sanguine about leeches, if I may be forgiven the dreadful pun. Once you overcome your disgust, it is easy to pull them off and cast them away—and this I did more times than I can count.

But not all the denizens of the forest are unpleasant. Such an environment teems with life not only on the small scale but the large: guenons and mangabeys and colobus monkeys, gorillas and chimpanzees, bongos and duiker and okapi, pygmy hippopotami and forest elephants and night vipers and more birds than a hundred naturalists could hope to catalogue in a year.

And, of course, dragons—but I will come to them in time.

Amidst this panoply of life, humans are not easy to find. Had I given in to the impulse I entertained from time to time and gone blundering into the Green Hell without proper guidance—and if I had, through divine Providence or sheer blind luck, managed to survive a month, which I doubt—I still might never have found the Moulish. There are fewer than ten thousand of them in an area more than fifty thousand kilometers square, and they shift camp regularly; it is like looking for a migratory needle in a haystack the likes of which you have never explored.

With Faj Rawango guiding us, we still could not find the Moulish. We could, however, go to a place where they might find us.

After leaving Atuyem, we traveled along the Bayembe border a hundred kilometers or so inland, keeping to the savannah, where our progress was easier. But we drew steadily closer to the broken land that fell from the plateau into the swamp, and the Green Hell loomed ever larger to my left; I stared frequently at it while we rode, even to the point of neglecting my other observations. Was it my imagination that supplied a distant sound of drumbeats? That emerald sea seemed an abyss to me, full of dragons and fevers, from which I might never emerge. Perhaps the sound I heard was only the pounding of my own heart.

But I had committed to this purpose. When at last we came to the region Faj Rawango sought, we bade farewell to the landscape that had been our home these four months, and which had grown almost comfortably familiar, and addressed ourselves to the forest below.

Our descent from the plateau was swift, but we were still some way above the swamp floor when we came upon a clearing. It had obviously been hacked out of the jungle more than once, but as swiftly as men cut the vegetation away, it grew back. “It is a place of trade,” Faj Rawango said when we asked. “We—the villagers bring their harvest here, and the Moulish bring meat and ivory.”

“How long will it be until they come?” Mr. Wilker asked.

Faj Rawango only shrugged. They would come when they came. It was not a formal market, to be held every four days.

We set up our tents. There is a hazard to having a party with multiple naturalists in it; we occasionally shirk our camp chores in our rush to observe the world around us. (I fear Mr. Wilker and I left Natalie to do much of that work herself.) Myself, I became distracted with only two tent pegs in the ground, because a buzzing, fluttering sound drew my eye to the trees.

The creature I observed was birdlike but, with my recent taxonomical efforts fresh in my mind, I hesitated to classify it as such. In size it was comparable to a bird, with feathers of a luminescent blue-green, and a drooping bifurcated tail. Its head, however, was distinctly draconic, with a muzzle in place of a beak.

I had only a moment to observe it; then it spread its wings to fly across the clearing, and I saw the reason for the buzzing sound.

Like a dragonfly, it had two long pairs of wings.

I exclaimed in delight, and then had to explain the cause to my companions, who had not seen the creature. Natalie is the one who coined the term “drakefly,” on account of their insectoid wing configuration; Mr. Wilker objected to it, as the animals were clearly not insects of any sort, but it is the common designation even today.

We were still arguing this point the next morning, when Faj Rawango returned from the forest around our camp. His appearance stopped us short, and set both Natalie and myself to blushing, for he had discarded the wrapped garment of the Yembe, and in its place wore nothing more than the briefest of loincloths, held on his hips by a thin cord.

Dressed that way—I might better term it “undressed”—he seemed an entirely different man. With his Yembe trappings shed, those details which marked him as separate could no longer be overlooked: the smaller stature, the reddish cast to his skin, the leaner facial structure. He did not look like the other peoples who had surrounded us since our arrival.

Mr. Wilker broke the silence first, clearing his throat. “The iron knives we brought. We’ll be bargaining with those for their assistance?”

Faj Rawango shook his head. “No bargain. We will give them the knives. They will help us.”

It sounded like sophistry, but he appeared to believe there was a genuine difference. “Why would they help us,” I asked, “if not in trade? Is there something else we will be offering?”

He squatted down near us and picked up the pot that had contained our morning porridge. He had, I think, spent his time out in the forest not only changing his apparel, but considering how to explain the situation to us. “This,” he said, holding up the pot, “isn’t yours anymore. Not only yours. It belongs to the camp. Everything you have, you’ll share. And they’ll share with you. This is how they do things. It’s how they survive.”

I quote him as exactly as I can; if his meaning is not clear, that is because the kind of society he described is foreign beyond the ability of mere words to explain, at least for all who are likely to read this account. The Moulish have few material possessions, and little concern for personal property as most of us see it. Their way of living neither permits it nor derives much benefit from it. To own more than you can carry is folly; you will have to abandon it when the camp moves. But most of the things you own—if the “you” in this instance is Moulish—are easily replaced anyway, so their abandonment is no great loss. To try and hoard more than those around you have is a grave insult to social harmony and, I think, to the spirits; it invites ridicule from your fellows and, if that fails, more aggressive methods of forcing you to share. From this the Moulish get their reputation as thieves, but that word belongs to a different world.

Faj Rawango explained it as best he could, but we had little basis on which to understand him; and besides which, he was not Moulish—not precisely.

“My father came from the forest,” he said, when Natalie pressed him for his story. “My mother was a villager in Obichuri. I went into the forest for a time when I was a boy, but came back and studied, and went to Atuyem.”

He was an intensely private man; it took us months to expand that brief summary into something more like a story, one fleeting detail at a time. I will share the whole of it now, though—as much of it as I ever learned.

His mother had belonged to one of the Sagao lineages whose traditional role is that of the griot. To this day, I cannot tell you that lineage’s name; Faj Rawango never shared it. Despite the matrilineal nature of Sagao society, he was not welcomed by his mother’s people—likely out of distaste for his Moulish blood—and so he did not claim kinship to them. It was, I think, this same estrangement that sent him into the forest. But he declined to stay there, and upon returning to Bayembe, laid claim to the education that was his right. It did not suffice to make him a griot, but it won him a place in the civil service, and thus he came to us.

What lineage did his mother’s family serve? Not the royal one, that much I knew. How did he end up with his name? It was neither Sagao nor Moulish; I found out much later that it came from the Mouri, the people dwelling at the northern edge of the forest, who are close kin to the Moulish. I had only fragments of story, never the full tale. He was a man who did not properly exist in any single world, but he seemed to have found a place between them, and that, more than his past, was who he was.

This, of course, is the judgment of later years. At the time, those fragments made my curiosity itch like mad. We thought we had discovered more, though, the day that a group of five Moulish—two men, one old woman, and two male youths—showed up in our clearing.

We heard them coming well in advance of their appearance. It is no advantage to be silent when traveling in the Green Hell; animals will attack silent creatures. The Moulish sing and stomp as they go, making themselves sound a far larger party than they are, to scare off beasts that might otherwise trouble them. We were therefore ready when they emerged from the trees.

All were dressed in the manner of Faj Rawango, in brief strips of barkcloth hung from their hips, and (apart from the occasional ornament) nothing more. The old woman was bare-breasted like the men—a sight that startled me a great deal at first, but soon became routine. (Nudity, I find, rapidly becomes boring when it is not treated as scandalous.) They looked at us with open curiosity, and listened with interest as Faj Rawango explained our purpose there.

Philologists say that there used to be a Moulish language unrelated to the Sachimbi family, that today only survives in some of their songs and chants. It was fortunate for our purposes, though perhaps tragic in other ways, that it has since been replaced with a language derived, through the Mouri villagers, from Yembe and other Sachimbi tongues native to the region. Because of this, while I had difficulty understanding Faj Rawango, the task of learning this new language was akin to learning Chiavoran when one has studied Thiessois. I could, by extrapolating from that common foundation, expand my vocabulary with good speed, although grammar took more time. For one such as I, with average skill at best on that front, this was a vital advantage.

I was therefore able to determine that Faj Rawango greeted the two adult men as “Brother,” and the old woman as “Mother.” “I thought he said his mother was a villager,” Natalie whispered to me, confused.

“It may just be a title of respect,” I whispered back. “The men, though… Mr. Wilker, can you understand him? It sounds like he’s actually claiming to be their relative.”

Mr. Wilker waved me to silence, the better to listen in, then nodded. “That’s why he wants to join them in their camp. Because he’s their brother. Half brothers, perhaps? They don’t look much alike.”

Indeed they did not, beyond the simplest resemblance arising from their shared heritage. Faj Rawango gestured at our camp, and as if that were a signal, one of the men and both of the youths began to prowl around, examining our tents and equipment. One of the boys approached the three of us and asked a question I could not understand.

“Your names,” Faj Rawango said. We obediently gave them, which led to much merriment on all sides; the Moulish had great difficulty pronouncing them, as we did we with theirs. The old woman was Apuesiso; the men were Natchekavu and Eguamiche; the youths were Kisamilewa and Walakpara.

It was Kisamilewa who had approached us, and his attention soon alighted on the notebook I held. He extended one hand for it, in a manner that struck me as peremptory; but, mindful of Faj Rawango’s comments on property, I handed it over. Not without misgivings: it was a fresh book, not the one in which I had recorded my savannah observations, but it did have my sketch of and notes on the drakefly, as well as sundry less memorable creatures. I did not want to lose them.

And lose them I did. Kisamilewa smiled broadly and walked off, notebook still in hand. (I did not regain it until nearly a month later.) It was, of course, a test: would we share as we were expected to? My notebook was not the only thing the Moulish claimed that day. Much of it, I realized in time, was not even “sharing” by their own standards; they pushed as far as they could think to go, beyond the boundaries of their usual sense of propriety. We were strangers to them, more so even than the “villagers” (a category encompassing not only Mouri, but every Erigan who is not Moulish), and it was necessary to see what we would do.

We handed over pots and pans, notebooks and compasses, an entire crate of gin. (A drink they returned as soon as they tried it; the taste was not at all to their liking.) I began to wonder where it would end, and no sooner had the thought but found my answer: Walakpara pointed at my blouse.

I almost did it. The heat was intense—I understood why the Moulish wore so little clothing—and I had been insisting to myself so vehemently that I must cooperate that I almost began to undo my buttons. Mr. Wilker’s gaping stare stopped me, though, as did the understanding that I would be eaten alive by insects if I stripped. (And although I had an undershirt beneath the blouse, would they not ask for that next? Would it end before I was naked?)

“I’m afraid not,” I said firmly, in Yembe, and vowed to take the consequences.

My refusal was met, not with anger, but with laughter. Apuesiso said something to the boys; it had the sound of calling them off from the hunt. My blouse stayed on; some of our belongings were restored; and so we packed up and went to join their camp.

THIRTEEN

Faj Rawango had given us other warnings on the ride to that clearing, chief among which was to show no fear of the forest. The villagers fear it—with good reason; they do not know how to survive in it—and the Moulish scorn them for this; to show fear, therefore, is to mark oneself as a villager, and not welcome.

Is the swamp frightening? In some ways, yes. I have mentioned the great variety of creatures that live within it; what I have not yet said is that they are invisible to the untrained eye. You hear them on all sides, but the dense growth conceals them, sometimes even when they are scarcely two meters away. It is also as near to trackless as makes no difference. The clearing in which we had camped persists only because the nearby villagers maintain it; Moulish camps vanish almost as soon as their inhabitants depart. I never did acquire the skill by which they find their way, and so following our quintet of guides felt like plunging into an abyss from which I might never return. I had been far from home before, but never had I felt so strongly that I was in a different world entirely. I could only trust to those around me, and hope it would be enough.

Contrary to some of the more foolish reports that have been made about my time in the Green Hell, facing the swamp with courage does not make one an “honorary member of the tribe.” It may suffice to win acceptance in a camp, and from time to time I did wonder whether the Moulish around me recalled any noteworthy difference between us, apart from my childlike incompetence with various tasks. (“Childlike” is a generous term. I might better be compared to the victim of a head injury. Moulish children are astonishingly competent, on account of not being coddled, as offspring in Scirling society are.) But the basic assumptions of life in the swamp are not those of life outside it, and although I reached the point of being able to navigate them with a degree of ease, they never became habit, much less unthinking reflex. I misstepped time and time again, and was tolerated only because of my willingness to learn from my mistakes.

As an example of this: when we came to the Moulish camp, perhaps two hours’ walk from our clearing, I assumed we would be taken before some kind of chief or headman. It took me days to understand how erroneous this assumption was. The elders of their people are looked to for wisdom and advice, and their youths for judgment in times of conflict (a fact which startles me deeply even now, depending as it does on a view of the cosmos I do not share), but there is no single leader, nor even a formal council.

How could there be? If there are eight elders in camp today, there may be only six tomorrow, two having wandered off to spend time in another camp. This, also, is a source of the odd acceptance we encountered: membership in a camp is not at all a formalized thing, like the lineages of the Bayembe region. A member is someone who eats and sleeps near the others, and contributes to their work. As soon as that person leaves—and they do leave, very often, while others show up—that membership ends, until the next time.

This, we came to understand, was the source of our confusion over Faj Rawango’s greeting to the others. Natchekavu and Eguamiche were his “brothers” in the sense that they were men of his own generation, nothing more. Claims that the Moulish have no concept of “family” are not true; they acknowledge that some people are the sons and daughters of the same parents, and such relatives often work together when they are in the same camp. But all those of a given age group within the camp are brothers and sisters, as all those above them are mothers and fathers, or (if older still) the camp’s elders. Faj Rawango calling those two his brothers was simply a way of claiming the right to join their camp, and to bring the three of us with him.

It sufficed to get us in the door, metaphorically speaking. Those presently belonging to the camp—about fifty altogether—gathered on the open ground at the center, where Kisamilewa and Walakpara, the youths who had brought us in, explained our situation. We distributed the iron knives and a few more things besides, and assured them, through Faj Rawango, that we did not at all mind doing our share of the work. There was a stretch of time during which he was drawn in for further questioning, and the rest of us shooed to the edge of the camp. This was nerve-wracking on two accounts, the first being that we worried about the closer examination they were giving him, and the second being our inability to cope in more than the most atrociously broken Moulish with the questions we still received during that time.

I cannot give you a full report of why the camp chose to accept our presence that day, any more than I can recount who said what and to whom. At the time they were all strangers to us, apart from our quintet of guides, and even those five I could only understand in snatches. I felt, indeed, as if I had suffered a head injury, and lost all comprehension of the world around me. Curiosity had a great deal to do with it, I know; the Moulish were largely unfamiliar with pale-skinned Anthiopeans. But there were deeper reasons I never fully uncovered. The decision having been made, the Moulish frowned upon us questioning it, as that might disturb the harmony created by their agreement—and they prize harmony to a high degree.

What I can tell you is that we were allowed to stamp out our own bit of forest, not quite a part of the camp but near to it, rather like the clearing in which their children played. Instead of building temporary leaf-walled huts as the Moulish did, we pitched our tents in that space, stacking the supplies and equipment between them and using a few crates for seats and tables. After some discussion with Faj Rawango, the Moulish slaughtered the donkeys who had carried our belongings from Atuyem (our horses having remained in a nearby village). Both creatures were mild-tempered enough that I did regret their fate, but as Mr. Wilker pointed out, the alternative was to wake up some morning and find nothing but a bloodstain where they had been. Better that our hosts should get the benefit of their meat, rather than some nocturnal predator.

His logic was sound, but I could not help seeing the poor donkeys as our last link with the world outside the Green Hell. With their deaths, we were committed to this course, for good or for ill.

If we wished to be successful in the mission Ankumata had given us, then we could not pursue it immediately.

We could not even pursue our broader agenda of research. If we went gallivanting after swamp-wyrms straightaway, the Moulish would have dismissed us as antisocial lunatics, more concerned with our own inexplicable desires than with the well-being of the camp. At best they would have lectured us on our lack of consideration; at worst they would have abandoned us, solving an intractable conflict in their usual manner, which is to simply walk away from it. A group as small as ours does not survive well on its own in the swamp, even with guns to help. We had to prove our worth to the camp first.

Fortunately, proving our worth was far from incompatible with the work of naturalism. The morning after our arrival, a deafening chorus of cicadas and other insects roused us from our sleep, followed shortly by Faj Rawango. “Today is a hunt,” he said, and nodded at Mr. Wilker. “They’ll expect you to come and help with the nets.”

“What of Natalie and myself?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Here with the children, or making noise to drive the game into the nets. They will tell you.”

It was a near thing that morning; the children were fascinated by everything from my clothing to my hair, and wanted the chance to study me. But I, of course, preferred to study the swamp, and so we compromised: Natalie remained behind, and I came to do my part in the hunt.

This entailed walking past what I later learned to identify as the sacred hunting fire, whose odorous smoke—nearly as foul as a swamp-wyrm’s breath—must touch all those who go out for that task, and then navigating the intricate maze that is the natural environment of Mouleen. We were still close enough then to the swamp’s edge that the land was mostly dry; farther in, one seemingly cannot go ten feet without crossing a waterway. Here I only had to wade through two narrow streams before we came to the area chosen for our day’s work.

It was as Faj Rawango had said. The men (with Mr. Wilker among them) strung nets between the trees in a broad arc; then the women (myself among them) beat sticks together and shouted at the top of our lungs to frighten the game from us into that arc. Now I began to see all the creatures only my ears had detected before: tree hyraxes, talapoin monkeys, delicate little duikers. Where larger animals charged, the nets were pulled aside to let them through; the Moulish will hunt such beasts, but by different means than we used that day. The smaller ones, once caught, were clubbed or stabbed with fire-hardened spears.

I had not brought my notebook, but I recorded all that I could in my memory, for commitment to paper that evening. This became the standard mode of my work for much of my time in the swamp; although we did have excursions wholly for the purpose of observation, a great deal of our data was gathered in the course of participating in the daily labors of our Moulish hosts. It is excellent training for the memory, if not quite as good for scholarly progress, which prefers to commit things to paper straightaway.

I could not, however, resist asking questions. (Nor could I resist paying attention to things the Moulish considered entirely uninteresting. They are fond of giving nicknames to people; mine was soon Reguamin, which translates to something like “woman who stares at things.” Natalie was Geelo—“builder”—for her good assistance with huts and other such structures, and Mr. Wilker was ignominiously dubbed Epou, “red,” for his permanently flushed face.)

On our way back to the camp, when we reached the first of the streams, I gestured at the water. Grammar was beyond me as yet, but I knew from Faj Rawango the word I wanted. “Legambwa?”

The girl leading me laughed. She was no more than sixteen, I judged; her name was Akinimanbi, and in all my time with her I rarely saw her other than cheerful. Her answer meant nothing to me, but she was quickly adapting to my ineptitude, and bent to splash her hand in the water, indicating its shallowness. By way of similar motions and a few Yembe words I inquired as to the depth a swamp-wyrm would require, and got a shrug; her explanatory gesture seemed to indicate a variety of possibilities, from little more than half a meter to a channel that would merit the name of river.

I pantomimed jaws latching onto my leg, and pretended to scream. Akinimanbi laughed again. That much I understood; she thought me foolish for worrying about such a thing. The significance of her waving arm, however, was opaque to me, as it seemed to indicate the trees. I had thought swamp-wyrms aquatic, but I had not forgotten the so-called arboreal snakes of Bayembe; were their lowland cousins similarly opportunistic, and known to climb? I might be eager to see dragons of any sort, but the prospect of having one drop on my head was alarming.

No dragons fell on my head during our return to the camp, nor in the days that followed. We were about three weeks in that location, with hunts every few days, and smaller excursions to gather food every morning: nuts, berries, roots, frogs, whom the Moulish ate in vast quantities, without ever seeming to dent the supply.

(Because someone always asks: yes, I ate termites. Also ants, beetles, caterpillars, and the cicadas whose cacophony woke me every morning. If one is to live without the benefits of agriculture beyond sporadic trade with villagers, every source of food becomes vital. I will not, however, pretend I ever became fond of the practice. Insects are too crunchy for my taste.)

During those three weeks, we applied ourselves assiduously to being good members of the camp—a task made easier by the absence of dragons, at least that we saw. Moulish came and went, some of them drawn from other camps after word reached them of our presence; others moved to visit kin, or to get away from neighbours who vexed them. It meant constantly learning new names and, as our command of the language improved, explaining ourselves again and again; I began to feel we would never truly settle in, but be trapped forever in this limbo of novelty. But in time the questions stopped.

With the fluctuation of the camp (most of which I will gloss over here, except where it becomes pertinent), you might rightly ask whether we stayed with the same people our entire time in Mouleen. For sufficiently small values of “the same people,” the answer is yes. Akinimanbi, I discovered, was newly married, and she and her husband Mekeesawa shared a fire with her grandparents, Apuesiso and Daboumen. At all times except a few I will note in due course, we were always in camp with one or the other of those two couples, and often both.

As in the previous volume of my memoirs, I will not force you to toil through broken sentences that would more accurately represent my early lack of skill with the Moulish tongue. You may simply imagine that when I said to Akinimanbi, “I’ve heard that the dragons here are rather bad-tempered,” one morning shortly before we left that campsite, my phrasing was not nearly so fluent.

She shrugged, cracking nuts with great efficiency and throwing the shells into the fire. “A hippopotamus is worse. The dragons usually won’t chase you.”

I had less faith than I might in that “usually,” owing to my experiences with the “usually” approachable rock-wyrms of Vystrana. “Do you ever hunt them?”

Akinimanbi stared at me as if I’d suggested throwing a baby into the fire along with the shells. “Hunt them? That would be”—and she finished with a word whose meaning I could not guess. (Geguem, which I suspect is a term left over from the older language.)

“I don’t understand geguem,” I said, apologetically.

She looked to her grandmother, Apuesiso, who was squatting on the other side of the fire. I could not imitate their posture; a lifetime of chairs has trained me out of the position. I sat on one of our crates, having discovered that sitting cross-legged on the ground meant unpleasant visitors crawling up my skirts.

Apuesiso was braiding a rope from some fiber I had not identified. Without pausing in her work, she sang a song, at least half of which was in the older tongue. I could not understand a word of it, and prepared to say so. But Apuesiso knew that; I think she began with the song for reasons of tradition or propriety. When it was done, she shifted without pause from music to speech. “A long time ago, a man killed a dragon. He was ashamed of what he’d done, so he tried to hide it by getting rid of the body. He ate the meat, used the skin, and turned the teeth and claws into tools. But it was no good: the spirits knew what he had done. Geguem.”

Murder, then; or perhaps sin. “Did they punish the man?”

By her snort, I might have asked whether rain fell from the clouds. “Because of him, we die.”

The broken quality of our conversation meant I had to ask several more questions before I properly understood what Apuesiso meant. The death of the dragon was, in their view, the reason human beings are mortal.

I am more a natural historian than an ethnologist; my immediate thought was to wonder how hungry that man must have been to resort to eating foul-smelling and fouler-tasting dragon meat. But of course such myths change over time; the exact phrasing owed more to the usual hunting practices of the Moulish than to the actual disposition of a dragon’s body. (Indeed, I later heard another rendition of the story wherein the bones were also said to have become tools. I was far too excited about that one, until it became apparent that, no, the Moulish ancestors did not have their own method for preserving dragonbone.)

But if I have relatively little interest in the religious practices of other people, there is no surer way to draw my attention than to bring up dragons. “Why did he kill it? Was it for food, or did the dragon attack him?”

They laughed my questions off, as well they might. It was a myth; such narratives are not known for their exploration of the human psyche and its motivations. As well ask why Chaltaph refused the gifts of Raganit in the Book of Schisms: scholars may think up interpretations, and those are enlightening in their own fashion, but in the end the story itself gives no clear answer. But the taboo against further dragon killing was clear.

I brought this up with Natalie and Mr. Wilker that afternoon, as we went through the tedious routine of washing our clothes in buckets of water collected for the purpose. (We could not use groundwater, as it was too often muddy. Fortunately, the storms that came every afternoon as regularly as clockwork made it easy to collect rain.)

“So they won’t look kindly on us killing a dragon,” Mr. Wilker said, wringing out one of his shirts. It is a credit to the man that he never once asked Natalie or myself to do his laundry for him—though on reflection, it may be more a discredit to our own clothes-washing skills, or lack thereof. We were both too gently reared to have firsthand experience with such matters; Mr. Wilker, with his working-class childhood on Niddey, knew more than we.

“About as kindly as we would look on someone pulling another fig from the Tree of Knowledge,” I said, trying, with less than total success, to scrub mud from the hem of one of my skirts.

Natalie was hanging the clean articles from a line to dry (inasmuch as they could, in the eternally damp air of that place). “No tests on bone, then, unless you want to try and do it in secret.”

Mr. Wilker and I exchanged glances, then both shook our heads. “Not yet, anyway,” he said. “Too much risk of being found out and losing their goodwill.”

“Besides,” I added, “it works, with modification, on both rock-wyrms and savannah snakes, who cannot possibly be related except in the most distant sense. I think we can assume it would work on swamp-wyrms as well. And as much as I would like to be able to study samples for reasons other than preservation, Mr. Wilker is right; it would lose us their goodwill, which would do more harm to our work in the long run.”

I had gone on with my skirt-washing efforts while I spoke, but my thoughts had drifted from that task; it startled me when a pair of hands appeared and took the skirt away. Mr. Wilker set it against the crate lid he was using for a washing board and began to scrub it, doing in mere seconds what would take me minutes to achieve, if indeed I could at all.

“Thank you,” I said, blushing. “Would it scandalize you terribly if I cut that apart after it dries and turned it into trousers?”

“Oh, please do,” Natalie said, with vast relief. “Then I won’t feel guilty for doing the same. Skirts in this place are sheer madness.”

Mr. Wilker had seen me in trousers before, in Vystrana. He had not liked it at the time—but then, we had not liked each other at the time, either. He said, only a little stiffly, “It seems the practical choice, yes.”

Natalie and I accordingly spent the evening cutting up and restitching our clothing, much to the amusement of our hosts the following morning. The only differentiation they observe in clothing the two sexes lies in how they hang their loincloths; skirts versus trousers meant little to them in that regard. But Natalie and I both felt awkward in such masculine garb, and it showed. We soon adjusted, however, and this is the origin of my practice of wearing trousers whenever I am on an expedition, which has been such an article of gossip over the years. (Whatever the scandal-sheets may claim, I do not wear them at home, though I have considered it once or twice.) (The incident at Booker’s Club should not be counted; I was extremely drunk at the time.)

Our decision was timely, as we moved camp the very next day. I have spoken already of the tendency for the Moulish to come and go from a camp; there is also the migration of a camp wholesale, when they have been long enough in an area to exhaust the nearby sources of food, and must move elsewhere to find game and wild fruits.

This created a spot of difficulty for our expedition, as we had known it must when they slaughtered the donkeys. With no beasts of burden, the Moulish carry all of their belongings with them, in baskets strung from tumplines on their heads. Although this is quite an effective method for those whose neck muscles are conditioned to it, the four of us (Faj Rawango included) could not be so described, and also had more equipment than we could carry in such fashion.

Our best guess at conversion from “distance a Moulish man carrying a burden can walk before noon” to Scirling units told us they intended to move about fifteen kilometers farther into the swamp. Some of our things we could abandon, having discovered we had no real need of them. (A proper Moulish sentiment, and one that has become habit for me over the years.) Others we could get rid of, so to speak, by encouraging members of the camp to take them; they rarely resented us borrowing things back when we needed them. But some items—foremost among them the crate of gin and the box containing our preserved dragonbone—posed a genuine problem.

“Well,” Mr. Wilker said with a sigh, “I suppose we could conduct another experiment. Bury the bones, and see how they fare in this muck.” He kicked at the wet soil.

That box was nailed firmly shut; the Moulish did not know what was in it, and I preferred to keep matters that way. “Will we be able to find it again? I feel I’ve come to know this area quite well, but I’m sure that a week from now it will look like every other bit of swamp to me.”

“They know the spot,” Natalie said, fishing a machete from among our baggage. “And I think Faj Rawango could find it again. We’ll just have to ask for help. I fear, though, this is the closest thing we have to a shovel.”

We dug the hole with two machetes and our bare hands, which would not have gone very well in more solid earth. In that terrain, however, it was more a matter of hacking through a mat of roots, then scooping away what muddy dirt remained. (And then pausing with every handful to shake off the small creatures crawling up one’s arms.) This, of course, attracted an audience, but we were able to satisfy their curiosity by saying we only wanted to spare ourselves the effort of carrying the box’s contents with us.

Everything else went into packs and baskets and so on. Akinimanbi talked her husband Mekeesawa into taking our bottles of gin, removed from their crate and wrapped in clothing for protection; he grumbled at carrying a tumpline-hung basket “like a youth”—grown men carried their nets and spears, not other burdens—but agreed without much rancor, as the rest of us were taking on substantial loads of our own. And so, shouldering our loads, we went with our hosts to their next camp.

FOURTEEN

I thought I had seen the Green Hell during our weeks in that first camp, but I was wrong.

Compared to the swamp proper, those upper reaches are dry and scrubby, with dwarfish vegetation (however much it may tower above the trees and brush of the savannah). Once you descend into the heart of the Green Hell, you find yourself in a land of water and giants.

The trees there soar forty or fifty meters high, as if they were the pillars of some great temple. Their roots form great bladelike walls, bracing the trunks in the soil, sometimes growing closely enough that earth accumulates in between and a smaller tree begins growing in the cup thus formed. The space beneath is emerald and dim, save for where a stray beam of sunlight breaks through the many layers of vegetation to strike the ground. There the swamp grows even warmer, but at the same time the light is a glorious thing, as if it carried the voices of angels.

Most of the light is to be found where the waterways grow wide enough that branches cannot fully bridge the gap. But these are rare; storms and floods along the three rivers that feed the swamp can change the landscape enough that what last year was a minor stream has now become a main artery of the delta. “Rivers” in Mouleen therefore have trees growing in them like islands, and are patched with sunlight like a piebald horse.

When we came to a waterway deep and broad enough to be troublesome, or (more often) turned to follow one for a substantial distance, the Moulish paused to make simple rafts, on which they floated their belongings for ease of transport. “Tuck the hems of your trousers into your stockings,” Mr. Wilker said, suiting action to words. “It will reduce the chance of you finding a leech on your leg.”

“I think trousers just became my favourite thing in all the world,” Natalie said.

We tucked our hems into our stockings and half-waded, half-swam downstream. When we came out again, our hosts picked leeches off their limbs with an unconcerned air. We Scirlings examined ourselves and one another; Natalie circled behind me, and I felt her tug on the fabric of my shirt. Then she made a most peculiar noise—a sort of strangled moan.

“Ah, Isabella?” she said. “You, ah—your shirt—”

My shirt had come loose from my waistband during our exertions. I put my hand to my back, very unwisely, and felt the soft, disgusting mass of a leech just above my right kidney.

I fear it may damage my reputation to admit this, but I yelped and promptly began to dance in a circle like a cat chasing her tail, trying to see the leech and also to get away from it. The latter was futile; it had fastened onto me, and slapping at it with my hand was hardly persuading it to let go.

The Moulish were no help, as they found my antics utterly hilarious. Finally Akinimanbi took pity on me; while Mr. Wilker held me by the shoulders, stopping my dance, she lifted my shirt and pried the thing off. I shuddered at the sight of it, and kept shuddering for a good while afterward, obsessively running my hands over various parts of my body to make sure I had no more bloodsucking passengers, at least none of any size larger than a mosquito. (I did, as I have said, eventually become accustomed to leeches, but this being my first encounter with them, it did not proceed so calmly.)

On we went, until we came to the place the camp had agreed upon for its next site. How they identified it, I do not know; with the landscape as changeable as the shifting waters, there seemed no guarantee a location would still be where one remembered it, even if one could find it again.

With what remained of the day (and our energy), we helped the others cut away brush and saplings from the new site, trimming the detritus to make huts for them to sleep in. Pitching our own tents took longer, and when it was done, I had no will even to eat. But Natalie insisted we feed ourselves, so I swallowed a plantain and some starchy root whose name I had not yet learned, then collapsed face-first into my pillow.

This was the basis of our routine for the next several months. The camp—or rather, the portion of it that consisted of us and Akinimanbi’s family—never stayed more than three or four weeks in any one place. We were in the depths of the rainy season now, which meant a daily deluge each afternoon, and often showers at other times of day; it is not the near-constant rainfall seen elsewhere in the world, but it is more than enough. The mountains farther inland had melted their snowcaps by now, feeding the three rivers; it began to seem that the swamp was eighty percent water and twenty percent land. Campsites were wherever the ground rose high enough to have a chance of staying above the flood. Nor were such places accidental: Mekeesawa told Mr. Wilker that they piled branches and planted certain vegetation in what passed for their “dry” season to ensure these miniature hillocks would persist.

There was, I began to realize, more organization to their society than met the eye—though it is still nothing like as structured as those which develop in less ecologically hostile regions. The Moulish cannot afford stratification by class, nor even much in the way of gender roles; all must do what they can. But they not only understood their environment, they shaped it in small ways to suit their purposes. They also maintained a surprising degree of connection between camps, firstly through the constant migration of people, and secondly through the use of talking drums.

Natalie was fascinated by these. For a people with so few material possessions, and most of those temporary, the drums were treasures: carved with elaborate designs, and carried with reverence each time the camp moved. Their use is too complex for me to explain, but the Moulish have a way of translating their language into drumbeats, which can then be used to send messages between camps. By passing a message from one camp to the next, they are able to communicate from one end of the swamp to the other, much faster than any human could carry a message. The drums therefore permit them to stay in touch with kin far away, and are often used to ask or tell where someone is, so that another may find them.

Mekeesawa explained this to me one afternoon, while Natalie was questioning the current drum bearer about the method of translation. He added, “It is very useful during this season. No one wants to wander for too long.”

By now my command of the language had improved substantially, such that I could converse with him in more than my early mixture of nouns and mime. I laughed and said, “Because of the rain? I can understand that.”

“The rain,” Mekeesawa said, “and the dragons.”

We were not busy with any task for the camp; I judged it safe to question him, without fear that my interest would seem selfish. “What makes them more dangerous in this season than another? Do they object to this much water?”

He grinned. “They love it. Full of things to eat. But this is when the eggs hatch.”

I attempted not to perk up like a scent hound that has come upon the trail of a fat, juicy rabbit, but I fear my success was middling at best. It was easy to forget that a world existed outside the Green Hell: a world, and perhaps a war. Had the Ikwunde backed off from the rivers, or were Scirling soldiers and Bayembe warriors fighting them as we spoke? I had no way of knowing.

Even if open conflict had broken out, nothing I did here could affect it—or so I thought. Eggs would not help Ankumata immediately. Even so, Mekeesawa’s words reminded me that the oba would be waiting for us to deliver on our promise.

If the eggs were in the process of hatching, though, he would have to wait a while longer, until there was a fresh set. “Do the dragons lay them in the water?” I asked. “Or on dry land, and they hatch when they become submerged?”

It was not, I thought, an alarming question. Mekeesawa, however, clapped his hands together, which I recognized as a sign to ward off bad luck or evil spirits. “I don’t know about such things,” he said.

The peculiarity of his response arrested me. The key factor distinguishing the Moulish from their neighbours—even the closely related Mouri—is not physiognomy or language; it is their relationship to the swamp they call home. They know every plant that is useful and every one that is hazardous, every insect that can poison you and every one that can be eaten for lunch. They hunt a wide variety of creatures, even hippopotami and forest elephants (against whom they use some of those poisonous insects), and are as well versed in the behaviour and life cycle of those beasts as any naturalist could hope for.

Now a Moulish hunter claimed to me that he did not know where swamp-wyrms laid their eggs. You may understand, gentle reader, when I tell you this made me suspicious.

I considered several possible responses and settled on, “Many animals become quite violent if they believe you might threaten their young. I should like at least to know what to watch out for, so as not to stumble upon swamp-wyrm eggs.” Of course I would go looking for them eventually, but this made for a more discreet way of questioning him.

Much good it did me. “They’ve all hatched by now,” Mekeesawa said.

“Yes, but if we are still here when the next set are laid—”

I should have known better. Yves de Maucheret had claimed the Moulish worshipped dragons; I had seen no sign of it thus far beyond that one myth, the tale of how humans became mortal, but I should have known that something gave rise to that claim. I had clearly stumbled upon a taboo subject, and it is my fault for letting my intellectual curiosity drive me into pursuing it too directly.

No more would Mekeesawa say on the topic, and I had to restrain the urge to question others in the camp, in the hopes of finding someone more willing to speak. Instead I passed this along to the others, and we discussed how we might proceed.

“We have a fair bit of time to spare,” Mr. Wilker said. The rainy season meant the Moulish had only to drop a net in the water to get their supper; they spent much of their day at leisure, singing and dancing, when they were not occupied with household tasks like pounding out fresh barkcloth or weaving baskets. “We’ve gathered useful information for the general purpose of naturalism, but perhaps it’s time we devoted ourselves more strictly to dragons.”

I nodded in agreement. We had caught distant glimpses of a few, and likely been closer to more; a swamp-wyrm who wishes to remain concealed is not easily spotted. But those glimpses had taught us very little so far. I said, “Not pursuing eggs, of course; not immediately. But we know virtually nothing of what swamp-wyrms eat, or how they hunt, where they sleep, the differences between male and female, their mating habits…” I ticked each item off on my fingers, and stopped when I ran out on that hand. I could have kept going. My understanding of what a naturalist did had greatly deepened in the years since Vystrana.

“We don’t even know how one might safely observe them,” Natalie pointed out; and that became our first question to answer.

For some time we had been agreeable if moderately inept members of the camp, mostly going along with the day-to-day activities of our hosts. Now that we reared our heads as naturalists, however, we met with more difficulty. Not hostility, per se, but simple confusion.

“This is the lazy season,” Akinimanbi said, suiting inaction to words. At her side, Mekeesawa was stripping the bark from a branch to make a new spear, but his movements were desultory. He might have been a Scirling farmer, whittling wood to give his hands something to do. “Why would you go out when you don’t have to?”

“We do have to,” I said, and then stopped. Most of the reasons I could give her were so foreign to the world in which she lived, I might spend the next hour explaining them and still not convey my point. There was nothing like the Philosophers’ Colloquium here, nor journals in which one might publish, nor acclaim given for that sort of thing. And simple scientific curiosity, as I had learned in Vystrana, rarely meant much to the people for whom my object of curiosity was their daily and sometimes disagreeable reality. (One need look no further than Scirland for proof of that: while we have naturalists who study local birds and bugs, they are far outnumbered by those whose interest lies in more distant lands—myself chief among them.)

Akinimanbi waited patiently while I considered how to explain myself without seeming like a madwoman. At last I said, “If you consider the three of us to be hunters of a sort, then what we are hunting is knowledge.”

Her eyebrows went up at this, and I realized my error. “Except it’s not like your story, where the man did wrong by killing the dragon! We don’t want to kill anything. Forget what I said about hunting; we gather knowledge, as you gather food. To, ah, feed our minds. Or—”

At this I stopped, because Akinimanbi and Mekeesawa both were laughing at me, slapping their thighs and rolling back where they sat. I deserved it, for the way my words had tumbled over one another; I might have explained myself, but the part about not seeming like a madwoman had been a resounding failure.

Belatedly, I thought of a better way to make my point. “Your people understand the forest: how the animals behave, where to find them, and so on. I want something similar—but instead of the forest as a whole, I want to understand dragons. They are not only here, you know; there are dragons in the savannah—” Mekeesawa nodded. “Well, there are more than that, all over the world. They live in the mountains and on the plains and maybe even in the ocean. I want to know them as you know the creatures of this forest.”

“But why?” Mekeesawa asked. His eyes were still merry with laughter, but his question was serious. “You don’t live in all those places.”

With the amount of time I have spent traveling in my life, one might make the argument that I do live in all those places, if only temporarily. But Mekeesawa’s point was a good one, and not easily dismissed. The Moulish understood the creatures of the Green Hell because their survival depended on it; my survival did not depend on my traveling the globe to find dragons. (Indeed, it has on more than one occasion nearly been detrimental to my life expectancy.) How could I answer him?

Thinking back on the matter now, it is possible my only true answer to that question is now in its second volume, with more to come. These memoirs are not only an accounting of my life; they are an accounting for it.

But that day in the Green Hell, I could hardly present these books to Mekeesawa. I gave the matter my final try. “There is a man—an elder of my camp, in a manner of speaking. He has asked me to do this for him.” That was the best explanation I could give for Lord Hilford’s role as my patron. “And if that does not make sense to you, then I can only ask you to tolerate the madwoman.”

I suspect that last suggestion was the one they accepted in the end. One way or another, we got the freedom to continue with our work—and, at long last, an explanation for Akinimanbi’s overhead gesture so many days before.

FIFTEEN

I have described to you how the inundation of the Green Hell made the place almost more lake than land. We had gained two newcomers to the camp since settling there, and lost five others; I had assumed they went by raft while I was otherwise occupied. But travel by raft is too dangerous during that season: apart from the usual predators, swamp-wyrms not excepted, the water swarms with small, eel-like creatures we had dubbed fangfish, which are rapacious carnivores. To avoid these hazards, the Moulish traveled by other, more exciting means.

Three of us went out with Mekeesawa; Faj Rawango elected to stay in camp, I think to mitigate any sense that we were being antisocial by pursuing our own ends. Mekeesawa took us to the end of the long spit of land on which we had pitched our camp, and we waded across a shallow stretch to another spot that was not so much island as tree. It was one of the great forest giants, tangled about with smaller parasitic trees, and he indicated to us that we should climb.

Tamshire’s rocky soil does not support much in the way of good climbing trees; nor do Tamshire’s gentry support much tree-climbing in girls. Mekeesawa clambered up with no trouble, and Natalie followed him with surprisingly little, but I required Mr. Wilker’s assistance. My face, I am sure, was flamingly red by the time we reached the others; in part because of the heat, but much more because of the indelicate physical contact his aid required. We had swept aside our conversation on the hunt—or rather, swept it under the rug—but it is difficult to ignore questions of propriety when a man places his hand on your posterior to help you up a tree.

He, at least, could blame the redness of his skin on his Niddey ancestry. (I am not sure Mr. Wilker had stopped being red since we arrived in Nsebu.) And we were both soon distracted by what Mekeesawa had brought us up there to see.

The giant tree soared higher still, but here the parasites that clung to its trunk branched outward. In front of us those branches tangled with others from another tree; then I looked more closely, and saw the tangle was no accident at all.

It may have begun that way. But just as the island on which we camped had been built up by human action, so too had this tangle been fostered, with creeping vines binding the branches together and shaping them into—

“A bridge!” Natalie said, grinning from ear to ear.

In Scirling, I said to her, “You truly have the soul of an engineer.” I did not mean it as a slight, though. Nor did I mean to denigrate the bridge, especially once I discovered it was part of a semiformal network extending across various parts of the swamp. During most times of the year this elevated system is more trouble than it’s worth to use, but when the waters rise high, it allows the Moulish to traverse the places where dragons and other predators are likely to lurk.

As works of building go, it may not be as obviously impressive as a Nichaean aqueduct or a Yelangese highway. But I defy anyone to stand at the end of a Moulish tree-bridge and not be impressed.

I also defy them not to be the slightest bit nervous about committing their weight to such a structure. Mekeesawa went first, examining the bridge and pausing occasionally to weave a branch in where it would grow to reinforce the whole. While the process was fascinating to observe, it did not exactly foster confidence.

We three Scirlings exchanged dubious looks. “There are two ways to approach this,” Natalie said. “Mr. Wilker, you are the heaviest of us. If you go first, the bridge will be the least damaged and most able to support your weight; however, that may increase the risk for Isabella and myself. If we go first, you will have some warning as to its structural integrity… but it may also be damaged, and therefore unsafe, by the time you cross.”

Mekeesawa was by then on the other side, and waving impatiently for us to come. “It must be quite safe,” I said, and made myself approach the end of the bridge. “The Moulish cross these things all the time.”

“The Moulish,” Mr. Wilker muttered, “weigh half what I do”—which was only a minor exaggeration.

I drew in a deep breath and set my foot on the branch, gripping a nearby vine as if my life depended upon it (which I hoped it would not shortly do). The structure I faced was to what I would call a “bridge” what a rope ladder is to a staircase: it might support my weight, but that did not make it reassuring. Sparing a moment to bless once more the decision to dress in trousers, I slid my other foot past my ankle, settling it just beyond the point where another branch crossed my main support. Bare feet, I realized, would be much better for this task, being able to bend and grip the surface—but only if those feet belonged to a Moulish woman, mine being far too tender for the task. The branches and vines I gripped were, at least, blessedly thorn-free; at this height, they had much less to fear from passing herbivores. Step by step, I proceeded.

It is inevitable, I suppose, that halfway through such an undertaking, one will commit the error of looking down.

Beneath me lay a lacework of branches and vines too thin to support my weight if I fell; beneath that—vertiginously far below—the water was a murky, green-brown plate, broken only by the wake of something swimming just beneath the surface.

I forced myself to look away and breathe through my nose, preventing the hyperventilation that would have made me dizzy. When I finally forced myself to take the next step, my shoe slipped a few centimeters: not enough to imperil me, but more than enough to set my heart racing. The half-dozen steps it took to reach Mekeesawa seemed to take forever—but then, at last, I was safe.

Whether Natalie and Mr. Wilker had similar difficulties, I cannot tell you, for I was busy restoring strength to my now jellylike limbs. Once we had recovered, Mekeesawa led us onward to a place where he said we could likely observe the dragons—including some of their young.

This was an area low-lying enough that it had been thoroughly drowned by the flood, with only the tips of underbrush poking up here and there in the water to show there was anything between the trees. Swamp-wyrms love such territory; it is full of fish, frogs, and other bite-size snacks. Much of their diet comes from these sources, but they do also pursue more substantial targets; and here, as in the savannah, we did not have to wait long before we saw this demonstrated before our eyes.

The manner of it was quite similar; only the environment differed. In the trees across the way from where we sat, a troupe of colobus monkeys had begun a chattering argument amongst themselves. One of them so offended another that the second took to flight, branch to branch across an overhanging tree; and so it met its end.

A ripple of disturbance made a traveling V along the water’s surface, our only warning of the dragon. And scant warning at that; an instant later, the swamp-wyrm burst above the surface, lunging into the air with jaws extended—snap! And the monkey was gone. A great wave spread as the wyrm splashed down. The colobus troupe fled in a panic, but one of them missed his grip upon the next branch and fell. He floundered only briefly in the water before the lithe, mud-green body eeled over to him and sent him to join his brother.

This is not the only way swamp-wyrms hunt, of course. They will, like crocodiles, snap up creatures that wander too close to the water’s edge, as well as those in the water with them. In the drier reaches of the forest, they will behave more like arboreal snakes, concealing themselves beneath brush or twining around a tree. This semi-aerial hunting, however, is their most striking characteristic. When they swim, they fold their wings up into something like a fin that helps them steer at speed; then, when they are ready to strike, they extend their wings and use them rather like the arms of a ballista to propel themselves into the air. Sometimes one will lurk beneath his prey and bring his mouth just to the surface of the water; then he will patiently expel his extraordinary breath (which readers of the first volume may recall is a noxious fume) until the creatures above are so overcome that they drop. The result is rather like manna from heaven—at least if you are a swamp-wyrm.

“It’s very like a savannah snake,” Mr. Wilker said when the dragon had subsided once more. “They may be more closely related than we thought.”

Natalie’s mind was on more immediately physical matters. “I’ve never seen a wing fold like that. How on earth are those joints structured?”

Without killing and dissecting one, answering that question would be difficult. But we had more than enough to occupy us, trying to estimate the size of the beast (from our brief glimpse of it), querying Mekeesawa about how that compared to the usual run of swamp-wyrms, and guessing at the number of colobus monkeys a dragon would have to eat each day in order to keep itself in good health.

Mr. Wilker climbed a tree to study the water, calling down observations regarding the movement patterns of the creature, while Natalie exhorted him to be careful he was not eaten himself. I took my sketchbook from the small bundle I had lashed to my back and put down a loose collection of lines, but what I had observed thus far was grossly insufficient to let me make a good drawing. I had seen the one Velloin captured, but it was a malformed runt, and much inclined to curl into a sullen ball. I remembered well enough that the legs were set more like a crocodile’s than those of a terrestrial dragon, but not their exact disposition, and of the jointing of the wings I had little idea, on account of the runt’s deformities.

Indeed, it took many observational trips before we had good data on such matters. But those trips took longer than they should have, because of the difficulties we—or more precisely, I—encountered.

It began on the journey back to camp, when I fell into the swamp.

We had crossed two tree bridges on the way to that spot; those traverses had been enough to reassure me that the structures would bear our weight. Perhaps that reassurance made me careless; I cannot say. I believe I was still as cautious as any woman might be who is trusting her life to a few branches woven together with vines. But on the second bridge, not far at all from camp, I misstepped, and found myself off balance. I reached for a vine—it tore—I windmilled my arms, trying to recover—I struck a nearby branch—and then I was falling.

The instinct to flail for support was still active, and it saved my life. My right hand caught a lower branch, and if its bark tore half the skin from my fingers and palm, it slowed my descent. Slowed, not stopped: when the limb finished bowing beneath my weight, my arm was nearly yanked from its socket, and I lost what grip I had. Like that second monkey, I fell into the water, and you may recall that the purpose of these bridges is to lead the Moulish safely past the areas where dragons and other perils may lurk.

I hit the water with a slap, driving down hard enough that I sank almost to my knees in the soft mud below. That came as near to killing me as the fall or any predator did; had I not managed to pull myself free, I might have drowned in short order. But pull I did, with all the strength that a good dose of panic can bestow. Then I kicked to the surface and sucked in a great gulp of air, and at that point I was home and dry, apart from being in the middle of some dragon’s possible hunting pool.

A commotion off to one side was the two men hurling themselves down the tree as fast as they could go. I struck out toward that sound, trying not to splash too much. My thoughts kept returning to that smooth ripple across the water, and the swift death that had followed. Would a swamp-wyrm attack something as large as a human woman?

The general answer to my question is yes. But as it turned out, that was the least of my worries.

My fall had sent everything in the water darting away, but now they were returning. I felt movement past my limbs, and then a sharp pain on my left arm: one of the eel-like fangfish had found me, and buried its sharp teeth in my flesh.

It had already been imperative that I get out of the water, but with this, my situation became dire. Fangfish will come to the scent of blood, and a school of them could tear me to pieces, leaving nothing but a skeleton behind.

As with the leech, I reacted on terrified instinct, seizing the fangfish and ripping it free. My blood made a dark ribbon in the muddy water. I retained sufficient presence of mind to shout for Mr. Wilker to stay out; he had reached the shore, and was plainly about to throw himself in, but it would help not at all for both of us to be chewed on. Heedless now of splashing, I redoubled my efforts, and soon came within reach of his arm; he gripped my wrist and hauled me from the water.

My breath sobbed in my chest, from exertion and fear alike. But I was safe now—or so I thought, until I heard Mekeesawa shouting in alarm. Heart pounding, I turned to look over my shoulder, expecting that narrow and graceful V.

What I saw instead was the charging thunder of a pygmy hippopotamus.

You may laugh; hippos are absurd-looking creatures, and the term “pygmy” suggests a pocket-size version. But your average pygmy hippo weighs more than two hundred kilograms and will beat the living daylight out of anything that trespasses in its waters. It is smaller and less vicious than its savannah-dwelling cousin, but this is like saying that a tornado is smaller and less destructive than a hurricane. While true, that does not mean it cannot wreak havoc.

Mr. Wilker and I prepared to run. But Mekeesawa, knowing what we did not, urged us back up into the branches instead.

Which is how I came to be treed by a furious, porky creature that would have cheerfully employed its silly little legs to stomp me into the mud. Once roused, hippos cannot be trusted to stop at defending their waters; they will chase the intruder, and can often outrun him. The one benefit of the entire debacle was that the creature’s bellows of rage drew the attention of the nearby camp, and some of the hunters came and killed it; we dined upon hippo meat that night.

(This, you may be interested to know, is the incident which persuaded me to wear trousers at all times while in the field. I no longer cared what others thought proper; I was all too aware that I never knew when I might have to swim, run, or climb a tree to escape an angry beast. I may risk my life on a regular basis—or I did in my youth—but I will not do so in the name of mere propriety.)

I had torn a great deal of skin from my hand, wrenched my shoulder, and thoroughly jammed my legs with my landing in the mud. This slowed our progress, and as I indicated above, it was only the first of many setbacks.

To this day, I maintain that the difficulties we suffered were only the natural consequence of doing strenuous work in a hazardous environment. I have been in other hazardous places before and since—Vystrana; the Akhian desert; anywhere politicians may be found—but I think only the Mrtyahaima peaks equal the Green Hell for sheer lethality. Even the Moulish, who know the region better than any, suffer a great deal of hardship as a result of living there. Had we not encountered difficulties, it would have been a clear sign of supernatural blessing.

But I cannot deny that the dragon’s share of those problems fell upon my head. It was I, not Mr. Wilker or Natalie, who fell from that bridge. I am the one who, on a subsequent day, was bitten by a venemous snake; I am the one who fell inglorious victim to an intestinal parasite, which had to be purged with a careful dose of strychnine. I broke two fingers on two separate occasions, attracted leeches like iron filings to a magnet, and knocked one of my sketchbooks into the campfire one night. I was, in short, a recurrent disaster.

The effect of this upon my mood was if anything worse than the incidents themselves. In Vystrana I had ostensibly been my husband’s companion and secretary to the expedition; here I was supposed to be an equal partner with Mr. Wilker, yet I felt incompetent in comparison. It raised the spectre of our old strife—less, I should say, through any fault of his, and more through my own self-doubt. I tried harder to prove my worth (which led to things like the broken fingers), bore an unjustified grudge against Mr. Wilker for seeming proof against all perils, and generally made an utter shrew of myself. (How the two of them never gave in to the urge to chuck me into the swamp, I will never know.)

The most detrimental effect, however, was upon our pursuit of a certain goal.

I had not forgotten the matter of dragon eggs. Remembering Mekeesawa’s reticence on the subject, I tried asking Akinimanbi; Natalie’s theory was that the Moulish had a gender taboo, and such things were considered the proper province of women.

As theories go, it was not a bad one, but in this case it was incorrect. It might have been a seasonal taboo—eggs not to be spoken of in the season of their hatching—but I did not know enough to suspect such a thing, and in any event that was not it either. This frustrated me enough that I began to press more sharply than was polite.

Which did not earn me an answer, but did give me something else. Akinimanbi rounded on me at the edge of camp and said, “Why should I tell you? You’re cursed!”

By then the “camp” had dwindled to Akinimanbi, her husband, her grandparents, and our crew of four. This was usual for the season; later they would come back together in larger groups. I had cause to be grateful for the smallness of the camp, as it meant the embarrassment of our argument was seen only by a few. “What do you mean, I am cursed?”

“All these accidents,” Akinimanbi said, gesturing at my splinted finger. “A witch has put an evil spell on you, Reguamin. Everyone knows it. No one will tell you anything until you deal with it.”

Before the last division of the camp, some of the youths had been telling stories in my presence—quite loudly—about people under the influence of witches. I had not realized their stories were meant as a coded message to me. It was the same notion I had gotten from the grandmother in that village, when Natalie became ill with malaria; and I had as little patience for it now as I did then.

“No one has put a spell on me,” I said, “evil or otherwise. It’s simply bad luck. Or who are you saying has done this? Your husband? Your mother? One of the people who has been with us in camp?”

“The witch doesn’t have to be here,” she countered. “It could be a villager. Or someone in the land you come from.”

That struck me as very convenient. Blame misfortune on someone not even present: it was the same as saying the Lord did it, with an extra helping of blame. “No one in my land practices witchcraft,” I said. “If anyone does such things, it’s your own people.”

“Everyone practices witchcraft,” Akinimanbi said forcefully, stepping closer. With my advantage of height, she should not have been able to glare down at me, but somehow she gave the impression of doing so. “They practice it in their hearts, when they become angry or upset. Maybe your brother here in camp lusts after you, but you won’t marry him, so his heart works witchcraft against you. Maybe you have a child who wasn’t mourned properly, and so its spirit has cursed you. Who have you wronged?”

I thought of the tension between myself and Mr. Wilker, my mother’s disapproval, Lord Denbow’s fury at Natalie’s disappearance. But if he were working witchcraft, would it not target his daughter instead?

It was all nonsense, just like the legend of Zhagrit Mat. I even wondered for a moment if one of the Moulish might be responsible for my misfortunes. But no; it was simply bad luck, and I said so.

“Bad luck has a cause, Reguamin,” Akinimanbi told me darkly. “If you spent your time staring at the right things, you would understand. Until you take care of it, the bad luck will not go away.”

And she would not tell me what I wanted to know. Controlling my impatience and frustration as best I could, I said, “Assuming for a moment I believe a word of this… how would I take care of it?”

Even the hypothetical possibility of my cooperation made her look relieved. “Find the cause. Think who you’ve wronged, and make peace with them. Undo the witchcraft.”

I could hardly go back to Scirland for a tearful reconciliation with my mother. “I will think about what you’ve said,” I told Akinimanbi, and hoped that would be the end of it.

But the worst, of course, was yet to come.

SIXTEEN

You may recall that I praised Natalie Oscott in an earlier segment of this narrative, for not being so foolish as to attempt to press on with her work when she suspected that she might have contracted malaria.

I was less sensible than she.

My excuse—and it is a poor one—is that I already felt a keen sense of my insufficiency, owing to the string of misfortunes I had suffered. My broken fingers had healed enough for me to be of use once again; I did not want to delay us more, or put my share of the burden on Mr. Wilker and Natalie. (No, that phrasing is too noble, though I shall leave it for posterity. I did not want to surrender to others’ hands what contributions I might now make.)

When I felt the first stirrings of a headache, therefore, I shrugged them off. The ache in my body I attributed to the ongoing lack of a proper bed; stiff muscles were a familiar problem, and if they pained me more now than before, surely that did not mean anything. Nor did my lack of appetite, which could be attributed to weariness with a diet of hippo meat, honey, and termites, and a craving for the familiar comforts of home—never mind that I felt no such craving, not even for foods that were ordinarily a pleasure. Part of me recognized the peril in these signs, but I was not yet ready to admit their significance, not even to myself.

That stage of my denial may, perhaps, be excused. But as the day wore on, I began to shiver, and then I acted like a proper fool: I strove to conceal my shudders from the others, knowing they would insist we return to camp at once. The three of us had found a swamp-wyrm wrapped around a tree, lying in wait for unwary prey, and I had at last a good opportunity to draw it; I told myself that the opportunity should not be wasted, and that evening would be soon enough for me to lie down and rest.

But soon my hand began to shake badly enough that it affected my work. And Natalie, who had been crouched where she could study the jointing of the dragon’s wing, noticed.

“Isabella,” she whispered, in a tone of concern.

Before she could say anything further, my lack of appetite abruptly asserted itself in the other direction. I dropped my sketchbook and vomited into the underbrush, and from there matters only got worse.

The dragon fled, which brought Mr. Wilker back to us, and he wasted no time in lecturing me as I deserved (though at the time I was bitterly angry with him for it). He insisted we return to camp on the spot, and I was no longer in any condition to argue; indeed, I was in no condition to walk. Before long he resorted to carrying me, and by such ignominious means did I find myself back in my tent.

Once laid on my pallet, I moaned and curled into a ball. Mr. Wilker, about to depart, stopped and turned back. “What is it?” he asked.

“My back,” I said. “It aches.”

He dropped to his knees and rolled me over against my protests, peeling back my eyelids with careful fingers. Whatever he saw there made him recoil. “God almighty. This isn’t malaria.”

“What?”

I will never forget the look of abject fear in his eyes. “I think you have yellow fever.”

And so I did. The early stage is much like malaria; the back pain and sometimes a yellowing of the sclera in the eyes are what distinguish the two. For the next three days I shuddered and sweated on my pallet, alternately attempting to take sustenance and refunding it a short while later. It was like a dreadful case of the ’flu—dreadful first because it was so physically unpleasant, and second because I knew the peril I was in. Yellow jack rarely kills Erigans; they most often contract it in childhood, and afterward are immune, as we Scirlings are with measles or the pox. But for those of us not exposed to it from an early age, it can be very hazardous indeed.

I knew all this, and yet when my fever abated, I still fell prey to the unfounded optimism that accompanies the course of the disease. “I feel quite better,” I insisted, and ate a hearty meal to prove it. “We shall be back at work tomorrow.”

But Mr. Wilker would not let me take refuge in hope. “If you remain healthy for a week,” he said, “then we may consider it. Until then, you rest.”

He was, of course, correct. Some people escape yellow fever that easily, but I was not among them. Shortly after my apparent recovery, I entered the second, and far worse, stage of the disease.

I can tell you very little of what happened during those days, at least from my own perspective. I was delirious with fever and pain, which rendered my memories little more than a hallucinatory smear of impressions. Natalie told me afterward that Akinimanbi’s grandmother Apuesiso stripped me bare and coated me in cool mud, changing it as necessary to bring my fever down; this explains why, when I came to my senses, I was filthy and naked even by the minimalist standards of the Moulish. She also told me I vomited black bile, which is a terrible sign and heralds death more often than not. I dreamt of the talking drums, pounding out my doom. I shook and I raved; I sweated blood out my pores, and where the mud did not cover me my skin was gold with jaundice. In short, I nearly died—a phrase I can write with equanimity only because it was so long ago, and because I have the reassurance of knowing I survived. (As you can plainly tell, for I am not writing this memoir from beyond the grave.)

But at the time, it was nothing short of terrifying, even once the worst was past. Knowing that, having recovered, I was thereafter proof against further infections comforted me little; I had thought myself recovered before, only to be dragged under once more by the second stage of the fever. I lived in fear that this new reprieve was likewise temporary, and I would soon succumb entirely.

My will to live was sufficient to make me bathe, so that I could dress once more in something other than mud. But my enthusiasm for our research was shattered by the conviction that the Green Hell was going to kill me.

In this fragile state did the dragon find me.

If you have never been seriously ill, you cannot understand how sensitive your mind is afterward, how easily jarred by the world around you. But remember that state, if you have experienced it, and imagine it if you have not.

Now imagine that a sound begins in the forest, beyond range of your sight. It is a snarling, roaring sound, which your tired, sensitive mind immediately tries to identify, fitting it to one beast or another you have seen. You fail, because this is nothing like any animal call you have heard before, and this failure makes you afraid. Is the creature something new, or is your mind going to pieces?

Before you can answer that question, the sound changes. It draws closer, in a trampling rush that paralyzes you where you sit. And then something comes bursting between the trees, a beast like none in all the world, with a terrible maw and a seething, many-legged body behind it, which snarls and rages in a swift circle around you, then turns its fury upon your camp. It knocks down tents, flings your belongings into the dirt, scatters the fire and stomps your clothing into the ashes. It is chaos and noise incarnate, and if you were healthy and well rested you would recognize it as nothing more than someone wearing a wooden dragon mask, with others trailing behind it under cover like a Yelangese festival puppet.

I was not healthy, nor well rested, and I had never seen such a puppet. I shrieked and cowered, the noise and destruction too much for me to encompass. The dragon saw my fear and fed it, rushing at me again and again—and then, with one final snarl, vanished back into the forest.

Silence fell, more complete than any I had heard since coming to the Green Hell. The display had shocked even the natural beasts of the swamp into quiet.

Just as I began to regain my breath, Mr. Wilker broke the silence. Red with rage, he stormed forward, to where Apuesiso was picking herself up from the dirt. He swore the air blue in Scirling, then mastered his tongue enough to speak in a language she would understand. “What is the meaning of this? Your people have just destroyed half our things! They’ve terrorized Isabella—is this how you treat a woman only barely recovered?”

“It is how we warn those who do not listen.”

The voice was not Apuesiso’s. I turned, still trembling, and saw Akinimanbi standing a little way behind us. She and Mekeesawa had not been with our camp in some time—not since before I fell ill. When had she returned?

Only just now, by the surprise with which Mr. Wilker and Natalie faced her. Akinimanbi nodded to her grandmother. “She sent word of what happened, through the drums. We brought the legambwa bomu. It is a thing we do, when people ignore the advice of those around them.”

That gave me the strength to rise to my feet. “You are saying I brought this upon myself? How? And what is this—this destruction supposed to teach me?”

“It teaches us all,” Akinimanbi said, gesturing around the camp. Following her hand, I saw that Apuesiso and her husband Daboumen had not been spared the pseudo-dragon’s wrath: it had torn leaves from the roof of their hut, smashed their meat-drying rack, broken the new spear Daboumen had been working on. “We have made noise in the world, and so it comes back to us. We are all to blame for letting it reach this point.” Her gaze came back to me, its weight almost palpable. “You know what the noise is, Reguamin. You must root it out, before it kills you.”

Noise, to the Moulish, was not simply unpleasant sound. It was a disruption to social harmony. And Akinimanbi directed her words to me, as the pseudo-dragon, the legambwa bomu, had directed its roars.

Even with my body and spirit exhausted by fever, I did not believe in witchcraft. But I had submitted before to foreign rites, in order to reassure those around me—could I not do the same here?

It depended on the rites in question. The Vystrani might have been Temple-worshippers, but at least they were Segulist. I did not know what might be required of me here.

There was a simple way to find out. I drew in a deep breath, stiffening my weak knees, then went forward so I could talk to Akinimanbi without others listening in. “What would I have to do, to rid myself of this ill?”

She said, “Witchcraft is caused by the evil in people’s hearts. It unbalances the world and makes problems for everyone. Whatever evil is in your heart, you have to let it go.”

I could not contain a weary snort. “It’s that simple? I decide to let go of whatever troubles me, and all will be well?”

Akinimanbi shook her head. “Maybe others resent you. Maybe your brother and sister”—by which she meant Mr. Wilker and Natalie—“or people who aren’t here. Have you done something to offend them?”

“I can hardly mend bridges with people all the way back in my homeland.”

“Apologize to them anyway,” she said. “Here, in camp. We will hear you, and so will the spirits.”

Her advice struck me as oddly Segulist. The New Year lay several months off as yet, but she was urging me to repent of and atone for my errors. Had I not known better, I would have wondered whether sheluhim had come to the Green Hell after all, or some shred of our religion filtered through into the Moulish world. I think, however, that such practices are simply a basic human impulse. If we cannot ask for and receive forgiveness, how can any society survive?

I have never been a very good Segulist, though, and I still did not accept the notion that following Akinimanbi’s counsel would end my misfortune. With all the dreary pessimism of my half-dead state, I told her as much.

Her reply was pragmatic and eye-opening. “Is that a reason to stay silent?”

There was no good answer to that. All the things I feared—giving in to superstition, humiliating myself in front of others, tearing the scabs off wounds I was happier ignoring—did not outweigh Akinimanbi’s point. My spirit was not easy; it ached under the weight of all the things I had not said, even to myself. Even if that was not the cause of my woes, would it not be better to lay that burden down?

And—lest you think my motives were purely noble—I suspected that going along with her plan would also remove the barrier that stood in the way of my research.

(Admitting to such mercenary thinking will not reflect well on me, but I do not want anyone thinking I am one of the Righteous. The driving force in my life has always been my passion for draconic research, and although I have tried to be fair in my dealings with others as I pursue that goal, my motivations are not what you could call selfless.)

“Very well,” I said, resigning myself to this fate. “Show me what to do.”

I did not speak of what followed for many years after the fact. It was too personal, not only for myself, but for Natalie and Mr. Wilker, and while I may choose to expose my every flaw here in this text, I have no right to decide the same for them. Before he passed away, however, Mr. Wilker gave me permission to tell others what he said that day, and everything Natalie said became public eventually, in its own fashion. What Faj Rawango and our Moulish hosts said was, to their way of thinking, behind them as soon as the event ended; they do not object to others mentioning it later, so long as it is not done to encourage further discord. Furthermore, it feels contrary to the spirit of the event itself to dishonestly recount what we said. I will therefore set it down with as much precision as memory permits.

The Moulish, of course, have ceremonies for such things. The youths who had made up the legambwa bomu rejoined us, as did Mekeesawa, and we all seated ourselves around the central fire of the camp—a significant place, as it is both literally and metaphorically where they come together as kin. Certain leaves were thrown into the fire, creating fragrant smoke, and we scooped this smoke with our hands as if we were hunters departing with our nets. The leaves may have soporific qualities; I cannot say for sure. It is possible that the feeling of quiet contemplation that settled over me was simply the consequence of my choice.

I began by making my apologies to the camp. “We came here not to aid you and act as kin, but to learn about dragons. We want this knowledge for our own people—” I caught my phrasing, stopped, and began again. “I want this knowledge for my people. They will respect me more if I learn things they do not know. But they will not respect you for knowing it, because you are of a different people. I was going to present the knowledge as my own, even though you helped me gain it. That is not fair to you, and I am sorry.”

Our hosts clapped their hands, to banish the evil in my words. Then Akinimanbi said, “I have been impatient with your ignorance, Reguamin. You try, but you are like a child; I have to spend much of my time telling you what to do or what is going to hurt you. It makes for more work.” She cupped one hand over the bare skin of her belly. “But I carry a child now, and teaching you has prepared me to teach my son or daughter. I should not have resented you.”

Dutifully I clapped my hands, but my cheeks heated with embarrassment. I was a world traveller, a natural historian, and beginning to think of myself as intrepid, even if that sense had taken a beating of late. Being called an ignorant child put me quite neatly in my place.

Mekeesawa spoke next. “My brother left to join another camp because he did not like having you among us. I had not seen him since before the floodwaters rose. I thought about going to visit him, but I did not want to leave Akinimanbi, and she did not want to leave you. Finally I insisted we go, and she agreed—but while we were gone, your troubles grew worse. She might have stopped it, if she had been here. I took that from you; and I was angry at you for being the reason I have not seen my brother, and for claiming so much of my wife’s attention. Forgive me.”

On it went, through Akinimanbi’s grandparents and the others in camp. It was an eye-opening experience; despite living among them all these months, we had not seen the effects of our presence very clearly. Our willingness to do our part, however ineptly, had won us a degree of tolerance; but our ineptitude, and the burden it imposed on those around us, was greater than we had realized. I saw that understanding dawn on Natalie and Mr. Wilker, even as it did on me. They were not the focus of this undertaking, being not the ones supposedly targeted by witchcraft, but the arrangement of it was such that we could not help but all be made aware of some of our errors.

Faj Rawango kept his words simple, because of our Moulish audience. “You made a promise,” he said. “You have not yet carried it out. If you are set on keeping your word, then I do not believe witchcraft will come on you—but if you are reluctant in your heart, it will.”

My promise to the oba. Was I set on keeping my word? I honestly did not know. I should not have made that promise so blindly; I had sworn to give Ankumata something that belonged to another people, without understanding its value to them. I still hoped that, when I learned more, a solution would reveal itself—but what if it did not? Which obligation would I honour: my promise, or the debt I owed to the people around us now?

When it came time for Natalie to speak, she hesitated and looked around the fire. “I—I don’t think I can say this in your language. Not easily.”

Daboumen flapped one hand at her. “Your words are for your sister and for the spirits. They will understand you.”

I confess I felt relief at that. The Moulish might be watching, but what we Scirlings had to say, we would say only to one another. Natalie looked equally glad. In our language she said, “The truth is that I’m not sure what to say. I think you were an idiot not to admit you were unwell, but apart from that, there’s very little I resent you for, and far more to make me grateful.”

“Your father would not agree,” I said ironically. “If there is anyone minded to curse me, I think it may be him.”

Natalie shrugged. “Apologize to him if you will, but not to me. While I do not think this is the life for me—I miss my bed too much—it has given me the courage, and I think the freedom, to pursue the life I do want.”

“What is that?” I asked, curious.

She blushed and glanced sidelong at Mr. Wilker. “I—do you remember what I said to you before we left Scirland? About things I was not interested in?”

Her reddened cheeks directed my memory. She did not want the touch of a man. “Yes, I remember.”

“While we were in Atuyem, I found out that sometimes co-wives will… provide one another with affection. I have wondered, from time to time, whether that is what I want. But I—well. Suffice it to say that I have tested my theory, and proved it false. I enjoy the company of women a great deal, but I honestly do not think I want anything, ah, more.”

By now her blush was fierce, despite her oblique phrasing, and Mr. Wilker’s expression far too stiff to pretend he had not caught her meaning. Sometimes a widow’s companion provided her with more than just a friend, though such arrangements were not spoken of in polite society. I wondered with resignation whether those rumours had begun making the rounds as well.

“I understand, Natalie,” I said. “And you are welcome to stay with me for as long as you please. If you do not want to join me on expeditions—”

“I honestly think I would like to work,” she said. “At a proper career, I mean. But that is something we can talk of later.”

Given a choice, I would have preferred to go on talking about whatever career she had in mind, rather than continuing with this ceremony. But the Moulish were waiting, and Mr. Wilker had not yet had his turn. Natalie and I clapped; the others followed suit; and now I had nothing left with which to delay.

He sighed. “Where to start.”

“Oh dear,” I said involuntarily, glad all over again that we were speaking Scirling. “That bad, is it?”

Mr. Wilker scrubbed one hand across his face. “No, not that bad. But we have never been very good at saying things to one another, have we?”

I had to grant the point. “We resented one another in Vystrana, for certain. I thought you low-class—which was entirely arrogant of me, and I’m sorry for that. But I also resented you for being a man, and not having to justify your presence on the expedition. You were skilled, and that was enough. I had to ride my husband’s coat-tails.”

“No coat-tail could have brought you in if Lord Hilford did not think you qualified,” Mr. Wilker said. “Which I did not see at first. But even once you had proved yourself… I mean no slight against the earl, who has been exceedingly generous to me. But my position is far from secure. I feel the necessity, every day, of proving myself to him and to the world, and I have spent far too much time worrying that…” He trailed off, and I could tell he had gone further into the truth than he meant to. But having gone that far, he could not retreat, and so he finished what he had begun. “Worrying that I would lose my place to you.”

Startled, I said, “But you have so much knowledge I lack!”

“Yes—but you amuse him. I don’t mean to belittle you by saying that, either. Lord Hilford likes to shock people, and he likes other people who do the same. Getting as far as I have, though, has depended on caution, on never offending those whose toleration and aid I need. I may be a good assistant for him, but I am not what he looks for in a protégé.”

We were indeed headed for territory through which our command of the Moulish language could not have borne us. I said, “I have wondered from time to time which of us faces the more difficult obstacles. A lady can be taken as an exception to the rules, if her breeding is good enough; mine will carry me this far, at least. You cannot escape your own breeding as easily. But I think that, in time, the quality of your work will win you a place in the Philosophers’ Colloquium; they have taken men of your class before, if not often. They have never taken a woman. So there are doors that will open for you, which remain firmly nailed shut for me.”

For the first time, I saw Thomas Wilker unbend enough to grin at me. “Shall we storm them together?”

“That sounds like a splendid plan,” I said, and extended my hand. He took it in a firm grip, the way he might have taken a man’s hand, not a lady’s. The very frankness of the gesture made me say, “You—do not have an interest in marrying me, do you?”

A laugh exploded out of him. “For God’s sake, no. No insult intended—”

“None taken. To be perfectly honest, I have little interest in remarrying.” I sighed and released his hand, returning my own to my lap and studying it as if it were of great interest. “I would give a great deal for Jacob to still be alive. But with him gone… a widow has freedoms a wife does not. I could wish for greater financial security, but apart from that, what would I gain from having another husband?”

“It would provide a father for your son,” he said.

That swiftly, the scab was torn off. Little Jacob: he did not deserve to be thought of as a wound, but there it was, and with my defenses lowered by illness and this ritual, I could no longer pretend otherwise. A sudden jolt rattled my shoulders, as if something—a laugh, a sob, a shout—wanted to burst free. “My son. Oh, God. What am I to do with him?”

“What do you mean?”

The words came forth, slowly at first, then increasing until they formed a flood. “How could I risk coming here, when I have a son? Of course, few people ask that question of men who leave their sons behind to go abroad—because those sons have mothers to care for them. But even if the man is a widower, he does not face a tenth the censure I have received. Should his child be orphaned, everyone will pat the boy on the head and praise his father’s courage. Should I die, Jacob will grow up knowing his mother was an unfeeling madwoman who got what she deserved.”

I could not bear to look at anyone, whether they spoke my language or not. I fixed my gaze on the fire, as if its flames could burn this tangle out of me, and leave me free of such conflicts. “I resent my son. There—I have said it. I resent him because he shackles me; I cannot live the life I want, not without feeling guilty for devoting my heart to the thing that makes me happy. Surely it is selfish of me to care so much about the contributions I could make with my intellect; surely the greatest contribution to society a woman can hope to make lies in raising her children. No sacrifice she might make is too small, in service to that great cause.

“And all the while I have people telling me, at least you still have something of your husband. Do they mean the book chronicling our work in Vystrana? No, of course not—never mind that we undertook that work together, with intent. That cannot possibly be as valuable as the accidental consequence of biology.”

Very quietly, Tom said, “Is not a child worth more than a book?”

“Yes,” I said violently. “But then for God’s sake let us value my son for himself, and not as some relic of his father. When he is grown enough to read, I will be delighted to share his father’s legacy with him; it is my legacy as well, and I hope he has inherited our curiosity enough to appreciate it. I would not mind a motherhood where that was my purpose—to foster my son’s mind and teach him the intellectual values of his parents. But no; society tells me my role is to change his napkins and coo over the faces he makes, and in so doing abandon the things I want him to treasure when he is grown.”

At long last I brought my gaze away from the fire. Akinimanbi sat with one hand on her belly; she was bearing, and seemed glad of it. I was happy for her—but I had never particularly wanted that for myself, and at least half of my disinterest in remarrying stemmed from that fact.

“‘Would that I were a man,’” I said, quoting Sarpalyce’s legend. “Except that I do not wish I were a man. I only wish that being a woman did not limit me so.”

The fire crackled quietly. Then, nodding—in understanding or acceptance, perhaps both—Tom Wilker brought his hands together in a clap.

The others followed suit. I did not cry; I have rarely been prone to tears. But I felt purified. There is a word I learned later, a term from Nichaean drama: catharsis. I had, at long last, said what was bottled up tight in my heart, and while I still did not believe in evil spirits, I felt infinitely more free for having spoken.

Of course, others believed in evil spirits. Daboumen gestured me out of the way. I obeyed and watched, mystified, as he dug in the soil beneath where I had been sitting. I had chosen the spot of my own free will—no one directed me there—but a few inches below the surface, he found a twisted, ugly piece of wood. (Cynic that I am, I believe he placed it there by sleight of hand, though I am uncertain how he managed that when his only garment was a loincloth.)

“The witch put this there,” he said, and gave it to me. I did not need his gesture to guess my part in the script: I threw the twisted thing into the fire.

“Now,” Akinimanbi said, “you are free.”