The Tropic of Serpents

SEVENTEEN

When I have related an abbreviated version of this tale to others, every last one of them has asked the same question: did the ritual work?

I am not sure how to answer that. Did we suffer no more mishaps in our research? Of course not; we were still in the Green Hell, which had not transformed itself into the Garden of Paradise simply because my companions and I voiced our woes. Furthermore, I doubt there is a single person reading this account who is not aware of the even larger problems I was to encounter before long.

But it is true that I no longer felt myself jinxed. In part, I attribute this to the improvement of my mood and my concentration; I no longer made the sorts of careless errors that had caused me trouble before. The rapport between myself and my companions improved, and so did the coordination of our efforts, with concomitant good effects. And since human minds are very good at finding patterns, and ours had recently shifted from looking for bad luck to looking for good, we wrote off setbacks as expected, rather than proof of misfortune. This is how I explain it, at any rate; our Moulish hosts, of course, viewed the matter differently.

What mattered was that both groups were in better spirits, and as a result my companions and I soon found ourselves offered the very opportunity we had been looking for.

It began with the arrival of a newcomer into camp, a man I had never met before. Mekeesawa introduced the man as his brother Yeyuama, and I soon realized he was an actual brother: related by blood, not merely by age, as the Moulish measure such things.

Yeyuama was not like the other Moulish men we had known, in any age group. “Did he go out hunting with you yesterday?” I asked one morning, about three weeks after I had purged myself of the witchcraft taint.

The intimacy of the ritual had changed matters between Thomas Wilker and myself; he was Tom to me now, and I was Isabella. (Natalie remained “Miss Oscott” to him, I think because of his situation with her grandfather. I found myself much more aware now of his little deferences, the ways in which he acknowledged his lower-class origins and made certain no one would think him trying to rise above them.) Tom said, “Not that I saw. Was he here in camp?”

“Not that we saw,” Natalie said. And that was peculiar indeed, for it did not fit any of the patterns we knew for Moulish responsibilities.

Yeyuama did not keep us wondering for long. He came over to the fire we had built in front of our much-bedraggled tents and squatted on his haunches with the ease of a man who has sat thus his entire life. “You follow the dragons, Reguamin,” he said.

Followed, and stared at. “With caution, yes,” I said, hoping my humourous tone would come through. Yeyuama had an air about him that intrigued me: both gentle and watchful, as if he could spring into action at a moment’s notice. He was extremely fit; the Moulish are not a fat people, as a consequence of diet, behaviour, and natural physique, but Yeyuama had the compact musculature of a man who both eats well and exercises often.

He cocked his head at me. “Have you killed?”

“A dragon? No, of course not. I know the story.”

Yeyuama waved that away. “Not only dragons. Anything.”

My thoughts raced back to the savannah snakes we had hunted, the rock-wyrm in Vystrana, the wolf-drake I had shot (but not killed) when I was fourteen. “With my own hands?” He nodded. I was about to say no—I wanted to say no, as it was clear which answer Yeyuama was looking for—when I remembered the Great Sparkling Inquiry.

Both ethics and pragmatism prevented me from lying to him, the latter because my face fell before I could stop it. “Yes. In my homeland, there are these creatures…” I held out my fingers to indicate the size of a sparkling. “Like insects.”

(Lest anyone accuse me of dishonesty, I must assure you that my taxonomic speculations had not yet gone so far as to change my thinking about sparklings. Would I have admitted it to Yeyuama, had I begun to think of them as members of the draconic lineage? I do not know. The honourable answer, of course, is yes—but I am not certain my ethics would have carried me that far.)

Yeyuama brushed this off as being of no consequence. Everyone in Moulish society killed things like insects, but only grown men were hunters. He looked next at Natalie, who denied killing anything, and Tom, who confessed it. Yeyuama nodded, as if he had expected that. “What I have to say is not for you,” he told Tom. “Only the pure may hear it.”

The pure: those who had never hunted and killed. Yeyuama was pure; he never went with the other men. He was, I realized, the closest thing to a priest one might find in Moulish society. This must be what Yves de Maucheret had meant.

With our recent conversation so fresh in my mind, I could easily read Tom’s expression. Here, where there was no stratification of wealth or birth, he had expected to be able to participate in full; to be refused, as the Colloquium refused him, cut deeply. On impulse, I said to him in Scirling, “You’ve shot animals with a gun. Perhaps that doesn’t count as ‘with your own hands’?”

That provoked a rueful, bitter laugh. “No, I imagine it counts. And besides, when I was fifteen I cut the throat of my family’s carthorse after he broke his leg. Don’t offer,” he said, forestalling the next words out of my mouth. “It may upset them if you share what he says afterward. If this is a research opportunity, then you two should make the best of it.” He got up and left.

As it transpired, the core of what Yeyuama told us was not so secret that I feel obliged to leave it out of this narrative. (There would be a great gaping hole if I did, as if you walked in at the tail end of some tremendous anecdote being told over drinks. Everyone in the room would be goggling and laughing and you would wonder where the elephant came from.) I may elide some details, but the bulk of it should be clear to you.

“There is a test,” Yeyuama said, once Tom was gone. “Before you can touch the dragons. This test is dangerous; sometimes it kills those who try.”

A Moulish man—a lifelong resident of the Green Hell—was telling me something was dangerous. I said before that the Moulish do not fear their home, because they know how to survive it; this does not mean, however, that they fail to respect its perils. I asked, “Do we have to say now whether we will try? Or may we decide after we know what the test is?”

Yeyuama laughed, breaking the atmosphere of hushed secrecy. “Only a fool would agree without knowing. I will show you. There is no shame in refusing; most boys do.”

For there to be men like Yeyuama, who have abstained from killing in order to remain pure, this test must be offered while they are still young—before they, as youths, join the men on the hunt. I use male terms; virtually all of those who “touch the dragons” (a phrase whose meaning will become apparent later on) are men, though the Moulish denied any prohibition against women when I asked. It is simply that the challenge is a strenuous one, and few women choose to undertake it. But there was no resistance to Natalie and I trying. Merely a great deal of curiosity, to see how the Scirling women would do.

This challenge required us to go with Yeyuama on a lengthy journey. He would not name our destination, but we knew it lay west, toward the cliff from which the three rivers fall. It would take us the better part of a month to get there and return, he estimated, and no one could go with us who was not also pure.

Which meant leaving behind both Tom and Faj Rawango. The latter said, “After this, you will get eggs for the oba.”

The way he phrased it, I wasn’t sure whether it was a statement or a command. “After this, I may finally have some notion of how to do that. But much will depend on when the egg-laying season is.” I thought about how long we had already been gone, and added, “Would you like to go back and report to him? He must be wondering.”

“No,” Faj Rawango said. “I will stay here.” (A decision which I chalked up mostly to his unwillingness to report so little progress. He did not seem to be enjoying his sojourn among his father’s kindred.)

Tom was another matter. “You’ll be going from camp to camp,” he said, having queried Yeyuama for details. “Not going entirely on your own. Still…”

“You do not like it,” I said.

“First that business with witchcraft, now this test of theirs. I didn’t expect you to embrace so many of their ways.”

I had not embraced anything. In the case of the witchcraft ceremony, it was more “shoved unwillingly,” and as for this—“We require doctors to obtain certification before they can practice, and lawyers must sit examinations before they can pass the bar. Whatever this test may be, think of it in that light. It is a matter of qualification, nothing more.”

“Passing the bar,” he said dryly, “rarely threatens one’s life. But you’re right about one thing: it appears to be necessary. We can observe dragons all we like, but there are some secrets we won’t know unless you go through with this. I’m not trying to stop you. I only wish we had another way.”

For my own part, I wished he could come with us, though I had wit enough not to pain him by saying so. Natalie and I packed up what we could; it was not much, as neither of us had the strength of neck to carry a basket on a tumpline. Then we made our farewells to Tom and Faj Rawango, Akinimanbi and Mekeesawa, Apuesiso and Daboumen, and ventured deeper into the swamp.

I will gloss over the process of our journey, in favor of coming more quickly to its end. Suffice it to say that we did, as Tom had predicted, go from camp to camp, meeting both strangers and people who had formerly been part of our own camp, and enduring a thousand questions when they discovered that Yeyuama was taking us on this pilgrimage. I soon realized our destination was not secret; it was merely taboo, a thing not spoken of except when the occasion arose. Those we passed seemed to have at least a general understanding of what Natalie and I faced, and few of them seemed to think we stood much chance.

There is no faster way to harden my determination to do a thing than to assume I will fail at it. But when I saw at last the challenge Yeyuama intended, the revelation shook even my self-confidence and will.

We had left the last camp behind two days before. My sense of geography was sorely addled by the tracklessness of the swamp, but Natalie and I, making estimates of the distance we had traveled, could guess where Yeyuama was taking us. We were drawing near to the western border of the Green Hell.

The noise grew by subtle degrees as we traveled onward, at first remaining faint enough that my conscious mind did not notice it. Then it rose high enough to attract my attention: the steady, rushing thunder of falling water. “We must be near,” I said, and got a bright grin from Yeyuama in response.

This I took to be agreement, only realizing my error after we had slogged at least another mile onward. We were not yet near at all. I had simply underestimated the magnitude of what we had come to see.

The Great Cataract of Mouleen.

As I have said before, the three rivers of Girama, Gaomomo, and Hembi come together west of the Moulish swamp, a confluence of the sort that happens in many parts of the world. But here, as nowhere else, the rivers are stopped shy of their peaceful meeting by a fault in the earth that dropped the land of Mouleen not quite a hundred meters below the rivers’ previous beds. Along this curving and irregular edge, the three rivers spread out and break up their flow, plunging downward in a roar of countless waterfalls.

Yeyuama brought us to the very edge of the great lake which forms the base of these falls, an expanse of water large enough to give me an unobstructed view of much of the Great Cataract. Even at this range, I could feel the force of it: the constant thunder of the water, torrents of it crashing endlessly down, threatening to drive the air from my lungs. Everywhere I looked I saw rainbows, light refracting from the mist thrown off by the falls. I might have stepped through some portal into a magical place—the homeland of wild-hearted faerie creatures grander and more terrible than any human could hope to understand.

My face opened with exhilaration, in an expression that was not quite a laugh. I could not help myself; the madness I felt at the mere sight of this place could not be held in. Natalie looked much the same. Yeyuama was solemn by comparison; but then, of course, he had been here before. And this place, clearly, was sacred to his people.

I could not imagine a place less like the sober Assembly Houses I associated with religion; but I could, with no difficulty at all, understand why one might attach such a word to this place. Such sublime grandeur seemed very much like a thing of the gods.

The cataract itself was too breathtaking to behold for long, even though the height of the floods had passed and the waters of the swamp were beginning to subside. My eye sought out more restful sights. I saw that the lake was the hollow pounded out by the falling water, and surmised that it must be quite deep. From there the mingled contents of the three rivers spread out through the low-lying region we called Mouleen, and thus gave rise to the swamp; indeed, from here we could no longer speak of it in a meaningful sense as a river, whether singular or multiple, for the waterways branched and recombined into the mazelike delta which I had been inhabiting for the last five months.

But for what purpose had Yeyuama brought us all this way?

Such was the noise that I had to raise my voice almost to a shout in order to be heard. “Is this the place of the test?” I asked, gesturing at the entire stunning scene: cataract, lake, and all.

Yeyuama grinned again. “That, Reguamin, is your test!” And he pointed.

The broken curve of the Great Cataract was not a single fall, but many. Here and there along its length, islands persisted on the edge, dividing the whole into its parts. It was not, however, to one of these that Yeyuama directed my attention, but rather to an island within the cascade itself.

It jutted out from the white thunder perhaps two-thirds of the way between us and the plateau above. It was framed by falling water all around: the rivers tumbling down one stage behind, then parting to plummet the remaining distance on either side. Thinner trickles, some of which might have been respectable falls in other parts of the world, ran through the island and emerged from its front like strings of diamonds. And the whole of the island was thickly covered in verdant growth, trees finding purchase on the stone, vines falling in elegant curtains below.

“You must visit that island,” Yeyuama said, his voice strong over the roar of the water. “Then you will be ready to touch the dragons.”

I understood why many boys refused, and few women tried. Visit the island? How was one to get up there, or for that matter to come back? It stood in the midst of the falls, nowhere near the border of the lake. To go over the first edge in a boat (or the more stereotypical barrel) would only result in missing the island, or being dashed to pieces if one did not. Swimming the lake would be both hazardous and difficult, as the current pushed one away from the base, and once that obstacle was surmounted one still had the challenge of climbing the rock face.

Yes, these were the thoughts in my mind as I stared at the Great Cataract of Mouleen. Of course I had begun to ponder how it might be done. If you know anything of my life, you will not be surprised.

Natalie and I discussed it, once we had retired far enough to be able to converse in more normal tones. “I expect it used to all be like that,” she said, sketching out a shape with her hands. “Multiple tiers—you can still see fragments of it, apart from that major island. But the force of the water would, over time, knock down the lower tiers, leaving that one remnant as the only piece of significant size.”

The geologic history of the place interested me less than the navigational opportunities it afforded. “I don’t suppose there are likely to be caves behind? Perhaps it’s a mystery of sorts, with a tunnel that offers safe passage. Those who pass the test are the ones who find it.”

“And those that don’t are the ones who die,” Natalie said, with a decided lack of optimism. “It would be lovely if there were a tunnel, but somehow I don’t think you will be that lucky.”

I noticed her choice of pronoun. Somehow, without ever saying so directly, we had agreed that I would be the one to attempt this thing, not both of us together. There was no particularly good reason for it, and several against; indeed, others were quick to point out later that only one of us had a small dependent child at home, and that one was not Natalie. But only one of us was mad enough to try, and that one was not Natalie, either.

Because I could not look at that island, overgrown and floating in the midst of rainbows, and not want to experience the triumph of standing on it with my own two feet.

Yeyuama caught frogs and roasted them while the two of us discussed the matter in Scirling. There was no need to speak in the Moulish tongue for his benefit; he had made it clear that he would offer no advice, and he was good enough at maintaining his poise that no twitch of alarm or satisfaction would steer us in one direction or another. We were entirely on our own.

“Why is this the test?” I asked at one point, when our speculations had ground to a halt. Then I repeated myself in Moulish, for this, at least, was a question Yeyuama might answer.

But he shook his head. “You will see—or you will not.”

Meaning that only those who passed the test were fit to know the answer. I ground my teeth in frustration and renewed my determination to reach that island.

We scouted the area for another two days, circling the edge of the lake to view the island from different angles. It seemed likely that the best approach was from above, coming down from the rivers onto the island; without viewing the land up there it was hard to be certain, but it seemed more promising than any attempt to come at it from below. But then how to return? “If I had a long enough rope…” I began, then shook my head. “It would have to be absurdly long, and I have never been good at climbing.”

Natalie opened her mouth to answer, then stopped.

“No, it’s foolish,” she said, when I looked at her inquisitively.

I laughed. “And I am, of course, the last person to entertain foolish notions. Out with it, my dear.”

“You would break your neck,” she protested.

“And I am unlikely to do so by the means we have already discussed? You have my curiosity up now, you know. There is no help for it; you will have to tell me.”

She sighed. “We don’t even have suitable wood, so it couldn’t be done anyway. But I was thinking of those glider wings.”

Her obsession back in Scirland. An untested design, though recently improved by that enthusiast in Lopperton.

A chance to fly.

I tried to throw a halter over the nose of my sudden, wild hope and hold it back from galloping away. It was reckless. It was impossible. Natalie was right; we did not have suitable wood.

We did, however, have something else.

EIGHTEEN

“Can you not tell me what you need them for?” Tom asked, as we waded across a shallow stream. “Even the slightest hint.”

I could have told him that I didn’t want to offend Yeyuama and the others; it had the virtue of being true. It was not, however my chief reason. “If I tell you, then you will try to talk me out of it.”

He stopped on the bank and stared at me. “Is that supposed to set me at ease?”

Our time in the swamp had left him a scruffy thing, his clothing stained beyond repair, his hair grown shaggy and his jaw darkened by stubble. Likely my own appearance was little better (although I was at least spared the stubble). Had we wandered the streets of Falchester in this state, we would have been thought lunatics—which was, I imagined, not far off the mark. Long residence in harsh and unfamiliar conditions does strange things to the mind. You swiftly learn not to heed irritations that would be unbearable in the normal course of your affairs, and you embrace notions that would be unthinkable at home.

“It is supposed to be honest,” I said. “I do not want you chiding me afterward for hiding more from you than I must.”

Tom’s first response to that was inarticulate. Then he said, “I have asked myself, time and again, what possible need you could have for dragonbone—dragonbone, when we’re among a people for whom dragons are in some way sacred. You don’t mean to impress them with it; that wouldn’t be as dangerous as you’ve implied. What, then? Everything I can think of is worse than the previous idea.”

He would not have thought of Natalie’s wings; I was fairly certain he had no idea of her interest in the subject. I considered asking him what he had thought of, but decided it would only upset him further. Instead I fell back on the only recourse available to me, which was simple persuasion. “Please, Tom. If we are to proceed with our research, and fulfill our promise to the oba, I must do this. And it will go better with your help.”

He sighed in frustration, but said, “I am here, am I not?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “For which I thank you.”

By then the others had caught up to us: Natalie and Yeyuama, Mekeesawa and Faj Rawango. The rest of our camp was not far off, but we six were making a side journey to retrieve something left behind during our earliest days in the Green Hell.

The box was still where we had buried it. Already the wood was somewhat worse off for being buried in the wet earth, and the fabric that wrapped the bones was half-eaten by insects, but the bones were still wholly preserved.

“Will it be acceptable to use this?” I asked Yeyuama, holding out an alar humerus for him to see.

He frowned at the bone. “Who killed this dragon?”

“A hunter,” I said. “But not in the way that your brothers are hunters. He kills animals only for the pleasure of proving himself stronger than they, and takes trophies to prove his strength to others.” Yeyuama indicated the bone, and I shook my head. “He does not know we have this, and would try to take it if he did. We kept the bones so we could understand dragons better.”

Akinimanbi had explained to him our purpose in the swamp. Her rendition had made us sound more like priests than scholars—but that was not entirely unfitting; or at least it was useful to our cause. Yeyuama said, in a cool tone masking something I could not read, “Dragon bones fall to dust. How is this one still solid?”

We had been cautious in who we shared that information with, but I had no fear of sharing the truth with him. Not because he lived far from Vystrana and would never trouble the dragons there; not because he lacked the chemical equipment to imitate our work. Those things were true, but also irrelevant. Yeyuama was pure: he would never kill a dragon for its bones. Nor would he help others do so.

I therefore told him everything, as much as my command of his language allowed. The mourning behaviour of rock-wyrms; Rossi’s experimentation; Frederick Kemble’s struggle to synthesize a replacement for the bones, which might be aided by Tom’s efforts with the savannah snakes. Yeyuama listened in silence, and when I was done he sighed, gesturing at the bones. “You should not have done this before facing the island. But you may use it.”

I wondered if the Moulish had funerary customs for their own dragons. Was that what Yeyuama meant by “touching the dragons”? Well, I would find out soon enough—if I did not break my neck.

Natalie sorted through the bones, chewing on her lower lip. “Mr. Garsell insists a curved surface is better, but still, I could wish some of these were straighter. The ribs, though, will be useful for the center of the frame, and we can make cords…” She trailed off, sketching in the air.

Tom had a good visual imagination. He followed the movement of her finger with narrowed eyes. Before I could divert him, his jaw sagged in disbelief. “You—Isabella, please tell me she isn’t planning to build some kind of wing.”

My mouth opened and shut a few times, while he stared at me. Then, helplessly, I said, “Would you like the truth, or a comforting lie?”

“What in God’s name are you doing?” he demanded. We were speaking Scirling; the three Erigans looked on in interest, no doubt speculating as to what we might be saying. “Do you have to fly with the dragons to prove your right to study them? Moulish swamp-wyrms don’t even fly!”

“They do glide, though—and I shall do the same. It’s an unconventional solution to the problem I’ve been set… but Tom, I believe it will work.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, hands frozen in midair as if, should he just concentrate hard enough, he could make this entire conversation not have happened. Then he opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on Yeyuama. In Moulish, he said, “I know I am not ‘pure.’ But please, for the love of—of whatever spirits you worship, let me help with this. If she is injured, I’ll never forgive myself.”

His concern touched me, all the more so because he made no reference to the consequences he would likely face in the event of my death. Jacob had once told me he would be blamed if anything happened to me in Vystrana; Tom, I suspected, now occupied the role of “man responsible for my well-being” in the eyes of society. I said to Yeyuama, “He has some knowledge of healing injuries. I hope, of course, that his skills will not be necessary, but if they are…”

Yeyuama sighed, looking resigned. “If I don’t agree, he will probably follow us.” Tom did not deny it. “Very well, Reguamin. Your brothers and sister may assist you. But they may not go all the way with you.”

(At the time, it surprised me that Yeyuama agreed to let anyone else be involved. In retrospect, I think Tom was not the only one dumbfounded at my chosen approach to the problem of the island, and Yeyuama did not want to be responsible for killing me, however indirectly. That is only speculation on my part, though.)

We bundled up the bones Natalie deemed useful and took them with us back to camp, but we would not be with our hosts for much longer. As I proposed to come at the Great Cataract from above, and was bringing bulky equipment with me for the task, it would be easier for us to make the journey along the top edge of the swamp, rather than in its depths. So long as our paths lay together, however, we would travel with the other members of the camp, who were shifting to a new location.

It was by then becoming a larger group once more, as the seasonal round brought the Moulish back together, and they sang as they walked. Natalie had been singing with the Moulish for some time, but now Tom joined in; his voice was rough but tuneful. “You should sing,” Yeyuama prompted me; when we left the camp, he would break off on his own to wait for me at the base of the Great Cataract.

“Oh, no,” I said hastily. “The frogs are more melodious than I.”

He seemed puzzled by my protest. “Why does that matter? It makes harmony.”

The word he used, ewele, has the same double meaning as its Scirling translation: not only the effect produced by music, but a concord among people. Judging by the way he deployed it now, he meant the latter sense—or rather, he meant the latter produced the former. Still—“I would be embarrassed to try.”

But Yeyuama would not accept my refusal. Nothing would do but that I sing. And so I did; Natalie gave me an encouraging pat on the shoulder, and Tom did his best not to wince. But the Moulish all smiled: however out of tune I might be, now I was harmonious.

Our harmony, alas, did not last. It was broken by a furious, coughing snarl, and the sound came from some distance ahead.

All singing fell silent. The hunters, who carried few burdens other than their spears and nets, dropped anything else they held and vanished into the surrounding growth. Mothers and elders boosted children into the trees, and within a few seconds I could not see them, either. Even after my time among them, I was startled at the speed with which they all concealed themselves.

Yeyuama had gone stiff at my side. He met my gaze, and I saw him make a decision. “Dragon,” he said, and I nodded. “An angry one. Come.”

That seemed to be extended to all three of us—three, because Faj Rawango had gone with the hunters. Tom stepped forward, but Natalie shook her head and grabbed the bones tied to his back. “Leave these with me. I’ll hide them.”

As I went forward with Tom and Yeyuama, I wondered uneasily whether those bones might be the cause of the disturbance. It was the death and theft of their kin that had made the Vystrani rock-wyrms angry; we had not observed anything of the sort here, but the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Moulish dragons were sullen and hostile creatures under the best of circumstances, but I had never seen one in a fury. Had we inadvertently provoked this one?

I had my answer soon enough, in the shouts and curses of men.

They were not speaking the Moulish tongue. I picked out Yembe words here and there, but the part that came through the most clearly to me was an unholy admixture of Thiessois and Eiversch. And although I had not heard that voice in months, the language of the profanity told me who the speaker must be.

M. Velloin had come into the swamp in search of newer and more exciting prey.

Yeyuama’s expression hardened as I gave him this explanation in a quick, worried undertone. “We will not let him kill a dragon,” he said—leaving unspoken what measures they might take to prevent him. Yeyuama himself might be pure, his hands unsullied by death, but the same was not true for the hunters.

I half-expected to hear screams before we even reached the scene. The hunters, after all, had gone before us, and must already be in place. I also expected the raging of the dragon to subside, for Velloin was assuredly armed with a good rifle, and had shown pride in the swift kill. But neither shift came, and as we crept to the edge of the scene behind Yeyuama, I saw for myself what was happening.

Five or six Yembe hunters were ranged around the dragon, spears at the ready—but it was spears they held, not rifles, and they used them only to keep the dragon at bay. Three other men were engaged at closer range, hauling with all their might on ropes that had been looped about the swamp-wyrm’s limbs. Velloin stalked around this fray, protected, as the others were, by a kerchief tied over his mouth and nose in addition to a pair of goggles, to keep the noxious gas from his eyes. He held another lasso in his hands, and as I watched, he flung it over the dragon’s muzzle and dragged the loop tight.

“God almighty,” I whispered, staring. “They’re not trying to kill the dragon. They’re trying to capture it.”

Velloin had done it before, and had said he wanted to try again. But the swamp-wyrm before us was no runt; it was a splendid beast, one of the largest I had seen. Even with four men trying to bind it, the creature still thrashed. It was difficult to imagine Velloin could drag it ten feet like that, let alone into a cage.

As it transpired, he didn’t intend to. Velloin passed his rope to another man, then picked up a bow. The arrow he nocked was too light to have any chance of killing the creature, but before he put it to the string, he dipped the head in a small clay jar. Poison of some kind, I assumed. Something to weaken and slow the dragon for easier transport.

He did not get the chance to try. Yeyuama had been watching the scene with narrowed eyes; when he saw the poisoned arrow, he lifted his hands to his mouth and made a sound like a birdcall. Like, but not the same: clearly it was a signal, and just as clearly, this was what our own hunters had been waiting for.

I would have sworn my oath on the Holy Scripture that there were no Moulish in the immediate vicinity of this struggle, but on Yeyuama’s call, half a dozen nets dropped from the trees to snare the men below. Spears thudding into the ground at the feet of the Yembe caused several of them to leap back. Ropes slipped free of hands, and then the dragon spun about, smashing men to the ground with its muscular tail.

What followed was chaos. Half-restrained as it was, the swamp-wyrm could not move easily, but it was determined to crush its tormentors; then Yembe spears began to stick in its hide, and it changed its intent to flight. This most of the Yembe seemed willing to let it do, but as the dragon slipped away, I saw Velloin raising a rifle.

“No!”

I did not even realize I was the one who had shouted until I had already flung myself forward. Then there was nothing to do but continue. “Hold your fire, sir!” I commanded, staggering across the trampled ground, coughing on the foul air.

One of the Yembe caught me. But I had caught Velloin’s attention; for a moment that rifle was pointed at me. Then the hunter saw me properly, and jerked in surprise.

“Well,” he said, tugging down the kerchief that covered his face. “Mrs. Camherst, I presume. My God—you still live.”

“I was not aware my status was in question,” I said, trying and failing to pull my arms free of my captor. “Will you tell this man to unhand me?”

Velloin grinned, not pleasantly. “I do not give orders to the son of a king, Mrs. Camherst.”

Confused, I twisted to look up at the man holding me. He released one arm and uncovered his own face, revealing Okweme n Kpama Waleyim.

“Is this your scheme?” I asked him. “Or Velloin’s? I have a hard time believing it is his; surely he would prefer to kill his prey, rather than snare it.”

Okweme’s grin was as unpleasant as Velloin’s. Had I ever thought the man friendly, let alone attractive? “We are here at the request of my royal father. He will not be glad to hear that you interfered.”

“It wasn’t just her,” Velloin said. He resettled his rifle on his shoulder. “Those nets and spears must have come from the swamp rats. Come out!” he shouted, turning to scan the trees. “We know you are there.”

Tom needed no encouragement; indeed, I suspected Yeyuama must have been holding him back. Yeyuama himself followed a step behind. One might have mistaken his slow stride for relaxed, but to my eye, it had more the character of focused anger. The hunters stayed hidden, and I blessed them for it.

I had grown accustomed to measuring people according to Moulish stature, against which Tom, whose height was middling at best, seemed a giant. Facing Okweme and Velloin, Yeyuama was almost childlike in his smallness. There was nothing childlike, however, in the look he directed at the interlopers. “You are not welcome here.”

“Speak Yembe,” Okweme snapped.

Yeyuama merely raised his eyebrows at the man. “He doesn’t know your language,” I said, remembering my own experience with the Moulish tongue. “He might pick a few words out from what you say, and vice versa for you—no more.”

“Then you translate,” Okweme said.

However little I wanted to follow his orders, an interpreter would be necessary. “Unhand me, and I will.”

Scowling, Okweme complied. I explained my position to Yeyuama, then repeated his original message and his subsequent expansion. “You have tried to harm one of the dragons. Because he is feeling merciful, he will let you go, but you must not return.” (His actual phrasing had been “Because you are ignorant,” but I softened it; proverbs about shooting the messenger kept dancing through my mind.)

“Harm?” Velloin said, with half a laugh. “That is rich. How many have you harmed, Mrs. Camherst, pursuing your research? Or are you still reliant on others to do your butchery for you?”

“I can learn by observation alone—and so I have,” I said. Yeyuama looked to Tom for a translation, but Tom was rigid with tension, watching the rest of us. Gritting my teeth, I conveyed what Velloin had said.

Velloin saw my discomfort and pressed the advantage. “Have you stolen any eggs yet? Eggs,” he repeated in Yeyuama’s direction, very loudly, making sure he noticed the word. “Tell your friend about your own orders—that the oba sent you to take away something even more precious than a living dragon. See how he likes you, when he hears that.”

He had me over a barrel. I was not good enough at lying to make up something else to say to Yeyuama; even my hesitation gave too much away. Desperate, I looked at Tom, and saw him open his mouth, perhaps to lie on my behalf.

No, I thought, very distinctly. Perhaps I was like these two, in that I had come here for the oba’s gain as well as my own. I would not further compound that by trying to conceal anything. That was witchcraft, at least in the nonsupernatural sense; it was evil. And such evil must be purged with truth.

I relayed Velloin’s words as faithfully as I could, then said, “It is true. The ruler of Bayembe sent me here to take eggs, though I have not done it. If these men do not shoot us, I will explain more later; but the explanation will not supercede the apology I give you now. I made my promise to the oba in foolish ignorance, without first learning what its consequences would be. I am sorry. And I am doubly sorry for not telling you sooner.”

Yeyuama listened without blinking, without any hint of reaction. When I was done, he remained silent a moment longer, while my nerves wound tight. Then he said, “You will be tested. After that, we will see.”

Tested? Another witchcraft ritual, perhaps. Okweme interrupted my speculations. “What did he say?”

I translated both that and Yeyuama’s next words. “You are noisy—he means something more like ‘disruptive’—and ignorant, and you do not care to learn. You must leave now.”

Velloin snorted. “How does he think to make us leave? We have rifles.”

“And we have poisoned spears,” Yeyuama said, through me. “We have nets and traps. We have the forest. You are villagers, and our home will eat you. Go now.”

The other Yembe heard my translation and looked uneasy. They were indeed villagers, outsiders to this place, and although they had spent this entire time looking for the hunters they knew must be about, they had not yet spotted a single one.

It was a fragile threat. These people could easily kill Yeyuama; the Moulish, however, could kill more than a few of them. Then the oba might send a larger force, this one hunting not dragons, but men. However well the Moulish knew the Green Hell, they were safe here largely because no one cared to face the difficulty of coming after them. If they gave the oba a reason to change his mind, they would lose.

But those were future possibilities; the present was this confrontation, and I could see that the other men were not eager to gamble their lives against the demons of the forest.

“I recommend you take his advice,” I said. “The Moulish are quite fierce in defending what they hold sacred. Please assure the oba that I will have useful information for him soon; he must, however, be patient a while longer.” Information, of course, was not the same thing as eggs, nor was “useful” the same thing as “encouraging.” But it would, I hoped, buy us a little more time.

“Very well,” Velloin said, and shot a look at Okweme that silenced whatever the prince had been about to say.

Tom spoke, for the first time since this entire affair began. “I don’t recommend trying to come back at a different point. By this time tomorrow, the entire swamp will know of your hunting party, and I doubt they’ll be so generous a second time.” The talking drums. The Moulish were not a unified state, but at times like this, they could act in concert, and would.

I did not know whether Tom had convinced Velloin or Okweme, but it at least gave the other Yembe something else to be worried about. The two leaders might have a mutiny on their hands, if they tried to come back.

They left for the time being, at least, and I sagged in relief when they were gone. But not for long: there was still Yeyuama to deal with, and the revelation Okweme had forced upon me. As little as I wanted to return to that topic, delaying would be even worse.

But when I tried to explain further, he stopped me with the same answer as before: “You will be tested, Reguamin. Then we will see.”

Ominous words. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to accept them.

NINETEEN

Given the dangers I had already faced in my short life—deadly disease, attacks by wild beasts, kidnapping, and other threats from human sources—you would not think that leaving the forest for the more open ground of the savannah should be frightening. Yet so it was.

The villagers of the Moulish border fear the forest, and when I went into the Green Hell, I experienced a taste of their fear. But the reverse side, which I have not yet mentioned, is that the Moulish themselves fear the land outside the forest. It does not quite go so far as what physicians term agoraphobia—the fear of open places and crowds—but after a life lived in the close embrace of the swamp, the savannah feels like a desiccated wasteland by comparison, one in which there is no shelter to be found. You are exposed: the sun beats down without mercy, the scattered trees providing only tiny oases of shade, and everything can see you.

Being not Moulish, and only a visitor to the Green Hell, my reaction was not so extreme as theirs; but I did gain a degree of sympathy for it. My months in the swamp had acclimated me to an environment never further away than my elbow. Now I felt as if I teetered atop a small and unstable perch, and might at any moment go tumbling away into the emptiness.

This feeling was all the stronger because I knew I would only be in the open air for a short while, after which I would tumble (or, one hoped, serenely glide) back into the confines of the swamp. I was not particularly eager to return to the Green Hell, but at the moment it felt familiar—and besides, I hoped, great discoveries awaited me there.

Having departed from our Moulish hosts, Tom, Natalie, Faj Rawango, and I picked our way across the broken land where the fault that created the Great Cataract began. It was not easy going, but moving out onto flatter land would bring us too near the villages, and the men who fortified and held the rivers against Ikwunde advances. We did not want their attention and their questions. In due course, however, we came to the bank of the Hembi and settled down, under Natalie’s guidance, to build a pair of wings.

I would not be able to fly with them, of course, in the sense of achieving the kind of lift and maneuverability that most breeds of dragons can manage. I lacked the thoracic muscles necessary for such a thing; the best I could hope for would be to glide. Even that was the fulfillment of a girlhood dream, though, and so I threw myself into this task with goodwill.

The center of the frame was an oval shape, made by lashing ribs together, with a division where they could be pulled apart for easier transport. Two femurs reached out from this to form the leading edges of the wings, the surface itself consisting of canvas stretched over fans of alar cartilage. I painted that canvas with the sap of the rubber vine to make it airtight, while Tom helped Natalie lash the bones and cartilage together with gut and cord.

I myself would hang feet-down from the center of this affair, just behind the femurs, with a crossbar for me to grip. Natalie was going to use a fibula for the crossbar, but I had, out of nostalgia for my childhood, insisted that a wishbone be among the pieces we preserved, and it seemed too apt not to employ here. (Apt and—I must admit—superstitiously lucky. If wishbones were a thing of flight, and I wished to fly… an irrelevant connection, of course, as it would not be serving anything like the anatomical function of a furcula in this instance. But when one is going to fling oneself off a cliff, these little superstitions become oddly vital.)

Tom and I had spent enough time studying the mechanics of flight for me to need little instruction in the use of my glider. By leaning my weight to one side or another, I could turn; by throwing it forward or back, I could direct myself down or up. But only so far: the control offered by such a design is limited in the extreme, as enthusiasts of more advanced designs are no doubt shouting at the page even now. Furthermore, while I might not need instruction, to undertake such a thing without practice is little short of suicidal. But the art was in its infancy back then, and that meant there had been no dramatic accidents (such as the one that claimed the life of Mr. Garsell, Natalie’s Lopperton friend, three years later) to instil the proper fear in me. I therefore had only enough fear to make myself terrifed—not enough to turn back.

While we did this work, Faj Rawango scouted the river. He soon returned with good news. “If you can cross the Hembi,” he said, “and come at the falls along the spit of land between it and the Gaomomo, I think you will be almost directly above your island.”

“That sounds ideal,” I said. “I would prefer not to have to glide along the waterfall any farther than I must, as the air currents there are likely to be unpredictable.” (We had, in those days, a general sense that air currents were relevant to flight; the specifics had not yet been tested with anything more complicated than a kite. If they had… but it is quite useless to second-guess my own actions at this late date.)

To cross the Hembi, I would need some sort of vessel. Faj Rawango accordingly went out again, and while he was gone, I held my final conference with Tom and Natalie.

“There’s a good vantage point a mile or so back,” Tom said. “We’ll watch from there—though to be honest, it will make no difference one way or another.”

A born gentleman would not have shown his nerves at the thought of what I faced. I was glad Thomas Wilker was not a born gentleman; it made me less ashamed about the storm of sparklings dancing in my stomach. “I will feel better for knowing you are watching,” I said, and shook his hand.

Natalie embraced me. She had been all efficient concentration during the building of the glider, but with that task done, she had nothing to distract her from the situation. “I think the design is good,” she said into my shoulder, “but if it is not—”

“I have every confidence,” I told her. “Come, though—we must give my conveyance a name. What shall we call it?”

A dozen possibilities fluttered through my mind as I said that. I had named my son after his father, but to call a glider after them both seemed a bit much. Greenie, after my beloved sparkling trophy? Ankumata, in an attempt to flatter the oba, or alternatively Lord Hilford? Draconean, in honour of the ancient civilization?

Tom made a sound I had never heard from him before, which I can only call a gurgle, as if he almost swallowed his tongue laughing. “Furcula,” he said.

I had related the story while we built the glider, of how I dissected a dove in my childhood to discover the purpose of a wishbone. “It is vital to flight,” I admitted. “And if it breaks, well, that is supposed to make my wish come true. Furcula it shall be!”

And so it was that, with the wondrous Furcula in two pieces athwart my lap, I came to be rowed across the Hembi River near the border of Bayembe, for the purpose of flinging myself over a waterfall.

Faj Rawango rowed the small boat, and studied me with an unblinking gaze as he did so. “What is it?” I asked, when I could bear the silence no more.

He did not answer immediately, to the point where I thought he might not do so at all. At last he said, “You could have gotten eggs more easily than this.”

“Perhaps,” I said, after some reflection. “We still know nothing about dragon mating: when it happens, where eggs are laid, even how to tell a female swamp-wyrm from a male. I would have had to go searching. That would have upset the Moulish, possibly to the point of violence—which is a different sort of cost, and one I am not eager to pay. And then there are other things I would not have learned. They may not be entirely relevant to natural history; tree-bridges, for example, are not directly concerned with dragons, but rather with how humans coexist with them. That is, however, something I am interested in knowing. As is this priesthood, or whatever term I should use for it, that Yeyuama belongs to. So perhaps I pay in difficulty, but I believe I gain more than enough in return.”

Faj Rawango pulled steadily on the oars, not taking his eyes off me. “You do not do this for them.”

The Moulish. In all honesty, it took me a moment of thinking to understand what he meant. Some years later—after stories of my exploits aboard the Basilisk began to filter back home, and the outrage over my Erigan deeds had faded somewhat—there were those in Scirland who romanticized me as some kind of champion of the Moulish, nobly aiding them with no desire for my own gain. This is entirely false, and I cannot decide if its falsity is too flattering to me, or perversely insulting, to myself and the Moulish both. One could imagine that I approached my research the way I did out of respect for our hosts and their traditions, but insofar as that is true, I cannot claim credit for it. It was the accidental consequence of my true reasoning, which was concerned with how to achieve the best results with a minimum of fuss. Flinging myself off a waterfall was, in my ledger, less fuss than Velloin’s approach; that is as noble as I can claim to have been.

We were nearly to the far bank of the Hembi. The Moulish had not been on my mind, not in that fashion, but now Faj Rawango had put them there, reminding me of a conversation in Vystrana years ago, about what good our expedition could do for the people of Drustanev. This time we had done better; we had not held ourselves aloof from those around us, but had assisted in their daily work, contributing where we could in repayment for their hospitality. Still, it was not as much as we might have done.

Now was hardly the time to be thinking about such matters, when I needed all my concentration for the task of not dying. I said to Faj Rawango, “I hope I have at the very least not been detrimental to our hosts. But if you know of any way I can be more beneficial to them—”

The prow of the boat scraped against the bank. Faj Rawango did not answer me. It was, I think, not his place; I was asking about the Moulish, and although they were his father’s people, they were not his own. Furthermore, the point was not so much to effect a trade, wherein I gave them a particular thing in exchange for what I had received thus far, and would receive in the future. The point was to make me think about the question.

I did not intend to think about it right then, not when I had more immediately perilous concerns at hand. But as I turned to brace myself against the boat’s edge and step out, I swept my gaze across the long, shallow valley where the three rivers came together, just to reassure myself the Ikwunde were not even now sneaking a raiding party across.

They were not. The waters here were too treacherous to make a good crossing, and the close spacing of the rivers meant they could too easily be caught with their forces strung out in a vulnerable line. But as those thoughts went through my mind, I remembered something I had heard Natalie say.

The Royal Engineers were planning a dam, somewhere in the west.

I knew the geography of Bayembe passably well by now. More than well enough to be certain that there was only one part of the country with a river that might usefully be dammed, and that was this western region, the border with Eremmo.

Speculation froze me where I stood, with one foot in the boat and one on the bank. They could try to dam the Hembi—but if they did so anywhere in this valley, it would spill over into the nearby Gaomomo and Girama, with very little profit to anyone.

If one were to dam all three rivers, though…

Faj Rawango said something to me, but I did not hear it. My mind was racing across the landscape, wishing desperately that I had one of those survey maps on hand, or that Natalie were there to answer a few questions. Could all three rivers be dammed? And what would happen if they were?

It would create an enormous, shallow lake all through this valley. One which the Ikwunde would find much more difficult to cross than these three rivers; they would need a fleet of boats, or else—if the lake stretched far enough—they would be forced up into the western hills, which offered difficulties of their own. Provided the thing could be built (which would be easier said than done, with the Ikwunde making forays into the area), it might substantially improve the defensibility of this border. Had Galinke not said something about that, when we were in the agban? And with the water turbines Natalie had been so excited about, it could supply power for a number of industrial purposes, which I was sure would be very useful to our commercial interests here.

But what would it do to the swamp below?

I turned, staggering a little as the boat shifted beneath my foot, and looked toward the Great Cataract. I was no engineer; some of the ideas that went through my mind then were utterly false. (The dam would not, for example, cut off all water to the Green Hell; it must perforce allow the rivers through eventually.) But I was correct in my basic assumption, which was that a dam would interfere with the flow of the water, and that would, in turn, have untold consequences for the creatures and people of Mouleen.

By then Faj Rawango had stood and reached for my arm. “Are you all right?” he said, awkward in his concern. “If you do not wish to do this… I’m sure there’s another way.”

He thought I was paralyzed by my impending doom. “No, that isn’t it,” I said, then belatedly added, “Thank you.” I finished disembarking and bent to retrieve the pieces of the Furcula out of the boat; they were light enough that it was easy to carry one in each hand. “But please do me a favor. Ask Natalie whether those engineers were talking about building a dam here.”

Whether they had admitted it to her or not, I was convinced that was their intent. If memory served, Lord Hilford had said something about an attack on the Royal Engineers in this area. This might also explain what Sir Adam had meant, the night we dined at Point Miriam; he had said something about how the Green Hell might not always defend Bayembe. Oh, he knew what this would do—I was certain of it. Certain, and seething mad, that he would dismiss the “backwater” as an unimportant casualty in pursuit of this goal.

It seemed Faj Rawango knew nothing of such plans; he frowned in puzzlement, but nodded. Then he handed me my small, waterproof bundle, which I strapped to my back. It held a notebook and pencils, a bottle of water and a few strips of dried meat, a coil of rope, a penknife, and bandages with which to strap up any joints I might sprain along the way. A few other small odds and ends. They would, I hoped, be enough.

Faj Rawango blessed me in the Yembe fashion, which I acknowledged with gratitude. They say there are no atheists in war; I tell you that pantheists abound at the edge of a cliff. I would have taken the blessing of any god I could get.

Then there was nothing left to say. I put the dam out of my mind; it should have been difficult, but preparing to risk one’s life concentrates the mind wonderfully. Natalie had a letter in her pack, addressed to my son, in case I should not survive this. Jacob was too young to read it, or even to understand its meaning if someone else read it to him, but the words needed to be set down for posterity. (His posterity, not that of the world; I will not share its contents with you here.)

I hesitated: this was my last chance to turn back. Then, with what I hoped looked like a decisive nod, I left Faj Rawango and walked toward the edge of the cliff.

Rocks broke the smooth flow of the water here, making treacherous rapids no boat could approach. Now that I was atop the cliff, I could see those rocks went very near to the edge—no, all the way to it; there was a perch from which I could survey the (vertical) terrain. Leaving the wings of the Furcula on the ground with my bundle to pin them in place, I went to see what I faced.

From the ground, the mist of the falling water had been an exquisite thing, veiling the cataract in rainbows and mystery. From here, it veiled the ground instead—which was a mercy. I had vertigo regardless, the world reeling around me as I gazed over the cliff. But it did not reel so badly that I failed to find the island for which I aimed.

It was not so far away. In fact, from here it looked quite different: not so much hovering as dangling, as a pendant dangles from its chain. The chain on the far side was broken, inasmuch as I could see through the thunderous mist, but a rough string of rocks, some of them overgrown with vegetation, appeared to lead from my perch down to not very far above the island’s surface. Was this how the Moulish made their own journey?

(In fact it was not. But I will not tell you how they did it, for I do not want hordes of curiosity-seekers to try that path for themselves. Suffice it to say that their way is far easier than my own—which accounts for Yeyuama’s willingness to permit me some assistance. Fortunately, few people are reckless enough to imitate what I am about to detail.)

This presented me with an interesting choice. The intent had been to fly the Furcula down to the island, and then to fly a second time from the island to the swamp below. But that, of course, was to commit myself to the hazard twice, and furthermore to do so when my first jump, of necessity, must be the more difficult of the two. The wind whipped about me quite strongly, and my target was small. It seemed I had another option, however, which was to try to climb down by terrestrial means, and then to use the Furcula for the second, and much easier, stage.

Of course this had its own hazards. The rocks were wet with spray. I must climb with the two pieces of the glider strapped to my back, which would not be easy; they might act as a sail to carry me off. I could not even be certain that the path I thought I saw would take me all the way; it might prove more broken than it seemed from this angle.

But with a choice between those perils and the ones attendant upon flinging myself from the cliff, I found my answer was clear.

The first part of the descent was relatively easy, save that I had to watch the edges of the glider’s wings, lest I damage them against the stone. (The dragonbone, of course, would survive any knock I might give it; the bindings and canvas, however, might not.) The stones were indeed slick beneath my hands, but there were also pockets of dirt and small plants; for a wonder, none of them were thorned, nor occupied by anything worse than a confused beetle or two. I had to make a sideways traverse that was worryingly narrow, and the wind was indeed tugging at my unused wings, but the difficulty grew the closer I came to the island.

I will not pretend I navigated this challenge with aplomb. My heart was racing, my hands cramping with tension, and I knew that the mist was a blessing; without it I might have seen exactly what awaited me if I fell. As it was, I kept my gaze glued to the rock no more than a few feet away. Unfortunately, I could not do so forever: there came a point where my so-called path ended, and I was not yet at the island.

From above, it had looked complete. As I had feared, however, the view had been deceptive. The path brought me laterally to the island, but not vertically. I stood above it, with no easy way to close the gap.

Evaluating this required me to look down, which promptly rendered me certain that my foot would slip, the wind would seize me, the very stone would fling me off. I clutched the cliff face as if it were the dearest thing to me in the world; indeed, at that moment no thing could have been dearer. But I could not stay there: one way or another, I had to move.

To go up would be as hazardous as coming down had been, with a flight still waiting at the end of it, and my body exhausted by this trial. Would the others see me, and send Faj Rawango back?

The alternative was no safer. I had a coil of rope wrapped about my body, and Jacob had taught me to abseil in Vystrana. Even presuming I could do so again, however, it would cost me my rope; I could not untie it once I was at the bottom. And to try abseiling with my bundle and wings strapped to my back…

I am a scientist, and fond of thinking matters through in a rational fashion. On some occasions, however, rational thought is not one’s friend. Before I could weigh the circumstances in great detail, I edged back along my path, to a space where a larger outcropping gave me a bit of safety to move.

There I unstrapped my wings (nearly losing one to a gust of wind) and my bundle, tying them together with my belt. This achieved, I went back to the end of my pseudo-path and, hoping with all my might that I was not committing an act of abject stupidity, dropped them over the precipice. They tumbled a bit in the air, but landed on the island as I had hoped. Whether they had been damaged in the fall would remain to be seen: first I must try not to damage myself.

I had kept my coil of rope, which I fixed about a stone, blessing Tom and Mekeesawa for teaching me knots during my time in the swamp. There was no time for questioning whether the rope might slip, or my weight pull the stone loose; such questioning would only paralyze me. I wrapped the rope around my body as Jacob had taught me, and committed myself to the void.

It was not like abseiling in Vystrana. Here there was mist, which softened my hands and made the rope burn them unmercifully; here there was also an unpredictable wind that tried to spin me about like a top. I cracked not only my knees against the wall but also my shins, my hips, my shoulders, my elbows—every part of me, including my head, though fortunately that blow was glancing. I felt I had gone a hundred meters, but I was not yet at the island; I dared not let myself look down to see how much farther I had to go.

As a consequence, the ground beneath my dangling left foot took me by surprise, and I thumped onto my posterior when my grip loosened for an instant. Fortunately the rope, wrapped about my body, kept me from rolling off the nearby edge, which I might otherwise have done.

Some minutes passed before I could force my mind to work again, and more before I could persuade my body to unwrap itself and crawl away from that edge.

But I had done it—half of it, at least. I was on the island.

Not without damage. I was bruised and scraped, and my wings, when I collected them, had suffered three small ruptures in the canvas. I had needle and waxed cord with which to repair that, however, and they were (I hoped) not large enough to endanger me. I was not eager to contemplate the perils of getting off the island, however, not when I had only just arrived.

Instead I set myself to discover why Yeyuama had sent me here.

The island was not large. I estimated it to be no more than thirty meters across where it met the cliff face, and less than that in depth. Here and there the rocks projected through the vegetation, but much of it was thickly overgrown, and rivulets from the thin falls behind traced paths through and under the green. It was a beautiful place, and I intended to draw it before I left, but I saw nothing that looked like an answer.

So I went to the edge of the island, where it projected into the air. My gaze went first to the cliff above, to the place from which I thought Tom, Natalie, and Faj Rawango might be watching. Between the distance and the mist, however, I could not spot them. Next I looked down (with a careful grip on a stone to make certain vertigo did not send me over), but there was no hope of seeing Yeyuama. He should be watching for me, though, and we had arranged to meet by a particular large and identifiable tree.

I did, however, see something else.

There was movement in the water below that was not turbulence from the falls. It moved crossways to that turbulence, in a smooth and sinuous curve, shifting as I watched. The curve was not large relative to the lake as a whole but, measured against the bank, must have been at least ten meters long. It reminded me of nothing so much as a serpent I had seen eeling through the muddy, still waters of the swamp.

Serpent. Sea-serpent. Dragon.

Heedless of my lofty perch, I dropped to my knees, then to my stomach, so I could lean out in greater safety and get a better view. The movement I had been watching faded—dove deeper, perhaps?—but there was more to the south. A second disturbance. Watching, scarcely daring to blink, I counted three in all, that I could be certain were distinct from one another; there might have been more.

This, I was certain, was what Yeyuama had sent me to see. There were dragons in the lake below.

(I was glad all over again that I had not chosen to try and swim those waters in my quest for the island.)

Dragons in the lake. What might it mean? They were not swamp-wyrms; of that, I was sure. They were too large and too mobile, eschewing the stalking tactics of their downstream kin. Kin—that was an intriguing notion. How did these dragons relate to the other local breeds? Surely the lake could not support a large population. How did they propagate, with so small a number?

The chain of thoughts that followed was not, I confess, entirely scientific. My astonished mind leapt from one idea to another with the speed and unpredictability of a grasshopper, making connections and then discarding them. But the picture formed by those it did not discard felt right; it explained the data, albeit with some intuitive leaps along the way.

I had been asking about dragon eggs. Mekeesawa put me off. Akinimanbi told me I would get no answers so long as I was under the baleful eye of witchcraft. I duly got myself out from under it, and Yeyuama appeared. He brought me here, saying I would understand once I saw.

And our expedition, in all our observation, had not managed to record the differences between male and female swamp-wyrm anatomy.

Humans have a small degree of what we term sexual dimorphism, with males generally a bit larger than females, and slightly different in form. Other species have more. And in some insects, for example bees, the number of fertile females is extremely low, with all others being males or infertile females.

In Vystrana, I had speculated briefly about the existence of a “queen dragon.” Rock-wyrms had no such thing… but lying full-length on that waterfall island, I became convinced that swamp-wyrms did, and they were in the lake below me.

The full shape of the thing did not become clear to me until later, when Yeyuama, satisfied by my achievement in reaching and returning from the island, shared with me the details of his calling. (Details I will, out of respect for his wishes, leave incomplete here. The biology is of concern to my audience, and that I will share; the rituals and geographic specifics will remain with the Moulish.) But my theory was correct in its general outline, which is that what lived in the lake were the females of the breed, and those we had seen until now were exclusively male. And while I might have seen that from the shore—with difficulty, on account of the turbulence in the water—this rite of passage served a multifarious purpose, not only showing me the female dragons, but testing the qualities necessary for carrying out the work of Yeyuama and his brethren.

I sat back, breathless with speculation and delight. A thousand questions wanted to burst from me, about the dragons, about how the Moulish interacted with them, and what I might do now that I understood.

Alas, the man who could answer them was a very long way below me, and I had not yet passed his test. First I had to return to the ground in one piece.

Newly energized by my excitement, I retrieved the pieces of the Furcula and set to work stitching closed the holes that had formed in my wings. My needlework has never been impressive, but the necessity of repairing our clothing, not to mention modifying my skirts into trousers, had made it functional, and I included patches cut from my shirt-tails to cover the seams for extra reinforcement.

When that was done, I drank some water and ate a little, surveying the island with an eye toward sketching it before I departed. It was only partially a delaying tactic, putting off the moment when I would have to test the glider; but I am glad for that delay, as it led me to notice the oddity of my surroundings.

Some of the island’s stones were too regular in shape.

Not very regular; they had been badly weathered by the elements. But here there was something like a row, and there, a corner. Heedless of my raw palms, I began to dig at the covering growth and dirt, hacking away with my penknife when the roots and vines resisted my pulling. And I uncovered enough to confirm my suspicion.

There were ruins on this island.

Ruins of ruins: if Natalie was right, and there had once been a more continuous ledge interrupting the progress of the Great Cataract, then the rest of what once stood here had gone tumbling down with it. But there was enough for me to be certain that what I saw was not natural.

The Moulish do not build in stone. There is no reason they should; the Green Hell is not well supplied with it, except at the edges, and stone houses cannot move with their owners when the nearby food runs out. Anything they might build would be lost to the jungle by the time they came back, and so it is far easier and more sensible to simply fashion a new hut at need. The peoples of Bayembe use some stone, but much more mud brick, whose raw materials are abundant and cheap. And with these ruins so weathered and overgrown… it was not the work of anyone recent.

My instant thought, of course, was that the ruins were Draconean. Yeyuama had sent me up here as a rite of passage, so that I might “touch the dragons”; it seemed obvious that this should be a relic of the civilization that had once worshipped them, the civilization to which Yves de Maucheret had compared the Moulish religion. There was nothing here, however, to indicate a Draconean connection, apart from their apparent great age—and I was no archaeologist, to estimate more precisely than “thousands of years old.” No great walls stood on this island, no striding statues or other characteristic pieces of Draconean art.

Nonetheless, it was intriguing enough that I felt obliged to document the remains. In several places the overgrowth was too thick for me to pursue the remnants of the walls, but I sketched as much as I could uncover, working my way methodically across the island. This systematic approach soon brought me to another suspicious regularity: an alcove in the cliff, where the water of the falls parted around the promontory of the island. It was nearly my height, and oblong in shape—almost like a door.

“I will feel like an idiot if I was right,” I remarked to the air. If there truly was a tunnel to this place, and I had simply failed to find its entrance… but at least that would save me jumping off the island when I left.

Closer inspection told me I was not so lucky as to be an idiot (at least not where this matter was concerned). The alcove was far too overgrown and silted with dirt to be the means by which the “pure” reached this place, and my probing hand, reaching through the leaves, found stone beneath.

Smooth stone. Far too smooth to be natural.

Thrusting both hands into the greenery, I found more smoothness—indented with lines, as if it were carved.

The vines resisted my tearing them away, as they had a good foothold in the dirt along the sides. But I was stubborn, and my curiosity was up; and once I had torn enough out to see what lay behind, nothing short of the island dropping out from beneath me would have turned me from my task.

The entire back of the alcove was filled with a vertical slab of granite, much discoloured by the ages, but inscribed from top to toe, except where a gap in the middle broke the text into two portions.

I stared at it, mouth open. This was not, I felt sure, what Yeyuama had sent me to see; it was too thoroughly buried. No one had laid eyes on this in a long time. But then what was it? The writing in the top half reminded me of Draconean—well, truth be told, it reminded me of chicken scratches, which had been my first impression of that ancient script when I saw it as a child. But I had seen enough Draconean writing since then to know this was far more chicken-scratchy, as if a child had tried to imitate their work.

Or had been in the process of developing it. Could this place be older than the Draconean ruins we knew? I wished I were archaeologist enough to guess. Regardless of the truth, I had no idea what to make of the text in the lower half, which was quite different in appearance: little rounded blocks, which I might have thought decorative had there not been so many, in tidy lines.

I take the time to describe this stone to you, even though many of my readers have likely seen photographs (or the thing itself, in the Royal Museum or a touring exhibition), because I want you to understand what I found that day. I did not know what I was looking at, other than a puzzle. And one which, alas, I could not take with me: had the Lord Himself given me the strength of ten men, to pluck that slab from its sheltered pocket, I could not have taken it off the island. The weight would have sent the Furcula straight into the lake. Nor did I have any large sheet of paper with which to take a rubbing.

I briefly contemplated tearing all the blank pages from my notebook and making a kind of mosaic, but it would have taken an age, and my sunlight was rapidly vanishing. As nervous as I was about trying my wings, darkness would make that task neither easier nor safer. I must do it now, or wait until the morrow, and I did not relish the thought of a night spent up here in the thunder and the cold spray.

Were it not for that ticking clock, I do not know how long I might have dithered. Instead I set to work, slotting the two pieces of the glider together, tightening their lashings, tying my bundle to my back.

That sufficed to get me physically ready. My mind was another matter entirely.

The wind tugged at my wings as I went toward the edge of the island, though not so strongly as to risk lifting me off my feet. I almost wished it had; that would have reassured me that this contraption was indeed capable of supporting my weight. But no: like a baby bird, I must hurl myself into the air, and see only then whether or not I could fly.

(I had always thought baby birds adorable beyond words. Now I found myself admiring them for their courage.)

Have you ever stood at a precipice and felt a sudden fear, not that you will fall, but that you will fling yourself over? That the instincts which preserve our lives will fail you for that one vital moment, and in the gap, you will, for no good reason, step forward and seek your own end? I have, on more than one occasion. That afternoon in Eriga, however, I discovered that it is not so easy as your fears would have you believe. I had reason to step forward; flinging myself over was my purpose in being there. Yet my legs stood frozen. They might have sunk roots into the ground, so little capable was I of lifting my foot even an inch. With the harness of the Furcula wrapped about me—a promise that I would not die—I became convinced of my own doom, and could not move.

The wind jarred me from my paralysis. A stronger gust knocked me a little sideways, slightly off balance, and before I could regain my inertia, I ran forward and leapt from the island, into the rainbows and mist.

TWENTY

And I flew.

Glided, rather—but it was enough. Instead of falling to my death, I hung suspended in the air, floating on currents and the carefully measured physics of my wings.

It was a miracle.

An uncomfortable one, I must say. We have invented better harnesses since; the one I wore dug unmercifully under my arms, and I held the crossbar in a strangulation grip out of fear that I would somehow slip free. This dragged the nose of the Furcula downward, and I began to descend more rapidly; a hasty shove sent my nose upward once more, leveling me out. My heart pounded so hard it seemed in danger of leaping from my chest, but I was flying.

My panicked gyrations had not only changed my altitude; they had altered my direction. I was headed swiftly for the northwestern corner where the Green Hell met the Great Cataract and the plateau above, and while the dragonbone struts might survive the collision, my own bones would not. I attempted to turn right, over the forest, but something—a wrong shift in my weight; a trick of the air currents—fought me, so that it was easier to go left instead. I skimmed along the falls, back toward the center and the waterfall island, though too low now to make a landing where I had begun.

Landing there was not my aim regardless. I had lost sight of the tree where I was supposed to meet Yeyuama, but was more concerned with finding a safe place to alight. My original intent had been to plunge myself into the lake, in preference to crashing into a tree; now that I had seen the queen dragons, such plans seemed less wise. If I could direct myself to the edge of the lake, though, it might be safe enough.

No one, man or woman, can take into account factors they do not know in the first place. So it was with me and the behaviour of air currents.

Hot air rises. Birds take advantage of these drafts, which we now call thermals, to gain altitude. The air near the falls had been cool, owing to the mist thrown off by the water and the growing shadows of the setting sun, but over the forest proper it was the full blazing heat of a tropical afternoon.

The Furcula rose. I was trying to direct it downward, but my control was minimal and my skill even less; I was, even more than I had realized, at the mercy of the elements around me. Instead of settling, my glider lifted me up, up, above the shorter trees near the lake’s bank, above the giants beyond. Glorious as flight might be, this was not at all what I wanted.

As before, I would have to turn myself about and head back the way I came. I threw my weight to the side… and lost stability altogether.

Some unexpected draft—from the Great Cataract or the slopes of the Green Hell, I do not know which—sent me veering sharply to the side. This sudden shift in my balance made my legs swing wildly, turning my course still more erratic. The attempt to bring my lower body under control caused me, by reflex, to draw my arms in; the Furcula tipped downward. My toes slapped a high branch. I forced my hands outward again, and the glider lifted, but by then there was no hope of regaining control.

I was going to crash.

I knew this, very clearly. I felt I had all the time in the world to know this fact, to study it, to imagine what the consequences would be. I saw the forest below me and tried to evaluate one spot or another for its desirability as a crash site. A foolish waste of time: the emerald sea that was the canopy of the Green Hell had little to offer in the way of variation, and I had not the slightest control over where I would fall. I saw the top branches approaching, and had the presence of mind (though it threw my glider off even more) to draw my legs up, so I would be less likely to catch my ankle somewhere and dislocate a joint.

Then I struck the branches, dragging through them for a short distance before the resistance grew enough to stop my forward momentum.

And then I fell.

I did not fall very far. I was strapped into a dragonbone glider; the wings were too large to pass easily through the trees, and too strong to break. But they dragged some distance through the branches before catching against a few sturdy enough to hold, and then I jolted to a halt.

I almost kept going. The Furcula had stopped at an angle that left me dangling from the crossbar, my weight only partially supported by the harness, and the jolt caused my grip to falter. I made an undignified noise, half yelp, half squeak, and clutched for dear life at the wishbone. My devout wish at that moment was for it not to break.

The bone held. But my grip would not; sooner or later it would give way. Thinking to support my weight by some other means, I glanced about, saw a nearby branch, and attempted to hook my leg over it.

This jarred my glider loose from its precarious angle. With a cracking of branches, the Furcula and I slid free once more. For a moment we were in relatively open air, and I, driven by terrified instinct, dragged the glider’s nose down as hard as I could, lest I lose the support of the harness entirely. The Furcula struck another branch, nose first, and flipped entirely upside down—and there, again, it stopped.

Once my heart slowed to something like a sustainable pace, I realized that I had inadvertently improved my situation. I still sat above a lethal fall, but at least the glider was now between me and my potential demise.

Moving carefully, I persuaded my hands to let go of the wishbone, extricated my arms from their harness, and shifted myself around until I sat atop the bones that formed the central frame of the glider. The branches beneath me might give way, but the bones, at least, would hold.

There I sat for several long moments, concentrating on nothing beyond my breathing and my pounding heart. When at last I achieved a semblance of composure, I opened my eyes and looked about.

I was still in the forest canopy—a fortunate thing indeed. Beneath the level on which I sat, the branches became much more numerous, and might have speared me through the canvas. Below that would be a gap in which there were few branches at all; had I plunged through the understory, I would not have stopped until I reached the ground thirty meters below, and there I would have died. As it was, I had suffered nothing worse than an assortment of scrapes and bruises, and two wrenched shoulders. For an uncontrolled landing in a glider, I considered myself virtually unharmed.

Of course, I still had to reach the ground alive.

I thought longingly of my rope, left dangling above the waterfall island. I could have used its aid now. Lacking such, I faced a long and hazardous climb—one I was not at all certain I would survive.

What did I have that might serve as a rope? My clothing, if cut apart; but I did not relish the notion of climbing naked, nor surviving in the Green Hell that way afterward. I was neither as hardy nor as resistant to disease as the Moulish. The bindings on the glider frame, but they were too thin to grip, and too firmly lashed into place. The canvas of the glider wings.

That, clearly, was my best prospect—compared against the alternatives, which was not saying much. I would not call it ideal. I had to balance on the branches of the tree in which I had landed and use my penknife to cut through the tough, rubber-painted fabric. My harvest, such as I could collect without endangering myself, was not very large. But I had seen the Moulish use vines to support themselves when they climbed trees, wrapping them about the trunk like straps, while bracing their feet against the bark. Where the tree afforded no good branches, I could try the same.

My descent to the forest floor was nothing short of grueling. As I said in my description of the tree-bridges, I was not much of a climber (though I was a much better one by the time I reached the ground). I slipped often, and had to rest a dozen times along the way. I strained my fingers and my ankles, scraped my left knee raw, and was stabbed by countless thorns before I thought of wrapping a length of rubberized canvas around my palms to protect them.

The only saving grace was the chance to observe the life of the forest from this new vantage. (If you doubt that I had any care for such things when my own life was in danger, understand that it was a means of distracting myself from my peril.) Birds and insects buzzed about me, and monkeys danced through the trees. I saw a drakefly alight on a nest not ten feet away, and discovered that in addition to eating insects, they are thieves of eggs.

I would have taken notes on this, but the light was failing me. As I neared the lowest rank of branches, I was forced to consider my situation. Should I finish my descent to the ground or not?

I hardly relished the notion of spending the night in a tree. But I was exhausted in body and mind, which would make the remainder of the climb even more perilous; furthermore, this would be my first night in the Green Hell without the shelter of a tent or hut and the warning light of a fire to keep animals away. There were nocturnal predators in the swamp, some of which would certainly be bold enough to prey upon a lone, helpless woman.

No, the tree it must be. I lashed myself in place with the strips of my poor, butchered Furcula, and attempted to get some rest.

As you might imagine, this was easier said than done. I had grown accustomed to the sounds of the forest, but they seemed different when no wall, however flimsy, stood between me and the creatures making them. Furthermore, my bindings did nothing to convince my brain that I was not going to tumble off the branch if I so much as breathed too deeply. Nor could I help but think about my companions, who would have seen me go careering off over the swamp. They might have even seen me crash. The thought of their fear made my heart ache.

How far had I gone? I had the vague sense that my course had taken me southward and east, but beyond that, I had lost all sense of distance or direction.

My sense as a naturalist reasserted itself. I was not in the heart of the Green Hell, that wet, tangled delta. The ground beneath me was drier, which meant I must be on the slope—but not too far up it, as the vegetation was not the scrubby stuff we had camped in while first waiting for the Moulish. (“Scrubby” by the standards of Mouleen; it would have been a respectable forest, albeit fantastically overgrown, in Scirland.) And I had not been in the air so long as to come anywhere near the bay. I was therefore somewhere in the southwestern quadrant of the swamp, and if I headed west and perhaps a bit downslope, I would come once again to the Great Cataract, which was a place my companions might find me—if I did not come across any Moulish first.

If I did not perish first. I had only a little water and food; my survival was far from assured.

Fear of my state kept me awake long into the night, but exhaustion can trump many things. I did at last snatch a bit of sleep, and woke with a start around dawn.

My disorientation was profound. I did not know where I was, and felt for an instant as if I were about to fall. I clutched the branches around me, then hissed in pain at the pressure on my abused hands. Every part of my body ached; I had not felt this poorly since my bout of yellow fever. This, I realized when my heart slowed down, was the flaw in leaving the last of the climb until morning: my various injuries were all much the worse for a night spent rigid and terrified in a tree.

But there was nothing to be done for it now. I worked my way methodically through my body, easing cramped muscles and warming stiff joints as best I could without unbinding myself from the tree. (That, I wanted to leave for as long as I could.) This done, I considered the food and water still tied to my back. Should I consume them now, for strength? Or conserve them for later?

Before I could decide one way or another, I saw movement down below. My instant thought was predator, and I froze—but then I saw the movement had a human origin.

I was exhausted and terrified, and did not yet have my bearings. Moreover, I had no reason to expect anyone but Moulish here, on the southern side of the Green Hell.

“Hello! You there, down below! Oh, thank heaven you’re here. I was so worried I would—”

The men froze, raising their spears as if to attack. Then, far too late, I took in all the details that should have warned me.

These were not the short, slight figures of Moulish hunters. They were taller and darker of skin—nearly as dark as the Yembe. They wore fringed bands about their arms and calves, carried shields of hide stretched over a frame. And they journeyed in silence through the swamp, as the Moulish rarely do.

They were strangers, men of a people I had never seen before, and by the looks of their armament, their purpose here was not peaceful.

You may blame me for being so slow to recognize them, and I will grant that as fair. I had seen no accurate images, only the caricatures then current in Scirling news-sheets, which were exaggerated for the purpose of whipping up support for the Nsebu colony and our alliance with Bayembe.

They were Ikwunde warriors.

On the other hand—and I can laugh about it now, when the event is years behind me—it took them a comically long time to spot me. They had no reason to look for a woman halfway up a tree. When one of them at last turned his gaze upward, he leapt back a full pace in shock.

By then I was wishing I had untied myself, so I might at least have tried to hide. But I was still bound in place, and could not take back the unwise words that had drawn their attention to me. The one who had seen me pointed his spear, directing the others’ eyes, and they began to talk in quick, low voices amongst themselves.

Their language is wholly unrelated to the Sachimbi family; I could not understand a word of it. The tone, however, and the hostile looks I received, told me their conversation was not one of pity. With fumbling fingers, I began trying to unbind myself.

They saw the movement, and it seemed to hasten their decision. One of the men yanked the spear and shield from my spotter’s hands, giving what was clearly an order for him to climb the tree. I redoubled my efforts—to what end? Did I think I would escape them? But I had to try. Whatever these men were doing here, I wanted no involvement with it.

I soon discovered why my spotter had looked grumpy upon being ordered after me. Ikwunde, of course, is a nation of desert and grassland; they are a herding people—or they were, before the inkosi Othaku Zam redirected their efforts toward conquering his neighbours. My spotter was as bad a climber of trees as I. He got one of his companions to give him a boost up, but then had to contend with the parasitic tree wrapped around the base of my own, and did very poorly.

Not that I fared much better. I got myself untied at last, but nearly fell in trying to change my position. I could not go groundward, not with that man below me, nor could I leap across to another tree like a monkey. Up once more? I could not reach the stripped frame of the Furcula, and it would not do me any good if I did.

I was, I thought, too high for them to throw a spear at me. (I did not know how far an Ikwunde warrior can throw a spear.) Given how badly my pursuer climbed, I might simply outwait them on my branch—for surely they had pressing business elsewhere.

But I underestimated the determination and agility of the man sent after me. He drew close below me, close enough that he would have caught my skirt, had I been wearing one. Frightened, I kicked out, trying to deflect his hand or even strike his head.

I should not have tried. The attempt destroyed my precarious balance, and I fell.

My panicked grab at the branch slowed me, as did the smaller vegetation I crashed through on the way down. It was brake enough that I escaped a fracture. But I landed hard, driving all the breath from my body—and even had I not, they would have been upon me before I could flee.

The Ikwunde surrounded me. There were five of them, and very terrifying they looked, from my perspective on the ground. One barked a question at me, which of course I could not answer. He asked again, his voice growing steadily more angry, and I feared he would kill me simply for my lack of comprehension.

I held out my hands as if they could ward off such a fate. “I am unarmed. You see? I am no threat to you. I—”

They, I think, understood me no more than I did them. One seized the bundle on my back and wrenched it away, upending its contents onto the ground. Notebook, needle, thread; what remained of my scant rations. He picked up the notebook and began to page through it. “I am a scholar,” I said, even though I knew the words were useless. “Surely you must see. I am only here for study.”

But it mattered naught what I was there for. The fact remained that I had seen them. Ikwunde warriors, in the Green Hell, where they had no business being.

No more than they had business at the rivers, which was territory Bayembe supposedly controlled. But our soldiers were on guard for them there, and so I supposed it was inevitable that they should try their luck here, despite the lethal reputation of this place. I had heard nothing from the Moulish of previous attempts; this must be their first.

There were only five of them, though, with no sign of more. Five men might be dangerous to me, or to the Moulish, but not to Bayembe. Not even these five, whose distinctive regalia I now recognized: they were Labane, some of the most elite troops the Ikwunde possessed. Chosen as young as ten, they were taken into intensive training, and lived the next twenty years in a regiment with their new brothers, according to their shared age. A Tsebane (for that is the correct form of the singular, though one never saw it in Scirling papers at the time, and rarely sees it now) cannot marry while he still serves; there is nothing in his life except loyalty to his brothers and to the inkosi, the ruler of Ikwunde. And the task to which the inkosi set him was war.

Such men had no need of a captive. I would only slow them, threaten the secrecy of whatever they sought here. I knew, as clearly as I knew my own name, that they stayed their hands only out of confusion, that a battered, trouser-clad Scirling woman should fall out of a tree at their feet; once their confusion was satisfied or grew dull, they would kill me.

What reason could I possibly give them for sparing me?

Innocence would not avail. Neither would a plea to their compassion. I seized upon the only thing I could—which was my notebook, dropped in disgust just a moment before.

When I reached out to collect it, three spears whipped down to point at me. I persevered, taking the volume in my hand and paging to a suitable sketch. This I held up for one of the Labane to see: the one I thought must be their leader, for he had ordered my pursuer up the tree. “You see this? The dragon. Legambwa,” I added in Moulish, for there was a greater chance they would recognize that word than the Scirling one. Belatedly, I thought to switch to that tongue, and proceeded in a mixture of it and Yembe, in the hope that some fragment or other would be familiar to my captors. “They are all over this swamp. Very dangerous. They will attack you. But I—I can show you how to avoid them. How to be safe.”

I illustrated my words with pantomime, pointing repeatedly at the swamp-wyrm sketch, then using my hand, clawlike, to suggest a draconic attack. My palm I pressed to my heart, indicating by warm and hopeful tone that I offered a way to avoid such perils.

Perhaps someone among my captors spoke a rudimentary amount of Moulish or Yembe; perhaps my pantomime was effective. Perhaps something else passed among them, during their brief conversation. I had, as some readers may recall, been caught by strange men in a foreign country once before, but on that occasion I had been able to parse their language as a dialect of Eiversch, which made communication possible, if not easy. This was as opaque to me as Draconean, and that, as much as the warlike nature of the men who had caught me, made this incident far more terrifying. I felt as if I were in the grip of yellow fever again, the world around me making no sense, and I my next breath potentially my last.

Something persuaded them, whether it was any part of my plea or a notion of their own making. All I knew was that the one who came for me did so with a length of vine rather than a spear, and so I did not resist as he bound my hands together behind my back. Nor did I protest when he ripped apart the fabric of my bundle and used it to gag me, though I dearly wished for a drink of water before he did. I was not dead yet, and that was more than I had expected a moment ago; everything else could wait.

When they dragged me to my feet, someone worked at my wrists for a moment, and then I felt a tug on my bound arms. They had tied another length of vine to the first, making a kind of leash to prevent me from running.

As if I could run. You have an image, I hope, of the treacherous terrain that makes up the Green Hell; now try to imagine traversing it at speed, with your hands behind you to disrupt your balance. I would not get ten paces before I fell. I nearly fell when a Tsebane shoved me forward, but through sheer determination not to squander my reprieve, I managed to keep my feet.

They placed me in the lead, as if I were the canary whose demise would warn them of danger. I dearly wanted, once I could think straight, to lead them into just such a situation; there were predators out there, patches of sucking mud, even perilous insects that might be persuaded to attack. Unfortunately, my previous luck with such tactics notwithstanding, I could not be sure I would survive the trap myself—and besides, they did not yet trust me. Any attempt to lead them astray would result in a spear between my shoulder blades.

In order to survive, I had to prove my worth as a guide.

I therefore bent all the knowledge I had gained of the swamp to the task of impressing them. This was difficult to do, bound and gagged as I was, but I led them ostentatiously away from a thicket of underbrush whose thorns housed very unpleasant ants, then veered again, nodding my head upward, to avoid a serpent dangling from a branch.

Step by step, hazard by hazard, we proceeded into the depths of the Green Hell.

TWENTY-ONE

I had some hope that a friend might find me. Tom, Natalie, and Faj Rawango had promised to watch from the plateau above; they, unfortunately, were on the north side of the swamp, and could not quickly reach me, the descent from that point being more or less impassable. But Yeyuama had promised to watch from the lake. He knew this place as well as I knew my own garden, and might even now be on his way toward me.

Which, I soon realized, might get him killed. One against five was terrible odds, and worse when the one is sworn to nonviolence. But surely his sharp eyes would spot the Ikwunde before they saw him? And if not, I had seen for myself how easily the Moulish could conceal themselves when they chose. Perhaps he could gather hunters to help. They had followed his lead against Velloin and Okweme—though I suspected that was because the conflict there was dragon-related. Would the camps here stir themselves to help me? We had met briefly during my first journey to the Great Cataract, but these were not the Moulish who had been a part of my larger social world these past months.

Such were my thoughts, chasing in anxious circles like a mouse trapped in a box. It was preferable to thinking about the alternatives.

Unfortunately, the Labane were driving me northeast: deeper into the swamp, but away from the lake. With each step, the chances of Yeyuama finding us decreased, and the chances of us stumbling across a Moulish camp increased. I had once likened finding them to searching for a migratory needle in a haystack, but now, with such risk attendant, I feared a needle behind every straw.

It was possible the Moulish would be safe nonetheless; they might hear the Labane before they drew near, might hide themselves before one of these warriors struck. That possibility was not one I could rely upon: to do so would be despicable, a callous abrogation of what I owed them for their shelter and aid.

I therefore had to escape.

The skill and courage of the Labane are praised even by their enemies, but they were not foolhardy enough to travel the Green Hell in darkness. When it came time to halt, I meekly advised my captors away from what I recognized as a trail nocturnal predators would follow; this I did not only for my own safety, but to convince them of my sincere aid. We camped in as secure of a location as I could find, and I was, with reluctance, ungagged long enough to consume what remained of my own water and food. Whether they would give me any of their own the next day, I could not tell.

They bound me, of course, feet as well as hands, before sitting me against a tree and tying my body to it for good measure. One of the five kept watch, too. I had expected it, but still I cursed inwardly. How could I escape, with such measures in place?

In time I had to give up that question, for exhaustion claimed me, like falling over a cliff. In the morning my captors held a conference in which they seemed to be debating my continued use; I could scarcely breathe until one came to untie me. I would live another day. But how many more would I have?

This day proceeded much like the first, except that I did my best to guess where the Moulish might be, and to guide the Labane away from such places. This made for a fair bit of wading through inhospitable muck, but my captors could scarcely fault me for that; as far as they knew, inhospitable muck was what the Green Hell was made of. At one point I smelled a foul odor clearly recognizable as the lingering effects of a swamp-wyrm’s extraordinary breath, but the dragon itself—both fortunately and otherwise—was nowhere to be seen.

We did, however, find something else. And as wretched as it was to be a captive, a part of me is glad I had not escaped the previous night, for I would have missed my chance to learn more about what the Labane were doing in Mouleen.

I feared at first that we had come across Moulish hunters, or worse, a camp. But the sound and movement that made my captors go into ready crouches proved to have another source: a second group of Labane.

This was a group of three, but I saw that they carried extra equipment, and some of it was bloodstained. From this I guessed that their brothers had met with misfortune along the way. I cannot be glad for the death of men, even my enemies, but it reassured me that my captors would see my value as a guide. Indeed, I hoped that was what they were telling the second party, as the two exchanged information in low tones. By his gestures, it seemed the other leader was vastly annoyed at his men having gotten turned around in the swamp.

For my own part, I was busy thinking. Two groups: that made it likely there were more than two. Both of them small. None of them carrying guns, whose crack would advertise their presence for kilometers around. Everything about this arrangement spoke of stealth. I was certain now that these were scouts, looking for a path across the Green Hell.

I was no military strategist, but I knew that if they succeeded, it would mean dreadful things for the defense of Bayembe. It was more imperative than ever that I escape and warn someone.

The second group did not join our own, strengthening my belief that these were scouting parties. I wished them ill fortune and damnation in their search. Our home will eat you, Yeyuama had said. For the sake of those to the north, I prayed that it would.

We continued on. I stumbled often with exhaustion; the leader finally unbent enough to allow me more water, without which I believe I would have died. But the various scrapes I had taken were hot and tender, and my joints ached; I was not sure how much farther I could go. Only the prospect of escape gave me strength… but I knew that the later such escape came, the more likely I was to fail.

Oddly, it was a fall that gave me hope. I tripped over a tangled fern and landed hard on my right side—hard not only for the force of it, but for the object in my pocket that dug painfully into my hip. It was, I realized, my penknife: the same penknife I had once nicked from my brother Andrew, so many years ago, which had accompanied me faithfully ever since.

With that knife (and a bit of flexibility), I might be able to cut myself free. That was one hurdle cleared, at least potentially; and the relief of it gave me conviction that I could clear the others, too. I would need a distraction, something to divert the man keeping watch that night, and then I would need an escape route.

Both meant choosing our campsite wisely. I forced my tired mind to focus, and was rewarded with the observation that there were quite a few drakeflies about. I mentioned before that they are insectivores; from my research I knew that, for drakeflies to be present in such numbers, there must be a hive of some sort nearby, to provide a suitable concentration of potential meals.

Finding what I was looking for without being obvious about it was difficult, but at last I spotted what I had hoped for: a wasps’ nest, not too high above the ground. The wasps would ordinarily be dormant at night, but I knew—from painful experience—that they were easily disturbed.

I contrived to get my knife out of my pocket while taking care of biological necessity—the one task for which my captors unbound me, as none of them wanted the job of assisting me. (They did not, however, grant me any privacy during the process.) I kept it folded in the palm of my hand while one of them re-bound me, and breathed easier when the task was done. I was, as before, tied to a tree, and then I watched as they ate their evening meal.

They carried some rations of their own, but supplemented them with hunting as the occasion arose. (Hunting only, never gathering; I cannot blame them for fearing what plants might be poisonous, nor for distrusting the advice I tried to give them.) Earlier that day I had discovered how far a Tsebane can throw a spear, when one of them skewered a duiker at a distance I would have thought impossible. It raised the very real possibility that, in my flight, I might catch a spear between the shoulders… but I screwed my courage tight. I must do this thing.

This thing, however, had to wait for them to settle in for the night. The evening before, the leader had checked my bonds before bedding down; I could not risk him noticing any change. Once the camp was silent, though, with only one man keeping watch, I unfolded the knife and set to work.

The vines binding my wrists were first, and the most difficult. I cut my hands several times, and once dropped the knife—a loss that put my heart in my mouth, for what if I could not find it again? But I did, and resumed my task, feigning exhausted sleep the whole while.

The next part posed a different set of challenges. I waited, eyes closed to slits, until the watchman looked the other direction; then I slid my right shoulder (the one farthest from him) out from under the vines. Now I must be swift, for if he looked closely, he would see that I should not be able to slump so far in my bonds. With my right hand I felt about for something I could throw: a stone, a branch, anything.

Nothing came to hand. There are few stones lying about in Mouleen, and fallen branches are too often tangled with whatever has grown about them. With a sinking heart, I realized I would have to throw what was, right then, my most precious possession: my knife.

Before I did that, I would need to get one more use out of it. Working quickly, trying not to pant with fear, I transferred the blade to my left hand, blessing the undergrowth that gave a tiny amount of cover to my movements. I drew my ankles up as close as I could, wincing at the sound; the guard glanced my way, but did not react. With the penknife I cut through the vines on my ankles (and also cut my calf, for I was clumsy with fear and insufficient ambidexterity).

Perhaps I made a sound. Perhaps the Tsebane was simply that wary. But he turned then, half-rising from his crouch, as if to come investigate me.

I yanked myself free of the last of the vines and threw my knife at the nest. My arm had not the range of a Tsebane’s, but I had spent their entire meal calculating the arc from me to that nest, repeating to myself again and again that I would strike it true. And so, through blind luck, divine providence, or sheer conviction that I would succeed, I threw right on my first try.

I did not stay to see the results, though I heard them as I fled. I dodged around the tree, and knew I had chosen right when the watchman’s spear thunked into the wood; then I was off, through the forest, running desperately (but not at all quietly) for the closest thing I had been able to approximate for a safe escape route.

A nearby waterway.

I dove in without a single thought for leeches, snakes, fangfish, swamp-wyrms, or anything else. I exhaled a portion of my air, so as better to sink down, and began to push my way along the muddy bottom, trying not to shriek in fear when I felt things brush against my body. With my eyes shut, I could not see where I was going; I could only hope that by me moving underwater like this, in the darkness, the Labane would not be able to see me to throw a spear. (Or, better still, that they were too occupied with the wasps to pursue—but I could not take that risk.)

My intention was to stay underwater for as long as I could; and so I did, but that was not very long. The pounding of my heart soon drove me to the surface, where I tried to gasp in a new breath as quietly as I could—partly to keep from being heard, and partly because I wanted to listen for the Labane. I thought to hear curses and shouts from the direction of the camp, on account of the wasps. The silence that greeted me caused my muscles to clench in fear. The Labane were not ordinary soldiers; they were trained from childhood to accept pain and privation without complaint. They might die of the wasp stings, but they would not scream.

It meant I had no idea where they were.

I continued along a short distance, diving when I could, but fear kept using up my air. My progress was maddeningly slow, and when I surfaced for the fourth time, I saw movement on the bank I had left.

Whether it was a Tsebane, I cannot tell you. I believed then that it was, and did not stay to confirm my suspicion. I flung myself toward the opposite bank, not caring now how much noise I made, and plunged into the forest on that side, praying the water would delay them, praying some creature might eat them, praying for anything that might aid me.

What I found was a tree.

There were many trees about, but this one was of a particular sort: one of the forest giants, its trunk well wrapped in parasitic growths, standing alongside what a few months ago would, I knew, have been a flooded region. It was, in short, the kind of tree often used for tree-bridges—and that gave me an idea.

I dragged myself up with the panicked agility of a squirrel, clawing my way from one handhold to another, too driven by fear of what lay behind to even squeak when my footing slipped. The farther I went, the more apparent it became that I had chosen correctly: this tree and its parasites had been cultivated by the Moulish, which meant there was a bridge somewhere above me.

When at last I reached it, I crawled out a little distance, until I was something like halfway along the span. Here I lay, flattening myself as best I could amidst the twined branches and vines of the bridge, far away from any tree the Labane might expect to find me in.

They did not know the forest. They would not think to look for the bridge.

Or so I prayed.

My decision was rewarded when I heard a quiet voice below. Whether it had been a Tsebane on the other bank, one was here now—no, two, for I heard a response from not far away. They were indeed searching for me. And I had no doubt that if they found me, they would not take the chance they had before, that a Scirling woman was too useless to pose a threat.

But they did not find me. They searched in the area for a time; I heard them going back and forth, though they were surprisingly silent for men in darkness, in terrain totally unlike their homeland. I was well concealed by the structure of the bridge, though, and from the ground the bridge itself looked like nothing more than a particularly thick tangle of branches. One had to know what to look for to spot it, and they did not.

Nor did they know what hazards to look for. I heard a coughing roar, familiar to my ears, and knew they had woken a swamp-wyrm.

I heard no shouts of pain to tell me the creature had taken a bite out of a Tsebane, nor any equivalent sound from the dragon. I did catch a faint scent of its extraordinary breath, drifting up from the ground below, and was glad to be out of range. More distant sounds might be the Labane fleeing; I could not tell. But I stared into the darkness above me and blessed the forest which had cut and scratched and stung and battered me—and, ultimately, protected me.

I lay rigid and frightened for what seemed like an age before light began to filter through the green, and then lay for a time longer before I could persuade myself to move. Even then, I peered through the vines in all directions, picking off leeches while reassuring myself (insofar as I could) that the Labane had not laid a clever trap that I was about to spring.

They had not. Eventually I climbed down, aching from head to foot. But I could not permit myself the luxury of collapse: quite apart from my ravenous hunger and need for water, I had to warn the Moulish.

TWENTY-TWO

I would not go so far as to say I found the Moulish; it would be more accurate to say they found me. I did, however, correctly read my surroundings to the extent of guessing where there might be a camp, so of that I can be proud.

My grammar, I fear, suffered terribly from my exhaustion and distress. It took far longer than it should have to explain the situation to them, while an elderly man fed and watered me. Then one of the hunters, an energetic fellow named Lumemouwin, wanted to go out with the others to look for the Labane. “They will kill you,” I said helplessly. I knew the Moulish were perfectly capable of moving in stealth, but that did not change the fact that I would feel any deaths as if they were my fault. “Please, will you not warn the other camps—”

“We will,” said one of the grandmothers, a woman called Ri-Kwilene. “But first we must know what to tell them.”

She meant rather that they wanted to make sure what I said was true, before they alarmed anyone else. I suppose I did not look like the most reliable messenger, and foreigners have been known to run mad in jungles before. That did not make me any calmer as they sent hunters out to investigate.

But the men returned before long with confirmation that they had seen what few signs the Labane camp had left behind. (No bodies; it was too much for me to hope that the wasps or the dragon had done them in.) Then the elders took to the drums, pounding out the message that would soon spread from one end of Mouleen to the other.

The drums brought Yeyuama to me a few days later. As grateful as I was to see him, I immediately noted that he was alone—or rather, accompanied by two young men I did not recognize, both of them Moulish fellows. “Where are the others?” I asked, my hands twisting about one another. “Has something happened?”

Yeyuama shook his head. “I do not know. They never came down from the cliff.”

My first thought was that the Labane had captured them. Then I told myself that was foolishness; the Labane were coming from the southern side of the Great Cataract, and my friends had been on the northern. Still, it did little to reassure me. (It would have done even less had I known that the Ikwunde pressed an attack along the Girama River the very day I went over the waterfall—I think to divert attention from their scouts in the swamp.)

If I would feel guilt for the deaths of any Moulish, how much more would I feel if anything happened to my companions? I bore a great deal of responsibility for their presence here in the first place. I looked from Yeyuama to Rikwilene. “Can a message be sent out, asking after them?”

She frowned and shook her head. “The villagers will wonder, if they hear too much speech from the drums.” (The “villagers” in this case were the Labane scouts.) “Someone will send word if your brothers and sister are found. The other camps know you are here.”

I argued, but could not budge her. Which was, I suppose, practice for what followed, when we began to discuss what to do about the Labane.

With the aid of a map laid out in sticks and leaves, I explained the larger situation: the impending war against the Ikwunde, of which the Moulish knew only a little, and what might happen if the people to the south could bring their army through the swamp. Here, however, I ran into immediate objections. “As many villagers as all the people of the forest together?” Lumemouwin said skeptically. (I had told them there were more Ikwunde than that, but they simply had no personal experience of human crowds on that scale.) “Impossible. They could never bring them through. The forest would eat them.”

“The forest might eat some, yes—but even if two in every five die, it could be disastrous,” I said. “For you as well as for the peoples of Bayembe; I assure you they would not hesitate to kill Moulish along the way. Though I wonder…” My words trailed off as I stared at my own map. Yes, the Ikwunde could march through, if they were prepared to accept such attrition. But could they do so effectively? I had heard military men talk about the importance of supply lines, and my own experience with the logistics of carrying equipment through the Green Hell made me doubt an army would fare well. A small, mobile group like the Labane could manage—but a small, mobile group would not be good for much more than harrying villages along the northern border. Was the aim to distract the defenders stationed along the rivers? Surely this was too much trouble for something so small. Unless they had a more valuable target…

My map was incomplete. I had focused on the Great Cataract and the northern and southern edges of Mouleen, but I had not paid much attention to the eastern end. With one hand I fumbled blindly for another stick, and jammed it into the soft dirt.

“Point Miriam,” I whispered.

It was a fort—but one built to defend the harbor. The Ikwunde were not great seafarers; they had, however, conquered enough coastal towns that they might conceivably mount an assault on Nsebu and Atuyem. That was why the Scirling colony had been placed there: our defense of the harbor was part of our agreement with Bayembe. We had built our walls and placed our guns, and all of that effort was focused on the sea, which they believed to be their only point of vulnerability.

But the eastern fringes of the Green Hell came very close to Point Miriam. And if an attack came from the fort’s landward side…

How many men would they need to take it? I was not tactician enough to guess. A small force might do it, though, if they had surprise on their side; and undoubtedly it would be a great surprise if the Ikwunde appeared out of the swamp to assault the fort. My mind spun out possibilities for what would follow: an invasion force by sea, perhaps, once the harbor’s main defense was gone, or perhaps an attempt to hold the fort itself. All of the possibilities were dreadful.

Swiftly I laid out for the others what I envisioned. “Can you warn the fort?” I asked when I was done. The Moulish carried out some amount of trade with the villagers along their borders; surely that was true along the bay as well.

Those around me exchanged glances. “We can tell the camps in the east,” Rikwilene said. “But will the villagers listen?”

The villagers, or the Scirling officials at Point Miriam. “If the message was from me…” I dismissed this thought before it was even complete. “They’d have no reason to trust such a claim. Even if they believed the words came from me, they would doubt my judgment.” Sir Adam would hardly be inclined to vouch for my reliability. And while I wanted to believe they would take precautions regardless, I knew they were just as likely to laugh it off. No one could assault Point Miriam through the Green Hell. No one.

If I went in person, I might have a chance of persuading them. But the scouts were already in the swamp; the army could not be that far behind. My odds of making it the length of Mouleen before they mounted their attack were even worse than my odds of Sir Adam listening to a transcribed drum message.

But there were people who would listen to the drums. And I had seen for myself how effective they could be, the day we found Velloin and Okweme trying to kidnap a dragon.

I looked around the circle at the gathered camp, youths and hunters and elders, with the children slipping between legs to listen. “Please,” I said. “You can stop them before they even get to Point Miriam. You can save any number of lives in Bayembe. If you send a message to the camps—I have seen how strong your hunters are. You can fight the Ikwunde. Not head-on, of course, but from the shadows—”

Even before I started, I knew it was a lost cause. Heads were shaking all around, men and women drawing back in disapproval. “This is a villager fight,” someone said; I did not see who.

Ikwunde against Yembe, Scirlings interfering, Satalu in the wings. What did any of that mean to the Moulish? Even if the Ikwunde conquered Bayembe, enclosing the Green Hell on three sides, it would have little consequence for the people here. Oh, perhaps someday that would rebound ill upon them—but vague fears of “someday” would persuade no one to put himself in harm’s way. Indeed, from their perspective it might be better if the Ikwunde triumphed, for that would destroy or at least set back the Scirling colony, and take with it the plans for a dam above the Great Cataract.

Not that the Moulish knew of the dam…

“What does this mean?” Yeyuama asked, snapping his fingers.

I stared at my hand. I had not even realized I had done that, so caught up was I in my thought. “It means I’ve had an idea,” I said slowly. “One I should perhaps share only with you—to begin with, at least. It concerns the dragons.”

He nodded and beckoned the two fellows who had arrived with him to join us off to one side. “They are pure,” he said, when I looked quizzical. “I brought them for the ceremony, but what you have to say comes first.”

I would have been happier sharing this only with Yeyuama, who at least was familiar to me. But I was in no position to object. “It concerns what those hunters said,” I told the three of them. “I needed permission to come here, from the oba of Bayembe, and he required a promise from me in return.”

This tale I kept as short as I could, stressing at every point my ignorance in making that promise, and my apology for having done so. “But,” I said, and then took a deep breath. “If it is not wholly blasphemous to suggest this… then I think, should that bargain be kept, it would help save the forest from a very great danger. One your people are not yet aware of.”

Explaining the dam was both easier and more difficult than I expected, first when I told Yeyuama and the other two, then again when I repeated my words for the rest of the camp. The Moulish understood dams well enough; they created their own in certain seasons, to aid in their fishing. But a dam large enough to control the Great Cataract? Nothing in the world could be so powerful.

“I assure you it can,” I said, with all the conviction I could muster. “And if this is built, it will change your forest forever. No longer will the floods rise as before; the swamp will always be in its dry season. The waterfall itself will be changed, and Yeyuama fears what the consequence of that may be for the dragons.” This had not been in my original speculations, when I stood on the bank of the Hembi, for at that time I had not yet seen the queens in the lake. Yeyuama’s hands had trembled when the possibility came to him. After that, he had given his full support to my plan.

I said to my assembled listeners, “If you stop the Ikwunde from crossing the swamp and attacking Point Miriam, I will tell the oba that in gratitude for your help, he must not build this dam. It will be an agreement between his people and yours, sealed by the giving of a gift. The specifics of that gift are a matter for the pure, but I truly believe it will gain you this man’s friendship. And that friendship will protect your home for generations to come.”

They needed time to consider it, of course. Such a thing could not be decided on a whim. I chafed at every minute of delay, but Yeyuama took pity on me; he and the other two pure drew me aside for the ceremony acknowledging my safe return from the island, which also served as distraction.

It should have been done on the bank of the lake, but we could not spare the time to go there. They built a hut away from the camp, then put me inside it with a small fire, onto which they threw the leaves whose scent was so reminiscent of a swamp-wyrm’s extraordinary breath. It was the same material used on the fire the hunters passed when leaving camp, but whereas they were only required to walk through the smoke, or perhaps scoop it onto themselves with their hands, I was left inside the hut until I nearly asphyxiated. When Yeyuama finally let me out, I was glad enough of the fresh air that I hardly minded his insistence that I strip naked (yes, in front of all three of them) and bathe myself in a quiet and predator-free part of the swamp.

“The smoke purifies us,” he said when I was done and clothed once more. “Nothing can undo the harm caused by that first death, but we come as close as we can.”

Yeyuama’s distraction had served its purpose, with pefect timing. A boy came running up just then, summoning the four of us once more back to camp.

The other pure were drawn into conversation briefly after we returned, while I waited apart. Then I was beckoned over, and Rikwilene delivered their answer. “You speak wisdom on some things,” the old woman said, “and foolishness on others. We will not attack the Ikwunde.”

My heart sank. All that hope… but this was too much to ask of them, and the possible reward too uncertain.

“Our hunters can be hunters of men when there is no other choice, but what you ask—for us to stop their camps so directly—that would only result in death on both sides. But,” Rikwilene said, and my breath stopped, “we have agreed to try other ways.”

On the instant, my imagination filled with new possibilities, each one madder than the last. The hunter Lumemouwin stopped me, though, with a cautionary hand. “You do not know the forest, or our people. Not well enough. We will be the ones to make these plans.”

He was right. I was no tactician, nor was I Moulish; I did not know how they might be most effective. What I had to offer was information, and assistance with the world outside when this matter ended. “If it would be useful,” I said, “I can tell you things about Point Miriam, and the weapons the people on both sides carry.”

Yeyuama laughed. As tense as I was, it shocked me that he could be so cheerful. “We will have to think how to translate that for the drums, but yes. And you can do more than that. You are one of the pure now.”

As pure as a hut full of foul smoke could make me. “Yes,” I said. “The promise I made—”

“Not that,” Yeyuama said, grinning. “Come. This, too, is only for a few ears.”

The ears in question were those of the pure: those who had qualified themselves to “touch the dragons.”

That category, you may note, does not include your ears, nor your eyes neither. (Unless you have undergone that test yourself and passed, in which case you will not need me to tell you what I am about to omit.) As before, I will speak only of those things which I believe are safe to be shared with others, based on the judgment of my more experienced Moulish counterparts. I may have gone to the island and returned, but that was only the barest part of what it meant to join their ranks.

“If we move the eggs now,” Yeyuama said when we had drawn apart, “they will hatch early. And then they may feast upon those who come into their waters.”

I received these words in wide-eyed silence. He spoke the way my parents’ housekeeper in Tamshire might, suggesting that it would be advisable to shift the winter shutters into position a few weeks early. As if “moving the eggs” were a common task—just one not usually done at this time.

While the other fellows considered it, Yeyuama explained to me. And this, suitably edited, is what I learned.

The dragons I had seen in the lake were, as I have said, queen dragons, the females of a species for which I had heretofore only seen the males. Now I learned that the chief task of the pure was first to bring suitable males up to the lake for breeding, and then to disperse the eggs after they were laid, to various points around the swamp.

The ramifications of this have been laid out extensively in my more academic works; I will dwell on only one now, as many of you are no doubt anxious to leave the dusty byways of natural history and get back to the invading army. The eggs so distributed were not, as is common among other draconic breeds, large and few in number. They were myriad, and shockingly small: less than ten centimeters in length. I thought of swamp-wyrms and their usual habits, and asked Yeyuama how on earth newly hatched dragons could be of much use in stopping an army, however many of them there might be.

He grinned from ear to ear, as delighted as a magician pulling back the curtain to reveal his great trick. “You have seen them, and feared them. But you have called them fangfish.”

The tiny, eel-like predator that had taken a bite out of my left arm back in Floris; the entirely aquatic creature we had thought at best to be a draconic cousin. In reality it was the infantile form of the great swamp-wyrm. They hatched in abundance, and were eaten in abundance not only by snakes and other creatures, but by their own, more mature kind; those who survived grew and changed, eventually becoming the full-grown dragons to which we had devoted the bulk of our attention and study.

(Despite the unsightly scar on my arm, there was a part of me that thought in delight: I’ve been bitten by a dragon!)

Then I remembered the swarms of fangfish that had roiled the waters during the flood, the avoidance of which had spurred the construction of tree-bridges. If the Ikwunde attempted to wade through on their way to Point Miriam—and they could hardly avoid it—then the consequences would be very bloody indeed.

“You will help,” Yeyuama said, still grinning. “Your way of going to and from the island was madness; I have never seen anything like it. Most of us go a much easier way! We should call you Sasoumin instead.”

Sasoumin—“woman who flies.”

Yeyuama went on while I was considering my new appellation and fighting the urge to giggle with delight. (Even now, I believe that is the name by which I am best known in the swamps of Mouleen. It is much more flattering than some of the sobriquets I have born in the news-sheets of Scirland.) “I will show you where the eggs are, and you will help move them; that is your work now. We will use the drums to tell others to do the same.”

I will, of course, not tell you where the eggs are initially laid, save to say that they are not on the island; the purpose of that challenge is to give a view of the queen dragons, and to test the mettle of those who will henceforth be taking their unhatched offspring from their original place of laying to new locations deeper in the swamp. This stage of the process I did not do, for it was not the correct season for newly laid eggs. Although the experience sounds hair-raising—queen dragons are decidedly unfriendly—it is one of my great regrets that I never had the chance, for my time in Mouleen was drawing to an end, and I have never been able to return for more than a few days. To come so close to one of the queens… I have had other breathtaking experiences in my life, some of which (others would say) surpass even that one. But one does not cease to treasure a gem simply because one owns another that is larger. I would have loved to place that in the jewelry box of my memory.

I did, however, go with Yeyuama to where the current clutches of eggs were buried, in soft swamp muck. This is where they do much of their incubation, before being shifted to the water for hatching. The history of how this process developed has been discussed at greater length by the Yembe historian Chinaka n Oforiro Dara; I advise those interested in such matters to read her work, and to consult my own monographs for analysis of its effect on draconic development.

But enough of such matters: there is an invading army to attend to.

Drums had passed the requisite messages through the Green Hell, faster than any messenger could carry them. The four of us (myself, Yeyuama, and our two companions) were not the only ones shifting eggs; indeed, ours were likely to be the least relevant, for the Ikwunde were almost certain to make their crossing farther to the east. To hatch only some of the dragons now would, however, disturb the balance of the swamp. As it was, Yeyuama admitted that the effects of this would be difficult, as it was not the season of flooding, when food would be most abundant. “I hope they get a good meal off the Ikwunde, then,” I said.

He shrugged philosophically. “If necessary, we will make another queen egg next year”—and that is how I discovered that part of the egg-handling process fosters the sexual differentiation between the queen dragons in the lake and their male suitors in the swamp.

I keep diverting to matters of natural history. This is, I suppose, because what followed was akin to a large number of dominoes toppling over where I could not see them. Much of it I only learnt about afterward, or pieced together from what I was not told; altogether, the picture it made was very complex. As is only fitting, I suppose, for the chain of events that led to me being accused of treason against the Scirling crown. I shall have to give you the larger picture first, and then my humble strand within it that stitched these events together.

TWENTY-THREE

The Moulish had, as per my request, sent a messenger to the fort at Point Miriam. In their generosity, they did not even recruit a coastal villager to carry the word on their behalf; this was deemed important enough that they sent one of their own, a man who spoke Yembe, an elder named Nagoreemo.

He left the Green Hell and climbed the rocky slope up to Point Miriam, drawing many stares, I imagine, from Scirlings unaccustomed to seeing a man in nothing more than a loincloth. At the gate to the fort he was stopped by one of the soldiers on guard, and in his careful Yembe, conveyed the news that an Ikwunde force intended to pass through Mouleen and attack them from the landward side.

What words he used to explain this, I do not know. My own conjecture had been translated into the language of the drums, which is (of necessity, owing to how that language functions) both long-winded and limited in its specifics. But the Moulish are practiced at sending a message the length of the swamp without distorting it, so I have faith it arrived at the coast in much the same shape it left our own drums in the west. Once there, however, it was interpreted by the local camps, then given to Nagoreemo, who then translated it into Yembe and relayed it to soldiers whose own grasp of that tongue was, I suspect, less than fully proficient.

Small wonder that no one believed him. One of the officers at the fort, an army major by the name of Joshua Maitland, believed Nagoreemo was a defector from his own people, come to warn them about an ill-advised Moulish assault on the fort. Others thought him simply mad. The result was that he was turned away—with, I am ashamed to say, many jeers, and even a few blows from rifle butts. That venerable elder deserved better from us.

In the meanwhile, events at the far end of Bayembe had become quite warm, to distract all eyes from anything that might be happening along the bay. The Ikwunde mounted a series of assaults along and across the Girama, including one that nearly made it to the Hembi before our forces caught them. This, as you may imagine, raised alarms all through that region, with the consequence that our side instituted new patrols to watch for any Ikwunde advance scouts. They not only found some of those; they also found Tom, Natalie, and Faj Rawango.

Had the patrol that found them been composed of Bayembe forces, all might have been well, for Faj Rawango was experienced enough in the ways of the oba’s court that he could have demanded, and likely received, a proper hearing. They were, alas, found by Scirlings—and promptly taken prisoner.

Did the lieutenant think those three were Ikwunde spies? No, of course not; only one was Erigan, and even the blindest Scirling private could see that the short, slight Faj Rawango was nothing like the tall, well-knit men in the Ikwunde army. But they were something inexplicable, and so they had to be detained. (The fact that Tom and Natalie both explained themselves to him at length did not dissuade him from this course.)

They were soon transferred into the care of a captain—but this fellow, alas, had heard complaints of their activities from the despicable Velloin, who had given a highly biased account of our meeting in the swamp. As a result, they were read a lengthy diatribe on civilized behaviour and the necessity for them to reflect well on Scirland; following this, they were summarily packed up with the wounded from the river fighting and shipped back across toward Nsebu. All three of them were somewhere in the middle of the savannah when the rest of this matter resolved.

The Ikwunde, from what we can determine, were following a plan more or less like the one I had posited, though with a great many subtle flourishes I could never have imagined and honestly cannot recall. (Those interested in such things can find an exhaustive discussion of all aspects of the Ikwunde War in Achabe n Kegweyu Gbori’s ten-volume work Expansion and Retreat of the Ikwunde, translated into Scirling by Ezekiel Grant.) Scouts like the ones I encoutered had been sent into Mouleen all along its length in the hope of locating a waterway suitable for transporting their army by boat; needless to say, this failed. The Ikwunde therefore took the information gathered by their scouts—including, I fear, some I provided myself—and sent five companies of Labane by the shortest route possible, from Osheth on the Eremmo border to Point Miriam.

Toward Point Miriam, at least. They encountered some difficulty along the way.

I saw with my own eyes how rapidly the swamp-wyrm eggs hatched once placed in water, the “fangfish” wiggling free like the eels they resembled. They are a disturbing sight then, soft and almost helpless looking, but with mouths already full of teeth. We took great care in crossing the waterways as we traveled from egg cache to egg cache, and even more care after that task was done, when Yeyuama and I set out for the eastern edge of the Green Hell.

For although I esteemed the Moulish greatly and knew they would be of more use than I in opposing the Ikwunde, I could not bring myself to sit idly by while this matter played out. If nothing else, I needed to see enough that I could accurately inform the men at Point Miriam of what had transpired.

Which meant I was there to see one of the Labane companies—already much worse off for their travels to that point—attempt a crossing of fangfish-filled water.

They had searched for a way around it, and been thwarted by creative Moulish troublemakers; now they had no choice but to build rafts and attempt to pole across. Yeyuama had refused to try and provoke any fully grown dragons into troubling them, because these Labane carried guns, but he could not stand in the way of a swamp-wyrm’s own inclination. One took great exception to the Labane trespassing upon his territory, and rammed a raft before anyone aboard it saw him there.

I had thought to feel triumph at watching the forest eat those who would trespass in it. When the moment came, I merely felt sick. There was no pleasure to be had in the screaming—for even a Tsebane will scream when a dozen infant dragons latch onto him. It is a horrible way to die, and yet those who did may well have been luckier than those who were merely bloodied, for the latter faced near-certain infection, which in many cases was only a more protracted way to go.

But I knew better than to think we could warn them off their course; these were, after all, the most dedicated troops the inkosi possessed. And when my resolve faltered, I had only to remind myself of the casualties my allies suffered. Despite warning and care, the Moulish had not been able to stay entirely safe; Labane scouts had caught some of them, and one camp was overrun as they tried to move out of the army’s line of march. All in all, twenty-one Moulish died, which is a massacre for numbers as small as theirs.

Because of this, some among the western camps argued in favor of actively hunting and killing those the forest had not disposed of. But the youths brought out the legambwa bomu, the dragon mask, and charged around with it, reminding all that killing was what cursed humankind with mortality; and while killing for food might be a tragic necessity, killing these men was not. They therefore took the surviving Labane prisoner.

Prisoners were not something they had much experience with. The Moulish deal with their own internal problems by talking it out or walking away to a new camp, not by waging war. Tying people up was something done only when a person had run mad (or, as they would put it, was targeted by serious witchcraft). What should they do with their captives?

Had I not just spent seven months in the swamp, flung myself off a cliff, crash-landed in the trees, been a captive myself, and then run the length of the Green Hell, I might have thought my answer through more thoroughly. As it was, I asked whether they would be willing to send enough hunters with me to escort the prisoners to Point Miriam, and the Moulish, glad to be rid of them, agreed.

This is how I marched out of the jungle toward the fort with what, at first glance, might understandably be mistaken for a small invading army.

Our slow pace (limited to the speed of hobbled Labane) and general disorganization went some way toward establishing us as no threat. Soldiers, however, are apt to get nervous around armed strangers, even when the weapons in question are nets and fire-hardened sticks of wood. I placed myself prominently at the front of the group, intending to draw the eye and give the soldiers something like a familiar (by which I mean a Scirling) face to reassure them.

This might have been more successful had I looked less a scarecrow. I had been in the same clothing since the morning I parted from Tom and Natalie, and it had seen a great deal of abuse in the interim. I was unwashed, underfed, and giddy with the success of our plan. So it was that when rifles were leveled in our direction, I waved my arms above my head, hallooed the fort, and cried out in a loud, laughing voice, “Do you believe us now?”

It was of course my luck that Major Maitland answered me from the wall (though I did not know he was the one who had misinterpreted Nagoreemo until later). He shouted down at us, “You and your army of savages can stop right there!”

“My army?” I looked at the Moulish with exaggerated surprise. “These do not belong to me, sir. Unless you mean our prisoners? I would not claim them if you paid me, for it was their intent to sneak up on you from a direction you did not expect—as I believe you were warned, though you did not listen. Fortunately for you, the Moulish believe in sharing what they have, and they have wit and common sense in abundance. More than enough to make up for its lack elsewhere.

“I, by contrast, am Scirling, and less well schooled in generosity. I therefore say that if you and your masters do not promise to clap these Ikwunde in irons and then reward these brave people as they deserve, then we jolly well may just let these fellows go, for they are not worth the nuisance of keeping.”

(In hindsight, I can see how this may have been construed as a threat.)

Maitland went quite purple. I think he might have given the order to fire—a few warning shots to put me on better behaviour, at least—but by then Sir Adam had attained the top of the wall and seen what lay outside. “Mrs. Camherst?” he called down, shocked, and I answered, “What is left of her.”

“What the devil is all of this?” he demanded, gesturing at the mass of people I stood with.

This time I answered him with more decorum, although Maitland provoked me sorely with his own interjections. Sir Adam continued to question me—how had we captured them; how many there were; what on earth did I think I was wearing—until I said, “Sir, I will answer everything to your satisfaction, but not by shouting it up at you. This is dreadfully public, and my voice will give out. Will you take the prisoners, and give your surety that the Moulish will be rewarded? They, not I, have done the work of capturing these Labane, and have killed a great many more besides, at no small risk and cost to themselves.”

Maitland snorted loudly enough for me to hear it, even at that range. “You expect us to believe that your savages killed Labane warriors with—with what? Sharpened sticks?”

“No, Major,” I said coolly. “They killed the Labane with dragons. As a gentlewoman and natural historian, I assure you it is true.”

I suspect it was my declaration more than anything else that opened the gates of Point Miriam to us, for everyone wanted to know what I meant by they killed the Labane with dragons. We shuffled in, me at the front, the Moulish surrounding the hobbled prisoners, and I made sure to find a soldier with good Yembe to serve as an interpreter before I let Sir Adam take me off for questioning.

If that strikes you as a phrase that might be applied to the suspect in a crime, you are not far wrong. Sir Adam was deeply suspicious of my tale; he called in a doctor to examine me before anything else, so certain was he that I had lost my reason. (I blame the trousers.) Much tedious back-and-forth ensued after that, but the important moment came when I told Sir Adam what I intended going forward.

“In return for their work in saving this colony and Bayembe,” I said, mustering what remained of my energy, “the Moulish do have a price.”

“Gold?” Sir Adam asked. “Guns? Out with it, Mrs. Camherst; tell me what you have promised them.”

“Nothing so mercenary, I assure you. But it is the forest known as the Green Hell that has protected Bayembe and this colony; it must be protected in return. I understand that you intend to build a dam in the west, across one or more—I presume all three—of the rivers. The plans for this must stop.”

The governor shot to his feet. “Mrs. Camherst, I do not know where you have gotten your information—”

Under no circumstances was I going to name Natalie. “Do you think no one knows what your engineers are here to build? Do not fear for the defense of Bayembe, Sir Adam. Even without your lake, I assure you, this country will be safe.”

I was extraordinarily lucky that he stopped me before I said anything more.

“Damn the defense,” he growled. “Our soldiers can stop the Ikwunde. There are contracts depending on that dam, Mrs. Camherst—blast it, what do you think the point of this colony is?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, mostly to purchase time to think.

He made a disgusted noise. “Power, of course. Of all kinds. Power from the dam, and we have contracts saying that eighty percent of it will be ours for a period of fifty years after construction is done. With that and Bayembe’s iron, our profits will be enormous. Think of what the effects of that will be. And you expect us to throw all that away, simply because a few naked savages stopped a raid?”

My hands were shaking; I clutched them tight in my lap. “I knew nothing of this.”

“Of course you didn’t. You are nothing more than a reckless young woman—”

“Who just saved this colony from invasion and possible destruction.” My voice wanted to shake, too; keeping it steady made my words come out loudly. “You should perhaps consider keeping the young ladies around you better informed, Sir Adam—but in this case I am glad you did not. Can you not see the headlines now? SCIRLING GENTLEWOMAN SAVES NSEBU. DARING FLIGHT REVEALS DASTARDLY PLAN. SWAMP NATIVES DEFEAT LABANE WARRIORS. HUMILIATED PRISONERS BROUGHT IN CHAINS TO FORT. And then can you imagine the response if people learn that you turned your back on those who kept Labane spears out of it?”

He did not go purple as Maitland had; he turned pale instead. “Are you threatening me, Mrs. Camherst?”

“No, Sir Adam,” I said. “I am merely explaining how people back home will see this. If you hear a threat in that, it is only because you fear the inevitable consequence.”

“It is not inevitable,” he said, his voice trembling. “It is something you intend to bring down upon me. It is a threat, Mrs. Camherst, however you try to disguise it with pretty language.”

I sighed. I was weary; I was filthy; I had entirely spent the energy which had sustained me on the way here, and wanted nothing more than to sleep for a month while my various wounds healed. “Very well, Sir Adam. Call it a threat if you must. I gave my word to the Moulish that I would do everything I could to assist them in this cause, and I intend to keep it. Lock me up if you wish; it will not help you, for I have already written down my tale, and made arrangements for it to be shared with friendly ears.”

It was the last inspiration of my tired brain: an utter fabrication, invented on the spot to forestall the house arrest I otherwise saw in my future.

It failed.

Sir Adam strode to the door. “Find a room for Mrs. Camherst. And see that she does not leave.”

TWENTY-FOUR

But of course I did leave in the end—courtesy of Ankumata n Rumeme Gbori.

I do not know what precisely he said to Sir Adam, but I believe it had something to do with the promise I had made before departing for the Green Hell. He wanted to know why I had failed him, and refused to let a Scirling question me in his stead. It was not freedom; armed guards accompanied me from Point Miriam to Atuyem, and took me back again afterward, too. Still, it was the salvation I needed. Sir Adam’s outburst had stopped me before I admitted that the success of my plan depended on me speaking with the oba, and so he let me go.

This time there was no public ceremony, no hangers-on. The oba preferred to express his displeasure in private. Apart from the guards who stood both outside and inside the chamber, there was only his griot for company, and his sister Galinke.

“The Golden One grants you what you desire,” the griot said, “and in return, you betray him.”

It was not a good sign that the griot spoke to me. This is a thing they do in Bayembe, to underline the exalted status of the oba; he speaks to his griot, and the griot speaks to whatever lowly soul is unworthy to receive the words directly. Mr. Wilker and I had previously been honoured by Ankumata’s friendliness, but I had now lost the privilege.

Galinke sat with her hands folded and eyes downcast. This rebuke was for her as well as for myself; she had suggested me to her brother as a tool, and so she too had failed him. And I, in a sense, had failed her.

My curtsy was as deep and respectful as I could make it. “Chele, I thank you for bringing me here today. There is more you have not heard, but Sir Adam would not release me to tell you.”

Ankumata gestured at his griot, who said, “Speak.”

I had rehearsed the words all the way from Point Miriam. “You asked me to bring you eggs. Whether you meant me to collect them, trade for them, or steal them outright, I soon discovered that for me to do any such thing would have been a grave insult to the Moulish, and dishonourable repayment for their generosity, without which I certainly would have died in the swamp. My promise was a blind one, and I will know in the future not to repeat that mistake.

“But blind although my promise was, I have found a way to keep it.”

Alert readers may recall that Yeyuama had told Okweme that he would address my intended theft of eggs after I had visited the island. I thought at the time that he was referring to my possible death in the attempt; had I perished, it might well have been seen as proper judgment upon me for my intended crime. But when we debated the possibility of stopping the Ikwunde and the dam alike, he told me his true meaning—which was not at all what I expected.

It is the privilege and responsibility of those who touch the dragons to move the eggs where they are needed. Prior to the island, any attempt on my part to interfere with that process, whether by theft or trade, would have been a blasphemy grave enough to ensure my death.

But after the island… if I wanted to move eggs somewhere, then it was my right to do so.

“The Moulish have agreed to let me offer you eggs,” I said. “I do not have them with me; you will have to wait for more to be laid. But when the time comes, certain men among them will bring you eggs and instruct you in their care. When one of those dragons perishes, they will bring you another—for the ones they supply will be incapable of breeding. This is not meant as a slight against you; it is the unavoidable consequence of swamp-wyrm biology. But if you place those dragons in the rivers above the Great Cataract, you will have a defense like that which has just protected Point Miriam.”

The oba listened to all of this impassively, hiding his thoughts behind the mask of a man who has survived political waters more dangerous than those the Labane tried to cross.

I swallowed and went on. “For this arrangement to work, however, the Moulish will require something in return. They have sheltered your land, at no little risk to themselves, and now offer you a treasure; moreover, what they require is a necessity for that treasure to thrive. I hope your generosity and wisdom will see the value in granting their wish.”

Here I paused, until the griot prompted me to continue. This was the most delicate point, for if I angered Ankumata as I had Sir Adam, I might be locked up and never let out again.

But I could hardly stop now. “The dam,” I said. “The one planned in the west. Its effect on the swamp would be catastrophic for the Moulish and their dragons both. If you wish for the arrangement I have described, then you must not allow the dam to be built.”

Silence fell. Ankumata propped one hand against his leg brace, unblinking gaze never wavering from me. I fought not to squirm under its weight. Eighty percent of the power, Sir Adam had said; that was the dragon’s share of the benefit, and I had no doubt that most of the cost in labor and material would come from Bayembe, not Scirland. It was not a deal that favored the oba. But could he abandon it? And did he wish to?

The next words did not come from the griot. They came from Ankumata himself.

“There is no profit for your people in this trade.”

“We have already had our profit,” I said, “in the safety of those who would have died in the Labane attack.” My mouth was very dry. Surely it was a good sign that he was no longer speaking through his griot, but his words reminded me that my peril came from multiple directions. “As for the rest…” I shrugged helplessly. “I can only do what I think is right, chele. For as many people as possible. This seems better to me than allowing the dam to be built. But perhaps my judgment was incorrect.”

More silence. I do not know whether Ankumata was still thinking, or merely waiting, to make certain no one would think he rushed into his decision.

I nearly jumped out of my skin when he said, “The gift is good. There will be no dam.”

Muscles I had not even known were tight suddenly relaxed. Then my traitor mouth betrayed me, saying, “Are you certain? Sir Adam, I fear, will be angry—”

Ankumata’s eyes gleamed with what I think was suppressed amusement. “Your country has promised assistance in defending Bayembe. I accept the assistance you have provided on their behalf.”

That was undoubtedly not the wording in the treaty—but if he thought he could get away with that argument, who was I to disagree? I asked, “Is that why you sent me to the swamp, instead of one of your own? Because you could call it Scirling aid? No, that cannot be it. I thought at the time that you would not mind as much if we died. Later, it occurred to me that you could more easily disavow our actions if we caused trouble. But if that were the case, you could have sent Velloin. Or both of us together, but I am sure someone has informed you of how I detest the man. I cannot think why you did not send him instead, before me, unless it is because I am Scirling and he is not.”

This is why I have declined all offers of diplomatic postings. As I have grown older (and in theory more sedate), various government officials have thought to take advantage of my experience and international connections by sending me as an ambassador to one place or another. But I have at all ages been too prone to speaking my mind, and not always judicious enough in who I speak it to.

The oba of Bayembe, however, chose not to punish me for my frankness. He said, “If Velloin were a woman, he would not have gone into the agban.”

I did not immediately parse his meaning. I looked to Galinke, who smiled; I thought of the days she and I had spent in conversation there. My seclusion had been less than entirely willing… but I had gone, rather than risk offense to my hosts, which might have jeopardized my ultimate purpose.

Velloin would not have bent to such concerns.

Understand: this is not the same thing as saying I was perfectly respectful of Yembe traditions, or Moulish ones, either. Romantics of various sorts over the years have painted me as a kind of human chameleon, adapting without difficulty or reservation to my social environment; this is twaddle. (Flattering twaddle, but twaddle all the same.) As I indicated during my account of the witchcraft ritual, my driving concern has always been my research. In pursuit of that, however, I have generally believed that it is more to my advantage to cooperate with those around me than to ignore them. Sometimes this has been a nuisance, and on occasion an outright mistake, but overall this philosophy has served me well.

And on this occasion, it explained why my solution to the problem had appealed to Ankumata.

I curtseyed again and said, “Thank you, chele.” Then one final thought occurred to me. “If—if I may ask one more thing—”

He made an exaggerated show of wariness, but gestured for me to continue.

“Have you ever killed anything? Not flies and such, but animals or humans.”

His hand had come to rest again on the iron of his braces. They made him strong in some ways, including a few that healthy legs would not have, but they could not do everything. Ankumata said, “I am no hunter.”

I nodded. “Only those who have never killed may do the work that will bring swamp-wyrm eggs to you. There are other requirements as well, which you cannot fulfill… but I think it would please the Moulish to know that they are giving their dragons to a man who is in that sense pure. You may wish to find others who have not killed and recruit them to assist.” My gaze flickered briefly to Galinke. “Women as well as men.”

This audience had used up more than enough of the oba’s time. He dismissed me with a wave of his feather fan. “I will read your research notes before you depart.”

None of the secrets Yeyuama had shared with me were written down, so agreeing was easy enough. “I will see to it that you have copies of what is printed afterward as well,” I promised, and retreated from his presence with a sense of profound relief.

The natural effects of the agreement to transplant swamp-wyrm eggs into the border rivers of Bayembe did not become fully apparent for a number of years after my departure, and so I will not address them here; that is a matter for later volumes.

The political effects, however, played out more rapidly, as I found myself accused of treason against the Scirling crown.

These accusations came in three distinct waves. The first was immediate, following on the rumours that I had brought an army to the walls of Point Miriam and threatened the soldiers there. That, I think, prepared the soil for the later rumours; it made for a good story, and a pleasingly scandalous counter-narrative to the tale of Isabella Camherst, savior of Nsebu.

The second wave was a product of my argument with Sir Adam and subsequent house arrest. He had the good sense not to share the specifics of our conversation, but a great many people knew I had done something dreadful enough to warrant being locked up, and later marched under armed guard to see the oba. When that selfsame oba intervened to have me released, whispers began to fly that my loyalties lay not with my own homeland, but with our colonial ally. No one could say for certain what action I had taken on their behalf—that awaited the third wave of accusations—but rumour supplied any number of scurrilous possibilities.

As for the third wave, it did not take shape immediately. Ankumata was too experienced a politician to tell Sir Adam of his arrangement with the Moulish before he had to; I was safely back in Scirland by the time that matter came to light. (And a good thing, too, or I might never have escaped with my life.) But eventually it became known that there had been plans for a dam, and that Bayembe had backed out of those plans, in favor of some arrangement with the Moulish. This damaged the trade agreements with Scirland, which led to other foreign parties taking an interest in Bayembe, and ultimately weakened our influence in that country. I would not say this damaged Scirland, in the sense of inflicting harm upon my own nation; but it robbed us of a profit we might otherwise have had. This was more than enough for some to declare me a traitor to my own people.

All of this was inadvertent on my own part—but it does little good to cry, “I only wanted to study dragons!” Science is not separate from politics. As much as I would like it to be a pure thing, existing only in some intellectual realm unsullied by human struggle, it will always be entangled with the world we live in.

(That is a lie, though I will leave it in. Not the entanglement—that much is true—but the notion that I would like it to be otherwise. If science were only some abstract thing, without connection to our lives, it would be both useless and boring. But there have been times when I wished that I might snip a few of the threads tying it to other matters, so they would stop tripping me as I went.)

The effect of these accusations, along with others acquired during the expedition (such as the rumours of intimacy with Tom), was to drive all interest in my scientific discoveries out of the public mind in both Bayembe and Scirland. While my companions and I recuperated from our trials—in Nsebu, for Sir Adam had refused to allow us to return to Atuyem, even after my house arrest ended—we endured endless questions, not one of which had to do with natural history. On Tom’s advice, I answered as few of those as my indiscretion and the status of my inquirer would allow. The political negotiations played out with a minimum of our involvement, which was as I preferred; I devoted myself instead to making better notes of my observations in Mouleen, since swamp conditions had made proper efforts there impossible.

It was a peculiar time. If I had felt odd briefly leaving the Green Hell for the savannah during our trek to the Great Cataract, how much stranger was it to sit on a chair in a Scirling-style house, to sleep in a bed, to wear skirts once again? The air felt positively cool and dry after the oppressive humidity of the swamp, and the sky seemed impossibly huge. Things that had become routine to me these past months reasserted themselves as unthinkable: had I truly eaten insects? Conversely, things which had once been shocking were no longer so. When every woman one has seen for half a year, only Natalie excepted, goes about wearing nothing more than a loincloth, the Gabborid custom of leaving one breast bare seems positively modest.

Over it all hung the certainty that we would not be in Eriga for much longer. “They’ll drag us home,” Tom predicted, shortly after we were reunited. “The soldiers were talking on the way here; they said the government might recall all civilians from Nsebu, if the Ikwunde continue to press. Except for the trading companies, of course. And now, with what you’ve done…” He shook his head, bemused. “There will have to be an inquiry.”

Natalie laughed. The recent surprises seemed to have done her in; her manner was that of a woman who had washed her hands of everything, and now was merely waiting to see what would happen next. She said, “Well, I’ve ruined myself thoroughly enough to avoid marriage, and if I am very stone-headed I may yet avoid the madhouse. I suppose I am ready to go home.”

I was not. Now that I knew fangfish were immature swamp-wyrms, I wanted to study their life cycle in greater detail, perhaps get an estimate for what percentage survived that infantile stage and grew to adulthood. I wanted to see the seasonal mating of the swamp-wyrms in the lake below the Great Cataract; I wanted to watch the great queen dragons lay their eggs, and distribute them through the forest alongside Yeyuama and the others. I wanted to document how the hatchlings fared in the river environment of Bayembe (and that was before I knew what would happen after their transplantation).

But I have never once left the site of an expedition feeling that I have learned everything, answered every question there is to ask. My curiosity always finds new directions. Despite that, I was honestly not certain I could face the Green Hell again—not so soon. Like a man undertaking strenuous labor, I had thought myself fit enough while I was still working, but now that I had stopped, a profound weariness set in, as much psychological as physical. A mattress might feel strange beneath my back at night, but I was not eager to trade it for a damp pallet again.

Regardless, the choice was not ours to make. Tom was right: before the month was out, Sir Adam informed us that we were to return to Scirland. “Are our visas revoked?” I asked.

I meant the question politely enough, but Sir Adam was not inclined to read anything I said in a charitable light. He said, “They will be, if that’s what it takes to get rid of you.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Tom hastened to assure him, and we left his office.

We did obtain permission to return to Atuyem—under escort, of course—so that we might make our farewells there. I had already parted from Yeyuama two weeks before; the Moulish did not tarry long in Point Miriam after handing over the Labane. I sent gifts with him, as lavish as I could arrange: more iron knives, foodstuffs not found in the swamp, anything I thought the Moulish might find of use. They wear little jewelry, but I sent a carved wooden pendant for Akinimanbi, a charm made in Bayembe to protect infants from sickness. I had no belief in its supernatural efficacy, nor would Akinimanbi necessarily think much of an item that invoked a Yembe god, but it was the best gesture I could think of to express my gratitude for her aid and forbearance.

In Atuyem, I met with Galinke and clasped her hands. “Despite all the trouble and confusion that has come of it,” I said, “I am still more grateful than I can say that you recommended me to your brother. I only wish there were something equally vital I might do for you in return.”

She smiled broadly. “In a way, you have. The more secure Bayembe is, the less likely it is that I will be sent to the mansa as his wife.”

I had not forgotten our early political discussions in the agban, which had played no small role in affecting my decisions. “Then I am glad to have been of service,” I said.

Galinke was not the only one who benefited from our expedition. Faj Rawango had, on account of his ancestry, been appointed to a prominent role in the new contact with Mouleen. And of course Ankumata had gotten what he desired, though he did not bid us farewell in person.

When people speak of the tragedies in my life, they ordinarily mean the deaths: not only Jacob, but all those around me who have perished, whether in direct consequence of danger or simple misfortune and the passage of time after our friendship has formed. At times, though, I think these partings should be accounted as highly, if only in the ledger of my own sorrow. Akinimanbi did not die on a Labane spear, but I never saw her again after leaving for the Great Cataract; in that sense I lost her as thoroughly as if she had died. So it was with Yeyuama as well. I only saw Faj Rawango once more, years later, and although Galinke corresponded with me, we could not be friends the way we might have been had we dwelt in the same land. So it has been, again and again throughout my life, as I form connections with people and then lose them to distance and time. I mourn those losses, even when I know my erstwhile friends are safe and happy among their own kin.

But the only way for me to avoid such losses would be to stay home, to never journey beyond the range of easy visitation. As my life will attest, that is not a measure I am willing to take; nor would I forgo the pleasures of my transient friendships if I could.

So we made our farewells, packed our things, and boarded a steamship in the harbor of Nsebu. Much browner, thinner, and more worn than we had been when we arrived, we made our way back to Scirland.

TWENTY-FIVE

There was indeed an inquiry, and a flood of articles in the news-sheets, and gossipmongers swirling in the social waters like so many hungry fangfish.

That I survived these things at all owes a great deal to Lord Hilford, who was my tireless champion in venues ranging from Society to the Synedrion. He defended me against Sir Adam’s report, accusations of fornication, and his own son (who had not forgiven me in the least for absconding with his daughter). Natalie was disowned, and took up residence with me as my permanent companion.

She proved surprisingly able with Jacob, once she was a resident of my house rather than a visitor to it. “I would not want one of my own, I think,” she said with a laugh, “but I do not mind borrowing yours for brief spans of time.”

My son. Now three years old, he had grown tremendously in my absence; I might not have recognized him, had his resemblance to his father not become even stronger. He, I think, barely recognized me at all, shrinking into Mrs. Hunstin’s skirts when I crouched down and held out my arms for him to come.

His diffidence struck me like a blow. It was not only his youth that made him forget me, or the fact that I had been absent for a third of his short life; it was the distance between us before that. I was, I thought wryly, as remote a figure in his world as a queen dragon was to a fangfish, dwelling far away in the clean, turbulent waters of the lake. (Of course I thought of it in those terms. My head was full of plans for the book I would publish, which I had been using as a distraction from the prospect of a Synedrion hearing. And I had begun to think about motherhood as a naturalist might—which made it much more interesting to me.)

The witchcraft ritual had purged some of the tension and pain from my thoughts, though, and on the journey home I had realized that I was eager to see my son once more. I vowed, as Mrs. Hunstin coaxed him toward me, that I would find some means of improving matters between us. I still had no desire to be the sort of mother society expected me to be; but surely I could be some kind of mother to him, in my particular way, to a greater extent than before.

My own mother… I will not go into detail regarding the conversation between us, save to say that “conversation” is an exceedingly polite name to give it. She had heard the rumours about Tom Wilker, and drawn very erroneous conclusions from them, not the least of which was the notion that I had only gone to Eriga for his sake. I took great exception to her readiness to condemn me, and after that I no longer had to ignore her letters, for she wrote me none.

Andrew I apologized to for the loss of the penknife he had given me when we were children. He listened to the tale of its demise with all the wide-eyed excitement of the eight-year-old boy he had been, and afterward clapped me on the back as if I were a man. “It fell in a noble cause,” he said solemnly, and then demanded to know whether Erigan women really went bare-breasted.

I had expected to return to my life as a recluse, albeit for different reasons than before. I imagined myself rising each morning to write papers on our observations, Tom and I having agreed to bombard the Philosophers’ Colloquium and other scholarly bodies with material until they were forced to acknowledge our existence and our merit. We had plans for another book as well, which ultimately turned into two: Dragon Breeds of the Bayembe Region and Dragon Breeds of Mouleen.

But I had not accounted for my celebrity, which brought a flood of mail and even some curiosity-seekers to my house in Pasterway. Natalie dealt with these, but I could not (and did not) refuse all invitations to events and house parties; if I wanted the Colloquium to acknowledge me as a scholar, it was to my benefit to present myself as such in public. (This also lent strength to my assertions that any scandals, real or imagined, associated with my time in Eriga were secondary at best to my true purpose there.) I set to work making a place for myself in Society, even if it was not the place Society intended for me.

And, one Athemer morning in early Pluvis, I sat down in Kemble’s parlour with Tom, Natalie, Lord Hilford, and Frederick Kemble himself, to discuss the matter of dragonbone.

“It was Canlan,” Lord Hilford said. “I have no proof of it—nothing I could take to a court, not with a marquess as the defendant—but I’m certain he is the one behind the break-in. The man I set to investigating wrote to me recently, reporting that Canlan received a very large sum of money from a company in Va Hing. A new outfit, one whose members include several chemists and industrialists.”

Tom frowned, drumming his fingers on one knee. “But why sell the information, when he could profit more by exploiting it himself?”

The earl snorted. “Because he needed ready money. The Canlan estates are not what they once were; to invest in this research himself would require more funds than he can spare. And also, I suppose, because he’s lazy. Gilmartin isn’t a chemist himself, which means he would need to hire men who are, which means dividing his profits, and also a great deal of work I doubt he’s inclined to undertake. Much easier for him to hand it off to someone more energetic.”

I thought of the accusations against me, that I had betrayed Scirland by helping Bayembe do without our help. That had largely been inadvertent on my part, but Canlan had sold this knowledge to Va Hing with malice aforethought.

Of course, I could hardly throw stones, not when we had stolen the seeds of it from a Chiavoran working for a Bulskoi lord in Vystrana. Whatever came of this would be an international collaboration, against the will of all involved.

“What do you have for us, Mr. Kemble?” I asked.

He rose and unlocked his desk, taking from it a small oblong wrapped in canvas. Because I was the one financing his work, he handed it to me first.

My hopes were too high; I nearly dropped the thing, surprised by its heavy weight. This was not the feather-light material from which we had built the Furcula. I unwrapped it nevertheless, and found in my hands a solid bar the color of dragonbone, no longer than my palm.

“Chemically, it’s the right substance,” Kemble said. “Which is more than I had a year ago. But the structure is entirely wrong. It’s too dense; it weighs more than lead. Though it’s stronger than lead, for what that’s worth.”

His tone said he did not think it was worth much. “If it has the strength of dragonbone, surely that is of use,” I said, giving Tom the bar to examine.

Kemble grunted. “Only if you could produce it in large quantities, easily and cheaply. Which, right now, you can’t. Or at least I can’t. I gambled on making that; it cost all the funds you gave me for the next year. I had to know if it would work. But you might as well build your machines out of firestones as use that for any industrial purpose.”

I could not contain my wince. His funds for a year? I could not fault him for the experiment, but even so…

Kemble proceeded to outline the method by which he had created the bar, while Tom and Lord Hilford asked intelligent questions. I followed none of it, but slouched in my chair in a most unladylike fashion and chewed on my lower lip. It was progress, though not success. And I was determined to follow through until it became success, even if it bankrupted me—but far better, of course, if it did not. With Natalie now a part of my household and Jacob steadily growing, I would need a greater income.

Up to that point, my sketches had only been for private pleasure, and later for field notes and scholarly illustrations. But news of what transpired in Eriga had ignited public interest: all the world knew the Moulish had just defeated the mightiest warriors of the Ikwunde with dragons. Might there not be a market for pictures? Several news-sheets had offered me money for the “true story” of what happened in Eriga, and while I did not trust them to report my experiences honestly, it suggested I might profit by selling a non-scholarly book as well. Something of more substance than A Journey to the Mountains of Vystrana, but less density than what I would present to the scholarly community.

I had more reasons than just Kemble’s research and the maintenance of my own household to spur me. Lord Hilford had been my patron for this expedition, but I could not depend upon his generosity forever; he had his own financial security to consider, and besides which, he was not a young man. By the time I was ready to begin the project I had in mind, he might not be in a position to fund it.

The sea-snake we had seen on the voyage to Nsebu; the lack of difference between savannah snakes and arboreal snakes; the drakeflies in Mouleen; the swamp-wyrms and their queenly kin and the fangfish I had not known were related. Wolf-drakes and sparklings and wyverns, and all the other creatures that we classed as mere cousins. I was increasingly convinced that our entire draconic taxonomy needed to be rethought—but to do that properly, much less persuade anyone to heed me, I would need a great deal more data than I had now. For all my reading, there were still woeful gaps in my knowledge, particularly where the scholarship was in another tongue; and once I had remedied that lack, I would need to undertake a much larger study than anyone, so far as I knew, had ever attempted.

Tom saw me chewing on my lip and leaned over. “Something troubling you?”

“Not troubling, precisely,” I said, keeping my voice down so that I might not interrupt Kemble and Lord Hilford.

He raised one eyebrow, inviting me to elaborate.

A slow grin crept over my face, against all rationality and common sense. “How much do you suppose a voyage around the world might cost?”