A Natural History of Dragons (17 page)

The abrupt crack of a rifle a little over an hour later brought me whirling around to face the direction they’d gone. Before I’d completed half the turn, two more shots echoed the first; then a fourth. Then, as I held my breath once again, a fifth, much belated—as if to put a dying beast out of its misery.

“They got it,” I murmured, staring toward the upper end of the gully as if my gaze could penetrate rock and tree to see the men. (In fact I was staring in the wrong direction; the cave lay about forty degrees westward of the way the gully pointed.)

If I thought I could find the location unaided, I would have gone charging off that instant, without pen or paper or anything else of use. Since I had to wait, I gathered everything up, and went to wait at the top of the gully. The moment I saw Jacob, I hurried to greet him, and to meet my dragon in person.

The carcass sprawled across a bare shoulder of limestone, whose scored surface gave testament to the dragon’s leaps and landings. Its grey, plated hide blended very well with that backdrop, giving me a sudden jolt as I wondered how many of the stony outcrops we had passed the day before might have included drowsing dragons. The head had fallen more or less in the direction of our approach, and the mighty jaw gaped open, the green eyes already glazing over in death.

The memory of the attack we suffered on our way to Drustanev had not left me. Even knowing the beast was quite dead, I hesitated to approach the dragon. It seemed both larger and smaller than I expected; larger because I was so near, and smaller because it lay so still. I held my breath as I put one foot forward, and then the next, until at last I was close enough to lay my hand upon the grey hide, its warmth already fading in the chill mountain air.

A dragon. More than a badly drawn shape on the page; more than a sudden threat from above. Real, and in front of me—and now we would begin to learn its secrets.

Lord Hilford and Mr. Wilker were already busy taking measurements: wingspan, girth, length from nose to tail. (Ours was quite a good specimen, nearly five meters in total length, and very well proportioned.) Then smaller divisions: the head, the neck, the spread of its claws, and so on. We had no convenient way to weigh the beast, alas; only Mr. Chiggins’s formula, which has since been proven woefully inadequate for calculating the mass of a dragon. But we did our best.

My job, of course, was to draw. I had given a great deal of thought to how I wished to approach this task, and so did not hesitate before giving orders. “Jacob, darling, could you spread out one wing? The right one will do very nicely, yes, across the stone there. Relesku may begin the task of skinning the other, for the muscular and skeletal drawings; I expect that will take him a little while. Best we do the more delicate parts before proceeding to the main body.”

O
UR
D
RAGON

The exposed location was good for our purposes; it would receive sunlight for almost the entire day. We posted Iljish to keep watch for dragons, and set to work.

I laid out my drawing board, charcoal, ink, and pens, and clipped a sheet of paper into place. I half expected my hands to tremble: I was standing scarcely one foot from a dragon—albeit a dead one—and the time had come for me to justify my presence with the expedition; surely that was enough to make any young woman nervous. And so I was; but my hands knew their business, and carried it out without concerning themselves over the state of my brain.

The first priority, of course, was a rapid sketch of the carcass, providing suggestions of the surrounding terrain, and including Jacob for scale as he crouched to take a cast of the dragon’s teeth. Although the drawings of details would be more useful to science, it was just as vital to depict the whole; most dragon illustrations at the time still held deplorable inaccuracies, showing the beasts with humanlike shoulder joints, or bodies far too thick, or wings far too small. My first sketch would be the frame into which we would fit the later details. But I could not take too long at it, and so once I had the most necessary lines, I bent to the task of drawing the wing.

Its structure is remarkable. The uninformed often say that dragons have “batlike wings,” which is a gross oversimplification. It is true that the appearance of a dragon’s wing (and here I speak of the most common terrestrial species) is more akin to that of a bat than a bird, with a membrane stretched between elongated phalanges. But it is more accurate to say there are four major types of wings extant in the animal kingdom: birdlike, batlike, insectlike, and dragonlike. The spacing of the phalangeal joints makes the fourth type entirely distinct.

But all of that thought came later, once I was in a more scientific frame of mind. That particular day, two things distracted me as I worked. The first, of course, was the periodic spurts of giddy joy: I was drawing a
dragon wing
! All my girlhood obsession had come to fruition in most spectacular fashion.

The second was less pleasant. Relesku had dutifully gone to work skinning the beast’s other wing, adding to the blood shed by the hunt, and the odor rapidly grew from “noticeable” to “appalling.” It occurred to me to wonder whether airborne predators posed the greatest danger after all; any number of creatures in these mountains would be drawn to the smell of fresh meat. Then again, most were leery of humans, and none were currently on a rampage against us. But the stench was very distracting, even for one as little squeamish as I.

There was no avoiding it, though. A tiger may be killed and preserved by a taxidermist, or defleshed and its skeleton studied at leisure; not so with a dragon. They did not fall to ash as sparklings did, but it was well known at the time that dragon bones rapidly became frangible postmortem, defying even the most careful padding to keep them intact. Even one day after death, simply picking up a bone in your hand could be enough to crack it, and the degeneration grew worse with time. This, of course, was one of the primary reasons we had so few accurate sketches; such work
must
be done in the field, and rapidly, before the decay progressed too far.

Relesku had not yet finished skinning the other wing when I finished drawing my own. I took a moment to lift the limb and study the underside. Despite common sense, I expected it to be heavy; a rock-wyrm’s wingspan is often comparable to its length, and my brain was convinced anything so large must be correspondingly weighty. But of course a heavy wing would not permit flight. The humerus, radius, and ulna are hollow, and the phalanges consist of tough, lightweight cartilage. The membrane of the wing itself is shockingly thin, to the point where I expected it to tear in my hand. But it stretched over my fingers without rupturing, a smoothly pebbled surface.

At least, it felt pebbled when I drew my fingers from the bones toward the wing edge. As I slid my hand back in the other direction, though, intending to lift the wing higher, the membrane rasped at my skin like a cat’s tongue.

“Lord Hilford,” I said to the earl, who was taking a cast of a nearby taloned foot, “have you noticed this before?”

He came and ran his hand over the wing’s underside. The roughness was only palpable there; the top surface felt quite smooth, if a little porous. “Hmm!” he exclaimed, bracing the wing higher so as to get a better look. “Indeed I have not. Mind you, I’ve only ever been within touching distance of my little runt, never a fully grown rock-wyrm. Is this a skin condition the beast is suffering, or a common feature my runt lacked? I wonder.”

The earl retrieved a piece of hide from Relesku’s work and slid his palm across it. “Same thing here. Tom, bring me the magnifying glass—” He examined it beneath the lens. “Hmm. It’s clearly textured in some fashion, but I can’t make out enough at this magnification. We’ll have to try it under the microscope, back at the house. Damnation—your pardon, Mrs. Camherst—I knew I should have brought brandy. The skin and flesh don’t degenerate in the same way as the bones, but they do decay. Well, cut a good sample, and we’ll hope this chill works in our favor, for once.”

His mention of decay recalled me to my purpose, and its urgency. I drew the body, sprawled inelegantly across the stone, and then the opposite wing was ready for me, stench and all. Dragon’s blood is truly a pungent thing; I recommend avoiding it if possible. I ended up sacrificing dignity for comfort, cutting two pieces from my handkerchief and stuffing them up my nostrils for relief.

Thus protected, I sketched the musculature and skeletal structure of the wing. Then the true butchery began. Mr. Wilker, whose veterinary knowledge surpassed my own, was determined to dig for whatever organ gave rise to a rock-wyrm’s extraordinary breath. This necessitated turning the carcass onto its back and thoroughly gutting it. (I caught a glimpse of the wishbone, and did not try to suppress my smile.) I had not yet drawn the feet in anything like sufficient detail, but since we had casts of those, it was decided that I should first devote my time to the skull. Mr. Wilker, in an oddly chosen attempt to protect my feminine sensibilities, had Relesku hack off the necessary bit and carry it a little distance away from the rest of the body.

There are undoubtedly stranger experiences in life than sitting cross-legged on an outcropping of stone with a severed dragon head facing you like the skull of Gortos himself—indeed, I have had my share over the years—but I must say that one ranks fairly high.

Especially when one begins conversing with the head. “This is most undignified for you,” I confided to the staring eyes, their green filming over with grey already. “My apologies. You were on your way to find breakfast, and instead you found us. I don’t suppose it would comfort you to know how much we are learning? No, I imagine not.”

The jaws remained silent and shut. (A good thing, too, or I would have fallen to my death from that stone in shock.)

“Why are you attacking people?” I mused, turning the head so I could draw its profile. Relesku had helpfully cut through the spine several vertebrae down from the skull, leaving the ruff undamaged, like a proud fan of stony plates. I was surprised to find them stiffly flexible to the touch. “Of course,
you
may not have harmed anyone. But what about your kin? Not that you could have told us if you knew. Do you communicate with one another at all, beyond mating and territorial disputes? Do rock-wyrms have some way of signaling that there is a fat, unguarded flock of sheep the next valley over?”

“What
are
you doing?” Jacob asked from behind me. My pencil skidded across the paper as I squawked and nearly toppled over. “My apologies,” he said, all contrition; but then—“Were you
talking
to the skull?”

“No,” I said, and then, “Perhaps,” which as responses go is not very good for covering up the truth. Jacob shook his head, but forebore to comment further. “Is there something you need?”

“Only to ask how long you think it will be before you’re done with the skull. Lord Hilford wants to try defleshing it before the bones become too brittle.”

The customary methods of defleshing, of course, involve boiling or leaving the material in a container with a large number of hungry insects. Neither is suitable for dragon bones; we would have to rely on knives. “I’ll be done presently,” I said, and bent once more to my work, this time without talking.

We worked until the light began to fail, leaving ourselves just enough time to return to our camp before it became too dark. With the exception of our Vystrani lads, none of us wanted to go; we knew very well that during the night, scavengers would be at the carcass, and the bones would continue their inevitable decay. But the location was far too exposed to be safe.

As soon as dawn came we clambered back up to our carcass—only to find it
gone.

We stood in a ragged line, staring comically at the empty expanse of stone. Blood yet stained the ground, and shreds of offal swarming with ants, but of the body itself, nothing.

Faintly, I said, “Bears…?”

“Or wolves,” Jacob added, as if wolves were capable of carrying off anything a tenth so large. Even for bears, it was too much.

Lord Hilford stirred himself and began to quarter the area, examining the ground. He had been a great hunter in his youth, I knew; for the first time, I could see it in him. “I don’t think so,” he said. “See here? Scratches in the stone—but they cut
through
the blood. These were made last night.”

Mr. Wilker had joined him, and was frowning over the scene. “It looks like they tore the carcass to pieces before carrying it off. A fight, I suppose.”

Dragons. “Do they
eat
carrion?” I asked, stammering slightly. “Their own
kind
?”

“As to the first, I imagine so,” Lord Hilford said. “We may idealize predators as noble hunters, but the truth is that very few of them will turn their noses up at a meal that can’t run away. As to the latter … it
does
happen among animal-kind. I have known lions to do it.”

My readers may recall that I am the woman who, at the tender age of seven, dismembered a dove with my brother’s penknife. I am not squeamish. But I must confess that the notion of dragons committing cannibal acts—tearing apart the body of their fallen brother, then carrying the pieces off to eat—made me sufficiently ill that I pivoted and went rapidly down the slope, stumbling and nearly falling as I went.