Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369) (10 page)

So congenial were those days that I felt quite regretful when the time came to bid Suhail farewell. I could have stayed for six months in Namiquitlan, studying the local quetzalcoatl and searching the region for others, but the rest of our journey beckoned, along with our obligations to our various financial backers. “If you should find yourself in Scirland,” I said, “then do not hesitate to seek me out. I am easily found.”

Suhail wrinkled his nose. “Scirland’s Draconean ruins are not very interesting.”

“True,” I said, and chided myself inwardly for feeling so crestfallen. I knew from my previous expeditions, and especially from the peripatetic nature of this voyage, that I would form friendships and then leave them behind. From the start, I had known that this one would not persist beyond our association in Namiquitlan. Yet knowing did not prevent me from wishing.

At the time, I thought I concealed that desire well. As later gossip would prove, however, I did not succeed half so well as I might have hoped.

PART TWO

In which we encounter a wide variety of dragons and an even wider variety of problems

SIX

The perils of bureaucracy—Sabotage—My illiteracy—Dragon turtles—A matter of propriety—Jake goes for a ride

There is a great deal I am glossing over in this account, of course. Some of it is documented elsewhere (such as in
Around the World in Search of Dragons
), but some of it is simply of no interest to anyone.

Into this latter category I place the finer points of the difficulties we faced upon arrival in Va Hing, one of the great conquered cities of Yelang. Contrary to popular assumption, going on an expedition around the world is not merely a matter of obtaining a ship and charting a course. There are visas to be considered, and bureaucracy to navigate when those visas fail to arrive in time, expire too soon, or meet with blank stares on the receiving end. The politics of nations and their economic markets may interfere with your journey. In short, you may spend an appalling amount of time mired in stuffy little offices, trying to get permission to be where you are.

I was fortunate in that the dragon’s share of this burden fell on Tom, not me. He had greater patience for such things than I did; but more to the point, he was male, and therefore more to be respected in matters of bureaucratic deadlock. I am not often grateful for the way in which my sex has historically been dismissed, but in this instance I must admit I was glad to leave the task of arguing to him.

Tom was also more capable than I of reading the gentlemen on the other side of the argument. He spotted, as I would not have, an oddity in their conduct.

“I think they know who we are,” he said, after another fruitless afternoon ashore.

My afternoon had been spent in study; my head was full of dragons. I blinked owlishly at him. “What do you mean? Our papers give our names, quite clearly.”

Tom shook his head, mouth opening to answer me. Then he glanced around. We were on deck; I was not about to closet myself in the coffin that passed for my cabin when I did not have to. All around us were sailors who might overhear. Tom put his hand on my elbow and nudged me toward the bow, where we might speak in something more like private.

Once there, he said in a low voice, “I think they
recognize
our names.”

Various scandal-sheets had made me notorious at home, but it was absurd to think anyone cared about such matters here, on the other side of the world. “There is no reason they should know us.”

“Isn’t there?” Tom said. “We are in Va Hing, Isabella. And we are here to study dragons.”

My jaw sagged loose as I caught his meaning. Several years previously, just before our departure for Eriga, the Marquess of Canlan had stolen our research on the preservation of dragonbone, and possible methods for synthesizing the material. We had never acquired proof—not enough to risk accusing him—but it would have brought little good if we had; the damage was already done. Needing ready money, that nobleman had sold the information to the Va Ren Shipping Association, based here in this city.

“What should it matter if we are here?” I said, my bitterness no less for the wound being so many years old. “They have what they wanted. Let us conduct our research in peace.”

“If they believed that was all we were here for, they might. But put yourself in their shoes. We might be using this expedition as cover for something else.”

“Such as what? Espionage on behalf of Her Royal Highness?” The princess’ diplomatic mission had not yet arrived in Yelang, nor was she due to visit Va Hing, but that would not prevent excitable minds from spinning tales. More likely, though, what they feared was specific to us. “Do they think we will steal the notebooks back? There’s no point; by now they’ll have made any number of copies.”

Tom’s eyes were grim and hard in his weathered face. “Sabotage.”

I could not help myself; I let out a bark of laughter that attracted curious looks from the nearest sailors. “Would that I could! They greatly overestimate me, if they think I can do such damage.”

“I believe the phrase is ‘better safe than sorry,’” Tom said, so dry it burned. “Even if we are innocent of such schemes, there’s no benefit to them in allowing us to wander about Yelang, looking at dragons. So they’ve taken steps to block us.” Then he stopped, sighing, and ran both hands over his hair, smoothing it back into place against the constant lifting of the harbour wind. “At least, I
think
they have. This seems like too much of a bureaucratic—”

He caught himself before he could use whatever term he intended; I expect it was very foul. “Too much so for chance,” I said, with a sigh of my own. “Very well. How do we circumvent it?”

Tom’s mouth twisted. “Money. Isn’t that the way of bureaucrats everywhere? Either they’ve only been told to refuse us—not paid to do so—or they weren’t paid that much. One of them was distinctly hinting that he’d be amenable to a bribe.”

If they had indeed been paid, then apparently the going rate for keeping Scirlings out of Yelang was higher than it had any right to be, for our bid had to be even higher. The sum was enough to make me quail. “This … will not do anything good to our finances,” I said in my cabin, staring down at the ledger.

“It’s that,” Tom said, “or give up on visiting Yelang entirely. Or ask Aekinitos to put us ashore in a longboat along some uninhabited stretch of coastline, and hope no one asks for our papers.”

Aekinitos would have done it, I had no doubt. I had no desire to risk arrest in a foreign country, though. Among other things, it would cause great embarrassment for Princess Miriam’s diplomatic mission, which should soon be arriving in Yelang—and I was already in bad enough odor with His Majesty’s government. “Then we pay,” I said. We would worry about the consequences later. I could try selling my art in the market square, perhaps.

Tom conveyed the bribe to the necessary officials, and we received our stamps. After all that trouble, I had half a mind to seek out the Va Ren Shipping Association and see if I
could
interfere with them somehow. Common sense asserted itself, however—the aforementioned lack of desire to be arrested, not to mention that I had no idea where in the city they were—and so, as always, we turned our attention to dragons instead.

*   *   *

One of the first things I did was scour the bookshops of Va Hing until I found a volume on the Yelangese taxonomy of dragons, which is quite different from our own. At least, that was what I hoped it was: there were very fine woodcuts of dragons in it, and I had brought along one of the sailors from the
Basilisk,
who could read a little Yelangese. As I have said before, I am not much of a linguist, and Yelangese characters had defeated me entirely. I could learn their shapes well enough, but my mind persistently failed to link those shapes to sound and sense.

(Why, you ask, did I bother to acquire the book if I could not read it? Because I intended to have it translated when I returned home. Which, it is true, would have been rather late in the day for my consideration of taxonomy—but as it happened, I was able to have it translated much sooner. That, however, comes later in this tale.)

I had no hope of studying all the dragons to be found in Yelang. There are simply too many, from the subterranean
hok tsung lêng
to the aquatic
kau lêng
to the winged
bê lêng,
not to mention the various draconic cousins: the
lêng ma
or dragon horse; the
hung,
said to have two heads; the
pa siah,
which will hunt even elephants. One could spend a lifetime simply attempting to understand them all—as indeed several naturalists have done, from Kwan Jan Siong in the forty-ninth century to Khalid ibn Aabir in recent years.

My chief aim was a simple one: to lay eyes on one or more Dajin dragons. The specimens of that continent constitute a major branch of the draconic family tree, quite distinct from the Anthiopean one, and no amount of reading about them would give me the same understanding that observation could. I knew that many Dajin dragons were not winged (which led Edgeworth to dismiss them as not ‘true’ dragons), and that a number of them were water-loving; I knew they had often been revered in Yelang, though not in the same manner as the Draconeans were thought to have done. With the quetzalcoatls of Coyahuac so fresh in my mind, I wanted to study the creatures to be found here, and see if I could derive any insight regarding possible relationships between them.

To do that, of course, we had to
find
them first, which has always been the most vexatious hurdle encountered in my work. Lacking a friendly tsar who might provide us with a guide, we had to hire one ourselves; and this task, too, belonged to Tom, while I scoured the bookshops for that text.

The day after I returned victorious, Jake came running down the deck toward me, with Abby in hot pursuit. I would have liked to take a hotel room in Va Hing, as we had done in Namiquitlan, but the expense of the bribe meant I had to practice economy and stay on board the
Basilisk
. I was therefore ensconced near the bow, perusing the woodcuts in my new acquisition, when Jake skidded to a halt beside me. “Mama! Mama! Can we go to see the dragon turtles?”

“The
what
?” I said, which I fear did not make me sound very clever.

“The dragon turtles! The man said there are lots just down the coast. He said I could go swimming with them. Please, can we go? Please?”

My son seemed liable to vibrate right out of his skin with excitement. Abby puffed to a halt behind him, one hand on her stays, and said between gasps, “He ran all the way from the other end of the docks.”

How could I say no? It was the first time Jake had shown much interest in anything draconic. I suspected his interest would have snuffed right out had they been dragon
tortoises
instead of turtles, and therefore land-bound—but I was not one to look a gift drake in the mouth.

Presuming, of course, that there were any such things as dragon turtles. I could not read my book, but paging through it, I found a woodcut of something that indeed appeared to be a swimming dragon with a turtle’s shell. That did not guarantee that the beast existed; the book also had a woodcut of a
hung
that showed it with two heads, which is arrant nonsense. (It has a club at the end of its tail, which can be mistaken for another head in poor light or stressful conditions.) But it was enough to merit investigation.

Asking questions around the docks, I learned that there was indeed a region just down the coast where dragon turtles or
lêng kuh
were known to be found; unsurprisingly, the place was generally called Dragon Turtle Bay. I also learned that the fat of the creature’s body is considered a great delicacy, and that the poor beasts are rather easily slaughtered, being on the slow and trusting side. The only reason that any of them survived in the area was because the local villagers take pains to cultivate good conditions for them, ensuring that the breed does not go locally extinct.

Tom was still engaged in the hunt for a guide to the interior, and Aekinitos was busy trading, to keep our expedition in hardtack and potable water. I therefore bought passage on a small junk for myself, Abby, and Jake, as well as Elizalde, the Curxia sailor who had helped me with the book. He served as our interpreter, and I must note for the record that without him, we would have been entirely adrift.

The
Basilisk
would not have been able to sail in close regardless. The region of Dragon Turtle Bay is breathtaking; the coastline there curves in for a small bay, which is dotted with countless steep-sided islands, their rocky slopes thick with greenery. The waters are treacherous for any ship with a draught deeper than two meters or so, especially if her helmsman does not know his way about.

Through Elizalde I heard the legend of the bay, which holds that those islands are all the bodies of dragon turtles, variously said to be either sleeping or dead and petrified. Even in the latter case, however, the fishermen assure you that if not kept happy with offerings of incense and charms, the
lêng kuh
will rise from their places and swim away into the sea, taking the wealth of the bay with them.

This last point was particularly stressed to us, for the locals insisted on our making suitable offerings before we could be permitted to go swimming with the dragon turtles. When I nudged Jake to cooperate, he looked at me with wide eyes. “Aren’t you coming with me?”

“I am sure you can report to me very well,” I said.

“But—they’re
dragons
!”

“They
may
be dragons. Or they may simply be turtles with peculiar-looking heads.”

Jake nodded firmly, as if I had proved his point. “Exactly. You have to come and see!”

I sighed and knelt, lowering my voice. Of all the people around us, I think only Abby and Elizalde spoke any Scirling, but I still did not want to advertise my thoughts to the world. “Jake, I cannot go swimming. I haven’t brought the costume for it.”