Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369) (18 page)

The notion seemed outrageous to me, but Suhail nodded. “It would not take as large a change as you think. Or at least, he does not think so.”

It was hardly my field of expertise. Still—“I cannot imagine the temperature rose overnight, however small of a change it might be.”

“No,” Suhail agreed. “And so we are back to metaphor: the oceans swamped the coastal settlements under, but it happened over a long period of time. Not in three days, as Scripture would have it.”

“A fascinating theory,” I murmured. It will surprise no one, I think, that I was less interested in its implications for Draconean civilization (or theology, for that matter) than in the consequences for draconic species. They are so well adapted to their circumstances that such a change in the environment would necessitate migration or further change—or else it would drive them to extinction. I cursed again the peculiar quirk of their osteology that robbed me of any fossil record to study … even though I knew that without it, I likely would not have any dragons larger than ponies to study, and those almost certainly flightless.

This speculation put new thoughts into my head, though, which stayed with me long after we returned to shore, and kept me up quite late that night. Suppose (I said to myself) the world had indeed changed in that fashion, many thousands of years ago. It had—according to Suhail—driven many cold-weather creatures toward the poles, allowing residents of warmer climates to expand their ranges. Might this have some bearing on the question of the sea-serpents? I could imagine the changing world inspiring a great deal of movement and turmoil, as the beasts went in search of waters whose temperature was more congenial. But because there is variation in all species, some tended toward higher latitudes, while others preferred to remain closer to the tropics.

If that were the case, then it put a new wrinkle in my taxonomical questions. What if they had been a single species, back in the days of the Draconeans … but were in the process of differentiating into two?

I did not know if the hypothetical progenitors had been tropical or arctic to begin with, but I suspected the former. Our globes, after all, featured the
Tropic
of Serpents, not the
Arctic Circle
of Serpents. They were more common in tropical latitudes than temperate ones, let alone the far north. Which made sense if they had gotten their start here, and had expanded as the world changed around them.

Some of you may read the preceding paragraphs and shrug at them. I had an idea; very good for me. The scientists among you, however, may understand why this was a matter of sufficient excitement to keep me awake well into the night. I had studied dragons before, and contributed something to our stock of knowledge about them. I had even made a few discoveries of note, among them the natural preservation of dragonbone, the mourning behaviour of Vystrani rock-wyrms, and the peculiar life cycle of the dragons of Mouleen.

But never before had I devised a
theory
. Even my purpose on this voyage—to reconsider draconic taxonomy—did not have the same glamour as this new idea. The former was merely (I thought) a revision of other people’s ideas. It might win me acclaim in some quarters, but others would resent me for it, as an upstart woman arguing that a respected authority like Sir Richard Edgeworth was wrong. My theory regarding sea-serpents, however, was entirely new. It brought natural history together with observations from archaeology and geology to craft something never before considered. It was a fresh contribution to the field—and, I thought, the one that would make my name.

I said in the first volume of my memoirs that one must be cautious of imagining patterns in data, especially when that data is scant. Alas, on this occasion I did not take my own advice.

That night I rose from my hammock, crept out onto deck, and by the light of the moon penned an explanation of my ideas. This was the first draft of an article later published as “On the Differentiation of Sea-Serpents,” which I, in a state of great excitement, sent off to the
Journal of Maritime Studies
not one week later, when we came into port at Moakuru and had an opportunity to send mail. Tom, to his credit, cautioned me to wait; although he found great merit in my idea, he felt it would be better to submit a more substantial work after the expedition was done. I, however, wanted this to be the first volley in a series of publications that would astonish the scientific community.

In a way, it was. “On the Differentiation of Sea-Serpents” garnered quite a bit of attention while I was still abroad, and while a portion of that was negative (for the aforementioned reason of my being an upstart woman with little scholarly standing), many found merit in my ideas. And certainly I have followed that article with many later works that have indeed made my name.

Unfortunately—as many of you know—my theory was entirely wrong.

I did not know it when I posted my article back to Scirland. I did not even suspect until some months later, and confirmation had to wait until M. Esdras de Crérat published the definitive work to date on sea-serpents, years after my expedition ended. But had I delayed and allowed my ideas to mature, I might have escaped a great deal of embarrassment later.

*   *   *

I suffered a scholarly frustration of a different sort soon afterward, when we had left Olo’ea for a more volcanically active archipelago—one that might be home to fire-lizards.

On that day Suhail had asked to have the use of our cabin, because it was out of the wind. When I returned some time later (intending to retrieve one of my sketching pads), I found him ensconced with a stack of three books, one small notebook, and an array of little boxes, which seemed to be filled with cards. “What on earth are you doing?” I asked, peering shamelessly at the notebook. Suhail was doing mathematics; that much and no more was apparent to me.

“Oh,” he said, looking up with the distracted air of one who had not noticed his interlocutor approaching. Given the minuscule size of the cabin, that meant he had been concentrating very hard indeed. “I am working on Draconean.”

Given his talent for languages, I was not surprised. Good manners warred with curiosity, and lost. “Very well; I concede my ignorance. What use are mathematics in deciphering an ancient language?”

He stretched the kinks from his neck and gestured at the little boxes full of cards. “An analysis of the frequency of each character—that is the simplest part of it. Sadeghi thinks he has found a mark that indicates separation between words, so if he is correct, it is also possible to record how often a character is found at the beginning of a word, or the end, or in its middle. After that, it becomes more complex: the likelihood that two characters will be found in conjunction, or three.”

When I described this to Natalie much later, she saw very quickly what Suhail was about, but between my difficulty with languages and my limited grasp of mathematics, I did not. “Very well—that would give you a sense of the patterns in the language. But it cannot tell you what the words mean … can it?”

“Not yet,” Suhail said. “It tells me, though—or rather it told ibn Khattusi, who was the first to observe this—that the Draconean script is likely a syllabary, with many characters representing groups of sounds.”

“How can you be sure of that?” I asked, fascinated.

“Because of the number of characters. There are only so many individual sounds in a language; even the largest has no more than a few dozen. Your alphabet has twenty-six letters, while mine has twenty-eight, with marks sometimes employed for vowels. The largest have fifty or sixty. But even a small syllabary usually has at least eighty characters—more often hundreds.” He nodded once more at the cards. “Draconean has two hundred forty-one—perhaps. It is not easy to count. If an inscription carved in clay adds a downward serif on one symbol, is that a different character, or was the scribe simply careless in making his mark? If three marks overlap one another, is that significant, or is it just an artifact of the small size of the writing?”

My eyebrows went up, and he dismissed his own rambling with a wave of his hand. “The point is this: knowing the script is a syllabary tells me something of how it must have sounded. And calculating the frequency of different arrangements helps me find patterns—”

“And where there are patterns, there are words,” I said, understanding at last. “You can find the shape of them, at least.”

“That is the hope.” Suhail stretched in his seat, and his back popped alarmingly. “It will be a great deal of work, though, and I have only just started.”

Getting from the shapes of words to their meaning seemed like another hurdle entirely, but Suhail did not need me to point that out. Instead I reached my hand toward one of his boxes, and when he nodded permission, browsed through the cards. I could read nothing of his notes, which were all in a tidy (and microscopic) Akhian hand, but the Draconean characters in the upper left were vaguely familiar to me. “I have found a few inscriptions myself,” I admitted.

“Oh?”

“Most of them from a ruin in Vystrana—near a village called Drustanev.”

Suhail made a sound of recognition and picked up one of his books, flipping through it with practiced fingers. “These, yes?”

The book, I later learned, was the most recent supplement in a series begun by the Akhian scholar Suleiman ibn Khattusi, who had made it his mission to collate all the Draconean inscriptions then known and to encourage people to gather more. At the time, all I knew was that I was looking at two pages of unintelligible Akhian script, captioning a pair of line drawings I knew
quite
well.

My voice was much too loud for the small cabin. “Where did you get these?”

“The books? I—”

“Not the books,
these.
” I stabbed one finger down on the Draconean inscriptions.

Suhail took the volume from me, perhaps as much to rescue it from my violence as to read what was on the page. “It says these were gathered and submitted by Simon Arcott of Enwith-on-Tye.”

The first sound to emerge from my throat was an outraged squawk. It was shortly followed by a string of epithets, the kindest of which was, “That
sneak
! I sent him those drawings myself, made from the rubbings I took in Vystrana. And he has the
gall
to pass them off as his own work?” I snatched the book from Suhail once more, studying the images to make certain there was no error. Indeed there was not; I had painstakingly copied them for Mr. Arcott, and knew every line.

Suhail did not question my certainty. He said, “If you wish, I can send in a correction.”

I did my best to moderate my tone. “That is very good of you. ‘Correction’—pah. That is the word, but it makes the attribution here sound like a regrettable error, rather than a damnable lie. Oh, when I get back to Scirland … or really, why wait? There is such a thing as mail service.”

“Having been in a similar dispute once myself,” Suhail offered, with the wary air of a man who is hoping a cat will not bite him, “I would advise waiting. If you write to him now, he will have months in which to prepare a defense.”

What defense could protect Mr. Arcott, when I had the original rubbings in my study and he had never been to Vystrana in his life, I could not imagine. Still, Suhail’s advice was good, and I nodded in reluctant agreement.

(When I finally did confront Mr. Arcott, after my return to Falchester, he had the cheek to try and argue that his intellectual thievery had been a compliment and a favor. After all, it meant my work was good enough to be accepted into ibn Khattusi’s series—but of course they never would have taken a submission from a woman, so he submitted it on my behalf. What I said in reply is not fit to be printed here, as by then I had spent a good deal of time in the company of sailors, and had at my disposal a vocabulary not commonly available to ladies of quality. But I had greater satisfaction in due course: he was drummed out of the Society of Draconean Scholars, and subsequent editions of ibn Khattusi’s series had not only my name but a note explaining the discrepancy in thoroughly condemnatory terms.)

I returned the book, restraining my uncharitable urge to throw it across the cabin. It would not have gone far, but the impact might have satisfied my sudden need for violence. “Well. I may take comfort that he cannot possibly have stolen the other inscription I found, as I never took a rubbing of it.”

Suhail gave me a sharp look. He knew well enough by then that I was not often the sort to pass up a chance to record knowledge. “Why not?”

I laughed, my ill humour not gone, but receding to where I could think of other things. “I had very little paper with me at the time, and nothing fit for a rubbing. Nor could I stay long enough to try and draw it—I had other tasks to address.” (To whit, getting off an island in the middle of a waterfall without breaking my neck.) “Besides, I am not certain it would be useful to anyone. The Draconean part of the inscription looked very odd—quite primitive.”

My dismissive words might as well have been the scent of prey, for Suhail perked up like a hound that has caught the trail of a rabbit. “Primitive? How so? Where was this? And what do you mean, the Draconean
part
of the inscription?”

“Which question do you wish me to answer first?” I asked with asperity, for he seemed likely to go on pestering me without pause for reply.

He apologized, and I said, “It looked … well, let me show you.” I fetched out my own notebook and sketched a few shapes as best as I could remember them: awkward scratches at bad angles.

Suhail frowned at the images. “Were they arranged precisely like this? No vertical stroke here?” One brown finger traced a line through what I had drawn.

“My dear fellow, this was six years ago, and I have already said I kept no record of them. This is me trying to recall the general style. I have no idea if there were any characters that even looked like this.”

He conceded this with a nod. “And the rest of the inscription?”

“You mean the part that wasn’t Draconean? I have no idea
what
it was. Rounded little blocks; they might not even have been writing at all.” I sketched another few shapes. These were decidedly more fanciful, as I had not even my vague familiarity with Draconean to aid recollection.