Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369) (38 page)

To my surprise, I found him standing quietly, watching the battle with close attention, but giving no orders to join it. “You will not fight?” I asked.

“Let them carve one another up,” he said. “I suspect the Yelangese will win, with that thing in the air, but they will be badly bloodied. Then we will move into range and hail them. They will give way, or if they do not, we will take appropriate steps.”

As little as I wanted him to fire on the Keongans, I found myself almost equally dismayed to hear him say he would stand aside. “You will just sit here and watch men die?”

“Should I risk my own men on their behalf, Mrs. Camherst? I was not sent here to involve myself in a local war. If I could sail past them to reach the princess, I would do so. If they fire upon us, I will answer in kind. But otherwise, I will wait.”

The most infuriating part of it all, then and now, was that Admiral Longstead was right. He could easily have routed the Yelangese if he moved in; they were already beleaguered, and the Scirling ships were both larger and superior in firepower. But why should he do so? We were not so much at odds with Yelang as to risk starting a war with them in this fashion.

And yet it tore my heart to stand there while the battle raged, watching the caeliger slaughter helpless men and beasts from above, and do nothing.

I hate above all else to do nothing.

People have accused me of lying on this point, but I truly do not remember making a decision. I remember thinking only that I must
do something
. Then I was over the railing and plummeting toward the sea, with Suhail shouting after me.

I hit the water with a great splash and sank deep, but soon kicked back up to the surface. A second splash inundated me; when it receded, Suhail was nearby, dashing the water from his face with a quick shake of his head. “What are you
doing
?” he demanded.

“The admiral will not go closer to the battle,” I said breathlessly. “I must find my own conveyance.”

The creature was almost to us. I had seen it approaching before I went over the rail: a sea-serpent, one of those which lost its rider in the battle, perhaps, or else a curious visitor. I struck out for it before Suhail could get more than two words into his description of exactly how mad I was. He was not wrong; but he must claim a share of madness for himself, along with a good helping of chivalric honour—for when he saw what I intended, he did not abandon me to do it alone.

We had learned some lessons from our previous ride. I felt almost competent as we caught our holds with a minimum of trouble; soon we were atop the serpent as before, and together encouraged it to swim in the direction of the battle. This was not difficult, as the blood in the water had attracted its attention. But once there, we faced two challenges, each one alone far greater than the simple task of riding: we must figure out something of value to do, and then find a way to do it.

I thought at first to go for the Yelangese ships, as the other riders were doing. But there were any number of difficulties in doing that: a churning sea of chaos lay between us and those targets; we should have to steer through the canoes, which I did not at all trust our ability to achieve; the Yelangese would be shooting at us the whole way, both from the ships and from the caeliger; and we might do more damage to the side I intended to support. The sea was simply too crowded for me to have any certainty of directing the serpent’s blast in a safe direction—given that I had not practiced for it at all.

Suhail was shouting something at me, but I did not hear it. My gaze had fallen upon the caeliger.

Had ours been functional, we might have used it in the battle, but the puncturing of its bag had released whatever gas the Yelangese were using to create lift, and the engine had taken a wetting besides. I had no way to get at the enemy caeliger, and would not have been much use with a rifle even had I thought to take one from our ship.

But it was possible that someone else—some
thing
else, I should say—might be able to strike that high.

The caeliger was approaching, completing one pass across the battle and preparing to make a turn. I saw one of the men above notice us. He was too distant to have a good shot, but held his rifle and waited. That, I realized might be my death—or Suhail’s.

“Pull!” I cried to him, and suited action to words, hauling with all my might upon the tendrils we held.

Even our combined strength could not have moved the serpent’s great head. I did not expect it to: I sought instead to vex the creature enough that it would lift its head of its own accord. And so it did, flanks rippling with the motion I knew meant it had drawn in water, preparatory to expelling it. But its head barely crested the waves, which would not be enough at all.

Half a dozen thoughts and more flashed through my head at once: serpent cranial anatomy, the tendrils we held, rings in bulls’ noses. The strength of dragonbone. The likelihood that I would fall into the water before I could even test my theory. The bullets now piercing the water around us as the caeliger drew near—and above all, an internal voice crying,
What are you doing?

What I was doing was releasing my grip upon the tendrils behind the head and hurling myself forward, down the serpent’s long snout. There were tendrils there, too, much smaller, fringing the serpent’s nose … and it was these I now seized hold of and pulled.

I thought to bring the serpent’s head up to an angle where it would expel its blast of water at the caeliger, hopefully damaging it as the other serpents had damaged the ships. The dragonbone components would likely survive unbroken, but if I could break the machinery, or knock the men from their perch, or rupture the caeliger’s bag, I might yet save some of those below.

It shames me as a natural historian to admit this, but: I had not stopped to consider that I was riding a younger cousin of the beast we had killed in the arctic.

The serpent did not merely lift its head. The entire front of its body rose snakelike into the air, just as its cousin had done in attacking the
Basilisk
. I found myself dangling from its snout by a desperate grip on the edge of one of its nostrils. It did indeed release its water—I could not see where it aimed—but a moment later it struck something hard, as its head collided with the passing caeliger.

We all crashed into the water together, serpent, riders, and flying machine. They had swooped too low in approaching us, believing that we had no way of striking back at them. No one else had been foolish enough to try what I had done (for the Keongan riders know that the anatomy of the snout is exceedingly tender, and that interfering with it is a good way to send the beast out of control). It would not even have worked had we not been at the edge of the battle, in waters quiet enough that the caeliger felt safe in descending for a better shot.

But descended they had, and I was too ignorant to know how unwise it was to try and take a serpent by the nose. In my recklessness, I had succeeded in removing the caeliger from the sky.

I saw quite a few engravings of that moment in subsequent months and years; some of them are still to be found today. All of them depict me standing proudly atop the serpent, feet planted firm on its scales, hair blowing majestically in the wind (conveniently ignoring that it was less than ten centimeters long at the time), and often in a dress. (Skirts, I suppose, blow more majestically than trousers.) None of them show me dangling for dear life from the serpent’s nostril. However prosaic the reality of my act, though, it made for very good storytelling later on, and I am not surprised it became so widely known. The crew of the Scirling ships had seen it; the Yelangese had seen it; the islanders had seen it. My son had not, and I thank heaven for that, as it was bad enough once he heard the tale of what his mother had done. But I made myself well and truly famous with that act, which many say ended the Battle of Keonga.

NINETEEN

Return to Keonga—The temple—Exile—Phetayong—I read my mail—A letter for Suhail—Life in Scirland—My new hobby—A plaster cast

Reality, again, is somewhat less dramatic. The fighting continued; the Yelangese were not vanquished for some time, and then only because it occurred to Admiral Longstead that he could gain a degree of goodwill from both sides by moving in to halt what would otherwise have been a long grind to the finish. The Scirlings ended up playing peacemaker between the two sides, at first militarily, then diplomatically, once the princess stepped in.

The process by which that occurred was a marvel of misdirection, and even now I am not sure how it was arranged. No one wanted to say out loud where Her Highness had been; there were too many onlookers, ranging from some of the Yelangese sailors to the men of the
Basilisk
to a surprising percentage of the islanders, both local and visiting with the war fleet, who did not know she had been on Lahana. Admitting the truth would not have made anyone look terribly good. So everyone pretended she had come in with the fleet; that Suhail and I had never flown away on a stolen caeliger; and that when I rode into battle on the back of a sea-serpent, I did so from the shores of Lahana, where I had been recuperating after my harrowing first ride. There were rumours, of course—there are always rumours—but it has never, until now, been public knowledge that Her Majesty was once a political hostage in the Broken Sea. (I would not reveal it here, save that I have royal permission to do so.)

All of that, however, came later. In the immediate aftermath of my deed, Suhail and I floundered in the water, putting as much distance as possible between us and the downed caeliger. The sea-serpent had decided that vehicle was the cause of its suffering, and set about destroying the thing with all dispatch. The Yelangese crewmen floundered with us, and one seemed to have a notion of setting upon us as the sea-serpent had upon the caeliger; but fortunately he was forestalled by the arrival of a longboat. Men aboard the
Boyne,
one of the other ships in Admiral Longstead’s little fleet, had seen me go over the side and, not having any notion of what was going on, had set out to rescue me.

The sailors pulled us in, then took on the Yelangese, who judged that captivity in Scirling hands was preferable to remaining in the water with an angry sea-serpent that might soon go looking for new prey. It had done quite a good job on the caeliger, considering all the dragonbone; the bones themselves had survived its bite, but the lashings had not, and so the waves were now littered with a motley osteological assortment.

When the battle was done, we came ashore on Keonga, escorted by a dozen war canoes. There the chief greeted Admiral Longstead, but I saw very little of that meeting: Liluakame wormed her way through the crowd to my side, the first friendly face I had seen, and beckoned for me to follow her. “Where are we going?” I asked. Fear sprang up in my heart. I could think of no reason that my wife should be there, but not my companions or my son, save that something dreadful had happened to them.

“To the temple,” Liluakame said. “Quickly.”

This was the platform I had seen when we first came to Keonga, high upon the promontory that divided the
Basilisk
’s cove from the place where the chief dwelt. There were still a few sailors up there, watching over the cannon Aekinitos had brought up for the battle, but I did not pause to speak with them. Apart from reassuring me that the others were safe and well, Liluakame had discouraged any conversation. This was a side to my wife I had not seen before, in our brief cohabitation: focused and urgent, taking me in hand as if I were a child she could not spare the time to educate. Weary and confused as I was, I found myself happy to follow her lead.

The temple itself was a modest structure by Scirling standards, but an impressive feat of engineering for the islanders, being a series of stone platforms and low walls constructed entirely without mortar. The walls demarcate a system of enclosures, the inner ones being more
tapu
than the outer, and ceremonies of different sorts are performed at different locations depending on their nature. Liluakame took me only within the outermost enclosure, that being the only one I was considered fit to enter. There I found Heali’i waiting.

She led me through a process of purification and repentance, which, she said, might earn me a degree of mercy from Pa’oarakiki when he was done with Admiral Longstead. (Suhail, I later learned, had been taken to a temple the warriors use.) She spoke as if the transgression for which I repented was departing from Keonga against orders, and that indeed was part of it; I did not ask whether she knew my crime was greater still.
Ke’anaka’i
were believed to die if they set foot upon Rahuahane, yet I had gone and lived. I suspect Heali’i knew, but to this day I cannot tell you what she made of that: whether she questioned my identity as dragon-spirited, or the reality of the curse upon that island, or merely chalked me up as a very fortunate exception.

My Scirling companions were waiting outside the temple when I emerged. Jake flung his arms around my middle hard enough to squeeze all the breath from me; Abby did much the same. Tom, looking more haggard than usual, tried to offer me his hand; I flung my arms around him instead, and damned what the gossips might say if they heard. The last few days had been distressing enough that I could not be content with a mere handshake.

Fortunately, dealing with two errant birds was not particularly high on the Keongan agenda, not with the aftermath of the battle to address. Four of the Yelangese ships had fled, but that still left the islanders with a great many prisoners to sort out, agreements to settle, and other matters to arrange. All of us from the
Basilisk
were told to remain in the area of our cove, where the sailors alternately worked on repairs or stood around and gossiped about recent events, depending on how closely Aekinitos was watching them. I fear I may have doomed them to a lot of profane shouting, for I was not free to tell the captain where I had been and what I had done, and the lack made him as grumpy as he had been when he broke his leg.