Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369) (9 page)

Suhail’s tone was one I recognized in my marrow: the passionate intensity of someone who has found his intellectual calling and will pursue it to the ends of the earth. “What do you think of their relationship with dragons?” I asked—for that point of connection had generally been my only real interest in the ancient civilization.

“You will not laugh?” he said. I thought this time his grin was a shield: pre-emptive self-mockery. I shook my head, promising solemnity, and he said, “I think they tamed them.”

The legends claimed it was so, and yet— “People have tried, many times. The Yelangese supposedly have had success with breeding them in captivity; that is something I should like to look into. I have seen dragons chained to act as guards. But actually taming them? Domesticating them, as we have done with horses? We have no evidence of it.”

“Unless you have found some,” Tom said.

Suhail turned to look out over the ruined city. “These aren’t the first ruins I’ve studied. In Akhia, there are enclosures, large ones, with high walls and little areas inside, like cells. Everyone has a different interpretation for what those places were. Markets, prisons, storehouses for valuable goods. Most of the interpretations assume there used to be a ceiling, now gone. But we find no broken tiles, no holes in the walls for support beams. If they were open to the sky—and I think they were—they would not be good storehouses.”

“But they could be dragon pens,” I said, understanding. “Presuming, of course, that they either tethered the dragons, or trained them sufficiently to keep them from flying away. It’s a possibility, I’ll grant you … but not proof.”

“Of course not. That’s why I’m here. I’m looking for proof.” Then Suhail shrugged, his expression lightening. “Of that, and many other things. Come—I promised you feathered serpents. I hope they cooperate.”

*   *   *

He led us down from our vantage point and across the tangled ground of the city. It was treacherous going, with roots and stones always ready to turn the ankle and trap the foot, and made no easier by the need for stealth. “They often sun themselves at this hour,” Suhail told me, “but any close approach and they flee. Or it—I’m not sure if it’s always the same one. Perhaps you will be able to tell.”

“Few of the large ones are gregarious,” I said. “But I am surprised to find even one this close to Namiquitlan. I knew there were some in the region, but with the demand for their feathers being what it is, I expected I would have to go much farther afield.”

Suhail nodded. “I had not told anyone about this, until you. I do not want hunters tramping through here trying to kill it.”

He stopped us then and pointed at the last pyramid, lying some distance out from the others. “Near the peak—two tiers down—do you see?”
the feathered serpent

At first I did not. We were too far away, and the thick vegetation acted as both cover and camouflage. But I followed Suhail’s pointing finger, and then, indeed, I saw.

The quetzalcoatl lay along the stone tier of the pyramid as if it were a great bed, its body curling through and around the surrounding growth. Its feathers gleamed iridescent green in the sun, the same shade as the quetzal bird from which it took its name. I estimated it to be at least five meters in length, quite possibly more.

Could the creature hear us at this range? I had read what was known about quetzalcoatls, but there had been no mention of the quality of their hearing. In a low voice, I asked Suhail, “How close can you get before it flees?”

Q
UETZALCOATL

He shook his head. “I haven’t really tried. The first time, I stumbled on it by accident. I was at the base of the pyramid.”

Then I could get closer. I spent a few moments studying the beast through my field glasses, then picked my way with care across the rough ground, not wanting to trip and startle him off. To my chagrin, I discovered that approaching closer was of very little use; I could hardly see anything at all through the bushes and trees that had taken root along the pyramid’s sides. If I wanted to see more, I would have to climb—and surely that would provoke it into fleeing.

I considered what I knew of them. Crepuscular hunters (as many dragons were), and flightless. If I contrived to be atop the pyramid before it came for its midday nap, could I observe it from above?

I could indeed, though Suhail was astonished when he heard I wanted to try, and Tom insisted on standing ready with a gun in case the creature noticed our presence and took offense. It required a dreadfully early start the next morning, not to mention a trip through the forest in the dim light of dawn, but the climb was the worst part. We identified the path by which the quetzalcoatl usually ascended, then made our way up on the far side, so as not to leave a scent trail that might alarm it. Since our quarry had chosen the
easy
route for its ascent, that perforce left us with a more difficult one. But once atop the pyramid, we were able to build a blind, and from there observe the thing to our heart’s content.

Thanks to these efforts, which continued over the next fortnight, I was able to tell Suhail that his site had only the one draconic visitor, and that she was female. (Males possess a patch of red feathers on the throat beneath the head, which this one lacked.) I never did discover where she spent her nights; it was not at the ruin, and we could not track her well enough to find the location. But she was atop that pyramid more days than not, and I came to know her rather well.

This, perhaps, is why we did not shoot her. At the time I named other reasons, chief among them the fact that her return to an area from which her kind had been driven was a good thing, one I did not wish to undo. We also knew the skeletal details moderately well, for while the bones of a quetzalcoatl are delicate, they do not decay as those of true dragons do—this being one of the chief arguments against classifying them as dragons.

And yet I was not sure. We gathered feathers she had molted where she lay, and haggled with a local hunter for samples from the quetzal bird. At the hotel one evening, I sat fingering them both. “They are so alike,” I said to Tom. “I look at these and think that Miriam must be right—that dragons must be related to birds. And yet, if that were true, why should there be only one breed that exhibits feathers? Unless we count the kukulkan as a second—but by all accounts, it is as like the quetzalcoatl as a crested quetzal is to a resplendent one. And drakeflies, I suppose, if we stretch the family tree to include them. Conversely, if dragons are
not
related to birds, why is there a feathered breed at all? Why should they not all have scales?”
more taxonomy

Tom was conducting repairs on one of his boots. Indistinctly, because of the needle clamped in his mouth, he said, “Perhaps they aren’t dragons at all.”

It was the simplest answer. After all, what grounds did I have for calling them dragons? A serpentine body and a draconic head, the latter quite unlike the head of either a snake or a bird. But they had no extraordinary breath, their bones did not decay, and they lacked limbs entirely, let alone wings. Yet sea-serpents had only fins as forelimbs, and wyverns had only hind limbs and wings. Which created the possibility of a continuum, with the feathered serpents at the far end from, say, a desert drake.

At which point I had to ask myself how such a continuum came to
be
. It made no sense. Primates might encompass everything from human beings to lemurs, but there were no ocean monkeys, no feathered gorillas. The very notion was absurd.

Suhail mostly worked at the far end of the site, tramping across the rough ground with a methodical regularity that refused to let anything short of an entire tree divert him from his path. He was, he explained to us, attempting to map the old city—not merely the pyramids, which everybody knew about, but the smaller bits that were of interest only to him. Periodically he would stop and dig, and then on the trek home we would listen to his grandiose plans of hiring a hundred workers to excavate the entire site. “I’ll never do it, though,” he admitted. “Not for many years, at least. I am like you—I aim to circle the world and see it all. Only then will I know where to focus my effort.”

When that day came, I was certain his effort would be formidable. He seemed incapable of exhaustion: he would labor all day at the ruin, pausing only to pray, then come back to Namiquitlan and teach Jake to swim. My son was already able to keep himself afloat, but Suhail taught him how to use his movements more effectively, how to protect his ears when he dove. This did much to reconcile Jake to being shore-bound; he spent half his day in the water, collecting shells and other marine life to show to Abby. “He isn’t learning what he’s supposed to,” she confided wearily to me, “but I can’t say he isn’t learning.”

I shrugged, accepting it with philosophical resignation. “He already has a better education than I did when I married. The history and such he can acquire later.”

He certainly had more than enough opportunity to pick up odds and ends of knowledge, for he was present in the evenings when Tom and I argued points of natural history, sometimes with Suhail in attendance. On those nights, our conversations often turned to the question I had raised before: the relationship between the Draconeans and the creatures they had worshipped, from which we derived their name.

“They never
domesticated
dragons,” I said very firmly, early on in this debate. “Not as we have done with dogs or cattle. Domestication does not simply mean that you keep such animals around; it implies a host of changes, from the behavioural to the physical. Think of the differences between your average hound and a wolf. If anything similar had ever taken place, we would know, because domesticated dragons would still be around today.”

The chairs in our rooms were sturdier than those on the verandah. Suhail had a habit of leaning back in his, the front legs slightly off the floor, while he alternately steepled and interlaced his fingers. I had seen him teasing delicate remains out of the ground with those fingers, and knew he could be very still and slow when he wished—but without something to excavate, he very rarely wished. Now he tapped his forefingers together, thinking. “They could have gone feral.”

“But that is not the same as returning to their wild form. Besides, they would make dreadful candidates for domestication. Have you not noticed that most of the creatures we alter in such fashion are social? It is easier to domesticate a species that is accustomed to co-existing with others. They understand the concept of hierarchy and will follow humans as their leaders. But most of the bigger draconic breeds are solitary—or near to it.”

Tom grinned. “And I have yet to hear anyone claim the Draconeans rode into battle on the backs of fire-lizards.”

Since fire-lizards are the size of small cats, the mere thought was laughable. Suhail grinned, too, but it was brief; he lapsed back into thoughtfulness. “Men have tamed cheetahs, though. Even to the point of sending the cats to hunt for them.”

I was rapidly learning that he relished a good debate and was not afraid to throw himself fully into one, armed with whatever information he had to hand—and his memory was encyclopedic. Fortunately, he was equally unafraid of conceding the point when faced with superior knowledge. I said, “Yes, but taming is a different matter. A tame animal has merely been socialized to tolerate human contact, and perhaps a modicum of control. But the change is individual: its offspring will need taming all over again.”

“Is it possible the Draconeans did that?” He waved a hand before I could respond, dismissing one interpretation of his question. “I mean from a biological perspective. The practical considerations are another matter.
Can
dragons be tamed?”

“It isn’t as simple as that,” I said. “I can’t answer yes or no. Much depends on which breed you mean, and what degree of effect you require before you would call the creature ‘tamed.’ In Bayembe, the oba keeps savannah snakes on chains. The Moulish have ways of shepherding a swamp-wyrm where they want it to go. But none of that is comparable to, say, a falcon on your wrist, hunting at your command.”

The conversation devolved then into a discussion of the different draconic breeds and their characteristics, which might make them more or less suitable for taming; and this topic we revisited many times over subsequent days, interrupted by digressions onto matters ranging from Draconean architecture to survival tactics while out in the jungle.

Suhail was a fascinating man to converse with. His intellectual curiosity matched my own, but his field of knowledge stretched in different directions, intersecting with mine in just enough places to give us common ground on which to range. I have written before about my growing sense of myself as a scholar; those conversations in Namiquitlan were an affirmation of that truth and, in a small way, consolation for the temporary loss of the Flying University. It is a wonderful feeling to have one’s brain stretched and tested, to know both that one
has
knowledge, and that one is gaining more.