A Natural History of Dragons Read online

  The reason for his muttering was that without Gritelkin’s guidance, they had very little notion of where to go looking for dragons. Oh, it was often possible to see them winging through the air; during my morning constitutional around the village, which I undertook so as to have some escape from the grim darkness of our house, I glimpsed the beasts gliding about the distant mountain peaks, long-winged shapes instantly distinguishable from those of raptors. But to see them more closely was a much greater challenge.

  The Vystrani rock-wyrm, you see, prefers to lair in caves. (This, along with its stony grey hide, gives rise to the name.) Once such a lair is found, the natural historian may track the inhabitant’s movements to see where it goes to feed, to water, to attract the attention of other dragons. He may, if he is bold, enter the lair during the dragon’s absence to examine its castings and ordure. The lair is a nearly indispensible starting point for such work.

  But first it must be found. And one of the reasons Vystrani rock-wyrms love to lair in caves is because they abound in the region, which is largely a karst landform. The primary function of the map my husband was making with Mr. Wilker was to mark the locations of caves. They discovered easily half a dozen each day, though many were too small for dragons; some they discovered on their way home, passing through an area they thought already mapped in its entirety. Jacob found one by the unfortunate expedient of falling down a loose, steep slope, fetching up on a ledge beneath an overhang of brambles that had previously obscured the cave’s entrance from their eyes. Intrepid man that he was, he had Mr. Wilker lower down an unbroken lantern so that he could search the interior before finding a route back up. Deep gouges in the stone of the floor said a rock-wyrm had indeed once laired there, but the drift of dead leaves above those gouges betrayed how long ago that had been.

  In the dark of night, when I lay on our lumpy, uncomfortable bed and tried to go to sleep, my mind entertained itself with ever wilder visions of how I might solve this puzzle on their behalf. It began with half-reasonable notions: I could sit with a sketch pad at a good vantage point and draw the movements of the dragons, to see if there was a pattern. (And pray none of the dragons spotted me and swooped in for an easy meal: this is why the notion was only half reasonable.) I could make my own search of the mountains, concentrating in areas Jacob and Mr. Wilker had not yet covered. (And pray I didn’t fall as my husband had, break my leg, and lie helplessly until a dragon came looking for an easy meal.) I could walk empty-handed into the Vystrani wilderness, trusting to my childhood dream of dragons to guide my steps, as Panachai had been guided by the Lord in the desert, until fate led me to the perfect lair. (Where I would become an easy meal. The deranged side of my mind invented these ideas, but the practical side knew where they would end.)

  Then again, I should not speak too readily of practicality. Although I did at last find a solution to our problems, the means by which I arrived at it was nearly as foolhardy as the worst of my dreams.

  NINE

  A shadow in the night — A foolish response — Staulerens in the mountains — The possibility of aid

  There is a peculiarity that comes with living in a rural village, with which my readers—most of who, I imagine, enjoy the benefits of the electric lights that are nowadays everywhere—may be unfamiliar.

  In the absence of artificial illumination, one’s sleep divides into two distinct periods, with a gap of wakefulness during the dark hours of the night. Experiencing this in Drustanev, I initially attributed it to the lumpiness of the bed, the cold of the room, the general alienness of my surroundings, and so on; it took me some time to discover this was the usual way of things for the villagers. (Jacob’s own habits took longer to shift, I think because of the strenuous exercise he received, climbing about the mountains.)

  On the night I will now relate to you, I had not yet learned the reason for my wakefulness. All I knew was that I awoke, as I had for several nights running, and could not immediately go back to sleep. Rather than trouble Jacob with my tossing and turning, I rose from the bed, wrapped myself in a thick robe, and tiptoed out to occupy myself elsewhere until drowsiness returned.

  It’s an odd time, that period of midnight wakefulness, if you are not accustomed to it. The world seems dreamlike at that hour, and the mind subsides into a meditative state; my own thoughts seemed distant to me, like specimens upon the table of my shed back home. I considered reading, as I had the previous two nights, but felt guilty at using yet more candles—especially as I was beginning to suspect that striking a light only postponed my return to sleep.

  I went into our workroom, it being the place I was least likely to disturb anyone, but instead of reading I unbarred the shutters and swung them open. Chill air struck my face, simultaneously bringing me further awake and yet strengthening the dreamlike nature of my thoughts. I felt pleasantly detached from myself and, sitting in the dark room, gave myself over to contemplation of the cloudless night sky.

  I pray you forgive me if I temporarily postpone the true purpose of this narration to speak about that sky. In Falchester at that time, and in many places these days, the light from human habitation blots out a portion of the stars. And? you may ask, wondering why this matters. There are still plenty of stars to be seen. But I remember my childhood home in Tamshire, far enough from the nearest city to be spared this change, and I remember the sky above the mountains of Vystrana. You may think you see plenty of stars, friend reader, but you are wrong. Night is both blacker and more brilliant than you can imagine, and the sky a glory that puts to shame the most splendid jewels at Renwick’s. Up in the mountains, where the air is crisper than the humid atmosphere of Scirland, I beheld a beauty I had never before seen.

  I am not often a sentimental woman. But whether it was the splendor above me or my odd state of mind—likely both—I found myself nearly overwhelmed. At first I was entranced; then, feeling it was too much, I tore my eyes away and contemplated the far more mundane scene of sleeping Drustanev.

  Mundane—except for the light that flared some distance away.

  This was not the diamond wink of a star, but the warm, spilling glow of firelight. A door had opened in one of the houses, and two figures appeared in the gap. One, smaller, had the rounded silhouette of a woman, with a shawl thrown over her shoulders. The other was noticeably taller, with clothing in an unfamiliar style, and in the light from inside I saw something even more out of place: yellow hair, pulled back into a very un-Vystrani plait.

  The fascination of the stars fled as I sat up, peering through the darkness toward those two. My first, absurd thought was that Mr. Wilker had taken a Drustanev woman for his lover—for lovers those two certainly were, by the way they embraced in the doorway, the man appearing as reluctant to depart as the woman was to let him go. But Mr. Wilker’s hair was not so light, nor nearly long enough to braid. The man was no one I had seen in the village; and there were not so many people in Drustanev that I could have overlooked that blond head among them.

  I became aware that I was now hanging halfway out the window, its sill pressing uncomfortably across my pelvis, as if closing the distance by two feet would allow me to make out more detail. My interest was not prurient; in fact, I wished the two would stop kissing and move apart so I could see the man’s face. But the face was not what mattered, was it? His features would not tell me who he was. I hauled myself back inside, stuffed my feet into the muddy shoes I had left by the door, and slipped outside without a sound.

  I would like to tell you I did this because of the dreamlike state brought on by waking in the middle of the night. It is a fine excuse, and there might be some truth in it. The bulk of the blame, however, must fall first upon my impatience, which chafed under the slowness of our research, and second upon my curiosity, which knew even fewer bounds than usual that night.

  By the time I made it outside, the door had closed. I halted, clutching up my robe so it would not trail in the half-frozen mud, and soon spotted movement: the man, walking uphill out o
f the village. Very definitely not a local, and my curiosity grew stronger. I set off after him, darting from house to house so as to have some cover if he looked back.

  How far did I intend to follow him? I cannot tell you. Eventually I would have had to ask myself that question, but before I reached that point of awareness, something took the decision entirely out of my hands.

  The village was surrounded by a rocky, cleared area, and downhill there were fields, but the woods began not far up the slope. I had gone far enough into their depths to realize that a nightgown and robe do not make good attire for creeping after a man who obviously knows his way through such terrain, and to feel the chill biting at my stockingless ankles. Drustanev was obscured from sight by a screen of trees, and so was most of the light from the sky. I therefore had not the slightest bit of warning before an arm pinned me tight and a hand clamped down over my mouth.

  I let out an immediate scream—insofar as I could, muffled as I was. It wasn’t yet a cry for help; my thoughts had stopped dead with shock, leaving nothing but pure animal reflex. The man jerked me closer and hissed something unintelligible in my ear. I could not tell if it was Vystrani or some other language; it could have been Scirling, for all my brain was capable of comprehending it. I twisted, trying to get free, and now I did try to shout for help, with no particular success. The man snarled wordlessly, a sound of clear threat, and I stopped.

  We had managed enough noise between the two of us, though, that my quarry heard and turned back. For the moment or two it took him to reach us, I thought he might prove my savior. As he drew near, unfortunately, my hopes were dashed. He spoke, not to me, but to my captor, and my captor answered him, in a language that was neither Scirling nor Vystrani. They clearly knew each other, and if they were not happy with each other, that still did not mean either one was on my side.

  The dreamlike feeling vanished as if it never had been there at all. I stood rigid in my captor’s grip, mind racing in useless little circles, like a mouse trapped under a basket. What would they do to me? Kidnapping, murder, an outrage upon my honor—all of those and worse seemed possible. I had faced a wolf-drake and a stooping dragon, but never a human who wished to do me harm, and the one part of my brain that remained detached enough to observe this scene was disgusted at how badly I was handling it.

  I am grateful to that little corner of my brain, for it shamed me into better effort. I weighed my options, and found them sadly wanting. I had nothing of value with which to bribe the men into letting me go. We were far enough from the village that I couldn’t be certain anyone would hear me scream, if my captor uncovered my mouth long enough for me to try. His grip was strong as a dragon’s, and even if I somehow broke free of it, I wouldn’t get very far, stumbling through the woods in my nightgown and robe. I found myself wishing, quite irrationally, that I had read more of Manda Lewis’s sensational novels—as if those would provide anything like useful guidance in a situation like this.

  Perhaps I would have been better off not weighing my options. They both dismayed and distracted me, such that I was taken by surprise when the hand over my mouth vanished, and the man I’d been pursuing stuffed some kind of rag between my teeth. I shouted as loudly as I could—which was not very—and squirmed more, but they soon had me bound, gagged, and blindfolded. Before the kerchief went over my eyes, I caught a glimpse of my captor, who proved to be another light-haired man, taller and more heavily built than the first. Once I was sufficiently trussed up, he threw me over his shoulder, and off we went.

  So it was to be kidnapping, then. At least to begin with, and my blood ran cold at the possible sequel.

  We soon achieved sufficient distance from the village (or rather they did, and I was carried along willy-nilly) that the men felt it was safe to talk at greater length. From the tones, it was clear that my captor, now my bearer, was seriously displeased with the man who had gone to visit his lover, and was reading him quite a lecture. And then, to my surprise, I realized that I was gathering this sense from more than just their tones: I could understand them.

  Not well, mind you. If my Scirling readers have ever encountered a farmer from the more distant and rural parts of the country, they will have some sense of what I heard that night: familiar words, turned on their heads and decorated with oddly bent vowels. They were not speaking Scirling, of course. But their language, once recognized, was easier for me to grasp than Vystrani: it was an obscure dialect of Eiversch, which I had studied as a girl.

  There is, of course, a world of difference between learning to sing a song or read a poem in Eiversch—or any other language—and translating the angry conversation of two strangers while you are slung over the shoulder of one, being carried through the midnight forests of mountainous Vystrana. Now that I recognized the language, though, I was able to follow the general thrust of the argument, which I shall take the liberty of re-creating.

  “You’re an idiot,” my bearer said in disgust—except he used some word I did not know, whose meaning, I suspect, was rather more opprobrious. “I told you not to go back there.”

  “I didn’t think it would do any harm!” the young lover protested. (I had seen his face while they were trussing me, and he could not have been much more than a year or two above my age, if that.)

  My bearer snorted and hitched me higher on his shoulder. “You mean you didn’t think I would notice. You’re lucky I did, or this little chit would have followed you all the way back to our camp.”

  “What does that matter?” the lover asked sullenly. “You’re bringing her there yourself.”

  So he was, and I did not like to think why that might be. But knowledge was my one tool, and so I kept listening.

  “I’m not about to let her go running back and raise a cry,” my bearer said. “Maybe the locals ignore you going for a tickle with your pretty widow, but this one isn’t from around here. I want to know who she is, and what she’s doing here. Then we’ll decide what to do with her.”

  For all that “we,” he spoke like a leader—of this pair at least, and likely of more. And they hadn’t been in the area for long, or they would know of Drustanev’s Scirling visitors.

  I grunted as the pieces fell into place. Yellow hair, and a dialect recognizable, if only barely, as Eiversch: these fellows must be Staulerens. I could not, in that moment, remember the details of their history, but an army from Eiverheim had marched through these mountains some two hundred years previously, and some, being cut off at war’s end with no pay and no way home, had settled in the region. Their descendents, known as Staulerens, lived for the most part on the northern side of the Vystrani mountains, but their young men occasionally crossed south toward Chiavora, for one clandestine (and lucrative) purpose:

  Smuggling.

  Well, two clandestine purposes, if one counted midnight tickles with pretty widows. But smuggling was of primary importance. Brandy or opium, I wondered—not that it much mattered, except insofar as it might tell me whether my captors were more likely to be drunk or drugged when they decided what to do with me. Did smugglers sample their own cargo? I had no idea. Nor any idea what to do with my understanding, except cling tight to it and wait for a chance.

  Upside down and blindfolded as I was, I cannot say how long I was carried through the woods. All my blood had rushed to my head, and my bearer’s shoulder digging into my lower abdomen became more painful with each step. Furthermore, my clothing was far from sufficient for the nighttime chill; I have known winter days in Scirland that are warmer than a Floris night in Vystrana. Consequently, it came as a complete surprise when my bearer stopped and dumped me without ceremony to the ground.

  My first reaction was pure relief, that I could relax my abused stomach muscles and breathe freely. All around me was half-intelligible speech in Eiversch, which I hadn’t the wit to attend to. Then a hand snatched the kerchief from my head, and I could see.

  Even the small fire burning nearby was too much light at first. I blinked and curled my legs unde
r me, less to hide my bare ankles than to warm them. There were half a dozen men, I saw, all Staulerens, each one more villainous-looking than the last, if only from lack of bathing. My bearer knelt in front of me, kerchief in hand, and addressed me in Vystrani. “Who are you?”

  I thought of my shouting matches with Dagmira, my deplorable grammar, and judged it better to take my chances with standard Eiversch. In that tongue, I said, “I’m sorry—I don’t speak Vystrani very well. Can you understand me?”

  His eyebrows went up, and the others muttered in surprise. “You’re from Eiverheim?” my bearer asked.

  Judging by the way the others were standing back, letting him question me, he was indeed their leader. I quickly reviewed the formal pronouns in my mind—it is never bad policy to be polite to one’s captor—and said, “No, I am from Scirland. But you and your companions are Staulerens, are you not? I thought we might converse more easily in your language.”

  From what I could gather out of the laughter and muttered jokes between the other men, they thought it grand comedy that I was using formal pronouns for their leader. The man himself grinned. “Scirling, eh? And what are you doing here, in Vystrana?”

  During the men’s interruption, I had taken swift inventory of my present assets. They consisted of one inadequately warm robe, one even more inadequate nightgown, a pair of shoes. I had other belongings back in Drustanev—but we’d brought equipment more than money, and these men would not want to show their faces to negotiate for my ransom. The pine needles, small stones, and dirt within my reach. Myself.

  As I have said before, I am an old woman now, and don’t much care whom I shock or offend. I will tell you honestly that I thought of the pretty widow in Drustanev, and I thought of myself: not particularly pretty, but young and healthy (which goes quite far, among men isolated in the mountains), and far from completely attired; and I wondered if I might be able to bargain my charms in exchange for release.