In the Labyrinth of Drakes (31 page)

The Akhians dismounted and began to quarter the ground. Suhail picked up fragments of shell and conferred with al-Jelidah in the nomad dialect. Then he raised his voice and called out to us in Scirling. “It was animals. Hyenas, perhaps. There are still signs of their digging, and tooth-marks where they broke into the shells.”

I sagged atop my camel. Too late, yes—but not because we had failed to estimate the hatching season correctly. Predators had beaten us here.

When I persuaded my camel to kneel and went to examine the wreckage, I saw what Suhail meant. The eggs had not been cracked from within, as if by a hatchling struggling to get out. An outside force had broken them, in some cases all but crushing the egg completely. “Does this happen often?” Tom asked, gesturing with a shard of shell.

Al-Jelidah shrugged and said something, which Suhail had to translate for us. “It depends. He says that sometimes the drakes fail to dig their nests deep enough, or the wind uncovers the eggs.”

I went to one of the pack camels and pulled out the notebook where I had written my original observations. “This one was no shallower than the rest. Do you think the recent sandstorm exposed them?”

Suhail shook his head immediately. “No, the storm didn't reach this far. And this happened longer ago than that.”

So even had we hurried more, we would still not have found the cache in time. It was cold comfort.

We camped a little distance away that night, and had the type of scant meal that was all too common during that journey: tough, tasteless flatbread baked in the ashes of our fire, with a tiny bit of coffee to wash it down. It was the month of fasting in the Amaneen calendar, but travellers are exempt from that requirement; Suhail had promised Mahira that he would make up for it when he returned to Qurrat.

Tom and I pored over our maps, but to little avail. All the other caches we had marked had been harvested by the Aritat and sent to Qurrat. If we wanted to observe a hatching in the wild, we would have to find another clutch … and quickly.

Al-Jelidah shrugged when we said this to the group. He was Ghalbi: he knew the desert like no other. He had not needed Scirling naturalists to find eggs before, and he did not need them now.

But searching would not be easy. “The Labyrinth of Drakes,” I said, touching that spot on the map. “We did not mark clutches there, so they will not have been harvested. And drakes are known to lair in that area.”

We had been planning to go there regardless—but it had been a later stage in our plans, not our sole hope for seeing a hatching. “Finding buried eggs, without being eaten by predators along the way…” Suhail mused. “Not an easy task. And travellers often get lost.”

Andrew roused enough to say, “
You've
been there.”

Suhail grinned. “In my foolish youth. And a few times in my equally foolish maturity. I'm not saying it can't be done—only warning you. The depths of the Labyrinth are not for the faint of heart.”

“The faint of heart would not be out here in the first place,” I said. “Let us enter this Labyrinth, and see what we may find.”

 

TWENTY

In the Labyrinth of Drakes—Searching for eggs—The Watchers of Time—Hatchlings—Dragonsong—Smooth stone

I have tried many times in my life to sketch the Labyrinth of Drakes, and failed every time.

Mere pencil or ink cannot capture the place. Even photographs cannot do it, for such an image can only show you a limited slice of the whole, and the true experience of the Labyrinth is to be surrounded by it. The terrain there is spiderwebbed with canyons, until one cannot truly say whether the high ground is broken by these depressions, or the low ground is interrupted by hills and plateaus. In many places the canyons become so narrow, one might be in a corridor rather than out in the wild. Over the ages, wind and rushing water have carved the stone into fantastical shapes, fluid and twisting, exposing the striations of the rock.

This is where the Draconeans of southern Anthiope chose to settle, the location that many have long believed to be the heart of that ancient civilization. It was a more habitable place back then: they built dams to protect the canyons against the sudden floods that make it so lethal in winter, and dug wells to supply themselves from artesian sources, which have since become clogged and unusable. For shelter they reached into the stone, carving out chambers that are among the wonders of the archaeological world. Elsewhere they built their temples and walls out of enormous blocks, but here they had no need; they merely hollowed out what nature had provided.

We passed the first of these ruins not long after entering the Labyrinth. “The Gates of Flame,” Suhail called these sculptures, and I could see why. The draconic shapes melded beautifully with the rich red and gold of the stone, wings reaching skyward. (These are sadly marred by bullet holes: too many passing travellers, both nomads and foreigners, have found them enticing targets.) I scrutinized them as we approached, trying to guess whether they were meant to depict desert drakes, or some ancient kind now lost. Perhaps the dragons they had bred? Presuming they had bred only one variety; I had no reason to assume the Draconeans of Rahuahane had cultivated the same type of beast on a tropical island as their cousins in a maze of canyons on the far side of the world.

I soon realized, though, that if I looked only for monumental works like the Gates of Flame, I would miss half of what there was to see. There were doorways set into the rock all over the place, and jagged piles where the hollowed cliff faces had given way at last. “One of these days,” Suhail murmured, eyeing a particular spot as we rode past. When I raised my eyebrows at him, he grinned and said, “Cranes and sufficient labour to haul the rubble clear. What might we find inside?”

Though I was no archaeologist, I could see the appeal. Draconean sites had been thoroughly looted during the millennia since that civilization's fall. Even the cavern he and I had found on Rahuahane had been in a ruinous state. In all likelihood many of those collapsed chambers were empty—looters had tunneled into some of them centuries ago, hunting remnants they could sell—but the possibility was tantalizing.

We were not going to answer such questions on this trip, though. Indeed, the only reason I had as much time to explore the ruins as I did was that I could not be of much use in looking for eggs. The drakes did not lay them on the canyon floors; their clutches would have been washed away by the winter floods. They had to seek out higher elevations, the plateaus above and the terraces partway down, where the canyon walls were not so steep. We knew well the sort of location they favoured, sandy enough to allow for digging, and exposed to the sun. But what a dragon can reach by flight and what a human can reach by climbing are not always the same thing.

Al-Jelidah was accustomed to this work, and scrambled about with phenomenal ease, clinging to minute protrusions of rock with fingers like steel bars. He went farther and faster than anyone else in the party. Suhail was not far behind him, though, using ropes where he could to assist his climb. “There are statues and inscriptions in some rather unlikely places,” he explained with a laugh, when I expressed my surprise. Tom, Andrew, and Haidar tramped about on the easier paths, searching every nook and cranny of the Labyrinth for possible clutches.

Which left me with the camels. Oh, I searched when I could—but my clothing hampered me, and even when I donned trousers, I lacked the strength and physical conditioning of my male companions, and could not get nearly so far. (Remembering this, I took the precaution of training before my next expedition, which came
very
much in handy.) I consoled myself by working on a map of the area, which Suhail said might be the first accurate attempt anyone had made since Mithonashri a hundred and fifty years before.

Our search took us deeper and deeper into the Labyrinth. One clutch we found had been raided by predators, like our original target; another had already hatched, which made me fret with impatience. Tom and I conferred and agreed that we should move onward, rather than studying the signs left behind at that one. What little we might learn was not worth the risk of missing the event itself elsewhere. If all else failed, we could always come back.

Suhail steered us a little, at the end. Not so far as to potentially miss a good spot—he would never have put our work at risk for a mere side trip—but when the choice came of going either left or right, he chose left, because he knew where it would lead. And so, on a morning in early Caloris, when the light was at its most dramatic angle, we emerged from a canyon barely wide enough for our camels to find ourselves facing the Watchers of Time.

*   *   *

If you have seen any images from the Labyrinth of Drakes, you have seen this site. The Watchers are five seated figures, fully twenty meters in height, carved into the sloping face of a canyon wall. They have the draconic heads and wings so typical of Draconean statuary, and seem to be gazing to the ends of eternity itself. Between them are four doorways, and above is an intricate frieze, depicting small flying dragons and human figures in chains.

The space that lies beyond those doorways has long been a mystery. All four open onto the same shallow antechamber, from which only a single archway gives access to the larger space within. This must have once contained furniture, paneling, or something else similarly flammable, for the walls of that chamber are covered with soot, which has almost completely obscured the murals that once decorated every square inch. Only bits and pieces can be made out, and efforts to clean away the soot have in many cases removed the murals as well. There is hope nowadays that our methods have improved, and the ancient artwork of that place might be seen at last … but so far, it has come to naught.

T
HE
W
ATCHERS OF
T
IME

It was not what I had come to the Labyrinth to see, but even a woman as obsessed with living dragons as myself could not help marveling at the place. Had I grown up with such relics nearby, who is to say that I, too, would not have formed a fascination like Suhail's? The Draconean ruins in Scirland are few and disappointing. The Watchers of Time took my breath away.

We camped nearby that night. Suhail admitted he had once laid his pallet within the antechamber itself—“But never again,” he said with feeling. “I hardly slept a wink that night. I was convinced the Watchers knew I was there, and did not approve.” I knew what he meant. Though I am not a superstitious woman, I did not want to sleep with their stony eyes on me; we went around a corner to a spot out of their sight.

We stood watches during the night while we were in the Labyrinth, for the groundwater allows vegetation to persist through the summer—which attracts various herbivores—which, in turn, attracts carnivores. Our tiny fires, built from camel dung, were not enough to keep them away. I alone was not expected to stand sentry, less on account of my sex, and more on account of having refused Andrew's offer to teach me to shoot … but that night I slept very little regardless, thinking of the Draconeans and the world they had known.

The next morning my companions searched the area, while I stayed below and sketched the Watchers. (It was hardly necessary, as they have been a popular subject for every traveller who passes through the area and even some who have never even seen them—but I could not look upon those ancient guardians and not wish to render them with my own pencil.) We would not be able to stay long, and knew it. There had once been a well nearby, whose site Suhail pointed out, but it was so thoroughly collapsed that it would be less effort to dig a new one entirely. For water we would have to go some distance. One of our milk camels had foundered after the sandstorm, and the other was not giving as much as we had hoped.

From high above, I heard a triumphant shout.

I twisted on my seat to find Tom standing at the edge of the plateau across from the Watchers. He was a dusty blot against a sun-bleached sky, but he waved his hat to attract my gaze, and put his other hand to his mouth to direct his voice. “Up here!”

He had scraped his hands bloody getting up there—a fact I discovered after Suhail led me by an easier route. (I say “easier”; it is not the same thing as “easy.”) But his suffering paid off, for he had located a clutch of eggs, nestled in the cup of sand above.

From a dragon's perspective, the site was ideal. The plateau was high enough that it received almost no shade, except in the very late morning and afternoon. It had a little dip in its center, though, which caught sand that would otherwise have blown away; and in this sand, the dragon had laid her eggs.

(I had the utterly fanciful thought that
she
had laid them: the first drake whose mating flight we observed, the one I lost track of when al-Jelidah prevented me from riding onward into the Labyrinth. The odds of it were small … but my mind does not always weigh odds rationally.)