In the Labyrinth of Drakes (6 page)

Lord Tavenor was of the school of thought which said that a gentleman should not dirty his hands collecting data himself. His information came from travellers, sheluhim, merchants trading in various locales. In this case he had the reports of the Aritat, who undoubtedly were keen observers of the world in which they lived—but they did not deal in the sort of precise measurements that were necessary for scientific work. And Lord Tavenor, it seemed, had not asked them to.

“You want to go into the field,” Tom said. “We can try—we always planned to try—but I get the impression the sheikh will not be in favour. It's possible Lord Tavenor asked, and was refused.”

“If so, he made no note of it here,” I said. Then I softened. “But you may be correct. These diaries are entirely devoted to the eggs themselves, not to conversations he may have had about them.”

Tom picked up the diary, flipped through it (taking care to leave my pencil in place as a marker), and laid it down again. “At the very least, we'll want to finish orienting ourselves here before we ask any favours.”

Which in practice would likely mean sending Tom to ask, though the prospect galled me. To distract myself, I said, “What of the dragons themselves?”

He sighed. “More of the same, I suppose. Certainly neither the sheikh nor Pensyth had as detailed a description of their natural mating habits as I would like. Though in fairness, I very much doubt Lord Tavenor would have been able to replicate
those
conditions even if he knew them.”

Nor would we be able to, however scientific our methodology. Among the dragons capable of flight, mating often involves an aerial dance. Allowing the same here would be a quick way to lose our captive dragons.

“What did he try, then?” I asked, for I had not yet touched those records.

I will spare my readers a full recounting of what Tom described—though interested parties can find the details in
Dragons of Akhia,
which has a chapter on the efforts carried out at Dar al-Tannaneen. Suffice it to say that Lord Tavenor was a keen horse-breeder (this being part of what had secured him the Akhian post), and he had applied both his knowledge and his ingenuity to the problem, searching for ways to bring together two desert drakes without them injuring themselves, each other, or their handlers. A great many restraints had been involved, and at one point he had even resorted to a process I will call “mediated by human assistance,” and leave it at that.

When Tom was done, I asked, “The sheikh is gone now, yes?” He nodded, and I stood up so rapidly that my chair caught on a broken edge of tiling and nearly fell over. “Then there is no reason for me not to go see the dragons with my own eyes.”

Tom stood as well, but with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “Isabella—I did not say.” He hesitated, one hand tapping nervously on the surface of the desk. “You saw the dragons in the king's menagerie, all those years ago. They were runts, and easy to control. Some of the hatchlings here are defective, but not all of them, and not the adults that were captured for breeding. Lord Tavenor had to find a way to keep them. It … will distress you.”

I stilled, laying my fingers flat against my skirts. “What do you mean?”

“He tried chains and muzzles,” Tom said, clearly reluctant. “But the drakes developed sores on their hides, which became infected; he lost three that way. And two men died unmuzzling one of them for a meal—they got burned. He had to resort to other methods.”

“Tom.” I swallowed, and realized my throat had become very dry. “Delaying will not make it any more palatable.”

“The supracoracoideal tendons,” Tom said. “He cut them, so the dragons cannot fly. And he tested a method on one of the carcasses—a heated knife, to cauterize the organ that produces their extraordinary breath.”

With one hand I felt behind me until my fingers met the arm of my chair. Then I sat down again, very carefully.

“If you do not wish to see them in person,” Tom said, “then I will take those duties.”

“No.” The word came out of me of its own accord, a reflex as natural and unstoppable as breath. “No—I will see them.”

It was not professional ambition that drove me to say so. True, that was a consideration: to abdicate any portion of our scientific work to Tom alone would reinforce the very assumptions we both fought against. But that was not why I insisted on going.

I refused because I cared about the dragons too much to hide from their suffering.

Men commonly criticize women, and women scientists especially, for an over-abundance of sentiment. The reasoning goes that we feel too deeply; and our feelings, being unscientific, damage our scholarly detachment. Thus, by the logic of this syllogism, women are unsuited to scientific work. I have given this a variety of responses over the years, some longer and more elaborately constructed than others, but this being a memoir (and therefore by definition personal in tone), I will simply say that this is utter tosh.

Yes, I felt physically ill at the thought of what had been done to the dragons. I am indeed partial to their kind; I have not hidden that fact in these volumes, though for many years in my early career I strove to do exactly that, so as to establish some kind of credibility among my peers. I also recognized the pragmatic necessity that underlay Lord Tavenor's actions: it is simply not practical to keep healthy adult dragons captive, without taking
some
kind of measures to restrain their capabilities. But I do not believe that recognition of that necessity should mean abandoning all human feeling about our methods and their consequences. Indeed, a science which has no concern for such matters is a science with which I do not care to associate.

When I went to see our captive dragons, therefore, it was with a heavy heart; and I no longer shrink from saying so. What I saw did not make me feel better in the slightest.

The dragons were kept in large open pits within a perimeter wall that had been added onto the original compound. The edges were higher than they could leap without the assistance of their wings, and slightly overhung so the beasts could get no footing to climb out. Each had a small subterranean chamber adjoining, into which they could retire to escape the heat of the sun as needed; this was lined with stone, to mimic the rock shelters in which they often reside, and was pleasantly cool compared to the open sand.

But the dragons themselves were not happy. Beasts though they are, they are capable of feeling, and this can be read in their posture and behaviour. Our dragons were listless, dull-eyed, their scales dusty and neglected. Their crippled wings dragged in the sand; I saw that one had a bandage affixed to her left wing-edge, to protect a chafed spot from further aggravation.

In short, they were nothing like the dragons of the tales, great golden beasts soaring over their desert kingdoms, and the difference made my heart ache.

“No wonder they will not breed,” I said to Tom. “An upset horse is less likely to conceive; I expect the same is true of dragons.”

“Then we must find a way to please them,” he replied. “Though how we will do that, I don't know.”

Our stable at the time consisted of two females and one male; a third female had pined away during the gap between Lord Tavenor's departure and our arrival. Lord Tavenor, showing more education but little more imagination than I had when I was seven, had named them sequentially: one of the females was Prima, the male Quartus, and the other female Quinta. (Secundus and Tertia had perished some time ago, along with Sexta, Septimus, and Octa.) I walked the circuit of all three inhabited pits, and went down into the fourth to examine it from the inside. It was not all that much like the landscape in which they ordinarily roamed, but I could imagine the reactions of Colonel Pensyth and the sheikh if I asked them to create an enormous desert park.

Tom was leaning on the railing above, watching me explore. “Perhaps an enormous cage,” I called up to him. “Two cages, one layered inside the other. We can measure the fullest reach of their flame, and make that the gap between the two cages, so that no one will be burnt. And build it high—a framework like the one they used for the Invisible House during the Exhibition. Forty meters would not be much for the dragons, but they would be able to fly at least a little.”

I could see Tom smiling, even at this range. “With some kind of cart on rails to deliver their food. Though cleaning the interior might be difficult, I fear—we'd have to sneak in while they were sleeping.”

If we could make the drakes reproduce reliably, the Crown might build a hundred dragon cages to our specifications, be they never so lavish. The creatures were unlikely to oblige us, though, if we could not better their conditions: and so my thoughts went around in circles. But there was value in imagining the possibilities, as that might give us notions of more feasible solutions.

I climbed up the ladder and stood for a moment, the dry wind brushing like silk against my skin. I felt utterly drained.

Tom put one hand on my arm: a gesture of support he did not often give where others might see. “We'll find a way, Isabella.”

I nodded. “And if we fail, it will not be for lack of trying.”

 

FOUR

Lumpy—Honeyseekers and the use thereof—In search of eucalyptus—A lack of hospitality—Messenger from the desert—A folded piece of paper

I made a point of visiting the dragon pits every day, including the smaller enclosures where the juveniles were kept. There were eleven of these, ranging from a hatchling barely six months old to one I thought would soon enter draconic adolescence.

The younglings were a good deal easier to keep than their elders, as desert drakes only develop their extraordinary breath when they reach physical maturity. Lord Tavenor had not named them, except with numerical designations; I suspect he felt they were not worth the effort, given how many of them emerged from the shell in poor form and died soon after. From another angle, one might say it was unwise to name them, for names create attachment, and attachment creates grief when a life ends. But it being winter, we were receiving no eggs, and I did not like calling them by numbers, so I gave them names instead.

I had a certain fondness for the eldest, whom I dubbed Ascelin, after the legendary Scirling outlaw: although Lord Tavenor had hoped that being in captivity from birth would habituate the drake to human contact, he was a feisty creature, not much inclined to cooperate with anybody. It was likely to doom him in the end—if he would not settle down in adulthood, he might well be slaughtered for his bones—but until then, he was the closest thing we had to a healthy wild drake. His wings had not yet been crippled, for fear it would send him to an early grave, but he was not permitted to fly.

The youngest of the lot, however, was the one with whom I formed a special bond. My sentimental choice of words may raise your eyebrows—as well they should—but my interactions with this creature were more like those between an owner and a pet than a scientist and her subject.

Our relationship began when I visited the juvenile pens and said to Tom, “That must be the one you were referring to earlier—the lumpy one.”

He was thereafter known as Lumpy. His egg had been brought to the House of Dragons when it was quite new, and what hatched therefrom was obviously abnormal. Lord Tavenor had weighed the hatchling and confirmed his suspicions: the creature was much too heavy for his size, indicating that his bones had formed as solid masses, rather than acquiring the airy structure typical of the species.

My heart went out to him from the start. I knew from reading Lord Tavenor's records that our predecessor had considered having Lumpy put down: the little creature was nothing more than a drain on resources, being of no use to our scientific inquiry. The order was never given before Lord Tavenor's departure, though, and so Lumpy remained, crawling about his enclosure, occasionally flapping the undersized wings that could never hope to carry his adult weight.

I could not bear to have him put down, and told Tom as much. “I can make a scientific argument for it, if you like,” I said while we ate lunch in our shared office. “I'm sure I could come up with quite a splendid one, if you give me a moment to prepare. Something about understanding development by observing both successful and unsuccessful examples. If the abnormality is congenital, we might even have an advance in the captive breeding problem: after all, a dragon too heavy to fly need not have its tendons cut.”

L
UMPY

“But none of those,” Tom said, “are your real reasons.”

“Of course not. The truth is that I do not feel the poor creature should die just because someone bungled his care.”

I meant to say more, but hesitated, wiping seasoned yoghurt from my plate with a scrap of flatbread. Tom read my hesitation correctly. “You wonder what kind of life it will be, though.”

A heavy sigh escaped me. “He will never fly. I look at how the grown ones pine … though of course they have
known
flight, and lost it. Perhaps he would not miss it in the same way. But his health is not good; it is entirely possible that as he grows, it will become worse. Should we condemn him to an earthbound existence, laden with suffering, because of misplaced pity? Is that kinder than giving him a merciful end?”