A Natural History of Dragons (14 page)

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 under 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.

Did you not believe me when I wrote earlier of my deranged practicality? Perhaps this will convince you, then. We are not supposed to speak of such things, of course, but on that cold night, my mind performed an even colder arithmetic: it would be better to comply than to be forced, and compliance might preserve my life in the bargain. If I could bring myself to it, which was by no means certain.

Whether I could or not, such tactics would not be my first resort. I answered the leader’s question honestly. “I’m here to study dragons.”

By the perplexity in his expression, he thought at first that the differences of language were causing him to misunderstand. I watched him mouth the words, as if tasting them for consonants I might have pronounced wrong, the way Hingese will sometimes say “bear” when they mean “pear.”
“Balaur,”
I added helpfully, trusting that he would recognize the Vystrani word.

His eyes widened. “Dra— You mean you are here to
hunt
them.”

There were at the time big-game hunters who pursued dragons for sport, despite the impossibility of keeping trophies beyond the odd tooth or claw. I shook my head. “No, I mean study. For science.”

“You?”
he said in disbelief, gesturing at my disheveled and female self. (He did
not
use the formal pronoun.)

“Not alone, no,” I said, feeling a twinge of guilt for overstating my role. “I am here with companions. A Scirling earl and his assistant, and my—my husband.” I stumbled over those last words, remembering my bleak calculations of a moment before.

The leader scratched his beard. “Your husband, eh?”

I wondered frantically whether to issue the usual melodramatic threats—
If you hurt me, he will hunt you to the ends of the earth!
—or to attempt to flirt my way free. Or to claim it was my unclean time; Staulerens, I thought, followed the Temple, even though their brethren back in Eiverheim had since become largely Magisterial. In the end, my conflicting impulses produced a smile.

I cannot describe that smile for you. I have no idea what it looked like to the smuggler; to me it felt like an incoherent blend of hopefulness and desperation. Whatever its appearance, its effect was to make him burst out laughing.

“Good God, woman,” he said, proving by his blasphemy that if he
did
follow the Temple, he did not do so very well. “You bat your eyelashes at me and expect me to believe you’re here for science?”

“I am!” I said, the confusion of a moment before resolving quite neatly into indignance. “Vystrani rock-wyrms. I came along to do sketches—I’m an artist of sorts—at least, I
would
do sketches if we knew where the dragons were lairing and could get close. But so far—” That last word stretched out comically as inspiration ambushed me. “You must know! Rock-wyrms don’t normally attack people, or so Lord Hilford says—despite what happened to us on the way here—but they
are
territorial, and don’t like people coming near their lairs. You’re smugglers, aren’t you? So you must know the mountains very well. Surely
you
know where the dragons are. Oh, if you tell us how to find them, I’m certain Lord Hilford would pay you handsomely. We’ve wasted so much time already.”

By the time I ran out of breath and words,
everyone
was staring. In my excitement, I had risen up onto my knees, gesticulating with my bound hands like a Chiavoran street-seller. There was no chance of my captor doubting me now; I would have to have been a stage actress to feign that kind of demented enthusiasm. What sort of woman, upon being kidnapped by smugglers in the middle of the night, would jump for joy at the thought of questioning them about dragons?

He didn’t doubt me, but he didn’t entirely believe my words, either, simply because they made no sense. “Why do you care about dragons?”

I’m afraid I stammered in trying to answer; too many replies attempted to come out of my mouth at once. The scrimmage was won by a simple truth, with me from the moment I held little vinegar-soaked Greenie in my palm. “Because they’re beautiful. And, and—for
science,
because we know so very little about them. I don’t know why Lord Hilford chose Vystrana, except that he hates the desert, and it’s relatively close to Scirland, as such things go. But—” I belatedly tried to gather my wits. “We are here for scholarly purposes, I assure you. My father has some Minsurgrad brandy that may very well have come through these mountains by, shall we say, an
unofficial
route; he would not thank me if I interfered with your work.”

My unwise reference to that work hardened his face, but it did not produce violence, as it might have done. The leader sat back on his heels, pulling the kerchief through his fingers as if to smooth it out. “You said three others.” I nodded. “All here to study the dragons?”

I nodded again, and he glanced over at one of his companions—not the young lover. The other man knelt to mutter in his ear, and between the low volume and the dialect I could not catch a word. The leader scowled, and I tensed. But the scowl, it seemed, was not for me. “Your friends,” he said, addressing me. “They can make the dragons stop attacking people?”

My gaze slid past him to the other men. Now that I looked properly, I saw that one leaned on a crutch that looked new-cut, and the clothing of another was stained with an ominous amount of blood, likely not his own. Of course they would be in danger, as much as or more than the people of Drustanev.

Could
we make the dragons stop? We had debated possible causes, but without observational data, it was all just speculation. And until we knew the cause, I could only guess at whether we’d be able to affect it.

It is the prerogative of old women to give unlooked-for advice, so let me offer you this, friend reader: when you are lost in the woods and your safe return home depends on telling a Stauleren smuggler that you can help him, that is
not
the time for a scientific evaluation of your chances. It is the time for smiling and saying, “Yes, absolutely.”

The leader considered this, then stood without replying and went off to the side, gathering his men with him. No one bothered to keep watch over me; there was no need. What was I going to do, run off into the night? I had no sense of which way Drustanev lay, except “downhill.” And there were wolves and bears in these mountains—not to mention angry dragons.

My interlocutor had made some effort to speak distinctly while addressing me, but in conversation with his men it all dissolved into an incomprehensible smear. Besides, I rather thought it would not do to seem like I was eavesdropping. I occupied myself by trying to straighten my nightgown and robe, then hunching over into the most heat-conserving posture I could achieve.

To my surprise, after a minute or so of this, a rough and smelly blanket was dropped over my shoulders. I looked up in time to see the young lover returning to the group. Even that small gesture of charity gladdened my heart, and changed my perspective on these men. They were not the romanticized figures you think of when you hear the words “Stauleren” or “smuggler”—but neither were they vicious cutthroats, ready to murder at the first opportunity. They were simply men, mostly on the youngish side, who made their living by carting boxes of illicit cargo through the mountains. It is a trade that has gone on for ages in this region, though the boundaries, goods, and carriers have changed with time; as occupations go, it is nearly as venerable as sheep-herding, and the local boyars rarely rouse themselves to stop it.

Even the “leader” seemed a democratic sort, consulting with his fellows before arriving at a decision. This did not take very long, though. Soon they broke up, and he returned to kneel before me. “At first light,” he said, “we take you back down to the village. You tell your men we want to meet with them, at the spring below the cliff. Can they find the place?”

I had drawn it on the map myself. “Yes.”

“We want money,” he said. “And help. Money first; then we tell them where the dragons are. Then they quiet the beasts down. So long as they do that, and don’t try to interfere with us, we’ll leave you alone.”

He hadn’t named a figure, but bargaining over the price of my safety was a task I would gladly leave to the gentlemen. “I understand.”

The smuggler reached out and untied my hands, then my feet. “Get some sleep.”

He turned to go, and the words burst out of me: a deep-seated Scirling impulse toward good manners, entirely out of place in my current surroundings. “I am Isabella Camherst.”

He cast a glance back over his shoulder at me, eyebrows raised. Then a hint of a smile lifted the corner of his mouth. “Chatzkel,” he said. Only his given name: well, I could not blame a criminal for not wanting to identify himself more than was necessary.

“Thank you,” I said, and he went on his way.

By then it was long past the time that my midnight wakefulness should have ended. With my blood still racing, though, and the ground hard and cold beneath me, I did not manage a second sleep that night.

TEN

My triumphant return — A productive meeting — Progress at last in our work

Sunrise, as seen from high on a mountain, is a truly glorious thing.

The light cut like a knife blade through the trees, setting aglow the mist that had gathered in the valleys below. Its cold brilliance hurt my eyes, but I was glad to see it all the same; it meant I would soon be going—

Not
home.
In fact, that sleepless dawn in the mountains brought with it the strongest tide of homesickness I have ever felt. I often miss Scirland during my travels; there is a great deal to be said for the place where one need not
think,
all the time, about the right thing to do or say, but simply behave according to well-worn habit, and that feeling has never been more intense than on my morning with the smugglers. But I had spent enough time in Gritelkin’s dark house for it to feel like the closest thing to safety I would find in Vystrana. I very much wanted to return.

My cold-stiffened legs had other ideas. I tried to stand, failed entirely, and turned my back on the men so I could massage my calves and thighs into something resembling life. My feet remained frozen, but I could not bring myself to beg for stockings. No one gave me breakfast, either; I suspected, by their lean and hungry looks, that they had little enough for themselves.

Most of the men stayed behind; the leader and two others formed my escort. Each carried a rifle and a pistol, which I hoped were only for such wildlife as we might encounter on the way. I tried to return the blanket to the young lover with a smile and thanks in Eiversch, but he pressed it back onto me, and in truth I was glad for its warmth as we began our hike.