He bent and studied with his lens the sample on the glass. “Let us now examine the hallucinations a woman experi ences while under the influence of venom. She is filled with empathy for the dragon. She imagines herself as a hatch ling, hunted by men. She experiences maternal fear for the dragon.
Now
we are getting somewhere! Who is the main predator of dragons, hmm? Humankind. What greater way to neutralize an enemy than to make the enemy one’s ad vocate, one’s protector! So. Somehow, millennia and mil lennia ago, the ancestors of the Djimbi and the ancestors of the dragons began the peculiar symbiotic relationship that we frown upon today. Fascinating, yes?”
I made a breathy noise that he took as assent.
“Years ago, before I learned of the rite, I studied hatch lings,” he continued, even as he scratched a quill over his ledger. “I was fascinated by the hatchlings’ apparent urge to attack the human face. I did experiments, took measure ments, and made a discovery. It is not the human face the hatchling instinctively shoots its not-yet-venomous tongue at: It is the human mouth. A wet, gaping, red hole. Much like the maw of a mother dragon, yes, only on a smaller scale. A food source! Maht comes from such a maw, and maht feeds a hatchling. So. When I learned of the bestial rite, I could see how the instinct of a hatchling could eas ily be utilized to train a dragon to insert its tongue into a woman. You have a question?”
He’d devoted his life to examining things, scrutinizing his surroundings, noticing minute changes. My face must have shown the question forming in my mind.
“You don’t believe dragons are divine,” I said slowly. I didn’t, after all, phrase it as a question.
He snorted. “Certainly not. Nonsense inspired by venom hallucinations, promoted by the lore of primitives, upheld by scheming governments and theologians. Divinity, gah! There’s no more divinity in the dragon than there is evil in the kwano snake. They are mere beasts, dumb results of change and time.”
“And humankind?” I asked.
He glanced at me, one enormous goggle-eye dwarfing his lens-free one. “We are mere beasts. Dumb, with the poten tial for greatness, but we are incapable of achieving that greatness, will always be incapable of it. We are steered by primitive urges.”
He looked pointedly at the little stable room where Jotan still moaned and wept in carnal bliss. “We are no better than humping snakes. And we never will be, dragonwhore. Never will be.”
That night, long after Jotan had returned to her room, leav ing me raw, naked, and musky upon my bed, I mulled over Sak Chidil’s conversation. His theories disturbed me, stole my sleep. I didn’t want to believe that the dragons were as mundane as we humans, didn’t want to believe that dragonsong was temporal hallucination, that the venom rite had evolved as a means of survival for the dragon.
If dragonsong were merely the hallucinations suffered by a venom-touched woman, then how come I, who had never witnessed shinchiwouk prior to entering Arena, had been able to imagine specific details of shinchiwouk in Temple’s jail, upon receiving undiluted doses of venom direct within my womb? What about the magic I’d witnessed my mother perform during my youth, and the dark magics Longstride’s people had performed? How could Sak Chidil explain the presence of the haunt, its ability to appear as a Skykeeper? Surely there were otherworld forces at work in our lives, and if so, why should they not involve the dragons?
Or might the haunt and my mother’s pagan magics and my visions of shinchiwouk one day be described in terms as scientific as Sak Chidil had described the rite?
I didn’t know.
I paced.
I fretted.
When my mind grew tired of flinging itself against the
dead ends and down the dark tunnels Sak Chidil had presented it, I worried over other matters: my loss of the dragonmaster, the disappearance of Daronpu Gen, Kratt’s megalomaniac crusade against me, my sister’s use of the Skykeeper. As the dark hours of the night dragged toward the small hours of morning, my thoughts centered around the yamdalar cinaigours in the arbiyesku warehouse and around the rite performed upon me by Longstride.
What had I missed? I knew Tansan was right; the cocoons needed more than just heat and time to develop into neo nate bulls, else over the centuries chance and circumstance would have produced, at some point, a bull.
Influenced by Sak Chidil’s methodical pattern of inquiry, I stoked the fire in the hearth, dipped quill into ink, and sat before a table. I meticulously recorded every aspect of Longstride’s rite, down to the detail of the musky smell of the matriarch and the raspy sound her necklaces of gold had made as she’d stooped over me. I then recorded the routines and actions of the arbiyesku, as pertaining to the cocoons. By then my inkpot was empty, my arm ached, my fingers were cramped, and I’d run out of firewood for the hearth. I lit all the candles I could find in my room and tucked myself under the quilts of my bed. The coir in the mattress groaned softly beneath my weight.
I reread what I’d written. Over and over I reread it, searching for clues. There had to be something in there, had to be. . . .
My vision began to blur. Dawn was coming. I was ex hausted and thickheaded and cold. I wanted to curl up and sleep, abandon my fruitless search.
We are mere beasts. Dumb, with the potential for great ness, but we are incapable of achieving that greatness, will always be incapable of it. We are steered by primitive urges.
My eyes had closed; I jerked awake. I would
not
be a mere dumb beast. Screw Sak Chidil:A human could achieve greatness. I’d prove it to him.
I stared at the hieratics slumping and slithering across my pages, and my eyes grew heavy again.
We are no better than humping snakes.
My eyes jerked open again and I stared dully at the pages in front of me. I was getting nowhere. I needed sleep.
I was surrounded by women in snake masks.
I read the hieratics I’d written without really seeing them.
The snake women surrounded the fallen dragon that was Longstride and circled her tightly.
I woke up a little, and then woke up a lot.
I pawed through my pages. There. Yes.
The arbiyesku reg ularly eradicates the warehouse of any stray kwano snake that has found its way from its regular habitat in the jungle to the savanna, lured there by the fetor of the cocoons.
I stared at the embracing dragontail membranes carved on the footboard of my bed, letting my thoughts slowly co here, hearing again Sak Chidil’s words in his laboratory.
A symbiont. An organism living in close physical associa tion with another, yes?
Kwano snakes had breeding cycles that synchronized with a dragon’s nesting habits. The suckers—the hatchling kwano snakes—lived like parasites upon a dragon until the sucker had developed the teeth and mouth of an adult snake, whereupon it detached from the dragon’s skin and went about its life in the jungle canopy. This was common lore amongst all Malacarites; songs were sung about the bloodsucking kwano; the threat of the evil snake was used as a means of getting children to obey adult whim and rule; artwork depicted the evil kwano being vanquished by the One Dragon; passages recited by daronpuis in tem ples throughout Malacar warned of the kwano’s insidious malice.
The kwano snake was a perfidious parasite. Everyone knew that.
But what if it wasn’t a parasite? What if it was a symbi ont?
Perhaps the yamdalar cinaigours required the presence of kwano snakes to transform into bulls, for whatever reason. Perhaps the snakes consumed the dead flesh and prevented rot. Perhaps the snakes emitted something through their skin, like how the sawbuck lizard secreted poisons to ward off its predators and in doing so protected the gilli bird. Who knew? I didn’t. Perhaps one day someone like Sak Chidil would. But for now, the little I knew was enough.
Kwano snakes. Those masked women who had sur rounded me during the rite had represented kwano snakes. They’d circled en masse around Longstride when she’d fallen to the ground and tucked her wings about herself to imitate a cocoon. They’d had suckers for mouths. How could I have been so obtuse?
Kwano snakes.
There was my answer.
Dressed in the same dove gray outer bitoo I’d worn to the Wapar the day previous, with my fingers artfully stained with ink and a ledger crooked under one arm, I spent the morning following Waivia’s midwife through the bustling streets of Liru and into the mansions of its most recently postpartum elite. Trying hard not to shoot amazed looks at the ostentatious decor of the mansions I was shown into, I instead frowned studiously at my ledger and took copious useless notes, all the while struggling to suppress my anxi ety over my upcoming meeting with Waivia.
Once I’d been introduced as a student of childbirth re search, I was immediately ignored by the women whose babies I made notes about, so although the disguise was a tedious one, it was sound. I was all but invisible.
Just before noon, we reached the palatial mansion of white stone in which Waivia and her infant were residing, the abode of a relative of Lupini Re’s, Jotan had informed me.
We went through a court to a gate where large paras with brilliant blue facial cicatrices peremptorily stopped and questioned us. I waved my letter under their illiterate noses, and my midwife, who was known to them, vouched for my behavior. Once inside their gate, we were led by a stout eu nuch into a large, dim room that reeked of heavy perfume and melting wax candles and was crowded with rugs, richly covered ottomans, and divans. At the eunuch’s insistence, we pressed our thumbs upon an inkpad and imprinted them upon a sheet of parchment; then he led us outside and through another court, this one graced by a tinkling foun tain, peaceful almond trees, and beds of dense hyacinths. Up a flight of stone stairs, along an overpass covered by an ar cade dripping with lush red blooms. Into a tiled foyer, cool and well lit by many long, open windows. Caged songbirds trilled merrily about the perimeter of the room.
“The Wai-ebani is expecting you,” the eunuch said, giv ing a shallow bow, and he pushed open two great teak doors and gestured for us to enter within. He didn’t follow, and the doors were closed after us.
And there was Waivia, a barbaric beauty, her voluptuous figure stretched upon a divan as green as wet emeralds, a cascade of thick, tawny curls spilling lazily over her shoul ders and hips. She was undeniably Djimbi, and the oil she’d used on her warm-tinted skin highlighted her sage whorls.
Upon a marble table beside her, glasses of fruit ices sweated. At her feet, in a lace confection of a bassinet, slept her babe.
The midwife kowtowed. Heart hammering, I followed suit. When I rose from the floor, I briefly swayed from the pounding of blood in my head.
Waivia’s eyes were brilliant, like orbs of translucent orange-brown chalcedony, and they looked only at me. The midwife muttered an explanation about my presence, but Waivia flicked a hand at her to cut her off.
“The baby is sleeping. Wait outside in the foyer till he rouses. The student can remain with me; I’ve questions for her concerning her studies.”
I was slightly alarmed by Waivia’s careless dismissal of the midwife; Waivia should have waited for a more op portune moment to subtly arrange for us to be alone. But no, that was Waivia: twice as impatient as I, and scornful of guise. The midwife was used to the ways of the bayen women she served. She merely kowtowed, tight-lipped, and left the room.
Waivia and I stared at each other. My mind was blank. “Thirsty?” She lazily gestured to the glasses of sweating fruit ices beside her. I was outrageously thirsty, but couldn’t move from where I was stood, staring at her.
“I thought you were dead,” I said, and my throat was tight and my vision was blurring with tears. My body be gan quaking, as if I were ill. “All this time . . . Why didn’t you ...?”
I didn’t know what to say. How to express all the anguish I’d watched our mother go through because Waivia had been sold as a sex slave to the glass spinners’ clan a decade before? How to summarize the grief and suffering I’d ex perienced during our mother’s mad attempts to buy Waivia back, the obsessive stalking the haunt had subjected me to most of my life thereafter? The guilt I’d grown up with for how Waivia had been treated compared to me; the inad equacy I felt in the face of our mother’s protective love for her; the loneliness, the helplessness, the frustration, the anger ...?
“I was only nine,” I said hoarsely, and tears spilled down my cheeks. She rose from the divan, supple and smooth, and she flowed toward me and embraced me, held me against breasts warm and full of milk, and I sobbed, and once again we were sisters.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered against my head. “It wasn’t your fault, Zarq. I’m sorry.”
She was my sister. I’d known her voice while in my mother’s womb. She’d carried me about upon her back when she herself was but a child; she’d taught me to walk. Every night of my youth, it was the sound of her breath ing beside me that had lulled me to sleep, the gentle, rhythmic fall and rise of her chest beside me each dawn when I woke.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she murmured over and over, hold ing me in arms so familiar, rocking me slightly from side to side, as she, too, wept.
Eventually she led me to the divan and made me sit. Gave me a silk hankie to wipe my face with, then thrust a glass of fruit ice into my hand. I gulped it down, diaphragm still spasming, sounding like the nine-year-old child I felt I was.
She sat beside me and we looked at each other. Slowly adulthood crept over me again, but how I loathed it and all it entailed. I was weary from the burden of strife and responsibility; I wanted to be held and comforted and pro tected by my big sister forever.
Of course, I couldn’t be. She was the Wai-ebani to Kratt, a man on a mission to rid the earth of my presence.
“What are you doing in Liru, Zarq?” she asked, and the last vestige of belief that she could hold and protect me in her arms forever was driven away by the question.
“I had business here.”
“Business connected to Xxamer Zu? That
is
the Clutch you live in now, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know that I have a place I can call home any more.” I hadn’t meant to sound petulant and evasive, nor rancorous. “Will you direct mother’s haunt to assist Kratt in his takeover of Xxamer Zu, the way you directed her to help him seize Clutch Cuhan?”
“I needed Cuhan for my son to govern in the future. Xxamer Zu means nothing to me.”
Yet, I thought to myself.
She shifted, became all brusque business. “I have ar ranged passage for you on a Xxelteker ship that leaves from Liru tomorrow at dawn. You’ll go with enough funds to set yourself up in Skoljk, a city port in Xxeltek that ap parently rivals Lireh. What you choose to do with yourself there is up to you: have babies, own an emporium, become a midwife. As you will. Kratt will never learn where you went. You’ll be safe.”
The allure of it was overwhelming.
Her infant stirred and cried, and I thought of Agawan, Savga’s baby brother, and I thought of our own brother, hidden by Daronpu Gen in a Hamlet of Forsaken some where. Our brother, a young boy who’d been torn away from our mother at birth and later used by Kratt as an ob ject of cruel pleasures.
I wonder if Waivia even knew of his existence.
Waivia lifted her baby from the white froth of lace at her feet, smoothly bared a breast, and suckled her babe. In tense jealousy swept over me and I could barely breathe.
The babe, I immediately noticed, had skin as ivory toned and pure as the Emperor.
“Will the charm on him render him impotent?” I asked harshly.
Waivia didn’t glance at me, her gaze focused on the babe pulling at her breast, his tiny hands clenched into contented fists.
“When the appropriate time comes, the charm will be lifted and he’ll be as fertile as a bull,” she said calmly, though I heard sharp steel behind her words. She looked up, met my eyes with her tawny agate ones. They were cold. “The ship’s name is the
Zvolemein
. You must board her tonight, under cover of dark. The captain will be expecting you; use the name danku Cuhan Kaban’s Kazonvia.”
“You move fast, to have arranged this with such short notice of my visit.”
“I saw no sense in delaying.”
I glanced down at the puckered face of the swaddled in fant cradled in her arms. His face was so tiny compared to her massive breast; I was gripped by a sudden urge to unwrap him, to place a cheek upon his small belly, rest his tiny feet in one of my palms.
I wondered if I’d ever see him, or Waivia, again.
I rose to my feet, throat again tight, heart hammering hard. “So. The
Zvolemein.
Thank you.”
She looked up at me, eyes shuttered. She’d already shed her tears; she’d already told me it hadn’t been my fault. She’d apologized for what I’d had to suffer through for her sake, and she’d arranged my safe passage out of her life.
She’d already said good-bye to me.
I turned and swiftly left the room, before my tears could fall again.