In the Labyrinth of Drakes

SEVEN

“If we are to go into the desert,” Tom said, “we will need a flawless case for doing so. Not just what good it might do here, but an actual plan for how we are to conduct our research.

Such plans are more common nowadays, but at the time it was a startling change from our usual mode of operation, which involved wandering out into the field and seeing what we might discover. (That mode worked far better when the body of existing knowledge was small enough that all one had to do was hold out a hand for new data to fall into it.) Tom and I worked long hours for a full week constructing our plan, for we knew any failed request would only make the next one more difficult: if we wanted to succeed, our best chance would be on our first try.

We might also have stood a better chance if only one of us tried to go. The truth was, however, that the House of Dragons did not require much attention from us on a daily basis. Lord Tavenor had done a good job setting up the procedures there; Tom and I were needed only when crises arose (which they did not often do), or when we altered the standard arrangements. We were reluctant to do much with the latter until we had data to guide our alterations, and so I saw little reason why we both should not go to the desert—except that Colonel Pensyth would not approve. “We shall tell him the truth,” I said. “You know anatomy far better than I, but I am the one who can record it best, with my drawings.”

“And you’re the better student of behaviour,” he agreed. “What if we marked this up—made it clear who will be doing what tasks? Some of them could be either of us, but if we divide it all very carefully, we can make it so that the two halves can’t possibly be pulled apart.”

When I came home from Dar al-Tannaneen to Shimon and Aviva’s house, I sat up for hours more refining my plans for the honeyseeker eggs. The creatures lay these in nests made of leaves, and cement them into place with a mixture of saliva and nectar, which dries to a sticky consistency. I would be leaving some eggs in situ as a comparison—a “control,” as it is properly called—and placing the remainder in different situations. Each nest would have an attendant thermometer, and Lieutenant Marton would record the temperature at regular intervals. I even prepared tags for the legs of the resulting hatchlings, with instructions that any who perished or failed to hatch should be preserved for later examination.

“It would be best for all involved if I went away for a time,” I said wryly to Andrew after showing him my plan. “I am starting with the smallest variations, and working my way up to more significant ones; it will be months before I have enough data to draw conclusions. In the meanwhile, I imagine Lieutenant Marton would prefer to have me not looking over his shoulder every five minutes.”

My brother shook his head, browsing through my outline. It went on for pages. I had thought I was being thorough when I conducted the Great Sparkling Inquiry, fifteen years previously, but I had been a mere novice then in scientific methodology. Now that I had a better grasp of the subject, I could be very thorough indeed.

“I never would have thought,” Andrew said, “when you had me steal books out of Father’s library for you, that it would lead to this.”

That was peculiar, for it seemed to me that my life had drawn a fairly straight line from that beginning to my current position. All the same, I supposed Andrew had a point: it is one thing to think your younger sister may eventually study dragons, and another thing entirely to find her conducting a breeding programme in a foreign country, with the threat of impending war driving her work.

“I hope it will lead me a good deal further,” I said with a smile. “I am not nearly done yet.”

The day after Tom submitted our proposal to Colonel Pensyth, Andrew arrived in the morning with the news that I was to report to the building that housed the soldiers, rather than going directly to my office as usual. I went with him readily enough, assuming that Tom would be joining us there. In this, as it happened, I was wrong.

“Dame Isabella—please, have a seat,” Colonel Pensyth said, gesturing me to a wicker chair in front of his desk.

I did not miss the fact that his adjutant had closed the door behind me. “Are we not waiting for Tom?”

“He is not coming,” the colonel said. “Tea?”

“Yes, please,” I said automatically, my thoughts awhirl.

This much I will say for Pensyth: he did not waste much time on the niceties, which would have only given me anxiety. “I read the proposal Mr. Wilker sent me, and it seems quite sound. But there is one issue, which is the… social situation with the Aritat.”

I sipped my tea, buying myself time to think. By the time I had swallowed, I had not found any reason to be other than blunt; and so I was. “Are you speaking of the unfriendliness between myself and the sheikh?”

“I’m more concerned with his brother.” Pensyth settled back into his chair. I had never gone to school, but I had heard my brothers’ stories; I felt like a boy up in front of the headmaster for some transgression. But I was a woman grown, and reminded myself of that fact. I had nothing to be ashamed of in front of Pensyth, nor was I required to accept his judgment in all things.

He said, “Before you came here, Dame Isabella, I read your account of your voyage. Hajj Suhail ibn Ramiz is the man you traveled with, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he is.” I sighed and set my teacup on Pensyth’s desk, so I could lace my fingers together and grip them tight without being obvious. “Shall we get to the point? You are afraid that I will disgrace Scirland by carrying on with an unmarried man.”

“I would never suggest that.”

No, he would only imply it. I ground my teeth, then said, “Colonel, do you make a habit of querying your men about their involvement with every woman they meet? I assure you that many if not most of them have done far more to merit censure than I have. I know it may be difficult to believe, but dragons truly are my concern here. I have not undertaken their study in the hope of attracting a new husband; indeed, such a thing would be an inconvenience rather than a benefit, as there are few husbands who would accept my life as I have become accustomed to living it. As for scandal outside the bounds of marriage… that would be even more inconvenient, as people question my professional integrity quite enough without such justification to encourage them. So you may lay your mind at ease, sir: I have no intention of disgracing our nation. Not when there are dragons to be studied.”

By the time I reached the end of this increasingly frosty diatribe, Colonel Pensyth was staring wide-eyed at me. He even looked embarrassed, which perversely softened my feelings toward him. (I expected him to be angry.) When I finished, he shut his slackened mouth and seemed determined not to open it until he was absolutely certain what was going to come out of it.

“Well,” he said at last, shifting in his chair with a creak of wicker. “That is good to know. Because I agree with you and Mr. Wilker: it would be very good for you to gather more data, and that means going to the desert. Since that is where the sheikh’s brother is… well.” He cleared his throat, and an uncomfortable silence followed.

Given what I had just said to Pensyth, I took great care not to show any excitement at the prospect of seeing Suhail again, out from under the eye of his brother. “I am very glad we are in agreement, Colonel. When should Tom and I be prepared to depart?”

“As soon as I can get you out there, I suppose. But that may be a while yet.” Pensyth rose, locked his hands behind his back in the military manner, and began to pace. “Dame Isabella… how much do you know of Akhian politics?”

I blinked, not following his change of subject. “Within the country? Very little, I fear.”

“Do you know what I’m referring to when I say ‘rebellious tribe’?”

That was the term Suhail had used, in the garden. I had forgotten, and not inquired about it after. “I have heard it, but nothing more.”

Pensyth said, “There are two kinds of Akhian—in a manner of speaking. They divide themselves into ‘the people of the towns’ and ‘the people of the desert.’ City-dwellers and nomads, essentially. But they’re all of the same stock: trace the city lineages back, and you find they all come from the desert. Call themselves by the same tribal names; those in the towns send their boys out to the sand for a few years so they won’t forget their roots. That sort of thing.

“But over the last century or so, those two groups have begun to split farther apart. So when the current caliphate got into power, they decided to tie city and desert together. The tribes are all ruled by sheikhs in the towns, now—people like Husam ibn Ramiz. They get some benefits in exchange. But there are tribes that don’t like the arrangement, and refuse to be ruled by city men.”

“The rebellious tribes. I see.” I thought back to what Suhail had said in the garden. “And one such group is the… Banu Safr, I believe?”

Judging by the sharp look Pensyth shot my way, I might have been better off concealing my knowledge. He no doubt wondered where I had obtained it. “Yes, the Banu Safr. Old enemies of the Aritat, and therefore enemies of the caliph, because his dynasty took power with Aritat support.”

All of this was information Tom ought to know—but I feared that if I said as much to the colonel, I would lose this moment of agreeable candour, in which he was speaking to me like a human being rather than a female-shaped problem. And since I had already shown some awareness of the topic, I might as well continue. “There’s been trouble with them, I understand.”

“A hell of a—Your pardon, Dame Isabella. Quite a lot of trouble. Which is why I bring this up. I read what you and Mr. Wilker submitted, and I understand that you think you can make a valuable contribution in the field. But the Banu Safr have staged several raids on the Aritat in the last few months, and men have died. You must see my concern.”

I was busy biting my tongue over his phrasing, that I merely thought I could make a valuable contribution. I had to collect myself to say, “I have been in the middle of armed conflict before, Colonel. More than once.”

“All the more reason for you to exercise caution, I should think.”

“And I so shall.” I rose and crossed to the wall, where he had hung a large map of Akhia. “Can you show me where we are talking about? I know that Aritat territory is in the Jefi, but not its specific borders.”

Pensyth exhaled sharply. “Borders, I can’t give you. I’m sure they have them—they defend them very strenuously against their enemies—but it isn’t the sort of thing that gets marked on paper. At least not any paper I’ve seen. But here.” He came and pointed to a part of the basin between the Qedem and Farayma ranges. “This section, roughly speaking, is Aritat territory. And here is where the Banu Safr run.”

“Where have our dragons been coming from?”

This time his exhalation was more of a snort. “You have the records of that, Dame Isabella—not me. If it isn’t specified there, I don’t know. But I do know that this—” He tapped an area at the foot of the Qedem. “This area is absolutely lousy with dragons, so I would guess around there. They even call it the Labyrinth of Drakes.”

I liked the sound of that very well indeed. “There is your answer, then. The Labyrinth is farther removed from Banu Safr territory. We shall go there, and be safe.”

“You’ll go wherever the Aritat are.” Pensyth went back to his desk. “Even in winter, Dame Isabella, the desert can kill you very quickly. But once you find them—then yes, by all means ask them to take you as far from danger as you can.”

He had, clearly without realizing it, slipped into speaking as if I would be going along after all. I hid my urge to smile. This tactic can work very well with certain people: divert them with practical matters, logistics and such, and they will forget they meant to send you packing. By the time they recall, it is too late; backtracking will only make them appear foolish. “The sooner we depart, then, the better,” I said. “Our work depends heavily on the season, and I do not want to waste any of it.”

Pensyth jotted down a note. “I’ll talk the sheikh around. We’ll arrange kit for you, out of our own gear, though if we can get him to supply animals that would be ideal.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” I said—and then fled before he realized he had lost the argument.

Andrew was dispatched with us, ostensibly to provide a military presence in what was, after all, a military undertaking, but also—I suspected—as my chaperon. Although such measures would ordinarily have irritated me, in this instance I did not mind. In fact, our departure had something of the feel of a holiday: I was setting out with two of my favourite people in the world, away from the strictures of society, and I was going to see dragons.

I behaved myself, though, as we assembled at a caravanserai on the outskirts of Qurrat. Our traveling party was small, consisting only of myself, Tom, Andrew, and a quintet of Aritat men who would guard us and see to the animals. That latter was quite necessary, for the animals outnumbered the humans by more than two to one; the sheikh was taking advantage of our departure to send new breeding stock of both camels and horses to his people.

Tom, Andrew, and I were all on horseback, being wholly unfamiliar with the alternative discipline of camel-riding. “We should learn, though,” Tom said, eyeing the ungainly-looking camels with disfavour. “They’re hardier than horses, out there.”

We did not trouble with this for the first two days, being more concerned with sorting out other logistical matters. But on the morning of the third day, Tom approached one of the Akhians, a fellow named Yusuf, and asked whether teaching us to ride camels would slow us down too much.

Yusuf looked us over with a dubious eye. “It can be hard on the back, if you aren’t used to it.”

“The only way to become accustomed is to practice,” I said, in my most utterly sensible voice.

I was still dressed in skirts, but this was no obstacle to that day’s grand experiment. The nomads of the desert go about in long robes all the time, often with nothing at all on underneath—as I found out during my time among them. One has the option of a number of postures in a camel saddle; the truly skilled can sit almost cross-legged, with each foot on the opposite side of the camel’s neck. I opted for a more common posture in which one hooks a leg around the horn of the saddle, tucking that foot beneath the other leg.

The arrangement thus produced bears some resemblance to riding sidesaddle on a horse, which one might expect would mean I was good at it. In truth, however, I had not used a sidesaddle for years, preferring to dress myself in divided skirts and sit astride. Furthermore, a camel’s gait differs from that of a horse in certain ways… not to mention that their greater height and humped back leaves one feeling perched atop a very unstable hill, sure to fall at any moment. In counterpoint to this, I must say that although camels have a reputation for evil dispositions, the one I rode was quite agreeable. I will not go so far as to call her sweet or affectionate; she was clearly a creature with a mind of her own, and a somewhat unpredictable mind at that. But I have ridden horses that are far more intractable, and I appreciated her inquisitive nature.

Camel-riding was indeed hard on the back, but we adapted and made acceptably good time. This far from the river, the terrain was scrubby farmland, agriculture being scratched out of soil so dry it is startling it will bear fruit at all. One early afternoon, halfway through our journey, we entered a narrow valley with suspiciously straight walls. Much later I learned this may have been a canal, during the height of Draconean civilization. Archaeologists have found signs that the area around it used to be rich farmland, which of course requires more water, and there is a place that may be where the canal was breached and destroyed.

But at the time it was merely yet another bit of uninspiring terrain that stood between me and dragons. I chafed at the length of our journey, wishing with all the fervor of a young girl trapped in a carriage with a least favourite aunt that we might be at our destination already. Which is unfair to my companions—I liked all of them a good deal better than my least favourite aunt—but all the same, the days dragged by.

We might have made better time had we taken a barge upriver and proceeded from there. Doing that, however, would have taken us through the lands of the Taaruf, who are not on the best of terms with the Aritat. I began to appreciate that, although on paper Akhia is a single country, it is not unified to the degree that I had assumed. The current arrangement binding town and desert together has gone some way toward changing that, but the tribes still control their own territory, answering more to their sheikhs than to the caliph on his throne.

Instead we struck out overland, first through territory belonging to the Banu Zalit, then through the lands of the Isharid. As the days went by, farmland gave way to drier and drier terrain until, by imperceptible degrees, we arrived in what was unquestionably the desert.

It did not consist entirely of sand dunes. Indeed, though this is the common image of deserts, there are relatively few places in the world where it is true. Much of the landscape is stony and hard, supporting thorny plant life here and there, and lusher vegetation—if anything can be called lush away from the main rivers—in wadis and oases, in nooks and crannies of the barren ground. The trick of surviving in the desert is to know where these nooks and crannies might be, and to conserve water in between.

What amazed me the most was the realization that we were seeing the desert at its most verdant. The winter rains were drawing to a close, and everything was in full flower. But this greenery was still intermittent, with long stretches of hard soil in between where nothing at all would grow; and then we would come over a rise and find a carpet of wild lavender or red anemones had sprung up in the lower ground between two ridges. In a few months these would be gone as if they had never been, devoured by camels or burnt to crisp straw by the sun. For this brief span of time, however, the desert alternated between sterility and wonder.

The nights were bone-chilling, and all the more so because the days were still acceptably warm. The sun was also strong; I wore both hat and scarf so as to shield my face and neck, and we non-Akhians daubed our exposed skin with a paste intended to prevent burns. It did not work as well as Tom in particular might have hoped, but we fared better with it than without.

In retrospect, I feel as if I ought to have seen the smooth course of our journey out into the desert as a sign. It is not true that all great deeds must be attended by hardship and privation, and that any expedition which begins without trouble must inevitably go awry… but such has been my experience more often than not. Superstition therefore says that I should have known I would either accomplish little, or find myself in difficulty very soon upon arrival.

EIGHT

The tents of the Aritat spread out along the edge of a wadi, dark shapes above the green, with camels moving all around. I was astonished at their number, tents and camels both: I had envisioned the nomads as existing in small bands, perhaps as few as two dozen individuals. This is not at all the case, and the Aritat at that time claimed more than three thousand tents (the customary method of counting the population), with tens of thousands of camels to their name. What we came upon was not the entirety of the tribe—they almost never gather in a single location—but this particular group alone boasted in excess of fifty tents, each one home to several people.

We dismounted when we drew near, and the Akhians with us threw handfuls of sand up to form clouds in the air, which is how one signals peaceful approach. In response, two men mounted their camels and loped out to meet us.

As usual, my limited aptitude for linguistic matters hobbled me in this initial encounter. My command of Akhian had been improving, but people in rural corners always speak differently from their urban counterparts, and it was decidedly urban Akhian (not to say scholarly) that I had been mastering. Yusuf spoke that dialect better than his companions, which was why we communicated with him the most—but among the nomads, he lapsed into what almost seemed like another tongue entirely.

The men seemed to be directing us to a tent some distance away. We dismounted and led our camels there, while all around us men, women, and children emerged from their tents to watch us go by. We were not the first Scirlings they had seen—a detachment of soldiers had come out here at the beginning of this enterprise, to scout out the situation—but I was the first Scirling woman to visit them, and very exotic in my khaki dress.

Our destination stood out from all the others by virtue of its size: whereas many of the tents had only a single central pole to support them, creating one “room” within, and few had as many as three, this tent had five. The man who waited outside it was more finely dressed than the others, in white robes as snowy as the environment would allow. This was the sheikh of the local clan, Hajj Nawl ibn Dawwas—a man who, in different times, might not have been beholden to any superior authority. Since the imposition of unified governance between the towns and the desert, however, he answered in some matters to Husam ibn Ramiz. Between that and our status as guests, he showed great deference in greeting us.

We were soon seated upon fine cushions and plied with coffee and dates, while a man sat cross-legged in the corner playing upon the stringed instrument called a rebab. Outside, men slaughtered a camel for our supper—and not one of the camels used to bear burdens on the march, either. The meat was therefore very tender, and a sign of great esteem. (This accrued to us not on our own merits, of course, but those of Husam ibn Ramiz. To feed us a tough old camel—or worse, to feed us no camel at all—would have been an unforgivable insult to him.) Certain notables of the clan joined us, while others listened at the flap, hanging on every word of our conversation.

For once we did not meet with the polite (or not so polite) disbelief that so frequently greets our work. People often have difficulty understanding why Tom and I would risk ourselves in pursuit of mere understanding… but tell them your purpose is war, and no one questions your sanity at all. Nawl ibn Dawwas was not a particularly warlike man, the Aritat having lived more peaceable lives since the ascendance of the current caliphate; but it was still a thing he had been brought up to value above almost anything else. He knew this business with dragons had a military purpose, and he approved.

Encounters with powerful people have always made me uneasy, and so I was grateful that I took my own supper with the sheikh’s wives and other female relations rather than the men. I was even more grateful when at last we escaped the sheikh’s tent. By then it was full dark, with scarcely a sliver of moon to light our way, and I could only follow blindly in Yusuf’s wake as we crossed the encampment to another tent. This one was not exceptional in any way, being woven of dark goat hair, with one side open to catch the wind, and light spilling out across the ground.

A guard dog began barking as we approached, but fell silent when someone came out and touched the top of its head. Even in the dark, with nothing but a silhouette to go by, I recognized Suhail.

It was my turn to halt in my tracks, as he had halted when he found us in the courtyard of his brother’s house. I knew, of course, that he was out with the Aritat—but that tribe consisted of many clans, scattered across many camps. No one had told me he was with this one.

Likely because no one here had reason to think I would care. It seemed the rumours concerning my conduct had not reached this far.

Tom greeted him with surprise, and received an apology in return. “I only just returned to camp,” Suhail said, “or I would have come to find you in the sheikh’s tent. We did not expect you to arrive so soon. Please, come in.”

This was directed at all four of us: Tom, myself, Andrew, and Yusuf. I took a moment to straighten my dress and the scarf over my hair, then followed the men into the tent.

It seemed Suhail had been out hunting. A splendid falcon sat on a perch in one corner of the tent, and a woman near the fire was plucking the feathers from one of several small birds, which I presumed were the fruits of Suhail’s labours (or rather his falcon’s). She cleaned her hands off and rose to greet us, along with another man.

Both were older and much weathered by the sun. Suhail, making introductions, said, “These are Umm Azali and Abu Azali—my desert mother and desert father.”

This he said in Scirling, so there was no chance of misunderstanding him. “Desert mother?” I repeated, my gaze slipping to the woman. She did not look much like Suhail, nor did the father—even allowing for the way desert life had thinned their flesh. Suhail was not a fat man, but we all looked plump next to the nomads, who seemed universally made of rawhide.

“They raised me during my fosterage,” he said. “It is custom, for many of us in the city. A way of making certain we do not forget where we came from.”

Pensyth had mentioned this, after a fashion. I wanted to inquire further, but felt it would be rude. The couple urged us to sit and fed us more coffee and dates, eager to share their hospitality; Umm Azali joined in, despite the mixed company, which meant I had to do the same. (I did not manage sleep until quite late that night; it has not generally been my habit to drink coffee after sunset.)

The conversation was pleasant, if largely inconsequential or else incomprehensible. It is incumbent upon any traveller to share news from the territory he has passed through; Yusuf had spoken to other nomads on our way here, and now he related what he had learned from them, little of which meant anything to me—when I could even understand his words. I mostly looked around the tent, which was made of goat-hair panels and surprisingly sparse in its furnishings. I felt as if I were among the Moulish once more, as in a sense I was: these, too, were a migratory people, for whom material possessions were often more of a burden than a luxury.

As you may imagine, I also watched Suhail, as covertly as I could. He seemed more like himself out here, which pleased me, but also surprised me a little. After all, I knew him largely as a man who loved the sea: I half expected him to pine in such an arid land. But it was clear that he was more comfortable and relaxed in the tent of his desert mother and desert father than he was in the house of his brother. And if he spoke to me but little, nor looked in my direction much—well. I had promised Pensyth I would behave myself; it helped that he did the same.

I was recalled to the conversation when Suhail spoke in my own language. “Tomorrow,” he said to Tom; I had missed the question he was answering. “It’s too late tonight. Besides, there was an argument over who would be your host. If I weren’t here, you’d stay with the sheikh—but since I am, Abu Azali won the argument.”

He was referring to our sleeping arrangements. Of course it was much too dark out to pitch the tent we had brought; but I had not thought about what that would mean. I was simultaneously relieved and alarmed: relieved that we would not be in the sheikh’s tent, and alarmed at the prospect of word reaching anyone that I had slept under the same roof as Suhail.

But it was also the same roof that sheltered Tom, Andrew, Abu Azali, Umm Azali, and Yusuf. The most inappropriate deed either of us could have performed in such crowded quarters was to accidentally tread on someone if we got up in the night. No one seemed to think there was any reason for concern, and so I went along.

The next morning we undertook the task of setting up our own household. Using the phrases Suhail taught him, Tom formally begged leave on behalf of our Scirling trio to become the “protégé” of Abu Azali, which is to say a guest under his protection. This is an extension of hospitality among the nomads, and meant that we would pitch our tent next to Abu Azali’s in the line, as if we were members of his family. Furthermore, they dispatched a girl—Shahar, daughter of their son Azali—to see to our domestic needs. This was reckoned good practice for her, as she was fast approaching the age at which she might marry, and thus become mistress of her own tent.

In this she reminded me a great deal of Liluakame, the Keongan girl who had been my “wife” during the time of our shipwreck. Here no such pretense was needed, nor was I providing an excuse for Shahar to delay marriage until her prospective husband would be ready. My household was, however, serving once more as a training ground for a future wife. Shahar was quite determined in her practice, and firmly halted any effort on the part of either Tom or myself to take on some of her duties; whether this was owing to her zeal or the status we had as associates of Husam ibn Ramiz, I do not know.

Indeed, for once we had no responsibilities at all save the pursuit of our work. To this end, Tom and I asked the very next day who might be able to guide us to the dragons.

We had to inquire of Abu Azali, because Suhail was nowhere to be found. Even conveying our point was something of a challenge—Yusuf had to assist—but once he understood, he responded with a flood of words that made Yusuf grimace. “The man you want is one of the Ghalb,” he said. “Al-Jelidah. He is not here, and no one knows when he will be back.”

“Who, or what, is a Ghalb?” Tom asked.

Yusuf spat into the dirt. “Filthy carrion-eaters. But they know the desert.”

This was, of course, not the most useful answer he might have given. Further questioning elicited that the Ghalb were a tribe—“If they even deserve that name,” Yusuf muttered—unlike any other in Akhia.

Indeed, some have questioned whether they are Akhian at all, or whether their ancestors hail from some other land. Certainly their way of life differs from that of the other nomads. They have no fixed territory, but pay a fee to the other tribes for protection and the right to pass through their lands. By law they are forbidden from owning horses, and most do not even own camels, instead making do with some sheep, and a breed of donkey that is esteemed above all others in the region. They survive largely by hunting, and by dispensing their skills in medicine and handiwork to the other tribes; for this reason, and because they are barred from raiding or making war, the nomads despise them as mere craftsmen. (Their reputation as carrion-eaters arises from the fact that they do not slaughter their meat according to either Segulist or Amaneen law.)

But the Ghalb, as even Yusuf admitted, know the desert. Because they do not engage in warfare and are permitted passage throughout Akhia, they are sometimes employed as guides by the more conventional tribes, directing them to good pasturage or hidden sources of water. It seemed the Aritat had been making extensive use of Ghalbi aid in seeking out caches of eggs; and this man al-Jelidah was the one who had been assisting this camp.

Tom, asking around, learned that al-Jelidah had gone to share his wealth with his family—or possibly to bury it, which the Ghalb sometimes do if they have no immediate need of the money. (The Scirling traveller Saul Westcombe wrote a sensational tale fifty years ago about the secret treasures of the “Gelbees,” for which he hunted fruitlessly through the mountains until a rockfall did him in. Likely he would have been sorely disappointed had he found the pittance of coins al-Jelidah had received.) But the men in camp assured Tom that Ghalbi assistance was not needed, not in this season; there were no eggs for us to find right now, only dragons. And for those, all we needed was our eyes.

Among the Moulish we had needed to delay our work, for not participating in the life of the camp would have marked us as inexcusably antisocial. Here, however, we had the imprimatur of the sheikh, and therefore were expected to carry out our duties post-haste. As it happened, we had an opportunity to begin our work the very next day—or rather, the very next night.

Andrew and I had gone in search of Suhail. Having given us into the care of his desert mother and desert father, he seemed to have vanished. I gathered from Umm Azali that he might be found in the tent of the local sheikh. This I approached with trepidation, not knowing if it would be an offense for me to stroll up unannounced—but one of the women there (the sheikh’s younger wife, Genna) came out to greet me. From her I understood that Suhail was elsewhere in camp.

We found him eventually between two rows of tents, surrounded by a quartet of sleek, graceful hounds. These were the salukis, a breed almost as renowned as the horses and camels of the desert: sighthounds, deep-chested and narrow-waisted, like cheetahs or the savannah snakes of Bayembe, with feathery tufts of hair down the backs of their legs. They frolicked about him, tongues lolling in canine grins, while he ruffled their ears with a gentle hand. At our approach, they went still and watchful, until Andrew and I both offered our fingers for a sniff. Even then, however, they remained wary, and did not return to their play.

“Umm Yaqub,” Suhail greeted me respectfully, rising from his crouch and dusting his hands off. “Captain Hendemore. I hope you have been settling in well?”

I said, “Yes, very much so. Your—does she count as your niece? Shahar bint Azali. She has made our tent comfortable with laudable speed. We are lucky to have her assistance.”

It was not the most graceful small talk I had ever made. Fortunately we were soon rescued by a sudden commotion. There were shouts at the edge of camp; turning, I saw a boy galloping in on a camel, looking as if he might slide off the hump at any moment. But he kept his seat, steering toward us, and nearly tumbled over the camel’s head in his haste to rein it in and dismount. I could not follow his breathless report, but had to wait for Suhail to translate. He listened, then turned to us and said, “A dragon has taken one of the camels.”

“Damnation!” I said, then winced. Andrew had not been a good influence on my manners. Fortunately, Suhail had heard salty language from me before (when I was too much in the company of sailors, who were just as bad as my brother). In a more moderate tone, I asked, “Would it be troublesome if I went out with the herdsmen in future days? If I wait in camp, I will never see a drake hunt.”

I saw a brief flash of Suhail’s smile, before it faded once more into reserve. “You’ve missed only one part of it. If you are brave—if you do not fear the lion and hyena—you may see more.”

He knew very well the measure of my courage, not to mention my foolhardiness. “Do you mean—” I stopped, eyebrows rising. My heart began to patter like that of a young lady at her first public dance. “The stories are true?”

He answered with more levity than I had heard from him since arriving in Akhia. “How am I to know what stories you’ve heard? But you will see with your own eyes what is true.”

Suhail took us to meet another man, a fellow called Haidar ibn Wajid. His age was difficult to judge; the desert is not kind to human skin, and his weathered face might have belonged to a man anywhere between thirty and sixty. He was a hunter rather than a herdsman, riding out often with a falcon on his glove to bring down bustards, sand grouse, and francolins, rabbits and foxes and more. At Suhail’s request, he mounted his camel and rode out. In the afternoon he returned and pointed at black specks in the sky, some distance off. In a careful approximation of city Akhian, he said, “Vultures. That is where we must go… but not too close.”

Six of us rode out shortly before dusk: myself, Andrew, and Tom, with Haidar and two of his comrades leading us. Suhail himself stayed behind, much to my regret. Our Akhian companions found a rise overlooking the vultures’ target, and when I fixed upon it with the field glasses, I saw the carcass of the camel, already somewhat torn by scavengers, but far from entirely consumed. Of the drake, there was no sign.

We waited for several hours without result. This was my first time sitting out in a desert night, rather than sheltering inside a tent; the experience, apart from the penetrating cold, was both breathtaking and eerie. The stars above were brilliant beyond compare, and the waxing crescent moon gave some light before it set… but all around us the desert was composed of silver and shadow, and sounds carried across it for miles. I heard the coughing roar of a lion and tensed, until Haidar shook his head. “A long way off,” he said. “He will not come here.”

Of greater concern—and greater promise—was the unnerving laughter that came from much closer by. The Akhians held their weapons close when they heard it, while I tried and failed to pinpoint the origin of the noise. “What was that?”

“Hyena.” Haidar’s voice was barely more than a whisper. “They will find the camel soon.”

In the darkness I could barely make out the carcass, but I remembered more or less where it had been before the light faded, and after a bit of searching fixed its dim silhouette in my field glasses. Before long I saw dark shapes slinking about it, and heard more of that strange, cackling sound, so disturbingly like a human laugh.

Haidar, who had seen this before, was not looking at the carcass. Instead he watched the sky, waiting for the stars to go out.

“Now,” he murmured, and I lowered the field glasses just in time to see.

The flare was shockingly bright, after hours in the dark. Howls came from the desert floor, and there was a scrabbling of nails against the dirt as the surviving hyenas attempted to flee. But the drake wheeled about—I could barely see it, tracking its movement by the blackness that swept across the sky—and stooped again, blazing once more at its fleeing prey. A frantic search through the glasses showed me hyena corpses strewn about, some of them still burning, especially around what was left of the camel. Then the dragon settled to the ground and began its feast.

Some of the stories told about desert drakes are pure fancy. Among these I count the jinn, the spirits said to be born from the “smokeless fire” of a drake’s breath. But seeing those bursts of flame in the night, I can understand how such legends begin. And it is no fable to say that drakes are cunning hunters, clever enough to kill one beast and then use it as bait, luring scavengers who will become the main course.

A drake, hunting in this manner, can often gorge itself on enough meat to sate it for a week or more. Having done so, they are often too heavy to fly; they will lair where they can, or if no immediate location offers itself, walk ponderously back in the direction of their home caves, making short, gliding flights when the terrain permits. Once ensconced in a safe place, they will remain inactive until hunger begins to pluck at them again, rousing only to shift between shade and sun as their comfort requires.

I was shivering uncontrollably by the time we regained the comfort of our own camp, but the experience had been thrilling. During the course of our research I went out several more times to observe what I could of this nocturnal hunt, wishing that I, like a cat, could see in the dark. Even once I learned to watch the stars, I often missed the drake’s initial approach, for it glides down on silent wings, lest it frighten off its prey.

It was a promising start to our work. But, unfortunately, it was all too soon disrupted—by those long-standing enemies of the Aritat, the Banu Safr.

NINE

I missed the attack of the Banu Safr, as I had missed the drake taking its initial prey, because I was not out with the camels in their pasture. But even at a distance I heard them: the shrill yells, the bellowing of the camels, the crack of gunfire.

At the time I was sitting in front of our tent, with one of the scruffy guard dogs (so different from the graceful salukis) sniffing around my feet. I was attempting to sketch the night hunting of the drake, as much from imagination as from the few visual observations I had been able to make. At the sudden outburst of sound I twitched in my seat, nearly dropping my pencil. “What is that?” I asked no one in particular—for everyone who spoke Scirling was elsewhere.

Shahar came outside to stare in the direction of the noise, biting her lip. I repeated my question in Akhian, but did not understand what she said in reply until she mimed shooting a gun, grabbing something, and running away. The Akhian government has made great strides in curtailing the raiding ways of their nomadic tribes, but they have not stamped them out entirely; and the rebellious tribes are the most prone to breaking that edict.

I made an abortive move toward the camel tethered alongside our tent, but Shahar grabbed my sleeve to halt me. From her flood of words I understood that I was being an idiot—and she was right. What good could I do, riding unarmed toward a battle? But Suhail had gone out to view the herds, and Andrew had gone with him, for curiosity’s sake.

Certainly I was not the only one lunging for an animal to ride. Virtually every man in camp was mounting up, with weapons in hand, and they quickly thundered out to join the fray. But a raid is, by its nature, over very quickly: before long men were flooding back into camp, the remaining camels in tow, minus the ones that had been taken.

Suhail and Andrew were among those who returned. My relief, however, was short-lived. “We’re going after them,” Andrew said breathlessly as he dismounted. “If we can get the camels back before the thieves reach their own territory—”

“We?” I repeated, my voice sharp. “Andrew, you are not going with them.”

“Why not?”

My foremost reason was that I did not want to risk him, and did not trust him not to risk himself… but I did not say that. (I do, however, write it here, which I suppose means that now Andrew will know the truth.) “Do you think Colonel Pensyth will thank you for involving yourself in a matter of internal strife between two Akhian tribes?”

“Fine words, coming from you,” Andrew said with a snort.

I gave him a quelling look. “Besides which, you cannot keep up with them. On a horse, yes; but they are saddling camels, which you barely know how to ride. Do you know their tactics? The tricks raiders use to conceal their trail? Will you be anything more than one more gun, when they catch the thieves at last?” Softening, I added, “I know you are a soldier, Andrew. And it chafes, sitting idle while others deal with a problem. But look—they are not taking everyone, not even all of the fighting men.”

Indeed, the group that was collecting supplies and loading them onto their camels was quite small, barely a dozen riders. One of them, I saw, was Suhail.

I did not properly hear Andrew’s first, muttered response. Only when he raised his voice and said, “Very well, Isabella—I won’t go,” did I turn and take his hand in mine. “Thank you,” I said. “I have quite enough to worry about as it is.”

Tom appeared then, a rifle in his hands and two more slung under his arm. “Dear God, not you, too,” I said involuntarily.

He ignored me, going to where Suhail and the others were preparing. I drew close in time to hear him say, “These may be of use to you.”

Looking about, I saw that most of the pursuit party were armed only with bows and lances. Some had rifles, but less than half; and Suhail was not among them. He looked at the gun Tom was proffering and said, “Your colonel sent those with you for your own use.”

“And today my use is to give it to you,” Tom said. “You’ve bloody well got more need for it than I do at the moment. Just bring them back when you’re done.” He extended the rifle further, almost forcing it into Suhail’s hands, then leaned the other two against the side of Suhail’s camel, which gave him a grumpy look.

“Your ammunition—”

The word was not even out of Suhail’s mouth when Tom dug two cardboard boxes out of his back pockets and handed them over. Suhail grimaced. “I was going to say, you have a limited supply, and should conserve it. We don’t need guns to deal with these Banu Safr dogs.”

“But they’ll help,” Tom said. “Good hunting.”

Suhail did not argue further. I watched, hands knotted tightly about each other, as the retaliatory party mounted up. Of course he had to go: he represented his brother here, and would lose a great deal of face if he hung back from battle. But I worried all the same.

The camp was quiet after they left. Several men had been injured during the raid, but they bore it stoically as their wives cleaned and bandaged their wounds. I tried not to pace as I calculated how rapidly the party might return. There were too many variables I could not account for: it depended on how determined they were, and whether they caught the raiders before they passed into Banu Safr lands. Our group might turn back at that border—or they might not, carrying their counter-raid into enemy territory. It would be brave, but a good deal more dangerous.

Either way, they would not return by nightfall. Andrew offered to help stand watch over the camel herds, lest a second party of raiders strike while the best warriors were gone; this was apparently a tactic employed by the more cunning nomads, though no one thought it likely here. I dressed for bed on my side of the tent we shared with Tom—an arrangement I had thought would be decried as inappropriate, given the absence of any other woman. (Certainly it had attracted censure during our previous expeditions, even when we were not sharing a tent.) But so long as the tent was officially Andrew’s, he had the right to give shelter to any guest he liked, even with his unmarried sister present.

Through the curtain that divided us, I addressed Tom. “Thank you for giving him the rifles.”

“You’re welcome,” Tom said. After a moment he added, “I would have given my left arm to go with them. These raids have been causing no end of trouble for the Aritat, and I suspect it’s because of us.”

The enmity between the two tribes went back a long way… but from what I could tell, it was not always so active as this. “I fear you may be correct.”

“I don’t know what to do about it, either,” Tom said. “This is about more than just our scholarly curiosity; there are governments involved. The caliph is the one who told them to gather dragons and eggs for us.”

I nodded, even though Tom could not see me through the thick goat-hair fabric of the curtain. “All the more reason for us to reach a point where we no longer need supply from the desert.”

Then I paused, thinking. My thoughts were interrupted shortly thereafter by Tom saying, “I recognize that kind of silence. What are you thinking about?”

I smiled ruefully. “I am thinking that we ought to have had this conversation before I dressed for bed, so that I could come to the other side of the curtain without being completely scandalous. But I am also wondering why the Banu Safr should care.”

“About the dragons? I’ve been considering that myself. They supported the old caliphate, you know, before the Murasids came to power. They may just be eager to interfere with anything the caliph is trying to do.”

Unlovely though it is to admit, I hoped Tom was right. That would mean Scirland’s involvement here was peripheral to this conflict, rather than central. We would merely be an excuse: the spark that lit the bonfire, not the fuel itself.

These thoughts, combined with worry for Suhail, made sleep difficult that night. Ordinarily I sleep like a very tired log in the field, but all I could seem to manage was a fitful doze, from which I was roused by every little sound: a camel grunting, men laughing around a distant fire, Tom turning restlessly in his own bed. I had just made up my mind to call out and ask if he, too, was still awake, when I felt a breeze across my cheek.

Had I resided for longer in that tent, I might have understood more quickly. As it was, I thought Andrew had finished his watch and lifted the flap to come in. Then my sluggish brain pointed out that the breeze was coming from the wrong direction for that.

I rolled over just in time to meet a hand bearing a damp piece of cloth.

This hand reacted quickly to my movement, clamping itself over my nose and mouth, muffling all sound. Someone was kneeling over me, almost invisible in the darkness. I shoved at his arm, trying to dislodge his hand, and kicked with my legs, hoping to hit something that might topple over and make a sound. All I caught was air, and my fiercest efforts made no mark on his arm; I cursed the way fieldwork destroyed my fingernails, leaving me without claws.

But it was not failure that made my struggles subside. My mind was lifting free of my body, floating into the night sky on a dragon’s wings; and then I had no awareness of anything at all.

I awakened on the back of a camel, galloping through the darkness.

My immediate response to this was not heroic in the slightest: I vomited. An intense nausea wracked me, and it was not made any better by the swaying motion of the camel, when night gave me no stable point upon which to fix my gaze.

The man in front of me growled under his breath. I had, on instinct, turned my head aside—but this had not entirely spared him. As my senses returned, however, I felt no guilt whatsoever for this. For I realized that he had drugged me (or if not him, then one of his comrades); and having accomplished this, he had kidnapped me.

My voice answered but weakly when I tried to shout. Even that feeble croak, however, made my kidnapper pull a curved knife from his sash and hold it up so that it caught what light was to be had. The message was clear, and I fell silent.

Shouting would not have done much good anyway. I could tell by the terrain—flattish desert, quite unlike the wadi I had gone to sleep in—that we were no longer anywhere near the Aritat camp. Sound carries far across the open desert, but at this distance, the best I could hope for was to be mistaken for a hyena.

What other options did I have? I tried to force my disoriented brain into motion. Even my best efforts, however, turned up little. By wiggling I might have unbalanced myself enough to fall from the back of the camel; this would have earned me only bruises and perhaps some broken bones. I could not hope to overpower the man in front of me, and even if I did, there were others around us who would subdue me rapidly enough.

The thought of others made me look about. I soon spotted Tom, bare-chested and still unconscious, riding pillion on another camel. Far too late, it came to me that the sound I had taken for restlessness on his part had likely been another kidnapper drugging him. Were it not for that blasted curtain… no, even then matters would not have ended well. They would simply have synchronized their attacks more precisely; or matters would have become violent. I took some minor solace in knowing they did not wish us dead. It would have been far easier to slit our throats than to spirit us out of camp.

Did the men of the Aritat follow us? With my hands lashed to the saddle, I could not turn to watch our trail. It depended on whether our captors had gotten us out quietly, I supposed. It might be that no one even knew we were gone. Once they did…

I slumped, trying not to lean against the man in front of me. (Oh, if only propriety had compelled them to put me on my own camel.) The best warriors of the clan were gone, pursuing the raiders. Had that been a diversion? Either way, I was not sure how many men could be spared for a second pursuit. Andrew would not be held in camp, of that I was sure—but alone, he could not do very much.

Such calculations were not cheering, but they gave me some minor distraction from the bone-deep chill that soon robbed me of all feeling in my bare toes. I tucked my feet against the camel’s warm sides, curled in on myself, and endured. Dawn came as a blessing, even though we did not stop; we rode on until it was nearly midday. Then we halted amid some rocks that offered shade for a few, while the remainder propped up their cloaks to form miniature tents and huddled inside.

By then I was tormented with thirst. The day was not hot, but the air was terribly dry, and I had not had anything to drink for hours. Pride made me want to refuse when my riding partner offered me a waterskin; I knew I would be grateful to him for it, and did not want to give him such influence over me. But I would need water eventually, and the longer I delayed, the more precious the gift would seem. I took it and drank: one swallow only, after which he pulled the container from my hands.

They kept Tom separate from me, in the shade of a different rock. Unprotected though I might be in my nightgown, he had it worse, fair as he was; his shoulders and back were already painfully red. “Please,” I said to my captor, in my very best Akhian, city-inflected though it was. “Have you any robe or cloak that might shelter us from the sun?”

He made no reply, but only scowled at me. Then he got up and went to a man I promptly marked as their leader. Hope rose in my heart—but when he came back, the only item of clothing he bore was a gag, which he stuffed into my protesting mouth. Tom was similarly gagged soon after; and so we remained for the rest of the journey, except when freed to take water and food.

(I wondered at the time why they had not gagged us from the start. I cannot say for certain, but I believe they knew the drug they had used—later identified as ether—would cause vomiting after we roused; to gag us would have been to risk us choking on our own spew. Which raised any number of interesting questions about how they had obtained ether, and learned the use of it. The chemical was first discovered by an Akhian chemist, Shuraiq ibn Raad al-Adrasi… but that does not mean it is commonly found in the middle of the desert.)

Once a little time had passed, we mounted and rode again. By nightfall it was apparent to me that any pursuers were unlikely to catch us before we reached enemy territory. It was not merely cold that made me shiver as I tried to sleep.

Long-time readers of these memoirs may recall I had been kidnapped in the night once before, during the expedition to Vystrana. The difference between the two situations, however, could not have been more stark. There it had been my own foolishness that put me at risk; here I had been doing nothing more foolish than trying to sleep in my own tent. There my captors had been relatively decent men: smugglers, to be sure, but more interested in making a living by illicit means than sowing mayhem. Here it was apparent that my captors only needed me alive, and any suffering I might endure along the way was of no concern to them.

I did not think I could talk my way out of this one.

I lay on the hard ground and stared up at the sky, watching the stars swim back and forth. When I blinked the tears away, my gaze lit upon a constellation I recognized: Kouneli, the Rabbit. The sight was so unexpectedly comforting that I almost broke down in a mixture of sobs and laughter. There, I thought. At least one thing here is familiar to you.

It also gave me a notion of which direction we traveled in. Our path curved back and forth somewhat to follow the terrain, but overall we had been heading southeast. That might prove useful, and so I filed the information away.

We rode throughout the next day, with the usual pause when the sun was at its height, and arrived at another camp just before sunset. By then Tom was in a wretched state, his skin blistered from overexposure to the sun. I had unbraided my hair during that first halt and used it to shelter my neck as best I could, but my feet were almost as badly off as Tom’s back. Any plan for escape would have to account for those injuries, or we would not get very far.

I was half afraid they would leave us in a heap on the bare dirt. But no: we were dragged into a tent, and after one of the men gave us water, he left our gags off. I supposed there was no reason to fear noise now.

It meant we could talk at last. “Tom,” I said urgently. “Are you all right?”

An inane question, of course—and yet one asks it all the time, in such moments. He tried to sit up, and made the most extraordinarily unpleasant noise when his movement brought part of his blistered arm into contact with the ground. “Stay still,” I said, and looked about for anything that might help. The tent was very bare, but there was a jar not too far away that proved to contain more water. I conveyed some to Tom in a cheap tin dipper, then drank my own fill. Then I found a nearby rag—it looked as if it had once been a man’s headscarf—and soaked it before laying the fabric across the worst of the blisters. Tom hissed through his teeth when it touched him, but then he sagged and said, “That helps. Thank you.”

“I assume these are the Banu Safr,” I said, as much for distraction as because I thought it needed saying. “If Suhail and the others went out to get a few camels back from their enemies, we can only hope they will do as much for us.”

“One hopes. Yes.” Tom shifted position, wincing. “Isabella, if you have a chance to get free, then go. Don’t wait for me.”

“Don’t be absurd,” I said, my heart beating so strongly I could taste my pulse. “I would not last two hours out there.” But he was not the only one thinking of escape. Two days and a night: a camel could go that long without water, easily, and a person might survive it. That assumed, however, that we could find our way back as efficiently as we had come. Under the circumstances, leaving without a supply of water would be suicidal.

Nor would I leave without Tom. They had not killed us… but if one vanished, who was to say the other would remain safe? (If I may be permitted the exaggeration of calling our situation there “safe.”) I said, “Now that we are here—and no longer gagged—we may be able to talk to someone. Negotiate a trade, perhaps. There must be something they want.”

“Ransom,” Tom speculated. “It will take them a long time to write to Pensyth in Qurrat, or Lord Ferdigan in Sarmizi. Longer to hear back. We may be here for a while.”

On that cheering note, we fell silent.

I had time to re-wet the rag twice before they came for us. One of the men cursed when he realized we had taken water from the jar; I presumed that meant we were in his tent. But not for long, as they dragged us upright and took us across camp to another shelter.

A woman waited for us there. The sight of her startled me: I had been thinking of the Banu Safr only as our enemies, and had therefore conceived of this as a military camp. But of course that was absurd; they were a tribe like any other, and had women, children, all the elements of ordinary life. I would have noticed them sooner, had I not been so concerned with the simple task of walking. I had pressed my feet often against the sides of the camel to keep the soles from being burnt, but the tops were in poor shape, and the rocks on the ground were sharp besides.

She took me behind a curtain to inspect me, while someone else presumably did the same to Tom. “My name is Isabella,” I said quietly to her as she moved around me. “What is your name?” She made no answer. I tried again, my Akhian broken more thoroughly than usual by the tension of my circumstances. “Please, water? My feet—pain. Cool is good.” But it seemed she was not there to treat me, for no help was forthcoming.

The inspection done, I was pulled back out into the main part of the tent, where a man waited. Tom soon joined me, and was pushed onto his knees at my side. I mentally identified the man as their sheikh; his clothing was finer than the others’, and he stood as one who is accustomed to wielding authority. To us he said, “You speak Akhian?”

Tom nodded, swaying on his knees with exhaustion. I said, “A little.”

“You are sojana,” he said. “Do you understand this?”

“Prisoners?” I said in Scirling, which of course did no good at all. Thinking of the words we had used for our dragons, I shifted to Akhian and said, “Captive.”

He nodded. “Please,” I said before he could go on, “what do you want? From us, or from others. Money? Camels?” I did not know the word for “ransom,” and could not assemble a good enough sentence to explain that I would be happy to negotiate.

The sheikh shook his head. “Someone else will come for you. Until then, you stay.”

Someone else? I doubted he meant the Aritat. Some unknown party, perhaps? The Banu Safr were rebellious; they did not have a city sheikh this man might answer to. But there could be a sheikh of greater renown, someone leading a different clan of his tribe. Or perhaps I was wrong, and he was not the sheikh. That man might be out even now with the raiding party that had stolen the camels, and this one waiting for his return.

“If we—” I stopped, frustrated with my linguistic limitations. I did not know how to ask whether there was any practice among the nomads that amounted to a white flag, a signal of peaceable parlay, under which we might be permitted to communicate with our friends and prevent them from doing anything foolish. I was not even certain I wanted to prevent them: as much as I feared the consequences if they staged a counter-raid, that might be our best chance at freedom. Once we were transferred to that unknown third party, who knew what would happen.

The sheikh did not wait for me to sort out what I wanted to say, much less how to say it. He left the tent, and Tom and I were alone with our captors.

TEN

I was able to guess some things about our captors. Based on physical resemblances and the way the woman behaved, I surmised that the two men who slept in the tent were brothers, and she was the wife of one. The husband had participated in the kidnapping, but the brother had not. I never did learn their names for certain; I thought the brother might be called Muyassir, but they were taciturn around us and addressed one another rarely. I thought of them as Kidnapper, Brother, and Wife. Kidnapper, Brother, and Wife

Tom and I were tethered to the two central poles of the tent, with tough leather cords we could not easily break nor unknot. These gave us some freedom of movement, but not much; and in any case neither of us was in a hurry to go anywhere. Tom spent most of his time lying facedown on the rugs that covered the ground, protecting his burned skin as much as he could. Despite his care, some of the blisters broke; any time I was given water, I used some of it to rinse the sores, hoping to prevent infection. When I moved about the tent, I did so on all fours, with my feet up in the air to keep them from scraping against anything. I could only do this in the brief periods when we were alone: to show the soles of the feet is a terrible insult in Akhian society, and the first time I put mine up to protect them, Brother retaliated with an immediate blow. This almost led to disaster, as Tom lunged to stop him from striking me again, and was himself struck in turn. I threw myself to the ground, babbling apologies in a mixture of languages, and learned my lesson.

I did achieve one minor victory early on. Our kidnappers had dragged me out of my tent in my nightgown, and I was exceedingly aware of this fact at every turn. I soon hit upon the tactic of huddling under one of the carpets, demanding in a loud voice to be provided with suitable covering against the eyes of all these strange men. Before long Wife took up my cause; it was the one point upon which we were united. I do not think back on the woman with any fondness, and I doubt it was my well-being which motivated her to speak; but I am grateful to her for that small measure of support, whatever the reasoning behind it.

So I was given a proper robe and headscarf, and even a belt—which Wife threw at me with a comment whose words I could not understand, but whose tone implied that a woman who went unbelted might engage in any sort of impropriety. The items were tattered and less than clean, but I counted them as a trophy nonetheless.

We gained another minor respite from the steps they took to secure us. The Banu Safr moved camp the very next day, to a different area with fresh pasturage, and Tom and I were loaded into a howdah on the back of one of the camels. With the sides tied shut around us, we could neither see where we were going, nor be observed by any scouts; but we were also sheltered from the sun. As stuffy as it became in there, I preferred it to the alternative, which might have killed Tom outright.

We were two days in transit to the next site, and Tom predicted that the Banu Safr would attempt to hide their trail, making it difficult for our companions to find us. By then I was fairly certain we had been taken in a different direction from the stolen camels, increasing my suspicion that the raid had been a diversion from this, their true mission. But who were the Banu Safr waiting for?

If I could not escape, then I might at least hope to answer that question.

Escaping would not be easy, and I hesitated to rush into a poorly planned attempt, for fear that doing so would only make matters worse. No one ever left sharp objects within our reach, with which Tom and I might cut our tethers. Even once we were free of those bonds, we would have to leave the tent without anyone noticing, or else overpower our guards without a disturbance. We ought to steal two camels: we could ride double, as we had on the way here, but that would tire our mount and make it easier for pursuers to catch us. I had grand visions of sending the entire herd of camels stampeding off into the wilderness, forcing the Banu Safr to choose between their captives and their livelihoods; but I did not know if camels were prone to stampeding, and even if they were, it would be impossible to drive off enough of them at once.

Hunting for openings we might exploit, I found myself noticing other things. The rugs that carpeted the floor of the tent, for example, were clearly new: their nap was still thick, their colours unstained and undimmed. When Wife cooked meals, she used brass pots that lacked the scrapes and small dents of older tools. She wore quite a bit of gold jewelry as well—cheap stuff, as even I could tell, but she seemed very proud of it, and during our move to the new campsite I saw her displaying it to another woman, in the manner of one showing off a new acquisition.

All of it pointed toward wealth recently obtained. It might have been a reward to Husband and Brother for their valour; I rather thought most of it predated the kidnapping, but the Banu Safr had been causing trouble for a while, and sheikhs are supposed to be generous with their followers. But where had the sheikh gotten that wealth? This tribe lacked the city connections that helped enrich their brethren. They might have been extorting “brotherhood” from villages in settled areas; that is the term given to the protection money that was once common, before the current political arrangements came into being. (Indeed, one could argue that the tax money the city sheikhs now receive and distribute to their tribes is still “brotherhood,” just given a different name. But that is neither here nor there.) Their rebellious status meant the Banu Safr scraped by in marginal territory, however, and I could not imagine the villages within their reach had any great wealth to offer. Where, then, was the money coming from?

“Perhaps,” I muttered to Tom when I had the chance to share this with him, “it is coming from whoever is coming for us. Whoever has put them to the task of interfering with our work.” There was no longer any question in my mind as to whether the raids had been solely a product of tribal enmity, or spurred by the attempt to capture and breed dragons. If the Banu Safr only hated the Aritat, they would not have bothered kidnapping Scirling naturalists.

“I’ve seen a surprising number of guns, too,” Tom murmured back. “All throughout the camp. They don’t look very new… but where are these people getting them?”

He and I did not have many opportunities to talk. Our captors became angry when we conversed in Scirling—or, for that matter, in any language they did not understand—and in Akhian, of course, they could supervise everything we said. But there were times each day when Wife stepped out to fetch water or handle some other domestic matter, and then we could whisper briefly. We debated trying to leave during one of those absences, if we could break our cords. Even with clothing, however, I would not long be mistaken for an Akhian woman; and Tom, of course, was still clad in only the trousers he had worn to sleep. (They gave him a robe and a headscarf when he went out; but with his burns, this was not a mercy.) At night, we might stand a better chance outside the tent… but inside the tent, night meant three enemies sleeping at our elbows.

Unfortunately, we could not afford to wait for a good opportunity to escape. Several days after our arrival in the new campsite, Tom overheard a snatch of alarming conversation.

“We’re to be handed off,” he whispered to me when he came back to the tent, the words harsh and quick. “I don’t know who’s coming for us, but—”

But whoever it was, we almost certainly did not want to be in their clutches. I bit my lip, thinking. “Tonight—”

Tom shook his head. “Sooner. Make them take you out, and run.”

They never allowed us both to leave the tent at the same time. Tom had already made that calculation, though, and put a finger on my lips when I would have refused to leave him behind. “I’ll distract them,” he said, and then we could say no more; Brother was coming back into the tent, and he already looked at us with suspicion.

I wanted to argue with Tom. Even with a distraction, I stood very little chance of escaping. But I recognized the set of his jaw all too well. Even if I had the freedom to say everything on my mind, I would not persuade him. All I would do was squander this opportunity, slim as it was.

To allay Brother’s suspicions, I waited a short time, quelling the urge to fidget. I could not delay long, though, for fear Wife would return; if she did, my semblance of a plan would fall to dust. Ordinarily she accompanied either Brother or Kidnapper when they took me out to attend to biological necessities, which I then performed under her watchful eye. I had no desire, and likely insufficient skill, to subdue her. Seeing opportunity in her absence, I spoke up, indicating an urgent need to leave the tent.

Brother did not want to take me without her supervision. But I insisted, until finally he spat what sounded like a curse and unknotted my tether, leading me out into the morning sunlight.

He took me out past the edge of camp, to the area used for such matters. I gave him a freezing glare when it seemed he might stay by my side; he looked disgusted and turned his back. It was not enough. If I tried to send him out of sight, though, over the low rise that separated us from the camp, he would become suspicious. I found myself eyeing a rock on the ground a little distance away, and thinking very unpleasant thoughts.

Shouts from the camp stopped me before I could decide one way or another. Brother took a step away, listening; then he ran to the top of the rise and a short way down the other side, his attention fixed on the commotion. That, no doubt, was Tom at work, and my heart ached to think what he might have done to cause so much noise.

But I would not let it be for nothing. Hiking up my borrowed skirts, I ran.

There was broken ground not far away, studded with scrubby trees, which might afford me sufficient cover to hide. Brother would search, or call for help; in time they would bring the salukis to run me down. I must make it to a camel or a horse before that happened, or my escape attempt would not get me even a half mile to freedom.

When I saw movement up ahead, I knew even half a mile had been sheer optimism.

There was a man among the rocks, armed and veiled against the dust: a guard, I presumed. I veered to the right, wincing as my bare feet slammed into the hard ground. Behind me I heard more shouts, Brother noticing my break for freedom. I ran for all I was worth, but it was not very much. I had not gone a hundred meters when Brother slammed into me from behind, knocking me down and driving all the breath from my lungs.

What followed was unpleasant. Brother dragged me back into camp—and I do mean dragged; he did not even permit me to regain my feet. Tom and I were both beaten soundly for our disobedience, him worse than me. When that was done, they threw us once more into the tent. I suspect that were it not for the security the tent offered, they would have staked us out in the dust, like the guard dogs.

Lying sprawled on the carpet, Tom spoke in a voice barely more than a whisper. “I’m sorry. But we had to try.”

“Quite right,” I said, trying to sound resolute. One of his eyes was swollen nearly shut. “Tom… do you think you can ride? Tonight?”

He lifted his head just enough to look at me, then put it down before anyone could notice. We had no chance to speak after that, but we knew one another well enough that we did not need to. The last thing anyone expected was for us to try to escape a second time, so hard on the heels of the first. There was good reason for that—we were in dreadfully bad shape to be attempting anything—but what could they do if we failed? Beat us a second time? It seemed they would not kill us, even when provoked. And while I did not relish the prospect of pain, I was more and more certain I did not want to be handed off to whomever had ordered our kidnapping.

Our second plan was no more complicated than our first, for we had nothing with which to complicate it. While Wife stood in the opening of the tent, calling out to a friend of hers across the way, I unhooked the lamp from its place on the central pole for long enough to spill a bit of oil on the knots of our tethers. That, I hoped, would speed the process of unknotting them, which we must try to do in the dark.

We had to wait until they were fully asleep. When at last their breathing evened out and stayed that way for a time, Tom and I turned our attention to the cords. He was better with knots than I, and had watched how Brother and Kidnapper undid our bonds; his slid free first, and then he bent to work on mine.

In the grand scheme of things, it was not much of a victory. Getting ourselves loose from the tent pole was only the first of many steps that must be completed before we could escape, and far from the hardest. But I took heart from it anyway as I stood, biting my lip when my abused feet took my weight.

Once more I felt a breeze upon my cheek.

This time I had no confusion as to the cause. The sensation was not from the direction of the front flap, and I was wide awake; I could see the paler spot where the back wall of the tent had opened, its seam cut apart, and someone was crawling through.

I did not know until much later that the nomads tell tales of this sort of thing; indeed, it is one of their favourite genres. I only knew that I thought, He is a madman.

The Aritat had indeed come after us, and Suhail had led them himself.

He paused just inside the slit, allowing his eyes to adjust to the greater darkness within. Tom took a step forward. Fearing he had not recognized that dim silhouette, I gripped his wrist to stop him. Tom’s breath hissed between his teeth, and for a moment all three of us froze, for fear he had roused our captors.

They, however, were quite accustomed to Tom’s small sounds of pain in the night. No one spoke or sat up, and after a moment Suhail parted the slit in the tent wall again. It may have been to confirm what he thought he had seen, or to usher us out. I took it as the latter.

Suhail stayed put while Tom and I crawled through the gap, then followed us out. His clothes were dun-coloured and his face whitened with ash; on a night like this one, with the moon bright in the sky, that was better camouflage than darkness would have been. Tom blended in a good deal better than I did in my borrowed clothes.

Leaving that camp was one of the most terrifying things I have ever done. The Aritat had not come in sufficient numbers to stage an assault—and any such attempt might have had dire consequences for Tom and myself. Instead we departed by what I presumed were the same means the Banu Safr had used to kidnap us, the chief difference being that Tom and I were on our feet.

Suhail led us, crouching in the shadow of one tent until he saw that the way was clear, then running for the next. Our path seemed tortuous, angling first one way, then another, in order to avoid guard dogs and camels couched alongside the tents. Partway through this I realized we were not alone: two other men of the Aritat were paralleling our path, and judging by the knives and rifles they held, both were prepared to kill anyone who stumbled across us. After that I could scarcely breathe.

Only when we left the final row of tents did my lungs begin to work properly. I knew we were not yet clear; if someone noticed us missing the camp would give chase. But we were past the point at which someone might accidentally stumble upon us—or so I believed.

He was not a guard, I think. I do not know who he was. He carried no rifle, and seemed utterly startled when we scrabbled up a narrow wash and came face-to-face with him.

The tableau lasted for only an instant. He stared at us, mouth open in surprise. Then a hand clamped over that mouth, for someone had risen up behind him; another hand passed over his throat, and blood fountained out in its wake, black in the moonlight.

Andrew held on a moment longer, until the man had stopped thrashing. Then, breathing quickly, he lowered the body to the ground. “Come on,” he whispered. “Before someone wonders where he’s gone.”

The sudden violence of it paralyzed me. But Suhail took me by the arm, heedless of propriety, and pulled me forward. Their camels were not far away. We mounted up, and were gone before the Banu Safr knew we had escaped.

I will not say much of that ride. It reminded me far too vividly of another desperate flight, which some of my readers may recall. (Tom was not half so badly injured as Jacob had been, but he could not stay on a camel without riding double; the resemblance was more than enough to upset me.)

Andrew stayed close beside me. My relief at seeing him warred with the unpleasant realization that my brother had indeed become a soldier; and this meant more than simply putting on a uniform and idling about in foreign countries. His clothes were stained with blood, which of course we could not stop to wash out. The man he killed belonged to an enemy tribe, one that had kidnapped and mistreated me in an effort to stop my work… but it was a long time before that memory no longer made me shake.

We rode pell-mell for Aritat territory, and if you have never been atop a galloping camel, you will have a difficult time understanding what that was like. When it moves at a trot or a pace, a good camel may have a remarkably smooth gait; at a gallop, it is about as stable as a bucking horse. We did not gallop the whole distance, of course, as that would have been a good way to kill our mounts. But we did so often enough for it to be exhausting—because of course we had to assume the Banu Safr were pursuing us. Suhail’s companions assured us that the enemy camels were poor creatures, with no chance of catching Aritat camels in the chase; but this was not so reassuring as it might have been.

Our Akhian rescuers were in good spirits overall, even when the skies opened the next night and drenched us in chill rain. They laughed and clapped one another on the back, showing a gaiety wholly at odds with my usual impression of the nomads. I gathered that nobody of the Aritat had carried out that sort of secret, nighttime raid in generations; their enemies thought them incapable of it. Such efforts were not deemed as glorious as the more public sort of raid, charging into battle atop a spirited horse—but there was a romance to the activity that could not be denied. One of the fellows seemed to think this would impress the girl he hoped to marry, and preened as he rode.

It certainly had impressed me, to the point where it robbed me of anything resembling eloquence. When I attempted to thank Suhail for the risk he had taken on our behalf, it came out pure stammering incoherence. He fixed his gaze between the ears of his mount and said, “I should have moved more quickly. When you ran…”

Startled, I turned to stare at him. That figure I had seen in the distance—in my fright, I had not looked properly, had not recognized him as I ordinarily would. Not a Banu Safr guard after all.

“Perhaps it was for the best,” I said, swallowing. “Had you come to my aid then, who knows what would have happened to Tom.”

“You would not have been beaten,” Suhail answered, gaze still fixed. “But the attempt showed us which tent you were being kept in, which we hadn’t known. I am grateful to you for that.”

The robe and headscarf they put on Tom when he left the tent had not merely been for propriety; the clothing was a security measure, designed to conceal him from watching eyes. “How long were you out there?”

“Since the day before.” He straightened his shoulders and managed something like a smile. “And hardly needed, it seems. You were halfway out of the tent by the time I got there. All we did was provide camels for the ride home.”

That came far short of the mark—but I could not find the words to say it. Instead I asked, “Has anyone been told that we vanished? Outside of the camp itself, of course.”

I had not meant to make him look at me, but I succeeded. His head whipped around, the damp ends of his scarf swinging loose. “No. What could they do in time? I knew we could get you back.”

This last was said with more than a little bravado—but as he had indeed gotten us back, I could hardly argue. It was a relief to know the Scirling cavalry would not soon go thundering across the desert to start a war that was no longer needed… or at least, I hoped it would not be. “We’ll have to tell them now,” I said with a sigh. “If only because I’m certain there is more going on here than a few raids born of traditional grudges.” I told him what Tom and I had observed in camp: the signs of wealth, the unusual quantity of guns.

He frowned especially over the guns. “I thought they had too many,” he muttered, twisting to glance over his shoulder as if he could count the firearms from here. “Who could be paying them? The Muwala? Or—” He stopped himself, shaking his head. Such names would mean nothing to me, ignorant as I was of Akhian politics. What mattered was that we had evidence of conspiracy; others would be better positioned than I to investigate it.

The Aritat camp was not where we had left it. I was grateful anew for our rescuers, who saved us not only from the Banu Safr but also from wandering in the desert like something out of Scripture. I nearly lost my composure when I saw that Umm Azali had pitched our tent alongside her own, so that it was ready and waiting for Tom and me to collapse into it. She inspected our burns and other ills, pronounced them not so serious as to need Ghalbi attention, and doctored us as necessary, while Suhail reported to Hajj Nawl.

He returned to us just before sunset, when Tom was asleep and Andrew was in the tent next door obtaining our supper. I met him outside, so as to avoid waking Tom. “You will both be well, I hope?” he asked in a low voice.

“Yes, with a bit of rest,” I said. “A few of the blisters need care, but we will heal.”

“Good,” he said. “It will help if I can say that to my brother and your colonel.”

The words caught me unprepared, though they should not have. “You mean—you are going back to Qurrat?”

Suhail shrugged, looking away. The tents cast elongated shadows across the ground, and I could not help but think how much this camp resembled the one I had just fled. Nomads can tell the difference between the tribes based on little more than camel tracks, but such skill is well beyond me. “I have to,” he said. “I can’t write a letter saying, ‘misplaced your naturalists, so sorry, but got them back mostly in one piece.’”

When he put it like that, I supposed he could not. “I see.”

He hesitated, then said, “I do not like to abandon you, though.”

I could imagine what was going through his head. He went off to chase raiders, and came back to find us missing; now he proposed to leave us again. Who knew what might happen in his absence? “Do you think the Banu Safr will attack again?”

“Yes. We killed one of their own; they’ll want revenge for that. But we alerted the Firiyin when we were chasing the camel thieves—they’re another clan of the Aritat, and they’re nearby. They’ll keep an eye on the Banu Safr, and send warning if they see a force headed this way.”

How the nomads remained so aware of each other’s locations and movements in the vast expanse of the desert, I could not comprehend. I trusted his trust in them, though. I therefore said, “You would not be abandoning us. Your duty is to your brother, not to Tom or myself. And as you said, people in Qurrat need to know what happened here.”

During our previous travels, I had often thought of Suhail’s expression as being open and sunny. That was less true in Akhia, however, and now it closed off into a polite mask. “If you are certain.”

“The language is a difficulty,” I allowed, “but we have dealt with that before. Your responsibility lies in the city: I would not keep you from it.”

“Very well,” Suhail said—and he left the very next morning.

ELEVEN

It took two weeks and a pointed comment from my brother before I realized I had made a mistake.

Those two weeks were rather busy. We moved camp soon after our return, heading farther from the Banu Safr, even though the grazing to the south was not as good. (I later learned that the other Aritat clans mustered a force of fighting men, and these kept their enemy usefully occupied while we got away.) Our status as guests meant that Tom, Andrew, and I would not have been expected to assist, even had Tom and I not been recuperating from our injuries—but I chafed more than I expected to at the idleness. “At least there are camels to carry things for us,” Tom said wryly. He remembered as well as I did the challenge of shifting our gear through the Green Hell of Mouleen, with nothing more than our backs (and those of the Moulish we could persuade to assist us) to bear it.

I was exceedingly glad not to have to carry everything this time. I had packed few changes of clothing; in the field I am often resigned to wearing the same garments long after I would have considered them unacceptably soiled at home. We had one saddlebag loaded with field glasses, thermometers, and other scientific equipment; another contained books and empty notebooks, pencils for my sketches, Tom’s dissection tools, and so forth. On the whole, it was not so very much. But there was also the tent and all its furnishings; and Husam ibn Ramiz had not stinted us there. We lived in a style matched only by the local sheikh.

Because of the duty laid upon them, the Aritat took our needs into account, choosing a wadi that might afford us a better chance to see dragons. Tom said, “I get the impression that’s why they were sent the new breeding stock. The work they’ve been doing on our behalf has lost them more than a few camels and horses along the way.”

I remembered well the camel that had served as bait during the nighttime hunt. “Then I am glad they are being compensated. They will likely lose more before this enterprise is done.”

Tom and I, however, had come to the desert to observe life, not death. It was mating flights we needed to see, rather than hunting flights, and those lacked vultures to serve as a signal flag. To achieve our goal, we had to exert much more effort.

Mating flights did not take place over the hospitable wadis where the nomads pastured their camels. True to their name, desert drakes preferred to conduct their displays over the stony, barren ground in between regions of relative bounty.

I owe a great debt to al-Jelidah, the Ghalbi man we had been told about upon our first arrival. He had returned to the Aritat camp while Tom and I were captive, and we met with him at the first opportunity, to recruit his help in seeking out dragons.

As I mentioned before, I lack the encyclopedic knowledge that permits the nomads to distinguish between one tribe and another based on small details: the shape of a camel’s footprint, the way they secure their headscarves, the roofline of their tents. Even I, however, could tell at a glance that al-Jelidah was not of the Aritat. He wore a long shirt of gazelle skin, and covered his hair with a tied cloth rather than the more usual scarf-and-cord. Where most of the Aritat wore woollen socks in winter, or else boots of camel leather, and sandals in the summer, al-Jelidah went barefoot regardless of season, and the soles of his feet were as hard as horn.

He often travelled alone in the desert, which is almost unheard of. Even in these days of relative peace, conflicts often arise between the tribes, and a man alone is easy prey for enemies. But the Ghalb are the enemy of none: many despise them as beggars, but they are permitted to travel throughout the region, and few bother to trouble them. Their camps are small, rarely more than an extended family in total, and individuals may be found in the oddest places—such as the depths of the Jefi, chasing dragons.

I do not know what he made of our work. To him it hardly seemed to matter; he had been hired as a guide for us, and would have guided us in search of anything we wanted, be it dragons, locusts, or the truffles which liven up the nomad diet in winter. He made no complaint when the sheikh insisted we take Haidar with us, the man who had led us to watch the dragon hunt at night. To the best of my recollection, I never heard al-Jelidah complain about anything. He was as phlegmatic as stone.

Haidar came with us as a guard, and made no secret of that fact. (He would have brought nine more of his fellows, too, had we allowed it, but such a party would make our work all but impossible. Tom persuaded the sheikh that Haidar, Andrew, and himself constituted sufficient armed force.) His presence was a great boon to us, for we spent more time out of camp than in it, and his hunting both extended our rations and gave us a welcome respite from the tedium of dates, coffee, and unleavened bread.

This was the group we took into the field proper. They saw me in trousers, as few others did; al-Jelidah did not seem to care (as per usual), Haidar frowned in disapproval but said nothing (I made sure to don a belt, so he would not think my morals suspect), and Andrew clapped one hand over his eyes, proclaiming loudly that he took no responsibility for my behaviour. But if I was to ride throughout the Jefi in search of dragons, I did not want a skirt or robe hampering my ability to move at speed.

The first drake we found was male. I noted him on the map I was creating, but we spent little time in his vicinity, for we were interested not only in the flight but its fruit. Female drakes, as we learned from al-Jelidah, will not lair within a ten-kilometer radius of their male counterparts, and so we rode a circuit at that distance from the overhang in which he sheltered, hunting signs of a female. It took days to locate one, for that region has many rock formations that can serve as lairs; but, having found it, now we knew where to watch.

We made a meager bivouac in a sheltered nook from which we could easily venture forth to watch the site. We took it in shifts to do this latter, for our quarry had hunted with great success just before we arrived; we saw her dragging her full belly up the scree to her home, and then had to wait for hunger to drive her forth once more. Indeed, we were altogether more than a week in that location, twiddling our thumbs and hoping for profit—which left us a great deal of time for other occupations.

For the most part Tom and I spent our energy on recording desert life more generally, so as to create a picture of the environment in which the drakes thrive. There is a surprising amount out there, at least in winter: everything from large mammals like the onager and oryx down to beetles, scorpions, and an abundance of spiders. But nomads are accustomed to filling their idle moments with conversation, and so we spent a great deal of time talking, whether around the fire at night or during our shifts watching the female’s lair. It was during one of the latter, when I had only Andrew for company, that he enlightened me as to my error.

I did not think I had mentioned Suhail much. From what I could recall, my work had occupied the bulk of my attention, as it ordinarily does; I only mentioned Suhail at that moment because I was discussing the possibility that the Draconeans had successfully bred dragons. Andrew said—out of nowhere, or so it seemed to me—“You know, Isabella, if you wanted that fellow here, you should not have sent him away.”

“I—what?” I stared at my brother in complete perplexity. “I don’t know what you mean. I did not send Suhail away.”

Andrew had been fanning himself with his hat while he leaned in the shadow of a tall rock. Now he gestured with it as if to wave off my words. “All right, all right. I should have said, you ought not to have told him to stay away.”

Indignation was rapidly overtaking my perplexity. “I did not do that, either. I merely said—”

“That his duty was in Qurrat. Translation: you didn’t want him to come back.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth. But I could not say that to Andrew. “What ought I have said, then?”

Andrew rolled his eyes heavenward. “How about ‘hurry back’? Or ‘we’ll be waiting for you here’? Except that one isn’t true, I suppose; we’ve moved camp again. You might have tried ‘I left something in Qurrat; would you be a dear and fetch it for me?’”

“Suhail is not a dog, to fetch my slippers on command. And I can hardly go calling him ‘dear,’ when—” I clamped my mouth shut, breathing out through my nose. “Andrew, I am trying to keep my behaviour above reproach. I do not need you encouraging me to do otherwise.”

“Oho.” Andrew sat forward, folding his legs like a tailor and putting his elbows on his knees. His gaze, above the reddened skin of his cheeks, was more piercing than it had any right to be. “Is that how the wind lies.”

“Don’t use nautical metaphors; they make you sound ridiculous.” But I was needling him in the hope of distracting him from the topic, and we both knew it.

Andrew let me squirm for a long moment. Then he said, “I should have guessed, when you asked me to carry that love note to him.”

My outraged squawk startled lizards back into the rocks. “It was not a love note!”

“From you? ‘A piece of research material’ is as good as a lock of your hair, tied up in a scented ribbon.” He laughed.

For once I blessed the lingering effects of my sunburn. It made my skin peel disgustingly… but it also meant no one could see when I was blushing. Andrew had been there when I met Jacob in the king’s menagerie, standing at the edge of the dragon enclosure. He knew that courtship had proceeded along unusual lines. It was true that if I were minded to seek a new husband, an intellectual gift would show my esteem far more sincerely than a more conventional token of love.

All of that, however, was neither here nor there. I had not come to the desert for personal reasons, but professional ones. “Andrew, I have other things on my mind. You are in the army; you know as well as I do how important this research is. Your work in Coyahuac—were you securing mines there? No, do not answer that; if you were, you likely are not permitted to say.” In theory it was possible to synthesize dragonbone. We had not yet mastered the process; but if we ever did, we would need the raw materials, some of which were abundant in Coyahuac. “Right now, this programme here is our best hope. We must have caeligers to face those of the Yelangese, or we will lose ground to them all around the world. If Suhail staying in Qurrat helps me concentrate on my work, so much the better.”

“But it doesn’t.” Andrew climbed to his feet, knocking dust and pebbles from his palms. “I can see your thoughts drifting, a dozen times a day. Besides—it doesn’t have to be one or the other.”

I felt weary, as if I were ten years older than my brother, instead of a year his junior. “Yes, it does. You and I are not held to the same standards, Andrew. People will forgive a slip, a weakness, a minor personal folly—when it comes from a man. They may click their tongues at you, even gossip about your behaviour… but at worst, it will only reflect on you.

“If I misstep, it goes far beyond me. Errors on my part are proof that women are unsuited to professional work; they are evidence that the Crown should never have assigned a woman to this post. My flaws are not merely my own. And so I cannot permit myself to indulge in anything that might validate the assumptions people have already formed—about me, and all my sex.”

Andrew scowled and kicked at a small stone, which ricocheted off into the dust. “Bollocks. Sorry, Isabella, my language—you aren’t like other women. People know that.”

“Ah, yes,” I said ironically. “I have made myself exceptional. It is a wonderful game, is it not? Because I am exceptional, anything I achieve does not reflect on my sex, for of course I am not like them. Strange, though, how that division seems to vanish when we are speaking instead of my shortcomings. Then I am a woman, like any other.”

I had never seen my brother look so uncomfortable. The last time we had been in the same country, I would never have said such things. I did not even know what provoked me to say them now: sibling trust, the constant irritations I had suffered in Qurrat, or—yes—my wish that Suhail had not gone away. I had not even spoken this angrily to Tom, who knew more of my feelings on the matter than anyone save Natalie.

Andrew retreated from the awkwardness by returning to our original topic. “Suhail, though. I saw his face, when he was packing up to go back. I think you hurt him, Isabella.”

Now it was my turn to flinch from his words. But fortune smiled upon me: at that moment a scraping sound drifted on the desert wind, and I turned to see the drake at the mouth of her lair.

She yawned prodigiously and lay down just beyond the edge of the shade, basking in the sun’s warmth. Her scales brightened gold where the breeze wisped dust away, and her broad ruff rose from time to time, catching the air and, I thought, cooling her slightly, by means of the blood vessels that laced its underside, akin to those on her wings. Apart from that movement, she was so still that a fox ran near her jaws; she was not yet hungry, for she let it pass with no more comment than one opened eye.

None of this was especially noteworthy, but observing it ended my conversation with Andrew. He said nothing further then, nor when he and I returned to the camp, leaving Tom to keep watch until dark.

As my readers may well imagine, though, his words stuck under my skin like burrs. Had I done wrong by Suhail? I had only meant to assure him that we would not perish if left alone for a time… but reviewing my words, I saw how they could be interpreted in quite another light. From that perspective, I sounded ungrateful and cold, eager to be rid of him at last.

Surely he did not think that—not when I was so grateful for his aid. And not after I had given him the rubbing of the Cataract Stone. I blushed to remember what Andrew had said regarding that, but clung to the thought nonetheless. Although calling it a love note was a great overstatement, I would not deny it was a token of friendship. Suhail had understood that, had he not?

Without him present to ask, I could only speculate. And, of course, plan what I might say when he returned.

In the meanwhile, I had my work; and it kept me very busy indeed.

When desert drakes rise to mate, they must signal to one another their readiness to entertain callers of the opposite sex. This is accomplished in dramatic fashion, by the female ascending to the peak of the tallest hill, dune, or rock formation she can find and roaring in a powerful voice that, it seemed to me, must carry to the farthest edges of the desert. She accompanies this with many gouts of flame; and for this reason, the display customarily takes place just before dawn, when her flame will be visible at a great distance.

Male drakes who wish to present themselves for her consideration travel to this location and array themselves around the base of her perch. They make a great presentation of their ruffs and wings, stretching both as far as they can go so as to make themselves appear large; they are of course smaller than their female counterpart, and a male who is too dainty will rarely win the attention of his lady-love.

The female, having attracted her suitors, will snarl and breathe flame at those she finds unacceptable. I am told, though I did not witness it with my own eyes, that a particularly stalwart male may weather this abuse and keep his place; but most who are thus spurned will depart, leaving behind three or so that have gained her favour. These are the dragons who participate in the mating flight itself.

With a great sweep of her wings, the female leaps into the air. Her suitors follow, but as they start without the advantage of height, it takes them longer to become airborne. This gives the female a respectable lead, and she uses it shamelessly, wheeling and soaring above the desert floor. Here a smaller male may sometimes fare better than expected, if he is especially nimble. But a drake who relies on such tactics must succeed quickly, or not at all; otherwise the flight becomes a contest of endurance, and his larger brethren will win out. They maneuver for position in the sky, lashing out at one another as circumstance requires or allows. It is not uncommon for a male to be wounded in this struggle, and to quit the field on account of his injuries. This happened in the very first flight we observed, and the beast in question was not able to hunt for some time afterward. I suspect he did not survive the summer, for a drake that does not feed well in the wet season will lack the bodily resources to last when food becomes scarce.

This drama enters its third and final act when one of the males succeeds in attaining a position above the female. Now he may attempt to stoop upon her; she ordinarily permits this, though I did see one female drive off her would-be paramour in no uncertain terms. (I can only speculate as to why, and none of my guesses are terribly scientific.) Here there is a countervailing pressure against the desire of a female to seek out a large mate: she must sustain them both in gliding flight while the copulation takes place. This is a brief matter, but the strain upon her must be enormous, and more than one flight has ended in failure because the participants had to separate early to avoid crashing.

The airborne stage of the process poses quite a challenge for the landbound audience. Drakes have been known to travel kilometers while conducting their aerial dance, and often the only good perch from which to observe is the one upon which the female began her display. Tom and I opted for a more active approach, which is to say: we threw ourselves into the saddle and set out to see just what Akhian horses were capable of.

Our mounts responded magnificently. On more than one occasion I was charging hell-for-leather after the drakes as they soared away, only to wheel my mare about on her hindquarters when they came swooping back in my direction. At any time other than during a mating flight, Tom and I would have made irresistible bait, easy prey for a drake to claw up or burn to a crisp. But all their attention is on the dance; and so we raced madly about beneath them, crying out observations to one another that often became lost in the roaring.

This was exhausting work, and by the time the flight ended I would gladly have collapsed in the nearest bit of shade—but I could not stop there. The most vital data was yet to come.

Andrew had been waiting in the shelter of a small cliff, safely distant from where the female made her initial display. Tom and I rode to his side, and I dismounted at a trot—a stunt I had not tried since I was fifteen, but I did not want to lose a single moment. Our camels were already kneeling in the sand, and lurched to their feet almost before we were in the saddles. For rapid changes of direction at speed, horses were the most effective choice; but only camels could do what we needed now.

We set off with al-Jelidah, first at a gallop (to make up the ground we had lost), then slowing to the pacing gait the camels could maintain for an extended period of time. The drake coasted ahead of us, sometimes ascending or making leisurely sweeps from side to side, looking for a good nesting ground. The sun climbed high overhead, and I had not had a drink of water in hours. But ahead of us the land rose steadily, and I whacked my camel with my stick, urging her up the slope.

Just as I reached the crest, al-Jelidah’s borrowed camel surged forward to join mine. As soon as he came within range, he leaned forward to seize the halter, pulling me up short. “What are you doing?” I exclaimed.

He gestured ahead, and spoke a word I did not know.

This has happened to me more times than I can count, in the course of my travels. I had a list in my head of possible translations: dangerous, forbidden, cursed, and so forth. But Tom, pulling his camel to a halt on the other side of me, said, “Isabella, remember the map.”

Our pursuit of the drake had gotten me entirely turned around. I had to work to recall the geography of the area, and every second I delayed, our quarry’s lead grew. The sun was no help, being too high overhead to provide much sense of direction. But when I turned to the ground ahead of me, I saw that it was increasingly broken; and then I remembered.

I stood at the edge of the Labyrinth of Drakes.

This is a curious geological formation, nestled at the base of the Qedem mountain range. Millennia of floods from the higher peaks have carved the sandstone into a maze of canyons and gullies, some of them exceedingly narrow, so that one seems to be riding through a corridor without a roof. There are oases within it, but little space to farm, and no one lives there today.

Thousands of years ago, of course, it was quite different.

The Draconean ruins there are famous, and have been since they were rediscovered by the Haggadi outlaw Yoel ben Tamir while he was fleeing from his pursuers. Whether they constituted a city or merely a ritual site was a matter of long-standing scholarly debate. Giorgis Argyropolous, the Nichaean antiquarian who made the first comprehensive survey of the place, gave fanciful names to each of the structures he found, and termed many of them temples; those appellations have endured, even though in most instances there is not a shred of evidence to support them. It is the natural response of the human imagination, when confronted by the silent, monumental remnants of the past: we assume that surely they were special, that the awe we feel is a sign of their hallowed nature.

That these ruins remained lost for so long is a testament to the hazards of the region. It is not safe to wander long in the Labyrinth: apart from the predators that lurk within, there are rock slides, and one may easily become lost in the winding passages. Furthermore, during the winter and spring there is great risk of sudden floods from storms at higher elevations, which can easily drown the unwary. In ancient times it is thought the Draconeans maintained dams which reduced this risk by channeling the flow in a controlled manner to where it was needed—but these are long gone. The peril of the Labyrinth remains.

Perilous or not, that was our drake’s destination. “We have to watch her nesting behaviour,” I said, trying to pull my camel free of al-Jelidah’s grip. “And take measurements once she is gone—temperature, the depth in the ground—”

Al-Jelidah cut the air with his free hand. “No.”

Tom chivvied his camel until it came around to stand in front of mine. She snapped her teeth at Tom’s mount, as if to express my own mood. “There will be other flights, Isabella,” Tom said. “And drakes who nest somewhere we aren’t liable to drown.”

I gestured at the canyons ahead. “They’re bone dry!”

“At the moment, to be sure. But how much has it rained in the mountains recently?” We did not know the answer to that… which was part of the problem. “The water could be on you in a heartbeat. And how are you going to chase her, when she can fly over the things you have to ride around? I know you aren’t afraid of risk—but this would be a damned stupid way to get killed.”

A damned stupid way to get killed might have described any number of incidents in my life, had my luck been only a little different. Tom’s steady gaze, though, reined in my impulse to give a defiant answer. A past history of reckless decisions did not oblige me to behave recklessly every time the opportunity arose. He would not mock me for showing caution; I had no reputation to maintain here.

And that thought—the notion of what other people might say—robbed me of all my momentum. Had my increasing notoriety gone that thoroughly to my head? The account I had written of my travels on the Basilisk, the speaking engagements I had taken after my return… despite my intentions, they had often skewed toward the sensational, rather than the scientific. A headlong charge into the Labyrinth of Drakes would have made a splendid story to tell. But my purpose here was not to increase my fame as an adventuress; it was to study dragons, not merely for the benefit of natural history, but for the future well-being of my nation. Risking my life, in a situation where I stood very little hope of success, would do nothing to further that goal.

Buried beneath that was something even less admirable: the realization that I wanted to go in simply because al-Jelidah had said no.

I released my camel’s rein and lifted my hands, relinquishing any intention of going forward. Tom nodded, looking relieved. He and I both lifted our field glasses and watched the drake for as long as we could; but she soon dropped down behind a promontory and was lost from sight. I imagined her digging the pit for her eggs, somewhere the intense desert sun would find and heat them, and vowed I would see it with my own eyes before long.

TWELVE

As Tom predicted, there were other flights. We developed quite a good system for observing them, too, stationing ourselves and Andrew at various points and dividing up the terrain so that we need not all race to watch. And very few of the dragons were as inconvenient as our first; most laid their eggs in more accessible locations.

I had an especially splendid chance to observe one of these, by dint of scrambling to the top of a large, rocky outcropping and peering down on the drake from above. She dug a shallow pit, scraping the earth sideways with her claws, rather than between her hind legs as a dog does. This done, she crouched over it and laid her eggs—six of them in total. Then she tossed sand back over them, and lowered her head to the ground to blow across it, blurring the marks of her activity. (They do not breathe fire over their eggs, whatever legend says. Doing so would vitrify the sand, and the resulting plate of rough glass would tell any interested predator that tasty treats lie below, ready to be tunneled out.)

We marked the spot and came back the next day, when we were sure the drake had gone. She would, we were told, revisit her clutch periodically, and rebury the eggs if necessary; but desert drakes do not brood, which gave us leisure to examine the site. Careful excavation netted us a great deal of data, from the depth at which the eggs are buried (fifteen centimeters or so: enough to keep them covered if the wind is not too fierce, but not so deep as to be entirely insulated) to the temperature of the ground (easily thirty degrees at the surface during the hottest part of the day; perhaps ten degrees cooler where the eggs lie). Standing by the egg pit, I could feel for myself how well the drake had chosen her spot. It lay in a shallow bowl, reasonably protected from the wind, but fully exposed to the sun. If our guesses about the role of heat were correct, then such conditions were vital to the successful incubation of the eggs.

“Do you want to take them?” Haidar asked when we were done, gesturing at the pit.

“No, definitely not,” I said. “By all means remember the location—but if we take them now, we will likely have nothing to show for our efforts but dead eggs. We do not know nearly enough yet to interfere so early in the process.”

Tom did take one egg, not to incubate, but to dissect. We had only rudimentary chemical equipment with us, but he analyzed the albumen and yolk as best as he could, and I packed the pieces of shell carefully in sand for later study. Their texture was very different from that of mature eggs, and the comparison might tell us something.

“Even if we can’t breed them,” he said to me one night, over the last scraps of our supper, “at least we’ll have learned a good deal about them.”

“We will figure out how to breed them,” I said. But having watched the mating flights in their full glory, I spoke with a good deal more assurance than I felt.

I have not yet said much about Suhail’s desert mother and desert father, and should remedy that now.

As with many of the relationships I recount in my memoirs, what I am about to describe came together over an extended period of time, through many small conversations and moments of rapport. I did not learn everything in one fell swoop (a phrase which, I note in passing, originated in the description of dragons hunting). For the sake of convenience, however, I will condense matters here—not to mention smooth over the inevitable linguistic difficulties—so that I might not tax my readers’ patience overmuch.

Umm Azali I came to know far better than her husband. This has generally been the pattern in most of the places I have gone: with the exception of Keonga, where my primary ally was considered to be neither male nor female, I have generally been on closest terms with my own sex. It is an extension of the same segregation I experience at home, which says that the conversation of women is primarily of interest to other women, as men’s is to men, and rarely do the twain meet. I had made concerted efforts to overcome this in the Flying University; but each expedition put me into a new social world, and I lacked both the time and the energy to pursue such ends except where necessary to my work.

(I did not realize until long after I had left the desert that the nomads of the Aritat treated me in some respects like a man. This is a thing that happens sometimes with widowed or divorced women, or those who are too old to go on bearing children: their disassociation from the primary marker of womanhood, which is to say motherhood, reduces the assumed distance between them and the world of men. I shall refrain from extended commentary on this, except to note that my own widowed status and lack of attendant child put me once more into something of a grey area—albeit not to the extent that had pertained in Keonga.)

Umm Azali and I never became what I would call close, largely because I spent so much time out in the desert pursuing dragons, rather than in camp. She was unfailingly friendly, however, which I attribute to my association with Suhail. It was therefore natural that I should talk to her about him.

“How long have you known him?” I asked her one day.

“Since he was a boy,” she answered. “Four years he was with us—for his fosterage. His nephew Jafar will come to us next year, for the same thing. No one would follow a sheikh who does not know the desert!”

I was mending a great rent I had torn in one of my dresses when it caught against a thorny bush; she was baking bread. Many of my conversations in the field have been conducted thus, with one or both of us engaged in some useful task; it is often more productive than when I try to question people too directly. “Was Suhail with you for more than just his fosterage, then?”

Umm Azali shrugged, kneading the dough with tough, efficient hands. “Off and on. Not always with us, not once he began to explore the ruins. More than he had as a boy, that is. But he visits often.”

Of course it would be out here that Suhail had cultivated his fascination with Draconean ruins. Although al-Jelidah had stopped me from going into the Labyrinth, I had seen any number of fragments during my own work: everything from a statue carved into the side of a cliff to the shaft of a stela, abandoned in its quarry after it cracked in half. Their fingerprints were all over the desert, worn down by the ages. “How old was he? During his fosterage, I mean.”

“Eight? At the start.” Umm Azali’s grin cracked her face. “Braids flapping as he ran about.”

I had noticed that the Aritat boys often wore their hair in two long braids, dangling down their chests. I forbore to mention that in my homeland, that style belonged exclusively to little girls; I was too busy reeling at the image of Suhail arrayed thus.

It was on a later day, I believe, that I asked her about the Draconean ruins, and his interest in them. Umm Azali clearly did not share that interest, for she merely shrugged again. “He used to imagine himself as an ancient prince. Lord of the desert—all sorts of foolishness, as children do. But mostly it was the language. Every time we rode past one of those carvings, he wanted to know what it said.”

We might soon have an answer to that, I thought, if he could translate the Cataract Stone. I wondered if he was working on that even now, back in Qurrat.

Umm Azali talked a great deal about her family: not merely Suhail and his brother Husam, whom she and her husband had fostered a few years before Suhail himself, but their son Azali and all his children; their daughter Safiyya, married to one of Abu Azali’s nephews; even their son Abd as-Salaam, who had, as Umm Azali put it, “grown his beard.” It took me some time to realize this was a colloquial way of saying he had become a prayer-leader, i.e., one who no longer cut his beard or hair. He lived now in a town on the edge of the desert, in the area where the Aritat would go once the rains ended and the desert became too dry to support the herds. (As nomad tribes go, the Aritat were of middling piety: they prayed, but only twice a day, and they observed the month of fasting according to when circumstance allowed, rather than the dictates of the calendar. Some of the tribes are very nearly heathen; for example, I did not recall seeing anyone among the Banu Safr pray during my captivity. Though admittedly, I had not seen much outside that tent.)

All of this was fascinating to me—but not, I must confess, because I had any great interest in their children and grandchildren. (Apart from Shahar, I had very few dealings with Umm Azali’s kin.) Rather, I prized the way these stories built up my sense of Suhail’s world and his past: the boy he had been when he came to the desert; the ways he had become a man here; the role he had among the Aritat, as his brother’s representative in the matter of the dragons. Knowing that he had once strutted about as an imaginary Draconean prince changed my understanding of him—and I will not relate some of the other stories Umm Azali told, on the occasions when we were sitting privately with other women and the conversation became distinctly improper. He had said so little of himself when we knew one another aboard the Basilisk; all I had known was that he was estranged from his family. To meet a woman who was kin of sorts, with whom Suhail appeared to have a warmer relationship, gave him a very different appearance in my mind.

In time I reached a point where I felt safe inquiring about that estrangement. I began by asking, “Do you know how I met Suhail?”

“During his travels,” she said.

“Yes. We encountered one another by chance, not once but twice. Very happy chance indeed, from my perspective. I was sad when we had to part company—when he received word that his father had died.”

Umm Azali made a noncommittal noise. We were not in public then; we had gone into the shade of the tent, for it was the hottest part of the day, and very few people were moving about camp. Abu Azali was out with his son’s herd, and Tom and Andrew were in the sheikh’s tent, enjoying his hospitality and the masculine company to be found there. It was as good a time as any to press.

“I know very little of Suhail’s father,” I said, “save that he was sheikh before Husam ibn Ramiz, and that he and Suhail were not close.” I hesitated for a moment, considering, then added, “You have no doubt noticed my familiarity in calling Suhail by his given name alone. It is because when I knew him, he used no other; and he said once that his father would not thank him for using his name.”

This time her noise was less noncommittal—rather more of a snort. Umm Azali said, “Hajj Ramiz ibn Khalis would not have wanted his name attached to what his son was doing.”

“Why not?” Scandal had attached itself to me, and by association to Suhail; but that came well after we met. If Suhail had done anything worthy of his own scandal before our first encounter, I had not heard of it.

“Those ancient ruins,” Umm Azali said. “Abu Husam wanted his younger son to grow his beard—he was a pious man. He did not like anything associated with idolatrous pagans.”

Idolatrous pagans? The Draconeans, I presumed, once I sorted out the Akhian words she had used. “When you say he did not approve…”

Umm Azali’s lips thinned. “He threatened to lock his son up until he renounced all connection with the blasphemies of the past. Suhail ran away.”

My mouth was very dry, for reasons that had nothing to do with the desert air. I remembered once, at the age of fourteen, being tempted to say “damn the cannons” and chase after my dreams regardless of consequence. I had not done it; I had endured my grey years and gone obediently in search of a husband, with fortunate results. Suhail, it seemed, had done otherwise—for a time.

I wanted to ask whether the occasion of Suhail running away had been the same journey on which I met him—and if so, how on earth Suhail had come to be as well funded as he was, for certainly he had no shortage of money when I knew him. I doubted his father had given him coin when he ran away, especially not for the purpose of digging up Draconean ruins. But Umm Azali was clearly becoming uncomfortable with this line of conversation, and so I let it rest there for the time being.

From Abu Azali I got a rather different impression of Suhail. I should pause here to explain that among the nomads of Akhia, poetry is a highly developed art; it has the virtue of requiring no material resources and posing no burden to carry from one camp to the next. One cannot go a day among them without hearing a poem, for children recite them in their games, and men and women alike share them during work and leisure, as a distraction from their labours or a pleasant pastime. They use it to remember history, to argue about disputed points, to elicit shocked giggles when in suitably private company… and they use it to tell stories.

I said before that actions like Suhail’s—creeping into an enemy camp in the middle of the night to carry off some theft by stealth—are a thing told of in desert tales. In the more prosaic cases, it is a camel or sheep the raiders go to steal; in the more romantic ones, it is the kidnapped son of a sheikh. Such poems had not been recited much in recent times, I think, for no one among the Aritat had done anything of the sort in many generations; but they became exceedingly popular following Suhail’s exploit. It is only natural that someone would undertake to compose a new poem in honour of the occasion.

Abu Azali missed no opportunities to recite that poem. He was so proud of his foster son, I thought he might burst. It made me regret that I did not understand the nomad dialect well enough to appreciate the poetry firsthand; I gathered that it compared Suhail to a desert drake, moving in stealth through the night, with only the wink of the stars to signal his passage. (I learned rather later that it was just as well I could not understand the poem, for its description of me would have left me unsure whether I should squawk in indignation or burst out laughing. There were descriptions of my beauty that likened me to a camel—a high compliment in that society, but in my case both unfounded and not at all an aesthetic I could comprehend—and a good deal of swoony behaviour that would have been very pleasing to my childhood friend Manda Lewis, but bore very little resemblance, I hoped, to reality.)

This, then, was my second image of Suhail: a noble warrior, the son of a sheikh, esteemed for his learning and his courage. It struck me as both accurate and not, for while I knew Suhail’s courage very well, I did not see him as a warrior. We had ridden sea-serpents, stolen one caeliger and crashed another (by means of a sea-serpent, no less), and I had once seen him cut a man’s arm off with a single blow—but that had been done to save the man’s life, and the effects of that action had haunted Suhail for some time after.

The truth, I knew, was neither the brave raider of the poem—who owed more to the conventions of the genre than to Suhail’s own actions—nor the fanciful boy Umm Azali remembered. Nor, indeed, was it the man I had known on the Basilisk, for that man had been without context or a past. The reality of Suhail ibn Ramiz lay somewhere at the intersection of those things, and other byways besides, which I had not yet begun to discover.

In short, I did not truly know who Suhail was. But I did know this much: whatever obstacles propriety might pose, I did not want him to become a stranger to me again.

In addition to pursuing mating flights and marking every cache of eggs we could find, Tom and I spent some time observing juveniles. “After all,” Tom said, “once they hatch, we still have to keep them alive. And it may be possible to train them out of some of their most inconvenient habits, if we know how they’re trained into them in the first place.”

We had of course missed the first window for this. The eggs hatch at the height of summer—a most unusual timing, biologically speaking, for that is when food is at its most scarce. Furthermore, we knew that desert drakes estivated, which is of course the summer equivalent of hibernation. It is not so deep a slumber as hibernation, and includes periods of wakefulness; but it rather suggested that the adults were not closely engaged with nurturing their offspring. (Indeed, a female desert drake makes me look like a doting mother by comparison.)

We could, however, learn something from last year’s crop, who were then approximately six months old. They did not hunt in the dramatic fashion of their elders, for they lacked extraordinary breath; instead they subsisted on lizards, rabbits, and the largely terrestrial bustards that form such a significant part of the nomad diet. We soon discovered that the majority of conflicts between humans and drakes occur with juveniles: the nomads will hunt an adult drake if they must, but avoid that whenever possible, owing to a justified fear of being burnt alive. The immature beasts, however, are merely competition, and are fought as such.

It was comical to watch the youngest drakes attempt to hunt. Their flight is not exceptionally well developed at that age; they will launch themselves into the air and sink down again quite rapidly, hoping to land on prey, but often failing. “If their parents are asleep when they hatch,” I asked Tom, “how do any of them survive?”

He shook his head, not taking his gaze from our current subject. “They may cannibalize one another after the hatching. If not that, then something else kills them; otherwise the desert would be overrun with ten thousand starving drakes.”

Cannibalism seemed plausible, given what we knew of swamp-wyrms and their immature form. “Even a nest full of siblings, though, would only feed them for a short time.”

“True.” The juvenile staggered on landing, then steadied itself with outstretched wings before sauntering onward, for all the world like a cat attempting to persuade onlookers that no lapse of grace had occurred. Tom turned to me, a grin creasing his sunburnt features. “The only way to answer that will be to come back out here again later.”

We both knew we would have to go back to Qurrat soon. The Aritat themselves would be retreating; the winter rains that made the desert briefly verdant had ended, and pasturage would rapidly become scarce. Most nomads would move to the fringes of more settled areas, to oases and the periphery of rivers, where they could wait out the dry months. The heart of the desert would be left to the drakes.

But our work was no respecter of personal comfort. To understand the drakes properly, we had to see them in all seasons—even if it meant walking into the furnace.

Tom and I planned it out in the shelter of our tent. “We’ll go back to Qurrat for a time,” he said. “Pensyth will want us back; and besides, there won’t be much we can do here until later. We’ll come out again in… early Caloris, do you think?”

“Late Messis would be better. It will depend on how matters are at the House by then. Well before the eggs are expected to hatch, so that we can take notes on estivation and such.” I did not say that I desperately wanted to sneak into the cavern of a sleeping dragon, but judging by Tom’s wry smile, he knew my thoughts regardless.

In the meanwhile, the Aritat would bring us eggs at regular intervals, rather than the system that had prevailed under Lord Tavenor, wherein they shipped their finds as their hunters encountered them. That way we could make reasonable estimates of the eggs’ maturity, which would allow us to experiment more precisely with their incubation conditions, as I had arranged with the honeyseeker eggs.

Our thermometers we left with Haidar, who promised to take measurements of every cache before it was dug up. Our tent we left as a gift to Umm Azali and Abu Azali, who promised it would be Shahar’s when she wed. The Aritat were moving in the same direction as our group, but far too slowly for our purposes; we therefore rode ahead, with a well-armed escort the sheikh had provided.

The morning we departed, I cast one glance over my shoulder toward the Labyrinth of Drakes. I knew I would return; but I had no idea what would happen when I did.