Voyage of the Basilisk : A Memoir by Lady Trent (9781429956369) (7 page)

Upon my return, however, I learned that such was not the case. “It’s cold up here,” Jake complained, huddling inside his coat.

I might not have been closely involved with his early rearing, but it seemed that some things were transmitted
in utero
. I had, after all, been shivering in Vystrana when he was conceived. “Yes, it is,” I agreed. “But did you not want to go hiking? Feodor Lukovich told me he would show you how his falcon hunts.”

Jake shrugged, in the way that only nine-year-old children can manage—and usually male children at that, girls not being permitted the same kind of insouciance. “It would only kill rabbits and such. I want to go back to the ship.”

Whatever kindred feeling had been engendered by his complaint of cold, it vanished in the face of this inconceivable prospect: that any son of mine might not be interested in
something with wings
. “At your age, I would have been mad to see a falcon hunt, only no one will take a girl for such outings.”

This did not sway him. He wanted to go back to the ship; Haward, one of the sailors, had promised to teach him knots. “I am sure Feodor Lukovich could teach you some,” I said, whereupon Jake informed me (with no little scorn) that he already knew all of
those
.

Cruel mother that I am, I forced him to stay there a while longer. Tom and I were not done with our work, and I was not about to send Jake down the Olovtun with nobody but his governess for company. If he would not learn about northern Bulskevo, then he could sit and drill Spureni verbs with Abby.

When I spoke with her privately about his behaviour, she spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “He likes it on board the ship. He’ll settle down once we get back.”

“I hope you’re right,” I said. “If he is this contrary for the entire expedition, there will be no living with him. And I do not want to shackle you to the
Basilisk
simply because that is where Jake would rather be.”

“I don’t mind at all,” Abby demurred.

This was exceedingly kind of her to say, but I knew it was not true. “Ah, well,” I said with a philosophical sigh. “He is only nine. I imagine he will tire of it soon enough, and long for some variety.”

Which just goes to show how little I understood my son.

*   *   *

From Bulskevo we could have continued down the eastern coast of Anthiope, for there were certainly dragons to be found in places like Zmayet and Uhwase and Akhia. But Tom and I, after assembling the most complete list we could of dragons and draconic cousins, had agreed that it would be better if we focused our efforts elsewhere. For one thing, the existing literature on such creatures was heavily biased toward Anthiopean observations, with much less known about them elsewhere. For another, there was relatively little taxonomic variation to be found in Anthiope, apart from cousins like sparklings, wyverns, and wolf-drakes. To truly question the nature of dragons, I needed to look farther afield.

The
Basilisk
therefore provisioned herself in Kupelyi, then struck out across the ocean toward the continent of Otholé. On this passage—a journey of nearly two months, during which the cramped conditions ceased to be awkward and started to become intolerable—I began to grasp the truth of what was happening with Jake.

As related in the first volume of my memoirs, a tipping point in my life came early on, when at the age of seven I first learned how to preserve a sparkling and then dissected a dove to study what the wishbone was for. From those two events I formed an obsession with all things winged, which eventually settled more firmly upon dragons (though I still retain a great fondness for birds and some insects).

Jake’s tipping point was the
Basilisk
. From the moment he set foot on her decks, he knew—though he did not articulate it this way until years later—that he was home. He loved the great and complex array of rigging and sails that brought the ship to life. He loved the clever way the necessities of life were miniaturized and tucked into every available corner. He loved the tang of salt water and the whip of the sea wind and above all, the sheer feeling of
freedom
that came from being in flight across the waves.

I did not understand this at first. While I enjoyed being at sea, it was not an unmitigated delight. And Tamshire, my childhood home, is a landlocked county, so I had no personal familiarity with the way in which the ocean calls to some hearts. It was inexplicable to me that Jake, who had grown up in the quiet suburb of Pasterway and the busy streets of Falchester, would take so instinctively to the sea. But so it seemed to be; and if indeed it was a passing infatuation, as I had at first assumed, then it was exhibiting a notable failure to pass on schedule.

Of course, Jake being nine, he did not take to shipboard life in anything like a dignified fashion. Despite that early admonition from the captain and his experience with the sea-serpent, he went where he should not, touched things he should not. And one day when we were in the middle of the ocean, with the
Basilisk
standing almost motionless on a glassy plate, Aekinitos hauled my son before me by the scruff of his neck.

We were then in the region sailors call “the doldrums,” near the equator. Here the winds sometimes fail altogether, leaving sailing ships utterly becalmed. The sky was hot copper above us, the water flat gold below. I was on deck, taking advantage of the stillness to produce more finished drawings of the sea-serpents and wyverns. I did hear the commotion down below, but I disregarded it, as I had learned to disregard many of the noises and activities that periodically roiled the crew.

I did not even look up when a clump of people began moving toward me across the deck. Not until they stopped before me did I pause in my pencil work. Then, to my dismay, I saw Aekinitos standing with one hand clenched around the collar of my son’s shirt, and Jake looking both sullen and guilty. Sweat plastered his hair to the edges of his face in damp swags that could not muster the will to be curls.

“What is going on?” I asked.

Aekinitos gave a quick shake of his hand, making my son twitch. “Mr. Dolin caught him playing with
this
.”

The first mate handed him an object, which Aekinitos then thrust toward me. A sextant, I saw. “Whose is that?”

“Mine,” the captain rumbled. “Your boy stole it, and was using it as a
toy
.”

I had no doubt that Jake had borrowed rather than stolen it; what would he do with a sextant of his own? But such a distinction would not mean much to the captain, nor should it. “Jake,” I said, my own voice hardening, “is this true?”

Shame-faced, my son nodded.

We were gathering more of a crowd: not just the sailors who had followed Aekinitos and Dolin and Jake from belowdecks, but others who were up above, and Tom and Abby besides. The captain raised his voice slightly, no doubt for their benefit. “I cannot have such disobedience aboard my ship. For theft, the penalty is flogging.”

“Now see
here,
” I said, shooting to my feet. My drawing board and pencil clattered to the deck. I knew enough of sea life to know there was a world of difference between the switching a disobedient boy might get at school and the sort of flogging practiced on board ships. Aekinitos could not be serious.

Nor was he. But neither was he speaking in jest. I met his gaze, and saw that while he did not intend to flog my son like a common sailor, he
did
intend to leave an impression Jake would not soon forget.

And I had a notion of how to accomplish that.

“You will
not
flog my son,” I said, the words as firm as I could make them. Then I allowed myself to wilt, sighing. “But you are right. You cannot have such behaviour on the
Basilisk
. This is not the first time Jake has been disobedient, and it will not be the last. Our next port of call is, what—Axohuilli? Not ideal, but it can’t be helped, I suppose. If the winds will cooperate and take us there, then I will make arrangements for Jake and Miss Carew to sail back to Scirland.”

“Mama, no!” Jake cried, jerking in the captain’s grip.

I met his gaze, letting my sorrow show. “I am sorry, Jake. I said too much of the adventure to be had here, and not enough of the responsibilities that would come with it. I did not prepare you adequately for this, and perhaps you are simply too young.”

“I’m not,” he said desperately. “I won’t do it again, I promise. I’ll behave—don’t send me home!”
jake’s promise

“And when you grow tired of behaving? I cannot leave you in a situation where you might be flogged. It would be very irresponsible of me.”

Reckless, he said, “I won’t get tired of behaving. I’ll prove it! If I don’t, you can beat me, just like he said.”

To Jake, who had never suffered anything worse than a spanking, a flogging probably sounded very romantic. (I had overheard him talking gleefully to Tom about keelhauling not three days prior.) I sighed again, putting my head in my hand, then lifted it and addressed the captain once more. “Surely there can be some sort of allowance made for first offenses—provided there is not a second. What else would you do to punish a sailor who had erred so grievously?”

“I would break an officer,” Aekinitos said. “But this boy has no rank to strip from him.”

I opened my hands, half in pleading, half a shrug. “Then treat him as if he did. Demote him to—oh, I do not know my sailing terms well enough. Some lowly position, from which he might learn proper naval conduct.”

Jake’s face, which had fallen like a mudslide when I spoke of sending him home, began to light up. To him, this would sound less like punishment, more like a wondrous treat. But I trusted Aekinitos to disabuse him of that notion. “
Boy,
” Aekinitos rumbled. “That is the lowest position he could have, and if there were a lower, I would give it to him.”

“What sort of tasks does a ship’s boy do?” I asked.

Although his fate hung in the balance, Jake could not resist saying, “Swabbing the decks?”

Aekinitos’ heavy brows drew inward and down. I imagine his glare must have looked very fierce from below, for Jake quailed. “
The bilges,
” the captain said.

He was as good as his word. Aekinitos could guess as well as I could that Jake adored the notion of learning to be a proper sailor; accordingly, the captain at first did not let him do anything that seemed sailorly in the least. Jake spent that first day down in the filth of the bilge, about which the only good thing one could say was that it was out of the blistering sun. After that he assisted the cook in the galley or helped drag stores about in some arcane maneuver designed to improve the balance of the ship—always supposing its sole purpose was not to keep a disobedient boy busy.

It would have broken the spirit of any child staying on a whim. Had Jake come to me and begged for mercy, I would have told the captain to desist … and then, as I had said before, put him on a ship for home. I could neither torment my son nor ask Aekinitos to tolerate his misbehaviour. But Jake’s desire to stay was no whim, and so he persevered, though he be up to his eyebrows in muck. And so, one step at a time, Aekinitos began to teach him more.

Not directly, of course. The captain of the
Basilisk
had better things to do with his time than train a single boy. But he put Jake into the care of his bosun, a fellow of mixed Anthiopean and Erigan ancestry named Cranby, and that fellow undertook to make my son a sailor. Jake learned the parts of the ship, the points of the compass, how to tie more knots than I knew were geometrically possible. He did tedious work like picking oakum out of old ropes, scraping barnacles off the hull, and (yes) swabbing the decks. Eventually he did more interesting things like holding the reel when someone else threw out the log-line to measure our speed. Much, much later, Aekinitos let him hold the sextant again, and learn how to take a sighting so as to chart our position.

And Jake loved it. Sailing is exhausting, back-breaking work, but the complaint I heard most often from my son was that he was neither large enough nor strong enough to do more. A boy his age was no use in handling sails or hauling on ropes; he would only get in the way. But Jake vowed that he would someday be like those men, and after seeing the labor he was willing to endure so long as it was on a ship, I believed him.

The bulk of that, however, lay in the future. In the immediate term, we finally escaped the doldrums, and when we came to port at Axohuilli in Coyahuac, I did not send Jake home. We reprovisioned and asked some questions, then set sail for Namiquitlan … where, we were told, there were feathered serpents to be found.

FIVE

Namiquitlan—The cliff diver—Meeting Suhail—Among the ruins—Suhail’s theory—The feathered serpent—More taxonomy—Domestication

Coyahuac reminded me a great deal of Mouleen, the only other tropical country of which I had personal experience. Here the vegetation was equally thick, the trees towering giants laced together with vines and ferns. Beneath the canopy, I sweltered almost as much as I had in that swampy land. But there were differences: rather than being half-drowned by muddy rivers, Coyahuac had no surface water, all rainfall soaking through the porous ground to gather in underground streams and wells. The verdant life that rose above it was a thin skin over rocky bones, and here and there the bones showed through.

Such was the case with Namiquitlan, where we went in search of feathered serpents—
quetzalcoatls,
as they are known in the local tongue. The waters in the region of that town are an intense, deep blue, even close to shore, for the ground there drops off precipitously; even the harbour of Namiquitlan is a mere pause in the sheer face the land presents to the sea. We passed close to one of these sea cliffs as we came into port, and those of us not occupied in the task of keeping the
Basilisk
safely clear of that peril crowded to the rail for a good look.

Twenty meters of stone gleamed gold in the westering sun, an emerald cap of thick vegetation spilling from its edge. I looked at that cap and sighed. I knew from experience that finding dragons in such an environment was not easily done; and here, unlike in Bulskevo, we had no guide arranged in advance.