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