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.”