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.