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.”