This was frustrating, but hardly surprising. They would have no desire to tell us about their internal conflicts; those would only open up gaps my own nation might exploit. I said, “Without information, though, we can’t do much to stop them in the future.”
By the scowl on Pensyth’s face, he did not need me reminding him. “If it were up to me, I’d march a company into the desert and teach the Banu Safr a lesson they won’t soon forget. It wouldn’t get at whoever is behind this, but it would rob them of one tool, at least. Unfortunately, there’s no chance of the caliph allowing that.”
I imagined not. Doing so would be tantamount to announcing he couldn’t keep order in his own country. Tom said, “The Aritat did what they could on that front. It kept us safe enough, after the initial trouble.”
“Well, you’re back here now, and well away from the Banu Safr.” Pensyth linked his hands and leaned forward, adopting the posture of a man getting down to business. “I hope you have something useful to show for all the time you spent out there.”
“I could share our notebooks with you, if you like,” I said.
It must have come out too sweetly, because Tom shot me a quelling look. He said, “We have a good deal of data, where before we had only guesswork. It will show its value, I’m sure. The current breeding season has passed, but that gives us time to prepare for next winter’s effort. Isabella and I have some thoughts for how to change the drakes’ environment so they’ll be more inclined toward their natural habits.”
He was better at saying that with a sober face than I was. Our thoughts ranged from a kind of overhead sprinkler that might induce them to believe it was the rainy season in midsummer, to a set of harnesses into which we might strap the drakes and then swing them about to simulate flying. The only one that was even faintly practical was a special breeding enclosure, with a pedestal for the female and space enough for all our captive males to gather around her. Without a flight to follow, though, we were not at all certain how much good it would do.
The only way to find out was to test it, and as Tom said, we could not do that right now. The prospect of delay, however unavoidable it might be, clearly irritated Pensyth. “In the meanwhile,” I said before he could complain, “we’ve made arrangements for a more systematic approach to the eggs. Once we have a chance to study the data from the honeyseekers, we’ll be able to make alterations that will, I believe, greatly improve our success rate there.”
It only mollified Pensyth a little: after all, our purpose here was to breed dragons, not merely to hatch them. I wondered what he had expected, when he heard we would be taking up Lord Tavenor’s duties. Was our reputation so tremendous that he believed we could achieve instant success? Or was he simply so impatient for results that any failure to produce them was unacceptable?
The latter, it seemed. “The world didn’t stop turning while you were off in the desert. The Yelangese have unveiled an entire fleet of caeligers in Va Hing—thirty of them. And our observers say the design is different, more refined. How many caeligers do we have? Five. It isn’t enough.”
When I last heard of it, our own fleet had numbered four: one largely reconstructed from components fished out of the Broken Sea, and three built from material acquired since. I surmised that Prima’s bones had been put to quick use. “Have the Yelangese done anything with their caeligers yet? Aside from unveiling them.”
Pensyth gave me an unpleasant stare. “Would you prefer we wait for actual war to begin, Dame Isabella? The threat is enough.”
I had not forgotten the Battle of Keonga, where the raking fire of a single caeliger had wreaked havoc on the defenders below. Such tactics would be of limited use against an enemy that had artillery with which to respond; but Andrew had already speculated in my hearing about other applications. A caeliger might drop bombs on ships or fortified positions—or even if it were not used to fight, it could scout the movements of the enemy, giving generals much more accurate knowledge for their own maneuvers.
It was not always reassuring, having a brother in the army.
“We are doing our best, sir,” Tom said.
Pensyth sighed wearily, nodding. “Yes, of course. I should not keep you from it.”
Five minutes more or less would make no difference to our success—but I was glad to escape his office and return to the (in my eyes) more comfortable world of dragons and their needs. Lieutenant Marton had managed things effectively in our absence; Sniffer had died, but he had been in poor health when we departed, and I was not surprised to see him go. “I tried to get ice to keep him in, so you could examine the carcass,” Marton said apologetically, “but it didn’t work out.”
Tom thanked him, and we began our rounds. Lumpy was still alive, I was pleased to see, as was Ascelin, the eldest of the juveniles, the fierce one for whom I had a liking. Saeva, the adult brought to us in Nebulis, had developed an infection in her tail, but the men had managed to restrain her enough to wash and bandage the wound on a regular basis, and it had healed well.
Once we had inspected the place and found all in order, Tom set about instituting the changes he and I had planned—changes based on our desert observations—while I turned my attention to the records of the honeyseeker eggs.
Not enough time had passed, of course, for me to have anything like definitive results. Even honeyseekers do not breed so quickly as to supply me with the hundreds of eggs I would need to test their tolerances in full; and of course I would ideally repeat the process later, or have someone else do so, to see if the second set of data matched the first. (As some of my more scientific friends are fond of proclaiming, twice is once, and once is nothing.) Marton had done as I asked, though, with diligent care, and so I had the beginnings of a pattern, which I was very keen to study.
I had decided to introduce new variables one at a time, beginning with the one I believed to be the most influentiaclass="underline" temperature. What extreme of heat could the eggs tolerate without losing viability, and what extreme of cold? Nowadays we can control this to a very nice degree, quite literally speaking. Back then, though, the best we could do was to place the eggs in different locations, ranging from the cellars of Dar al-Tannaneen to its rooftop. At regular intervals Marton measured the temperature there, with one of the sergeants taking over the task at night. Some of the eggs were carried from the cellar to a warmer spot during the day, to simulate the fluctuation they would experience in nature; others were left in the coolness all the time, while a few lived quite cozily by a fireplace. Altogether, it made for a substantial set of data—and it was only the beginning.
An unused room in the House of Dragons became the repository of this information. I spent a day drafting a very precise graph that would show me what I knew at a glance: the horizontal axis measured days since laying, while the vertical measured temperature. On this I drew curves delineating the environment of each egg, in different colours of ink.
“It’s very pretty,” Andrew said when I tacked it on the wall, “but what does it mean?”
I stood, tapping my tack-hammer against my thigh, studying the graph. “It means I can see what is going on.” Exchanging the hammer for a pencil, I went to the graph and began drawing hashes through some of the lines. “These are the eggs that produced unhealthy specimens. And these—” I drew more hashes, crossing them to make Xs. “These are the ones that did not hatch at all. You can see, they are much less tolerant of cold than of heat. Which makes sense, of course, given their native environment. One wonders whether it would be the opposite with, say, rock-wyrms.”