From high above, I heard a triumphant shout.
I twisted on my seat to find Tom standing at the edge of the plateau across from the Watchers. He was a dusty blot against a sun-bleached sky, but he waved his hat to attract my gaze, and put his other hand to his mouth to direct his voice. “Up here!”
He had scraped his hands bloody getting up there—a fact I discovered after Suhail led me by an easier route. (I say “easier”; it is not the same thing as “easy.”) But his suffering paid off, for he had located a clutch of eggs, nestled in the cup of sand above.
From a dragon’s perspective, the site was ideal. The plateau was high enough that it received almost no shade, except in the very late morning and afternoon. It had a little dip in its center, though, which caught sand that would otherwise have blown away; and in this sand, the dragon had laid her eggs.
(I had the utterly fanciful thought that she had laid them: the first drake whose mating flight we observed, the one I lost track of when al-Jelidah prevented me from riding onward into the Labyrinth. The odds of it were small… but my mind does not always weigh odds rationally.)
From a naturalist’s perspective, the site left something to be desired. It was not close to water; furthermore, if Tom and I wished to observe the hatching, we would either have to sit in that cup with the newborn drakes—not a very wise idea—or else climb an even steeper hill a little way off and watch through field glasses.
This last, as you may imagine, is what we chose to do, while Andrew and al-Jelidah took our camels and went to acquire water.
There is nothing like an intellectual victory to distract one from miserable heat and thirst. We had found the clutch just in time: the very next day, when Tom and I were still trying to tent our cloaks over ourselves as shelter from the sun, the eggs began to hatch. I lay full-length on the burning stone for hours, field glasses glued to my face, putting them down only when necessary to sketch what I had seen. Suhail stepped around and over us with fabric and sticks, trying to make sure we would not die of heat exhaustion while we were too busy to notice. By the end of the day I had an excruciating headache, but I hardly cared—for I had, at last, seen desert drakes hatch.
Tom and I had both read Lord Tavenor’s accounts of the hatchings at Dar al-Tannaneen, of course. Many of those eggs produced unhealthy results, though, and we could not be certain how the change in their circumstances had altered the process. Watching that day, we treated the entire affair as a new observation, discarding all of our assumptions and noting every detail, no matter how small.
The eggs were nearly spherical, which is common among birds that lay their eggs in holes (where there is no risk of them rolling away). Their colour was pale and sandy, but speckled here and there with darker spots, like the eggs of sand grouse—in both cases, we surmised, as camouflage against predators that sought to find and raid the nests. The shell had become hard since the laying, which is not universal among dragons: some lay leathery eggs, like those of reptiles, but others are more like those of birds. The hatching drakes used an “egg tooth” to break through the shell; this is actually a specialized scale, and is shed soon after birth.
Where our observations diverged most from those of Lord Tavenor was in the matter of the shell membrane. This was a good deal thicker than he had reported, and it became apparent that before the drakes broke free of their shells, they had to shred that membrane. “Why so thick, do you think?” Tom asked me without ungluing himself from his field glasses.
“Perhaps it is a holdover from the more leathery type of egg,” I said, propping myself up on one elbow so I could sketch with the other hand. “The harder shell could have developed in response to environmental factors, but the more flexible interior remained.”
It was a nice theory, and I held to it for many years. Tom eventually conducted experiments, however, that gave us a more accurate explanation: the inner membrane of a desert drake egg is a highly specialized material that responds to heat. This connects to the yolk by means of the chalaza, the thready component one sees upon pouring an egg into a glass, and actually supplies the drake with energy supplementing that of the yolk itself. At the time we did not know this, though. All we knew was that the drakes showed a surprising amount of vigor upon emerging from their shells, and were soon stumbling about without having been fed a single thing.
There are few things more hideous and adorable than the newly born of any species. The drakes had the benefit of scales, which kept them from looking like raw flesh the way so many avian hatchlings do; but they were gawky and pale, and much prone to plowing their faces into the sand when their weight got ahead of their feet. Far from cannibalizing one another, they showed a startling degree of sociability: as night fell, they gathered together among the remnants of their shells, forming a pile to keep themselves warm.
Tom and I had to retreat from the plateau before the light was entirely gone. We were not much more graceful than the drakes as we made our way down to our camp on the canyon floor, and without my observations to distract me, I felt in full the consequences of a day spent under the sun’s merciless eye. Though I did not say it to anyone at the time, I was more physically wretched than I had been when the Banu Safr kidnapped us—albeit less sunburnt. I drank every drop of water Suhail gave me and passed out on my bedroll, too tired even for the whirl of my thoughts to keep me awake.
Even so, I found myself rousing again about two hours later. A sound had disturbed my sleep, quiet and low, but persistent. When I rolled over, I found Suhail was sitting up, arms loosely linked across his knees. “What is that?” I whispered.
“I think it is the drakes,” he said.
It was a steady, soothing hum, in shifting chords as voices dropped out and came back in. The result was not precisely musical—even I, not blessed with much sense of pitch, could tell the various notes conflicted at times—but it was beautifully eerie in its way, like the howling of wolves, but gentler. “They are… singing to one another?”
Even in the darkness, I could make out his smile. “Purring, perhaps. Like cats. There are stories of this, but I’ve never heard it myself.”
After a moment he lay down again, and I pillowed my head on his shoulder. I cannot tell you how long I listened to their aimless song; it followed me into sleep and shaped my dreams. But those moments, however many there may have been, have remained in my memory as among the most priceless of my life: enduring a rough camp in the Labyrinth of Drakes, with a man I loved warm at my side, listening to the dragons sing.
Three days passed before we could investigate the nest directly, which is the length of time it took for the drakes to abandon it for good. I will not trouble my readers with too many details of this period, as it is all but prelude to what came next; I will say only that the time was physically unpleasant, for we were down to our last mouthfuls of water, barely enough to keep body and soul together, and I no longer had the joy of new discovery to distract me.
Fortunately Andrew and al-Jelidah returned on the third afternoon, bearing as much water as they could harvest from the spring without draining it or keeping us waiting for too long. Even then I could not drink my fill—but that water, bitter and goat-flavoured though it was, tasted more glorious than the finest wine.
“Do we want to look for another nest?” I asked Tom.