“It’s a pity the Nying can’t set them after rats and shrews. It would do wonders for the grain situation here.”
Much to the bemusement of not only the Nying but also our companions, Tom and I did make some efforts to see whether the mew could be trained. Suhail was a great deal of help in this, although he found the entire enterprise hilarious. During his fosterage among the Aritat nomads, his “desert father” Abu Azali had taught him the noble art of falconry, which Suhail had continued to practice after we purchased the estate of Casselthwaite in Linshire. He was able to show us how to fashion jesses and a hood, and then teach our captive mew to fly to a glove. He did this by placing tidbits of food on the glove and whistling in a particular manner, so that the dragon would come to associate him, the glove, and the sound with reward. This stage of the process went well enough, but Suhail was less than convinced. Watching the mew, he said, “I think it’s cleverer than most falcons—too clever, even. You can almost certainly teach it to fly to a lure… but the first time you set it loose in the open air, it will be gone.” He pondered for a time, then said, “I wonder if they would imprint, as an eyass does. Raising a bird from the shell requires a great deal of effort, and I cannot imagine that a mew would be any easier; but it does offer the best results.”
We did not want to risk losing our mew by setting it after a lure, as capturing a replacement would be more trouble than it was worth. It therefore reigned alone in the shed we built for it—“the mews,” as Suhail insisted on calling the structure, grinning every time he did so. (This is of course the proper name for the place where trained falcons are kept… but the pun entertained him far too much.)
Tom did contemplate a second capture, though not for the purpose of training. “It would be interesting to see if they exhibit developmental lability, too. We’ve got evidence of that in a few breeds now, but we’ll need more before we can say for certain that it’s a broad characteristic.”
His phrasing was conservative. In truth, he and I had begun to formulate a theory which did away with the six criteria Sir Richard Edgeworth had used to distinguish “true dragons” from mere “draconic cousins,” and put in their place only one: developmental lability. We did not yet have a good understanding of how the different breeds related to one another—indeed, this is a question that continues to vex dragon naturalists to this day—but we had long since begun to suspect that whatever the anwer was, lability played a large role in the diversity we see today. As it is not a characteristic anyone has documented outside the draconic family, it might serve as an admirably simple means of differentiating that family from unrelated creatures.
I would dearly have liked to try breeding mews, or at least conduct experiments with their eggs. After my conversation with Suhail in Falchester, a part of my mind was constantly examining my research, asking at every turn, And what else? It was a peculiar feeling. On the one hand, I lamented the loss of my girlish glee, the sense that it was enough simply to see a new thing and record it for other people to learn. On the other hand, it was also exhilarating, for I was challenging myself to look further, to think harder, to fit what I saw into a larger picture and then tease out its implications.
Unfortunately for our mew-related aspirations, we were again there in the wrong season. Unlike honeyseekers, who will mate at any time of year, mews did so only toward the tail end of winter, with their eggs hatching in mid-spring—“And if we are still here then, something will have gone terribly wrong,” Tom said.
“Can’t you trap a pair and try to carry them out?” Chendley said, when he heard this.
It was a mark of how restless our lieutenant had become that he showed any enthusiasm for the prospect. Even granting that we would carry a smaller quantity of supplies out of the mountains than we had carried in, adding a pair of caged mews to the pile would not make things any easier. But it was a moot point regardless. “If they’re anything like yaks,” Tom said with a wry grin, “they’ll go toes-up from heat exhaustion at the searing temperature of fifteen degrees. But who knows. If all else fails, I’ll have a shot at it.”
One thing Tom and I did not attempt: bone preservation. We had not brought any of the necessary chemicals with us, as Thu’s report had made it clear that we should not expect any bones to survive in one of his mystery specimens. Besides, the process had gone from a matter of great industrial import to a minor curiosity, of interest as a footnote in the history of dragonbone synthesis, but otherwise of use only to individuals like ourselves, who wished to study the skeletons of dragons at leisure. We did dissect several mews, working from carcasses provided by the spinsters who hunted them, and confirmed that their bones disintegrated according to the common habit of their kind; but for records we were dependent upon my drawings.
One other activity kept us occupied during the monsoon, and that was mountain climbing. Once Suhail had enough fluency in Tser-zhag to handle minor daily matters, Chendley went out on a regular basis with either him or Thu to hone their skills on the nearby ridges and peaks. Tom and I went less frequently, but the weeks we spent with the herdsmen involved a great deal of clambering around by routes that made the Nying laugh at us. It was preparation for what was to come: the snows would have made our route much more treacherous, and the five of us could not afford the suspicion and lack of coordination that had weakened us on the journey to Hlamtse Rong. By the time the monsoon ended, we were in the best fighting trim of our lives, and ready—we thought—for anything.
EIGHT
Although the Nying had been willing to accept us as guests, the strain upon their resources meant they were pleased to see us go—though not in the direction we chose.
I mentioned before that the nearby peak, Gyaptse, is named for its supposedly cursed nature. There are meadows below it which might be profitable for the grazing of yaks, but the locals never used them; they were certain that anyone who went there would die. They held to this certainty even though, upon questioning, none of them could name a single person who had done so within living memory—for this is how folklore works.
What caused this belief? Elsewhere in the world (that is to say, in Vystrana and Keonga), it had been the presence of Draconean ruins which inspired such dread; but as I have mentioned, it was deeply unlikely that any such things should be at so high an elevation, and Thu had seen nothing of the kind during his own exploration there. No, the fear had a more fleshly source… or so I suspected.
Elsewhere in the Mrtyahaima, there are stories of monstrous snow-apes, variously called yeti, mi-go, and an assortment of other names. But in Tser-nga, the stories tell instead of ice demons. Could these, I wondered, be derived from the creature Thu had found?
We had seen no sign of any such creature during our time in Hlamtse Rong, despite locals who swore up and down that they had seen them with their own eyes. Again, this is customary with folklore; Scirling farmers will swear equally blind that they have seen giants and fairy hounds on the country roads at night. But this did not mean that, once upon a time, something had not existed and roamed the mountains. Even if they were all gone now, their memory might survive.