Marie Brennan: Voyage of the Basilisk

Half a dozen thoughts and more flashed through my head at once: serpent cranial anatomy, the tendrils we held, rings in bulls’ noses. The strength of dragonbone. The likelihood that I would fall into the water before I could even test my theory. The bullets now piercing the water around us as the caeliger drew near—and above all, an internal voice crying, What are you doing?

What I was doing was releasing my grip upon the tendrils behind the head and hurling myself forward, down the serpent’s long snout. There were tendrils there, too, much smaller, fringing the serpent’s nose… and it was these I now seized hold of and pulled.

I thought to bring the serpent’s head up to an angle where it would expel its blast of water at the caeliger, hopefully damaging it as the other serpents had damaged the ships. The dragonbone components would likely survive unbroken, but if I could break the machinery, or knock the men from their perch, or rupture the caeliger’s bag, I might yet save some of those below.

It shames me as a natural historian to admit this, but: I had not stopped to consider that I was riding a younger cousin of the beast we had killed in the arctic.

The serpent did not merely lift its head. The entire front of its body rose snakelike into the air, just as its cousin had done in attacking the Basilisk . I found myself dangling from its snout by a desperate grip on the edge of one of its nostrils. It did indeed release its water—I could not see where it aimed—but a moment later it struck something hard, as its head collided with the passing caeliger.

We all crashed into the water together, serpent, riders, and flying machine. They had swooped too low in approaching us, believing that we had no way of striking back at them. No one else had been foolish enough to try what I had done (for the Keongan riders know that the anatomy of the snout is exceedingly tender, and that interfering with it is a good way to send the beast out of control). It would not even have worked had we not been at the edge of the battle, in waters quiet enough that the caeliger felt safe in descending for a better shot.

But descended they had, and I was too ignorant to know how unwise it was to try and take a serpent by the nose. In my recklessness, I had succeeded in removing the caeliger from the sky.

I saw quite a few engravings of that moment in subsequent months and years; some of them are still to be found today. All of them depict me standing proudly atop the serpent, feet planted firm on its scales, hair blowing majestically in the wind (conveniently ignoring that it was less than ten centimeters long at the time), and often in a dress. (Skirts, I suppose, blow more majestically than trousers.) None of them show me dangling for dear life from the serpent’s nostril. However prosaic the reality of my act, though, it made for very good storytelling later on, and I am not surprised it became so widely known. The crew of the Scirling ships had seen it; the Yelangese had seen it; the islanders had seen it. My son had not, and I thank heaven for that, as it was bad enough once he heard the tale of what his mother had done. But I made myself well and truly famous with that act, which many say ended the Battle of Keonga.

Reality, again, is somewhat less dramatic. The fighting continued; the Yelangese were not vanquished for some time, and then only because it occurred to Admiral Longstead that he could gain a degree of goodwill from both sides by moving in to halt what would otherwise have been a long grind to the finish. The Scirlings ended up playing peacemaker between the two sides, at first militarily, then diplomatically, once the princess stepped in.

The process by which that occurred was a marvel of misdirection, and even now I am not sure how it was arranged. No one wanted to say out loud where Her Highness had been; there were too many onlookers, ranging from some of the Yelangese sailors to the men of the Basilisk to a surprising percentage of the islanders, both local and visiting with the war fleet, who did not know she had been on Lahana. Admitting the truth would not have made anyone look terribly good. So everyone pretended she had come in with the fleet; that Suhail and I had never flown away on a stolen caeliger; and that when I rode into battle on the back of a sea-serpent, I did so from the shores of Lahana, where I had been recuperating after my harrowing first ride. There were rumours, of course—there are always rumours—but it has never, until now, been public knowledge that Her Majesty was once a political hostage in the Broken Sea. (I would not reveal it here, save that I have royal permission to do so.)

All of that, however, came later. In the immediate aftermath of my deed, Suhail and I floundered in the water, putting as much distance as possible between us and the downed caeliger. The sea-serpent had decided that vehicle was the cause of its suffering, and set about destroying the thing with all dispatch. The Yelangese crewmen floundered with us, and one seemed to have a notion of setting upon us as the sea-serpent had upon the caeliger; but fortunately he was forestalled by the arrival of a longboat. Men aboard the Boyne, one of the other ships in Admiral Longstead’s little fleet, had seen me go over the side and, not having any notion of what was going on, had set out to rescue me.

The sailors pulled us in, then took on the Yelangese, who judged that captivity in Scirling hands was preferable to remaining in the water with an angry sea-serpent that might soon go looking for new prey. It had done quite a good job on the caeliger, considering all the dragonbone; the bones themselves had survived its bite, but the lashings had not, and so the waves were now littered with a motley osteological assortment.

When the battle was done, we came ashore on Keonga, escorted by a dozen war canoes. There the chief greeted Admiral Longstead, but I saw very little of that meeting: Liluakame wormed her way through the crowd to my side, the first friendly face I had seen, and beckoned for me to follow her. “Where are we going?” I asked. Fear sprang up in my heart. I could think of no reason that my wife should be there, but not my companions or my son, save that something dreadful had happened to them.

“To the temple,” Liluakame said. “Quickly.”

This was the platform I had seen when we first came to Keonga, high upon the promontory that divided the Basilisk ’s cove from the place where the chief dwelt. There were still a few sailors up there, watching over the cannon Aekinitos had brought up for the battle, but I did not pause to speak with them. Apart from reassuring me that the others were safe and well, Liluakame had discouraged any conversation. This was a side to my wife I had not seen before, in our brief cohabitation: focused and urgent, taking me in hand as if I were a child she could not spare the time to educate. Weary and confused as I was, I found myself happy to follow her lead.

The temple itself was a modest structure by Scirling standards, but an impressive feat of engineering for the islanders, being a series of stone platforms and low walls constructed entirely without mortar. The walls demarcate a system of enclosures, the inner ones being more tapu than the outer, and ceremonies of different sorts are performed at different locations depending on their nature. Liluakame took me only within the outermost enclosure, that being the only one I was considered fit to enter. There I found Heali’i waiting.

She led me through a process of purification and repentance, which, she said, might earn me a degree of mercy from Pa’oarakiki when he was done with Admiral Longstead. (Suhail, I later learned, had been taken to a temple the warriors use.) She spoke as if the transgression for which I repented was departing from Keonga against orders, and that indeed was part of it; I did not ask whether she knew my crime was greater still. Ke’anaka’i were believed to die if they set foot upon Rahuahane, yet I had gone and lived. I suspect Heali’i knew, but to this day I cannot tell you what she made of that: whether she questioned my identity as dragon-spirited, or the reality of the curse upon that island, or merely chalked me up as a very fortunate exception.