Marie Brennan: The Tropic of Serpents

That was undoubtedly not the wording in the treaty—but if he thought he could get away with that argument, who was I to disagree? I asked, “Is that why you sent me to the swamp, instead of one of your own? Because you could call it Scirling aid? No, that cannot be it. I thought at the time that you would not mind as much if we died. Later, it occurred to me that you could more easily disavow our actions if we caused trouble. But if that were the case, you could have sent Velloin. Or both of us together, but I am sure someone has informed you of how I detest the man. I cannot think why you did not send him instead, before me, unless it is because I am Scirling and he is not.”

This is why I have declined all offers of diplomatic postings. As I have grown older (and in theory more sedate), various government officials have thought to take advantage of my experience and international connections by sending me as an ambassador to one place or another. But I have at all ages been too prone to speaking my mind, and not always judicious enough in who I speak it to.

The oba of Bayembe, however, chose not to punish me for my frankness. He said, “If Velloin were a woman, he would not have gone into the agban. ”

I did not immediately parse his meaning. I looked to Galinke, who smiled; I thought of the days she and I had spent in conversation there. My seclusion had been less than entirely willing… but I had gone, rather than risk offense to my hosts, which might have jeopardized my ultimate purpose.

Velloin would not have bent to such concerns.

Understand: this is not the same thing as saying I was perfectly respectful of Yembe traditions, or Moulish ones, either. Romantics of various sorts over the years have painted me as a kind of human chameleon, adapting without difficulty or reservation to my social environment; this is twaddle. (Flattering twaddle, but twaddle all the same.) As I indicated during my account of the witchcraft ritual, my driving concern has always been my research. In pursuit of that, however, I have generally believed that it is more to my advantage to cooperate with those around me than to ignore them. Sometimes this has been a nuisance, and on occasion an outright mistake, but overall this philosophy has served me well.

And on this occasion, it explained why my solution to the problem had appealed to Ankumata.

I curtseyed again and said, “Thank you, chele. ” Then one final thought occurred to me. “If—if I may ask one more thing—”

He made an exaggerated show of wariness, but gestured for me to continue.

“Have you ever killed anything? Not flies and such, but animals or humans.”

His hand had come to rest again on the iron of his braces. They made him strong in some ways, including a few that healthy legs would not have, but they could not do everything. Ankumata said, “I am no hunter.”

I nodded. “Only those who have never killed may do the work that will bring swamp-wyrm eggs to you. There are other requirements as well, which you cannot fulfill… but I think it would please the Moulish to know that they are giving their dragons to a man who is in that sense pure. You may wish to find others who have not killed and recruit them to assist.” My gaze flickered briefly to Galinke. “Women as well as men.”

This audience had used up more than enough of the oba’s time. He dismissed me with a wave of his feather fan. “I will read your research notes before you depart.”

None of the secrets Yeyuama had shared with me were written down, so agreeing was easy enough. “I will see to it that you have copies of what is printed afterward as well,” I promised, and retreated from his presence with a sense of profound relief.

The natural effects of the agreement to transplant swamp-wyrm eggs into the border rivers of Bayembe did not become fully apparent for a number of years after my departure, and so I will not address them here; that is a matter for later volumes.

The political effects, however, played out more rapidly, as I found myself accused of treason against the Scirling crown.

These accusations came in three distinct waves. The first was immediate, following on the rumours that I had brought an army to the walls of Point Miriam and threatened the soldiers there. That, I think, prepared the soil for the later rumours; it made for a good story, and a pleasingly scandalous counter-narrative to the tale of Isabella Camherst, savior of Nsebu.

The second wave was a product of my argument with Sir Adam and subsequent house arrest. He had the good sense not to share the specifics of our conversation, but a great many people knew I had done something dreadful enough to warrant being locked up, and later marched under armed guard to see the oba. When that selfsame oba intervened to have me released, whispers began to fly that my loyalties lay not with my own homeland, but with our colonial ally. No one could say for certain what action I had taken on their behalf—that awaited the third wave of accusations—but rumour supplied any number of scurrilous possibilities.

As for the third wave, it did not take shape immediately. Ankumata was too experienced a politician to tell Sir Adam of his arrangement with the Moulish before he had to; I was safely back in Scirland by the time that matter came to light. (And a good thing, too, or I might never have escaped with my life.) But eventually it became known that there had been plans for a dam, and that Bayembe had backed out of those plans, in favor of some arrangement with the Moulish. This damaged the trade agreements with Scirland, which led to other foreign parties taking an interest in Bayembe, and ultimately weakened our influence in that country. I would not say this damaged Scirland, in the sense of inflicting harm upon my own nation; but it robbed us of a profit we might otherwise have had. This was more than enough for some to declare me a traitor to my own people.

All of this was inadvertent on my own part—but it does little good to cry, “I only wanted to study dragons!” Science is not separate from politics. As much as I would like it to be a pure thing, existing only in some intellectual realm unsullied by human struggle, it will always be entangled with the world we live in.

(That is a lie, though I will leave it in. Not the entanglement—that much is true—but the notion that I would like it to be otherwise. If science were only some abstract thing, without connection to our lives, it would be both useless and boring. But there have been times when I wished that I might snip a few of the threads tying it to other matters, so they would stop tripping me as I went.)

The effect of these accusations, along with others acquired during the expedition (such as the rumours of intimacy with Tom), was to drive all interest in my scientific discoveries out of the public mind in both Bayembe and Scirland. While my companions and I recuperated from our trials—in Nsebu, for Sir Adam had refused to allow us to return to Atuyem, even after my house arrest ended—we endured endless questions, not one of which had to do with natural history. On Tom’s advice, I answered as few of those as my indiscretion and the status of my inquirer would allow. The political negotiations played out with a minimum of our involvement, which was as I preferred; I devoted myself instead to making better notes of my observations in Mouleen, since swamp conditions had made proper efforts there impossible.

It was a peculiar time. If I had felt odd briefly leaving the Green Hell for the savannah during our trek to the Great Cataract, how much stranger was it to sit on a chair in a Scirling-style house, to sleep in a bed, to wear skirts once again? The air felt positively cool and dry after the oppressive humidity of the swamp, and the sky seemed impossibly huge. Things that had become routine to me these past months reasserted themselves as unthinkable: had I truly eaten insects ? Conversely, things which had once been shocking were no longer so. When every woman one has seen for half a year, only Natalie excepted, goes about wearing nothing more than a loincloth, the Gabborid custom of leaving one breast bare seems positively modest.