Marie Brennan - Within the Sanctuary of Wings

But I had a better heart for it now, and so I asked. Ruzt said, “We are watchers, the three of us—we look for signs of humans at our borders.”

“Do you cross the mountains?” I said, intrigued.

“We used to. We stopped years ago.”

The Nying had pushed almost to the limits of possible habitation, short of entering the Sanctuary itself. Patrolling outside the ring of mountains risked beginning the confrontation the Draconeans had striven so long to avoid. “But you saw me?”

“We saw two humans,” she said. “Up there.” I followed her pointing claw to the col; the day was sunny and nearly cloudless, which made it look only a short stroll away. Tom and I had ventured a little distance to the west when we first stepped out, so as to look down into the valley beyond. Likely it was the two of us whom Ruzt saw.

But a great deal of time had passed between that moment and when I stumbled half dead down the western slope, not to mention a storm. “Were you watching us dig?” Even though the sisters were now my friends—two of them, at least; I was not certain I should count Zam as such—the thought of them spying on us from concealment was unsettling.

Ruzt denied it. “Zam insisted that we collect our weapons first. And we argued. As we were climbing, the mountain came down, and she said you must all be dead. But we agreed to search before we gave up.”

“I was very lucky that you did,” I murmured. “I should certainly have died otherwise.” At no point had the sisters carried weapons in my sight. Where did they keep them? What did they arm themselves with? Not firearms, I suspected; I had observed nothing in the Sanctuary that led me to believe the Draconeans had the technology to manufacture anything so complex. Bows and arrows? Swords? I was surprised Zam had not insisted on arming herself around me, every waking and sleeping minute.

As it turned out, I was not the only one who had been sitting on her curiosity. “Zabel,” Ruzt said, “why were you there ? You do not live here.”

She did not mean in the Sanctuary. My pictures and attempts at storytelling had made it clear to them that I hailed from a more distant land—and of course they had seen the Nying from a distance, and knew I was no kin of theirs. But I suspected that my rough charcoal attempts to sketch dead Draconeans in the snow had not made much of an impression when I scrawled them on the plastered wall of the yak barn.

To answer her, I made more drawings, these of a wide array of draconic creatures: everything from drakeflies to desert drakes, swamp-wyrms and tê lêng and fire lizards. “These are all dragons,” I said, giving her the Akhian word, and resuming the conversation we had abandoned that night in the cave, when I was examining the wings of a mew. “As all birds are birds, but different kinds. Does that make sense?” Ruzt nodded. “My task is to understand dragons: that is what I do for my people. I have been doing it for most of my life. We believed…” I hesitated, searching for the correct words. “There are many… places in the world, like your temple, but old and fallen down.”

“Ruined.”

“Yes, ruined. From the days of the Anevrai. There are pictures of the Anevrai in those places, but we did not understand them; we thought they showed—” Here I floundered, for I lacked the word for “gods.” Rather than fall down the pit of religion, I merely said, “We thought there were no such things, outside of the mind. We did not know you existed.”

Ruzt pulled back in startlement. “You—did not know we were here?”

“Not at all. When I woke up and saw you, I was very surprised!” I could laugh about it now, with my delirium and terror so far behind me.

This was so astonishing to Ruzt that she insisted on sharing it with Kahhe and Zam before we went any further. Zam stared at me, frankly incredulous. “It is true!” I kept insisting. Then the sisters retired for a conference—not, I think, because they wished to keep their discussion secret from me, but because they did not want to slow themselves down for my sake. It was only then that I realized their plan had been predicated on the assumption that humans knew they were in the Sanctuary (or at the very least, that they existed), and had simply not bestirred themselves to wipe the remaining Draconeans out.

It did not change anything in the immediate term, of course. We were still waiting for spring, and I must still prepare. Ruzt and I returned to our interrupted conversation the next day. I told her, “I thought the Anevrai were human, and had bred some special kind of dragon for their own use. When a man named Thu Phim-lat told me he found a strange body out there, I wanted to see for myself what kind it was.”

“A body of one of ours?” Ruzt said.

I described to her what we found in the col, how its bones had dissolved and its flesh frozen hard in the endless cold. “That was when we discovered that the Anevrai were not gods.” I laughed, this time with a wry smile. “Just before the mountain fell down.” We had not gotten around to establishing the word for “avalanche,” I think because it amused us both to go on using that phrase. I did not even know how to say it in Akhian, as the word is not often needed in the desert.

Then my perspective changed, yet again. When we dug that Draconean out of the snow, I had seen it as a specimen: the carcass of a mysterious creature, hailing from a species unknown to us. But if Ruzt had become a person to me… then the carcass was the sad remains of another person, one who froze to death in the icy heights of the mountains.

In a quiet voice, I asked, “Do you know who they were? The two we found.”

“I think so,” Ruzt said. “Years ago—when I was only a hatchling—the rains came terribly late. The land was so dry, and there were fires… worse on the other side of the mountains, I think. We could see the smoke from here. The elders decided that we should keep a closer watch on our borders for some time after that. Two of the guards were lost in a storm, not long before the sleep.”

“What were their names?”

My question clearly startled her, for her ruff twitched slightly. She said, “Seymel and Yaminet.”

Thu had found one in the valley; the five of us had uncovered the other. I did not think we would ever know which was which. “What do you ordinarily do with your dead? Do you bury them, or burn them, or…?”

Ruzt said, “They go to the sky.”

At first I took this for a euphemism, much as we might say that a late relative has gone to a better place. But while the Draconean religion is indeed very oriented toward the sky, she meant it in a somewhat more literal sense. It is their custom to leave the bodies of the deceased out in the open, where scavenging birds may consume their flesh and carry it into the heavens—with the bones, of course, falling to dust.

It was some comfort, then, to think that the Draconean who fell from the col met with something like the treatment his people would have wanted. The other, I feared, had vanished beneath the snow; he might never be found again.

My mental phrasing snagged against another thought in passing. “These guards who were lost. Were they female, or male?”

“Female,” Ruzt said, as if it were obvious. “None of our border watchers are male.”

So I still had not seen a male Draconean, even one frozen and squashed flat. They had begun to acquire a mythical status in my mind, as if they were a fiction invented by female Draconeans to explain where hatchlings came from.

Male Draconeans were real enough, naturally, and I met some in due course. But such thoughts led me to inquire about reproduction—for one cannot be a naturalist without losing a great deal of the delicacy one is expected to have in speaking of such matters.