Marie Brennan - Within the Sanctuary of Wings

The final tally was three dead out of eight; two sister-groups had banded together for the ambush. Five of ours were wounded to one degree or another, including both Ruzt and Zam. But none on our side had perished, and the sheer relief of that turned my knees to water. I knew very well that if someone had died defending me, the loss would have poisoned minds against my cause, perhaps beyond repair. As it was, the death of three attackers was bad enough, for it was my presence that had provoked them to this extreme.

One of the elders confronted me after order had been restored. Her name was Tarshi, I thought; I was working hard to familiarize myself with them all. Without preamble, she said, “You did not fight.”

“I do not know how,” I said. It was more or less true: my brother Andrew had made good on his offer to teach me a few things I might use to defend myself, but they would have been of limited use against Draconeans, who had a tremendous advantage in both height and mass, and claws and knives besides. Honesty prompted me to add, “And if I fought, what would you think of me then?”

She made no reply to that, simply turning away and rejoining her peers. It was not my most glorious moment; but at that particular moment, glory would have served me ill. The dreadful human, heir to a legacy of murder and rebellion, cowered in the face of Draconean fury. Under the circumstances, it amounted to a diplomatic master stroke—albeit a wholly inadvertent one.

The ambush shook everyone in the party, I think, for we travelled with a great deal more care after that. The elders were not accustomed to thinking of themselves as the targets of a threat—and they had not been even in this instance, as the attack was directed primarily at me and secondarily toward the three sisters who had brought me there. But their society is agrarian and scattered enough that they rarely if ever face the kinds of conflicts that are familiar to the rulers of more populous and concentrated states, and the realization that my presence might spark an actual rebellion was an unpleasant surprise.

For my own part, I did not like the feeling that every step I took shook the ground, that simply by existing within the Sanctuary I was spreading fear and discord. But how much worse, I reasoned, would it have been had this first contact happened under different circumstances? Everything that made me vulnerable—my lack of companions, my lack of martial capability—also made me less of a threat. In a sense, I traded my safety for theirs… albeit not by my own choice. This was the decision of Ruzt and Kahhe and Zam, who leapt on the opportunity presented by a lone human, bereft of support.

It was with a great deal of trepidation that I came to the place of the elders. This was the phrase used to describe it, and so generic were the words that I had no idea what to expect. Not the temple, that much I knew; we had rounded the base of Anshakkar, leaving those sacred chambers far behind. A palace, perhaps?

That term will do as well as any, though it implies a much grander structure than the reality. The place of the elders was the set of buildings where those nine Draconeans dwelt, along with their male counterpart. Although the greatest of these was smaller than the yak barn of Imsali, it was far larger than any ordinary house, and much more finely made, with carved decoration outside and painted inside. In the summer months the terrain around the compound was a kind of garden, consisting mostly of sculpted rocks, in which they would plant flowers and other beauteous greenery; when I arrived, however, it was of course still mired in winter’s leavings.

The three sisters and I were given a chamber to sleep in, while the four who had come as our guards were dispatched back to Imsali. This was by decree, not the sister-group’s voluntary choice; the elders had security enough there, and I suspect they did not want the disruption our self-appointed watchdogs might bring. I took the decision as an encouraging sign, for it also sent away several Draconeans who were hostile to me, leaving us greater peace and quiet in which to speak. Of course this did not last; nearly every village in the Sanctuary sent representatives to the place of the elders, to examine me or render their opinions on what ought to be done. But we had a little breathing space before those began arriving.

Our meetings I expected to take place in the central chamber of the largest building, which was an audience hall. We did indeed spend a great deal of time in there—enough so that the place became nearly as suffocating to me as the sisters’ house, though that was due as much to my desire to leave the Sanctuary as to the amount of time I spent inside. But we were also outdoors a great deal, weather permitting, for the Draconean religion as it was practiced in the Sanctuary revolved around the contrast between two extremes: the secrecy and protection of a cave, and the vitality of the sun in the open sky.

This I learned from the first male Draconean of my acquaintance, a fellow named Habarz who was the counterpart of the ruling council of elders. I tried not to show my excitement upon being introduced to him, but I fear I did not succeed very well.

Physically Habarz was not much different from the females: sexual dimorphism among their species is much less apparent than in humans, consisting primarily of a larger and more interestingly patterned ruff, which is considered their most attractively masculine feature. His was far from the most impressive, though at the time I had no real basis for comparison. Unlike some males of his kind, who earn their keep through what I can only term stud service, Habarz was a scholar.

His work bore little resemblance to mine, of course: scholarship in the Sanctuary was far more theological in nature than scientific. Male Draconeans, as I have said, are in the minority of their species; they constitute no more than twenty percent of the population, with any given clutch ordinarily containing several sisters and a single brother. Although no one admitted it openly to me, by reading between the lines, I came to understand that their eggs were kept communally—likely somewhere in or near the temple; I was not about to ask—where a cadre of elder males watched over them. Once hatched and old enough to travel, the juveniles were sent back to their home villages, where again they were in the custody of the oldest male age group. They do pay attention to which eggs came from which female, and not only that Draconean but all of her immediate sisters are considered the mothers of that clutch; but the care and education of the young is the responsibility of the males en masse.

In light of this, it is unsurprising that those same males should predominantly occupy the intellectual roles of Draconean society. Much to my amusement, I had once again marked myself as peculiarly masculine—but not for quite the same reasons as usual. My tendency to wander about and put myself into danger is a quality associated with female Draconeans (who, being more numerous, are more easily risked); my drawing skills, on the other hand, acquired in childhood as part of my feminine accomplishments, are more commonly seen as masculine. The sisters frequently whittle geometric patterns, but it is their brothers who paint figurative art.

Figurative—and religious, for the two go hand in hand. Males form not only the majority of the artistic class I mentioned before, but the majority of the spiritual leadership; or rather I should say it in reverse sequence, for it is the latter which leads to the former. Their religious role also leads to the greater rate of literacy among males, as a modernized version of the ancient script is used primarily for religious texts and important historical documents. After all, there is little need for reading or writing when one spends the majority of one’s summer either farming or herding yaks, and the majority of the long and idle winter asleep.