Marie Brennan - Within the Sanctuary of Wings

Perhaps it is just as well that I did not have the time to survey the ranks of those I was joining. My hand might otherwise have shaken quite badly as I added my name to their company. But I did take a moment to look back a smaller distance, to the page that bore the name of Maxwell Oscott. He was not the Earl of Hilford when he signed; but he was, of course, the man whose patronage had launched me on my career, without whom I would not have been in the Great Hall that day.

I could not look for long. It would not have done my reputation any good for me to sniffle, or for a tear to fall upon the pages of that precious book. But I looked up and sought out Tom Wilker’s eye, for he had benefited as much as I had from that patronage. We shared a smile; then I bent and signed my name to the book. If you have a chance to see it there, know that the slight gap in the column is intentional, for I felt it was only proper to place my signature to the right of Tom’s.

After that there was a banquet, in which the President of the Colloquium stood up and said a great many flattering things about me, and many toasts were drunk in my honour. Much was made of the fact that the vote to award me a Fellowship was unanimous. Tom had told me in private that the President had taken a few recalcitrant gentlemen aside and informed them that if they did not vote in favour, they would not be welcome on the premises thereafter; for it would be to the eternal shame of the Colloquium if they failed to recognize the achievements of the woman who had found the last surviving population of the Draconean species. Those gentlemen had attended the signing, but absented themselves from the banquet, and I did not miss them. I did not need their dour faces marring that day. I said earlier in this volume that if the Colloquium had not admitted me to their company, I would have washed my hands of them without further ado; but it was much finer to achieve my girlhood dream at last.

For although the Colloquium is often a hidebound place, it is still a fine institution, and one that fosters scientific understanding in countless fields. My son Jacob is now a Fellow himself, having earned recognition through his work as an oceanographer—a field for which we did not even have a name when I was born. Natalie Oscott and her friends turned their attentions from the sky for a time in order to build him superior devices for exploring the world beneath the waves, and he has put these to excellent use. Suhail served as President of the Society of Linguists for a number of years, though he retired from that position a while ago; in his words, “If I never have to sit through another meeting again, it will be as good as attaining Paradise.” (A part of me is relieved that no one has yet been able to stomach the notion of a female Colloquium President. I have no doubt that it will happen someday, and I will applaud the lady who takes that laurel—but I had rather it not be me.)

At this point I find myself wanting to make some comparison between the world as I knew it when I preserved my first sparkling and the world I live in today. But the latter is so familiar to my readers that any extensive description of it would be tiresome, and as for the former, if I have not conveyed the general sense of it with the previous volumes of my memoirs, I could not hope to do so now. The changes are pervasive: everything from the pragmatic facts of daily life (travel by caeliger, and the widespread use of dragonbone machines for countless tasks), to the fabric of Scirling society (vastly increased educational opportunities for my sex, and the right of women to vote), to the state of all scientific fields, my own not excepted. Those with a far greater understanding of anatomy and chemistry have begun to establish the various mechanisms by which extraordinary breath is produced: a thing I could not have hoped to puzzle out for myself, as my own education was so informal. And, of course, we know far more about developmental lability, and how it produced the Draconean species in the ancient past.

I will not pretend this knowledge is an unmitigated good. As one might expect, it has unavoidably led to a great deal of unethical experimentation, with disreputable types who hardly deserve the name of “scientist” attempting to create their own breeds for a variety of purposes. Some of them have even tried to make new Draconeans—or rather, new hybrids of dragon and human. Their efforts have succeeded in establishing that the theory I formulated while living in the Sanctuary (dragon eggs anointed with human blood) is likely correct; but the rate of viability for the resulting organisms is low enough that it must have taken ages of primitive dragon worship among humans before a breeding population was established. I personally suspect that the Draconean species arose from a single pair, the happy accident of two successes in close enough temporal and geographic proximity that they were able to produce offspring. From there, developmental lability ensured enough variation to avoid inbreeding.

We will likely never know for certain, though. These days we can read the ancient Draconean language quite well, but even the scribes of that civilization did not have records of how their species began, apart from myth. Records of the Downfall are also few and far between, as the event itself so disrupted the fabric of their society that it produced a great silence, a gap between that age and the rise of great human kings afterward. But translations and archaeology together produce a clear enough image, of a civilization fallen into decadence and cruelty, and of a great and merciless slaughter when some nameless human created a potion that could kill unborn Draconeans in the egg.

Of course someone immediately set forth to rediscover that, too. The value of firestone has fallen tremendously from what it was in my youth, as both its greater availability and the moral repellence of its origin have caused many wealthy individuals to cease wearing it.

But against these ills I may set the position of Draconean society today, which is unquestionably improved from the time during which they hid in the Sanctuary of Wings, with nowhere left to run. I will not pretend their re-emergence in the outside world has been without its difficulties; many humans are indeed hostile to them, and a counter-movement among the Draconeans has continually agitated for renewed isolation. But the more outward-looking members of their society have taken advantage of their new freedom, with the result that their population has nearly doubled since the creation of the Sanctuary Alliance. Many of these new generation were nurtured and hatched in less harsh conditions, which in turn makes it easier for them to travel outside the Mrtyahaima. In time they hope to re-establish a settlement in Akhia, where their civilization began—though opposition to them among certain Segulist and Amaneen factions is strong. For reasons both biological and political, I do not expect to see that happen in my lifetime.

One change, however, may happen quite soon. The final terms of the Sanctuary Alliance included the construction of a Scirling caeliger base there, for the protection of Draconean sovereignty. Although the garrison proved useful once or twice in the early years, it has not faced any significant threat in quite some time. The duration set for the base’s operation will expire next year, and I am certain the Synedrion would not even think of failing to honour the promises they made then, that they would dismantle the base and return the Sanctuary fully to Draconean control.

I still correspond with Ruzt, who now sits on the council of elders in the Sanctuary. It is a wonder brought about by the use of caeligers; when we first met, to send a letter from Scirland to the depths of the Mrtyahaima would have taken half a year, and the other half for the reply to come back. These days I may converse regularly with friends all over the earth, from the Sanctuary to Yelang to Bayembe, and read the findings of scientific colleagues from countless other lands. As my enthusiasm for strenuous field expeditions wanes with age, I find this is a great convenience.