The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons) by Marie Brennan Page B

port’s local trade, the spices whose aromatic vibrancy is all out of proportion to their quantity. Unwashed bodies and tar, fresh-cut tropical lumber, the greasy stench of lunch being fried for dockworkers and hungry travellers alike. But I can only tell you of one scent at a time, and I cannot present those to you at the same time as I give you the sounds and the sights, the mad clamour that was my first experience of Eriga.
    With the knowledge I have now, I can give the proper names to what I saw then only as a bewildering array of peoples. There were Scirlings among them, of course, merchants and soldiers, there to protect our interests in iron production. Nor were we the only Anthiopeans, despite tensions with our rivals over their involvement elsewhere in Eriga; there were Thiessois, Chiavorans, a cluster of Bulskoi looking exceedingly uncomfortable in the heat. Pigtailed Yelangese bustled around their ships, and Akhians were nearly as common as Scirlings.
    But it was the Erigans who dazzled my eye, for they were new to me, and formed the bulk of the crowds.
    Amongst themselves, they displayed a hundred different modes of dress and adornment, a hundred different details of physiognomy that mark one people as distinct from another. I saw complexions ranging from inky blue-black to bronze, mahogany, and dark amber, sharp chins and square jaws, high foreheads and low, full lips and wide mouths and cheekbones that rode flat or stood out like the arches of a bow. The people wore their hair in loose braids or braids close to the scalp, in beads or strips of fabric, in soft clouds and corkscrew curls and sharp ridges held in place by white or red clay. There were Agwin veiled from head to toe and Menke in little more than loincloths, Sasoro in silver and Erbenno in embroidery, Mebenye and Ouwebi and Sagao and Gabborid in variations on the folded wrap, whose subtleties of color and arrangement communicate a great deal to the knowledgeable eye, but escaped my understanding entirely that first day. And, of course, there were countless Yembe, the dominant people of that land.
    I had studied the Yembe language (from a reference grammar, which is an abominable teaching tool), but it had in no way prepared me for the social language before me now. Staring out at the docks, I understood, for the first time, that I had left behind the familiar commonalities of Anthiope, and crossed the oceans to a different continent.
    Mr. Wilker put his hand under my elbow, which tells me I must have reeled. “It will be a little while before we can go ashore,” he said. “You might want to go below until we do. The sun can be brutal, for those not used to it.”
    Once he would have phrased it as “you should go below.” Disagreements over Natalie’s presence aside, we had indeed made great strides in our relationship with one another. “The sun does not bother me,” I said absently, digging in my satchel for my sketchbook. I’d done little drawing since leaving Scirland, the pitch and roll of the ship wreaking havoc on my ability to place a precise line, but I could not pass up this opportunity to sketch the docks.

    I could feel him wrestling with the answer he wanted to make to that, before finally swallowing it—for the sake of harmony, I suspect. “I will make certain our trunks are being seen to,” he said, and went away.
    I had only put the broadest outlines of the scene down on paper when a popping noise sounded behind me, and then my page was in shadow. “Natalie,” I said, annoyed.
    “You’ll burn otherwise,” she said, all practicality as usual. “Grandpapa warned me. About the sun, and about you—that you wouldn’t take sufficient precautions.”
    “The sun here is strong, yes. It was strong in the mountains of Vystrana, too, and I had little trouble there.” I had suffered more from dryness of skin than from sunburn.
    Natalie laughed. “Yes, because you were cold all the time. You covered up and spent much of your