But none of us had forgotten what Thu said about seeing what might have been another specimen up there. If we could work out the path the first one had taken.…
I knew the truth. Every last one of us was hoping for a break in the weather that might allow us to attempt a climb up there. We searched below less because we expected to find anything of use, and more because we could not yet risk ascending higher. I am not often a religious woman, but I prayed for clear skies and calm winds.
In the meanwhile, we turned up nothing more than a few scraps of badly decayed flesh which might not even have come from a dragon. The night our search ended, I sat up with Tom and Suhail around the fire, discussing the entire situation.
“I do not think there can ever have been dragons living at the elevation of the col,” I said. I was sitting with my knees up in front of me, arms crossed over them. Even this close to the campfire, bundled in nearly every stitch I’d brought, I was cold. The day’s warmth fled promptly with the day’s light. “Developmental lability can achieve a great deal—but not, I think, a dragon that derives its sustenance entirely from rock and ice.”
Tom nodded. “Humans and yaks can adapt to living at altitude, and dragons might take it further. Insulation against the cold, more efficient respiration, that kind of thing. But they still have to eat. And nothing grows that high.” Even where we camped, the pickings were slim indeed.
“So what was a dragon doing there to begin with,” Suhail said. His intonation did not make it a question; he was instead stating the problem.
“Migration,” I said. “Wild yaks have been known to climb barren passes. A dragon could do it, too.”
Tom leaned back on his elbows and tipped his head toward the sky, thinking it through. “Then we have a few possibilities. One is that Thu was mistaken; there was only the one preserved carcass, and whatever he thought he saw in the col was only a rock or a strange formation of ice. The second is that more than one dragon tried at various points to cross that pass, and died in the attempt.”
“Humans have died in this region,” I said. “Remember the stories the Nying told. There is no reason the same could not have happened to animals.”
“And the third possibility,” Tom said, “is that the breed was social. Which would be quite unusual for a dragon of that size.”
Unusual, but not unheard of. “They could have been like savannah snakes, with unattached males hunting in sibling groups.” I paused, tapping my fingers against my elbows. It had become more of a habit lately, as I often kept my arms tight around my body to retain heat. “But migrating in such a group would be quite useless. Sibling males cannot breed.”
Suhail’s snort quickly tipped over into immoderate laughter. Tom sat up, and we both stared at my husband, who seemed to have lost his reason entirely. “My apologies,” Suhail said, once he’d regained a modicum of composure. He wiped his eyes. “It is the exhaustion at work, I suspect. But you made me think of those frogs you mentioned once, the kind that change their sex when needed. And then I imagined frog-dragons hopping their way through the mountains.” He illustrated with one hand, springing over imaginary peaks.
I giggled, but Tom looked thoughtful. “It isn’t impossible. Not the hopping, of course, but the other part. We already know that swamp-wyrm eggs can develop into either sex. The ability to change in maturity would be quite valuable to dragons living in a place like this, where populations can be very isolated.”
“We aren’t likely to be able to tell that from a carcass,” I said. “Assuming we can find one at all. But yes—it’s an interesting thought.” I wondered if mews were capable of such a change. If nesting in tamarisk leaves and incubating the eggs at high heat could produce an orange honeyseeker with salty saliva, who knew what kinds of variation could occur in the wild?
None of that was the kind of question I could answer while camped in the shadow of Gyaptse. But until the weather cleared, speculation was all I had.
*
And then some benevolent deity smiled upon us, for the next morning we woke to find the skies a brilliant, frozen blue.
The only cloud to be seen was a wisp trailing off the peak of Gyaptse, which is a frequent phenomenon at that altitude. No sooner did we discover our good fortune than we scrambled to bring out the field glasses and examine the col above.
Looking at it directly was painful; we could only do so for brief periods of time. The same clear weather that blessed us with a view also reflected off the snow with blinding radiance—quite literally blinding, if we did not take care. We had goggles with darkened lenses, but these could not be combined with the field glasses without losing so much clarity as to make the whole exercise pointless. So we looked with unprotected eyes, and took it in turns to risk the light.
“If you see that horizontal band of bare stone,” Thu said, “it was below that somewhere—I think.” He did not sound as certain as a man who hauled us halfway around the world should have been.
We searched. After a time, we realized that the band of stone Tom, Suhail, and I had been looking at was not the one Thu meant. We found a dozen suspicious-looking lumps, spent far too much time trying to direct the eyes of others to those lumps, and then realized they were only stones or piles of snow. Or were they? We scrutinized them, arguing size, shape, piling speculation atop guesswork, optimism conquering pessimism and then being conquered in turn.
It was Tom who finally put his field glasses down and said, “We can’t tell from here. Whatever you saw, Thu … if it’s still there, it’s been too deeply buried by the snow for us to have any hope of finding it again. Not at this distance.”
My shoulders sagged in disappointment. All this effort, and we had nothing. In the ordinary way of things my work with the mews should have pleased me—but not when I had hoped for so much more.
Then I realized what Tom meant.
I looked up to find him gazing steadily at me. I, in turn, sought my husband’s eyes. Suhail’s frustrated expression faded to quiet stillness; then a silent laugh shook his shoulders. I did not even have to explain. “God willing,” he said with a half smile.
Chendley was staring at the three of us. He tumbled to it an instant later, for he had been in our company long enough to understand our habits. “You can’t be serious. You don’t even know that there’s anything up there to find!”
“The only way to find out,” I said, “is to go up there and look.”