Thanks to the commenters who encouraged me to have a look at Naomi Novik’s adventure with dragons Down Under. I read most of her Temeraire series when it first came out, but somehow managed to miss Tongues of Serpents. It was worth taking the time to fill in the gap.
The nine-book series that begins with His Majesty’s Dragon is what happens when Anne McCaffrey and Patrick O’Brian get together and have a baby. Dragonriders in the Napoleonic Wars. Adventure on the high seas—with dragons. Adventure everywhere else, too, as Temeraire and his beloved Captain Laurence circumnavigate the globe. They go everywhere, and here, in Volume 6, they fetch up onshore in Australia.
It’s not a happy voyage. Laurence and his dragon have been transported for treason. They had their reasons, and those were both excellent and morally imperative. For that they’ve been drummed out of the corps and condemned for life to the far side of the world.
It’s very hard on them, because the war with Napoleon is at a critical juncture, and the loss of a large and powerful fighting dragon is a great blow to the British cause. But here they are, and here they’re condemned to stay. They have a small but important job to do, protecting three dragon eggs and eventually overseeing their hatching. They find themselves, as usual, in the middle of a complicated and volatile situation, with ongoing mutinies against the authorities, clashing personalities, and, eventually, a series of international incidents.
This book is not a standalone. If you’re new to it, I recommend starting with the first volume, His Majesty’s Dragon, and proceeding in order from there (though I skipped a couple in the middle, including Tongues of Serpents, and was able to keep up without too much difficulty). Much of what goes on here relies heavily on events in previous volumes, and there’s not a lot of summing up for the newcomer. You pretty much have to know who everybody is and why they’re friends or enemies (or frenemies), and the political situation is beyond complicated.
But this is the SFF Bestiary, and we’re here for the fantastical fauna. The dragons are already well established in the series; Novik doesn’t spend much time going over the basics. We are informed that Temeraire is a Celestial, a rare and highly prized Chinese breed, which may only be associated with a member of the imperial family. Laurence, a former British Naval officer, has managed to get over that very high bar by becoming the adopted son of the Emperor. There’s a female dragon of another breed, Iskierka, who breathes fire and spouts steam and has a personality to match. As the story goes on, the three eggs hatch three very different dragons, and we meet a few others as well—including an army of sea serpents.
Novik’s dragons, like McCaffrey’s, are imprinted at hatching, usually by aviators who have been raised and trained in the corps. Laurence is an outlier, and he won’t turn out to be the only one. A good part of the human drama revolves around the stress between insiders and outsiders in the corps, with the added complication (and irony) that the corps itself is very much outside the norm of British society and politics.
Australia is the ultimate outsiders’—I won’t call it paradise; it’s more of a purgatory when it’s not outright hell. The bulk of the novel consists of a grueling trek through the Outback on a more or less manufactured mission, to get out of the political mess in the raw new capital of Sydney. The would-be colonizers have only the most rudimentary knowledge of what they’re getting into. They don’t know the land, the people (far too many of whom have been wiped out by European diseases), or the creatures that inhabit it.
It takes a good half of the book to get to the bunyips. The first sign is the disappearance of one of the convicts assigned to the expedition, and initially it seems that he’s simply made a break for freedom. After the second man is snatched from camp, a passing group of Indigenous men names what took him: Bunyip. By the time Laurence almost but not quite glimpses one of them, it’s clear there’s something haunting the water holes.
And then, one night, Temeraire is mired from end to end in quicksand. In the lengthy and exhausting process of getting him out, the travelers get a good look at what tried to trap him.
Bunyips in this world appear to be a species of dragon. It’s not clear if they’re sentient, and they don’t seem to talk (the one sound they’re heard to make is “a low throaty howl more like the coughing of a hyena than the hiss of a reptile”), but they are capable of laying sophisticated traps for prey. They dig tunnels in the earth with carefully hidden, lidded entrances, funnel water into oases, and mount coordinated attacks on travelers.
They’re very quick and very good at eluding detection. When they’re finally sighted, they’re as big as any animal gets in this part of the world, and there are a good many of them. They have long muzzles, rounded snouts, and small, black, pupilless eyes that gleam yellow in torchlight; their lean, snakelike bodies are red and brown like the earth they tunnel in, their hides pebbled, and their heads topped with tufts like dry grass. They’re built for digging, with massive, clawed forelegs and much smaller hindlegs, and what seem to be vestigial wings.
The Outback is their country, and they’re an object lesson in what happens to invaders who have no idea what they’re doing. They can be fought off, but a small company of outlanders, even with dragons, has to learn quickly how to either avoid them or coexist with them.
In the end the expedition settles on a combination of both. They try to camp away from water sources and if possible on solid rock, and instead of tearing up the bunyips’ tunnels, they start leaving a portion of each day’s hunt for the bunyips. The abductions stop, and so do the attempts to trap the dragons. The message seems to be, Pay the toll, stay out of our way, and we won’t try to eat you.
It’s a nice combination of real-world legend and cautionary tale—don’t go down to the water at night or the bunyip will get you—and fantasy worldbuilding. These bunyips are probable dragon relatives, reptilian, wily, and clearly carnivorous. They’re well adapted to their environment.
