Tongues of Serpents t-6, Page 2

  “Lord, yes, it must be almost six,” Emily Roland answered, putting down her sword; she and Demane were fencing a little, in the yard. She patted her face down with a tugged-free tail of her shirt, and ran to the promontory edge to call down to the sailors below, and came back to say, “No, I am wrong: it is a quarter past seven: how strange the day is so long, when it is almost Christmas!”

  “It is not strange at all,” Demane said. “It is only strange that you keep insisting it must be winter here only because it is in England.”

  “But where is Granby, if it is so late?” Iskierka said, prickling up at once, overhearing. “He did not mean to go anywhere particularly nice, he assured me, or I should never have let him go looking so shabby.”

  Temeraire flared his ruff a little, taking this to heart; he felt it keenly that Laurence should go about in nothing but a plain gentleman’s coat, without even a little bit of braid or golden buttons. He would gladly have improved Laurence’s appearance if he had any chance of doing so; but Laurence still had refused to sell Temeraire’s talon-sheaths for him, and even if he had, Temeraire had not yet seen anything in this part of the world which would have suited him as appropriate.

  “Perhaps I had better go and look for Laurence,” Temeraire said. “I am sure he cannot have meant to stay away so long.”

  “I am going to go and look for Granby, too,” Iskierka announced.

  “Well, we cannot both go,” Temeraire said irritably. “Someone must stay with the eggs.” He cast a quick, judgmental eye over the three eggs in their protective nests of swaddling blankets, and the small canopy set over them, made of sailcloth. He was a little dissatisfied by their situation: a nice coal brazier, he thought, would not have gone amiss even in this warm weather, and perhaps some softer cloth to go directly against the shell; and it did not suit him that the canopy was so low he could not put his head underneath it, to sniff at the eggs and see how hard their shells had become.

  There had been a little difficulty over them, after disembarking: some of the officers of the Corps who had been sent along had tried to object to Temeraire’s keeping the eggs by him, as though they would be better able to protect them, which was stuff; and they had made some sort of noise about Laurence trying to kidnap the eggs, which Temeraire had snorted off.

  “Laurence does not want any other dragon, as he has me,” Temeraire had said, “and as for kidnapping, I would like to know whose notion it was to take the eggs halfway across the world on the ocean, with storms and sea-serpents everywhere, and to this odd place that is not even a proper country, with no dragons; it was certainly not mine.”

  “Mr. Laurence is going directly to hard labor, like all the rest of the prisoners,” Lieutenant Forthing had said, quite stupidly, as though Temeraire were allowing any such thing to happen.

  “That is quite enough, Mr. Forthing,” Granby had said, overhearing, and coming upon them. “I wonder that you would make any such ill-advised remark; I pray you take no notice of it at all, Temeraire, none at all.”

  “Oh! I do not in the least,” Temeraire answered, “or any of these other complaints; it is all nonsense, when what you mean is,” he added to Forthing and his associates, “you would like to keep the eggs by you, so that they should not know any better when they hatch, but think they must go at once into harness, and that they must take whichever of you wins them by chance: I heard you talk of drawing lots last night in the gunroom, so you needn’t try and deny it. I will certainly have none of it, and I expect neither will the eggs, of any of you.”

  He had of course carried his point, and the eggs, away to their present relative safety and comfort, but Temeraire had no illusions as to the trustworthiness of people who could make such spitefully false remarks; he did not doubt that they would creep up and snatch the eggs away if he gave them even the least chance. He slept curled about the tent, therefore, and Laurence had put Roland and Demane and Sipho on watch, also.

  The responsibility was proving sadly confining, however, particularly as Iskierka was not to be trusted with the eggs for any length of time. Fortunately the town was very small, and the promontory visible from nearly any point within it if one only stretched out one’s neck to look, so Temeraire felt he might risk it, only long enough to find Laurence and bring him back. Of course Temeraire was sure no one would be absurd enough to try and treat Laurence with any disrespect, but it could not be denied that men were inclined to do unaccountable things from time to time, and Forthing’s remark stirred uneasily in the back of his head.

  It was true, if one wished to be very particular about such things, that Laurence was a convicted felon: convicted of treason, and his sentence commuted to transportation only at the behest of Lord Wellington, after the last campaign in England. But that sentence had been fulfilled, in Temeraire’s opinion: no-one could deny that Laurence had now been transported, and the experience had been quite as much punishment as anyone could have wished.

  The unhappy Allegiance had been packed to the portholes with still-more-unhappy convicts, who had been kept chained wrist-and-ankle all the day, and stank quite dreadfully whenever they were brought out for exercise in their clanking lines, some of them hanging limp in the restraints. It seemed quite like slavery, to Temeraire; he did not see why it should make so vast a difference as Laurence said, only because a law-court had said the poor convicts had stolen something: after all, anyone might take a sheep or a cow, if it were neglected by its owner and not kept under watch.

  Certainly it made the ship as bad as any slaving vessel: the smell rose up through the planking of the deck, and the wind brought it forward to the dragondeck almost without surcease; even the aroma of boiling salt pork, from the galley below, could not erase it. And Temeraire had learned by accident, perhaps a month out on their journey, that Laurence was quartered directly by the gaol, where it must have been far worse.

  Laurence had dismissed the notion of making any complaint, however. “I do very well, my dear,” he had said, “as I have the whole liberty of the dragondeck for my days and the pleasanter nights, which not even the ship’s officers have. It would be unfair in the extreme, when I have not their labor, for me to be demanding some better situation: someone else would have to shift places to give me another.”

  So it had been a very unpleasant transportation indeed, and now they were here, which no-one could enjoy, either. Aside from the question of kangaroos, there were not very many people at all, and nothing like a proper town. Temeraire was used to seeing wretched quarters for dragons, in England, but here people did not sleep much better than the clearings in any covert, many of them in tents or makeshift little buildings which did not stay up when one flew over them, not even very low, and instead toppled over and spilled out the squalling inhabitants to make a great fuss.

  And there was no fighting to be had at all, either. Several letters and newspapers had reached them along the way, when quicker frigates passed the laboring bulk of the Allegiance. It was very disheartening to Temeraire to have Laurence read to him how Napoleon was reported to be fighting again, in Spain this time, and sacking cities all along the coast, and Lien surely with him: and meanwhile here they were on the other side of the world, uselessly. It was not in the least fair, Temeraire thought disgruntledly, that Lien, who did not think Celestials ought to fight ever, should have all the war to herself while he sat here nursing eggs.

  There had not even been a small engagement at sea, for consolation: they had once seen a French privateer, off at a distance, but the small vessel had set every scrap of sail and vanished away at a heeling pace. Iskierka had given chase anyway—alone, as Laurence pointed out to Temeraire he could not leave the eggs for such a fruitless adventure—and to Temeraire’s satisfaction, after a few hours she had been forced to return empty-handed.

  The French would certainly not attack Sydney, either: not when there was nothing to be won but kangaroos and hovels. Temeraire did not see what they were to do here, at all; the eggs were to be seen
to their hatching, but that could not be far off, he felt sure, and then there would be nothing to do but sit about and stare out to sea, as far as he could tell.

  The people were all either engaged in farming, which was not very interesting, or were convicts, who it seemed to Temeraire marched out for no reason in the morning and then marched back at night. He had flown after a party of them one day, just to see, and they were only going to a quarry to cut out bits of stone, and then bringing the bits of stone back to town in waggon-carts, which seemed quite absurd and inefficient to him: he could have carried five cartloads in a single flight of perhaps ten minutes, but when he had landed to offer his assistance, the convicts had all run away, and the soldiers had come to complain to Laurence stiffly afterwards.

  They certainly did not like Laurence; one of them had been very rude, and said, “For fivepence I would have you down at the quarries, too,” at which Temeraire put his head down and said, “For twopence I will have you in the ocean; what have you done, I should like to know, when Laurence has won a great many battles with me, and we drove Napoleon off; and you have only been sitting here. You have not even managed to raise a respectable number of cows.”

  Temeraire now felt perhaps that jibe had been a little injudicious; or perhaps he ought not have let Laurence go into town, after all, when there were people who wished to put him into quarries. “I will go and look for Laurence and Granby,” he said to Iskierka, “and you will stay here: if you go, you will likely set something on fire, anyway.”

  “I will not set anything on fire!” Iskierka said. “Unless it needs setting on fire, to get Granby out.”

  “That is just what I mean,” Temeraire said. “How, pray tell, would setting something on fire do any good at all?”

  “If no-one would tell me where he was,” Iskierka said, “I am quite sure that if I set something on fire and told them I would set the rest on fire, too, they would come about: so there.”

  “Yes,” Temeraire said, “and in the meanwhile, very likely he would be in whatever house you had set on fire, and be hurt: and if not, the fire would jump along to the nearby buildings whether you liked it to or not, and he would be in one of those. Whereas I will just take the roof off a building, and then I can look inside and lift them out, if they are in there, and people will tell me anyway.”

  “I can take a roof off a building, too!” Iskierka said. “You are only jealous, because someone is more likely to want to take Granby, because he has more gold on him and is much more fine.”

  Temeraire swelled with indignation and breath, and would have expelled them both in a rush, but Roland interrupted urgently, saying, “Oh, don’t quarrel! Look, here they are all coming back, right as rain: that is them on the road, I am sure.”

  Temeraire whipped his head around: three small figures had just emerged from the small cluster of buildings which made the town, and were on the narrow cattle-track which came towards the promontory.

  Temeraire’s and Iskierka’s heads were raised high, looking down towards them; Laurence raised a hand and waved vigorously, despite the twinge in his ribs, which a bath and a little rough bandaging had not gone very far to alleviate; that injury, however, could be concealed. “There; at least we will not have them down here in the streets,” Granby said, lowering his own arm, and wincing a little; he probed gingerly at his shoulder.

  It was still a near-run thing when they had got up to the promontory—a slow progress, and Laurence’s legs wished to quiver on occasion, before they had reached the top and could sit on the makeshift benches. Temeraire sniffed, and then lowered his head abruptly and said, “You are hurt; you are bleeding,” with urgent anxiety.

  “It is nothing to concern you; I am afraid we only had a little accident in the town,” Laurence said, guiltily preferring a certain degree of deceit to the inevitable complications of Temeraire’s indignation.

  “So, dearest, you see it is just as well I wore my old coat,” Granby said to Iskierka, in a stroke of inspiration, “as it has got dirty and torn, which you would have minded if I had on something nicer.”

  Iskierka was thus diverted to a contemplation of his clothing, instead of his bruises, and promptly pronounced it a natural consequence of the surroundings. “If you will go into a low, wretched place like that town, one cannot expect anything better,” she said, “and I do not see why we are staying here, at all; I think we had better go straight back to England.”

  Chapter 2

  “I AM NOT SURPRISED in the least,” Bligh said later that evening, when they had left Riley’s table and gone to the quarterdeck for coffee and cigars, “not in the least; you see exactly how it is now, Captain Laurence, with these whoreson dogs and Merinos.”

  His language was not much better than that of the aforementioned dogs, and neither could Laurence much prefer his company. He did not like to think so of the King’s governor and a Navy officer, and particularly not one so much a notable seaman: his feat of navigating three thousand miles of open ocean in only a ship’s launch, when left adrift by the Bounty, was still a prodigy.

  Laurence had looked at least to respect, if not to like; but the Allegiance had stopped to take on water in Van Diemen’s Land, and there found the governor they had confidently expected to meet in Sydney, deposed by the Rum Corps and living in a resentful exile. He had a thin, soured mouth, perhaps the consequence of his difficulties; a broad forehead exposed by his receding hair; and delicate, anxious features beneath it, which did not very well correspond with the intemperate language he was given to unleash on those not uncommon occasions when he felt himself thwarted.

  He had no recourse but to harangue passing Navy officers with demands to restore him to his post, but all of those prudent gentlemen, to date, had chosen to stay well out of the affair while the news took the long sea-road back to England for an official response. This, Laurence supposed, had been neglected in the upheaval of Napoleon’s invasion and its aftermath; nothing else could account for so great a delay. But no fresh orders had come, nor a replacement governor, and meanwhile in Sydney the New South Wales Corps, and those men of property who had promoted their coup, grew all the more entrenched.

  The very night the Allegiance put into the harbor, Bligh had himself rowed out to consult with Captain Riley; he had very nearly asked himself to dinner, and directed the conversation with perfect disregard for Riley’s privilege; though as a Navy man himself he could not be ignorant of the custom.

  “A year now, and no answer,” Bligh had said in a cloud of spittle and fury, waving his hand to Riley’s steward to send the bottle round to him again. “A full year gone, Captain, and meanwhile in Sydney these scurrilous worms yet inculcate all the populace with licentiousness and sedition: it is nothing to them, nothing, if every child born to woman on these shores should be a bastard and a bugger and a drunken leech, so long as they do a little work upon their farms, and lie quiet under the yoke: Let the rum flow is their only maxim, the liquor their only coin and god.” He did not, however, stint himself of the wine, near-vinegared though it was, nor the last dregs of Riley’s port; ate well, also, as might a man living mostly on hardtack and a little occasional game.

  Laurence, silent, rolling the stem of his glass between his fingers, had been unable to feel some sympathy: a little less self-restraint, and he might have railed with as much fervor against the cowardice and stupidity which had united to send Temeraire into exile. He, too, wished to be restored, if not to rank or to society at least to a place where they might be useful; and not to merely sit here on the far side of the world upon a barren rock, and complain unto Heaven.

  But now Bligh’s downfall might as easily be his own: his one hope of return had been a pardon from the colony’s governor, for himself and Temeraire; or at least enough of a good report to reassure those in England whose fears and narrow interest had seen them sent away.

  It had always been a scant hope, threadbare; but Jane Roland certainly wished for the return of Britain’s one Celestial,
when she had Lien to contend with on the enemy’s side. Laurence might have some hope that the nearly superstitious fear of the breed which had sprung up, after the dreadful carnage of Lien’s attack upon the Navy at the battle of Shoeburyness, was beginning to subside, and cooler minds to regret the impulse which had sent away so valuable a weapon.

  At least, so she had written, encouragingly; and had advised him, I may have a prayer of sending the Viceroy to fetch you home, when she has been refit; only for God’s sake be obliging to the Governor, if you please; and I will thank you not to make any more great noise of yourself: it would be just as well if there is not a word to be said of you in the next reports from the colony, good or evil, but that you have been meek as milk.

  Of that, however, there was certainly no hope, from the moment when Bligh had blotted his lips and thrown down his napkin and said, “I will not mince words, Captain Riley: I hope you see your duty clear under the present circumstances, and you as well, Captain Granby,” he added.

  This was, of course, to carry Bligh back to Sydney, there to threaten the colony with bombardment or pillage, at which the ringleaders MacArthur and Johnston would be handed over for judgment. “And to be summarily hanged like the mutinous scoundrels they are, I trust,” Bligh said. “It is the only possible repair for the harm which they have done: by God, I should like to see their worm-eaten corpses on display a year and more, for the edification of their fellows; then we may have a little discipline again.”

  “Well, I shan’t,” Granby had answered, incautiously blunt after the free-flowing wine, “and,” he added to Laurence and Riley privately, afterwards, “I don’t see as we have any business telling the colony they shall have him back: it seems to me after a fellow has been mutinied against three or four times, there is something to it besides bad luck.”