Crucible of Gold t-7

by Naomi Novik

  “Ambassadors, I have always understood, are meant to be especially gracious and polite,” Temeraire said, eyeing Maila darkly. “What language is that?”

  “Quechua,” she said. “The Inca speak it.”

  The ship was the French transport Triomphe, fresh from the docks in Toulon and having just come around the Horn; she was sailing north, en route to the Incan empire, evidently with a project of alliance.

  “I am sure it must be some mischief of Lien’s,” Temeraire said to a very disheartened Arthur Hammond—in Chinese, the only language in which they might have some privacy—when that gentleman had come up on deck. “But at least she is not here herself, and if we should explain all the circumstances to the Inca, I am sure they will think better of allying themselves with her and Napoleon: they cannot be pleased with him when he has been delivering strange dragons from over the ocean into their territory, or near it, anyway. Where is Laurence?”

  “The French are not likely to give us an opportunity of making them any such explanations,” Hammond said, seating himself on a coil of rope, “and Captain Laurence is belowdecks with Captain Granby and Demane: they are in good health. I am to inform you that they will each be allowed an airing once a day, in your sight, on the quarterdeck; so long as there is no gesture—no attempt—which might suggest a violation of parole.” He spoke disconsolately.

  “What is he saying about Granby?” Iskierka said, picking up her head, and when Hammond had repeated the intelligence for her in English, she hissed in displeasure. “I do not see we have given our parole at all; I did not surrender, and I am sure the three of us can take this ship, if we like: what is this nonsense of keeping my captain away from me?” she demanded.

  “We needn’t have let you land last night,” Genevieve said, with some heat—she had been taught English, as well, it seemed—“and then you and your captains would be drowned. It is all very well to say now that you can take the ship: you ought have done it then, if you liked to try.”

  Iskierka snorted a curl of smoky flame from her lip—much to the alarm of the crew, whose urgent shouting she ignored—but there was no answering Genevieve’s argument, however much one might have liked to do so.

  It was hard to find oneself aboard a perfectly splendid prize, a French transport only just built, and not be allowed to take it when they could have. Besides Genevieve, who was not even fully grown, there was only a Chanson-de-Guerre named Ardenteuse, and a Grand Chevalier absurdly named Piccolo, both of them presently aloft overhead to make room on the deck for the visitors. Piccolo was flying back and forth over the ship and peering downwards narrowly, trying to see just how big Kulingile was—somewhat difficult as Temeraire and Iskierka were coiled up over him.

  So that was three against three, or three against four if one counted Maila on the French side—he was disagreeable enough that Temeraire was perfectly willing to do so—and none of them able to breathe fire, or anything like. Oh! They would certainly have been victorious, in a fair fight; only it would not have been fair when they had just come from three days’ flying.

  Maila, watching Iskierka, said something to Genevieve without turning his head; she ruffled up her wings and answered him shortly, then after a second exchange she turned and said to Iskierka, “He asks if that is as much fire as you can breathe, at a time.”

  “Of course not,” Iskierka said, and put her head to the leeward side and blew out a rippling streamer of flame which reached nearly the full length of the ship and shimmered all the air about it. “And more than that, if I care to,” she added, with a flip of her wings.

  This was too much for the sailors: a few minutes later the ship’s captain, a M. Thibaux, mounted the dragondeck with lips grimly set and his hand upon the hilt of his sword, to express his objections to open flame aboard his ship. That was quite understandable, Temeraire felt, but the captain carried it too far, saying to Hammond, “I must beg you to convey to the beast, in whatever terms you think best, that her captain must suffer the consequences of her behavior—I would be sorry to have to execute such a threat, but monsieur, it cannot be tolerated; the next time, I will have him flogged.”

  “You will do nothing of the sort to Granby,” Temeraire said indignantly, in French, “and if you should try, Iskierka would set the ship on fire; and I would not stop her, either.”

  “What is he saying?” Iskierka demanded, coiling up onto Kulingile’s shoulders to peer down at the captain, jetting steam from her spikes. “Oh! Why do you all not speak so anyone can understand; what is it about Granby?”

  “He says he would flog him,” Temeraire said, still angry, “and I am telling him he mayn’t at all: it is not Granby’s fault,” he added to the captain, “when your guest all but asks her to show away, and anyway she was perfectly careful.” Not that Iskierka needed to be breathing fire all over the place, and ordinarily Temeraire would have been all too pleased to issue her a reproof himself, but he did not mean to yield any ground on this point.

  Iskierka hissed in a dozen voices at once, from throat and spikes together; and woke Kulingile: he cracked a sleepy eye and rolled it upwards to peer at her as she jounced on his shoulders in fury, and asked, “Is there anything to eat?”

  It was maddening to hear the rising uproar on deck, some two feet directly overhead, while powerless to have anything to do with it. “I suppose we may call it a blessing if this ship isn’t sunk, when we are done,” Granby said from the hanging cot where he lay, without opening his eyes; his face was drawn and deeply lined with pain.

  Captain Thibaux had been everything gracious—had brought his surgeon to see to Granby’s arm, and his servant to give them an excellent dinner, though their hunger would have made it easy to do justice to one far inferior. But there was still a guard upon the door, four men well-armed and with a look of sturdy competence, and Laurence had no illusions as to their orders: the soldiers looked anxiously at one another, and above, as the noise of quarreling dragons grew all the louder.

  That noise soon subsided, however, and shortly thereafter a tapping came on the cabin door.

  “Captain Laurence, I regret we are fated always to be meeting in the most uncomfortable circumstances,” M. De Guignes said. “Do you permit?” He poured: an excellent Madeira. “When this endless war is over, I insist that you shall visit me, and I may give you better hospitality, if God wills we should both be spared.”

  “You are very kind, sir; it would give me great pleasure,” Laurence said, taking the glass with more politeness than enthusiasm; at present he could hope only that he would not be spending the interval in a French prison, with very little reason to encourage that hope. “I am afraid you might find Temeraire less convenient to host.”

  De Guignes smiled. “He should pose no more difficulties than my Genevieve,” he said, touching with pride a small decoration upon his sleeve: the Legion de l’Aile, a singular honor lately created by Napoleon which came accompanied by a dragon egg and an endowment for the beast’s future maintenance, together. Laurence heard this explanation in some astonishment, and later, when De Guignes had gone again, Granby coughed out a laugh from his cot and said, “Lord, trust Bonaparte to bring having a dragon into fashion: I suppose every one of his new aristos will want one, now.”

  “Mme. Lien has condescended to offer her advice on the most profitable of crosses to attempt,” De Guignes now added. “Genevieve has now five tongues to her credit, and the last acquired after she was already out of the shell.”

  It had not before occurred to Laurence that Lien might improve the French breeding lines through such a mechanism: the Admiralty had rather congratulated themselves that Lien, being female, could only produce a handful of offspring for Napoleon’s benefit. Laurence himself had strongly doubted she could be induced to do even so much, given her pride in her own lineage and disdain for Western breeds. Certainly the Chinese were acknowledged supreme in dragon-breeding techniques, but Laurence had imagined that these must be the province of some band of expert
gentlemen very like those who served in the role in Britain and in France. But that was absurd, he belatedly realized: who better to direct the breeding of dragons than the dragons themselves, and if Lien had made any study of the matter, her knowledge would benefit the breeders of France far more than any individual contribution she might have made.

  “The captain grants you should have the liberty of the quarterdeck from two to four bells of the afternoon watch, one of you at a time,” De Guignes said, “and you will of course wish to see to the comfort of your men; I am desolate to inform you they must remain in the ship’s gaol, in consequence of their numbers, but every effort will be made—”

  “I understand entirely, and your assurances must satisfy me,” Laurence said, interrupting: he did not much object if the rescued sailors were kept in chains and sustained on weeviled biscuit and bilgewater. “If I might solicit some better housing for our officers and crew, I would be grateful: I will stand surety for their parole, if they are willing to give it.”

  De Guignes bowed acquiescence.

  He had managed to quiet the earlier uproar among the dragons—“Nothing to concern you, gentlemen,” he said, “only the least of misunderstandings, owing to Captain Thibaux’s unfamiliarity with the nature of dragons: he is new to his command, you see. But all has now been made clear: although I cannot greatly envy you, Captain Granby,” he added in a touch of raillery, which Granby’s set mouth did not appreciate.

  “But sir,” Laurence said, “I must ask you to confide in me: will we not overmatch your resources? Three dragons of heavy-weight class added to your complement—”

  “We are perhaps a little incommoded,” De Guignes said, “but I beg you not to fear: I have discussed the matter with the captain and our aviators, and I am assured we have no cause for alarm. The dragons shall take it in turns to spend some hours aloft, and by rationing and attention to fishing we will arrange to feed them all, if not quite so well as they might like.”

  “Everything is quite all right,” Temeraire said the next afternoon, calling down to the quarterdeck—in English; De Guignes had very gently hinted that efforts at concealing the captains’ conversation with their respective dragons might be taken amiss. “Iskierka is complaining of the seaweed—”

  “As anyone would,” she put in, without opening her eyes or raising her head, “—it is perfectly foul, and it is all great nonsense to say it is a delicacy in China: we are not in China, and I would much rather have a cow.”

  “Well, there isn’t a cow for you to have,” Temeraire said, “and I must call it the worst sort of manners to complain when we are guests.”

  “Seaweed?” Laurence said, puzzled.

  “Ardenteuse has the net, you can see her there aloft,” Temeraire said, pointing with his snout at the Chanson-de-Guerre flying alongside the vessel with a long rope dangling: shortly she pulled up a fishing net of fine line, full of dark green seaweed and wriggling silver bodies.

  “They might pick the fish out for us, at least,” Iskierka said, grumbling, “instead of giving it to us all mashed together. Besides, we are not guests; we are prisoners, since we have surrendered”—very sullenly—“so I will complain as much as I like.”

  “And it is not at all unpleasant to keep aloft for half the day,” Temeraire went on, lordly ignoring her, “so long as one may come down and sleep later.”

  He made light of the difficulties, but there was an undertone of weariness in his voice which all the effort at cheer did not mask, and he put his head down and fell back to sleep even before Laurence had been gently ushered from the deck at the conclusion of his brief airing.

  “It’s not that they can’t fly half the day,” Granby said at dinner, having returned from his own outing equally anxious for Iskierka, “but not when they are to be half-fed, day-in and day-out; and this cold weather don’t make it easier on them, either. I suppose it is still a long way to landfall?”

  “Four weeks perhaps, if they are aiming for Matarani,” Laurence said, an educated guess only: he barely knew anything of the Inca ports. They were notoriously unfriendly to sailors putting in at their ports in anything larger than a ship’s launch, so any merchantman determined to trade was forced to anchor miles off the coast out of sight and ferry goods in by boat; and these on return often reported half their crews missing, lost to a fate whose horrors were only magnified for being unknown. Those boats nearly as often carried back chests loaded with gold and silver, in exchange for their goods, which caused the adventurers to persevere; but the Inca were not to be considered hospitable.

  In any case, even if Laurence had known the coast as well as that of England, the French had not shown him their charts, and looking out the porthole at what stars he could see did not tell him precisely where they were. “We are out of the forties, at least I can say for certain, so will make worse time the rest of the way.”

  “Would you know when we are in range of land, Captain?” Hammond asked, dropping his voice confidentially, in a way Laurence could not like. “In flying range, I mean—and if we should be straining the ship’s capacity—”

  “We would nevertheless be bound by our parole to remain, unless the French should give us leave to go,” Laurence said with enough finality, he hoped, to forestall any untenable suggestion: Hammond was a remarkable man in many respects, and Laurence had cause to be grateful for his gifts, but on occasion one might not be sure of him.

  “Yes, of course,” Hammond said, and sank back into his chair with a face like a sail with the wind spilling out of it, all gloom; in a moment he burst out, “They must have sent spies through Brazil—it is the only explanation; but how they should have persuaded the Inca—” and subsided; a moment later he was repeating, “I cannot conceive how they should have persuaded the Inca to open relations—”

  De Guignes certainly did not mean to volunteer any information; however smiling his courtesies, it was plain he disliked extremely having encountered them, and meant so far as he could to isolate them from the life of the ship and in particular from his Inca passengers, if there were any: Laurence had so far seen none, saving the feathered dragon upon the deck. Captain Thibaux was more really welcoming, but as he could count on the captain’s share of the head-price for three heavy-weight dragons and their officers, as well as for nearly three hundred sailors, he had greater compensation for his pain.

  “No, Mr. Hammond, I have met none of the Inca aboard,” Mrs. Pemberton said, when she was permitted to visit them, “although I have been made very welcome: Mme. Récamier has kindly lent me this dress, as I came away without baggage.”

  “Récamier?” Hammond said, puzzled. “Not of the salon, in Paris?”

  “I believe she lives in Paris,” Mrs. Pemberton said, confirming, “and several of her companions also.”

  “But,” Hammond said, and fell into muttering confusion; Laurence could not deny he was as perplexed to find De Guignes carrying along half-a-dozen Frenchwomen of noble birth on a mission to a dangerous and isolate nation.

  * * *

  “I don’t see why he must be so unfriendly,” Kulingile said, meaning Piccolo, who was presently taking his turn to sleep, with his head buried beneath his wing so he would not see Kulingile flying overhead. It had proven necessary to the maintenance of harmony to have only one of the two of them on the deck at any time, once Piccolo had determined that Kulingile was indeed the larger. “It is not as though I were doing it on purpose.”

  “That scarcely makes a difference; it is not as though you would choose to be smaller if you could,” Temeraire said. In all honesty he did not himself see why Kulingile needed to be quite so large, and still growing, when he had started out so small and from a stunted egg; it was a little difficult to adjust one’s thinking.

  But to be fair, Kulingile was not at all inclined to make a fuss: even though there was not enough to eat, he did not try to demand more than a proportional share, or filch some of the catch for himself the way Piccolo would if one did not make sure h
e was watched.

  “I am not a prisoner of war,” Piccolo had said over-loudly, when Iskierka had caught him at it the other day. “My captain did not surrender himself; this is our ship.”

  “It is all very well to make remarks of that sort,” Temeraire had said coldly, “if you were prepared to defend them, but you know very well we cannot be having it out in the middle of the ocean. You may be sure there is not another transport about if we should lose this one, and if there were, there would be even less food to go around.”

  Temeraire did not like to remember those last desperate hours of the flight, drawing in a mist of salt with every too-short breath, his whole body growing steadily more heavy around him; it felt too like defeat. But there was no denying that he could not have flown much farther, with all the will in the world to do so. Nor could have Iskierka and Kulingile, of course; so it was not at all a weakness of his own, but nevertheless he had been forced to acknowledge what must indeed be a practical limitation upon almost any dragon.

  He would have liked to question Lung Shen Li about her technique—perhaps there was some trick to a long flight—but after all, she did not have the divine wind, so he could not begrudge her a particular gift all her own. In any case, he now properly appreciated the absolute necessity of the ship to all of them, and so they must not quarrel; however much one would have liked to push Maila’s nose in for him, with his constant airs and the shameless way he made up to Iskierka.

  “Perhaps when we have made land?” he said to Laurence wistfully. “Not, of course, to violate parole,” Temeraire added hurriedly, seeing Laurence’s expression, “we would not really take the ship away; but only to make quite clear that if they hadn’t our parole—”

  But evidently this was not acceptable, either; although Iskierka snorted her opinion of that. “It is all stuff,” she said. “Do you know that they mean to send us back to some breeding grounds in France, and put Granby and Laurence and Demane in prison, for all the war? We should not have any battles, or prizes, ever again; it is perfectly ridiculous to expect us to go along with it when we can roust them in ten minutes.”