Crucible of Gold t-7

by Naomi Novik

  “Yes, but,” Laurence began, “have her chances of marriage been materially harmed, by her—her congress, with—”

  “Why would they be?” Magaya said.

  “I am sure I do not know,” Temeraire said, and looked at Laurence inquiringly.

  “As she is no longer virgin,” Laurence said in despair, forcing himself to bring it out. “And even if that dragon does not care either way, perhaps men will; pray inquire of the young lady, herself.”

  “Very well, but it seems silly to me,” Temeraire said, and when he put the question to her the young woman blinked up at him and looked as perplexed as Magaya herself had. Laurence shook his head and gave up: the young woman plainly was neither friendless nor excessively sorry at the desertion; nor could he feel he was doing her any great disservice by taking Yardley away.

  Of Handes, he saw nothing all the time, save perhaps a skulking half-crouched shadow the sun threw out from behind one of the storehouses, as though someone had hidden in the space between the wall and where the roof reached down nearly to the ground. Laurence looked irresolutely; he did not intend to make himself a prig, and he felt all the compulsion of their dire need and the mercy of leaving Handes behind, and yet there was everything to dislike in the principles of such an act, if not the practicals.

  “I do not think there can be anything really wrong in it,” Temeraire said. “Magaya seems a decent sort now that she has come around to behaving better, and I am sure she will take excellent care of Handes: which is more than he deserves, anyway. Besides, Laurence,” he added, “you have just said yourself that the King’s subjects have the right to do as they wish, so long as it is consistent with their duty: Handes wishes to stay here, and it seems to me even if he did not wish to do so, one might consider it his duty to do so, since we will come by so many useful goods, in consequence.”

  “It is no free man’s duty to allow himself to be sold into slavery, in a foreign land, no matter how good the price,” Laurence said.

  “It is not exactly slavery, though,” Temeraire said. “You would not say that you were a slave, after all, only because you are mine.”

  It was some time since Laurence had considered himself entitled to demand Temeraire’s obedience, which otherwise might have enabled him to explain the contradiction easily; and on the face of it, he realized in some dismay, the relations between captain and beast could with more rationality be given the character of possession by the latter, than the former.

  “I dare say,” Granby said, when Laurence had laid this insight before him that evening, while all around them the camp bustled with activity, as the new harnesses were stitched together under Shipley’s busy and strutting supervision. “At least I am damned sure Iskierka would agree with you on the subject; pray don’t say it so loud. This wretched country cannot be a good influence: we may count ourselves lucky if Temeraire don’t go home thinking dragons ought to have men and not just votes.”

  Chapter 10

  H OME AND ENGLAND seemed very distant in the morning, when they came into the foothills of the great clawing peaks of the Andes, serrated and blue-shadowed where the long swaths of snow lay on their sides. The river divided into a hundred little tributaries trickling down the mountain-sides as they climbed, and by evening the dragons were landing in a high meadow gasping for breath. They had made scarcely ten miles if their progress were to be measured as a line drawn on a map, Laurence thought, and more than a hundred straight up.

  He stumbled himself, climbing down from Temeraire’s back, and they were all of them short of breath and queerly sick with some miasma of the mountain air. A few of the men fell over heaving like bellows, and lay where they fell.

  Laurence walked to the edge of the meadow where it ended in cliff to breathe deep of some cleaner air and pull it into his lungs, and found he was looking down at a series of terraced fields: man-made yet lying fallow; maize plants struggled with weeds and tall grasses for dominion, and even a few tools lay half-buried in the greenery, abandoned.

  All the rest of that journey had the same quality, as though they walked through a stranger’s unattended house, neither host nor servants there to greet them. They saw once in a while dragons, some even laboring in the fields and others carrying loads of timber. Only once in the first few days did they see any human life: a couple of young girls sitting in a field with their arms wrapped around their knees, watching over a great herd of grazing llamas in a high valley.

  They threw a swift startled glance up at the strange dragons and dived for cover into a nearby cave little more than a crevasse in the rock, too narrow for any dragon to reach into, and rang out a clanging bell for alarm. “Pray let us continue on,” Hammond shouted anxiously in Laurence’s ear, “as quickly as may be; there is nothing served by offering even the appearance of provocation—”

  “We might have stayed and had some of those llamas, fresh,” Iskierka said, later that evening; instead they had come to ground in another abandoned field with a storehouse, and she was eating a porridge of dried maize flavored with the smoked llama meat which Gong Su had prepared.

  “It is truly wonderful, the quantity of supply which this nation has provided along its roads,” Hammond said, inspecting the storehouse. “I believe we have seen not fewer than six to-day alone; do you agree with me, gentlemen?”

  Gong Su also was interested in the construction of the storehouse, and when he saw Laurence looking, showed where his attention had been drawn to its design. “It must work excellently, for draining the rainfall: certainly this food has not been stored recently, but very little is spoilt.”

  Easy, also, to build up great stores when so far as they could see there were few to consume them. There was something strange and sad in the dragons tilling the great fields, to raise crops which no-one would eat. The handful of beasts to which Temeraire spoke looked at the two hundred men and more aboard with eyes at once eager and resentful: and many offers were made him.

  “There once were more men,” Taruca said, when Laurence questioned him. “Many more: my grandfather told me there were so many that only half the ayllu had even one dragon among their curaca—” by which word he seemed to mean the chiefs of each clan. “It was a great honor to persuade a dragon to join one’s ayllu: a great warrior might win one for his kin, or a skillful weaver.”

  “So you see, Captain,” Hammond said, listening, “I was not at all wrong: it is not slavery, in the ordinary sense.”

  “It was not, in those times,” Taruca said. “Why does a dragon wish to say how a man shall live his life? The honor of the ayllu was the honor of the dragon; its strength her strength; they did not govern. But then the plagues came: and men died, so now nearly all the chiefs of all the ayllus are dragons. And they are grown anxious, and do not like us to go anywhere; and rightly when they steal from one another.”

  There were people, of course: the country was not deserted. As they came northward into the more populous regions, men might be seen openly upon the roads with llama pack-trains, and dragons in a particular blue fringe flew the route. “She says they are watching the roads to make sure there is no theft,” Temeraire said, when one of these had stopped them in their way and demanded that they land in a deserted valley, and show her their safe-conduct from the governor.

  All three dragons were inclined to be offended by her intrusion, as she could not have weighed above two tons: to Laurence’s eye she was smaller than the little courier Volly. She did not seem to care that she was dwarfed by them, however, and when she saw the men were most of them in native dress—courtesy of Magaya’s gifts—she insisted on having every last one paraded before her, so she could assure herself of their indeed being all Europeans. This caused some difficulty, as they were not; and aside from the handful of Malay and Chinese sailors who made her most suspicious, several of the British men were tanned too dark and were forced to disrobe to reveal their natural color; and then Demane and Sipho and the three other black men among the crew, she suspected of
being made-up in reverse fashion.

  “Demane is mine,” Kulingile said, when he felt she had looked too long. She only ruffled her feathers up and back at him in answer, still peering closely, and he reached the end of his patience. Sitting up, he spread wide his wings and threw out his chest: he had always before been remarkably even-tempered, and not often given to parading himself, but he had despite all their privations continued to grow, and when a dragon of nearly thirty tons chose, he could no more be ignored than an avalanche. The patrol-dragon gave a hop sideways, startled into looking up at him, and he threw up his head and roared.

  Kulingile’s voice had remained thready and piping, but his roar shared no such qualities. It did not have the same eerie and particular resonance as the divine wind, but the noise was shocking nonetheless, sourced in so vast a pair of lungs, and at such a near distance. Involuntarily many of the men covered their ears, and when Kulingile leaned forward, the patrol-dragon skipped prudently back still farther, made some hasty remarks about being satisfied, and scurried into the air.

  “You did not need to make quite such a fuss,” Temeraire protested, his ruff flattened backwards. “She might have been more polite, of course, but she was very small: it is not as though she were really any threat.”

  “She was not so small she is not bigger than Demane,” Kulingile said, which was inarguable, “and those dragons are quick, too; what if she had snatched him up, and I could not have caught her? Anyway,” he added, with a worrying rumble, “I am done with swallowing insults.”

  “I hope he does not mean to be quarrelsome,” Laurence said to Temeraire, troubled, that evening when they had made their camp; Kulingile had retreated from all their company and was brooding over three slaughtered llamas. “He has never before behaved so—”

  “I expect he is still distressed,” Temeraire said. “I will confess, Laurence, I am not wholly easy in my own mind, either, where the sailors are concerned. How much more dreadful it must be for Kulingile when they actually laid hands on his captain; and I must say, Demane might be kinder,” he added.

  Laurence considered at first whether to apply to Roland, to speak with Demane, but realized they were no longer sitting together as had been their habit: she was putting Gerry, and Baggy with him, to mathematics, the first time Laurence could recall her ever showing the least unforced engagement upon any sort of schoolwork. The torn skin of her injury had mended as well as might have been expected, and she had only a tracery of thin lines crossing her cheek and a crook in her nose to show for it now, which she disdained to conceal: instead she had plaited her hair still more severely back.

  Demane meanwhile sat a little distance away from her, just past the limits of intrusion, and watched her broodingly; he broke only now and again to pass a suspicious gaze over the sailors, particularly Baggy, who came in for his coldest looks. Roland steadfastly refused to meet Demane’s gaze all the while. So Laurence could not ask her to breach a silence whose cause he could only approve, if she had taken his last advice to heart, and meant to add a proper distance, however inconvenient that might prove in this particular circumstance.

  Demane’s temper could not be said to have improved with her reproof, if reproof there had been. “I don’t mean to be always sitting in a basket, being watched,” Demane said, shortly, when Laurence spoke to him directly of Kulingile’s distress, without taking his eyes away from Roland. “You do not hang back, when there is fighting, even when Granby says you ought,” which was a shot that went home too well. Laurence had often been reproved for hazarding himself further than his duty might allow, as an aviator, and had never yet been able to make himself cleave to a practice which, in a Navy officer, must have instead borne the name of rank cowardice.

  “There is a distinction,” Laurence said, “between seeing one’s duty differently, and neglecting it. To render your beast unhappy merely for the sake of demonstrating an excessive independence, with no pressing cause, can only be called the latter.”

  “You shall not lecture Demane,” Kulingile flared, raising his head abruptly from where he lay, having overheard. “He is also a captain, and I am larger than Temeraire; you do not outrank him.”

  “Oh!” Temeraire said, indignantly rousing in his turn, “I call that nice, when you should not ever have grown so large if I had not carried you halfway across Australia, and shared my kangaroos when you could not fly yourself; and anyway even if Laurence and Demane are both captains, Laurence is the senior.”

  “No, he isn’t,” Kulingile said, “for he was not a captain, when Demane harnessed me; he had been dismissed the service.”

  “That,” Temeraire said, “was only in the nature of an interlude; it does not signify.”

  “It does, too,” Kulingile said, “for Caesar told me, in Sydney, that the captains are all on a list, and one’s name goes on it in order; so Demane is ahead of Laurence on it.”

  “And Granby is ahead of them both.” Iskierka smugly flung her own fuel on the fire, and with Temeraire’s ruff bristling out fiercely, the three looked likely enough to come to blows in a moment.

  “Captain Laurence has been restored with seniority!” Hammond cried, rising from his own place by the fire to break into the looming quarrel, and added urgently when the dragons had looked over, “And if I am not mistaken, Captain, that dates from your having made post, in the Navy.”

  “So Laurence is first, and by a great margin,” Temeraire said, with intense satisfaction, and Kulingile looked at once mulish and sullen: so matters had only been worsened, and over a mere triviality. Laurence had not troubled himself to inquire regarding his place on the Admiralty lists: even more meaningless than his polite fiction of a reinstatement.

  “Regardless,” Laurence said, “Captain Demane, I do offer you my apologies; it is perfectly true that I spoke as I ought not, to a fellow captain: interference is not allowed in the Corps, and for good cause; I hope you will allow me to cry your pardon.”

  “Oh,” Demane said, blankly: wind spilled out of his sails. “I don’t—yes, sir, of course?” he finished uncertainly, and then looked at Roland, who hastily averted her own gaze. Gong Su called them to dinner then, interrupting. But when they had eaten, Demane strode over with a determinedly casual air to sit with Kulingile after all; he slept between the dragon’s forelegs rather than going out with his sling to forage as had been his wont, the previous nights of their journey.

  Laurence was prepared to find a handsome settlement at Lake Titicaca, from the quality and regularity of the roads and the general excellence of the construction, but his expectations were inadequate for the vista, when they at last saw the blue haze of the water: some distance from the shores, a great city was laid out before them, centered on a raised plaza dotted by immense carved figures, and surrounded by curious fields carved into rows flooded with water.

  “Is that your home?” he asked Taruca, as they drew near. “There is a city of red stone—”

  Taruca shook his head. “No, that is Tiwanaku; but there is no-one who lives there now,” and as they flew past, Laurence saw that the broad roads were deserted, and the great temple, for so it seemed to him, stood empty; the fields were fallow and dry.

  They continued to the lake: or the inland sea, Laurence might as easily have called it, stretching enormously wide and cupped by mountains, and of a piercing and almost unnatural shade of blue. There were villages scattered about on the lake islands, and the largest of these supported more than one settlement and was nearly ringed round with the cultivated terraces.

  Taruca directed them towards the island’s southern end, where a broad hillside cut with terraces rose up from a series of storehouses at its base, and at the summit a great courtyard where a truly immense dragon slept: longer than Kulingile even, and perhaps near him in weight, although that was difficult to tell beneath the feathery scales; she was burnt orange and violet in her markings, but the scales were faded along their length and nearly grey at the tips, and her eyes, opening as they land
ed before her, were filmy with age.

  Four other dragons took to the air from other points around the lake directly they put down, and came winging over: all hatchlings of her get, Laurence gathered from the debate which followed between the dragons. “We are not here to steal anything, or anyone,” Temeraire said, exasperated at last, “indeed, if anything we are here to give you someone back: here is Taruca, who asked us to bring him to you.”

  “Taruca was stolen eleven years and three months ago,” the ancient dragon said, “and none of my hatchlings could find him; what do you mean, you are here to bring him back?”

  Taruca waved an arm from Temeraire’s back, and called, “I am here, curaca; I am here.”

  The dragon’s enormous head swung around towards him, and she reared up her forequarters with an effort to lean forward and sniff at him. “It is Taruca,” she said, “it is—how dare you take him? I will call the law upon you at once, if you do not give him back.”

  “We are giving him back!” Temeraire said. “That is why we are here; I have already told you so.”

  The exchange was prolonged for several minutes more by mistrust before at last Curicuillor both understood and believed that they truly meant to give Taruca back, and without any recompense. The final resolution was indeed only achieved when he had been helped down from Temeraire’s back and guided over to her, and she had nosed him over thoroughly to make sure of him.

  “Why, your nation has been unfairly maligned,” she said at last, settling slowly and painfully back onto her stone bed. “You must forgive an old beast her confusion: but indeed I cannot recall a more astonishing example of generosity to mind, from all my days. Taruca returned to us, after so long, and when we had quite given up! We must celebrate, and we must do you honor: we must feast all together, and give special thanks to Inti.”

  “Yes!” Iskierka said, with enthusiasm, when Temeraire had translated the offer: they had flown the last three days with no sign of an untended herd, and they had been obliged to ration even the dried meat.