Crucible of Gold t-7

by Naomi Novik

  Temeraire and Iskierka seated themselves in leonine fashion, though Maila and the other Inca dragons, six in number, remained on their haunches, and there was a tension in their limbs which suggested a readiness to spring. “We shan’t make a fuss about their behaving rudely,” Temeraire said to Laurence, in what was likely intended to have been a whispered aside, “because they are so very nervous; but pray do not be the least worried, Laurence, for if they should attack us I shall certainly not allow any harm to come to you; if I had the least doubt on that subject we should not have come.”

  Laurence sighed: there was a firm insistence on this final point which he did not think boded well for Temeraire’s complacency, in future, when duty should compel him into danger. He halted where they stood and bowed to the Inca, who looked at them with a thoughtful expression: not a particularly handsome woman, and made less so by the scarring, but her eyes were exceptionally dark, and a shrewd calculation looked out of them.

  “I am Anahuarque Inca, and I welcome you to Pusantinsuyo,” the Empress said, in English only lightly accented, and then changed to surprisingly excellent French to invite them to be comfortable; woven cloths, thickly padded, were brought and laid out on the floor for them to sit upon.

  “At least that makes it plain enough how near to approach,” Granby muttered to Laurence, very gingerly lowering himself onto one of the blankets; and then started: the Empress rose from her throne and descended to the floor of the hall, and even as her warriors and her dragons stirred uneasily, she seated herself on another woven cloth not five paces distant.

  “Are you comfortable?” she asked, looking at him with an attitude of curiosity. “This is the custom of your people: to sit while you talk?”

  “Oh, er,” Granby said. “Well—thank you, yes, most comfortable—”

  “And the conditions of your journey? The roads were in good repair, and the storehouses full?” she inquired.

  Granby threw Laurence a desperate look, but she was too clearly addressing him directly. “Yes, ma’am—Your Majesty?”

  He would gladly have stopped there, but Iskierka put down her head and nudged him, hissing, “Say something more, Granby: why are you being so stupid? She will think you are not clever.”

  “I am not in the least clever, in conversation, and less so in French!” Granby answered her with some heat, and groped about feebly for something to say. “The storehouses are remarkable, Your Majesty,” he added. “We scarcely had to hunt along the way—oh, hell,” he said, reverting to English and muttering to Laurence, “ought we admit to taking from them all along the route?”

  “I am glad to hear it,” Anahuarque said, however, without any sign of objecting to their pillaging. “The harvest has been good in the south, so I hear; I believe you have said it was so, Ninan?”

  She repeated this question, directed to one of the hovering warriors, in Quechua: the gentleman in question, a tall and fiercely glaring young man, whose hand rested on the butt of a pistol thrust into a sash at his waist, started and answered her after a moment. She turned back to French and asked Granby about his satisfaction with their quarters; then discussed the weather and the approaching change of season, in each case weaving her own attendant men into the conversation.

  Laurence, who had been used from childhood to hang his head from the banister overlooking his mother’s political dinners, even before he had been old enough to join the table, realized in short order there was no accident in the seeming banality of the conversation, but rather a masterful degree of management. He might have blamed it on Anahuarque’s being hampered by speaking as she did in a tongue other than her own, but this would have more naturally led to stammering and pauses; of which there were none.

  As the conversation continued, and poor Granby bore the brunt of it, Laurence looked closer and saw the warriors around her throne were plainly not mere guards. Several of them were older men, others visibly battle-hardened; and all of them adorned both with large disks of gold embedded in their ear-lobes, and woven and fringed turbans which he began to think denoted perhaps nobility, or military rank. And the suspicious looks these men cast were not confined to Granby and to Laurence: they scowled at one another with equal fervor.

  “She is playing Penelope’s game, I think,” Laurence said to Granby, when they had at last been dismissed the Empress’s presence and landed at the hall again. “She is being pressed to take a consort, who surely would seek to assert his authority direct; and she is playing her rivals off one against another.”

  “And we are as good as a circus for distraction,” Granby said. “She can’t have had the least wish to speak to us for any other reason, when all she did was ask me about the weather in England, and I can scarcely tell you if it is summer or winter there at present. Laurence, she will keep us all here dancing attendance endlessly, along with the rest of those fellows, if only we give her a chance.”

  “Yes,” Laurence said, and added to Hammond, who had been waiting to meet them, “but I think we can at least give you this assurance, sir: I do not think she can intend any serious alliance with France, at least not one which would engage her to commit any portion of her forces. She cannot afford to raise one of those men above the others; if she makes a great general, or allows any one of them to build repute as the foremost warrior of her realm, she at once puts herself in that man’s power.”

  “Unless,” Hammond said bitterly, “she puts into place a counterbalance,” beckoning them inside the inner chamber.

  “What do you mean?” Laurence said. “Have you heard something?”

  This last was addressed to Emily Roland who yet wore the gown which Mrs. Pemberton insisted upon, for their visits to the women’s court, so they had come straight from there: Roland would otherwise have immediately cast it off for her uniform. Mrs. Pemberton stood in the corner of the room chafing her hands over the small brazier of coals, almost wringing them in an uncharacteristic betrayal of anxiety.

  “Yes, sir,” Roland said. “The Empress wasn’t at court this afternoon, for she was meeting you, and so none of us had anything to do but sit and watch her ladies weave; and then that French lady, Mme. Récamier, blabbed a bit to one of the others: ‘Yes, poor Josephine; but not quite so poor as she was: she has got Fontainebleu, and not him.’ ”

  “What?” Granby said. “What the devil does that mean?”

  “It means, Captain, that Napoleon has divorced Josephine at last,” Mrs. Pemberton said. “He is at liberty to wed.”

  Chapter 12

  “I T IS NOT REASONABLE,” Temeraire said to Iskierka, “that Napoleon should also try to become Emperor of the Incas; one would think he might be satisfied with France, not to mention Italy and Prussia and Spain, and all the other places which he has conquered. It is quite outrageous; and I suppose that fellow Maila has been encouraging them, or else they should never have come here with him: I hope you do not think so much of him now.”

  But Iskierka refused to acknowledge the very dire situation, and was only quite dismissive. “I am sure the Inca is not going to marry Napoleon; why would anyone marry Napoleon, when we are going to beat him? You do not need to worry. Although,” she added, “you all have made a great muddle of the negotiations. It is just as well that I am here. I am sure the Inca would not have had anything to say to any of us, otherwise.”

  “She is quite absurdly partial, only because Maila is so very impressed that she fights so well, and can breathe fire,” Temeraire said to Laurence, “which is ridiculous in itself: they have fire-breathers here also.”

  “Rather small creatures, from what we have seen; and with limited range, my dear,” Laurence said. Temeraire sniffed; he did not see why that should alone make so great a difference.

  “If she should have any intelligence to suggest the Inca will not marry Napoleon—” Hammond began. “If, perhaps, Maila might have conveyed privately—” He glanced at Laurence and added hurriedly, “Not to suggest she should violate a true confidence, but any suggestio
n—any cause to believe—she would need only hint—”

  “I am quite certain she has no such thing,” Temeraire said, and stalked away to the courtyard and went aloft to go and take a couple of vicuña for dinner; when he had brought them back, however, Gong Su was already occupied: Maila had sent over a brace of pigs—real pigs, which had been acquired from trade with the colonial nations—as a gift; and Iskierka was sitting in the courtyard watching Gong Su roast them on spits, with an expression that one could only call smug.

  “No, thank you,” Temeraire said coldly, when he was offered a portion.

  “I will take them, then, if you don’t mean to eat them,” Kulingile put in.

  “You may do whatever you like,” Temeraire said. “I will wait for my own catch to be ready, if you will be so kind, Gong Su; that pork does not look particularly fresh, to me.”

  “It eats excellently,” Kulingile said, crunching through a rib cage; Temeraire settled himself upwind of the smell of roasted pork, and ignored the general feasting.

  “I hope,” Hammond said, “I hope, Captain Laurence, that we will not have any trouble. Any open quarrel must be dreadfully prejudicial to our cause. Churki has assured me that in a challenge, even victory on Temeraire’s part—which we must of course hope for if matters should come to such a pass—would scarcely leave us the better off than an ignominious defeat: Maila is not merely respected, but considered the guardian of the royal house, and any injury even to his pride would be widely resented.”

  Laurence looked soberly out at the courtyard: Maila had come again, and was speaking with Iskierka at the far end too quietly to overhear, their heads intimate and conspiratorial; and Temeraire was sitting nearer their hall with his head raised haughtily, hearing Sipho recite some poetry to him. Or at least pretending to do so: his head was tilted ever so slightly at an angle calculated to give him the best chance of overhearing the distant conversation, and when Sipho paused for a question it was several moments before Temeraire looked down and replied.

  “I cannot easily answer you, Mr. Hammond,” Laurence said. “I should not have said that Temeraire’s affections were engaged in such a way as to enable Iskierka to cause him pain; even now I must believe that it is his pride which is wounded, more than his heart.”

  “The cause matters very little,” Hammond said, “if it should lead to the same end; the question is only whether you can restrain him; for I must call it increasingly evident that restraint will be called for.”

  Laurence disliked that he was not sure of his power to do so, and disliked still more discussing the subject with Hammond; he excused himself and stepped outside, to join Granby in his usual haunt of late: sitting in what might have been a casual manner upon the roof of the hall, which offered him an excellent vantage point over the city: as dragons came and went, he sketched them and made note of their points in a crabbed and awkward hand which contrasted peculiarly with the precision and clean lines of his sketchwork. His left arm was at last out of its sling, though it still gave him some pain; but he could now rest it atop the sketchbook to keep it in place for his work.

  “I have two new catches so far to-day,” Granby said, showing Laurence the results: one middle-weight beast marked as being all over yellow with green eyes, and a small, bright-eyed creature with a wingspan twice its length, which according to his notes could play the flute. “What? Oh—that says, fly backwards,” Granby said, when Laurence asked a translation. “I have never quite seen the like: she pulled up mid-air and went back on herself as easy as winking. That makes twenty-six distinct breeds,” he added, “and I have seen another half-a-dozen new beasts come and go, also.”

  They looked back at the courtyard, where Iskierka and Maila continued their tête-à-tête, and Temeraire his sulk. “I do not suppose, John, that you have any notion how seriously Iskierka has engaged herself with Maila?” Laurence asked him.

  “No; and I wonder at it, for ordinarily she will brag of anything and everything to me, at all hours of the day,” Granby said. “I will try and get it out of her, if you like; but don’t let Hammond fret you to pieces. There shan’t be any fighting over her, much though she would like. She has been chasing Temeraire for a year and ten thousand miles or thereabouts without much luck; I expect she is only trying to annoy him into it, instead, and sees this fellow as a handy way to do it.

  “You might try and persuade him instead,” he added. “I don’t mind saying it would be a great thing for the Corps, if we could get an egg out of the two of them.”

  Laurence demurred at doing any such thing: if he could recognize the desirability of the mating, he felt still more strongly the very great officiousness of interference in such a matter; and even if Temeraire’s attitude towards the proposals of England’s breeders had at first been less outraged than flattered, he had lately been given a disgust for the business through excessive solicitation. “And in any case, if Temeraire should apply to her, at present, and find himself rejected—whether for Maila’s sake or as mere stratagem on Iskierka’s part—it cannot ameliorate the situation; indeed it must provoke a still more passionate feeling on his part, as regards setting himself against Maila.”

  “Well, I don’t count on her doing any such thing,” Granby said, “if only he gave her a little encouragement; but I will have a word with her, and see what she is about; not,” he added resignedly, “that I expect to be able to persuade her to do anything differently, if she is determined to go on playing cat-among-the-pigeons, but at least you can whisper a word in Temeraire’s ear, and maybe that will settle him down.”

  He stood to call to her; but before he could do so Iskierka had gone aloft again with Maila, and Temeraire had abandoned his fiction of disinterest and looked after them with his ruff alarmingly wide.

  “If I may say so, Captain, I would rather propose a cooling draught,” Gong Su said to Laurence, who had approached him to prepare a consolatory dinner of some unusual style, to divert Temeraire’s attention. “The local peppers are excellent, but not to be recommended in the present circumstances. I am afraid her excess of yang makes Iskierka a difficult companion for Temeraire, from time to time,” he added, with delicacy.

  “I see he is tolerably transparent,” Laurence said.

  “If you will permit me,” Gong Su said, “I will see if I can invite his attention into a more calming direction,” and he shortly enlisted Temeraire’s aid in fetching a great block of ice, cut from the peaks which overlooked the city, and then a bar of iron. This Temeraire and Kulingile laid upon the ice block and drew along its surface to shave a great heap of soft ice into a waiting trough; meanwhile Gong Su had prepared a syrup of some kind in his great cauldron. When he judged the ice sufficient and the alarmingly green concoction had cooled, he directed the dragons to pour it over the shaved ice.

  “Oh!” Temeraire said, lifting his snout out of the resulting heap, “oh, it is splendid beyond anything, Gong Su; I might eat it forever.” Kulingile did not interrupt his own ecstatic consumption long enough to compliment the receipt; but when he had finished he settled back on his haunches and sighed with wordless delight.

  “I am afraid we could not reserve any of it,” Temeraire informed Iskierka, with an air of smugness, when she returned that afternoon from yet another excursion, “for of course the ice would not stay; it is a pity you could not have any.”

  “I will have it sometime, I expect,” Iskierka said, dismissively.

  “All right,” Granby said to Laurence, “I am going to have it out with her. I should not have thought it out of the ordinary if she had snatched Gong Su and stormed off to fetch more ice at once, even if she were only gone for pleasure; and if she did mean to be prodding Temeraire, she would be mad as fire to-day.”

  “I do not care about a sweet; I am concerned with much more important matters,” Iskierka said, when Granby had asked her. “As,” she added, with a sidelong look at Temeraire, “it seems to me others ought to have been; I have not neglected our mission, and meanwhile
you are all doing nothing but wringing your hands, or making some treat, selfishly.”

  “Oh!” Temeraire said, “as though you were really negotiating anything, when you are only busy making up to Maila—”

  “I have been carrying out our mission!” Iskierka said. “The Empress only wished to see Granby because of me; if it were up to you, I dare say she would marry Napoleon. Maila has told me she thought of it, and the French have made her a great many promises.”

  “What? And you have not said a word, all this while—!” Hammond said. “Do you know anything of their offers? Would their marriage give him in any way charge of their army in some fashion—of the aerial forces? But surely she must go to France, if she accepts him—would she install some governor—”

  “No, no! I would have told you, if it was of any concern, but you may stop fretting; she will not marry him at all,” Iskierka said, and jetted some steam, smugly. “She will marry Granby.”

  “What?” Hammond said.

  “What?” Granby said.

  * * *

  The only ones at all pleased with the situation were Iskierka, and Hammond, who once past the initial shock urged them to take no hasty measures. “After all, we must have some alternative to offer them,” he said. “If the Sapa Inca indeed is willing to consider—”

  “Damn you, Hammond,” Granby said, “don’t you see Iskierka must have lied her tongue black to bring this about? You don’t suppose the Incan Empress wants to marry a serving-officer, or that her people would let her, if they knew; she is not proposing some little fiction like you arranged in China, which everyone can forget as soon as the ink is dry on the paper.”

  “We know nothing of the proposal, or what obligations have been assumed on our behalf,” Hammond said in placating tones, putting a hand upon Granby’s arm earnestly, “and just so we must go carefully until we do understand, or risk giving offense. I hope,” he added, “I am sure, Captain Granby, that my knowledge of your character is not mistaken: you would not refuse to undertake any singular duty, for your country, which only you could perform—”