Crucible of Gold t-7

by Naomi Novik

  They were aloft scarce twenty minutes after Churki’s warning. Full dark had fallen, and even as they rose they were attacked by a patrol: five dragons, striking out of the dark, all with small spear-shaped heads and dark green feathers cropped short. They were middle-weights at most, each not a quarter of Temeraire’s size, but they made up for that in numbers and in night-vision; their coloration made them nearly invisible against the night, and plainly the hazy moonlight which came through the clouds was sufficient to enable them to see.

  The green dragons were making low calls to one another, in almost chirping voices. “Do not roar,” Laurence called urgently, as yet another of the dragons came darting into the fray from up ahead, slashing at Temeraire’s flank in passing as it winged to join the other five in harrying their flanks. “Temeraire, do you hear me? The jungle must be alive with these beasts; if you should roar, you will draw them upon us in a cloud: we must get ahead of their line before you roar.”

  Temeraire flicked his ruff in acknowledgment; he was flying and fighting at once, and Laurence had all the pain of feeling himself and his crew useless in their present circumstances: they had neither guns, nor incendiaries, nor even flash-powder, which might have allowed them to be of assistance against enemy beasts, and could only cling on and hope they did not obstruct Temeraire’s own efforts.

  “Mr. Ferris,” Laurence called, leaning over, “do we have that netting—the rope and sailcloth netting, have you any of it left, below? Light it along, if you please—”

  “Aye, sir,” Ferris called, and came clambering up Temeraire’s side with a rope lashed around his waist, a tether to the heavy entangled bundle; Forthing and Roland and even Hammond joined their hands to the cable, and they drew it up, brine-stinking cloth and half-rotten rope. Laurence hacked apart a portion with his sword, Roland setting her knife to the sailcloth: she and Ferris and Forthing, aviators all since childhood, managed to take and keep their feet long enough to heave it out as one of the green-feathered dragons swung close to Temeraire’s hindquarters, and the mess billowed open, descending, and settled on the dragon’s head.

  The beast squalled, muffled and surprised, and fell away clawing blindly at the unexpected attack; it ran into a second beast and fouled her flight for a moment, but this one squirmed loose and plucked away the ragged cloth, throwing it out over the trees. It sank, a momentary flash of pale cloth, and vanished away amid the trees behind them.

  The effort won Temeraire only the briefest respite, but at least it was something. Laurence sawed grimly away at the rope with the dulled edge of his blade, and they managed to try a second time, and a third, but by then the green dragons had grown wiser. Three more of them had joined the pursuit by now; Laurence looked again where the moon made a glowing patch of haze in the sky: they were being herded back westward, and the dragons’ chirping calls were growing more energetic.

  Iskierka also had not loosed her flame: as much as lighting a beacon of invitation to the enemy; but the enemy dragons evidently already knew to fear it, anyway. She bore the brunt of their sweeping attacks, one pass after another which only her maneuvering enabled her to avoid; and even so she was clawed and bleeding from a dozen small wounds. She hissed in fury as another pass caught her along one shoulder, and turned to lash out reprisal at the smaller beast: the green dragon fled and was caught only a glancing blow, feathers bursting loose, but the effort left an opening which the enemy were too numerous to miss.

  Two of the dragons flew at Iskierka’s head, one from either side, beating their wings furiously to obscure her vision; a third, the largest of the enemy, lunged at the side which Iskierka’s strike had bent into a wide and open curve, unprotected by the chainmail which was her usual battle-gear, and savaged her with tooth and claw both, opening the flesh to the air.

  Iskierka roared in agony, and turning blasted flame at the dragon who had already lifted away, too late. Her head was wagging back and forth in pain; and Laurence could see a line of steam in the air where her blood ran freely away. Then he heard Granby crying out, “Sear the wound! If you go down, it doesn’t matter, Iskierka; sear the damned wound, or I swear to you on my honor I will jump anyway—sear it at once—”

  He was standing on her back, harness-straps hanging loose save one that he gripped in his hand. Iskierka cried out in protest, and then bent her head back and breathed fire upon her own side: flames coruscating up and over her hide, washing down her length as she flew. Laurence saw Granby and Bardesley silhouetted black against the yellow-red banner of fire for a moment, then the night was pitch-black, darker for the moment of light, and he did not know what had happened to them.

  He blinked away the dazzle of the light: Kulingile had ranged himself alongside Iskierka, trying to shield her wounded side with his bulk, and Temeraire was racing to her other side: but behind them, the enemy were gathering together for another run at her, one which should surely bring her down. Their light chirping voices rang clear, incongruous and dreadful as they arranged themselves for the strike and came, arrow-shape formation, towards them.

  Laurence felt Temeraire gathering himself, drawing in the great breaths one after another which expanded out his lungs, and yet something different: when Laurence put down his bare hand, he felt nearly a drumming tension to the hide. The enemy dragons were coming, swiftly; then Temeraire turned and roared: but not once only; he roared, low, and roared again, and a third time, and only with the fourth rose to that shattering, terrible sound that was the divine wind.

  The very air seemed to shake and howl, rushing away from them; the rain-mist boiling into tight spindled clouds. The first dragons of the formation were pulling up, beginning to pull up, as the ripple struck, and Laurence saw blood come bursting from their noses and their ears.

  The three dragons foremost in the formation fell from the sky without a sound, stone-dead; Laurence heard their bodies crashing through the branches below. Others, too, were falling, thrashing in mid-air, choking on blood; and only the hindmost beasts survived, sheltered by the bodies of their fellows: survived, reeled back, and fled away into the night, shrilling out their horror.

  Chapter 15

  T HEY WERE PURSUED NO LONGER. That night they lay exhausted amid trees that towered away from a strangely dim and barren jungle floor populated by ferns and the decomposing bodies of fallen giants, suffering the yelling resentment of the monkeys and of astonishing birds plumed in colors Laurence had scarcely seen in artifice much less nature.

  The next morning they buried Lieutenant Bardesley there, in a grave as deep as Temeraire’s claws could open. There was no avoiding the funeral, as the ordinary course of putrefaction seemed accelerated by the damp heat and luscious verdure all around: though Mrs. Pemberton had sacrificed her petticoat and Emily’s to make a shroud, by first light the corpse was crawling with ants the size of grasshoppers, whose jaws left angry bites as they were beaten away. They did not open the shroud to look on his face before they laid him to rest.

  Iskierka’s wounds had not mortified, cauterized as they had been by her flame, but a strange feverishness set in by the following evening: the steam which ordinarily issued from her spikes dried to a bare trickle, and her eyes were glassy and bloodshot nearly to black. The heat of her body was become intolerable for close quarters.

  “She must have water, and soon,” Churki said, after a sniffed inspection of the injuries, and with a decided air. Laurence had known dragons of more years—Messoria, of their formation, and Excidium—but these had been raised in the British fashion, to obey rather than to command, where Churki seemed to take a certain precedence as a matter of course: she was of course eldest of the dragons by far. “Where do your family live, Hammond? We must determine the best course to reach them.”

  When Hammond had, with a certain degree of duplicity, explained their desire to reach Rio and thence to take ship for Britain, she looked at Laurence’s sketch of their proposed route and shook her head, ruffling. “This will not do very well: guessing at water
is not sensible. We must go to the Ucayali and follow it to the sea.”

  They were no longer pursued, though they did little to conceal their passage. Three more days of flying under Churki’s lead brought them to the river she had described: sluggish-brown, enormous, swollen with all the ice-melt of the Andes.

  “If it is not the Amazon, it must yet come out at the ocean,” Laurence said, shading his hand to look down along its length while Iskierka crawled into the river and submerged herself; crocodilian animals with long snouts swam away resentfully, and she rested her head upon the bank and closed her eyes as steam curled up and away from her back where the water lapped against the scales.

  The river swelled ever further as they followed its course northward and it met new tributaries until at last the whole mass of it turned east, away from the mountains, and they began the long and grindingly slow journey to the coast. The country was not unpopulated: native tribesmen looked in on them now and again, mostly from the other side of the river, but these vanished as quickly as they came if ever Laurence tried to hail them, or even if Temeraire called out a few words in Quechua. Of dragons they saw only a few small feral beasts, and those by accident: Iskierka was in the river again, preferring to half-paddle herself along than to fly, and so Temeraire and Kulingile had gone off to hunt meanwhile; Iskierka came around a curve and startled three little dragons the size of Winchesters, sharing a meal of a peculiar long-snouted piggish creature on the shore.

  She was barely a head in the water at the time, and the dragons stared in curiosity; then she reared up partway on the bank and demanded, “Where did you find that, and is it any good?”

  Yet three-quarters and more submerged, she nevertheless outweighed all three of them together; the dragons went into the air as though fired from a cannon and fled, leaving behind their dinner; this proved their only encounter, save for glimpses at a great distance of small beasts flying away. “Oh, well,” Iskierka said callously, and devoured the remnants without a pause, gulping them down with swallows of river water.

  “What have you been eating?” Kulingile inquired, on returning: their hunting efforts had so far yielded only some smallish red deer, which did not answer very well to satisfying the hunger of three large dragons, one of them convalescent, though Gong Su did what he could to stretch them.

  “I don’t know; they wouldn’t stay and tell me,” Iskierka said drowsily, already half-asleep on the shore and resisting persuasion to continue any farther that day.

  In the middle of the night, Laurence woke to her groaning and an acrid stench: she was vomiting heavily into the river, and sank miserably back on the shore afterwards gone limp. They went nowhere that day, and when Temeraire managed to return with a couple more deer, Gong Su insisted on their being boiled nearly to inedibility. Iskierka’s misery carried the day for him, but the dragons were not enthusiastic about the resultant meal, and neither were the sailors, although by then they were glad enough for anything to eat.

  The jungle miasma lay heavily upon all of them. Hammond was also queerly feverish and short-tempered, and so, too, several other men, including Ferris; Laurence feared the beginning of some tropical fever setting in among them. He himself was almost perpetually in a sweat, the woolen clothes suited to the high mountain fastnesses of the Inca were become a prison for all of them, but the viciousness and size of the insects prohibited all but the most insensible from exposing any unnecessary part to the air.

  “Well, and it is an evil part of the world we have come to, Captain,” O’Dea said, expressing a general sentiment, after a few more days: Temeraire had woken them all with a shattering roar of protest, and shaken off three bats which had latched on to him, in the dark.

  “They bit me,” he said; as improbable as the accusation was, investigation turned up small leaking wounds upon his flank where the bats had clung and fed, so it seemed, upon the blood; and several more of them were discovered on all the dragons.

  There was something especially horrid in feeding this species of hunger, but the bats were no more to be escaped than the mosquitoes, though Granby slept on Iskierka’s back and woke several times throughout the night to chase them off with his one good arm; and their bites offered a similar kind of discomfort, growing hard and swollen and hot to the touch after a day.

  The half-healed injury which Granby had taken to his arm, in the sinking of the Allegiance, had been aggravated and all earlier progress lost in his being flung from Iskierka’s back to the limits of his harness-straps, leaping to escape the flames. Laurence looked at it grimly, in the light: the elbow grossly swollen and bruised purple-black, and the hand dangling useless. They had no surgeon; only the former barber Dewey, who had been pressed into the Allegiance out of a dockside carouse, and his only contribution was to offer, “Why, I can have it off easy as you please, sir, if the little miss will lend me her knife; and someone can find me a bit of drink to steady my hand,” which made Roland glare.

  “Wrap it up tight for me, Laurence, if you please,” Granby said hastily, “and let us see what a few weeks will do: it does not pain me over-much—” this last delivered while he was clammy-cold and pale with agony; but Laurence was in too much doubt of the wisdom of the arm’s removal to argue for its being endured: the shoulder which seemed the real seat of the injury could not itself be taken off.

  Four days later, the arm looked yet worse: a bluish darkening beneath the skin from elbow to fingers, and Granby could not close his hand. The shoulder at least seemed a little recovered, and when palpated the flesh of the upper arm yet felt warm; but in the morning there was a feverish heat growing above the elbow, and the engorgement of the blood vessels creeping upwards.

  “Had it better come off?” Granby said, looking at Laurence’s face.

  “I think it must,” Laurence said grimly, and Dewey, coming to inspect his field of work, patted Granby’s shoulder.

  “Never you fear, Captain; why, I have had off the arm of a fellow twice your size in under three minutes; although I do not have my saw.” He took the knife which Roland silently proffered him, her irritation at being called miss now subsumed in anxiety, and carried it down to the riverside to sharpen against the stones of the bank.

  “Laurence,” Temeraire said, peering over, “whatever are you about? Surely you do not mean him to take off Granby’s arm, for good? Iskierka is asleep: I am sure she ought to be consulted on the subject.”

  “That is all I need, at present,” Granby said, under his breath. “Let her sleep, if you please, and Laurence, I would be glad of something to bite on.”

  Laurence nodded, and rose to call Forthing and Mayhew to assist him with holding Granby down; abruptly from the bank came a shriek, and he turned to see Dewey being dragged into the river headfirst, a pair of massively wide crocodilian jaws clamped about his skull. They all stared, horrified; three more of the creatures erupted from the water, seizing on flailing arms, legs, and wrestling over the body with terrible strength: before even Temeraire could act, the water was running red, and his lunge pulled out only a headless corpse, lacking also a leg, with a crocodile dangling still clenched upon the other.

  “Oh!” Temeraire said, furious, “oh, what do they mean, eating him!” and plunged his head savagely into the midst of the still-frothing waters: he came up with three thrashing beasts, each perhaps a ton in weight, and holding them in his jaws cracked them with a sound not much less dreadful than Dewey’s own death-cry.

  He flung them down, and went again into the water, and again, until he had piled up a dozen carcasses; by then the rest had slunk beneath the surface and glided prudently away.

  “There,” Temeraire said, panting, “they will think better of it, next time,” and Laurence had not the heart nor the stomach to argue with his estimation of the animals’ intelligence: in any case the men would certainly think better of going anywhere near the riverbanks without great care.

  Iskierka had been roused by Temeraire’s frenzy; she sat up and yawned and said, “W
hatever did you do that for? They are not good eating; but I will have a couple, if there is nothing better,” and several of the men crept away into the trees to be noisily and emphatically ill.

  The crocodiles were abandoned uneaten; but the slaughter forced their immediate departure, as the scavengers of the jungle were too enraptured by the immense feasting prepared for them to delay: the monkeys were not afraid of dragons, and neither were the beetles. Granby said uneasily, “I will have to make the best of it,” and wrapped his arm up against his waist once more before he pulled himself one-handed aboard Iskierka’s back.

  Laurence had grown used to the tremendous speed at which dragons consumed the miles: fifteen in an hour at a steady enduring pace, and as many as two hundred in a day, with no obstacles to be surmounted or roads to clear and no dependence upon the wind; but their passage through the jungle was more akin to the slow creep of a ship through the doldrums, being towed by her boats: Iskierka could not fly for long. She leaned heavily on Kulingile and Temeraire, who took it in turn to brace her up, but even they could not support her massive weight very well or for any real length of time. Granby drooped upon her back; she drooped in mid-air, and often came down to rest in the body of the river and moved along like some vast steaming river snake, paddling herself along.

  The heat was tremendous, and the air of the jungle close and thick around them when they flew low, or crept after Iskierka in the river. Hammond urged speed, and looked piteous for it: he mopped his brow with shaking hands nearly every minute, and slept fitful and feverish; the other men had by now most of them recovered, but Hammond had never given the impression of particular resilience, and their journey had strained stronger men to the limits. But there was no speed to be had: all energy, it seemed, had been wrung out of them.