Tongues of Serpents t-6

by Naomi Novik

  “I call it damned stupid and a waste besides,” Granby was saying to Laurence meanwhile, low, but not very low. “To leave you here, and with Rankin to command the covert; if one can even call it a covert when there are three dragons in it, and two as likely to throw him in the ocean as obey him.”

  “I wish him very great joy of the command,” Laurence said dryly. “It is not likely to demand much initiative, and he may as well be here as anywhere; he cannot do very much harm in the position, and he is welcome to the politicking. In all honesty, we would be at more of a standstill if Demane were confirmed in rank; from what we have seen of Governor Macquarie, I cannot imagine he would be in the least inclined to listen to a stripling, quite apart from his birth.”

  “As far as that goes, Demane is as much an officer as he is a fish; so I don’t know you are worse off with Rankin, either,” Granby said. “No; but it is still a crime to leave you here to rot along with him, and I expect he will make a nuisance of himself; I don’t think he knows how to otherwise. And a prime heavy-weight,” he added, with still more frustration, “with not a prayer of getting him off the continent when the Allegiance has gone.”

  Kulingile had outgrown Caesar a short way into their journey, to Temeraire’s private satisfaction, but it seemed to him Kulingile did not need to continue growing at such a pace now, when it plainly consumed so much of the available stores. Even if Iskierka was going away, that still did not leave them with so very many cows, and the hunting grew a good deal more tedious when anyone was taking half-a-dozen kangaroos at a time; soon they should have to fly several hours afield to find herds which could be culled.

  “And you have surely heard several of the officers say that there is no use for a really big heavy-weight here in this colony,” Temeraire had said to him, when they had at last returned to the valley, and Kulingile had insisted on a portion of cattle just as large as those which Temeraire and Iskierka had commanded.

  But Kulingile remained unimpressed by the hints which Temeraire dropped, and continued both to eat and to grow. “Of course he will not outgrow Maximus,” Temeraire murmured to Dorset interrogatively, when the second cow had vanished, and Kulingile was eyeing the rest of the herd with a sad, speculative gaze; Temeraire did not really see why Kulingile should outgrow him, either, but one did not wish to sound self-centered, or as though one would mind any such thing: it did not signify, of course, if one were a Celestial, even if Kulingile was also coming into a quite handsome pattern of golden scales, as he grew.

  “Very likely he will,” Dorset said, writing in his log-book; he had been making a record of everything which Kulingile ate, and doing a great deal of measuring with his knotted string, at least until Kulingile had grown so large that only his talons might so be measured in any reasonable amount of time.

  Dorset added, “We will know he has begun to reach his growth when he ceases to be quite so rounded: that is when the body will have overtaken the air-sacs, and so begin to approach the limit.” But it was now more than a week later, and Kulingile still had a tendency to roly-poly, and if he was not quite as long as Temeraire, it would have been a little difficult to say he was decidedly smaller, if one should compare their shadows on the ground.

  MacArthur was certainly very impressed by his appearance when he came up to the promontory that afternoon, presumably to speak with Laurence; but Laurence had gone down to the Allegiance to dine with Riley and Granby one final time before their departure, and so there was no one else to meet him. MacArthur paused at the edge of the hill, and asked Temeraire, “So this is the new one, I gather? Something prodigious, I see, for a few months out of the shell; he will have your measure if he goes on a little longer this way.”

  “I suppose, if one is only concerned with weight,” Temeraire said, a little repressively.

  “Ha ha,” MacArthur said, although Temeraire saw nothing very funny in it. “And does he have a captain?”

  “He is mine,” Demane said, belligerently, having already raised his head to listen from where he and Roland were sketching out the proposed plan of attack upon the serpents, and arguing over its merits; Demane was inclined to dislike it only because Rankin had proposed it, and so was finding fault, where Roland had said impatiently, “Yes, he is a scrub, what has that got to do with fighting? If Laurence said to jump in the water and fight them, would you like to do it?”

  MacArthur eyed Demane more than a little doubtfully, and then said something to him which did not make any sense: it was a little like the aboriginal languages which Temeraire had now heard bits of, mixed together with a great deal of English peculiarly pronounced. “What?” Demane said, justly baffled.

  “He thinks you’re one of their natives!” Sipho said, without looking up from his book. “We are from Africa, and we aren’t stupid, either; you needn’t talk like you are babbling to a child.”

  “Well, that is handy,” MacArthur said. “It is a shame more of you black fellows cannot speak better English.”

  “It is a shame you can’t speak better Chinese, too,” Sipho said, not quite under his breath, to which MacArthur said, “Why, I cannot say I would mind it these days,” and laughed again, ha ha, and said to Demane, “Now then, how did that come about: you are never an officer?”

  “I am, too,” Demane said defiantly, “whatever Captain Rankin may have said; he wanted to have Kulingile killed, when he was hatched, so,” he spat, “that, for him, and anyone else who likes to deny me, I am happy to meet them anytime they like.”

  “Well, for my part you may keep your sword in its sheath,” MacArthur said, “and I am happy enough to call you captain if the dragon does; there’s the real sticking-point of the business, after all. I suppose the other fellows are being sticklers over it?” he added shrewdly, and Demane looked mulish.

  “You will be sticking here with this big fellow, I gather: what do you mean to do, stick here in this covert?” MacArthur went on. “A little uncomfortable, with a grousing pack of envious fellows about; you might do better to go it your own way, after all—with your own piece of land, and raise cattle of your own.”

  Demane took a low startled breath; there was nothing more highly valued in his childhood society than cattle, at once survival and currency: orphan and impoverished, he had risked his life willingly to become the possessor of a cow, which yet remained in some corner of his spirit a standard of wealth. MacArthur might as well have said, that Demane ought to dig up a chest all full of treasure, and pointed him in its direction. “I might,” he said, attempting to be a little cool about the matter, and sounding merely wary.

  “Well, keep it in mind,” MacArthur said. “There is no need to make any hasty decisions; only you might think it over, whether it would suit you.”

  He asked after Laurence, then, and hearing he was at dinner touched his hat and went away, not without promising another pair of cattle, “With a yearling beef for the littler fellow,” he said, meaning Caesar, “and that way you don’t need to squabble it with this—Kulingheelay, did you say?” as though Temeraire would have squabbled anyway, in some undignified manner. “Give your captain my regards,” he concluded, and so departed, leaving Demane to say to Roland in an undertone, “It would suit me better than scraping to Rankin.”

  “As though you would, anyway,” Roland said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t be an ass; he probably wants to see if you can be persuaded to fetch and carry for him, or something like, at a bargain price.”

  “Do you suppose he might like something carried at not a bargain price, if he could not get better?” Temeraire inquired; though Roland abjured the idea scornfully, as beneath the dignity of an aviator to consider, Demane was of very like mind when Temeraire said to him privately, afterwards, “But if he or some other person were prepared to pay in cows, no one could object, I find, to doing him some service.”

  There would be time yet to consider; at present, the question and MacArthur’s visit both were driven quite from his mind, for the wind had shifted: not very
strong, but enough to rattle the spars a little, and in the ideal quarter. There was a consultation going forward on the deck of the ship, which Temeraire could see in the fading light: the young officers on duty peering up and calling questions to the crow’s nest. They were a little while at it and resolved not too soon: below in the street, the doors to the inn opened, where the men had gone to dine, just as the ship fired away a blue light and the small blue pennant rose up on the mast to summon all her officers aboard.

  Laurence came up the hill slowly and rested his hand on Temeraire’s side as the ship’s launch rowed back out, the guests from dinner crawling up the side one after another; the men were already at the two massive capstans, marching around, as the sails billowed out in sheets of rolling white.

  “Good-bye!” Iskierka called from the dragondeck, her voice carrying over the water. “Good-bye! I will tell Granby to write you whenever anything interesting should happen.”

  Temeraire sighed a little, and put his head down upon his forelegs as the Allegiance began her slow and stately progress: the evanescing light orange-pink and steam wreathing her foremast from Iskierka’s spikes, spilling up the belled sails and trailing away; shouts, calls, the bell rung at the quarter-hour came distantly. The ship was moving towards night, away, and the curve of the land gradually concealed the hull so that one saw only the sails gliding; a little longer, and then only the lantern-gleam high up, if Temeraire sat upon his haunches and stretched his neck. Then even that faded to just the gleam of the stars coming out, and between one blink and another, Temeraire lost the track, and she was gone. The Allegiance was gone: the first he had ever sat upon the shore and watched her leave.

  The harbor looked strangely empty and smaller with her out of it, as though one could not quite imagine that any ship so large had been in that place, and all the other ships which had looked so small beside her now seemed ordinary in size and respectable. “There is no reason she should not come back someday,” Temeraire said to Laurence, “of course; after all, a ship may go anywhere it likes, and she was sent here once. They might like to send some other dragons. And oh! it would be so very tedious to be sailing another eight months, as Iskierka is likely to do—if she is not sent to Brazil, that is,” he finished rather despondently. He was sure Iskierka would be sent to Brazil, it would be just the sort of thing which happened to Iskierka; it did not seem very fair that anyone so careless should have acquired heaps of treasure, and all the ship’s stores of cattle to herself, and also have a great deal more fighting, and everything pleasant.

  But he was determined not to be dismal: he would not be a weight upon Laurence, who had also been left behind to manage with Rankin, and this new governor; Temeraire had been forced sadly to reconsider his feelings towards Macquarie. Laurence certainly thought better of him than of Bligh, and Temeraire would not quarrel on that point, but it seemed Macquarie was rather given to consulting Rankin, and not Laurence, and Laurence had not been invited to several of the conferences to further discuss the plan of attack.

  Instead Rankin would return to the covert after these were held, and present the plan to the aviators in a very officious manner; and if Laurence had a point to make, or some question, Rankin would address him very pointedly as Mr. Laurence, and the others as Lieutenant, such as Lieutenant Blincoln; he only ever addressed the midwingmen so, as Mr. Peabody, or Mr. Dawes, so it was all the ever more sharp.

  “That scarcely concerns me,” Laurence said, when Temeraire had expressed his very great irritation. “He might as easily refuse to share with me any intelligence from the conferences at all, and try and put another man aboard with us to govern the course of events during the battle; he would be within his rights.”

  “As though I should allow any such thing,” Temeraire said, “and I am sure he knows it; he might fight the battle without me, then, and I expect without Kulingile, too.”

  Kulingile cracked open an eye at his name and asked drowsily, “Is it time to eat again yet?”

  “No, but I imagine you have not long to wait; I passed a butchering on my way,” Tharkay said, coming up the hill.

  He shook Laurence’s hand; to Temeraire’s dismay, he had come to also take his leave. “The master of the Miniver informs me he means to make port at Bombay,” Tharkay said, “and I know the road from there to Istanbul.” He smiled a little, twistedly. “Much of my intelligence may be a little old by the time I have got there, but I have promised to deliver it.”

  Temeraire did not see why Tharkay should have to go so far, only to deliver news; and particularly when he did not seem as though he wished to go, very much. “But if you must, you might come back,” Temeraire said, “and if you see Bezaid and Sherazde, pray tell them that their egg hatched quite safely; I have often thought that I ought to send them word. It is not their fault, of course, that Iskierka is so very irritating.”

  “I think we must expect to regret you a longer time,” Laurence said. “—there can be very little to call you back to this part of the world anytime soon.”

  Tharkay paused, then said, “We spoke some time ago of endeavors which might call you away from it, however. I would have opportunity to make inquiries, if you have decided.”

  Laurence did not answer immediately; then he said, “No; thank you, Tenzing. I cannot see my way to it. I am very grateful—”

  Tharkay waved this away. “Then I will hope some other occupation finds you; you do not seem likely to me to lie idle.” He drew out a handsomely embossed card from a case in his pocket. “My direction is likely to be, as always, uncertain; but you may write me care of my lawyers: if they cannot find me, they will hold the letters until I have called for them.” He gave Laurence the card; they clasped hands once more and agreed on dinner, the following day, before Tharkay went down the slope away.

  “I certainly hope that he is right,” Temeraire said, with a little sigh; privateering did seem to him a splendid occupation, and it was a great pity Laurence felt it was not quite the thing. It did not seem to him that anything of interest should ever happen here, nor fair that everyone but himself and Laurence should go.

  Tharkay and Laurence were away at dinner the next afternoon when the gunfire erupted, late in the evening. Temeraire had just woken to enjoy the cooler hours, and had been contemplating whether he might call it worth the effort to fly a little distance to the more shaded water-hole and have a cold drink; as the crack and whistle of musketry went off, Kulingile opened his eyes and sat up.

  “Is it time to fight the serpents?” he inquired hopefully: his voice had not grown lower, but a great deal more resonant in an odd, echoing manner, so that when he spoke it seemed as though several people were talking at once, saying the very same thing.

  “Of course it is not time to fight the serpents,” Caesar said, peering down the slope, “my captain would have come for me, and my crew. There are men fighting one another: perhaps it is duels.”

  “It is not duels,” Temeraire said, “no one fights duels at night, and with dozens of people against one another; one fights them at dawn. I do not see why there should be so much disorder in this town, and why Laurence must always be in the midst of it, somewhere I cannot see him; oh! they are firing again.”

  There were a great many men in uniforms in the street, struggling now against one another with bayonets and wrestling, their rifles held like staves and battering away. Temeraire rose and peered down the hill anxiously, looking to see if he could make Laurence out anywhere at all in the melee, but his brown coat would have been difficult to see in better light than they had, so that Temeraire did not see him was no comfort; if he had seen Laurence, he might at least have had the opportunity of snatching him away to safety.

  “I am going to go down there,” Temeraire said, decisively, “—no, Roland, I cannot wait; plainly Laurence might be anywhere, and perhaps they will stop if I should land among them—I will only knock over that low building, which is very rickety-looking anyway, and perhaps the one beside it.”

>   “You are not to go anywhere,” Rankin said, panting up the hill, in his heartlessly plain evening clothes and great disarray, with Blincoln and his second lieutenant behind him. “Mr. Fellowes! You will rig Caesar out at once; it is a rebellion. You are to remain here,” he added to Temeraire. “Laurence is in no danger whatsoever: they are advancing on the governor’s mansion, and nowhere near the inn where he was dining.”

  “As though I were likely to take your word for it,” Temeraire said scornfully, “or listen to you; I am not under your command, and if someone is rebelling, who is it, and why?”

  “That,” Rankin snapped, “is none of your concern; if you do mean to go blundering in, and likely crush Laurence yourself in reckless abandon, by all means do so, but you will keep out of our way. Caesar, does all lie well? That breast-band does not look secure to me, Mr. Fellowes, you will see to it.”

  “It is a little loose there over the shoulder, as well,” Caesar reported, puffing out his chest tremendously, and then Demane said, “I don’t see why we should—ow!”

  Roland had kicked him soundly in the shin, and as he bent towards it caught him by the ear, twisting it painfully. “Don’t be an ass,” she said, “and don’t you yowl at me, either,” she added, when Kulingile had reared up his head in bristling protest. “It is for his good, and yours.”

  “Let go!” Demane hissed back at her, but she was managing to dance around him and keep hold, so he could not easily wrench loose without hurting himself worse. “Why should we let him decide, who is ruling the colony and everyone in it—”

  “We shouldn’t,” she hissed, “but you aren’t the son of an earl with twenty thousand a year and half the Lords in his pocket; if you look a rebel, someone will just shoot you, you ass, and not bother with trial about it, either; you haven’t a scrap of influence. And anyway,” she added, “if he hasn’t any business deciding, you have less; you don’t even know who it is rebelling, or why: and I dare say they are all just drunk.”