Tongues of Serpents: A Novel of Temeraire

by Naomi Novik

  “They are certainly not drunk,” Temeraire said, “for they have got off three volleys: and it is no joke to reload a gun even when one is sober; it was the greatest difficulty for our artillery company to manage it, with seven men to a cannon, so it must be even more trouble for one person with a musket, it seems to me; and I do wish I knew who they were—”

  “It is the New South Wales Corps,” Lieutenant Forthing said, panting; he had dashed up the hill. “Mr. Laurence is coming, Temeraire; he says to tell you he is quite well, and you are not to come in search of him.”

  “Where is he, pray?” Temeraire said, still a little wary; Laurence, he knew, thought a little better of Forthing after their journey, but Temeraire did not see that he had done anything of particular value; he would much rather have had Ferris back, or perhaps his midwingman Martin; except of course Martin had given them the cut direct, after the trial.

  It was grown too dark to see, but there was a lantern coming up the hill, and then Caesar said, “All lies well, Captain Rankin,” very satisfied with himself, and stood waiting while the company of officers began to go aboard with their rifles and their pistols, and as they mounted, he added aside to Temeraire and Kulingile, in a tone of unpardonable condescension, “Well, fellows, we will settle this in a trice, and be back; pray don’t trouble yourselves over it.”

  “I do not see why we do not get any fighting, and you do?” Kulingile said queryingly, which Temeraire felt was a remarkably appropriate question. “I have been very sleepy, but no one can sleep when there are guns going. And if it is the New South Wales Corps, have they not been giving us those sheep? and the cows?”

  “Well,” Temeraire said judiciously, “so far as that goes, Governor Macquarie did provide us with some cattle.” One ought, he felt, be scrupulously fair in such circumstances. “But he does mean to start a war with China, which no one would like; Laurence,” he said, swinging his head around, “I am so very relieved to see you: I had meant to go down, but Forthing came sooner. We are discussing whether we ought help Governor Macquarie, or the Corps, who are rebelling again.”

  “Yes,” Laurence said, grimly, “—Roland, my glass.”

  The battle, if one might call it that, had gone all the distance to the governor’s mansion now, and seemed so far as Temeraire could see it to be quite reduced in scope; there was very little fighting, and the soldiers who had stood in the way now seemed to be walking with the rest, except for the small company of Marines, who had fled. There was singing going on, and a great many of the townspeople had come out with lanterns and also flagons and bottles: one could see the light shining on the glass as they drank and cheered, and pistols were shot off into the air.

  Laurence closed the glass and gave it to Roland. “Caesar,” Rankin said, “put me up.”

  “Temeraire,” Laurence said, “you will not permit him to go aloft, if you please. Sir,” he said to Rankin, “the event has run past you: you will not turn your beast against a crowd of civilians. God knows there has been enough of that in this war: I will not see it done again.”

  Rankin’s face went very pale with anger, and his hand clenched upon the straps of his carabiners, which he held ready. “Mr. Laurence, if you should dare interfere—”

  “I do,” Laurence said flatly, and whatever Rankin might have said foundered: there was no threat he could offer.

  “If you had the least ambition of pardon,” he said after a stifled, furious struggle briefly contorted his narrow, aristocratic mouth, “you may leave it aside forever; if you think the account I shall give of you will not suffice, Governor Macquarie will surely damn you as thoroughly.”

  “I have no doubt of it,” Laurence said, and turned away; he did not care to give Rankin his face.

  Epilogue

  “OF COURSE it is not a real rebellion,” MacArthur said, handing Laurence a glass of the cool sillery; the heat had broken at last, and the autumnal air was pleasant as the small bats cried and flung themselves among the trees along the border of his gardens. “I don’t see any reason we ought to behave like those Yankee Doodles, cutting off our nose to spite our face; but it is unreasonable to be governed at eight months’ distance and guesswork. Their Lordships cannot have known they were asking for a war we cannot win: what should we do if China sent over a dozen of these albatross creatures, which they do not even know existed, and ran them over our heads with sacks full of bombs? No, plainly we must manage ourselves; but certainly I do not mean to forswear my loyalty to the King. Never that.”

  By which, Laurence supposed, MacArthur meant that he did not mean to forswear himself for at least the next year and a half, before some fresh answer came; if the ministers should not choose at that time to recognize his new self-declared position as First Minister of Australia, Laurence suspected MacArthur’s feelings on the matter would prove somewhat more malleable.

  “Now then,” MacArthur said, “this Rankin fellow: I cannot see how he can continue the commander of our little aerial force here—”

  “I should be surprised if you had much success in persuading him to undertake it,” Laurence said dryly. He had rather expected Rankin to return to England, with Macquarie: the deposed governor had no notion of lingering as Bligh had, but meant at once to leave by the same frigate which had brought him, when that ship was ready.

  “You would be surprised, I think,” MacArthur said. “He is a little stiff-necked, there is no denying it, but his beast is a reasonable creature; I have found it work well enough when I have a word in his ear beforehand to any discussion with his captain. But it is no use saying Rankin has charge of the covert, under the circumstances: you are the man we want for the business. I have written you a pardon; there may be a little irregularity about it, of course, but it must do for now—”

  “Sir,” Laurence said, “I am obliged to you; I must call it more than a little irregular.”

  “Well,” MacArthur said, waving a hand to leave this minor quibble in the air, “we are all irregular here, more or less, and we shan’t grow less so for a good long time: I do not think, sir, you are inclined to sit in a corner until we get back some word: you are not made to moulder in some forgotten corner of the world. And why ought you? You were sent here, after all, and with the intention of your doing work for the colony. I cannot see how it should in any way contravene the terms of your transportation.”

  There was a special sort of gall in proposing that Laurence’s life-sentence for treason did not preclude his taking command of the nascent covert and its aviators; the same sort of gall, of course, which had staged not one but two separate coups d’état. Laurence rather thought MacArthur and Bonaparte were cut from the same cloth, spiritually speaking, if they did not have the same gifts.

  “And I do not mind saying,” MacArthur said, “you cannot help but be damned useful in this whole China business. They turn up remarkably sweet as soon as they have clapped eyes on you and this fellow, no one can help but see that.”

  For this MacArthur’s evidence was a pair of young Chinese officials, who had been brought to the colony the last week: Temeraire at his request had managed to intercept Lung Shen Gai, the dragon previously sighted so near to Sydney, and invite discussion of the territorial issues. MacArthur represented the general sentiment of his citizenry in embracing with great enthusiasm the prospect of Chinese goods entering their market in considerable quantity: free trade was the byword on every man’s lips who had an opinion, which was everyone. The reports from the north of the haul of treasure brought in by the serpents, of tea and luxury, had by now diffused very widely among the populace from O’Dea’s reports: which he recounted nightly in the taverns for his grog, the accounts losing no allure in the transmission and gaining much.

  “I dare say if you should not care to be the commander of the covert,” MacArthur added, “you might take on the foreign ministry: why, that might do better, indeed.”

  “You would do better to hire Temeraire for that post, if he were inclined to serve,”
Laurence said. “No: I thank you for the compliment of your confidence, but no.” He set down his glass. “Pray give my compliments to your wife.”

  Temeraire was drowsing in the field behind the house: filled out a little better after a month of recovery, and the scales of his hide beginning to regain some of that particular glossy sheen. He raised his head as Laurence came nearer, and yawned. “Is your dinner finished? What did he wish to say to you?”

  “To offer me the earth, or at least a portion of it, if we would take charge of the covert,” Laurence said, swinging himself up and hooking on his carabiner straps. “He would like to make me an admiral, or a minister; and of course he has pardoned me, for whatever that is worth in a British court: perhaps another twenty years on the sentence, I would imagine.”

  “It is a kind thought, of course,” Temeraire said, his ruff pricking up. “You are sure you should not like to be a minister?” he inquired. “That is very like a lord, is it not, for you are always saying their Lordships when you should mean the King’s ministers.”

  “Very sure,” Laurence said.

  The deposed governor was at the promontory when they returned, speaking with Rankin, low; a small guard of New South Wales Corps soldiers stood a little way off, his escort—or gaolers, nearer the truth.

  “If I cannot approve your reluctance to act, I am glad to hear you have not wholly acceded to MacArthur’s rebellion,” Macquarie said heavily. “The Crown will wish to remove you at once, with Captain Rankin and the loyalist officers: if we can catch the Allegiance, we will return for her to serve as your transport. Some arrangement can be made for your sentence to be carried out in India—”

  “You must forgive me, sir,” Laurence said, “but if you have no better use for us than to trundle us over the ocean to a pen in India, only to keep us from MacArthur’s powers of persuasion, I will forgo the pleasure.”

  Macquarie was by no means easily reconciled to this position: he protested, and commanded, and came as near cajolery as a man so sensible of his dignity, and wounded in it, could do; but Laurence found himself wholly unmoved even by the final, grudging offer. “You are impatient with your lack of use; some honorable work surely can be found—will be found,” Macquarie said, “which perhaps may even render suitable a pardon—”

  “There is an ugly character to the work which has heretofore been found for us,” Laurence said, “and I think I have done trying the patience of my commanding officers.”

  “Laurence,” Temeraire said tentatively, when Macquarie had gone away frustrate, “it is not that I mind, for I had just as soon not have anything more to do with Government and their orders; but are you quite sure you would not like to go back to the war, if they will have us?”

  Laurence was silent a moment, waiting for the sense of duty to answer; but it did not speak. They would not be asked to defend England, or liberty, or anything worthy of service: only to assist at one spiteful destruction or another. He found in himself only a great longing for something cleaner. “No,” he said finally. “I am sick of the quarrels of nations and of kings, and I would not give ha’pence for any empire other than our valley, if that can content your ambition.”

  “Oh! It can, very well,” Temeraire said, brightening. “Will we go there tomorrow, then? I have been thinking, Laurence, we might have a pavilion up before the winter.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NAOMI NOVIK is the acclaimed author of His Majesty’s Dragon, Throne of Jade, Black Powder War, Empire of Ivory, and Victory of Eagles, the first five volumes of the Temeraire series, recently optioned by Peter Jackson, the Academy Award–winning director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In 2007, Novik received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the World Science Fiction Convention. A history buff with a particular interest in the Napoleonic era, Novik studied English literature at Brown University, then did graduate work in computer science at Columbia University before leaving to participate in the design and development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide. Novik lives in New York City with her husband and six computers.

  www.temeraire.org

  Tongues of Serpents is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Temeraire LLC

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Map © Mapping Specialists Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Novik, Naomi.

  Tongues of serpents / Naomi Novik.

  p. cm. —(Temeraire)

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52175-0

  1. Great Britain. Royal Navy—Officers—Fiction.

  2. Penal colonies—Australia—Fiction. 3. Napoleonic Wars,

  1800–1815—Fiction. 4. Dragons—Fiction. I. Title

  PS3614.O93T68 2010

  813′.6—dc22 2010012934

  www.delreybooks.com

  v3.0