by Naomi Novik
The headman came towards him shortly, to press him with smiling firmness to come down to the village and be housed there for the night. Laurence had not the least doubt there would be a guard on the house, and he did not mean to carve his way out of another prison through innocent farmers.
“Pray thank him for his kindness,” Laurence said, casting for some way of deferring the entanglement, “and tell him I am honored to accept his invitation: we will come down very shortly, if Kiyo does not wish to get back on the water.”
“Oh, I do not mind staying the night,” Kiyo said, unhelpfully, without looking up from her gnawed bones. “We will not get to Ariake to-day, anyway, and there is not much moon to-night. We had much better sleep here, and get on the way in the morning.”
By the morning, Laurence was sure, he would have no opportunity; but he bowed to the headman, and determined to wait for some small chance to get into the trees and out of sight. Kiyo abruptly compensated for her indiscretion by sitting up and belching enormously and noxiously, emitting a large diffuse cloud of greyish smoke that stung in the nostrils and left those near-by coughing and gasping: perhaps some aftereffect of her labors in heating the water, and the stink of it not unlike burning tar.
Many of the guests were wiping streaming eyes; the headman was distracted. Laurence seized his bundle in one arm and caught Junichiro with the other; they did not exchange a word, but together hurried as discreetly as they could back into the trees.
They ran as soon as they were out of sight, until they reached the banks of the river and pulled up again: there were a few small fishing-boats pulled up on the shore, with serviceable-enough oars. Junichiro balked. “We cannot steal from peasants,” he said, but Laurence had already reached into the bundle and twisted off one of the gold buttons upon his coat.
He pressed it into the soft dirt of the bank. “Let us hope that will make adequate answer,” he said. “I will tell you again, you may go back: it is not too late—”
“You know my course is decided,” Junichiro said flatly, already climbing in.
“Very well,” Laurence said, pushing off, and he bent his back to the oars with a will.
The river ran at a good pace, the boat was light; Laurence had labored harder, for less cause, and arms that took a regular turn at the pumps were not overly tasked by the steady pull. The day had been already long, even with Kiyo’s assistance earlier, but Laurence thought it better to row through the night and seek some concealment for the day; the countryside would surely be roused after them, now. “How much further, to this Ariake Sea?” he asked Junichiro, as he rowed onwards.
“Another night after this one,” Junichiro said, dully. He sat huddled low in the bottom of the boat: their narrow escape had been a fresh reminder to him of his crime, and there was no longer the pleasure of a dragon’s company to distract him. He watched as Laurence rowed on and on; when at last they came to a quicker eddy, and Laurence shipped the oars to give himself a rest, he asked abruptly, “Are you truly a—nobleman?”
“What, because I can row?” Laurence said, half-amused. “Yes; my father is Lord Allendale. But I have been aboard ship since I was twelve years old. I dare say there is not a shipboard task I have not set my hand to.”
The river was empty, for the most part, in the advancing night; only fishermen seeking a last piece of luck were out, and not many of those, mere shadows; one they passed was singing softly to himself, and raised a hand to them as they glided on past. Laurence felt the deep peacefulness of the countryside, its stillness, and the loneliness of being outside that quiet.
“Are we likely to meet anyone along the river?” Laurence asked quietly.
“Only at the fords,” Junichiro said, “if we are unlucky.” He paused and then said a little too quickly, as though he at once wanted very much to ask, and was conscious he should not desire it, “Have you been in a battle, at sea?”
“Three fleet actions,” Laurence said, “and perhaps a dozen ship-to-ship. There is nothing very pretty in it. Have you never seen a battle?”
“The bakufu has kept the peace in Japan for two hundred years,” Junichiro answered, with not-unmerited pride. “There are pirates and bandits, of course, but not near my mas—not near the honorable Kaneko’s home.” For all his satisfaction, there was a small wistful note in his voice.
“They are to be congratulated, then,” Laurence said. “I do not think we have had peace in Europe for ten years together, in living memory: nor are like to have, with Napoleon roosting in France.”
They fell silent together: there were a few huts approaching, and a lantern hung with a gleam of light. Laurence took up the oars again and fell into the easy rhythm of the work, no sound but the faint dripping patter of the water upon the river surface with each oar-stroke, the hush of the wind going by. The moon rose, gibbous and pale on the black water, and he drifted. He might have been on the broad deck of his ship at the prow, facing into the wind and the sails making a low clap-clap behind, the hands singing at the stern and a lantern throwing light in a circle on a book before him as he read aloud, looking up to speak to—
He started and looked over his shoulder: there was a light, and music, up ahead. A road came to cross the river at a ford, and on the left bank stood several houses lit up and festooned with lamps, women in long gowns at their doors calling out in a great noise to a party of travelers on the road, and several porters and two ferrymen perched upon both sides of the crossing, watching the approach of their small boat with interest and suspicion.
• • •
Temeraire had meant to send Wampanoag another invitation, the next day, but he did not need to; instead in the morning, when the hands had just finished holystoning down the dragondeck, the American dragon flew over of his own volition with a white scrap waving. Kulingile grumbled: it was his turn to sleep, after staying aloft during all Maximus’s turn—as Temeraire could not presently take a turn aloft himself—and he disliked having to move.
“I am sorry to come shoving in amongst you,” Wampanoag said, as he came down, “but as I can’t ask you over to Lacewing, in turn, I hope you’ll forgive me for making this answer instead for all your hospitality,” and he lay down a large package wrapped in oilcloth, tied up with string.
“Oh!” Temeraire said, astonished but by no means displeased; Iskierka sat up and took notice. Maximus had been taking a swim, in lieu of going aloft, but he put his forelegs on the railing and peered over, and all the other dragons raised their heads to have a look; even Kulingile cracked an eye. “Roland, will you open it, if you please?”
She cut open the strings, and folding back the sheets revealed a glory of blaze, beautiful glass beads strung on silver chain, with pearls and gold beads scattered along the length, and how immensely long indeed—it might have made an anchor-chain for the Potentate, and a little more to spare.
“If you have a smith aboard, as I suppose you must,” Wampanoag said, while they all gazed upon it in mute delight, “he can parcel it out for you all into lengths: I thought that might be better than my trying to cut it up beforehand. We wear it like so, in Salem,” he added, and sitting up on his heels showed how a similar chain hung from one woolen pouch to another across his breast.
“Now that,” Temeraire said, “I must call very handsome.” No-one at all was inclined to disagree, and Temeraire considered it all the evidence which he required, of Wampanoag’s being a very good sort of dragon, and to be trusted with important business. He knew perfectly well that Hammond might have a different view of the matter, of course—Hammond had complained a great deal of Temeraire’s having spoken with Wampanoag yesterday at all—but Hammond had certainly forfeited any right to consideration after his shameful attempt to leave Laurence behind, and Temeraire did not mean to waste any time in useless quarreling with him where his own mind was made up.
It was too early to eat again, but Wampanoag was very ready to be persuaded to sit with them just for company, awhile, and when they had settled th
emselves as conveniently as possible, Temeraire delayed no longer in broaching the topic, very delicately. “For you see,” he said, “I am afraid that Mr. Hammond may not quite have pursued the matter properly: it does not seem to me that any real search can have been put into train. And,” he added, “I consider all the sailors of the ship to be our responsibility. I do not think it at all the thing for us to leave any of them here. We cannot sail away until we have found him: our lost sailor, I mean.”
He was not entirely insensible to all Hammond’s cautions: there was no need for anyone to know that Laurence should be a valuable hostage, so they might try to put him in prison; Temeraire much preferred for them only to know that if Laurence were returned, they would leave, and otherwise not.
“Are you sure he isn’t only dead?” Wampanoag said, greatly diminishing Temeraire’s opinion of his intelligence. “They usually are, if they get washed overboard.”
Temeraire with an effort restrained himself from mantling. “I am quite sure,” he said, repressively. “And I intend to remain so until I am offered proof otherwise.”
Wampanoag had a trick of tilting his head a little to one side, as though he were looking you over from another angle to see if you seemed different, which Temeraire now found had the effect of making him feel under a too-sharp observation. But Wampanoag only said, “So you are only lingering to find him, this fellow you lost?”
“Yes,” Temeraire said, eagerly. “And we should be very glad of any assistance in recovering him.”
“But I beg your pardon,” Wampanoag said, “aren’t you here over the Phaeton?”
“No, for we hadn’t any notion what had happened to her,” Temeraire said. “We were only on our way to China: we have been invited to the court, you see.”
Wampanoag was quite gratifyingly surprised to hear of their destination; he expressed himself very prettily on the matter indeed, calling it a remarkable honor. “And I will not scruple to say, that puts a very different shade on things here, it seems to me,” he added, “if you are not here to quarrel.”
“We are not, in the least,” Temeraire said, although a stab of guilt, when he thought of what Laurence should say when he heard of the Phaeton, forced him to add, “although I do say we think it very hard that the Phaeton should have been sunk, so far from home with all her hands, and all because, we suppose, of some misunderstanding.”
“Let us certainly call it that, for the moment,” Wampanoag said. “That is a very good name for it, I must say.”
He declared himself delighted to be of service in any way he could, promised to speak with the chief of the Dutch, a gentleman called Doeff, to forward the search, and even with the Japanese directly. “I have a bit of Dutch myself, you know,” he said, “from the shell: my tribe adopted a good many of them back during the quarreling over New Amsterdam that was. So I can have a jaw with their translators, myself: that is why I hired us on here.”
He was so ready to be obliging that Temeraire could not even be too angry with him for adding, “but pray do understand that it is more than I undertake, to return you your sailor. I don’t mean to distress you, but my firm have lost a few ships entire ourselves, all hands, too. It is a dreadful sad wrench, I can tell you, to hear that a neat clipper with her hold packed full and three dozen men aboard has gone to the bottom of the ocean, to be gnawed by serpents, and a clear loss of twenty thousand pounds sterling.”
Temeraire shuddered in real horror, his ruff flattening involuntarily down against his neck, and Churki exclaimed in passionate dismay; but Wampanoag made a prosaic flip of his wing in the air. “I don’t complain: it is a hard business,” he said, “and a necessary risk to run, if you mean to make your fortune at it. But what I mean to say is, not a scrap of sail or bit of timber do we have to show for any ship we have lost: we only know they are lost because they left the one port and never came in at any other, and after we had sat hoping after them a couple of years it was time to leave off saying, ‘She will come in tomorrow.’ So I cannot promise you we will find a trace to say, one way or another, what has happened to your sailor. But whatever I can do, I will, sure enough.”
“I cannot hope for more than that,” Temeraire said as politely as he could manage, rather wishing that Wampanoag would leave now before sharing any other ghoulish stories, and seeing before him a long empty stretch of days, waiting and waiting, while Laurence did not come.
The party about to ford the river was evidently the train of a lord on his way home from the capital, amongst them several armed retainers wearing two swords and more serviceable armor as well. Laurence kept his head bent down and rowed industriously but not, he hoped, too fast; Junichiro was silent in the boat’s belly. Laurence thought for a moment they would manage it. The ferrymen and the porters lost interest when they saw that Laurence showed no intention to compete with their business, of which in any case there bade fair to be as much as they could manage with the sheer size of the lord’s retinue, and the confusion and noise of the welcoming inns might have overwhelmed any interest in Laurence and Junichiro’s quiet passage.
But luck turned against them: one of the lord’s servants on the far bank, evidently in charge of getting the entire assembly across the river and looking exasperated and hot, with a few strands of hair straggled loose from his neatly swept-back arrangement, caught sight of the boat. He called out to them peremptorily, beckoning—you there, you, the boat—plainly wishing them to come and assist in the ferrying, despite the scowls of the ferrymen.
Laurence pretended not to hear, not to see; he rowed onwards with more vigor, trying to evade the clumsy-handled ferries, crammed too full of men. But an eddy pushed one of the waddling boats towards their little fishing-boat and bumped her, and a disapproving older woman in the prow took the opportunity to reach over and swat him reprovingly, gesturing back at the crowded bank as she chided him.
The swat dislodged the rag covering his hair; one of the samurai aboard the ship glanced over, and, after a moment of confusion, a recognition dawned. The samurai leaned over, and sought to grab him; Laurence shipped one oar and seized the other mid-stem, jabbing the handle hard into the man’s belly, and tipped him over the side. Another was standing up in the ferry, trying to draw his sword, which he would have needed to practice a good deal more on the water before trying to accomplish it on a wallowing tub of the sort. Before he could get it out, Laurence swung up the flat of the oar and struck the man a hard and ringing clout across the head, knocking him down to the floor of the ferry.
The two boats were yet entangled. “Ma’am, I beg your pardon,” Laurence said to the old woman, who was still sitting ramrod-straight in the ferry over the side from him and regarding him with a flat expression of utter disapproval and not the least evidence of fear; he put out a boot over the side and shoved the ferry off with a heave, and they were loose.
But the entire retinue were now alive to his presence, swarming out upon the banks, and a couple of the samurai wading out towards them with blades drawn: the ford was shallow enough to make attack practical, the river not waist-high on a man. “Take the oars!” Laurence said to Junichiro, who was hesitating with his hand on the hilt of his blade—he could scarcely have been eager to strike men of rank, of his own nation.
Junichiro looked even more torn; but he seized the oars and began awkwardly to pull. One of the samurai had reached them, catching at the boat’s side: Laurence gripped the man’s wrist to hold away the blade, and with his other hand closed hard struck him across the face and away from the boat. Another was struggling furiously through the current, almost there, but Junichiro had mastered the boat, and they were moving into deeper water.
Laurence ducked a last wild desperate swing of blade, and then he sat again and took the oars—pulled as urgently as ever he had pulled in his life: no longer the easy strokes he had used to move them along, but deep cupping sweeps, legs and back and shoulders all gone into every stroke. He had put a hundred yards between them and the ford before the f
irst ferry could be emptied of her passengers, and a pursuit began to organize. Then he was further on, around a bend of the river, and they had vanished from sight.
He did not slacken his pace; he thought at first he might hope to escape the pursuit—the boats at the ford had by no means been very serviceable, and any rowers they had were like to be unhandy. But as he pulled them onwards, a blue flare went shooting up, back from the ford, and burst with a great thunderclap noise and a shining light on the water. A signal, and faintly he heard an answering roar—a dragon, alerted.
“They will set the patrols on us now,” Junichiro said. “We will be taken,” with a calm certainty, given almost in a conversational tone. He had straightened up in the boat, and looked as though he were already preparing himself to meet his fate.
“I do not propose to be quite so dull a fox as that,” Laurence said. “Pick up that bundle, and jump for the shore when we are near enough.” He turned them towards the left, where the bank came low to the water, with trees close together but not impassable.
LAURENCE PUSHED THE FISHING-BOAT off, water already rising inside from the hole he had stove in her hull, and saw her go away downriver not without a qualm: even if remaining aboard would have been certain doom, she was still the quickest road to the sea, and the only one at all familiar. He had left the remains of his already-tattered old shirt wrapped around a bundle of branches to make a sort of scare-crow, standing up in the prow and fluttering out white; if only the boat evaded capture long enough to get some distance away before she sank, he hoped it might prove some source of confusion, if not long defer the pursuit.
At least it would conceal where they had gone, for a little while. Junichiro was already doing his best to obscure the marks their landing had made in the bank with more dead leaves and branches.