by Naomi Novik
He looked for one of the ship’s boys: a small creature was darting by him on the dragondeck, head full of yellow curls and in a patched green coat. When Laurence caught him by the shoulder, the boy looked up and said in a piping voice, “Aye, Captain?”
“Light along to my cabin and fetch my log-book, if you please,” Laurence said, and pausing added, “And tell me your name again.”
“Gerry, sir,” the little boy said, giving him a peculiar look; Laurence sighed inwardly and made a note he should have to get all the names given him, at least. He thought he would read it over, and learn the daily routine thereby; perhaps he might thus advise himself.
“What a splendid notion,” Temeraire said, unexpectedly, raising his head; his eyes had brightened. “Of course that must help your memory return more swiftly. Although I must tell you,” the dragon added, “the log-book has not been very interesting at all. It has been nothing but fish and wind, these six months, before we ran into that storm. We have not seen a battle anywhere, since we had to run from the Inca, and that was ages ago.”
He was regretful. Laurence’s own thought: the Inca? And hard on that, it belatedly dawned upon him that the dragon himself, unlike a horse, or even a recalcitrant landsman pressed into service, might be relied upon to tell him of their work. “Temeraire,” he said, “do you know the names of the rest of your crew?”
“Of course,” Temeraire said. “You have always told me it is the duty of any good officer to know all the names of his officers and his crew.”
“So it is,” Laurence said grimly. “Pray will you tell me them, one after another?”
“He is already much better,” Temeraire said to Maximus, anxiously, hoping for confirmation. “I know it is quite odd, when he does not remember someone’s name, or a thing which happened in front of him, and quite lately; but you cannot say he is not better.”
“Of course he is better,” Maximus said reassuringly, lifting his dripping jaws from his share of the cod stew. “I dare say he will remember all the rest of it in a week or so, Temeraire; no need to fuss.”
But Laurence was so very strange—so very stiff and awkward; it was not only that he had lost a great deal of his memory, which was bad enough and very inconvenient, but he did not seem to know Temeraire, either, or any of the other aviators, for that matter. He had spent nearly all the last two days closeted with Hammond, and had said very little to anyone. “But I am sure he will improve, once he has had a rest, and we are under way,” Temeraire said to himself, uncertainly.
There was some little difficulty over their departure: Temeraire did not understand, himself; he saw no reason why they should not have sailed out directly they had Laurence again, and he would have liked to: what if the Japanese should have taken it into their heads to snatch Laurence back? And it was no use Hammond’s trying to tell him they had no reason to do such a thing; they had kept him back in the first place, after all. And as for Lord Jinai—that was the name of the particularly rude sea-dragon—if he liked to stop them, he was very welcome to try. Temeraire felt himself quite equal to answering him, with Iskierka, and Kulingile, and all the formation at his backs; not to mention the guns of the Potentate.
But Hammond had objected to that, also; and so a great deal of communication had gone back and forth, passed through the Dutch commissioner, who evidently did not like Napoleon at all and persisted in considering himself a neutral party to the war. “And through us,” said Wampanoag, having come over to share a bite, “which, I don’t mind saying, has done some good: they have decided to give you a proper dinner, to say farewell politely, and see you on your way.”
“That,” said Temeraire somewhat baffled, “is quite absurd: they would have been perfectly welcome to give us dinner, anytime they liked.”
“They might give us more than one, too,” Maximus put in somewhat wistfully: the cod had vanished.
“Why, it’s not the dinner that matters, of course,” Wampanoag said. “It is the timing of the thing: if you sail out before they have given you permission, then they will have lost face; if they should give permission and you shouldn’t go, they will have lost face. And you shouldn’t like it any better if they should try and stop you, or try and chase you, either way. This way, everything will be quite clear.”
Temeraire still did not see very much sense in this: if all parties wished them gone, it seemed to him they might simply go: no-one was asking Lord Jinai to sit there in the harbor mouth, in their way. But Wampanoag seemed to think it entirely sensible.
“And I will say, I am pretty grateful to you,” he said, “for opening the door, as it were. I like them very much, now they have decided to talk to me: very polite fellows, perfectly honest: easy to do business with. They don’t like to say no, so you have to keep a sharp lookout to notice when they mean no, but that isn’t so difficult: the older fellows of the tribe are like that.”
“I do not understand,” Temeraire said. “Why would they not have spoken to you before, when they do have these Dutch translators?”
“Well, their shogun wouldn’t have it,” Wampanoag said. “They aren’t much for foreigners here, but I guess they have thought it over and decided, since the Chinese are throwing in with you lot, they had better start making some more friends.” He snorted and waved his tail in the air. “They aren’t wrong, either: those of us who don’t want to get dragged into this mess you lot and Napoleon are brewing up all over the place had better stick together. I’ll tell you, you ought to think better of it. Bad for business, that sort of thing.”
That was not very fair, in Temeraire’s opinion: he did not want war—he did not object to battles, of course, but war did seem a great trouble for everyone. “But we cannot very well just lie down before Napoleon: he is always provoking war, and trying to conquer his neighbors, and tell them how they are to go on; only someone very poor-spirited indeed could endure it.”
Wampanoag shook his head doubtfully. “If you say so: it takes two to make a quarrel, in my experience.” He shook out his wings. “But I cannot complain of the consequences for myself: they have given me license to buy more goods than they had meant to allow, on credit, and I suppose I will have a commission for Yankee ships to come in our own right before I go away again. I have promised them we will bring them a company of shipwrights straight from Salem, next season, if they will give us a treaty and let us trade, and I don’t doubt the President will back me if I bring him terms for that.”
“The President?” Temeraire said, and listened with mounting indignation as Wampanoag said, quite casually, “Yes: I have met him half-a-dozen times, and I am sure he will see the sense of a proper treaty with the Japanese for us. I should have rather had Hamilton in the job, of course, but there! You can’t have everything, and for all that he isn’t a Federalist, Tecumseh is a clever fellow.”
He gave a final nod of his head, and leapt aloft, leaving Temeraire to simmer. “It is a good deal too much,” he said to Maximus stormily, “that Napoleon sits in Lien’s lap, and Wampanoag is off chatting with the President, and we must yell and make a great noise in Britain only to be seen by a general now and again. I have never met a minister in my life.”
“Why would you wish to?” Maximus said, sleepily. “Berkley is always saying they are nothing but a lot of tiresome old windbags.”
“Not to mention,” Iskierka put in, as her own pontoon-raft drifted closer, “that if you hadn’t interfered, Granby should have been a king himself: then you needn’t have complained.”
• • •
Laurence found the dinner, which he could not escape, a peculiarly constrained affair. It was held at the estate of the Japanese governor, in his gardens very near the shore, and the whole of it passed very nearly in silence. Hammond alone had anything to say to any member of the other company, having monopolized the conversation of the governor since the moment he had come ashore, through one of the translators; with an oblivious rudeness almost painful to witness, he had taken the seat at that gen
tleman’s right hand, although the servants had made a very valiant effort to reserve it for Laurence himself. Laurence had then been established on the governor’s other hand, making him unwilling witness to the rest of Hammond’s performance: a mortifying experience, as all Hammond’s too-anxious entreaties and half-apologies were met alike with silence, or responses brief and noncommittal: the governor betrayed by not the flicker of an eyelid his opinions on any of Hammond’s remarks, and offered no encouragement whatsoever to his proposals for an exchange of envoys, or an opening of diplomatic communications.
The governor’s safety was secured by the looming bulk of Lord Jinai, who hovered ominously overhead in the shallow waters just off the coast, and a dozen Japanese dragons also in attendance, most of them in polished armor. There were not very many friendly looks exchanged between them and the British dragons: Temeraire had come ashore, and Iskierka, to keep close watch on Jinai; she in particular kept a gimlet and suspicious eye upon the sea-dragon, and occasionally remarked audibly of her perfect willingness to set the entire city ablaze if he should make any motion towards the ship and its precious cargo.
Only Kiyo, who had hauled herself out of the nearby river mouth to attend the feasting, was in good humor. She had greeted Laurence cheerfully: no-one had dared to challenge her on the matter of the assistance she had given him. “No, why would anyone mind that?” she said, with perfect unconcern, when he had asked if she had been put to any distress. “I have been meaning to have a good look at one of these Western ships, anyway, that I have been hearing about the last century, and I am glad especially to have seen such a prodigious one, because I suppose most people would not have believed in it, otherwise. How large it is! I have swum all around it,” she added, a piece of intelligence which would not have failed to horrify Captain Blaise, or for that matter any of their party, “and we must certainly have some like it.
“I petitioned the bakufu on the subject myself, and they have agreed we must let these Americans show us how to build them. And that good little fellow Wampanoag has promised that his crew will perform your Julius Caesar for me, before they sail away,” she added, with great satisfaction. “So you see, it has all worked out splendidly. And there will be fireworks, after dinner!”
She put her head back into her wine-bowl and glugged away; but Laurence grimly realized she was by no means a mere carefree fool, pleasing herself, as he might have supposed before. He did not think Hammond would consider it a splendid outcome, to have the Japanese allied with the colonials, and busy at building a navy of their own.
The fireworks, set off above the harbor and splendid, were a relief to all present, as preventing any further need of conversation: all rose and stood gathered near the shore to watch the blooms of glittering light. Laurence took the opportunity however of speaking with Kaneko, who had been seated some distance down the table from him, at Lady Arikawa’s side.
He bowed deeply, when Laurence approached him, and addressed him as a prince; Laurence received the title with dismay. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “but I assure you I cannot consider myself deserving of the mode of address: I am not a prince, whatever fiction may have been invented for political necessity.”
Kaneko said quietly, “A thing cannot be at once true and fiction: and this, I think, must be considered true, when it is the foundation of an alliance of two great nations.”
He made no outward reproach, but Laurence could not help but feel one: he had lied to Kaneko, even if not deliberately. He awkwardly made his apology, on that score, and hoped rather than thought he was believed: Kaneko received it only politely. “I wished also to promise you,” Laurence said, “that I will do whatever is in my power to secure Junichiro’s future. His familiarity with dragons—”
“The fate of the criminal you mention is none of my concern,” Kaneko said with an unanswerable finality, although when he turned back towards the fireworks the spray of the lights shone wetly in his raised eyes.
Laurence did not press him. “May I ask you, sir,” he said, “if honor is satisfied?”
Kaneko was silent, and then said, “Lady Arikawa insists it must be so,” somewhat reluctantly. He paused and added, “She has honored me with an invitation to take up residence upon her estate.”
Laurence wondered at the significance, and still more at Kaneko’s evident doubts. Kaneko glanced at him and said, “The honor of dragons can only with great difficulty endure conflict with their affections. The authorities hold that their best and wisest course is to retain a proper distance from any particular individual. I fear I have been the instrument of diminishing her standing.”
Laurence was silent, thinking of Temeraire’s willingness to spring out a cause for war and all for his sake. “Perhaps I take your point,” he said, soberly, and then had to raise a hand: as if knowing himself spoken of, Temeraire had broken off his own rapt contemplation of the fireworks, and looked over anxiously towards him, until Laurence went to his side.
“I do not see why you must be speaking with that fellow who tried to kill you,” Temeraire said, putting out a foreleg, as if he would have liked to gather Laurence in close.
Laurence thought, with black humor, that there was every reason: he knew Kaneko better than any other man present. “That was merely his duty,” he said, “and nothing ungentleman-like in his behavior: I have no reason to think he means me the slightest ill, as a personal matter. I can scarcely condemn him for trying to uphold the law of his nation, or its interest.”
“I can,” Temeraire said, “when he thought he would do so by putting a sword through you.” He gave Kaneko, and Lady Arikawa behind him, a cold glare: Laurence shook his head and let Temeraire put him up. The sooner they were gone, the better; there was too much wrath still simmering, nearly palpable when he lay his hand upon Temeraire’s neck. Laurence felt again unequal to the strength of Temeraire’s affection: like a gift handed to him unexpectedly, and which he did not recall having earned.
He woke in his cabin early on the morning, to the welcome hurrying thunder of many feet on the ladderways, the bosun’s shouts. Hammond was meant to breakfast with him—they were to review the order in which the presents carried aboard were to be delivered to the harbormaster, in Tien-sing; after that it would be on the order of the presents for the Imperial envoy, and how those should differ depending on the rank of the individual sent. Laurence struggled with temptation; temptation carried the day: he rose from his cot, dressed quickly, and called in O’Dea.
“Aye, Captain, it’s a fine morning, and the wind and tide bid fair to get us under way,” O’Dea said gloomily, as he helped Laurence into his coat. “Properly into the kraken’s mouth: that sea-monster is lurking ready there at the mouth of the harbor like Jonah’s own whale, and it’s sure enough the beast will try and have us down to the bottom if only it can.”
Laurence swallowed down a cup of hot coffee, very bitter, and took himself to the dragondeck. There was no opportunity for conversation amid the cacophony, with every hand turned to clearing the dragondeck and making way for all the beasts to land. The dragons carried on their own negotiations, as to which should take a first turn in the air, to make the quarters more comfortable for all: Iskierka and Kulingile leapt aloft, circling the ship; the rest arranged themselves in a complicated tangle on the deck, and the hands began to haul in the pontoons to be deflated and secured beneath the dragondeck.
Somehow it was managed in under an hour, and the massive anchors brought up by the beasts themselves while the men merely wound the chain back around the capstan. “Make sail!” the bosun cried, and they were under way: a cautious progress out of the harbor, past the raised and suspicious head of the sea-dragon, who paced the ship ominously while they crept past the harbor mouth and out to the open ocean, his great pallid eyes watching. But the wind held all the while, and they were in the clear before the sun had even reached its zenith. Blaise nodded to his first lieutenant, and the ship opened her own wings: “Make sail, make sail,” the cry
going up, the loud rumbling and snap of sailcloth unfurled, belling out with wind: coast and sea-dragon fell away behind them almost abruptly.
Laurence stood watching the whole from the railing of the dragondeck, at once glad and disquieted, feeling himself out of place. He had nothing to do, and no-one to speak with. Captain Blaise he recalled very vaguely, having met him some ten years before at an assembly in Mallorca: a sensible man and a proper sailor by reputation and who knew his work; not a blazing light by any means, but to be relied upon. There was not another soul aboard he knew even so distantly.
Save one: Junichiro stood by the taffrail, looking back at the shore. He ought not have been there, in the midst of the activity; it was a solecism, and several of the sailors cast him sour looks as they went past almost elbow-close, though on a transport there was no shortage of room, and he did not even understand their pointed muttering. He stood with hands clasped behind his back, and expression stoic, peculiarly isolated and standing out sorely despite his Western dress: a borrowed aviator’s coat, and trousers.
“Gerry,” Laurence said, catching that young boy where he leaned over the rail into the rising wind of their passage, his tow hair blown up into a cloud, “light along to Mr. Junichiro, there, and invite him to the dragondeck, if you please; and be sure you bring him back along the port side.”
The sea-dragon was vanished beneath the waves, a handful of fishing-boats on the water receding, the low mountains of the coast rapidly diminishing. Junichiro lingered for one final uncertain and lonely look back at his native shore before he turned and followed. His steps dragged. In the morning, Laurence intended to find some work for him—surely there could be no shortage of it, on a ship so heavily burdened with dragons—and see him worked to exhaustion for a few weeks. It would strengthen his appetite and dull his capacity for imagination: both ends much to be desired, at present, where his health was concerned. A ship’s ration did not suit the palate of most landsmen, even ones not so gently reared; thankfully Junichiro was still young enough to adapt. And of an age with some few of the aviators, including one young sandy-haired fellow whom Temeraire had named Roland, in Laurence’s own crew, who according to Hammond spoke the Chinese tongue: Laurence would have his young gentlemen to dinner, to-night, and introduce Junichiro around.