Empire of Ivory

by Naomi Novik

  And he was in no fair way armed to justify the practice of slavery, or to deny that it was carried on at the behest of white men, if he might refute some few of the particulars which were leveled against them—“No, good God, of course we do not eat them,” he said, but beyond this could make very little more argument. The dreadful incident of the Zong, where more than a hundred slaves had been deliberately flung overboard, for the sake of insurance-money, chose the moment to come uncomfortably to his mind, with a blush for the guilt and shame of his nation; made him look a liar, if they had not already thought him so.

  He could only repeat, that he was not himself a slaver, and was not surprised to find this excuse hold no water with them, nor even when Mrs. Erasmus had explained to them her husband’s perfect innocence; the objection plainly was wider than such personal acts. There was no sympathy offered, for the illness which had driven them to seek the medicine; Laurence rather received the impression that they thought it little more than just deserts, drawing as they did no particular distinction between the British and their dragons, and their temper grew rather more fixed, than less, for all Laurence’s attempts to explain.

  The king turned, and, in response to a beckoning flick of her tail, Laurence was led farther back into the chamber, where stood a low table of enormous size, no higher than his knee but some twelve feet long and across. The women folded away the wooden covers, and a hollow space perhaps a foot deep was revealed, like a sort of display-case; inside lay a strange sculpture in the shape of the African continent. It was a map, an enormous map in thick relief to show elevation, gold-dust for sand and mountains of bronze, jewel-chip forests and rivers of silver; and with great dismay Laurence perceived the puff of white featherdown used to stand for the falls. It stood almost halfway between the tip of the continent, where Capetown lay, and the sharp jutting prominence of the African Horn: in his worst fears, he had not thought they had been brought so far into the interior.

  They did not let him look at it long; instead they drew him to the other end, where the table had been lately extended: the wood was darker, and the sections of the map laid down only in soft painted wax. He did not at first know what to make of it, until by relative position he understood the blue oval stretch of water at the top of the continent must be the Mediterranean, and realized it was meant to figure as Europe: the outlines of Spain and Portugal and Italy misshapen and the whole continent shrunk; Britain itself nothing but a scattering of small whitish lumps in the upper corner. The Alps and the Pyrenees stood in pinched-up relief, approximately correct, but the Rhine and Volga were strangely meandering, and smaller than he was used to see them marked.

  “They wish you to draw it properly,” Mrs. Erasmus said, and one of the prince’s men handed him a stylus; Laurence gave it back. The man repeated the instructions in his own tongue, exaggeratedly, as if Laurence were a slow child; and attempted to press the stylus on him once more.

  “I beg your pardon; I will not,” Laurence said, shaking off his hand; the man spoke loudly and struck him abruptly across the face. Laurence pressed his lips together and said nothing, his heart pounding in a furious temper. Mrs. Erasmus had turned to speak urgently to Kefentse; the dragon was shaking his head.

  “Having been taken prisoner, in what I must consider an act of war, I must refuse under these conditions to answer any questions whatsoever,” Laurence said.

  Moshueshue shook his head, while the dragon-king lowered her head and fixed him with a glittering and furious eye, her head so close that he could see that what he had taken for tusks in Kefentse were a kind of jewelry: ivory rings banded with gold, set in the flesh of her upper lip like ear-rings. She snorted hot breath across his face, and bared serrated teeth; but he had too much use of being so close to Temeraire to be frightened thus, and her eyes slitted down angrily as she drew her head back.

  The king said coldly, “You were taken as a thief, and a kidnapper, in our country; you will answer, or—” and Mrs. Erasmus paused and said, “Captain, you will be flogged.”

  “Brutality and further ill-usage will in no wise alter my determination,” Laurence said, “and I beg your pardon, ma’am, if you are forced to witness it.”

  His answer provoked her only further; Moshueshue laying a hand on the king’s foreleg spoke in low tones, but she shivered her skin impatiently, and threw him off. She spoke in a low angry continuous rumble, which Mrs. Erasmus could only manage piecemeal to convey: “You speak of ill-usage to us, kidnapper, invader—you will answer—we will hunt you all, we will break your ancestors’ eggs.”

  She finished and violently cracked her tail above her back, issuing orders. Kefentse held his forehand out to Mrs. Erasmus; she threw Laurence one look of deep concern before she was carried briskly away, which he would have been glad to think unmerited, and then his arms were seized, on either side; his coat cut away down the middle of the back, also his shirt, and he was forced to his knees with the rags still hanging from his shoulders.

  He fixed his gaze out through the archway, which opened upon the loveliest prospect he had ever beheld: the sun still low in the sky beyond the falls, newly risen, and glowing small and molten through the gusting clouds of mist. The torrents of water churned to pure white were roaring steadily over the verge, the tangled branches of trees yearning out towards the water, from the canyon-walls where they had taken root; the gauzy insubstantial suggestion of a rainbow, which refused to be seen head-on, but clung to the edge of his vision. His shoulders ached as they drew him taut.

  He had seen men take a dozen lashes without a sound; foremast hands, under his very own orders, he reminded himself after every stroke: by the tenth, however, the argument lost its potency, and he was only trying raggedly to endure, in an animal sort of way, the pain which no longer ceased between the strokes but only ebbed and flowed. The whip struck awry once; the man holding his right arm cursed, the edge of his hand having been caught by the lash, by the sound of it, and yelled a complaint at the flogger, good-natured. The whip did not cut the skin, but the weals broke, after some time; blood ran down over his ribs.

  Laurence was not precisely insensible when another dragon returned him to the cave, only very far away, his throat raw and stretched to ruin. He was grateful for it, or would have been; otherwise he would have screamed again when they put hands on him, to lift him face-downwards onto the ground, even though they did not touch his torn back: every nerve had been woken to pain. Sleep did not come, only a kind of murky absence of thought, which darkened by degrees into unconsciousness.

  Water was put to his lips. With sharp authority Dorset ordered him to drink; the habit of obedience carried Laurence through the effort. He faded again, and for a long time a grey heat stifled him. He thought perhaps he drank a little more, and another time dreamt his mouth was welling up with salty blood, and choking half-woke to Dorset squeezing cold broth into his mouth from a rag, before again he slept and wandered in fever-dreams.

  “Laurence, Laurence,” Temeraire said, through the haze, in a strange hollow voice, and Ferris was hissing in his ear, saying, “Captain, you must wake up, you must, he thinks you’re dead—” His voice was full of so much fear that Laurence tried to speak to comfort him, although his mouth would not quite form words properly, then the dream fell away again into a terrible roaring; he felt as though the earth shook; then all gone, into a comfortable darkness.

  Chapter 12

  THE NEXT HE knew of the world was a cup of clean water held for him by Emily Roland. Dorset was kneeling on the floor beside him, and bracing him up by the waist. Laurence managed to put a hand around the cup and guide it to his mouth, spilling a little; he was palsied as an old man and trembling. He was lying on his stomach on a thin pallet of gathered straw covered with shirts, bare to the chest himself; and he was desperately hungry.

  “A little at a time,” Dorset said, giving him small round balls of cooled porridge, one after another. They had eased him onto his side to eat.

  “Temeraire?”
Laurence said, around an involuntary and desperate gluttony, wondering if he had only dreamed. He could not move his arms freely: his back had scabbed over, but if he reached too far forward the edges split, fresh blood trickling down the skin.

  Dorset did not at once answer. “Was he here?” Laurence said sharply.

  “Laurence,” Harcourt said, kneeling down by him, “Laurence, pray do not get distressed; you have been ill a week. He was here, but I am afraid they ran him off; I am sure he is quite well.”

  “Enough; you must sleep,” Dorset said, and for all the will in the world, Laurence could not resist the command; he was already fading again.

  When he woke it was daylight outside, and the cavern nearly empty, except for Roland and Dyer and Tooke. “They take the others to work, sir, in the fields,” she said. They gave him a little water, and reluctantly at his insistence the support of their shoulders, so he might stagger to the edge of the cave and look outside.

  The cliff face, opposite, was cracked, and the dark stains of dragon blood looked deep burnt orange-red on the striated walls. “It is not his, sir, or not much,” Emily said anxiously, looking up at him.

  She could tell him nothing more: not how Temeraire had found them, nor if he had been quite alone, nor his condition; there had been no time for conversation. With the number of dragons flying at all hours through the gorges, Temeraire had passed for a few moments as one in the throng, but he was too large and remarkably colored to escape notice, and when he had put his head into the cave to see them, he had at once raised an alarm.

  Temeraire had penetrated so far only because their captors evidently did not anticipate an incursion of dragons, so deep into their stronghold; but there was a guard now, newly stationed above their cell: Laurence could see its tail, hanging down from the top of the cliff, if he painfully turned his neck, as far as he could, to look directly upwards. “And I expect that means he got clear away from them,” Chenery said comfortingly, when the others had been returned, late in the afternoon. “He can fly rings around half the Corps, Laurence; I am sure he gave them the slip.”

  Laurence would have liked to believe it, more than he did; three days had gone by since that delirious state had broken, and if Temeraire had been able, Laurence knew very well he would have made another attempt in the teeth of any opposition; perhaps had, and out of their sight had been injured again, or worse.

  Laurence was not taken, the next morning, with the others: they had been set along with the other prisoners of war to working in the elephant-fields, spreading the manure, much to the satisfaction of the young women to whom the work ordinarily fell. “Nonsense; I would be perfectly ashamed if I could not manage it,” Catherine said, “when all those girls do: a good many of them are further along than I am, and it is not as though I have not been brought up to work. Besides, I am perfectly stout; indeed I am much better than I was. But you have been very sick, Laurence, and you are to listen to Dr. Dorset and stay lying down, when they come.”

  She was very firm, and Dorset also; but they had been gone a little more than an hour when another dragon came for Laurence: the rider issuing peremptory commands, and beckoning. Roland and Dyer were ready to back him into the depths of the cave, but the dragon was a smallish creature, not much bigger than a courier, and could easily have put himself inside. Laurence struggled to his feet, and for decency’s sake took one of the sweat-and blood-stained shirts which had helped make up his pallet to cover himself, if he was not truly fit to be seen.

  He was carried back to the great hall: the king was not there, but the iron-works were in full swing under the supervision of Prince Moshueshue; the smiths were engaged in pouring bullets, with the help of another dragon, who nursed their forge regularly with narrow breathed tongues of flame, rousing the coals within to a fever-pitch of heat. They had somehow acquired several bullet-molds, and there were still more muskets stacked upon the floor, if marked here and there with bloody fingerprints. The room was sweltering, even with a couple of smaller dragons fanning away vigorously to make the air move; but the prince looked satisfied.

  He took Laurence back towards the map again; it had been already a little improved, and an entirely new addition made to the west: a vague distance allowed for the Atlantic, and then the approximate shapes of the American continents drawn out: the great harbor of Rio most prominently marked, and the islands of the West Indies placed a little tentatively somewhere to the north. There was none of the exactness needed to make it of practical use for navigation, Laurence was glad to see; he was far from that earlier complacency, during their abduction, which had dismissed their captors as a threat against the colony itself: there were too many dragons here.

  Mrs. Erasmus had also been brought, and Laurence braced himself for a further interrogation, to which he would not allow himself to feel unequal, but Moshueshue did not repeat the king’s demands or his violence; his servants instead gave Laurence a drink, oddly sweet, of pressed fruits and water and cocoanut milk, and his questions were of generalities and trade, wide-ranging. He had a bolt of cloth to show Laurence, calico-patterned and certainly from the mills of England; some bottles of whiskey, unpleasantly harsh and cheap by the smell, also of foreign manufacture. “You sell these things to the Lunda,” Moshueshue said, “and those also?” indicating the muskets.

  “They have lately fought a war against them,” Mrs. Erasmus said, quickly adding her own explanation, at the tail of the translation: there had been a battle won, two-days’ flight from the falls. “North-west, I think,” she said, and asked Moshueshue permission to show him the territory, on the great map of the continent: north-west, and still deep inland, but in a few days’ striking-distance of the ports of Louanda and Benguela.

  “Sir,” Laurence said, “I have never heard of the Lunda before two weeks ago; I believe they must have these goods from perhaps the Portuguese traders, upon the coast.”

  “And do you only want captives, or will you take other things in trade? The medicines you stole, or—” and one of the women carried over at Moshueshue’s beckoning a box of jewels, absurdly magnificent, which would have made the Nizam stare: polished emeralds tumbled like marbles with diamonds, and the box itself of gold and silver. Another carried over carefully a tall curious vase, made of woven wire strung occasionally with beads, in an elaborate pattern without figures, and another an enormous mask, nearly tall as she herself was, carved of dark wood inlaid with ivory and jewels.

  Laurence wondered a little if this were meant for another sort of inducement. “A trader would oblige you, sir, I am sure. I am not a merchant myself. We would be glad—would have been glad—to pay you for the medicines, in what barter you desired.”

  Moshueshue nodded, and the treasure was taken away. “And the—cannon?” He used the English word, himself, with tolerable pronunciation. “Or your boats which cross the ocean?”

  There were enough jewels in the box to have tolerably purchased and outfitted a fleet of merchantmen, Laurence would have guessed, but he did not think the Government would be very pleased to see such a project go forward; he answered cautiously, “These are dearer, sir, for the difficulty in their construction; and would do you very little good without the men who understand their operation. But some men might be found, willing to take service with you, and such an arrangement made possible; if there were peace between our countries.”

  Laurence thought this was not further than he could in justice go, and as much attempt at diplomacy as he knew how to make; he hoped as a hint, it would not be badly received. Moshueshue’s intentions were not disguised; it was not wonderful that he, more than the king, should have taken to heart the advantages of modern weaponry, more easily grasped at musket-scale by men than by dragons, and should have cared to establish access to them.

  Moshueshue put his hand on the map-table and gazed thoughtfully down upon it. At last he said, “You are not engaged in this trade, you say, but others of your tribe are. Can you tell me who they are, and where they ma
y be found?”

  “Sir, I am sorry to say, that there are too many engaged in the trade for me to know their names, or particulars,” Laurence said awkwardly, and wished bitterly that he might have been able to say with honesty it had been lately banned. Instead he could only add, that he believed it soon would be; which was received with as much satisfaction as he had expected.

  “We will ban it ourselves,” the prince said, the more ominously for the lack of any deliberately threatening tone. “But that will not satisfy our ancestors.” He paused. “You are Kefentse’s captives. He wants to trade you for more of his tribe. Can you arrange such an exchange? Lethabo says you cannot.”

  “I have told them that most of the others cannot be found,” Mrs. Erasmus added quietly. “—it was nearly twenty years ago.”

  “Perhaps some investigation could locate the survivors,” Laurence said to her doubtfully. “There would be bills of sale, and I suppose some of them must yet be on the same estates, where they first were sold—you do not think it so?”

  She said after a moment, “I was taken into the house when I was sold. Those in the fields did not live long, most of them. A few years; maybe ten. There were not many old slaves.”

  Laurence did not quarrel with her finality, and he thought she did not translate her own words, either; likely to shield him from the rage which they could provoke. She said enough to convince Moshueshue of the impossibility, however, and he shook his head. “However,” Laurence said, trying, “we would be glad to ransom ourselves, if you would arrange a communication with our fellows at the Cape, and to carry an envoy with us, to England, to establish peaceful relations. I would give my own word, to do whatever could be done to restore his kin—”