Tongues of Serpents

The fighting was beginning already to die down – not the length of an engagement, on the deck of a ship, where there was something to be gained. Laurence limping across the room made it to Granby’s side: Agreuth and one of his fellow officers had clawed their way back up onto their feet and were yet grappling weakly with him in a corner, vicious but half-exhausted, so they were swaying back and forth more than wrestling.

Coming in, Laurence heaved Granby free, and leaning on each other they stumbled out of the courtyard and into the narrow, stinking alleyway outside, which yet seemed cool and fresh out from under the makeshift tarpaulin roof; a fine misting rain was falling. Laurence leaned gratefully against the far wall made cool and light by the coating of dew, ignoring with a practised stomach the man a few steps away who was heaving the contents of his belly into the gutters. A couple of women coming down the alleyway lifted their skirts over the trickle of muck and continued on past them all without hesitation, not even looking in at the disturbance of the tavern courtyard.

‘My God, you look a fright,’ Granby said, dismally.

‘I have no doubt,’ Laurence said, gingerly touching at his face. ‘And I have two ribs cracked, I dare say. I am sorry to say, John, you are not in much better case.’

‘No, I am sure not,’ Granby said. ‘We will have to take a room somewhere, if anyplace will let us through the door, to wash up; what Iskierka would do seeing me in such a state, I have no notion.’

Laurence had a very good notion what Iskierka would do, and also Temeraire, and between them there would not be much left of the colony to speak of afterwards.

‘Well,’ Tharkay said, joining them as he wrapped his neck-cloth around his own bloodied hand, ‘I believe I saw our man look into the establishment, a little while ago, but I am afraid he thought better of coming in under the circumstances. I will have to inquire after him to arrange another meeting.’

‘No,’ Laurence said, blotting his lip and cheek with his handkerchief. ‘No, I thank you; I think we can dispense with his information. I have seen all I need to, in order to form an opinion of the discipline of the colony, and its military force.

‘Temeraire sighed and toyed with the last bites of kangaroo stew – the meat had a pleasantly gamy sort of flavour, not unlike deer, and he had found it at first a very satisfying change from fish, after the long sea-voyage. But he could only really call it palatable when cooked rare, which did not offer much variety, and in stew it became quite stringy and tiresome, especially as the supply of spice left even more to be desired.

There were some very nice cattle in a pen which he could see, from his vantage upon the harbour promontory, but evidently they were much too dear here for the Corps to provide. And Temeraire of course could not propose such an expense to Laurence, not when he had been responsible for the loss of Laurence’s fortune; instead Temeraire had at once silenced all his mild complaints about the lack of variety: but sadly Gong Su had taken this as encouragement, and it had been nothing but kangaroo morning and night, four days running – not even a bit of tunny.

‘I do not see why we mayn’t at least go hunting further along,’ Iskierka said, even while licking out her own bowl indecorously – she quite refused to learn anything resembling polite manners. ‘This is a large country, and it stands to reason there ought to be something more worth eating if we looked. Perhaps there are some of those elephants which you have been on and on about; I should like to try one of those.’

Temeraire would have given a great deal for a delicious elephant, seasoned with a generous amount of pepper and perhaps some sage, but Iskierka was never to be encouraged in anything whatsoever. ‘You are very welcome to go flying away anywhere you like,’ he said, ‘and to surely get quite lost. No one has any notion of what this countryside is like, past the mountains, and there is no one in it, either, to ask for directions: not people or dragons.’

‘That is very silly,’ Iskierka said. ‘I do not say these kangaroos are very good eating, because they are not, and there are not enough of them, either; but they are certainly no worse than what we had in Scotland during the last campaign, so it is stuff to say there is no one living here; why wouldn’t there be? I dare say there are plenty of dragons here, only they are somewhere else, eating much better than we are.’

This struck Temeraire as not an unlikely possibility, and he made a note to discuss it privately with Laurence, later; which recalled him to Laurence’s absence, and thence to the advancing hour. ‘Roland,’ he called, with a little anxiety – of course Laurence did not need nursemaiding, but he had promised to return before the supper hour and read a little more of the novel which he had acquired in town the day before. ‘Roland, is it not past five?’

‘Lord, yes, it must be almost six,’ Emily Roland answered, putting down her sword; she and Demane were fencing a little, in the yard. She wiped her face with a tugged-free tail of her shirt, ran to the promontory edge to call down to the sailors below, and came back to say, ‘No, I am wrong: it is a quarter past seven: how strange the day is so long, when it is almost Christmas!’

‘It is not strange at all,’ Demane said. ‘It is only strange that you keep insisting it must be winter here only because it is in England.’

‘But where is Granby, if it is so late?’ Iskierka said, prickling up at once, overhearing. ‘He did not mean to go anywhere particularly nice, he assured me, or I should never have let him go looking so shabby.’

Temeraire flared his ruff a little, taking this to heart; he felt it keenly that Laurence should go about in nothing but a plain gentleman’s coat, without even a little bit of braid or golden buttons. He would gladly have improved Laurence’s appearance if he had any chance of doing so; but Laurence still had refused to sell Temeraire’s talon sheaths for him, and even if he had, Temeraire had not yet seen anything in this part of the world which would have suited him as appropriate.

‘Perhaps I had better go and look for Laurence,’ Temeraire said. ‘I am sure he cannot have meant to stay away so long.’

‘I am going to go and look for Granby, too,’ Iskierka announced.

‘Well, we cannot both go,’ Temeraire said irritably. ‘Someone must stay with the eggs.’ He cast a quick, judgmental eye over the three eggs in their protective nests of swaddling blankets, and the small canopy set over them, made of sailcloth. He was a little dissatisfied by their situation: a nice little coal brazier, he thought, would not have gone amiss even in this warm weather, and perhaps some softer cloth to go directly against the shell; and it did not suit him that the canopy was so low he could not put his head underneath it, to sniff at the eggs and see how hard their shells had become.

There had been a little difficulty over them, after disembarking: some of the officers of the Corps who had been sent along had tried to object to Temeraire’s keeping the eggs by him, as though they would be better able to protect them, which was stuff; and they had made some sort of noise about Laurence trying to kidnap the eggs, which Temeraire had snorted off.

‘Laurence does not want any other dragon, as he has me,’ Temeraire had said, ‘and as for kidnapping, I would like to know whose notion it was to take the eggs halfway across the world on the ocean, with storms and sea serpents everywhere, and to this odd place that is not even a proper country, with no dragons; it was certainly not mine.’

‘Mr. Laurence is going directly to hard labour, like all the rest of the prisoners,’ Lieutenant Forthing had said, quite stupidly, as though Temeraire were allowing any such thing to happen.

‘That is quite enough, Mr. Forthing,’ Granby had said, overhearing, and coming upon them. ‘I wonder that you would make any such ill-advised remark; I pray you take no notice of it at all, Temeraire, none at all.’

‘Oh! I do not in the least,’ Temeraire answered, ‘or any of these other complaints; it is all nonsense, when what you mean is,’ he added to Forthing and his associates, ‘you would like to keep the eggs by you, so that they should not know any better when they hatch, but think they must go at once into harness, and that they must take whichever of you wins them by chance: I heard you talk of drawing lots last night in the gunroom, so you needn’t try and deny it. I will certainly have none of it, and I expect neither will the eggs, of any of you.’

He had of course carried his point, and the eggs, away to their present relative safety and comfort, but Temeraire had no illusions as to the trustworthiness of people who could make such spitefully false remarks; he did not doubt that they would try and creep up and snatch the eggs away if he gave them even the least chance. He slept curled about the tent, therefore, and Laurence had put Roland and Demane and Sipho on watch, also.

The responsibility was proving sadly confining, however, particularly as Iskierka was not to be trusted with the eggs for any length of time. Fortunately the town was very small, and the promontory visible from nearly any point within it if one only stretched out one’s neck to look, so Temeraire felt he might risk it, only long enough to find Laurence and bring him back. Of course Temeraire was sure no one would be absurd enough to try and treat Laurence with any disrespect, but it could not be denied that men were inclined to do unaccountable things from time to time, and Forthing’s remark stirred uneasily in the back of his head.

It was true, if one wished to be very particular about such things, that Laurence was a convicted felon: convicted of treason, and his sentence only commuted to transportation at the behest of Lord Wellington, after the last campaign in England. But that sentence had been fulfilled, in Temeraire’s opinion: no one could deny that Laurence had now been transported, and the experience had been quite as much punishment as anyone could have wished.

The unhappy Allegiance had been packed to the portholes with still-more-unhappy convicts, who had been kept chained wrist and ankle all the day, and stank quite dreadfully whenever they were brought out for exercise in their clanking lines, some of them hanging limp in the restraints. It seemed quite like slavery, to Temeraire; he did not see why it should make so vast a difference as Laurence said, only because a lawcourt had said the poor convicts had stolen something: after all, anyone might take a sheep or a cow, if it were neglected by its owner and not kept under watch.

Certainly it made the ship as bad as any slaving vessel: the smell rose up through the planking of the deck, and the wind brought it forward to the dragondeck almost without surcease; even the aroma of boiling salt pork, from the galley below, could not erase it. And Temeraire had learned by accident, perhaps a month out on their journey, that Laurence was quartered directly by the gaol, where it must have been far worse.

Laurence had dismissed the notion of making any complaint, however. ‘I do very well, my dear,’ he had said, ‘as I have the whole liberty of the dragondeck for my days and the pleasanter nights, which not even the ship’s officers have. It would be unfair in the extreme, when I have not their labour, for me to be demanding some better situation: someone else would have to shift places to give me another.’

So it had been a very unpleasant transportation indeed, and now they were here, which no one could enjoy, either. Aside from the question of kangaroos, there were not very many people at all, and nothing like a proper town. Temeraire was used to seeing wretched quarters for dragons, in England, but here people did not sleep much better than the clearings in any covert, many of them in tents or makeshift little buildings which did not stay up when one flew over them, not even very low, and instead toppled over and spilled out the squalling inhabitants to make a great fuss.

And there was no fighting to be had at all, either. Several letters and newspapers had reached them along the way, when quicker frigates passed the labouring bulk of the Allegiance, and it was very disheartening to Temeraire to have Laurence read to him how Napoleon was reported to be fighting again, in Spain this time, and sacking cities all along the coast, and Lien surely with him: and meanwhile here they were on the other side of the world, uselessly. It was not in the least fair, Temeraire thought disgruntled, that Lien, who did not think Celestials ought to fight ever, should have all the war to herself while he sat here nursing eggs.

There had not even been a small engagement at sea, for consolation: they had once seen a French privateer, off at a distance, but the small vessel had set every scrap of sail and vanished away at a heeling pace. Iskierka had given chase anyway, alone – as Laurence pointed out to Temeraire he could not leave the eggs for such a fruitless adventure – and to Temeraire’s satisfaction, after a few hours she had been forced to return empty-handed.

The French would certainly not attack Sydney, either; not when there was nothing to be won but kangaroos and hovels. Temeraire did not see what they were to do here, at all; the eggs were to be seen to during their hatching, but that could not be far off, he felt sure, and then there would be nothing to do but sit about and stare out to sea.

The people were all engaged either in farming, which was not very interesting, or they were convicts, who, it seemed to Temeraire, marched out in the morning for no reason and then marched back at night. He had flown after them one day, just to see, and had discovered they were only going to a quarry to cut out bits of stone, and were then bringing the bits of stone back to town in wagon-carts, which seemed quite absurd and inefficient: he could have carried five cartloads in a single flight of perhaps only ten minutes; but when Temeraire had landed to offer his assistance, the convicts had all run away, and the soldiers had complained to Laurence stiffly afterwards.

They certainly did not like Laurence; one of them had been very rude, and said, ‘For five pence I would have you down at the quarries, too,’ at which Temeraire put his head down and said, ‘For two pence I will have you in the ocean; what have you done, I should like to know, when Laurence has won a great many battles with me, and we drove Napoleon off; and you have only been sitting here. You have not even managed to raise a respectable number of cows.’

Temeraire now felt perhaps that jibe had been a little injudicious, or perhaps he ought not to have let Laurence go into town, after all, when there were people who wished to put him into quarries. ‘I will go and look for Laurence and Granby,’ he said to Iskierka, ‘and you will stay here: if you go, you will likely set something on fire, anyway.’

‘I will not set anything on fire!’ Iskierka said. ‘Unless it needs setting on fire, to get Granby out.’

‘That is just what I mean,’ Temeraire said. ‘How, pray tell, would setting something on fire do any good at all?’

‘If no one would tell me where he was,’ Iskierka said, ‘I am quite sure that if I set something on fire and told them I would set the rest on fire too, they would come about: so there.’

‘Yes,’ Temeraire said, ‘and in the meanwhile, very likely he would be in whatever house you had set on fire, and be hurt: and if not, the fire would jump along to the nearby buildings whether you liked it to or not, and he would be in one of those. Whereas I will just take the roof off a building, and then I can look inside and lift them out, if they are in there, and people will tell me anyway.’

‘I can take a roof off a building, too!’ Iskierka said. ‘You are only jealous, because someone is more likely to want to take Granby, because he has more gold on him and is much more fine.’

Temeraire swelled with indignation and breath, and would have expelled them both in a rush, but Roland interrupted urgently, saying, ‘Oh, don’t quarrel! Look, here they are all coming back, right as rain: that is them on the road, I am sure.’

Temeraire whipped his head around: three small figures had just emerged from the small cluster of buildings which made the town, and were on the narrow cattle track which came towards the promontory.

Temeraire and Iskierka’s heads were raised high, looking down towards them; Laurence raised a hand and waved vigorously, despite the twinge in his ribs, which a bath and a little rough bandaging had not gone very far to alleviate; that injury, however, could be concealed. ‘There; at least we will not have them down here in the streets,’ Granby said, lowering his own arm, and wincing a little; he probed gingerly at his shoulder.

It was still a near-run thing when they had reached the promontory – a slow progress, and Laurence’s legs wished to quiver on occasion, before they had reached the top and could sit on the makeshift benches. Temeraire sniffed, and then lowered his head abruptly and said, ‘You are hurt; you are bleeding,’ with urgent anxiety.

‘It is nothing to concern you; I am afraid we only had a little accident in the town,’ Laurence said, guiltily preferring a certain degree of deceit to the inevitable complications of Temeraire’s indignation.

‘So, dearest, you see it is just as well I wore my old coat,’ Granby said to Iskierka, in a stroke of inspiration, ‘as it has got dirty and torn, which you would have minded if I had on something nicer.’