Tongues of Serpents

‘Well, I have brought sheep, but I did not much think of bringing over elephants,’ MacArthur said, looking at the three eggs with an altered expression. ‘How much would a dragon eat, do you suppose, in the way of cattle?’

‘Maximus will eat two cows when he can get them, in a day,’ Temeraire said, ‘but I do not think that is very healthy; I would not eat more than one, unless of course I have been fighting, or flying far; or if I were very particularly hungry.’

‘Two cows a day, and soon to be five of you?’ MacArthur said. ‘The Lord safe preserve us.’

‘If this has brought you to a better understanding of the necessity of addressing the situation, sir,’ Laurence said, rather pointedly Temeraire thought, ‘I must be grateful for your visit; we have had very little cooperation heretofore in making our arrangements from Major Johnston.’

MacArthur put down his chocolate cup. ‘I was speaking last night, I think,’ he said, ‘of what a man can make of himself, in this country; it is a subject dear to my heart, and I hope I did not ramble on it too long. It is a hard thing, you will understand, Mr. Laurence, to see a country like this: begging for hands, for the ploughshare and the till, and no one to work it but an army of the worst slackabouts born of woman lying about, complaining if they are given less than their day’s half-gallon of rum, and they would take it at ten in the morning, if they could get it.

‘In the Corps, we may not be very pretty, but we know how to work; I believe the Aerial Corps, too, might be given such a character by some,’ MacArthur went on. ‘And we know how to make men work. Whatever has been built in this country, we ha’e built it, and to have a – perhaps I had better hold my tongue; I think you have been shipmates with Governor Bligh?’

‘I would not say we were shipmates,’ Temeraire put in; he did not care to be saddled with such a relationship. ‘He came aboard our ship, but no-one much wanted him; only one must be polite.’

Laurence looked a bit rueful, and MacArthur, smiling, said, ‘Well, I won’t say anything against the gentleman, only perhaps he was no’ too fond of our ways. The which,’ he added, ‘certainly can be improved upon, Mr. Laurence, I do not deny it; but no man likes to be corrected by come-lately.’

‘When come-lately is sent by the King,’ Laurence said, ‘one may dislike, and yet endure.’

‘Very good sense; but good sense has limits, sir, limits,’ MacArthur said, ‘where it comes up hard against honour: some things a man of courage cannot bear, and damn the consequences.’

Laurence did not say anything; Laurence was quite silent. After a moment, MacArthur added, ‘I do not mean to make you excuses: I have sent my eldest on to England, though I could spare him ill, and he must make my case to their Lordships. But I will tell you, I do not tremble, sir, for fear of the answer; I sleep the night through.’

Temeraire became conscious gradually, while he spoke, of being poked; Emily was at his side, tugging energetically on his wing-tip. ‘Temeraire!’ she hissed up to him, ‘I oughtn’t go right up with that fellow there, he is sure to see I am a girl; but we must tell the captain, there is a ship come from England—’

‘I see her!’ Temeraire answered, looking over into the harbour: a trim, handsome little frigate of perhaps twenty-four guns: she was drawn up not far from the Allegiance, riding easily at anchor. ‘Laurence,’ he said, leaning over, ‘there is a ship come from England, Roland says: it is the Beatrice, I think.’

MacArthur stopped speaking, abruptly. Emily tugged again. ‘That is not the news,’ she said, impatient. ‘Captain Rankin is on it.’

‘Oh! whyever should he have come?’ Temeraire said, his ruff pricking up. ‘Is he a convict?’ Without waiting for an answer, he turned his head to the other side. ‘And Roland says that Rankin is here, on the ship: that dreadful fellow from Loch Laggan. You may certainly put him in a quarry,’ he added to MacArthur. ‘I cannot think of anyone who deserves it more, the way he treated poor Levitas.’

‘Oh, why won’t you listen,’ Roland cried. ‘He ain’t a convict at all; he has come for one of the eggs.’

Chapter Three (#ulink_04e13225-4dad-5815-932c-84309fedda41)

‘Owing to the mode of our last communication, it is quite impossible Mr. Laurence and I should have any intercourse. I hope I may not be thought difficult,’ Rankin said, his crisp and aristocratic vowels carrying quite clearly, over the deck of the Allegiance; his transport the Beatrice had already gone away again, with no more news for the colony: she had left only two months after the Allegiance herself, and the news of the rebellion had not yet reached the Government. ‘But it is generally accepted, I believe, that the dragondeck is reserved for officers of the Corps; and if the gentleman is quartered towards the stern, I see no reason why any inconvenient scenes should arise.’

‘I see no reason why I shouldn’t push his nose in for him,’ Granby said, under his breath, joining Laurence on the leeward side of the quarterdeck, where passengers were ordinarily allowed liberty. ‘The worst of it,’ he added, ‘is I can’t see any way clear to refusing him: the orders are plain black on white, he is to be put to Wringe’s egg. What a damned waste.’

Laurence nodded a little; he, too, had had a letter, if not in an official capacity. ‘… though would I like nothing better than for him to sink on his way to you,’ Jane had written. ’… but his damned Family have been squalling at their Lordships for nigh on Five Years now, and he had the infernal Bad Luck — mine, that is — of finding himself in Scotland, lately, when we were so overset: went up with one of the Ferals out of Arkady’s pack, saw a little fighting, and managed to get himself wounded again.

‘So I must give him a Beast, or at least a Chance of one, and Someone must put up with him thereafter; as I am about to have twenty-six hatchlings to feed and likely enough a War in Spain, I don’t scruple to say, Better You Than Me.’

This last was emphatically full of capitals, and underlined.

‘I have made the Excuse, that this is the first Egg we have had out of the Ferals, and his having Experience of them in the field, should be an Advantage in its Training.

‘I was tolerably transparent, I think, but a Title does wonderful things, Laurence: I should have contrived one much sooner if I had known it’s Use. Gentlemen who swore at me like fishwives sixmonth ago are become sweet as milk, all because the Regent has signed some scrap of paper for me, and nod their Heads and say Yes, Very Good, when before they would have argued to Doomsday if I should say, It is coming on to rain. Also it is a great benefit they none of them know whether to say Milady or Sir, and as soon as they have arrived at a Decision, they change it again. I only hope they may not make me a Duchess to make themselves easy by saying Your Grace; it would not suit half so well.

‘I am very obliged to your Mother, by the bye: she wrote, when she saw my name had come out in Debrett’s — as J. Roland, very discreet — and had me to a nice, sociable little Dinner, with every Cabinet Minister she could contrive to lay hands on: all very shocked, as they had brought their Wives, but they could not say so much as Boo with Her Ladyship at the foot of the Table as if Butter would not Melt in her mouth, and the Ladies did not mind inn the Least, when they understood I was an Officer, and not some Vauxhall Comedienne. I found them sensible Creatures all of them, and I think perhaps I have got quite the wrong Notion about them, as a Class; I expect I ought to be cultivating them. I don’t mind Society half so much if I may wear Trousers, and they were very kind, and left me their Cards.

‘We are trundling along well enough otherwise and getting back into some Order: feeding dragons on Mash and Mutton Stew is a damn’d site cheaper, Thank God, if the older ones do complain; Excidium is all Sighs and loud Reminiscences of fresh Cattle, and Temeraire’s name is not much lov’d among them, for having given us the Technique.

‘I will say a word in your Ear for him: I am uneasy about this Business in Spain. Bonaparte is no’ a Fool, and why he should wreck a dozen cities, on the southern Coast, fresh from the ruin of his Invasion, I cannot understand. Mulgrave thinks he means to take Spain and to stop us from supplying them from the Sea, but for that, he ought to be burning them in Portugal, instead.

‘If Temeraire should think it some Contrivance of Lien, some Chinese Stratagem, I would be glad to know of it, even late as the Intelligence must come: it is very strange to think, Laurence, that I cannot hope for an Answer in less than ten Months and a year and a half the more likely. Now we have lost the Cape Town port to those African fellows, the couriers cannot even go to India, and meet your letter halfway.

‘For Consolation, if you should find yourself overcome with Passion and happen to accidentally drop Rankin down a Cliff, or by some Mischance run him through, at least I will not hear of it for as long, and anyway you are already transported, which I must call a great Convenience for Murder. But I do not mean to Hint, although it is a great Pity to waste an Egg upon him, even one of our poor unwanted Stepchildren.’

The three eggs which had been sent with them to begin the experiment were not, by the lights of Britain’s breeders, any great prizes: one a dirt-common Yellow Reaper, sent over because there were seventeen such eggs in the breeding grounds waiting; the second a disappointing and extremely stunted little thing which had unaccountably been produced out of a Parnassian and a Chequered Nettle, both heavyweights. The last and most promising of the three, large and handsomely mottled and striated, was the offspring of Arkady, the feral leader, and Wringe, the best fighter of his pack.

There was no great enthusiasm for this egg in Britain, where the breeders for the most part viewed the newly recruited ferals as demons sent to wreak havoc and destruction upon their carefully designed lines; so it had been sent away. But it had quickly become the settled thing among the aviators who had been sent along as candidates for the new hatchlings to anticipate great things of the egg. ‘It stands to reason,’ Laurence had overheard more than one officer say to another, ‘if that Wringe one should have got so big out in the wild, this one should do a good deal better with proper feeding, and training; and no one could complain of the ferals’ fighting spirit.’

Those young officers were now in something of a quandary, which Laurence was not above grimly enjoying, a little: they had been firm and united in their disdain, both for his personal treason and for what they saw as his failure to manage Temeraire properly. But now Rankin had come to supplant one of them, and claim the best egg for himself; he was at once their most bitter enemy, and Temeraire’s recalcitrance their best hope of denying him.

‘He mayn’t have it at all,’ Temeraire had said at once, when he had been informed of the proposed arrangement, ‘and if he likes, he can come up here and try and take it; I should be very pleased to discuss it with him,’ darkly, in a way which bade fair to answer all of Jane’s hopes.

‘My dear,’ Laurence said, having lowered his letter, ‘I like the prospect as little as you; but if he should be denied even the chance, and return to England thwarted, we have only deferred the evil: he will certainly be put to another egg, there, where you may be certain the poor hatchling will have less opportunity to refuse. And the blame will certainly devolve upon Granby: the orders are for him, and the responsibility to carry them out.’

‘I am certainly not having Granby take the blame for anything,’ Iskierka said, raising her head, ‘and I do not see what the problem is, anyway; the egg will be hatched, by then, and why should it be any business of ours what it does after that? It can take him or not, as it pleases.’

Iskierka herself had hatched already breathing fire, and with all the disobliging and determined character anyone could have imagined; she would certainly have had no difficulty in rejecting any unworthy candidate. Most hatchlings did not come from the shell with quite the same mettle, however, and the Aerial Corps had developed many a technique and lure to ensure the successful harnessing of the beasts. Rankin had certainly prepared himself well: he had come over from the Beatrice with not only his two chests of personal baggage, but a pile of leather harness, some chain-mail netting, and a sort of heavy leather hood.

‘You throw it over the hatchling’s head as it comes out of the shell, if you are out-of-doors,’ Granby said, when Laurence now inquired, ‘and then it cannot fly away; when you take it off, the light dazzles their eyes, and then if you lay some meat in front of them, they are pretty sure to let you put the harness on, if you will only let them eat. And some fellows like it, because they say it makes them easier to handle; if you ask me,’ he added, bitterly, ‘all it makes them is shy: they are never certain of their ground, after.’

‘I wonder if you might be able to put me in the way of some cattle merchant,’ Rankin was saying, to Riley and Lord Purbeck. ‘I intend to provide for the hatchling’s first meal from my personal funds.’

‘Surely he can be restrained in some way,’ Laurence said, low. He was not yet beyond the heat of righteous anger kindled all those years before, when they had been unwilling witness to the cruelty of Rankin’s treatment of his first dragon. Rankin was the sort of aviator beloved of the Navy Board: in his estimation as in theirs, dragons were merely a resource and a dangerous one, to be managed and restrained and used to their limits; it was the same philosophy which had rendered it not only tolerable but desirable to contemplate destroying ten thousand of them through the underhanded sneaking method of infection.

Where Rankin might have been kind to Levitas, he had been indifferent; where indifferent, deliberately cruel, all in the name of keeping his poor beast so downtrodden as to have no spirit to object to any demands made upon it. When Levitas had with desperate courage brought them back the warning of Napoleon’s first attempt to cross the Channel, in the year five, and been mortally wounded in that effort, Rankin had left his dragon alone and slowly dying in a small and miserable clearing, while he sought comfort for his own lesser injuries.

It was a mode of service which had gone thoroughly out of fashion in the last century among most aviators, who increasingly preferred to better preserve the spirit of their partners; the Government did not always agree, however, and Rankin was of an ancient dragon-keeping family, who had preserved their own habits and methods and passed these along to the scions sent into the Corps, at an age sufficiently delayed for these to be impressed upon them firmly, along with a conviction of their own superiority to the general run of aviators.

‘He cannot be permitted to ruin the creature,’ Laurence said. ‘We might at least bar him from use of the hood—’

‘Interfere with a hatching?’ Granby cried, looking at Laurence sidelong and dismayed. ‘No: he has a right to make the best go of it he can, however he likes. Though if he can’t manage it in fifteen minutes, someone else can have a try,’ he added, an attempt at consolation, ‘and you may be sure fifteen minutes is all the time he will have; that is all I can do.’

‘That is not all that I can do,’ Temeraire said, mantling, ‘and I am not going to sit about letting him throw nets and chains and hoods on the hatchling: I do not care if it is not in the shell anymore. In my opinion, it is still quite near being an egg.’

He realized this was an irregular way of looking at the matter, but after all, if the hatchling had not yet eaten anything, and if perhaps a bit of egg were still stuck to its hide, one could not be sure that it was ready to manage on its own, and so it was still one’s responsibility. ‘Anyway,’ he added, ‘I do not like him at all, and I don’t see that he has any right to be a captain again; just let him try and come here, and I will knock him down for it.’

‘You are not doing anything which Granby would not like!’ Iskierka said, jetting out a bit of steam.

‘As though you had anything to say to it,’ Temeraire said, coolly. ‘Anyway, you do things which Granby does not like every day.’

‘Only,’ Iskierka said, ‘when it is particularly important,’ a monstrous lie, ‘and anyway, that is quite different. You might think of Granby, since you are always on about how I do not take proper care of him: I am not having him made not a captain, like you have done with Laurence, only because you are being absurd again and worrying about hatched dragons,’ she added, which thrust hit home quite successfully; Temeraire flinched involuntarily, and put back his ruff.

‘Why,’ Iskierka continued, ‘I have seen this Rankin person: he is smaller than a pony, even. I could have burnt him up to a cinder as soon as I cracked the shell.’

‘If he wanted you,’ Temeraire said, ‘he might have you, and welcome,’ but this was only a feeble bit of quarrelling, and not really a just argument; he put his head down and stared at the eggs unhappily.