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Crucible of Gold
Naomi Novik


Naomi Novik’s stunning series of novels follow the global adventures of Captain William Laurence and his fighting dragon Temeraire as they are thrown together to fight for Britain during the turbulent time of the Napoleonic Wars.Former Aerial Corps captain Will Laurence and his faithful dragon, Temeraire, have been put out to pasture in Australia – and it seems their part in the war has ended just when they are needed most.The French have invaded Spain, forged an alliance with Africa’s powerful Tswana empire, and brought revolution to Brazil. With Britain’s last desperate hope of defeating Napoleon in peril, the government that sidelined Laurence swiftly offers to reinstate him, convinced that he’s the best man to enter the fray and negotiate peace. So the pair embark for Brazil, only to meet with a string of unmitigated disasters that forces them to make an unexpected landing in the hostile territory of the Incan empire.With the success of the mission balanced on a razor’s edge, an old enemy appears and threatens to tip the scales toward ruin. Yet even in the midst of disaster, opportunity may lurk – for one bold enough to grasp it.















Dedication (#uabc456c0-c894-57e8-82cb-e20d6b044b03)


To Betsy Mitchell, editor extraordinaire, who gave Temeraire his wings


Table of Contents

Cover (#uca5d249f-49ef-5236-ac38-3c4dcb92059b)

Title Page (#u5fa34a2d-c676-5f6b-be12-feee6846573d)

Dedication

Map (#uc337b0f8-36dd-5087-9b87-e87c611bf9f5)

Prologue

Part 1

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Part 2

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Part 3 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Acknowledgments

About the Author

The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik

Copyright

About the Publisher










Prologue (#uabc456c0-c894-57e8-82cb-e20d6b044b03)


Arthur Hammond prided himself on a certain degree of insensibility in the cause of duty—an indifference to physical discomfort and even to social awkwardness—a squelching of the natural repugnances, when these should interfere with the progress of a diplomatic mission. Other men, blessed with a greater share of the graces, could afford delicacy; he acknowledged himself a blunter instrument, and if he must be so, he must be the ideal blunt instrument—must be seen to be as heedless of himself as of others, the only possible justification—to be thought of, if grudgingly, “Oh, Hammond—intolerable, but he will see the job through.”

So he had cultivated where native tendency led, and seized without compunction or politesse whatever opportunity offered itself, with the consequence that he could while not yet thirty years of age call himself ambassador plenipotentiary to China: a post which he himself had contrived to establish.

And which in turn had led him to his present miserable state, which put to bitter test his determined self-neglect: frost grimed over the surface of the woolen blankets which he had wrapped even over his head, and the hideous swoop-and-lift of the great pale blue wings as the dragon dived to eat, at intervals too far apart to grow used to and yet too near to recover fully from one to the other. Hunger warred with nausea at every moment; there was meat and rice in his satchel, but he scarcely managed to worm his hand out of the coverings to feed himself once a day, and half his provisions were taken off by the wind in any case. He subsisted mostly on the strong rice wine in his flask, in rationed swallows, and passed from one day to another in a daze of blurred vision—his glasses were carefully tucked inside his coat—and illness.

His figurative insensibility had become, by the end of three weeks, nearly a literal one: he did not notice for a long time when the descent at last began, and when the courier folded her wings and put her head around and said, “We have had a very pleasant flight,” Hammond was unable to remove himself from the harness for half-an-hour together, hands shaking and clumsy.

Shen Li politely did not remark on his difficulties, but bent her head to the water-hole and drank very deeply for a long stretch; then she raised her head and shook off the water from her muzzle. “I do not see the most honorable Lung Tien Xiang,” she observed, while Hammond continued to struggle with the clasps, “but you see the pavilion which he has commanded to be built, there on the mountain—”

Hammond did not see, until he had managed to wrest out his glasses and wipe the lenses, and peering saw the pavilion standing on a cliffside at the far end of the valley where Shen Li had landed. It was an ambitious edifice: something neighbor to the Parthenon in size by the columns of yellow stone which paced out its perimeter, as yet without a roof and circled round by makeshift huts.

“Yes, I do; but are we not very far away?” Hammond said—or meant to say; a dry croak was all that emerged, and he gave up the attempt to converse, in favor of getting off the harness. At the moment he felt he would gladly have walked all the remaining distance in bare feet, over thorns, before going aloft again.

He let himself down from Shen Li’s back in the indecorously slow manner used in China only by small children and the infirm, moving one hand or foot at a time. When he had reached the ground he sank down upon a broad smooth stone near the waterside.

“Perhaps I will go and hunt before we continue to the pavilion, if you would care to compose yourself a little,” Shen Li said, a hint he could not manage to be ashamed to require. She shook out the immense wings and went aloft in a scattering of leaves and pebbles. Left behind, Hammond sat and gazed at the surface, churned-dark, and imagined drinking: the reality should have to wait another half-an-hour, he thought, before he might dare trust his legs to carry him across the two yards separating him from the water.

He gradually became aware, as the sun penetrated the intense chill which had settled into him, that the day was immensely hot. In Peking it was presently winter: as though he had been aloft for months instead of three weeks, or transported by some fairy-tale mechanism into another season. He began weakly to disentangle himself from one blanket and then another, more urgently as sweat gathered and rolled down his back, until at last he gave up all dignity and put his head and arms down and wriggled out of the rest. Abandoning his cocoon and dignity both, he simply crawled over the rock to the water and put his face into its cool relief.

He lifted it out dripping and rolled over onto his back, gasping, for once wholly aware of his body and grateful beyond measure for warmth and sated thirst, and then a pair of clawed, scaled limbs lunged flashing out from the bushes, seized upon the pile of bundling, and dragged it out of sight: he had only a glimpse of a saw-toothed maw and glittering black eyes, and then all vanished.

Hammond stared, and then leapt to his feet: his legs wavered and shook, and he fled in a shambling stumbling run, shuddering away from every branch and leaf which trembled in the wind. Horror gave him strength, and the hissed disappointment behind him: the mistake had been discovered. But he was unequal to the task; he felt a peculiar stirring beneath his feet, and he halted: a head was peering out from the bushes ahead, hungry and malicious, and there was no shelter anywhere to be seen; he was alone.

Evidently though it preferred to hunt from ambush, the creature was not unwilling to confront solitary prey; it crept one leg and then another out of the shrub-growth and came towards him at a slow deliberate pace: forelegs with long, many-jointed talons, scaled in dark shades of brown and green, with heavy sloping shoulders. Hammond turned to flee and halted: there was another half-emerged from a hole up the slope a little way, watching, jaw hung open in a gruesomely eager smile, and another two heads just peering out.

His breath was loud in his ears, labored, even while terror held him for a moment immobile; then he was running, hopelessly, and crying out, “Shen Li! Shen Li!” in hiccoughed bursts as he scrambled up the one narrow rocky slope barren of growth, with the sleek bodies flowing almost leisurely in pursuit.

He heard a coughing note which might have been a noise of amusement going around the creatures, behind him, and then he fell over the far side and tumbling came to rest at the feet of another man: a ragged backwoods hunter, bearded and dusty, in loose shirt and trousers and a broad-brimmed hat with, oh the blessings of Heaven, a rifle in his hand—but he was only one man, and already the five scaly heads were looking over the ridge down at the both of them.

The hunter did not pause; he raised the rifle and fired, but over the creatures’ heads, and then lowering the gun said, “That is enough: be off, the lot of you, or we will clear your nest out to the bare rock.”

The creatures hissed, and then as quickly, they vanished: a terrible immense shadow had fallen over them, the ground trembling. Hammond only just swallowed a shriek of dismay: teeth upon teeth gleaming around an endless red mouth, and an inhuman voice saying, “Oh! We ought to, anyway; how dare the bunyips, when they know very well I will not have them hunting men here.”

“Temeraire,” said Hammond, gulping, “that is Temeraire; it is all right,” a reassurance to himself which he did not entirely believe; every nerve quivered with desire to flee.

“Hammond?” the huntsman said.

Hammond stared up at him even while taking the hand which had been offered him: a broad and callused grip, and skin tanned dark beneath the shaggy yellow beard; blue eyes; and Hammond said slowly, “Captain Laurence? Is that you?”





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Chapter One (#uabc456c0-c894-57e8-82cb-e20d6b044b03)


“I am afraid his attention is much given to material things,” Shen Li observed in a mild way, while Temeraire strove in the distance lifting up the great carved-out slab of stone which should form the central part of the floor of the pavilion: a curious opinion to hear from a dragon, who were nearly all of them inclined to extreme attachment to material things; but perhaps her long stretches in the air, over the barren distances of the Australian deserts and the southern Pacific, had inclined the great-winged Chinese courier to adopt a philosophy more suited to her lot.

“It is of course an admirable work,” she added, “but such attachments inevitably must lead to suffering.”

Laurence answered her with only a small part of his attention: Temeraire had managed to get the slab aloft, and Laurence now waved the team of men forward to raise the skids which should guide it into its final resting place; but even this immediate work did not hold his thoughts. Those were bent upon the low hut some ten yards distant, under a stand of trees and the coolest place in their ragged encampment, where Hammond lay recovering: and with him all the world, come back to knock at Laurence’s threshold when he had thought it done with.

The slab swayed uncertainly in mid-air, then steadied as it reached the long wooden braces; Temeraire sighed out his breath and lowered slowly away, and the stone scraped bark and shreds of wood down onto the workers as the slab eased gently down and settled in, the men backing away with their staves as it slid.

“Well, and a miracle it is no-one was crushed, or lost a hand,” Mr. O’Dea said with something of an air of disappointment, as he paid off the men with their tots of rum and a few coins of silver; he had made a great many predictions of disaster over Temeraire’s obstinate determination to have the single enormous slab of beautifully marbled stone preserved at the heart of his pavilion.

“It would have been quite criminal to cut it up smaller,” Temeraire said, “and spoil the pattern; not that I do not admire mosaics very much, particularly if they are made of gems, but this is quite out of the common way, even though some might say it is just ordinary rock.”

He had finished inspecting all the supports, sniffing at the fresh mortar anxiously, and now sank down with some relief beside Laurence and Shen Li for a drink of water from the flowing stream. “Do you not agree?”

“It is very handsome,” Shen Li said, “although I can see no evil in admiring it in the valley where it was formed.”

“I do not mean to be rude, Laurence,” Temeraire said quietly aside, when she had turned her attention elsewhere, “but Shen Li can be rather dampening to one’s spirits; although I must be grateful to her for being so obliging as to come and bring us letters and visitors: how kind of Mr. Hammond to travel so long a way to see us.”

“Yes,” Laurence said soberly, as he undid the wrappings on the mail: a large and heavy scroll wrapped on rollers of jade, for Temeraire from his mother, Qian, which accompanied a book of poetry; and a thick sealed packet which Laurence turned over several times and at last had to remove the outer layer of covering to find it addressed to Gong Su with no more direction than his name.

“Thank you, Captain,” Gong Su said, and taking it went into his own small lean-to; shortly Laurence could see him performing the Chinese ritual of obeisance to it, and supposed it must be a communication from his father.

There was also, more incongruously, a heavily crossed note for a Mr. Richard Shipley: “Can this be for you, Mr. Shipley?” Laurence asked, doubtfully, wondering how a former convict should have come by a correspondent in China.

“Aye, sir,” the young man said, taking it, “my brother’s in the Willow-Tree as runs the Canton route, and much obliged to you.”

Shen Li had brought also a small mailbag to be passed along to Sydney, but these were all the letters directed to the members of their own small company of laborers. Laurence closed up the bag: O’Dea would take it to Port Jackson tomorrow, and perhaps Hammond would go along with it. His business might well be there, with Captain Rankin, who after all was the senior officer of the Corps in this country.

Laurence could not persuade himself to believe it, however. While the cows roasted on spits, for the dragons’ dinner, he walked out over the newly laid floor of the pavilion to its edge and looked down upon the broad valley, already sprouting with the first seed crops, and the browsing herd of sheep and cattle lowing soft to one another in the late afternoon. The war was only a distant storm passing on the other side of the mountains, a faint, far-away noise; here there was peace, and honest labor, without the clinging stink of murder and treachery which seemed to have by slow octopoid measures attached itself to his life. Laurence had found himself content to forget the world, and to be forgotten by it.

“Thank you, I will,” he heard Hammond saying, and turned: Hammond had at last emerged from the hut and was by the fireside accepting a glass of rum from Mr. O’Dea and sinking into an offered camp-chair. Laurence rubbed a hand over his jaw, over the hard prickle of the beard, grown familiar. No: Hammond had not come from Peking to bring a few letters and some conversation.

“Pray allow me to renew my gratitude,” Hammond said, struggling back to his feet, when Laurence had joined him. “I have slept all the day!—and I am astonished to see you so far advanced.” He nodded towards the pavilion.

“Yes, indeed,” Temeraire said, swinging his head around at the compliment, “everything is coming along splendidly, and we have thought up several small improvements to the ordinary design. You must walk through it; when you are feeling more the thing, of course: you cannot have had a comfortable journey.”

“No,” Hammond said, very decidedly, “—but I ought not be complaining; Laurence, will you think of it, three weeks!—this time three Sundays ago I was taking tea in Peking; it is scarcely to be believed. Although I am not certain I have survived the experience; yes, thank you, I will take another.”

Hammond was not a bulky man, and not given much to drink; three tots of strong unwatered rum worked upon his caution, or perhaps he would not have spoken so readily when Laurence said, “Sir, while your company must always be welcome, I must confess myself at a loss to answer for your presence here; you cannot have made such a journey for some trivial purpose.”

“Oh!” Hammond said, and looking round in vain for a table at last set down his glass upon the ground, and straightened up beaming, “but I must tell you at once: I am here to restore you to the list, Captain; you are reinstated, and—” Laurence was staring, while Hammond turned to rummaging in the inner pockets of his coat. “I even have them here, with me,” and brought out the two narrow gold bars which marked a captain of the Aerial Corps.

Laurence held himself very still a moment, against the involuntary betraying jerk of movement which nearly escaped: if the bars had not been lying across Hammond’s palm Laurence would have imagined it a sort of wretched joke, a twist of the mind inspired by exhaustion and liquor, but so much premeditation made it true: true, and no less absurd for that. He was a traitor. If he had done anything of note in the invasion of Britain to merit a lessening of the natural penalty for his crime, he had already been granted the clemency of transportation instead of hanging for services rendered, and since had done nothing which should merit the favorable attention of Whitehall: had indeed refused the orders of a Navy officer point-blank.

“Oh! Oh, Mr. Hammond, how could you not say so at once? But I must not reproach you, when you have brought such splendid news,” Temeraire was saying, head bent low and turned so that one enormous eye could survey the bars. “Laurence, you must have your green coat, at once; Mr. Shipley! Mr. Shipley, pray fetch Laurence’s chest here—”

“No,” Laurence said, “—no, I thank you. Sir,” he said to Hammond, with more courtesy than he could feel under the circumstances, “I am very sensible of the kindness you mean to do me by coming all this way with the news, but I must decline.”

He had said it: the only possible answer he could make, and bitter to give. The bars still hung upon Hammond’s palm before him: small and unadorned to represent as they did the lifting of a blot upon his name and his family, whose shame he had with so much effort learned not to think of, as he could do nothing to repair it.

Hammond stared, his hand still outstretched, and Temeraire said, “But Laurence, surely you cannot mean it,” looking at the gold bars.

“There can be only one purpose for ordering my reinstatement in such a manner, in our present circumstances,” Laurence said flatly, “and that is to charge me with oversetting the rebellion here in Sydney: no. I am sorry, sir, but I will not be the Government’s butcher again. I have no great sympathy for Mr. MacArthur and his grab for independence, but he has not acted without cause or without sense, and I will not slaughter British soldiers to march him to a scaffold.”

“Oh—but—” Hammond said, stuttering, “no; no, Captain—I mean, of course, Mr. Laurence; I ought not presume, but—sir, you have mistaken me. I do have business with Governor MacArthur; of course this notion of independence is all nonsense and cannot be allowed to stand, but that is not—while certainly your assistance would be convenient if—”

He paused, collecting himself, while Laurence steeled himself against the hope which demanded its long-abandoned place, and which he ought to have known better than to indulge: if Hammond had brought a mission which any honorable officer of the Corps might be asked to undertake, such an officer would have been asked. But Hammond had drawn himself up more formally: whatever he might now offer would certainly be cloaked in more tempting accents, and all the more difficult to resist.

“First,” Hammond said, “allow me to say I entirely understand your sentiments, sir; I beg your pardon for not expressing myself in a more sensible mode. I will also add for your ears that in many quarters, Mr. MacArthur’s other actions have been seen in nothing less than a prudential light. I hope you can imagine that cooler minds have regarded the prospect of outright war with China, which Captain Willoughby’s—out of courtesy, I will not say folly—which Captain Willoughby’s intentions would have induced, as sheer madness, and not in any accord with the spirit of his orders.”

Laurence only nodded, austerely; he had expressed much the same sentiments in his report on the matter to Jane Roland, which if it had not been officially taken notice of had certainly been seen: Hammond did not have to study far to know his feelings on that subject.

“Insofar as Mr. MacArthur has shown better judgment in rebelling than in acceding to so disastrous a course, he may well be pardoned for the extremity to which he has gone,” Hammond went on, “provided he should acknowledge his mistake and recant. You of course, having direct knowledge of the gentleman, can better say if he can be swayed by reason, but I assuredly have not come with the intention to work upon him by violence, or merely to treat him as a felon.”

“I am very sure Mr. MacArthur will be sensible,” Temeraire put in anxiously: his wings were pinned back flat and the expressive ruff also. Laurence knew Temeraire valued his lost captaincy all the more for blaming himself for its loss and that of the better part of Laurence’s fortune. Though Laurence was unable to value either so high as the honor which he had sacrificed, Temeraire had proven unable to accept his assurances on that score: perhaps for the greater chance which the former had, of ever being recovered.

But however Laurence thought of MacArthur—a second-rate Napoleon, whose talents were not more outsize than his ambitions—he could do him this much credit, or perhaps calumny: if Hammond indeed bore such an offer, Laurence thought it would indeed be accepted. Certainly MacArthur had proclaimed often enough that he had not rebelled on his own account, or for selfish reasons, but only to protect the colony. If that were not entirely the truth, at least MacArthur had deliberately kept open a line of defense less likely to lead him to the gallows; and if he were not inclined to be as sensible as Temeraire hoped, his wife, a wiser woman, likely would be on his behalf.

“Then for what purpose do you require me a captain, instead of a farmer?” Laurence said.

“Nothing at all to do with the rebellion,” Hammond said, and then qualified himself, “at least, perhaps—I do not wish to be accused of deceiving you, sir; it may have been considered as an adjunct to the main thrust of our deliberations, that your reinstatement should perhaps give my discussions with Mr. MacArthur a certain—a degree of—let us say, potency—”

“Yes,” Laurence said, dryly.

Hammond cleared his throat. “But that is not at all our central purpose: any dragon, any first-rate, might be deployed here for such an action, should it prove necessary, and certainly if you have any objection I would consider myself empowered to—that is, you should not have to undertake the mission yourself; after all there is nothing very urgent in correcting the situation, so long as Mr. MacArthur continues to accept the convict ships, as he has. No: it is the situation in Brazilia; perhaps you have heard something of it?”

Laurence paused; he had heard only the most wild hearsay, borne by an American sea-captain. “That Napoleon had shipped some number of the Tswana dragons there, to attack the colony; to Rio, I understand, if it is not only rumor.” They heard only a little news in their isolate valley, and he had not pursued more than what came of its own accord.

“No—no, not rumor,” Hammond said. “Bonaparte has conveyed, at last report, more than a dozen beasts of the most fearsome description, who have wholly laid waste Rio; and there is every expectation of his shipping still more as soon as his transports should return to Africa for them.”

Laurence began to understand, now, what might have brought Hammond here, and his anxious look. “Yet I was only a prisoner among them, sir,” Laurence said slowly, remembering that sudden and dreadful captivity: borne over a thousand miles into the heart of a continent and separated from Temeraire without warning and, at the time, no understanding of the purpose behind his abduction.

“That is more familiarity than nearly any other person can claim,” Hammond said, “and in particular with their language—their customs—”

He stammered over it, and Laurence listened with skepticism: what he had learned over the course of those months of captivity, most of it spent in a prison-cave, he had conveyed in his reports, and he found it difficult to believe that his small experience of the Tswana should have rendered him an acceptable ambassador in the eyes of their Lordships.

To this Hammond said, “I believe—that is to say, I have heard—that his Grace of Wellington thought it not inadvisable—”

“If Wellington maintains any sentiments towards myself or Temeraire past the liveliest impatience, I should be astonished to hear it,” Laurence said.

“Well,” Hammond said, “rather, as I understand it—a certain suggestion—”

Hammond tried for a little longer to dress it up: but when at last he came out with a description which Laurence could swallow, it seemed Wellington had expressed the opinion that if anyone might be hoped to have success at talking sense into a band of uncontrollable dragons, it should be the two of them; as long as someone was sent along to be sure they did not in the process give away three-quarters of the colony.

“I am sure we should be splendid ambassadors,” Temeraire put in, peering down at Laurence hopefully, “however uncomplimentary Wellington may have been about it. Not that I was not quite angry with the Tswana at the time, for after all they had no right to take you, but one must make allowances for their people being taken for slaves, and I am sure the Tswana can be reasonable. Indeed, I do not see why we might not satisfy them at once, by returning those who were stolen.”

“Ah,” Hammond said awkwardly, “yes, well—of course, the interests of our allies must be considered—the difficulty of tracing particular individuals—and naturally the position of the Government vis-à-vis the, the property rights of—”

“Oh! Property rights! That is perfectly absurd to say,” Temeraire said. “If I should take a cow to eat, even if no-one was watching it, you should call it stealing; and if I should give it away to Kulingile for some opals, you would not say that he had any property rights, I am sure, particularly if he knew perfectly well that it was not my own cow at the time.”

Hammond began to take on again the harried look familiar from several occasions of their first mission together, to China, and Laurence was unable to resist, with a certain dour amusement, some speculation whether Hammond would not quickly regret having allowed time to soften his impressions of those past difficulties—and to add a roseate glow to the final triumph—and having volunteered himself as the man intended to keep a leash upon them in this proposed endeavor.

For his own part, Laurence was entirely sure that the number of slaves who would be returned in such a programme as Temeraire proposed would not satisfy the Tswana. Even if the Portuguese were willing to hand over their slaves honestly, they could not raise up the dead devoured by the cruel labor of their mines and plantations, and by the hopelessness of their captivity. Nor could he conceive of making himself in any way the agent of slave-owners, which Hammond had ought to have known, if not from acquaintance with Laurence himself, then from the reputation of his father: Lord Allendale had long been a passionate advocate for abolition.

“But nothing of the sort is conceived, I assure you,” Hammond protested. “Indeed, I will go so far as to say that the Portuguese are quite prepared—under the circumstances, a certain readiness to compromise—” He halted, before making any outright promises, and added, “but in any case, you should not at all be their agent, but ours.”

“And our interest in the matter?” Laurence said.

“The establishment of peace,” Hammond said, “which surely you cannot dispute to be desirable.”

“Peace is not unpleasant, or nearly so boring as one might expect,” Temeraire said, with a faintly wistful note that gave him the lie, “but I do not see why you should be particularly interested in peace in Brazil; if you thought it so splendid you might make peace with Napoleon, in Europe, first: not that I at all wish to promote such a thing,” he added hastily, “at least, not while Lien is lording it over in France: I hope we shall never be at peace with her.”

“Ah,” Hammond said, fumbling, and then stopped, visibly irresolute before saying, “Sir, if I may rely upon your discretion—the utmost secrecy—”

“I am sure you may,” Temeraire said with interest, pricking forward his ruff as he leaned in; Hammond looked still more uncertain, as a large dragon’s notion of confidential whispering might be heard a good ten yards away.

“So far as it is in our power, you may,” Laurence said, “and for what we cannot control, you may rely, sir, on your news being of only scant interest locally, and unlikely of being carried on in any manner which should render it worth relying upon, to any hostile agent.”

That, at least, was very true: there was commerce to and from Port Jackson, but there was not a man laboring in the valley who might reasonably expect to leave this country again; where poverty and perpetual inebriation did not bar them, the law would, and they were as trapped here as Laurence had thought himself and Temeraire to be. Britain was another world; the war a distant fairy-story; none of them would care, if they overheard.

“Then I will be so bold as to reveal to you,” Hammond said, “Napoleon has overreached, with the failure of his invasion, and now the jaws of a trap are laid open for him at last: we will shortly be landing our own troops in Portugal. We mean to bleed him from the south, while the Russians and the Prussians come at him from the east; and Wellington is confident of our eventual victory.”

Audacious in its very extremity: Laurence could only imagine the slog of this proposed war, their troops clawing one inch at a time slowly up the Peninsula through Portugal, through Spain, through the Pyrenees at last to France. Napoleon had indeed suffered dreadful losses in Britain, and left behind an army of prisoners in making his own escape, but whether those losses had been sufficient to leave him vulnerable to final defeat in a grinding campaign, Laurence was not nearly so certain.

“But there can be no hope of victory at all, without a foothold established,” he said.

“Yes,” Hammond said. “We must have Portugal. And if the Prince Regent should have to flee Brazil and return, with Napoleon already occupying Spain—”

“You doubt their continued willingness to permit our passage,” Laurence said.

Hammond nodded. “We must have Portugal,” he repeated.

Temeraire had scarcely understood at first what Hammond was about; it did not seem reasonable to him that anything so momentous should be attended with so little ceremony or notice, but he recalled that just so had it happened to begin with that Laurence had lost his rank. Temeraire had known nothing of it, until one afternoon someone was calling him Mr. Laurence, and the golden bars had gone; and now here they appeared again as swiftly, a lovely gleam in Hammond’s palm.

Laurence was silent, when Hammond had finished expounding on the mission; Temeraire looked at him anxiously. “It does not seem to me there is anything very unpleasant in what Hammond is asking,” he ventured. He could not—naturally he did not wish Laurence to accept his commission back, if it only meant being ordered to do something dreadful, which they should have to refuse, and then have the same unpleasantness of being called traitors all over again; but it was very hard to have such a chance extended and then snatched away.

“You must be tired, sir, after your journey,” Laurence said to Hammond. “If you would care to refresh yourself, my hut is at your disposal, and there is clean water to hand here above the falls; Mr. Shipley will, I hope, be so good as to show you the way,” beckoning to that fellow.

“Oh—oh, certainly,” Hammond said, and went away, though he looked over his shoulder more than once, despite the rough ground, as if to read Laurence’s thoughts off his face.

“Of course you shall not do anything you would dislike, Laurence,” Temeraire said, when Hammond had gone away, and left them in privacy, “only, it does not seem to me there is anything to object to in going to Brazil, and you should have your title back, and your rank.”

“That, my dear, can be nothing more than a polite fiction,” Laurence said. “I cannot pretend that I am in any real sense an officer of any corps when I am determined never again to submit to orders which my own judgment should find immoral.”

A fiction which brought with it bars of gold, and changed entirely the mode in which persons addressed you, seemed to Temeraire real enough for anyone’s taste. “And after all, it is not as though they must give you dreadful orders: perhaps they will have learned their lesson, and think better of it, from now on,” he said hopefully. He did not have any great reliance on the wisdom of the Government, but anyone might be expected to learn, after so many proofs, that he and Laurence were not to be cowed into doing anything which was not just.

“I am sure they will not rely upon either of us to any extent further than they must,” Laurence said.

He was silent again: standing, with his hands clasped behind his back, and looking out over the great expanse of the valley; even in his rough clothes his shoulders were as straight as though they still bore the golden epaulets in which Temeraire had first seen him, and only a little imagination was required to restore to him his uniform, his green coat and the leather harness, and the golden bars. Laurence paused and after a moment longer asked, “Do you wish to go, then?”

It only then occurred to Temeraire that of course, the mission would require leaving their valley. He turned and looked at the pavilion, and the herd of cattle milling below among the grass; the prospect of tree-furred gorges stretched out before them, carved through the yellow and ochre rock of the mountains. He curled his tail in, the tip wanting to switch uneasily through the air; it seemed as though they had only just come and begun the work.

Perhaps it was not so exciting as battles—Temeraire could not argue that—but there was something splendid even in seeing plants grow, when one had helped to sow the fields, and the pavilion half-finished seemed already lonely and abandoned when he thought of going away.

“I suppose—we have been happy here?” Temeraire said, half-questioning. “And I would not like to leave things undone, but—” He looked at Laurence. “Would you rather stay?”

Temeraire drowsed off a few hours later; the handful of small fires near the campsite died away to embers yellow as cream, and the great swath of southern stars came out overhead. From the far side of the valley Laurence heard faintly a song, rising and falling, too distantly for words: the Wiradjuri in their summer camp along the river.

Tomorrow was Tuesday: he should ordinarily have gone down to meet with them and exchange goods, and present for their approval Temeraire’s next intended step in the pavilion’s construction, the acquisition of timber from a stand of large old trees to the north, for the wall-paneling and to build out the rooms which Laurence himself should occupy, and any of their human guests.

O’Dea would go to Sydney with the mail, and return in a week’s time perhaps with some new book. In the meantime, there was the rest of the floor to be laid down, and two of the men had already been set to working upon the shingles for the eventual roof. In a few days the cattle would be moved to fresh pasture; in the evenings Laurence would puzzle out the new volume of Chinese poetry under Temeraire’s guidance: the ordinary daily course of their new life.

Or instead they might be aloft for Port Jackson and Brazil: a couple of pebbles briefly cast up and allowed to rest on the shore, carried away again into the ocean by the retreating tide.

Laurence knew his decision already made; perhaps had been made even before Hammond had spoken. He wished he could be certain his choice was not driven by pride, by the lingering grip of shame: he had done his best to make his peace with his own treason, since it had been a necessary evil, but he could not deny Hammond had laid out a potent bribe. Easy enough to hope, to plan, that they should do more good than evil in the grander orbits of the world, if they should re-enter that sphere; easier still for those hopes to prove false.

Easier than that, to allow those fears to imprison them more securely even than the miles of ocean. Laurence laid a hand on the warm scaled hide of Temeraire’s foreleg. If nothing else, Temeraire was not made to lie idle, in a peaceful valley at the far ends of the earth.

Temeraire slitted open one blue eye and made an interrogative noise, not quite awake.

“No; go back to sleep, all is well,” Laurence said, and when the heavy lid had slid closed again, he stood up; and went down to the river to shave.




Chapter Two (#uabc456c0-c894-57e8-82cb-e20d6b044b03)


“I cannot say much for a pavilion without a roof,” Iskierka said, with quite unbearable superiority, “and anyway you cannot bring it along, so even if it were finished, it would not be of any use. I do not think anyone can disagree I have used my time better.”

Temeraire could disagree, very vehemently, but when Iskierka had chivvied a few of her crew—newly brought on in Madras—into bringing up the sea-chests from below, and throwing open the lids to let the sunlight in upon the heaped golden vessels, and even one small casket of beautifully cut gemstones, he found his arguments did ring a little hollow. It seemed the Allegiance had in her lumbering way still managed to get into flying distance of not one but three lawful prizes, on the way to Madras, and another one on the way back, when Hammond’s urgent need of a transport to carry Temeraire to Rio had necessitated her abrupt about-face and return.

“It does not seem very fair,” Temeraire said to Laurence, “when one considers how much sea-journeying we have done, without even one French merchantman coming anywhere in reach; and I do not find that Riley expects we should meet others on the way to Brazil, either.”

“No, but we may meet a whaler or two, if you like,” Laurence said absently. Temeraire was not mollified; whales were perfectly tolerable creatures, very good eating when not excessively large, but no-one could compare them to cartloads of gems and gold; and as for ambergris, he did not care for the scent.

Laurence was presently interviewing the aviators at the covert to form their new crew—a small and undistinguished group to choose from, even though swelled by other men whom Granby had brought back from Madras, the coverts there having been half-emptied of dragons by the plague. But it seemed Iskierka had already taken her pick of the available men for her own crew. Temeraire and Laurence were only to have the leavings, even though, Temeraire thought, they had the greater seniority and also the greater need, as one could not conveniently get very many men on Iskierka’s back to begin with thanks to her endlessly steaming spikes.

Temeraire could only console himself that at least he now had Fellowes back as his very own ground-crew master, and Emily Roland was once more officially Laurence’s ensign; but apart from this he had been stripped almost entirely. At least Gong Su had remained with them all along, so Temeraire had one properly loyal crew member—but Dorset for no very good reason had decided not to rejoin them. There had been some suggestion that it was his duty to stay with the covert, which had no other surgeon; but why Dorset might not come along, and Iskierka’s new surgeon remain behind instead, Temeraire did not understand at all.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Blincoln said, standing rather awkwardly outside the clearing where Laurence was sitting with his writing-table, “sir, I hoped I might have a word.”

Laurence looked up from his notes, and Blincoln began to stumble over an apology—very sorry if he should ever have failed in proper respect; hoped he had done his duty as best he could, always; begged leave to recommend himself to Captain Laurence’s attention—

“Mr. Blincoln,” Laurence said, interrupting him, “I have no complaint to make of your manner towards me under the previous circumstances; if any apology on that score is merited, you may consider it accepted if you wish. I should by far be more inclined to hire a man who had abused me to my face, for a just conviction, than one who has to my own certain knowledge and further credible report behaved in an outrageous and underhanded fashion towards a young officer, friendless and without that defense which he ought have had from your superiors, and knowingly and with selfish intent interfered with the rearing of a beast not his own.”

Laurence meant Demane: evidently the aviators in Sydney had continued their attempts to sway Kulingile away from him, and it was no surprise to Temeraire that Rankin should have done nothing to prevent it. Although, Temeraire did not think it should have been anything so very dreadful if one of the other aviators had succeeded. After all, Demane should have been very welcome back in his own crew, and been much better off, if his dragon had proven so very faithless. Not, of course, that Temeraire wished for any such thing to happen; only, if it had—well, it had not; he sighed, peering over at the sadly abbreviated list of officers that Laurence had jotted down.

Blincoln meanwhile would have protested, but Laurence cut him short. “No,” he said, “I have no interest in hearing whatever explanations you can dredge up, and that your casting of lures was condoned by your senior officer and imitated by many of your fellows as little excuses you as it does credit to any of them. It was wrong in you, and you knew it so; I must ask you and any other man who has acted in similar fashion to expect nothing from me but the strongest possible censure.”

Blincoln hastily retreated; and Laurence put down his pen. “I find I am more given to haste, these days; I have grown too used to a more select company,” he said to Temeraire ruefully.

“It was certainly no more than he deserved,” Temeraire said, “for imagining we should take him for my crew; I certainly have not forgotten how rude he was to you.”

“I can make allowances for any man who might object to treason,” Laurence said, with far more tolerance than Temeraire thought merited, since they had not properly been traitors after all, and now even the Government had admitted it. “But not of this selfish and underhanded leech-work; and now I think on it, we cannot leave Kulingile and Demane here under Rankin’s command. I must speak with Hammond: between us and Granby, I think we have enough authority to make off with a heavyweight, particularly as he has never been formally issued orders since the hatching. Otherwise those men will never let them alone; and if they should think my reinstatement means my ill-report of them will have more credence, they will only grow all the more vicious, for having less to lose by it.”

“Of course Demane should come with us,” Temeraire said, brightening, “and if Kulingile chooses, I do not see any objection. He might come instead of Iskierka?” he suggested hopefully. Unfortunately, it seemed that Hammond quite insisted on her accompanying them: more of this unreasonable favoritism towards fire-breathers.

But at least Kulingile’s coming meant that Temeraire should not be parted from Demane and from Sipho—whom Temeraire was also not prepared to cede from his own crew, even though as Demane’s brother his proper posting might be contested. “But I have an egg-mate back in China, and it is not as though we are always together; so it does not necessarily follow,” Temeraire said to himself, arguing it out.

“Mr. O’Dea will come with us, also, I think,” Laurence said. “He has grown steady, these last few months; and at least that will mean one decent hand in the log-book; and Mr. Shipley. Yes, Roland?”

Emily Roland had come into the clearing, and said in a low tone, “Sir, I beg your pardon; they won’t let him come up, but I thought—I was sure you would wish—”

Temeraire looked down the hill, where the all but unnecessary gate to the covert was manned rather to occupy the aviators than to prevent any incursions from the town: a man in ordinary clothing was being barred. “Why,” Temeraire said with pleasure, after squinting to be sure, although the shock of reddish brown hair was immediately familiar, “I think that is Lieutenant Ferris; whyever should they not let him come up?”

Laurence looked very pale, and said quietly, “Roland, if you please, run and tell those men to stand aside, and that Mr. Ferris is my guest.”

She nodded and dashed away, and shortly Ferris came into the clearing: quite altered, Temeraire found on closer inspection. He had grown heavier-set, especially in the shoulders, and perhaps he had been sunburnt so often that the color had finally stuck, for he was florid in the cheeks, and seemed older than he must be. Temeraire was delighted nevertheless: Ferris had perhaps not been so good a first lieutenant as Granby, but he had been very young at the time, and in any case he should certainly be an improvement over any of the officers here, and of Iskierka’s crew, also.

Poor Ferris looked very ill, Laurence thought as he stood to meet him: untimely aged beyond his twenty and three, and, Laurence was sorry to see, the marks of strong drink beginning to be visible in his face.

“I am very happy to see you again, Mr. Ferris,” Temeraire was saying, inclining his head, “however you have come here; are you lately arrived?”

Ferris a little stumblingly said he had come on a recent colony ship—he had heard—and there trailed off; Laurence said, “Temeraire, if you will excuse us; Mr. Ferris, perhaps you will walk with me a moment.”

Ferris came with him to the small tent which Laurence was using for shelter: set apart from the other aviators, to avoid grating too often against Rankin; Laurence was doubly grateful for the privacy now. He waved Ferris to one of the small camp-chairs, and sitting said quietly, “I am also very glad indeed to see you again, and to have the opportunity to make my apologies, if you can indeed have the grace to accept them: I know of no man I have wronged more deeply.”

Ferris darkened a little in the cheeks, and took Laurence’s offered hand with a low and half-muttered word, not intelligible.

Laurence paused, but Ferris did not speak further, his eyes still downcast. Laurence hardly knew how to proceed—to offer amends at once impossible and insulting. He had thought to protect Ferris, and his other officers, by concealing from them his treason and Temeraire’s; but the court-martial had struck wherever a target might be found, and for the sin of ignorance, Ferris had been dismissed from the service. A promising career blighted, a family heritage disgraced, and the only thing Laurence could not reproach himself for was that by some small grace they had not hanged him.

“We looked for word of you,” Laurence said finally, “but—I could not presume to write your family—”

“No, of course,” Ferris said, low. “I know you were in prison, when—” and they were silent once again.

“I can hardly offer you any recompense which should be adequate,” Laurence said at last: as futile as the offer might be, still it must be made. “But whatever remedy should be in my power to make you—if you have come here intending to establish an estate, I would—” Laurence swallowed his distaste. “I can presume on some acquaintance with the governor, MacArthur; if you should—”

“No, sir, I don’t, that—I heard you had gone, and Temeraire, to start the breeding grounds here,” Ferris said. “I thought, if you were not an officer yourself, anymore, then perhaps you might—that I might be of use, if I came. And in any case—” He stopped, and indeed did not need to go on to make abundantly clear the other motives which should have made such a flimsy hope sufficient to induce him to take ship around the world, for a tiny and ill-run prison colony: the worst sort of disgrace and mortification, and the life of an outcast. “But I hear you are restored to the list, sir.”

Laurence scarcely repressed a flinch: he, the actual traitor, had been reinstated, and guiltless Ferris had not. And that very injustice now barred Laurence from giving him a real place: as a captain of the Aerial Corps, he could appoint only aviators to Temeraire’s crew. He might contrive to offer Ferris some unofficial position, as a hanger-on of sorts; but such a situation could only be deeply painful, putting Ferris in daily company with aviators less gifted and likely to offer him the same disdain which Laurence with more justice had met.

He made the offer nevertheless. “If you should care for such employment as should offer itself,” he said, the details of necessity remaining vague, “and would not object to the journey, I would be glad of your—” There he stopped, and finished awkwardly with, “—company,” as the best of inadequate choices.

“I would be glad of—of the opportunity,” Ferris said, also awkward; that he perceived all the same disadvantages as did Laurence was plain, and equally plain that he was resigned to them. Laurence could not help but recognize he had no other alternative that was preferable: a miserable situation in which to offer a man work, knowing him unable to refuse.

“I will send word to the Allegiance; if you will be so good as to transfer your things there,” Laurence said. “We leave at the earliest opportunity.”

“I am very sorry not to be able to oblige you, Captain,” Hammond said, “but of course, you understand that only Royal dispensation can make any remedy—I would be happy to write a letter, in this regard—”

Laurence had written before now, more than once, and knew that Jane would have gladly seen Ferris reinstated as well if she could; he was not in the least sanguine. “Sir,” he said, “I beg you will forgive me; I have made no demands, nor have I any for myself or for Temeraire, but I must make this my price, as little as I like to have one. You must see there is no just cause why I should have my rank restored, and Mr. Ferris not.”

“He does not have a dragon,” Hammond said, brutally. “No,” he added, “I do understand your sentiments, Captain, and without exceeding myself I will venture so far as to say, the successful accomplishment of our mission should certainly have a material and beneficial effect on his suit; particularly if the young man in question—I understand he will be accompanying us?—should manage to be of service during the expedition.”

With such scant assurances, insufficient even to mention to Ferris, Laurence was forced to content himself; and he regretted the lack even more when he had completed his interviews: the crew he had managed to assemble was not one such as to inspire great confidence. He had taken on Lieutenant Forthing, who had shown himself a competent officer if not a brilliant one, during their crossing of the continent; and for midshipmen three of the younger men: Cavendish, Bellew, and Avery. These were distinguished from the others mainly for their having had less time in their careers to demonstrate a lack of initiative or skill, so he could have some small hope of uncovering some previously hidden talent.

The farewell dinner, given by Mrs. MacArthur, was an event of considerable magnificence despite the limitations of the colony; her husband had been reasonable, or at least sufficiently so to persuade Hammond to endorse the occasion. “You know, Ambassador, I don’t care if I shall call myself First Minister or Governor or Grand High Master of Kangaroos, in the least,” MacArthur had said to him, and repeated at nearly every opportunity, with small variations, wherever witnesses would listen to him, “so long as it is understood we must be allowed to know our business better than anyone else, and let to settle it ourselves, instead of this sitting fire waiting eight months for word from Westminster, or worse, having some Navy officer with more will than mother-wit come blundering in to set us at logger-heads with our nearer neighbors, and they only looking for good trading partners, as we would anyhow care to be.”

The distinction between this position and real independence seemed to Laurence a vague semantical thing, but at least for the moment Hammond professed himself satisfied to indeed call MacArthur Governor, and to see the British colors on the flagpole above the Government House, and to attend his dinner there.

The table was lopsided, almost inevitably, but Mrs. MacArthur had managed to find enough women to intersperse between any men of the rank of lieutenant or higher, so at least the upper half of her table preserved the appearance of even numbers. There was still very little in the way of society in the colony, and Laurence found himself seated beside the particularly beautiful wife of a captain in the New South Wales Corps, one of MacArthur’s subordinates, whom a very little conversation sufficed to discover had come over on a convict ship, for pickpocketing.

Mrs. Gerald could not be called respectable except in the article of her marriage, which she did not scruple to avow, over her third glass, “the best joke, because Timothy would always go on as he was hanging out for a rich woman, when he should go back to England; and nothing more tiresome for a girl to hear. So I wrote out a long letter to myself, and put on it the name of an old beau of mine back home, saying as how he was coming out and meant to have me, with a ring if you please, and I left it about where Timothy should see it: meaning only to keep him from going on as though I was beneath thinking of for anybody. But he went into a rage, and stormed about so, that I lost my temper quite and said he might marry me himself, or else go about his business; and so here I am! And I swear he is none the worse by it, for I am sure no rich woman would know the first thing about how to get on in a country like this.”

She was, despite lacking any shade of sensibility, an amiable dinner companion, more so than the wretched creature on Laurence’s other side, whom he would have been astonished to find a day above fifteen years of age, evidently released from the schoolroom just in time for the event. Despite a better share of the virtues of birth and education than Mrs. Gerald, Miss Hershelm was stricken with so much shyness that all Laurence’s efforts could barely win a syllable from her lips; she did not raise her eyes from her plate even once.

He could not think the occasion ideal for such a child, particularly when the younger men lower down the table began to show signs of forgetting their company, and growing boisterous. Laurence saw Mrs. MacArthur glance down the table, and a quick word to her butler followed; an assemblage of cheeses and sweets came to the table accompanying the pudding, in a rather incoherent combination. Laurence rather suspected another two courses had been intended and forgone, though no-one could have complained of the menu so far: fresh-caught roughy in a sauce of lemons and oranges, with fresh peas; an exceedingly handsome crown roast of lamb ornamented with preserved cherries; new potatoes in their skins presented alongside veal chops dressed with brown butter; a whole tunny baked in salt crust, occupying half the table.

But when the pudding had been cleared, Mrs. MacArthur rose; with equal prudence, MacArthur did not let the port go round very long after dinner was cleared, and proposed their rejoining the ladies almost at once.

When they had come into the drawing rooms, several of the women had vanished, Miss Hershelm among them, Laurence was glad to see; Mrs. Gerald, on the other hand, coming up took him by the arm and declared her intention of presenting him to all the eligible young ladies of the company.

“For it is a great shame you should not be doing some girl any good,” she said, “and it is really too bad of you; I am sure you could use some good company, and you needn’t worry I will present you to anyone so poor-spirited as to mind a dragon. Miss Oakley, may I introduce to you Captain Laurence?”

Laurence managed eventually to demur, on the grounds of ineligibility and imminent departure both, and joined Hammond by the balcony, where he was speaking with another of the ladies: a Mrs. Pemberton, widowed on the very journey which had brought her to the colony, and only lately out of black gloves.

“I do not suppose we would have thought of it, save that Elizabeth—Mrs. MacArthur—is a friend of mine, from our schoolroom days,” she said, Hammond having exclaimed over her having made so long a journey. “But having made your own home in so distant a country as China, can you be so surprised that others might wish to see more of the world than encompassed by a single parish in Devonshire, and six weeks in London? I was glad of the notion when she proposed our coming and taking up a grant of land; her husband would have had work for mine. But there is nothing for a woman alone to do here.”

Except to marry again, she did not say, and her speaking look at the company—grown coarser by the moment, and more loud—made clear she did not see much to admire in the local prospects.

“You might return to England,” Hammond said.

“And go back to Devonshire, and tat lace with my mother-in-law, while her pug snores at our feet,” she said, dryly: it did not seem the sort of portrait which would appeal to a woman who had willingly followed her husband across the world to a half-established colony. “I understand you are gone away again shortly, yourselves?”

“As soon as we have our tide, and the wind is in the west,” Hammond said, poetic but quite inaccurate, as making sail with a westerly wind from her present anchorage would serve better to drive the Allegiance onto the harbor rocks than to the open ocean. “But I do hope to return to England, ma’am, someday. I do not grudge my country any service, but I am not so peripatetic as that; and surely the delights of home must call still more to a woman’s heart.”

“And you, Captain Laurence?” she asked. “Does your heart yearn for a quiet retirement at the end of your service, and a house in the country?”

There was something a little mocking in her tone. “Only if there were room enough for a dragon,” Laurence said, and excused himself to step outside and take the air: in the dark, with the lights of the house shining and the garden full of palm-trees and fruit bats obscured, he might have been at exactly that sort of manor, which he might indeed have imagined for himself, six years and a lifetime ago. He had given the future scarcely a thought since then, occupied excessively by an unexpected present; he was surprised to find he would now gladly prefer his isolate valley, with all its toil and inconveniences.

But the valley had been left behind: the cattle sold, or loaded aboard the Allegiance to feed the dragons; the pavilion roofless under the stars with its pillars sentinel over the half-grown sheaves of wheat. No caretaker could be found for so lonely a place; if ever they returned, there would be vines twining the pillars, and weeds and saplings thick in the fields they had so laboriously cleared.

If ever they returned. He turned and went back into the house.

The governor’s mansion stood opposite the promontory housing the covert, around the bay, so the aviators and the soldiers had a sobering course of night air on the way back to their quarters. Some of the younger officers found the lights of the dockside taverns along the way a stronger lure than the quiet of their barracks, however, and eeled away in twos and threes; until Laurence was very nearly walking alone but for Granby. Rankin was on ahead, with Lieutenant Blincoln and Lieutenant Drewmore, and without need for discussion Laurence and Granby slowed their steps and turned off onto a more circuitous route, to stretch out the walk.

“No-one can say it wasn’t a handsome way to see us off,” Granby said, “although MacArthur might have been less festive about it: I am sure he would have wrung my hand with just as much pleasure if I had told him I was going to the devil; not to say we aren’t.”

“I think we must have a little more faith in Mr. Hammond than that,” Laurence said.

“I’ve more in the Tswana,” Granby said. “I can’t imagine what he supposes we are going to say that will turn them up sweet, and they have some damned dangerous beasts: fire-breathers, and four heavy-weight breeds that we know of, and we know precious little. I would just as soon try farther north, and see if the colonials would hire out some of their beasts for fighting, if they have so many they are using them for freight these days.”

He spoke with a vague disgruntlement shared, Laurence knew, by every aviator who had learned that the Americans had begun to raise dragons in so much earnest that they were bidding fair to rival British numbers, with a scant fraction of the number of men looking to fly them: it was deeply dissatisfying to those who had spent their lives in service, hoping for a rare chance to one day captain their own dragon.

“But much smaller creatures,” Laurence said, “and without military training; there can be no comparison. You may be certain Napoleon will have shipped the most deadly of the Tswana, and as many of them as he could cram aboard his transports.”

“Well, I will hope the three of us may make them take enough notice to bother listening, instead of just having at us straight off,” Granby said, but pessimistically.

“I know Hammond is claiming there will be reinforcements sent to meet us from Halifax, or the Channel, but I will rely on that when they land before us yelling for cattle, and not an instant before.

“Anyway, I oughtn’t complain about the Foreign Office’s latest notion, when I am damned grateful for the consequences: it was enough to drive a fellow wild thinking of you and Temeraire thrown away in this wretched little port with that fellow Rankin yapping at your heels, and a crowd of useless layabouts besides. I don’t blame you for chucking the lot of them and going into the wilds. Whatever are they about, now?” They had come at last in sight of the covert gates, and there was a commotion up on the hillside.

They found something of an uproar, overseen by four interested dragons whose heads loomed above the knot of men; Demane at the heart of it, Laurence rather despairingly saw, and an officer of the New South Wales Corps on his knees in the dirt before him with a bloody lip and wild-eyed alarm at Kulingile peering down.

“—outrage,” Rankin was saying in great heat, “—will have his commander here in the morning, demanding an explanation—”

“I don’t care!” Demane said. “And the only one who has been outrageous is him; I know you don’t care a jot, so he is here and will stay here, until Captain Laurence comes back; and if he wants to get up and leave before then, he may try, and I will have Kulingile hold him upside-down over the cliff.”

“But Roland, I am sure if Demane is angry with him, he has done something to deserve it,” Temeraire was saying meanwhile to Emily Roland, with what Laurence could only call misplaced loyalty, “so there is no reason not to wait for Laurence to come back: he will certainly know whatever is the best thing to do. But perhaps you had better not hold that fellow over the cliff,” he added to Kulingile, the first thing of sense in the conversation, “for you might very easily drop him, if he squirmed. If he should try and run away, you can just pin him down instead: only being careful not to squash him.”

“You are all a pack of damned fools,” Roland said, as furious as Laurence had ever heard her, “and if he weren’t a coward, he would run, and none of you should do anything; there ain’t any reason the captain ought hear anything about it.”

Iskierka said, “Well, I would like to hear about it, as I am not asleep anymore; is there some fighting?”

“Oh, lord,” Granby said, under his breath.

“I am here; what the devil is going on?” Laurence said grimly. “Demane, we spoke this afternoon, I thought, on the subject of brawling.”

“I haven’t!” Demane said; then realizing the bloody mess of his captive’s face gave him every appearance of a lie, added, “Roland did that; only she would have let him off—”

“Because I didn’t care to make a stupid great fuss of knocking down some drunken looby is no reason for you to put your oar into it; what bloody right do you suppose you have, pushing into my affairs?” Roland said. “Sir, pray don’t give him any mind—”

“How was I to know, anyway?” the soldier blurted, from the ground, “—with her hanging about in trousers; I thought it was a get-up, for a joke.”

“If it was, that wouldn’t mean I wanted any of your grabbing, anyway,” Roland said contemptuously, “and if you didn’t know that, you ought have asked, first, if you mean to complain of me.”

Rankin snorted. “Ah; I might have known it would be something on the order of this sordid mess. You may relieve yourself of your prisoner, Demane: no-one expects that the women of the Corps protect their virtue as if they were gentlewomen, and I can only imagine the ridicule with which any suit for breach should meet in such a case; or did you expect to be permitted to hang him for jealousy?”

“That is enough, sir; more than enough,” Laurence said to Rankin, sharply. “And you: your name, sir, and your commander’s,” he said to the soldier, who a little belligerently gave it as Lieutenant Paster. “He will hear from me in the morning; I trust he will share my opinion of a man who cannot show decent respect either to a woman, or to a fellow officer.”

Lieutenant Paster did not stay to argue, when Laurence had waved him off, but escaped down the hill at speed; Demane scowled, and the crowd began to disperse with the focus of interest lost.

“Sir, I don’t need a fuss made,” Roland said, coming up to him. “There wasn’t anything to the matter—”

“If you please,” Laurence said, forestalling her with a hand, and turning to lead her back to his tent, Demane following and trying to speak to her; Roland kept a determined shoulder to his face and ignored him coldly, while he protested that he had only done as he ought—

“That is more than I can say,” Laurence said sharply, sitting at his desk. “Your first concern, Demane, ought have been for the reputation and satisfaction of the lady in question, neither of which can have been served by enacting a public scene in a temper—”

“Thank you, sir,” Roland said, and glared at Demane with satisfaction.

“—I excuse it in the circumstances,” Laurence added, “only as having proceeded from my own failing: the insult could not have been offered in the first place, had I done my duty and arranged for proper chaperonage. No, Roland,” he said, when she began to splutter, “your duties must of course come first, but you are nevertheless a gentlewoman and the daughter of a gentlewoman—”

“I am not!” she said, indignantly. “I am an officer and Mother is—”

“If a man may be asked to be both officer and gentleman, so, too, may you, as far as duty permits,” Laurence said implacably, “—The one does not preclude you from the responsibilities of the other; nor me from mine as your guardian, until you are of age. I will see to the matter in the morning.”

“Now see what you have done,” Roland hissed at Demane, and stormed out of the tent.

“Sir,” Demane said in protest, “I didn’t mean anything of the sort; it is not as though I would let anyone bother Roland—”

“That, sir, is not your privilege,” Laurence said, “nor will be, unless Roland should choose to make it yours, with the consent of her family; until then, I will see to it you comport yourself as a gentleman, also. There will be no more of this running wild, and so far as you choose to press your suit, you will do so within bounds.”

“But that is not—Roland and I—” Demane said.

“Has she made you any commitments, or given you license to consider her promised to you?” Laurence said.

“—No,” Demane said, surly, “but—”

“Then let me hear nothing more of this,” Laurence said with finality.

Demane stalked from the tent in as great a temper as Roland herself, and left Laurence with the very meager satisfaction of knowing he had faced up to an inconvenient duty, without the slightest idea of how to accomplish it. Hiring a satisfactory chaperone at all in the unsettled state of the colony would have been a remarkable task, much less finding one in the span of three days who would not balk at coming on a long sea-voyage and a dangerous mission.

And he could not leave Roland in Sydney; that would be to neglect his still-greater duty to see her formed into an officer fit to command a priceless dragon, the which could not be done without useful experience, even if accompanied by danger. She should have no opportunity to acquire any in a sluggish port, and still less under Rankin’s command. In any event, that gentleman had made it perfectly plain he could not be relied upon to have any consideration for either Roland’s training or her protection.

Laurence wondered doubtfully if perhaps he might find and hire some retired soldier, of advanced years, for the duty: the arrangement could not be called proper, and such a person could offer Roland none of that advice which Laurence vaguely felt was also the purview of a chaperone, unless perhaps the man had raised daughters? But it might do, in lieu of any better solution; and in the meantime, he realized, he should have to row out to the Allegiance and speak to Riley about Roland’s quarters.

“Nothing particularly out of the ordinary,” Laurence said, “but there must be a separate berth, and one for the chaperone.”

“A lady?” Riley said, doubtfully. “Not that I don’t see the need, of course,” he added, “but Laurence, you cannot mean us to go carting a gentlewoman about to Brazil, with a war going? I don’t suppose we have above three women on board, if you count Old Molly in the galley, and the gunner’s wife, and her baby, which I don’t think should count.” And he looked even more doubtful at Laurence’s proposed substitution of a retired gentleman.

Laurence was particularly grateful, now, that Riley had learned of the existence of female officers among the aviators; at least Riley did not need a long explanation. It was true Roland could not expect to enjoy the usual satisfactions of marriage and family, either, and perhaps nothing might truly apply, of the ordinary course of rearing a young woman; but Laurence knew very well what he would have thought of a sea-captain who let his young midshipmen run themselves into gaming debts or overindulgence in either drink or whoring; or otherwise render themselves wholly ineligible to a woman of sense and character. He did not intend to be guilty of the same, nor to allow a situation to persist which had already exposed Roland to insult.

“Even if I can only hire a maid, that would at least be something,” he said.

“You had better consult Mrs. MacArthur,” Riley said. “At least she can tell you how to go on, and perhaps put you in the way of some steady creature; if there is one to be had at such short notice: I think we will have our wind tomorrow, and the tide is at noon.”

They went out on the deck, presently noisy with holystoning and stinking with fresh paint, the hands hard at labor under the watchful eye of Lord Purbeck, the first lieutenant; and Laurence thought Riley was right: a certain unsteadiness in the air, which spoke to old instincts.

“And if you do find someone, I can manage the berths, of course,” Riley added. “You haven’t much crew among the three of you, and there is plenty of room in the bow cabins,” these normally being intended for the use of aviators, aboard a dragon transport, and for a much greater number than the Allegiance would be shipping in this case. “I suppose my own mids may cut up a fuss if your ensign has a berth, if they aren’t to know why; but they must lump it.”

“That one source of difficulty, at least, I may remove,” Laurence said, and shook Riley’s hand before he went down to the ship’s launch, to be taken back to shore.

He found Roland working, with short angry strokes, on oiling some of Temeraire’s harness which had been neglected for lack of ground crew; she sprang up when she saw him. “No,” Laurence said, “I have not reconsidered; however, I have also another duty, to which I trust you will not object: you have seen more than enough service to make midwingman.”

The announcement mollified her a little, but she did say with hopeful cunning, “As midwingman I surely cannot need a chaperone, sir; and anyway, ought you hire one without consulting Mother?”

This reminder was as unnecessary as it was unwelcome: Laurence was awkwardly aware that he was by no means certain of Jane’s approving the hiring of a chaperone. Certainly she herself had never had the benefit of one, and would likely abuse the notion as absurd. But neither did he think Jane would have approved of Emily’s being subject to any unwanted attentions which she could no longer avoid through camouflage; and still less approve of Emily’s engaging herself in any permanent attachment at so young an age.

“When we should again be in England, in her purview, naturally you shall not want for any other guidance,” he said. “Until then, I cannot consider myself alone adequate supervision; have you never felt the want,” he added desperately, by way of persuasion, “of some companion, to whom you might turn for—for advice?”

“Mother has told me all about that,” Emily said with impatience, “and I don’t mean to do anything stupid and put myself out of service for a year; whatever else should I have to talk about with some stuffy old woman who will sniff because I don’t wear skirts?”

Laurence gave up the hope of argument, and contented himself with ordering her to see to the requisition of more gunpowder, for their incendiaries.




Chapter Three (#uabc456c0-c894-57e8-82cb-e20d6b044b03)


Temeraire could not particularly regret seeing the small mean buildings of Sydney dropping away behind them, although Laurence and Riley spoke together so approvingly of the qualities of the harbor; that was very well, but it did not make up for the untidy appearance of the unpaved streets, which were too narrow besides, and the mud which was everywhere. And while he certainly appreciated all the goods which the sea-serpents brought, from China, he did not appreciate the extraordinary stench of the mash of half-rotten fish which they liked to eat; and he did not see why it needed to be kept in open barrels by the dockside. The wind was very nearly directly at their back, carrying the smell along to haunt them as the Allegiance traveled onward.

“I suppose they would not eat any of us?” Mrs. Pemberton inquired of Roland, hesitating at the base of the stairs up to the dragon-deck.

“Oh, they certainly would, if ever you gave them any opportunity,” Temeraire said, peering down at her, “—They have no discrimination at all, I am afraid; but you see, they do not seem to be able to speak, so one cannot very easily explain to them that one ought not to eat people. If you should care to go swimming, you had better wait until we are at least a few days out.”

The lady stared up at him dumbly. Temeraire had not precisely followed why Laurence had felt her presence necessary, and when he had asked Roland, she had said, “It is not, at all,” in venomous tones; she now answered Mrs. Pemberton with faint contempt. “Of course none of them will eat you: she means you, Temeraire, and Iskierka and Kulingile, not the serpents.”

“So I am afraid she cannot be very clever,” Temeraire said to Laurence in an undertone, later that day, when they had come out into open ocean and Laurence had come up to the dragondeck again. “And you know, Laurence, I must say that I would consider myself equal to providing any protection which Roland should need, if only you had mentioned it to me; even if she were not of my own crew, I should consider it only my duty to Excidium, since he cannot be with us.”

He could not quite suppress a hint of injury: in the interim Lieutenant Ferris—or Mr. Ferris, as he evidently was to be called—had explained Mrs. Pemberton’s position to him, and Temeraire found himself in perfect agreement with Roland on the subject.

“In body I have no doubt of it,” Laurence said dryly, “—in reputation, I am afraid you might have more difficulty: your opinion would not be solicited in the matter.” He sighed and added, “She is a sensible woman, and not a coward, to have agreed to the position in the first place; I am sure she will soon understand you are no danger to her.”

Several of the serpents had followed them out of the harbor, either for a frolic or in hopes of a meal, and played in the froth spilling out from the Allegiance’s bow, their sides gleaming in spray. No-one liked their company; aside from the smell, which anyone might have objected to, the sailors were very anxious over them and worrying they might at any moment attack. Which the serpents would not, of course, because they were too fat and well-fed; they had only to go back to the harbor if they were hungry. But the sailors were unconvinced and viewed the dragons as their only defense, so that if ever Temeraire tried to take a nap, the sailors were sure to make a great noise in the sails overhead, or send a cannonball rolling across the deck, or drop a coil of rope down upon him from aloft.

“I might be a danger to them, after all,” Temeraire said, disgruntled, when a pailful of slurry had by supposed accident been allowed to pour down onto his neck after one of the serpents still following along in their wake had breached the water in a great curving iridescent leap, evidently to make sure he was paying attention.

Roland was now apparently too senior to wash him: instead Sipho was put to the task, along with a little creature called Gerry: the relic of a New South Wales officer and his wife who had both been carried off by some sort of fever, leaving behind the boy, not quite eight, with no family in the world within two thousand miles. Laurence had acquired him as a runner from Mrs. MacArthur, along with Mrs. Pemberton. “The price of her advice,” Laurence said ruefully, but as far as Temeraire was concerned, Gerry was far more useful: his small fingers were much better able to clean underneath the scales, where some of the slurry had leaked unpleasantly.

He cried when brought up on the dragondeck, to be sure, but Roland abused him for stupidity. “I would have given a great deal to be taken on as a runner two years early, instead of only being put into school; what business do you have to be blubbing like an infant? No-one will ever think you worthy of having a dragon yourself, if you cannot properly appreciate the chance,” she said.

Gerry sniffed wetly and said, “I do not want a dragon myself,” which Temeraire could only approve: perhaps at last he might have another person in his crew who did not mean to go scurrying off to some other dragon, just when he and Laurence had got them trained properly.

“Then you are a great looby,” Roland said. “Who would not like a dragon of their own, and be able to go flying and do their duty to England; and you the son of a soldier: you ought to be ashamed.”

As Gerry’s father had been an eager participant in MacArthur’s rebellion, that late gentleman’s commitment to country and duty was perhaps in question, but the argument at least distracted the boy from his tears. “I am not a looby,” he said sullenly, and followed Sipho up on Temeraire’s back, and by the time they had finished washing him was already reconciled to his new situation enough to go sliding down Temeraire’s flank after.

No-one went pouring slurry on Iskierka, who slept in hissing, steaming state coiled along the front of the dragondeck; Temeraire regarded her with deep disfavor. At least Kulingile was being useful, and fishing: even if he did eat most of what he caught himself, that at least kept him from eating everything in sight at dinner-time, and looking wistfully over at other people’s portions if one did not eat quickly enough.

“You needn’t rock the boat so hard when you land,” Iskierka even complained, when Kulingile had dropped back down licking his chops.

“You needn’t make a noise about anyone else who is not lazing about quite uselessly,” Temeraire said, “and that is very kind of you, Kulingile; thank you,” he added graciously, taking the remnants of the small whale which Kulingile had brought back to offer around, though the edges were ragged and somewhat gnawed, and even these leftovers were more than Temeraire really wanted. He did not quite like to admit that he could not eat so much as Kulingile; it did not seem fair that anyone who had started quite so small and deflated should now be larger than himself, and very soon might even outstrip Maximus.

“I am not hungry,” Iskierka said. “If there were any prizes in sight, that would be different, but there is no sense in flying around only for fish one does not want. Anyway you are not hunting yourself, either.”

“I am guarding the ship from the serpents,” Temeraire said, dignified.

The last of the serpents fell back to Sydney by mid-morning the next day, and left the Allegiance alone and driving towards the roaring forties: the water cold, dark iron-grey, and mazed with greenish froth. Laurence joined Riley at the stern to watch them go, through the glass: spined backs breaching the surface in glittering curves up and down as they swam, until they reached the end of the water stirred up in the Allegiance’s wake, and then plunged deep and vanished.

From there on, monotony, of the sort a sailor loved best: a steady knife-edged wind at their back, and the sun small and cold white on the horizon for all but a few hours of the day. Laurence woke each day to the holystoning of the deck, the round of the ship’s bells; sometimes in the first confusion of rising he wondered why he had not been called for the morning’s watch, and looked in vain for a blue coat.

He could have wished only for a little more occupation: he had grown used in the valley to have every day as much to do as could be done, and found himself now unequal to the task of filling the hours aboard a ship where he had no duty but to be a passenger. Even his self-imposed duties as schoolmaster were usurped by Roland’s chaperone, whom he could not deny was better suited to the task than himself, having before her marriage served as a governess.

He had Granby for company; and might have had Riley, but their relations had never quite recovered from the tensions which had arisen on their journey to Africa. Riley’s father was a slave-owner in the West Indies; Laurence’s own, Lord Allendale, devoted to the cause of abolition: the voyage which led them past all the wretched slave-port cities of that continent had left them constantly rubbed against one another, and without room for apology. Laurence could not open his real feelings on the subject of their mission to Riley; Riley could scarcely avoid knowing what those feelings were; they walked around each other with scrupulous courtesy, and spoke only of sailing, and the weather, and the life of the ship.

Laurence had the pleasure, at least, of going out flying with Temeraire: cold air brisk in their faces, clouds stinging with snow if they ventured south, and beneath them now and again great silvery schools of fish, or pods of whales or porpoises; occasionally the shadow of a handful of sharks. “I do wonder why they are not at all good eating when what they eat themselves is nice; it seems a waste,” Temeraire said, as an aside, before continuing, “And I do not see why we should not do exactly as you propose, Laurence: after all, if the Tswana will take away the slaves anyway, the Portuguese may as well let them all go instead and not have all their cities destroyed, too.”

“The Tswana cannot hope to raid all of Brazil,” Laurence said, “not in time to rescue any of their people yet alive; if that is their only preoccupation.”

He spoke cautiously but hoped otherwise: the Tswana had bent their wrath against even slave ports which had never shipped a single one of their own people, at great distances from their empire; that augured for a chance of persuading them to accept the offer which Laurence privately wished to make: a general liberation throughout the country, in lieu of having all their particular kindred returned.

This hope he did not intend to unfold as yet to anyone but Temeraire; Laurence could easily imagine Hammond’s reaction. Wholesale abolition would scarcely recommend itself to the Portuguese, and might not satisfy the Tswana, either; but the mere possibility of engineering such a stroke demanded any effort in its pursuit.

“At least we must make the attempt; and if we had no other cause to come away, it must have been enough,” he added.

“Certainly we must; and I am sure that the Portuguese will think better of refusing, if they do, when the Tswana have burned up a few more of their cities,” Temeraire said blithely. “And I do not see that Hammond will have any reason to complain, if we should make peace as he wishes. Then we will go back to Britain and defeat Napoleon at last. Do you suppose that is a prize, Laurence?”

It was not: a whaler in the distance, almost certainly a neutral; too small to support Temeraire’s weight, and undoubtedly only to be alarmed by such a visit even if they had been worth bespeaking for news. Temeraire looked around inquiringly; Laurence shook his head in answer; they wheeled away and flew onward without descending even to be seen.

The ocean was otherwise deserted and had been for weeks now; a few islands along their way, mostly rocky outcroppings of deserted volcanic rock half-eaten by lichen. The isolation, for lack of work, was more to be felt than in their valley; Laurence chose to feel it more. It was what he must expect, if he did not mean to subject himself to authority or ask Temeraire to do the same; if they meant to follow their own judgment. Laurence could not but look down half-rueful and half-amazed at the ship below, when they returned to her, and he saw in her the orderly decided pattern of his former life: an ordinary life, a comprehensible one.

He wondered suddenly at Bonaparte: at a man who would discard such a life deliberately, not under an inexorable press of duty or honor but only a flashing reckless hunger; at a man who could put himself outside the society of his fellows for such a motive. “I do not suppose anything will ever content him,” he said to Temeraire. “What victory, what glory, could satisfy such a man? Although perhaps age may do what the mere turning of the world will not, and wear away the worst of his ambition.”

“You may be sure that even if he were to grow tired of conquering and glory, that Lien would not; after all she will not be old for a very long time,” Temeraire said darkly. “And anyway it does not seem to me we ought to only wait and hope: we had much better stop him ourselves, and be quite sure he cannot do any more harm.”

“If Napoleon can seek to ascend all the thrones of Europe, I suppose we may go dragging them out from under him,” Laurence said, although with some humor: descending alone from Temeraire’s back to a ship on the far side of the world in the midst of a cold ocean, and setting his sights on the acknowledged sovereign of a great nation and the conqueror of half of Europe.

The table he returned to, that evening, was a slightly peculiar one, for Laurence and Granby had privately agreed they should treat Demane as if he possessed the rank to which his dragon entitled him, although neither his conversation nor his manners were suited to a seat near the head. But that was an evil often found in the service, in men without the excuse of tender years, and at least Demane might yet be worked on by admonishment and the embarrassment of finding himself under more observation than he had been used to, either as a runner or while deliberately ignored in Sydney.

But Hammond was an uncritical guest, and did not notice if Demane ate through four removes in a row in perfect silence or had to be nudged to make a toast; and his own conversation was more than adequate to fill anything lacking among the rest of the company. Four years as the chief British representative at the Chinese court had brought him some two stone in weight and settled his former driven confidence into assurance, but he was as pell-mell and passionate as ever when enlarging upon a subject close to his heart.

“By report, they have shipped two transports already, which remain in the harbor at present,” he said, laying down biscuit crumbs to make the outline of Rio, and picking out the weevils. “The Tswana have evidently encamped within the ruins of the city.”

“They cannot be much fonder of Bonaparte than of us,” Granby said. “He hasn’t outlawed slavery, either; are they really his allies?”

“I suppose one cannot call it an alliance, not in the real sense of the word,” Hammond said. “You might better say they have given him a truce, in exchange for reparations: but as his reparations involve shipping them across the sea to attack their enemies, which are also his, there is very little to choose between the two. They have not ceased their attacks upon the Spanish coast and the Portuguese, either,” he added with a significant look at Laurence: such attacks should certainly pose a danger to any troops which Britain should land, as well.

“I don’t suppose we might give them something more to think about at the Cape?” Granby said. “Or closer to their home, anyway; the Med is a long way from the south of Africa, and I don’t suppose they can have an easy time of supply.”

“The prospects of a new front in wholly unknown territory, for uncertain gain, can have but little appeal,” Laurence said. “We knew nothing of the existence of the Tswana and their empire, and the present evils of our situation are in no small order due to that ignorance; how much more cautious ought we to be about venturing yet again past the coast of that continent, when we have already certain proofs of their ability to maintain a significant force over so great a distance.”

He spoke absently, listening: above their heads, a change in the rhythm of footsteps and voices on deck had intruded gradually upon his awareness. There was no alarm, no beating to quarters; he had no excuse for leaving the table, and had perforce to restrain his curiosity until the meal had been cleared away, when he could propose coffee on the dragondeck.

Laurence put his head out of the ladderway and saw the sky: curiosity was at once satisfied. Riley had been due to dine with the gunroom that evening; he was already on the quarterdeck, directing the men: no frantic hurry, but a steady progress; the sails were all being reefed. “We are in for a blow, I think; nothing to alarm anyone, of course,” he said out loud, cheerfully, before he added to Laurence in an undertone, “The mercury would have run out of the bottom of the glass, if it could; the dragons had better be chained down sooner than late.”

Laurence nodded silent acknowledgment and went to tell Temeraire he must endure the storm-chains which he so hated. “There is time for a short flight beforehand, if you should like,” he added by way of apology, when Temeraire had flattened down his ruff in protest.

“I do not see why it must always be storming, when we are at sea,” Temeraire said disconsolately, when they had gone aloft and seen in the distance the great billowings of red-violet and purple climbing the sky; the ocean had flattened to black.

He landed reluctantly prepared to submit; and then Iskierka said, “Well, I do not mean to be chained at all: whyever should I not just hold on to the ship, or if it is very bad, we may as well stay aloft,” and Laurence realized in dismay she had never yet experienced a true three-days’ gale, which should outstrip the endurance of any dragon even if the winds alone did not prove fatal.

“I suppose it is likely to blow too long,” Granby said, looking inquiry up at Laurence, who slid from Temeraire’s back and hastened to assure him of the necessity, as quietly as he could manage. Even so the sailors standing ready with the great tarpaulins and the storm-chains cast reproaching looks at him for inviting ill-fortune, which grew still more mournful as Granby began to argue with Iskierka, at a volume which could not help but carry across the ship.

Apart from a general deprecation of superstition, Laurence could not think that the storm building ahead of them required any additional invitation to be as thoroughly bad as could be imagined. Certainly the worse consequence would come from leaving Iskierka unconvinced and unprepared to endure the length of the confinement which the weather bode fair to demand. She argued the matter with Granby for the better part of an hour, while the shadow crept steadily nearer and Riley began to look anxious for the men being kept idle, and the dragons still unsecured. At last in desperation Granby said, “Dear one, we must have done: I will wear the coat if only you will do this for me; pray lie down and let them secure you.”

This coat was a monstrosity of cloth-of-gold crusted with gemstone beads which would not have looked out of place in the last century at Versailles; Iskierka had managed to arrange for its commission in India through Mr. Richers, Granby’s new first lieutenant—subsequently much chastened by his captain—and Granby’s flat refusal to be displayed in so much magnificence had since been a source of great and running dissatisfaction to her.

She pounced at once on the offer. “Whenever I wish it?” she demanded.

“So long as it isn’t all wrong for the occasion,” Granby said, hurriedly qualifying.

“Only if I may decide whether it is wrong or not,” Iskierka said, and Granby submitted to his doom with resignation if not precisely with grace; in turn at last she yielded and stretched herself upon the deck, and allowed them to drag the netting over the massive red-and-black coils of her body, with the chains laced atop it.

Granby avoided Laurence’s eye and went to stand in the bow while the process went forward. Laurence knew it ashamed him deeply to be forced to resort to bribery and stratagem to subdue Iskierka’s temper to the needs of the service, and he could not have been comforted when Kulingile, who was of a very different and amiable temperament, said, “Oh, if you like, but how am I to go hunting?” when Demane asked him to lie down under the tarpaulins also, and required only the assurance that he would be fed if he grew hungry to reconcile him to the experience.

“It will not be at all comfortable,” Temeraire said unhappily as he stretched himself out also, with more accuracy than pessimism: he and Kulingile would spend the storm lying to either side of Iskierka, whose inconvenient spikes made her more difficult to secure, as additional anchors for her bulk: subject as a result not only to the worse brunt of the storm but also to the perpetual emissions of steam from her body.

“We had better feed them up now,” Granby said, returning, while the chains were made fast to the deck, and ropes thrown after them for reinforcement. The debate had consumed nearly all the time which remained to them of the unearthly calm, and now the swell began to slap rhythmic warning against the ship’s sides. Even the hands who normally shied from any contact with the dragons were clambering urgently over the talons and scales to draw the bonds tight: the weight of the beasts could easily overset the ship, if they were not well-secured. “It can only help if they sleep away the first day or so, and there may be difficulties getting the cattle up on deck later on.”

Temeraire was determined not to be difficult; he had seen Granby’s crimson cheek, and Laurence should certainly have no such cause to blush for him, even if Temeraire disliked the chains extremely, more than Iskierka did, and therefore had far better right to ask some return.

“But I am not going to kick up a fuss, and make difficulties for everyone and the poor sailors, who will be working all the storm,” Temeraire said, although he was sorry a moment later to have silenced himself a little too early: he would very much have preferred to have a proper meal, cooked through, but instead he could see a cow being hoisted out from the fore hatch, and the ordinary slaughtering-tubs were out on deck, even as the first spatters of rain came down and rattled in them tinnily.

“And for that matter,” he added sulkily, as the meat was served out, “Laurence has more right than Granby to wear finery; after all he is a prince and a captain, both, and Granby even has less seniority. So if Laurence does not choose to always be going about in his best robes,” which Temeraire could understand: one did not wish to risk damage to anything so handsome unnecessarily, “I do not see that Granby is at all right to do otherwise.”

Kulingile raised his head and put in, “Demane is a prince also,” which Temeraire did not think was quite true, although he did recall Admiral Roland saying something of the sort to some fellow from the Admiralty who had objected to Demane and Sipho being his runners; but certainly it was not as true as for Laurence, who had been adopted with a great deal of formal ceremony. “And he does not wear anything particularly fine.”

Iskierka bristled and hissed steam from her spikes. “Granby has more seniority, if one counts years as an aviator, and I am sure I cannot see any reason he should not be a prince, too, someday very soon.” With this feeble rejoinder she put her head beneath her wing.

The rain had begun falling in earnest, an hour later; Iskierka, sheltered from the wind between them, was securely asleep and jetting out small puffs of steam regularly so that the drops collected upon the tarpaulin and set it sticking clammily to Temeraire’s back. The raw cow sat unpleasantly in his stomach, and he was just contemplating whether it was worth sending Gerry for Gong Su, to perhaps brew him a bowl of tea, when Kulingile put his head over Iskierka’s back and whispered, “Temeraire?”

“Yes?” Temeraire said, rather unhappily concluding that the wind and rain would spoil the tea before he could enjoy it, and then he should have wasted a bowl of their small supply: it was too dear for Laurence to buy in the quantities which Temeraire would have liked to drink.

“Ought Demane wear something more fine?” Kulingile asked, with an anxious note.

“Oh—” Temeraire said, and struggled with warring impulses, but justice decided him: he could not be reconciled to losing Demane and would have been very glad to have him back, but it would have been the meanest sort of trick to mislead Kulingile if he intended to look after Demane properly.

“Certainly one might expect the captain of a dragon of note to present a particularly handsome appearance, when the occasion demands,” Temeraire said, therefore. “I will venture to say, he would do well with a better coat, at least, and he ought to have gold bars as Laurence and Granby do; you see that no-one thinks him a proper captain, without them.”

“But where am I to get such things?” Kulingile said, and with a great rush of generosity Temeraire said, “Well, I will ask Laurence for you, as I am not quite certain; but if we were to take a prize,” he could not help a wistful note in his voice, “and had shares, you would be in funds and could purchase anything you liked with them.”

“Iskierka has many prizes, but we haven’t?” Kulingile said, interrogatively.

“That,” Temeraire said, “is only because she has been put in the way of them, by luck; you may be sure if ever a prize offered, I should certainly be equal to taking it, and I dare say,” he added in fairness, “when you have been in a few actions, you should be sure of doing so as well; as long as you do not let yourself be shot.”

“I don’t think I should care for being shot,” Kulingile said, and shook his head as a wave came rousing over the bow and went sheeting over them, cold straight through. “I don’t care for this, either,” he added.

“No,” Temeraire agreed, hunching water off his shoulders, and huddled back down as the ship went bounding into a trench, a glassy wall of ocean rising sharply ahead.

The Allegiance was by no means the vessel one would choose for riding out a typhoon. “A wallowing bow-heavy tub with more sail than sea-sense; I would as soon cut my throat as try and make her mind,” Laurence remembered hearing Riley himself say of her several years before, when the two of them had watched from the rail of the dear old Reliant as the transport attempted awkwardly to maneuver her way into Portsmouth: neither of them dreaming, at the time, they should ever be upon her in their present circumstances. Laurence had then six years of seniority on the post-list, and with an influential and political family and a record of distinction was marching steadily towards his admiral’s flag, destined only for the most plum assignments; Riley his protégé and second lieutenant, with reason to hope for his own ship in the course of another five years with Laurence’s own influence behind him.

That influence eradicated, Riley had been glad enough to take the Allegiance when she had been offered him. Now, of course, no more such criticism was to be heard from him or even tolerated in his presence, but it was not to be denied that her only virtue was in being almost too large to sink, which in the present circumstances felt more a gauntlet thrown to the elements, a challenge they looked all too determined to meet. Laurence recalled with no fondness their last experience of a serious blow: three days endlessly laboring their way up the crowded swells, doubting every moment whether the ship should reach the crest in time.

And though Riley had knocked some seamanship into all but the worst of the landsmen and gaol-birds, during the passage to New South Wales, there were a great many of the worst: dragon transports were not prized assignments, and Riley had not sufficient influence to preserve his best men from being pillaged away by senior captains. Laurence could not observe the workings of the resultant crew with anything like satisfaction; and yet he could do nothing to amend it but keep himself to the dragondeck or his cabin, containing any impulse to interfere.

“They have matters well in hand, I assure you,” he said to Mrs. Pemberton that afternoon, remarks addressed half to himself, and regarded his cold dinner without enthusiasm by the dimmed light which filtered in through the windows: it was deeply foreign to sit to his meat while the ship’s existence rose and fell without him.

But the storm did not run three days: it lingered for five, following them across the ocean as if by malice, without a single break in the weather long enough to sleep, and with a great many long enough to give them false hope that here, at last, had come an end. As the thicker darkness came to mark the night of the fourth day, and a fresh icy howling of wind swept over them from the south, Laurence went to Riley, who stood haggard and bloodshot by the wheel, and shouted in his ear, “Tom, do you let me send Lord Purbeck to sleep, and I will second you; when he is rested he may spell you in turn.”

Riley nodded after a moment, dully; when Laurence went to him, Purbeck did not say a word to argue but only stumbled away half-asleep already. Laurence did not know the men very well: there was more separation than one might imagine possible aboard a single vessel between the aviators and the sailors, none of whom liked very well to share their ship with dragons. But he knew the Allegiance well enough by now to direct them, and pantomime served better than shouts, with the wind yelling in all their ears at once.

“Surely it must almost be over, now,” Temeraire said, when Laurence came to speak to him briefly: the rain had lightened for a short while. “We might be let up, and stay aloft until the last of it has blown itself out—”

But he spoke low and hopelessly, enervated with fatigue and cold, and his eyes lidded down to slits; when Laurence said, “Not yet, my dear; pray have patience,” Temeraire subsided without further complaint and ate the raw sheep, which was put into his gullet by hand: the galley fires were still out, for safety.

Iskierka, sheltered from the worst of the weather, was in high temper at the length of their confinement, and more difficult to restrain; if Kulingile and Temeraire had not effectively formed part of her prison by the weight of their bodies, anchoring the restraints, Laurence did not doubt she would have flung off the chains and likely cast the entire ship ahoo despite all Granby could do to persuade her to calm.

“Oh! Not yet? It will never end, and I will not stay here, I will not,” she said, furiously, and began to try and throw herself back against the tarpaulin.

“Why are you making such a fuss?” Kulingile said drowsily, and Laurence saw Demane say something in his dragon’s ear; Kulingile yawned, and then heaved his head and one massive foreleg over Iskierka’s shoulders and sighed out, pinning her to the deck with his weight.

Iskierka whipped her head around and snapped at his nose, hissing, but there was no satisfaction to be had: Kulingile was already gone back to sleep, his tongue licking the fresh sheep’s blood from his muzzle in small darting unconscious strokes. “I will not,” she repeated, angrily, but ceased to fight the chains; instead she flung herself flat upon the deck and glared fury at the clouds.

But by the next morning, even her spirits had been defeated by the ceaseless storm. She only gummed at the goat that was offered her, and left half of it in the tub; Temeraire ate nothing at all, and barely opened his eyes to acknowledge when Laurence came to speak to him. “They can’t go on like this,” Granby said to Laurence, meeting him below: Purbeck had slept a little, and was gone on deck again. “Perhaps we had better let them aloft for the rest? It can’t keep storming forever, I suppose.”

He did not sound very convinced, and indeed in the moment it seemed entirely believable that the storm would continue without end, that they sailed under judgment and deluge.

“I would not give anything for the chances of their keeping in company aloft in this cover, and we cannot arrange any sort of rendezvous; we have not the least notion where we are, nor will until we see the stars again,” Laurence said.

“Then maybe Riley would let us put up a fire, and give them something hot to eat, if we were careful about it,” Granby said. “It is bad when they are refusing their meat, Laurence; in cold like this, they ought to be eating more than their usual, even if they are not flying.”

Laurence could not regard this suggestion with anything but dismay, but Gong Su, putting his head in—the aviators would never learn the polite fiction of failing to hear what was said on the other side of a bulkhead, aboard ship—made the suggestion that coals laid in the bottom of one of his great cauldrons would do to make some sort of hot soup, without the risk of open flame.

But Riley was asleep, and Purbeck would not countenance anything of the sort. “You might as well set the ship on fire to begin with,” he said flatly, without even the little courtesy he ordinarily offered Laurence, “and save us wondering how long it will take; and you damned well shan’t unchain them, either: we would be brought by the lee in moments if they went jumping around the deck. They must wait like all of us.”

“If I were sure Iskierka would wait, I shouldn’t ask,” Granby said, with some heat.

“If she is run so mad she would sink us only to have a chance of drowning herself, you may say so, and I will run one of the bow-chasers up to her and we will put a ball in her head before she sends us to the bottom,” Purbeck returned coldly; Laurence had to seize Granby’s arm and draw him away.

Even when Riley returned to the deck, however, he was little more favorable to the notion. “I cannot see taking such a risk, in the least,” he said, “and I wonder at your asking,” he added, even his more generous temper worn away with weariness and the endless grating struggle to keep the ship afloat.

“I am tempted to tell Gong Su to go forward,” Granby said angrily, as Laurence towed him back to the dragondeck, “and be damned to them all, talking as though we were asking for our own pleasure. The ship is meant for carrying dragons about to begin with; what else are they here for? Put a ball in her head, indeed; I would shoot him, first.”

He did not even try to speak quietly, and besides the storm had altered their sense of volume, like deaf men raising their voices to compensate for their own lack; his words fell into another brief lull in the roaring tempest, to be carried precisely where they had no business to go. Riley stiffened; Purbeck looked disdainfully; and where the continuing storm might have shortly erased the memory under the pressure of necessity, in that moment abruptly the clouds broke, and the first sunlight in five days spilled down upon the deck.

“I do not see why anyone would ever choose to be going this way, when there are no prizes and such storms,” Temeraire said, gulping toothfish while hovering mid-air; he was in no hurry to return to the ship, at all. He was sure he would not feel dry and warm again for weeks: the thin spare sun was not up to the task, for all it made a swath of bright colors hanging low among the horizon clouds, and he felt waterlogged to the bone.

Iskierka was farther aloft and flying in wild circles, breathing out flames and looping through the heated air to dry herself off. Temeraire would have been tempted to ask her to do as much for him, if it were not beneath him to be asking favors of her; and anyway, she was quite puffed-off enough for being a fire-breather without still more recognition.

“Are there any more of those?” Kulingile asked, swinging down to circle Temeraire, regarding the toothfish with interest. He had already eaten that afternoon a cow, two seals, and an entire pot of rice porridge which Gong Su had meant for all three of them and the leftovers for their crews.

Temeraire pointed him at the meager school of fish, although they were hardly large enough to be worth the effort even for himself. Kulingile swung back aloft to study the school from farther, however, and then made an efficient bite of them by diving and lowering his jaw directly into the water: dozens of startled fish went flopping wildly out of his mouth as he pulled back aloft, but enough remained for him to crunch in satisfaction, seaweed trailing out the sides of his jaws.

To lie upon the deck afterwards full and contented and unchained, with the galley fires going below for warmth, was in every way satisfactory, even though the swell remained high and at regular intervals waves crested up and flung cold spray upon them. Temeraire propped a wing to shield himself from the worst, and curled his forelegs to make a space where Laurence might sit and read to him.

“I am sure it does not stop there?” Temeraire said, when Laurence had paused rather too long in the midst of a poem; Laurence did not continue, though, and when Temeraire peered down he found Laurence with his head tipped back limply in sleep against a talon, the book neglected and open upon his lap.

Temeraire sighed a little and looked, but Sipho was also asleep, huddled up against Kulingile’s side under a scrap of tarpaulin, Demane beside him; even Roland, who might have been able to puzzle out enough of the characters to read to him, was drooping over her mathematics.

Kulingile sighed also. “I do not want to sleep anymore.”

“I am not going to, either,” Iskierka said; not even this declaration stirred Granby, lying in front of her in his splendid cloth-of-gold coat with his head pillowed upon a coil of rope. “I am sure there are no prizes worth taking near-by, but we might as well go look for some.”

Temeraire could not find fault with this project; even Iskierka might have good notions now and again. “Only we must arrange a rendezvous first,” he said, looking for the sailing master, Mr. Smythe, who might tell him the ship’s heading, and other such things, which Laurence always asked for when he and Temeraire flew away from the ship for any great distance. Temeraire was not entirely sure how this information should guide them in returning, but perhaps Mr. Smythe could explain that as well, so he should not need to wake Laurence; there was no need to wake Laurence at all. Not that Temeraire thought Laurence would in any way object; only Laurence often did not think much of seeking after prizes, even when there was plainly nothing better to do, or at least nothing much better.

But Smythe was also not on the deck; only Lord Purbeck was on deck, and Lieutenant George standing at the helm with his head tipped aslant upon his neck, before he suddenly jerked straight again and blinked his watery blue eyes many times.

“I do not mean to wait; we can find the ship again without any of this,” Iskierka said. “It stands to reason we only need to fly back the way we go, and then follow the ship’s course from there; I can remember that without doing figures.”

“I do not see how you can,” Temeraire said, “when we will be over the open ocean, and you cannot mark your place by a tree or a building or anything of that sort; it would be very stupid of us to get lost, and likely have to spend hours flying about trying to find the ship.”

“Maybe we had better not go,” Kulingile said. “They are cooking something else for us, I think: that is a nice smell.”

It was a nice smell—a roasting smell—beef searing over an open flame, somewhere belowdecks, and Temeraire inhaled with pleasure. He was not hungry at present, and he would not have pressed Laurence for more, when he knew all the cattle must be rationed against possible ill-luck fishing, but no-one would have said no to a treat like roast beef; if only Gong Su did not mean merely to turn it into a stew.

“I want the head!” Iskierka said, snaking her head over the rail to peer down into the forward hatch. “I have not had a roasted cow’s head in ages: and you have both been on land forever and ever.”

“It is not as though there were so many cows in the colony that we might have eaten them whenever we liked,” Temeraire said, “and anyway we have all been at sea already for weeks; I do not see why you should have the head all to yourself. I would not at all mind a taste of beef brains-and-tripe.”

“I will have a haunch,” Kulingile said, “if they don’t overcook it,” anxiously; the smoke was growing a little thick.

Laurence jerked awake abruptly and came standing, the book tumbling from his lap heedless of Temeraire’s protest. “What are they about, below there?” he said, and cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed across the deck, “Fire!”

Laurence seized Granby’s shoulder and roused him; together they plunged down the fore ladderway and into the ship’s belly. More smoke was rising around them and wisping up between the deck seams, grey and bitter; men struggling past them to climb up out of the haze, red-eyed and red-faced and not merely stinking of rum but grinning with it, giggling, despite the dreadful danger of their situation. Laurence realized grimly they had certainly broken open the spirit-room: enough unwatered liquor to make the day’s grog for seven hundred men over the course of six months, and every idler and waster of the ship’s company like as not afloat with it, while the officers and able seamen slept off their exhaustion.

The galley floor was blood-slick with drunken butchery—two cows dead and spitted in their parts over open flame, flesh blackening; the fire had escaped to the tables, and was crawling along ropes. “Get to your pumping stations,” Laurence roared, and caught a man out of the press: Yarrow, one of the able seamen and from Cheltenham, not ordinarily an unreliable man, but he had evidently also yielded to the temptation of drink: his face was soot-bruised and his eyes staring like damnation with the fire’s ruddy glow cast upon them.

“To your station!” Laurence shouted at him, but there was no answering comprehension in that face; Yarrow only wrenched himself from Laurence’s grip and back into the general mass of men, all of them maddened with liquor and fear.

Granby had pulled on his leather gauntlets and was tipping over the great cauldrons of seething salt pork to douse the cooking-fires: men screaming as the boiling water and fat ran down the smoking boards and over their bare feet. The fires were quenched, but a man howling in pain knocked over a burning table, and then he was struggling among the others and spreading fire from his clothing to theirs in the close quarters.

“Captain, Captain—” Darcy yelling—one of Riley’s mids and only a boy, his voice still high and shrill, standing bare-legged in a white nightshirt with his yellow hair loose, visible in the light from the fore hatch. Past him Laurence glimpsed Riley, with no neckcloth and his coat barely on, his mouth open but his shouts impossible to hear over the crowd and the fire, and behind him several of his officers in a wedge trying to force a path through the men to the galley.

Laurence had his sword on his belt: no use here. Granby stooping wrenched loose a plank from one of the tables and handed Laurence another; together they began to clout the drunken, maddened men to either side, and Riley at last won through with half-a-dozen officers. The cook’s mate Urquhart, who had been induced to the butchery of the cattle, was cowering behind the stoves with his guilty knives; five of the ship’s boys more enthusiastic over the meat than the grog had secreted themselves in a corner with a joint and were even in the midst of confusion still tearing away half-raw bites; two men who had been knocked down were now dazed enough to be compliant and not so drunk as to be useless.

With this undistinguished crew they set about mastering the worst of the fire: the men dragging over the bags of sand and the boys snatched from their dinner and set to pouring it in cupfuls onto anything which offered the least flicker; Urquhart cringing put out all the galley fires which were left.

He then lost himself slinking into the crowd and made his escape, perhaps hoping to have his sins forgotten if he could only get out of sight for a time; meanwhile hydra-like the little fires still crept along the deck, and the smoke clotted Laurence’s nose and his breath; they stopped and wiped their eyes, steam of the cooking pots damp on their faces. “Laurence, Laurence,” he heard Temeraire calling from above, the deep sonorous voice penetrating through the boards.

“We had better get back up where they can see us,” Granby said hoarsely—no need to articulate for anyone the consequence of leaving the dragons to grow too anxious for their safety.

“Darcy, go along there and tell that tar-eating cawker Powton to beat to quarters, if he damned well cannot hear me shouting it; and if he has deserted his post, find a drum and beat it your own self,” Riley said. “If I cannot have them pumping water, I would rather have the men at their guns than running wild all through the ship; we must get a little order here.”

The boy scrambled up the ladderway even ahead of Laurence; he and Granby had barely gained the deck before the relentless drum-beat was pounding away and the officers all set up a shout, “To quarters, to quarters!” The effort did some good: sailors were not unused to smoke and disorder, in battle or in drill, and the familiar roll sent many of them, even confused with drink, running below to their battle-stations on the gundecks. But too many of the men less trained or less sensible were left shoving to and fro on the upper deck, to no end, and spoiling what progress could be made.

Laurence pulled himself out of the ladderway wreathed in smoke that curled and clung to his arms, and thrust away a pair of sailors wrestling with each other over an uncorked jug that spilled all its contents even as they fought. They reeled away from him, and then Kulingile reached down over the dragondeck railing and snatched them up in one great taloned forehand: Laurence looked up and saw him dropping the pair into an open sack made of his own belly-netting, pulled down loose.

“I thought it would help, sir,” Roland called down: all three of the dragons were taking it in turn to pick off the worst of the drunkards, clearing the deck.

“Well done,” Laurence called back, before he fell to coughing; he took one quick swallow from the rain-barrel to rinse his mouth, then with Granby joined the rest of the aviators in herding the worst of the drunkards forward to their doom, to be piled in on one another in the netting, a mass of arms and thrashing legs.

“Only be careful!” Temeraire called, not without cause: shot was rolling loose over the deck, knocking men off their feet and going overboard with gulping splashes, or tumbling into the hatches. The sailors had the advantage of liquored stupidity, which made them thoroughly unpredictable: careened into one another and pulled on the ropes, knocked over water-casks, slapped and shoved and yelled. The men on duty in the rigging, not drunk themselves and sorry for it, were jeering and throwing down handfuls of greasy slush scraped off the sails with indiscriminate aim.

The swell was not high—that was to say, not high for the Southern Ocean; only twenty feet—and the Allegiance rolled and pitched wildly from her crew’s neglect. “Look out there!” Purbeck shouted, from the helm: one of the cannon had burst loose from its tackle, and as the ship heaved majestically over the next crest, the snub-nosed iron monster eased out of her traces and began trundling towards them at deceptive pace, wheels of the gun-carriage a hollow grumble over the deck.

Granby was trying to guide some men towards the reaching dragons: the carpenter and three of his mates, amiable drunks swaying deeply and keeping their feet only with the practiced balance of long-time sailors, arm in arm with one another and hiccoughing with laughter. The cannon slid into them sideways at the waist and knocked them over the barrel: expressions more of surprise than alarm as it swept onward with them.

Laurence had only time to seize Granby by the arm, and be dragged alongside with him by the inexorable weight: a corner of his coat was hooked over and pierced by the broken iron ring that had set the gun-carriage loose. Sliding over the deck behind the gun, Laurence managed to set his boot-heels to the railing and stop himself with a jolt as the gun crashed with ease through the oak. The cannon went over; the carpenters went, too, at the last yelling in fear as they fell. Granby screamed once, a shocked cry wrenched out of him, and his arm came queerly loose in Laurence’s grip.

The fine silk slid through Laurence’s fingers, embroidery snarling upon his rough calluses; the sun was in his eyes and dazzling on the cloth-of-gold. Granby had clenched shut his jaw, but his hand did not grip back, and he was sliding over the edge. Abruptly Ferris was beside them, dropping to his knees with a knife in his hands. He put it to the back of Granby’s coat and thrust it through, ripping up, and the cloth sheared away.

Laurence tumbled backwards with Granby, who gasped only, very pale under his sunburnt color; the arm still hung limp when Laurence and Ferris had set him on his feet.

“Granby, Granby!” Iskierka was shrilling, leaning deeply over the dragondeck railing and reaching for the mainmast to support herself, trying to get to them: in a moment she would have clawed through the rigging.

Ferris called back, “I’ll bring him to you, Iskierka; don’t snatch at him or you’ll jar his arm worse,” so she subsided back in hissing anxiety; Laurence nodded to Ferris, who ducked under Granby’s other arm and helped him across the deck.

There was no sign of the other men over the side; the ocean was beaten into a froth all around the ship. No more jeering came from the rigging. All the ship’s officers and her Marines were now awake and on the deck, Riley calling orders from the stern and his servant Carver hovering behind him with a neckcloth flapping in the wind like a white banner, attempting now and again to dart in and tie it for him, over Riley’s impatient jerked hand.

“Laurence, are you well?” Temeraire was calling, with not much less anxiety than Iskierka. Laurence wiped his streaming eyes. Smoke still seeped up from the creeping fire below, and Riley was sending the more coherent of the men down in groups under an officer, to go at it with buckets and pails; he needed hands now, and badly.

“I am very well,” Laurence said, “and pray take those men in your belly-netting and go dunk them half-a-dozen times in the ocean; we will see if they can be sobered enough for work.”

Then he was suddenly looking at the Allegiance as through a window of old mazed glass, green and rippled, with a sunset behind her: fascinated he watched her growing darker and more distant, red and gold color swallowed up by murk; he felt curiously light and free, like flying but without wind.

His head was dragged abruptly up through the water, the clear sun overhead a painful dazzle in his eyes and salt water choking his mouth; he vomited more onto the waves, and blindly clung where Demane put his hands, on a piece of driftwood—on a piece of deck planking, hot to the touch and still smoking from one corner—

There was no sunset. The Allegiance was shattered open along her stern: from the gundeck to the waterline a gaping mouth full of splinters and flames, and all her sails were ablaze.

“My God,” Laurence said involuntarily; his voice was a raw croak.

“What happened?” Demane said, gasping for breath beside him, also holding fast to the plank as it bobbed in the waves.

A sudden roar and shudder shook the Allegiance again, and another eruption of incandescent fire burst from her side; Laurence pulled Demane’s head down and ducked his own: in a moment a rain of splinters and ash came pattering over them, stinging on the skin.

The cloud passed. “But—” Demane said. “But—” He stopped.

Laurence looked up again. The flames inside the ship were dying as the waters rushed in over the broken planking. She was tipping backwards and up, the great fan-shaped dragondeck rising into the air. The dragons were circling overhead like ravens watching some great beast die, as she began slowly to sink down beneath the waves.




Chapter Four (#uabc456c0-c894-57e8-82cb-e20d6b044b03)


Temeraire did not precisely understand what had happened, at first—he had been skimming low over the water, soaking the drunken sailors despite their loud protestations, and then suddenly a great roaring and fire everywhere, a hundred times louder than Iskierka might have been. Burning scraps of sailcloth and wood were flung upon him, and when he pulled up into the air to look, he saw the flames rising from the deck.

“Is it a battle?” Kulingile demanded in high excitement, dashing over and dripping water onto Temeraire from the men crammed into his own belly-rigging. “Will we have a prize?”

“Well, I suppose we must have been attacked, but I do not see any other ship at all,” Temeraire had said, deeply confused himself, and winged around the Allegiance, only then seeing the enormous gaping hole into the ship—and so very strange to see her cut open in such a way and look in at all the decks in cross-section, the lumpy white hammocks swinging from the rafters like the drawing he had seen once of silkworms in their cocoons, and the guns sliding out into the ocean with tremendous plashes. Casks and bales were floating everywhere, and the sheep had escaped their pen and were swimming away, bleating: many of them had fire caught in their wool.

“Oh,” Kulingile said with interest.

“I am sure we oughtn’t eat them now,” Temeraire said, “this is not a time to be eating. And where is Laurence?” he added, and looked higher. The deck was littered with rigging and broken yards, the ladderways seething with fire and smoke, and bodies lay limp and strewn carelessly everywhere, bloody. Temeraire did not see Laurence anywhere, or any of his crew, and no-one answered when he called. “Laurence!” he cried again.

He flew around the ship again in perfect distraction—there were men in the water, but it was very hard to make them out, only little heads bobbing very much like casks, and they did not call out to him—why, why had Temeraire ever left the ship without Laurence? He had only meant to be gone a few moments—there had been no enemy in sight—what business did the ship have, bursting open in this way—

He jerked his head as something bright flashed in his eyes, and looking over saw Roland—Roland, waving at him wildly from the edge of the dragondeck. She had out one of his talon-sheaths and was reflecting the sunlight at him off the polished gold; she had been ducked underneath one of the tarpaulins. He stooped and snatched her up at once, and seized little Gerry and Sipho also while he was at it—he ought not have left any of them out of his reach at all, ever.

“Laurence?” he demanded. “Yes, yes, I see you,” he added with impatience, taking up Cavendish, who was waving his arms frantically to be picked off the deck also: a midwingman of sixteen, whom Laurence had taken on for some inconceivable reason; who cared anything for him?

“I don’t see the captain,” Roland said, hooking her carabiners onto his harness, and reaching to help Gerry with his. “Leave off yammering, you damned drunken sots,” she added, to the men clamoring from the belly-netting, as she climbed up past them, “or I will tell Temeraire to cut you all loose, and good riddance.” Temeraire had quite forgotten they were even there. “Do you circle about, Temeraire, and go slowly; we’ll all look, for him and—and for Demane.” Kulingile was already flying in wide anxious rings around the ship, calling for Demane.

Iskierka came winging back to help look—she had Granby, latched on to her back; she had not lost her captain. And she had Ferris also aboard, even though Ferris was Temeraire’s—but Temeraire could not be properly annoyed by that; there was no room in him for anything so small at the moment.

Gerry piped faintly from his back, “I see him! I see Demane, and the captain, too,” and Temeraire plunged at once to snatch them both from the water, with the scrap of wood that seemed quite shockingly, painfully small to have been their only support.

“Give him here!” Kulingile demanded at once, hard on his heels and circling anxiously. “Demane, are you well?”

“He is too chilled to speak,” Laurence said—at least, it seemed he said it; his voice did not sound at all like himself, very hoarse and grating, and he stuttered a little. “You must wait until he has warmed again.”

“I’ve a tarpaulin, sir, if you will wrap up in that,” Roland said, reaching up to help him and Demane step down from Temeraire’s claw onto his shoulders. “And we might get some of our gear off the dragondeck, I expect, before she goes under: most of it was tied down.”

Temeraire at first wondered what Roland meant; then he looked back at the ship. Water was pouring into the open hole, and the Allegiance was sliding slowly and gracefully beneath the surface.

“Oh!” he said, “but how are we to save her?”

“There is no hope of that,” Laurence said, locking himself onto the harness with slow, precise movements; his hands were shaking. “Temeraire, I cannot shout; tell Iskierka and Kulingile to take up whatever survivors they can, and we will go after the supply: only you can hover over the ship.”

Laurence was very urgent they should work quickly, but it did not speed matters at all that most of the sailors, quite stupidly, tried to swim away when Iskierka or Kulingile reached to pick them up out of the water. And they were able to get a few things only off the dragondeck—some harness and another tarpaulin, fetched by Roland hanging down on a strap from Temeraire’s belly, with a hoist rigged up to get the things into his netting.

Gong Su had managed somehow to climb out of the belly of the ship, his boots tied together by their laces slung around his neck, with a thin oilskin pouch. He stood helping a still-drink-addled O’Dea balance on the ship’s figurehead—a woman with flowing robes and also great feathered wings, which Temeraire had never seen before due to its ordinarily being hidden beneath the dragondeck; she presently pointed almost directly into the air.

Gong Su pulled himself up Temeraire’s side, when put onto the harness. “No, sir,” Temeraire heard him say, when Laurence asked him about Fellowes, “I am sorry, but I did not see him; all the lower decks are full of smoke, and there are many men dead.”

“It is only to be expected, sure,” O’Dea said, and hiccoughed. “The judgment of the ocean—”

“Enough,” Laurence said: that was all he said, but O’Dea subsided, abashed, and muffled his further hiccoughs into his hand.

“Should I try for some of those water-casks, sir?” Roland called up.

“Tell her no,” Laurence said to Temeraire, “but you ought to drink whichever of them you can reach, yourself, and let Iskierka and Kulingile do the same; and you had better eat those sheep.”

“Those fellows in the belly-netting will be thirsty very soon,” Temeraire pointed out, “and so will you, Laurence.”

“Let Roland light along a couple of canteens, and as for those bastards, they may go hang,” Laurence said, and it was not only his altered voice which made him sound grim. “You must travel as light as may be, my dear: we will want land sooner than water.”

An hour passed, dragging up supplies and a few more survivors from the ship, and then Iskierka was winging by. “We aren’t pulling anyone else up,” Granby called over wearily; his arm and his shoulder were bound up tightly against his body. “Not alive, anyway: the water is too cold. We had better go.”

“Set your course northeast,” Laurence said, “and keep as far apart from the others as you can and still be in sight of one another, so we may best watch for land; make sure Iskierka and Kulingile have lanterns for the night.”

It was very strange and lonely to fly away from the remains of the Allegiance for good, out across the open ocean with no destination. She was nearly all beneath the water now and sinking more rapidly; only the dragondeck yet jutted out into the sky. The ship’s boats were pulling away, crammed with sailors. They could not keep in company with them, of course; there had only been a brief shouting back and forth. Lieutenant Burrough was in command of the launch, and Lieutenant Paris, a boy of fifteen, in charge of the one cutter which had survived, with Midshipman Darcy to assist him.

“You do not see Riley anywhere, do you?” Laurence asked quietly, after they had spoken with the boats.

“No—” Temeraire said, after a moment. Riley had fed him that enormous red-fleshed tunny, three days after his hatching. Temeraire had never been quite so hungry ever in his life as those first few days, and Laurence had been asleep at the time—Riley had come down to the cabin with the fish himself because most of the sailors were too afraid—

“No,” Temeraire said. “No, Laurence, I do not see him.”

Laurence said nothing; when Temeraire glanced back, his face was set and grim, his eyes looking over the smoking wreckage distant; he only nodded, and turned to ask Mrs. Pemberton, “Ma’am, would you prefer to go in the boats?” She had been retrieved along with Mr. Hammond from the bow cabins: they had pushed out a window and waved her spare petticoat to attract notice, and been pulled up by a rope. “We can lower you down to them, and take off one or two of the men, if they are crowded.”

“Thank you, sir; I should rather stay aboard,” she said.

“You must realize,” Laurence said, “dragons can stay aloft at most two days—perhaps three—”

“As I understand it, there is very little chance of a boat making landfall, either, from these latitudes,” she said. “If it were done, t’were well it were done quickly, I think.”

“Of course you are much better remaining with me than going in one of those boats,” Temeraire said, swallowing a last morsel of raw mutton. After all, Lung Shen Li flew all the long way from China to the coast of Australia, scarcely landing along the way. Laurence might be pessimistic, but Temeraire was quite certain he was not going to sink in an ignominious fashion, without even a battle for excuse; he would certainly not drop before they found land.

“I still think we ought to pull her up,” Iskierka grumbled, circling the tip of the Allegiance once more: all her prize-goods had been in the hold, and Granby’s coat was entirely spoilt. That did not cheer Temeraire precisely, because one could not be happy that anything so very nice was ruined, or going to the bottom of the ocean for no-one but sea-serpents to enjoy, but it was something that Iskierka could not show away anymore, and meanwhile Laurence’s own formal robes were safely aboard in their oilskin bag, with Temeraire’s talon-sheaths for company; he could congratulate himself on having detailed Roland to keep them safe, and on the deck.

“We have already tried, when she did not have so much water in her, so there is no sense in imagining we will do any better a second time,” Temeraire said. “We had much better go.”

He put the sun behind him and flew.

Laurence looked around only once while the Allegiance dwindled away behind them, wreckage and flotsam spreading wide around her like the skirts of a court dress; the sharks were already busy in the water. It was a sorry, bitter end for so many good men: the worst saved and even now making moan in Temeraire’s belly-netting, the best sent down to a silent grave trying to repair their folly, without even hope of glory for reward. Riley would be remembered as the man who had lost a transport on a cloudless day; if any of them lived to carry the report back to the Admiralty.

The weak sun, shrunken down and pale this far south, did little to warm skin and clothes waterlogged with salt, but Laurence was sorry to see it sinking, and still more sorry that the dragons had spent so much of the morning aloft in hunting and play.

They spread out as they flew; by dusk, Kulingile and Iskierka were specks to either side like distant sea-birds, growing faint to see as night fell: then there was only the small struggling glow of the lanterns keeping pace with them through the dark. They made not much noise besides the complaining from below, and even that died over time. The wind cut sharp and icy through the oilskins and tarpaulins on their backs, whistling, and the ocean muttered in low voices, patient.

“I am sorry we did not bring along some of the sheep with us,” Temeraire said, yawning tremendously into the wind as the sun came up after only a brief night. “I would not mind another one now; it cannot be convenient to fish when I have so many people dangling off me.”

He put his head down and flew onward. Laurence could not help but think how much lighter Temeraire would go without the men crammed into his belly-netting; it might mean as much as another day aloft. A thought rooted in darker sentiment, in angry resentment: They have killed us.

There were a few rocky atolls scattered across the Pacific at these latitudes; the chances of finding them with neither map nor compass were not to be counted, and if found, little hope of finding another within flying distance from there. These waters were not so hospitable they would sustain three large dragons for long, fishing in the same narrow space.

There was some better chance they would find instead a ship, which might be spied at even great distance by her lights—some lonely whaler plying her lines, or a clipper making for Cape Horn. But such a ship would offer no refuge for any of the dragons; they could only let off their burden, then drown having spent their last strength to rescue the men responsible for the disaster, who deserved better to end their journey at the end of a rope.

Laurence wrote a report as they flew, ten minutes at a time before he had to pause and warm his hands again, tucked inside his coat beneath the tarpaulin. If they did find any such refuge, the Admiralty should at least receive a full accounting, and know Riley had been neither a fool nor an incompetent.

He was betrayed, rather, by the Folly of foolish men, and the Evil of Liquor: when he and his Officers, who had put forth every most heroic effort and preserved the Ship throughout a Gale of terrific force and danger, over the course of five Days and Nights, were overcome for a little while by Fatigue; a great many of the less-skilled Hands, who were used more gently during the Crisis, in Shifts, than the Officers used themselves, seized upon this Opportunity to bring Ruin on all alike in their mad greed for spirits.




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