Crucible of Gold. Naomi Novik
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,