Tongues of Serpents. Naomi Novik

       Chapter One

      There were few streets in the main port of Sydney which deserved the name, besides the one main thoroughfare, and even that bare packed dirt, lined only with a handful of small and wretched buildings that formed all the permanence of the colony. Tharkay turned off from this and led the way down a cramped, irregularly arranged alleyway between two wooden-slat buildings to a courtyard full of men drinking, in surly attitudes, with no roof but a tarpaulin.

      Along one side of the courtyard, the further from the kitchens, the convicts sat in their drab and faded duck trousers, dusty from the fields and quarries and weighted down with fatigue; along the other, small parties of men from the New South Wales Corps watched with candidly unfriendly faces as Laurence and his companions seated themselves at a small table near the edge of the establishment.

      Besides their being strangers, Granby’s coat drew the eye:bottle-green was not in the common way, and though he had put off the worst excesses of gold braid and buttons with which Iskierka insisted upon adorning him, the embroidery at cuffs and collar could not be so easily detached. Laurence wore plain brown, himself: to make a pretence of standing in the Aerial Corps now was wholly out of the question, of course, and if his dress raised questions concerning his situation, that was certainly no less than honest, as neither he nor anyone else had yet managed to work out what that ought in any practical sense to be.

      ‘I suppose this fellow will be here soon enough,’ Granby said, unhappily; he had insisted on coming, but not from any approval of the scheme.

      ‘I fixed the hour at six,’ Tharkay answered, and then turned his head: one of the younger officers had risen from the tables and was coming towards them.

      Eight months aboard ship with no duties of his own and shipmates nearly united in their determination to show disdain had prepared Laurence for the scene which, with almost tiresome similarity, unfolded yet again. The insult itself was irritating for demanding some answer, more than anything else; it had not the power to wound in the mouth of a coarse young boor, stinking of rum and visibly unworthy to stand among even the shabby ranks of a military force alternately called the Rum Corps. Laurence regarded Lieutenant Agreuth only with distaste, and said briefly, ‘Sir, you are drunk; go back to your table, and leave us at ours.’

      There the similarity ended, however: ‘I don’t see why I,’ Agreuth said, his tongue tangling awkwardly, so he had to stop and repeat himself, speaking with excessive care, ‘why I should listen to anything out of a piss-pot whoreson traitor’s fucking mouth—’

      Laurence stared, and heard the tirade with mounting incredulity; he would have expected the gutter language out of a dockyard pickpocket in a temper, and hardly knew how to hear it from an officer. Granby had evidently less difficulty, and sprang to his feet saying, ‘By God, you will apologize, or for a ha’penny I will have you flogged through the streets.’

      ‘I would like to see you try it,’ Agreuth said, and leaning over spat into Granby’s glass; Laurence stood too late to catch Granby’s arm from throwing it into Agreuth’s face.

      That was of course an end to even the barest hope or pretence of civility; Laurence instead pulled Granby back by his arm, out of the way of Agreuth’s wildly swinging fist, and letting go struck back with the same hand, clenched, as it came again at his face.

      He did not hold back; if brawling was outrageous, it looked inevitable, and he would as soon have it over with quickly. So the blow was armed with all the strength built up from childhood on rope-lines and harness, and Laurence knocked Agreuth directly upon the jaw: the lieutenant lifted half an inch from the ground, his head tipping back and leading the rest of his frame. Stumbling a few steps as he came down, he pitched face-front onto the floor straight through the neighbouring table, to the accompaniment of several shattering glasses and the stink of cheap rum.

      That might have been enough, but Agreuth’s companions, though officers and some of them older and more sober than he, showed no reluctance