Tongues of Serpents. Naomi Novik
to Temeraire, marched out in the morning for no reason and then marched back at night. He had flown after them one day, just to see, and had discovered they were only going to a quarry to cut out bits of stone, and were then bringing the bits of stone back to town in wagon-carts, which seemed quite absurd and inefficient: he could have carried five cartloads in a single flight of perhaps only ten minutes; but when Temeraire had landed to offer his assistance, the convicts had all run away, and the soldiers had complained to Laurence stiffly afterwards.
They certainly did not like Laurence; one of them had been very rude, and said, ‘For five pence I would have you down at the quarries, too,’ at which Temeraire put his head down and said, ‘For two pence I will have you in the ocean; what have you done, I should like to know, when Laurence has won a great many battles with me, and we drove Napoleon off; and you have only been sitting here. You have not even managed to raise a respectable number of cows.’
Temeraire now felt perhaps that jibe had been a little injudicious, or perhaps he ought not to have let Laurence go into town, after all, when there were people who wished to put him into quarries. ‘I will go and look for Laurence and Granby,’ he said to Iskierka, ‘and you will stay here: if you go, you will likely set something on fire, anyway.’
‘I will not set anything on fire!’ Iskierka said. ‘Unless it needs setting on fire, to get Granby out.’
‘That is just what I mean,’ Temeraire said. ‘How, pray tell, would setting something on fire do any good at all?’
‘If no one would tell me where he was,’ Iskierka said, ‘I am quite sure that if I set something on fire and told them I would set the rest on fire too, they would come about: so there.’
‘Yes,’ Temeraire said, ‘and in the meanwhile, very likely he would be in whatever house you had set on fire, and be hurt: and if not, the fire would jump along to the nearby buildings whether you liked it to or not, and he would be in one of those. Whereas I will just take the roof off a building, and then I can look inside and lift them out, if they are in there, and people will tell me anyway.’
‘I can take a roof off a building, too!’ Iskierka said. ‘You are only jealous, because someone is more likely to want to take Granby, because he has more gold on him and is much more fine.’
Temeraire swelled with indignation and breath, and would have expelled them both in a rush, but Roland interrupted urgently, saying, ‘Oh, don’t quarrel! Look, here they are all coming back, right as rain: that is them on the road, I am sure.’
Temeraire whipped his head around: three small figures had just emerged from the small cluster of buildings which made the town, and were on the narrow cattle track which came towards the promontory.
Temeraire and Iskierka’s heads were raised high, looking down towards them; Laurence raised a hand and waved vigorously, despite the twinge in his ribs, which a bath and a little rough bandaging had not gone very far to alleviate; that injury, however, could be concealed. ‘There; at least we will not have them down here in the streets,’ Granby said, lowering his own arm, and wincing a little; he probed gingerly at his shoulder.
It was still a near-run thing when they had reached the promontory – a slow progress, and Laurence’s legs wished to quiver on occasion, before they had reached the top and could sit on the makeshift benches. Temeraire sniffed, and then lowered his head abruptly and said, ‘You are hurt; you are bleeding,’ with urgent anxiety.
‘It is nothing to concern you; I am afraid we only had a little accident in the town,’ Laurence said, guiltily preferring a certain degree of deceit to the inevitable complications of Temeraire’s indignation.
‘So, dearest, you see it is just as well I wore my old coat,’ Granby said to Iskierka, in a stroke of inspiration, ‘as it has got dirty and torn, which you would have minded if I had on something nicer.’
Iskierka was thus diverted to a contemplation of his clothing, instead of his bruises, and promptly pronounced it a natural consequence of the surroundings. ‘If you will go into a low, wretched place like that town, one cannot expect anything better,’ she said, ‘and I do not see why we are staying here, at all; I think we had better go straight back to England.’
‘I am not surprised in the least,’ Bligh said, ‘in the least; you see exactly how it is now, Captain Laurence, with these whoreson dogs and Merinos.’
His language was not much better than that of the aforementioned dogs, and neither could Laurence much prefer his company. He did not like to think so of the King’s governor and a Navy officer, and particularly not one so much a notable seaman: his feat of navigating 3600 miles of open ocean in only a ship’s launch, when left adrift by the Bounty, was still a prodigy.
Laurence had looked at least to respect, if not to like; but the Allegiance had stopped to take on water in Van Diemen’s Land, and there found the governor they had confidently expected to meet in Sydney, deposed by the Rum Corps and living in a resentful exile. He had a thin, soured mouth, perhaps the consequence of his difficulties; a broad forehead exposed by his receding hair and delicate, anxious features beneath it, which did not very well correspond with the intemperate language he was given to unleash on those not uncommon occasions when he felt himself thwarted.
He had no recourse but to harangue passing Navy officers with demands to restore him to his post, but all of those prudent gentlemen, to date, had chosen to stay well out of the affair while the news took the long sea-road back to England for an official response. This, Laurence supposed, had been neglected in the upheaval of Napoleon’s invasion and its aftermath; nothing else could account for so great a delay. But no fresh orders had come, nor a replacement governor, and meanwhile in Sydney the New South Wales Corps, and those men of property who had promoted their coup, grew all the more entrenched.
The very night the Allegiance put into the harbour, Bligh had himself rowed out to consult with Captain Riley; he had very nearly asked himself to dinner, and directed the conversation with perfect disregard for Riley’s privilege; though as a Navy man himself he could not be ignorant of the custom.
‘A year now, and no answer,’ Bligh had said in a cloud of spittle and fury, waving his hand to Riley’s steward to send the bottle round to him again. ‘A full year gone, Captain, and meanwhile in Sydney these scurrilous worms yet inculcate all the populace with licentiousness and sedition: it is nothing to them, nothing, if every child born to woman on these shores should be a bastard and a bugger and a drunken leech, so long as they do a little work upon their farms, and lie quiet under the yoke: let the rum flow is their only maxim, the liquor their only coin and god.’ He did not, however, stint himself of the wine, near-vinegar though it was, nor the last dregs of Riley’s port; ate well, also, as might a man living mostly on hardtack and a little occasional game.
Laurence, silent, rolling the stem of his glass between his fingers, could not but feel some sympathy: a little less of self-restraint, and he might have railed with as much fervour, against the cowardice and stupidity which had united to send Temeraire into exile. He too wished to be restored, if not to rank or to society, at least to a place where they might be useful; and not to merely sit here on the far side of the world upon a barren rock, and complain unto heaven.
But now Bligh’s downfall might as easily be his own: his one hope of return had been a pardon from the colony’s governor, for himself and Temeraire; or at least enough of a good report to reassure those in England whose fears and narrow interest had seen them sent away.
It had always been a scant hope, a little threadbare; but Jane Roland certainly wished for the return of Britain’s one Celestial, when she had Lien to contend with on the enemy’s side. Laurence might have some hope that the nearly superstitious fear of the breed which had sprung up, after the dreadful carnage of Lien’s attack upon the Navy, at the battle of Shoeburyness, was beginning to subside, and cooler minds regret the impulse which had sent away