Tongues of Serpents. Naomi Novik

       Chapter Three

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

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

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

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

      This last was emphatically full of capitals, and underlined.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Iskierka herself had hatched already breathing fire, and with all the disobliging and determined character anyone could have imagined; she would certainly have had no difficulty in rejecting any unworthy candidate. Most hatchlings did not come from the