Crucible of Gold t-7

by Naomi Novik

  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 me
n 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 4

  T EMERAIRE 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.