Crucible of Gold t-7

by Naomi Novik

  He was reconciled to the loss further when he considered that Curicuillor had provided them with an abundance of supply, and even made him a present of a pair of silver hoops, which Laurence with difficulty dissuaded him from having pierced through his wing-edges. “They would likely catch, in battle,” Laurence said.

  “I am sure I could avoid that,” Temeraire said, “but it is quite true that only one pair would not be very impressive. When we should take a prize next, perhaps we may get a few dozen, and then it will be something like.”

  “Something like a Covent Garden dancer,” Laurence said to Granby, with a sigh.

  “You shan’t complain to me,” Granby said, with some justice.

  The spring was cold and delicious, and they flew the rest of that day over a rolling grassland peopled with roving herds of wild vicuña and a handful of villages: Churki led them on, and the patrol-dragons made no attempt to check them. She had the same orange-and-violet plumage as her mother, and if not quite as large, still more than a respectable match for any Regal Copper: a beast of some twenty years’ age, she had informed Hammond. “I was with the army, until last year,” she said, with her gaze fixed on him in what could only be called an unsettling way, “and I won many honors: then I came home to learn good management from my mother before she goes to the other world. I am ready for an ayllu of my own, now. Very soon I shall begin my establishment.”

  She paused and then added, “Do I understand correctly that you are not properly of Temeraire’s ayllu, yourself? And not Iskierka or Kulingile’s, either?”

  “I must be flattered,” Hammond said to Laurence, “but I hope it may not be considered neglect of any possible service to our country that I do not pursue the offer; I doubt very much she would be willing to come back with me, if I did.”

  “I might put it to her,” Temeraire offered. “Curicuillor was very impressed that we should have so many people in Britain, so perhaps Churki would consider it after all.”

  “Oh, ah,” Hammond said, in some alarm: he had still a faintly green cast from the day’s flying, and no desire whatsoever to belong to a dragon.

  The next day at morning, Churki suggested he should accompany her, flying; and when he feebly demurred she nosed at a tall stand of green-leaved shrub and said, “Brew those leaves fresh, instead of those strange dried ones you carry with you, and you will feel better; or take a handful and chew them.”

  “I trust she would know if it would poison me,” Hammond said doubtfully, and carried a sample to Gong Su for his opinion; Gong Su nibbled and spat and shrugged.

  “It is always safer to boil, first,” he said, and when brewed the tea had a peculiar but not unpleasant flavor; by the end of the day Hammond had drunk seven cups, and would certainly have been dead if it had possessed even the most mildly toxic character.

  “It is quite miraculous,” he said that night. “Do you know, Captain, I have not been ill even once all the day: I feel myself as I have not since we left New South Wales, and I have been shipboard or dragon-back every day. I feel wonderfully clear-headed, indeed; I am willing to declare that it outstrips tea in flavor and in healthful effect, both.”

  Their flight the next day brought them to a deep river valley that Churki called Urubamba, and from there they followed the river upstream through deep gorges. They were descending now, the highest mountains behind them, and more roads and villages scattered beneath their passage, until coming around a narrow pass within the river gorge they saw an immense bridge of rope, stretched from one peak to another.

  It was heavily laden: three horsemen leading their beasts, and a train of some dozen llamas behind them, and a large party of men walking—or rather clinging to the sides. The bridge was swaying not only with ordinary use, but towards its destruction: the thick ropes were fraying, and even as they approached a piece of matting fell away towards the river, decomposing into its component sticks.

  The horses were blindfold, to be led across more calmly, but they were already uneasy with danger; as they scented the dragons on the wind, they went mad with terror and began to rear and struggle against all handling. If there had earlier been any hope of the party’s clearing the span before all the structure came down, there was none now, and scarce moments to disaster.

  Temeraire dived at once; the men on the bridge pointed at him and cried out, shouting, but he passed them and hovering bore up underneath the main portion of the bridge as best he could. “A little farther to port,” Laurence called to him, already unfastening his own harness-straps, “and if you will shift backwards, the weight will lie across your hindquarters. Roland, light along that spare harness, from below; we must get those horses hobbled before they fling themselves over.”

  He pulled himself up onto the bridge ahead of the party, Forthing and Ferris scarcely a step behind, and they together managed to calm the lead horse, if calm were the word for it; they had nearly to bind it into immobility and bodily drag it, and as they hauled the snorting and terrified creature its saddle-girth burst. Saddle, blankets, harness, all fell away and jouncing off Temeraire’s hip-bone tumbled down the gorge and were flung from side to side in their descent, the stirrups clanging, until at last they vanished into the cataracts below.

  Even with Temeraire supporting nearly all its length, the bridge felt alarmingly fragile: a motion not unlike the crow’s nest on a windy day, save it had not the solidity of aged oak underfoot and thrice-laid hawsers in arm’s reach. Laurence managed to draw the plunging horse along its length—a stallion, he noted with some irritation, and no wonder the beast could scarcely be managed—with Ferris lashing its hindquarters unmercifully, until at last it was got up onto the far bank and he left Forthing to secure it to a nearby tree.

  He climbed cautiously back out upon the leaping bridge, and offered a hand to the man lying prostrate and clinging to the matting, white-faced; what use, if the bridge were to fall apart around him, Laurence did not see. “Get along, there,” he said, pushing him along the length, and turned to the second horse: but the poor animal’s frenzy had overcome it. In its mad kicking, it had put one leg clear through the matting, tearing its own flesh against the sticks, and even a glance showed there was no hope: blood pouring freely, and bone showing white from fetlock to hock.

  The man at its bridle had seen as much; he drew a pistol from his waist and threw Laurence a swift unhappy look, found no reprieve in Laurence’s nod, and clapping the gun to the animal’s head put a period to its misery. “Temeraire,” Laurence called up, “can you take this carcass off?”

  “Not very easily, I am afraid,” Temeraire said, craning his head about, “but I had a llama this morning: Kulingile, would you care for it?” he called: the other dragons had withdrawn to the far side of the gorge, and perched themselves where they could upon the bare stone.

  “Arrêtez, arrêtez!” the handler said, pointing to the fallen animal’s belly, which Laurence only then saw was grossly distended with pregnancy; as they watched a tiny hoof might be seen pushing out from within as if in protest.

  “What the devil does he want to do, cut it out in mid-air while we are all hanging fire?” Ferris said: he had clambered back out to Laurence’s side, and the bridge yet undulated beneath them like a blowing veil.

  Kulingile came off the wall of the gorge and sweeping low took the dead horse off in one massive talon, and laid it in the same pass upon the far side; Demane slid down his shoulder and was by the side of the carcass in a moment, knife out, to slice open the belly. The handler looked long enough to see that Demane knew his work, then turned back to the last of the horses; with his assistance and that of the third horseman, they had the beasts off at last, and in the meantime the llama-train and their handlers had retreated to the other side of the gorge.

  The little foal had been extracted from the body of its dam and was tottering feebly on stick legs; the handler had wiped it gently clean. “What does he mean to feed it?” Demane said, frowning, but the third animal, another mare, was not
much less forward in pregnancy as well. Though she seemed justly perplexed to be applied to by a foal before having given birth, she did not make great objection, and shortly the small animal was suckling energetically enough to give hope of its survival.

  “Mille fois merci,” the handler of the horses said, coming away from the nursing foal to seize and shake Laurence’s hand vigorously.

  “De rien,” Laurence said, bowing politely, and then belatedly realized they were speaking French: and also that his hand was now all over blood. The horseman noticed as much in the same moment, and in some embarrassment left off his clasp.

  “Do you mean to tell me,” Granby said, when Iskierka had landed—they were encamping for the night only a little way off from the men they had rescued—“that we have just been risking our necks to save a French baggage-train?”

  “Yes,” Laurence said. “They are on their way to Cusco overland, following De Guignes: he and his embassy are certainly there already.”

  “And a baggage-train of gifts, I have no doubt,” Hammond said, “meant for the Sapa Inca: those horses are breeding stock.” He spoke half-reproachfully, as though he blamed Laurence for having rescued the Frenchmen and their goods. “And here we look little more than beggars.”

  “As we have none to give, sir,” Laurence said, “let us hope instead that the ruler of a mighty nation will not be so easily swayed by trinkets and gifts.”

  “Let us hope that without them, we will be admitted into his presence at all,” Hammond said.

  Chapter 11

  C USCO STOOD IN THE BOWL of a mountaintop, cupped round by jagged short peaks, green and mossy, and overlaid with a veil of clouds. The city from aloft had a curious and peculiarly deliberate shape: a lion in profile, its head an immense fortress of carven stones built upon a hill, and the city its great body, lying alongside the banks of a river and formed of many large houses of fine construction, many with deeply sloping roofs thrust high into the air, of thickly layered thatch. The buildings were established in groups around courtyards: in several of these dragons lay sleeping, in others sitting alert and watchful, all of them in an array of brilliant plumage and adorned in gold and silver, so a faint chiming might be heard even from aloft.

  So far as Laurence could see, there were no hovels, not even smaller houses, and no sign of any market within the proper bounds of the city: these practicalities seemed to be constrained to villages that huddled around the city walls in clusters, along short and well-used roads.

  Several dragons in the ensign of the patrol came winging to meet them, long before they had reached those walls: the patrol-beasts flew in rings around them peering at Temeraire’s safe-conduct, and exchanging a yammering conversation with Churki. They were at last escorted—whether as guests or prisoners was difficult to ascertain—towards an immense raised plaza, directly to the north of the river, plainly of ceremonial function and which would have admitted even a small army of dragons.

  “We are to stay in the kallanka there to the side,” Churki informed Hammond, indicating a great covered hall alongside the plaza. “The other foreigners, they say, are on the other side—”

  “The other foreigners?” Hammond said. “De Guignes is here, then?”

  And as they landed, across the plaza Laurence could see Genevieve asleep beneath another covered hall, the Fleur-de-Nuit’s immense lamp-eyes lidded down to pale slits.

  The patrol-dragons settled down around them as they landed, with an air of intending to remain; Churki held still more discussion with them, and at one moment turned and hissed something aside to Hammond, who started and then said to Laurence, “Pray, Captain, shall we let the men down? Churki is of the opinion that—that it cannot but convey our peaceful intentions, when they have seen us disembark—”

  From his awkward looks, Laurence doubted whether Churki’s exact meaning had been translated, but Temeraire was distracted at the moment by low argument with Iskierka on the subject of the ornamentation of an immense temple visible a little to the southeast: “Laurence,” he said, swinging his head around, “do you think that can really be gold, there on the outside of that building? Surely no-one would put gold out where it might be rained upon, and dirtied.”

  “You had better apply to Churki, for an answer which might have some authority behind it; it may be gold leaf only,” Laurence said, doubtful himself: certainly the frieze looked golden, but it seemed implausible. “Mr. Fer—Mr. Forthing, I think we will let down the men, if you please.”

  The disembarkation of nearly two hundred men certainly had an effect: as the belly-netting was let down and the sailors gratefully spread out to stretch their legs, and set up a clamoring for beer, the patrol-dragons stretched out their necks to peer at them with interest and low murmurs of appreciation and, Laurence thought, perhaps of envy. In any case, they looked on Temeraire and Iskierka and Kulingile with a less suspicious eye.

  “Yes,” Churki said, “now they begin to believe me, when I tell them you brought back one of my mother’s own stolen ones: they thought I must be mistaken somehow. And of course they are very impressed; you see, there is no reason for you to be distressed that the French are bringing horses and jewels; what is that, to what you have brought?”

  Temeraire added to his translation, “I have no notion what she can mean; surely she sees we are quite destitute,” and asked her.

  Churki shook her wings out, with a great jingling noise. “Why, all these men, of course.”

  “Mr. Forthing,” Laurence said, as they began to lay out pallets and rig a few rough tents for more shelter against the cool mountain air, “you will post a watch of trusted men, and let there always be an officer on duty with them, if you please.” A guard which he meant for protection in all directions: Laurence was unpleasantly certain that Hammond would not have scrupled to exchange even two hundred men for any advantage he might gain thereby over the French, in establishing diplomatic relations with the Inca.

  The letter, or khipu, had gone to the authorities; Churki also left them, to convey her assurances to a more significant representative. But the day wore away around them without an answer, and meanwhile across the plaza they saw the great French Grand Chevalier Piccolo make a landing accompanied by several Incan dragons who bore many slaughtered llamas in their talons, to share out as a repast with Genevieve.

  “I would not mind a llama,” Kulingile said, watching intently. “Mayn’t we go hunting? It is getting late.”

  But Hammond would not have any of them leave, before some authorization came; he was not without justice anxious should any of the dragons, flying alone, provoke a local beast to challenge their presence in the heart of the empire. He was still more adamant when Churki at last returned, to inform them that their messages had gone home, and some representative of the court would shortly come and see them: “We cannot fail to meet them in whatever state we can manage,” he said, and would have the dragons line themselves up, and arrange the men in ranks around them, dispersed in such a way as to suggest their numbers were even greater than they were.

  “You might put on your robes now, Laurence,” Temeraire suggested, egged on by Hammond’s enthusiasm; Laurence could only with difficulty divert him to the task of assuring his own appearance: the talon-sheaths were brought out, and the breastplate polished, and under Roland’s guidance a party of the sailors were formed into a line to carry water from the great fountain at the center of the courtyard to the dragons, and pour it over their backs.

  “For I cannot but agree with Mr. Hammond that we must present a respectable appearance, if we can,” Temeraire said defensively, when he had roared in a small way at a few of the sailors who had unwarily expressed objections to being put to this labor, “and I am sorry to say it, but for that we can only rely on Kulingile and Iskierka and myself: there is no denying we have a very strange look, as a party, with all that Curicuillor was kind enough to do for us in the article of clothing. You would not wish us to give this Incan nobleman a disgust of us, Laur
ence, surely; and are you certain you would not consider—”

  Fortunately, before Temeraire could renew his efforts to push Laurence into the robes, Churki said, “There: he comes now, and look, it is a lord of the Sapa Inca’s own ayllu, himself; did I not promise, Hammond?”

  Temeraire sat up sharply, arranging his wings against his back, looking around the empty courtyard as vainly as the rest of them; then he looked aloft and said, “Oh: not him again?” and drooped his wings, as Maila Yupanqui descended into the square before them.

  “I do not see why you insist on being so unfriendly,” Iskierka said, and made rather a spectacle of herself in Temeraire’s opinion nodding to Maila, who simpered back at her even while he answered Hammond’s shouted inquiries.

  “There is certainly some official who might meet with you, if you wish. Perhaps the political officer for Antisuyo: you wish to travel through the jungle, do you not, to this country of Brazil?”

  “Yes—yes, of course,” Hammond said, darting a cautious glance at Laurence, “but naturally as I am here, as representative of His Majesty’s Government it is incumbent upon me—it would be inexcusable—not to make my bows to the Sapa Inca: to convey His Majesty’s affections and to bring greetings from the ruler of one great nation to another; and information regarding the present circumstances of the war in Europe—”

  “Well, you are a man,” Maila said dismissively. “It is not yet clear to me such a meeting must be necessary. But,” he turned to Iskierka, “there is no reason you might not visit the court, and be presented: the Sapa Inca has heard of your victory in the arena of Talcahuano, and is most eager to see you: the great Manca Copacati has not been defeated in battle in twenty-three years, and all would know how it was done.”