Empire of Ivory t-4

by Naomi Novik

  “She fusses for days, if I will not, every time she takes another prize,” Granby muttered, crimson to the ears.

  “How many has she taken?” Laurence said, rather dubiously.

  “Oh—five, since she set about it in earnest, some of them strings like this one,” Granby said. “They strike to her right off, as soon as she gives them a bit of flame; and we have not a great deal of competition for them: I do not suppose you know, we have not been able to hold the blockade.”

  They exclaimed over this news with alarm. “It is the French patrols,” Granby said. “I don’t know how, but I would swear they have another hundred dragons more than they ought, on the coast; we cannot account for them. They only wait until we are out of sight, and then they go for the ships on blockade: dropping bombs, and as we haven’t enough dragons well yet to guard at all hours, the Navy must stand ship-and-ship, to fend them off. It is a damned good thing you have come home.”

  “Five prizes,” Temeraire said, very low, and his temper was not improved when they reached Dover, where upon a jutting promontory above the cliffs Iskierka now had a large pavilion made of blackened stone, sweating from the exhalations of her spines and surely over-warm in the summer heat. Temeraire nevertheless regarded it with outrage, particularly after she had smugly arranged herself upon the threshold, her coils of vivid red and violet displayed to advantage against the stone, and informed him that he was very welcome to sleep there, if he should feel at all uncomfortable in his clearing.

  He swelled up and said very coolly, “No, I thank you,” and retreating to his own clearing did not even resort to the usual consolation, of polishing his breastplate, but only curled his head beneath his wing and sulked.

  Chapter 14

  HIDEOUS SLAUGHTER AT THE CAPE

  Thousands Slain! Cape Coast Destroyed!

  Louanda and Benguela Burnt!

  It will require yet some time before a complete Accounting will render final all the worst fears of Kin and Creditors alike, throughout these Isles, as to the extent of the Disaster, which has certainly encompassed the Wreck of several of our foremost citizens, for the destruction of many of their Interests, and left us to mourn without certain knowledge the likely Fate of our brave Adventurers and our noble Missionaries. Despite the territorial Questions, associated with the War with France, which lately made us Enemies, the deepest Sympathies must be extended now across the Channel to those bereaved Families, in the Kingdom of Holland, who in the Settlers at the Cape Colony have lost in some cases all their nearest Relations. All voices must be united in lamenting the most hideous and unprovoked Assault imaginable, by a Horde of violent and savage Beasts, egged on by the Jealousy of the native Tribesmen, resentful of the rewards of honest Christian labor…

  LAURENCE FOLDED THE paper, from Bristol, and threw it beside the coffee-pot, with the caricature facing downwards: a bloated and snaggle-toothed creature labeled Africa, evidently meant to be a dragon, and several unclothed natives of grinning black visage prodding with spears a small knot of women and children into its open maw, while the pitiful victims uplifted their hands in prayer and cried O Have You No Pity in a long banner issuing from their mouths.

  “I must go see Jane,” he said. “I expect we will be bound for London, this afternoon; if you are not too tired.”

  Temeraire was still toying with his last bullock, not quite sure if he wanted it or not; he had taken three, greedy after the short commons of their voyage. “I do not mind going,” he said, “and perhaps we may go a little early, and see our pavilion; there can be no reason not to go near the quarantine-grounds now, surely.”

  If they did not bring the first intelligence of the wholesale disaster in Africa, having been preceded in their flight by many a swifter vessel, certainly they carried the best: before their arrival, no-one in England had any notion of the identity of the mysterious and implacable foe who had so comprehensively swept clean the African coast. Laurence and Harcourt and Chenery had of course written dispatches, describing their experiences, and handed them on to a frigate which had passed them off Sierra Leone, and to another in Madeira; but in the end, these had only anticipated their arrival by a few days. In any case, formal dispatches, even the lengthy ones produced over the leisure of a month at sea, were by no means calculated to satisfy the clamoring demands of Government for information on so comprehensive a disaster.

  Jane at least did not waste their time with a recounting of the facts. “I am sure you will have enough of that before their Lordships,” she said. “You will both have to come, and Chenery also; although perhaps I can beg you off, Harcourt, if you like: under the circumstances.”

  “No, sir, thank you,” Catherine said, flushing. “I should prefer no special treatment.”

  “Oh, I will take all the special treatment we can get, with both hands,” Jane said. “At least it will make them give us chairs, I expect; you look wretched.”

  Jane herself was much improved, from when Laurence had left her; her hair was shot more thoroughly with silver, but her face, better fleshed, showed all the effects of cares lightened and a return to flying: a healthier wind-burnt color in the cheek, and lips a little chapped. She frowned at Catherine, who despite a perpetual lobsterish color from the sun managed still to look faintly bluish under the eyes, and pallid. “Are you still being taken ill?”

  “Not very often,” Catherine said, without perfect candor; Laurence—indeed, all the ship’s company—had been witness to her regular visits to the rail, aboard ship. “And I am sure that I will be better now we are not at sea.”

  Jane shook her head disapprovingly. “At seven months I was as well as ever I have been in my life. You have not put on nearly enough weight. It is an engagement like any other, Harcourt, and we must be sure you are up to the mark.”

  “Tom wishes me to see a physician, in London,” Catherine said.

  “Nonsense,” Jane said. “A sensible midwife is what you need; I think my own is still in harness, here in Dover. I will find her direction for you. I was damned glad of her, I will tell you. Twenty-nine hours’ labor,” she added, with the same dreadful reminiscent satisfaction as a veteran of the wars.

  “Oh,” Catherine said.

  “Tell me, do you find—” Jane began, and shortly Laurence sprang up, and went to interest himself in the map of the Channel which was laid out on Jane’s desk, striving rather desperately not to hear the rest of their conversation.

  The map was not as distressing in the visceral sense, although this was perhaps rather a sign of improper sensibility on his part, as the circumstances it depicted were as unfortunate as could be imagined. All the French coastline of the Channel was now littered with markers, blue representing companies of men, white for the individual dragons: clustered around Brest there were fifty thousand men at least, and another fifty at Cherbourg; at Calais a force half that number again; and scattered among these positions some two hundred dragons.

  “Are these figures certain?” Laurence asked, when they had finished their exchange, and joined him at the table.

  “No, more’s the pity,” Jane said. “He has more; dragons, at any rate. Those are only the official estimates. Powys insists he cannot be feeding so many beasts, so close together, when we have the ports blockaded; but I know they are there, damn them. I get too many reports from the scouts, more dragons than they ought to be seeing at a time; and the Navy tell me they cannot get a smell of fish but they catch it themselves, the price of meat has gone so dear across the way. Our own fishermen are rowing over to sell their catches.

  “But let us be grateful,” she added. “If the situation were not so damned dire, I am sure they would keep you in Whitehall a month, answering questions about this business in Africa; as it is, I will be able to extract you without much more than a day or two of agony.”

  Laurence lingered, when Catherine had left; Jane filled his glass again. “And you would do as well with a month at the seashore yourself, to look at you,” she said. “You ha
ve had rather a dreadful time of it, I find, Laurence. Will you stay to dinner?”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “Temeraire wishes to go up to London while it is still light out.” He thought perhaps he ought to excuse himself; he rather felt that he wished to talk to her, more than knew what he wanted to say, and he could not be standing there stupidly.

  She rescued him, though, saying, “I am very grateful to you, by the bye, for the compliment to Emily. I have sent on to Powys at Aerial Command to confirm her and Dyer in rank as ensign, just so there should be nothing havey-cavey about the business; but there shan’t be any trouble about that. I don’t suppose you have any likely boys in mind for their places?”

  “I do,” he said, steeling himself, “if you please: the ones I brought from Africa.”

  Demane had passed the weeks after their escape from Capetown deep in delirium, with his side, where the bayonet had gone in, swelled out beneath the small scabbed cut as if an inflated bladder had sat beneath the skin; and Sipho, too distressed even to speak, refusing to leave the sickbed except to creep away and fetch water or gruel, which he patiently fed his brother spoon by spoon. The southern coast had slipped rapidly away to starboard, taking with it any hope of kin to whom they might have been returned, long before the ship’s surgeon had informed Laurence that the boy would make a recovery. “It is to your credit, sir,” Laurence had said, even while wondering whatever was to be done with the boys now; by then the Allegiance had seen Benguela, and there could be no question of turning back.

  “It is no such thing,” Mr. Raclef had retorted, “a wound in the vitals of this sort is invariably fatal, or ought to be; there was nothing to be done but make him comfortable,” and he went away again muttering, vaguely offended at having so obvious a diagnosis defied.

  The patient persisted in his defiance, making good proofs of the resilience of youth, and very shortly had reacquired the two stone of weight lost in his illness, and another for good measure. Demane was dismissed the sick-bay before they had crossed the equator, and the two were installed in the passenger quarters together, in a tiny curtained-off compartment scarcely large enough to sling their one small hammock: the older boy’s wariness would not permit them to sleep at the same time, and he insisted alternating watches.

  He was not without justification nervous of the general crowd of refugees from the Cape, who regarded the boys with simmering anger as representatives of the “kaffirs” they blamed for the destruction of their homes. It was useless to try and explain to the settlers that Demane and Sipho were of a wholly different nation than the one which had attacked them, and there was great indignation that the boys should be housed among them, particularly from the elderly shopkeeper and the farmhand whose respective nooks had each been shortened by the width of seven inches for their sake.

  A few quiet belowdecks scuffles with the settler boys predictably followed. These ceased quickly, it becoming rapidly evident that a boy, even lately ill, who had been for several years entirely dependent for his survival upon his own hunting skills, and by necessity forced to contend against lions and hyenas for his supper, was not an advisable opponent for boys whose experience ended at schoolyard squabbling. They resorted instead to the petty torments of smaller children, covert pinching and prodding, small malicious traps of slush or filth left just beside the hammock, and the ingenious use of weevils. The third time Laurence found the boys sleeping on the dragondeck, tucked up against Temeraire’s side, he did not send them back to their small compartment below.

  Temeraire, being nearly their solitary point of familiarity and the only one left among the company who had any grasp of their language whatsoever, quickly lost whatever lingering horrors he had possessed for them; the more so, as they were sure, in his company, to avoid their tormentors. The boys were soon as apt to be clambering over his back, in their games, as any of the younger officers, and through his tutelage acquiring a reasonable command of English, so that a little while after they had left Cape Coast, Demane might come to Laurence and ask, in a steady voice betrayed only by his hand clutching tightly at the railing, “Are we your slaves now?”

  Laurence stared, shocked, and the boy added, “I will not let you sell Sipho away from me,” defiantly, but with a note of such desperation as showed his understanding that he had not much power, to defend himself or his brother from such a fate.

  “No,” Laurence said, at once; it was a dreadful blow, to find himself regarded as a kidnapper. “Certainly not; you are—” but he was here stopped by the uncomfortable lack of any position to name, and forced to conclude, lamely, “you are by no means slaves. You have my word you shall not be parted,” he added; Demane did not look much comforted.

  “Of course you are not slaves,” Temeraire said, in dismissive tones, to rather better effect, “you are of my crew,” an assumption springing from his native possessiveness, which serenely made them his own in spite of all the obvious impracticality of such an arrangement, and forced Laurence to recognize he could see no other solution, which should give them the respectability they might have earned, among their own tribe, for the services which they had performed.

  No one could have called them gentleman-like, in birth or in education, and Laurence was dismally aware that while Sipho was a biddable, good-natured child, Demane was too independent, and more likely to be obstinate as a pig, if not belligerent, towards anyone wishing to effect an alteration in his manners. But difficulty alone could not be permitted to stand in the way: he had taken them from home, from all the relations which they might have, and robbed them of all standing in the world. If, at the end, there had been no practical way to restore them, he could not escape responsibility for the situation having arisen; he had willfully contributed to it, to the material benefit of the Corps and his mission.

  “Captains can choose whom they like; that has always been the way of it,” Jane said, “but I will not say there shan’t be a noise about it: you may be sure that as soon as the promotions are posted in the Gazette, I will be hearing from a dozen families. At present we have more likely boys trained up than places for them, and you have got yourself the reputation of a proper schoolmaster, even if they did not like to see their sprouts on a heavy-weight: it is a pretty sure road to making lieutenant, if they do not cut straps before then.”

  “I must surely give the greater weight,” he said, “to those who have given so much in our service; and Temeraire already counts them as his own crew.”

  “Yes; but the carpers will say you ought to take them as personal servants, or at best ground crew,” she said. “But damn them all; you shall have the boys, and if anyone complains of their birth, you may always declare them princes in their native country, without any fear of being proven false. Anyway,” she added, “I will put them on the books, quietly, and we will hope they slip past. Will you let me give you a third? Temeraire’s complement allows for it.”

  He assented, of course; and she nodded. “Good: I will send you Admiral Gordon’s youngest grandson, and that will make him your best advocate, instead of your loudest critic: no one has as much time for writing letters and making noise as a retired admiral, I assure you.”

  Sipho was very willing to be pleased, when informed of their elevation; Demane said a little suspiciously, “We take messages? And ride the dragon?”

  “And other errands,” Laurence said, and was then puzzled how to explain errands, until Temeraire said, “Those are small boring things, which no one very much likes to do,” which did not reduce the suspicion.

  “When will I have time to hunt?” the boy demanded.

  “I do not suppose you will,” Laurence said, taken aback, and only after a little more exchange gathered the boy did not realize that they would be fed and clothed: at Laurence’s expense, of course, as they had no family sponsoring them; cadets drew no pay. “You cannot think we would let you starve; what have you been eating so far?”

  “Rats,” Demane said succinctly, explaining belatedly to
Laurence’s satisfaction the unusual lack of those delights more civilly referred to as millers, which had been much lamented among the midshipmen whose traditional prey they were, “but now we are on land again, I took two of those small things last night,” and gestured to make long ears.

  “Not from the grounds of Dover Castle?” Laurence said; certainly there would not have been many of them nearer-by, with the smell of so many dragons about. “You must not, again; you will be taken up for poaching.”

  He was not perfectly sure Demane was convinced, but at last Laurence declared a private victory and detailed the two of them to Roland and Dyer’s supervision, to be led through their tasks a while.

  It was a short flight only to the quarantine-grounds, and the pavilion established to good effect in a sheltered valley, sacrificing prospect for a windbreak. It was not empty: two rather thin and exhausted Yellow Reapers were sleeping inside, still coughing occasionally, and a limp little Greyling: not Volly, but Celoxia, and her captain Meeks. “On the Gibraltar route, I think,” Meeks said, to their inquiry, “if he has not been broken-down again,” rather bitterly. “I don’t mean to carp at you, Laurence; God knows you have done all you might, and more. But they seem to think at the Admiralty that it is like putting the wheel back on a cart, and they want us flying all the old routes again at once. Halifax and back, by way of Greenland and a transport, anchored in the middle of the north fifties, with ice-water coming over the bow with every wave; of course she is coughing again.” He stroked the little dragon’s muzzle; she sneezed plaintively.

  The floor was very comfortably warm, at least, and if the wood-fire was a little smoky, worming up through the square stone slabs of the floor, the open plan blew the fumes away. It was a simple, practical building, not at all elegant or ornate, and Temeraire might have slept in it, but it could not have been called spacious, on his scale. He regarded it with brooding disappointment, and was not disposed to linger; the crew did not even have the opportunity to dismount before he wished to be off again, putting the pavilion at his back, and flying with rather a drooping ruff.