Crucible of Gold

by Naomi Novik

Page 15

 

  “That, as much as hunger, was behind this adventure, I do not doubt,” Laurence said, making a tally of the damage. There were now fewer than two biscuits a day for each man, if rationed over four months: futile to hope the French would return any sooner.

  “Well, don’t look so glum, Laurence: perhaps there will be a plague, or some tropic fever, and kill off half of us,” Granby said. “You don’t suppose some ship will put in here? Some other ship, I mean. ”

  “I cannot think it likely; we are too close to the continent and the island too poor,” Laurence said. “A captain would likely seek a more certain harbor if desperate for resupply, and not waste the time otherwise. Nothing to count upon, at least. The dragons may sight one, more likely. ”

  “And probably frighten them straight off, too,” Granby said. “What are they doing now, do you suppose?”

  He meant the sailors: farther down the beach they for once had stirred themselves to build up a bonfire and gathered around it; cocoanut shells were being passed around, and a burst of riotous laughter carried over the sand. “Oh, damn them all,” Laurence said. “They have made a still somewhere, I suppose; that is why one of the barrels was taken. I ought have known. ”

  “Can you brew liquor out of cocoanuts?” Granby said dubiously.

  “That or they have found some other fruit which would serve them,” Laurence said, “unless they are busy poisoning themselves; we will know in the morning. Yes, Mr. Ferris, we know,” he added, as Ferris joined them gesturing over at the bonfire.

  “One of the ship’s boys told Gerry, inviting him to come along,” Ferris said, “but only just now. ” And Gerry had evidently reported not to Forthing but to Ferris; Laurence privately shook his head.

  “I don’t suppose we can stop them,” Granby said, looking over at their small band of aviators. “Not until the dragons come back, at least. ”

  “And not then,” Laurence said. “They will be all the more unmanageable with liquor in their bellies; we must let them drink themselves insensate if they will, and I only hope they will do so before they achieve some worse devilry. ”

  “We had better get the rest of the biscuit and meat under some better cover instead,” Granby said, and added, “See to it, if you please, Ferris—” to Laurence’s dismay.

  They worked all together the next few hours in the worst of the day’s heat, digging a fresh cellar for the foodstuffs and lining it with palm bark and leaves, and carrying over what remained of the biscuit and pork. All the while the distant noise and celebration grew louder and more riotous: songs drifting over with the smoke, and also the smell of roasting cockles; the sailors had at least shown some industry in arranging their entertainment.

  Meanwhile the aviators settled wearily on the sand, and Gong Su shared out their meager dinner: salt pork over long noodles made of pounded biscuit and seaweed, in a thin broth of pork and fish bones; this they were forced to slurp out of cocoanut-shell bowls, using sticks to maneuver the lumps of salt pork to their mouths. “Where is your brother?” Laurence asked Sipho, who was putting aside a bowl—was putting aside two bowls, Laurence noticed, and he added more sternly, “And where is Roland?”

  “Demane has gone hunting,” Sipho said evasively. “You know he is very good at it. ”

  This was perfectly true, and did not satisfy Laurence any the better. Mrs. Pemberton had remained aboard the Triomphe as De Guignes’s guest. Laurence had entreated the privilege for her, and could not have wished to subject a gentlewoman to the experience of marooning, but he felt it frustratingly inconvenient that the chaperone should be gone at precisely the moment her services would have proven of any use.

  Demane and Roland did not reappear for hours, while the sailors’ rout grew steadily louder and more turbulent, a quarreling noise: they did not have enough food nor liquor to content them. Scuffles broke out of the crowd, a few yells encouraging the brawlers as for entertainment; but in a darker spirit: a spray of blood bright on the sand, and ugly laughter. “Next pull is mine, lads,” Handes shouted, grinning, as he pushed back towards the still; blood was on his fingers.

  Laurence turned away, disliking even to look; and it was no fit sight for the young officers. “Gentlemen, I think we will send you into the interior for an hour or two—”

  “No, sir,” Ferris said abruptly, interrupting. “Look sharp, fellows,” and he was standing up—a party of the sailors was coming towards them, dividing off the main body with a line of men trailing after, as though some rough beast reached out a paw; Handes was in the lead.

  Laurence rose also, and found himself and Granby barred from the advancing men: Cavendish had planted himself directly before Laurence; Granby’s ensign Thorne, only thirteen, was beside him; Bardesley and Forthing and Ferris had put themselves out front, and all in unison were herding them away towards a stand of scrub and thornbrake, with only Gerry and Sipho inside that protective circle with them: to be sheltered from harm as though he and Granby were children, Laurence thought, repulsed in every instinct.

  The sailors closed in, loosely half-a-ring around them, eyes stained red and skin glazed with excessive sweat: their brew was not a wholesome one, and more than one man had vomit already in the corners of his overgrowth of beard. Their breath was so thick with spirits Laurence could smell it, even at the distance. Handes was smiling at him over Ferris’s shoulder with a baring of teeth, gleeful and bloody. “Now, there’s no call for arguing, boys,” Handes said. “We don’t mean any harm, only the captains will come along of us; and then I fancy we’ll hear a different song from the beasts, when they are back. ”

  “They’ll disembowel the lot of you for the crabs, you ass,” Granby said, “and like as not all the fellows who hadn’t anything to do with it just the same; where do you even suppose you are going to put us?”

  “Keep off, there,” Bardesley said, sharp, and shoved away one of the sailors who was pressing in on him too closely.

  The man crowded back in directly, and his fellows with him—a smothering weight drawing around them, and Laurence was pressed back against the crackling brush even as the young aviators fought to hold off the encroaching bodies. It was a queer wrestling struggle, an irregular pushing and pulling—when the sailors did try to strike blows, these as often landed only slightly and glancing, gone drunkenly amiss. It was nonetheless deadly serious for all that, and hideous. Disembodied hands came pushing through the human wall to clutch at Laurence’s arm, drag upon his clothing, his belt: broken nails and hard-callused fingers caked with sand, which he could not join to any particular face or sentient will; he felt himself the subject of a blind and hungry urgency, groping after destruction with as much eagerness as if for life.

  And over shoulders and heads he looked into eyes squinting and inhuman with that same mad urge; but it was there accompanied, Laurence thought, by fear: a fear he had seen sometimes in the faces of enemy soldiers in a desperate and impossible action; men who went to fight because they were in a mass of other men, forced to it, and knowing it a futile act; knowing they courted death for no reason. Only a few eager faces—Handes’s eyes fixed on him full of delight and snarling—and the rest only men frightened enough they must act somehow, their wits loosened by drink.

  The aviators had linked arms; they kicked and butted their heads at the uncoordinated assault, an ignominious defense, but the sun was dropping low, and soon the dragons would be—“Temeraire!” little Gerry cried: he crawled out from under their legs and ran out onto the sand, waving his arms, “Temeraire!”

  There were three specks on the horizon, coming in: coming in swiftly, and half-a-dozen men broke away from the attack and fled, back towards the bonfire and the restless, watching mass of men. Another two followed, and soon the aviators would scarce be outnumbered by their assailants; Handes looked baffled. He struck abruptly at Cavendish—clubbed the boy’s head aside and clawed, his fingers scraping over Laurence’s cheek and tearing at the corner of his lip; h
e brought them away with bloodied nails, but he could not get purchase, even if Laurence could not strike back.

  Handes fell back suffused with choleric red; his fellows were dropping back with him; and then they turned towards the brush at a crackle of branches: Roland and Demane were spilling out onto the beach, panting and in haste. They pulled up in dismay, looking at the sailors: and then Handes said, “He’s captain for that big yellow one; we’ll have him, anyway, boys—”

  Roland shoved Demane back at the brush. “Run; run now, damn you!” she said, and stooping snatched up two handfuls of sand and flung them into the sailors’ eyes as they came at her.

  Sipho pulled his arms loose from the human chain and ran towards them; Ferris sprang after him. Handes had grabbed Roland by the arm and thrown her to the ground, and Demane was leaping on him: nearly a foot shorter and still slim as wire, but for once Laurence had cause to be grateful for his lack of gentlemanly restraint. Demane struck a clenched fist into Handes’s belly, and an elbow at his throat; the fingers of his other hand went at Handes’s eyes, and the big sailor went down choking, his breath suddenly a rattling wheeze, and blood was running down his face.

  “I said to run!” Roland said, rolling up to her feet. “Get away from them, you ass; the dragons are coming. ” But the rest of the sailors were on them: some twenty men, and three of them seized Demane at once, heaving him up and off the ground. Roland dived at their legs, and managed to trip them; but one man booted her in the face and knocked her aside bloodied.

  Ferris was there, trying to pull Demane free; Sipho had snatched up a dry branch and was beating one of the sailors holding him about the head. “Go, hurry!” Granby shouted at the other aviators; he had Laurence’s arm. “We’ll get into the brush—”

  “What?” Laurence said.

  “Go!” Granby said to them again, dragging Laurence with him, over-riding protest: “No, damn your stiff neck; haven’t you been an aviator long enough?”

  Forthing had reached the sailors also, running hard across the sand; but he and Ferris were out in the open, and there were too many: another man seized Demane’s arm and hauled him from under the pile of men; others were helping him, and the larger crowd gathered around the bonfire began to move as a body towards them.

  “O God,” Granby said, slowing to watch. The sailors were yelling in mad triumph as they began to drag a struggling Demane towards the bonfire with them. Sipho was trying to go after, but Roland grabbed him with one hand, holding him back; the other she had pressed up to her nose to keep the running blood from her mouth. Handes got up off the sand and stumbled after the rest, calling hoarsely with a hand clapped over his eye, “Wait for me, fellows—now we’ll make the beast mind—”

  Then he was falling to the sand and throwing his arms over his head: Kulingile was roaring, coming in over the water at full speed; roaring so it shook the trees, and his shadow poured over the bonfire like a flood.

  It was over very quickly. Then Kulingile had Demane clutched in one talon, and lifting him padded away over the sand, saying, “Demane, you are quite well? You are not hurt?” He put Demane down for a moment only, and shook off a last dismembered arm before picking him up again and proceeding onward away; behind his lashing angry tail the fire had been scattered and crushed into ash, and bodies were strewn upon the sand; some still crawling, and moans carried over the sound of the surf.

  The dead departed on a pyre built from the corpse of the bonfire and the palm-trees fringing the beach which had been laid waste. Most of the surviving sailors labored silently alongside the aviators to raise it, and the wounded were laid on makeshift pallets of grass, and bandaged with scraps. They had no surgeon among them, of any kind: Granby’s new dragon-surgeon Mallow had been lost with the Allegiance, and Dorset had remained at the covert in New South Wales. Dewey, the former barber, only could do a little. There was for medicine only the dregs of the liquor.

  “The biscuit won’t run short, anyway,” Granby said to Laurence, in a morbid humor. They were seated in state upon a few logs of driftwood, looking over the work going forward at a significant distance: the dragons were in no mood to let them go among the sailors, and the sailors were still less inclined to have the dragons anywhere near.

  Temeraire had argued for keeping every last one of the aviators by his side: he could not see anything disproportionate, or for that matter out of the ordinary, in the scale of Kulingile’s fury and the damage it had wreaked. “But Laurence, no-one could expect anything different,” Temeraire had said. “I have never seen anything so brazen: even Prince Yongxing did not try and drag you away from me while I was looking on, as though I had nothing to say to it at all. I cannot reproach Kulingile in the least. Are you sure you had better not sit on the other side of me, where they cannot see you?”

  Laurence was quite sure, despite the wells which Temeraire’s restless clawing talons dug into the dry sand to be markers of his anxiety. But that was as much concession as Laurence could win: he and Granby remained a quarter-of-a-mile distant from the camp, with nothing to do but sit and be jealously guarded from a band of ragged and hopeless castaways by dragons the size of frigates.

  Kulingile had gone still further: he had flown out to a rocky outcropping some distance out from the shore and sat there perched on his haunches with Demane held in his cupped talons; an occasional protesting noise might be heard from him, and he waved at the shore urgently once in a while, but Temeraire had firmly rejected the notion of going to fetch him.

  “You could not wish me to be so very rude, Laurence,” he said, “and anyway I am sure nothing could be more provoking at present; not that I could not fight Kulingile, but I do not in the least wish to do so. ” Meanwhile he had laid himself in a protective arc, and Iskierka had thrown several of her coils over his hindquarters, and so entwined the two had made a wall of themselves around Laurence and Granby.