Crucible of Gold

by Naomi Novik

Page 16

 

  “Lord, Ferris, you needn’t look so sour,” Granby added now, as Ferris trudged down the beach to report again. “I am sorry for the poor damned fools, but it’s no worse to be dragon-clawed than hung at the end of the day, and they are man and all of them mutineers. Nothing much worse can have happened, I suppose, while we have been sitting here watching. ”

  “Oh, can’t it,” Ferris said, losing in impatience the formal manner which was not so thoroughly seated in aviators under any circumstances. “There isn’t any biscuit to run out: a couple of those big palms came down in the stream, and a corner of it has been trickling into the new cellar for the last four hours. ”

  The cellar was two inches in mud stinking of spoilt salt pork: all the barrels on the bottom level mired deep. Ferris had already put some of the men to prying open the ruined barrels and shifting what biscuit was not soaked into new containers roughly formed out of palm leaves. Nearly half the already-inadequate supply gone: “We would starve, if Kulingile hadn’t thinned us out,” Granby said, dropping himself wearily back to the sand after he had peered down. “Or will we starve anyway?” he added, to Gong Su.

  “I am afraid we may be a little hungry in two months,” Gong Su said: by which he diplomatically meant, Laurence supposed, that by then they would likely be drawing lots for rations, day-to-day.

  But not all of them: he would not starve, and not Granby, and not Demane; they could not be allowed to starve, or even go hungry enough to alarm their beasts. Laurence looked away, his fingers hooked into his belt and drumming on the dangling ring where the harness ought to have been attached; the French had taken that, too.

  “Perhaps the dragons might take a whale,” Granby said. “I suppose one whale would set us up for another month, even if we will get tired of nothing but meat pretty soon. ”

  “They are not likely to find anything but finwhales,” Laurence said. “And not even a heavy-weight is going to bring one of those to shore: it can always dive away. ”

  “Captain,” Gerry said, running up to them, “Roland wants you: she is awake again. ”

  Poor Roland was on a pallet set aside from the other wounded, and Laurence steeled himself to show no dismay: her face was swollen into purple grotesquerie, the lines unrecognizable, and her nose badly broken and imperfectly set. The sailor’s boot had left her cheek torn open and the corner of her mouth; he was afraid it would surely scar. “Well, Roland, not too badly, I hope,” he said.

  “No, Captain,” she said, the words coming slow and laborious through the slurring, “but Demane—Gerry says Demane is all right, but everyone is here—”

  “Kulingile has gone broody and hauled him out on a bit of rock,” Granby said. “Never fear, Roland, he’ll do; when you are better you can walk out and hear him yelling if you like. ”

  “I mean everyone else is still here, in camp,” she said. “Did he tell you about the ship?”

  “A ship?” Laurence said, at once eager and yet dismayed: by now any ship Roland and Demane might have sighted in the morning would be well away, in who knew what direction. “Where away?” he asked, already calculating in his mind—if he and Granby should set out at once, with Temeraire and Iskierka, what course would cover the best distance—

  “The other side of the island, the long cove,” Roland said, meaning a narrow twisting inlet which Forthing had reported from the aerial survey, which penetrated deeply into the interior: too impassable for dragons to follow very far inside the island.

  “Well, that’s a piece of luck,” Granby said. “A ship really at anchor?”

  “No, no,” Roland said. “Wrecked. ”

  There was no sense in beginning until the next morning, when Roland insisted she was well enough to show them the way, though Laurence would have spared her another day to recover. “Better sooner than late, sir,” she said, and indeed if there were one point of agreement among all their party it was the desire to escape the macabre ruin of their shore encampment, with the ashes and smoke of the dead being carried ceaselessly upon them by the sea-wind.

  If they had not had so many wounded, even the many practical difficulties of moving their remaining supply to some other beach would not have been permitted to stand in the way. During the night three more had died, others were beginning feverish, and they were all of them hungry and all badly parched: the stream now only sluggishly worked to refill the small basin which they had originally dug, where the dragons could drink.

  Kulingile had come back to shore only once and during the night, as secretively as a dragon approaching twenty-six tons might be expected to manage, to let Demane get a canteen from Sipho.

  “He won’t listen to me at all,” Demane said, gulping hurriedly in Kulingile’s looming shadow: the dragon’s body was swaying back and forth from the energetic lashing of his tail, and the spikes upon his shoulders were bunched and bristling. “He wouldn’t bring me in until I started coughing I was so dry, and keeps too close a watch for me to swim to shore. Sir, we found a ship—”

  “Roland told us,” Granby said, “so don’t fret him trying to get away. It’s bad enough already: why the devil didn’t you run for the forest when Roland told you? You and Laurence,” he added, in some exasperation. “But at least it’s not too late for you to learn better. ”

  “Is she—” Demane said.

  “Midwingman Roland will be perfectly well,” Laurence said, flatly, “and we will discuss your excursion when circumstances better permit. ”

  Demane darted a guilty look, and then Granby called, “All right, Kulingile, he’s done; and we’ll have a guard set when he needs to come for water next, only give us a shout. ”

  Kulingile answered by snatching Demane away, but he settled back onto his rock more easily, and in an hour he had let Demane sit upon his back instead of clutched in his talons. Demane looked not much better pleased but sat watching them forlornly with his shoulders hunched against the cold water, which sprayed with regularity up Kulingile’s haunches.

  “I cannot quite like the notion of going away and leaving only Kulingile to watch over things here; he is too preoccupied,” Temeraire said. “Not that I blame him in the least; only he might not think to keep a watch on my crew, at present. ”

  “You cannot think me in any danger now,” Laurence said: a more demoralized assemblage than the remaining sailors could not be imagined.

  “I did not think you in any danger before,” Temeraire said, “and plainly I was mistaken. It does not seem to me anything is so very different: Kulingile did not kill above thirty of those sailors, and they might as easily make another still, if you wish to blame it all on liquor; which I am by no means ready to do,” he added. “After all, I have seen sailors quite drunk before, and they never set a ship on fire, or tried to snatch you; I am sure there must be something wrong with this particular lot. ”

  Yes; but if there was, Laurence felt now he had encouraged it by his very despair of them: he had not wished to make anything of them, if anything might be made.

  “Yet someone must go hunting,” he said. “You and Iskierka and Kulingile have not been feeding so well you can go two days without anything to eat; and Kulingile will not. ”

  “Then Iskierka may go,” Temeraire said.

  “I shan’t, either,” Iskierka said, raising her head bristling, but after some squabbling the matter was settled by lot: Granby drew a line in the sand and Temeraire dropped onto it a handful of pebbles—pebbles by his standards; each of them a boulder dredged from the ocean floor and roughly the size of a man’s head—and then the results counted off: there were two more on Iskierka’s side of the line than on Temeraire’s.

  “I am sure it might come out differently if only I tried again,” Temeraire said, dissatisfied.

  “Oh, I will not let anyone do anything to Laurence,” Iskierka said impatiently, “and I will set them on fire if they should try, so you may as well go; you know they are more frightened of me anyway. ”
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br />   “I am sure I do not know why that should be so,” Temeraire said to Laurence unhappily, before setting out, “but it is; what ought I do?”

  “Nothing in the least,” Laurence said, “when you consider—” and halted; he did not like to say, where Granby might overhear and be wounded by the justice of it, that any man of sense would be terrified of so ungovernable a temper as Iskierka’s in command of so great a power of doing harm. “You must consider it as a compliment; true respect is to be preferred above fear, and to induce it a greater achievement than one which can be as easily credited to mere brutality. ”

  Temeraire was persuaded to go; and meanwhile Laurence was forced to acknowledge the same criticism might be applied as well elsewhere. Where real mutiny was found—and while he would not give that name to the initial sin of running mad after liquor, scarcely so very unusual among sailors, he could give none other to the deliberate attempt to seize himself and Granby and Demane—where mutiny was found, there were sure to be bad officers at the root of it, he had always privately thought.

  “It is not as though there had been anything to be done with the men, though, Laurence,” Granby said, too easily dismissing the charge. “After all, what else have we to do but lie about?—and men who are working hard need more food and water than we could spare. ”

  “Even so,” Laurence said. “We ought to have imposed some discipline upon them, however high the cost; we might have known that men at once excessive idle and half-mad with fear could be relied on for the worst sort of starts: these are pressed men, not volunteers. ”

  Only fifteen men, he felt, must be called mutineers: fifteen, that is, who were yet left alive. Handes, who in a more just world ought to have been first among the corpses and instead had taken scarcely any harm, could not escape the charge; nor had Laurence any desire to spare him, or the others who had been in the forefront. But the body of men might be spared: Laurence could choose to ignore that last general movement towards the struggle with the aviators.

  “Mr. Forthing,” he said, beckoning him aside quietly, “you will choose ten men from the sailors: steadier men, older men, who were not near the struggle; we will take them with us into the interior. ”

  “Sir,” Forthing said doubtfully, but Laurence was in no wise prepared to welcome discussion of the order, and his looks must have shown it; Forthing went.

  In the same ruthless spirit Laurence left Ferris behind, and went into the island interior with less than three men he could have gladly relied on: Roland jarred painfully by every step, Sipho not yet eleven years of age and brought along to run back with tidings of distress if any should arise, and Bardesley, whom Granby had insisted on his taking—“If you mean for me to have Ferris here, you had better have some help. ”

  Mayhew would come with them; he had held himself back from the worst excesses of the celebration, merely taken a cocoanut shell of the homemade grog and stood off in the shade of the palms with several fellows talking, which had spared him both a charge of mutiny and Kulingile’s wrath. Laurence had no great reliance upon him, but something, he thought, might yet be made of him.

  Forthing had dredged up also some men evidently chosen more for advanced age or a placid stupidity than any good qualities, and also Baggy: one of the ship’s boys and so called because as a child of six, he had thought the ship was being boarded when Badger-Bag had climbed up the side in the ceremony of the crossing of the equator, and had leapt down from the rigging upon him, much to the distress of the ship’s cook who had been playing the role, and the general delight of the rest of the crew. Baggy was now fourteen, and in the space of the past seven weeks had abruptly gone from a plump and nimbly scampering child to a gaunt-cheeked pole given to toppling over his own feet. He also blushed every time he looked at Roland, despite the bandage covering half her face—he had not much attention to give to her face—and blushed again when he met by accident Laurence’s censorious eye.

  “If I might be of use—” Hammond offered, tentatively; and remembering from five years gone a long grim night in a pavilion under siege, Laurence took him along.

  The cove could not be approached from the air without doing such damage to the undergrowth, to clear a space for landing, as might easily send what was left of the wreck to the ocean floor. They were forced instead to go overland, hacking open the path which Demane and Roland had taken the day before: a meandering and mostly theoretical path, as they had not known their own destination at the time.

  “We only meant to see if we could find anything to make rope with,” Roland offered as they went, peering at Laurence out of her swollen-squinted eye to see how this was received.

  “If you mean to compromise yourself sufficiently to impose upon me the necessity of requiring Demane to fulfill the obligation which his side of those actions imply on the part of a gentleman,” Laurence said grimly, “you may continue in just such a fashion, Mr. —Miss—Roland. ”

  “What obligation?” she said, in sincere confusion, and when he had clarified his meaning an offer of marriage said impatiently, “There’s nothing to require: he already has, a dozen times. But it is no good anymore; you must see that, sir. I had thought—”

  She stopped while they came to a particularly vicious stand of thornbrake, which she and Demane had merely squirmed beneath the previous day; while the men hacked away at it, she leaned against a tree and said softly, unhappy, “But now he has his own dragon. He can’t be an officer of mine, when Mother retires and I get my step, and I can’t ask Excidium to push off Candeoris after all these years,”—the Regal Copper who was the back center of the Longwing’s formation, and his main defender—“even if the Admiralty wouldn’t want Kulingile elsewhere.