Tongues of Serpents t-6

by Naomi Novik

  “Well, sir,” O’Dea said to Laurence, “I do not mean to be quarrelsome, but we were offered our liberty for cutting a road: and I don’t suppose we will get the one without the other.”

  “Those who wish to remain, and carry out their service, may,” Laurence said. “Any man who prefers to return to the security of the colony, likewise; I prefer no unwilling hands.”

  Temeraire sighed a little, watching Iskierka go, after a great deal of urgent persuasion from Granby and only with the promise of returning, within the narrowest span of time. “And she is flying flat-out,” he said, “and on quite a straight course; none of this tiresome sweeping. I do not suppose Tharkay might be able to make out their trail a little better, now that he knows they are natives and not smugglers, so we might not have to go hunting quite so wide?”

  “First,” Laurence said, “we must have water.”

  Water they might not have, however; not easily. The trees were quite misleading, and a patch of greenery did not seem to mean an oasis, as one might have expected. “They may be like succulents,” Laurence offered as an explanation, “and have some reservoir of water to sustain them through the summer droughts, I suppose.” But if Temeraire tore one up—rather difficult for all they were very skinny, as they had enormous nests of roots—it was quite dry all the way through, and there was not even a little cache of water which a person might drink from.

  So they had to keep on with their sweeps, looking now always for some little trickle or gleam of water, and even more importantly for another sign of the thieves: who might easily go in any direction whatsoever. It was very distressing to look upon Laurence’s maps of the enormous continent, so spread open, and so unmarked; they were already a way into the blank mysterious space at the center, and far from the surveyed coastlines. Now that Iskierka was gone, Temeraire felt still more anxious to be sure he did not overlook any movement, any small track which Tharkay perhaps could not see so well from aloft.

  Caesar was flying alongside now, which limited their pace to his; as Laurence had pointed out, that was even so a good deal faster than any person might have walked, so Temeraire tried not to be anxious, but he was nevertheless very soon annoyed, for even though it was Caesar who necessitated their going slower, he nevertheless felt justified in making many unnecessary remarks on Temeraire’s own preoccupation, and his efforts to watch the ground.

  “I can’t see why you should be jumping down and up like a jack-in-the-box, every time you see some sand being stirred up by the wind,” Caesar said. “You will get worn out, and then you will want more of the food and water when we get it, and precious little of either to start.”

  “Whatever there is,” Temeraire said, “if I am the one catching it, I will take as much as I like; you might help look, instead of complaining.”

  “And if I happen to see an egg,” Caesar said waspishly, “I will let you know of it; or anything worth seeing, but I don’t suppose you would like it much if I began to say, Oh look, there is something, and then I would say, sorry old fellow, I am mistaken, it is only a bush, after you went flinging yourself at it.”

  Temeraire was a little hungrier than he might satisfy as they flew, over such a short distance: there were larger kangaroos here, with reddish fur, but they could move quite surprisingly fast, and the hopping made them a little tricky to catch when he must at once avoid too much jostling of the egg; he had only managed to snatch two all afternoon.

  “There are a whole lot of them hopping away over there, Temeraire, if you like,” Roland said, as evening drew on; and though it was not quite in the right direction, Temeraire was tempted; but as he pursued, it came clear they were hopping away from a narrow creek, and everyone was very thirsty.

  “If you are not excessively hungry,” Laurence said, “we had best stop: the light is fading, and we may not easily find our way back.”

  “Perhaps,” Temeraire said, setting down very carefully, so as not to disturb the grounds, “perhaps, Tharkay, the aborigines should have been here, too? It is the first water we have seen since mid-morning.”

  “I can only inform you that there have been a great many kangaroos here lately,” Tharkay dryly said, which was not at all fresh news. Temeraire tried not to be discouraged, but when they had dug a deeper hole for the water to collect, and he had drunk, he looked up and gazed with dismay around the wide-open country: low red dunes swelling and falling in all directions, a few outcroppings of rock, stands of bushes and of trees along the little creek which ran away into the distance, the bed gone nearly dry in places. There was nothing to distinguish one direction from another.

  He sighed and closed his eyes for a little rest, while the men made their own small smoky fire, and cooked a little salt pork to eat with their biscuit, and they all disposed of themselves to sleep; the pleasant coolness of the night crept on, and Temeraire found himself half-drowsing, listening just in case the kangaroos should come back; the hopping ought to make a noise, he felt, and abruptly a short high shriek startled him up, wide-eyed and looking.

  Dawn had not quite broken, but the sky was paling; the men were all sitting up around him, blurred grey shadows against the ground, not moving.

  The yell had cut off as abruptly as it had begun. Laurence stood, walking amongst the men to count heads as the light crept nearer, and there was a spare hollow in the ground with empty shoes set beside it, where someone had been sleeping.

  “It’s them,” O’Dea said, “—waiting out in the dark and picking us off one by one, taking us in the night. The egg is only bait to lure us on deeper into their country, so they can kill us all. We never ought to be able to follow them otherwise—”

  “There’s witchery in it, I say,” another man muttered, not low.

  The men were for leaving at once, at once; no-one proposed staying this time to search any longer for the luckless Jonas Green. “The ground at the creek has been disturbed a little,” Tharkay said to Laurence quietly, while the hasty packing commenced, and the men warily filled their cans of water afresh, “but I see nothing one might expect, of a grown healthy man being dragged away, alive or dead; they cannot have swept the ground clean behind them.”

  “This is a strange country,” Laurence said, low and puzzled, and came to swing himself aboard.

  Temeraire was as pleased to be gone, quickly, not only so they might keep looking for the egg: it worried him a little that this mysterious snatching agency might seize on one of his crew. It seemed just as well to have Laurence and all of them safely away. But then in the air he paused, before he had even properly made any height, and stooped swiftly to the lee side of the rock outcropping.

  “Oh, not again,” Caesar complained, “and we have not even had breakfast,” but Temeraire paid no attention, none whatsoever, as he thrust his nose into the low, half-hidden hollow in the stone, tearing away the covering of brush: and in the dirt lay a small heap of fragments of bright, red-glazed porcelain, the lemon-curd-yellow pattern of birds smashed apart.

  Chapter 9

  “I WISH YOU FELLOWS would make up your minds,” Caesar said, “are we looking for smugglers, or natives, or the egg; and can’t we go find something to eat, instead?”

  “Pray don’t be so thick,” Temeraire said, “we are looking for all three, of course, and all three of them are one; and we will go get something to eat when Tharkay has worked out their trail and which way we ought to go.”

  This conclusion seemed quite self-evident to him, so he was puzzled to find Rankin utterly dismissive of the notion, and even Laurence saying to Tharkay, “Can the natives be responsible for the smuggling of the goods? I suppose the French might be supplying them, at some distant port—”

  “It would certainly save them a great deal of labor,” Tharkay said, “if I do not see how the natives could profit from the effort of carrying large quantities of goods across the width of an entire continent, only to the Sydney market.”

  “Why should they not like the goods for themselves?” Temeraire sa
id, “—the porcelain is very nice; although they have been careless again.” Anyone would have liked the piece, he thought, when it had been whole. “While I cannot really wish anything so nice broken, if they meant to break them anyway, it would be very useful if they should drop some others, as they go; and perhaps they may. Which way have they gone?” he asked, which after all was the real, the crucial point.

  It was a little disheartening that Tharkay would have it that the pieces were older—had been here since the last rainfall, which certainly had not been in the last week, and of course that was far too long; but he insisted. Temeraire sighed a little, but after all, this was still a trail: if they had come this way before, then likely they had come this way again, or at least should end in the same place.

  “And that would suit very well,” Temeraire said to Laurence, tearing hungrily into his meat; they had gone on, and taken a few kangaroos to breakfast upon, “if we might fly on, and then wait for them to come to us, now that we know they will not be carrying the egg onto a ship somewhere, and over the ocean where we can never get at it again.”

  He looked for more shards or broken bits as they flew onward, now: if the ground had not been such an inconveniently bright color, it might have been easier; and also there were quite distinct sections, flying over, some of which were much more troublesome to examine. Temeraire preferred those where the trees and shrubs were scant and fire-blackened, and the grass very low to the ground, but in the afternoon when they had flown past a dry creek bed lined with the dark green shrubs, the vegetation flourished up again, huge straw-yellow mop-heads of grasses and pale green tender shrubs everywhere, trees spiking up.

  Caesar did not help, either; he would have it that one could not hunt very well here, and they had very likely lost the trail, and the aborigines had gone quite another way, and so forth. And all the while the hot, dusty wind blew and blew into Temeraire’s nostrils, and his eyes, and the red sand gritted upon his hide and collected in small pockets as his wings rolled through each stroke, and itched; and the men in the belly-netting muttered low and sullenly of home, and called out now and again to try and wheedle a halt for “a little grog, sir; it is downright inhuman, in this heat.”

  Caesar murmured and complained also, muffled by the heat and wind, until after an hour he said suddenly, “Hi, what is that there,” and Temeraire halted mid-air and whipped his head around, hovering.

  “I saw something there, I thought,” Caesar said, but Temeraire flew back and forth and saw not the faintest gleam of foreign color among all the bushes and trees, not a track or even much of a clearing which could have been a camp, and Tharkay shook his head when he looked an inquiry back.

  “Well, it wasn’t color, so much,” Caesar said thoughtfully, on being interrogated; he was flying in lazy circles while Temeraire searched. “Just I thought I saw something moving, but when I sang out it stopped. No, I can’t tell you exactly where; this country all looks the same to me. I think it is pretty wonderful I should have spotted it at all.”

  “Very wonderful,” Temeraire said, “when you cannot even say what you saw, and no-one else can see it.”

  “I am sure I don’t need to bother, another time,” Caesar said, bristling up his shoulders, and throwing out his red-blazoned chest, “if my effort is so unappreciated; just how I suspected it should be, and my fault, of course, that you can’t hunt it out. If you want my opinion, if there were a hundred aborigines hiding about in this grass, you wouldn’t know it, at all. We ought to fly somewhere else entirely; and at least we might set down and have a rest.”

  “I am not so lazy that I must have a rest before mid-day,” Temeraire said. “We have already wasted enough time on whatever it is you saw.”

  Rankin was standing in his harness, on Caesar’s back, looking behind them. “We will have to set down,” he said, “in at best an hour: there is a thunderstorm coming on.”

  “Whyever should he think so?” Temeraire said to Laurence as he banked away, onto his course; the sky was clear, except for a little bank of blue clouds one might see if one looked around behind, but those were not coming on swiftly.

  “I have been flying courier duty since I was twelve years old; I can damned well smell a storm,” Rankin said flatly as Caesar came up with them, and twenty minutes later Temeraire was forced to concede, as the wind coming towards them began to die away in odd fits and starts, a suggestion of heaviness in the air, and as they flew on, the cloudbank behind grew long and turned a dark, essential blue striped a little with luminous grey and seaweed-greenish bands of color. The trees stood pale and white-limbed beneath it, lit from before by the sun.

  “And it will surely erase all signs of passing,” Temeraire said to Laurence unhappily. “Whatever can be done? I suppose we might fly on anyway, and try to keep ahead?”

  “I am not flying on through that,” Caesar said, looking behind apprehensively, as for emphasis the clouds put down abruptly a silent forked line of lightning directly to the earth, spidery and branching and flaring a moment in the dark. The roll of thunder came a long, dragging moment later; and a thin, wispy grey curtain of rain trailed down at one end of the cloud.

  “We had better not,” Laurence said, grimly, “and we ought not set down on higher ground, either; you are too large.”

  There was a little open space, of bare red earth and yellow grass, among some larger dunes and sheltered from the worst of the rising wind; the clouds were near upon them by then, and spattering gusts of rain which did not fill the eagerly outstretched canteens and cups, but only dimpled the softer loose dirt and left spots upon their clothing, and rattled the dry blades of grass. It was still hot and oppressive. The dark cloud came rolling up across the sky, suddenly quick after its long creeping approach, and the sun vanished.

  More great long forks of lightning were tonguing down to the earth against the wide-open horizon, all around, and the voices of the thunder roared and groaned to one another from one side of the clouds to the other, so that one almost imagined meaning into it. Temeraire could not stop himself trying to make sense of it—he felt on the verge, over and over, as when he had learned only a little of some different sort of language, and thought he had just picked out a familiar word or two amid the sea of new sounds.

  The wind shifted, coming hard into their faces: another thin spatter of unrefreshing rain thrown into his eyes and nostrils and flinging the dust upon him, so he had to blink and shake his head, snorting; a smell of distant smoke quite clear upon his tongue. Violet and orange haze spread across the sky, and Temeraire put out his wing a little further to shield the egg a little better from the wind.

  “Peculiar sort of color there,” Caesar said uneasily, sitting up on his hindquarters: he had grown a great deal, and when he stretched, now, his head might clear Temeraire’s shoulder. It was a strange color: a vivid glow of red as though someone had painted a line across the horizon, and it was altering the color of the sky, casting that umber light on the clouds, so they were at once blue and muddied with orange-red, and still the lightning flashing against it, although now difficult to see.

  “May I beg you to put me up,” Laurence said, and Temeraire lifted him so he might see; Laurence opened up his glass and stood looking on Temeraire’s shoulder, and then said, “Thank you; Captain Rankin, Mr. Forthing, I believe we had better get all aboard again.”

  The fire came upon them with shocking speed, a low hissing beneath the continuing crash of the thunder and dry wind, whispering with great malice and hunger, and Laurence shouting over the noise, “Leave that, damn your eyes,” while one of the convicts came reluctantly out from behind some bushes and through the grey wisps of drifting smoke, dragging a cask of rum which he had somehow stolen away after their landing, meaning to privately enjoy. The other men jeered and called, yelling at him, “Bring it on quick, Bob, and we’ll be merry as grigs all this fucking flight for once; you won’t have it all to yourself, you old sodden bitch, no you won’t.”

  Maynard haltin
g stooped to heave the cask up to his shoulder. The fire was in the distance yet, a broad and smoke-shrouded wall of glowing orange seen through the veil, but already the yellow tips of grass were igniting like red embers upon the crest of the dune behind him as he bent, and a wave of heat came shimmering almost palpable into Temeraire’s face and stole his breath.

  Maynard was staggering towards them, and the cask was dripping; small sparks of blue fire going up as the droplets struck the ground to meet the catching tinder of dry grass, and then the thickets were going up ahead of his feet, smoke rising in one thin column after another blown into spreading curtains. Temeraire could not see the fire at all anymore as a separate thing: all the world beyond the dunes was flame, and the smoke climbing into thick and stinging pillars around him.

  The man let the cask fall, and began to run shambling and coughing towards them. Temeraire felt very strange; his head was thick and confused and his wings felt leaden. He breathed in deeply, and coughed and coughed also; his throat and chest were closing as though someone had wrapped chains around him, and was trying to draw them taut. “Aloft,” Laurence was roaring, “Temeraire, go aloft,” and Temeraire thought, but I must wait, and he felt quite tired; and then a sharp stab of pain caught his hindquarters, startling his eyes open: when had he closed them?

  “Get that egg out of the fire, you damned beast,” Rankin shouted, from behind him, and the egg, the egg: Temeraire with a great bunching effort launched himself up; as his wings spread a great shuddering gust of hot, hot, hot wind blew up from beneath him, catching him aback; Maynard was dangling from the belly-netting, being pulled in, and the cask below was a brief torch burning blue-white out of the smoke for a moment. His hindquarters yet ached: there was a little blood dripping, where Caesar had pricked him hard with his claws, which ran down Temeraire’s legs as he beat upwards. His wings still did not wish to answer very well.