Tongues of Serpents t-6

by Naomi Novik

  However, watching the ground as they drew near yet another half-dry water-hole, he did at length near the end of the day catch sight of a little movement: a shadow which did not quite fit the rest of the ground, and Temeraire realized all at once it was one of them, the bunyips. He dived at once, stretching, and the bunyip burst suddenly into motion, skittering away across the sand towards a bare patch of ground, and as Temeraire reached, it squirmed itself madly beneath the earth, casting up a cascade of sand at its heels as it burrowed.

  It was astonishingly quick: Temeraire landed and stuck his claw inside the freshly dug tunnel, and could not reach it; he sat back on his haunches and hissed in displeasure. “Come out, you wretched craven thing,” he called into the tunnel, and looked back. “Laurence, are you quite sure you would not like us to smoke them out? I am certain we could quite easily manage them, if they did not squirm and run away so.”

  “And so ensure an endless sequence of attacks,” Laurence said, “further delaying our search for the egg; pray let us continue on, my dear.”

  “You may consider,” Dorset said, peering over, “that it is in their nature to hunt from their burrows, and the consequence of our own venturing into a country we do not know; and after all, you are eating the game on which they depend for sustenance. We are as foolish to resent their predation as cattle would be to despise you.”

  This argument swayed Temeraire to some extent; at least he was persuaded to fly onward without further molesting the bunyips. Later in the evening, Temeraire said thoughtfully, contemplating the stew which Gong Su was brewing, with the meager haul of kangaroos, “I have never before considered the feelings of a cow: I suppose they must not care for us at all.”

  “They are only dumb beasts,” Laurence said, “and such thought surely beyond them; any animal will defend its life and young, but that is not in the same vein as a thinking, reasoning creature.”

  “Only, how could one be certain?” Temeraire said. “After all, if one wishes to be particularly dull, one might be like that fellow Salcombe, and say that dragons are also dumb beasts. And I am quite sure the bunyips are not, though they do not seem to talk at all: they are only nasty thinking creatures. It is not very fair, though, that I should allow them to have sense because they will contrive one unpleasantness after another; what if cows are very clever, only they do not like to make a fuss about it?”

  “If they dislike fuss enough to tolerate being eaten,” Laurence said, with rather an amused expression, “surely it need not matter one way or another.”

  “Perhaps they think they will be eaten anyway, as they are so delicious,” Temeraire said, and sighed. “I would give a great deal for a cow, Laurence; not that I wish to complain, and I am very grateful that Gong Su will go to such lengths: only they are a bit thin, the kangaroos, I mean.”

  They posted a watch that night, and twice Temeraire and Iskierka were obliged to shift their places, as the ground beneath them grew odd and unsteady to a probing stick; Caesar was nearly buried when abruptly a sinkhole opened beneath him, tumbling him down in a cascade of pouring sand. He roused all the camp to his cry of alarm, and several pistol-shots were fired uselessly into the dark, spending some of their precious store of munitions for panic.

  “Keep your head raised,” Rankin said, his hand on Caesar’s neck; he had leapt clear as the sand poured in, and then jumped in to keep the young dragon steady. “Fetch a light, there, and bring shovels; we will have to clear some of this off him before he can scramble out.”

  It was near enough two hours before he could be resettled, now safe if uncomfortable upon an outcropping of rock; they none of them passed a very quiet or a restful night, and in the morning, all of Gong Su’s stew had leaked away, the consequence of a smaller but equally malicious shifting of the earth beneath the cooking-hollow. Temeraire was obliged to eat the gummy and nearly leached-clean kangaroo or go hungry, as he had not eaten the night before; they might be soft, but were scarcely palatable. They had all to contend with thirst as well as irritation.

  Iskierka was all for waging a thorough war upon the enemy: all their shelters were to be fired, or filled with smoke, despite the dreadful hazard of open flame in this dry country, and the utter impracticality of fighting who knew how many of the creatures there were with a force of four dragons, one half-grown, one stunted, and no supply whatsoever. Temeraire at least was grown more willing to be sensible, perhaps under the preoccupying influence of hunger, which drove out some quantity of pride.

  He said, “I do not like it in the least, but we do not have the time to serve them all out now, and they can make it so very uncomfortable: we had better wait until we have the egg back safely, and then we may settle them; or,” he allowed, “I suppose we may give them a chance to show they can behave better,” and that afternoon, when they had taken half-a-dozen kangaroos and stopped at another half-dry water-hole, they laid one before the first trap-door which they found, and did not molest the covering after all.

  Iskierka eyed it darkly and brooding; Kulingile eyed it, too, with a very different, a yearning expression, but he turned to his own portion instead, and Iskierka grumbled under her breath and did the same. Temeraire was hungry enough to ignore the pain of his throat and eat the kangaroo unstewed, only roasted a little, and crunching the bones for the marrow, though Laurence was sorry to see him forced to it, and Termeraire winced as he swallowed.

  “It’s gone, then,” someone said abruptly, and Laurence realized that while they had all been engaged in their own meals, the kangaroo offering had silently vanished—rather a dreadful reminder of the speed and stealth of their enemies, and their omnipresence. But they were at least not harassed the remainder of their halt, although they did not tempt fate: no man ventured anywhere near vegetation, and they drank their share of water under guard.

  The experiment was repeated that evening, when they paused again at a fresh spring with a larger outcropping of harder, stony ground near-by where Laurence thought they might encamp safely; whether for this reason, or the accepted bribe, they did not suffer further attacks that night, and Temeraire declined to risk his supper again, and ate his portion of game once more only seared.

  They might also by now have been outstripping the speed of the bunyips’ communications, whatever method they used. Tharkay was not particularly sanguine of their chances of finding still more traces of the smugglers’ route, and did not encourage the fervent searching for scraps which Temeraire and Iskierka would have indulged in, left to their own devices.

  “If they are not going to some central location lying in this direction we have been given, as limited as it may be,” Tharkay said, “then we have no hope of catching them: a few shards of five years of age and half-buried samples do not make a trail worth following. We may as well hope for a more cooperative fate, and make the only attempt which has a hope of success.”

  So the dragons flew on with much less investigation of the countryside, and quicker: the red miles were eaten up swiftly with Temeraire’s wingbeats, the unvarying dunes rising and falling, vanishing away beneath the leading edge of the black wings, only to be exposed once more, falling behind them like waves receding. The desert might have gone on forever: everywhere one looked, the world was flat and barren and strange to the curving blue-hazed edge of the horizon. Occasional taller hills would swell out of the low dunes; salt pans stretched pallid white; a trickling stream or a hollow full of water. These fell away and rode the earth over the horizon and disappeared, one after another.

  The shapes were at first easily mistaken for clouds, low on the horizon; but they remained, and grew, and grew, until the brick-red stone was struck by the sunset and glowed fiercely against the sky. They reared up from the flat plateau, enormous and uncanny domes clustering together in the absence of all other company, their surfaces pitted and streaked in grey, a faint clinging fuzz of greenish moss upon a few of their heads. Temeraire slowed, as they approached; Laurence did not know what to think of the peculiar con
struct, so alone.

  It was not possible even from the air to encompass the whole: at different angles it had a wholly different appearance, even as that first intensely glowing color faded, and a twilight cast of violet dampened the domes’ presence, blurring them into the sky. Though the stone would have offered a certain refuge from the bunyips, they did not land upon the rocks. They had from habit and the fatigue of extreme toil begun, Laurence thought, to grow used to the alien and rust-red landscape; but in their strangeness, the monoliths made all else around them once more strange, a reminder.

  They encamped instead upon a few dunes, not far removed; a little trickle of water came past the camp, not very much to drink from, and with no sign of bunyip management, which they now had a little cause to regret. They dug out a hollow in the curve of the creek, and it gradually filled; meanwhile Laurence stood with Temeraire watching the strange monumental stones blur and fade away into darkness, as all the stars of the Southern Hemisphere came wheeling out above.

  They were all quiet that night, in the unseen shadow of the monoliths. In the morning Temeraire said, “Laurence—Laurence, there is another one, over there; look,” and Laurence rising saw one last monolith standing at a distance: alone, wholly alone, even without a separated hillock for company: pink and palest orange cream in the early sunrise, and then Temeraire said slowly, “—is that a dragon?”

  Iskierka roused up looking, and Caesar said, “Well, what else would it be?”—to be glimpsed at this distance, standing beside the monolith and casting a shadow against the smooth red wall, of wings outspread. Huge wings, even half-furled: and there were tiny dark figures of men to be glimpsed, moving around the dragon; there were bundles upon the ground, bales tied up with string, boxes, which they were taking off the beast: and still others, smaller bags, were going up to be stowed in replacement upon the dragon’s back.

  Iskierka said, “Whyever are we only sitting here? Let’s go and have a look, and see if it has seen—”

  “Oh!” Temeraire cried, “the egg, the egg!” and indeed, a round swaddled bundle was being handed carefully up to the men aboard the dragon, easing into a sling across its breast.

  Laurence had barely a moment to seize upon the chain of Temeraire’s breastplate, and get himself latched on, as Temeraire lunged aloft in a burst of speed, Iskierka with him. They had not been seen, Laurence thought, by the company on the ground near the other monument: there was no visible hurry, no move to self-defense. Instead the strange dragon rose and leisurely unfurled its wings the rest of the way—going on and on and on, twice the length of its body and more—and with a tremendous spring of its hindquarters was aloft; one wing-stroke, two, three, and then it spread those wings and was swinging away to the north, gliding on the air.

  “Come back!” Temeraire called, flying quicker. “Stop!” and he paused, hovering mid-air, and began to draw in his breath, his chest expanding with the divine wind, that shattering roar which should reach even across that distance.

  “Temeraire,” Laurence said sharply, “Temeraire! You ought not, your throat is not—”

  “Hurry, hurry,” Iskierka said, circling impatiently; she could not get into its path. “She is getting further away, and with the egg!”

  Temeraire flung back his shoulders and pulled in one more heaved breath, and then he opened his jaws, and roared—and broke, the thunder barely begun and the resonance dying in his chest, so Laurence felt the tremors come rippling through the flesh. Temeraire’s voice cracked like strings upon some instrument breaking, and he clenched upon himself coughing—coughing—wracked and gasping, and he sank abruptly to the sand, his head bowed forward over his breast.

  Part III

  Chapter 13

  THEY GAVE CHASE ANYWAY: Kulingile and Caesar left to trail behind, the men packed into the belly-netting with haste; Temeraire and Iskierka stretched themselves lean and straight and flew and flew, at the limits of their speed. They made progress; little by little the dragon grew larger in Laurence’s glass as he watched, the immense wings protruding past the edges of the lens. Onward through the panting heat of the sun, always keeping the dragon in their sight; then the dusk a welcome relief, but there still might be no respite: their quarry did not stop to rest, so neither could they.

  The night came on, and the moon spilling silver: Laurence had to struggle to keep his eyes on the dragon now, a moving inkblot crossing the stars, and still it did not pause. The wings scarcely moved; one beat or two now and again to catch a draft of wind, and otherwise nothing, like one of the great sea-birds, an osprey or an albatross, hanging peacefully aloft and more at rest in the sky than on the ground.

  It was drawing away. Temeraire’s breath labored more gratingly than before, and Iskierka’s speed was dying. They had flown already a long day, and without halt for anything but a little game snatched on the wing, a few gulped swallows of water at a creek. “There’s another,” Granby said at last, his voice faint but clear across the gulf of the empty air, and Temeraire and Iskierka landed by the gleam of water to drink, their legs trembling and wings drooped nearly to the ground.

  Granby leapt down. “Mr. Forthing,” Laurence said quietly, “let us disembark, and see about a camp; by those rocks, if you please, clear away from the water.”

  “Yes, sir,” was all Forthing said; failure lay heavy upon them all.

  Temeraire and Iskierka did not speak a word; they drank heavily and thirstily, and fell upon the sand asleep as soon as they had been unburdened. Forthing marshaled the aviators and they formed a phalanx of pistols and knives bristling while in that shelter the convicts hastily filled canteens and jugs, and they all drew back to the security of the rocks to eat their dry biscuit and a little hot tea.

  “Do you know, the worst of it is, I don’t think they were even trying; I don’t know that they ever saw us,” Granby said tiredly, stretching his legs one after the other out and then in again, working out the stiffness of nearly twenty hours aloft. Laurence did not yet trust himself to sit at all; he thought once he had gone down he would not come up again very easily.

  “No,” Laurence said. “The crew all kept below and out of the sun, and so far as I saw them they were sleeping. The dragon did not look around once.” He shook his head. “She might have been sleeping on the wing, herself; I have known Temeraire to do it, on a long flight.”

  “Half-sleeping, anyway,” Granby agreed. “Did you see those wings? I suppose she could go around the world on them twice if she wanted to. I have never seen the like. That is no feral beast; that’s breeding, if you please, and I should like to know what they have bred her out of, when we haven’t seen a single other dragon anywhere in this country.”

  “Their own lack of concern argues there may be none to be seen,” Tharkay said quietly. “They did not see us because they did not look; they did not imagine any pursuit.”

  “You think they have her from somewhere else?” Granby said. “I suppose there might be something like her in Java, with all those islands to fly amongst; but how we have missed ever seeing one of them, I would like to know. I suppose I wouldn’t value an egg of hers much over half-a-million pounds.”

  “I should value more,” Laurence said, looking over at Temeraire, so exhausted his head had lolled to one side, and he had not stayed awake even to have his muzzle cleaned of the red dust of their travel, “some way to catch her up.”

  The quarry already lost, they waited the next day until Caesar caught them up, himself exhausted and deeply disgruntled: “Well,” he said, “and you haven’t got the egg back, with all this mad peltering, and meanwhile I have had to slog on all day with this lump hanging on to me; and he has eaten everything.”

  Kulingile ignored him in favor of swallowing yet another kangaroo nearly whole. Caesar’s complaint was not without some justice: Kulingile had grown visibly in the short span of their absence, and would have made an increasingly heavy burden. Caesar had made by now some eight tons in weight, but Kulingile bid fair to make near enoug
h a ton in weight himself by the end of the day.

  “I will not have Caesar carry him again,” Rankin said. “We are not going to stunt his development to carry a spoiled beast along.”

  “I have said I am sorry,” Kulingile said, piping, “but I cannot help it I am so very hungry. I think I might fly to-day, though, and then I need not slow anyone down.”

  “I don’t see why you should fly to-day, when you did not fly yesterday, or the day before,” Iskierka said dismissively, “so it is no use saying anything like that; but I will carry you, since I am not a complainer.”

  Kulingile looked at Iskierka’s bristling sides a little sadly, and it did prove something of an awkward puzzle to fit him aboard, as his own armament of spikes was by no means insubstantial, and were beginning to harden into solid horn, so that as he squirmed into position they clacked noisily against Iskierka’s own. “That will have to do,” Iskierka said, “now strap him down; and you had better not squirm.”

  Dorset climbed out of Temeraire’s throat after a final inspection. “I can hardly overstate the damage. There are burst blood vessels throughout, and what blisters were half-healed are now raw. It was wholly inadvisable.”

  Laurence nodded but only briefly; there was no sense in dwelling on what was done. “What would you recommend?”

  “Rest,” Dorset said, “rest, and a soft diet of fat salt pork; but under the present conditions I must settle for absolutely no exertion of the throat. I will not answer for the consequences should he attempt to roar again until he is quite healed; and if it can be helped, he ought not speak at all.”

  Temeraire did not much like not being able to speak: it was very irritating to always be thinking of something, and then unable to tell anyone. And if he should turn his head round to say something, as he flew, Dorset would pick up his head and glare from behind his red-dust-coated round spectacles, quite like a gimlet—Temeraire did not know what a gimlet was but had the impression it was a disapproving, narrow-faced creature that was sour and unpleasant—and anything Temeraire might have been about to say died away.