by Naomi Novik
Taking pity on them all, Laurence looked for his runners: Roland, Morgan, and Dyer had been told to stay quiet on the dragondeck and out of the way, and so were sitting in a row at the very edge, dangling their heels into space. “Morgan,” Laurence said, and the dark-haired boy scrambled up and towards him, “go and invite Mr. Hammond to come and sit with me, if he would like.”
Hammond brightened at the invitation and came up to the dragondeck at once; he did not even notice as behind him the men immediately began rigging the tackles to hoist aboard the barge. “Thank you, sir—thank you, it is very good of you,” he said, taking a seat on a locker which Morgan and Roland together pushed over for him, and accepting with still more gratitude the offer of a glass of brandy. “How I should have managed, if Liu Bao had drowned, I have not the least notion.”
“Is that the gentleman’s name?” Laurence said; all he remembered of the older envoy from the Admiralty meeting was his rather whistling snore. “It would have been an inauspicious start to the journey, but Yongxing could scarcely have blamed you for his taking a misstep.”
“No, there you are quite wrong,” Hammond said. “He is a prince; he can blame anyone he likes.”
Laurence was disposed to take this as a joke, but Hammond seemed rather glumly serious about it; and after drinking the best part of his glass of brandy in what already seemed to Laurence, despite their brief acquaintance, an uncharacteristic silence, Hammond added abruptly, “And pray forgive me—I must mention, how very prejudicial such remarks may be—the consequences of a moment’s thoughtless offense—”
It took Laurence a moment to puzzle out that Hammond referred to Temeraire’s earlier resentful mutterings; Temeraire was quicker and answered for himself. “I do not care if they do not like me,” he said. “Maybe then they will let me alone, and I will not have to stay in China.” This thought visibly struck him, and his head came up with sudden enthusiasm. “If I were very offensive, do you suppose they would go away now?” he asked. “Laurence, what would be particularly insulting?”
Hammond looked like Pandora, the box open and horrors loosed upon the world; Laurence was inclined to laugh, but he stifled it out of sympathy. Hammond was young for his work, and surely, however brilliant his talents, felt his own lack of experience; it could not help but make him over-cautious.
“No, my dear, it will not do,” Laurence said. “Likely they would only blame us for teaching you ill-manners, and resolve all the more on keeping you.”
“Oh.” Temeraire disconsolately let his head sink back down onto his forelegs. “Well, I suppose I do not mind so much going, except that everyone else will be fighting without me,” he said in resignation. “But the journey will be very interesting, and I suppose I would like to see China; only they will try to take Laurence away from me again, I am sure of it, and I am not going to have any of it.”
Hammond prudently did not engage him on this subject, but hurried instead to say, “How long this business of loading has all taken—surely it is not typical? I made sure we would be halfway down the Channel by noon; here we have not even yet made sail.”
“I think they are nearly done,” Laurence said; the last immense chest was being swung aboard into the hands of the waiting sailors with the help of a block and line. The men looked all tired and surly, as well they might, having spent time enough for loading ten dragons on loading instead one man and his accoutrements; and their dinner was a good half-an-hour overdue already.
As the chest vanished below, Captain Riley climbed the stairs from the quarterdeck to join them, taking his hat off long enough to wipe sweat away from his brow. “I have no notion how they got themselves and the lot to England. I suppose they did not come by transport?”
“No, or else we would surely be returning by their ship,” Laurence said. He had not considered the question before and realized only now that he had no idea how the Chinese embassy had made their voyage. “Perhaps they came overland.” Hammond was silent and frowning, evidently wondering himself.
“That must be a very interesting journey, with so many different places to visit,” Temeraire observed. “Not that I am sorry to be going by sea: not at all,” he added, hastily, peering down anxiously at Riley to be sure he had not offended. “Will it be much faster, going by sea?”
“No, not in the least,” Laurence said. “I have heard of a courier going from London to Bombay in two months, and we will be lucky to reach Canton in seven. But there is no secure route by land: France is in the way, unfortunately, and there is a great deal of banditry, not to mention the mountains and the Taklamakan desert to cross.”
“I would not wager on less than eight months, myself,” Riley said. “If we make six knots with the wind anywhere but dead astern, it will be more than I look for, judging by her log.” Below and above now there was a great scurry of activity, all hands preparing to unmoor and make sail; the ebbing tide was lapping softly against the windward side. “Well, we must get about it. Laurence, tonight I must be on deck, I need to take the measure of her; but I hope you will dine with me tomorrow? And you also, of course, Mr. Hammond.”
“Captain,” Hammond said, “I am not familiar with the ordinary course of a ship’s life—I beg your indulgence. Would it be suitable to invite the members of the embassy?”
“Why—” Riley said, astonished, and Laurence could not blame him; it was a bit much to be inviting people to another man’s table. But Riley caught himself, and then said, more politely, “Surely, sir, it is for Prince Yongxing to issue such an invitation first.”
“We will be in Canton before that happens, in the present state of relations,” Hammond said. “No; we must make shifts to engage them, somehow.”
Riley offered a little more resistance; but Hammond had taken the bit between his teeth and managed, by a skillful combination of coaxing and deafness to hints, to carry his point. Riley might have struggled longer, but the men were all waiting impatiently for the word to weigh anchor, the tide was going every minute, and at last Hammond ended by saying, “Thank you, sir, for your indulgence; and now I will beg you gentlemen to excuse me. I am a fair enough hand at their script on land, but I imagine it will take me some more time to draft an acceptable invitation aboard ship.” With this, he rose and escaped before Riley could retract the surrender he had not quite made.
“Well,” Riley said, gloomily, “before he manages it, I am going to go and get us as far out to sea as I can; if they are mad as fire at my cheek, at least with this wind I can say in perfect honesty that I cannot get back into port for them to kick me ashore. By the time we reach Madeira they may get over it.”
He jumped down to the forecastle and gave the word; in a moment the men at the great quadruple-height capstans were straining, their grunting and bellowing carrying up from the lower decks as the cable came dragging over the iron catheads: the Allegiance’s smallest kedge anchor as large as the best bower of another ship, its flukes spread wider than the height of a man.
Much to the relief of the men, Riley did not order them to warp her out; a handful of men pushed off from the pilings with iron poles, and even that was scarcely necessary: the wind was from the northwest, full on her starboard beam, and that with the tide carried her now easily away from the harbor. She was only under topsails, but as soon as they had cleared moorings Riley called for topgallants and courses, and despite his pessimistic words they were soon going through the water at a respectable clip: she did not make much leeway, with that long deep keel, but went straight down the Channel in a stately manner.
Temeraire had turned his head forward to enjoy the wind of their progress: he looked rather like the figurehead of some old Viking ship. Laurence smiled at the notion. Temeraire saw his expression and nudged at him affectionately. “Will you read to me?” he asked hopefully. “We will have only another couple of hours of light.”
“With pleasure,” said Laurence, and sat up to look for one of his runners. “Morgan,” he called, “will you be so good as
to go below and fetch me the book in the top of my sea-chest, by Gibbon; we are in the second volume.”
The great admiral’s cabin at the stern had been hastily converted into something of a state apartment for Prince Yongxing, and the captain’s cabin beneath the poop deck divided for the other two senior envoys, the smaller quarters nearby given over to the crowd of guards and attendants, displacing not only Riley himself but also the ship’s first lieutenant, Lord Purbeck, the surgeon, the master, and several other of his officers. Fortunately, the quarters at the fore of the ship, ordinarily reserved for the senior aviators, were all but empty with Temeraire the only dragon aboard: even shared out among them all, there was no shortage of room; and for the occasion, the ship’s carpenters had knocked down the bulkheads of their individual cabins and made a grand dining space.
Too grand, at first: Hammond had objected. “We cannot seem to have more room than the prince,” he explained, and so had the bulkheads shifted a good six feet forward: the collected tables were suddenly cramped.
Riley had benefited from the enormous prize-money awarded for the capture of Temeraire’s egg almost as much as Laurence himself had; fortunately he could afford to keep a good table and a large one. The occasion indeed called for every stick of furniture which could be found on board: the instant he had recovered from the appalling shock of having his invitation even partly accepted, Riley had invited all the senior members of the gunroom, Laurence’s own lieutenants, and any other man who might reasonably be expected to make civilized conversation.
“But Prince Yongxing is not coming,” Hammond said, “and the rest of them have less than a dozen words of English between them. Except for the translator, and he is only one man.”
“Then at least we can make enough noise amongst ourselves we will not all be sitting in grim silence,” Riley said.
But this hope was not answered: the moment the guests arrived, a paralyzed silence descended, bidding fair to continue throughout the meal. Though the translator had accompanied them, none of the Chinese spoke at first. The older envoy, Liu Bao, had stayed away also, leaving Sun Kai as the senior representative; but even he made only a spare, formal greeting on their arrival, and afterwards maintained a calm and silent dignity, though he stared intently at the barrel-thick column of the foremast, painted in yellow stripes, which came down through the ceiling and passed directly through the middle of the table, and went so far as to look beneath the table-cloth, to see it continuing down through the deck below.
Riley had left the right side of the table entirely for the Chinese guests, and had them shown to places there, but they did not move to sit when he and the officers did, which left the British in confusion, some men already half-seated and trying to keep themselves suspended in mid-air. Bewildered, Riley pressed them to take their seats; but he had to urge them several times before at last they would sit. It was an inauspicious beginning, and did not encourage conversation.
The officers began by taking refuge in their dinners, but even that semblance of good manners did not last very long. The Chinese did not eat with knife and fork, but with lacquered sticks they had brought with them. These they somehow maneuvered one-handed to bring food to their lips, and shortly the British half of the company were staring in helplessly rude fascination, every new dish presenting a fresh opportunity to observe the technique. The guests were briefly puzzled by the platter of roast mutton, large slices carved from the leg, but after a moment one of the younger attendants carefully proceeded to roll up a slice, still only using the sticks, and picked it up entire to eat in three bites, leading the way for the rest.
By now Tripp, Riley’s youngest midshipman, a plump and unlovely twelve-year-old aboard by virtue of his family’s three votes in Parliament, and invited for his own education rather than his company, was surreptitiously trying to imitate the style, using his fork and knife turned upside-down in place of the sticks, his efforts meeting without notable success, except in doing damage to his formerly clean breeches. He was too far down the table to be quelled by hard looks, and the men around him were too busy gawking themselves to notice.
Sun Kai had the seat of honor nearest Riley, and, desperate to keep his attention from the boy’s antics, Riley tentatively raised a glass to him, watching Hammond out of the corner of his eye for direction, and said, “To your health, sir.” Hammond murmured a hasty translation across the table, and Sun Kai nodded, raised his own glass, and sipped politely, though not very much: it was a heady Madeira well-fortified with brandy, chosen to survive rough seas. For a moment it seemed this might rescue the occasion: the rest of the officers were belatedly recalled to their duty as gentlemen, and began to salute the rest of the guests; the pantomime of raised glasses was perfectly comprehensible without any translation, and led naturally to a thawing of relations. Smiles and nods began to traverse the table, and Laurence heard Hammond, beside him, heave out an almost inaudible sigh through open lips, and finally take some little food.
Laurence knew he was not doing his own part; but his knee was lodged up against a trestle of the table, preventing him from stretching out his now-aching leg, and though he had drunk as sparingly as was polite, his head felt thick and clouded. By this point he only hoped he might avoid embarrassment, and resigned himself to making apologies to Riley after the meal for his dullness.
Riley’s third lieutenant, a fellow named Franks, had spent the first three toasts in rude silence, sitting woodenly and raising his glass only with a mute smile, but sufficient flow of wine loosened his tongue at last. He had served on an East Indiaman as a boy, during the peace, and evidently had acquired a few stumbling words of Chinese; now he tried the less-obscene of them on the gentleman sitting across from him: a young, clean-shaven man named Ye Bing, gangly beneath the camouflage of his fine robes, who brightened and proceeded to respond with his own handful of English.
“A very—a fine—” he said, and stuck, unable to find the rest of the compliment he wished to make, shaking his head as Franks offered, alternatively, the options which seemed to him most natural: wind, night, and dinner; at last Ye Bing beckoned over the translator, who said on his behalf, “Many compliments to your ship: it is most cleverly devised.”
Such praise was an easy way to a sailor’s heart; Riley, overhearing, broke off from his disjointed bilingual conversation with Hammond and Sun Kai, on their likely southward course, and called down to the translator, “Pray thank the gentleman for his kind words, sir; and tell him that I hope you will all find yourselves quite comfortable.”
Ye Bing bowed his head and said, through the translator, “Thank you, sir, we are already much more so than on our journey here. Four ships were required to carry us here, and one proved unhappily slow.”
“Captain Riley, I understand you have gone round the Cape of Good Hope before?” Hammond interrupted: rudely, and Laurence glanced at him in surprise.
Riley also looked startled, but politely turned back to answer him, but Franks, who had spent nearly all of the last two days below in the stinking hold, directing the stowage of all the baggage, said in slightly drunken irreverence, “Four ships only? I am surprised it did not take six; you must have been packed like sardines.”
Ye Bing nodded and said, “The vessels were small for so long a journey, but in the service of the Emperor all discomfort is a joy, and in any case, they were the largest of your ships in Canton at the time.”
“Oh; so you hired East Indiamen for the passage?” Macready asked; he was the Marine lieutenant, a rail-thin, wiry stump of a man who wore spectacles incongruous on his much-scarred face. There was no malice but undeniably a slight edge of superiority in the question, and in the smiles exchanged by the naval men. That the French could build ships but not sail them, that the Dons were excitable and undisciplined, that the Chinese had no fleet at all to speak of, these were the oft-repeated bywords of the service, and to have them so confirmed was always pleasant, always heartening.
“Four ships in Canton h
arbor, and you filled their holds with baggage instead of silk and porcelain; they must have charged you the earth,” Franks added.
“How very strange that you should say so,” Ye Bing said. “Although we were traveling under the Emperor’s seal, it is true, one captain did try to demand payment, and then even tried to sail away without permission. Some evil spirit must have seized hold of him and made him act in such a crazy manner. But I believe your Company officials were able to find a doctor to treat him, and he was allowed to apologize.”
Franks stared, as well he might. “But then why did they take you, if you did not pay them?”
Ye Bing stared back, equally surprised to have been asked. “The ships were confiscated by Imperial edict. What else could they have done?” He shrugged, as if to dismiss the subject, and turned his attention back to the dishes; he seemed to think the piece of intelligence less significant than the small jam tartlets Riley’s cook had provided with the latest course.
Laurence abruptly put down knife and fork; his appetite had been weak to begin with, and now was wholly gone. That they could speak so casually of the seizure of British ships and property—the forced servitude of British seamen to a foreign throne—For a moment almost he convinced himself he had misunderstood: every newspaper in the country would have been shrieking of such an incident; Government would surely have made a formal protest. Then he looked at Hammond: the diplomat’s face was pale and alarmed, but unsurprised; and all remaining doubt vanished as Laurence recalled all of Barham’s sorry behavior, so nearly groveling, and Hammond’s attempts to change the course of the conversation.
