Tongues of Serpents: A Novel of Temeraire

by Naomi Novik

  In the morning, however, the sustaining wrath had fled. All that remained was a grey, grinding misery, the sensation of failure mingled with the certainty that however futile, the search must continue, until the egg’s final fate—dreadful though it was likely to be—should be known. Temeraire nosed at the last, littlest egg to comfort himself: it had begun to harden, he thought, and would soon cease to be in danger; the event could not come quickly enough to suit him.

  “You might hurry, if you liked,” he told the egg quietly, “although certainly not so you do yourself any harm; only if you felt hungry, perhaps, or ready to try a little flying, you might come out sooner rather than late.”

  Iskierka was pacing, meanwhile: a restless abbreviated movement back and forth, so her long and coiling tail lagged behind when she made her turns, and continued in her original direction for a while, until she lashed it up behind her again. “Well?” she said. “Let us be going; it is light again.”

  It was not yet quite light; there was just enough of a paler quality to the sky to see her shape silhouetted black against the horizon, and the faint white clouds of steam issuing from her spikes. But the men had still to be got aboard: the sun was near the horizon as they finally leapt back aloft, and in their climb they broke into the sunlight before it had struck the land.

  They had a little while searching before they found the trail itself again, and were obliged to land several times that Tharkay might look for signs. The repeated delays were extremely wearing to the spirit, but Temeraire held back the complaints which he might have wanted to make; he could see that their insistence on continuing to search, into the night, had made it quite impossible for Tharkay to keep any sight of the trail. He could not be unreasonable, he told himself, and added to Iskierka at the fourth such pause, “And the chances of finding the egg must be so much smaller if we should lose the trail entirely; it is only sensible, and we are not wasting time, really, but gaining it.”

  “Yes, yes,” Iskierka said. “Is he not done yet? Whyever must it take so long, only to peer at the ground; and why must there be so many trees here?”

  “As long as they are here, you might let me down to rest under them; I am very hot again,” Caesar put in, from Temeraire’s back, where he had been sternly instructed to remain; naturally, just to make more of a nuisance of himself, he had put on another five or six stone of weight overnight, Temeraire thought.

  It was very inconvenient to be hunting over such forested country: they had crossed now over the mountains, and there were everywhere trees, so one might look as far as one liked without seeing a break in them, except for the river below flowing south- and westward, away from the ocean. “It must flow to the southern coast, or empty into some lake or inland sea, I suppose,” Laurence said, looking at them, and at his spread-out maps of the coastline of the continent, sadly incomplete.

  “That would be something to look forward to, I suppose,” Granby said, wiping his sleeve across his forehead. “I would not mind coming across a lake. These smugglers must have water somewhere along their road?” he added.

  It was very hard to endure the slow pace, the endless trees slipping by, the river winding away from them. Iskierka was of the opinion they had better be done with it, and fly onward straight; and Temeraire found it a grave struggle to persuade her otherwise: he had to argue with himself and not only her, even though Laurence and Granby were so very certain.

  Temeraire tried to fly as cautiously and slowly as he might, but several days went by without a sign, and Tharkay began insisting for all their efforts they had overshot and must go back. Temeraire could not quite believe it—they had been going so very slowly—but Laurence at last persuaded him to pause, one morning before they had gone aloft, to let him draw out a diagramme, showing him the fastest pace the thieves could have made: and Temeraire could not deny it; they had gone too far.

  They had another three days flying back over the same ground, retreating to the last traces they had found and repeating their search, before at last Tharkay allowed them to continue further: but he had found nothing new. Temeraire landed dully for water that afternoon by the river, full of despair; he could not help but drink thirstily, but he did not feel he deserved it.

  “Laurence,” Tharkay said, rising, “a word, if you please.” Temeraire pricked up his ruff, and valiantly resisted the temptation to eavesdrop; whatever could Tharkay be saying, which he should not like the rest of them to hear? And Laurence looked quite serious, when he said it; of course one could not go prying into a secret conversation, but—

  “I cannot hear them at all,” Iskierka said. “Granby, go and tell us what they are saying.”

  “Well, I shan’t,” Granby said firmly, “and you shan’t go nearer, either; you have enough sins to your account with adding on the vice of listening.”

  But then Laurence came back and said, very gently, “My dear, I must ask you to exert the greatest restraint, and to persuade Iskierka to do the same, before I should—” and Temeraire stricken said, “Oh—oh, he has found—a bit of the egg—”

  “No,” Laurence said, “no, my dear; quite the contrary, but you must not disturb the trail, nor lose it. Tharkay thinks they were here, only last night, and that they kept the egg here on this low hillock of sand: but he cannot be certain—”

  “They are near, then!” Iskierka exclaimed, rearing up on her hind legs.

  “Stop, stop!” Temeraire said, and leaping pinned down several of her coils to the ground. “You must not flap and stir the ground, otherwise he will lose everything; we must wait. Tharkay, can you tell at all where they have gone?”

  His wings wished to tremble with excitement; all the grimy sense of despair quite swept away. They had not failed: the thieves had not got clear with their prize. “Why, we have only been flying a few hours this morning,” Temeraire said, exultantly, “and stopping so often; surely we must find them and catch them up before to-day is spent, after all. And you are quite sure, I hope, that the egg was well when they were here?” he asked. “Was it near their campfire, perhaps, could you tell?”

  “I have already provided you the best part of a phantasy,” Tharkay said, “to speculate the egg was here at all,” but that was only his dry way, Temeraire decided.

  Iskierka was all for going at once, with all speed on a direct course, but Granby and Laurence were insistent on the subject: they had to keep flying their sweeps, for the thieves likely should know by now that they were being so closely pursued. “It is very inconvenient that we should be so large, and they so small,” Temeraire said to Laurence unhappily, “for I dare say they are hiding somewhere in the trees looking at us this same instant, thinking, There they are, and they cannot see us at all! in a very unpleasant gloating way.”

  “I will go so far as to assure you,” Laurence said, “that if the thieves are anywhere and under any sort of cover imaginable, where they can see you and the treatment you have been meting out to the surrounding vegetation, they are not in the least inclined either to gloating or laughter. Prayer might be more to the point.”

  Temeraire could no longer complain at all whenever Tharkay wished them to stop again, and neither could Iskierka; instead they peered over his shoulder, at whatever speck of dirt or dust he might be inspecting, and tried to work out whatever traces he had found. Temeraire saw nothing at all, himself, although he nodded and tried to look wise when Tharkay should point at some perfectly indistinguishable patch of ground and call it a footprint, or at an unremarkable bush and call it a trace of passage.

  A few days later, still at the creeping sluggish pace, they had struck away into open country away from the river, only creeks and smaller tributaries left: traveling north-west. The forests were clearing out of the way into scrubby grassland, so Temeraire could not mind the dust, however much there was of it: which was a great deal; he coughed and sneezed as he flew, and when they stopped for the nights.

  Laurence was anxious on the subject of water. Temeraire could not let such
small concerns distract him, and though it was certainly not as convenient to leave behind the river, if the smugglers had done so, then there must be water. “That does not mean we may find it as easily as have they, my dear,” Laurence said, when the last little stream dried away and fell behind them as they flew, “and you must consider: a small party of men may carry their own supply of water for several days, where we have not that luxury.”

  “But there is so much less cover, too,” Temeraire said, “and so it must be easier to see the water even from quite far away, and the thieves, too; if only we can find them, we needn’t worry about anything else.”

  “We’d best worry about it, I warrant,” Jack Telly said to the other men, from the belly-netting. “If there’s water found, there’s some gullets as it’ll go down first, and maybe none left for the rest of us.”

  Temeraire snorted in disdain at this. “And there is a perfectly nice water-hole directly there,” he added, “so you need not complain.”

  It was easy to see: a faint silvery gleam amid the dusty country, ringed invitingly by many shrubs and a few thin trees, and after they had drunk, Tharkay called their attention to the small hill a little way off, where at the summit he had found the mid-day camp where the thieves had paused to eat a little.

  Tharkay said, “I imagine they had a fire, here,” pointing at a bare patch of ground, with a little mess of twigs perhaps. Temeraire sniffed unobtrusively at this last after Tharkay had stood to move to another part of the camp, but he could not even make out any smell of smoke until he put out his tongue, and then he thought he just barely might have a sense of faintly burnt wood.

  But then, then, then, Tharkay said, “—and the egg was here,” and Temeraire turning saw it very plainly: there was a nest of leaves and grasses scraped quite close together, around a little framework of thin branches, and the nest had a smooth, curved hollow depressed within it, just the right size and shape to hold an egg: Temeraire might have scraped together something very like for the same purpose.

  “You have brought us up on their heels out of ten thousand acres of wilderness,” Laurence said. “—I should not have credited it.”

  Tharkay shook his head. “You may praise me when we have them in hand, and I do not see them; do you?”

  Temeraire went aloft, for them all to peer about, and indeed he could not see any sign of anyone walking in any direction—there was a little dust going up a few hills over, but that was only some cassowaries running, and in the distance a few wild dogs. “But we must be close, if they ate here so lately,” he said, rallying his spirits as he landed.

  “I do not care to be discouraging,” Tharkay said to Laurence, “but they seem to know this country uncommonly well. There is no hesitation in their trail—no false starts. They ate quickly—they had food with them, or knew where nearby to get it. They came directly to this camp, knowing there would be water here; and they did not have the advantage of an aerial view.”

  “I hope I may not be called over-optimistic,” Laurence said, “but I will indulge in a little more confidence, even so: they may know their route, but they cannot know the countryside well enough to stray very far from it, and we have the advantage of being able to cover it in wide swaths.”

  “We had better use that advantage, then,” Temeraire said. “Pray let everyone come back aboard.” The convicts reluctantly came up and out of the shade to go back into the belly-netting, even Caesar was prodded up whining, and then Lieutenant Forthing said, “Where has that blasted fellow Telly got to?”

  Jack Telly was quite gone.

  “But where can he have got to?” Temeraire said: there was not much of anything for several miles around, and even if the man had wanted to run away from them, there was nowhere he might have run away to; they had covered a good ten miles of country, even flying the tedious sweeps, since their camp that morning.

  It turned out, however, that the last anyone remembered of him, he had gone down to get a drink at the water-hole, and had taken with him a canteen: one of the other convicts had seen him go with it in his hand.

  “So he has deserted and taken to the wilderness,” Rankin said impatiently, “—looking for this idiot notion of China reachable by land, no doubt; and we may consider ourselves lucky he did not steal anything more necessary than a single can of water. Do you propose to spend an hour hunting him out from under whichever bit of scrub he has secreted himself beneath, or do you suppose we might value a little more highly the prize that has brought us out this far, than preserving a fool from his chosen folly?”

  “We cannot spare the time, surely,” Temeraire said anxiously to Laurence.

  “We can and shall spare the time,” Laurence said, “at least to fly some passes overhead around the immediate countryside and call out to him: this man is in our charge, and one of our party. If he has deserted, that is one thing; but desertion would be strange indeed in our present situation, so far from any sign of civilization; far more likely that from an excess of heat or air-sickness he has grown disoriented and wandered into the scrub, and lost his way back.”

  “I don’t see why we should care, if he is silly enough to go roaming around in the wild without coming back,” Iskierka said. “He is not an egg, being dragged about wherever anyone likes who has a hold of it, and quite unable to manage for itself.”

  Temeraire would of course not quarrel with Laurence, but he inclined to Iskierka’s view of the situation, particularly after he heard one of the convicts say to another, “Ask me, he is well out of it and no mistake; halfway to China, I warrant, and here we sit swinging like the dugs of a back-alley sixpence whore under this monster’s belly,” while they were supposed to be yelling out Jack, Jack as Temeraire flew his circles. Jack himself seemed to agree with them; at least he did not answer, or step out from behind a shrub and wave an arm.

  “He must be choosing to stay hidden,” Temeraire said, “surely, Laurence; we have made such a tremendous noise no one anywhere near-by could fail to hear us. I hope,” he added, only a little reproachfully, “that the thieves have not, for they must be warned if they have.”

  He did not add, although he might have, that Telly had been quite a regular nuisance since even before they had left Sydney: had complained quite incessantly. It did not seem to Temeraire that he would be a very great loss, if he did not wish to come with them any further.

  “I cannot account for it,” Laurence said. “Pray go below and ask those men, Demane, what was his sentence, and his profession?”

  Demane climbed down Temeraire’s side, to speak with the convicts in the belly-netting; and swung back up again to report: Telly had been trained up as a carpenter, once, and had so called himself; but convicted of debt in the amount of £2 5d 7s at the age of sixteen had gone through a window in London to snatch a few goods to repay; finding this a more lucrative profession, he had given over hopes of respectability; he was, in short, a thief: a second-story man, sentenced to twenty years of transportation and hard labor.

  “What business has such a man in the open wilderness, and running out into it?” Laurence said.

  “I cannot see why you insist on crediting such a man with more wit than willfullness,” Rankin said. “I am sure he imagines all will be charmingly easy: a man with prospects of a respectable profession, who runs himself into a debt ludicrous to his station, turns thief, and runs riot in London until he is seized for transportation, surely cannot be allowed to have the remotest powers of reason.

  “Nor,” Rankin added cuttingly, “any value to society; and meanwhile a beast priceless to our situation is being trundled away by, I gather your Chinaman friend suspects, some party of French spies. If you insist on pursuing this course of action, we will surely lose the trail; and you may be sure I will not stint in speaking my mind on the subject in my own report to their Lordships, or about Captain Granby’s ill-judgment in yielding to your wishes.”

  It was very unpleasant to be in any way of the same mind as Rankin, particularly when
he spoke in so offensive a way, and Temeraire thought he had not much value to society, either. But—the egg must be paramount, that was incontrovertible; and even as Temeraire steeled himself to speak to Laurence, Iskierka was swinging back towards them. Granby called over, “Laurence, I am damned sorry, but the fellow don’t want to be found, if he hasn’t broken his neck somewhere; and Iskierka won’t stand for looking any longer.”

  “Very well,” Laurence said, after a moment, “—let us go onward.”

  “You are not very distressed, Laurence, I hope?” Temeraire asked, as he and Iskierka fell again into the sweeping pattern he had worked out that morning: she flying slightly above, and the two of them interweaving, and looking in opposite directions always, that both of them should have cast an eye over the same ground, to be sure not to overlook anything.

  “No,” Laurence said, “only I must find it strange; I have known men desert, often enough, but only at the prospect of some immediate gain and a nearby harbor: with women, generally, and I would be the more likely to credit him with deliberate flight if he had taken a cask of rum instead of the canteen. I imagine Granby has it right, and the poor devil took a wrong step and fell into some crevasse; where he will likely die of thirst, if those wild dogs we have heard at night do not come on him first. This is not a kind country, and I cannot think very much of abandoning a man in it.”

  They did not find the smugglers that afternoon, nor that evening. They flew on through the deepening dusk, which took all the color out of the countryside, and their sweeps grew more narrow while they peered in every direction for the tiniest glow of a campfire; but there was nothing.

  The ground cover rapidly thinned out further as the twilight advanced; even the shrubs had begun to diminish and crouch lower to the ground, small dark lumps as they flew. The only trees to be seen looked dark stick-like things against the fading sky, much like the brushes Mr. Fellowes used for scrubbing the harness-buckles or carabiners: long thin trunks like young saplings and a small lump of twiggy branches and small leaves atop. The stars were very bright and clear, above: cold and brilliant speckles of light, and the spray of the Milky Way pearly grey in a wide swath.