Tongues of Serpents: A Novel of Temeraire

by Naomi Novik

  Kulingile shook out his wings and drew a deep breath and reared up on his hindquarters; he flapped a little; his sides quivered, jelly-like, and then he tipped back down panting thinly and said, “Maybe I will manage it tomorrow.”

  Temeraire sighed.

  Demane was plainly glad for the respite, also; he had gone out hunting at mid-day again, to take advantage of the bounty of game at the lake, and as soon as they had disembarked to the security of the rocks, he collapsed almost enervated in what shade they offered. Temeraire thought he might say a private word to Kulingile: he was not taking very good care of Demane, and one might be hungry and still think of these things.

  Temeraire, and Caesar, had cleared away the brush and once again filled in all the wretched tunnels—there were so very many of them; Temeraire did not see why they should be necessary. If the bunyips were as quick as Laurence said, it seemed to him they did not need to be hiding underground and leaping out on some unsuspecting person, only to eat; they might hunt respectably. There was something unnatural and unpleasant in it, he felt—and when they had cleared all away, and made safe the camp, the rest of the men shifted over: but Demane lay where he was, asleep.

  “If he does not want anything to eat, he can stay there,” Sipho said, rather coldly. “I am surprised he has not gone out hunting again; won’t Kulingile be hungry?”

  “You are saying it wrong,” Temeraire said, “it is Kulingile, and you know better, so there is no excuse.”

  “I don’t see why it should matter to anyone,” Sipho said, and stared down at his book mulishly.

  But Roland pushed herself up, after she had drunk and rested a little, and trudged over to Demane with her canteen. He struggled up and hanging limply over his crossed legs drank and drank, and then drooping followed her to the camp and fell asleep once more, as far as he could be from the little fire which the aviators had put up, for comfort and cooking. Kulingile crept over to him and nosed at his shoulder anxiously until Demane blindly reached out and patted him; then slumped back.

  Kulingile sighed, reassured; then looked up at Temeraire and said, in his thin voice, “May I have another kangaroo?”

  “After all those rats you ate, anyone would think you had put away enough,” Caesar said, but as Caesar had taken two kangaroos earlier and not shared a bite, Temeraire was quite out of temper with him, and it pleased him to say, in what he felt was a particularly gracious way, “Certainly you may; I do not believe in being stingy,” and Kulingile fell with so much gratitude upon the meal that it gave Temeraire a glow of lordly satisfaction.

  “If he is going to smother himself with his own weight,” Caesar said, “it seems to me you can’t call it friendly to help him do it quicker,” but this was only spiteful meanness, Temeraire felt; although Kulingile would eat too quickly, and then stop and gasp to catch his breath, and then begin again; and when he was done and had collapsed in slumber beside Demane, his breathing was a little worse.

  “Another ten feet,” Dorset remarked, winding up his knotted cord again as he stood from Kulingile’s side. “The rate of growth is exceptional. I will have to make a note of it for the breeding journal, and perhaps for the Royal Society.”

  “But when will he be able to fly?” Temeraire asked, and Dorset had no satisfactory answer to give.

  But this was only a small and vanishing shadow on his general complacency of spirit: his throat did not hurt quite so much, and Gong Su was now making another pot of soup, which Temeraire expected to enjoy a great deal in the morning—flavored this time with the small yellow fruits of one of the bushes which Temeraire had torn up; Tharkay had pointed it out as having been harvested a little by the aborigines, he thought, and an experimental taste had not caused any discomfort: a little sweetness, and a strong flavor rather like tomatoes, although they looked more nearly like raisins.

  “Will you try and eat a little now, before you sleep?” Laurence said. “We can cut some kangaroo small, if that would ease the passage; you cannot heal quickly or well when you are straining to your limits, and not eating.”

  “I think I can,” Temeraire said, feeling optimistic, and if he only managed perhaps one kangaroo, and none of the bones, those went directly into the soup and so would not be wasted, and he did not feel quite such vivid pangs when he at last settled upon the sand.

  To cap his evening, Laurence read to him a little; when their patience for going over the by-now-familiar material had faded, he put the book down, and Temeraire said, “I have been thinking, Laurence, of the valley: perhaps we might take some of this red stone out of the desert with us, as we return, and use it in building a pavilion: would it not make an interesting pattern, with the yellow stone there?”

  “I cannot quarrel with your taste,” Laurence said, looking at the red earth, “although the labor in bringing back so much stone must be great. But we will have the time, I imagine.”

  He was silent a little while: night had come on fully now, clear, and with the moon out and shining, cool and pleasant after the sun’s heat. The desert beneath was endless shadows of clumped grass and the thin scrubby trees, dunes rising and falling away into the distance, and the water a silvered reflection gleaming out at them from the ground. Temeraire thought perhaps Laurence had fallen asleep, but then he said, softly, “I had not quite felt the vastness of this country, until we had come into it all this way, nor its strangeness.”

  “Laurence,” Temeraire ventured, holding his breath for the answer, “are you very sad to not return to England?”

  “I must be anxious for the sake of our country,” Laurence said, “and our friends left behind; it is difficult to know them in dire straits, and feel we might be of more use elsewhere, and yet remain helpless to assist. But in a personal sense, I have left very little behind, my dear. I have long been used to rely upon correspondence to sustain the intimacy of friendships: it is a necessity for a sailor.”

  He paused, then, and said low, “You must be more constrained than I am, by our remaining; I have not forgotten Tharkay’s proposal, only—” He stopped.

  “Well, I must say that privateering seems quite splendid, to me,” Temeraire said, unable to conceal a touch of wistfulness, “but I do see, Laurence, that you do not quite like to think of it; and I should not at all wish to do it if you did not feel perfectly satisfied, also; only I thought perhaps you might miss the war.”

  “The war? No,” Laurence said. “To be of use, yes; but there is no sense in thinking of it. I am very sorry, my dear, but I hold out no hope for a pardon.”

  “But I am sure we need not be useless here,” Temeraire said. “We have found our valley, after all.”

  “It would be something, indeed,” Laurence said, “to build for once, instead of tear away; yes.”

  So Temeraire might lay his head down with some degree of relief, and the pleasant occupation, before he slept, of working out in his head a design for a pavilion of adequate magnificence to console Laurence for any remaining regrets, patterned in stone of red and gold.

  He woke gradually, very cool and comfortable, except for a little smacking of sand at the corner of his jaw; he raised his head and spat it out, and startled: he was overbalancing, and his hindquarters went tipping away underneath him as though he were on the deck of a ship plunging unexpectedly down into a trough. “What has happened to the ground?” he said, and tried to stand, and could not: there was nothing solid for his feet to grasp, and his limbs dragged very strangely if he moved them—everything seemed very low—“Laurence?” he said: the moon had set, and the sun was not yet risen, and he could not make out much of anything but the small glow of the fire’s embers, down within the camp, and the rearing outcrop of rock some distance away.

  “Yes, my dear?” Laurence said drowsily, from his back, and then looking over raised his voice and called, strongly, “Mr. Forthing! A light there, if you please—”

  The aviators came with torches, and then abruptly stopped, scrambling back with exclamations: their boots sin
king in the sand, thick sludgy noises like the bubbles of a porridge slowly boiling as they pulled them free. In the light, Temeraire saw he had sunk into the earth, nearly up to his breastbone; the folded edges of his wings were plunged deep and his tail was half-submerged, his legs wholly so—

  “But I was only sleeping,” he protested, and tried to rear out, but he could not pull his forelegs free, though he exerted all his strength: one would come a little way out, rising, wet sand dribbling from his hide as he pulled, but the effort required grew, and grew, until he could not continue, and sank forward again.

  He panted and found this raised him perhaps half-a-foot, not unlike bobbing in the water, but he could not get out: he could not move. He tried again, more vigorously thrashing his limbs—he might move them a little side to side, he found, if he did not try to pull free—until Laurence sharply said, “Temeraire, stop! You are sinking further—”

  The sand had crept up higher on his chest, and was lapping at the edges of his back. “Laurence, perhaps you had better climb off,” Temeraire said, turning his neck around to inspect Laurence’s position with some concern. “I am sure I can reach to the others, if I stretch my neck.”

  “No, I thank you,” Laurence said.

  “I would advise against moving, or lowering your neck to where it may be entrapped,” Tharkay said; he was crouched down inspecting the pit, and setting broken-off twigs into the sand to mark its border. “I am surprised the quicksand should go deep enough for you to have sunk this far.”

  “We cannot have overlooked this last night,” Laurence said. “Temeraire and I were sitting here an hour before we slept; the earth was perfectly solid.”

  “I only do not understand why it will not let me out,” Temeraire said, unable to resist trying again to draw his foreleg free, very slowly and carefully, only a little way at a time, but it dragged and dragged and dragged, and at last halted: he could draw it no further, and it sank gradually back away as soon as he stopped his efforts.

  He was not uncomfortable, precisely: it was quite pleasantly cool, and when Laurence asked, Temeraire said stoutly, “Oh, I do not mind it of itself, only I would like to get out of it, now,” but that did not address the clinging, sticky quality of the stuff: sand was squirming everywhere under the edges of his hide, and there was something dreadful in not being able to get out: it was not at all like swimming in water, which did not try and drag you back down, like chains which you were not allowed to take off.

  “Well, I don’t see why you didn’t get out of it when you first noticed,” Caesar said, having roused up, and yawning tremendously against the early morning: he was not yet done with a hatchling’s usual tendency to sleep endlessly.

  “I was asleep,” Temeraire bit out, annoyed, “and so I did not notice, until I had woken; and I do not think it is at all wonderful I should not have, as no-one would expect perfectly ordinary sand to turn into something like this. How are we to turn it back?”

  “The sun’s heat may burn off enough of the moisture to allow you to dig free, when it rises,” Tharkay said, after a moment. “Perhaps some underground spring feeds this place.”

  “If we can remove some quantity of the sand, you may be able to free yourself more quickly,” Laurence said. “Mr. Forthing, shovels, if you please—”

  “What’s over there, then,” one of the convicts said, pointing, and Temeraire looked: on the ridge of the dune rising above his precarious position, a narrow angular head was up and visible as a black silhouette against the lightening sky, watching.

  Another rose up beside it, and then another: until there was a line of them, long muzzles with rounded snouts, and small black eyes which caught the reflections of the torches and gleamed yellow back at them. They had queer tufted heads. “Steady, there,” Forthing said; the aviators had out their pistols.

  The light was increasing: the bunyips were shades of red and brown, the very color of the earth, with pebbled hides, and the tufts were yellow as the grass; if they were not poking up from the hill, they would have been very difficult to see at all. “Oh,” Temeraire said, indignant, “I see now how it is: they are even more cowardly than I thought. This must certainly be their doing; they did not care to fight me properly, or defend their territory, but instead they have made this wretched sneaking trap.”

  Rankin snorted. “How a gaggle of lizards are to have produced anything of the sort, I should care to know,” he said. “More likely they have come like vultures, to wait.”

  Laurence would rather have liked to knock Rankin into the quicksand. “Mr. Forthing,” he said, tightly, “let us begin digging: I doubt the beasts will make any direct attempt while we have Caesar here, nor come near enough for Temeraire to reach them with his jaws.”

  The row of spectators was nevertheless unpleasant to endure: those gleaming pupil-less eyes, malevolent even in their immobility, while they worked and dug heaps of wet sand out from around Temeraire’s body to pile up dark and wet into piles like the misshapen sand castles of small children, towers crumbling as they dried in the rising sun.

  “Laurence,” Temeraire said, as the sun grew higher, “I would not mind a drink of water, if it were at all convenient,” which it could not be, given his size, but Forthing sent men down to fetch back all the largest jugs of water, under a pistol-wielding guard.

  They returned empty-handed. “There isn’t any,” O’Dea said, “—any water, it has all run away in the night.”

  “We drank it nearly dry last night, but it ought to have refilled by now, surely,” Forthing said.

  Tharkay had slipped silently away at their announcement, drawing his own pistol; he returned shortly and said, “The spring is no longer flowing to the water-hole. It has been diverted; underground, so far as I can tell.”

  Laurence paused, looking up at the row of sentinel bunyips, and said, “Tenzing, do you mean they have done it? Deliberately?”

  “Certainly they have done it deliberately,” Temeraire interjected. “You cannot imagine they have done it to be friendly; oh! How I should serve them out, if they were not such cowards, and hiding all the way over there where I cannot get at them, thanks to all this sand.”

  Tharkay said, “I see no reason to doubt it. They would find it still more convenient to their hunting to make the water-holes, rather than merely take advantage of whatever natural ones the countryside should offer. If they can divert a natural spring to suit one purpose, why not this one?”

  “Why did they not make the pit deeper then, and sink him entire?” Laurence said.

  Tharkay shrugged. “It is no great difficulty to avoid drowning in quicksand,” he said. “He is too buoyant to sink so far. The difficulty is in getting out.”

  And whatever difficulties should entail on extracting one man, trapped in such a quagmire, were as nothing to the problem of extracting Temeraire, Laurence dismayed realized—and Temeraire was already thirsty.

  “This excavation is nonsense,” Rankin said. “We cannot hope to get him out without Granby returns, and that is scarcely likely.”

  “If you have any better solution to propose, Captain Rankin, we may hear it at any occasion,” Laurence snapped: he had been looking to the east, vain and unlikely though the hope was, of course, when they had been blown so far off their course and their line of cairns broken by the storm.

  “We might rig some ropes as well,” Forthing said, “and do what we can to pull him—”

  Rankin snorted, and there was indeed very little to be hoped for, from such an effort: thirty men to drag him out when Temeraire himself could not even presently free one limb. “If you will try and drag him nearer one edge,” Laurence said grimly, “perhaps, Temeraire, you may then draw yourself out.”

  The ropes were hurled over, and Laurence secured them about the base of Temeraire’s neck, and through the rings of the harness which he was devoutly glad they had not removed, the previous night. But there was not very much purchase, still, for such an operation; with only a handful of passenge
rs, and no expectation of combat, Temeraire had barely been rigged out with what harness was necessary to support his belly-rigging.

  Thirty men hauling, the rope resting upon their shoulders, their hands wrapped around the length: Temeraire did move, a little, trying to help as best he might, with a sort of paddling; but they gained a few inches with the best they could do, and needed perhaps fifty feet. “Sir,” Forthing said to Captain Rankin, “I believe we must rig Caesar up,” politely but firmly: Rankin hesitated, but could scarcely refuse under the circumstances.

  “I will help, also,” Kulingile piped up, watching, and seized onto the rope near the edge with his jaws, to pull; Demane said, “Wait—” and to Mr. Fellowes said, “Can you put him into harness?”

  “Precious good that will do,” Caesar said, ungraciously submitting to having the ropes secured to his own harness, as Kulingile was hooked in to a makeshift affair of a few straps and buckles: he had grown at least to the size of a respectable cart-horse and, while he might not be anything to Temeraire, or to Caesar, was not wholly inconsequential.

  Mr. Fellowes said, “We might send the ropes around a tree, or some of these rocks, to make a bit of a pulley, sir.”

  They took up the oilcloths and folded them together to make a pad about an outcropping of rocks, and stretched their two hawsers around it; Caesar and Kulingile were put at the end, and the men hauled on wheresoever they might. The bunyips made an excellent overseer, their small eyes gleaming: if Temeraire were taken so, Caesar could not carry all the men out of the desert; and if any were left behind, there was hardly any doubt of the death-sentence to be read in those eyes.

  Muscles strained, and groaning they all pulled together; Temeraire bracing back his neck so the pulling would act upon his body instead. The quicksand glubbed around his breastbone and eddied away, curling in upon itself in thick slow-moving rolls like pudding batter being stirred, and he moved—a little, only a little, but he moved. “Heave, there!” Forthing shouted, and, “Heave!”—one enormous effort after another, each one winning a little more space.