Tongues of Serpents: A Novel of Temeraire

by Naomi Novik

  Rankin looked away, as though to express silently his mortification at Laurence’s crudeness; Captain Tomkinson of the Otter covered his mouth and issued a cough, soft and uncomfortable. Granby only did not see anything awkward in the speech, and added, “And speaking of whom, if you do mean to make some noise, you oughtn’t be glad to have found us; Temeraire won’t in the least sit still for your having at these fellows, and I don’t suppose any of the other beasts would care to disoblige him. I don’t know what Captain Rankin may have said about seniority, which is a right-enough mess between us presently, but he knows very well that it don’t make a lick of difference to them. What are your orders?”

  Willoughby frowned: he was a narrow-faced man, whose hair had already crept back along the curve of his skull, and he was not particularly well-dressed: his clothes were those of a man who had been at sea for eight months, and lodging in irregular shelters. But Granby had given him an excuse, and it was to Granby he answered: “Our orders,” with emphasis, “are to take the port. And if it will not be surrendered, gentlemen, I will take it; I will take it if I have to shell it to the very earth.”

  Willoughby’s authority was quite real: the orders, which he allowed Granby to read, were from Commodore Rowley and indeed specific: the port, if it existed, could not be tolerated, and must be taken before it were fortified; the grounds for doing so a mere bagatelle of a technicality: the Regent had ordered the remainder of the continent claimed on the basis of Fleming’s circumnavigation, which might as easily have given France a claim by the journeys of La Pérouse.

  “There’s no sense arguing it with him, anyway,” Granby said, when they had flown back to shore. “He has the bit in his teeth, and the orders are clear enough, to be just.”

  “If we must choose between starting a war with China now,” Willoughby had said, “and starting it a year from now, when they have cannon here and are letting the French romp merrily through our trade, we will start it now. And I say it has been too long in coming, myself, when they have been giving Bonaparte one plum of a dragon after another. One despot likes another, I suppose.”

  This was a wholesale misunderstanding of the original intention of the Chinese in sending Temeraire’s egg to Napoleon, which had been done for purely interior purposes and merely to avert a question of succession; and even more so Lien’s presence amongst the French: she had fled the country an exile, suspected in treachery against the crown prince, and had gone to Napoleon seeking only revenge.

  But this was not Willoughby’s deepest objection; he had added, more vehemently, “And when I think of the way they snatched our East Indiamen, and all of us forced to be meek as milk to them after, I avow it must make any man worthy of the name want to put his hands to his gun. It is time and more we blacked their eye for them.”

  Laurence remembered well his own feelings on learning that the Chinese had confiscated four British ships: confiscated them, and forced the sailors to sail their envoy to England, with neither cargo nor payment and only peremptory demands. It had been a gross violation of sovereignty, and he had felt, with every other sailor who had heard it, the most violent fury, not lessened in the least by the cringing behavior of Government—more anxious then to prevent the entry of China into the war, or at least more sanguine that it was to be prevented.

  Jia Zhen might of course have felt a similar sense of outrage when Rankin presented to him the demands for surrender, through Temeraire’s dubious translation, to which Temeraire added as commentary, “I do not see how this is reasonable: after all, it is stuff for the Regent to say we have claimed the country, when the Larrakia are right here and have been for ages and ages. Why, what if I were to land in London and say, Very well, because I am the first Chinese dragon to land in London, now I will claim it for the Emperor—that has as much sense as this does.”

  Rankin snapped, “That is enough: these are our orders. You may question them if you must in private, not in front of the agent of a foreign nation.”

  “That is a very handsome way to talk,” Temeraire said scathingly, “after you have been sleeping in his house, and came to his dinner; it all seems to me like the sort of thing that Requiescat would do, when he was behaving like a scrub. And anyway,” he added, “if Jia Zhen could understand whatever I was saying in English, I would not have to translate, so I do not see why I ought to be any quieter about it in front of him.”

  Whitehall claimed a violation of the treaty of Peking, the agreement negotiated by Hammond, wherein China had granted to Britain an equal access to any of her opened ports under the same terms as any other Western nation. Jia Zhen with great courtesy pointed out that this agreement said nothing whatsoever about China’s granting her own merchants other and more favorable terms for export, as should be natural to any nation, and further that the port was not after all a Chinese port, but the possession of the Larrakia, if they had been so kind as to grant the Chinese the use of much of the land.

  “And certainly British merchants must always be welcome, in any case. The Pomfrey, I believe,” he said, “was here in the spring: her captain a pleasure to deal with, and most reasonable. I hope that Captain Willoughby will reconsider his position. Any disagreement or quarrel between our nations must be a most painful circumstance, and I fear could scarcely help but grieve the Emperor.”

  Laurence ignored Rankin’s black looks to say, “Mr. Jia, I hope that you might agree that the terms of the treaty are somewhat unclear, and the possession of this port itself open to dispute: certainly left to their own devices, the Larrakia had not opened such a trade. Perhaps if the trade were suspended for a time, while our respective governments should discuss such amendments to the treaty as would satisfy them both—”

  But Jia Zhen was not to be persuaded, not without reason; he did not refuse outright, but spoke in a calm and roundabout fashion of the difficulty of managing the sea-serpents, the impossibility of interrupting their peregrinations without causing their training to founder, and the expense of providing their food, which must be supported by the trade; he also, to Laurence’s dismay, spoke of the warehouses which were to be constructed, and added, “By the order of the Emperor, several craftsmen have already been commanded to prepare themselves and their families to make the journey: Lung Shen Li will bring them hence on her next journey.” This of course was very like throwing tinder onto a fire, and likely only to stir further enthusiasm on Willoughby’s part for immediate action.

  “There was no real hope, of course,” Laurence said, low and bleak, when they had ended the fruitless audience.

  “If it is any comfort,” Tharkay said, “I doubt whatever concessions you might have wrung from them would satisfy Willoughby. He is here to take the port; nothing less will content him, and he does not strike me as that political sort of creature who might be persuaded by an appeal to his caution.”

  “But he is wholly unreasonable,” Temeraire protested. “It is not as though Britain had built a port here, and the Chinese were taking it away; we had months to travel only to reach here at all.”

  That the port was strategically placed so as to easily wreck all of Britain’s shipping, and her mastery of the Indian Ocean, did not appease him. “I do not see how one small country can complain if it does not rule all the oceans of the world, even those which are quite upon the other side,” he said, “and after all, have we not heard that Java is only on the other side of the water here, and the Dutch are there, and our friends? Why does Willoughby not go there and say, Those are yours, and hand them over.”

  “He would,” Tharkay said, “but they are defended with modern guns and modern navies, which can raise the price of making such a demand.”

  Granby was kind enough to make one final attempt: they flew over with Caesar once more, and he remonstrated with Willoughby, who if he heard, did not show any particular interest in listening. When Granby had finished, he nodded, and then said, “Well, I have heard you out, and now, Captain Granby, and Captain Rankin, I am giving you a dam
ned order: you will get your beasts and all these others out of the port. We scarcely need your help to secure the place, so you need not involve yourself, if you do not choose to—I will be happy,” he added coldly, “to forward your reasoning to Whitehall. All I require is that you do not interfere with my orders, and we will manage the thing ourselves.”

  “So he means to smash up all the port,” Temeraire said, “and maybe kill Jia Zhen, who has been so kind to us, or the Larrakia: when I think of the tremendous, the extraordinary generosity which has been shown us—oh! what a wretched little worm this Willoughby fellow must be; it is no wonder he should like Rankin so.”

  Laurence said somberly, “I am afraid the fault was ours in accepting that hospitality when we had so little information on the position which our nation had taken, or might choose to; there was reason enough to know the Government would dislike it, if not to guess they should risk a war over the matter. They may,” he added, “suppose that a sharp rebuke here will warn China off from any similar attempts.”

  He looked up at Temeraire and said, “I do not say I like it, my dear; I do not, in the least, and Willoughby is the last man I would wish to see entrusted with the power to offer so great an insult to any foreign power not already our enemy. But he has been entrusted with that power, and this is an open and honest act of warfare. The enemy has been offered terms, and however little I think of Willoughby, I know of no reason to suspect he will refuse quarter when surrender has been given. I hope a warning shot will be sufficient to persuade Jia Zhen not to prolong the engagement.

  “If it is any comfort to you, I ask you to consider that we ought have left before now, in any case, and we might already be on the track back to Sydney, wholly unaware of anything which occurred in our absence.”

  “But we have not left,” Temeraire said, “so we are not unaware, and that is not comforting at all.”

  He brooded after, when Laurence had gone to pack his things; he did not mean to make things still more awkward for Laurence, or for Granby, but it seemed very wrong to allow this Willoughby person to destroy the pavilion only because the Government wished to quarrel; after all, the Government had sent Temeraire away here, and did not want him in the service anymore, so he did not see that he owed the Government anything; meanwhile Jia Zhen had been perfectly splendid.

  Temeraire was not quite sure what he might do, but while everyone else made ready to depart, a little surreptitiously he went behind the pavilion, and experimented with clearing his throat and trying to take the deep breaths which were required for the divine wind. Dorset paused going by with his instruments, frowning, and when Temeraire in a roundabout way inquired he said disapprovingly, “I cannot recommend the exertion of the throat yet in any way. The strain has been very great, and you have not kept quiet as you ought to have.”

  Temeraire thought this was hard, when he had been so silent on their journey—he had not talked above half-a-dozen times a day, except on special occasions, or if he needed to explain something, or if he had seen something of interest which he wished to mention to Laurence or one of his other crew, or had needed to consult on their direction. His throat did not feel so unpleasant anymore, either: it did not hurt when he spoke, and at dinner he had eaten a couple of tunny spines, roasted deliciously, without suffering the least difficulty or soreness.

  And he certainly must have the divine wind, to do anything very useful: if he were only to claw away at the ships, he could not do much to both at once. Of course, he did not mean to do anything excessively unpleasant to the ships, either, or at least not to the sailors; but he thought perhaps he might wash them some distance out to sea, so they were too far away to do any shelling; or he might make the seas high enough beneath them that they should be forced to stop working the guns.

  Temeraire had tried a little, on their long sea-voyage, to work out how Lien had built up the tremendous wave which she had used to drown the British squadron at the battle of Shoeburyness, but it had to be admitted he had not had very much success. He understood vaguely how she had done it—she had built many little waves, and sent them sculling on, and then had built one last and sent it sweeping along to gather up all the smaller. He had mastered the trick enough to manage perhaps four or five little waves, compounded into one great, and this one he had certainly made more substantial than the ordinary waves all around, but by this Temeraire meant he could achieve a crest of ten feet, perhaps, above the swell; scarcely enough to do more than rock a frigate for a minute or two.

  He had thought of his former trick upon the Valérie, where he had struck her with the divine wind directly, but the ships in the harbor had their sails furled: they were riding at anchor, and built solidly of oak; the divine wind had nothing to grip upon. It would not do, so that night he determinedly shook out his wings and flew from their new camp—out on the sand across the bay, exposed to all the weather, with meanwhile the pavilion standing empty but for little Tharunka—and he flew out to the ocean and began doggedly to practice once more, trying to work out how quickly each wave should go.

  “For that is the difficulty,” he said to Kulingile, while he scratched calculations in the dirt—he quite missed Perscitia, who would have done the mathematics in her head for him—to try and work out how many breaths he should take between raising another swell. “They do not keep apart the same distance, and some are further apart, and so when the large one goes, it reaches a larger gap, and then by the time it reaches the next wave it is already breaking, and it only falls upon the rest of the waves and does no good to anyone.”

  Kulingile ate another bite of his raw cassowary, which he had managed to catch for himself that morning—they were now obliged to fend for their own meals again, without the very material assistance of the Larrakia hunters, who even if they had not brought something pleasant back would at least reliably be able to tell where one might find game—and piped, “But if it takes so long to make, and you do not sink the ships, won’t they only wait until it is gone and then shoot afterwards?”

  “Well,” Temeraire said—but it would at the very least disrupt any immediate attack, and very likely make them confused. “And anyway they will have a time beating back up into position; if only the wind should not be in the right quarter, that is, but I do not see why it should be.”

  “What are you working on?” Iskierka said suspiciously as she came landing with her own dinner, and looked over the figures; of course she did not understand a thing of mathematics, but only to be safe, Temeraire swept his tail-tip over the diagramme.

  “It is none of your affair,” he said loftily; he did not intend to confide in Iskierka, of whom he felt a little wary; one could not rely on her to have the right sort of opinions in such circumstances as these; Granby was still in the service, of course, and so their interests might not be perfectly aligned.

  He felt rather more uncomfortable over having so far also avoided the subject with Laurence; but he thought they might better discuss the matter a little later, once Temeraire had already worked out how to make the great waves—after all, so long as he could not do it, then there was nothing really to be spoken of; and when he had, he might then demonstrate the technique to Laurence, which would certainly be a source of great relief and pleasure to him. Laurence had not said anything on the subject directly, but he had encouraged the experiments, and asked Temeraire to consider how one might defeat a similar effort, another time. And if Temeraire should happen to demonstrate it somewhere the ships could also see, perhaps this Willoughby person would be afraid, and Temeraire would never even need to use it directly upon them at all.

  He did not just yet think over what he would do otherwise—what else Laurence might say. It seemed after all a great waste of time—one might even consider such ruminations to be an attempt to shirk the certainly very difficult work of learning how to make the wave. And there was no time to be wasted: the ships were almost surely only waiting for the tide to come in that night, so they might come further into the ha
rbor, and do their worst.

  “I am going to go find something more to eat,” Temeraire announced, therefore, and flew out to make another attempt. It was not after all false: if there were any fish about when he worked the divine wind upon the water, they often came directly up, dead already or at least so confused that one might just collect them without any difficulty. He had already made a handsome meal of them on his first pass, and the sea-serpents had been pleased enough to take the leavings; he could see their heads breaking the water in the distance, peering at him in anticipation of more, even if they did stay properly and respectfully clear.

  He had more success this time in regulating the interval between the waves, and having sent out a series of them pursued with one large final roar: which did make his throat ache dully, and he was forced to stop and cough a little, but oh! what was any of that, for abruptly a great glassy hill was rising up out of the water. The swell went rushing away from him, eating every one of the little waves—climbing higher and higher, until it would certainly have gone to the topmasts at the least, thirty feet and shining pale green, and Temeraire was compelled to fly around in several circles to express his delight as the whole struck upon the hidden reef half-a-mile further out and crashed in a thundering, foaming roar very like an entire broadside firing off.

  There was no time to be lost: the boiling white seafoam was tinged pink with sunset, and Temeraire flew flat-out to the shore and landed by the tents, calling, “Laurence—Laurence, pray come and see—”

  Laurence looked up from the letter which he was writing—to be carried back to England by the ships, about Demane, although privately Temeraire thought there was no reason why anyone should wish to be a captain in the Corps anymore. If the Corps did not want Laurence, their judgment was plainly unreliable, when even the Emperor had approved of him so highly, and Qian; Temeraire had not mentioned to Laurence, for fear of seeming an excessive brag, but her letter had mentioned him as well, and informed Temeraire that she felt he had made a most auspicious choice of companion.