Tongues of Serpents (10 page)

“I will not urge it on you,” Tharkay said. “If you should care for the introduction, however, I would be at your service.”

“But that sounds quite splendid,” Temeraire said, with real enthusiasm, when Laurence had laid the proposal before him in only the barest terms. “I am sure we should take any number of prizes; Iskierka should have nothing on it. How long do you suppose it would be, for them to build us a ship?”

Laurence only with difficulty persuaded him to consider it as anything other than a settled thing; Temeraire was already inclined to be making plans for the use of his future wealth. “You could not wish to remain here, instead?” Temeraire said. “Not, of course, that I mean to suggest there is anything wrong here,” he added unconvincingly.

The mornings and late evenings were now the only and scarcely bearable times of day, and they had begun to stretch them with early rising and late nights; the sun was only just up, spilling a broad swath of light across the water running into all the bays of the harbor, making them glow out brilliantly white against the dark curve of the land rising away, blackish green and silent. Temeraire had not eaten in two days: the stretch was not markedly unhealthy, given his inaction, but Laurence feared it was due largely to a secret disdain for his food, the
regrettable consequence of Temeraire’s having grown nice in his tastes, a grave danger for a military man—and there Laurence was forced again to the recollection that they were neither of them military, any longer.

Even so, there was an advantage to a stronger stomach: he himself, subject to shipboard provisions during the most ravenous years of his life, could subsist on weeviled biscuit and salt pork indefinitely; even though he had not often had to endure those conditions. Temeraire had too early in his life developed a finicky palate; Gong Su had done what was in his power, but he had made quite clear one could not turn a lean, scrub-fed game animal, half bone and sinew and anatomical oddities, into a fat and nicely marbled piece of beef; Laurence was considering if his finances could stretch to the provision of some cattle, at least for a treat.

“There is Caesar’s breakfast,” Temeraire said, with a sigh, as the mournful lowing of a cow came towards them from the bottom of the hill; but when it was brought up, by an only slightly less reluctant youth, he delivered it not to Caesar but to them, stammering compliments of Mr. MacArthur, and for Laurence there was an invitation card, asking him to supper.

“I wonder he should make such a gesture,” Laurence said, rather taken aback; one thing for MacArthur to bring himself to the covert—however irregularly organized, still in the nature of an official outpost—and quite another to invite Laurence to his home, in mixed company likely overseen by his wife. “I wonder at it indeed; unless,” he added, low, “he has had some intelligence of Rankin’s interest in Bligh’s case: that might make sufficient motive even for this.”

“Umm,” Temeraire said indistinctly, nibbling around a substantial thigh-bone; his attention was fixed notably on Gong Su’s enthusiastic preparations: the cow had been butchered, and was going into the earth with what greenstuffs had passed muster, and some cracked wheat; even Caesar had peeled open an eye and was looking over with covert interest.

The hour was fixed sufficiently late they could wait until the heat of the day had passed and travel at the beginning of twilight; Temeraire, having made a splendid meal, carried Laurence aloft into the softening but yet unbroken blue: no clouds, yet again, all the day. What would have made an hour’s journey on horse, across rough country,
was an easy ten minutes’ flight dragon-back, and there was a wide fallow field open near the house, where Temeraire could set down.

“Pray thank him for my cow,” Temeraire said, contentedly settling himself to nap. “It was very handsome of him, and I do not think he is a coward anymore, after all.”

Laurence crossed the field to the house, and paused to knock the dirt from his boots before he stepped into the lane: he had worn trousers, and Hessians, more suitable to flying; but in concession to the invitation, he had made an effort with his cravat, and put on his better coat. A groom came out, and looked about confused for Laurence’s horse before pointing him to the door: the house was comfortable but not especially grand, built practically and made for work, but there was an elegance and taste in the arrangements.

He was shown into the salon, and a company heavily slanted: only four women to seven men, most of those in officers’ uniforms; one of the women rose, as Mr. MacArthur came to join him, and he presented her to Laurence as his wife, Elizabeth.

“I hope you will forgive the informality of our society, Mr. Laurence,” she said, when he had bowed over her hand. “We are grown sadly careless in this wild country, and the heat crushes all aspirations to stiffness. I hope you did not have a very tiring ride.”

“Not at all; Temeraire brought me,” Laurence said. “He is in your southwest field; I trust it no inconvenience.”

“Why, none,” she said, though her eyes had widened, and one of the officers said, “Do you mean you have that monster sitting out in the yard?”

“That monster’s sharpest weapon is his tongue,” MacArthur said. “I am pretty well cut to ribbons yet: did the cow sweeten him at all?”

“As much as you might like, sir,” Laurence said, dryly. “—you have quite hit on the point of weakness.”

The supper was, for all the ulterior motives likely to have been its inspiration, a comfortable and civilized affair: Laurence had not quite known what to expect, from the colonial society, but Mrs. MacArthur was plainly a woman of some character, and though indeed never striving for a formality which both the climate and the situation of the colony would have rendered tiresome and a little absurd, she directed the style of their gathering nevertheless. She could not have a balanced table, so she served the meal in two courses, inviting her guests to refresh
themselves in between with a little walking in the gardens, illuminated with lamps, and rearranging the seating on their return to partner the ladies afresh.

The meal was thoughtfully suited to the weather as well: a cool soup of fresh cucumber and mint, meat served in jellied aspic, beef very thinly carved from the joint, lightly boiled chicken; and instead of pudding an array of cakes, with pots of jam, and excellent, fragrant tea; all served on porcelain of the very highest quality, the one real extravagance Laurence remarked: dishes of white and that particularly delicate shade of blue which could not be achieved by any European art, and the strength of real quality.

He noticed it to his hostess with compliments; to his surprise she looked a little crestfallen, and said, “Oh, you have found out
my
weakness, Mr. Laurence; I could not resist them, although I know very well I oughtn’t: they must be smuggled, of course.”

“Do not say it aloud!” MacArthur cried. “So long as you do not know it for certain, you may ha’e your dishes, and we our tea; and long may the rascals thrive.”

One of the many charges Bligh had laid at the rebels’ door had been the practice of smuggling: the back alleys and trading houses of Sydney were flooded with goods from China, which from the price alone one could tell had evaded the East India Company’s monopoly on such trade. “And I expect he would blame us for the drought, too, if he heard me say I thought the weather would hold clear another month,” MacArthur said, offering a glass of port, when the ladies had left them.

“I don’t say we have never brought in some goods which a governor might not approve of,” he continued, “but I am speaking of rum, which we must have; you cannot get a man to work here, except you fill his glass, and with more than you can pour at five shillings the bottle. A damned folly, too: a pickled liver cannot tell good dark West Indian rum from the Bengali stuff. But we cannot even bring in that, now: there is not a smell of any kind of goods, from Africa, since the Cape was lost.

“As for the China goods, by God! If I could make a profit selling China ware at two pounds a box in Sydney, with all the cost and risk of freight, I would be packing it on ships for England, instead, and die rich as Croesus. There are fellows making a pretty penny selling it on, I believe, even when they can only buy it one box at a time.”

There was a general murmur of agreement, and some anecdotes of trading agreements followed: it seemed to Laurence the officers all were tradesmen also, in some measure, and the tradesmen all former officers, and many of them landed as well: they made no distinction amongst themselves, and perhaps could not have, if there were not men of business enough established in the colony to provide opportunities for investment, or their rough-and-tumble fortunes not yet sufficiently realized in coin to take advantage of them.

MacArthur drew him aside, as the cigars were offered around and lit, and to the open doors looking into the gardens: squeaking small bats were flying now in clouds around the trees where earlier they had slept, hanging. “I am grateful to you for coming,” he said. “We gave you little enough reason to do so.”

“You are a good host, sir,” Laurence said, “and it is a welcome I had not looked for.”

“Governor Bligh would call me a traitor, so far as that goes: has done oft enough, I imagine,” MacArthur said, “and would hang me for it, too. I will not pretend, sir, to be anything less than deeply interested, under the circumstances. I said to you, I believe, that I am ready to stand judgment for my acts; and so I am, but I don’t care to be marched to the scaffold
before
it is handed down.”

Laurence looked out at the gardens a little grimly—wilting in the heat and yet still restful to look upon, neatly arranged, and beyond them the wide spreading fields. He was conscious that MacArthur’s establishment made a powerful argument in support of his claim to have made something of himself, and in an isolate and difficult country to have carried forward the banner of civilization: uniting all the taste and respectability which was absent from the sad and rackety condition of the town. So long from England and longer yet from any respectability, Laurence could feel the force of that argument all the more strongly.

“Sir,” he answered, “I can well understand your desire; but forgive me, I will not commit myself, and moreover Temeraire, to any course of action in advance. I have a reputation which may make me seem more a friend to rebellion than I am by any willing choice; and for that part, my assistance might not be an unmitigated boon to you, if you had it.”

“And, if you will allow me to be blunt,” MacArthur said, “for your part, you would be in a pretty position, standing in the way of seeing Governor Bligh restored, if a frigate should come in a couple of weeks,
declare us the worst unhanged scoundrels south of the line, and the governor to be put back into place at gun-point. No, sir; I do not ask any man, so unconnected to me as you are, to put his neck on the chopping-block with mine; but if you are amenable enough to listen, I had rather propose to you a means of evading the issue entirely.”

He drew Laurence into his study, and on the desk drew out the maps of the colony, and the penning mountain range about it, a great labyrinthine mass of gorges and peaks, only vaguely sketched. “All our purposes can march together,” MacArthur said. “You wish to be well out of the affair; just so: I wish you out of it also, and every other dragon in the place with you, at least long enough for our doom to arrive. It cannot be long now, when the last frigate brought the post only a month behind our news.”

His proposal was an expedition whose purpose should be to find a crossing over the Blue Mountains, and establish a cattle-drive road from the colony to the open territory beyond, “where,” he continued, “you may set up this covert your beasts will require, and take yourselves all the land you might like: I cannot see how anyone can complain, when you have opened the passage yourselves.

“Captain Granby is senior, I think,” he added, “and can I suppose order this Captain Rankin on such a mission: if this new creature means to go on eating as he has begun, it seems to me you had all better be thinking of how to feed him, particularly as you have two more hatchlings to come.”

“I am afraid it must keep you here a little longer,” Laurence said, rather diffident in making the suggestion: he could not like asking Granby to enter into such a stratagem, however practical.

He felt himself caught between shoals and a lee-shore, in an unfamiliar channel: MacArthur’s machinations were no more noble than Bligh’s in their ends, and likely less; even if in their forthrightness more appealing, and with the benefit of MacArthur’s greater charm of person. And they were neither of them looking beyond the parochial boundaries of their quarrel, to the titanic struggle creeping ever more widely over the world. If either of them gave a thought to the war, Laurence could not discover it, and though they might gladly make him any promises which would make of him the useful ally they desired,
they neither of them recognized in any real way the colossal folly of wasting Temeraire in this isolate part of the world.

It was enough to make him look again at Tharkay’s suggestion: Laurence could easily long for the sea-wind in his face and the open ocean, and at least the comfort of doing
some
rather than
no
good, even if that small and diversionary. Something in his heart curled away from the mercenary life; but he was not certain he ought let that stand in his way, and Temeraire’s. If there was no honor in it, neither could he see any here, at best errand-runners for an indifferent overseer, and at worst pawns in a selfish squabbling.

MacArthur’s proposal offered, however, at least a temporary escape from all these alternatives; if it could not answer for long, Laurence was at present in the mood to be satisfied with small blessings. “But I would not in the least press it upon you,” he added, “and I hope you will not act in any way contrary to your judgment, nor—”

Nor
, he meant to add,
in excessive haste
, but Granby broke in on him before he could. “For God’s sake let us go first thing in the morning,” Granby said, passionately. “I have been living in mortal terror every day I should wake up and find myself a hundred miles into the interior: she keeps talking of going to look for elephants. What I am to do if Rankin will not come, though, I cannot tell you. No one can argue Iskierka isn’t in a different class, but I have no official orders to be here, where he does; and seniority is a sad puzzle: he was a captain first, even if he hasn’t had a dragon for years.”