Tongues of Serpents (18 page)

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.

At last they had to give up again, and they settled for the night with somewhat diminished spirits. “And I am hungry,” Iskierka said irritably: the hunting had not been as good.

But Temeraire could not feel quite so low as he had yesterday. “After all, we have nearly caught them twice now,” he said. “At least, we have seen where they were, and it stands to reason we will get closer tomorrow, too, and we
do
know,” he added, “that the egg is well: that alone is worth all our pains.”

“Only if by
well
you mean, is not yet broken into bits,” Iskierka said dampeningly, and curled herself up to sleep.

There was no water to drink here, either; the last gleam of water they had seen in the day’s flying was some eight miles back in the distance, and three miles sweeping out from the line of the trail. The aviators rationed out cupfuls of water to themselves and the convicts; and smaller ones of rum, which were drunk up first, before the shares of biscuit went about.

While they ate, to Temeraire’s great dismay O’Dea said, quite loudly, “I expect we won’t find them at all, now we’ve left Jack Telly behind to starve and die, food for dogs in a strange country. Tisn’t right, and I have a mind his spirit is following us while his body lies behind
rotting. We won’t smoke out their trail with a curse upon us; Jack wants company, fellows, in his lonely grave. We’ll search and we’ll look, and we’ll never find another living soul, though we go until we are all grey and bent as widows.”

“Laurence,” Temeraire said, in high anxiety after overhearing this, “Laurence, you do not suppose that might be so, at all? I did not think of that, when we left; I should never have suggested we go away so quickly, if I thought he would curse us to stop our finding the egg.”

“I do
not
suppose,” Laurence said, “and I am surprised, very surprised, my dear, to find you grown so sadly superstitious,” but this offered limited comfort. Privately, Temeraire was forced to admit that Laurence was unreasonably deadly on the subject of superstition, even though it did not make any sense, as he was equally firm on the subject of the Holy Spirit; Temeraire did not see how one could deny other spirits, when you had allowed
one
.

“Well, I don’t think there is anything to it, either,” Roland said, when Temeraire quietly asked her, after Laurence had gone to discuss their next day’s course with Tharkay and Granby.

“I do,” Demane said, examining his knives. “I would haunt us, too, if we had left me behind.”

“He might
like
to,” Roland said, “but if a fellow could haunt us, then he ought be able to do a little more to help us find him, in the first place.”

“That don’t mean anything; spirits aren’t the same as bodies,” Demane said, scornfully dismissive; and Roland did not seem to have an answer for this.

“Anyway, it ain’t as though we flew off straightaway, or left him on purpose,” Roland said, but this was not a settled thing amongst the men.

“Jack made a fuss, didn’t he,” Bob Maynard said, slurred with rum and not so quietly that he could not be heard, and rolling a significant glance towards Rankin where he stood speaking with Caesar. “Some as are high-in-the-instep didn’t much like him saying what was what, when we are being hauled into the back of beyond; some here were mighty quick to hurry us off, and not a tear to shed for old Jack.”

Though Maynard was given to persuading the other men to game away their rum to him, and while being nearly twice as large as most of
the other poor thin convicts scarcely managed half the work of anyone else, he was endlessly ready to oblige with a song, in a fine deep baritone, or an entertaining story; not at all wont to complain, ordinarily, so the accusation struck with more than ordinary force, from him. Temeraire could not easily repress a start of guilt; he had himself thought—for just a moment, though, and not spoken aloud, he excused himself—that it would not be so dreadful not to have Jack Telly along always complaining.

“Still, it was
not
on purpose; no one asked him to go away and jump into a pit,” Temeraire said, “and we did look, for quite some time,” but he could not quite convince himself that Jack Telly would have accepted these arguments, and as it should be his decision whether to haunt them or not, Temeraire could not find any relief; he could only lie down curled very close about the last remaining egg, to make sure no malevolent spirits could creep in at it.

B
UT IT SEEMED
to Temeraire that Jack Telly had indeed cursed them, for all their luck had run away. They searched and searched, and were always it seemed a little too late, or had gone a little too far; meanwhile the trail crept onward beneath them at the snail’s pace of foot speed, offering only the most tantalizing bits of encouragement—today a scrap of porcelain; tomorrow another nest for the egg.

Temeraire passed an uneasy night, and woke even more uneasy; he raised his head in the first moments before dawn, while everyone else yet slept, and watched the line of the horizon growing sharper where it met the sky. It seemed very far away. The forest had broken up at some time during their last night’s flight, and there was nothing to conceal the hard edge of the world but a handful of brushy trees looking a little like broomsticks stuck into the earth upside down, and low hillocks.

At first the dawn grey lingered, cast over all the ground, pale knotted clumps of grass and darker shrubs standing out against the dark earth. Then by degrees the blue washed over the vast bowl of sky in advance of the sun, and color began to come back into the world—but color terrible and strange. The sandy earth all beneath them was red as the exposed side of a freshly broken brick, as though someone had painted it. The grasses were hay-yellow, as if dead, but
all
of them; there was not a single green blade anywhere.

The stand of bushes along one side of their camp looked a little less unnatural: full of shining, dark green leaves; but they alone looked verdant, and the stand of trees which Temeraire had been looking at, between them and the horizon, were blackened as if by fire. The
smoke-stains were dark up and down the bark, but equally strange, they had fresh green leaves put out at their ends, despite the curled-up, charred scraps of the old ones clinging still to the lower branches.

There were no clouds in the sky, no water on the ground; not a living thing stirred anywhere around. It was the queerest place Temeraire had ever seen: even the Taklamakan, which had been empty and barren and cold and of no use to anyone, had not looked so very
wrong
—at the oases, there had been poplar-trees, and proper grass; and where there was no water, there were no plants growing; and the ground had not looked so peculiar at all.