Tongues of Serpents (22 page)

The camp was quiet, except for coughing. Laurence sipped at a mug of grog at intervals himself, the heat a little soothing against the rawness of his throat; there was a heaviness to his limbs, and despite all the game easy to hand, he did not wish to eat apart from a little biscuit soaked in water, which went down softly.

No one had much appetite. Aviators often did not set a regular meal hour, and lately the scarcity of water had made their mealtimes still more irregular, occurring when sufficient number of the party began to make a noise of protest; to-day no one spoke, even as the day advanced and the noon hour must have gone, even though the sun had not shown itself clear. The younger aviators only had any interest in their surroundings, more resilient: Demane had been foraging, and Roland had organized Sipho and Paul Widener—Rankin’s signal-ensign, an anxious and fretful sort of boy—to butcher his findings and put out the meat to dry, sprinkled thoroughly with salt. For their immediate delectation, they roasted a brace of large lizards on sticks: Demane had found them alive but so dazed by smoke and thunder they might be taken by hand.

“It is quite good, sir,” Roland said, offering some to Laurence, but what little of the smell he could perceive over the clouding of his senses was not appealing enough to provoke his deadened appetite.

They had already more meat than they would require for the return voyage; Demane went out again anyway, unable to resist the bounty, and coming back in the space of less than half-an-hour put down his latest trophy, a handsome-sized kangaroo, only a little singed, and then ducked under Temeraire’s wing.

Laurence looked up; Demane said, “There are men there, on the other side of those dunes.”

The men were for attacking at once, “before they creep away again, and come lurking upon us during the night, and steal away another,” O’Dea said, presenting this to Laurence and Rankin, as a petition on their behalf. “Even the little one ought be able to do for them—” meaning Caesar, rather bloodthirstily, and Rankin said icily, “That will be quite enough, Mr. O’Dea; when your opinion is desired again it will be solicited.”

A good deal of resentful muttering followed this, which the convicts did not trouble themselves to keep low; Rankin ignored it roundly, but Laurence shook his head a little: he had seen mutiny before, and with less motivation than the conviction of imminent murder. With Temeraire and even Caesar a little ill and groggy, there could be a real mischief done, if the convicts chose to try and seize upon himself
or Rankin, or even another of the crewmen whom Temeraire valued.

“It is not them,” Demane said, loudly and impatiently. “They do not have the egg.”

Temeraire stirred, here, from his restless drowse, and raised his head: when he understood, he brightened and said, “But perhaps they may know where the others have gone—” and swinging his head towards the convicts asked, “Can no-one of you speak with them?”

“It is no good talking to them,” O’Dea said, “what we want is some quick action: if they know we are here, they are sure to run off again, and steal back—”

“They do know we are here,” Demane said. “They saw me taking the kangaroo.”

“Well, he is a black fellow, though, isn’t he; one of them,” one man said; Demane was certainly of sable complexion, but hailing from the south of Africa had no more in common with the natives than this accident of coloration; although Laurence supposed doubtfully this might engender some common feeling, or at least defer the suspicion which their own appearance, so far different, might provoke.

“Are any of you gentlemen conversant with their tongue?” Laurence said, and after a little shuffling O’Dea granted that he had some experience; so, too, did a Richard Shipley, one of the younger of the convicts, not twenty and one, who said, “Though not much more than to trade some rum or some buttons for—well, sir, for a little company,” with a blush.

“I cannot see how that will be any use here,” Temeraire said anxiously. “I might make out a little bit, or they might know some other language: perhaps I ought to come as well.”

“That must substantially diminish any hope of their receiving us in a friendly manner,” Laurence said, and checked his pistols, instead, which if smaller were no less deadly.

He and Tharkay and Forthing took their two prospective interpreters, however inadequate, and Demane led them over the charred dunes perhaps a mile from the camp, near the far edge of the seared band where the marks of the fire ended and the vegetation had escaped. The aborigines had already collected their own supply of game, many dead animals strung together, and were standing near the unburnt ground, holding some discussion amongst themselves: four men, and a
youth perhaps a few years older than Demane. Laurence was surprised, when they drew nearer, to see that the ground before them was burning, and evidently by their doing. They were watching it with narrow, careful attention, and stamping out flames which leapt back towards them.

The aborigines received them not unwarily but without open hostility, and when Shipley and O’Dea hesitantly spoke, they listened and made some reply. This at once exceeded the translators’ limits; Shipley said, “It don’t sound at all like, a word or two maybe.”

Laurence turned instead to pantomime and sketchwork, in the conveniently empty canvas of the burnt ground which showed his lopsided figures red against the black of the ash; he tried to draw a picture of the egg, large, being carried away by small men—blank looks only—and then held out a fragment of the pottery.

This opened some species of communication: the aborigines nodded, and one held out a spear-thrower, which Laurence was startled to see decorated at the end with a string of porcelain beads in red and blue, and another of jade and pearls. He pointed at the pistol in Laurence’s belt. Laurence shook his head and said, “No, I thank you,” rather bewildered to be offered such a bargain in the middle of the desert. The hunter shrugged and equably accepted refusal, and when Laurence brought out his map and laid it out, they were willing enough to look down at the chart.

This, however, they did not seem to think meaningful; they touched the paper between their fingers appreciatively, and traced the colored lines of ink, but turned it upside-down and back without sign of recognition, even the territory lately traversed which Laurence pointed out to them, the newly marked creek beds and salt pans and hills which must have been familiar landmarks; but perhaps the aborigines did not have the habit of mapmaking.

Instead, Shipley pointed at the necklace and asked “Where?” in the version of the language which he knew, then pointing in each direction of the compass; the aborigines answered with “Pitjantjatjara” and “Larrakia,” and pointed north and west, with almost a throwing gesture and another word—“Far, far,” Shipley said. “I think that’s what it means, anyway.”

“And then what about the men they have been snatching?” O’Dea said, and drew in the sand several figures in stick form, and by them the
water-hole and the rock outcropping where Jonas Green had vanished. He then crossed out one of his figures; the aborigines nodded without surprise and said, “Bunyip,” and shook their heads vigorously.

“Bunyip,” they repeated, and crossed the man out more thoroughly, and said a great deal more, which might have been excellent advice if they could have understood a word of it. But then, perceiving they were not understood, the youngest of their company proceeded to hold up his hands like claws by his mouth and made a hissing snatching gesture, with a growl, rather looking like a children’s bogey; and Laurence grew doubtful of the proffered explanation: there had certainly been no monsters wandering about the camp.

But O’Dea proved more willing to accept this excuse, and, somewhat mollified, trying more of his limited supply found a few more common words: he drew the egg larger and showed a dragon coming out of it, wings outspread. The aborigines repeated their gesture towards the north-west, and then the oldest tapped the youth on the shoulder, demanding attention, and opening his mouth sang, in a low and gravelly if resonant voice; the other men clapping softly along, to add rhythm to the chant.

“No use to trying to work that out,” O’Dea said, looking around. “They go off so from time to time, when you ask them directions, but it is only these stories of theirs: monsters and gods and the making of the world. It don’t mean anything.”

The song finishing, and the small smudgy fire also, the men bent to take up their strings of game and to move on to another patch of the grasslands; the youth stepped into the newly burnt section and took himself a branch still burning quietly at one end. Laurence would have liked to try and get a little more intelligence out of them, perhaps recruiting Dorset, who was a good hand at draftsmanship, and trying to with better illustrations convey more precise questions; but the hunters had evidently tired of a conversation of so little profit to themselves, and to restrain them could only provoke the quarrel which the men had formerly imagined.

“Bunyips,” O’Dea repeated to Shipley with ghoulish satisfaction, as they walked back towards the camp. “So it is bunyips: and they must be man-eaters, did you see how those black fellows shook at the word? God rest their souls, Jack Telly and poor Jonas; in a bunyip’s belly, it is a cruel way to end. Like tigers, they must be.”

The story would certainly be all across the camp in moments, when
they had returned, and the men undoubtedly as pleased to transfer all their fears to man-eating monsters, as to native tribesmen; or more pleased, for the greater hideousness of the threat. Laurence sighed, and climbed wearily up the dune ahead to wave a reassuring hand to Temeraire, who should be worrying; but when he came in sight, Temeraire was looking down instead at the egg, which Fellowes was hastily taking out of its wrappings.

“I
WILL THANK YOU
for an end to this wholly inappropriate interference,
Mr
. Laurence,” Rankin said, icily. “You have neither rank nor office, nor even proper training to recommend your opinion on the matter. Mr. Drewmore, I trust you are ready to stand the duty? Mr. Blincoln, I believe you are next in seniority, should Mr. Drewmore fail to secure the hatchling; you will prepare yourself as well.”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Drewmore said after a moment, not displeased but only slow to grasp the offered advantage: a man of forty, heavy of body and of mind at once; he had shown not an iota of initiative, which Laurence had seen, and set himself apart only by a certain amiable willingness and basic competence. He had reached the rank of first lieutenant aboard a middle-weight, for no greater accomplishment than being the son of a distinguished and well-liked captain; but he had been grounded by the death of his beast, during the plague, and no equal post had been offered him.

And Blincoln, only a little second to him in both years and seniority, was similarly a nonentity; neither of them in any way worthy of the one, the last egg. Meanwhile Forthing, who alone among the aviators had distinguished himself in service, however meager his connections, was evidently to be set aside.

Laurence had grown up in a service where influence was very nearly all, in the way of promotion, but he had grown used to the very different mode in the Corps: if a man had much in the way of influence, he was not an aviator, as a rule. Rankin himself was an exception, and Laurence’s former lieutenant Ferris: the only two such cases Laurence had so far met, in the service. Merit, and the lucky opportunity of demonstrating it, had in practice by far the greater reach. Personal loyalties
might have their impact, but Rankin did not know these men; they had not been affectionate towards him. He had met them one and all, not a month ago.

Laurence had known the gesture was a futile one; but he had spoken anyway. “Sir, you may not be aware that Captain Granby had other intentions,” he had said, quietly.

Rankin had rebuffed him in as offensive a way as possible, and without bothering to lower his voice; adding now, “I do not intend this covert should be conducted on the irregular and unsound lines of your own model of behavior.”

“By which I can only suppose you mean that Mr. Forthing is not of a line of aviators,” Laurence said.

“Your own example must be all that any man requires to appreciate the value of a trained, a trusted lineage: of men who understand what dragons are, and what their own duty is,” Rankin said.

Temeraire, who had been anxiously watching the egg so far, lifted his head here and said, “Well, if the egg should prefer Mr. Forthing, it may have him; and I will tell it so whether you like me to or not:
I
do not care whether he has a trusted lineage.”

Rankin wheeled to confront him, but meanwhile the egg was rocking; it cracked abruptly across its equator, or near enough, and all their attention was drawn over to it at once. Tipping over, it did not quite separate; with an evident effort, the broken upper half was slowly pushed forward over the sand, furrowing up the burnt patches, and the hatchling beast crawled laboriously out.