Tongues of Serpents (39 page)

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 harbor, 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.

“If you please, Laurence, would you come and fly out with me?” Temeraire said, “I should like to show you something,” and Laurence looked at the water lapping high upon the shore and said, “I will have my harness in a moment,” and spoke to Granby briefly as he shrugged into the leather straps.

“My dear, I know the situation must give you great pain,” Laurence said, as Temeraire beat out—not so very far this time, still in eyeshot of the harbor. “I cannot like asking you to bear an insult to the nation of—not precisely your birth, but your origin, and certainly of intimate concern to you: I beg you to believe I do it with the utmost reluctance.”

“Laurence, you do not like it yourself at all, though, do you?” Temeraire said. “You do not think that Willoughby should behave so badly to our hosts
—you
do not approve.”

“No,” Laurence said, “—but I find there is very little to approve of, particularly, in war or in the relations amongst nations. There is no secret of our colony in New South Wales, my dear; China certainly has known of it, and of our interests in the Indian Ocean trade. They cannot even pretend ignorance when they have been sending goods to Sydney herself, and there is certainly a degree of provocation in seizing upon a location so strategic, and so very near the boundary of Cook’s claim to establish their own holding.”

“But that does not excuse destroying the port,” Temeraire said, “and perhaps killing our friends. I do not see that Cook had any business claiming anything anyway, but even if one should make allowances for that, he has
not
claimed this, so it is not as though one could call it a real challenge.

“But,” he added, stopping to hover, “I do not mean to argue, Laurence; I have something splendid to show you.”

Laurence paused and said, “We might fly further out.”

“Well,” Temeraire said, “I particularly thought it might be useful if Willoughby might see it, also, from where he is—”

He turned and looked, and the ships were making sail: the great billows of white spreading to catch the wind, and come about into the harbor; and the guns had rolled out of the portholes, black tongues. “The tide is not wholly in yet,” Temeraire cried in protest.

Laurence laid a hand upon Temeraire’s side. “My dear, pray let us go further; there is no reason you should be witness here.”

“But you do not understand,” Temeraire said. “I have done it: I have worked out how to make Lien’s wave—” and on his back he felt Laurence go very still.

“No—no, Laurence. I did not mean—of course I did not mean that,” Temeraire said, into that awful silence. “But if only they should see it, I thought—I thought they might not persist.”

Laurence paused, very long, and then he said, “A threat rarely suffices which you do not mean to carry out. And regardless—no. I can have, I will have, no part of even issuing such a threat against the Navy. To prevent an officer of the King from performing his duty and from the commission of his orders would be equally grievous a crime whether committed by violence or mere intimidation. No. I have committed treason once, but in the service of a higher cause than nations, not the lower one of mere personal sentiment; I must beg you to excuse me.”

He spoke with hard, bleak finality, and Temeraire shuddered with distress. He had not seen it so, at all; he had not thought—“It need not be treason, surely,” Temeraire said, “not just to let them see?” but as he spoke, the protest shriveled small upon his tongue: he had known, of course; he had not spoken to Laurence.

He coiled around himself in distress, mid-air, and said, “Oh—I am so very sorry; Laurence, I beg you will forgive me. You cannot think I would ever mean to ask anything like of you again, after everything so dreadful which has occurred—not just to defend a pavilion,” and he was very relieved to feel Laurence’s hand upon his neck, and added, to try and explain himself, “Only I cannot see how it can be right to only watch, as friends are hurt, who have been so generous—and when the Government, after all, has taken so much away.”

“By this argument you should soon reduce all loyalty to a mere competition of bribery,” Laurence said. “If I had thought for one instant that those robes should so secure your affections as to make you wink at treason, I should have thrown them on the fire directly, regardless of what distress you might feel; and,” he added, with a degree of heat, “I am growing inclined to think Jia Zhen knew precisely what he did when he made you so extravagant a gift.”

“I do not mean only the robes,” Temeraire protested weakly, but he was very much shocked that Laurence should even consider so hideous an act, and added, “and I hope you would never really do anything so dreadful. Of course I cannot help but feel kindly towards them, and the Government is always behaving like a scrub; that is not any of their fault, and certainly it is no fault of the robes.”