Tongues of Serpents (41 page)

They made another journey, and then a third, picking men out of the water. The sun was sliding away behind the pavilion, glowing red upon the lacquered roof; in the water, the corpses of sea-serpents rose and fell with the lapping tide. Temeraire sank upon the sand, heaving breath and his neck bowed deeply with fatigue.

The Larrakia were watching; the young men who had been helping to carry the half-drowned survivors had drawn back and taken up their spears again, standing loosely ringed along the shore: many of them, quiet and watchful, and others joining them; several of the younger Chinese men also, with swords which looked awkward in uncertain grips: they were none of them soldiers. “Mr. Blincoln,” Rankin said, from Caesar’s neck, “if you please, let us have a little order here; Caesar, if you would,” and Caesar reared up onto his hindquarters, making
himself however more imposing could be managed, and thrusting out his breast with the bright-blazoned red stripe.

The aviators began loosely to form an opposing line. Laurence slid down from Temeraire’s neck and laid a hand on the soft muzzle, feeling Temeraire’s breath going in labored rasps: aggravated again, no doubt, by the excessive use of the divine wind. Whatever they had in the way of supply remained back in the camp, further along the curve of the bay and out of reach. “Roland,” Laurence said, low, “go and tell Demane; if it comes to fighting, you are to go back to the camp and fetch out powder and shot, and whatever guns might have been left.”

She nodded and ran to join Demane on Kulingile, who despite fatigue was perhaps among all the beasts the nearest to wide-awake, his eyes bright with hunger. Some of the Larrakia had come fresh from their hunting: a brace of small kangaroos were roasting on a spit behind their line, and this had all of Kulingile’s attention.

The sailors lay inert upon the sand, spent more even than the dragons and worn past exhaustion by the wreckage and the horror of what Laurence hardly knew how to call a battle: a struggle against some elemental force, invoked too unwarily, and as swiftly gone when its bloodthirst had been appeased. Out past the edge of the harbor, many of the serpents were at play again, heedless like children who had already forgotten a reproof.

The Larrakia men were speaking amongst themselves, spears held low and ready; the elders in convocation with and the younger men interjecting occasionally. There was a hesitation on both sides: no one was unshaken by the violence of the eruption.

Galandoo came forward out of the men, and beckoned to Tharunka to translate; and to Laurence he said simply, “It is time for you to go.”

T
HEY AT NO TIME
saw any of the natives during the long tedium of the return voyage, which even on dragon wing consumed half the autumn: the desert creeping by slow, and their passage wary and hunted. They found tracks and signs enough, in the mornings, to know that they were watched; at the water-holes they drank swiftly, and left what small offerings they could spare for the bunyips from their hunting with the country grown still more spare and ungenerous in the waning of the year, and four dragons, one of rapacious appetite, to be fed.

The beasts were all four of them thinner than Dorset liked before they reached at last the marker, the great monolith standing up out of the red desert with all its vegetation now burnt yellow by the sun; and began their turn for the coast. “At least there will be the lake, soon,” Temeraire said wearily lapping at another water-hole, too shallow to put his muzzle in to drink properly.

It was all their hope that long fortnight’s flying: though they were yet only halfway home, they were now moving at a pace wholly different than during their first journey, flying straight instead of in pursuit of an unknown foe, and the prospect of the lake’s refuge invited them onwards. When at last they sighted it in the distance as a faint brilliant gleam stretching over the curve of the horizon, catching the sunset, Temeraire’s wings quickened; all the dragons’ pace increased, and they came landing by the shore not an hour later: to the stench of rotting fish, and a shore crusted with a rim of pink-stained salt; the lake had receded to a long narrow stretch of water.

The water of the shrunken lake could not be drunk: it was become more salty than sea-water, pinkish in hue, and the dead fish floated
half-eaten in clumped masses on its surface. The birds had deserted the shore.

They managed to find a small water-hole, sufficient to give the dragons a few swallows, although the requisite bribe drew down too much of their stores; in anticipation of the game at the lake, they had not paused so often for hunting. What little they had left, they ate in silence, huddled close around their small fires. It was not merely inconvenience; the disappointment felt something of a parting slap, contemptuous, from the wild back-country: a reminder they were not welcome.

And yet Laurence felt little more so as they limped finally back into Sydney, a ragged and thinner band, and set down upon the promontory already once more overgrown in their long absence: grass and weeds and small prickly shrubs beginning to re-establish a hold. They arrived late, the
Allegiance
riding at anchor in the harbor, a small flotilla of merchant ships clustered nearer-in to the shore; the sun hung low in the sky, throwing orange flame across the water, and at the mouth of the harbor, where it emptied out into the ocean, the light glittered on the hides of a dozen sea-serpents, rising and plunging from the water at their play.

“The question only remains how it is to be done, not whether,” Governor Macquarie said: Bligh’s replacement, finally arrived a little while after Granby’s second departure. In the intervening months of their journey, an elegant house had been raised on the spur of land overlooking the harbor, with a clear prospect from the office stretching all the way to the open ocean. Even a small rug lay upon the floor, and the furniture neatly joined; Laurence and Granby stood raggedly out of place, and Rankin for all his efforts was not much better arrayed.

They had not been afforded any opportunity to acquire new clothing; the summons had come last night before they had even sent a runner to formally announce their arrival, and called them at first light to the governor’s mansion, to find the new governor waiting urgently, pacing across the floor of his study.

“I can see no reason to have them here,” Bligh was saying scarcely under his breath, meaning MacArthur and Johnston, on the point of being shown in; MacArthur came across the room to shake Laurence’s hand.

“I find you have been a prodigiously long way, Captain,” he said, throwing a look at the dust-stained and faded maps which had been laid out across the broad desk. “I am glad to see you returned safely,” although there was perhaps some enthusiasm lacking: he and Johnston were ordered to England with Bligh, to stand trial for the rebellion; Granby’s return meant the
Allegiance
would sail at last, and she would make their natural transport.

“We must first however resolve what is to be done with these serpents: their presence was ominous enough before the report we have had from you, gentlemen,” Macquarie said, interrupting the private greetings, and waving a hand to the chairs at his table.

The serpents had not appeared alone: another of the wide-winged dragons, not Shen Li, had been sighted lately off the eastern coast, on one occasion not thirty miles distant; the serpents shortly thereafter had begun to make their sporadic appearances, evidently being trained upon some new harbor, near enough that in their frolics they from time to time came past Sydney. Shipping went still to and fro without incident; the serpents had not been incited against them, and seemed sufficiently well-fed that any natural inclination which might have led to attacks was suppressed; but this was scarcely much comfort to those who had seen the devastation they might easily wreak.

“They must be eradicated, at once,” Captain Willoughby said harshly, his wooden-leg stump stretched out awkwardly before his chair; he had insisted on accompanying them, though his injuries yet left his face grey and drawn with pain. “We must trace them to their harbor and put them to the sword; them and their masters.”

“Sir,” Laurence said, “we have already suffered a repulse from one attempt at taking a harbor so guarded, without sufficient preparation and, Captain Willoughby must pardon me, without sufficient provocation for the consequence we court. Surely there can be no justification for spurring on a war with China which, we now know, they have the means to carry against all our shipping. Even without the direction of intelligence, the serpents have been a constant peril to sailors before now; they need neither wind nor current in their favor to maneuver, and may strike wholly unexpected from below.”

“Yes,” Bligh said belligerently, “and there are a dozen of them outside our harbor this very moment. If the Chinese meant to teach us to respect their power, they have succeeded; if they meant to teach us fear, sir, they have failed and will always do so.”

“Hear, hear,” Willoughby said, glaring at Laurence, who compressed his lips at this ludicrous enthusiasm; he could scarcely fault Willoughby’s courage, having already lost both an eye and a leg to the serpents, but his sense offered more to criticize.

“The Navy gentlemen must forgive me,” MacArthur said, “but I cannot help but wonder if we could not manage to think of something better to do with these fellows who can, I gather, bring in twenty tons of goods from China to our shores in a month.”

Bligh might have purpled himself into an apoplexy in response; Macquarie raised a hand. “If you please,” he said: he was quiet-spoken, and his face drawn in craggy but warm lines, with deep-set dark eyes. But he would not allow the possibility of negotiation. “Our last orders, by Commander Willoughby’s report,” he nodded to that gentleman, “are plain enough: we are not to tolerate any foreign encroachment on this continent. If efforts to dislodge them from this northern port have failed, that is only more cause to repulse them before they can establish another, nearer.”

He was bent upon the eradication of the serpents; it was left only to discuss how it was to be done. “Bombs must be our surest method for disposing of the creatures,” Rankin said, “delivered from aloft: if they have been trained to come to fish-slops, we can easily bait them to their doom.”

His suggestion was adopted with enthusiasm, despite the obvious difficulties of delivering bombs upon creatures which could plunge to the ocean depths, and whose size alone would make them difficult to kill; Willoughby applauded regardless, and Macquarie approved. Granby, who had more experience of aerial warfare than Rankin, whose former experience had been in the courier service, looked doubtful, and said, “We had better try it on one, first, and at a good distance: if you drive them mad and it don’t work, they might do for all the shipping in the port.”

“Perhaps we ought to clear out some of the most valuable ships,” MacArthur suggested. “If we will be dropping on them from above, I cannot see there is any need to keep the
Allegiance
in port for them to gnaw on her anchor-cables.”

There was something disingenuous in this proposal: he had already offered his services and Johnston’s to arrange the manufacture of the bombs, which should give them excuse to postpone returning to England. But Riley had already once seen his ship nearly brought down by
a sea-serpent, and could not be said to be eager to repeat the experience: he was only too pleased to second the notion, and Governor Macquarie did not disagree.

The plan of attack was agreed upon; the conference dismissed, not before Laurence was given his long-delayed post: three letters bundled together from Jane, and another two for Temeraire; and one to be passed on to Tharkay. He put them in his pocket as they departed; MacArthur caught him at the door of the governor’s office.

“I suppose they aren’t to be reasoned with,” MacArthur inquired, “—these Chinamen, I mean. Do they wish to have us all thrown into the harbor and fed to the things?”

“I will beg you, sir, not to entertain the sort of absurd fancies which I have grown used to hear from raw hands,” Laurence said, too exasperated to be courteous. “They are men, like any others, and like any others possess full measure of folly and vice; but I cannot say their portion is greater than our own.”

“Ah, well,” MacArthur said, “then we may all go to the Devil together.”

He touched his hat and they parted, Laurence to join Temeraire upon the promontory, to share their letters. The correspondence did not go any length to reconciling him to the imminent attack, devastating almost equally in success or failure: Bonaparte had indeed made alliance with the Tswana, according to Jane.