Read Tongues of Serpents Online
Authors: Naomi Novik
Tongues of Serpents (6 page)
Laurence looked a bit rueful, and MacArthur, smiling, said, “Well, I won’t say anything against the gentleman, only perhaps he was no too fond of our ways. The which,” he added, “certainly can be improved upon, Mr. Laurence, I do not deny it; but no man likes to be corrected by come-lately.”
“When come-lately is sent by the King,” Laurence said, “one may dislike, and yet endure.”
“Very good sense; but good sense has limits, sir, limits,” MacArthur said, “where it comes up hard against honor: some things a man of courage cannot bear, and damn the consequences.”
Laurence did not say anything; Laurence was quite silent. After a moment, MacArthur added, “I do not mean to make you excuses: I have sent my eldest on to England, though I could spare him ill, and he
must make my case to their Lordships. But I will tell you, I do not tremble, sir, for fear of the answer; I sleep the night through.”
Temeraire became conscious gradually, while he spoke, of being poked; Emily was at his side, tugging energetically on his wing-tip. “Temeraire!” she hissed up to him. “I oughtn’t go right up with that fellow there, he is sure to see I am a girl; but we must tell the captain, there is a ship come from England—”
“I see her!” Temeraire answered, looking over into the harbor: a trim, handsome little frigate of perhaps twenty-four guns: she was drawn up not far from the
Allegiance
, riding easily at anchor. “Laurence,” he said, leaning over, “there is a ship come from England, Roland says: it is the
Beatrice
, I think.”
MacArthur stopped speaking, abruptly.
Emily tugged again. “That is not the news,” she said, impatient. “Captain Rankin is on it.”
“Oh! whyever should
he
have come?” Temeraire said, his ruff pricking up. “Is he a convict?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned his head to the other side. “And Roland says that Rankin is here, on the ship: that dreadful fellow from Loch Laggan. You may certainly put
him
in a quarry,” he added to MacArthur. “I cannot think of anyone who deserves it more, the way he treated poor Levitas.”
“Oh, why won’t you listen,” Roland cried. “He ain’t a convict at all; he has come for one of the eggs.”
“O
WING TO THE MODE
of our last communication, it is quite impossible Mr. Laurence and I should have any intercourse. —I hope I may not be thought difficult,” Rankin said, his crisp and aristocratic vowels carrying quite clearly, over the deck of the
Allegiance;
his transport the
Beatrice
had already gone away again, with no more news for the colony: she had left only two months after the
Allegiance
herself, and the news of the rebellion had not yet reached Government. “But it is generally accepted, I believe, that the dragondeck is reserved for officers of the Corps; and if the gentleman is quartered towards the stern, I see no reason why any inconvenient scenes should arise.”
“I see no reason why I shouldn’t push his nose in for him,” Granby said, under his breath, joining Laurence on the leeward side of the quarterdeck, where passengers were ordinarily allowed liberty. “The worst of it,” he added, “is I can’t see any way clear to refusing him: the orders are plain black on white, he is to be put to Wringe’s egg. What a damned waste.”
Laurence nodded a little; he, too, had had a letter, if not in an official capacity.…
though nothing would I like better than if he should get himself sunk in the Ocean on his way to you
, Jane had written.
… but his damnd Family have been squalling at their Lordships for nigh on Five Years now, and he had the infernal Bad Luck—mine, that is—of finding himself in Scotland, lately, when we were so overset: went up with one of the Ferals out of Arkady’s pack, saw a little fighting, and mannaged to get himself wounded again
.
So I must give him a Beast, or at least a Chance of one
,
and Someone must put up with him thereafter; as I am about to have twenty-six hatchlings to feed and likely enough a War in Spain, I don’t scruple to say, Better You Than Me
.
This last was emphatically full of capitals, and underlined.
I have made the Excuse, that this is the first Egg we have had out of the Ferals, and his having Experience of them in the field, should be an Advantage in its Training
.
I was tolrably transparent, I think, but a Title does wonderful things, Laurence: I should have contrivved one much sooner if I had known its Use. Gentlemen who swore at me like fishwives sixmonth ago are become sweet as milk, all because the Regent has signed some scrap of paper for me, and nod their Heads and say Yes, Very Good, when before they would have argued to Doomsday if I should say, It is coming on to rain. Also it is a great benefit they none of them know whether to say Milady or Sir, and as soon as they have arrived at a Decision, they change it again. I only hope they may not make me a Duchess to make themselves easy by saying Your Grace; it would not suit half so well
.
I am very obligd to your Mother, by the bye: she wrote, when she saw my name had come out in Debrett’s—as J. Roland, very discreet—and had me to a nice, sociable little Dinner, with every Cabinet Minister she could contrive to lay hands on, I gather: all very shocked, as they had brought their Wives, but they could not say so much as Boo with Her Ladyship at the foot of the Table as if Butter would not Melt in her mouth, and the Ladies did not mind inn the Least, when they understood I was an Officer, and not some Vauxhall Comedienne. I found them sensible Creatures all of them, and I think perhaps I have got quite the wrong Notion about them, as a Class; I expect I ought to be cultivating them. I don’t mind Society half so much if I may wear Trousers, and they were very kind, and left me their Cards
.
We are trundling along well enough otherwise and getting back into some Order: feeding dragons on Mash and Mutton Stew is a damn’d site cheaper, Thank God, if the older ones do complain; Excidium is all Sighs and loud Reminiscences of
fresh Cattle, and Temeraire’s name is not much lov’d among them, for having given us the Technique
.
I will say a word in your Ear for him: I am uneasy about this Business in Spain. Bonaparte ain’t a Fool, and why he should wreck a dozen cities, on the southern Coast, fresh from the ruin of his Invasion, I cannot understand. Mulgrave thinks he means to take Spain and to stop us from supplying them from the Sea, but for that, he ought to be burning them in Portugal, instead
.
If Temeraire should think it some Stratagem of Lien’s, I would be glad to know of it, even late as the Intelligence must come: it is very strange to think, Laurence, that I cannot hope for an Answer in under ten Months and a year and a half the more likely. Now we have lost the Capetown port to those African fellows, the couriers cannot even go to India, and meet your letter halfway
.
For Consolation, if you should find yourself overcome with Passion and happen to accidentally drop Rankin down a Cliff, or by some Mischance run him through, at least I will not hear of it for as long, and anyway you are already transportd, which I must call a great Convenience for Murder. But I do not mean to Hint, although it is a great Pity to waste an Egg upon him, even one of our poor unwanted Stepchildren
.
I hope Emily has not got into too many Scrapes; tho she cannot officially be your Ensign, I am sure you will oblige me by keeping her from any really reckless Behaviour, and do not let Rankin come the Scrub over her, if he have the Gall: I have seen enough to know he is just the sort of Rotter who would try off Airs of False Pity for her Sacrifice and other non Sense
.
The three eggs which had been sent with them to begin the experiment were not, by the lights of Britain’s breeders, any great prizes: one a dirt-common Yellow Reaper, sent over because there were seventeen such eggs in the breeding grounds waiting; the second a disappointing and extremely stunted little thing which had unaccountably been produced out of a Parnassian and a Chequered Nettle, both heavy-weights. The last and most promising of the three, large and handsomely
mottled and striated, was the offspring of Arkady, the feral leader, and Wringe, the best fighter of his pack.
There was no great enthusiasm for this egg in Britain, where the breeders for the most part viewed the newly recruited ferals as demons sent to wreak havoc and destruction upon their carefully designed lines; so it had been sent away. But it had quickly become the settled thing among the aviators who had been sent along as candidates for the new hatchlings to anticipate great things of the egg. “It stands to reason,” Laurence had overheard more than one officer say to another, “if that Wringe one should have got so big out in the wild, this one should do a good deal better with proper feeding, and training; and no one could complain of the ferals’ fighting spirit.”
Those young officers were now in something of a quandary, which Laurence was not above grimly enjoying, a little: they had been firm and united in their disdain, both for his personal treason and for what they saw as his failure to manage Temeraire properly. But now Rankin had come to supplant one of them, and claim the best egg for himself; he was their most bitter enemy, and Temeraire’s recalcitrance their best hope of denying him.
“He mayn’t have it at all,” Temeraire had said at once, when he had been informed of the proposed arrangement, “and if he likes, he can come up here and try and take it; I should be very pleased to discuss it with him,” darkly, in a way which bade fair to answer all of Jane’s hopes.
“My dear,” Laurence said, having lowered his letter, “I like the prospect as little as you; but if he should be denied even the chance, and return to England thwarted, we have only deferred the evil: he will certainly be put to another egg, there, where you may be certain the poor hatchling will have less opportunity to refuse. And the blame will certainly devolve upon Granby: the orders are for him, and the responsibility to carry them out.”
“I am certainly not having Granby take the blame for anything,” Iskierka said, raising her head, “and I do not see what the problem is, anyway; the egg will be hatched, by then, and why should it be any business of ours what it does after that? It can take him or not, as it pleases.”
Iskierka herself had hatched already breathing fire, and with all the disobliging and determined character anyone could have imagined; she
would certainly have had no difficulty in rejecting any unworthy candidate. Most hatchlings did not come from the shell with quite the same mettle, however, and the Aerial Corps had developed many a technique and lure to ensure the successful harnessing of the beasts. Rankin had certainly prepared himself well: he had come over from the
Beatrice
with not only his two chests of personal baggage, but a pile of leather harness, some chainmail netting, and a sort of heavy leather hood.
“You throw it over the hatchling’s head as it comes out of the shell, if you are out of doors,” Granby said, when Laurence now inquired, “and then it cannot fly away; when you take it off, the light dazzles their eyes, and then if you lay some meat in front of them, they are pretty sure to let you put the harness on, if you will only let them eat. And some fellows like it, because they say it makes them easier to handle; if you ask me,” he added, bitterly, “all it makes them is shy: they are never certain of their ground, after.”
“I wonder if you might be able to put me in the way of some cattle-merchant,” Rankin was saying, to Riley and Lord Purbeck. “I intend to provide for the hatchling’s first meal from my personal funds.”
“Surely he can be restrained in some way,” Laurence said, low. He was not yet beyond the heat of righteous anger kindled all those years before, when they had been unwilling witness to the cruelty of Rankin’s treatment of his first dragon. Rankin was the sort of aviator beloved of the Navy Board: in his estimation as in theirs, dragons were merely a resource and a dangerous one, to be managed and restrained and used to their limits; it was the same philosophy which had rendered it not only tolerable but desirable to contemplate destroying ten thousand of the French beasts through the underhanded sneaking method of infection.
Where Rankin might have been kind to Levitas, he had been indifferent; where indifferent, deliberately cruel, all in the name of keeping his poor beast so downtrodden as to have no spirit to object to any demands made upon him. When Levitas had with desperate courage brought them back the warning of Napoleon’s first attempt to cross the Channel, in the year ’five, and been mortally wounded in that effort, Rankin had left his dragon alone and slowly dying in a small and miserable clearing, while he sought comfort for his own lesser injuries.