Tongues of Serpents (2 page)

“By God, have you taken all leave of your senses?” Laurence said, and seized upon the knife-wielder’s hand with both his own, twisting the blade away, while Granby efficiently knocked down the third man and turned back to help him. The melee was spreading rapidly now, helped along by Tharkay, who was coolly throwing the toppled chairs across the room, knocking over still more of the tables, and flinging glasses of rum into the faces of the custom as they rose indignantly.

Laurence and Granby and Tharkay were only three together, and thanks to the advance of the New South Wales officers well-surrounded, leaving the irritated men no other target but those same officers; a target on which the convicts in particular seemed not loath to vent their spleen. This was not a very coherently directed fury, however, and when the officer before Laurence had been clubbed down
with a heavy stool, the choleric assailant behind him swung it with equal fervor at Laurence himself.

Laurence slipped upon the wet floorboards, catching the stool away from his face, and went to one knee in a puddle. He shoved the man’s leg out from under him, and was rewarded with the full weight of man and stool landing upon his shoulder, so they went sprawling together upon the floor.

Splinters drove into Laurence’s side, where his shirt had ridden up from his breeches and come wholly loose, and the big convict, swearing at him, struck him on the side of his face with a clenched fist. Laurence tasted blood as his lip tore upon his tooth, a dizzying haze over his sight. They were rolling across the floor, and Laurence had no very clear recollection of the next few moments; he was pounding at the other man savagely, a blow with every turn, knocking his head against the boards over and over. It was a vicious, animal struggle, insensible of both feeling and thought; he knew only distantly as he was kicked, by accident, or struck against the wall or some overturned piece of furniture.

The limp unconsciousness of his opponent freed him at last from the frenzy, and Laurence with an effort opened his clenched hand and let go the man’s hair, and pushed himself up from the floor, staggering. They had fetched up against the wooden counter before the kitchen. Laurence reaching up clutched at the edge and pulled himself to his feet, aware more than he wished to be, all at once, of a deep stabbing pain in his side, and stinging cuts in his cheek and his hands. He fumbled at his face and pulled free a long sliver of broken glass, tossing it upon the counter.

The fighting had begun already to die down, oddly quick to Laurence’s instinctive sense of an action; the participants lacked the appetite of a real engagement, where there was anything of worth to be gained. Laurence limping across the room made it to Granby’s side: Agreuth and one of his fellow officers had clawed their way back up onto their feet and were yet grappling weakly with him in a corner, vicious but half-exhausted, so they were swaying back and forth more than wrestling.

Coming in, Laurence heaved Granby free, and leaning on each other they stumbled out of the courtyard and into the narrow, stinking alley-way outside, which yet seemed fresh out from under the makeshift tarpaulin; a fine misting rain was falling. Laurence leaned gratefully
against the far wall made cool and light by the coating of dew, ignoring with a practiced stomach the man a few steps away who was heaving the contents of his belly into the gutters. A couple of women coming down the alley-way lifted their skirts over the trickle of muck and continued past them all without hesitation, not even looking in at the disturbance of the tavern courtyard.

“My God, you look a fright,” Granby said, dismally.

“I have no doubt,” Laurence said, gingerly touching at his face. “And I have two ribs cracked, I dare say. I am sorry to say, John, you are not in much better case.”

“No, I am sure not,” Granby said. “We will have to take a room somewhere, if anyplace will let us through the door, to wash up; what Iskierka would do seeing me in such a state, I have no notion.”

Laurence had a very good notion what Iskierka would do, and also Temeraire, and between them there would not be much left of the colony to speak of afterwards.

“Well,” Tharkay said, joining them as he wrapped his neckcloth around his own bloodied hand, “I believe I saw our man look into the establishment, a little while ago, but I am afraid he thought better of coming in under the circumstances. I will have to inquire after him to arrange another meeting.”

“No,” Laurence said, blotting his lip and cheek with his handkerchief. “No, I thank you; I think we can dispense with his information. I have seen all I need to, in order to form an opinion of the discipline of the colony, and its military force.”

Temeraire sighed and toyed with the last bites of kangaroo stew—the meat had a pleasantly gamy sort of flavor, not unlike deer, and he had found it at first a very satisfying change from fish, after the long sea-voyage. But he could only really call it palatable when cooked rare, which did not offer much variety; in stew it became quite stringy and tiresome, especially as the supply of spice left even more to be desired.

There were some very nice cattle in a pen which he could see, from his vantage upon the harbor promontory, but evidently they were much too dear here for the Corps to provide. And Temeraire of course could not propose such an expense to Laurence, not when he had been responsible for the loss of Laurence’s fortune; instead Temeraire had silenced all his mild complaints about the lack of variety: but sadly Gong
Su had taken this as encouragement, and it had been nothing but kangaroo morning and night, four days running—not even a bit of tunny.

“I do not see why we mayn’t at least go hunting further along,” Iskierka said, even while licking out her own bowl indecorously—she quite refused to learn anything resembling polite manners. “This is a large country, and it stands to reason there ought to be something more worth eating if we looked. Perhaps there are some of those elephants which you have been on and on about; I should like to try one of those.”

Temeraire would have given a great deal for a delicious elephant, seasoned with a generous amount of pepper and perhaps some sage, but Iskierka was never to be encouraged in anything whatsoever. “You are very welcome to go flying away anywhere you like,” he said, “and to surely get quite lost. No one has any notion of what this countryside is like, past the mountains, and there is no one in it, either, to ask for directions: not people or dragons.”

“That is very silly,” Iskierka said. “I do not say these kangaroos are very good eating, because they are not, and there are not enough of them, either; but they are certainly no worse than what we had in Scotland during the last campaign, so it is stuff to say there is no one living here; why wouldn’t there be? I dare say there are plenty of dragons here, only they are somewhere else, eating much better than we are.”

This struck Temeraire as not an unlikely possibility, and he made a note to discuss it privately with Laurence, later; which recalled him to Laurence’s absence, and thence to the advancing hour. “Roland,” he called, with a little anxiety—of course Laurence did not need nurse-maiding, but he had promised to return before the supper hour, and read a little more of the novel which he had acquired in town the day before—“Roland, is it not past five?”

“Lord, yes, it must be almost six,” Emily Roland answered, putting down her sword; she and Demane were fencing a little, in the yard. She patted her face down with a tugged-free tail of her shirt, and ran to the promontory edge to call down to the sailors below, and came back to say, “No, I am wrong: it is a quarter past seven: how strange the day is so long, when it is almost Christmas!”

“It is not strange at all,” Demane said. “It is only strange that you keep insisting it must be winter here only because it is in England.”

“But where is Granby, if it is so late?” Iskierka said, prickling up at
once, overhearing. “He did not mean to go anywhere particularly nice, he assured me, or I should never have let him go looking so shabby.”

Temeraire flared his ruff a little, taking this to heart; he felt it keenly that Laurence should go about in nothing but a plain gentleman’s coat, without even a little bit of braid or golden buttons. He would gladly have improved Laurence’s appearance if he had any chance of doing so; but Laurence still had refused to sell Temeraire’s talon-sheaths for him, and even if he had, Temeraire had not yet seen anything in this part of the world which would have suited him as appropriate.

“Perhaps I had better go and look for Laurence,” Temeraire said. “I am sure he cannot have meant to stay away so long.”

“I am going to go and look for Granby, too,” Iskierka announced.

“Well, we cannot both go,” Temeraire said irritably. “Someone must stay with the eggs.” He cast a quick, judgmental eye over the three eggs in their protective nests of swaddling blankets, and the small canopy set over them, made of sailcloth. He was a little dissatisfied by their situation: a nice coal brazier, he thought, would not have gone amiss even in this warm weather, and perhaps some softer cloth to go directly against the shell; and it did not suit him that the canopy was so low he could not put his head underneath it, to sniff at the eggs and see how hard their shells had become.

There had been a little difficulty over them, after disembarking: some of the officers of the Corps who had been sent along had tried to object to Temeraire’s keeping the eggs by him, as though they would be better able to protect them, which was stuff; and they had made some sort of noise about Laurence trying to kidnap the eggs, which Temeraire had snorted off.

“Laurence does not want any other dragon, as he has
me,”
Temeraire had said, “and as for kidnapping, I would like to know whose notion it was to take the eggs halfway across the world on the ocean, with storms and sea-serpents everywhere, and to this odd place that is not even a proper country, with no dragons; it was certainly not mine.”

“Mr. Laurence is going directly to hard labor, like all the rest of the prisoners,” Lieutenant Forthing had said, quite stupidly, as though Temeraire were allowing any such thing to happen.

“That is quite enough, Mr. Forthing,” Granby had said, overhearing,
and coming upon them. “I wonder that you would make any such ill-advised remark; I pray you take no notice of it at all, Temeraire, none at all.”

“Oh! I do not in the least,” Temeraire answered, “or any of these other complaints; it is all nonsense, when what you mean is,” he added to Forthing and his associates, “you would like to keep the eggs by you, so that they should not know any better when they hatch, but think they must go at once into harness, and that they must take whichever of you wins them by chance: I heard you talk of drawing lots last night in the gunroom, so you needn’t try and deny it. I will certainly have none of it, and I expect neither will the eggs, of any of you.”

He had of course carried his point, and the eggs, away to their present relative safety and comfort, but Temeraire had no illusions as to the trustworthiness of people who could make such spitefully false remarks; he did not doubt that they would creep up and snatch the eggs away if he gave them even the least chance. He slept curled about the tent, therefore, and Laurence had put Roland and Demane and Sipho on watch, also.

The responsibility was proving sadly confining, however, particularly as Iskierka was not to be trusted with the eggs for any length of time. Fortunately the town was very small, and the promontory visible from nearly any point within it if one only stretched out one’s neck to look, so Temeraire felt he might risk it, only long enough to find Laurence and bring him back. Of course Temeraire was sure no one would be absurd enough to try and treat Laurence with any disrespect, but it could not be denied that men were inclined to do unaccountable things from time to time, and Forthing’s remark stirred uneasily in the back of his head.

It was true, if one wished to be very particular about such things, that Laurence was a convicted felon: convicted of treason, and his sentence commuted to transportation only at the behest of Lord Wellington, after the last campaign in England. But that sentence had been fulfilled, in Temeraire’s opinion: no-one could deny that Laurence had now been transported, and the experience had been quite as much punishment as anyone could have wished.

The unhappy
Allegiance
had been packed to the portholes with still-more-unhappy convicts, who had been kept chained wrist-and-ankle all the day, and stank quite dreadfully whenever they were brought out for exercise in their clanking lines, some of them hanging
limp in the restraints. It seemed quite like slavery, to Temeraire; he did not see why it should make so vast a difference as Laurence said, only because a law-court had said the poor convicts had stolen something: after all, anyone might take a sheep or a cow, if it were neglected by its owner and not kept under watch.

Certainly it made the ship as bad as any slaving vessel: the smell rose up through the planking of the deck, and the wind brought it forward to the dragondeck almost without surcease; even the aroma of boiling salt pork, from the galley below, could not erase it. And Temeraire had learned by accident, perhaps a month out on their journey, that Laurence was quartered directly by the gaol, where it must have been far worse.

Laurence had dismissed the notion of making any complaint, however. “I do very well, my dear,” he had said, “as I have the whole liberty of the dragondeck for my days and the pleasanter nights, which not even the ship’s officers have. It would be unfair in the extreme, when I have not their labor, for me to be demanding some better situation: someone else would have to shift places to give me another.”

So it had been a very unpleasant transportation indeed, and now they were here, which no-one could enjoy, either. Aside from the question of kangaroos, there were not very many people at all, and nothing like a proper town. Temeraire was used to seeing wretched quarters for dragons, in England, but here people did not sleep much better than the clearings in any covert, many of them in tents or makeshift little buildings which did not stay up when one flew over them, not even very low, and instead toppled over and spilled out the squalling inhabitants to make a great fuss.