Tongues of Serpents (21 page)

The fire came upon them with shocking speed, a low hissing beneath the continuing crash of the thunder and dry wind, whispering with great malice and hunger, and Laurence shouting over the noise,
“Leave that, damn your eyes,” while one of the convicts came reluctantly out from behind some bushes and through the grey wisps of drifting smoke, dragging a cask of rum which he had somehow stolen away after their landing, meaning to privately enjoy. The other men jeered and called, yelling at him, “Bring it on quick, Bob, and we’ll be merry as grigs all this fucking flight for once; you won’t have it all to yourself, you old sodden bitch, no you won’t.”

Maynard halting stooped to heave the cask up to his shoulder. The fire was in the distance yet, a broad and smoke-shrouded wall of glowing orange seen through the veil, but already the yellow tips of grass were igniting like red embers upon the crest of the dune behind him as he bent, and a wave of heat came shimmering almost palpable into Temeraire’s face and stole his breath.

Maynard was staggering towards them, and the cask was dripping; small sparks of blue fire going up as the droplets struck the ground to meet the catching tinder of dry grass, and then the thickets were going up ahead of his feet, smoke rising in one thin column after another blown into spreading curtains. Temeraire could not see the fire at all anymore as a separate thing: all the world beyond the dunes was flame, and the smoke climbing into thick and stinging pillars around him.

The man let the cask fall, and began to run shambling and coughing towards them. Temeraire felt very strange; his head was thick and confused and his wings felt leaden. He breathed in deeply, and coughed and coughed also; his throat and chest were closing as though someone had wrapped chains around him, and was trying to draw them taut. “Aloft,” Laurence was roaring, “Temeraire, go aloft,” and Temeraire thought, but I must wait, and he felt quite tired; and then a sharp stab of pain caught his hindquarters, startling his eyes open: when had he closed them?

“Get that egg out of the fire, you damned beast,” Rankin shouted, from behind him, and the egg, the egg: Temeraire with a great bunching effort launched himself up; as his wings spread a great shuddering gust of hot, hot, hot wind blew up from beneath him, catching him aback; Maynard was dangling from the belly-netting, being pulled in, and the cask below was a brief torch burning blue-white out of the smoke for a moment. His hindquarters yet ached: there was a little blood dripping, where Caesar had pricked him hard with his claws, which ran down Temeraire’s legs as he beat upwards. His wings still did not wish to answer very well.

Caesar was ahead, stretched out long and flying all-out in a straight line, beating and beating: Temeraire fixed upon his grey body and flew as best he could. The smoke still climbed after them, in rising tendrils mingling into columns mingling into sheets, thickening along the ground as all the heaped growth was consumed. His breath whistled painfully in his throat, a particular effort every time, and the thunder roared abruptly very near, out of the huge building clouds overhead; he twisted away on instinct, quite uselessly: the lightning had already struck the ground, perhaps a quarter-of-a-mile distant, and another tree was burning like a torch on its hill of red and gold.

The cold air felt better on his hide, in his throat; but the wind struck him from one side and then the next. One great buffeting gust came rushing at them from above, wet and shockingly cold after the heat, and Caesar was tumbled over: his left wing and shoulder blown hard down, and turning his other directly into the gust, so he was blown every which way, and Temeraire with a laboring burst of speed came under him only just in time to right him; sharp painful sting as Caesar’s claws scrabbled on his hide.

Caesar steadied a little, and then they were taken apart again by the wind, another dragging gust which pulled Temeraire suddenly fifty feet straight upwards, only barely managing to keep his wings from snapping against his back.

“Laurence, Laurence,” Temeraire called, to be sure that Laurence had not been hurt, by Caesar’s claws, nor any of his crew; or he tried to call, but nothing came from his throat, so far as he could hear. The thunder was going off again, like cannon or worse, beside him and ahead, all at once: the sky above blazing with great gunpowder-flashes of lightning which showed the clouds going up and up and up like mountains full of cavernous hollows, false promises of shelter, and the edges billowing and crawling out and in, like living things brooding.

He tried to look and nearly had his neck wrenched around for his pains, the only comfort that he could glance downward and see the egg against his breastbone, the oilskin wrappings shining wet with rain. But the harness did not look so tight, he thought with sudden anxiety, and then the wind struck and he was tumbling, his head bowed down nearly below his forelegs, the blazing orange of the fire suddenly become the sky, the ground yawning with blue cloud-canyons, and then turned over and over, blurring; he could not spread his wings.

He stretched his jaws wide and drew in all the breath he could; the
wind cut a little as he fell back towards the earth and the heat rose up instead, and he felt lighter as his chest filled out. He managed to twist himself sideways, and open his wings out straight up and down, in the line of his falling, and banking just a little into the wind caught an up-draft back towards the blue-black heights of the storm, already reaching a talon towards the egg, anxiously, to try and see: he brushed it very gently and carefully with the edge of a knuckle; it was there, it was safe.

“Secure that rigging there, if you please, Mr. Roland,” he heard Lieutenant Forthing shouting, and as the fire roared up in pursuit behind them, Temeraire might have heard Laurence’s voice; but he was not perfectly sure. But he could not look, he could not turn; the fire was below, the storm above, blind and unmeaning ferocity in every direction, so vast one could not even see the limits of it. He did not see Caesar anywhere, anymore. The sky was so dark, so black, smoke and thunderclouds and no relief, and somewhere there might be sunlight, but so far as Temeraire was concerned there was none left in the world at all, and no direction, either.

He put down his head and flew on.

Laurence nodded his thanks as Roland gave him the small cup of water, and drained it off despite the bitter and acrid taste. Water was rushing with great violence along the once-dry creek bed and had collected in deep puddles over the flat baked surface of the ground, but all choked with ash and dirt, undrinkable until it had been poured through a handkerchief to strain it as clean as it might be gotten.

The landscape had been wholly altered: trees reduced to black-twig skeletons, the thick grasses all gone as if into vapour, leaving behind only scorched and blackened patterns upon the ground which in places still sent up thin lines of smoke. Only the thick dark green bushes yet survived, more or less; the fire had only skirted along their line, and on the other side a region of the sparser vegetation had escaped destruction. Distantly ahead, the fire continued on, a thick black smudge against the sky.

Temeraire lay sleeping, his breath coming in low, worrying rasps. He had landed and thrust his muzzle into the rushing stream to drink long and deep, despite the clots of debris; then had fallen into a stupor. Dorset had listened to his chest and his throat and shaken his head.

Caesar had flown limping into their camp perhaps half-an-hour
later, dripping-wet and exhausted from being tumbled about but a little less wretched: Rankin had steered him into the sheeting rain, far to the west along the cloud, where the fire had not been able to take hold. “I would not mind a bite, anyway,” he said, drowsily, with his head upon his forelegs; his grey hide was streaked and mottled with charcoal.

Meat proved no difficulty, except for their fatigue. Many of the desert creatures formerly hidden by the scrub had been robbed of shelter where they had not also been robbed of life; there were twelve kangaroos lying upon the earth near enough to be dragged back to the creek, their fur already singed off and the flesh partly cooked through. The aviators wearily set about the gathering and butchering, under the direction of Gong Su. The best Laurence could say of the convicts was that they were keeping quiet and out of the way, having been doled out a reduced ration of grog. Maynard was forced to take his own glass at the opposite end of the camp, alone and in disgrace.

“I shouldn’t like to go aloft on this harness again, sir, not without repairs,” Mr. Fellowes said, climbing down from Temeraire’s side with a segment of leather, to show him a buckle which looked as though it had been made of soft clay, pulled and stretched long and misshapen. “Not the worst of it, either: all the buckles are gone ahoo: softened by the heat, I think, and twisted up with all that buffeting we took.”

“Do what you can with the supplies, Mr Fellowes; in any case we cannot think of leaving tomorrow,” Laurence said tiredly, running his sleeve across his forehead; Temeraire would need the rest, and the pursuit should have to wait, if it were not now rendered quite hopeless. “Mr. Forthing, Mr. Loring, we will have a little order in this camp, I hope: let us have a couple of fires, and clear some of this debris; and perhaps if these gentlemen will dig us a pit near enough the water channel, it will give us a little cleaner water for drinking.”

“Yes, sir,” Forthing said, and went to work upon the convicts, sending those of them less greenish than the others to fetch their shovels; Laurence realized belatedly he had not thought anything of giving an order, nor evidently the officers of obeying: the united power of crisis and habit, he supposed, on both sides.

The sun was sinking, through the shredded remains of the storm clouds and the haze of smoke: all the sky become true extravagant splendour of purple and crimson and violent pink, gold-limned clouds and shafts of light flaring out like beacons through their gaps. There
was not enough strength among them for any great labor. They managed with the shovels to rake away the worst of the smoky, stinking debris; the hole was dug in a curve of the creek and gradually began to fill up with water, filtered in through the dirt.

There was biscuit and the meat, thoroughly tasteless and without any scent and difficult to chew. “Can you stew them softer?” Laurence asked Gong Su, over the three kangaroos set aside for Temeraire; Gong Su nodded, but said, “They will be better in the morning,” and Laurence nodding did not wake Temeraire to eat.

They slept uneasily, with a watch of four men all the night. The plains glowed with lingering embers all around, like a field of fallen stars burning gold, and a haze of orange-lit smoke hung in the west, as if the sun had chosen not to set but only to drop below the horizon. The creek’s roar died away little by little. Laurence woke twice when Temeraire fell into a coughing fit, shudders rippling down his hide, and his head bent over; but Temeraire did not himself fully rouse, his eyes still closed to slits even as he trembled and spat grey-streaked phlegm.

“No, I am well, very well,” Temeraire croaked out frog-like the next morning, although he swallowed the kangaroo, stewed into small half-disintegrated lumps, only very slowly and with visible pain, and reluctantly. “We must go on: we must find the trail again.”

“My dear,” Laurence said quietly, feeling a species of sneak, “I understand your feelings, but we must be practical: we must consider the egg which we yet have, and put its safety before the one which has been lost. Any strange territory is dangerous, wholly unguided as we are; we have already nearly come to grief one and all, and several of our company have suffered worse misfortune. We risk the last egg with every moment we continue: only your utmost exertions were sufficient to preserve it from this last disaster; if we should encounter a second such, could you honestly declare your present strength equal to the task?”

Temeraire was silent, his head bowed deeply over the last, the tiny egg. Laurence could not repress acute guilt: deeply unfair to use Temeraire’s feelings so against him, perhaps even smacking of dishonesty, yet Laurence could not for a moment wish to withdraw, if by such a low method he might persuade Temeraire to take the rest necessary for his own health, even if a thousand eggs should be cracked upon the sands. “When you are recovered,” Laurence said, “and the fire has died down, we will have more opportunity of finding the trail again. There is this benefit: the fire has quite cleared the landscape for our search.”

“But also all the trail,” Temeraire said sadly. “I cannot see how we should ever find them again if we wait at all; although I suppose I am being foolish. The trail
is
lost, and there is no help for it. Oh!” he cried. “I am glad we are never to go back to England again, Laurence: I do not think I should ever be able to look Cantarella in the face.”

Temeraire cast his wings up and hid his head beneath them, afterwards, and did not care to speak; Laurence rested his hand on Temeraire’s muzzle, for what comfort wordless sympathy might convey, and then fetched his writing-case and sat beside him in the dim shadowed cavern the wing-membranes made, pale bluish-grey light filtering in through their translucence. Laurence had been keeping a log of the journey, from the habit of service days; now he added the annotation,

He wrote to Jane afterwards, a separate sheet to enclose with the letter he had already begun to her: he felt he could not put off so unpleasant a task on Granby as to convey the intelligence of the loss of the egg. If it had not been estimated so valuable in England, here it had been priceless, where the long journey would make any shipment of additional eggs all the more difficult; and if Jane had fresh hostilities to contend with, in Spain, she would all the less wish to spare more eggs to the very hypothetical breeding grounds of this new continent.