Naomi Novik - Tongues of Serpents

There had not even been a small engagement at sea, for consolation: they had once seen a French privateer, off at a distance, but the small vessel had set every scrap of sail and vanished away at a heeling pace. Iskierka had given chase anyway—alone, as Laurence pointed out to Temeraire he could not leave the eggs for such a fruitless adventure—and to Temeraire’s satisfaction, after a few hours she had been forced to return empty-handed.

The French would certainly not attack Sydney, either: not when there was nothing to be won but kangaroos and hovels. Temeraire did not see what they were to do here, at all; the eggs were to be seen to their hatching, but that could not be far off, he felt sure, and then there would be nothing to do but sit about and stare out to sea, as far as he could tell.

The people were all either engaged in farming, which was not very interesting, or were convicts, who it seemed to Temeraire marched out for no reason in the morning and then marched back at night. He had flown after a party of them one day, just to see, and they were only going to a quarry to cut out bits of stone, and then bringing the bits of stone back to town in waggon-carts, which seemed quite absurd and inefficient to him: he could have carried five cartloads in a single flight of perhaps ten minutes, but when he had landed to offer his assistance, the convicts had all run away, and the soldiers had come to complain to Laurence stiffly afterwards.

They certainly did not like Laurence; one of them had been very rude, and said, “For fivepence I would have you down at the quarries, too,” at which Temeraire put his head down and said, “For twopence I will have you in the ocean; what have you done, I should like to know, when Laurence has won a great many battles with me, and we drove Napoleon off; and you have only been sitting here. You have not even managed to raise a respectable number of cows.”

Temeraire now felt perhaps that jibe had been a little injudicious; or perhaps he ought not have let Laurence go into town, after all, when there were people who wished to put him into quarries. “I will go and look for Laurence and Granby,” he said to Iskierka, “and you will stay here: if you go, you will likely set something on fire, anyway.”

“I will not set anything on fire!” Iskierka said. “Unless it needs setting on fire, to get Granby out.”

“That is just what I mean,” Temeraire said. “How, pray tell, would setting something on fire do any good at all?”

“If no-one would tell me where he was,” Iskierka said, “I am quite sure that if I set something on fire and told them I would set the rest on fire, too, they would come about: so there.”

“Yes,” Temeraire said, “and in the meanwhile, very likely he would be in whatever house you had set on fire, and be hurt: and if not, the fire would jump along to the nearby buildings whether you liked it to or not, and he would be in one of those. Whereas I will just take the roof off a building, and then I can look inside and lift them out, if they are in there, and people will tell me anyway.”

“I can take a roof off a building, too!” Iskierka said. “You are only jealous, because someone is more likely to want to take Granby, because he has more gold on him and is much more fine.”

Temeraire swelled with indignation and breath, and would have expelled them both in a rush, but Roland interrupted urgently, saying, “Oh, don’t quarrel! Look, here they are all coming back, right as rain: that is them on the road, I am sure.”

Temeraire whipped his head around: three small figures had just emerged from the small cluster of buildings which made the town, and were on the narrow cattle-track which came towards the promontory.

Temeraire’s and Iskierka’s heads were raised high, looking down towards them; Laurence raised a hand and waved vigorously, despite the twinge in his ribs, which a bath and a little rough bandaging had not gone very far to alleviate; that injury, however, could be concealed. “There; at least we will not have them down here in the streets,” Granby said, lowering his own arm, and wincing a little; he probed gingerly at his shoulder.

It was still a near-run thing when they had got up to the promontory—a slow progress, and Laurence’s legs wished to quiver on occasion, before they had reached the top and could sit on the makeshift benches. Temeraire sniffed, and then lowered his head abruptly and said, “You are hurt; you are bleeding,” with urgent anxiety.

“It is nothing to concern you; I am afraid we only had a little accident in the town,” Laurence said, guiltily preferring a certain degree of deceit to the inevitable complications of Temeraire’s indignation.

“So, dearest, you see it is just as well I wore my old coat,” Granby said to Iskierka, in a stroke of inspiration, “as it has got dirty and torn, which you would have minded if I had on something nicer.”

Iskierka was thus diverted to a contemplation of his clothing, instead of his bruises, and promptly pronounced it a natural consequence of the surroundings. “If you will go into a low, wretched place like that town, one cannot expect anything better,” she said, “and I do not see why we are staying here, at all; I think we had better go straight back to England.”

“I AM NOT SURPRISED in the least,” Bligh said later that evening, when they had left Riley’s table and gone to the quarterdeck for coffee and cigars, “not in the least; you see exactly how it is now, Captain Laurence, with these whoreson dogs and Merinos.”

His language was not much better than that of the aforementioned dogs, and neither could Laurence much prefer his company. He did not like to think so of the King’s governor and a Navy officer, and particularly not one so much a notable seaman: his feat of navigating three thousand miles of open ocean in only a ship’s launch, when left adrift by the Bounty , was still a prodigy.

Laurence had looked at least to respect, if not to like; but the Allegiance had stopped to take on water in Van Diemen’s Land, and there found the governor they had confidently expected to meet in Sydney, deposed by the Rum Corps and living in a resentful exile. He had a thin, soured mouth, perhaps the consequence of his difficulties; a broad forehead exposed by his receding hair; and delicate, anxious features beneath it, which did not very well correspond with the intemperate language he was given to unleash on those not uncommon occasions when he felt himself thwarted.

He had no recourse but to harangue passing Navy officers with demands to restore him to his post, but all of those prudent gentlemen, to date, had chosen to stay well out of the affair while the news took the long sea-road back to England for an official response. This, Laurence supposed, had been neglected in the upheaval of Napoleon’s invasion and its aftermath; nothing else could account for so great a delay. But no fresh orders had come, nor a replacement governor, and meanwhile in Sydney the New South Wales Corps, and those men of property who had promoted their coup, grew all the more entrenched.

The very night the Allegiance put into the harbor, Bligh had himself rowed out to consult with Captain Riley; he had very nearly asked himself to dinner, and directed the conversation with perfect disregard for Riley’s privilege; though as a Navy man himself he could not be ignorant of the custom.

“A year now, and no answer,” Bligh had said in a cloud of spittle and fury, waving his hand to Riley’s steward to send the bottle round to him again. “A full year gone, Captain, and meanwhile in Sydney these scurrilous worms yet inculcate all the populace with licentiousness and sedition: it is nothing to them, nothing, if every child born to woman on these shores should be a bastard and a bugger and a drunken leech, so long as they do a little work upon their farms, and lie quiet under the yoke: Let the rum flow is their only maxim, the liquor their only coin and god.” He did not, however, stint himself of the wine, near-vinegared though it was, nor the last dregs of Riley’s port; ate well, also, as might a man living mostly on hardtack and a little occasional game.