Empire of Ivory (19 page)

proper understanding of precedence in these matters; you

can make no such excuse. You know your duty perfectly well.

You set your beast deliberately onto the ship's crew,

without permission. You might have asked for a chair, if

you wished one slung-"

"If I had imagined that such a request needed to be made,

upon what I had supposed to be a well-run ship, when a lady

was to come aboard-" Laurence said.

"I suppose we must mean a little something different by the

term," Riley retorted, sarcastic and quick.

He at once looked heartily embarrassed, when the remark had

escaped him; but Laurence was in no way inclined to wait

for him to withdraw, and said angrily, "It would grieve me

indeed to be forced to impute any un-gentlemanlike motiveany selfish consideration, which might prompt a gentleman

to make remarks so nearly intolerable upon the character

and respectability of a clergyman's wife, and a mother,

wholly unknown to him and therefore offering no grounds

whatsoever to merit his scorn-save perhaps as an

alternative, preferable to the examination of his own

conscience-"

The door flung open without a knock; Berkley thrust his

head into the cabin. They stopped at once, united in

appalled indignation at this perfect disregard for privacy

and all shipboard etiquette. Berkley paid no attention to

their stares. He was unshaven and gaunt; Maximus had passed

an uncomfortable night after his short flight aboard, and

Berkley had slept no more than his dragon. He said bluntly,

"We can hear every damned word on deck; in a moment

Temeraire will pull up the planking and stick his nose in.

For God's sake go knock each other down somewhere quietly

and have done."

This outrageous advice, more suitable for a pair of

schoolboys than grown men, was not heeded, but the quarrel

was necessarily ended by the open reproof; Riley begged to

be excused, and went at once away.

"I must ask you to go-between for us, with Captain Riley, I

am afraid, henceforth," Laurence said to Catherine, some

time afterwards, when his temper had been as much relieved

as could be managed by the violent pacing of the narrow

length of his cabin. "I know we agreed I should manage it,

but matters have arisen so that-"

"Of course, Laurence, you need say nothing more," she

interrupted, in practical tones, leaving him in some

despair of the discretion of all his fellow aviators; it

was such a settled part of his understanding of shipboard

life, that one should pretend not to have heard, even what

of necessity had been perfectly audible, that he hardly

knew how to answer their frankness, "and I will give him a

private dinner, instead of making it a common one with all

of us, so there will be no difficulty. But I am sure you

will make up the matter in a trice. What is there worth

arguing about, when we have three months of sailing

together ahead of us?-unless you mean to entertain us all

with the gossip of the thing."

Laurence did not in the least like to form the subject of

whispers, but he drearily knew her optimistic hopes to be

ill-founded. No unforgivable remarks had been made but many

unforgettable ones, a good number by himself, he was sorry

to recall, and if they did not need for honor's sake to

avoid one another entirely, he felt they could hardly be on

such terms of camaraderie as they had formerly known, ever

again. He wondered if he was to blame, perhaps for

continuing, too much, to think of Riley as his subordinate;

if he had presumed too far on their relationship.

He went to sit with Temeraire as the ship made ready to

weigh anchor: the familiar old shouts and exhortations

strangely distant from him, and he felt a disconnect from

the life of the ship such as he had never expected to know;

almost as though he had never been a sailor at all.

"Look there, Laurence," Temeraire said; south of the

harbor, a small ragged knot of dragons could be seen

winging away from the covert: towards Cherbourg, Laurence

guessed, by their line of flight. His glass was not to

hand, and they were little larger than a flock of birds at

the distance, too far to make out their individual

markings, but as they flew, one among them briefly fired

out a small exuberant tongue of flame, yellow-orange-hot

against the blue sky: Iskierka set out with a handful of

the ferals, for the first time on a real patrol; the

measure of the desperate circumstances which they left

behind.

"Are we not leaving soon, Laurence?" Temeraire asked; he

was painfully impatient to be under way. "If we would make

better speed, I would be very happy to pull, at any time,"

and he turned to look at Dulcia, presently lying in an

uneasy sleep upon his back, coughing miserably every so

often without even opening her eyes.

She and Lily, who lay with her head half-buried up to the

bone spurs in a great wooden tub full of sand, were yet in

much better state than the rest of the formation; poor

Maximus had made the flight to the ship in easy short

stages, and even so with much difficulty. He had been given

all the far side of the dragondeck and was sleeping there

already, heedless of the furious bustle around him as the

last of the preparations to launch them commenced. Nitidus

lay sprawled in exhaustion tucked against Maximus's side,

where once the Pascal's Blue would have lain comfortably on

his back, and Immortalis and Messoria, huddled to either

side of Lily in the middle of the deck, were grown a sort

of pale lemon yellow like milk custard.

"I could drag up the anchors in a trice, I am sure, much

quicker," Temeraire added. The topmasts had been sent up,

and the yards, and they were warping up to the kedge: fully

four hundred men or more could heave on the massive

quadruple-capstan at once, and all of them would be needed

to bring up the massive weight of the best bower. The

sailors on deck were most of them already stripped to the

waist, despite the cold morning, to get about it; Temeraire

certainly could have provided material aid, but Laurence

was under no illusion how such an offer would presently be

received.

"We would only be in the way," he said; "they will manage

quicker without us." He laid his hand on Temeraire's side,

looking away from the labor in which they could have no

part, to the open ocean ahead.

Chapter 6

"OH," TEMERAIRE SAID, in a very strange tone, and he

pitched forward and vomited tremendously all over the open

ground before him, heaving up an acrid stinking mess in

which the traces of banana leaves, goat horns, cocoanut

shells, and long green ropes of braided seaweed might be

distinguished among the generalized yellowish mulch,

scattered through with unrecognizable scraps of cracked

bones and shreds of hide.

"Keynes!" Laurence bellowed, having leapt out of the way

just in time, and to the two hapless medicine-men who had

offered the latest remedy, savagely said, "Get you gone,

and take that worthless draught with you."

"No, let us have it, if you please, and the receipt,"

Keynes said, approaching a little gingerly, and bending to

sniff at the pot which they had presented. "A purgative may

be of some use on future occasions, if this is not simply a

case of excess; were you feeling ill before?" Keynes

demanded of Temeraire, who only moaned a little and closed

his eyes; he was lying limp and wretched, having crept a

little way off from the former contents of his stomach,

which steamed unpleasantly even in the overheated latesummer air. Laurence covered his mouth and nostrils with a

handkerchief and beckoned to the deeply reluctant

groundsmen to bring the midden-shovels, and bury the refuse

at once.

"I wonder if it is not the effects of the protea," Dorset

said absently, poking through the pot with a stick and

fishing out the remnants of the spiny blossom. "I do not

believe we have seen it used as an ingredient before: the

Cape vegetation has quite a unique construction, among the

plant kingdom. I must send the children for some

specimens."

"As glad as we must be to have delivered you a curiosity,

it is certainly nothing which he ever ate before; perhaps

you might consider how we are to proceed, instead, without

making him ill again," Laurence snapped, and went to

Temeraire's side before he could make a further display of

his ill-temper and frustration. He laid a hand on the

slowly heaving muzzle, and Temeraire twitched his ruff in

an attempt at bravery.

"Roland, go you and Dyer and fetch some sea-water, from

beneath the dock," Laurence said, and taking a cloth used

the cool water to wipe down Temeraire's muzzle and his

jaws.

They had been in Capetown now two days, experimenting

lavishly: Temeraire perfectly willing to sniff or swallow

anything which anyone should give him, if only it might by

some chance be a cure, and exercise his memory; so far

without any notable success, and Laurence was prepared to

consider this latest episode a notable failure, whatever

the surgeons might say. He did not know how to refuse them;

but it seemed to him they were trying a great deal of local

quackery, without any real grounds for hope, and making a

reckless trial of Temeraire's health.

"I already feel a good deal better," Temeraire said, but

his eyes were closing in exhaustion as he said it, and he

did not want to eat anything the next day; but said

wistfully, "I would be glad of some tea, if it would not be

much trouble," so Gong Su made a great kettle of it, using

a week's supply, and then to his disgust they put in an

entire brick of sugar. Temeraire drank it with great

pleasure when it had cooled, and afterwards stoutly

declared himself perfectly recovered; but he still looked

rather dismally when Emily and Dyer came huffing back from

the markets, hung all over with the day's new acquisitions

in net-bags and parcels, and stinking from ten-yards'

distance.

"Well, let us see," Keynes said, and went poking through

the materials with Gong Su: a great many local vegetables,

including a long pendulous fruit like an oversized yam,

which Gong Su dubiously picked up and thumped against the

ground: not even the skin so much as split, until he at

last took it into the castle, to the smith, and had it

smashed open upon the forge.

"That is from a sausage-tree," Emily said. "Maybe it is not

quite ripe, though; and also we did find some of the hua

jiao today, from a Malay stall-keeper," she added, showing

Laurence a small basket of the red peppery seeds, for which

Temeraire had acquired a great liking.

"Not the mushroom?" Laurence asked: this being a hideously

pungent specimen they all recalled vividly from their first

visit, which in its cooking had rendered the entire castle

nearly uninhabitable from its noxious fumes. Laurence had

his share of the seaman's instinctive faith in unpleasant

medicine, and secretly the best part of his own hopes lay

on the thing. But it was surely a wild growth,

uncultivated: no person in their senses would ever

deliberately eat the thing, and so far it was not to be

found, for any price.

"We found a boy who had a little English and told him that

we would pay gold for it, if they would bring some," Dyer

piped up; a group of native children had brought them the

first example mostly as a curiosity.

"Perhaps the seed husks in combination with another of the

native fruits," Dorset suggested, examining the hua jiao

and stirring them with a finger. "They might have been used

on any number of dishes."

Keynes snorted, and, dusting his hands as he straightened

from the survey, he shook his head at Gong Su. "No, let his

innards have another day's rest, and leave off all this

unwholesome stuff. I am increasingly of the opinion that

the climate alone must cook it out of them, if there is to

be any benefit to this enterprise at all."

He prodded the ground with the stick he had been using to

turn over the vegetables: dry and hard several inches down,

with only the stubborn frizz of short yellow grass to hold

it together, the roots long and thin and spidery. A few

days into March, they were deep in the local summer, and

the steady hot weather made the hard-packed bare ground a

baking stone, which fairly shimmered with heat during the

peak of the day.

Temeraire cracked an eye from his restorative drowse. "It

is pleasant, but it is not so much warmer than the

courtyard at Loch Laggan," he said doubtfully, and in any

case the suggestion was not a very satisfying one, as this

cure could not be tried until the other dragons arrived.

And for the moment they were alone, although the Allegiance

was expected now daily. As soon as the ship had come in