Tongues of Serpents (38 page)

“Yes,” Laurence said, grimly. “Now they know.”

T
HE FRIGATE MIGHT BE SEEN
from shore before dusk fell, and a little after a sloop-of-war, sailing in company. “That is the
Nereide
, I think,” Laurence said, looking through his glass for what he could glimpse of the bow. “She was sent with the expeditionary force to Île de France, by my last
Gazette;
under Corbet.” He did not share what he had heard of that officer: a hard-knocks captain, court-martialed for brutality; anything might have changed in half-a-year, and rumor might be mistaken.

“I suppose—” Granby said, reluctantly.

“Caesar is the only one who can go,” Laurence said. “Neither Iskierka nor Temeraire could land upon the ship; and I have no confidence they would listen to Demane—or for that matter to me; the captain can scarcely have failed to hear of my case.”

“I don’t know I wouldn’t rather wait until he was close enough to row out to,” Granby muttered, but there was no help for it; they could not with any conscience at all allow a British company to approach without speaking them, so Rankin must go with them; in any case, he was scarcely waiting for their opinion on the matter, and had already gone to dress. Caesar was arranged upon the shore waiting, preening with self-importance.

“Well, we are glad enough to find you,” Willoughby said—Nesbit Willoughby, captain of the
Nereide
, having supplanted Corbet in that position after, he said, the successful taking of Réunion, which had been undertaken, under Commodore Rowley, to secure a port in place of the lost Capetown; but Laurence could not take any great comfort in the substitution: Willoughby had himself been charged with cruelty before a court-martial, in his previous command, and the ship did not
have a happy air; there was a lowering stiffness everywhere, and Caesar was looked upon with a wariness more intimate than mere reflexive anxiety: these were men who feared punishment, and feared it might grow worse.

“Not,” Willoughby continued, “that I imagine we will have any great difficulty. I wonder at them, indeed: planting themselves here cool as you please, not a single possession nearer than four thousand miles and only that one floundering mess of a junk to defend it; other than the dragons, of course, and I am relieved to hear they have only the one they stole. I believe we cannot expect to recapture her?” he inquired.

“Sadly,” Rankin said, “I am afraid the beast has been too thoroughly suborned to permit us to entertain any such hope: several of my officers,” some effrontery in that, which Laurence controlled himself from remarking upon, “have attempted to entice her back, but she has rejected wholly all the lures: her egg was in their possession too long.”

Willoughby nodded. “Well, it is a shame,” he said, “but at least we cannot be too worried about her, new-hatched and untrained. I suppose they will strike their colors at once when we have made clear the situation, in any case.”

“And what is that situation?” Laurence said, a little sharply, and Willoughby looked at him with disfavor.

“I do not much care for your presence at this conference in any case, Mr. Laurence,” he said, “and I will thank you to keep silent. I do not propose to answer to the inquisition of a convicted traitor.”

“Captain Willoughby,” Laurence said, too impatient to tolerate this, “I must beg you to imagine my own interest in either your feelings or your opinion of myself, when I have allowed no similar consideration for those who had greater claims by far to alter my course; and if you dislike my company, you may be shot of it all the sooner if you will not stand upon some notion of preserving ceremony, in circumstances so wholly irregular and unexpected: unless you imagine that a twenty-ton Celestial will have any more patience for it than do I.”

Rankin looked away, as though to express silently his mortification at Laurence’s crudeness; Captain Tomkinson of the
Otter
covered his mouth and issued a cough, soft and uncomfortable. Granby only did not see anything awkward in the speech, and added, “And speaking of whom, if you do mean to make some noise, you oughtn’t be glad to have found us; Temeraire won’t in the least sit still for your having at these fellows, and I don’t suppose any of the other beasts would care to
disoblige him. I don’t know what Captain Rankin may have said about seniority, which is a right-enough mess between us presently, but he knows very well that it don’t make a lick of difference to them. What
are
your orders?”

Willoughby frowned: he was a narrow-faced man, whose hair had already crept back along the curve of his skull, and he was not particularly well-dressed: his clothes were those of a man who had been at sea for eight months, and lodging in irregular shelters. But Granby had given him an excuse, and it was to Granby he answered:
“Our
orders,” with emphasis, “are to take the port. And if it will not be surrendered, gentlemen, I will take it; I will take it if I have to shell it to the very earth.”

Willoughby’s authority was quite real: the orders, which he allowed Granby to read, were from Commodore Rowley and indeed specific: the port, if it existed, could not be tolerated, and must be taken before it were fortified; the grounds for doing so a mere bagatelle of a technicality: the Regent had ordered the remainder of the continent claimed on the basis of Fleming’s circumnavigation, which might as easily have given France a claim by the journeys of La Pérouse.

“There’s no sense arguing it with him, anyway,” Granby said, when they had flown back to shore. “He has the bit in his teeth, and the orders are clear enough, to be just.”

“If we must choose between starting a war with China now,” Willoughby had said, “and starting it a year from now, when they have cannon here and are letting the French romp merrily through our trade, we will start it now. And I say it has been too long in coming, myself, when they have been giving Bonaparte one plum of a dragon after another. One despot likes another, I suppose.”

This was a wholesale misunderstanding of the original intention of the Chinese in sending Temeraire’s egg to Napoleon, which had been done for purely interior purposes and merely to avert a question of succession; and even more so Lien’s presence amongst the French: she had fled the country an exile, suspected in treachery against the crown prince, and had gone to Napoleon seeking only revenge.

But this was not Willoughby’s deepest objection; he had added, more vehemently, “And when I think of the way they snatched our East Indiamen, and all of us forced to be meek as milk to them after, I avow
it must make any man worthy of the name want to put his hands to his gun. It is time and more we blacked their eye for them.”

Laurence remembered well his own feelings on learning that the Chinese had confiscated four British ships: confiscated them, and forced the sailors to sail their envoy to England, with neither cargo nor payment and only peremptory demands. It had been a gross violation of sovereignty, and he had felt, with every other sailor who had heard it, the most violent fury, not lessened in the least by the cringing behavior of Government—more anxious then to prevent the entry of China into the war, or at least more sanguine that it was to be prevented.

Jia Zhen might of course have felt a similar sense of outrage when Rankin presented to him the demands for surrender, through Temeraire’s dubious translation, to which Temeraire added as commentary, “I do not see how this is reasonable: after all, it is stuff for the Regent to say we have claimed the country, when the Larrakia are right here and have been for ages and ages. Why, what if I were to land in London and say,
Very well, because I am the first Chinese dragon to land in London, now I will claim it for the Emperor
—that has as much sense as this does.”

Rankin snapped, “That is enough: these are our orders. You may question them if you must in private, not in front of the agent of a foreign nation.”

“That is a very handsome way to talk,” Temeraire said scathingly, “after you have been sleeping in his house, and came to his dinner; it all seems to me like the sort of thing that Requiescat would do, when he was behaving like a scrub. And anyway,” he added, “if Jia Zhen could understand whatever I was saying in English, I would not have to translate, so I do not see why I ought to be any quieter about it in front of him.”

Whitehall claimed a violation of the treaty of Peking, the agreement negotiated by Hammond, wherein China had granted to Britain an equal access to any of her opened ports under the same terms as any other Western nation. Jia Zhen with great courtesy pointed out that this agreement said nothing whatsoever about China’s granting her own merchants other and more favorable terms for export, as should be natural to any nation, and further that the port was not after all a Chinese port, but the possession of the Larrakia, if they had been so kind as to grant the Chinese the use of much of the land.

“And certainly British merchants must always be welcome, in any
case. The
Pomfrey
, I believe,” he said, “was here in the spring: her captain a pleasure to deal with, and most reasonable. I hope that Captain Willoughby will reconsider his position. Any disagreement or quarrel between our nations must be a most painful circumstance, and I fear could scarcely help but grieve the Emperor.”

Laurence ignored Rankin’s black looks to say, “Mr. Jia, I hope that you might agree that the terms of the treaty are somewhat unclear, and the possession of this port itself open to dispute: certainly left to their own devices, the Larrakia had not opened such a trade. Perhaps if the trade were suspended for a time, while our respective governments should discuss such amendments to the treaty as would satisfy them both—”

But Jia Zhen was not to be persuaded, not without reason; he did not refuse outright, but spoke in a calm and roundabout fashion of the difficulty of managing the sea-serpents, the impossibility of interrupting their peregrinations without causing their training to founder, and the expense of providing their food, which must be supported by the trade; he also, to Laurence’s dismay, spoke of the warehouses which were to be constructed, and added, “By the order of the Emperor, several craftsmen have already been commanded to prepare themselves and their families to make the journey: Lung Shen Li will bring them hence on her next journey.” This of course was very like throwing tinder onto a fire, and likely only to stir further enthusiasm on Willoughby’s part for immediate action.

“There was no real hope, of course,” Laurence said, low and bleak, when they had ended the fruitless audience.

“If it is any comfort,” Tharkay said, “I doubt whatever concessions you might have wrung from them would satisfy Willoughby. He is here to take the port; nothing less will content him, and he does not strike me as that political sort of creature who might be persuaded by an appeal to his caution.”

“But he is wholly unreasonable,” Temeraire protested. “It is not as though Britain had built a port here, and the Chinese were taking it away; we had months to travel only to reach here at all.”

That the port was strategically placed so as to easily wreck all of Britain’s shipping, and her mastery of the Indian Ocean, did not appease him. “I do not see how one small country can complain if it does not rule all the oceans of the world, even those which are quite upon the other side,” he said, “and after all, have we not heard that Java is
only on the other side of the water here, and the Dutch are there, and our friends? Why does Willoughby not go there and say,
Those are yours, and hand them over.”

“He would,” Tharkay said, “but they are defended with modern guns and modern navies, which can raise the price of making such a demand.”

Granby was kind enough to make one final attempt: they flew over with Caesar once more, and he remonstrated with Willoughby, who if he heard, did not show any particular interest in listening. When Granby had finished, he nodded, and then said, “Well, I have heard you out, and now, Captain Granby, and Captain Rankin, I am giving you a damned order: you will get your beasts and all these others out of the port. We scarcely need your help to secure the place, so you need not involve yourself, if you do not choose to—I will be happy,” he added coldly, “to forward your reasoning to Whitehall. All I require is that you do not interfere with my orders, and we will manage the thing ourselves.”

“So he means to smash up all the port,” Temeraire said, “and maybe kill Jia Zhen, who has been so kind to us, or the Larrakia: when I think of the tremendous, the extraordinary generosity which has been shown us—oh! what a wretched little worm this Willoughby fellow must be; it is no wonder he should like Rankin so.”

Laurence said somberly, “I am afraid the fault was ours in accepting that hospitality when we had so little information on the position which our nation had taken, or might choose to; there was reason enough to know the Government would dislike it, if not to guess they should risk a war over the matter. They may,” he added, “suppose that a sharp rebuke here will warn China off from any similar attempts.”