Blood of Tyrants
Page 4

Chapter 4
A SHARP POKE IN HIS side roused Temeraire from his torpor; he lifted his head only slowly. The steady rocking of the ship had cradled him in comfortable withdrawal. They had put food in his mouth, from time to time; he had felt the sun creeping over his body, and the heat of the galleys below. “It is time you were awake,” a voice said, in Chinese.
“Yes, I am awake,” Temeraire said, and put his head back down and closed his eyes once more: the glare of the sun upon the waves ached.
“No, you are not,” the stranger said, and prodded him unpleasantly with something sharp and cold in the pit of his shoulder; Temeraire flinched and looked around, frowning. The man, in long grey clothing, looked back at him with a severe expression; a long drooping beard with trailing mustaches hung down from his frowning mouth.
“Stop that,” Temeraire said, irritably. “I do not wish to be prodded; take that away.”
“Oho, next you will tell me how to mix your medicine,” the man said, and poked him once more: he was using for the purpose a very long and narrow silver stick, with a sharpened end. “Up! Up! How do you expect to get well, lying around on hot rocks day after day?” He jabbed Temeraire sharply with the stick, in his hindquarters, and Temeraire indignantly pushed up.
“I am feeling much better for having lain here, and it is not hot rocks but the galley, anyway,” Temeraire said. “And for that matter—” He stopped short, appalled: behind the stranger, three points to port, a merchantman flying the Dutch flag rode at anchor; and beyond this, only a little way off, the tight-crammed roofs of a city rose away from a curving and beautiful harbor. A ring of Chinese junks surrounded the Potentate, bobbing gently with the waves, like a garland made of ships.
“Where am I?” Temeraire cried. “Where have you brought me?” He turned to look furious reproach at Maximus, who was drowsing beside him and did not immediately open his eyes to be confronted: the other dragons were all further out to sea on the other side of the ship, all of them diving at the waves and plucking themselves up some fish.
“You are in Nagasaki Harbor,” the stranger said, “and you have been here three days and nights.”
Laurence was falling, wet leather slipping between his fingers and a smooth-scaled hide refusing to provide purchase, and he jerked up gasping from beneath the carpeting of leaves. Beside him, Junichiro slept on as soundly as if he had been upon a featherbed in a palace, his cheek pillowed on his arms and his face serene. Laurence ran a hand over his face, wearily, and pushed aside the remants of his covering. The sun was near making noon, he thought, though he could not see it very clearly for the leaves overhead.
They had continued on all the night, stumbling beneath the trees and over rocks. The dragon’s roars had pursued them, but her flight had fallen behind; she had turned one direction and another away from their trail, it seemed to Laurence, perhaps led astray by some wild animals leaping in fear from her approach. Fortune had saved them, he could only imagine.
Junichiro had turned aside abruptly, near the dawn, and led Laurence down a narrow barely marked trail to their present resting place: overshadowed by a great standing gate, two enormous pillars joined by bars painted in an orange now faded and peeling. A little beyond it they had found a stand of trees grown wild and engulfed in vines, sheltered from the wind by a great smooth boulder. Laurence rose, brushing himself free of dead vines, and looked up at the gate again. The scale was immense, and yet it seemed to lead nowhere; as far as he could see through the frame in either direction was only wilderness.
In the dim light they had buried themselves beneath dry leaves and slept as the dead. Laurence was yet tired and footsore, but he did not think they dared linger for long. There was a little trickle of a stream running through the woods, ending with a little burbling over rocks in a great clear pool beside the gate. Laurence limped to it and drank deeply, washed hands and face, and took off his sandals and soaked his feet in the cold water as long as he could bear: it was a long time since he had scrambled barefoot over the ropes and planks of a ship as a boy, and the sandals had left him bruised and sore.
He rose at last and tied them back on, then turned to go back to Junichiro and halted, gone very still. The boulder he had noted last night had raised its head and was regarding him with enormous unblinking interest: it was a dragon, hide dark greenish black and with large eyes of pallid grey, which evidently had curled up to sleep against the comfort of the trees.
It yawned, widely, and said something to him in Japanese; Junichiro, still soundly asleep and huddled up against its side, woke with a start and scrambled up and away. The dragon turned and inquired of him, instead; Junichiro answered with a slightly evasive air, backing away towards Laurence. “What is it asking?” Laurence asked him, low, but the dragon overheard.
“Ah! So you can speak!” the dragon said triumphantly, in Chinese. “Are you,” it leaned towards him with almost a longing air, “a Dutchman?”
“No, sir,” Laurence said. “I am an Englishman.”
“An Englishman?” The dragon rolled the sound around slowly, tongue flicking out to touch the air. It was only the size of a Yellow Reaper, perhaps, with a wide ruff and long dangling tendrils that hung down about its mouth: something of its appearance seemed strangely familiar, though Laurence had certainly never seen a beast anything like. “I have never heard any English poetry,” the dragon announced, after some consideration. “You must tell me some! Come, let us go up to the temple and have something to eat and drink.”
He uncurled himself and rose onto four feet, shaking himself out almost as might have a wet dog. He was long and as narrow in the chest as at the base of his tail, with feet widely spaced; his wings were short and peculiarly stubby, folded against his back. He ambled with a swaying stride through the gate itself, stopping briefly to knock his head against one of the posts three times, and went onwards up the rising slope beyond, where now Laurence saw the underbrush was lower, and trampled in places.
He glanced at Junichiro—he was not sure if they ought to take the chance and try to flee. But Junichiro was trailing wide-eyed after the dragon, and the promise of food was a powerful one. The beast at least did not seem to be immediately hostile.
The trail led a winding way through increasingly difficult undergrowth, where at last the dragon paused and looked back and said, “Why, you are falling quite behind. Up you get,” and reached out a taloned hand to deposit them each in turn upon his back. Junichiro made a small sound almost of protest, and Laurence would have liked to question him—what was the beast, and why did it seem to have no fear of the same law which bound all others against a foreigner—but he could not find it politic to do so when aboard the very beast’s back.
They continued on to a final steeper slope, where at the summit at last a small temple made of wood was found—a tall structure, enough that the dragon could comfortably walk inside, though not very large in plan; and in two great silver bowls at the center stood a pool of clear liquid, smelling very strongly of plums and spirits; and in the other a great heap of rice and meat, still steaming.
“Take cups! Help yourselves!” the dragon said, sprawling himself across the floor—or herself, Laurence belatedly corrected, when some portions of anatomy were thereby more exposed to view; he had been mistaken by a series of low finned spines which curved out from the dragon’s body along its length. “We will drink to the good fortune of this meeting, and then you will recite some poetry for me. You do know some poetry?” the dragon asked, anxiously.
“Ma’am,” Laurence said doubtfully, wondering where the attendants were, who had prepared this repast, and how he might hope to make a further escape, “I can give you a little Shakespeare, if that will suit you, but I do not know how it will do in Chinese.”
“No, no,” the dragon said, coiling back with an air of relief. “I do not want it in Chinese. I already know Li Bai and Wang Wei, and many more besides. I want English poetry.”
“But—you cannot speak the tongue?” Laurence asked.
“You will translate it for me afterwards,” she said, and nudged across to him with one talon a small empty cup, perhaps a little larger than a thimble, and another for Junichiro.
The excuses a rather shamefaced Granby provided Temeraire for their decampment were threadbare indeed. His health, the lurking unknown danger of the sea-dragon, the uncertainty of their position, the ship’s need of further repair, the safety of the egg—
At the thought of the egg, he could not forbear putting his head over the side carefully and peering in, with a single eye, at the porthole which looked into the egg’s chamber. This was below the galleys, carefully kept warm, and the egg itself was not visible for being swaddled in a great many velvet and silken dressings, and then hay, and then packed into a crate. But they had shown it to him, when he had first awoken: a splendid smooth pale-cream shell speckled with a very attractive pattern of red and violet spots, and one notable larger marking shaped roughly like a number eight.
“You must see it, surely.” Temeraire had pointed it out to Lily, though she had looked at it doubtfully.
“It looks more like a cloud to me,” she said, which was absurd; any shape might be a cloud. Temeraire pressed his other friends for their opinion, and finally Kulingile and Dulcia were brought to agree, when he had drawn them the shape of an eight, that it was not unlike; with this he was satisfied to consider his opinion confirmed, and nothing more propitious could be imagined.
Sipho had knocked him up quite a respectable watercolor on a large piece of discarded sailcloth, which was now draped over the crate and might be looked at in lieu of unpacking the egg again—a risk Temeraire quite agreed could not be taken under ordinary circumstances, although he was of course determined Laurence should see the egg as soon as he was found.
“And that,” he said stormily, “will be as soon as I can fly back and manage it: I am very sorry indeed, Granby, to have found you so false as to allow the ship to leave Laurence behind; what he must be thinking of me, at present! You may be sure I will not be silent on the subject, when I have seen him again; he will know of this treachery.”
“Oh! That is quite enough,” Iskierka said, cracking an eye. “For Granby did not wish to go, at all. He said you would be very upset, and it could do you no good, but Captain Blaise would not stay and the ship is his; and Hammond egged him on, naturally.”
“Pray be quiet, wretched creature, you are not making matters any better,” Granby said, reproving, and called up, “Temeraire, old fellow, listen to me: you mustn’t be so angry. You were very ill, and still are; you couldn’t have gone searching for Laurence any road. And Hammond is at this very moment speaking to the local authorities of the port to have them bring us any news of Laurence, I promise you. He must have made a figure of himself, you know—he is a tall fellow, and they haven’t yellow hair here; he will stand out a mile. Someone is sure to have taken him up, if—if he has come to shore.”
“If Hammond should come back with any news of Laurence at all, it will be a good deal more than I look for,” Temeraire said, his resentment unabated, and all the greater for his indeed feeling very ill—very wretched. He did not like the thought of a long flight at present, and disliked still more feeling himself in so weak a condition. “And I will go back, if I must fly overland to get there,” he added, in defiance of that consciousness.
Wen Shen, the physician, who had been hired to assist in his care, shrugged equably from the deck. “You will drop dead somewhere over the middle of the country, then,” he said, and ate an enormous heaping spoon of the rice porridge, flavored with tunny from Kulingile’s spare catch, which he had commanded to be worked up supposedly for Temeraire’s benefit.
Temeraire did not think much of him, despite his physician’s knot. He had insisted on Temeraire’s drinking a great vat of some bitter and foul-tasting infusion, and on his flying a full circuit around the ship, though he did not feel at all like flying and his wing-joints ached fiercely afterwards. Wen Shen had also made a great many disparaging remarks on Temeraire’s diet and general habits, some of them quite untrue: he did not eat an entire roast cow every day. Even if he had liked to, which he did not, they did not have enough cattle aboard for that.
Gong Su had dug up this physician, having rowed over to each one of the Chinese ships in the harbor on their arrival, where he had met with the greatest deference. Since he had openly avowed himself a servant of the Imperial court, he had exchanged his clothing for the formal robes of a scholar; he had shaved his head and put his hair into a severe topknot, with a blue button upon his hat, and now openly carried the pouch with the great red-sealed letter of his authority around his neck.
Temeraire knew Laurence had regarded this alteration of his costume coldly, as a reminder of injury—that Gong Su had deceived them all for so long, and spied, and passed on information. But in his own opinion, any injury could only be mitigated now by Gong Su’s making amends and doing his best to make a good showing of himself; he was still, Temeraire considered, a member of his crew. And after all, why should Crown Prince Mianning not wish to send a messenger, a trusted servant, to accompany his brother? But Laurence had remained unconvinced by this argument, receiving it only with a snort.
In addition to digging up Wen Shen, Gong Su had spoken with the captains of the Chinese ships; all the vessels had subsequently weighed anchor and maneuvered, awkwardly, into places around the Potentate, evidently with the design of providing her some protection. Temeraire had heard this with some skepticism: the Chinese ships were so very much smaller, but Captain Blaise was very well pleased.
“At least it may give us some notice, if a monster like the one you knocked heads with decides to come up from under us,” he said to Captain Berkley. “How we will come off in such an encounter, I am damned if I know, but we will give him a taste of hot iron down his gullet if only he gives us a chance, and see what he thinks of that,” and he gave orders that men should be at some of the guns all hours of day and night.
Temeraire could not really disapprove of any measures for the egg’s security; the sea-dragon had been so very unfriendly, even when there did not seem to Temeraire to be any excuse for such a cold reception. But he was not in the least pleased that Gong Su had also inflicted Wen Shen upon him, whatever any of them liked to say about the improvement in his condition since they had begun dosing him with the physician’s recipe.
“For I am not well enough to go, yet,” Temeraire said miserably to Lily, putting his head down again—somehow he had eaten up all the rice porridge, after all. “If I must be drinking medicine, at least it ought to work.”
“Well, you are better already than you were,” Lily said, consoling. “It was a great deal of time before I felt properly myself again, you know, after that nasty cough we all had a few years ago.”
“You had better eat something more, and here: if you cannot go, in a few days, I will have a word with Berkley and we will go and have a look around for you, I dare say,” Maximus said, which was very kind, but Temeraire did not believe it in the least: Berkley was like all the rest of them, quite insistent that Laurence was dead, and Temeraire was sure he would not be rigorous in any search.
“I only wish I knew where he was now,” Temeraire said, low, and shut his eyes again.
“Kanpai!” the dragon cried, when Laurence had finished muddling through another passage, and dipped her own head into the silver bowl. Laurence was forced to at least moisten his lips in a show of accompaniment, and hope that he had indeed buried Caesar and not praised him, or for that matter raised him from the dead one act too soon; he was not perfectly sure. He did not think he had been this appallingly drunk since he had been a boy of twelve, trying to make good on every toast at his captain’s table.
Junichiro had fallen asleep perhaps an hour ago, overcome with the liquor and the exertion of their night. He had by slow degrees eased to the floor, until his head had fallen onto Laurence’s bundle and his eyes had closed, almost at the same time.
“I am delighted with it,” the dragon continued, and hiccoughed. “Neither wit, nor words, nor worth,” this repeated unslurred and with a startlingly good accent, despite the truly remarkable quantity of liquor which the beast had consumed, “—that has a very pleasing rhythm. This is part of your funerary rites?”
“In the theater, when they have killed him,” Laurence said, confusedly, trying to explain; he was beginning to find it difficult to make his tongue work in Chinese. “There is a dragon when he gives the speech,” he added, with some vague sense that this might be of interest to another beast, trying with movements of his hands to convey some sense of the usual staging, which he had seen once as a boy of thirteen.
“I would be glad to see it,” the dragon said. “I have lately seen a splendid performance by a troupe, who came by upon the road. I will give you a little of it.”
She began to recite in a low melodious voice, rising and falling in the unfamiliar language. Laurence was not proof against so much inducement added to his own weariness, and before she had completed the third line he had fallen to sleep beside Junichiro. When he woke, the dragon was gone; Junichiro was stirring beside him, and the sun was going down. His head ached like the very devil.
“The guardian must have gone to the water,” Junichiro said. “We should go onwards.”
“Yes,” Laurence said, wearily, “but we had better wait until the sun has gone, and eat,” the bowl holding still a handsome share of leftovers, “and in the meanwhile, I will have a few answers: I am not ungrateful, but I would know what you are about. Did you—seek to escape Kaneko’s service, yourself?” He spoke dubiously; he could scarcely imagine that to be Junichiro’s motive. The boy’s affection for his master had been too visible and sincere for that, and yet it seemed equally unlikely he had been motivated by any sense of injustice done to Laurence himself; there was certainly no personal attachment between them.
“Of course not,” Junichiro said, bitterly; he was brushing his own garments clean as best he could. “I heard my master tell Lady Arikawa you were too much of a coward to take an honorable death. There was no course of honor left for him. If he gave you up for torture to the magistrate, he would have failed in his vow; and he could not disobey the bakufu to protect you. What else was there to do?”
“What was this vow?” Laurence demanded. “Why would he have sworn an oath to aid a perfect stranger?”
“He made the vow to Jizo,” Junichiro said shortly, “who guards travelers, to ask him to look after his wife and son.”
His manner did not invite further inquiry. But Laurence recalled the silence of the house, the absence of a chatelaine, Kaneko’s black clothing, and thought he might understand: a wife lost in childbirth, and the child with her. Enough cause, surely, for a man to seek the consolation of religion, and to hold the oath he had made for their sake more dear than a mere promise to be put aside when inconvenient.
“So I will keep you alive, and get you away,” Junichiro went on. “My master will not have disobeyed the law; he will not have brought shame on Lady Arikawa and his own family: the guilt will be on my own head.”
Laurence shook his head in dismay: it was a solution which he felt could only have appealed to the excessive optimism of a young man, a wish to be the hero of the piece. “Unless that magistrate is a fool, he will hold your master accountable for your actions, and you will have only gained a crime to your account and his,” he said.
“He cannot,” Junichiro said. “Kaneko is my teacher, not my lord. I am not yet sworn to service. My family were—ronin.” Laurence did not recognize the word, but Junichiro looked away and spoke as though ashamed. “He took me in. When my training was complete, he meant to present me to Lady Arikawa, to see if she would—” His voice died away, and he swallowed visibly: a dream plainly now lost. He straightened. “My family are dead. The shame of my behavior falls only on myself, not on him,” he said. “Why do you think Lady Arikawa let us escape?”
Laurence paused and looked at him doubtfully. He had credited good fortune for the improbable success of their flight, but he could scarcely deny that a deliberate impulse on the part of their deadly pursuer was compellingly more plausible. “If so,” he said slowly, “then you have achieved your aim. Listen: let me bind you here. That dragon will free you. You can tell them that I forced you to assist me—”
“And shame myself twice over, lying, and saying I yielded to you to preserve my life?” Junichiro said, with perfect scorn. “In any case,” he added, “you will never get to Nagasaki alone; and there will be no use in my having aided you this far, if I do not get you away,” he added, and there was enough likely truth to that, to force Laurence to silence.
He could not like taking a clear advantage of the boy, even if Junichiro had chosen his own course: he was too much a young enthusiast to be trusted to make that choice clear-headedly. Even granting that the maneuver would spare Kaneko, Laurence could well imagine that gentleman’s feelings on finding his young student had thus immolated himself to spare him; he knew what his own would have been, under similar circumstances.
But there was no answer to be made to Junichiro’s refusing to lie: Laurence indeed could hardly encourage him to do so, when answered in such terms. The only saving grace was knowing the boy an orphan: at least he had not riven him away from family as well as home. Laurence could give him a place aboard ship—if they could either of them get to the ship, which was certainly more likely with Junichiro’s guidance than without it. And if they could not, Laurence knew what his own fate would be; he could hardly imagine that Junichiro’s would be any more merciful.
A low bubbling roar came from the river below, and Laurence looked down the hill from the temple to see the dragon emerge—at least, he thought it was the same dragon, but she had swelled out to nearly thrice her size, so wide that her very hide was stretched to a paler greenish silver. Laurence watched in astonishment as she spouted a great fountaining of water like a cascade that took illumination from the descending sun. The torrent of water continued a long time, the dragon reducing by degrees to her smaller size as she brought it forth.
“What sort of a dragon is she?” Laurence asked Junichiro.
“A river-dragon,” Junichiro said, his tone implying strongly Laurence was a fool who required having the simplest of matters explained. “Like Lord Jinai!” the boy added pointedly, seeing Laurence had not followed.
“She is the same breed as that monster?” Laurence said, incredulous: the scale was so very different he could scarcely credit it.
“She cannot get big until she goes down to the ocean, of course,” Junichiro said.
The water-dragon padded back up the hill towards them, stopping by the temple doorway to shake herself free of droplets again in a fine spray. “Now then,” she said, stepping inside and ducking her great head beneath the lintel: Laurence recognized now the kinship between her appearance and the sea-dragon’s, where her lines would spread out, as she grew in size. “I have refreshed myself, and I am ready to hear more of this Shakespeare.”
Junichiro seated himself at once, as though this remark had the force of a command; Laurence hesitated, then said, “Madam, I beg your pardon: we cannot stay.”
The dragon paused in the act of settling herself and regarded him with blank astonishment; Junichiro stared at him so appalled that Laurence supposed he had committed some enormous solecism. The sensation was discomfiting, but not so far, he was grimly certain, as would be their discovery and inevitable pursuit.
“We are bound for Nagasaki,” he said firmly, “and cannot delay in our journey. I beg your pardon most sincerely if I do not express myself in the accepted mode, from unfamiliarity,” he added. “I assure you I mean no offense.”
The dragon sat for a moment, blinking; she seemed less offended than perplexed. “The river flows to the sea, whatever the wind says about it,” she said, and reached up and rubbed a talon over some of the great swinging tendrils from her forehead, thoughtfully. “You have a long journey ahead,” she said eventually. “Stay the night! In the morning we will go together, down to the Ariake Sea. You will not have so far to go from there.”
Laurence had no notion of the geography, but he could well imagine that a dragon-back ride would speed their journey. He glanced at Junichiro, who wore a peculiar expression of mortification and longing mingled; as though Laurence had brazenly committed a crime, and been rewarded for it instead of condemned. He at least showed no disposition to reject the offer; and to be fair, Laurence did not see how it was to be refused. “Ma’am, I am honored by your condescension,” Laurence said, bowing, and seated himself reluctantly again.
Hammond’s boat rowed back three hours later, swiftly crossing from the harbor. Despite his avowed distrust, Temeraire could not help but watch her approach anxiously. The Potentate was very far from land, for the sake of her draught, and there were a great many small boats going to and fro in the harbor before them, betwixt which Temeraire could make no distinction. Captain Blaise came to the dragondeck and stood watching them for some time with his glass as Hammond’s boat came nearer, and he said to Granby, “Well, it will be hot work, if they do try for us.”
“Whatever do you mean?” Temeraire said, peering down.
“They have loaded up those boats there with tinder,” Granby answered him, shading his eyes to peer at the shore. “They may come out and have a go at setting us afire, we think.”
“What?” Iskierka said, rearing up her head abruptly, her eyes going very wide. “What? How dare they! I will go and fire them, at once!”
“Oh, no, you shan’t,” Granby said firmly. “Not until we have seen what they mean to do; you cannot blame them for having a lookout, when a transport loaded to the brim comes creeping into their harbor.”
When Hammond had been put back aboard—he was so unhandy about coming up the side that Churki would no longer have it, pronouncing it a ludicrous and unnecessary risk, and insisted on reaching down to lift him up herself out of the launch—he did not say anything at all of Laurence, and nothing to reassure about the egg, either.
“The worst news imaginable,” he said. “I had private conversation of Mr. Doeff, who is the commissioner here, and good God! Do you know a ship called the Phaeton?”
“Lost in the Pacific, two years ago,” Captain Blaise said, automatically.
Laurence had thought well of Blaise—had called him a respectable and a sensible man, but in Temeraire’s private opinion he was only a block: not the least imagination or interest as far as Temeraire had been able to discover in nearly the full year of their acquaintance. He was not afraid of dragons, which was the best Temeraire could say of him, and indeed he made a point of taking the air upon the dragondeck every day—after making a punctilious request of the most senior aviator on deck for the liberty—as a sort of gesture to reassure the hands. But his head was full of nothing but the Naval Chronicle; he had no other conversation but the weather, and that was not very much use as he insisted on always saying the prospect was very fair, even when it was plainly coming on to a three-days’ blow.
“Pellew’s second boy had her, if I recall aright, and she was looking in at the Dutch trade last anyone heard of her,” Blaise added now. “Likely she went down in a gale—” and stopped as Hammond shook his head.
“She was sunk here,” he said, “—here, after coming in under false colors, taking hostage two of the Dutch officials who went out to greet her, and threatening to fire the shipping in the harbor if the Japanese did not supply them. Her captain must have been a lunatic,” he added bitterly.
The uproar this produced, Hammond had evidently not expected. He had meant to convey that the Japanese were not in the least pleased with the British, and that they naturally thought the Potentate had come to make a fuss over the sinking of the Phaeton. In this he had succeeded, but was dismayed to discover that Captain Blaise would have liked to confirm all the worst fears the Japanese might have entertained. When Hammond had finished, Blaise walked to and fro along the deck for an hour altogether in great fury, repeating that it was more than a dog could bear, that they should have sunk a British ship and receive no answer, even in the face of all Hammond’s increasingly anxious remonstrations.
He was only at last persuaded to go inside to write a report of it to the Admiralty; Hammond turned at once to the dragondeck, so he might corner Captain Harcourt, who was senior, and try to make repairs by urgently pressing her in turn to disavow any possibility of action.
“Hammond, I haven’t the least wish to start us another war in some hasty fashion,” she said at last, in some irritation, “but no-one can blame Blaise for being distressed, and I am so myself. It is all very well to say her captain was provoking: whose word do you have for that, but this Dutch fellow, whose trade he would have gone after?”
She walked away from his importunities, and at last Temeraire could pin Hammond down with a clawed foot laid down in his path, when he would have dashed away from the dragondeck at once again. “Oh—no, no, they do not know anything of Laurence,” Hammond said, distracted. “Pray will you move, I must go down and speak with Blaise again—”
“It is just as I thought,” Temeraire said savagely, without giving way, “you have done nothing at all and it was all falsehoods, your promises to look for Laurence: did you even ask them about him? And what is he to do, now, when you tell us they all hate the British here, and he is all alone, and we are hundreds of miles away? I ought have let this wretched ship sink,” he added, “and left you on it.”
“I hope to God I will not wish as much, soon enough!” Hammond cried, taken aback by his violence. “But I have asked, I give you my word, and Mr. Doeff has promised me he should inquire among the Japanese. But you must see under these circumstances I was forced to proceed with the greatest caution. Imagine if they should know his value as a hostage against us? So I have only said we had a shipwreck, and we would be glad to have any news at all of our sailors, if any sign had come up on the shore of any of them. I will bring you any word at once, I assure you: and pray consider that any opening of hostilities between us should certainly make his rescue a thousand times more difficult.”
He added this last urgently, and though of course Temeraire saw straight through this transparent piece of manipulation, he could not argue with it; neither could he do anything, for good or ill, to forward the matter. “Maximus,” he said, feeling quite desperate, when he had let Hammond go dashing away again towards the stern cabin, “I do not suppose you would go and look for Laurence? That sea-dragon cannot come out of the water. If you should keep away from the coast—”
But, “Enough of that,” Churki said, overhearing. “Maximus had much better stay where he is, and you had much better eat another bowl of soup and take your medicine, so that when we do hear some word worth acting upon, you will then be able to do so. Do you suppose Laurence would be grateful if you have made yourself ill or lost one of our company, in the meantime, just to feel as though you were doing something when anyone can see there is nothing sensible to be done?”
This shot went uncomfortably home: Temeraire knew Laurence by no means approved of any rash or hasty action, and had spoken with him on several occasions about the need for sober reflection. “Particularly,” Laurence had said, “when you must know the others will often heed your advice and attend your requests: how much more should that trust increase your obligation to serve them well in such circumstances, by the exercise of restraint? You must be careful not to abuse it, in trying to persuade them into a course against their own interest or that of the nation, for your own benefit.”
And how eagerly Temeraire had agreed with him! He sank his head upon his forelegs. The truth was he did not know where to fly, even if he had been well enough to go himself; and besides that, Maximus was not the fellow anyone would have sent on a search mission. He would have to spend half of every day only hunting, and likely making all the people very angry for the quantity of food which he should be taking from them.
“But I cannot only lie here!” he burst out. “And do not tell me,” he added, “—do not dare to tell me that Laurence is dead, so I might as well do so. If he is dead, then I cannot see any reason I should not go to the devil any way I like.”
The water-dragon’s name was Lady Kiyomizu, although much to Junichiro’s horror she breezily told Laurence to call her Kiyo, and not to stand on formality. “You have no manners anyway,” she said, “and there is no sense your trying to put out sakura blossoms, when you are a bamboo.”
Laurence ruefully swallowed this friendly condemnation as the price of his rudeness: he was more than willing to accept it, in any case, to gain such assistance as she was ready to offer in exchange for the scraps of poetry and drama which he could dredge up out of his memory. Fortunately he had always cultivated literary entertainments on his ships, to improve both the education and conversation of his young gentlemen, and the spirit of his hands. They had only just concluded the performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and on the King’s birthday last, Lieutenant Riley had given the officers a stirring rendition of the St. Crispin’s Day speech, which Laurence did his best to repeat now. Fortunately his cabin abutted Riley’s, and so he had heard the speech said over and over in the evenings for nearly a month beforehand.
“But I beg you will pardon me if you later learn I have mistaken any of the phrases,” he said. “I have not heard it since—” and stopped, for of course, he had not heard it in eight years gone and more.
Indeed the Reliant herself was surely no longer his at all. It would have been a peculiar career which after such a period should have left him in a prime frigate, and yet not seen him advanced to the command of a ship-of-the-line. Either an unlikely disgrace or promotion must inevitably have been his lot—and then he wondered suddenly if the transport herself was his, something in between the two.
He found it hard to sleep that night, searching for some scrap of memory to be a rope-line which he might have climbed to get a look at himself, past horizons which seemed empty all around. But nothing came to hand, and he felt ever more strongly the anxious sense of something lost; he put his hand into the bundle beneath his head and closed it around the hilt of the sword, the ray-skin familiar and not at once. He slept at last fitfully, ill-at-ease, and startled awake when footsteps came into the temple: an old woman carrying a steaming pot, and she screamed when she saw his face and dropped it, fleeing into the early dawn.
“Why, that is a pity,” Kiyo said, yawning tremendously: she seemed able to almost open her jaws in a straight line. “You have made her spill half the sake. Pour the rest in the bowl! It is a little early, but the morning is nice and wet. I do not mind getting up.”
She put them on her back again, when they had eaten the rest of the rice dish, and she had drunk the rest of the wine, and she tramped down the hill through a faint cold drizzle towards the river. “Put the baskets on,” she said, stopping on the shore, “and let us get under way! It’s a long way to Ariake, and we will have to stop and get something to eat along the way.”
There was a sort of harness resting upside-down underneath a little lean-to by the shore: two tightly woven baskets, watertight, lined thickly with straw and a final lining of fabric. These were joined to each other with straps which went about her body; each was big enough for a man to climb inside, and when Laurence and Junichiro had strapped it upon her and ensconced themselves so, Kiyo plunged into the river and swam out into the deep part of the current, very like a horse bearing saddlebags.
Almost directly they had left the curve of the river leading to the temple, they were in settled countryside: women and children on the banks, washing clothing and carrying water, waved to them with enthusiasm as they passed, and fishermen poled small vessels out of their way, yielding precedence. Laurence had bundled his hair beneath a scrap of his old shirt, and he hunched his shoulders and looked down as they sailed onwards to avoid any comment on his features: he was increasingly conscious that any journey overland would have offered scarcely any hope of success.
Junichiro for his part also kept his head down; from what Laurence could see of his expressions, he seemed to be caught in a confused welter of pleasure and misery. His delight in the dragon’s company, and in the condescension she had shown them, was very plain; it was equally plain he did not feel himself deserving of it, and Laurence would not have been surprised to have him burst out in confession of his crime at the least encouragement.
Fortunately this was not immediately forthcoming. The two of them might have been traveling alone, for Kiyo’s head was nearly always submerged beneath the surface as she carried on against the current, her long tendrils streaming away to either side around her like trailers of seaweed caught on a ship’s hull. Her speed was indeed remarkable: better than six knots, Laurence judged.
“Will you tell me about the course we are on?” Laurence asked Junichiro, when they were on an isolate curve of the river, hoping as much to distract him as to learn more of his circumstances: they seemed to have been swept up beyond his control for the moment.
“You must have done something notable in a past life,” Junichiro said, half to himself, as though trying to explain to his own satisfaction what had brought them so much undeservedly good fortune. Laurence, for his part, should have liked to know what he had done either evil or good so as to produce all the ills of his present situation, but as he did not accept Junichiro’s explanation, he could only attribute it to some forgotten act of his lost eight years. “And we are on the Chikugo River, following it to the Ariake Sea,” Junichiro added. “That is between Chikugo Province and Hizen Province—”
“Hold, you leap too far ahead,” Laurence said, and made Junichiro explain a little more of the geography of the nation, a small country like his own; they were upon the island of Kyushu, which after a little description Laurence mentally classed with Scotland: it was not the largest, nor the site of the capital, but the home of considerable wealth and industry; and this divided into several provinces.
“Nagasaki is in Hizen Province, on the western side of Kyushu—and Hizen is on the Ariake Sea, like Chikugo, so it will be much easier to get to there,” Junichiro added, and with a finger dipped in river water sketched him a very rough shape on the dry part of the dragon’s back, which shortly evaporated but left Laurence with the comfort, not inconsiderable for a man who was used to knowing his precise latitude and longitude at nearly every moment, of having some approximation of his bearings.
Junichiro said it should require the entire course of the day, to see them to the shore of the inland sea; Laurence settled himself low in his basket and prepared only to wait: the rocking motion of their journey was familiar, and he was ready to yield himself to sleep when cries from the bank started him up. He looked and saw a small crowd of people urgently waving a banner bearing several large-painted characters in red, which they had been in the process of rigging out on the riverbank from a signpost.
“Oh,” Junichiro said, taken aback, and Laurence, looking over, wondered if this were to their account—couriers, he supposed, might have carried around a warning to be posted to try to capture them. But after a brief hesitation, Junichiro reached down into the water and tugged on one of Kiyo’s tendrils.
Her head burst from the surface, rivulets streaming away, and the people on the riverbank renewed all their clamor; she did not hesitate for an instant herself, but immediately shifted her course out of the river’s current towards them, and as they neared Laurence could see the chief of the delegation, as he supposed, bowing deeply before they had even come to shore.
Kiyo climbed out partway onto the shore to speak with this man, balancing herself on forelegs in a pose reminscent of the great sea-dragon which Laurence had seen. The conversation, naturally, proceeded entirely in Japanese. Laurence crouched in his basket and tried as best he could to avoid any notice, which effort met with success only because no-one present showed the least interest in Junichiro or himself; all their attention was fixed on the dragon.
It struck him abruptly that Kiyo also had no captain, no master; as neither had Lady Arikawa nor Lord Jinai, nor even the light-weight who had ferried about the magistrate and his servants. Laurence was startled, and startled even more that he had not even noticed it before this moment; he had thought nothing of it at all.
It ought to have been certain proof of an untamed ferocity. Dragons required a captain, harness, crew, all the forms of control, to be tolerated anywhere near settled country, or they would rampage and destroy; any beast not so restrained could only be penned in breeding grounds and bribed with cattle to remain there. So Laurence had always supposed—so he had always known. But even as he articulated to himself this commonplace understanding, it rang false. Proof to the contrary was before him, of course—but that should have seemed peculiar, disconcerting, and did not.
He had not managed to explain it to himself when the discussion concluded and Kiyo turned her head over towards them and said, “Down you get!”
Junichiro obeyed at once, and leapt to unbuckle the baskets; Laurence had scarcely any alternative but to follow his example, and hide his face from the expectant delegation by keeping it turned towards her side. They at least did not immediately seize him. Unburdened, Kiyo plunged back into the river and opened her jaws: she began at once to swell up into that wide immensity which Laurence had witnessed the previous evening. This time when she had reached her full size she did not bring the water forth again, but swaying and ponderous dragged herself up onto the shore, and in a strangely gargled voice gave direction. The delegation all turned and set out along a track that led away from the river, carrying their banner with them.
“What is happening?” Laurence asked Junichiro quietly, as they trailed in Kiyo’s wake; but he might have reserved his questions. The path turned quickly out of the trees and opened onto a truly splendid wide-open vista: a series of very wide terraces falling away from them down a sloping hillside, each full of water and faintly green with the earliest sprouting of rice plants, though surely the season was too early. There was yet a sharp chill of frost in the air, which Laurence thought must be inimical to any farming, although only to be expected at this time of year.
At the summit stood a great stone basin with a wide irrigation channel running away from it down the hill: peering over, Laurence could see more channels leading to either side into each terrace. The delegation here broke up, and most of the number went running swiftly down narrow pathways along the hillside, calling notice: workers in the fields, who were mostly busy staggering under yokes of water-buckets, raised their heads from beneath wide-brimmed hats and, seeing the dragon, hurried to take themselves out of the terraces until they were lining the hillside paths.
From a village visible at the base of the hill, a neat hamlet of thatch-roofed houses, more people were streaming to join the welcoming party, children running with a cheerful clamoring; more banners were being carried out of a larger house, perhaps ceremonial, and set at the foot of the hill in bright array.
Kiyo was leaning forward into the basin and dipping her face into it, shaking her head so the tendrils made a great cloud around her. Laurence could hear a peculiar gurgling and hissing from her side, an internal noise like a man digesting an excessive meal. She raised her head up and shook off the droplets, and then nodded to the anxiously waiting delegation. Two of the great banners had by now reached the summit and were fixed to either side of the basin, cracking in the wind. All were standing silent, in attitudes of tense expectation.
Kiyo adjusted her position, and then she opened her jaws wide and began to expel the water into the basin: not in any massive quantity at first, a thin stream like the jet of a small fountain, but Laurence was astonished to see the water so hot that it was steaming in the open air. Shortly the rime of white ice, half-an-inch wide, which edged the pool in the stone basin had melted entirely away, and water was running softly away down the channels. Kiyo paused in her work and put her face into the basin again—perhaps working out in some way the desirable degree of heat—and then she sat up again and began once more, in earnest.
The gush of water came out of her jaws as from a kettle, steaming-hot, and went running down to water all the fields—likely saving them from that very frost which Laurence had noticed. As he watched the process, he realized that the Japanese might well receive from this influence an entirely additional growing-season: if they might rely on such a rescue, when a frost threatened the crop, they might begin the first planting earlier, and take the second harvest later, and get two crops instead of one. Their urgency was easily explained, now; having drawn the attentions of a water-dragon so soon likely had saved more of the crop.
When Kiyo had reduced herself back to her original dimensions and closed her jaws again, and the men along the hillside had tried each shallow terrace and waved one after another their banners in signal of success, the general relief was nearly palpable. More bowing and ceremonial thanks ensued, and though there were no effusions, no broad beaming expressions, even so shoulders had straightened; anxiety had lifted. Laurence could not fail to interest himself in proceedings so foreign to his experience, and yet so familiar: he had ridden the estate with his father on occasion as a boy, and there was not so great a difference between the expressions of the tenants receiving relief in the case of some disaster to their crops or homes, and the present—though his father had not nearly so dramatic a support to offer.
Nor so general: the entire village had benefited, here, and it was at once apparent they meant to show their appreciation in proper form: an ox was led up the hill, lowing in anxiety as it came nearer the dragon, and was shortly butchered before them. The tender offal was flung immediately into a hot pan over coals: sweetbreads and heart and liver and brains, and these having been quickly seared were presented to Kiyo, who devoured them delicately while the great sides of beef were carried away to prepare some more elaborate offering. Other preparations were already in train—cooking-steam was issuing from many of the houses below and baskets of cooked rice beginning to emerge; the leaders of the delegation were seating themselves formally on mats placed around Kiyo’s head.
“Well, we will be a little late getting you to the sea,” she said cheerfully, looking around to Laurence at last, as she settled herself down to eat, “but at least we do not need to worry about eating. How delicious good, fresh beef is!”
The remark fell, unfortunate, loud. Whether they merely had more leisure now for interest, or her addressing him drew attention, several heads turned: the village chief, some other of the older men and women, and Laurence found himself regarded with dawning astonishment, in a widening circle of silence.