Crucible of Gold (36 page)

The jungle miasma lay heavily upon all of them. Hammond was also queerly feverish and short-tempered, and so, too, several other men, including Ferris; Laurence feared the beginning of some tropical fever setting in among them. He himself was almost perpetually
in a sweat, the woolen clothes suited to the high mountain fastnesses of the Inca were become a prison for all of them, but the viciousness and size of the insects prohibited all but the most insensible from exposing any unnecessary part to the air.

“Well, and it is an evil part of the world we have come to, Captain,” O’Dea said, expressing a general sentiment, after a few more days: Temeraire had woken them all with a shattering roar of protest, and shaken off three bats which had latched on to him, in the dark.

“They
bit
me,” he said; as improbable as the accusation was, investigation turned up small leaking wounds upon his flank where the bats had clung and fed, so it seemed, upon the blood; and several more of them were discovered on all the dragons.

There was something especially horrid in feeding this species of hunger, but the bats were no more to be escaped than the mosquitoes, though Granby slept on Iskierka’s back and woke several times throughout the night to chase them off with his one good arm; and their bites offered a similar kind of discomfort, growing hard and swollen and hot to the touch after a day.

The half-healed injury which Granby had taken to his arm, in the sinking of the
Allegiance
, had been aggravated and all earlier progress lost in his being flung from Iskierka’s back to the limits of his harness-straps, leaping to escape the flames. Laurence looked at it grimly, in the light: the elbow grossly swollen and bruised purple-black, and the hand dangling useless. They had no surgeon; only the former barber Dewey, who had been pressed into the
Allegiance
out of a dockside carouse, and his only contribution was to offer, “Why, I can have it off easy as you please, sir, if the little miss will lend me her knife; and someone can find me a bit of drink to steady my hand,” which made Roland glare.

“Wrap it up tight for me, Laurence, if you please,” Granby said hastily, “and let us see what a few weeks will do: it does not pain me over-much—” this last delivered while he was clammy-cold and pale with agony; but Laurence was in too much doubt of the wisdom
of the arm’s removal to argue for its being endured: the shoulder which seemed the real seat of the injury could not itself be taken off.

Four days later, the arm looked yet worse: a bluish darkening beneath the skin from elbow to fingers, and Granby could not close his hand. The shoulder at least seemed a little recovered, and when palpated the flesh of the upper arm yet felt warm; but in the morning there was a feverish heat growing above the elbow, and the engorgement of the blood vessels creeping upwards.

“Had it better come off?” Granby said, looking at Laurence’s face.

“I think it must,” Laurence said grimly, and Dewey, coming to inspect his field of work, patted Granby’s shoulder.

“Never you fear, Captain; why, I have had off the arm of a fellow twice your size in under three minutes; although I do not have my saw.” He took the knife which Roland silently proffered him, her irritation at being called
miss
now subsumed in anxiety, and carried it down to the riverside to sharpen against the stones of the bank.

“Laurence,” Temeraire said, peering over, “whatever are you about? Surely you do not mean him to take off Granby’s arm, for good? Iskierka is asleep: I am sure she ought to be consulted on the subject.”

“
That
is all I need, at present,” Granby said, under his breath. “Let her sleep, if you please, and Laurence, I would be glad of something to bite on.”

Laurence nodded, and rose to call Forthing and Mayhew to assist him with holding Granby down; abruptly from the bank came a shriek, and he turned to see Dewey being dragged into the river headfirst, a pair of massively wide crocodilian jaws clamped about his skull. They all stared, horrified; three more of the creatures erupted from the water, seizing on flailing arms, legs, and wrestling over the body with terrible strength: before even Temeraire could act, the water was running red, and his lunge pulled out only a
headless corpse, lacking also a leg, with a crocodile dangling still clenched upon the other.

“Oh!” Temeraire said, furious, “oh, what do they mean,
eating
him!” and plunged his head savagely into the midst of the still-frothing waters: he came up with three thrashing beasts, each perhaps a ton in weight, and holding them in his jaws cracked them with a sound not much less dreadful than Dewey’s own death-cry.

He flung them down, and went again into the water, and again, until he had piled up a dozen carcasses; by then the rest had slunk beneath the surface and glided prudently away.

“There,” Temeraire said, panting, “they will think better of it, next time,” and Laurence had not the heart nor the stomach to argue with his estimation of the animals’ intelligence: in any case the men would certainly think better of going anywhere near the riverbanks without great care.

Iskierka had been roused by Temeraire’s frenzy; she sat up and yawned and said, “Whatever did you do that for? They are not good eating; but I will have a couple, if there is nothing better,” and several of the men crept away into the trees to be noisily and emphatically ill.

The crocodiles were abandoned uneaten; but the slaughter forced their immediate departure, as the scavengers of the jungle were too enraptured by the immense feasting prepared for them to delay: the monkeys were not afraid of dragons, and neither were the beetles. Granby said uneasily, “I will have to make the best of it,” and wrapped his arm up against his waist once more before he pulled himself one-handed aboard Iskierka’s back.

Laurence had grown used to the tremendous speed at which dragons consumed the miles: fifteen in an hour at a steady enduring pace, and as many as two hundred in a day, with no obstacles to be surmounted or roads to clear and no dependence upon the wind; but their passage through the jungle was more akin to the slow
creep of a ship through the doldrums, being towed by her boats: Iskierka could not fly for long. She leaned heavily on Kulingile and Temeraire, who took it in turn to brace her up, but even they could not support her massive weight very well or for any real length of time. Granby drooped upon her back; she drooped in mid-air, and often came down to rest in the body of the river and moved along like some vast steaming river snake, paddling herself along.

The heat was tremendous, and the air of the jungle close and thick around them when they flew low, or crept after Iskierka in the river. Hammond urged speed, and looked piteous for it: he mopped his brow with shaking hands nearly every minute, and slept fitful and feverish; the other men had by now most of them recovered, but Hammond had never given the impression of particular resilience, and their journey had strained stronger men to the limits. But there was no speed to be had: all energy, it seemed, had been wrung out of them.

Mrs. Pemberton, in her long black dress, was an improbable and lone figure of civilization amid their increasingly ragged number: she managed by dint of quiet but firm requests of a few well-chosen men—those not so tired as to refuse to move but disinclined to argument or quarrel—to every evening arrange a small separate campsite and fire for herself and Roland, and even hot wash-water.

They dragged themselves slowly through the jungle, until Laurence dreamed one night of gulls crying, and woke to hear their voices: when Temeraire went aloft there was a cloud of them wheeling and circling in the distance over the great mouth of the river where it met the open endless ocean blue: they had come to the shore of the Atlantic.

Iskierka lay down in a tidal pool and shut her eyes; Granby was lifted down from her back and carried into the shade of palm-trees. Temeraire and Kulingile went out into the ocean, and did not come back for a full day and night; Laurence had begun to fear in earnest when looking out over the waves, under his shading hand, he saw
the strange apparition approaching: a vast misshapen creature with four wings and no limbs.

“Clear the shore, there,” he called, when they came closer; and in exhaustion the two dragons set down their prize: a true monster of the deep, a blue whale not perhaps fully grown, but even so nearly larger than them both together.

“ ’Twould bring twenty thousand pounds rendered down, I expect,” one of the sailors, an old whaler, said in hushed tones, as they sank a sharpened spear into the blubber and cut away to find it nearly a foot deep. Every man had a slice, and Iskierka ate a good two tons of the stuff; Temeraire and Kulingile had already eaten.

“I killed it with my roaring, when it came up for breath, and then we took it in turns to keep the whole above water while the other ate,” Temeraire said, drowsily, while Laurence stroked his muzzle, “for we thought that should make it easier to carry back: but I do not mind admitting to you, Laurence, that I rather worried it was too large even so. Oh! I am very tired.”

In the morning, Iskierka finished another meal of whale meat and blubber, and roused enough from her torpor to say peevishly, “Where is Granby? Why is he not with me?” and then she saw him.

“If none of you are going, I am,” she said fiercely, when she had overcome her first confusion, after Granby did not answer her: his eyes were heavy-lidded and far-away, lost in fever and in pain. “He must have a surgeon: he
shall
have a surgeon; you will put him on my back at once.”

There were seven other men burning with fevers and the mortification of small wounds, mere scratches acquired in passing which had at first gone unnoticed, until they had gone quickly to rot; two had already been buried. Laurence had not yet decided to press forward, undecided as to the greater evil: he had seen enough men die, at the surgeons’ hands, not to easily take on the risk of moving Granby only to deliver him into those hands, even if any skilled man might be found near-by.

But Iskierka’s determination followed on the bleak acknowledgment there was scarcely any risk to be run, anymore. Gently they bundled Granby onto a stretcher made of branches and woven vines, and covered him with tented leaves against the sun. “I will go and hang on to him, sir,” Roland said, and not even Temeraire protested her climbing aboard Iskierka’s back to help keep Granby shielded and in place.

They turned southward, and came within a day to Belém: the small city huddled down behind its walls, and bells ringing out wildly in alarm as the dragons came into view. “Pull up!” Laurence shouted, realizing too late: the inhabitants saw only four dragons of enormous size, with no uniformed troops and no flags, and of no easily recognizable European breeds: Temeraire was Chinese, Iskierka Turkish, Churki Incan, and Kulingile a fresh cross and wholly unfamiliar. “Temeraire, pull up, and make Iskierka do the same: they will fire on us in a moment.”

Iskierka thought only of Granby, at present, and was diving for the city square: Temeraire plunged beneath her, and bodily heaved her up and out of range even as pepper-guns spoke by the dozen; the thin black clouds spread like a pall over the city’s walls, and then the narrow, long-throated cannon roared out at them and the small barbed balls flew.

But the town was better armed than generaled: the first spurt of firing died away, and a second did not come for nearly ten minutes, and was flung in their direction despite all the dragons having withdrawn beyond the range; when this had finished, Laurence touched Temeraire, and they dived forward into the square, where a regiment was trying to form up with what looked to be half the soldiers missing.

“Stop that,” Temeraire said angrily, in French, “we are not here to attack you, at all: we are British, not the Tswana, and we are here to help.”

“I ought to be more grateful,” Granby said, “seeing how I have had one close-run thing of it after another, and I amn’t in the ground yet; and I don’t mean to complain, but what a nuisance it will be,” answering Laurence, who had complimented him on the progress of the healing stump. The relief of their proving friend rather than foe had spurred a spirit of generosity on the part of the city, improved by Hammond’s presenting them to the local governor in the light of saviors who had come to assist against the invasion; Laurence suspected he had not yet mentioned the altered circumstances in the Incan empire. An excellent surgeon had been provided, along with enough strong spirits to render Granby still more insensible than his fever; and several religious were now nursing him day and night.

“I know fellows go up and down well enough regardless,” Granby added, “and I suppose I can get a hook, so pray don’t listen to me; meanwhile, we had better be going, hadn’t we? I can’t make out all of what they are saying, here, though I made my Spanish tolerably good when I was stationed in Gibraltar, but it seems pretty clear we are needed in Rio yesterday if we are to have any hope of finding the Regent there, anyway.”

“We will not go for a few days more,” Laurence said quietly; Granby was still pale and fever-hectic. “Temeraire is working with their local priest, and several of the traders, to plot us a route: we will save the time twice over, in not having to hunt after water as we fly.”