Crucible of Gold (37 page)

“All right, then; and tell Iskierka to behave herself, and I will creep out onto the balcony again to-night,” Granby said, and let himself sink back against the pillows, his eyes already closing; Laurence pressed his good shoulder, and went out to be pounced on for information by an anxious and fretting dragon.

“I am glad you killed so many of those dragons,” Iskierka said to Temeraire, when Laurence had given her his report, and gone to
speak with the surgeon about some point of the surgery, “very glad; only I wish I had done it, and perhaps I will go back and do it now. If Granby should not get well, I shall, too.”

“That would not be in the least sensible,” Temeraire said, “for we were fighting them in the dark: you will never recognize the particular dragons in question, and it is not as though all of them had an equal share in the assault upon us: I dare say there are a great many of that sort of dragon who never heard of us at all. If you would like to blame someone, you had better blame the Inca; or even Napoleon, for I suppose the Inca set the dragons on us for his sake. Anyway you are still not well, either: have some more of this cow.”

Iskierka ate, if sullenly, and Temeraire bent his head over the map which Sipho was drawing up, according to his instructions and what Temeraire had gleaned from the various traders who had been marched unwillingly up to him for questions.

Iskierka swallowed the haunch and said, “That whale.”

“Yes?” Temeraire said, absently.

“May I have it?” she said, and leaned over to nudge Kulingile. “And your half, also.”

“Can I have the head of your last cow?” Kulingile asked, opening an eye.

“Yes, all right,” Iskierka said, and pushed over the cauldron in which it had been stewed.

“If you like; but what do you mean to do with it?” Temeraire said. “It is nearly half-a-day’s flight away from here, now; and I suppose the meat cannot be good anymore, as we did not preserve it.”

“I don’t want the meat; I want the blubber,” Iskierka said, and insisted she did not care that the blubber would surely have taken on all the flavor of the spoiled meat; which Temeraire did not understand in the least, until she came back again at the end of the next day, stinking and sooty and triumphant, and fell upon her share of the provisions which the town now daily made them.

“Granby has asked for you twice,” Temeraire said, reproachfully, and flattened back his ruff, “and you might sit downwind; what have you been doing?”

“I have been rendering down the whale,” Iskierka said, tearing at her sheep, “for some of those traders: one of the sailors showed me how to go about it, and now I am rich again; and I am going to buy Granby a golden hook.”

“One might think she would be above trickery,” Temeraire said to Laurence, “not, of course, that I begrudge Granby anything at all; but it was
my
whale: mine and Kulingile’s, and she might have said so if she knew we might get gold for it.”

He could not stifle resentment when he saw the result, and had to watch as Granby came down from his sickbed at last several days later, to be presented by Shipley—whom Iskierka had recruited as her deputy in the matter and was all smiles in a fine suit of black cloth, bowing as he held out the box—with the truly splendid hook: shining gold on black velvet.

“It will be too soft for use, you know,” Granby said, when he could speak again, “so we will have to put it by for special occasions—”

“Not at all,” Iskierka said, “for I thought of that; and so they have made it out of steel, really: it is only gold on the outside; the rest of the funds went for the diamonds.”

“Yes; I see,” Granby said, staring at the shining faceted gems which gleamed all around the base of the hook in even rows.

“Put it on, at once,” Iskierka said, audibly hissing steam in her excitement, and then Granby put down the lid of the box and said, “No.”

Temeraire raised his sullen head, blinking, to watch as Granby said, “No. I am done with this, Iskierka, do you hear me? I am done with being dragged about, and made into what a lunatic might call a fashion-plate, and
married off
—”

“But you are not married, at all—” Iskierka protested.

“No fault of yours if I am not,” Granby said, which was very
true, “and I dare say if I let you go on as you have been, you will try again, soon enough as you have found some princess or duchess or other lying about—” Iskierka twitched in what Temeraire could only call a guilty fashion. “—and I shan’t put up with it anymore: you aren’t fresh out of the shell any longer, and we are going to have a little more sense. Or you may take your leave of me, and find a captain who will swallow all your starts, and let you do just as you like—”

“Never, never!” Iskierka said, bristling wildly. “Oh! How can you be so cruel, when you must see very well that I am only thinking of you.”

“What you mean is, thinking of how you can show me off to your best advantage,” Granby said bluntly, “which isn’t the same thing, at all.”

Iskierka coiled on herself uneasily. Temeraire felt a smart of anxiety for his own part: but, he told himself, it was not at all the same thing, to wish Laurence to be recognized for his own abundant merits; and after all he did not insist on Laurence’s wearing his robes, but only proposed it, now and again, when it seemed to him most appropriate, and when Laurence’s natural modesty should from time to time require a push to overcome.

“Well, I
mean
to think only of you,” Iskierka said in her defense, “and surely you must like to have splendid things, and have everyone see how particularly important you are—”

“The most splendid thing I am ever like to have,” Granby said, “is a Kazilik dragon, dear one. All I have ever wanted is to call myself a captain, in His Majesty’s Corps, and if you should manage to make me into a lord or an emperor or a rajah, I shouldn’t know in the least what to do with myself.”

Iskierka grumbled deep in her throat, but said grudgingly, “Well, if you very much dislike the idea of being a prince, I suppose I will give it up; but you do want a hook—”

“I should be very glad of a serviceable hook, of good steel, with no gewgaws to catch a blade upon in battle,” Granby said firmly,
“and as for the rest of the money, we will put it to provisioning, as the whale was caught for all our benefit,” which Temeraire brightened at, as repairing the injustice of Iskierka’s selfishness. “And if you should ever take another prize in future,” Granby concluded, “we will put it into the Funds.”

“What are those?” Iskierka said.

“Oh—stocks and so forth,” Granby said vaguely, “investments; I dare say when we have come to England I can find a man of business to manage them. I should much rather have the money in the five per cents than wear it in my sleeve.”

So when they left, two days later, they left at last decently equipped again: trousers for all the aviators, and boots—if these did not fit exactly right, they were still closer to proper uniform than before—and at least a shirt for every man. Temeraire rejoiced in four rifles, acquired triumphantly by Roland through an intense bout of haggling, and still more that he had proper riflemen again: Laurence had plucked up Baggy to take one, swearing the boy in as an ensign, and Ferris had one as well. And by Laurence’s order, the spare gunpowder was poured out and stored in small powder-horns, which might even be used as incendiaries in need.

The harness was repaired also; when at last it was buckled on again, and the men had climbed aboard in an orderly fashion almost like a proper ground crew, Temeraire breathed deep in satisfaction. “All lies well; and how wonderful to feel myself properly rigged out again, Laurence,” he said, looking over his shoulder as Laurence settled himself into place.

“Yes; I will be glad not to feel so wretchedly useless, when next we are in battle,” Laurence answered, with satisfaction of his own; and Temeraire noted with pleasure that he and all the crew had carabiners again, which should be far more reliable in keeping them safely aboard.

“I ought to ride with Temeraire,” Hammond said, trying to sidle past Churki, who was insisting on his riding on her back, alone; she had nothing but a light neck-strap for harness that he
might use to secure himself. “If we should encounter any of the Tswana, in the air, I ought to be on hand—”

“We will all keep in company,” Churki said, “and Temeraire is a fighting-dragon: you are not a soldier, and therefore should not be aboard a beast who must go into battle if it offers. I can much better keep you safe as an ambassador ought to be.”

He yielded without much grace, but consoled himself with a handful of coca leaves: he had found a fresh supply, and they had quite restored him to health. “Pray do keep in mind,” he called to Temeraire, “that if we
should
meet the Tswana, you must wait for me to bespeak them: we cannot have any more of this excess of independence.”

“I call that unfair,” Temeraire said to Laurence as they went aloft, “when it is not my fault that our negotiations in Pusantinsuyo did not work;
I
did not try and marry Granby to the Empress.”

Mrs. Pemberton joined Hammond on Churki: offered the opportunity to stay and await a ship for England, she had refused. “No, Captain, although I thank you for the offer,” she said. “But I should consider myself poor-spirited indeed not to see my charge through to the end: it is only now, after all, that we have arrived at our original destination.”

They made their approach to Rio directly from the north, cutting across a great swath of jungle; and as they drew near they began to be flying over broad cleared estates, green and full of peacefully grazing cattle. “I think perhaps we cannot have heard truthfully, about the destruction,” Temeraire said, swallowing another bite of delicious beef, when they had stopped short of the city to eat well and restore themselves. “Everything seems in order to me here, and we are very close to the sea again.”

But “There is no-one tending the herds,” Laurence said quietly, and asked him to circle around south, so they might approach the city unnoticed, sheltered from view by the Corcovado hill. That next afternoon they came at last into sight of the beautiful harbor
of which Laurence had spoken so often, and all the city laid out below.

“Good God,” Hammond said; they were all silent. In the harbor, a great dragon transport even larger than the lost
Allegiance
was riding at anchor, and a host of smaller vessels around her: six light frigates, bristling with guns. The tricolor snapped gaily from their masts.

All the rest of the city was a ruin of shattered houses and deserted streets, blackened by fire, with perhaps a dozen dragons of varied size nesting in the rubble or perched on some of the wreckage like crows. Some of them were eating cattle, and others lay watchful and huddled around a sort of encampment of tents and sheds which had been erected in one cleared section of the city near the docks.

“They are not all heavy-weights, anyway,” Temeraire said, although privately—he did not wish at all to convey alarm—but privately, he did think it would be rather difficult for even the four of them to manage so many, in a single fight, even if Churki should decide to fight with them; there
were
at least five heavy-weights among the enemy; and Iskierka was not yet quite well. “Although that red-brown one looks as though he might come up to my weight—”

“Kefentse,” Laurence said. “His name is Kefentse.”

“I
AM GLAD TO SEE YOU WELL
, Captain Laurence,” Mrs. Erasmus said—or rather Lethabo, as she informed him she had resumed her childhood name, from before her abduction. Indeed there seemed nothing left of the subdued, silent woman Laurence had first met on the way to Capetown. She now wore the elaborate Tswana dress of patterned cloth, and much gold jewelry bright against her skin, but these were mere externals: the true distinction lay rather in the stern carriage of her neck, the severely pulled-back hair which disdained to hide the scarring upon her forehead, and her direct look.

“But I hope you are not come as an enemy,” she added, bluntly.

She had returned hence with Kefentse to direct the search for more Tswana survivors among the slaves on the estates. Brazil had been the destination of nearly all those slavers who had preyed upon the villages of the Tswana before the Tswana’s armies, being roused, had struck against the slave ports of Africa and stifled the trade. She herself had been brought here as a mere slip of a girl, abducted from her home and sold into bondage; only great good fortune had preserved her to obtain her freedom and eventually return to her homeland. Yet there could not be any great number of similar survivors: apart from the hideous toll of the ocean crossing in the foulness of a slave-ship’s hold, those who lived to reach Brazil would for the most part have been set to hard labor clearing the deadly jungle or harvesting cane.

“You must know you are being used, by Napoleon,” Laurence said, “to an end which would see more and not less of the world reduced to a subjugated state; indeed he has reinstated slavery, rather than forbidden it, in the territories of France. Can you have found so many survivors of your own particular tribe, with this assault, as to justify the toll in life among the innocent?”