Crucible of Gold

“What is he saying?” Iskierka demanded, coiling up onto Kulingile’s shoulders to peer down at the captain, jetting steam from her spikes. “Oh! Why do you all not speak so anyone can understand; what is it about Granby?”

“He says he would flog him,” Temeraire said, still angry, “and I am telling him he mayn’t at all: it is not Granby’s fault,” he added to the captain, “when your guest all but asks her to show away, and anyway she was perfectly careful.” Not that Iskierka needed to be breathing fire all over the place, and ordinarily Temeraire would have been all too pleased to issue her a reproof himself, but he did not mean to yield any ground on this point.

Iskierka hissed in a dozen voices at once, from throat and spikes together; and woke Kulingile: he cracked a sleepy eye and rolled it upwards to peer at her as she jounced on his shoulders in fury, and asked, “Is there anything to eat?”

It was maddening to hear the rising uproar on deck, some two feet directly overhead, while powerless to have anything to do with it. “I suppose we may call it a blessing if this ship isn’t sunk, when we are done,” Granby said from the hanging cot where he lay, without opening his eyes; his face was drawn and deeply lined with pain.

Captain Thibaux had been everything gracious—had brought his surgeon to see to Granby’s arm, and his servant to give them an excellent dinner, though their hunger would have made it easy to do justice to one far inferior. But there was still a guard upon the door, four men well-armed and with a look of sturdy competence, and Laurence had no illusions as to their orders: the soldiers looked anxiously at one another, and above, as the noise of quarreling dragons grew all the louder.

That noise soon subsided, however, and shortly thereafter a tapping came on the cabin door.

“Captain Laurence, I regret we are fated always to be meeting in the most uncomfortable circumstances,” M. De Guignes said. “Do you permit?” He poured: an excellent Madeira. “When this endless war is over, I insist that you shall visit me, and I may give you better hospitality, if God wills we should both be spared.”

“You are very kind, sir; it would give me great pleasure,” Laurence said, taking the glass with more politeness than enthusiasm; at present he could hope only that he would not be spending the interval in a French prison, with very little reason to encourage that hope. “I am afraid you might find Temeraire less convenient to host.”

De Guignes smiled. “He should pose no more difficulties than my Genevieve,” he said, touching with pride a small decoration upon his sleeve: the Legion de l’Aile, a singular honor lately created by Napoleon which came accompanied by a dragon egg and an endowment for the beast’s future maintenance, together. Laurence heard this explanation in some astonishment, and later, when De Guignes had gone again, Granby coughed out a laugh from his cot and said, “Lord, trust Bonaparte to bring having a dragon into fashion: I suppose every one of his new aristos will want one, now.”

“Mme. Lien has condescended to offer her advice on the most profitable of crosses to attempt,” De Guignes now added. “Genevieve has now five tongues to her credit, and the last acquired after she was already out of the shell.”

It had not before occurred to Laurence that Lien might improve the French breeding lines through such a mechanism: the Admiralty had rather congratulated themselves that Lien, being female, could only produce a handful of offspring for Napoleon’s benefit. Laurence himself had strongly doubted she could be induced to do even so much, given her pride in her own lineage and disdain for Western breeds. Certainly the Chinese were acknowledged supreme in dragon-breeding techniques, but Laurence had imagined that these must be the province of some band of expert gentlemen very like those who served in the role in Britain and in France. But that was absurd, he belatedly realized: who better to direct the breeding of dragons than the dragons themselves, and if Lien had made any study of the matter, her knowledge would benefit the breeders of France far more than any individual contribution she might have made.

“The captain grants you should have the liberty of the quarterdeck from two to four bells of the afternoon watch, one of you at a time,” De Guignes said, “and you will of course wish to see to the comfort of your men; I am desolate to inform you they must remain in the ship’s gaol, in consequence of their numbers, but every effort will be made—”

“I understand entirely, and your assurances must satisfy me,” Laurence said, interrupting: he did not much object if the rescued sailors were kept in chains and sustained on weeviled biscuit and bilgewater. “If I might solicit some better housing for our officers and crew, I would be grateful: I will stand surety for their parole, if they are willing to give it.”

De Guignes bowed acquiescence.

He had managed to quiet the earlier uproar among the dragons—“Nothing to concern you, gentlemen,” he said, “only the least of misunderstandings, owing to Captain Thibaux’s unfamiliarity with the nature of dragons: he is new to his command, you see. But all has now been made clear: although I cannot greatly envy you, Captain Granby,” he added in a touch of raillery, which Granby’s set mouth did not appreciate.

“But sir,” Laurence said, “I must ask you to confide in me: will we not overmatch your resources? Three dragons of heavy-weight class added to your complement—”

“We are perhaps a little incommoded,” De Guignes said, “but I beg you not to fear: I have discussed the matter with the captain and our aviators, and I am assured we have no cause for alarm. The dragons shall take it in turns to spend some hours aloft, and by rationing and attention to fishing we will arrange to feed them all, if not quite so well as they might like.”

“Everything is quite all right,” Temeraire said the next afternoon, calling down to the quarterdeck—in English; De Guignes had very gently hinted that efforts at concealing the captains’ conversation with their respective dragons might be taken amiss. “Iskierka is complaining of the seaweed—”

“As anyone would,” she put in, without opening her eyes or raising her head, “—it is perfectly foul, and it is all great nonsense to say it is a delicacy in China: we are not in China, and I would much rather have a cow.”

“Well, there isn’t a cow for you to have,” Temeraire said, “and I must call it the worst sort of manners to complain when we are guests.”

“Seaweed?” Laurence said, puzzled.

“Ardenteuse has the net, you can see her there aloft,” Temeraire said, pointing with his snout at the Chanson-de-Guerre flying alongside the vessel with a long rope dangling: shortly she pulled up a fishing net of fine line, full of dark green seaweed and wriggling silver bodies.

“They might pick the fish out for us, at least,” Iskierka said, grumbling, “instead of giving it to us all mashed together. Besides, we are not guests; we are prisoners, since we have surrendered”— very sullenly—“so I will complain as much as I like.”

“And it is not at all unpleasant to keep aloft for half the day,” Temeraire went on, lordly ignoring her, “so long as one may come down and sleep later.”

He made light of the difficulties, but there was an undertone of weariness in his voice which all the effort at cheer did not mask, and he put his head down and fell back to sleep even before Laurence had been gently ushered from the deck at the conclusion of his brief airing.

“It’s not that they can’t fly half the day,” Granby said at dinner, having returned from his own outing equally anxious for Iskierka, “but not when they are to be half-fed, day-in and day-out; and this cold weather don’t make it easier on them, either. I suppose it is still a long way to landfall?”

“Four weeks perhaps, if they are aiming for Matarani,” Laurence said, an educated guess only: he barely knew anything of the Inca ports. They were notoriously unfriendly to sailors putting in at their ports in anything larger than a ship’s launch, so any merchantman determined to trade was forced to anchor miles off the coast out of sight and ferry goods in by boat; and these on return often reported half their crews missing, lost to a fate whose horrors were only magnified for being unknown. Those boats nearly as often carried back chests loaded with gold and silver, in exchange for their goods, which caused the adventurers to persevere; but the Inca were not to be considered hospitable.

In any case, even if Laurence had known the coast as well as that of England, the French had not shown him their charts, and looking out the porthole at what stars he could see did not tell him precisely where they were. “We are out of the forties, at least I can say for certain, so will make worse time the rest of the way.”