“Oh, I will not let anyone do anything to Laurence,” Iskierka said impatiently, “and I will set them on fire if they should try, so you may as well go; you know they are more frightened of me anyway.”
“I am sure I do not know why that should be so,” Temeraire said to Laurence unhappily, before setting out, “but it is; what ought I do?”
“Nothing in the least,” Laurence said, “when you consider—” and halted; he did not like to say, where Granby might overhear and be wounded by the justice of it, that any man of sense would be terrified of so ungovernable a temper as Iskierka’s in command of so great a power of doing harm. “You must consider it as a compliment; true respect is to be preferred above fear, and to induce it a greater achievement than one which can be as easily credited to mere brutality.”
Temeraire was persuaded to go; and meanwhile Laurence was forced to acknowledge the same criticism might be applied as well elsewhere. Where real mutiny was found—and while he would not give that name to the initial sin of running mad after liquor, scarcely so very unusual among sailors, he could give none other to the deliberate attempt to seize himself and Granby and Demane—where mutiny was found, there were sure to be bad officers at the root of it, he had always privately thought.
“It is not as though there had been anything to be done with the men, though, Laurence,” Granby said, too easily dismissing the charge. “After all, what else have we to do but lie about?—and men who are working hard need more food and water than we could spare.”
“Even so,” Laurence said. “We ought to have imposed some discipline upon them, however high the cost; we might have known that men at once excessive idle and half-mad with fear could be relied on for the worst sort of starts: these are pressed men, not volunteers.”
Only fifteen men, he felt, must be called mutineers: fifteen, that is, who were yet left alive. Handes, who in a more just world ought to have been first among the corpses and instead had taken scarcely any harm, could not escape the charge; nor had Laurence any desire to spare him, or the others who had been in the forefront. But the body of men might be spared: Laurence could choose to ignore that last general movement towards the struggle with the aviators.
“Mr. Forthing,” he said, beckoning him aside quietly, “you will choose ten men from the sailors: steadier men, older men, who were not near the struggle; we will take them with us into the interior.”
“Sir,” Forthing said doubtfully, but Laurence was in no wise prepared to welcome discussion of the order, and his looks must have shown it; Forthing went.
In the same ruthless spirit Laurence left Ferris behind, and went into the island interior with less than three men he could have gladly relied on: Roland jarred painfully by every step, Sipho not yet eleven years of age and brought along to run back with tidings of distress if any should arise, and Bardesley, whom Granby had insisted on his taking—“If you mean for me to have Ferris here, you had better have some help.”
Mayhew would come with them; he had held himself back from the worst excesses of the celebration, merely taken a cocoanut shell of the homemade grog and stood off in the shade of the palms with several fellows talking, which had spared him both a charge of mutiny and Kulingile’s wrath. Laurence had no great reliance upon him, but something, he thought, might yet be made of him.
Forthing had dredged up also some men evidently chosen more for advanced age or a placid stupidity than any good qualities, and also Baggy: one of the ship’s boys and so called because as a child of six, he had thought the ship was being boarded when Badger-Bag had climbed up the side in the ceremony of the crossing of the equator, and had leapt down from the rigging upon him, much to the distress of the ship’s cook who had been playing the role, and the general delight of the rest of the crew. Baggy was now fourteen, and in the space of the past seven weeks had abruptly gone from a plump and nimbly scampering child to a gaunt-cheeked pole given to toppling over his own feet. He also blushed every time he looked at Roland, despite the bandage covering half her face—he had not much attention to give to her face—and blushed again when he met by accident Laurence’s censorious eye.
“If I might be of use—” Hammond offered, tentatively; and remembering from five years gone a long grim night in a pavilion under siege, Laurence took him along.
The cove could not be approached from the air without doing such damage to the undergrowth, to clear a space for landing, as might easily send what was left of the wreck to the ocean floor. They were forced instead to go overland, hacking open the path which Demane and Roland had taken the day before: a meandering and mostly theoretical path, as they had not known their own destination at the time.
“We only meant to see if we could find anything to make rope with,” Roland offered as they went, peering at Laurence out of her swollen-squinted eye to see how this was received.
“If you mean to compromise yourself sufficiently to impose upon me the necessity of requiring Demane to fulfill the obligation which his side of those actions imply on the part of a gentleman,” Laurence said grimly, “you may continue in just such a fashion, Mr.—Miss—Roland.”
“What obligation?” she said, in sincere confusion, and when he had clarified his meaning an offer of marriage said impatiently, “There’s nothing to require: he already has, a dozen times. But it is no good anymore; you must see that, sir. I
She stopped while they came to a particularly vicious stand of thornbrake, which she and Demane had merely squirmed beneath the previous day; while the men hacked away at it, she leaned against a tree and said softly, unhappy, “But now he has his own dragon. He can’t be an officer of mine, when Mother retires and I get my step, and I can’t ask Excidium to push off Candeoris after all these years,”—the Regal Copper who was the back center of the Longwing’s formation, and his main defender—“even if the Admiralty wouldn’t want Kulingile elsewhere.
“And it’s not like you and Mother, you know,” she added, unconsciously heaping coals of fire onto Laurence’s already-burdened conscience. “The service is everything with her, and Excidium is next, so she doesn’t mind; she doesn’t want more than—” She shrugged in lieu of specification, with enough eloquence to make Laurence inwardly writhe. “But I don’t want someone I
Laurence was left not knowing how to answer her; despite the separation that was the common lot of Navy officers and their families he could not persuade himself the circumstances were the same. There, one might have the assurance that only one party was gone abroad; the other remained and gave the home its character. Correspondence might be more or less reliably managed, and a wife could reasonably hope to see her husband for long stretches on shore, even if he were absent years at a time.
Aviators could take no such leave, even if they wished; dragons did not go into dry-dock. And Roland had the right of it: Kulingile would not be used merely defensively, if Laurence was any judge. He had besides the advantage of his immense weight the particularly vicious talons inherited from his Parnassian progenitor, and the spiked tail of the Chequered Nettle from the other side. He would surely in time be given his own formation, when the Admiralty had swallowed Demane as his captain, and the odds that formation would be assigned to the Channel were, Laurence thought, slim.
“None,” Roland said despondently. “They’ll want him at Gibraltar: I hear Laetificat’s never gained back her weight, since the consumption, and she is sure to go to the breeding grounds soon. She’s only been hanging on until the breeders got another Regal Copper over twenty tons.”
The path had been cleared: she pushed herself up and went over to show where they might continue, through a curtain of hanging vines; her shoulders were stooped.
They came soon to a clearing with a fat gopher-like rodent hanging suspended in a rope-trap: Demane’s work of the previous day, forgotten in the urgency of the discovery. No-one would have disdained a bite; it was cut down and taken along. The sound of the surf, which had been muffled away by the thickness of the jungle, became again audible as they continued; and then they came out onto an unpromising rocky beach, which curving plunged back behind a massive tangle of strangler vines that concealed anything behind them so thoroughly, Laurence could not envision how Roland and Demane had even thought to explore.
“There,” Roland said, pointing where the sun gleamed on the picked-clean white of bone lying in a small pocket of sand; they clambered across the rocks and stood over the jumbled skeleton, in rags, disordered by the birds and lacking nearly all fingers and toes. The skull and one thigh-bone rested against a rock shallowly inscribed: HERE LAYS BASSEY AND GEORGE, GODE SHIPMATES, GOD HAV MERCEY.
“You can’t say fairer than that,” old Jergens muttered, one of the men Forthing had chosen; the low grumbling of complaint which had emanated from the sailors died as they climbed past the grave and lifted the
